Sputterpub's Blog

You never know what’s going to put someone over the edge. The straw that broke the camel’s back probably looked like any other straw.

For Charlotte, it was walking out of her house a month ago and stepping in soft dog shit on the way to her car. For me, it was Charlotte’s response to stepping in soft dog shit on the way to her car.

To be thorough, we’d both been going through a rough patch. I now know that Charlotte had recently lost her life partner to another woman, and I’d lost a raft of clients, which happens cyclically if you serve small businesses but which invariably brings me down.

All I knew (at first) was the surreal scene in her parkway, unfolding on my left as I walked home from the grocery store one Sunday. It was an eyespanking cheekslapping afternoon. Copenhagen blue sky pocked with puffy clouds. I was striding along with my two shopping bags, when suddenly: “NO DOGS!” screamed a cardboard sign on foot-high sticks, planted in the weedy grass between the sidewalk and the street. And “NO DOGS!!” blared another, shorter, four feet further. I turned in my tracks so swiftly the shopping bags knocked into my thighs. I read the biggest sign, aimed the way I’d been walking. It was about 18 inches off the ground and after “NO DOGS!!!” it said “CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR ANIMAL!”

This seemed to be an hysterically strong response to an invisible threat. My first wonder was whether the resident went off his or her meds. This is Berkeley after all. Then I tried imagining what could drive anyone to plant such signs.

The yard was unexceptional. Offensively low-maintenance: juniper and camellias near the one-story gray stucco edifice, ratty lawn elsewhere, all shaded by a big parkway elm. Only ginger rock and ivy would have been worse. I wondered what the resident was trying to protect.

I began walking again and I started to get angry. I’m like most dog owners: responsible. I don’t let Pippi out without me. I use a leash unless there’s clearly no one around. I carry a bag for scooping her poop. I’ll admit that, very occasionally, when my supply of plastic bags and patience is low and my social resentment is high, when no one appears to be looking, I walk away from Pippi’s shit. I feel a little young and reckless doing it, like when I dare to litter the floor of the bus. But mostly I’m socially ept.

So I was surprised about my anger at those signs. But I flashed on a high school memory. Some movie in Driver Ed called “Courtesy is Contagious.” It showed a woman driver pleasantly waving another driver into traffic ahead of her, and that other driver then behaving well to the next person he encountered, and so on, extending to people holding doors open for those behind them and all the way to smiling at passing strangers. I remember thinking it was hokey but completely true, and 40 years of life experience haven’t contradicted it.

But at the same time that I “got it” about courtesy, I also understood the contagion of rudeness: a person offended is a person ill-disposed toward others, tending not to inhibit his own offensive behavior.

I took a lot of offense at those signs. I felt my heart swell with determination to somehow say fuckyou right back at the sign-planter. And nothing arose in me to inhibit that determination.

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.

Clara had never been camping, and she liked everything about it except the mosquitos. She hated them. She didn’t understand why something so horrible had such a cute name. Little moscas: mosquitos. They were ugly, hideous bloodsucking abominations as far as Clara was concerned, and she couldn’t see that they served any useful purpose. She once read that the irritation from a mosquito bite comes from an anticoagulant the insect injects before she starts sucking. The article went on to state that if one doesn’t disturb the mosquito, she will withdraw the anticoagulant along with her needle-like proboscis, and there will be no resulting bumpy itchy reminder. It was hard to hold still while the nasty mosquito finished her meal, but Clara tried it. And it didn’t work. The bite left a welt just as irritated as any other, and Clara missed the satisfaction of trying to kill the bug.

The Everglades trip was important in two ways. It got Clara and Hank together; they began a relationship over those few days and, although they were separated by the width of the continent for awhile, they remained a tight couple ever after. Also, the Everglades with its obnoxious and omnipresent mosquitos started Clara thinking along the lines that would later develop into her Laws of Traffic. That was the dawning of the fractalization of traffic, circuit diagrams, and the natural circulatory systems.

People like Hank and Clara escaped anthrax exposure because they regularly failed to read the newspapers. They didn’t live in the suburbs. As innovative as was the terrorist attack against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it paled in comparison to the hideous brilliance of the later biological strike. Somehow everyone in America noticed that most cabs were driven by swarthy turbaned men, and that many corner stores were owned by Middle Easterners, but no one observed their other industry. The newspapers were delivered before dawn, after all, tossed with a regular thunk-swish from the darks of car interiors to the rough concrete of residential pathways. Nobody noticed the tossers, who were invariably young men of Arab descent. Hard-working, passionate Muslim men who had limited economic opportunity, no matter what, in this country.

The initial anthrax spores came through the mails, and landed in the offices of the media. No one was watching the home-delivered newspapers. On that Sunday in December nobody got suspicious about the slightly yellowish dust in the folds of the datebook section. Back in the days of old-fashioned inks a number of readers would have washed their hands to remove dark smudges after reading, but with the slightly-glossy convenience of unsmearable printer’s ink few washed between reading and eating breakfast. Americans blithely conveyed inhalational anthrax spores from their palms and index fingers to the warm moist vicinity of their noses and mouths. Epidemic ensued, with the expected vignettes of greed and generosity around the antibiotics. The U.S. lost almost eight percent of its population, mostly in the suburbs. Northern Mexico and southern Canada were affected too.

Starting late in 2012, American society ceased to move. Communities turned inward, made do with less, stopped interacting. But some of the college-age kids, those who had been associating most freely with each other, refused to quit.

Clara and Hank met half a year before that. As odd as their names was the site of their introduction: Ft. Lauderdale at spring break. It’s true that they were college students, but they weren’t party-type college students. She was a diligent architecture major at MIT, and he studied physics at UC Berkeley. It was a pure fluke that each of them made it to Florida that week, but once there it wasn’t that strange that they found one another.

Clara came from Los Angeles but she attended MIT because her parents were from the east coast and were secret snobs about college. She lived in the French house, and her housemates cajoled her into going with them to the spring break capital of the western world. But Clara was a diligent serious studious young lady, and she did not enjoy the heady hedonism of the Florida scene. She tended to sift back against the walls in any tavern or party.

Hank was born and raised in Walnut Creek, a suburb of San Francisco. He traveled less than twenty miles from home to move into his northside co-op at Cal. Compared to Clara he was a lackadaisical student, but he had a gifted brain and an outgoing disposition; he did well at school.

His full name was Henry, for no familiar reason. His parents were Creative Anachronists, ever into the Renaissance Faire, and they named their children Henry and Morgaine. The whole Arthurian atmosphere so permeated his childhood that Hank eagerly embraced science in school. He had an aptitude for it anyway, and he grew up a total rationalist. He was too sensible to waste spring break on frivolity when he could be contemplating quantum physics, but his best friend Jason was competing in a bicycle race there and then, and Hank didn’t have the heart to refuse Jason’s plea to make the trip with him.

Clara and Hank bumped into each other at the back of a party. He leaned against his left shoulder and looked toward the bar, half attentive to the flirtations going on there. She rested her right hip against the same wall and glanced the other way, toward the dancers. Without either intending it they bumped butts just as a song ended, and they heard each other’s awkward excuses. Eyes looked into eyes and they made a connection. Before an hour had passed they agreed to disdain the party, left it, and started making plans for a broader escape. The next morning they assembled sleeping bags and backpacks, borrowed one of her housemate’s cars, and drove off to experience the Everglades and each other.

(continued next Monday)

Before the Jihad, travel was easy. Before the Jihad, “jihad” meant holy war, but terrorists and the media changed that. Muslims had to come up with another word for holy war, afterwards. After-word.

In the old days, travel was easy. That was before newguilds were established or traffic was understood, back when people carried separate cellphones and personal computers.

They had all sorts of little devices hanging from their belts, but they didn’t have air travel restrictions. They could book their whole trip online, use electronic tickets, carry everything with them, and arrive just a few hours ahead of takeoff to make their planes.

It was easy then, often cheap, always popular. People from developed nations traveled all the time. The planet was wrapped like a golfball in airline routes; con-trails wreathed it like rings. Culture coursed. Commerce flourished. Viruses were transmitted. Terrorists acted.

Amazed afterwards at how obvious it was, it took the genius of Abner Abeneski to observe that neither terrorism nor disease could spread without travel. And it took the forcefulness of Capt. Powell to actually shut travel down.

The Jihad started in 2012. Within a year easy travel was a nostalgic memory. At first everyone declared the spirited intention to move and trade like before. Anything less would “let the terrorists win.” But the business-as-usual plan was like trying to stay friends after a romantic breakup. The participants have the sincerest intentions, but a process is initiated, a process which must proceed in its own inexorable time, eroding intentions and reshaping attitudes, until what results, the gradual complete estrangement, is perfectly natural and retrospectively obvious. In the same way, although everyone vowed to keep on keeping on, folks tended to stay in their communities because it was too much hassle to move around. Their communities began to resemble villages. There was a measurable improvement in security.

The problem was, novelty went down as security went up. It sank along with travel. There weren’t many visitors, and there wasn’t much news. Those conditions, along with a general fear of terrorist acts, led to a provincial distrust of strangers and of anyone who looked or acted differently. Nonconformity was not well tolerated.

Everything might have devolved with blissful ignorance if it weren’t for the transition group. If only there had been some adjacent wilderness area that people could inhabit for a generation, civilization might have made the shift and secured the advantages of a cozy feudal society. But the late adolescents were present. Most of them were caught up in the indignation and carried by the tide of fervent nationalism, but some paid attention. Theirs is the age most likely to attend, grown out of the pretense of childhood and not yet sheltering under the nostalgia of maturity. Some of the twentyish actually shake their heads, look up and around, point and say: “But see here: This makes no sense!”