We are survivors, you and I

It will be centuries before anyone knows.  A cosmic event has forced the earth to move its axis; the poles are now somewhere else.  Two hundred mile an hour gales crossed those poles to freeze all life instantly.  Oceans moved across continents and the monuments of men are forever gone, cities are crumbled wastes beneath the depths and in a fleeting moment all that was is no more.  Things never imagined happened and we are no longer who we were.  Birds took to the air with the first signal of the shifting of the earth and were suddenly without land.  They flew until weariness resigned them to the dark waters and they, too, were no more.  When land emerged and started the long process of forming lakes, rivers and solid earth, it was littered with the corpses of all forms of life and the stench endured for weeks.  Nothing survived.  The burrowed beast drowned, the nests were blown away, each hole, cave and den lost beneath the swirling waters.  Even many of the creatures of the sea were lost, thrown against cliffs, buildings and mountains.  The world itself was no more.

    We have survived, you and I.  We live in one of the two axis points that felt no affect of the earth shift except that our sun rises and sets in a different place.  I think about that and realize that Australia must have been one of those axis points in the prior shift.  The kangaroo, koala, platypus, kiwi and emu all testify that they survived and were unknown to any other part of the world we knew.  The life around us will probably be equally rare in ages yet to come.  

    Today we walked to the shore where the beaches are collecting the evidence of the catastrophe; boards, fragments of cloth, pieces of light plastic and ridiculous reminders like venetian blinds rest upon the sand. We pulled some of the boards farther inland without knowing why.  We have our houses.  Our trees still live.  We have saws if wood is needed, but somehow we needed to collect the reminders of the world we lost.

    Before long our oil and gas will be exhausted and we will be without electricity.  I think it will be better.  Our radio and television reaches only to our major city where all programming is news.  The announcers speak as if in the limbo of shock and they remind us of what has happened, calling upon local professors to give their opinions as if it really mattered.  Soon there will not be energy to receive their signal and we can begin thinking about what is to come.

    Perhaps madness is beginning to set in because I want to laugh at the sights about me.  The new car in my driveway; yesterday I was worried about the next payment and now it is an assortment of pieces of metal without purpose.  My lawn is manicured to perfection and yesterday I sweated beneath the noon sun to make it presentable.  I have a library book that needs to be returned.  The slot in the door reads “mail.”  I had intended to go to the movies this week.  I have a computer with an internet connection.  It was all lunacy.  And if it was lunacy, what will this be?

    In a few weeks there will be no law or public services.  The stores will be without inventory because people will begin to realize that money has no value.  They will take what they need and no authority will exist to stop them.  The prestigious bank will be the most useless of all businesses.  Seeds will be a prime commodity.  We will start worrying about if the river water is clean to drink.  Our bathrooms will be symbols of the past.  There will be public meetings about cooperating in the name of survival but that won’t last long.  Survival is a very personal thing.

    Social mores are among the first to go.  Veterans with survival training are the elite of all men.  The scientists, professors and technicians of the past are no longer valued.  The veteran knows how to make a trap, to fish without equipment, to make a shelter, to hunt.  He can provide, and provision will soon be the currency of the new world.

    In time the houses will be abandoned.  The farm animals will be slaughtered.  Fortunately, without the intrusion of man into their territories, wild animals thrive.  Men will leave the towns and villages to enter the forests to be nearer to their prey.  Shelters will be constructed beside the river and women will forage for wood while man learns to translate fresh tracks.  The new life comes more easily than imagined because it brings no complications.  Scenes from what was sometime intrude upon their minds; taking the children to ballet lessons or Little League, family dinners and Christmas trees.  She is now realizing that soon they must make their clothing from hides and remembers how much she wanted a fur coat.  

    The old concepts of courtship and manners are abandoned.  Woman realizes that man is stronger and the requisites now become his prowess as a hunter and fisherman.  If she has not been taken by a man, he will beckon her and if she follows, life will be easier for her aging parents.  When children are born, she agonizes with the question of if it is wise to teach them of what once was.  At last it is decided that the past must be delegated to itself and young boys are taught to fish and girls help with building fires and skinning the prizes brought by the men.

    Men will begin to wonder of their fate should they venture out upon the waters in boats or rafts fashioned from trees or reeds.  Old questions will be answered with the thought.  Some had been curious about how the islands of the South Seas could be occupied by three distinct types of people.  Were they the ones who moved upon the waters the last time the earth had changed the points of its rotation?

    It all begins again and one day it will all fall under the spell of some mythology.   Fossils will be found to create new theories about origin and progress.  Inventions, exaggerations, lies and superstitions will form the substance of man’s understanding of himself.  He will learn to consider himself supreme and in doing so he will create the world of his liking until time and nature prove once more that they are the masters of all.