To Simply Survive, Chapter 2.

Utah

The edge of eternity, the fringe of forever.

Where the hum of our blood sang so deeply into the silent nights and the rill of our veins, what little was left, ran scant through some strange nihility.

A falcon glided low and westward, bobbing and weaving to catch the better parts of the breeze. Using the airflow. White wings open, four foot and change, it appeared black against the colors of dusk. Like a shadow of itself, the bird angled upwards into the higher twilight and leveled out towards the setting sun among the wisps of white and pinkish gold that crossed the ever-darkening skies.

Charon looked on as the silhouette soared away to nothing, his arms crossed atop the long wooden shaft of a spade shovel, blade dug into the sand by the river bank. He had a long, lean frame. Green eyes and shaggy brown hair, banded in grey by his own years. Stubble, five days worth running up his cheeks and down his neck. Streaks of sweat and dirt ran the length of his bare torso and his skin was cold with goosebumps against the steely breeze rolling off the water.

It was known as the Tavaputs plateau. Eastern Utah. Here, he had settled. It was a remote and unforgiving place, and a stretch of the Green River cut clean through in a defiant respite to the rugged sterility of Gray Canyon. All around, the deep, narrow gorges of red-brown stood sentinel to the water below; a thrash of color in anguish. The shallow blues washed over the rocks, slowly chipping away and eroding in the current, and the sediment carried off into the deeper greens and blacks of the rushing river. The more violent parts of the waterway were of this world; the calmer were nothing of this Earth. That tranquil teal was chaos at rest, just biding its time to become one with the tumult.

Charon sometimes wondered. He wondered if in another place, a place so remote as this, there may be someone else. Another one, alone and surviving. If that person was also digging trenches off a river to collect water, if they also hunted whatever living thing they could find. If they too were doing what they could to remain as this terminal era slowly swallowed them whole.

And he felt it, something of a vicarious nostalgia. An old familiar longing for something he himself had never known. It would blow through like a rebel gale rising out of the stillness and it would carry him. And from out of the American Southwest he would be swept, as light as a wind-borne feather, and he would see this former country.

He would find himself atop the steep black cliffs of Lubec, Maine, looking out at the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean and he could hear the waves crashing against the rocks below. He could smell the Pacific at dusk as people moved casually around him on the Santa Monica Pier, he tasted the briny winds rolling off that boundless sea so peacefully swallowing the sun. New York City was vibrant, and he felt the rain tap the palm of his hand as he reached out from cover beneath a building’s eaves on Canal Street.

For what was this forlorn yearning? The coastlines would drift away. Those great and endless oceans would quietly evaporate to nothing and the cities would crumble and fade. None but false memories, repressed or shaken off and out of existence entirely. There was this canyon, there was this river, there was here and now. Even time, it was nothing more than an existential relic— a lost measurement of mortality in the face of our own extinction. Time brought the resolute roar of chaos, and left behind only the broken whimper of havoc.

But, even in this ravaged landscape, Charon still found love for the seasons. It was autumn. Brisk mornings, warm days. Evenings were cold and windy. He reveled in the frigid air and a stiff breeze swept through the canyon and over the river and he could feel his skin tighten like a desperate testament to his own sentience. That’s enough for today. He pulled the shovel out of the wet sand and he turned to follow the shoreline upstream.

True night fell heavy over the twilight. Black as ink. All around the cliffs stood lordly, the lowlands chilly in their commanding witness and the calm churning of the rivers flow barely a babble. And those canyon walls, abraded flat and scarred by glaciers long gone, rose in a steep race to the sky where the stars erupted upwards from the chasm edges in a flurry of flickering silver specks against the blackness.

Tonight was of a rare brilliance and Charon’s gaze wandered the stone below the eastern rim. The moon was low on the precipice, rusty and full, throwing little light as it crawled its path through the sky. The stars turned overhead in staggering brightness, constellations so clean and crystalline. It was as if the astronomer Hipparchus was conducting a symphony of his own maps, every piece moving together to render a deep and perfect evening. Charon took long and steady breaths of the crisp autumn air, letting out a light fog on every exhale. And with a languor reserved for such tranquility as this, his eyes passed over the brink of the canyon and continued on upward.

He saw Orion, the hunter— his belt laid out as three sharp points of light set against the hazy band of the Milky Way. Standing with deadeye confidence, the hunter drew his bow sighting West at Taurus. And the bull returned the hunter’s certainty with his own bloodshot eye, the star Aldebran flickering orange against the blackness. Scowling in defiance, he began his charge. But as surely as Orion held his aim never to release, Taurus stayed in stride never to gain ground.

Charon turned from the river. He could hear his boots sink into the mud below as he trudged forward off the bank and up into the wetlands. He moved through stands of cattail plants, rising green and blade-like, and he felt the rustling leaves all along his arms and up to his shoulders. As he continued on, the ground hardened beneath his footsteps until his feet no longer sank. Short and pointed saltgrass sprouted at his ankles and he continued through woody mounds of waist-high sagebrush to a tall hedgerow thick with green willow trees. He looked back, the thicket was still. He reached out, pushing aside some of the lower-hanging branches and he ducked through the small opening into a quiet clearing.

And lonely stood the cabin.

He listened for some sound to break the silence but heard nothing. It was the kind of peace found only in the wake of wild devastation. He thrust the shovel straight down into the sand and gravel and it stood upright, slightly askew. Walking towards the cabin, he knew tomorrow he would hunt. For this, he would prepare.

Charon would step inside and field strip the .30-06 at his small round table, cleaning all of the components and reassembling the weapon. He would then put the rifle back in the gun cabinet by his bed and he would inspect the 9mm handgun on his nightstand, dropping the magazine and checking the chamber for a round ready. And then, somehow, he would find sleep. The hope of tomorrow like a prayer of reprieve from this calamitous time on Earth.