Nov. 22, 2011

My journal entry for this day, marked as made at 5:22 a.m., simply stated: “Oh holy fuddleduddle.”

I awoke early with an ache in my chest, tight from anxiety. Rather than toss and turn and bother Carrie, I dressed and wandered around the old hotel, with Chickenhead padding along with me, meowing for breakfast.

From a top floor window I scanned the once bustling money pit that was Calgary and pondered the chaos that must have resulted when one million people suddenly disappeared. We weaved our way into downtown Calgary via 16^th Avenue, or the Trans-Canada Highway – once a cruel joke on east or west bound truckers. Welcome to Calgary! Now drive right through the centre of the city to keep heading east or west. It was chaos personified. My imagination did not have to work hard, when we passed by scenes of carnage, trying to figure out what happened.

The laws of physics were put on display that day.

There had been a steady curl of black smoke that had been rising into the sky in the city’s northeast – at the airport. It must have been something to behold as jets in various positions became pilotless. I thought about going to the airport to see if I could find surveillance footage, but I was feeling desperate to get out of the city. I knew that Carrie wanted to get out, too. We had to at least go check out where our kids had been last. A moaning sadness coursed through my bones as that task felt like we were seeing the body after learning of a death of a loved one. Confirmation was not a common thing nowadays, but finding a pile of clothes or getting a sense that our kids had really, truly disappeared along with the rest of humankind, leaving us alone in a chaotic mess, would bring some form of confirmation. A confirmation of grim fact was better than just sitting around. I had always been the type who just wanted to get going when it was time to get going. I always left the night before I was to leave on a trip.

Once the sun had climbed sufficiently high into the sky, I shook Carrie from what appeared to be a warm, comfortable sleep.

We had a quiet breakfast of cereal and fruit, taken from the two large crates of food I had packed that morning. There was enough food to last us several weeks and thanks to nature’s giant fridge known as the northern hemisphere in November, we could keep more supplies fresh for longer.

I was still boggling about the luck of power grids still operating. It is one thing to be left alone with cats and crows but to lose the pleasant luxuries of our pampered Canadian existence would be too much to bear!

While we loaded Ointment with our supplies, including comforters, booze and a fat bag of weed that I found in a room during my morning prowl, a throng of cats meowed at us as we moved back and forth from the hotel to the vehicle. A strong, warm wind – a famous Chinook – had removed most of the snow from the streets.

Chickenhead had disappeared, or perhaps he was among the pack of meowing critters watching us load up, but I left a door propped open, just in case. A steady stream of felines filed into the hotel as we drove away.

We headed south through the city, down Macleod Trail, winding our way around an endless junkyard of vehicles smashed and crashed into sundry objects and each other.

Passing by the Taj Mahal Restaurant, I Pavloved for tandoori chicken.

I gave up trying to get past Chinook Mall and took back streets. It was literally plugged with crumpled vehicles.

Further down the great strip we rolled, weaving and stopping and backing up and trying different routes, sometimes moving down the sidewalk or over wet lawns to dodge vehicles.

Not far from the southern edge of the city, I spotted an outdoors store that bragged about ‘guns, guns, guns.’

“Jackpot!” I shouted, wheeling Ointment into a parking lot.

I tugged at the door, fully expecting it to swing open. Opposition to my tug forced a puff of breath from me – “wuh?”

Carrie and I looked at each other and she turned back to the vehicle.

“Huh!” I said. “Guess these guys closed for Remembrance Day.”

Old habits: we almost left, because, well, of course, the store was ‘closed.’

Then I had a smug epiphany and with a sinister glint in my eyes, I searched for a rock.

Instead, I grabbed a large metal garbage can and flung it through the front window. It was delightfully liberating to think that such a vandalous act would go unpunished and that I wasn’t harming anyone’s property. SMASH. Tinkle, tinkle… entry gained. I opened the front door.

Carrie looked at me with a bemused smile and looked around, as if expecting someone to run up howling angry.

Inside the store, I found a treasure trove of weapons and got busy selecting some guns and ammunition.

The first thing that caught my eye was a short, black 12-gauge shotgun that seemed to define stopping power — a Mossberg 935. I took the time needed to make sure I gathered up the right ammunition for it — a shopping basket filled with boxes of 3.5-inch magnums.

If we ran into zombies, we were set. But we needed something that allowed us to kill from a distance and there was no shortage of guns to choose from.

I selected a .308 Winchester, bolt action rifle and grabbed as many boxes of shells as I could find.

Next up — a decision based solely on the tug of a heartstring, I grabbed an old but beautifully conditioned Lee-Enfield .303, with a sticker that noted it was used in the liberation of Holland by a Canadian infantryman.

I gazed at those three dandies leaning against the front counter and briefly thought about how cool it was to just roam about and select whatever gun I wanted.

“Something to be said about this free market world we have nowadays,” I said to myself.

Then I realized that I needed to grab a couple of smaller bore guns that Carrie could learn to shoot with and I could have hours of fun with target shooting, which was the real reason I was arming myself for war. War with who – what? Crows? No matter – free guns!

Faithfulness to a past fine brand, stemming to my youth, had me gently unclasp a Remington 597 from a wall mount and I held it with childish sentimentality. My dad had given me a similar rifle when I was 10 or 11 and it served me well through my gun crazy teens.

That was when I noticed a really cool looking lever action jobby — a Marlin 39A and I grabbed it, too. It was noticeably heavier than the Remington and gave the impression that it would shoot true and clean.

A few days later I counted the number of .22 rounds that I also liberated from the store and gave a low whistle at the thought of having 3,800 to play with. In total, the rounds and shells that I filled the back of Ointment with amounted to enough firepower to launch a small revolution.

“Tarrr-ggggottts,” I said, then paused for a moment of sadness as I thought of my oldest friend, Dingbat Alien, with whom I had spent many glorious autumn days through the course of my life shredding elaborately designed arrays of targets with our .22s and other gnarly forms of weaponry.

We’d get savagely drunk while playing shooting games consisting of one of us selecting a target, having the other spot it with binoculars and then firing. If we missed, it gave the other guy a chance to double up and if he hit it, the loser would have to drink double — of whatever it was we were consuming. If he missed, it went to triple, quadruple etc. until the target was knocked down, shredded, blown into pieces or nicked. You can imagine how downhill such contests would go if targets were particularly difficult to snipe, which many were – like having to hit a CD turned sideways or a needle sticking out of an orange.

We  were once stopped by a conservation officer, on a Thanksgiving Day, in the Sandy Lands, just southeast of Winnipeg. We were on our way home after a ferocious afternoon of “tarr-gott” shredding. We were stowing our weapons in the back of Dingbat’s Landcruiser, when the strap he was pulling to fasten his gun case in the back snapped. His hand flew up and smashed him on the nose, breaking it. He looked at me with tears gushing out of his eyes and I nearly peed myself. His nose was bent 45 degrees to the right and he calmly asked me to “set” his beak back in place. I complied and he howled like a thumb-smacked spaz carpenter.

This caused us to open the 26-ounce bottle of rye that remained in our possession, and drain it in no time flat. We’d already powered back more than two-dozen beer at that point. Pissed as a nit, Dingbat began steering his old Landcruiser down the bush road, until he grew bored with that. With a swollen face, he ripped the vehicle off the road and into the bush and we bounced through the thick forest, plowing down smaller trees and barely avoiding the larger ones that would have stopped us in our tracks.

He came upon a 10-foot wide sinkhole and, for an inexplicable reason, aside from the massive impairment, began to circle it, growing closer and closer to its edge, until a front tire plunged over the sandy side and we became stuck.

We drunkenly climbed out, giggling like schoolboys and Dingbat proceeded to scratch sand away from around the stuck tire, when the vehicle suddenly pushed down, trapping his hand. I was able to help him free his hand and we noticed that to go along with his broken nose, he now had a broken finger.

Five or so minutes later, we managed to get the Landcruiser unstuck and headed back to the bush road, where upon we encountered one of Manitoba’s brave conservation officers (CO) — poor souls who patrol hunting lands unarmed.

Being generally obedient lads, we stopped and slurred a greeting to the bush cop.

“Have you guys been out hunting?”

Dingbat blubbered, “Nope. Tarr-gott shooting.”

“Do you mind if I see your guns?” the CO asked.

“Nawahtall,” Dingbat verbally spurted, completely giving away the fact that we were about 12 or 15 drinks over the legal limit to be behind the wheel of a vehicle.

Holding his nearly crushed hand with the badly broken finger in the air, almost obscuring his swollen beak, Dingbat emerged from the vehicle. The CO’s eyes were fixed on him and then they shot toward me, as if he expected to see me in similar shape.

Dingbat extracted his .22 from the back of the cruiser and the CO sniffed the end of the barrel.

His head snapped back. “Holy… yeah, you guys haven’t been hunting, that’s for sure. If you had been, there’d be nothing left for me to find. Wow. How many rounds did you go through?”

Dingbat shrugged and paused while he counted… slowly and drunkenly, out loud.

He stopped at “500 or so” and smiled at the CO, who leaned down and looked at me, asking, “you too?”

I slurred that I only had a single shot rifle, as opposed to Dingbat’s 10 shot semi-auto, and “prolly only shot about 300” rounds.

Apparently not too concerned about the heavy state of our inebriation, the CO handed Dingbat’s rifle back to him and said, “All right then, you boys get home safely now. And you better not do any more shooting because your rifles will need a thorough cleaning now.”

Dingbat held up his trigger finger, bent badly to a side a finger shouldn’t be in and said, “Busted my shootin’ finger. Can’t shoot n’more.”

Even now, I wonder what that CO thought about as we drove away.

With thoughts of Dingbat still in my mind, I moved to the handgun section and spent a good while browsing over the selection, which while not as good as an American gun store or recreation/outdoor store, was still pretty substantial.

In addition, I grabbed two Glock 19s — nine millimeter cop-style pistols, a Browning Buckmark Camper .22 and the piece de la resistance — a Smith and Wesson 627 357 magnum revolver.

Carrie watched me squirrel up the appropriate ammunition for the handguns with an amused half grin.

“What war are you going to fight? Are you declaring war on me? The cats? The crows?”

I nodded, “Mm, hmm. The crows have proven to be something to watch out for. Who knows what else is lurking out there, starving from the loss of food supplies. If crows and cats are still around, anything can still be around, including people who may not be the most desirous of our company. Do you really think we are the only people left? Besides, it is better to be safe than sorry.”

She agreed but wondered aloud as to why we needed so many guns.

“Because,” I replied, “we can have them.”

Along with stowing the guns in Ointment, I selected several hunting knives, camouflaged outer wear, a powerful spotting scope, binoculars, a crossbow, gun cleaning supplies and a couple of pairs of high quality hunting/hiking boots.

“Never know when you might need a buffalo-skinning blade and have to shoot something in silence, from a distance, hidden with warm, dry feet,” I said.

“Now, all we need is some beer and we’re outta here.”

Carrie asked where we were going.

I stopped dead still and looked at her questioningly. “South, I guess — back to Cranbrook and… uh… to… we’ll figure it out as we go.”

And with that, we slowly picked our way southward down Highway 2 to Fort Macleod, then turned west on the Crowsnest Highway, into a strong wind that blew fat flakes of snow across the white expanse of highway that, like the other highways, was the final resting place of so many vehicles, somehow abandoned — vacated.

I felt a bit uneasy about the tracks we were making. I was now convinced that we could not be the only people left in the world. Maybe it was hope.

As we toured up into Crowsnest Pass we passed the Pure Country Lounge, a place we used to stop at for a drink and a round of video lottery terminal gambling.

Carrie said, “What do you think? For old time’s sake?”

I wheeled into the parking lot, a pure white covering unsullied by tire tracks. “Why not. We’ve got lots of cash for gambling!”

It was like walking into a wooden mausoleum. The usually lively establishment located near the Frank Slide was unsurprisingly empty.

Despite the fact we’d been abandoned by the seven billion or so other souls on Earth for 11 days now, it still felt supremely wrong to step behind the bar and search for a nice white wine for Carrie.

I popped open an Alexander Keith’s for myself and found a Sauvignon blanc for my lady and we tucked into the VLTs blinking against a wall. On my third or fourth poker hand I became excited.  The machine beeped and tootled and chimed and my eyes focused on the straight flush I had won— ace, two, three, four and five of hearts, which appeared on a maximum bet.

Sitting next to me playing some kind of spinning fruit or vegetable game, Carrie laughed.

“Whoo hoo,” I shouted at the top of my lungs, and yet still looked around, expecting to see startled faces. “I just won 400 fucking quarters. What’s that? A hundred bucks? Fuck me politely! If the world hadn’t come to an end, this wouldn’t have happened, you know. It would have been the usual sound of a large vacuum extracting money from my pocket and me wondering why I waste money on these bloody things!”

“Start the car!” Carrie shouted with a laugh.

Old habits: we finished our drinks and games and left. First, I printed out my winning ticket and left it on the bar — payment for our beverages.

It was still a couple of hours to Cranbrook and darkness was closing in.

A notation in my journal summed up the last leg of our trip ‘home’: “It was an uneventful tour back through the Rockies. Fernie was almost completely dark, except for streetlights. Calgary seemed to beam with light, for some reason. If the disappearance happened in the late morning, I am left wondering why Calgary had so many lights on. Then again, it was the downtown buildings, so they would have been somewhat occupied, even though it was a holiday. I guess Fernie folks really take that day off. In comparison, Cranbrook appears completely alive, except for the fact that when we drove into town, as we angled around crashed vehicles, we left the lone tracks in the light snow. It’s really weird to be home. It was warm and welcoming and I am wondering when power is going to start shutting down. Kudos to the engineers be they gone.”

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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