Jim Collins stood on a rocky outcropping and looked west into the Sawtooth Valley, a beautiful, deep coniferous green valley that he remembered as an Eden of tranquility. It had been a wonderful place to visit and maybe retire if the family left Florida, which now was history. Then he turned, once again, to look back at Buckham, Idaho, at what used to be a wonderful small town of log buildings with a million-dollar view of the Sawtooth Mountains. Was it just three years ago that he and Trudy and the three young ones had become nomads, fleeing from Florida that was awash with other low-lying areas threatened or inundated by the rising seas?

Collins had been a successful engineer in Olaca, working for a rising mid-level firm, designing electrical systems to operate anything from robots to 'hands free' pharmaceutical labs. He found Beckham on one of his western trips to a technical conference and returned to Florida with a plan, which was accelerated after things began to fall apart in the Sunshine State.

***

He wished with daily despair that his new location had not been the result of a preventable man-made disaster that had changed the world he remembered. A change that forced him, his family, and other survivors, to hoard food and set up a militia – though there were a number of residents who did not like that term and would not use it -- to guard their communal property, their water sources, and food-growing areas, their dwellings, and their lives. There was no joy in many similar small gatherings across large sections of the United States, only fear and desperation, and suppressed anger. It had been years, a hundred generations before Collins was born, that the glaciers had begun to melt; they were now a fifth of their original size, and the Gulf and the Atlantic had risen nearly 140 feet and had swallowed coastlines and cities, had killed and injured thousands in the food and property riots that began in waves in the eastern United States and turned culture back 500 years in many of the makeshift communities that now existed.

Why had those previous generations ignored the clear, scientific warning signs until it became too late to reverse the damage? Yes, solar power had come to some areas, but ultimately the grid could not handle the demand and blackouts increased. Political leaders tried, but arguments increased and progress was negligible; legislation was enacted but it was words on paper. Environmental regulations were routinely ignored or purposely violated in the name of profit. The need for new energy was lagging behind the requirements, and the economy, what there was of it, pushed the country back into the use of coal and oil. Skies got dirtier, respiratory diseases flew off the medical charts and life expectancy dropped by nearly 4 years.

***

So the Collins family moved and settled in Beckham with about 80 other family groups. Once an isolated, beautiful tourist destination, now it was a collection of tents, makeshift lean-tos, and reclaimed buildings that had been burned or otherwise destroyed by previous visitors who passed through and picked apart anything of value, then moved on, looking for more spoils. There was no law, in fact, except what the gatherings had decided would be the law.

Punishment for stealing anything from anyone in Beckham was immediate exile, and if the food was taken, the perpetrator's belongings were sifted and given to anyone who had a need before the thieves were sent away. But in many other locations, especially in bigger communities, the law was weak and police forces had been thinned by mass resignations. What replaced order was chaos, and the strong were surviving, those who took what they wanted.

***

Jim and his wife, Trudy, and the three children, 15 to 20, felt guarded in Beckham, but it was relative and changed almost day-to-day. They had a measured trust in their immediate neighbors, three families from New York State, Delaware and Connecticut. Jim had armed himself before the family left Florida when the mobs began to move through the area ransacking anything that was not under guard or already destroyed. He had visited a sporting goods store not too long before the looting began. The owner had left, and also had left his inventory; Jim took a rifle, two handguns, and a case of ammunition for all three guns.

***

Olaca, Florida is 2,500 miles from Beckham, It was where Jim and Trudy had sold their home for less than a fourth of its assessed value before leaving for Idaho. At one time Olaca was 169 feet above sea level and about 50 miles east of the Gulf of Mexico shoreline; it was now about 30 feet above the water and less than 10 miles from the Gulf. The younger couple who bought the Collins' Florida house, was confident the property would stay dry, but torrential rains driven by hurricanes had repeatedly swept across Florida and along the Gulf Coast and up the East Coast, ravaging communities. Entire neighborhoods had disappeared and virtually no one felt safe in those that remained. And in the West, where rain, at one time a divine blessing, was becoming a curse, and the irony was the continuing need for water to raise crops in the new communities.

There was no real communication system for many of the migrants. Some were able to patch through with makeshift electric grids and gather pieces of information, but nothing was connected in an organized way, except for the haphazard chance that two persons simultaneously might broadcast on the same frequency. And then the information exchange was sketchy and full of unverifiable rumors. The Collins' family had left with a van and a U-Haul with minimal belongings and gambled that Idaho would be a better place to live. The Beckham that Jim remembered, though, was friendly and scenic almost beyond description. Now it was only a collection of people who had gathered for basic survival and limited self-protection. But it was about 6,000 feet above the sea. Life was not normal, but there was a certain quiet resignation that those who had come here from different places with different lives and different traditions and found themselves accepting one another because they had to. Everyone who resided here had a never-ending list of things to do. There were no leisure moments to enjoy, and smiles were fleeting The water source for the community involved a gas generator and a 50-yard hose run from the Salmon River, which was becoming polluted by those who lived upstream and had to be boiled before use. There was, once a week, what amounted to a religious gathering. It was not a joyous, hand-clapping celebration; most of those who came, and there were many who desperately needed to belong and to believe, offered their prayers in somber and fervent tones: “Please keep us safe, please show us a path out of this darkness. Please, please allow us to begin to form a new community where trust and mutual aid and forgiveness are bywords. We need each other more than at any time is the past, even the ancient past. We must reach out. We must survive.”

Electricity was something that was going to be established, but for now, candles and small fires lit the area and reminded those with a sense of history that society originally was formed by the need for fire, not only for comfort but for protection and for attracting others to the glow, which created a social network.

***

The Collins' had a tenth-acre plot on which to grow vegetables. They had been given seeds by the people from New York, and Trudy, relying on her home garden experience, began a plot that really was a sheet of plastic over a crude frame of discarded PVC piping. They were able to barter carrots, beets, and potatoes for nails and shingles to complete the roofing patch in what had been a small convenience store they were lucky to have. They had arrived with bedding, some tools, a couple pieces of furniture, some food, and some clothes. They had dug an outside root cellar for the vegetables. What they did was similar to what the other survivors had done. They learned from each other and traded useful items so that both parties benefited. And there was always something to do, improving their dwelling, cultivating their crops in the short growing season at this elevation, and meeting periodically with other survivors to discuss mutual concerns. There were many and most were a life and death matter: How to deal with serious disputes between residents; what to do about new arrivals without credentials or references; how to allocate stores from the communal food bank, how to hare the diminishing supply of fuel from the one service station tank that originally contained about 24,000 gallons of gas but now was less than a quarter full.

Toward the end of October, the 20-year-old daughter of a logger from Maine was attacked by the drunken brother of a newly-arrived Ohio farmer. The logger took an ax and fatally attacked the brother. The logger, in turn, was wounded by a nephew of the deceased brother, and the immediate result was chaos. The next day the logger and his family packed up the moving van in which they had arrived and left. Collins called a family meeting to discuss the event and to discuss the future. He and Trudy had been completely unnerved by the killing. They had been in Beckham for three years and both could see history repeating itself. Where they going to have to move again? Would they have to move from the next place, and from there, again and again, never to have a home, never to feel grounded? What about the kids? How could they be shielded from this? How were they to survive in an increasingly violent society where there were no rules, no order, no future?

Emergency group meetings began then, and plans were formulated for an administrative system, a police system, and a judicial system. The death of the farmer's brother had created a renewed fear in Beckham, but also an allied determination to restore and maintain order in the community, simply because that was the only path to survival and the entire populace knew it; there was no alternative.

Jim Collins returned in the succeeding days to the rocky area where he first viewed the Sawtooth Valley. That now seemed like a lifetime ago. The huge natural area comforted him, gave him hope that it would remain undisturbed as a monument to the future.

And then Jim, who was not a religious man and never had been, knelt down in a patch of wild grass overlooking that beautiful valley. And he prayed.