The End of the World

The three of us took a walk just before dark. We wanted to see how the partygoers from the previous night had fared. In the two blocks we walked from our house to theirs, the level of destruction to Hattiesburg sank in. Nine months earlier, I’d been patrolling the embattled streets of Fallujah. The two places were shockingly similar.

Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction

Hattiesburg, Mississippi
August 2005

“You’re dead!” I shouted, “I shot you.”

“Nuh uh, I shot you first,” came the call from the ditch across the street. These arguments usually signaled the end of the game that we just called ‘playing guns.’ How uniquely American. This often led us to throwing a string of firecrackers into a culvert or climbing trees.

These drainage ditches in the low, rolling clay hills of north Florida served as our trenches. The crumbling blacktop was our no-man’s-land. Our rifles were oak boughs, and our battlefield was the neighborhood.

When not defying death by wiggling into tiny crevasses in the earth, I was the kid who always played war. Even when everyone else wanted to ramp our bicycles across our former entrenchments, I wanted to keep playing combat.

Often these mock battles were outside, but in the humid south, the rain frequently drove us indoors. While playing guns, the game would turn into commando raids on the kitchen. One of our favorite targets was juice and Pop-Tarts.

Joining the Marine infantry at 17, I never grew out of this phase.

After being discharged from the Marines in 2005, I moved back to the state that I had learned to call home, Mississippi. I enrolled in college at the University of Southern Mississippi simply because that’s where many of my old high school friends were.

I rented a one-bedroom apartment, thrilled to have my own space, since for the previous four years I’d rarely been more than spitting distance from another dude. Mine was a downstairs apartment with dark brown siding.

I kept to myself but would always say hi to my upstairs neighbor, an older lady with a brachycephalic Boston terrier named Petey, who liked me more than her, I think.

I was 23, a freshman at the same college my little sister, four years my junior, was enrolled in. Both being freshmen, we even shared some of the same classes, which was odd. I was adrift from the world I’d known. I’d been institutionalized by a system of ranks and unquestioning orders, and then set loose on the world only a few months after I’d been in combat.

Most of my classmates viewed me as an oddity. I was a veteran, but the only veterans anyone knew back then were from Vietnam. Despite being young, I was older than most freshmen, and I didn’t talk about the Marines, and certainly not about Fallujah. That was my story. I’d earned it. So, I mostly kept to myself, more of an observer of college life, rather than a participant.

All children growing up in the South learn from a young age that the sky is always trying to kill us. Tornadoes carve swaths through the pine forest, hail as big as baseballs could pummel us to death on any given day. These phenomena are so frequent that we barely bat an eye. Although, should a quarter of an inch of snow fall from the sky, we treated it as if it might as well be brimstone.

The other storm that we all have learned to carry some measure of respect for was a hurricane, where complacency is the true killer. Over the course of a summer, half a dozen of them can hit the Gulf coast on a bad year. The only people that seem to be affected by them to most of us are the rich people who live along the beachfront. We’d watch as our favorite weather anchor, Jim Cantore, would put himself in the eye of the storm and hang on to a streetlight for dear life for our amusement. We knew if Jim, the South’s personal gladiator, was in our neighborhood, it was time to evacuate.

“It ain’t gonna do shit,” said Colin, my longtime friend who lived a few blocks away from me with two roommates.

“I don’t know man. Jim Cantore is on the coast,” I said as we were sitting in his living room late one August evening. “Jim is never wrong,” I added.

We’d been watching our favorite reality TV show, the Weather Channel, keeping tabs on the trajectory of a massive swirling storm churning out in the Gulf of Mexico. The 2005 hurricane season had been especially active in the Gulf. Tropical storms get assigned a name alphabetically as they form during the year. We were on letter K. Katrina was her name, and her projected path had inched its way east, moving from Louisiana to the Mississippi coast, and she’d gained strength to a category 5, as high as the scale goes.

“Nah,” said Colin, his heavy southern drawl had infected my latent one to where I almost sounded like I’d never left. “They said all of them other ones were going to be bad too, and nothing happened. It ain’t gonna do shit.”

My memory only recalled one other category 5 storm, Hurricane Andrew, that hit Miami when I’d lived in Central Florida for a few years as a kid. We’d gotten some wind, and the occasional tree limb had snapped, but I remember seeing the news coverage of a city that looked more like the victim of an atomic bomb as opposed to a storm. The destruction was total.

I’d been eyeing his house, a mid-century brick ranch home and comparing it to my 1980s apartment complex that was trying to hide its mold and aging siding issues.

“You mind if I crash on your couch?” I asked, knowing the request was just a formality. One of Colin’s roommates, Lance, had already evacuated, and the other, Nate, didn’t care.

“Come on,” he said, lighting a Camel cigarette. “Hurricane party tonight.”

Hattiesburg Mississippi was 75 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. I knew this was going to be a big storm, but I figured we were just far enough inland that we were perfectly safe, yet close enough to the action to have a front-row seat to the biggest show in the country. I went back to my apartment and packed a few things, and filled my bathtub with water, a trick I’d learned from the hurricane prep of my youth. If the water went out for a few days, it would be nice to have a big tub full ready to go, if for nothing else than to just flush the toilet.

I was just about to walk out when I paused. A nagging thought kept creeping into my head: take the gun. I was being paranoid. The storm was supposed to make landfall the next morning, and I’d be back by nightfall. With my door locked, I drove my old truck back to Colin’s brick fortress from my house made of sticks.

A phenomenon occurs in the South on the eve of a hurricane: the hurricane party. Since it was a college town, the residents always took any excuse to party. It was our way of giving Mother Nature the finger. “Bring it on. You ain’t gonna do shit.”

We didn’t have a party planned for Colin and Nate’s house, so we wandered the neighborhood to where an actual party was already in full swing. That house had a long, tree-lined driveway that was bumper to bumper with cars and trucks of students living on their parents’ money.

The conversation was all about the weather. We knew the storm was coming. It was all just speculation as to how bad it would be. The consensus was that it wouldn’t be terrible, and we were all just happy to have the day off from class.

“Those poor bastards on the coast sure have it coming, though,” I’d heard one frat boy say to his completely uninterested girlfriend.

After midnight, the three of us made our way back to our house. That night it was my house too. I collapsed on the faded blue sofa in the living room that had once been a garage. The wind was just beginning to blow. It was only a breeze, but it was steady, tropical, and wet. I fell asleep within minutes to the gentle rustle of leaves outside on a moonless night.

Was that incoming or outgoing? I think that was artillery, outgoing. It’s ours. No need to worry. Thump. No, that’s something else. Mortars? Thump. That’s coming in from the other side of the river. Oh Jesus, I gotta take cover. Boom.

The sound was deep, dreamlike. Where was I? Boom. I rolled over onto the floor. As my eyes adjusted to the blue gray of early morning light, I could see the couch and feel the old shag carpet of Colin’s living room between my fingers. This was not Iraq. Boom. What was that?

I stood up and walked to the bay window, echoes of war fading away. Outside I could see that Highway 49, Hattiesburg’s main north to south thoroughfare, was empty. Another loud bang hit, and I saw a green loblolly pine cone about six inches long roll off the roof and hit the driveway. That’s what was making those noises. The wind was rocking the 100-foot-tall trees around the house so much it was causing them to lose their immature cones. A thin rain was blowing sideways.

The house had a recessed front porch, more of a landing than an actual porch that sat between the converted garage and the old formal front room. I walked out onto the concrete porch, elevated four feet above the driveway, and watched the low clouds scud overhead. They seemed so close to the ground that I thought they might touch the treetops. These were true hurricane clouds, fast and silent.

The door opened behind me. Colin stepped out and lit a cigarette. The wind that was pushing the trees was coming from behind the house, and our small alcove was a dry, windless pocket.

“Told you it wouldn’t do shit,” said Colin, the cherry of his camel bobbing up and down with each syllable. He offered me one, and I took it. After watching the sky for a while, we headed in for a southern style breakfast of cereal with whole milk and a side of Coke-a-Cola, the South’s version of iced coffee.

Colin worked for the Coke-a-Cola bottling company and had worked for them since he was in high school, so we were always well supplied with Coke products in damaged packaging.

The power flickered around 8 a.m., and after thirty minutes, it went out for the last time and didn’t come back. We’d all been through this drill before; we’d expected it to happen. The beer stash was in a cooler, and we knew not to open the refrigerator for anything other than a very short snatch and grab.

Nate got up and the three of us pulled some camp chairs out to our little protected porch and watched the storm blow in. By mid-morning, the rain had gone from the occasional pulse to where the view would white out in a sheet of rain to a steady gale. This is when the swaying pines moved more than the wood of their trunks.

The ground around the base of the trees in the saturated soil looked as if it were breathing. Large mounds heaved and swelled like waves in a choppy sea as the root mass shifted under the earth.

The first tree fell in a gust across the highway from where we sat. We watched as it seemed to fall in slow motion. A grand ball of roots and black soil with a deep wedge of taproot fell away from us, clipping the gutter on a house as its upper branches grabbed at air as if trying to catch itself as it went down. This elicited a great cheer from us.

“Did you see that?” we all said, pointing to the fallen tree.

“Hell yeah, that was awesome. I’m getting a beer, y’all want one?” Colin said as he walked into the house.

“Just bring the cooler out here,” said Nate.

Colin hauled the blue Igloo out to the porch. Figuring that we might as well imbibe. We weren’t going anywhere, and we each cracked open a cold silver and blue can of Bud Light.

Within an hour of that first tree falling, a dozen more went down. Limbs from the trees in our yard started falling from high up, hitting the ground like javelins. Our relaxed demeanor was now much more anxious. We were no longer sitting but standing with the door open.

There was a sound of a rapidly approaching train that sent us scrambling into the house to take cover in the hallway. We thought it was a tornado, but more likely it was a microburst, a powerful downdraft of air that spilled mature trees like dropped toothpicks in the neighborhood. As it subsided, we laughed nervously.

“Let’s pile up our mattresses in the hallway, just in case this thing spits a tornado at us,” I suggested.

Hurricanes are insidious things that spawn off tornadoes during the storm. We hastily erected our mattress fort in the hall. Some padding and coils of springs were our insurance policy against a brick, mid-century ranch house falling on top of us.

Most of the houses in the Deep South don’t have basements because of the high-water table. The hall was the only place where we were surrounded by interior walls. Our thought being that we’d be crushed under the weight of the falling roof as opposed to suffering the embarrassment of being flung out and impaled on a fence for all the world to see, I guess.

After that first microburst the wind became a living thing, picking trees at random to toss down without a thought, some snapped in half, others uprooted, the trunk falling like an executioner’s ax, often splitting the exterior wall of a house and cleaving into someone’s bedroom.

Visibility dropped to a gray veil of ceaseless, biting rain squalls. The wind howled so loud that we had to shout above the noise just to be heard. Water poured through the back door, flooding the lower living room that I’d slept in a few hours earlier.

The thought that we were in real danger came when another microburst hit across the street from us while we were standing at the door watching the storm rage. The rain crushed straight down as if pushed by an enormous helicopter rotor. Trees parted and fell in all directions. We watched as the corner of the neighbors’ house, where their carport made an umbrella, catch the outflow. The roof buckled and lifted. For an instant it hovered in place, then separated from the rest of the house before peeling backwards and being flung into a maelstrom of splinters and shingles.

We stood, transfixed by the spectacle. The town we knew was being shredded apart by unseen hands. Colin’s phone rang. It was his third roommate, Lance. Colin put him on speaker. “Y’all need to get to a shelter,” his voice came through the little speaker weak and barely discernible. “The worst part of the storm, the eye wall, is going to hit you head on.”

“We ain’t going nowhere,” added Colin, “You should see this-” a thunderous crash on the roof of the house cut Colin short. “Holy shi-” was the last thing Lance heard from us. A massive pine tree in the backyard whose diameter exceeded four feet crashed onto the roof. Branches and water broke through the ceiling above our heads, and we dove for cover. The tree landed on the brick wall at nearly the exact angle of the roofline, displacing the weight enough so that it didn’t split the house in half, crushing us underneath it.

Colin picked up his phone to see that the call was lost. Along with the call, the signal went with it. The cell tower must have gone out at the same moment the tree hit the house because both Nate and my phones had no reception either. We’d just lost all communications.

“He’ll think we’re dead for sure,” said Nate.

The eye wall of a hurricane, especially the eastern wall, is the most powerful part of the storm. That was what was bearing down on us. There’d be no calm in the eye for us.

Surreal scenes passed before us for the next hour. The screaming wind was relentless. There was no break, only a nonstop howl punctuated by the sounds of trees falling and glass breaking. During that time, I heard an eerie warbling coming through the gale that grew in intensity as it approached. A green highway sign the size of a sedan came tumbling end over end like a saw blade spinning 100 miles an hour. It passed by our house and continued unabated out of sight, down the four-lane road.

The banshee wailed.

She was still a hurricane when the eye went over Atlanta, Georgia, over three hundred miles away. It was slow at first, almost imperceptible, but the wind died down. By evening, the rain was only a drizzle accompanied by a gentle breeze.

People started emerging, and everyone had the same question to ask, “Are you okay?”

“Yes, and you?”

We’d made it, we’d survived. This is when things got interesting.

______

No sooner had the rain stopped than we heard chainsaws firing up. People were helping cut each other free. Everyone was a hero, and villainy didn’t exist. We all shared a bond. We were survivors.

Being a broke college student with an even more broken truck, I’d had a bit of foresight and placed the old truck right under a weak-looking tree that I thought might fall and total the vehicle. I was hoping the insurance would cover enough to let me get a newer, more reliable beater. The tree in question had in fact fallen but got caught in the fork of a second tree on the opposite side of the driveway. The tree trunk hovered inches above the bed, making it impossible for me to back it out. My vehicle blocked Colin and Nate’s cars in the carport.

The only thing we had to cut the truck free was a dull Coleman hatchet that kept a sharpness just slightly more than a bowling ball. Thankfully, the tree was only about 10 inches thick and after an agonizingly long time, the three of us cut the truck free by nightfall.

I moved the truck to the front of the house on the street corner that wasn’t covered in downed trees. As I walked back up the driveway, I heard the neighbors with the missing roof come driving demolition derby style through the mud of their front yard. I turned in time to see them careen backwards through the flooded ditch, sending a wake of brown water over the road. Their SUV had the spare tire mounted on the back and this acted like a battering ram as it slammed into the side of my truck.

“I’m so sorry,” said the driver.

She was a middle-aged woman with her elementary school aged daughter in the passenger seat. “We only have a quarter of a tank of gas and need to get out of town. We lost our roof and have no place to stay.”

That was understandable. I nodded. “We’ll worry about it when you come back,” I said. “Be safe, good luck.”

They sped off, weaving through the debris on the highway. I never saw them again.

When we arrived at the house and saw only two cars, it appeared as if there were only a few people still there. As we walked closer, we spotted a newer black Toyota truck wedged six feet up in the branches of a tree to the side of the house.

Their long driveway had a goliath of a pine tree lying dead center down the length of the asphalt. Sticking out from the edge of the bark were tires, many tires. The tree had crushed three cars parked nose to tail.

The house was still full of people, who were a mix of shocked and hungover. A small creek that ran along the back of their property had flash flooded, floating the truck into the tree. The water level had risen into the house, sending everyone fleeing into the attic.

The crowd all shared the same frantic bewilderment. They didn’t know how they were going to get home, or even if they still had a home. They felt traumatized.

Not having flashlights, and there not being anything we could do for them, we started the short hike back home before it became fully dark. The fallen trees crossed every street so thick that it would’ve been possible to walk from their house back to ours without ever having to touch the ground, just hopping from log to log. The neighborhood looked like a sawmill yard.

Since my truck was free from its tomb, we spotted the same path that Mrs. Crash and her daughter, who’d hit my truck earlier, had taken to get to the highway. We were curious what else there was to see around town, so the three of us loaded up and made a reconnaissance of the devastation.

It was like driving in a cave. Aside from my headlights, there was not a single light anywhere to be seen, and low clouds still blacked out any moon or starlight overhead. Most of the roads were totally impassable from downed trees and unidentifiable heaps of rubble and debris. Dead power lines snaked through the wet streets, and the awnings of convenience stores were tossed into the roadways dozens of feet away.

At one point, I became hopelessly disoriented. Street signs were missing, and the darkness was so total I believed that I’d driven out into the countryside.

“I’m lost as shit,” I admitted. “Where the hell are we?”

“Man, we’re on main street. The college is just to our left,” said Colin.

That was my cue to go home. Using the school as a landmark, I made my way, mostly using dead reckoning to make it back to Nate and Colin’s house, where I slept a second night to the smell of wet carpet and pine needles.

There were no plans, so we did what everyone else was doing, helped our neighbors in any way we could. There were no phones, no news, no electricity, and no water. What everyone had was freezers and refrigerators full of food that would quickly go bad in the Southern heat.

Spontaneous barbecue parties sprung up on every street. The propane tanks worked and those whose grills hadn’t gone airborne welcomed anyone and everyone to toss what they had onto the flames. The heady smell of roasting meat blanketed the entire city. Everyone had a story to tell, and for two days we all sat on fallen logs, eating with our hands and swapping tales about the storm.

By the third day, I’d realized something else too. There were no emergency services; no police, ambulances, or fire trucks. It was just the people who lived near us, most of whom we’d never met, looking after each other. It was, in its own way, beautiful.

Colin had picked his way across town in his car and got to the Coke-a-Cola plant. There were a few employees there. They were taking pallets of cases of water and dropping them outside of the gate for anyone who needed it, which, by this point, included everyone. There was a frantic buzzing about the pallets when a new one came out as people clambered over each other to get the precious commodity. Colin filled his work truck up with water and dropped it off at our house, so we had enough to get by for a while.

I’d gone back to my apartment to check on things. My downstairs home was unscathed, but the second-floor roof had suffered a near total loss. Water damage was universal for the tenants on the top floor. There was almost no one staying at the complex anymore. Petey and his mom had evacuated. My bathtub full of water was gone. It had slowly leaked through the plugged drain. So much for that.

I picked up a few more things, and anything of value, including the shotgun that I kept in the bedroom, and went back to my new home.

Something that the disaster movies don’t glamorize is the issue of human waste. A week without running water and things start to literally go to shit quickly. There was a bit of privacy in the backyard behind the fallen tree’s root mass. That’s where the latrine went.

While Colin and I were away, Nate cut his hand on some broken glass and tried to patch himself up with an old t-shirt. I arrived home that afternoon to a horror scene of a kitchen counter covered with dried blood and blood-stained scraps of cloth littering the floor. There was a note splattered in rust-colored droplets with “See what you missed,” scribbled on a sheet of notebook paper.

Thankfully, the hospital had generators up and running by that time. They sewed him back up and sent him on his way. We saw him walking down the highway, smoking a cigarette with his hand wrapped up like a ball of cotton candy, the tips of three of his fingers stuck out and held the smoldering Marlboro.

Unlikely heroes emerged from nowhere during those days. As evening fell, we heard a megaphone blast down the street. The crackled audio announced, “Pizza, one free pizza per family.”

We couldn’t believe our ears. Like children hearing the stereo of an ice cream truck, we rushed to put our shoes on and raced out the door. The Domino’s Pizza trailer sat at an intersection. I’d seen this little trailer before, with just enough room to fit a generator powered conveyor belt oven and stacks of frozen pizzas. This was a common sight at the tailgating parties around the University of Southern Mississippi campus during football season.

They were giving away large pepperoni pizzas to anyone that walked up to them. When we got there, the man working the oven said, “Sorry there’s not more of a selection, but this stuff is all going to go to waste if we don’t cook it.” He handed the three of us a pizza as we stared in amazement. “I’ll come back tomorrow. As long as I still have pizzas, I’ll keep giving them out.”

“You’re a miracle worker,” I said, “Thanks.”

For the next two days, we ate pizza for every meal. He came back for lunch and dinner, and we ate it cold for breakfast. Which is pretty much what we ate regularly before the storm anyway.

This was about the time we started seeing refugees walking up from the Coast. People told us they’d lost everything. We wanted to help, but we had little ourselves. We also started hearing rumors that New Orleans was gone.

“What do you mean, gone?” I heard Nate talking to one of our neighbors.

“Like, it’s been destroyed,” said the older man with thin white hair as I walked up to them. “People are killing each other. The Superdome is full of dead bodies. Gangs are shooting at rescue helicopters. My cousin has a friend down there that killed a guy trying to break into his house.”

“No way,” said Nate.

“Sure enough,” he continued. “Said he called the police and told them what he’d done. They just told him to drag the dead fellow out by the road and leave him. Like he was a bag of garbage,” he chuckled, “You ever tried to move a dead body?” He asked, looking at me.

“Nope,” I lied.

“There’s a reason they call it dead weight,” he said to Nate. He wasn’t wrong there.

It was a ridiculous rumor, though. Why would New Orleans be destroyed? It wasn’t even in the direct path of the storm. Rumors run wild in a vacuum. Americans are accustomed to the idea that help is on the way. But there was no help. We were on our own.

______

The major crime was theft. The longer people went without, they started looking at the people who were with. Generators became an easy target. Families would run them at night to keep their freezers going. Someone would take a push lawn mower up next to the running generator and fire it up, unplug the chords, and cart it off, the owners being none the wiser until they went out to refuel it or found their precious food supplies turning to mush.

We started hearing gunfire and rumors of people being robbed at gunpoint and shot for cases of water. In 2005, not everyone and their mother owned an AR-15. We started going everywhere armed with pistols and shotguns. All the friendly neighborhood banter ceased. The thought moved from let me help you, to I have what I have, and you’d better not try to take it.

Having been in the worst fighting of the Iraq war only months earlier, I felt right at home in this environment. We needed supplies, and I was willing to do what was necessary to get them. I divided my time between my apartment and Colin and Nate’s house, walking to save what little fuel was left in my truck.

My walk took me past a collapsed gas station. The roof had fallen in and shattered the glass front wall. I knew there was food in there, so I hatched a plan to get it. Technically, it was looting, but I had seen nothing resembling law enforcement and, to me, this was scavenging, not stealing.

I went in at night with my worn old assault pack I’d carried in Fallujah on my back and a headlamp clenched in my fist to keep the light to a bare minimum and only used it when I needed to find my way inside the store.

There were shelves of untouched candy bars, the chocolate ones soft and melted in the heat. I filled my bag with cokes and cinnamon rolls, beer and cigarettes. Pay day came when I found the ultimate southern emergency ration, Pop Tarts. Pop Tarts were the modern equivalent to a 19th century sailor’s hardtack. This was our softtack. I took as many as I could fit and slipped as quiet as a spider back to my apartment.

The nights following the hurricane were stifling, the days hot and hazy under a sky where no rain fell. There hadn’t been so much as a breath of wind. Cicadas screamed all day and crickets chirped all night.

I vowed to never steal from anyone’s house, but even as I thought about it, I knew I might need to break that oath, deciding to cross that bridge when I got to it. Combat had conditioned me to chaos. I thrived on my nightly raids to the store. The three of us feasted on sugar and nicotine. In Iraq, I’d fought for my friends, and here it was the same.

The nights I spent at my apartment, I’d pull the fake leather couch that I’d bought for $50 up to the sliding glass door that the screen had blown out of. I would leave the door open in a futile effort to catch any hint of a breeze. I kept the long vertical blinds pulled closed to stay concealed.

Sleep was illusive. I’d sweat all night and stick to the cheap upholstery, but it was more than being uncomfortable; psychologists use the term hypervigilant. I slept with the Mossburg 12-gauge turkey hunting gun an arm’s length away, leaning against the wall.

One night, my eyes flicked open. I’d heard a familiar sound, one that I recognized from another broken city half a world away. It was the sound of shoes moving across concrete, and it was close.

Through the blinds in the faint light, I could see someone standing on my small patio, their back turned to me. Looking left and right, he scanned the street, then glanced at the open door, where the darkness hid me, lying on the couch.

Thoughts raced through my head. He was going to come in here, and he’d be on top of me if he did. I had to do something. My mind reeled and my hands acted without me. My fingers tightened around the shotgun, and I pulled it up to my shoulder. I could hear the blood pumping through my temples.

The angle was awkward, laying on my left side, but I managed to slide the barrel of the gun through the blinds without a sound. The guy outside was rubbing his hands together as if he were cold. I could feel his nervous energy. It matched mine. I pointed the barrel at the back of his head. Sweat was pouring out of me and into my eyes, but my breathing was still slow and steady because of years of training and practical application.

Now what? The story from New Orleans crossed my mind. How far was I willing to take this? This was not Iraq; this was not combat. I had the drop on him. Would he kill me if I didn’t do it first? Two factions warred in my mind. Time slowed, and I saw myself laying on the couch. I was watching myself again, an involuntary tick that I’d picked up in combat. This was the part of my personality that I hid, taking over. It was saying, ‘Step back, Jeremy. Let me take care of this so you don’t have to.’ This “other” had done this for me before.

“Hey,” I said, taking control as I whipped back into first person view. I didn’t say it like an authority figure. This wasn’t my command voice meant to get compliance from a slacking private first class or sketchy looking Iraqi at a checkpoint. This was the dry mouthed, almost conversational tone that I’d squeaked out instead of taking this person’s head off.

He stiffened and turned, the barrel of the 12-gauge looking like the mouth of a cannon staring right at him. He was young, probably one of my classmates, three weeks earlier. There was a flicker of hesitation as the realization of what he was looking at dawned on him. Then he did what any sensible person in his shoes would’ve done. He screamed.

His was not the jump-scene in a horror movie scream, this was a primal, guttural, prey-seeing-the-tiger in the foliage kind of shout that lives in all of us. My scream was that of a scared child. I wasn’t ready for that outburst as he flew off the porch, sprinting into the darkness.

The eruption had startled me just as badly as him, and I flipped over the back of the couch, cushions sticking to me as I went. I rolled up to standing, shotgun in my shoulder held at the ready, he was gone.

It took a few minutes to calm my heart back down out of the cardiac arrest stage. As it did, it dawned on me: This was how the world ends. Here I stood, a kid with a backpack full of candy, holding a real gun, defending my fort from another kid wanting my Pop Tarts for himself.

______

The lights came back on, and order was restored. We all forgot those few desperate days when hope abandoned us. It was like we’d been in a fever dream, the memory of it all slipping away as we woke up. Sure, we’d been in a storm, but we cleaned up, life resumed; we were resilient.

I was in a unique position to experience Hurricane Katrina. I was still living my nightmare when it happened, and I remembered. Civilized society will eat itself in a matter of weeks. The recipe is simple: start with a base of cataclysm, add a dash of despair, and remove all information. Bon appétit.

Jeremy Martin is a public servant who spent nearly 15 years as a park ranger and wildland firefighter. Martin has guided countless visitors through the vast and rugged landscapes of the American west as an interpretive ranger, sharing not only the beauty of the natural world but lessons of survival and resilience. He is a former Marine combat veteran, and he served two combat tours in Iraq, including the harrowing November 2004 Battle of Fallujah. From battlefield to backcountry, his writing captures the connection between man, nature, and the past.