Authors: Mark Lavorato
There were electric lights everywhere - or at least the inverted bowl that had held lights at one point, their remnants dangling at the end of tall, arcing poles (which were different from the ones on the road, but just as rusted and vine laden). They dotted every imaginable street, side road, corner, intersection, and were in front of every dwelling. At night, they must have flooded the entire town in light, drawing a clear line at its outskirts between the place that was inhabited by people, and whatever lay beyond. And when I thought of it that way - that they had felt a need to distinguish between what was swallowed by the night and what wasn't - I realized that it was probably something much more than the dark that they were afraid of, it was wilderness itself.
The hints were everywhere; in the barricade along the stream, the grid of streets, lines abrupt and even, the careful angles of the roofs edging down, troughs to collect the water lest it spew out wildly from the shingles and onto the soil, the faces of walls squared with the roads, the windows parallel with the ground beneath them. These were a people who felt a need to apply strict rules to their environment. And I could see that, when the earth shifted outside of the parameters they had placed on it, when the cemented walkways lining the streets bulged and skewed, they had repaired them as quickly as they could, pounding down the soil, reshaping it, subjugating it. When the natural world fluxed, they reacted in ways that must have made them feel like they were still in command.
And it seemed like the closer the nature was to them, the stricter the rules became. There were corners of their rectangular lots with trees and bushes that still had scars from being endlessly pruned, truncated, and sculpted. There were containers of soil that hung from windows, which must have had carefully trimmed flowers, plants, or herbs inside them, where there was no room for them to grow out of control. There was a square plot in the centre of the town that probably served as a kind of public garden, a paved lane winding through the centre of it, and a pond lined with transported boulders and filled with redirected water, where domesticated birds most likely paddled around waiting to be fed.
I imagined that these people saw the wilderness as a kind of adversary in a continuous battle, something that was devious and cunning. Because regardless of their calculations and inventions, it would have still found a way to poke its fingers into every facet of their lives. I could picture them, frustrated, watching as it crept across the fields that they'd cleared and squared, growing back in oblong shapes, slithering toward their houses; stubborn leaves bursting out of branches that they'd cut, vines crawling over their newly constructed walls, spiders finding the corners of their rooms as the ideal site for a web, mice vigilantly checking the doors and foundations for imperfections, and finding them. Its fortitude was inexhaustible. And as they seemed to be pitting themselves against it, no wonder they had drawn a line with light at the edges of their towns. It illuminated the one space where they would be able to convince themselves that they had won, a place where they could believe that their constant manipulation was actually necessary, where they were important. And at the same time, it would allow them to put their backs to the wilderness that was stirring in the dark behind them, which could effortlessly point out how insignificant they really were.
Then it struck me that people had probably lived whole lives in these places, 'safe' inside one of the grids of wire-ridden buildings, that they spent their years without ever feeling the wind on their faces, or the rain run over their scalp, without even once being completely enveloped by the dark or by a true silence. And whoever these people were, I'm sure they were secretly haunted with a feeling that something was missing from their lives. Because they would have been living in a lost place, forever drifting between two worlds - one that they wished they hadn't come from, and another where they would never really belong.
I walked out of the town and descended into the flood plains without ever entering any of the houses. What I didn't know was that this town would be the biggest settlement I would ever come across, and I regret now not spending a little more time there, poking my head through windows, snooping around through looted kitchens, because I'm sure I could have learned a lot more about that culture. But the truth was that the few things I'd gathered about it were already enough to push me away, out from their streets and their paved walkways, and into the fields that surrounded the town. I felt uneasy there, for obvious reasons.
After drinking from the stream and filling the water bottle that I'd taken from the house the day before (which, to my surprise, didn't leak at all), I headed toward the trees and plants I'd sighted above the floodplains. While I picked through them, I began to get a good feeling about how much time I would have to spend searching for food in this land. The soil was fertile, and things seemed to grow easily. I gathered a few different varieties of fruits and vegetables, some that looked plump and ripe, and others that were a bit thin and dry but still seemed like they might have some sustenance to them. (I would later learn - after carrying it for two full days - that one of the largest, heaviest, and most succulent looking of these was completely inedible, and I would throw it to the ground after putting some in my mouth, spitting it out, wiping my lips with my sleeve, and shaking my head at myself for not having tasted it earlier.)
I wrapped everything in the blanket, tied it around my chest and stood on the edge of one of the banks, looking out at the ocean in the distance, the river squiggling through the landscape toward it. It was an interesting moment. Because now that I had food, water, and could see that shelter wasn't going to be much of a problem, I seemed to be at a loss for what to do next. Where exactly should I go, and what was the point of going there? Though, mostly, I wondered what I was going to do about The Goal. Was I going to start collecting the plants that I'd been trained to find, pillage equipment to make the sterilization mixtures, and then search the land for people on my own? And was that something that I
wanted
to do, or was obliged to do? Or neither? Or both?
I didn't know, which meant there were a few things that I had to figure out. But to do that, I would need to find a place where I could rest and think for a while - preferably somewhere far from the sad lattice of streets and wires that was still in front of me. And knowing that freshwater was going to be harder to come by than food, it was clear that I would have to stay along the river; I just wasn't sure if I should follow it down to the sea or venture deeper into the mainland. Of course, providing for myself would have been easier on the coast; I knew how to fish, swim, catch crabs, dig for shellfish, and gather seaweeds. Though, I knew there would be enough resources inland as well, which seemed to be the decision I was leaning toward. Maybe it was simple curiosity. Or maybe it was in thinking that the river could have come from giant hills of some kind, and maybe even from melted snow and ice - from mountains. Whatever it was, my legs seemed to make the choice for me, and I turned and started walking upstream, hiking until the land steepened, and the water was roaring down a thick chute beside me. When this rise tapered off, I lost sight of the town, and soon after that, the ocean; which, it turns out, I would never see again in my life.
I stopped after a few hours, and spent the night under a tree beside the river, the rushing water seeming to fade in and out of urgent whispers in a language I couldn't understand.
33
I felt like the land was growing, as if the contours were rolling away from me, the horizon crawling ever further into the distance. Its size was on a greater scale than anything I'd imagined, than any guess at enormity I'd ever made. I travelled for three days up the river, a tiny dot of movement being swallowed into the folds of the terrain, and though it felt like I was making some real distance, I'm sure that in relation to the entire landmass, I'd barely even scratched an edge.
While I walked I would switch between being barefoot and wearing the sandals I'd taken from the house. It was good to have something between the pads of my feet and the ground, and I could certainly move faster with them on. But after only a few hours, I would start to get blisters from the straps, and so would have to revert back to the waddling pace of hiking barefoot.
As it turned out, finding food along the way was a little more difficult than I'd guessed. While there were straggling patches of crop plants and fruit trees in some areas, there were also long stretches of woody vegetation that didn't seem to yield anything. Though, between what I'd already collected and what I was picking from the trees whenever I could, I had at least two days of provisions in the blanket with me at all times, which was enough.
The only time I stopped during those three days - besides to eat, drink, and sleep - was to examine a few interesting things that caught my eye; strange animal tracks that crossed the blotches of dirt along the riverbed, colourful insects scurrying away from my feet and into the cracks between the rocks, curious shorebirds that fed along the banks, which would flutter a safe distance away and perch on rocks to watch me pass. Once I found a deposit of clay-like mud that had countless prints imbedded inside it, one of which looked like the distorted palm of a human hand. I crouched down and compared them with the size and markings of my hand until I was confident they were different - though it was definitely a primate of some kind. I also stopped every time I came across a stray building that was perched on the edge of the river, peering my head through the door for a few seconds, eyeing the tools on the walls and the debris on the floor, speculating that most of them were temporary housing, maybe belonging to farmers and herders that stayed in them according to the harvest or seasons. However, none of these buildings ever struck me as a place that I could picture myself staying in for a longer period of time, or even, for that matter, to sit beside for more than a brief and needed rest. And so I would press on - on and up.
As the land steadily rose, the vegetation changed to better suit the differences in the air, moisture, and temperature of the rising altitude. The flora was becoming more lush and dense with every hour of travel, until finally, near the end of the third day, I came to some woody shrubs that were so thick that they seemed to create an almost impenetrable barrier. I had been watching this line of bushes get nearer all day, along with the clouds, which were sinking ever lower, growing darker, their bellies fat with rain.
The slope that I was climbing became steeper, more pronounced, and it seemed to end at a massive plateau where the dense and woody bushes began, visibly marking the beginning of another ecosystem. These bushes, I would later learn, were a tangled mass of branches that stood well over a person's head, and required something of a battle - usually involving at least some loss of blood - to move only a short distance through. Just below the plateau, under the lip of the dense bushes, was a fairly large terrace that had some surviving crop plants and fruit trees interspersed throughout. And at the edge of the terrace, close to the white and tumbling stream, was a small hut, which, like the other buildings I'd come across, had probably served as a kind of temporary housing for whoever kept the crop that had once grown beside it.
Everything was pointing me toward this tiny building: the wall of high bushes, my tired legs, my blistered feet, the rare crop food beside it, the darkening sky that was threatening to break open any minute - everything. It seemed like I'd found my spot to rest and think for a while.
I first walked around the terrace, breaking open and tasting one of the crop fruits to see if they were as edible as they looked. Then I circled the hut, pushing against the walls to make sure it wasn't going to fall down any time soon. Once I had done this, I went to see what kind of access I had to the river to get water. I even walked up to the barrier of tall bushes to see if there were any breaks or trails leading into it that I couldn't make out from a distance. (There weren't; which meant that the straightforward travelling would definitely stop there.) By the time I opened the rickety door, rain was speckling my clothes for the first time since the drizzling days after the storm. The timing couldn't have been better.
The hut was small, there being only enough room for a bed and a little table adjoined to a cupboard in the corner. There were also two windows on opposite sides of the room, but only one of them was intact, the long shards of glass from the other still scattered across the wooden planks of the floor. There were buckets, metal tools for crop growing that were hanging on the walls, strands of frayed rope, a few broken plates and bowls, utensils, two stools with wide cracks in the wood and wire reinforcing their legs, and a small frame on the floor that must have held a picture of some kind, but now only gripped a piece of paper that was bleached and curled with exposure to the elements.
I nodded my head. It was going to take some time, a little cleaning and mending, but that was all. I bent over to start the job, placing the slender shards of glass into a bucket first. Then I dragged the mattress outside, which had been shredded by mice and still had quite a few living inside, all of them scattering out of the mesh of springs and frayed cloth while I propped it up against the side of the building. By the time it was dark, I had everything fairly organized inside; and things that were broken, decayed beyond recognition, or simply of no use to me, were outside in front of the mattress.
I sat down at the table on the only stool that was salvageable - which complained of my every movement with the loudest of creaks - and ate some fruit in the dark. The rain pattered on the roof, and I looked up every once in a while, surprised that it still seemed to be waterproof (except for a drip that fell in one of the corners every few seconds, which was easy enough to remedy with a bucket on the floor).