To: Fred Whitman, Kansas City, MO

From: Olive Barnes, Eureka, CA

May 14th, 20+7

Dearest Fred,

Hello from me and all the Eureka Public Library crew. Well, what few of us there are still employed here.

Hope all has been well for you and your family down in KC. Haven’t heard very much from our super-extended family lately. Have you and Lisa tied the knot? Any little Freds on the way?

We are simply so isolated up here, so far off the major roads that we rarely get any outside news. Our courier only comes three or four times a year, and he or she is almost always forced to stay several days. It always turns into a rather weird event, with the courier getting brought all kinds of really good food and treats and even booze, if the local trees produce any fruit. Last time he (our courier is usually a he) relayed to us some weird rumors from up north... after gorging himself on salmon and cheese and lackluster perry, that is. Something about a boat full of Korean or Chinese saboteurs getting found out near Olympia...? So strange – what possible motive could there be? There’s almost nothing mechanical to sabotage now. Well, it’s doubtful that you’ve heard anything about that, you old flatlander. Bet you have some odd stories of your own.

We actually saw something extremely strange three weeks, maybe almost a month ago. Couple things, actually. It was mid-day on a Saturday, and Gary and I were working in the garden. I raise the veggies and a few chickens, and Gary has a booming ganja garden. (I don’t smoke it, and Gary smokes very little, but we get a great barter for it at the market.) Just both of us on our knees, toiling away when we heard an all-encompassing boom all of a sudden, then a roaring, rushing sound. Well, you just don’t hear those now, you know? So we both sprang up like a couple of meerkats and started looking up. Saw a huge ball of fire just streaking across the sky, trailing smoke and debris. It plunged out of our sight pretty quick and then we heard another gigantic boom. We had a town hall meeting that evening and discussed what it might have been. Most folks thought it was a meteorite. Others said they tracked it and saw it crash out in the bay. Well, most everyone is no longer very skittish about things around here, but I can say for us, anyway, that we didn’t sleep too well the next one or two nights. It was our understanding that meteors were prone to running in packs, so to speak, and we weren’t sure if the one that had buzzed Eureka was a loner or the alpha. Know what I mean? Well, four days went by, and neither we nor anyone else had heard or seen anything out of the ordinary, until a young lady – maybe 14 – came up to the reference desk carrying something really weird looking. It took me a few minutes to recognize what it was, but finally I figured out that it was part of a small photovoltaic panel. She said she had found it down by the bay docks. We’ve all seen some odd things come out of the bay now and then, right? But the panel looked halfway melted. Things were a bit busy – more on that later – but I asked her to meet me down there around six. So I rode down there as the library was closing, but I couldn’t get near the docks. There was a huge crowd of people there, and it was impossible to get through.

I finally saw the girl I’d met with earlier in the day. There was this sparkle in her eye, and she breathlessly told me all about the satellite washing up to the shore. She seemed truly excited that what was basically a two-ton re-entry missile had missed razing and/or setting fire to of her hometown by the narrowest of margins and plunged into a nearby body of water.

Can you imagine the panic had we all had foreknowledge of this event? Mass media-type news reporting, I mean. I suppose the folks at NASA would have been able to guide the satellite elsewhere, further out to the Pacific, maybe, but who knows? Eureka would have been emptied out in half a day. Nobody here would have eaten fish out of the bay for months, probably at least a year. It would have been a superfund site or some such affair. There would have been congressional investigations, hearings, etc etc. And rightly so. But now? Now it’s a sideshow for kids and adults alike.

I guess that... things have shifted at such a basic level. For us, here, anyway – guess I can’t speak for you and yours. But I... but we – I’ve discussed this with Gary, so I think I can speak for him, as well – feel simultaneously empowered by our new relevance to everyone else in Eureka (and their reciprocally increased relevance to us) and diminished by both the disconnect we have with almost everyone else outside town (Except you, sweetheart! Well, and everyone else I write, of course. But it’s not immediate the way it used to be, you understand?) and our newfound ambivalent attitude towards nature. Again, maybe it is different for you and yours in Kansas City – is it still pretty big, or has there been migration away from it? Couldn’t be larger than it used to be, could it? (We had our fair share of deaths the first couple years here, but were spared the horrors of what happened in the metro areas. Especially Los Angeles – so depressing to think about.)

We still really love the fact that we’re in such a beautiful area, but there are a couple things that lessen its general importance to us. First, I mean, it can’t talk back. One of my most favorite patrons ever was this Nam vet named Tim. Hate using the word grizzled, but it fits him so well. Left arm amputated just below the elbow, had one of those crude, hook-like prosthetics but only wore it maybe once a month. It was always a shock when I saw it, because he came in almost every day before the lights went dark. Simply the nicest person you’d ever want to meet. Quiet guy, but not in a creepy way, just so low-key. First time I saw him was in 1999 or so. Seems like forever ago. Anyway, he’d come in an hour after opening and sit in one of the upright chairs at a table (not those cushy ones most of the others patrons prefer) and read the daily Times. The morning after the entire modern world went to hell he was at the front door a little bit late. Well, everyone else was a little bit late, too – had to walk! And he was at the periodical rack pretty quick but there was no paper for him. So he sat in his same chair for a minute, then came back and asked me what I thought was happening. Why it was so quiet. And I’d noticed that the lights were out – hard to miss, despite having pretty good daylighting in the library – but hadn’t even taken a listen to anything all morning. I’d just been in such a rush, thinking it was an above-average pain in the ass day with no alarm, no shower and a fritzing car. But then, I heard what he heard. In retrospect, there always seemed to be a rustle, a vibration that wasn’t even part of the air when everything was still running. It was in everything you touched, it seemed. Maybe a constant baseline subsonic automotive hum? Regardless, at that moment that he mentioned it, I noticed. It was gone – the surrounding air was so still, flat almost. I don’t mind telling you that in that moment, I got profoundly weirded out and asked him when he had noticed it. He said it woke him up, and when he woke up, he couldn’t see, and that he knew something was up at that point. And so we started talking, it seemed, to take the place of that lost noise.

He didn’t come in all that often afterwards. I think he treasured his Times more than conversation with me – and really, you can’t blame him, can you? But, maybe four or five times a month he would show up at the reference desk early in the morning, and we’d just chat. Just half an hour or so, maybe 45 minutes, but never even an hour I’m sure. And virtually always simple day-to-day stuff that, back when the lights were on and I was somehow so engaged with other things, I would have been not even impatient but downright confrontationally brusque with him over. (I still have mixed feelings about this – have I somehow plunged into welcoming full-on banality into my life to simply shut out the fact that there is no more buzzing everything-elseness vying for my attention? I’d like to think not.)

Well, so about a year and a half ago, he just faded out of existence, just disappeared. In the dead of winter, with no vehicle (bike I mean, of course), no extra food that we knew of – it was a lean harvest for everyone that year – no note left behind and no left arm. Only seeing him a few times a month, it took me at least a couple weeks to notice. And we never found him. He’s gone, no telling where. I actually contacted the lazy-assed police and they wound up checking out his tiny apartment. And now. The mornings are a lot quieter. I got really used to no coffee machine spluttering, no semi-trucks rumbling by to shake the whole library, no instant messaging software beeping at me, a myriad of nothings to listen to. Still haven’t gotten used to not hearing Tim’s voice every now and then.

On the bright side, things have kept swinging here at EPL. We took such a hit the first few months after the lights went out that the director thought we may have to close down the library completely. I mean, we had such little traffic those months, nobody had any more use for DVDs or CDs or offline public use computers. It was a really desperate time for all of us here. But by late winter we were getting a steady trickle of community folks asking really practical questions. “It’s getting cold – how can I better insulate my place?” and “All this fish my husband caught the other day is going bad – how can I preserve it?” and on and on. So we checked out quite a few of our home improvement and food preservation books those months. Unfortunately, the majority of them have not been returned. Hope springs eternal, but it’s unlikely those will ever make it back to us. The non-return rate got so bad that we actually had to revise our circulation policies and how our collection was categorized. We went through every book in the library – yeah, I know! – and set aside those that were, at heart, do-it-yourself type books. Someone (Monica Perth, remember her? Jeez, what a bint.) wanted to toss out all the books that mention power tools or blenders or whatever, but that was stupid and we quashed it. I mean, honestly. There are manual tools that’ll do what power tools do, just slower and with greater exertion required of their operators. Regardless, the DIY materials are all on the reference shelf, now, which is now located in the most convenient and well-lighted area of the library. (Right where the CD and DVD collections used to be, you remember?) We will, under extremely powerful persuasion, check out one of those books. For the most part, though, people are happy to come in and pore over whatever book describes what they want to do, make a few notes, and then scamper off to put whatever it is they learned into practice.

We’ve been getting tons more fiction checkouts, too, but the real still-in-the-circulating-collection gems have been the music books. All kinds of sheet music, and instructional stuff like “Piano for beginners”, “Advanced piano”, “The New Drum Circle Companion” and “Harmonica Made Easy” (good god, we love checking out that last one to kids), etc. have simply been flying off the shelves. Their popularity has made both me and the director a bit nervous about the return rate, but she thinks that the general regard of and respect for the library has shot up so much lately that folks will use its collections more appropriately. She still has not ventured to make the do-it-yourself section a part of the circulating collection again, but most of the staff figure it’s only a matter of time. (We all want her to keep it as-is, though. It works so damned well, you know?)

There’s been a huge resurgence in the local politics scene, too. Hell of it is that it’s not been so great for Gary and my particular political predilections.

The first winter we spent without any lights or heat or anything else was comparatively mild. Stroke of luck, as everything else was bad enough already. So, we don’t have particularly bad winters here as a rule – just a lot of rain, mainly – and this one was even better than most. Still, most folks blew through what little wood and paper they had, if any, pretty quickly, and took to scavenging the nearby forests for easy limbs to break off or haulable logs. Few folks had any real idea how to cure wood or anything else, so there was a lot of smoky fires burning that winter. Several people who were unaware how to clean and operate their stoves succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning. Once word got out about that, we had a run on wood fire stove books. A couple that got returned were missing their title pages (we think they were used for tinder... what are you gonna do?)

Well, the next spring a whole bunch of rough-and-tumble types decided that cutting down a redwood would be a brilliant idea. So much wood, you’d be able to fuels dozens, hundreds of house stoves a year with just a tree or two. So they went out and did that, took them the better part of two days without any chainsaws. Then it fell and knocked over a smaller tree, which fell on one of the lumberjacks. Completely crushed his right leg, and he died a few hours later as they were hauling him back into town. So, though their idiocy and negligence they got a man with a wife and kid killed. But that got swept under the rug once everyone understood that there was a huge source of lumber and firewood out there for the taking. And, truth be told, it’s worked out pretty well. We have very few horses in town, and their main use now is to haul the logs back down to town, where folks can get at them with smaller saws and take what they need. The wood is not outstanding for any particular purpose, but adequate for most. After that first year we all met and re-prioritized, so that lesser trees get taken first, as the redwood regrowth rate is so phenomenally slow. The town is now harvesting maybe one redwood every couple years, depending on our needs. It’s been a compromise that most people are happy with. We’re not so much, but we’ve been grossly outnumbered and so that’s the way it is.

Well now we’ve got some “enterprising” folks – former lumberyard owners, imagine that! – saying we need to start harvesting more and sell it to other cities. You can probably infer Gary and my thoughts on that idea. They want to take out four or five a year! And who are they going to sell this lumber to? Can’t ship them, and we can only use so much here. So they’re just going to kill off almost half a dozen trees a year, chop them up and let them go to pot downtown. Gah!

We and most of the people we know well have dug in over this, and others are listening and weighing the options carefully. Not like before, when we couldn’t get a word in edgewise against logging interests. So maybe that’s it. We used to listen to the system, forced into taking a passive part in that one-sided conversation only maybe to whisper a tiny “yes” or “but I think...” every now and then. Now we’re talking to each other again to fill the silence that the system never should have filled in the first place. And they resonate loud and clear. And you’ll never hear me say “Talk is cheap” ever again.

And now I see that I’ve almost completely run out of space on this page, and this is the last page available to us in the entire house. (Well, next weeding I expect I’ll be able to pick up more. And I can dig out the last few CDs we have in the collection – the CD case booklets almost always have “Notes” sections. Perfectly lined, and their small size gets us a discount from the courier.)

Your ever-chatty friend,

Olive