Chapter 1 #3
"Third," Joe said, raising his voice a little. "Timber. Lodgepole, aspen, subalpine fir, all of it standing right there, all of it burning hot and dry, and a beetle kill stand two ridges over that is going to heat this house for the next fifteen years if I'm willing to work."
"You are always willing to work," Delores said. "I've seen you from the road."
"Fourth. And this is the one nobody thinks about."
He leaned in.
"Culture," he said. "This state has a religion with a food storage doctrine. There are actual church buildings in this valley with actual canneries in them.
There are grandmothers down that canyon with three years of wheat in the basement because their bishop told them to do it in 1978 and they never stopped. When the trucks stopped running last night,
this valley had more food per person sitting in private homes than almost any other place in North America."
The kitchen went quiet.
"That's not a small thing," Joe said. "That's the difference between neighbors who help each other for six months and neighbors who come up your driveway in week three. I did not pick a place. I picked a place full of people who already knew this could happen."
"Huh," said Hazel.
Bill Tandy nodded slowly and said, "Son, that's the smartest thing anybody's said in this county in twenty years."
Joe straightened up.
"So," he said. "In summary. Wyoming is wind and no trees. Montana is money and short summers. Idaho is a desert pretending to be a farm. Utah has snowpack, elevation, timber, and thirty thousand people with a year of beans in the basement."
He put his hands flat on the table.
"And I won't hear any arguments to the contrary."
And then, in the silence that followed, in front of his wife, his two children, and both of his elderly neighbors, Joe Henfry ripped a fart that rattled the chair.
It went on for a genuinely impressive length of time.
Nobody moved.
Zachary's mouth fell open.
Hazel said, "Oh my gosh," in a whisper.
Delores Tandy put her napkin over her face.
Bill Tandy said, "Well, that settles it," and then he lost it completely, wheezing, pounding the table with the flat of his hand, and Zachary went down sideways off his chair howling, and Mack scrambled to his feet and barked twice at nothing.
Imogen sat perfectly still with her coffee halfway to her mouth.
"Thirty two months of research," she said. "Two years of planning. A four hundred page binder. And that is how the speech ends."
"That's how the speech ends," Joe agreed.
"The end of the world," Imogen said. "Day one."
"Day one."
She set the cup down and pressed her fingers against her eyes and started laughing, really laughing, the kind that comes out of a person who has been holding something heavy for nine hours and finally gets to put it down.
Joe sat back in his chair and watched his family come apart at his kitchen table, and he thought, clearly and without any drama at all, that this might be the last easy morning they ever had.
He was right about that.
It was Hazel who stopped first.
She went quiet in the middle of laughing, and she turned her head, and she looked past her mother at the window over the sink.
"Dad," she said.
Something in her voice took the air out of the room.
"Dad, there's smoke."
Joe was up and across the kitchen in three steps.
It was not down the canyon. Down the canyon he had expected, sooner or later, because thirty two thousand people with no power would eventually make smoke somehow.
This was uphill.
It was a thin gray column rising above the timber to the northwest, straight up in the windless morning, maybe a quarter mile out.
Right about where the trail went.
Right about where the spring house sat over their only water.
Joe grabbed the rifle off the pegs and was pulling his boots on before anybody else had left the table.
"Bill. Doors locked, everybody in the cellar, the shotgun's behind the stove."
"Joe," Imogen said. "Joe, wait."
"Somebody's camped on our spring."
He went out the mudroom door at a run with Mack a stride behind him, and he made the tree line in ninety seconds and started up the trail with his heart going like a hammer.
The smell of woodsmoke got stronger fast.
He came off the trail at the last bend and moved through the timber instead, slow now, putting each boot down deliberately, working around to come at the clearing from the uphill side.
Mack pressed against his leg and made no sound at all.
Joe eased around the last fir and looked down into the clearing by the spring house.
There was a small fire ring with a coffee can sitting in it.
There was a blue tarp strung between two trees.
And there was a girl, maybe fifteen years old, sitting on a log with her back to him and both hands wrapped around a tin cup.
She was talking to somebody.
Joe shifted two inches to the left to see who, and his boot came down on a dry branch, and the crack of it went through that clearing like a gunshot.
The girl came off the log and spun around, and Joe saw her face, and every single thing he thought he understood about the last twelve hours stopped making sense.
He knew her.