A Different Way

My father once told me that you can drown in flax seeds. Claimed it had happened to a neighbour’s child when he was a kid. I’ve never bothered to look it up, but it always sounded plausible to me. Probably because of how much a field of grain moves like the waves on the ocean when the wind is on it. I also enjoyed the irony of drowning so far from more than enough water to get your shoes wet.

Dad was born in ’29 on the prairies so I grew up on stories of drought and dust storms that raged for days. Stories of crops that just never had a chance and how food had to be shipped in because the farmers couldn’t even feed themselves let alone send anything to market. By the time I was born that was all behind us of course. But I never forgot those stories.

My parents remembered it more strongly so they wanted to be self-sufficient when it happened again. Which they were convinced would be any day now. So they moved to northern Ontario and bought a farm. Sort of a farm anyway. As much of one as they could afford. They got a cow and some chickens, some goats and a horse.

“You can’t have a farm without a horse. When the gas runs out, you’ll be damn glad to have that horse.”, was one of my mother’s favourite sayings when we would complain about having to care for that four-legged free-loader.

My father scrounged some old farm equipment which was more rust than anything else, but he got enough running to bring in some hay and plow up about an acre of vegetable garden.

Self-sufficiency was all well and good, but my Dad still worked in the mines. The employment people had said it was the best way for him to help the Province so that’s what he did. Once we finished school, my siblings and I would receive our work assignments too.

We went to school just like the world wasn’t actually ending. None of us put more effort into it than we had to and usually not even that much. It’s hard to feel motivated to learn algebra when you’re constantly hearing at home that you’re never going to need to know much more than how to survive the coming collapse. Funny thing was, nobody else seemed too concerned about it other than our folks.

Besides, getting up to start your chores at five-thirty in the morning before going to school tends to limit your engagement with “The Catcher In The Rye”.

The closest fires were still a couple of hundred miles away but if the wind shifted again, that was still too close. Even our more oblivious class-mates couldn’t miss that one. “What if the winds pick up again?”, asked Kelly Harris nervously. “Mrs. Chutney says the Premier should be doing more to stop the fires.”

As quick as that, the principal Miss Woolcroft was there. “Neither you nor Mrs. Chutney should be engaging in alarmist talk like that.”

She was speaking to Kelly, but her words were clearly for all of us. “Premier Harz has already said that there is no danger from the wildfires. Unless you’re saying the Premier is lying to us all?” 

If there had been any more honey on her voice, Kelly would’ve died of diabetes on the spot. She rallied and said smoothly, “Of course not Miss Woolcroft. Everyone knows the Premier would never lie to us. I was only repeating what Mrs. Chutney was saying.”

Miss Woolcroft looked sternly at her for a long moment. “Well, there’s no call to be repeating things that make the Premier look bad. They’re the only one keeping us safe from everything going on right now.”

Well, the winds did pick up and the wildfires jumped the break. Burned up a big piece of the Province. About half of the nearest city went up with it. My father died when the Minehead burned, trapping him and the other two-hundred and sixty workers on his shift with him. 

Mom’s lungs had never been good and she perished from the smoke. We buried her under some tough old wild roses on the hillside.

That was early summer of 2064. Turned out the Premier had been lying to everyone and there was no turning back the clock on climate change. One of my brothers died in the collapse and my sister got religion and joined a band of travelling evangelicals. She stopped by a couple of years ago when they were passing through.

A few other folks joined us and we rounded up some stray animals from abandoned farms. It’s not the life we dreamed of. It’s hard and it’s dangerous. There’s no real doctors or medicine anymore so if anyone gets badly hurt there’s not much we can do. But we mostly have enough to eat  and it’s been a year or more since we saw any scavengers come through.

A week ago Kelly said, “Do you think we should maybe see if there’s anyone out there? Maybe join up with other people and try to rebuild?”

I thought about it for a little bit before I answered. 

“Maybe we shouldn’t try to rebuild what was there before. That didn’t seem to work out too well. I agree we need to be part of something bigger, to help build something. But it needs to be something different. A different way of treating each other and land. I don’t know if it will be better, but it has to be a different way of doing things this time.”

Any feedback would be most welcome!

Cheers,