I remember Ys
Though I have never seen her
Gold towers wreathed by mist
In the lands of lost Forever
Where the Old Gods lie sleeping
I can hear the bells ringing
One of my favorite quotes from a history text began, "In 400 BC the world was old, and knew it ..." Unfortunately, I’ve spent years trying to find that quote again, and even though I could swear it was in one particular book on my shelf, I can never find it. Accept however, as a starting point ... in 400 BCE, the educated elites of Western Civilization were poignantly aware of the history and peoples who preceded them. Egypt’s pyramids were as ancient, then, as the last ruins of the Colliseum are today; and the ziggurats of Babylon, then standing, were nearly twice that age. The sun-drowned temples of Thebes and Memphis were still the active sites of ongoing worship. And the histories of these peoples, their rulers and kingdoms, were known to legend if not scholarship, which would come a hundred years later when the staff of Alexander sat down to translate the Babylonian archives into Greek.
In ancient times, men knew that civilizations don’t merely rise and flourish; they also fall. Lands which were once famed for their fertility were barren with overgrazing, salinization, desertification. The effects were clear and unquestioned. Lions had roamed or crops had been grown in the reign of King Such-and-Such; they didn’t now. Cities were thrown down by earthquakes, razed both by accidental fires and the deliberate acts of conquerors. And yet others were drowned by encroaching seas. Ancient peoples lacked international committees providing them with two decades of advanced warning before torrential storm and flood overtook them, but judging from our ability to gratuitously ignore such blessings, the result is much the same. Granted, we would probably manage to evacuate most of the residents of Pompeii the day before the Big One – but nothing could rebuild the devastation. The past is littered with dead cities and dead empires. But our country, a country with a blissfully short past and shorter memory, fails to recognize the signs as they occur yet again, because in the intervening 2400 years, the human world has grown so young that it has trouble remembering past decades, let alone past centuries. At least once a decade, now, Someone Important declares that some new innovation has so thoroughly revolutionized human existence that all past experience is irrelevant. And seldom less than a decade afterward, they are shocked, just shocked to find that past experience was, in fact, rather predictive.
Medieval stories are full of drowned cities and countries: Ys, Avallon and Lyonesse all inhabit Arthurian legends; more recently my own great-grandparents immigrated to America after their small island in the Netherlands was permanently inundated. So watching as Hurricane Ike devoured Galveston this weekend, remembering the earlier seige of NOLA, and suddenly finding my own power out for 24 hours from the same storm after it had trekked inland A THOUSAND MILES, put me in mind of another time, and the gradual end of another civilization. The thing about gradual endings is, that you don’t notice them until they’re pretty much done. Each day comes by with just a few more challenges. The power goes out for days instead of hours. The roads are closed for days to clear the wreckage. The gas is expensive enough that trucks don’t roll, and the produce shelves in the grocery store start looking empty very, very gradually. It isn’t full shelves today, and nothing tomorrow. It’s the tangerines being available three months out of the year, then one, and then, ten years later, simply never getting here at all.
People adjust. That’s the good thing about slow declines. There’s time to make the adjustments you need to get by. My neighbors and I don’t talk much, but yesterday with the power out I took a walk to try and find out what people knew about the situation, and I spent some time with the lady across the street talking about how ABX Air, which used to be Airborne Express, and was bought by DHL, is now being sacrificed by a corporate owner that has gutted the company and left it – and our town – to rot behind it. I pointed out that the airfield and the expert labor force remain as good, solid capital infrastructure that somebody ought to be able to make use of. She told me that there’s a slight hope that the employees will be able to buy out the remains of the company in some way. I suggested that we try to persuade the owner of the local trucking company to invest in the business. The good thing about that would be that the trucking owner is a fiercely partisan local, who invests his profits in his community. The bad thing is that he is already the power in the town; if he were to also take over the airstrip, he’d be the Baron of Wilmington in all but name. And of course, the names come after. All the titles originally meant something else, in the early part of the Dark Ages. The feudal meaning comes after the original meaning is long gone; just as "President" now means "King" in the three-quarters of the world where democracy is a gentile fiction. Perhaps "President" (of the local Company) will come to mean "Baron" within our borders.
Meanwhile, for twenty-four hours I had reason to remember a recent diary on disaster preparedness, and was rather put out with myself for having left the camp stove up at my mountain cabin (not having lost power for more than half an hour all summer long, and not intending to stay at home if I lost it for more than four hours in the winter). Also all the large water jugs, which I use up there to store water for flushing the toilet. I’ve never had the water go completely out in town, any town, in forty years. But at work in suburban Cincinnati, today, we were suddenly told that we couldn’t use the restrooms because the City of Fairfield had completely lost water pressure. The city water pumps are run, of course, from the electric grid, and the lights were out throughout south-western Ohio. This was a little difficult in a large employer with at least a hundred people having managed to straggle in despite power outages, lack of sleep, and downed traffic lights (not to mention the trees falling on top of houses). Then we had toilets back, but the water was advisedly NOT for drinking. The softdrink vendors made shift to restock our vending machines repeatedly, and the company hastily commandeered a load of bottled water to distribute in the cafeteria, one bottle per employee only. Even so, I heard rumors that the managers were terrified at the costs they were incurring. But I felt sorry for them today; just for one day these simple white-collar pen-pushers were trying to deal with real crisis management. We were lucky. Frankly, I went in to work for one reason: they have a generator, which meant working microwaves and hot tea, which I wasn’t getting at home without the camp stove.
But I did have five gallons of drinking water standing by, since I didn’t need to use any the last time I went to the mountains – my gravity-fed springwater was working. In fact, I seriously considered going up there if the water wasn’t running when I got home (assuming, that is, that I could find gas). Water up there isn’t always running in the pipes, but water, there is. And firewood for the collecting. Of course, firewood wasn’t going to be a problem in Wilmington today, either. There’s half a tree worth of small timber down in my backyard, and I’m one of the lucky ones – nothing bigger around than my arm, and none of it hit the house or the car.
Half the lights in Wilmington are out tonight for the second night running, but I’m one of the lucky ones. My freezer came on before the food thawed out; all I lost was a bag of salad greens that was past its prime anyway. The furnace guy was already scheduled tomorrow, so he can make sure that the power surges yesterday didn’t permanently damage the air conditioner. I didn’t have to get gas to get home (a tricky business in our area right now due, again, to lack of electricity to run the pumps), and I have two days before I have to go back into work. My cell phone, which cut off last night, is working again. The Cat is happy that all the windows are open so he can come in and out as he pleases (he has a ladder directly under my study window for his personal convenience). The day-old laundry is getting dried. For now, the crisis is past, and life will be fairly much back to normal tomorrow.
But so it begins, with the small things. With getting used to crises, and not expecting the power to always be on. With keeping emergency food and water and a second set of more primitive tools ready, for times when civilization fails you. With cities destroyed and never fully rebuilt. With coastlines that change, sometimes gradually, more often suddenly in the aftermath of a monster storm, and rivers that change their courses or run dry. Glaciers that melt and disappear. Deserts that creep or race into the settled, irrigated suburbs and former farmlands. I know this feeling. I’ve been here before ...
"Oh, the more it changes
The more it stays the same
And the Hand just rearranges
The Players, and the Game"
Al Stewart, The Eyes of Nostradamus