The Dead Lands

 

THE PACIFIC EATS away at dunes and cliffs and the wreckage of towns built too close to the shore. Its waves battle, in a great foaming collar, the current of the long, fat snake of the Columbia River that oozes through the gorge dividing Oregon and Washington. And the rain. An acid rain that yellows leaves and spots skin and falls as many days as it does not.

 

Water encourages life but so does it promote decay. Birds break windows. Hail breaks windows. Branches break windows. The shingles on even the newest roofs last no more than two decades and then split with ice dams, peel away with the wind, scrape away with branches. Leaves rot in gutters and plants sprout from them, their roots groping their way into the house. Mice and squirrels gnaw their way inside. Termites and beetles, too. Woodpeckers. No matter how it happens, as soon as a hole opens, water penetrates, bringing the mold and rust and rot that dissolve the wood-chip subroofing and drop bricks and crack the foundation and make every building into a slowly collapsing planter box, furred over with moss and spangled with mushrooms.

 

Fires start. From lightning, from earthquakes cracking gas lines. But because the sewers have clogged, because water mains break, because fire hydrants crack, because basements have filled up like bathtubs, and because so much of the wood is rotten, they extinguish quickly. Winter comes and water freezes, thaws, freezes, thaws, and freezes, and in doing so splits cement, crumbles asphalt, shoves around everything man-made that was once laid or stacked in a straight line.

 

But not in Bellingham. Not in Walla Walla or Corvallis or Silverton. Not in many places, especially Astoria, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia River, where houses stand stubbornly against the attacking rain, where the roads run in clean lines, and where slaves arrive every few weeks.

 

They cluster in wagons forged from pickup beds and drawn by oxen. They stumble in long lines, weeping and rattling, collared and cuffed by chains. They cram into rust-pocked cattle cars and boxcars dragged by steam engines.

 

The slaves have numbers and letters branded into their skin, but so do they have names, at least among themselves. They have their own fenced-in shantytowns, their own families. They are tools, but even tools must be treated with some care or they will rust and break. They are told they are part of something bigger, a process of renewal. Some of the slaves work on construction, raising barns, repairing fallen chimneys, hammering together houses. Some of them farm, digging irrigation canals, hoeing and planting and reaping. Some grade roads. Some repair train tracks. Some log trees and some mine for coal in the Powder River Basin. Some birth children. They are, all of them, building something.

 

Something that extends as far east as Laramie and as far south as Palo Alto. They are growing. And they will continue to grow. Not just as a society, but as a species.

 

There were sixty-five nuclear power plants in the United States. Their hot innards seeped through cracks and seams. And in Washington, along the Columbia River, there is Hanford, the most contaminated nuclear site in the country, storing two-thirds of America’s high-level radioactive waste. Used nuclear fuel—in waste dumps containing rods that give off heat and beta particles and gamma rays—mutates into isotopes of americium and plutonium, making it a million times more radioactive than it was originally. When the facility was abandoned, the cooling ponds boiled over and evaporated. Exposed to the air, the waste ignited, creating a fire that clouds radiation into the air, spills it into the Columbia River, and to this day continues to burn.

 

The nearby reactors, in a state of meltdown, did not ignite when they overheated. They melted into radioactive lava that consumed the concrete and steel surrounding them, gelling into a massive silvery blob.

 

Aran Burr calls it the altar. So they call it the altar. Because his word is their word.

 

Astoria is close enough to the altar, and far enough away from it, kissed but not pummeled by the radiation. Some of them die of cancer. Some die of blood or respiratory disease. And some don’t. Some are born with mere deformities. A face that looks melted. A second set of teeth barnacling their shoulder. Cysts bulging and sacs of fluid dangling. Moles so plentiful that a body appears like some fungus found in the forest. But others are special, gifted. Some are born with oversize eyes that can see a mile, see in the dark. Some are born walking on all fours and able to outrun any dog. Some can lift boulders.

 

It is what makes them so special. Mutational genesis. Become the next. Evolve or face extinction.

 

That is what he says. And they all do as he says.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 52

 

 

 

GAWEA FINDS a river. The first canoe fills with water. The second floats. Colter takes the stern, Lewis takes the bow, and she nests between two gunwales in the center of the vessel. Sometimes they are walled in by basalt and rushing along whitecapped rapids and sometimes the river broadens and they can see far into hills dotted with sage. The world is not sand and the world is not snow. There are green-leafed trees and green-grassed fields. For the first time, outside of a map, outside of a book, Lewis can see the world the way it was, an inhabitable, living thing.

 

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