“The most encouraging thing was to see the ocean rejuvenated. The tide pools filled with life again, and barnacles and mussels began colonizing the rocks. We saw a few salmon in the Coho and even whales spouting on their way north. Every sign of recovery was a miracle to us. Some of our crops and animals died, others lived. Two of Shadow’s pups died, but two lived. And we lost another cat. That left only Mehitabel, a lone female.”
And I remember how I sympathized with her. I thought a great deal that year about being a female without a male. For all I knew, our species was near extinction, and I could do nothing to save it. I had no doubt I was capable of it; my menstrual cycles continued with frustrating regularity. Sometimes I saw Rachel and me as two Eves in a precarious Eden born of Armageddon.
I’m reminded that I’ve lapsed into silence when Stephen asks, “Did you and Rachel ever go to look for other people?”
“Yes, but not until late summer. By then we’d harvested the crops and put up the hay, and the animals born that year were old enough to fend for themselves. Still, we decided we couldn’t leave any of the animals for more than three weeks. We fortified the rabbit hutches and the chicken house and pigpen, and rigged water tanks and food bins that would hold enough to last that long.” I leaf through the diary, seeking the entry marking the beginning of our trek, but pause before I reach it, distracted by another entry.
“I made a note on August twentieth, Stephen. We saw an odd, brown cloud in the east over the mountains. Actually, we’d seen similar clouds earlier, and at first we thought they were smoke from forest fires, except the color was wrong. We learned the answer to that puzzle on our trek—one of the many hard lessons we learned. Anyway, on… here it is. On the last day of August we set off on our odyssey: two women, two dogs, and two horses loaded with food and camping gear. I remember worrying about the animals we left behind, but once we turned east on the Portland highway, all I could think about was what lay beyond the Coast Range. Or what I hoped…” My throat closes on the words. Stephen watches me; he seems to be holding his breath.
Finally I say, “First, you have to understand what that land was like Before. The Willamette Valley. A huge trough running north and south, a hundred miles wide, bracketed by the Coast Range on the west and the Cascades on the east. Oh, Stephen, it was so beautiful. Gentle hills and dark earth, wheat and hay fields bright green in the spring, and in the summer dotted with bachelor’s buttons, and at harvest time, they were like golden seas. Wild roses grew along the fences, and the orchards—some of them had thousands of fruit or filbert trees, and when they bloomed, they were glorious. You’d see hawks soaring over fields of strawberries and clover, and between the fields there were stands of firs and groves of oaks with their limbs frosted with moss. The rivers were wide and slow and deep green, and there’d be fishermen at almost any bend.”
Stephen is rapt, and I might as well be describing Oz. It is, in fact, a fantasy now.
“The biggest cities in the state were in the Willamette Valley, Stephen. Portland, which was a major seaport, even if it was so far inland. The ships came up the Columbia River. And Salem, which was the capital of the state. And they were targets for those reasons.”
He tilts his head, brows drawn. “Targets?”
“Targets for the bombs. I knew they would be, and I didn’t expect anyone to have survived in the cities themselves. But I thought somewhere in the Valley we’d find… some remnant of civilization.”
“But you didn’t.” It isn’t a question.
“No. I hadn’t counted on the firestorms from the bombs and the effects of the nuclear winter and the Blind Summer. What we found east of the divide of the Coast Range was a desert. A charred, dry wasteland. All the trees had burned. The river that flowed by the highway was brown. Every field was cracked and gouged with gullies. Only a few sprigs of grass and lupine tried to root there. It was a gray, silent place where no insects buzzed, and birds didn’t live to sing, and the only thing that moved was whirlwinds of dust.”
“What did you do?” he asks in a whisper.
I shrug. “We kept going east. I knew we wouldn’t find anything alive within thirty miles of Portland, but I convinced myself that the burns just east of the Coast Range were the result of forest fires that began in the mountains. And I convinced myself that between the forest-fire bum and the blast zones, there’d be a green corridor where people could survive. Rachel wasn’t convinced, but she knew I’d have to see for myself. So, we went on, following the highway, although at times it was buried under dunes. We passed small towns and farms, most of them burned out. On the fourth night we camped at a farm where the barn and house were still standing. We slept in the barn. The house was… occupied by the remains of the family that had lived there. That night we were wakened by the timbers of the barn groaning. The windmill outside was creaking madly, and when we opened the barn door, we ran into a wall of windblown dust. That’s when we understood the brown clouds we’d seen from Amarna, Stephen. They were dust storms. This one went on for two days, while we huddled in the barn with the wind battering at it, and the dust sifting through all the cracks until we could hardly breathe.”
Stephen laces his fingers tensely. “Weren’t you afraid?”
“Terrified. And I had to face the fact that there’d be no green corridor in a place where dust storms of such magnitude could be generated, that the wasteland was a product of firestorms fanning out from the bombs that hit Portland and Salem. Of course, there might’ve been green corridors in the Cascades or in the south end of the Willamette Valley, but we weren’t equipped for that long a trek—not through this new desert—and we couldn’t stay away from Amarna that long. So the coast seemed our only hope. But we knew if we headed south on the coast, we’d hit that big forest-fire burn from the year before, so we decided to head north.”
“That’s too bad,” he says, shaking his head. “If you’d gone south, you might’ve found the Ark.”
I stare at him, and I have to control the caustic reply that comes first to my lips. He speaks out of ignorance and innocence, and I bring out a smile for him, then turn my attention to the diary.
“Once we crossed back over the summit of the Coast Range, we were in living forest again, and we bathed in a cold mountain stream and feasted on trout. I realized then that we lived in the green corridor. The only question was how far it extended. The road we took over the mountains joins Highway 101 about fifty miles north of here. There was a small town at the junction, but it was deserted, all the buildings in ruins. Well, it wasn’t entirely deserted. We found a mother cat and her five half-grown kittens there. We managed to catch three of the kittens, and we were happy to discover that two were males. We made a cage of sticks and rope with a piece of plywood as a floor, and for the rest of the trip, the kittens rode in state on top of Silver’s packs.”
Stephen laughs at that picture, and I add, “I don’t think the kittens were impressed with this lofty perch. Anyway, that night we built a big signal fire. We thought if there were any survivors in the area, they’d see it. But there was no answer to our signal. The next morning, we continued north, then after a few miles, the forest suddenly ended, and we were in another bum. Forest fire, not firestorm. It went on for miles, for days. Dead, black trees as far as we could see. Sometimes we’d cross patches of green forest, but they were small. Most of the towns we went through along the way had been burned, too. Even when we found houses intact, no one was living in them. We saw a lot of little graveyards with wooden markers. None of the dates were later than four months after the End.”