Earth Abides

Out of Los Angeles, the boys had taken 66 eastward, just as Ish remembered so vividly he had done in the days following the Great Disaster, when he had not been much older than the boys were now. The highway across the desert was easy and open, except for an occasional stretch where sand had blown across. They had gone along with no more trouble than blowouts here and there. The Colorado River bridge they had found shaky, but still passable.

The next community was apparently at one of the old Indian pueblos near Albuquerque. From what he could make out from the boys’ description, Ish concluded that most of the few dozen people at this little community were not very dark in complexion, but that the dominant spirit must be Indian, because their pattern of life was based on growing com and beans as the Pueblo Indians had done for many hundreds of years. Only some of the older people talked English. This community also had drawn inward upon itself, and looked with suspicion upon the strangers. The people there had horses. They did not drive automobiles, and they rarely went into any town.

From there, the boys had swung north to Denver, and then out eastward across the plains.

“We followed a road,” said Bob. “It’s like 66, only just part of it.” He paused, hesitant. Ish thought for a minute, and then realized that the boy was trying to describe Highway 6. Some of the markers would still be standing along it, and Bob had sensed that they were the same shape as the numerals on 66, although there was only one of them. Ish was embarrassed that his own son was not sure of the numerals.

Highway 6 had led them on through the comer of Colorado, and across the plains of Nebraska.

“Lots of cattle everywhere!” Here Dick was taking up the story. “Cattle everywhere, you always see cattle.”

“Did you ever see the big brown ones with humps on their shoulders?” asked Ish.

“Yes, once we saw a few of them,” said Dick.

“How about the grass? Does any of it grow straight and stiff looking, with a head on the end, and little grains forming. When you went through they should have been still soft and milky, perhaps. When you came back, you might have seen it somewhere standing all golden with the grain hard. We called it wheat.”

“No. We saw nothing like that.”

“And how about com? You know what that is. They were growing it there by the Rio Grande.”

“No, there is no corn growing wild anywhere.”

Onward still they had gone, finding the roads now blocked more often, since they had come to the wetter country with ranker and faster growth and heavier rains, combined with hard frosts in winter. The highways were splitting up into great chunks and blocks as the frost worked under them, wherever the surface was cracked, grass and weeds, and even bushes and young trees were springing up to block the way. Yet they had crossed what was once Iowa.

“We came to the big river,” said Bob. “it is the biggest of all, but the bridge was good.”

They had come to Chicago, but it was a mere desert of empty streets. It would be an inhospitable place, thought Ish, when the winter winds swept in from Lake Michigan. He was not surprised that people, with the whole continent to choose from, had drifted away from the once great city by the lake, leaving it ghost-like behind.

Leaving Chicago, the boys had lost themselves in the maze of roads in the outskirts, and had ended up (the day was cloudy, and they lost direction) by going south instead of east.

“After that,” said Bob, “we got one of these things out of a store. It points direction—” And he looked at Ish for the word.

“Yes, a compass,” said Ish.

“We hadn’t needed one before, but now we used it and got going east again, until we came to the river we couldn’t cross.”

Ish figured out quickly that it might have been the Wabash. Floods of twenty-two years, or—more likely—just one great flood, had swept away the bridges. After exploring southward and finding no passage, the boys had had to go northward to Highway 6 again, which more or less followed a height of land.

The progress eastward had become more and more laborious. Floods, windstorms, and frost had transformed the once open and smooth highways into rough lines of concrete chunks strewn with gravel from washouts, overgrown with vegetation, and crisscrossed with fallen tree-trunks. Sometimes the jeep could push through the bushes or detour the tree-trunks. But often the boys had had to make a passageway with ax or shovel, and the constant work wore them down. Also the loneliness began to oppress them.

“There was a cold day with a north wind,” Dick confessed, “and we were afraid. We remembered what you used to tell us about snow, and we thought we might never get home.”