How The World Works

Frank reflected on what a peculiar place The North is.

Having decided when he first moved there that he would live in his new home for a year before choosing the site of his garden, he remembered that first spring morning looking out his north-facing kitchen window and the shock he felt as he realized that there was sunshine streaming in on his sleep-puffed face and squinting eyes.

The sun doesn’t rise in the north!

It rises in the east and sets in the west- that’s the proper order of things, that’s how the world works… but this far north the sun indeed rises in the northeast and sets in the northwest. In each day as spring advanced the sun described a more and more nearly complete circle in her daily path. How odd.

And how odd, too, to realize as that first year wore on that the best spot for his new garden, the spot that got the most sun during the short growing season, considering the shade of the house and the trees on the property, was in the northeast corner. But that was how the world worked in that particular spot on that ‘little blue planet, third from the sun’, as the old song so lyrically put it. Frank indeed felt like a stranger here…

A year passed, the frost had finally come out of the ground, and Frank happily took spade in hand to turn over the sod and create a garden.

The work was hard, but he reveled in the exertion so foreign to his normal work of shuffling paper from one file to another. He needed frequent breaks, and lots of rejuvenating water applied both to the mouth and to the head in general, but finally, after seemingly countless hours, the job was done.

Running his fingers through the newly turned and broken sod was satisfying- there was life here. The soil teemed with earthworms and bugs of all shapes and sizes. Frank sighed with pleasure as a vision entered his mind from childhood textbooks of charts showing the web of life. The interconnectedness of all living things. The various ways in which his health as a human was dependent on the health of this thriving miniature universe normally hidden from view, buried beneath the quiet and unsung grass.

Then he brought forth his treasures- precious globules brought from The South on a recent foray there. Potatoes. Onions. Garlic. Peas and beans and pumpkins. All things to be hidden under the earth, to be planted, to be invested like money in a bank but with hopes of returns not in the range of one or two percent but instead to be returned ten-fold, a hundred-fold, maybe even a thousand-fold.

Here was real wealth- something that was more than digits on a computer screen, something that no tax-man could take away, something that would sustain his life and maybe the lives of others, too.

Each day throughout that growing season Frank looked out of that north window at his pride and joy, at his hope and future, at the green and growing things that his labour had set in motion. The days grew longer and the night shrank towards insignificance as midsummer approached, but that only gave him more time to pull weeds and to inspect for the bugs that would compete with Frank for the growing supply of food.

This is how the world works. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

And Frank felt like he was living out that metaphorical curse the Hebrew God put on the heads of all humanity, imposed as the first humans were evicted from that first garden so very long ago. Life was destined never to be easy again. Here in the North there was no low-hanging fruit for Frank to pluck and eat as he lazed under a tropical sun, no fish to catch in a lazily meandering stream, no honey to steal from the combs of wild bees: no fruit at all for hundreds of miles around except what came in on the rare transport planes or on the even more rare trucks coming from the South.

And then the call came in.

As he had always done, Frank even in this new place kept regular office hours. Gardening was for the hours he was not ‘on the clock’. One day as he sat in his office, moving paper around in what felt like an increasingly pointless enterprise, there was a ping on his phone. A text message.

‘Urgent. Report to transport 0800 tomorrow. Survivors have been found.’

Frank tidied his desk- not sure how long he might be away- and then checked his gear. Boots. Gloves. Coveralls. Respirator. Helmet. Rations. Water. Sidearm. Other tools. Medical supplies. Check, check, check.

Then he walked home to check on his garden. The peas and beans had finished flowering and the pods were growing and engorging. Not long now. The pumpkins were still flowering, but some fruit was already set and growing larger, bright green still. Frank wondered briefly if he should pinch off the remaining flowers so that more energy could go into the fruit, and decided against it. These tremendously long days seemed to be magic for green and growing things. No need to get in the way of the way the world works, right?

0800 and waiting on the edge of the tarmac. Alone and nervous. It had been a quite a few weeks since Frank had seen another person. He mentally reviewed procedures until he heard the whine of an approaching plane. He looked up, shading his eyes, and watched as the pilot expertly guided his craft onto the runway, landing smoothly and taxiing to a perfect stop. A twin-engine turboprop. Very nice indeed. The door swung open and a ladder appeared. Frank climbed on board.

There was nobody in the cabin or the galley, so Frank looked in the cockpit. There was Brian O’Donnell, busy doing mysterious pilot-type things. He was alone, so Frank slipped into the vacant co-pilot seat.

Brian glanced up and smiled. ‘You’re looking fit, Doc. All this isolation hasn’t hurt you too much, eh?’

‘Nope, but I’m glad to have somebody to talk to. It gets a bit eerie up here all alone. Quiet, y’know.’ Frank paused to let Brian concentrate on getting airborne. Then, ‘so, what can I expect to find?’

‘Oh, man, I thought they’d have filled you in,’ Brian wore a surprised look, ‘yeah, this is the biggest thing in a long time. A whole family has been holed up- middle aged parents are both alive, but the real news is they have surviving daughters! And I don’t mean toddlers, either, which would still be pretty good news, but these chicks are breeding age. We can start building up the population again! My mouth is watering just thinking about it! Girls!’ He chuckled and squirmed a bit in his seat.

‘Relax, Romeo! Don’t get too excited or you’ll fly us into a mountain. Dial it back a bit!’

They chatted for an hour plus as they flew south, reminiscing about the way the world used to be. Lamenting the loss of so much- hotdogs, pizza, and hamburgers; pretty girls in flowered summer dresses walking down the street; the sheer simple joy of shopping in the malls and grocery stores that used to be everywhere. TV. Movie theatres. Beer. Holidays in sunny places. Even the crowds in the cities that used to be so annoying, the traffic jams, the drag of paying bills and saving for retirement. All these things seemed so quaint. So old-fashioned. So 2020.

‘Okay, we’re close now. We’ll chat more as we fly back up.’ And with that all was silent, Brian looking for the grass strip he had been told would be there, Frank going over in his head all the possible things that could go wrong on a mission like this.

‘There it is,’ Brian said, pointing forward, glee in his voice, ‘just where they said it would be. These folks really have their act together- right down to GPS coordinates for their cabin and for the meadow where we’re landing. Good stuff.’ Frank was silent. No need to disturb a genius at work, after all.

They landed without incident, which relieved Frank and sent Brian into an even more giddy mood.

Frank put on his sober face in an effort to cool Brian down. ‘OK, we follow procedure just like always. You stay on board, doors secured. I go out and examine anybody alive. If there’s any sign of the virus you leave immediately no matter who is out there. Nobody with a fever gets on board no matter how young and beautiful they might be. I’m surprised they didn’t send somebody along with you to help you keep watch.’

‘I guess nobody’s told you much of anything in a while, Doc. Murphy and Fraser are both dead. Our personnel roster is gettin’ a tad thin at the base. It was a case of sending me or sending nobody. I’m just glad I’ve still got you to send out there where things are really dicey!’

‘Bloody hell. Well, I guess it is what it is, but things better turn around soon if we’re gonna manage to avoid being the next extinct species. When the cockroaches build museums in a million years they’ll wonder what ever happened to those hairless apes that used to be everywhere. All right, I’m gone. Might as well get this over with.’

Brian laughed as he opened the door and let down the ladder. ‘Dibs on the prettiest one, eh?’ Frank grunted in reply.

He was gone hours and eventually returned, alone and looking dejected. The door opened and the ladder came dangling down. This time Brian was waiting at the door as Frank climbed in.

‘What the hell, Doc? I thought we had some live ones this time.’

‘Nope. They were all dead, just like that last spot we visited. Pretty newly dead, too. The flies were just starting to gather. Still in rigor. All of them in bed except the father. Took me a while to find him. He was outside, tending to their garden. He died trying to keep hope alive, I suppose. Let’s go home.’

‘Damn. The bugs win again. I guess that’s just how the world works, eh?’

‘Yup. That’s how the world works.’