Going fifty or a hundred miles through rural Nebraska, even after summer cleared snow from the roads and made a trip at least theoretically possible, was a whole different story. You not only had to go, you had to come back as well. That, of course, doubled the distance involved. It also doubled the expense for gas, even if his car happened to feel like running. Since he hardly ever used it in Wayne, he had some serious doubts about how trustworthy it would be on any kind of major journey.
Long-haul buses were few and far between, too. They weren’t cheap, either. If you lived in or near a city, buses still ran. In this state, that meant Omaha and Lincoln. The rest of Nebraska was the terminal—or rather, terminalless—boonies, as far as the bus lines were concerned. Bryce was damn glad the state had found the money to keep the bus line out to the college going.
For longer jaunts through what had been rich farmland and was now ash-dappled and heading toward tundra, choices ranged from bad to much worse. You could ride a horse—if you could find a horse to ride. Horses in the Midwest had suffered from ash-induced HDP as much as other livestock. They’d suffered much worse than people had, because they couldn’t wear masks to filter out the crud. You could also ride a horse if you could ride a horse. Neither Bryce nor Susan knew how.
You could ride in a horse-drawn wagon. There were some. Again, as with so many things in these post-eruption days, there weren’t enough to go around. They cost less than driving would have, but they were also much slower.
Speaking of slow, you could walk. That didn’t cost anything to speak of, but you needed to be seriously motivated to walk fifty or a hundred miles to see something and then to walk back again. Bryce wanted to see Ashfall State Park, but he didn’t want to see it bad enough to get shin splints in the process. Neither did his beloved, which was putting it mildly.
That pretty much left bicycles as the last surviving possibility. Bryce and Susan had both brought bikes from SoCal to the trackless wilds of northeastern Nebraska. Bryce hadn’t ridden one a whole lot till after the eruption. As natural catastrophe and war in the Mideast teamed up to send gas prices past Mars and heading straight out toward Jupiter, though, he’d gone from four fat tires to two skinny ones like millions of other people.
Places like Denmark and Holland had taken bikes for granted since before the turn of the twentieth century. Two-wheelers had briefly swarmed in the States before the internal-combustion engine culled their herds. Without cheap gas, though, internal- turned into infernal-.
So bicycles were back, bigtime. Bryce rode his to campus whenever the weather let him—and, the longer he stayed in Wayne, the less fussy about the weather he got. “Hey,” he said do Susan, “if we don’t make the trip this summer, when will we do it?”
“Never?” she suggested hopefully. But when Bryce kept right on getting ready to try a bicycle tour, she got ready along with him. The martyred sighs she let out were only background noise. Bryce hoped like hell they were, anyhow.
The two of them pedaled north up State Route 15 for not quite twenty miles. They took the left fork when the road branched just south of Logan Creek. It was two lanes of bumpy, potholed asphalt; no one seemed to have done any work on it since the supervolcano erupted, or, for all Bryce knew, for quite a while before that.
When he said as much to Susan, she just looked at him. “That’s not what I’m worried about,” she said. “I’m worried about riding north. I keep expecting to see polar bears every time we come over the top of the next little rise.”
“It’s not that bad,” Bryce said. “As long as it stays sunny, it’s not.” It was in the fifties. After you’d been going for a while, you could work up a sweat. Being warm felt good no matter how you did it.
No polar bears were in the neighborhood. A hawk circled in the air high above them. Jays and crows and little brown birds Bryce couldn’t name perched on barbed-wire fences and occasional light and power poles. Robins hopped in the fields. So did rabbits, which probably accounted for the circling hawk. Bryce supposed it would have taken more than a supervolcano to clear the countryside of rabbits. The end of the world probably wouldn’t have done it.
Just past the tiny town of Laurel—not deserted, because wood smoke curled up from a few chimneys—the state road ran into US 20. That was also a two-lane blacktop road, but a wider one. It had more traffic than State Route 15, which had felt eerily empty. Bicycles, wagons, people on horseback… The 405 at rush hour before the eruption it wasn’t, but Bryce no longer feared he and Susan were the last two people left alive this side of Wayne.
They heard the approaching ambulance long before they saw it. Everyone did, and had plenty of time to get off the road and make way for the leftover from a different era. The ambulance screamed past them and turned down the little road they’d just left. It headed south, toward Wayne.
“Hospital,” Susan said.
Bryce nodded. The hospital in Wayne wouldn’t make anyone forget Cedars-Sinai or the UCLA Medical Center any time soon. But it was at least there, and boasted equipment a country doctor couldn’t pull out of his ear. “I hope whoever’s in there comes through okay,” Bryce said, and then, “Boy, it sure was loud, wasn’t it?”
Now Susan’s head bobbed up and down. “I don’t remember them being that loud in the old days.” Her laugh sounded shaky. “Of course, we were usually in cars back then, with the windows closed and the radio or an iPod on and the AC going. And all the other cars and trucks and things made so much background noise, even a siren was just part of it. Not like that any more.”
When the sun neared the horizon ahead of them, they camped by the side of the road. They fumbled putting up their little nylon tent, but managed. They ate MREs, which were uninspiring but did putty over any accidental empty space you had inside.
They pedaled through a succession of small towns strung out along US 20: Belden, Randolph, Osmond, Plainview, Brunswick, Royal. All of them looked to have been forgotten by everyone except the people who lived in them long before the eruption. They were even more forgotten now. The fall of ash had probably killed some of the locals and made others pull up stakes. Only the stubbornest still held their ground. In every little town, there were some.
Not far past Royal, a sign pointed Bryce and Susan north again, along a straight and narrow road towards Ashfall State Park. Susan said, “What do we do if they’ve decided to shut down the park because they don’t have any money to keep it open?”
Bryce winced. California had done things like that even before the supervolcano hammered its tax base. But he answered, “We ride back, that’s what, and we try and be happy for all the nice exercise we’ve got.”
“Oh, boy!” Susan said in distinctly hollow tones.
“As of the day before we set out, the park’s Web site said it was up and running,” Bryce pointed out. Wayne did have power most of the time. You might wonder about polar bears there, too, but if they came at night you could at least turn on the light and spot them before they got you.
The park was open. Not a single car stood in the lot, but a few bicycles did rest in a steel rack that looked newish. Before the eruption, chances were that not a whole hell of a lot of people had biked out here to nowhereland.
A sign that also must have gone up after the eruption said LIFE IMITATES PARK! Bryce tried to decide whether that was funny or tasteless. He finally settled on both at once.
If the Web site mentioned that admission had gone up to fifty smackers a pop, Bryce didn’t remember seeing it. Chances were it did somewhere, in pale lavender six-point type. Once you got way the hell out here, what were you gonna do? Turn around on your bike and go back to wherever you came from without seeing what you’d come for? Or pay the nice man? Bryce paid the man—he really did seem nice—and muttered under his breath. Inflation had kicked the whole country in the teeth since the eruption, not just Ashfall State Park.