New Year’s Eve, 0

Sarah was aware of the absurdity that it was New Year’s Eve, and while she was on the precipice of a new year, she was also literally hanging on the precipice of a cliff. She was clutching a young pine tree like a cartoon and very much in danger of tumbling two hundred feet to her death.

That little pine was only about three inches in diameter, but the roots—a couple inches of which were now exposed—must have been deep because it hadn’t even bent when the hillside gave out beneath her feet and she grabbed onto it as she slid past. After the initial panic, she was overcome with intense gratitude for this tree, for the luck of history that dropped a pine nut right in this spot and not three feet to the left sometime in probably the past decade.

She struggled to pull herself up but just couldn’t do it, which was a sobering signal of just how much she had deteriorated in the past year. She had been an avid surfer since her twenties, and it had kept her remarkably fit even as she entered her fifties, but 2131 had been a disaster. The skies were already thick with smoke by the time the water warmed in April, so she and Doug hadn’t really gone out at all. Any other year, they would have surfed at least a couple of times per week until late October. She came to the mountains in August and was relatively active here, but her once-muscular surfer’s body was clearly withering.

She tried scrambling up the cliff, but nothing she could get a foot on was stable. Whenever she kicked a rock free, it bounced and rolled until it came to rest on the road far below. It was easy to imagine her body following the same path, bones shattering on the way down.

She shouted for help, but even as she did, her mind began to drift off in a familiar direction. Namely, she became hyper-critical of herself. Why did she have to be so stupid? She’d seen those signs back at the sea cliffs in San Diego a million times: Unstable Cliffs: Keep Back. She should have known what unstable looked like, even though the rock-faces dynamited centuries ago to make way for the road into the mountains were much different from the sandstone faces exposed to wind and waves of the Pacific day after day. She had seen this as just a hill in the mountains where she had planted potatoes, a west-facing hill at the edge of a pine forest where she once thought herself brilliant for calculating the placement for the plants to receive just enough afternoon sun to grow while being shaded during the harsh midday heat. She lamented how terrible it was that what seemed a good idea in September could have tragic consequences in December.

The last half-year had been dreadful. She had witnessed the unthinkable, suffered brutal violence, and made a ghastly and now-incomprehensible decision to come to the mountains with the last charge of her car and no chance of ever going back—lacking access to a charger—or ever seeing her son again. The guilt—survivor’s guilt, quitter’s guilt—had been immense. For weeks afterward, she could hardly look anyone in the eye when they asked how she came to be in the mountains. She had literally torn hair from her head in moments of anguish. The community had helped her start to forgive herself, but it was as if all her progress crumbled beneath her feet with the hillside. So she hung there, blaming herself for walking so close to the edge for no good reason. It was her own damn fault she was in this mess. She should never have come to the mountains. She shouldn’t have been so selfish, wallowing in her own incapacitating grief, deciding to abandon all of civilization when San Diego burned, when virtually everyone who wanted to live fled north—like Dougie had done a few years before. What poetic justice this would be: falling pointlessly to her death in the mountains where she had no business even being while her son languished two thousand miles away in Montana, never knowing what became of his mother and never even knowing how his father died because she couldn’t muster the strength to face him and tell the story.

“Oh, Doug,” she whimpered. As it had so many times in the last four months, the horrifying, tormenting image intruded on her thoughts: her husband, already bloodied, holding his right hand up to block the blows from a swinging steel pipe. Two vigilantes attacking him while their partners attacked and murdered dozens of other protestors on the United States side of the border fence and still more vigilantes murdered hundreds of desperate refugees on the Mexican side. Sparing her life for some unfathomable reason. But not before fracturing her skull with one vicious swing of the same pipe that killed Doug.

Torment.

What was a cliff compared to what she had lived through?

She was lost in those thoughts, not sure for how long. But she eventually came to her senses as if waking from a nightmare only to find herself in another nightmare, cold with sweat.

She tried again to pull herself up, but her forearms were made of rubber. She could do nothing.

She began to calculate. She was far-enough-removed from her little refugee community’s campground that there was little chance anyone would happen to wander by, and it might be hours before anyone realized she was missing and came to look for her.

Perhaps more encouraging was the possibility that one of the groups that had walked down from the mountain to check out the state of the city and bring back salvaged supplies would happen along the road below. They were due back today, but that could be a couple hours away, too.

There was always hope that Celia, the five-year-old who had somehow adopted Sarah as her much-older sister would come out searching for her just to spend time, as they did almost every day, playing and talking, learning Spanish (Sarah, poorly) and English (Celia, expertly) together.

The thought of Celia gave her clarity. She was not going to let herself die because she would not let down this child who had already been through so much. They were all refugees. They had all seen the world destroyed and lost something, lost everything. Celia and her parents had left their collapsing Guatemalan town two years before and landed in collapsing city after collapsing city like they were running across a crumbling stone bridge, one step ahead of plunging into the abyss. Celia deserved a little respite from tragedy.

Sarah renewed her struggle, still holding on with both hands but fanning out first to the left and then the right with her feet to expand the search for stability. She tried a worm kind of maneuver that felt like a pop-up on the surfboard and which seemed like it might be working as she managed to pull up a little before more of the dirt and rocks slid down beneath her and she was back to a full-extension hang.

Struggling and resting. Struggling and resting. It seemed like about two agonizing hours before one of her calculated hopes came true.

“Heeeyyyyy” came a call from a voice below.

She looked down to see her friend Jeremiah and some of the other community members who had embarked on the long hike to the city six days before. Jeremiah dropped his plump pack to the ground.

He was one of the San Diego locals who had originally come to the mountains thinking it was a place to get away temporarily while San Diego would be brought back to order and everything would go back to normal, a position that required both naivety and cynicism. But he was a sweetheart of a man who helped everyone with everything and both liked and was liked by everyone here.

“I’m coming up!”

“Wait!”, Sarah yelled. The worst thing that could happen was someone else getting hurt trying to save her. She could see Jeremiah was looking off to the left as if he thought he might see a stable route up the hill.

“No, don’t try to climb this way. I can wait! Just take the road!”, she called out feebly.

The others below had all dropped their packs, too. Some she saw running up the road out of sight, which she imagined was no pleasant task after hiking thirty miles with heavy packs, though they were probably glad for the excuse to unburden themselves. Others were pointing up and calling out short phrases as if directing Jeremiah, who was now also out of her sight.

“All the rain weakened the hill! Don’t try climbing!”

The mountains had the same precipitation pattern as the city: not a drop of rain from March to November, torrents in December. It was very possible that other parts of the hillside were equally ready to slide.

No one responded to her, and she figured she just wasn’t loud enough, so she took a deep breath and shouted as loudly as she could, “Unstable! Don’t climb this way!”

“It’s okay,” one of the spotters shouted back. “He’s almost there!”

“It’s not safe!”, she shouted, but then she heard Jeremiah’s voice from off to her left, at about the same height as her.

“Sarah!”

“This way!”

“Sarah!”

“Over here!”

She couldn’t believe how fast Jeremiah had climbed, and when he came into view among the pines above her, she was surprised to see he carried a rope. He must have brought it in his pack from the city.

“I’ll tie the rope to a tree and throw you the other end.”

Sarah said okay, but she was now worried. Would she be able to let go of the little pine and grab onto a rope without falling? When Jeremiah threw her the rope, she explained that her arms were tired from hanging there for hours. She didn’t know if she had the strength to make the transfer. He offered to climb down to her.

“No! That sounds like a dumb movie where the hero grabs a distressed victim with one hand and pulls them up like there’s nothing to it.”

“What?”, Jeremiah shouted.

“I think we’d just both end up falling!”

Jeremiah laughed.

“I’ve had time to think about this.”

“Okay, so what do we do?”

Now she laughed. “I haven’t figured that out yet.”

Soon, others began to arrive.

Somebody suggested finding a piece of wood for Sarah to sit on and tying a rope to either side like a swing, but Sarah thought that sounded like a good way to dump someone off the side of a cliff.

“Okay, how about this,” Jeremiah said. “What if we tie a loop in the rope so that you can put your foot in it. That might give you some leverage so that you can let go of the tree and grab onto the rope.”

“That’s the best idea so far,” Sarah agreed.

By the time the plan was finalized, the rope had two loops for her feet and one for her hands, and it seemed pretty likely to work.

By then, there was a crowd at the top of the hill and multiple ropes and people offering to lower themselves down to hold her while she made the transfer.

But Sarah was starting to see this as a bit ridiculous. After all, her little pine was maybe three feet out of reach from the more stable ground where they were all standing. This couldn’t be that complicated.

“Okay. That’s fine,” she said. “Just toss me the loops and one more rope just in case. Let’s get this over with.”

They took the time to add some loops to the second rope while another community member named Alejandro lowered himself down slightly beside her saying he could catch her if there was any problem. Finally, both ropes were lowered slowly so that with Aleandro’s help she could slip one foot, then the other into the loops and sort of stand on them as she released the little pine and grabbed the hand loop with both hands. It was perfect. Above her, everyone tried to find a spot on the rope to help pull her up. It seemed easy for them, all working together, and she only needed to be dragged a few feet before she let go of the rope and crawled on the stable earth, exhausted.

Somebody had also brought a blanket, which she accepted tearfully.

She thanked Jeremiah, and he brushed it off and thanked the others for working it all out.

***

The little community of the campground had early-on established a nightly ritual of gathering in the common area between the cabins in which they crammed eight or more to sleep each night. Virtually everyone would come, including those who slept in the larger rangers’ cabins further up the road and those who slept in the now-dead cars or RV’s they’d driven up the mountain or found abandoned there. Since the cold of winter descended, they’d been carefully using the fire pit to keep warm as they shared stories. Their own stories of how they got here, made-up stories about the new world being born, borrowed stories from books or movies, and little updates and tales about their experiences and accomplishments of the day.

Sarah had by far the most interesting experience of the day, and she found herself the center of attention, granted the space to recount the tale and reflect on her brush with death and the kinds of thoughts many people have on New Year’s Eve.

“You know, you have time to really reflect when you’re hanging off a cliff.” She spoke with ease, and the others laughed.

She held little Celia on her lap.

“I really looked at myself for the first time in a long time. And I think I just kind of decided that I’ve still been living in the old world. I mean, I realized I’m here, but I’m not living here. My heart is still back there, where everything’s dead. I have to start living here.”

Celia gave her a look like she wasn’t making any sense.

“How about this, niña? Necesito… uhhh almorzar vivir mejor.”

“Empezar?”, Celia asked, recognizing that Sarah had confused the word for “to have lunch” with the word for “to begin,” as she often did.

“Necesito empezar vivir con mi communidad, no en mi recuerdos.”

Celia gave her a crooked smile as if she was going to let her get away with some awkward Spanish and stiff pronunciation this time.

“When you’re standing on the top of a mountain, you see things laying out in front of you, and if you’re hanging off a cliff on that mountain, you’ve got nothing to do but assess your position in the mountain. When you’re standing at the beginning of a new year, you see things the same way. Tomorrow is the first day of 2132. But there have been times in history when people said, ‘everything has changed’ and they started counting again. I think tomorrow is the beginning of Year One for us. I think we’re always gonna remember it that way. I think this little campground and this mountain is our world now. We’re wrapping up Year Zero.”

“We talk a lot about the bad things that have happened. I know I’ve done that. And I’m probably going to keep doing that for the rest of my life. But I’m going to try to recognize the good things going on right here, too.”

“I know some of you want to return to the city as soon as possible, but I really think we are The People of the Mountains, now.”

In her wise little voice, Celia added “Los Montañeses.”

“Si,” Sarah responded. “Somos Los Montañeses,” adequately imitating Celia’s pronunciation.

The group let out a little round of cheers. They were really identifying with each other and with the mountains they’d collectively started to see as more than a refuge from the heat in the summer or a source of clean water (which they couldn’t get in the city), but as a source of their collective identity.

“We’re doing something right. Doesn’t it feel like we’re discovering how to live?”, Sarah said, pausing to make eye contact with Jeremiah, then Alejandro, and a few others gazing at her across the orange glow of the fire.

“I’m so grateful for all of you. And I’m grateful for the mountains and the peace—and the freedom—we’ve found here. Here’s to a happy Year One.”

Many voices shouted in response, “Happy New Year!”