The Crest

Old Portland City lay naked outside of the enclave. Gangs scurried about the decaying city like cockroaches, extorting and robbing at will. For safety, residents made friends with their neighborhood gang, even if it meant cooking them food and giving them what they demanded.

At the west end of Hawthorne Boulevard sat The Void, an intact bar from a different era. A person couldn’t miss it, there were remnants of urban gardens and squatters’ camps around. The homeless muttered obscure incantations on the sidewalks. Somehow, The Void survived the heat domes, escaped the fires, the floods, and the gangs. A pocket sanctuary to ease the madness of mankind.

The community around The Void bore a resemblance to another era, even amidst the concrete dust bowl called old Portland. There was a faded psychedelic mural of a tree on the side of The Void building. It said:

The Trees Have Souls.

Around the neighborhood, there were, in fact, still a few living trees, and real roses, watered with diligence, growing along the sidewalks. On another brick building, Keegan read the washed-out words.

Welcome to Hawthorne.

Home of the Photosynthesis Celebration.

Keegan went to that festival with his parents. A wild, exotic event. He never forgot it, the idolatrous came out of the woodwork. He never saw his mom and dad so happy.

A block from the The Void was the I Found God brothel. The large brown building bustled with customers from the enclave. These were people with means, lonely, despondent; individuals seeking their end of days consummation. True, with a wink of an eye they could claim 'they found God' amidst the great reckoning In so many words, it was their armageddon climax, why not go out with a bang, they rationalized. And despite the Shift, the I Found God brothel was busier than ever.

The decaying Old Portland city had another name, a more appropriate one called Stumptown, harkening back to a day when trees were as expendable as water. Now, the grand old dame of a city had neither trees nor water; how quickly everything changed.

Beside The Void sat the rusted shell of a flower power campervan, windows broken, tires flat. Keegan waited there for his pod.

“You made it,” he said to Margot.

“Yep, cool place here. I’m surprised Wild Bill let us out,” she said.

“No kidding. This is my old haunt,” he said.

“Nice, quite the beatnik you are,” she joked.

“We all have our other lives outside of The Crest. Besides, it’s not what you think. They’re on our side here,” he said.

They walked to the front door of The Void and waited outside; a crystalline beaded curtain hung in the alcove. They chatted a while until the others arrived, there was Lenore, Ben, Keegan, Margot, Agathe and Emilio. Beatrice and Markus didn’t come, the two had other plans.

Inside, they met the 82-year-old bartender named Maggie. She wore an orange velvet pantsuit with purple Janis glasses. A lapis necklace highlighted her furrowed face.

They walked in. “Welcome, friends; beer?” Maggie asked.

“What do you recommend?” Keegan asked.

“Everything we have is hedgerow beer. We have nettle, gorse, dandelion, oak leaf, and carrot.”

To Keegan, the place seemed quiet outside of a few young people drinking and chatting. They stopped talking and stared at the defenders, and then turned away, perhaps deferential to the Crefor, more often than not, disdainful. After a while, the gawkers returned to chatting. The Crefor were given a wide latitude in behavior, everyone knew what they did, glad they did it; the onlookers felt guilty for not being there themselves, but not too guilty.

Keegan watched as she brought the beer. Maggie hobbled around her bar, her gait slow, her body ached, an old woman doing the job of a young person. They took a seat and ordered their beers. They sat in a dark corner, all eight of them. They absorbed the ambiance of the dusty bar. There were memorabilia from the 60s, dusty, some tacky, paisley patterns, bright flowers. To the pod, it contrasted with the stark black and white barrenness of the place they worked.

To these eighteen-year-olds, the retro novelties meant nothing, curious anomalies perhaps, the pop culture of its time. A peace symbol was just a pictogram, with no backstory. Social justice, what’s that? Civil rights? Anti-war movements? Protecting the environment? The defenders were devoid of any pre-Shift history, except for Keegan. He knew otherwise from his parents; he read a lot.

Keegan stared at a faded poster on the back wall. He walked closer for a better look. He gazed at the picture of the woman, her dark eyes haunting, her lips sensual, her long black hair hypnotic. There was a sexuality in the face and the long eyebrows, but the image also brought a melancholy to the young man’s heart. Keegan didn’t know what it meant, perhaps a longing for that time, for the joy of a period. How could a woman in a poster from the 1960s elicit such emotion? He grew morose thinking about the world he lived in now.

“Her name’s Merrilee,” the bartender said to Keegan, noticing his enchantment with the picture. “She played here once; she autographed that poster at the bottom.”

“What was she like?” Keegan asked.

“I’ll tell you this. She had the voice of an angel, pure, crystalline, haunting.”

There was an element of nostalgia in the doddering bartender’s face, perhaps wanting to connect to those earlier days. Here with this young man, she could relive a moment in her life.

“I’ve seen nothing like her. I mean she has a raw beauty, but she looks clairvoyant,” he said.

“You’re not the first man to say that. I guess Merilee would make any man lose their mind, and yes, she seemed provident in a way. Especially, in the way she sang, her lyrics, her mannerisms.”

“I’m Keegan,” he said.

“They call me Maggie,” she said.

“What happened to Merillee?”

“Don’t know. She had a successful music career. She loved the Pacific Northwest, loved the trees, the moss, the green, the rivers….” The bartender began to choke up, her eyes became teary.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring back memories.”

“That’s okay, that’s all an old hippie like me can do these days anyway. Reminisce, reflect, ponder the beauty of what once was.”

“What kind of songs did she sing?”

The bartender’s eyes brightened. “Beautiful songs, ballads that would melt a young man’s heart. You from the Crest?” she asked.

“Yep.” Keegan said. “That obvious?”

“Yep.” she said. “Compared to the bleakness out there, I try to keep things colorful here, a little harlequin, that is until I get too old to run this place and believe me that time is coming. This body isn’t what it used to be.”

’It seemed like a good time to live, back then.”

“A glorious decade, full of love. I know it sounds cliché, but it’s true.”

“I’m trying to wrap my head around it. I mean how we got from that period to now.”

“We all are trying to figure it out, and I guess you’re going to ask why the boomers screwed it up for the rest of your generation. Right?”

“No… well, yes.” He was flummoxed by her honesty. “I mean, isn’t that the way things go, blame the previous generations.”

She laughed. “I never thought of it that way. I’ll tell you; we were just living our lives one day at a time, just like you. It’s not like we were naïve.”

“I don’t blame you; I just don’t understand your generation.”

“How so?”

“You boomers sounded so certain, so swayed by love and beauty.”

“And your point? Wouldn’t you want to live in a world like that? Look at what we’ve got now.”

“Yea, I guess you’re right.”

“Mind you, that decade created decent people who changed the world in later years. It wasn’t a one-off type of thing.”

“So, what happened?”

“Our system grew corrupt. We became a cliché in many ways I guess.”

“I don’t blame you for the Shift, but it sucks being on the Crest for two years of my life.”

“You’d better get back to your friends. Time is too precious talking to this old fool.”

“Right. Nice talking to you, Maggie.”

The pod seemed happy, letting off steam. They were engaged. Keegan looked at the other five people in the group and wondered who in the pod was the traitor. Maybe Wild Bill got it wrong. He couldn’t imagine who.

Maggie flipped on the radio.

The AM radio crackled and buzzed over the speakers and after a few more seconds, a charismatic broadcaster began his evening program. She turned up the volume. The announcer had a rich, resonant voice.

“Helloooo to you rockin’, roamin, eco refugees, prisoners, hippies, empaths, wherever you may be. This is your one and only Radio Free Oregon theeeee voice of the former state of Oregon serving the Willamette Valley and beyond. For those of you out there in the good old Oeste Americano, trapped in Antisis horror. For you on the road, the down, and disheartened, do not fret, do not give up hope, this is your place to tune in, to sing, to dance, or simply reminisce. We’re your broadcasting enlightenment bringing you 60,000 lovely watts from out here in the Greater Portland Enclave with three full-powered repeaters and five translators operating in hidden locations across the Valley and Coast Range.”

An advertisement came on the radio with a familiar advertisement that everyone in the Void knew by heart. “In a world of climate change, we are here for you. We at Permafrost Corporation design products for the ever-changing environment we live in. Our food products are meant to last in even the most inhospitable conditions and all our commodities are made in our remote factories right here in the Pacific Northwest. We are proud of our synthetic amino acid foodstuffs, including our scrumptious energy bars, our blissful Almost Meat canned products. Don’t forget our Tastes Like Bacon brand bacon, and our Tastes Like Eggs brand instant eggs. Of course, we source our ingredients from only the highest quality enclaves and habitats, even as far away as Alaska. Whether you’re starving out on the open road or in need of new recipes for your home cuisine, we are here for you. We are your technology company; we are the Permafrost Corporation.”

The advertisement ended and the announcer came back on the air. “Back again, ladies and gentlemen. We are here for you and especially for our resilient arbors out there. I dedicate this song to our lofty tree friends, defying the odds, greening the land again, and sucking in that good old dióxido de carbono.”

The song drifted across the bar room and some of the Crefor stopped their merrymaking to listen. It sounded enchanting, about a man who had sinned. The singer of the ballad sang of a man with character flaws; he’d performed terrible misdeeds. The ballad spoke of this former inmate and his one and only love. He’d fallen hard, failed badly, and harmed others, it weighed on the man’s soul. The vocalist of the song told of the man’s internal anguish. What if she didn’t care anymore? Better not get your hopes too high.

Only an old tree along the side of the road could bring the pair back together. The arbor possessed the gifts of resilience, patience; it held the power of reconciliation. It grew for hundreds of years and knew things that mankind did not. The tree could heal, if only the humans wished it to do so.

The song told of a sash placed in that tree that would be the man’s exaltation, or without it, his come down.

In the back of the smoky bar, the youthful defenders became captivated by the notion of an oak tree and a man down on his luck. They understood the enigma of the man and his need to start again, after all, they lived in the era of recapitulation.

After a long night, the pod members said goodbye to Maggie and left the Void. Faith in the benevolence of their species restored, they wandered back to the Crest.