Chapter Seventy-Five
The video from the Yellowstone plateau contracted to a white dot, phosphors glowing and dying down to a pinpoint and then to black.
“Curse my life,” snapped Bobcat, “not again.”
The studio communications system lost its satellite uplink connection as Abel and Bobcat monitored the live broadcast from a research aircraft above the vast gray Yellowstone desert. Daily, sometimes several times a day, Bobcat had to laboriously clean the community’s satellite dishes and components to remove volcanic dust. He dreaded the constant, grinding maintenance, but worked relentlessly to try to keep the communications channels open.
“So much for video tonight,” puffed Bobcat.
Abel glared at the lifeless screens, and hissed in frustration: “How the hell are we going to manage in the face of what we just saw?”
“We’ll get through this, Abel.”
“Oh, you’ve got a roadmap to the end of days, do you?”
“I do, actually. Thank you for asking,” Bobcat said in jest.
“It’s an autographed copy, is it?”
Bobcat swiveled in his chair, leaned back, and struck a pose suggesting he was at complete ease.
“Look,” Bobcat said, “this has happened before. It will happen again. You know, we’ve talked about this. But the world will come through it. The question is, really, will humans come through it.”
“Well, will we?”
“I can tell you this, Abel, throughout the long history of life on this planet, certain creatures always seem to muddle through a whole sequence of horrific events. You know, asteroid impacts, ice ages, wild sea level swings, strange fluctuations in oxygen levels or carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.”
“And Yellowstone eruptions?” Abel queried.
“Yes, and Yellowstone. I don’t want to make light of this, but there have been far worse events in the deep past and some creepy crawlies manage to come through them.”
“Anything on two legs?”
Bobcat smiled. “As a matter of fact, yes, if you count some dinosaurs. Are you familiar with the term the Deccan Traps?”
The words did not register with Abel. “No, I can’t say that’s familiar to me.”
“The Deccan Traps are the remains of continent-obliterating lava flows, or a long series of them, that took place some 68 million years ago or so and lasted through the end of the age of dinosaurs. The feature covers half of the Indian subcontinent. Most people have never heard of it, including the vast human population that lives right on top of it. The great cluster of active volcanoes that gave rise to the Traps impacted everything on this earth, changed the chemistry of the air and the oceans, caused wild global temperature swings, and certainly impacted the diversity of life of the planet in a negative way. Then, wham, the asteroid hits in shallows seas just off the Yucatan in Mexico a few million years after the Indian volcanoes start making mischief, and the whole world’s ecosystem falls to pieces.
“But, some organisms, even in the very worst of times—and there have been many ‘worst of times’ on this planet—always manage to squeak through and crawl off down radical paths to fill the skies, populate the continents, plumb the deepest depths, or give up the landlubber’s life for one in the ocean. The winners in life’s race are sometimes those organisms that were just plain lucky enough to have what paleontologists, biologists and others call pre-adapted traits. These are physical and latent genetic traits that, through sheer luck, just so happen to be best suited to new conditions arising after some terrible world-altering event. If you are a creature who just happens to have such traits, you make it. You win! Don’t have them? You lose. If you just so happened to be a little two-legged theropod dinosaur that sprouted feathers and modified your arm ligament and muscle attachments so you could flap your arms like wings, you made it, when your huge ground-bound cousin, T-rex, froze or starved to death.
“There is this treasure trove of scientific study out there that deals with catastrophic events that took place over the life of the planet. Most of that information never reaches the public, never makes the mainstream press. But you know, all any of us has to do is take a good look at the thousands of craters on the moon with a pair of cheap binoculars to see all the evidence you’d ever want of the cataclysmic adolescent years of this little rock orbiting the sun. The evidence of catastrophe is all around us, but we don’t see it. Hell, it took humans nearly 200 years to figure out what Yellowstone really was, and when we finally figured it out, it caught us with our pants down.”
Abel hadn’t heard Bobcat’s last few sentences. He was absorbed with the concept of pre-adapted traits that his friend had aired.
“Tell me something, old sage,” said Abel, “might what you call pre-adapted traits be applied to human existence now, or, you know, to human endeavor?”
“You mean,” said Bobcat, “do some humans have physical or mental traits that would make them better suited than other creatures to weather a post-Yellowstone world?”
“I don’t know about physical traits; humans are humans, we’re all one and the same species. What about cultural traits, though? Could your concept of pre-adaptation be applied to this little village?
Bobcat shrugged.
“If you will allow me some liberty,” Abel continued, “could it be that Independency is, as you call it, pre-adapted—through its insistence on self-reliance and self-sufficiency—and, therefore, more apt to succeed in a strange, cold post-Yellowstone world than most systems of human enterprise? Might Independency, the way we are organized, be far less apt to suffer distress and dislocation under the new hostile conditions brought about by the eruption?
“That, Abel, is one loaded question. Only time can settle that one.”
“Think about it for a moment, Bobcat. Independency isn’t so terribly different than the society around it, except for a few very specific traits.”
“Okay, name them.”
“Local food production, for one. Where in the broader society does the average member of any given community—city, suburb or rural hamlet—produce food for home consumption? It doesn’t happen. It used to, just three, four generations ago. That way of life became outmoded. Mass-production techniques swept local labor-intensive agriculture aside. But that way of life is not history in this town. We live it. We still have all the tools, all the knowledge, at our disposal. It’s not lost. We have it. Couldn’t you say, then, that by virtue of our penchant for keeping alive age-old rural skills and wedding them to our new systems, we are pre-adapted to move into the future without great upheaval?
“You are preaching to the choir, Mr. Whittemore.”
The town founder smiled warmly at Bobcat’s remark. “Yeah, but I’m not done preaching.”
“I figured that. I’m listening. Just keep it under three hours, and, please, don’t go off on one of your ‘round-the-room flits of yours, if you would. Spare me that tonight.”
“Very well, I’ll spare you.”
“Good. You may continue.”
“I like your concept, these pre-adaptive traits. As I think about it, it dovetails with much of what we’re doing. We are not heavily dependent on hydrocarbon fuels. Our food and energy systems are, to a great degree, self-contained. We’re not dependent on someone shipping spinach from Pasadena, oranges from Ocala or natural gas from the Gulf.”
Abel reined himself in for a moment, pausing to think through his argument before taking a leap forward.
“There’s something else, though, something basic, much, much more. It gets to the root of it all.”
“What would that be?”
“It’s the very specialized knowledge we possess and put to use on a daily basis. It’s the one trait we do not share with others, and it’s probably the most critical difference, the most valuable of all. We can do what we do because we have command of age-old knowledge and skills essential to bridging the gap between this world’s twenty-first century monoculture existence and that of the subsistence-level cultures that evolved over ten thousand human generations. We can reach back to the Olduvai Gorge, to the first people holding fishing spears and foraging for herbs, and we can actually take from them things we can use now. Who else can do that?