The World as We Know It Read online

  They committed themselves to building local postal centers, and they would spread the word of the new system throughout their own communities. As future carriers passed through, they could begin to send and receive letters. I wrote my own letters home, and a man from each place vowed to head north and deliver them. In addition to his deliveries, during the period of genesis, each carrier was also responsible for informing each place down the road of new locations to keep the network growing. Other carriers were recruited to establish regional routes to places I would not pass. Recruiting new carriers was easy. There were plenty of people like me who were looking for direction and purpose, and such a great responsibility provided exactly that. So began the New World Mail Network, as it would come to be called.

  The weather grew warmer as I moved south. I got used to traveling in the rain, and some days I even welcomed the cool cleansing it brought with it. It was liberating and exhilarating to travel in the open air, unconstrained by a need for luxury and comfort. Sometimes, that is. Other times, I could hardly bear it. The landscape grew increasingly lush and wet. Palm trees began to appear. I thought back to a vacation Maria and I had taken to Florida one February. We had left home with snow on the ground and blowing from the tops of tractor-trailers in front of us, and then we had passed under palm trees within the same day. People wondered then why we had decided to drive when a flight would have taken only a couple of hours. I just liked to drive. I liked to watch the scenery change as we passed from place to place. There was humor to be found in the irony. After the collapse, the same trip would take me weeks, and I longed for the convenience of a plane.

  Eventually, I came across a settlement outside of what had been New Orleans, and at a fascinating moment. The sounds gave away its location. The first of its inhabitants I met were the six armed sentries posted on the highway outside who blocked the road as I approached and surrounded me.

  Who are you?

  What is your purpose?

  Are you alone?

  How long will you stay?

  When they were satisfied that I wasn’t a threat, they allowed me to pass. I hadn’t seen the water yet, but the community spread immensely and abutted Lake Pontchartrain and the bayous. It was massive—there were thousands of people in dense crowds reminiscent of refugee camps in Africa or the Middle East or wherever that I had seen on CNN. Everyone seemed to be passionately involved in some kind of job.

  I dismounted and led Nomad on a stroll through the place, looking for someone in charge. It looked as though it should have had someone in charge, and that was the person I needed to meet. How, I wondered, would that person have been chosen? Would he be the smartest? The loudest? The most cunning and clever? Would “he” be a “she,” and would he or she be white? Black? Would he wear a suit? No, certainly not, I thought. Nobody in a suit and tie would be taken seriously. If you didn’t have a layer of dirt on your shoes, you weren’t to be trusted with much.

  I say it was a fascinating moment because after a short walk, I came across a group of laborers who were singing like they’d just struck gold. But it wasn’t gold they’d struck; it was water. I approached next to a man standing with his arms crossed and a grin on his face, watching the revelry.

  “The fun part will be digging the well,” he said, shaking his head. “You can’t miss the water table down here.”

  “I’m Joe,” I said with a chuckle, extending my hand.

  He turned to me and shook my hand with his, which was coated in dried mud. “Glad to meet ya, Joe,” he replied. “I’m Dr. Lazarus Heron, formerly of the USGS. Sorry about the dirt.”

  “No problem, Dr. Heron.”

  “Call me Laz,” he said. Then he looked me up and down. “Where ya from, Joe?”

  “St. Louis, originally.”

  “Rode that horse all the way down here?”

  “Well, we’ve been building a community in southern Missouri for a while. That’s where I came from.”

  “That’s quite a ride. How are things going up there?”

  “They’re coming along. We’re adapting, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. We’re all adapting. I can’t believe it’s taken this long to get a well going around here. You see all these people? Thousands of us. Millions, maybe. We’ve been drinking out of lakes and rivers and creeks. Depending on where you’re coming from, it can be quite a walk, and they get crowded. And you just have to hope there isn’t someone taking a leak upstream. I feel like a barbarian. I’m hoping we’ll have readily accessible running water within the year—hope being the operative word. We’ll have to pillage some supplies from the city. Lord knows I’m not looking forward to going back there. The things I saw…The first step, though, is a well. Will you be sticking around a little while?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Good. Got a place to stay?”

  “Not yet.”

  “All right. Let’s see your arms, Joe. Yeah, you’ll do just fine.”

  “Just fine?”

  “We start digging tomorrow.”

  “I’m exhausted.”

  “You’d better get some rest then. Gotta earn your keep around here. Come on, I’ll give you a place to lay your head.”

  Laz and his wife, Beth, had a cabin of their own where they put me up for the night. It was nestled in the bayou and shaded by cypress trees and Spanish moss. A rowboat was beached at the water’s edge. Next to the house was an old tree stump coated in the remnants of fish, which reminded me of how hungry I was.

  Beth had a personality as beautiful as her appearance. She was quiet but friendly, and she was a wonderfully accommodating hostess. A great chef, too. Most of our luxuries had been abandoned, but the ethnic creole and Cajun fare was too important to go by the wayside, as I came to learn. People there valued their heritage like nothing I had ever seen. During my first night with them, we shared a meal of blackened catfish and shrimp gumbo with a few welcome neighbors. We sat at a long table in the grass outside and watched the sunset through the trees, which were reflected in the water as we ate. After the time I had spent feeding on weeds and the monotonous soy fields while I traveled, I would have been prepared to ravage that fish raw had I seen it before the fire, but fortunately for all of us, my manners were not so compromised.

  It was a banquet unlike any I’d had since before the collapse. By that I don’t mean better, just different. Half the ingredients we couldn’t even get in the Midwest, which brought a whole new meaning to this mission. Of course, I had been focused on the essentials, and a line of communication was vital. I hadn’t considered that I was establishing shipping routes as well. I wanted to eat like that back home.

  It was nice to have a soft, warm place to sleep, but once I blew out the candles, I couldn’t get my mind off of Maria. Lying in a safe and comfortable bed with a full stomach, my mind slipped away from my task and away from survival and gravitated beyond the things keeping me alive toward the things that made life worth living. I felt there were so few. When I thought of her, I became angry, though I could not justify why. I scoured my memories for some betrayal, some transgression to rationalize those feelings, but in all our time together, I could find none.

  It was around ten o’clock. My beautiful wife was, I imagined, alone in our bed, save for the Siberian cat keeping her feet warm. I wondered if she had grown accustomed to the sounds of the night by then. We had never been apart for so long since the day we had met, and certainly not since we had been married. I could count on one hand the number of times I had been away from home on business for more than two days. But it had been weeks. I wondered if she had secretly reciprocated my resentment all that time and perhaps she had been better at disguising it than I. Despite all that had happened between us, I was beginning to miss her. Homesickness was something I hadn’t experienced since my childhood days at summer camp, and back then, it had been my parents who I had missed. My caregivers. Roles had changed as I had grown older and taken the first step toward a family of
my own, and as a man I felt more like the caregiver. It was my responsibility to provide for Maria, yet another at which I had failed, and I wondered if she didn’t share in the feeling that was already beginning to haunt me: that I had abandoned her. After all, she had used the word when I had told her I was leaving. I wondered if she was still crying herself to sleep as I was.

  Beth was gentle about waking me the next morning, almost reluctant, as if she had some moral objection to disrupting such a peaceful state. Little did she know that behind that calm façade was a dormant volcano of a man.

  “Good morning,” she said with a smile. “I’m making breakfast. Come on out when you’re ready. The boys are getting ready to start work.”

  By the time I emerged, there was a crowd of men outside, some sitting, some standing, drinking beer as they filled up on ham and eggs. I declined the former at that time of morning, but a good breakfast was just what I needed to start the day. It was cool for that time of year on the northern Gulf of Mexico, but the sun was bright in the clear blue sky.

  “How’d you sleep?” Laz asked, slapping me on the back.

  “Better than I have since I left home.”

  “Good. We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”

  “You drink beer with breakfast?” I inquired.

  “Ah, beer is a staple of human civilization, my friend. A culture can be judged by the quality of its beer.” He laughed. “Even the ancient Egyptians knew that, and look at what they did with their bare hands. You ever been to the pyramids, Joe?”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Someday you should.”

  I met a few of the others who welcomed my assistance and company. Many of them harbored an unusual curiosity about my journey, and they saddled me with a barrage of questions for half the morning. They asked about what the collapse had been like during the winter in St. Louis, about our move south, and about all of the places I had been between here and there. My impression was that moving to that place after the collapse was the farthest they had ever traveled from their previous dwellings in and around New Orleans.

  Laz didn’t ask questions, though. He was unguarded and friendly, but he never boasted about himself, though I suspected he had much to boast about. There was an air of humble intelligence about him that had been apparent from the moment we had met. I must not have been the only one who noticed, because he was the guy everyone came to for directions and answers, the same role Abraham played back home. Lazarus, though, was much younger. I would guess he was somewhere in his midthirties, perhaps only a few years older than I was.

  “You sure picked the wrong day to show up, Joe,” Lazarus laughed as we walked toward the future site of well number one. “Drilling is a whole lot easier than digging, but since we don’t have a drill rig and couldn’t power one even if we did, we’re going to be getting a workout.”

  “Well since I missed the easy part, tell me, how do you find groundwater?” I asked him.

  “It’s under there almost everywhere you go, actually. There’s more fresh water underground than there is in all the lakes, rivers, and streams in the world combined. Out at my place in the bayou, of course, we’ve got all the fresh water we need at the surface, but it’s far less convenient for the folks inland. There it’s just a matter of depth. You’ve got to look at what’s around. Do you see water anywhere? Is there a stream? A river? A lake? There will probably be water under the ground nearby. Look in low areas and for trees that thrive in wet conditions. Then start digging until you’ve broken past the water table and can’t dig anymore through the water rushing in. You’ll need a guy up above with a bucket on a rope and pulley helping to bail you out. When you think you’re going to drown, it’s time to start lining your well with stones to filter it and keep the soil from filling it in. With a drill, you could pass a thousand feet if you had to, putting your source deep in the aquifer. Unfortunately, you can’t get nearly that deep by hand, but I think the man-made pollutants near the surface will be less of an issue than they used to be. Maybe the fish will even return to the gulf now that they aren’t being decimated by toxic urban runoff and chemical fertilizers.”

  “You filter it after it’s drawn?” I asked.

  “You afraid of a little sediment, Joe? You must have made out better than most of us when things came down. Sure, you can filter it. Pour it through a strainer or a cloth if you want, which is more than most of us have been doing with the lake and river water. Eventually, we’ll have a spigot, but for now, a bucket on a rope will have to do. We’re going to need quite a few wells to accommodate this many people, especially since we can’t reach the aquifer. They’ll save us some walks to fresh water on the surface, and this will be cleaner.”

  “You keep saying ‘us.’ You live on the water, Laz. What do you need a well for?”

  “We’re all in this together, Joe.”

  About that, he was right. Those who lived in the bayou had a surplus of fresh water and seafood, but their produce came from farms outside and further inland.

  There were so many men in our crew that we knocked out three wells that day, set in various places around the community. We finished digging the first one they had begun the day before, walled it with stones, and built a crank structure above to raise and lower a bucket into it using salvaged materials from the old city. Then we moved on to the second, about a quarter mile away. Then the third. They got easier as we went, and we cycled our shifts frequently enough that nobody dropped from exhaustion. By the end of the week, we had around ten wells finished, and my arms were so fatigued that I couldn’t hold a cup of our fresh water without my hands quivering.

  Having never worked in what we called a blue-collar field, I couldn’t help but adopt with intrigue the cheer that seemed to cloak every man laboring by my side. We worked together like family. Some had done the same work many times before, and others, like me, had come from behind a desk. Yet there was no power struggle out there—no envy of the next man or a perception of his overcompensation. We would all profit equally in the freedom our work would provide.

  In the meantime, a man had been sent to deliver my latest letter home. They would be relieved and amazed, I thought, to learn that that sort of fellowship extended so far beyond the boundaries of our little Midwestern village in the hills. It flourished as if things had always been that way. People seldom spoke of the way things used to be, even down there. In the beginning, we had avoided the topic because it conjured painful memories of loss, but that avoidance was gradually evolving into a disinterest in the old world.

  A large group of us gathered for meals in the evenings, sometimes nattering until the sun came up. When I spoke of things I had learned back home about farming, hygiene, and survival, they usually already possessed the knowledge I had brought with me. I began to realize that there were people like Abraham everywhere I went—people we used to discount and ridicule as hicks or nerds, depending on what sect of society they had come from. But we would have been lost without them.

  The great team of men with whom I worked during the days followed Laz’s directions dutifully. They seemed to recognize and respect his expertise and asked few questions, other than to clarify his instruction. Never did I hear an argument, though that wasn’t because they feared him or needed the job. When I pointed that out to him, it seemed to be the first time he had taken notice.

  “Yeah, most of these guys are used to taking orders from a white man,” he said, “but they don’t seem to mind the color of my skin. Maybe it’s my PhD.” He laughed. “When we move on to the next project, I’m sure someone else will take over. Electricity is not my forte.”

  Electricity, I pondered. I had abandoned futile hopes that we would ever enjoy such a thing again in my lifetime.

  “Neither is hunting,” he continued, lifting his shirt and rolling his sleeves to reveal a collection of scars that would rival those of a veteran Roman gladiator. “Urban hunting, scavenging, whatever you want to call what we did after it all came down. We tri
ed to stick it out in the city for a while, but people were desperate. Food was scarce, so we had to fight for it. First it was one-on-one with fists. Sometimes knives. I fought a guy with a sword once, briefly. He left me with this souvenir. You didn’t argue with a guy who had a gun. It usually wasn’t loaded, but it wasn’t worth the risk.

  “People started forming gangs. They would fight over a carcass in the street like vultures. Sometimes even a human carcass. Little by little, the population in the city became less dense as people chose between leaving and dying, and we decided we had a better chance facing the gators in the bayou. At least they’d bring us food. I figure the people still left behind will eventually realize they’re better off working together rather than killing one another. Each of us has at least one strength—one talent applicable to any way of life. Just have to find out what that is.

  “Be careful of those guys though, Joe. They’re still out there. I haven’t been back into the city for a while, but I hear stories of what it has become. You may want to avoid it. I’d keep that shotgun handy if I were you.”

  As more wells became functional, life quickly grew easier in the gulf community. The time its inhabitants used to spend walking to and from fresh water could then be spent on other things. Some of the crew continued working on more wells, while I joined others in the construction of their own postal center.

  Shortly after we began, however, a log left me with a rather unpleasant splinter half the length of my forearm lodged deep under my skin. I took that as a sign that it was time to move on, and I headed back to Laz and Beth’s home to rest before setting off again. Perhaps I was getting too comfortable there anyway.