The World as We Know It (13 page)

“Why don’t you come along with us?”

Damn it.

“I don’t know. I am pretty hungry.”

“Good, so are we,” said Aaron. “You’ve found the right company. When you hunt with Dave and Jake, you never stay hungry.”

The pair smiled humbly at the praise.

“All right,” I said, “I’m in.”

“That’s the spirit. You can leave the gun.”

Aaron was right about the skills of his companions. The four of us ate well that morning before we headed toward their home, and the camaraderie brought back sensations of my first days hunting at the farm. That eased my tension, and gradually I began to look at them as friends. There was nothing hostile about them. How primal it is to immediately prepare defense in the presence of a larger, more dominant, or greater number of the same species. In
time, I think, that reflex will fade away in humanity. Our capacity for comprehensive reasoning sets us apart from every other creature, and cooperation, as opposed to competition, was clearly in everyone’s best interest.

The lawless place where we then lived sometimes seemed safer than it ever had with rules. As we strolled into the new city that had grown from what had once been the capital of the United States of America, southwest of the old ghost town with a Blue Ridge Mountain backdrop, I wondered if we would ever again see government and law as we had known them before. And should we? As Thomas Jefferson said, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

Without government, without modern technology, without many resources beyond the natural earth and the knowledge we had brought with us, we were all forced to start from scratch. For the first time since Europeans had set foot on this continent, it truly was a land of equal opportunity.

“You’re welcome to stay at my house if you like, Joe,” said Aaron, an offer I, of course, accepted. His home was similar to the one-room cabin that Maria and I called home. It sat among a neighborhood of similar houses where Dave and Jake also lived. Between our kill from that morning and the dishes supplied by the neighbors, nobody went hungry. That was the way things went.

We reminisced about our former trades, and I found that the professional skills and experience of my new friends had rendered them about as useless as I was after
the collapse. Jake wouldn’t exactly say what he did, but he told tales of the military coming into town during the rioting and imposing martial law and a citywide curfew, which only escalated the bedlam.

“That’s when we knew it was time to get the hell out,” he said. “They blocked the streets with tanks so that nobody could get in or out, at least with a vehicle. Then they turned on us. We had to sneak in at night to collect family members one by one. The ones that were left, anyway. You always assume the government is there to protect you, but when people lose sight of what they’re fighting for, then they’re just fighting.”

Dave, who had once been an engineer on the DC Metro, had become a facilitator for the clandestine exodus from the old capital. He had acted as a guide for refugees and had helped to establish their new settlement there. That was how he and Jake had met. I suspected his skills in hunting had been particularly useful for sneaking in and out of the city unseen. Or perhaps that was how he had learned those skills—out of necessity.

Aaron, ironically, had been a lobbyist for rail transportation, a luxury I yearned for. He told a story of the trip that had gotten him hooked as a child—a train ride from New England to Southern California. Day after day, he had watched the scene in the window change as the train passed mountains, deserts, forests, plains, and cities, with a view of those things from a whole different perspective. “You’re closer to the earth in a train,” he said, “like you’re really a part of it all.” From then on, he had wanted to see
the world, and by rail was the finest way to do it. That was his passion. Not the politics. But lobbying was more lucrative than engineering and afforded him the stately brick manor in Arlington that he had called home.

I’m sure all of my questions must have seemed like an interrogation as I probed to learn the dark secrets that had powered the political machine, but he took it all with humor. It wasn’t as though I could blow any whistle. “Ultimately,” he said, “it was all about money. Big government was always in collusion with big business. It’s just the way it was. Not always in the best interests of the American people, but it was profitable.” He told us about secret meetings with congressmen behind closed doors, anonymous campaign contributions, media manipulation, and envelopes passed under the table. “One on one,” he said, “it didn’t feel like what we called ‘corruption.’ We thought of it as ‘collaboration.’”

Things usually look different from a macro perspective.

His stories were like a blend of
The Godfather
and
House of Cards
. The definitions of honor and patriotism were bent to align with business interests. Aaron had operated that way simply because everyone else had. There had been no other way to compete or to be heard. He had believed in his cause, but every industry from tobacco to renewable energy had implemented the same tactics regardless of their ethics. Even the best ideas would have been doomed in the marketplace if their representatives hadn’t been willing to make the necessary sacrifices, which sometimes included their integrity.

Gerald Ford said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.” We had lost the corruption inherent in such a massive organization. What had come about in the new city, and I can’t imagine a more appropriate place for such a thing to have had its genesis, was a new form of peacekeeping that didn’t allow an opportunity for rampant immorality. It was explained to me as simply “the ethical way.” There wasn’t a word for it. The community had democratically selected a council based on virtues, not on politics or campaigning, to simplify the important decisions. When there was misconduct significant enough to warrant attention, which was rare, the council would determine the appropriate resolution and always leave an opportunity for the community as a whole to reject the decision and propose an alternate. That rarely came in the form of punishment. As we had learned, punishment seldom solved a problem. That should have been evident by the percentage of repeat offenders in our archaic “correctional system.”

“The idea now is to focus on why the offense was committed rather than to avenge the victim,” Aaron said. “Then we make an effort to correct the problem and help the offender to understand why his or her action was unacceptable without being patronizing. I don’t know what it’s like where you came from, but violent crime is almost unheard of here. For one, most of the social failures that bred that kind of behavior are long gone, and now we pay
more attention to people as individuals. Usually, we can catch flaws early before a person reaches such a state of desperation that they feel hurting another is the only way out.”

It was my first evening with them. We had been talking awhile around a fire, and as Aaron spoke, I suddenly realized that Nomad was no longer in sight. He had been tied up near Aaron’s home, no more than fifty feet from where we were all seated.

“Where’s my horse?” I interrupted him. I had been listening with such fascination that I had ignored my periphery. I stood to look around. Nobody else had noticed either, and their puzzled gazes met me with silence.

“My horse,” I repeated.

I began to pace, looking into the dark distance.

“You all right, Joe?” Dave asked.

“My horse was tied up over there. He’s not there anymore.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. He doesn’t wander off, and it was a tight knot.”

“He must be around then.”

“I have to find him,” I said, growing frantic. I had a terrible feeling. I grabbed a flaming branch from the fire.

The three rose to follow and we spread in a search. It was so dark that I could hardly see what was ahead or remember where I had already been as I wound through paths between cabins and trees and tramped through tall grass.

“Nomad!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Come here, boy!”

Nothing.

“Come on! Where are you?”

I felt my eyes watering.

“Try to keep it down, Joe,” Aaron called as he began to move farther away. “People are sleeping.”

“I don’t care! I have to find him!”

I began to panic. It was late in the evening, and most everyone was already in bed. Fires had died down. Everything was black and profiled by the moonlight. I saw the glow of the other torches in the distance.

“Anyone see anything?” I yelled.

“Nothing,” Jake called back.

“Keep looking.”

Tears of dread ran down my cheeks. Nomad was my only companion on the road and my only connection to home that I had to cling to. I would be lost without him. The horse had become the closest thing to family I had known in months. He would never leave me, I knew, which terrified me even more. He had not caught a wind of inspiration and run off on his own accord. Someone had taken him. I was sure of it.

We were reaching the outskirts of the village, and I could see the tree line in the distance when I heard Nomad’s neigh. I knew it instinctively. “Here!” I yelled, breaking into a sprint in the direction of the sound. I saw his silhouette in the moonlight, and then I saw a man
tugging the reins against Nomad’s will. He became more forceful when he saw me approaching.

“Drop it!” I screamed at him. “I’ll kill you!”

I charged at him with every intention of fulfilling the promise, the ground cover crunching beneath my feet. My skin grew hot with rage, and my vision blurred. The man released the reins and tried to run as I rushed upon him, but there was no escaping for him. I ran past my horse, drawing my knife to take the life of the thief, and I tackled him to the ground. He slid through the dirt and leaves face down as I grabbed one arm, twisting it behind his back, and slipped the knife around to his throat.

“You know what they used to do to horse thieves?” I screamed into his ear, my voice cracking.

“I’m sorry!” he pleaded, spitting out dirt, his face pressed into the ground.

“They used to shoot them on the spot, and nobody protested. You should have taken my gun off my horse. That might have saved you from me.”

“I’m sorry! I’m just so hungry.”

“You were going to eat him?”

The teeth on the blade snagged the skin of his throat, tearing grooves in his flesh. My grip only tightened.

“I’m so sorry. Please don’t hurt me.”

I heard footsteps behind me and Aaron’s voice yelling at me. “Don’t do it, Joe,” he said. The lights of torches glowed around us and grew brighter as neighbors approached to see what it was that had woken them.

“Don’t touch me. I’ll kill him.”

“Joe, take a breath.”

“He was going to eat my horse!”

“But he didn’t,” Aaron said. “Think, Joe. How will you feel when he’s dead?”

“I don’t care!”

“You do care. Take a lesson from Buck Grangerford and don’t start down that road. The world has seen enough violence.”

I said nothing. I felt warmth on my cheek and then a rub from Nomad’s moist muzzle. I turned to look at him and he looked right back, and I saw the compassion in his dark eyes. He was calm and still.

“Please,” said the thief, the dirt under his head turning to mud from the tears.

Slowly I released his arm, took the knife from his throat, and stood. He lay on the ground crying.

The next day was different. I had lost it, and I was ashamed of what I’d done. I had nearly killed a hungry man. His name was Thomas. As it turned out, Thom had just come out of hiding from the city, and the ways of the new world had not yet been introduced to him. He had no skill for wilderness survival, and he had taken the first opportunity he had seen for food without conflict. When he felt my knife at his throat, he had fully expected death to come next, but when he lay there crying afterward, they weren’t tears of fear, he said. They were tears of joy. The mercy and compassion that had
been shown to him in that single moment had renewed his faith in humanity.

Thom was not a violent man, I learned. Nor was he a career thief. He was a desperate man who, from his limited perspective, saw only one way to survive. Afterward, he was offered food and work, and I even assisted in building a cabin for him when I was around. Thom and I had about the strangest introduction that I can imagine a pair of friends can claim. One stole from the other, who in turn nearly killed him for it.

After that incident, though, I began to grow more attached to my horse. I kept him with me as much as possible, and when he wasn’t, I made sure he remained in the company of someone I trusted. I couldn’t go through that again. Everybody needs someone to care for, be that a spouse, a child, or even a horse. We aren’t complete without somebody relying on us.

Over the next several days, I had time to explore the new settlement, and it became evident that everything from Washington to New England had spread out so much that it was like one immense single-level megalopolis. There was no longer a government center or a commercial center. Just farmland, primitive architecture, and people sparsely scattered between the cities and suburbs that were still standing.

I took a few days and headed to the Chesapeake for some fishing. I was always expecting that a change in geography would change me as a person, and perhaps the vast
sea could help to ease my mind. Since that nearly fateful night, I had been on edge constantly, tense, and anxiety stricken. Whatever barrier had existed in my conscience to keep me under control had snapped, and I was losing my grip on who I was and what exactly I was doing there. That had to change before we set back out on the highway, and fishing helped to calm me while I made a contribution to the neighborhood I had become a part of. It reminded me of my home. I met some fishermen in the harbor who welcomed me aboard their old wooden schooner in exchange for a small percentage of whatever I caught.

The beautiful thing about the sea is that it never changes. Once we were far enough out of the harbor, the land behind us looked the same as it had during my last visit there years before. The rising sun lent an orange glow to the twinkling waves that gradually turned to deep blue as it made its way higher in the sky. Whitecaps peaked all around us. My time at sea was peaceful and quiet, and I felt a whole new connection with the earth. I imagine sailing is the way God might travel. Most of the time, the only sounds were the subtle waves crashing into the hull and the gentle creaking of the old boat as it rocked. Then excitement would suddenly erupt when one of us had hooked something, and occasionally, a catch would be large enough that it took two or three of us to pull the creature aboard.