The Old Man and the Wasteland. Nick Cole
that it came upon you and took you by surprise? But not so fast, since you were nearing the top. Maybe you blacked out?
The Old Man walked outwards from the front of the car. He thought of the size of the hole and the weight of the object as he walked down the other side of the hill scanning the ground.
Someone may have found it?
That does not matter. You are thinking as you once thought. Telling the story first. If you find the resting place of the thing and it is gone then you have won because you thought the way you are supposed to think. Some will always lead to more. That is the first rule.
I could wait until morning?
Why? You will sleep badly and all night think about where to look in the morning.
At the bottom of the hill was a dry river bed. Holding his torch down near the ground he checked the bed for ash.
In the years after the destruction, flash floods of ash had filled the old stream beds as the snowpack of that long winter had finally come to an end.
If the thing had fallen into the streambed then it is lost. Carried off by rivers of ash in the years since. Also most travelers use stream beds to move. They are shady, there might be water, and the rains may have collected salvage.
So if it landed in the stream then it is as good as gone.
Looking back to align himself with the car, he climbed up the rocky slope to the far side of the dry streambed. A few feet away he found a battered aluminum ice chest, half sunk in the mud and hidden by a mesquite tree that had grown up around its base. It was empty. Someone else had found it. Had followed the clues and found the thing in the dried mud with the broken cover.
The chest was too light to have made the journey from passenger seat through the window down the hill and across the stream bed to land where it did. Whatever had once been inside had been heavy enough to propel it that far.
In front of the fire, The Old Man sat cross legged and treated himself to one of the tortillas. He congratulated himself on finding the ice chest and thought little that it contained nothing. Instead he was happy that he had found it. Maybe the curse was a lie. It was he who had been lazy, easily accepting the blame of the curse. He was to blame. If so, then things were changing.
He finished the tortilla, put more mesquite on the fire and took only a small drink of water so he did not have to pee in the night. He rolled himself in his thin blanket and was soon deep asleep. In the night when the fire was low, he awoke thinking ‘I am sleeping really well tonight’, as though he had accomplished a great thing which had eluded him for some time. Pleased, he fell asleep once more.
The next day he crossed into the dunes of the wasteland. The scrub and hard rock gave way to smooth sand pink with the rising sun. By noon the landscape faded and the pink of morning turned a blinding white.
It was still early fall. It wasn’t as hot as it had been earlier in the year. The Old Man sipped the bottle of water, only half full now, and felt the heat more than he had expected to.
I need to look for water. Soon I will go too far and if I don’t find anything, then even making it back to the village might be impossible.
Maybe they are looking for me.
In the night, toward dawn he had dreamt of the child in the backseat of the car of the screaming man the guards had shot. She was the same age of forty years ago but The Old Man was still old, even though he had been younger that long ago day than her father.
In the dream he was back in the village. The child, who was a girl most surely, had knocked on his door. After letting her in The Old Man gave her cold water and she sat down at his desk, looking out the one window he had salvaged from an over-turned semi.
‘Have you been walking all night to get here?’ he remembered asking her. As if a night’s journey accounted for all the years in between that day and the dream.
But the child remained staring out the window, lost in thought and when she turned back to The Old Man she looked at him smiling. Then she said ‘It never happened, y’know.’ In the way a child who is young can affect a certain seriousness.
But The Old Man wasn’t sure if she meant her father being shot by the side of the freeway under the shadow of the reactors. Or something else.
He woke with a start, and already a desert breeze was blowing across the soft blue of first morning. He rose quickly, promised himself some breakfast later and was soon away from the wreck. The dream had bothered him. And he wondered if the dream of the child and the wreck of the car weren’t the cause of it.
Later, he felt better as he walked through a line of dunes. He was away from what was known to him of wrecks and the worst kind of luck. The wasteland was new. It was unknown. In a few hours, by nightfall, he would be farther than anyone had tell of in the depths of the wasteland. If anything, that was something.
So why did the dream bother you? It’s noon, so speak it now and be done with it so the child does not return tonight.
Ahead, the wasteland fell deeper into a series of white dunes, and The Old man entered them, weaving about the floor of them rather than climbing to the top of each.
I’ll do my best to keep a rough bearing north and maybe a little east. I’ll need water soon.
East is curst.
Then my curse and the curse of the east will cancel each other out.
He couldn’t remember what that was called; it was a law or something, something he had once learned in school.
How strange, he thought in the silence between the dunes. School. To think, once I attended a school. An elementary school, a school after that and then even a high school. College. I couldn’t even begin to explain school to the young of the village.
I am thinking too much. That is why I had the dream of the child. Too many things are coming up from the past and it is making my mind race. The silence of the wasteland is good for thinking.
You must think about water and salvage. You can’t just think about the past. If you don’t find water you won’t be able to find something out here and bring it back to the village.
The shadows began to lengthen and soon the shade of the dunes became cool. Gathering stray brush he set up his camp in the lee of a long dune and soon had a fire going.
There had not been the least sign of any salvage, anything man had made, or even the presence of man. The Old Man sat chewing a tortilla and thinking about this. Usually back near the village, even though it was the desert, there seemed to be nothing but the things of man’s past. All the collected salvage. The wrecks, the dead towns and settlements. Bones.
But how long since anyone had been through the wasteland? It had been forty years since the bombs. The years since, reasoned The Old Man, had been too hard. Too close to the bone for anything that didn’t yield enough profit to allow survival to the next day.
Maybe that was why there was no salvage in the wasteland.
Staring into the fire, he thought of the child.
Did she survive that day?
Not if she remained on the West Coast, especially from Los Angeles to San Diego.
But if she had survived would her life have been good?
She would have less memories of what was lost. That is a kind of ‘good’.
Those who survived those weeks of bombing, each one struggled with a question which determined whether they would keep salvaging or give up and die.
What was the question?
Can you let go of what is gone?
I think at first I felt that I could not go on. The things I lost were too painful and I could not imagine a life without them.