Airline travel died. Trains and buses began to lose business a few months later. Early in 2013 the home delivery of newspapers ended. That service had always been both a luxury and a security nuisance. At the end of May Clara managed to make it home to the West Coast. She had to do it in a car. There wasn’t a viable alternative.

A few members of her family had survived but no one shared her dream of a clean existence. She left the LA area for good six weeks after arriving, and lived with Hank in the Bay Area for the four months it took them to conclude that they needed more space and privacy than were available there.

Hank’s family was more understanding, and some of them accompanied Hank and Clara on the initial explore and the first several months. Their gypsy caravan headed north and east, considered the Trinities, concluded that the area would grow too congested once the exodus from the cities really began, and settled on the northern California/Nevada border, near Eagleville. They actually dug in there, partly in the South Warner Wilderness west of Eagleville and partly in the Hays Canyon Range of northwestern Nevada, just beyond the Middle Alkali Lake at the border. The good thing about northwestern Nevada and adjoining northeastern California was that it was unpoliced, unpatrolled, unprotected. Free. The bad things were the wildness of the Wilderness and the complete lack of shade on the Nevada side. That’s why they dug in. Forest lairs and desert caves.

In time they assembled a motley tribe. It was disharmonious but organized, anarchic but united, at least as long as Hank and Clara kept breaking ground in social and other theories. They all felt guilty enough about their dependence on gasoline-powered vehicles that they developed alternatives. Together they began assembling a new underground railroad, to bring back travel and social evolution.

It was on a trek to their special hot spring, fifty miles away from any paving, near dusty Soldier Meadows Road, that Clara first understood traffic. Contrary to some unsubstantiated reports, neither she nor any of her and Hank’s companions were under the influence of hallucinogenics; in fact for that retreat they didn’t even bring their home beer or marijuana. But that’s where Clara first saw cars as the machine analogy to mosquitos. Swarming the planet, sucking its blood from the inner veins and capillaries, serving no good purpose …

At first, Clara’s insights were received like Lilly’s theories about dolphins, which were resented by jealous scientific colleagues and discredited by the irrelevant reports about Lilly’s experiments with LSD, even though the theories were correct. Clara’s early publications about the Traffic Laws were smeared with malicious rumors about her life among the communards. She and Hank retreated even further underground.

It wasn’t until 2029, three years after the damage to earth’s ozone layer reached the point that was in fact irreversible, that some folks began to pay attention to the simple observations now known as the Clarian Laws of Traffic. It wasn’t until it was too late to make any difference that the survivors realized it had all, always, been about fuel. Oil. Gas. Blood. Sucking. Ironic that the civilized response to fundamental Middle Eastern terrorism was the scrapping of planes, trains and boats for an increased dependence on the black greasy resource that was beneath all the inequalities and unrest in the area. But death, even global death, is like that. Ironic.