Winter in Paradise

With solar powered freezers full of mutton, duck, armadillo, rattlesnake, coyote as well as various fruits and cacti that managed to continue to grow in spite of the lack of man-made irrigation, I was well-stocked for the winter and set about planning where I might go after the winter was over and making myself more comfortable where I was.

I knew that the three years of extreme winter were over and now, with the skies clearer and the planet a lot warmer, I expected the winter weather to be rough—erratic. It didn't disappoint me when the first Pacific fronts started arriving in late November. For Palm Springs standards, the rain was biblical. I wasn't sure about the rest of the country, but the days of mild, sunny afternoons in a golfing paradise were largely gone. It was either very hot, almost like summer, or cold and rainy to the point of not wanting to go out at all, even to the spa that stayed true to its geothermal sources and was relatively unaffected by what was going strange in the atmosphere.

On good days I searched the towns around for what I could use to continue on and had projects in the few usable vehicle repair shops that I could either scavenge or use. I set up in one truck garage a fairly good set of tools and began to make modifications to my truck, the Army truck and a fifth wheel trailer that I eventually elected to pull behind my Peterbilt and leave the Army truck behind. Later, I would regret that move, but I didn't know it at the time.

You may be wondering how I can write this in such great detail. All along the trip so far, I took dictated notes on my smart pad. During those stormy periods when I got tired of reading books I found, I started to write this story way back then. Of course, like all stories, I found myself revising it… Mostly shortening it… And that's why, after all the years there is such detail. My memory isn't that good, and the years soon became quite repetitious and less memorable, somehow. This first year was almost legendary in its loneliness. If it hadn't been for Charlie, I would've been the last man alive.

But, I didn't focus much on those who were no longer there, even though their evidence was everywhere, all of their personal belongings that they had taken with them in the rush to leave or their bodies, now reduced to a semi-mummy by the arid climate, a skeleton, or miscellaneous bones strewn around by various predators. Take your pick… They were all there for me to see. None living anymore. I tired of looking at their pictures and reading miscellaneous notes left lying around. They weren't coming back to life or back to Palm Springs. I was becoming ever more sure of that. That little or no one, except Charlie and I, had survived those first three years of fires, anarchy, radiation poisoning and prolonged winter without enough resources to combat it, succumbing to starvation, thirst or cold. I was just lucky.

As best I could, I put them and Charlie out of my mind and tried to plot a course that might take me to other survivors. I thought that, like Charlie, people who lived "off the grid" in these Western states would be most likely to have survived. I should have been concentrating on this region during the next summer to see if I could find any more survivors. Instead, I was drawn to finding out what had happened to the country as a whole, and steered towards touring the entire country in the next summer, starting in spring in the South and then returning back here where I had things working for the following winter. At least, that was my plan.

As the winter wore on, I stocked the trailer with every conceivable kind of tool and implement that I thought I might need. There was every possibility that I would get stuck. So I attached winches both on the front and the back of the trailer that I would run with two generators because I wasn't sure that one would last the entire summer for all the uses I would have for it. I also gathered enough solar arrays to provide adequate power for electrical convenience for me, lights, electronic devices, and cooling for my two refrigerators. The truck's air-conditioning would be once again useful on those very hot nights to come. The Peterbuilt’s high stantz would also get me through flooding that I expected would be up ahead, based on the floods that periodically ran the streets of Palm Springs.

I was busy and didn't have much time to think about loss. It was always about what I would run into and what I would need to make sure that I could continue to travel the interstates and some highways in a high-speed rig before that avenue would close and I would have to travel more slowly.

When the fronts began to let up a bit and it got warmer, signaling spring, I hurried up on last minute details, double checked my maps and lists of supplies and tools and began to get anxious to get out on the road again.