One Long Winter

“One Long Winter”

By Alex Lape

I guess as a species, we’ve finally done it. We’ve finally found a way to screw up this planet and turn it into a giant revolving death trap in the middle of space. Good job, humanity. All we had to do was safely dispose of all nuclear weapons in the 2037 Atomic Accord which was five years ago. But nope, some idiot just had to mess that up, too. Why would Lady Luck ever make life THAT easy for humans, when someone can just mess up, detonate every nuke in the last payload that was meant to be shipped off to space by knocking over the wrong switch while reaching for a skin magazine, forget the deactivation code, and launch us into a Nuclear winter? It wasn’t just that the Earth’s overall surface temperature basically plummeted to forty degrees below and pretty much made the world a frozen wasteland, it was also that the radiation levels were supposedly high enough to ensure the onset of cancer in a couple days if sufficient radiation was absorbed into the human body. That’s why everyone’s not super thrilled to go out these days. Either you freeze to death from the temperature and/or your DNA fries from the radiation. Luckily, over the last four years, homes have been modified to keep the radiation out as much as possible.Now, as for going outside personally? People have manufactured tons of specialized HazMat suits designed to shield the human body from radiation as much as possible with extra insulation against the cold, but even those can only protect someone from so much radiation for so long. But not everyone’s been on board with the HazMat suits, either. They think that normal winter jackets will do the trick until they find out they have harmful, spontaneous genetic mutations about a week later. People have also installed de-radiation chambers within their front doors to make sure neither they or their items stay irradiated before entering their main living space. Some people have stopped going out altogether from fear of the radiation and the bone chilling, circulation depriving cold, having moved on to working at home and having food and other supplies delivered to them before leaving them in the de-radiation chamber overnight or for a day or two.

So where do I come in? My name is Derek Wafflehaus, and before you ask - no, I did not make waffles for a living before the Winter. I was a traveling writer for the Technological editorial of a Men’s lifestyle magazine. Yes, I was a nerd, but a nerd who traveled in style. Springtime in Boston, summer trips to Miami - anywhere I needed to fly to for work, I flew. Nowadays, the closest thing to a vacation for me is peering outside of my apartment window and seeing some disgruntled maintenance worker swear furiously as he fumbled in the snow. And this is my life now. A life that afforded me multiple options for networking with people is now reduced to freelance in the “comfort” of my cramped apartment with the heater cranked on fully just to make sure I don’t turn into a human icicle. Granted, even with the heater, slight feelings of numbness can set in various limbs. Meanwhile, I’ve suddenly found that my life has revolved between bouncing between apps for work, grocery buying, entertainment, and whatever brief communication I can get from messaging apps. If I’m honest, it only makes me miss the connections I had before the Winter even more. My cousin Christina invited me to see her son’s birth in Maryland, but lo and behold - Detroit just had to give an advisory warning to ground all flights until Spring due to “ a possible increase in inclement weather conditions”. Great, like this planet wasn’t frozen enough. Both of our parents even called me to try to get me to head over to have a good old fashioned family holiday season. And yes, I had to once again regretfully tell them that Detroit wasn’t letting anyone go anywhere. Even all my old friends and flames from my high school and college days might as well have been dreams I had as a kid. As much as I wanted to tell them that I’d visit, and I’d be right there with them and it’d be like old times - the truth was: I couldn’t promise that, despite every fibre in me wishing I could. And it was probably for the best. For all I know, they’d have already gone on with their lives. Which was fair. People could only wait so long.

The one source of human interaction I DID manage to enjoy (depending on how thin you stretched that word) was my cooky old neighbor Jared who had subscribed to some of the craziest stories floating around like how the Winter was “some type of sinister plot by aliens to freeze off all humans before they would take over the planet”. Poor guy had been listening to too many podcasts set up by idiots with an opinion to spread fear over this, that, and a third. If you’d actually buy into their steaming pile of fantasies, you may think that someone recently tampered with the stoplight in Van Dyke Avenue to make it hypnotize people and cause more crashes. Not necessarily true, because the fact of the matter is: either a road has terrible visibility..or people are just terrible drivers. It wasn’t mind control or hallucingenically induced. But people like old man Jared bought into those theories at a time when panic and frustration were pretty much the only things constantly at a boiling point. If I was a bit more cynical, I’d chuckle that a heated argument was welcome every now and then. Heated...heh. Grab your humor where you can, I guess.

I’ve been seeing these same damn walls so much for months now that I think anxiety and everything that comes with it is starting to settle in finally. I can’t even begin to spell out how hard it gets when you can’t see the sunlight - both figuratively and pretty literally. Just the stress people face trying to pay for the bare basics like food, water, light, and rent is enough to weigh one down, especially during times when people rush to stock up and panic buy a whole store out of business in about two days. And then like bears, everyone hibernates into their own little “cave” of an apartment until the next time they need sustenance. For a dreamer and a natural born traveler like myself, all of this can sometimes feel like an unwarranted detainment stint.I had dreams to visit places - places that weren’t my kitchen or bathroom. It’s why I chose to become a writer for a Technology section in the first place. I loved traveling to distant places to try out the interfaces of the newest smartphone or learn about the inner workings of a new computer’s dual core processing system, as much as I loved the art of expressing myself through words. Now of course I had my bumps at the start of my career. Hell, some of my own cousins thought my career choice was a pipe dream at best. And while they currently weren’t completely wrong about the “probably won’t go anywhere” part for now, it was still a dream job. At least it was better than doing random surveys and marketing new items on blogs, anyways - at least for me. I’ve got nothing against people who enjoy that type of thing or other people like me who do it to make ends meet, but it just isn’t me. I always saw my life as being more than this. 

To make matters worse, Detroit’s current mayor is suggesting the possibility of implementing even more radiation codes. These codes are said to make sure that people do things like spend time in de-radiation chambers before and after entering and exiting buildings like banks, churches, and grocery stores; declaring certains parts of Detroit as No Entry zones due to differing concentrations of radiation. Of course some people, especially those living in those areas, may frame it as an attempt to target groups based on demographics like ethnicity, race, and income. But frankly, I don’t get into that any which way even though I may sympathize with the fact they shouldn’t have to live like that. And for the most part, I’m just another one of the people trying to make ends meet.

 It kind of makes one wonder if and when this whole Winter business is going to end, if they haven’t already accepted that it may not. It also makes it increasingly difficult to plan anything knowing that it can get cancelled or restricted in a moment’s notice. Talk about ways to dampen a mood, huh? And this is all most of us are doing nowadays: biding time, watching the news and the weather forecasts, arguing about who or what caused this, trying to make the days pass by a little lighter if we could (and in any way we could), and staying home. What DOES make my day a little lighter is the fact that the checks I get from doing those online blogs and editorials do help me keep a place to stay (frankly, I am a bit concerned about my rent hiking up next month, guess we’ll see how that goes..), and food on my table. 

So, until all of this clears up and life once again becomes what it was - I’ll be here. Looking at these same old walls, peeking outside of my window whenever a supply delivery comes by, poking at different app icons on a touchscreen to keep my job or my entertainment, thinking about the people I wish that I could be with, and warming myself the best I can as I eat meat I’ve left in the de-radiation chamber for a day or two, or maybe some canned stew I ordered. And who knows? Maybe that warm sun will poke through the dense, gloomy Detroit sky again, and warm our hearts with hope as it warms our land. Maybe I will see my cousin’s baby boy and share that very same warmth with him when I cradle him and tell him that I’ll always love him. Maybe I’ll see those classmates I knew who moved to Oregon. But until then, this is your man, Derek Wafflehaus - signing out.