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11:11 Chapters 5 & 6
Chapter Five
Nov. 17, 2011
‘Reality brought us back down today,’ I wrote in my journal. Even my handwriting indicates severe depression, with an almost page-ripping indentation holding the ink and larger-than-usual letters, with a slashing underline highlighting ‘down.’
‘For some reason the compilation of cash and supplies yesterday has made us both fall apart today, as we are apparently grieving the loss of our loved ones. I just cannot admit that anyone is dead. We aren’t dead. We have only seen one dead person — an old person at that — and as there is no plausible theory or explanation as to what has happened, we cannot begin to admit that anyone is dead. Yet today we grieved.’
An hour later I added: ‘It’s time to roam. I feel that I must confirm, as best as I can, that humankind has disappeared. As pointless as it may seem, the journalist in me wants to know the story.’
Chapter Six
Nov. 18, 2011
Exactly one week after the disappearance occurred, Carrie and I had my SUV loaded with supplies and her dad’s shotgun and we drove north toward to Invermere.
It was a typical November day for the Columbia River Trench – socked in and just cold enough to make you layer up.
I was sweating from being overdressed by the time we descended down Highway 93/95 toward the Kootenay River Bridge at Fort Steele. The commanding presence of the Rockies looming above the valley still captured my eyes, as did the pickup truck that was sitting in the Kootenay River. Relieved of its driver, as it rolled downhill, the truck just missed the bridge railing and careered downhill into the river.
Old habits: I filled up at the Fort Steele Esso, where I always topped up because the price of gas was much cheaper than in the over-priced Columbia Valley, where tourists flocked for the spectacular beauty and boundless recreational opportunities.
The 80-minute drive to Invermere took four hours. We lost count of vehicles crashed along the highway.
The first thrill of the trip was catching sight of life – a murder of crows hopping about near a thoroughly picked-clean road kill elk. I thought I had heard a crow or raven cawing the day before while laying in bed, but for some reason it had not settled into my head that it was not just humans that had disappeared, but apparently all life, except the corvid family, apparently.
Passing through Fairmont Hot Springs I marveled at the sight of a semi-trailer that had veered off the highway and barreled downhill onto Riverside Golf Course. It came to a gouging stop near the green on the 11th hole. But that was a peanuts sight compared the scattered remains of a jetliner than had slammed into the sweeping slope of the Purcell Bench rising from the Columbia River Wetlands, half way between Fairmont and Invermere. A fat grey scar showed beneath the snow that had fallen since the disappearance – and at the end of the scar was clearly the remains of a larger jet plane that must have just hit altitude after taking off from Calgary International Airport when its pilots, crew and passengers blinked into the ethers.
Silent and fretting, we rolled through Fairmont and further north through Windermere, driving by the homes of some friends, before heading to Invermere.
Old habits: Even though it had been years since I had worked there, I parked my SUV behind my old newspaper office, a mental/muscle memory move, entirely unintended, thanks to having worked there as editor and poorly paid slave to a pack of ungrateful corporate snots and ladder-climbing assholes. The back door of the paper was open and we walked in. There was a pile of clothes on an office chair and on the floor, in the production office.
A chill went through me when I spotted a pile of rumpled clothes in the editor’s office. I had wondered if Carrie and I were left on Earth simply because we were just in the right place at the right time, and that thought returned. What if I had not successfully extricated myself from this paper all those years ago? That pile of clothes might have been mine. I shrugged it off and we stepped outside.
We walked down the picturesque main street, plugged by cars that would have rolled to mild crunching stops thanks to the 35-km/h speed limit. A motorcycle, tipped on its side in ‘malfunction junction,’ a poorly designed and confusing four-way junction, made me wonder what it would have been like had we been out and about the day of the disappearance. How bizarre would it have been to just see everyone disappear, with the following carnage of mechanized abandonment.
“Do you think our condo has some kind of shielding that saved us?” I asked Carrie as we stepped into Dave’s Book Bar. On the newsstand sat the final editions of papers ever printed. The headlines meant nothing to us now. They were the least of our concerns, but I scanned them for a clue as to maybe what happened.
For the life of me, I can’t imagine that worsening economic woes in Europe had anything to do with all of mankind just disappearing.
“Maybe we ingested something in the Philippines last winter that made our bodies impervious to whatever it was that zapped everyone?” I suggested, remembering with a twitch the savage case of food poisoning I endured while in Manila – poisoned in an Italian restaurant, by either shrimp or chicken, or perhaps both. It was the worst case of food poisoning I had ever experienced and I was still wondering if I had some kind of worm gurgling about in my stomach. “Saved by a worm,” I said, drawing Carrie from her silence. “what the heck are you babbling about now?” She asked.
We stepped back out onto the street and crossed to Gerry’s Gelati, a small café owned by the town mayor, Gerry Taft. He would have been up to his chin in an election campaign, which would have culminated on the morrow – slated for municipal elections throughout B.C. – when he joined the billions of souls on the fast-track from Earth.
I wondered if people had final thoughts when the disappearance happened. What would they be? What did they see? Where did they go?
Old habits: I walked inside the café, feeling like a coffee, and was not amused when I could not get one.
“What did you expect, you doink?” Carrie shot when I came outside muttering.
We returned to Ointment and putted around town. I noticed my friend Steve’s truck stuck up against an unfinished condo unit near the hospital. Another pang joined the hundreds of others that had sliced through my heart and soul the last week.
We left town and drove to Wilmer, a small bedroom hamlet four km north. I had spent 12 of the 18 years I lived in the valley in Wilmer, including seven years in a basement suite belonging to my good friends, Joe and Karen.
Their house sat empty. Judging from the two small piles of clothes in the living room, and the two piles of clothes in the kitchen, they had been home for Remembrance Day with their young children. The power was out in the house, which likely saved the place from fire. Karen’s clothes were in front of the stove and a frying pan sat on a burner, with what I assumed was bacon in it. At the end of the kitchen counter, draped over a stool, were Joe’s duds – a cold cup of coffee still sat on the counter.
Defeated, we drove back down the hill to my former house, located beside the Columbia River wetlands. Departing we noticed the honey wagon (septic tank pumper truck) that had rolled into a power pole on a side street. That explained why the power was out at Joe and Karen’s.
My old house was still unoccupied and empty. I had had heard the person I sold it to had moved away. I kicked the door in and the greeting warmth of the inside told us that the power was on. We opted to spend the night in the sparse comforts of the house, sleeping on the living room floor. We could have stayed anywhere we wanted, I suppose. But this seemed to be the best place. Carrie and I had enjoyed the final few months of my time in that house, as I ventured back and forth between Invermere and Cranbrook, before making the move once-and-for-all. It had been our ‘weekend getaway,’ even though it was technically still my home.
Waiting for the house, emptied of all its contents, to sell, we’d camp out on the living room floor and just enjoyed the location – right adjacent to the ‘Serengeti of North America’ – the Columbia Wetlands.
I cranked the heat on and fired up the propane stove and we cooked a nice meal from the supplies we brought with us.
“No elk,” I said, munching on some chicken.
“What?” Carrie asked.
“No elk. At this time of year it is really common to see a herd of elk out there in the wetlands,” I said. “Dozens and dozens of the things.”
As we bedded down on the floor, we became aware of several crows perched on the deck railing. Their cawing grated at my nerves and, despite usually liking the birds, I opened the sliding glass door leading to the deck and shouted, “YAH.”
The crows didn’t flinch. They turned their shining tar black eyes at me and cawed louder and flapped their wings. They had no fear. And it wasn’t indifference or being accustomed to humans being so near to them. It struck me as possible that they might be hungry.
“God feedeth the raven,” I said, slamming the sliding glass door to the deck shut and climbing back into the blankets beside Carrie.
“What?” she asked sleepily.
“Ah, just something Dingbat used to say,” I explained. “God feedeth the raven.”
“Don’t reckon they have much to munch nowadays,” Carrie said.
Outside the crows cawed and an unnerving truth began to unfold in my mind, which rattled about in my skull like a wrench in a spinning dryer.
Ian Cobb/e-KNOW
