Boiling The Frog

It was mid-October but the heat was still brutal. Over 110 degrees Fahrenheit with high humidity every day over the last week or so. Bucking and hauling firewood under such conditions was gruelling and exhausting but winter would arrive at some point - no one could say when - and so they couldn’t stack the piles high enough. Last year the winter lasted over nine months.

Nate didn’t see any reason to measure the passage of time in terms of years any longer. The sun no longer rose and set at its scheduled times and the seasons had grown liberal and unpredictable in their duration. A cycle of 365 days no longer had any significance. So, despite the sweat and the toil and the strain they continued to stack cut wood until sundown, but Max didn’t look so good when they quit for the day.

“Are you all right, son? You look a little…off. You feeling okay?”

“I’m all right, dad. I just think the heat got to me today. I’m not really hungry. I just want to go to bed.”

Nate was concerned.

“Well, you worked hard today and you need to eat. Why don’t you finish your dinner first?”

Max pushed the food around his plate for a while and then asked again if he could go to his bedroom. Nate told him he could but first asked him if he wanted to take some ice cream with him. He felt a need to get some calories into the kid, even empty calories. Tomorrow would be another long day. Maybe the boy would wake up with an appetite for breakfast.

But Max never woke up the next morning, and Nate had been through this twice before. He shed the tears, punched the hole in the bedroom wall and then went and got the shovel and dug the ditch in the field out there behind the house, right next to where he had buried his wife and daughter. Then he went back into the house and drank Kentucky bourbon until he fell asleep and could no longer feel the pain of this final stage of isolation. The firewood stacks could wait for a day or two. It was only him now.

+++++++++++++++

It’s hard to really know how or even when this all started. There was talk of the various dangers associated with climate change in the news media for decades. Some took it seriously and some rejected it entirely. Most simply tried to find a comfortable space midway between the two sides so they could just continue to live their lives and focus on things over which they had more direct control, even as the situation grew increasingly dire and the shadows of consequence loomed larger and larger with each passing year.

But all remaining doubts and scepticism were firmly and finally extinguished on the day when three feet of snow fell in Dallas on the 4th of July, and since then nothing was ever the same again.

Nate’s wife, Caroline, died during the night in September two years earlier. His daughter, Marla, passed away in similar fashion just two months later. There were no hospitals nor doctors to turn to at that point but they had the home test kits and he knew that they had contracted the Pale Horse Virus in the days leading up to their deaths. Once those test strips turned red after sitting under the tongue for fifteen seconds the death sentence was rendered and there would be no appeals.

Max went so fast he didn’t even have a chance to test him first. He blamed himself for that. Hadn’t the boy looked weary over the dinner table the last few nights? Hadn’t he pushed him to buck and haul as much wood as possible in the oppressive heat day after day? He was thinking long-term during a time when his focus should have been on the short-term, and now his son was dead and he was alone. Why was he still alive? It was cruel.

The weather was starting to cool a bit, so he drank some bottled water and grabbed his chainsaw and axe and headed back out to the woods behind the ranch to harvest more firewood for the stacks in the basement. There was no way to know how much would be needed to make it through the next winter and soon he would have to lay down the chainsaw and axe to take up his hunting rifle and go out in search of whitetail or whatever else he might find. He also had a vegetable garden to harvest before the first frost came and some home repairs to attend to. There was much work to be done and it was just him and his own two hands now.

Winter would arrive at some point, and it would not care whether he was ready or not.

+++++++++++++++

Nate flipped the light switch and walked down the stairs to the basement. Two of the walls were stacked floor-to-ceiling with cut firewood, three rows deep. There was also a large pile of unstacked wood in one corner. Along the third wall 5-gallon containers of gasoline were stacked floor to ceiling, two rows deep. The rest of the remaining space was filled with large hard plastic containers filled with canned foods and pickled vegetables from the garden out back.

He looked around for a moment and then closed his eyes and rubbed his temples and then Nate grabbed one of the gasoline containers, carried it over to the feeder spout that he had constructed from the generator in the shed just outside and through the basement wall and he slowly poured in the fuel. It was no longer possible to take the fuel directly out to the generator shed. It was just outside of the backdoor, but he couldn’t get there now. Fortunately, he had anticipated this and made the necessary contingency plans. It was hard to prepare for everything though.

Once the generator was refilled he took up an armload of firewood from the pile in the corner and carried it upstairs to feed the hearth. When this was done he sat down in the kitchen and ate a can of chunk white tuna, then poured himself a large glass of bourbon on the rocks and took it upstairs. The fireplace was soon warming the house a bit but he still wore his coat, gloves and wool cap the whole time. His breath steamed the air.

In his bedroom on the second floor, Nate stared out through the window as the snow continued to fall. He had lost count of the days since it started, and it didn’t matter anyway. He was twenty feet above the ground there on the second floor but only the last four or five inches at the top of the window remained unblocked from the massive snow drifts outside. Nate was resolved to remain awake and watch the falling snow until it washed away the world and he could see it no more. It might be the last time.

It didn’t take very long. Soon the window was snowed over, so Nate finished off his bourbon and took his sub-zero sleeping bag and a pillow downstairs and lay down by the fire. He thought of his family. He thought of the snowfall. He thought of the world and what was left of it. He thought of the future, and wondered if there was such a thing now.

Eventually, Nate drifted off and he dreamed of a time when he took his family on vacation to Hawaii. As he slept he smiled his last smile, and outside the snow continued to fall.

THE END