Post-Apocalypse Dead Letter Office (4 page)

On the bright side, things have kept swinging here at EPL. We took such a hit the first few months after the lights went out that the director thought we may have to close down the library completely. I mean, we had such little traffic those months, nobody had any more use for DVDs or CDs or offline public use computers. It was a really desperate time for all of us here. But by late winter we were getting a steady trickle of community folks asking really practical questions. “It’s getting cold – how can I better insulate my place?” and “All this fish my husband caught the other day is going bad – how can I preserve it?” and on and on. So we checked out quite a few of our home improvement and food preservation books those months. Unfortunately, the majority of them have not been returned. Hope springs eternal, but it’s unlikely those will ever make it back to us. The non-return rate got so bad that we actually had to revise our circulation policies and how our collection was categorized. We went through every book in the library – yeah, I know! – and set aside those that were, at heart, do-it-yourself type books. Someone (Monica Perth, remember her? Jeez, what a bint.) wanted to toss out all the books that mention power tools or blenders or whatever, but that was stupid and we quashed it. I mean, honestly. There are manual tools that’ll do what power tools do, just slower and with greater exertion required of their operators. Regardless, the DIY materials are all on the reference shelf, now, which is now located in the most convenient and well-lighted area of the library. (Right where the CD and DVD collections used to be, you remember?) We will, under extremely powerful persuasion, check out one of those books. For the most part, though, people are happy to come in and pore over whatever book describes what they want to do, make a few notes, and then scamper off to put whatever it is they learned into practice.

We’ve been getting tons more fiction checkouts, too, but the real still-in-the-circulating-collection gems have been the music books. All kinds of sheet music, and instructional stuff like “Piano for beginners”, “Advanced piano”, “The New Drum Circle Companion” and “Harmonica Made Easy” (good god, we love checking out that last one to kids), etc. have simply been flying off the shelves. Their popularity has made both me and the director a bit nervous about the return rate, but she thinks that the general regard of and respect for the library has shot up so much lately that folks will use its collections more appropriately. She still has not ventured to make the do-it-yourself section a part of the circulating collection again, but most of the staff figure it’s only a matter of time. (We all want her to keep it as-is, though. It works so damned well, you know?)

There’s been a huge resurgence in the local politics scene, too. Hell of it is that it’s not been so great for Gary and my particular political predilections.

The first winter we spent without any lights or heat or anything else was comparatively mild. Stroke of luck, as everything else was bad enough already. So, we don’t have particularly bad winters here as a rule – just a lot of rain, mainly – and this one was even better than most. Still, most folks blew through what little wood and paper they had, if any, pretty quickly, and took to scavenging the nearby forests for easy limbs to break off or haulable logs. Few folks had any real idea how to cure wood or anything else, so there was a lot of smoky fires burning that winter. Several people who were unaware how to clean and operate their stoves succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning. Once word got out about that, we had a run on wood fire stove books. A couple that got returned were missing their title pages (we think they were used for tinder... what are you gonna do?)

Well, the next spring a whole bunch of rough-and-tumble types decided that cutting down a redwood would be a brilliant idea. So much wood, you’d be able to fuels dozens, hundreds of house stoves a year with just a tree or two. So they went out and did that, took them the better part of two days without any chainsaws. Then it fell and knocked over a smaller tree, which fell on one of the lumberjacks. Completely crushed his right leg, and he died a few hours later as they were hauling him back into town. So, though their idiocy and negligence they got a man with a wife and kid killed. But that got swept under the rug once everyone understood that there was a huge source of lumber and firewood out there for the taking. And, truth be told, it’s worked out pretty well. We have very few horses in town, and their main use now is to haul the logs back down to town, where folks can get at them with smaller saws and take what they need. The wood is not outstanding for any particular purpose, but adequate for most. After that first year we all met and re-prioritized, so that lesser trees get taken first, as the redwood regrowth rate is so phenomenally slow. The town is now harvesting maybe one redwood every couple years, depending on our needs. It’s been a compromise that most people are happy with. We’re not so much, but we’ve been grossly outnumbered and so that’s the way it is.

Well now we’ve got some “enterprising” folks – former lumberyard owners, imagine that! – saying we need to start harvesting more and sell it to other cities. You can probably infer Gary and my thoughts on that idea. They want to take out four or five a year! And who are they going to sell this lumber to? Can’t ship them, and we can only use so much here. So they’re just going to kill off almost half a dozen trees a year, chop them up and let them go to pot downtown. Gah!

We and most of the people we know well have dug in over this, and others are listening and weighing the options carefully. Not like before, when we couldn’t get a word in edgewise against logging interests. So maybe that’s it. We used to listen to the system, forced into taking a passive part in that one-sided conversation only maybe to whisper a tiny “yes” or “but I think...” every now and then. Now we’re talking to each other again to fill the silence that the system never should have filled in the first place. And they resonate loud and clear. And you’ll never hear me say “Talk is cheap” ever again.

And now I see that I’ve almost completely run out of space on this page, and this is the last page available to us in the entire house. (Well, next weeding I expect I’ll be able to pick up more. And I can dig out the last few CDs we have in the collection – the CD case booklets almost always have “Notes” sections. Perfectly lined, and their small size gets us a discount from the courier.)

Your ever-chatty friend,

Olive

To: Rev. Peter Hodgson, Independence, MO

From: Bobby Cox, Colorado Springs, CO

April 24, 20+7

Reverend Hodgson,

This is Bobby Cox, from Colorado Springs. Not sure if you remember me, but my folks and me were members of your church there in Independence. I’m writing you today for a few different reasons, so I’d appreciate it if you could bear with me a bit while I work through them all.

First, I haven’t heard from my parents for almost six months. It might be just that they didn’t want to send me any mail in the winter time because that’s when it costs so much more to send anything, but it’s spring now and I had hoped to hear something from them, and they always used to send me a letter every couple months, at least. Have you heard from them, talked to them or their neighbors or friends at all or know where they might be right now? Neil and Nancy Wright are a couple people my parents are friends with, and they’re in your church, too. And I think my folks know a Mr. Whitman who used to be in your church, but is now a Methodist or something. Not sure which church he’s in now. I know this isn’t your job at all, but can you ask around to see if you can find him or the Wrights, and if so ask them to contact my folks and/or me?

I’m not all that nervous about this being the case, but my parents are a lot older than some people out here in Colorado Springs that I know or know of who died. OK, I guess that does make me a little nervous, because most things have been not all that bad out here to be for the last five or six years, particularly climate-wise. And I know the heat and humidity out in your neighborhood is so much worse than it is here. It just... I hope they haven’t been overexerting themselves in the heat, or if so, that they’ll at least consider slowing down a bit. (I actually tried getting them to move out here with me a couple years ago – no offense to your or Independence, of course – for reasons including the less humid summers. As is obvious, they turned me down. Please forgive me for not filling you in on the fine details of that exchange at this moment.)

I guess if you do see my parents, would you please pass this letter or at least the gist of it to them, mainly just to tell them how I’ve been and to please get in touch with me.

I have been OK lately. Been much better, been a bit worse. Glad I had bought a condo with a southern exposure. Get a lot more light and warmth in the winter that way. Could be a bit closer to a decent water source. Fountain creek just doesn’t cut the mustard, ‘cause there’s tons of bums and now some gang members who use it as their personal toilet. Filthy, verminous people. Of course, things will get a lot better waterwise in the summer time. The thunderstorms still roll over Cheyenne mountain in early afternoon. (If I had a watch that still worked, I’d probably be able to set it by the minute the rain started.) I can usually get a few gallons every afternoon it rains using a big bucket at the end of my gutter. (A homebrewing bucket a “friend” of mine bought me years ago. Well, I have neither the extra money nor the motivation now to spend my time and effort making something that will simply poison me. Took me too long to figure that out for myself.) Don’t even have to share the runoff with my condo neighbors, as they started doing the same thing just a year or two ago. Makes it that much easier to stay clean and have drinking and cooking water.

I have been using my old books and magazines and old college papers and notebooks to cook food in my hibachi on the patio. I know my folks always disapproved of that, thought what I wrote and the books might be important some day, but cooking what food I can come across is more important than my undergraduate essays on the beatific imagination of Taylor Caldwell. (She did write so wonderfully about the savior’s redeeming power, but the grades I got were never that great.) I use the papers and such only to cook from time to time, to conserve them as fuel. Also, I still have all my old warmies to bundle up in during the winter, so I don’t really have to build a fire to heat the condo. Still gets pretty darn cold, I can tell you that, even with the southern exposure. I’ve heard that there are solar heater window type things that people can install that will really help heat up the area they’re attached to, but have neither the money to buy one or the materials or expertise to make and install one myself.

I guess I have been eating well enough. A few blocks away from the condo is Memorial Park. Well, I don’t know if you ever visited Colorado Springs, much less that area, but if you saw it now you wouldn’t recognize it at all. It’s a gigantic community garden now, with staples like corn and beans, tomatoes and chilies and just tons of other stuff. More and more every year. The apple trees that got planted have grown so-so and haven’t fruited yet. It’s been almost four years now, so we expect they’ll fruit soon. The cherry trees have done OK, took a rather meager harvest off them last year. Hope to get more this coming summer. The blooms look good so far this spring.

We even took out the firefighter memorial and all the concrete that surrounded it, converted the ball fields and everything to get more space for gardening. We need every inch of space that we can get because the harvest has to be split many hundred, maybe several thousand ways. I don’t know all that much about how it get split up, but as a laborer I get a decent share. (My folks know a lot of this I’m pretty sure. I just want to reassure them that I’m not starving. They worried about that, though, even when I was working at the base as a contractor for Lockheed-Martin. Seems like forever ago now.)

The fort really isn’t one anymore, hasn’t been for over four years now. It’s more like Ranch Carson now. There’s a little remnant of the military left, but it’s maybe a few hundred people. Just a garrison, and the rest of the land has been basically commandeered by the very folk that were pretty high up in the command structure to begin with. And so apparently they kept a lot of personnel occupied there, doing subsistence farming. Swords into plowshares, YES! The soil down that way doesn’t seem to produce quite as well, but I’ve heard those on the base get by OK.

There are those, and this is truly unfortunate, who left every semblance of civilization behind and have taken to looting and/or actually raiding the gardens and farms in and out of town. I can’t say that I understand why they feel this is a good thing for them to do. It only hurts others and themselves, in the long run. It seems to wax and wane according to the weather that year. It was pretty bad a couple years ago, when there was a bit of a drought on. They seemed to raid more frequently then, and were a lot more violent about it. Fortunately, their ilk is few in number, and they’ve never gotten truly organized. They seem more content to just thieve or even forcibly take food and then eat it down near Fountain creek, then defecate all over the place there. Scum... well, I’m sorry to have these feelings Reverend, but nothing anyone does seems to bring them around. I try to emulate Jesus best I can, but... God I am not. I think... hope you understand what I’m getting at.