The Last Train

We made it to the platform three days ago. It was already packed and with only two trains coming each day it took us two of those three days to make into the old station. The trouble was that there hasn’t been a train since yesterday morning and people were beginning to grow fearful and restless. There were a lot of refugees that were claiming the train would never come. Others planned to keep walking if only to give themselves a chance to look for food or clean water. Others just sobbed where they had made a makeshift shelter. This might have been harrowing if it wasn’t something I had been experiencing for months. 

I’m not sure why I have been documenting this whole mess from the time I left Georgia. At first, it was just something to do, then it began to be a way to blow off steam, and now it’s just become a habit I can’t seem to stop. Maybe someone will find this journal and take the time to read it. Maybe they will see what it was like for all of us. Maybe it’ll make them care. I highly doubt it. 

These people I have been walking with, and getting to know, are just that; people. In fact, we’re mostly your fellow countrymen. But you don’t see us in that way. You have come to see us as intruders, as people trying to take your land from you, your food, and what little opportunities are left. We’re kept between a wall and a coastline that keeps moving. I’d like to know what your plan is, are you just going to watch us drown? I’ll tell you what I’ve learned, desperate people that have nothing to lose will fight hard to survive. They won’t go quietly. 

I remember growing up in northern Florida. My family had owned an orange grove for generations so my childhood always smelled bright and sweet. We ran through the trees and swam in the clearest waters with the warm sun baring down on us keeping our skin dark and our hair light. Dad didn’t want to leave at first but the orange groves had all dried up, the grass turned into hardened dirt and the waters swarmed with garbage. The air didn’t smell like oranges anymore. But no one wanted to buy the grove or the house. Half the neighboring town was swallowed up by sinkholes making buyers weary of the area and the water had already drowned Orlando and Tampa. It was only a matter of time and we all knew it. So we packed what we could fit into the truck and mom, dad and I made our way to Georgia. 

By the time we hit the border though we were just one of a thousand other cars on the road. We were stuck for a whole day before people began to abandon their cars and walk the rest of the way with whatever they could carry. We had no choice but to go as well since we couldn’t very well move the cars around us. That’s when mom started crying and wouldn’t stop. Dad had to stop looking at her.

The goal was to get to Columbus as we heard they were taking people in and the eastern part of the state was already having its share of flooding. People along the way helped that way. They shared information they picked up along the way from other refugees. They shared food and how to test for safe drinking water even what symbols to look for. See the refugees began to use symbols to communicate important information like transients did in the late 1800s; places that were safe to sleep, friendly homeowners and not-so-friendly homeowners, and safe paths to walk. We made it along for a few weeks ok. We made it all the way to Damascus before dad’s knee began to act up and it was clear he needed rest. We made a shelter with some other people under a bridge that wasn’t being used anymore. 

I’m writing about this again because that was the first time I felt like giving up just like I do now. Sitting at this station, it just feels like the end of the line for me. I don’t want to admit it. But I’m tired of fighting. I know that we have this instinct in us to fight or flee until the end, but what if this is the end? What if this is the last stop? I’ve seen others along the way quit. People collapse along the path because they haven’t had food or clean water for days. You see their souls leave their bodies before they even hit the ground. They just stop being, as simple as turning off a light switch. People just walked over them and kept on moving as if they only saw a leaf floating down to earth. Or people got desperate. Salvaged what they could from the fallen; things they could trade, weapons or even the meat they could eat off their very bones. I’m saying things get ugly and sometimes you feel the sanest thing to do is to fall to the ground and just give up.

Our camp in Damascus became more crowded and there was a bug going around. There wasn’t enough food and people fought all the time. A man shot a woman when she tried to steal his jug of water. That’s when we heard that states north of us were beginning to set up barriers to keep out those trying to get to higher ground, places as low as Kentucky wasn’t letting people in. Many felt that this was to stop the flowing in from Mexico and Latin American refugees, not Americans so tensions towards foreign refugees grew. Many left the camp after that. But then Americans returned saying they weren’t let into Tennessee. This news spread through the camp like the flu and people got even more agitated. 

Panic surged as a literal storm was brewing over the part of the gulf that used to be Louisiana. Someone was able to get a weather broadcast through an old radio from somewhere up north. There was a severe hurricane coming our way expected to hit us in three days. Dad wanted to start walking again but mom was too sick and he didn’t want to leave her. The trouble was, like everyone else in the camp we had a makeshift tent made from a pool cover we had found. There was no way we could wait out the hurricane in that. Besides we needed higher ground because the radio was reporting major flooding again. 

People were leaving the camp in droves, and even those in the surrounding houses were leaving expecting their homes to be the next victims of the ongoing rising oceans. My parents wanted me to go with them but I refused. How was I supposed to desert my parents, leave them to die? But we were sure to die if we stayed there. I listened to the radio some nights and things were getting ugly all over the country. The National Guard had been called in to control trouble at the waterline, which is what they began to call the area between perceived safety from flooding and the area where we were, where water would come in months, weeks, or days. But the guard was outnumbered. The military was needed elsewhere as riots were breaking out all over the US over food shortages, power outages, and growing concern about where everyone below the safeline would go. There were arguments about which state would take us and which would watch us drown. Canada was asked to help but they were trying to keep Americans from overflowing onto their borders as well. It was clear to me that even if someone was coming to help, they couldn’t help everyone. We were on our own.

I’m sorry if I am repeating myself here, future reader, but I think this might be my last entry and I want to make sure I get everything down. I want to make sure you know everything and I’m starting to forget what I have already written down or what I had initially left out on purpose. There were things that at the time I didn’t write about because of what you might think of me. But seeing as this might be the end, it’s not very important to keep face. This journal might become a soggy mess washed up on some beach in Ohio and no one will know anyway. But I need to get rid of everything inside me, so here goes.

There in Damascus, I thought about trying to convince my father to leave my mother there to die. I had planned it all out in my head and I was going to take him aside and tell him we should. I walked up to our tent and saw him cradling mom in his arms while she was hot with a fever and I immediately felt like a horrible person. I felt that I deserved to drown. I actually had come to terms with the fact that we probably would. 

Then a man and his son we had come to know came up to us one night as the clouds overhead hung thick and low above us and told us that they had found a truck about a mile south that they were planning on hot-wiring and driving up to Tennessee no matter what the rumors were. So in the early hours of the morning, just as the wind was beginning to rev up, we snuck out of camp so that there wouldn’t be an ambush of people trying to get in the truck, and began to walk back toward what used to be my home state. Dad pushed mom into an old wheel barrel he stole from someone’s shed. 

When we got to the truck dad and I exchanged a worried glance. It looked like it hadn’t run in years let alone able to run at all. The man and his son began to try to get it to start and miraculously it began to purr and clink. The man’s son handed my dad a riffle as we settled mom in the back on a blanket. He instructed dad to shoot anyone who tried to rush the car as we drove past. Dad accepted the weapon with shaky hands. Dad was a good shot. He taught me how to shoot clay pigeons in the backyard when I was ten and he rarely missed. But he’d never killed a living thing in his life.

We got into the back and ducked down as low as we could. At first, it was alright, but the truck was loud and people stranded by the road quickly figured out what was going on and began to run after us. Just as the man and his son expected, people began to jump into the back. Dad started shooting. I ducked down and cuddled up close to mom who was unconscious and closed my eyes tight to shut out the noise of the gun. I don’t know how many people dad had to kill that day but he barely spoke after that. 

We got about 50 miles from the Tennessee border before the clunker ran out of gas. Then the priority was to find shelter that could withstand 150mph winds and torrential rain. The town we had stopped near seemed deserted, its inhabitants probably having migrated some time ago. The Town Hall was a two-story brick building that we hoped was far enough uphill. There was one room upstairs next to a bathroom that still had running water. The room only had one window that was easy for the men to board up. Once we had settled mom in there the men went out to break into the nearby homes to see if they could find any supplies people might have left behind. They came back with some canned food, blankets, a camp lantern, a battery radio, and even a bottle of whiskey. We hunkered down for three days while it sounded like the world was ending outside. Mom almost made it. She died on the morning of the third day just as the rain was beginning to finally let up. Dad and I were so exhausted and in shock that we barely cried. I’ve tried crying since but it seems disrespectful in some way. The fact is that everything has been a mess for so long that it’s hard to feel anything else but apathy.

Once the men took down the board from the window we saw that there was nowhere to bury mom as dad wanted to, everything was under three feet of water, trees collapsed, and not a sign of dry, safe land in sight. We had to leave mom there in the Town Hall of a town we didn’t even know the name of and wade our way through the murky water. Our plan was to still make it to Tennessee. We had heard over the radio when we could get a signal that there was a station that was taking trains of refugees to Illinois. We also learned that the waterline had now moved up past Atlanta which meant that our camp in Damascus was no more. 

It took us a day to get to higher and drier land. The men we were traveling with wanted to head towards West Virginia where they were hoping to find some distant relatives, so dad and I continued our way north to Tennessee. But after two days of walking Dad’s knee gave out again. I think his spirit had given out too, they were back on the road strewn with bodies and mom in that two-story brick building. This time when he told me to go on without him it was more of a pleading threat. That he was still my father and he still was in charge of what was best for me and if I didn’t listen I would be an ungrateful daughter. He told me he’ll follow along in a couple of days and meet me at the station. If I was already gone by then, we would meet at the first stop in Illinois. I half believed him then. But I could see he didn’t have it in him to go on. I pretended to agree to meet him further down the road and hugged him tightly for the last time. Again, I want to be honest and say that a little part of me felt relief. I wished that I had been able to give up there and then too. But I still had some fight left in me and so I walked on.

Pretty soon I was in a mass of people walking north just like when we had left Florida. This was a more worn down stalk though, thin, skin dark with grim and a look of fierce determination. No one spoke much or shared food. There were still people dying on the way, people fighting for what they needed, and more bad news from our weary grapevine. One day I heard a wail from a distance. The sound of a small child that might have scraped his knee from falling off his new bike. As I got closer the cries grew louder until I came upon a small boy, maybe no more than five standing over the body of his mother. People were just passing him by as he clutched her cold, stiff hand.

I almost walked away too. I want to be truthful about that. I averted my eyes and pretended I didn’t see, that I didn’t hear. And I was nearly 20ft away when I stopped and turned around. I can’t tell you why I did. Maybe I still had some of the girl my parents raised inside me. Maybe I hadn’t been marred by it all just yet. 

I came up to the boy and placed my hand on his shoulder. I squatted down and gave him a hug that couldn’t possibly soothe him, but he took my hand and we walked on together. He hasn’t said a word to me. I know he understands English because he does what I say. Hide when I say to hide, run when we have to run, but he hasn’t even told me his name, no matter how many times I tried to guess.

So now this boy and I have been sleeping at this station, in a town in Tennessee neither of us has ever seen with people that have come from as far as Colombia. And we’re waiting for a train. A train that hasn’t come in days. There are rumors that it will be the last one, that Illinois doesn't want any more refugees. There are more storms forecast in the next few days and the waterline is getting closer. I want to give up, but now I have this boy to see to. And I guess I’m writing in here for the last time because when this last train comes, I’ll have to fight my way on with this boy, and maybe we’ll both die trying to get on. Maybe he’ll make it. I’ll put this journal in a bag I’ll shove on with him. 

I wish I had a more hopeful way to end this. I guess what I want to say is that people will always fight until the very end until their spirit is broken and they can’t fight anymore, but they aren’t going to stop until that very moment. You can’t push them away. You can’t ignore them. And now you’re all one big storm away from being just like them. You’re lying to yourself if you think you’re not. The sea is coming and its spirit is stronger than ours. Goodbye now, I hear a train whistle.