He couldn’t pronounce it, so he spelled out the name, ‘Budziszewisky’.
“Shit,” I said.
“One person. Martha?” he asked.
“Oh my God.” I stood up.
“That’s her. That’s them,” James said excitedly. “Three lines down. Kale, Davis. Three people. Jana and Evan.”
I screamed like I won the lottery. June shrieked as well and so did James.
“They’re on blue,” I said. “Do you know where Blue is going?”
Suddenly June went from happy to serious. “I’ll find out the details for you.”
“Can you get me on a blue?”
June nodded.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I just know, with all the ports, there are one point three million people slated for blue.”
“Well, it’s better than one point four, right?” I asked.
“You are optimistic.”
“I happened upon him,” I pointed. “He found their names. I’ll find them.”
“I believe you will,” June said. “I believe you will.”
After discovering the ship, James offered to change his pass and go with me. I thanked him, but told him I felt it was something I had to do on my own. However, I asked June if it was possible for James to go with Del. She said one family member was permitted. It meant more to me that James stayed with Del and helped him recover. I also asked him to keep his eye open for a feisty ninety-two year old woman named Ruth.
He promised he would.
My mood was better and I really turned an optimistic page. It was short lived. Suddenly I found myself doing the math.
One point three million people, if I spent ten seconds on each person that was thirteen million seconds.
Two hundred and seventeen thousand hours.
Nine thousand days.
Three years.
That was speed searching and frankly, ten seconds per person wasn’t a reality.
As they days grew closer to my boarding a blue ship, I found out more information. Blue ships were going to Argentina. There were over seven hundred refugee centers planned through the twenty-three provinces.
My undertaking was larger than my optimistic view.
“You want to not do this?” Del asked, as I visited him.
“No, that’s not it. I just don’t know how I’m going to do this.”
“Maybe when you get there, they’ve registered people. It might be a piece of cake.” He reached over to me, gripping my hand. “You have to look at the big picture. Whenever you get discouraged you look at that. This was something that was placed in your hands long before you knew it. This is your task now. God made sure of it. Lacey wrote names of dead strangers, collected souvenirs from them and you ran into the family member of one of them. You’re not a drinker, yet you were drunk the day of the accident, making your body relaxed when we crashed. You moved seats right before. And the biggest thing… after that crash, the job literally landed in your lap in the form of that journal. You don’t get any bigger signs than that.”
“It’s just… seven hundred camps,” I said.
“Some might be big, some might be small.”
“This is all easy for you to say, you’re going to a rehab place. This is going to take years.”
“Oh, yeah?” Del raised his eyebrow. “Got something else, or better to do?”
Del drove home the point. Not only did I have nothing else to do, there was absolutely nothing better to do than to find Lacey’s family.
I had a direction. That was more than I had when I arrived in Norfolk.
THRITY-FIVE – Summer
The closest I was, in my entire life, to a foreign country was Niagara Falls, Canada and I viewed it from the New York side. Yet, here I was on a ship heading to a foreign land. I was on board for three weeks. It only took a few days to get there, but we waited miles off shore until they moved the first wave of refugees to camps.
Once we docked, we walked into a mess. It was a slum consisting of poor sewage, tents and rodents. It wasn’t that the government of Argentina wanted the refugees to live that way, there was no choice. They were dealing with their own problems in the aftermath.
I envisioned that south of the equator would be bright and sunny. While it was indeed much warmer and brighter, the sky was not blue. It was gray, almost as if that was our new atmosphere. At least the sun was trying to break through.
There was chaos and lawlessness in the camp, and I was glad to leave. After three weeks I was moved to a permanent refugee camp. I labeled that the starting point.
It wasn’t easy, or advised to go to other camps.
In the early stages, the remaining US government was trying to work with the Argentinean government to give us temporary homes until we could return to the United States. I was told by one official they would have a reliable refugee registry in place within two years.
Two years?
After several months, I was granted a work permit. It enabled me to travel to nearby camps. There I secured a list of the location of every camp, and then I slipped away one night.
It went unnoticed. No one registered me.
I made friends easily with the local people and they were all very friendly and helpful. I grew accustomed to my new lifestyle. Sleeping where I could, staying with host families that took me in, and walking wherever I needed to go.
Thousands of miles of walking.
The first year was so disorganized that I had to make my way back to several camps, because they kept moving people around due to their skills.
Year two, when longer range communication was restored, they started moving people once again. This time to larger camps, trying to migrate all Americans together for when it was time to leave. Things were beginning to recover, the world was healing, technology was slowly returning.
After two years, I was still searching. Every tent, every hut, every face. When I met anyone I showed them my pictures. It seemed as if Davis, his children, and the other people who helped Lacey never existed.
Seven hundred camps became two hundred. Two hundred camps crammed packed with people.
Every time they migrated people, I had to start over.
It was funny, I ran into the same people over and over, but never ran into Davis or the others.
The world had been thrust into a mini ice age, and I wandered a cold earth looking for people I had never met.
Then after three years, finally the clouds began to part. I remember seeing the first speck of blue sky, the first inkling of the sun. The temperature went from an average forty degrees a day to sixty. That first day of sun, everyone gathered outside, staring up to the sky, waiting, wanting more.
The truth was finally discovered.
Everything up to that point was ‘he said she said’, relayed information and speculation. With the revealing of the sky came the reality of what happened.
There was no planetary body that slammed into the moon, no meteor passing so close to earth that it threw us into a tizzy, it was just a longer, overdue cycle that caused a chain reaction. A simple natural burp of earth ignited a firestorm in the Pacific Ring of Fire. That in turn triggered the major eruptions of the Long Valley Caldera, and thirty days of continuous small eruptions at Yellowstone. All of that shot so much debris, smoke and ash into the air that the entire earth was shrouded in a gray cloak. It was more concentrated north of the equator.
It blocked out the sun completely in the north, freezing the landscape.
After three years, the sky started to clear south of the equator. The earth literally spun out of it. Just like a cataclysmic event created the moon, this event created a ring around earth.
Once the clouds parted it was visible. During the day it looked more like a cloud, but at night, it was illuminated, breathtaking and beautiful. I would stare at it for hours. In a strange land, I felt as if I weren’t even on earth any longer.