Covid Wasteland

A dystopian novel of the decline, fall and rebirth of the USA

Chapter 1 – Early aftermath

 

John Stamford engaged the propulsion on his electric-powered Pulling Boat, a 24-foot heavy wooden craft, and slowly pulled away from his net-drift. He had an important job in the newly-minted collective of Lower Columbia. He fed folks the salmon he caught in his half-size drift-nets, and today, he was bringing in an even dozen Fall Chinook Salmon, about 300 pounds of vital protein.

 

He looked around the horizon. After the utter collapse of the Federal Republic and the State government structures in the “Covid Crisis”, which was 98% a man-made disaster, the people along the River had drifted along, starting survival bartering, but now there was an attempt to restore SOME government, and this super-County with it’s claim of land covering parts of three former Oregon Counties had claimed a vital swath of the Lower Columbia River, some lowland agricultural land and some up-land timber country. It had three cities, Scappoose, St Helens and the town of Rainier, on which sat the only bridge across the wide and mighty River.

 

To protect the integrity of the new super-County, a militia had been mustered, it’s duty was split: some protected the road leading out from the former Portland, now a ghost city, and the rest of it was in Rainier, to protect Lower Columbia from invasion coming across the bridge. John had a boat that wasn’t dependent on fuel, it was electric or could be rowed, he charged the batteries in his craft with solar and wind generation at his St Helens Marina dock, so he was designated as being in charge of the boat-protection of Lower Columbia, a Militia duty. He had guns, an M4 and a 357 Magnum revolver with a long barrel. He was confident with both of them, but the rifle did get in the way of fishing from his too-small-for-the-job converted rowboat, so he normally carried only the revolver.

 

There was almost no fuel around, propane, diesel and gasoline were things of the past. The Feds had disbanded their military units, but some had refused to disband and had stayed together on their posts. Those commanders and units usually didn’t last long, though: when rations ran out, when the fuel supplies ended, the military wasn’t prepared for it. They tried bicycles to move troops around, but those were impractical for moves of anything over the size of a platoon, and few movements involving travel of more than 10 miles were even tried. When those remaining units folded up, their troops were generally allowed to take their rifles and pistols and all the ammo they could load onto their bicycles.

 

For Lower Columbia, the closest Army base, at Fort Lewis in Tacoma, had let go some bike troops who had wound up in Longview, on the other side of the bridge at Rainier. About a dozen of these people had formed a small Militia in Longview, but they had a food problem. Their only reliable source of protein was eggs from a few chickens, and game from up in the hills. Most of the livestock were gone, now a year after the collapse.

 

No one was keeping track of it, but for any one who stayed in one place long enough and survived, they were getting lonelier and lonelier. The population of the former USA was now unsupportable at over ten percent of it’s former size, and Nature took it’s course quickly, famine killing off most everyone who died, not the diseases. Scrounging stored food became a survival tactic, and most Militia leaders had their people doing this. The smarter ones also had elementary farming going, and sustenance fishing and hunting, and had developed/restored the old ways of food preservation, that is dehydrating and with salt. The few who knew these methods were in high demand, and most took their compensation in food for themselves and their families.

 

Very little information came out of the big cities, and anyone hearing it wouldn’t have had the time or resources to do anything with the information anyway. If anyone had known, they would have found horror there. The date of the collapse, now fixed at October 15^th, 2020, was when President Trump had thrown in the towel. He’d been spectacularly unsuccessful in getting the “blue-state” Governors to start an orderly transition back to normalcy from the closures ordered to combat Covid. Those governors had been instrumental in destroying the booming Trump economy, and thought they could essentially take over the country by continuing to refuse to allow commerce to restart. Just prior to resigning, President Trump ordered the US military to facilitate Militia formation, and that had happened quickly. Vice President Pence was sworn in as President, but he remained only long enough to communicate to the military that he would also resign, and when he did, he urged the Joint Chiefs to take a tough line with Speaker Pelosi, who would obviously attempt to ignore the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

 

When Madam Speaker WAS sworn in, she was ready with her list of edicts to essentially install herself as President-for-Life, but one after another, the heads of all the available policing agencies she supposedly controlled informed her that her edicts were rubbish, and unless she firmly rescinded them and started over, she would have zero help enforcing any of them, and in fact, they promised her that they would place themselves under military control, and they did. The first result was open street violence in Washington, DC, followed quickly by the same thing almost everywhere in the country in the cities. The revolutionaries claiming or feigning allegiance to President Pelosi were quickly chased from their untenable positions by militia actions. In the meanwhile, the trucks and trains were parked, the few airplanes flying stopped flying, and the country ground to a halt by what would have been Election Day.

 

No food, no fuel and then the electric grid was gone by the end of November. With it went all forms of digital communication. By Christmas, the cities began to be overwhelmed by the issue of dead bodies. Some cities managed better than others, but the problem was nationwide. No one kept track of the deaths, either. Historians would later estimate that the former USA lost half it’s people in the Winter of 20-21, and the death rate never let up when the warmer spring weather arrived. By the one-year anniversary of the “Covid Emergency” declarations, population losses amounted to five to eight percent of remaining population per month.

 

It was bad, but nowhere near that bad in the hinterlands. Most small towns are more or less self-supporting, with local agriculture being able to keep the local population from starving. The biggest shock to the hinterlands was farming having to drop back about two hundred years in accomplishment. Most farmers used the last of their fuel to prepare small plots which could be worked with hand tools. Potatoes suddenly became the crop to grow. 3500 square feet of tilled ground will yield enough potatoes to feed a family of four all their carbohydrates. Protein was another matter. Some livestock could survive on natural pasture, but rustling and poaching was a bad problem. No farmer planned for his/her livestock to make it through a full year, but with no power, it couldn’t be slaughtered and frozen, either. It all had to be converted into jerky, and that only lasted for a month or so before it also became inedible. The inevitable barter system of work paid for with meat products became the norm, and callused hands became the norm for everyone in the countryside. A day hoeing the rows bought you enough protein to keep you alive for the next two days.

 

Militia duty wasn’t popular. Most Militias couldn’t feed their troops full-time, so the troops had to put in their labor like everyone else AND pull their Militia duties. John Stamford’s life in the Militia was more determinate than most, since all he did was fish. The Militia commander had a couple of trusty troops who handled his fish for him when he brought them back to the marina in St Helens. John taught those guys the initial preparations for drying and smoking the fish, and they helped him when he got back. The Militia got used to eating the dried fish on duty, and the commander secured other food items for John as compensation for his vital work.

 

After his decent catch, John rowed most of the way down the Sand Island Channel, only using his batteries for maneuvering into his dock. The two helpers had a third person with them, and once the boat was tied up, John was introduced to her. Al Steward, one of the helpers, did the honors.

 

“John, this is Katherine Otter. She came over the bridge to see us, and we biked her down here yesterday. She is from the Cowlitz Nation, and knows fish-processing. She said she heard we were fishing and her Chief sent her down to help us make the most of your catches.” John looked at her. The young side of middle aged, short at five feet and stocky, she wore traditional sandals and had some sort of a native tunic-dress on, and it was embroidered with an otter-figure on the chest. John spoke then.

 

“Katherine, I am delighted to know you. Otter clan, there are two others, correct?” She smiled.

 

“Yes, Bear clan and the Wapiti clan. We Otters are the ones who do the river work, though, mostly fishing. This boat of yours is almost like an ancient river-canoe, John. My great-grandfather fished from something this size. Our Tribe has drawings of the boats Captain Cook used when he first came here to the River. This boat looks almost exactly like the boats he and his men came to us in. May I see your catch, John?”

 

“First things first, Katherine. First, I have to set my boat batteries to charging. Hand me that cord behind you.” She turned around and picked up the coils of stout extension cord. John plugged it into the receptacle on his boat and she turned back around, pointed at the light sequence, which turned green, then threw the switch as if she had done that task before. Al handed him two clean muck-tubs and he lifted the fish from the bottom of the boat where they had been covered with wet burlap, and the two guys carried them to the cleaning station and got to work. Katherine just watched. The guys produced knives and quickly cleaned the ten fish. At the end, there was a bucket full of fins, gills and heads. She piped up now.

 

“What do you do with that, John?”

 

“Some I use for bait for the sturgeon poles, some for the crayfish traps, but the seagulls get most of it.”

 

“You should be eating it. I will show you this. Do you have roots or potatoes?”

 

“Potatoes, yes. Occasionally, I get corn, but not at this time of year. Vegetable now is cabbage, mostly. Some carrots. A few squash.” Now the helpers were mixing up the brine, and one got to work cutting up a fish. Katherine interrupted him, and began to cut the fish herself, but into small strips, not the chunks he was making. Her strips had almost no bones in them, his chunks were full of bones. Her hands were a blur doing this, the fish filled the brine-tub quickly and the two guys began to copy her style.

 

“It’s finger-size, see that? A working man needs one finger-sized piece every hour, ten fingers for a day’s work. He won’t have to stop working, he just reaches in his Possibles bag for a fish-finger and eats it. Now the bones will go for soup along with the other parts. The soup will have potatoes and protein. A ladle of that is a meal also.” They finished the fish and it was all brining, and John baited the three sturgeon poles and cast them out from the dock while he built small fires in the smoker-barrels. He wasn’t paying attention to the poles, but he heard a “yip” and turned to see Katherine set the hook on one pole and reel in a small sturgeon, about three feet long. Another pole got some small nibbles, but John didn’t strike the pole until Katherine yelled at him.

 

“That’s a sucker. Bring it in!” He reeled it in, about a three-pound bottom feeder. He threw it into the fish-parts bucket. She was cutting up the sturgeon, but she stopped and sang something first. John smiled and spoke.

 

“You just prayed for the Spirit of the fish, didn’t you?”

 

“Of course. It’s Spirit will live again now in another creature. Maybe we will catch that being also.” They all heard a little bell then and looked back along the dock head-walk. A guy was pushing a mountain bike towards them. It was the Militia commander, Captain Borcher. He leaned up his bike and came over to the group, seeing Katherine cutting up the sturgeon. He just watched while her flashing knife blade did it’s quick work, then the sturgeon strips went into the brine bucket with the salmon. She flopped the roped bucket into the river a few times and sloshed all the fish slime and scales into the river.

 

Katherine stopped then, and made a prayer in her native dialect. John was mesmerized by the rise-and-fall tonal presentation and the Captain could see it on his face, and smiled. Made HIS job easier. To the two helpers, he signaled “give me a moment” and as they walked around the corner to tend the smoker fires, he faced John.

 

“John, we’ve got something new going here, something fantastic, and you and your boat are really the cause of it. Last week, the Cowlitz Shaman was down at the riverside in Kalama and watched you fish. She rode back to the Tribal Center and talked to her Ruling Council. As a result of her observations, the Tribe now extends us an offer we can’t refuse. It’s quite complicated, involves the Tribe really overseeing our new Super-County of Lower Columbia, but they want to join with us as the stewards of the land we essentially took from them four and five generations ago. The say that their Great Spirit (he throws up his hands towards the sky, eliciting a short chant from Katherine) has made the whites have this horrible tragedy of body and Spirit, and asked the Tribe to find the whites most attuned to the Earth and give them a chance to learn the ways of the Great Spirit (hands up again, and the chant). YOU, John, are now the first Lower Columbia Ambassador to the Cowlitz Tribe. What this does is give the Militia, who they see as Warriors, and therefore in a higher caste and closer to the Great Spirit (hands up, the chant, and now the Captain utters the strange throat-noises also), it gives us the status of a Tribe in their sphere of reality, and puts us almost equal to them, in a sort of “probationary” status for now, but it will become permanent shortly if we follow their lead.” John looks puzzled, so Captain Borcher continues.

 

“Their Chief realizes that we have a long way to go to attain their level of earth-awareness, WHICH INCLUDES SURVIVAL, so they have given us a Guide, and that’s Katherine. She has the same roles as Sacajawea did for Lewis & Clark. Now, this is the hard part for you, John. The Cowlitz are matrilineal, that is, the women pick their mates, not the husbands. The women also have the duty of passing all the tribal knowledge down to their children, so they really run their families. In return for that, the men protect them and sustain them with the Bounty of the Earth that the Great Spirit (now John has caught on, so he also throws up his hands, but hasn’t practiced the vocal salute, so doesn’t give it) points out to them via their Shaman and Chiefs, both of whom have placed Katherine with you to be your guide. Ahem, that also means she is your wife and you are her husband, John.” The Captain stops. John composes himself, and turns toward Katherine, then drops his head to his chest in abasement for a moment, then raises back up. Katherine now does the same, but also reaches up with her hands and pulls John’s face down to hers and they bump noses, then they both turn to face the Captain. She speaks, with her head lowered so she’s not equal.

 

“My Warrior-Chief, the first thing we need to do is find some fishers to replace John, so when he comes to the Tribal Center for his immersion-learning, your Warriors won’t starve. You need a month, we say moon, to get that going, and I suggest you start with the two Warriors who help John with his Bounty.” The Captain agrees, calls out to the two men, and they come back to the group of three.

 

“Okay, here it is in a nutshell, guys. The Cowlitz Tribe across the river is making a treaty with our new super-county. The good news out of this deal is that it ups our survival chances here from a weak maybe to a strong yes. The Tribe has resources we can’t match, and if the Feds ever do re-constitute, they are still bound by international law to respect the Native treaties, and we’re going to have one. It’s a learning process, guys. We have to quickly become familiar with their Traditions and Customs, but we of the Militia have already been put into their Warrior Caste, which is the highest caste below Chiefs and Shamans. Stamford here will be our Ambassador to the Tribe and you two guys are going to be in charge of the fishing operation while he is learning Tribal life across the Bridge. You will have to learn to run his boat, but I’m guessing you already have that down, except maybe for getting the right rowing muscles going. Al, you’re in charge, I’ll give you two more stripes, so you’re a Staff Sergeant, and Mickey, you’re a Corporal now. Means little, we’re still not paid, but it does give both of you a better food allowance.” Katherine broke out in a big smile.

 

“You see, my Warrior-Chief, this is how we’ve done it forever. Our Warriors also get more food as they rise in responsibilities, and in the old days, this was how they attracted wives of good caste, unless they took them in battle as captives. Are either of you two Warriors married?” The Captain answered.

 

“Al is, Mickey isn’t.”

 

“Well, maybe Warrior Mickey will get some help from Shaman about that emptiness in his Spirit.” Mickey grinned, and Katherine saw that, knew that this vital Fisher had to have a wife SOON. “Okay, my Warrior Chief, tomorrow I will have to travel back to the Tribal Center. Fishing is too good now to interrupt my Fisher-Chief, so how do I get back to the bridge?” The Captain looks at John.

 

“Get ahold of the Skipper, and tell him he’s going sailing tomorrow. Official duty. Food rations. Katherine, we have a sailing yacht we can use. We will sail you down to Longview tomorrow when the tide is right.” She piped right up.

 

“Mid-morning, the River Spirit wants to meet the Sea Spirit and speeds everything up, but afternoon, the Sea Spirit is stronger for coming back, and the Wind-Spirit is stronger also. When we get to Kalama, my radio will reach the Tribal Center, and some warriors will meet us at the bridge to escort us to the Tribal Center. I will have those Warriors bring some things for your Skipper that need to come back here and aren’t right for carrying except on pack animals or in carts. The Shaman might also come back with the Skipper, or even the Chief for parley. My Fishers, it’s time to smoke some fish now.”

 

 

Captain Borcher nodded to Katherine and turned to get his bicycle and head back to his headquarters. He knew that this new alliance was EVERYTHING for this neck of the woods, and to think it had only been a hungry man’s pipe dream yesterday. Katherine knew what SHE needed to do now, so she took John’s hands in hers, looked up at his face and asked him to show her his home.