Dec. 6, 2011

While we prepared dinner, ate and cleaned up, we discussed what should be done. And it struck me as a bit odd during that evening that Carrie and I had become so attached to Stacy. We’d done fine up to when we came across her but she’d been the only sane human we’d met, so we decided to follow her hunch and make the trek to Crescent City, California to visit one Kenneth MacKay, an enlightened Scotsman who would know all about what was going on.

The pessimistic journalist in me scoffed at Stacy’s optimism and suggestion that this guy would actually be around. But Carrie believed her by the time we began to prepare for bed. Stacy was going to drive in the morning and I would stay up and keep watch, just to be on the safe side that Jesperson didn’t follow us.

“What if this man is still here and he can give us some answers?” Carrie said, sensing my lack of enthusiasm for the plan. I liked it at Stacy’s cabin. It was isolated and the self-sufficiency we could enjoy meant we would be safe from the prowling insanity out in our vacated world.

In the end, despite throwing out ‘devil’s advocate’ scenarios, the ladies won me over.

With heavy eyes from staying awake all night, periodically strolling outside along the driveway and through the woods, having pulls on the pipe and playing uber-guard, we left Stacy’s cabin at 8 the next morning.

It was a beautiful, crisp morning. Several days of overcast and snowy weather gave way to a deep blue sky, unstirred by the human machine. Once again the skies were silent and untraced by jetliners.

We wound our way past the Mission Ridge Ski Area to Highway 97 and down to Ellensburg, on the I-90. Relieved to see roads covered in snow, and not rutted, meaning potential peril, we filled the Expedition at an interstate truck stop that still, remarkably, had power. As we stocked up with road munchies, we wondered about how long we could go with such luck, where power remained on and food was easily available.

We were a traveling gun shop, with shotguns, rifles and handguns at our disposal and Stacy was smart enough to bring a 10-gallon gas can that we also filled.

Once we left Ellensburg, heading south toward Yakima, I could no longer keep my eyes awake and I drifted off to sleep while the ladies listened to soft rock.

Half an hour later I was jarred awake when Stacy slid into a pickup truck that she thought she could sneak past on a bridge on the I-82 heading toward Toppenish. Carrie spotted “fresh” tire tracks in the snow and the ladies panicked. Stacy’s errant move tore the passenger side mirror off the Expedition and left a red scuff on my forehead. Fighting consciousness, I dropped back to sleep and woke up once again as we rolled to a stop at Maryhill, near the Columbia River. On a bluff on the north side of the Columbia River say Stonehenge – or at least a replica constructed by a local man to honour First World War veterans.

Uncertain about available gasoline further south down Highway 97, which seemed a quiet enough highway, we stopped and fueled up again. This time we had to search the station for a gas generator that was easy to fire up and once power was restored, we topped up with gas. Carrie joked about how we shouldn’t have said anything about power back in Ellensburg. I feared the scrounging of provisions was just going to become more and more difficult with each passing day.

It was four hours later when Carrie woke me up. We were creeping into a desolate Bend, which was free of snow and, therefore, a potentially dangerous place as we could not tell if anyone was touring around the town.

Like all the other towns, Bend was a maze of human transportation conveniences left to their own final rolling stops. We pulled into Whole Foods Market grocery store parking lot and, locked and loaded, entered the store. It was trashed. Cans and packages of food covered the floor and the cool air was laced with the smell of rotten meat and produce.

All we needed was water and some dry goods, so the disappointment of finding the store ransacked was muted. However, I kept expecting a zombie to rush around a corner and charge us as we gingerly picked our way over the disgusting mess.

“Why would someone do this?” Stacy said, sounding genuinely put out. “I mean, what’s the point of all this?”

Carrie cast a knowing glance at me and said, “I don’t know. Some people just can’t help themselves and they feel like they should disrespect other peoples’ property or just plain wreck things for the fun of it.”

I thought about opening fire on a row of canned goods — ravioli to be exact — that was left on an otherwise empty shelf. They posed such wonderful targets that it was hard to resist. Instead, I found a bag and stuffed it full of cans of ravioli. What the heck?

Then I began to realize that this store had been ransacked — by the looks of it, a few weeks earlier. That meant someone could be around. Bend wouldn’t be a bad place to wait out the apocalypse. Beats Moose Jaw, I thought. It’s warmer.

The sleep had made me feel better about the trip. I actually felt like I was on a road trip. Despite having extensively traveled the western half of North America, I’d never been to northern California. I was looking forward to seeing the ocean.

“Keep your eyes open girls. We may come upon someone or someones,” I said and then regretted saying it for its obviousness. It was time to smoke a fatty.

Stacy appeared with a large recycling bag filled with water. “Man, it is disgusting back there. What a waste.”

We carefully exited the store, like experienced gunmen leaving a bank job — ready for anything. It was clear as we pushed into the United States that there were people remaining after the disappearance, and thus far our experiences were telling us that the odds weren’t good that those left behind were trustworthy.

Once in the Expedition, I pulled out a joint and sparked it up. As Stacy stowed the goods and Carrie climbed into the back seat of the vehicle, I closed my eyes and listened to the grand silence. Even now, almost a month since I opened my eyes to see my world, short of my love, gone, I still expected to open them and to be back in Cranbrook, freshly stirred from a dream.

I slid into the driver’s seat and grabbed the handful of CDs that Stacy had brought with her. The first homemade CD I grabbed had ‘warning’ written on it in large pink letters. On the back was a list of songs and the first one I saw that screamed into my brain like a tracer bullet was The Pink Fairies – Tomorrow Never Knows.

I stammered, “This is actually the Pink Fairies?” The crush of mincing soft rock the girls had been listening to had not prepared me for such a find.

Stacy laughed and began to tell me who they were. My tongue tripped as I rushed to cut her off and tell her that I knew all about the band, being an audiophile and all.

“You’re not going to play that evil shit are you?” Carrie asked. “Hello? Girls here.”

I told her it was Stacy’s music. “Girl. She’s a girl.”

Shaking off the country music fan, I plunged forward. “The Pink Fairies were awesome. They were a British underground band that never amounted to much but they ripped. One of ‘em was Canadian.”

Stacy said she loved their cover version of The Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows and proved it by hitting play and cranking it.

Carrie slouched in her seat and busied herself by looking at the stalled idle pass by as we thumped out of Bend. Here and there we could see signs of destruction that seemed to be separate from the aftermath of the disappearance. But we did not see anyone.

With ‘City Kids’ wailing, we headed south down Highway 97, into the Deschutes National Forest and down to La Pine and then with more classic rock n roll blaring, we rolled south to Diamond Lake Junction, where we came upon a gas station that had been blown to pieces and turned to ash.

From what I could tell as we crept past the carnage was that a small plane had crashed into the station, likely setting off a fireball when it slid into the pumps. The only thing that told me that was a wing tip, which must have been sliced off when the now completely obliterated airplane swooped down and hit a light standard about 50 or 60 yards from the gas station. I assumed all that at any rate.

During the drive Stacy spoke about the power of music — about how it connects people to vital awareness, which we otherwise miss due to the cacophony of life and its passage.

“The truly spiritual are aware of the vital awareness and they embrace the universe and all its magic and glory. For most of us, though, we catch glimpses of it or hear momentary passages and it stills our souls in our bodies. Then something doesn’t work or something breaks or someone calls you and that awareness is popped like a soap bubble. Music brings us back to the awareness.

“I’ve always been a total music freak. When I was a young girl I was lucky enough to travel to England a few times and I had two cousins who introduced me to all sorts of great bands and far out music,” Stacy said, noting such bands as King Crimson, Hawkwind, Throbbing Gristle, Gong, Camel and the Pink Fairies. She then began listing off the great German bands from the same era… Amon Duul II, Can, Grobschnitt, Guru Guru and Popol Vuh.

If Carrie weren’t the love of my life, this semi mountain woman from the Washington Cascades would have been.

Aside from some friends back in Winnipeg, one of the all-time great music cities, I had not spoken to anyone in my adult life about these bands. I was enthralled and my brain raced to think of acts to talk about.

“I went to the 1977 bash at Glastonbury,” Stacy said, earning a rapt “no fuckin’ way” from me. Carrie smiled and shook her head. I saw her lips mouth ‘oh oh’ as I could not hear her in the back seat, with the tunes cranked.

“I believe music is the modern gospel,” Stacy continued as King Crimson’s Larks Tongues in Aspic Part One began, making me woof aloud and shout “awesome! You are awesome.”

Stacy expertly sidestepped my boyish enthusiasm and pressed forward with her dissertation about music.

“The electrical nature of rock ‘n’ roll — in all music – the notes and tones and messages in the words, they have been the sermons that formed me into a spiritual creature.  I also believe that music has been telling us all that we need to know over the years. The Beatles, The Stones and the Kinks and Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry… they were the initial messiahs and after them came a legion of saints, and sinners. The ebb and flow of good and evil, right there on our turntables and eight-track players and cassette decks.

“And CDs,” Stacy shouted, patting the stereo in the Expedition.

Carrie’s eyes were closed. She loved music, too, but country music and softer rock. She couldn’t understand how I could listen to “that weird shit.”

Frank Zappa was my man… but he made Carrie’s head hurt. To each your own.

I couldn’t imagine she was sleeping with the tunes so loud. So accommodating.

Stacy seized momentum from me agreeing with her about music. I felt the same way, though I didn’t think I had ever so eloquently stated it.

“I think music and artists warned us about this… rapture,” she said. “Don’t think the scientists called this puppy. Nope, the messages were delivered subconsciously. While Bible thumpers were coming down on Ozzy for helping correct the gene pool and acid heads were wrecking records and needles by playing them backwards to hear hidden satanic messages, the universe was shrieking at us to wake up and smell the vaguely Mayan coffee.”

I turned the music down.

“What do you mean Mayan?” I looked back at Carrie whose eyes were now open. She sat forward to listen.

Stacy stammered, “well, I don’t just mean the Mayans. I mean, I can’t think of any Mayan music that feeds into the theory I am espousing, but, c’mon… you know about the Mayan calendar right?”

I said we did and that we had contemplated all that Mayan business as it had been gaining plenty of public ground in the pseudo intellectual and conspiracy theory crowd the last few years.

“Well?” Stacy said, her voice spiking upward with a questioning crescendo.

“Have you got any other plausible explanations for what has happened?”

I shrugged and said, “you were the one who said rapture. What about that?”

She admitted she didn’t know much about it and that Kenneth was the one who had her head all “messed up about that. God I hope he’s still here. I know that he is,” she said, seemingly more to herself.

“I just know he’s going to be sitting in his garden listening to the birds when we get there,” she said, glancing at me with a confident smile.

I thought we were nuts looking for him but Carrie didn’t. “Funny, I don’t think we are wasting our time at all,” she said, nudging my shoulder to say ‘don’t be so pessimistic.’

Robert Fripp began to unload sonic fire and I cranked the stereo up again.

“Find the message!” Stacy bellowed.

I had failed to notice that Stacy had turned off Highway 97 and came to that realization as we passed a sign pointing to Crater Lake National Park. A pang of disappointment nagged at me as we drove past. Never been there before.

Snow became more of an obstacle, thankfully. Once again, the sight of large amounts of fresh snow and no vehicle tracks buoyed my spirits and we rolled on toward Prospect and then Shady Cove, before halting outside Grants Pass.

Snow had been replaced by rain and Stacy pulled over to discuss a game plan heading into the city. The going was treacherous as the Interstate we pulled onto about a dozen miles previous was littered with abandoned and destroyed vehicles. Two semis appeared to be humping, as one unit rode up onto the back of another in their halting throes.

“We need gas,” Stacy said. “And I need to pee.”

With that, we crawled forward to an off ramp and headed into a truck stop that had a truck crumpled into the wall of the adjacent restaurant.  Stacy parked beside a pump and we stepped out of the Expedition, armed and ready.

“It’s weird to be here, in broad daylight, and there is no traffic going by on the highway,” Stacy said quietly. “I always stop here when I visit Kenneth.”

I walked into the truck stop and felt small relief when it didn’t appear to have been ransacked. Other than a sticky floor from where a bottle of Coke had smashed apart near the till, it seemed ‘normal.’

Miraculously, the power was still on in Grants Pass and all I had to do was flip the breaker to get the station’s pumps working. Unfortunately, all the lights came on and even the cash register farted and ‘ka-chinged’ as the Redwood Highway Chevron came back to life.

What was more startling, though, was when music began to play. I felt as though someone was standing behind me after that. Ghosts?

“You must be alive, smoke gets in your eyes.”

I walked outside. Stacy was pumping gas and Carrie was staring off to the west.

“Tears that I cannot hide.”

The music was playing outside, too.

Stacy asked me why I turned “the entire city on” to get gas and grinned.

“Smoke gets in your eyes!”

I asked her what the message was in The Platters’ classic?

Pumping the final few squirts of gas into the Expedition’s stuffed tank, she said dryly, “You must be alive.”

Carrie’s voice re-directed our focus.

“I may be seeing things, but I thought I heard an airplane… at least before you turned on classic hits of the ’50s,” she said.

“Really?” Stacy asked. “Are you sure?”

Carrie replied that she couldn’t be sure but “it sure wasn’t a bird or a bug. Maybe it was a car or a truck in the distance?”

“Kenneth flies… he has an old Cessna… but he doesn’t get up much any more because he can’t afford the fuel,” Stacy stammered.

“He could afford the fuel now,” I said, as Stacy rattled the gas nozzle back into the pump.

We left the Chevron to greet the oncoming darkness with renewed light and sped out of Grants Pass down Highway 199 toward California and Crescent City. Stacy pushed forward with a renewed sense of urgency and we charged southwest without any messages being delivered.

It was 7 p.m. when we came to a stop in a small village called Gasquet, just outside Crescent City. Kenneth had a small property off the highway and Stacy was muttering about the darkness and “never remembering which turnoff it is. And this darned rain sure isn’t helping.”

Rain was thrashing down.

“Rains here… a lot!” Stacy said as the Expedition jerked forward. “I think I remember now.”

A few minutes later we were crunching and bouncing up a gravel road. The rig heaved and bounced as Stacy didn’t even try to avoid water-topped potholes or rocks. Another couple of minutes found us pulling onto a muddy drive way and then stopping in front of a dark cabin in the woods.

“Seems familiar,” I said with a smile to Stacy. “A cabin in the woods. Hmm.”

Stacy was quiet. Like Carrie and I, the unwelcome sight of the dark cabin was eating at her.

“His truck isn’t here,” she said. “He isn’t home.”

She tried the door to the cabin and it clicked open. We stepped inside and the rustic cabin smelled stale and the air was cool and moist. No one had been using this building for some time. In the darkness I could just make out a lantern sitting on a window ledge beside the door.

“Shit,” I said softly and reached for the lantern.

Stacy said she wasn’t giving up on him. He’s probably living in the biggest, most comfortable place in town,” she said brightly and headed back to the door.

“Uhh, I think we should just settle down for the night,” I said. “It’s dark and pissing down out there. Let’s go out and about in the morning.” I managed to fiddle with the lantern and light it.

Carrie said she agreed with me and Stacy turned around and pulled her sweater hood back. Water droplets bounced in every direction, capturing the pale orange glow of the new lantern light.

“There’s firewood around the side. I’ll get some. He doesn’t have electricity, so don’t bother looking for power.”

Carrie wrapped her arms around me and told me she loved me. I replied in kind and looked at her. “Everything all right?” She shook her head and her soul-tripping blue eyes held a mystical shine in the dim lantern light.

“I’m glad we’re staying,” she said. “I’ll go get our stuff.”

Stacy came back in with a bundle of wood in her arms. “There are more lanterns and flashlights through that way,” she said, gesturing with the pile of wood to move down the narrow hallway.  Bits of bark and saturated forest muck flicked from the firewood.

We emerged into a large kitchen, which had a low ceiling at the back end, where cupboards and a sink were located. On the counter was a couple of larger lanterns and luckily, they were full of fuel.

Once the lanterns were lit up, and a fire was roaring in the kitchen stove, I set about lighting a fire in the larger fireplace, in the adjacent sitting room, which Stacy noted was where she usually slept.

“You guys can have this,” she said, nudging a hide-a-bed that served as a separation from the sitting room and kitchen. “It’s far more comfortable than Kenneth’s room.”

Once all the fires were loaded for the evening, and we enjoyed a small snack, we decided to hit the hay.

Considering how the next day would pan out, it was a good thing we had a good night’s sleep.

Rain tap-danced on the moss-covered cedar shingle roof all night long. The entry in my journal from the next morning noted: “Have we been deposited in hell? Rain is lamenting these times as demons scratch at the hatchway.” I wasn’t in a good mood. An animal nibbled at my guts, making my heart squirm.

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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