Free Ashes of the Earth by Eliot Pattison

it was about secrets of
the spirit.

    Ten
thousand geese we have counted this past week, more than double the
migration rate of five years ago. Nature is well pleased with her
scoured planet. Once I dreamt of fixing a camera to the leg of one of
these feathered vagabonds. Now I dream of becoming one.

    The
earliest of the pages read like an almanac, giving a statistician's
review of life in the colony, listing number of inhabitants, babies
born during the past year, cows, horses, and pigs in the colony
farms, the size of the grain harvest, milk production, tons of flour
produced, even the gallons of syrup gathered in the maple groves.
Every page had the same format, elegant text framed in a box, the
shaded borders containing artwork and sometimes brief aphorisms or
quotes, several in Latin.
    An
unexpected contentment settled over Hadrian as he ranged through the
journal. His old friend was still alive in the pages, his presence so
real he could smell one of the sassafras twigs Jonah often chewed
when coming in from the forest. He couldn't help taking pleasure in
the accounts of the little events that made up life in Carthage.
    A
pet goat followed a girl into the school building. Two hundred pies
were consumed in the last night of the midsummer fair. A new schooner
had been launched to haul lumber and salt from up the coast.
    Surely
this had been Jonah's real goal, simply to document the normalcy,
show the colony as a living organism, demonstrate how, despite all
their trials and the self-destruction of advanced societies,
individual humans would find a way not only to survive but also to
celebrate life.
    Every
few weeks came a different type of page, ones filled with drawings
and instructions, like little manuals for civilization. These
recorded the designs for the equipment and buildings that had
advanced the colony. The pile driver used for building the docks, the
water-powered saw mill, the first steam boiler.
    He
found himself gazing at the darkest corner of the vault, where Jonah
had leaned wide planks, pinned to which were detailed drawings of his
future projects. Hadrian stacked these planks against the
bookshelves, exposing an obsolete highway map that he pulled away
from the wall. Then he choked with emotion as he brushed away the
dust accumulated over years. Waist high on the wall were six rows of
identical marks cut into the wood. Hadrian did not need to count
them. He himself had carved ten in each row, twenty-five years
earlier.
    This
was the place of first things.

    It
was a storm,
Hadrian had told himself when he glimpsed the first flashes on the
horizon. Hiking in the mountains by the lake, he had been in a low
ravine when he'd seen the brilliant flashes of light reflected off
the clouds and felt the first gale-force winds. He had gone in two
days ahead of the rest of the family to do repairs on their little
cabin deep in the mountains and felt it prudent now to descend closer
to the lake to find phone coverage, to tell his wife to wait at home
with the children until the weather improved.
    The
storm was like none he'd ever seen, with intense bursts of light on
the horizon yet no rain, only long angry strokes of lightning arcing
across the sky and violent blasts of wind that began leveling trees
along the ridgetops. He was not surprised to find no phone service by
the time he reached the water and had been about to return to the
cabin when he first heard the frantically ringing bell. Running down
the coastal trail toward the sound, uneasily watching the strange
white-capped roiling in the water, he nearly stumbled over the
bearded man hammering the old bell mounted at the edge of a high
cliff, a vestige of an old fog warning system. Neither man spoke, for
they had both caught sight of the large sailing yacht struggling to
reach shore, her mast broken, a makeshift sail shredded in the wind.
Suddenly a huge wave appeared and just as suddenly swallowed the
boat. Tears streaming down his cheeks, the stranger had