The World as We Know It (18 page)

I found myself standing alone in the field with beads of perspiration running down my face, staring into the distance at the blue cloudless sky, surrounded by what I thought was the most radiant green I had ever seen. My soaked shirt was draped over the cart and my pants were drenched in sweat. My skin was tan, and my hands were calloused. Muscles chiseled, waist thin. Thick beard and long hair turning blond from the sun. I didn’t look the same as I had with her. She might not even recognize me, I thought. The sun was beating down, but I was so deep in contemplation that I didn’t notice it. “In the zone,” they used to call it. To what zone were they referring, I wondered—some place better than here and now or just dreaming with your eyes open? I don’t know how long I was standing there before I heard Matthew’s voice.

“You all right out here, Joe?”

“Yes.”

“Been standing out here awhile. I saw you from the house.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Thinking about that pretty girl you got back home?”

“I can’t get her out of my head.”

“Yeah, I know what that’s like. I spent a few years overseas right after I got married,” he said, pulling up his
sleeve to reveal a faded “Semper Fi” tattoo on his bicep. “It wasn’t easy, but we got through it all right.”

“How?”

“Love and hope, my friend.”

“What if I forget those things?”

“You won’t forget the love. I had the same thought back then, but if it’s real, it doesn’t go away. Hope is the tough part. You focus on that love, and it will always come back.”

“I miss her. I think I have to go home.”

“You could do that,” he said. “Someone else will pick up where you left off.”

“But when?”

“That’s the question.”

“I could go home and bring her back with me. Things haven’t been the way I thought they would be. People, I mean.”

“That’s not what I’d worry about out west. I’d worry about the earth and the wilderness. And the winter. You don’t want to put your wife through that.”

“I should just go home.”

“Regret is the heaviest burden you’ll ever carry.”

As hard as it was to accept, I knew he was right. I went through my gear that evening and found the two letters I had been asked to deliver out west from the Big Apple, destined for Los Angeles and Denver. More than half of the people I had set out to reach were still severed from the rest of us. Regardless of my original motives, I realized that it wasn’t about me anymore. It was no longer about satisfaction of my own self-worth. I had to finish
what I had started for the good of millions. Hundreds of millions. It was my calling, something I had never experienced before. I had never done anything selfless. Nothing that had required true sacrifice, anyway. If I provided a service, there was always compensation, financial or otherwise. Not anymore.

The letter I wrote to Maria that night was different from the others. It was sweeter. I wondered whether she would see me changing through my words. The ink on the page bled with stray tears. I was ahead of schedule, I told her, and I couldn’t wait to see her. And I would see her soon. I loved her.

I gave that letter to Matthew the next morning for delivery, and I set out with Nomad after breakfast.

“Good luck out there,” said Matthew as I saddled up. “And God bless.”

10

ALONE IN THE NORTH

T
he sight of another person became scarce within a few days of leaving the Green Mill. Nomad and I passed by what used to be Milwaukee and Minneapolis–St. Paul and continued northwest on the old highway. We stopped briefly outside those places and other small settlements as we came across them, but they thinned out quickly. The highway was quiet and empty. There weren’t many cars left around up there. Fewer drifters passed by until eventually there were none.

The weather was growing cooler, which was a relief from what had been a scorching summer. Whether it was actually hotter than any other summer, I don’t know, but it sure felt like it. All day in the sun in the humidity of the ocean can make eighty-five degrees feel like a hundred, and a hundred unbearable. It was less brutal up north as autumn approached. For a while, we had a nice breeze
from behind us that cooled the sweat on my back. We traveled farther on days like that. The more pleasant the weather was, the longer we could go before our exhaustion got the better of us. When it was scorching hot or pouring rain, our endurance suffered. Sometimes I would get down and walk, and I almost had to drag Nomad to keep him going. Sometimes he pushed me. Slow days were excruciating, especially up north. All I could think about was how far we were from our next destination on the west coast, and every step was taking me farther from home.

The land was flat and green for a while, and then flat and brown. Giant hay bales lined the sides of the road and lay dispersed throughout fields. Nomad ate from them. I hunted small game and ate from trees, weeds, and farm fields. There were many farm fields in the east, but they became scarcer as we moved west. I fished when we came to water. Sometimes I starved, not because there was no food, at least at first, but because I was so anxious to move on that feeding myself just wasn’t a priority. I learned to block the hunger out. My stomach had shrunken on the journey so much that I could feel the void in my bowels. I missed Maria’s cooking. My own on the road didn’t make me want to eat until I had to, but I needed the energy to move on. Most of the time, I didn’t even bother with a fire anymore. I caught fish and ate them raw after scraping off the scales and gutting them with my knife, which was beginning to dull with daily use.

Shadows of clouds flowed like water over the fields and subtle hills. Every time one passed over, the landscape
seemed to change. Bright green and glistening yellow fields lost their shine and turned to gray, but when the clouds passed, the shine would return. Sometimes their shadows brought me relief from the sun. Sometimes they brought deep sorrow.

Eagles glided overhead. Small herds of bison, cattle, elk, or moose wandered the prairie and grazed, and they usually didn’t have any objection to our passing through. Heads would rise to watch, following us along the endless highway line that split the plain in two. Nomad feared nothing. He was at home in the wilderness among the beasts. When we had passed, heads would lower again as if we had never been there. Life in the wild went on.

At night, I slept out under the stars most of the time. I had quit pitching the tent weeks before unless the weather warranted it. Nomad, it seemed, could sense my homesickness, and he would move closer to where I lay as if to comfort me. I never knew a horse to express such affection and compassion, let alone one who had been wild less than a year before. I would sit up and pet his muzzle, feeling his hot, moist breath on my face, trying my best not to drag him into my sorrow.

“I’m fine, my friend,” I would assure him. “We’ll be headed home soon.” It was like lying to a child, but of course, he couldn’t understand. All he knew to do was love me, and he trusted me to take care of him. Sometimes, even the faith of an animal can be inspiring. It was comforting to have at least some connection to a creature, even
if not a person. He was all I had for nearly two months in the north, and the solitude brought us closer.

I thought of a cruise we had taken once, Maria and I. I remembered standing at the bow of the ship at night, looking out at nothing but water as far as I could see, and that sickening feeling of isolation the first time being surrounded by the endless black ocean.

Like floating in space.

Nothing above.

Nothing below.

As vast and wildly open as this land was, I felt as separated from the rest of the world as Robinson Crusoe alone on his island. Despite the difference in geography, it was the state of my consciousness that mirrored that of the proverbial man marooned. During the day, I had little more to do than to ponder the world and everything that had happened. I tried to maintain a constant state of meditation, tuning out the monotonous clapping of hooves on the pavement. Anything to keep my mind occupied. A vacant mind is dangerous to its owner and everyone around him. It’s counterproductive. It leads to complacency, ignorance, anger, and violence. None of those had any place in my life on the road and would only make the journey more trying. I did math in my head just for something to do. I struck up conversations with my horse.

“Nomad,” I said, “if a guy on a horse leaves Chicago traveling toward Seattle at twenty miles per hour at the same time another guy on a horse leaves Seattle traveling
toward Chicago at thirty miles per hour, how long before they meet?”

Wishful thinking.

“The distance? What do you mean ‘rest time’? Other variables? Ceteris paribus. No, I’m sure you’re the fastest horse on this road. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you. No, I don’t think talking to a horse makes me crazy.”

Not yet, anyway.

After a while, strange dreams began to come. I dreamed about people I barely knew. People I had only seen at work. People I hadn’t seen in years. People I had never met. It made me wonder how we’re all connected.

I dreamed of nights with Maria when we first moved to the farm. Though we had lost everything else, we made love with a passion that transcended the friction of our bodies, her breath in my ear and the look of ecstasy on her beautiful face glowing in the firelight. It was a passion that touched my soul, inspiring the same from me, the depth of our love truly manifested in the act of the same name.

I dreamed that she had left me.

I dreamed I was in a small boat at night in the middle of the ocean—a wooden boat, with a roof and a small cabin, but no sails or oars. A giant marlin had a hold of it and was tugging it violently, thrashing in the water, nearly capsizing my vessel. I dove in to fight the fish, blinding black water all around me, but I woke before the fight was over.

That last dream was recurring, and it always happened the same way. I would wake up in cold sweats, terribly afraid in the tall grass and surrounded by nothing more
than the wide open plain. The loneliness was haunting. It was so quiet. Fear is what happens to guilt and regret when you know that nobody but God is watching.

The days were better than the nights, though. Even as we moved west and the hills began to grow, the landscape was expansive and plain but so beautiful. It was bittersweet. Sometimes I wished it were uglier. To experience such profound natural beauty and have nobody with whom to share it is a feeling of equally profound loneliness. Most of the land looked as if no person had ever touched it. The only way I knew others had been there was by the road on which we walked.

There were a few small camps along the way—very small—just enough to remind me that I wasn’t the last person left on earth. Often, it’s hard to remember that existence is not as limited as our vision. Those times, it was exciting to see the upright spots moving toward us on the horizon, but the sight always ended in disappointment. Most of the towns up there had been abandoned, and the few people I did meet were already on their way elsewhere, looking for new places to call home. As the weather grew cooler, some were migrating south from what had been Canada. They had no more shelter or food to offer than I had. Nomad and I passed through briskly, and I hoped that those people would settle before the winter. As suddenly as we had found them, we were alone again in our eerie solitude.

Days turned to nights and nights to days, but little changed that I could see. The aurora borealis snaked across
the star-spread sky, smearing the night in green, purple, and red. It was astonishingly beautiful. Most nights, I fell asleep watching it, a cosmological wonder teasing us to inquire farther outside of our own little marble in this vast universe. A sign, I thought, to remind us that we were not alone. Such a sign has driven many a man to madness, but it was one of the few things that kept me sane. What was out there beyond our world? Where did we come from, and how had we arrived at this strange point in the comparatively short history of humanity? Where would we go from here? I felt gifted, blessed, even, to experience such a marvel that only a fraction of earth’s population would ever see.

The northern lights reminded me of Matthew’s family and the way they prayed. I began to do the same. Strange things happen to a man when he feels he has nothing left, and the farther I got from home, the more the feeling crept in, growing like a parasite feeding on my body and soul. Throughout the days, I began praying to a God whose existence I often questioned. Though on occasion I had pondered His presence, I wasn’t what I would call a man of faith. I hadn’t thought to talk to God before or to ask for help when I felt alone or without hope. Self-sufficiency had become such a staple of modern culture before the collapse that it had bordered on an epidemic of narcissism, and the irony was that we had never actually been self-sufficient at all. The more we “advanced,” the more dependent we had become on the things that I had come to learn were so fragile. So easily broken.

They appeared as an inescapable line of dark storm clouds, low to the ground, creeping up on us from the west until eventually the snow-capped peaks came into view. The mountains have a way of tricking you like that. I was relieved when I saw them. In that same moment, I heard the faint patter of hooves on the ground behind us and turned to find a herd of wild horses converging. There were dozens of them spreading like an organic sea of flowing manes behind us in a range of colors that shimmered in the morning sun. A low cloud of dirt and dust puffed beneath them and left a trail in the air.

“Look, your brethren!” I called to my horse over the rumble of the herd as it blended around us.

Nomad broke into a gallop, and for miles we ran among them, through the wild grass of the plain and toward the great Rocky Mountains. I was one with the herd, as if I belonged in that state of divine freedom with the cool wind gusting through my long hair like a mane of my own. For a short time, I forgot where I had come from and where I was going—even who I was. I didn’t feel alone. I felt the shine of a greater being upon me, drawing me forth as a part of that great wild place. I felt as I imagine the mustangs felt. Nomad galloped with an unmistakably untamed spirit. A herd such as that had been his family before we had taken him as ours, but I had become his family. I wondered: if I were to set him free, which path would he choose?