Life Goes On

I woke up earlier than normal. My wife and child still slept soundly in their sleeping bags, though our mutt had noticed my stirring. I lay there for a time, wondering what had caused me to awaken. There was something, something nagging at the back of my brain like an itch that I couldn’t quite scratch. The itch started to become a need to move, until finally I extricated myself from my sleeping bag and prepared to go outside.

More often than not we slept in our clothes. Doing so made it easier to get ready and be prepared for the day, whether that meant we would gather food and water, or break down camp to move to a new location varied from day to day. I threw on my boots and slowly unzipped the door to the tent.

Judging from the color of the sky, the sun was just starting to peek out around the horizon. It was the time of day when the air outside was crisp and damp. It didn’t sting my cheeks, but it was unpleasant enough to drive any remaining thoughts of sleep from my mind. I glanced back at the dog and made a gesture for her to come out, but all I got was a tired chuff before she buried her nose back into the blanket that partially covered her. Taking that as my cue, I zipped the door back closed and walked over to our fire pit.

Building a campfire is a science, and I took my time stacking kindling and tinder before I began to ignite the fuel. I had the kindling stacked up in a flat repeating triangle that built upon itself and filled the interior with dry moss and leaves. I then poked smaller pieces of kindling through the spaces in the structure so that they rested on and within the tinder. Once the fuels were set, I took out my lighter and began to scape magnesium shavings onto a broad leaf. When I had a sufficient pile, I placed that leaf with the shavings at the top of my fuel and used the striker on the lighter to spark the magnesium.

It took a few tries before the sparks caught the magnesium, but the fire built upon itself rapidly once it did. I kept the fire small, producing heat and light, but not an abundance of smoke. I sat down on a rock by the fire, steadily feeding it wood as it burned through the fuel. It was in that peaceful monotony that my mind was finally able to scratch that proverbial itch that woke me up.

“Five years already.” I spoke out loud. It was strange to hear my voice so early in the morning with only the gentle crackling of the fire in the background. I let go a gentle chuckle. This journey of ours started five years ago today. It was interesting how time had flown past and left us behind. Five years since the world had changed, and civilization had fallen away and the world had more or less reclaimed itself.

We didn’t know what happened, we just woke up one day and almost everyone was gone. Homes were empty, businesses abandoned, it was like nearly the entire population of the word just decided to up and leave. We had no idea where they went, only that they had gone. Services had continued to work, at least for a little while. Electricity went down first, and with that went the internet and all other things that are dependent upon electricity to function. Water lasted a little bit longer, but not much. Shortly after the water gave out we realized we had to face another grim reality. We had to leave our home.

Our child was only two at the time. She had done well with the disappearance. I don’t think she quite realized what had happened, why there were suddenly no people around, or that there weren’t any people around.

Or maybe she did, and she just didn’t care.

It was much rougher when we had to leave our house. She did not do well with that transition of leaving the house and not coming back. We packed up all the camping gear we had and made our way out. It is amazing what you can fit into a compact car when you need to get creative. We drove for hours each day, hoping to find someone else, anybody else. Time slipped by as days bled into weeks, which bled into months. We finally had to… trade, our little compact for something that ran on diesel, since gasoline was turning into paint thinner. We ended up finding some old diesel SUV, that kept us going for a good while, though it was tricky making sure we planned our routes so we would be in large areas with lots of cars to siphon fuel from when we needed to fill our tank.

We drove across the country, into Canada, and into Mexico, looking for anyone else. But we never saw a sign of anyone. Our little girl was well into being three by the time the diesel began to turn. It wasn’t long after that we had to start moving around on foot. We weren’t in bad shape when we had to transition to hiking, but we did have to carry our child a lot more than we would have liked. Still, we adapted, and so did she. We barely had to carry her by the time she turned four, and shortly after she began to carry some of our camping gear in a makeshift backpack.

We would stop in the abandoned towns and cities to gather supplies. Sporting goods stores were usually a good place where we could replace broken or worn-out gear, and the canned goods in grocery stores were usually edible. We always hoped to catch sight of someone, but other than the fauna and flora that was beginning to take back the land the cities were built upon, we never saw anybody else. So, we kept moving… sometimes staying in one place longer than another, but we just kept moving. The method in which we had hoped to find out we weren’t the last people in the world became something we did just out of habit, and eventually we just accepted the idea that there was nobody else out there as a reality.

Acknowledging that as a reality should have been crushing. It was a grim and depressing probability to consider, but we still had each other, and that was surprisingly helpful. As we continued our journey to everywhere, and nowhere, we saw the power of the natural world. We saw how in a few short years nature had begun to reclaim what had been taken from it. Roads broke apart as vegetation grew up through the asphalt. Vines grew up buildings, trees sprouted in parks and fields that had been used for crops for generations, and we never knew the sky could be so blue in the day or riddled with so many stars and celestial objects at night.

The sun crept up in the sky as I reminisced about these five long years. Eventually everyone woke up and got out of the tent. We had a breakfast of berries, oatmeal, and canned ham that hadn’t quite turned yet… and then we began to pack up our camp. Everything was done with a practiced efficiency, and before long we were ready to continue our journey.

“Daddy,” our child called to me as we started to hike. “What’s that?”

My wife and I looked behind to where our daughter had pointed. There was a thin line of smoke, but there hadn’t been anything to cause a fire in the forest. No lighting, no immense heat or dry spell, nothing at all. My wife and I looked at each other with hope and fear mixed in our eyes. “Let’s go see,” my wife said, and we walked along towards the misty column.