Days 284 and 285

Writing exercise – The world is upside down; climate change has made our home uninhabitable

…

We had all seen it coming, and to a certain extent, pretended it wasn’t happening.

Until we could ignore it no longer.

Perhaps we could have kept our collective heads in the sand, but Mother Nature wasn’t going to wait that long.

We woke up one morning to snow.

Three months early, just as Fall began.  Perhaps the fact that the trees had been losing their leaves far earlier than usual was a sign.

There were others, but it had happened before, a few years back, and it had sparked the usual warnings from scientists, debunking of climate change, politicians’ umming and erring, but in the end, nothing changed

We did the same this time.  Been there, done that, nothing to see here.  The government, such as it was, laughed it off.

As they did with most things that concerned the people, unless they were among the President’s private circle.

At first the snow turned the surroundings into a winter wonderland, usually here in mid-November, an interlude before the main event: Christmas.

It was barely into September, and it was a long way to the festive season.

It snowed every night for the next two weeks.  All night, virtually at blizzard level, and so badly that it was difficult and then impossible to keep the roads clear.  Except for the essential roads.

The houses were snowed in, then abandoned.

Whole areas were shut down and people evacuated.

I went up to the lookout once, and all I could see was white, except for a small area where the shopping centre was located

The whole was gone.  Our house would be next.

Beth was holding a light blue sheet of paper in her hand, a hand that was shaking.

I knew what it was.

“We got one.”  She held it up.

“Lou got his yesterday.”  Lou was across the street.  He’s lived there all his life, as did his parents before him.

We all knew this was the end.  Any more snow and our town would disappear.

It was the same in any direction you could go.

She had the TV on.  There was only one channel, reporting the weather and emergency information 24 hours a day.  She never turned it off.

“They’re not ignoring it now.  They keep playing the President saying it’s nothing and would go away in a few days.  Now he won’t talk to anyone.”

No surprise.  The last crisis, the pandemic, had been met with a similar response.

There were over a million deaths at that time; this had been exceeded in just two weeks.  If it didn’t go away, the total was going to be horrific.

“We’re not going to be leaving any time soon.  The police had shut the road for everything other than official vehicles.”  The trains stopped at midnight; the last one snowed in at our station.

“What’s going to happen to us?”

“Last I heard, we’re going to the missile complex.”

It was a ubiquitous small town, with a big secret.  We made up part of the air defence system in place to prevent invaders.  And the threat of being wiped off the face of the planet if anything went wrong.

Freda hated the idea of nesting with nuclear bombs.  So did I.

“Do we have a choice?”

“If you want to live.”

“So, in your opinion, it’s not going to stop.”

“No.”

I’d asked old man Bowen, ex-weatherman on channel 6 news, old meteorologist for Nasa, whose wife read tarot cards.

An expert.

“It’s part of a phenomenon that has happened in the past.  Two more years, if we’re lucky.”

“And you know this…oh.  the crazy old fool down the street.  Seriously, Monte?”

There were things wanted to believe, believable things, things that some people just didn’t want to hear.

Fundamentally, a good person, when she had first met the Bowens, she took an instant dislike to them.  He was abrupt and she was aloof, but that was just defence.

I smiled.  “As much as you hate them, so far, everything he’d said had come true.  As for the next, well, that was going to be the killer.”

“Or as the government says, we just have to wait it out a little longer.”

“While all the top officials, including our fearless leader, swan off to a country with a warmer climate.”

All the rich people were gone.

The president tried to sneak out by the back secret entrance that no one was supposed to know about.  Except for one old press hack.

She didn’t answer.  We agreed to disagree on certain matters, because not to would be letting politics destroy something good.

She glared at me.  “Don’t say it.  I’ve already had seventeen phone calls.  It’s easy to lay blame, not so easy to prove it.”

Yes.  He could do no wrong.  And it was going to kill her.

But I wasn’t going to be drawn in this time.  Just saying what I was thinking would get me arrested, and Beth would turn me in, husband or not.

“Then I guess God has a lot to answer for.”

That did it.  The president and then God, sometimes the two fused, according to the president, speaking candidly about his ‘friends’, telling the reporter, or rather the stooge paid to preen his ego, that who was he to dispute they believed he was the almighty himself.”

It had been impossible not to burst out laughing.

The truck came to pick us up, one small bag allowed.  Beth was going to come, but remembered that she had a small job to do and would come later.

She was warned that she had 24 hours.  After that, no one knew what was going to happen.

It was more like they did, but to tell us mere mortals might have set off a chain reaction of dissent.

The last I saw of her, she was waving.  I don’t think she expected me to leave.

We collected all the people on the street and headed to the silo.  There were two other trucks.  There was an officer in the truck who said there were rooms for 200 people.  It was once a mass point for soldiers in case of an attempted invasion.

I found it amusing that anyone would come to put two for the purpose of invading it.

So did the others.

There were five trucks.  The last of the townsfolk.  All outlying areas had been evacuated earlier.

About a dozen had chosen not to come or had something else to do, like Beth.

And after the sun went down and Beth or any of the others deigned not to come, it was the worst-case scenario.  The silo boss sent a team out to find them.

Then the snow started.

The search party came back in half an hour.  The cold was too intense.

That was what was going to happen.

After the snow, the earth was going to freeze.

It came and it didn’t go.

Everything froze unless protected.

Four months passed before the cold lifted to a point where we could go back outside.

By that time, we needed food, and I was charged with finding it, and took six volunteers.

We found food, and we found something else.

A place where those who believed that nothing was going to happen had frozen to death, dying as a result of their beliefs.

It was a terrible loss of life that could have been easily saved.

It was predicted that there would be a thaw, Mother Nature’s planet-wide reset.

It was hoped we had all learned a lesson.

…

©  Charles Heath  2025