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2055
by Katie Jordan
CHAPTER TWO
Anyway, I keep trying to write down what happened way back then. Of course there were no newscasts to let us know. All of a sudden there was no electrical power, and there was somehow a different feeling to the atmosphere. John and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows, rounded up my five younger children - the two oldest were both married and away - and loaded them into his mini-van.
Lucky for us, the gas tank was full. We drove from my little townhouse at the south end of Hamilton down to Concession Street and pulled into the pretty park at the end of Upper Gage. The kids all piled out and headed for the playground, but John and I walked over to the edge of the park overlooking the lower city.
You can imagine our astonishment when the lower city was no longer there. The lake, usually miles away on the north edge of the busy city, was now lapping up against the mountain ridge, about a foot below where we were standing. Nor could we see the far side of the bay as we always had been able to. Water stretched calmly as far as we could see. Assorted debris floated on the top of the new lake, stuff that very recently had been the belongings of people who were no longer there.
We clasped hands tightly and said a prayer for all the souls that were now lost, and then walked slowly back to his vehicle to turn on the radio. The only FM station we could find playing was K-Lite, who had its station up on the mountain, operating on emergency power. They had no real idea what had happened and confusion reined.
No one seemed to know what had actually happened. The radio people were panicked because all their telephone calls to other Southern Ontario radio stations couldn't be completed. Its own switchboard was dead.
Eventually, roaming here and there and talking to everyone we could, we were told that the St. Lawrence River, flowing in from the east coast, had burst its banks from what seemed to be a huge inrush of ocean water. To the north, Hudson Bay overflowed and covered a great portion of land with water. All the Great Lakes rose dramatically, swallowing up all the cities thriving on their shores.
John's own home in Niagara Falls was suddenly gone. The Niagara River, like all the other rivers, was unrecognizable, more like a long flowing lake. Niagara Falls, a beautiful natural attraction and Honeymoon destination, disappeared.
Millions and millions and millions of people were suddenly gone. All the electrical and nuclear plants were drowned, all the technology man was so proud of creating were wiped out in an instant.
The children, of course, missed their TV for quite a while, and I missed my computer and my friends all over the world from the Internet, but we gradually learned to live a different and more real life. I was sorry that John lost his home, but it wasn't long until we left my own behind as well. With no heat for the winter months, we decided to head farther south and see what might be happening.
In the high hills of New York State {New York City was gone too, of course}, we came across a man who explained why he thought the waters had risen. His theory was that the hotter and hotter weather made the polar ice caps melt at a much faster rate than they should, and their sliding into the northern and southern oceans caused a sudden and dramatic increase in the ocean levels all over the world.
The man we met said he had predicted just this eventuality, but nobody would listen to him. Now there was hardly anyone left to listen if they wanted to. Personally, I think it was a plain and simple act of God.
I forgot to mention that before we headed south my married children found us, and we all decided to travel together. Now, before the flood there was an incredible system of roads, highways and superhighways, always clogged with endless traffic. Almost every family had at least one gasoline powered vehicle, polluting the air terribly. I was not unhappy to see an end to all that, but it certainly made travelling anywhere a lot more difficult with most of the highways drowned. And after the gasoline ran out, we had to find alternate transportation.
My two older sons' minds were always working, and after we made our way west and south for some time, their ingenuity equipped us with three solar-powered vehicles. We liberated the solar panels from an abandoned house on what used to be a high hill. We couldn't figure out why someone would abandon a house that had solar power to heat their home and water, but eventually concluded that they must have been caught in one of the cities when the floods hit. We contemplated staying there, but our curiousity to explore our new world was too overwhelming.
It was very eerie for a long time, seldom encountering other living people. I'm trying to ignore and not tell about all the dead ones we found, but I have to say it. During the first few months, we had to retrieve and burn endless corpses from the water. This made all of us that helped with this job dreadfully sad and sometimes physically ill, but it was a duty that had to be done.
Of course, we endlessly questioned why John and I and my family had all been spared from what we considered to be the Judgment of God, but all we could do was go on from day to day, doing whatever macabre tasks were presented. We thanked God every day for sparing us and mourned those who had been lost.
Some of the worst times were when we came upon a family that had survived the floods, only to starve to death in the absence of grocery stores and ready food supplies. Late twentieth century society spent so much time on pleasure and entertainment that they forgot how to survive and take care of their own basic needs. They assumed that their easy, lazy lifestyle would last forever, and food would always be there for the exchange of money.
Naturally, money no longer had any meaning. We had a lot of people to feed, with my large family, and collected as much as we could from abandoned places along the way. It was too early in the season for many vegetables to be growing, but when we could we picked strawberries and other fruits in their seasons, and somehow managed to survive that first year.
When we got to the farthest southern point we could and still be on land - Florida was gone, Texas was under a blanket of water - we set up a base where we planned out gardens. We by now had a few animals in our little convoy, three milk cows we had acquired along the way, and five horses we'd found running loose about halfway down here.
We didn't stay very long at the base in the early years, although two adults were always left there at any one time, with guns we'd found in different places. Some of the people we met along the way were so desperate for food that they would literally kill to get it, and we had to make sure our place could be defended from any marauders.
There were always those who would rather take from others than look after themselves, but since the floods, there are of course very many less, since that sort usually stuck to the cities. But desperation makes people do desperate things, and John and I agreed that we'd rather know that we could defend ourselves if the eventuality arose.
Amazingly, to my knowledge, we are all still alive and healthy. Most of the children are now living away from us, but we travel around to visit them on a rotating basis, keeping in touch with the various little communities that they have helped to establish.
The air is so much cleaner, it amazes me that we ever managed to live through the pollution of those other days. And the stresses on us are natural ones, not things like how we are going to get that new Nintendo system the kids want, or how we're going to keep up with the credit card payments.
Even the youngest children learned fairly quickly how to get along without the hundreds of toys they at one time considered so essential. One thing we don't have to do without is music. I'd invested in a solar-powered CD player just before the world changed, so I still have my favourite music. I haven't been able to record the few new songs I've written. I don't have any way to do that, but I play the guitar we salvaged from somewhere years ago, and play this and sing my words for the family. The children have learned them to pass along to their own kids.
I have a knack for writing verse, and even before the floods I had already written over one hundred peoms and songs, very many of them trying to remind people to believe in and thank God for their lives and loves. And, of course, many about the heartbreak caused by the men in my life before John. Since being with John, I have written about the joy of our love, and since the floods, about the sadness and changes that followed. I'll share some of them here with you as we go along.
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to be continued - please if anyone reads this, post a review. This work seems to me to be a warning from God, and
this is the only point of publication at this time.......... Thank you, Katie Jordan
Posted 10/28/99