The Last of the Airplanes
She had not thought anything had changed until she realized that it had to have been an entire season since the last time that she saw a plane fly overhead. It had to have been wintertime since an airliner last slowly arced across the heavens. Even then she was not sure whether it had been in the winter at all. It could have been last fall.
She used to see them all the time. Her home was directly under the transcontinental route between Toronto and Europe. The big jumbo jets were as regular as clockwork. It used to seem like dozens would fly by every hour. It is funny that it had taken her so long to realize that they were now all gone. She figured that seeing that these airplanes were the only vestiges of the human race that she had come across in the last thirty-five years since they moved up here to the wilds of Northern Ontario that the planes would have made their absence more marked to her.
It had to take a wonderful spring day for her to take note. The past winter had been particularly harsh. Usually a winter could be snowy or it could be cold. This one was both and it kept her indoors most of the time. On those occasions that she was outside she was so wrapped in her chores that she just must not have noticed. Ever since Barney died she was stuck doing everything on their homestead at the edge of the bush. Keeping the wood stove going was a full time occupation.
When they first tuned in and dropped out there had been eight of them that had purchased this land to make a go at communal living. That first winter here was much like the last one. Before it was out the other six had enough of tuning in and dropping out. They had returned back to the city leaving just Barney and her and it had been just the two of them until Barney’s heart gave out and he died four or five years ago. She buried her partner on her own. His grave is behind the wood shed. Ever since then she was alone with only her memory of him and the few photographs she had of him three and a half decades earlier. These had grown yellow and so brittle that she dared not touch them. The thought of giving up on the homestead had never crossed her mind. She was a part of the land here. To leave it would be like inflicting a wound upon herself.
She wondered if her parents would be proud of her or think her a raving old hippie that had smoked one too many reefers. They had instilled in her a strong independent nature but would they have ever believed that she had become so self-reliant that she could live on her own in the middle of a boreal forest forty miles away from the nearest community. But she had done it. She had no idea if they were alive or dead. She had lost touch with them the day that she picked up a few childhood mementoes that she would bring with her to the land, as she called the two-hundred acre spread of forest and marshland that she and her friends had purchased for a song. After the others left that first winter, Barney was the only person from her species that she ever did see. They were entirely self-subsistent. They had no electricity and no telephone. They did not even have a mailbox. The old logger road that led to their land had grown over with the years and was now virtually indistinct from the rest of the forest. She and Barney were hermits, leading ascetic lives and not regretting a moment of it.
They worked hard clearing out enough of the forest to build their house and shed and a plot where they would grow their crops. In the early years they made room in their garden for marijuana but eventually they found that they preferred to observe all the nature that abounded around them with clear minds rather than through foggy lenses. Besides there really was never enough time to indulge in narcotics. The land demanded much out of them and they would go to bed each night exhausted from the rigors of the day. They had to do everything on their own from the cutting of the trees to the milling of the boards, from the growing of wheat to the baking of the bread. There was not a step in the production that they were not involved.
It was a beautiful life but it was also a life that took its toll upon them. When Barney first came up here he was a strong young man with a straight back. Each year that back took its wear and tear and grew more crooked and sadly more painful for him. He had aged rapidly and when she saw her reflection in the river she saw that she had done the same. Gone was the girl with the thick wavy long blonde hair. It had thinned dramatically these last five years and it was now white. She thought she looked seventy-five years old when in fact she was actually only about fifty-five or so. She was not quite sure. She had lost count. They used to carve out their calendars on planks of wood and keep track of the passage of days upon it. But after Barney died, she stopped with the ritual and nowadays only recognized the seasons and not the days and months that comprised it.
Barney died as best as she could recall in the year 2000. At least she thought it was that year for she had a dim recollection of the two of them celebrating the new millennium. He died in the spring after a hard day of tilling the soil in preparation for the new growing season. She guessed that he had a heart attack. He died in her arms while clutching at his chest with his mouth agape. It was the worst moment of her life and she could not bear to part with him. She kept his corpse in bed and she slept with it for at least a week before she could bring herself around to dig him a grave. As she dug it she wondered who would dig hers. There was nobody around. There never was.
The only sign of other human life was the airplanes overhead. She would often look up at them and wonder about the world that she had left behind. Up there would be people so absorbed in their society and culture that those would take precedent over the natural world. They would have their jobs and their families and their desires to get ahead and not see everything else that surrounded them. Not once did she ever feel envious towards them. She and Barney had made their decision and they stuck with it. They had given themselves over to the land. They did not seek to profit from it or to change it. All that they wanted from it was for it to nurture them and allow them to keep company with it. They never asked more and the land gave them so much.
After Barney was buried she found that she had no time to think about what she was going to do the rest of her life. There was so much to do from getting the seed into the ground to cutting firewood that she could not sit back and explore the idea of returning back to the human world. She was as fixated in her survival as the creatures that surrounded her were fixated upon theirs. Humans would say that the animals were behaving instinctively. She had to admit it to herself that she was behaving instinctively as well. The beavers do not give up on their lodges and dams whenever tragedy strikes them. They continue on and so did she.
And when the beavers hibernate in winter she did so as well in her own way. She spent the cold season preparing preservatives, fixing odds and ends that needed repair, and tending to all the chores that did build up. The beavers did not hold a candle to her when it came to being busy.
That was why she was not surprised that she had not previously noticed that the airplanes were gone. Today when she looked up into the crystal clear blue sky she did not see one contrail. She remembered seeing so many of them in the past that it had almost seemed that someone was using the sky as a canvas to make drawings upon. What could have happened to the airplanes?
Did the human race suddenly give up on flight? Did the gasoline shortages that were making all the news back then when she and Barney were still part of society finally run out? Had the icy relations between the West and the Soviet Bloc finally heat up into a nuclear conflagration? Without access to any media, she did not know but she did realize that something very serious must have happened for the airplanes to have disappeared.
Yet as her eyes fell from the sky to the brown field in front of her she realized that that was their problem and not hers. She had land to till and wood to cut. She had her existence to tend to.
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