Dragons Vs. the American Dream

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. Now, I know what you're thinkin' — "Elijah, you must have lost your mind. Dragons own Shenandoah, and most everywhere else for that matter. How do you suppose—" well, let me stop you right there. I don't know much of anything for sure. Neither do you.

I might not be old enough to remember what these here splendiferous Virginian mountains were like before, but my granddaddy sure is. Heck, it's more than half of what he talks about, by my estimates, and sure, most of the folks in town think he's lost it, but I know him, and I trust him. So, I like to think I have a half-decent idea of how it all went down.

See, my granddaddy worked with big-time mining companies, "back when things were good n' normal," as he'd put it. But he wasn't no foot-soldier. A "seismologist," he calls himself. Now, like most high-tech stuff, the bulk of their gear don't work anymore, but "seismologists," did very important jobs back in the day, and every one of 'em knew that Caleb Hill was the best.

All this is to say that the old man's talents were quite sought-after, you see, and as such, he was always traveling somewhere or other. So, he was "contracted," to help one of those big-deal mining companies I mentioned find some stuff called "lithium," way over in Tibet. And that's how come he was the first one to see it. "Too big for an earthquake, too fast to warn anyone," he said. He made it outside just in time to watch it happenin': everything around those Tibetan mountaintops, halfway up to the very peaks, drowning in the rising water.

By all accounts, something BIG crashed into some part of the Indian Ocean — big enough that the dust from the impact blocked out the sun for six months. And when that dust finally cleared, everybody in the world realized the sky that they were seeing wasn't the same sky they used to look up at. They couldn't find any of the stars they'd come to know and navigate by for all o' their lives, save for the sun itself. That, at least, didn't seem to change. But did you know there used to be one big moon instead o' three littler ones? And that, sometimes, it would be all dark at night with no moon at all lightin' the way? Strange times those must have been, but I digress.

All the engineers in the world still can't get the "computers," working again. Physicists think the whatever-it-is is still there, where it crash-landed, emitting one mighty strong "electromagnetic field." And my great uncle Buster and his biologist friends think it was carrying "microscopic extraterrestrial life." Some kind of weird germ or somethin'. So weird, in fact, that they're certain it had to come from someplace else. "Another world entirely." That's what they believe caused the "rapid mutations," all over. Everything alive started going through all kinds of changes. And the first spot those "mutations," popped up was someplace called "Komodo Island." Uncle Buster says you would not want to see that island nowadays, "under any circumstances." But granddaddy tells him that "nothing and no one is one hundred percent all-bad," and that there's probably even a dragon out there who's at least kinda good. I tend to agree with that way o' thinkin' about things.

In any case, this all happened sixty-some-odd years ago. Some folks alive today, though, can recall the Komodo dragons of the past — pretty scary in a vacuum, but all confined to one little island and, broadly speakin', no real threat to humanity at large. So much for all that.

The first generation of dragons — they dropped "Komodo," from the name pretty quick — grew up big. Ten times the size of their parents, just as tenacious, and even more venomous. And they turned out to be outstanding swimmers. Some even evolved gills, and they still rule the water to this day. But many of their kin decided they preferred dry land. Just a couple years later, they'd become the "apex predators," on every continent, and have been since. Darn things were "breeding like rabbits," and mutations happened so fast that "no biome was off-limits for long." Some of them even have wings now! Imagine that? Over a hundred feet long, three thousand pounds, and flying by their own strength! And Uncle Buster swears he saw one o' them things breathin' fire. "It defies all logic," granddaddy says.

Here's the thing, though: apart from the ocean-dwellers, these suckers don't abide the dark and cold. So, for the most part, we can avoid 'em by spendin' the daylight hours hiding out in mines and caverns and doing the majority of our hunting and gathering by night. Not that it'd kill the dragons to come after us. They're so big they could survive almost anywhere, in spite o' their cold blood. "Gigantotherms," Uncle Buster calls 'em. He says the lack of light and heat just makes 'em super sluggish, that they could hunt us down if they wanted, but "it'd be like running a triathlon to swat a fly." Whatever a "triathlon," is, he means the juice ain't worth the squeeze.

Lucky for us, these mountains are riddled with holes. Deep ones, too. And it's on account of the relative safety provided to us by this gracious landscape that we got people from all walks and talks of life whose families made their way here, where they could hand down their "various artistic and scientific disciplines." Pretty soon, all those folks had established a few densely populated settlements, like our "beautiful city of New Cavetown." Poor Old Cavetown's just a wreck about bein' replaced, though. Literally. It was destroyed. But safe as it is here, I'm dyin' to get out.

See, those biologist-types I mentioned earlier, they reckon the very same "mutagen," what instigated the evolution of the dragons is also responsible for the "extraordinary capabilities," that permeate our generation. The grown-ups have no idea what to make of all that. But we just call it what it is: magic. That's right, I said "sorcery." Wizard stuff! It's like, we can hear the trees, water, light, wind and animals — everything — reachin' out to us, and they all have their own languages. The more we learn to listen, to understand and respond, the more we can sweet-talk the world into, well, doin' stuff for us.

Most of the scientists, even my ma and pa, don't believe us, but science ain't the same thing it was when they were our age, clearly. "A schizophrenic side-effect of the mutation," they call it. Those sticks-in-the-mud have a nice, long name for almost everything. Think they know more about us than we do, and they wanna study, real close, what makes us tick. They think somehow by observin' the mutagen at work in a "controlled environment," they can figure out how to turn it all back. And maybe they're right, but the world around us — nature — it don't want that. It wants us free to explore, to learn, and yeah, maybe die, but most of that ain't so scary. All that reachin' out, that nature whisperin' to us, it leads to somethin'. Somethin' of great importance, I think. Truly, I do. And I'd bet the very last chocolate bar on Earth that at least some of our answers lie with that whatever-it-was that crashed into the planet all those years ago.

Oh, and you know what else? I'm not the only one who feels that pull. In fact, most of us kids can, and for a few of us, it's too darn strong to resist. So, you see, we're plannin' to break outta town and see where it takes us. Of course, the grown-ups have their gates and their guns. And even if we can get by them, we'll have to pass through the Shenandoah Valley, which, as I may or may not have alluded to, is positively chock-full of man-eatin' dragons. And it ain't just the dragons you've gotta worry about out there.

"But Elijah," I hear you say, "how's a buncha kids, magic though they may be, meant to make it through so perilous a gauntlet as you have here described, to uncertain ends, on their own and against all odds?"

Well, my granddaddy don't approve of gamblin', so I'll hear no talk of "odds." And anyway, he and Uncle Buster said they've got somethin' that might be able to help us. A kind of old-world machine that they've kept running somehow, stashed in a grotto a couple miles South of Cavetown, "for emergencies only." Somethin' called a "JEEP?"

Granddaddy always says it was a mistake for people to put "computers," inside their "cars," in the first place, that things used to be "built to last," and that there's probably fewer than a hundred "cars," in the whole world that still work. Most of the grown-ups give no credence to my granddaddy's words; they say it's "nothing but the dementia talking these days."

I don't understand any o' that, but the way he talks about this "JEEP," makes it sound otherworldly powerful. Incidentally, that's just the kind of powerful we're lookin' for to make our plan seem a little bit more feasible. But we'll need granddaddy's help to operate it. So, the next time he's havin' what he calls a "lucid moment," we spring into action and "fight for our freedom." Granddaddy says that a lot, too.