Meeting Mother Nature

The first thing I noticed when my eyes finally adjusted was that the creator of crayons had clearly never seen the sky when they created “sky blue”. The second was that they’d never seen grass either. 

Then again, in the years since our great-great-great grandparents had crayons to draw the pictures hanging on our school room walls, the colors had probably faded.

“Wow.” Kyler blinked a few times, his eyes still adjusting as he came out of the tunnel back down to the bunker. “Everything is so…”

A pause. “Yeah. I know.”

He nodded, and looked around a little longer, blinking, soaking the new colors through his eyes like the sunlight in his skin. He ran his hand through the waist-high grass, hissing when a drop of blood formed on his hand. “I thought this stuff was supposed to be soft.”

“And green. But honestly—Shit!” I jumped back as a mouse ran past my feet. Apparently the furry scourge of the bunker would not be avoided by our moving aboveground. I righted myself, scowling at Kyler’s snicker. “Anyway that sounds more poetic than ‘overgrown tan spikes of death.’”

He laughed. “It might be dying. Or a different plant.”

I shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter. I’m sure plenty has changed since anyone was last up here. That came back coherent, anyway.”

He bit his lip, bringing some rosy color into the pale flesh. “Well hopefully the Guidestones are still there. They said we’d be able to see them from here. I don’t see anything but trees."

"Maybe they grew around it.”

“So what, we wander around aimlessly and hope to find them? We don’t even know for sure they exist!”

I cracked my knuckles, shifting my weight around between my feet, and oriented myself to the crudely drawn map they’d made us memorize. “Shouldn’t they be over there?” 

He looked at the open space around us, and his eyes shifted as his brow furrowed. “None of this looks right to me.. But we can try that. I guess.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “Hey man, we got this. Alright? We’re gonna be fine.”

He nodded  and looked at me warily from the corner of his eye, but when I finally put one foot in front of the other and stepped towards the trees, he followed. It’s not like my stomach wasn’t doing gymnastics too, but I’ve always handled new things better.

Once we got into the dappled light of the forest, the light was more manageable and we were able to open our eyes fully without feeling the sunlight trying to scorch holes through our retinas.

That didn’t stop me from being blind enough to trip over a huge stone in the way.

“You okay?”

I nodded, brushing my hand over the stone. It was too faded to read, and cracked jaggedly down the side, but there had definitely been words on it before. “We’re close. It should be… there.”

I grabbed his outstretched hand, and we made our way to the giant landmark hidden behind a massive tree.

Kyler gestured at the tall stones towering over us, his nose wrinkling and lip pulling up. "What are we supposed to do with this? Monitor population, leave room for nature? All there is is nature! And there are barely a hundred of us. I can’t even imagine that many people."

I pulled my hands down the sides of my face and groaned. "This is stupid! More like a poem than any actual help."

"No kidding." The two of us stood there, breathing in the too-fresh air as it rustled through our hair. I drew closer to the stones, brushing my fingers over the ridges of other languages carved in the stone. While the words carved on it were vague guidelines that would not be helpful for centuries to come, they still provided hope that our civilization would grow back into one that had to worry about things like population control and preservation, that someday we could be like the people who left this, too.

"Well…" I took a deep breath, looking around. "What now?"

Kyler bit his lip. "Hmm. Um. I guess we go back to the bunker and tell the others this whole trip was useless."

My stomach sank. Useless or not, I didn't want to go back, at least not yet. "What if…" I chose my next words carefully, gaging his reaction as I spoke. "Instead of going back, we can explore, just us. I mean, it's what we were meant to do isn't it? Find this, then see if the world is really habitable?"

He considered. It wasn't as if the bunker had been a happy place for him either. It hadn't been for anyone since the food shortage started 200 years after the day we were supposed to leave.

I took his hesitancy as a sign to continue. "I mean, it took them years to let us out at all. And it's clearly safe now, we are doing fine."

He nodded, leaned back against the tall rock, feeling its warmth. "Okay. We can stay out here a while. Look for food and shelter. After we know it’s safe, we go back and tell them. If we don’t survive or can’t find our way, there’s always next year, right?"

I nodded my assent, then sat down in the grass. The wind wasn't sweet at all, not like the books said, and birds chirping seemed more of a scream than a song. I didn’t blame the last 45 groups for returning empty-handed, spouting gibberish. We had already made it farther than any other expedition, surely that meant something.

Though that didn’t stop me worrying about the 7 groups who disappeared. I looked around for any signs of danger while we still knew the way back. It wasn’t too late now, but soon enough it could be. It wouldn’t take much for us to get lost with our outdated map and lack of experience in the outside world.

But returning to a life underground wasn't enough for me. Those books, while clearly exaggerating the beauty, seemed to be right about the sheer vastness of the outside world, and with vastness came danger, but also potential. 

I looked at the stone again and sighed. “Population control and governing tips… I guess for a smaller apocalypse that would have been helpful. I really expected like, some hints on how to get food or something, yanno?”

He laughed. “Really, though. I mean, I guess this would have been good if there were more survivors. Maybe if the pandemic had actually ended in 2023 it would have been helpful for us to figure out governing.”

“Oh, well. It’s not like they knew we’d be down there so long.”

“Fair enough. I guess these kinds of tips could have helped our ancestors resume governing the survivors.”

I shrugged, and looked around. No use rehashing the past any further, it’s not like we could change it. “So, where are we going to sleep tonight?”

“I mean, I guess we will sleep under the stars, we just need to find the stuff for a fire, right?” 

I grabbed a dead stick on the ground, partially rotted but pretty dry. “A bunch of these should do, I think.”

“But where are we going to put it? Isn’t grass flammable, too?”

“Can’t we put rocks around it to keep it from spreading? We will just have to clear the grass from somewhere.”

“That’s right! I’ve heard that before. I’ll find rocks, and you find sticks. We meet back here? We can use the top of this rock for shelter. At least it won’t be completely useless that way.”

I nodded slowly. “Don’t go too far.”

As the pile of sticks and rocks grew to a respectable amount, Kyler started pulling grass, and I set up the rocks in a doubled ring. We piled the twigs and sticks together, trying to bang different rocks together and produce fire. Eventually there was a spark. It didn’t land in his twigs, but some grass caught fire and we were able to shove it in with a large limb.

My stomach growled, and we exchanged a glance. “I guess they were wrong. They should have sent us food.”

I nodded. “But don’t you think these fruits look like they might be good?”

“I mean, better to try them and be a little sick than starve to death.”

I pulled one down and felt it with my lips. It was weirdly fuzzy, but smelled sweet. I licked it. Bitter, and an awful texture, like licking a cat. But when I bit into it, sweet juice rolled down my chin. My eyes widened, then closed in bliss. “This is so good.”

Kyler pulled one off a branch and bit into it as well. He groaned. “Oh, you weren’t kidding. This is awesome! Way better than rolled oat bars, even!”

We set to work gathering more fruits from the trees around us. After a few hours as sweat dripped down my skin and the blinding light faded, there was a gasp. I whipped around, thinking something wrong.

"It's beautiful." 

The sun was melting into the horizon, painting vibrant splashes of color across the sky between the rustling leaves. "This is one thing the books got right. It really is amazing."

We sat together, eyes trained on the horizon as we watched the star fall beyond our line of sight just for its fainter cousins to speckle the sky.

I lay back and looked for the pictures that were supposed to be there. All I saw were dots, but it was gorgeous all the same. “Kyler? Do you see the constellations?”

“No. Just looks like spilled grain.”

“Oh. Me either.” 

We were silent for a little while. “We can make up our own, you know.” I looked over, watching the flames dance in his pupils. “We can find pictures of our own and tell our stories. See, like that over there? That looks like a tree, like these trees. And those two big, bright stars? That can be us. And there’s the hole to the bunker.”

I listened while Kyler wove a tale of adventure, painting pictures in the sky much more vivid than old tales of mythical creatures like the stories we were taught in school. Staring at the sky with the peaceful crackle of fire by my side, I thought I could live like this forever. 

Rocks of ice falling from the sky? Giant pillars of water, fire, wind? Cracks opening in the ground to swallow people whole? Monsters of all kinds large and small that sucked the very blood out of our bodies? 

None of that could possibly be true based on what I’d seen today. Mother nature was kind, providing for our every need, not destructive. The stories I grew up with must have been ridiculous myths they told to keep us underground this long, after the real threat of the virus had faded long ago.

But no longer. I sank into a deep, blissful sleep feeling more conviction in that moment than ever in my life. I was never, ever, going back inside.