Most of the local residents had fished and hunted. They lived in what I called “the end of the road” not because they had to, but because they wanted to. Almost every home in Darrington would have a gun or even several. And fishing poles with lures. And books on the first residents to settle here, others describing useful local plants, and how to successfully hunt, preserve food, and a hundred other useful things we could put to use.
It was all right there in front of me, easily accessed without a sat phone or hotspot for a laptop I didn’t own or have electricity to provide. The only problem was getting into the houses to search for what we wanted when others were breaking in and stealing food, sleeping bags, and warm clothing—exactly like we had done at the ski-cabin.
A silence followed. Sue appeared restrained and perhaps ashamed at her outbursts and simple solutions to problems I’d muddled over for a week. I’d thought myself so advanced and capable of reaching the great digital storehouses. Yes, there would have been problems, but in the back of my mind, I was fairly certain it never would have worked. I was a gamer, not a hacker.
All that cutting-edge technology and a top of the line laptop was surpassed in today’s world by a tattered backpack filled with a few well-chosen books. Oddly, I didn’t feel stupid or upstaged. I felt proud that the girl who was sharing my life who had contributed significantly.
“Sue?” I asked.
“Bill?” she used the same tone but refused to look at me as if ashamed of either her or me. I couldn’t tell which.
“Thank you,” I said simply. “My plan may have worked. At least, I like to think it would have. Yours is better.”
“Really?” she asked in a brighter voice.
“Absolutely. I made the entire thing so complicated it would have taxed my knowledge to the limit when the right answer was right there in front of me. We are changing our plans and going on a book search.”
“Then what?” she asked. “You still have not told me about your future plans.”
Then what, indeed? I’d barely gotten used to her latest bursting of my technical bubble and now she wanted me to read the future? “Exactly what are you asking?”
“After we find the right books, what then? Back to our tunnel?”
“Yes.”
She snorted. “No, silly, we can’t live here for the summer and certainly not next winter. Not enough food and we’ll be killed by others. Think about it. Can we really survive here through spring and summer—and then fall and next winter? All that time and nobody sees us? And we find enough food for a year? No. We need a plan, a better one.”
Like living in my basement for a couple of years, I said in my lazy way, “I guess I was just thinking of going along and seeing what happens. Take it day-to-day.”
Sue shook her head. “The mine tunnel is okay, for now. Better than what most people have, but it’s a waystation. A temporary stopover.”
“Why?” I asked, suspecting she had figured out something else a semi-hermit like me had missed. Actually, I had seen the problems she already pointed out. I just didn’t want to face them.
While living safely in my parent’s basement in the last few years, I’d had food and necessities delivered, as well as anything else I needed. The fact was that I’d stayed inside that house, mostly in the basement with my computers, for over two years. I rarely interacted with people during that time, even online. I saw the world differently than the girl/woman with the round, brown face sitting beside me. Hoping to change the subject, I asked, “Can you speak Spanish?”
The question escaped my lips before I could stop it. She rolled her eyes in disdain. “I was born here. So were my parents, and theirs, too. Can you speak Irish?”
“A little,” I admitted while suppressing a grin. “But English has been the official language of Ireland for a couple of hundred years, so I can get by.” We both laughed. That breached the wall that had slowly built up between us.
She said, “We need to get out of these mountains and the snow. Next winter there will be no food to steal from local houses and I can’t depend on you to provide it by fishing and hunting. You’re worse than me about knowing nothing of farming and stuff like that. Besides, someone is sure to find our farm and kill us for the crops if we try that. We need something more permanent.”
Her thinking was proceeding right where mine had been for a week. I was willing to chance that she and I were immune to the deadly flu, or that it had run its course. I hadn’t encountered any recent deaths by flu but hadn’t seen many dead lately.
The very real problems came in two varieties, which she’d just identified. She had realized the problems of surviving the first month or two were one issue, and the problems of long-term survival were different. They were not the same. The immediate ones were easier in many ways because they were defined by a daily goal, and we’d accomplished most of them. “I can see your point. So?”
“It rains all the time here, so we need a drier place to live. Where we can hide out but move around. We need food and supplies for when they get scarce because others will have cleaned out all the good places. By the end of the summer, food is going to be difficult to find and people will kill over it.”
“You’re not thinking of an RV, I hope.” It was like she had taken all our critical needs and wished for a tornado to whisk us away to a magical land. It was my turn to be down to earth and set her straight. What she wanted and what was possible were two separate things. I was deciding how to phrase more of my response when she turned to face me.
“Not an RV. We need a boat.”
“A what?” I mentally pictured a little, leaky rowboat with her sitting in the bow while I fought the oars, and enemies took potshots at us from the banks.
“A sailboat, Bill. It’s the perfect solution!”
“Sailboat?” The single word was forced from me as if she’d punched me in my stomach. “What the hell are you talking about? We’re in the mountains. Besides, do you know how to sail?”
She smiled delightfully as she shook her head.
I shut up.
“Let me talk,” she said. “We can refine the idea later but listen. The wind pushes a sailboat. No fuel. No noise. The cabin is dry. There are hundreds and hundreds of islands in north Puget Sound; we studied about them in school. There are salmon, clams, crabs, mussels, and different fish we can catch and eat. We could take seeds and plant little gardens on different islands and revisit them when the food has grown. Many islands are too small for people to live on, but we’d have a boat.”
“Have you ever even been on a sailboat?”
“No. But there must be books that say how to do it. Just like the ones that tell us how to survive here.”
I tried to maintain my scowl, but it seemed I knew a few things she didn’t, and the first was that I knew larger sailboats also have motors. If the engine would start, and there seemed to be no reason to think it wouldn’t after being idle only two weeks, it would be easier than driving a car. Just steer it where you want to go, and you don’t even have to stay on your side of the road.
Not only did I like the idea, but my mind also expanded upon it. We could have several rifles with scopes and any boat coming too close would get a few warning shots before we sank them. Her idea solved a thousand problems. Gangs of roaming looters acting like animals on land wouldn’t find us. That was number one. Like the three men this morning. We didn’t know what the three had done, if anything, to cause the motorcycle gang to kill them. We didn’t know and didn’t want to find out.
My new goals in life were to avoid everyone else and gather enough food to last until things settled down. Eventually, the bad people would all kill each other off, and good ones would be left. Or maybe all the good ones would die and there would be only bad ones remaining. If we were on a boat where we could sail away from trouble, we might live another year or two and feed ourselves with fish.