Inertia

I've been moving for so long that I’ve forgotten what day it is. Some days, it feels like just yesterday that I was visiting colleges in New York. Some days, running water feels like a distant dream.

It happened while we were in the air. It just seemed like turbulence; it only lasted about a minute. A man complained that his movie shut off and the flight attendant assured him they would have it all sorted out once we got through the rough patch and they regained signal. The flight attendant put out similarly miniature fires on her way back up to the front of the plane, navigating the shaking fuselage like a weathered sailor completely undeterred by choppy waves during a late-night storm. She buckled into her seat at the front facing the rest of the cabin and made a silly face at a little girl seated in the front row. The turbulence stopped shortly after, but the in-flight entertainment never returned. After a few quick complaints from impatient travelers, the flight attendant made her way to the cockpit. Ten minutes later, she returned and quietly sat down in her seat. The child in front of her tried to get her attention but the flight attendant just stared blankly out the window and clutched the heart-shaped locket hanging around her neck. Another flight attendant knelt next to her and gently shook her out of her reverie. She mumbled something to him before returning her gaze back outside. The other flight attendant rushed into the cockpit but never came back out.

A little over an hour later, the captain’s voice came over the intercom. “We apologize for the inconvenience, but there seems to have been a miscalculation while we were fueling up and we are going to have to make a quick pit stop in Vegas before continuing on to your final destination at LAX.” A collective groan rose up from the cabin. “We’ve been having some technical difficulties communicating with the ground but we’ll get this bird back up in the air and onto sunny California as soon as we can. Please buckle up and remain seated for what may be a bumpy landing.”

I couldn’t see out any windows, but I can only imagine what the other passengers began to see as we descended and the ground slowly came into view. A quiet murmur rose into a confused chatter. The captain spoke over the intercom again. “Please, nobody panic. We’re going to try to find a runway that is clear enough for landing and find out what is happening. Everybody remain calm.” A woman to my right with her face pressed against the glass gently started sobbing.

We taxied for a minute before coming to a stop in the middle of the tarmac. The flight crew opened the emergency door and inflated the landing slide. Apparently they weren’t expecting to take-off again anytime soon, and when I got outside I understood why. Everything was gone. Not gone, demolished. The entire airport lay in ruins, none of its structure remained – just twisted metal, shattered glass, and crumbling concrete. The runway and tarmac nearest to what used to be the international terminal was littered with the wreckage of planes and airport vehicles that seemed to have been violently thrown into each other. Scattered fires still raged from the collisions and no one dared venture too close. There were bodies near the edge of the crash zone. I looked away and tried to forget the unnatural way their limbs were contorted. The shell of an overturned jet lay smoldering a hundred yards away from any discernible runway, looking like a trebuchet had launched it to its final resting place. We couldn’t pick up any radio signals or broadcasts of any kind. Aside from the roar of the inferno, the world was quiet. No alarms. No sirens. Not even the occasional birdsong. Just overwhelming silence.

Several more planes landed that day. A man who earlier that day was flying a single-engine only a few hundred feet above the ground told us that it looked like the entire world below had briefly sped up underneath him and then suddenly halted. Everything on the ground got tossed like toys flung about by a petulant toddler that pulled the rug out from under them. Earthbound planes slammed into each other on the runways, fireballs erupting skyward on impact. A plane that was just gaining speed and taking off corkscrewed in the high-velocity winds and nosedived right back into the ground. The airport imploded and spilled over sideways. An unstable shelf from a nearby plateau cracked apart and tumbled to the ground, raising a massive dust cloud that the pilot raced to elevate above. It took twenty minutes for the dust to settle, but when it did, everything on the ground was completely still. Nothing moved. He circled overhead for a few minutes before venturing out to the city and flew over the Strip. He said that it was a concrete and marble mausoleum but refused to elaborate. He flew off again in his Cessna with a volunteer spotter just before nightfall to try to find other survivors, maybe another functional airport where others might have landed – signs of life, somewhere. They never returned.

The sky was incredible that first night. When the flames died out, there was no light pollution at all – just darkness emanating from every direction. I had never seen so many stars.

After the chaos of that first day, the next few passed slowly. We gathered the remaining planes together and took stock of our rations. There wasn’t much, just the leftover packaged airplane food and beverages from a few half-filled flights. Some tried to salvage supplies from the ruins of the airport, but the digging was hardly worth the effort. Most would return empty-handed, unable to bring back anything useful but demoralized from what they were able to find. Our group of survivors numbered about four hundred and we stayed together on the tarmac, using the immobile planes as shelter. We were all passengers from the planes that landed that first day.

After three days, we realized that the sun’s cycle was taking about 30 hours now. A physics grad student I recognized from my campus tour at NYU hypothesized that this meant the Earth’s rotation must have slowed by around 250 miles per hour. He said that, if what the other pilot said was true about the Earth speeding up before suddenly slowing, the whiplash from that sudden deceleration could have caused this kind of destruction on the ground worldwide. He couldn’t fathom why such a thing might have happened though. Nobody added any comments or offered any alternative guesses. After a week, I stopped wearing my watch. After two weeks, the acrid smell of decay coming from the rubble was too much to bear and even the toughest among us kept our distance. After three weeks, we managed to right a mostly-intact passenger bus and get its engine running. We had a few mechanics and engineers in the group and they quickly got to work repairing anything with a motor that might be salvageable. Someone found an untouched gas tank buried underground at what used to be a gas station a few miles away. Soon, we had a small fleet of capable vehicles to take us away from this desert grave that used to be an airport, but we had no clear plan of where to go. We split ways and I joined the caravan heading west, hoping to someday make it back home, hoping that something might be left of it.

We made steady progress through the desert. Most of the roads were clear, but where they weren’t, the desert was smooth enough to bypass trouble. We became experts in spotting abandoned gas stations, valued for their preciously hidden underground gas reserves but only noticeable by their scattered detritus. A half-submerged Shell sign sticking out of a sand dune 80 feet east of its original home - and that was the thing, it was always to the east. As we moved across the barren landscape, we got a better view of the destruction wrought in the wake of this world. It was like everything on the surface got swept in one direction by a malevolent force – or an indifferent Earth violently shaking the pests loose off its back. Any cars that were on the road at the time could still be seen littered about the desert in the distance, nothing more than crumpled wreckage dotting the horizon. Nature hadn’t fared any better than our man-made monuments. Cacti were ripped out of the ground and strewn about. Even if we had the inclination and the capability, we never saw any wildlife worth hunting. Only the insects remained.

When we finally got to the coast, we saw what the power of the raging ocean can do to an unprepared city. Shipwrecks garnished the tops of the monstrous, concrete gravestones of the former city, haphazardly placed by the tsunami that swept through after this tectonic disaster. We continued south, venturing into abandoned cities and looting resources whenever we ran low, but never lingering. I tried not to think about what would be awaiting me when I finally got back to Laguna. Maybe the home I was searching for was high enough in the cliffs that it avoided the same aquatic demise as the rest of the seaside. Maybe, by some miracle, you did too.

Our second week in California, we saw other survivors for the first time since we landed. A dozen headlights from a pack of motorcycles lit up the road about a mile ahead of us, all coming our way. We pulled over to the side of the road to greet them but lost sight of their headlights when they were about a hundred yards out. We were naïve enough to think that they would be as happy to see new people as we were – and I was lucky that we had stopped near a collapsed forest. When the shots started ringing out above the rumble of the approaching engines, I ran into the dark thicket of the trees and didn’t stop until I hit a wall of impassable wood.

When I returned to the caravan in the morning, there was nothing left. They picked it completely clean, leaving behind just one passenger bus with its tires slashed and marked with a jagged, obscene symbol. There were no bodies to mourn.

I walked the rest of my journey alone. When possible, I preferred to follow streams and rivers than roads. Fresh water and fewer chances of encountering other people. I followed the sun during the day and the stars at night, trekking south and west through the nature I had too often ignored. Or at least what was left of it.

After such a long time and with most of the houses from the Laguna cliffside wiped away, I wasn’t sure I would even recognize home when I found it. But somehow, the gnarled oak tree out front with our initials carved into the base survived the world’s cruel turns. Its roots must have reached far enough into the earth to hold firm, and nestled underneath one of its above-ground roots, was our time capsule. I can’t stop long enough to risk being found and I don’t have the heart to search through the ruins of the house, so I’m leaving this behind instead to let you know where I’ve been and where I’m going. I’ll travel north and south with the seasons but never settle anywhere, always returning to these only roots I’ve ever really known. I don’t feel like planting any more and I don’t know if this world would even be hospitable to them anymore. I hope you’re far away from here, but I hope you come back and read this someday. I’ll check it every time I wander through.

Love,

Your Hopeful Wanderer.