{"id":478,"date":"2009-10-06T07:35:51","date_gmt":"2009-10-06T12:35:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=478"},"modified":"2018-10-30T20:07:53","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T00:07:53","slug":"finzel-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=478","title":{"rendered":"Finzel, part one"},"content":{"rendered":"

Parker’s People <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Two miles past the exit for Finzel, MD on Interstate 68 was a billboard.\u00a0 Not the usual screaming ad mounted on a column, drawing attention for miles.\u00a0 This was a homemade affair, the sort of thing only a passenger noticed.\u00a0 Set back into the scrubby pines of the always seemingly hard-scrabble forest covering the hills of western Maryland, hand-painted but still tasteful, facing sideways on the northbound side, it read: \u201cThis Way to the Hen House\u201d and then provided directions from the next exit, a rural side track on old US 40 that led nowhere and promised nothing besides the mysterious Hen House.
\n
\nParker had passed the billboard countless times on her way from DC to West Virginia University in her college days and, later, between the same two sites for business.\u00a0 She was the child of a displaced Appalachian family: Grim West Virginia pessimism fleeing the Ohio Valley in the war years and blending with the queer southern hustle and sweat of DC.\u00a0 She was the granddaughter of a man and woman who pined for the harsh simplicity of their childhood hills to their dying days, and the daughter of a woman born in a rented dirt-floor Parkersburg shack and raised in a suburban rancher outside DC which World War II bought.<\/p>\n

Parker.\u00a0 Black sheep. The first of the family born in DC.\u00a0 Belonging neither to the city nor the hills, most of the time feeling that she didn\u2019t even belong to her own family.\u00a0 Life as a dream, rolling past her in increasingly unforgiving waves.\u00a0 Forty years gone and no family of her own.\u00a0 No time, no desire, to try and establish a home.\u00a0 How strange, then, to become a post-apocalypse den mother\u2026<\/p>\n

School, business, travel\u2026 The trappings of responsibility, expectations, and the duties of life.\u00a0 That was the old world.\u00a0 Her old world.\u00a0 But not even the apocalypse allowed her to escape the role.<\/p>\n

Now the Hen House billboard was no longer quaint roadside Americana, an oddity that, maybe, some day, if there\u2019s time, might be worth a side trip on America\u2019s byways.\u00a0 Now it was camouflage.\u00a0 A fading remnant, behind which her guards watched the dead Interstate.<\/p>\n

She arrived \u2013 this unexpectant den mother \u2013 with 27 people.\u00a0 They\u2019d stripped the land during their desperate flight up I-68, weaving through the dead traffic.\u00a0 They piled supplies into the backs of trucks.\u00a0 They hit Wal-Marts, they hit pharmacies, they hit grocery stores, they hit homes, restaurants, anything promising.\u00a0 They ignored the bodies of the dead, they fired over the heads of the few frightened survivors that chose not to join them, they were holy hell.\u00a0 And she regretted it.\u00a0 Every minute of it.\u00a0 But when she decided to make a run for the country, it was about survival.\u00a0 For the first time in her life, she was awake.\u00a0 Alive.<\/p>\n

Finzel stuck in her mind.\u00a0 A sleepy little town.\u00a0 That stupid Hen House sign.\u00a0 Now a road was cut through the struggling pines and the tangled undergrowth behind the sign, leading to an outpost of 35 souls.\u00a0 A Jeep was always parked just behind the sign, at the head of the obscured ruts leading into the forested hills, and always manned by two well-armed watchers.\u00a0 Everyone spent their lives hoping nothing would again come down I-68.\u00a0 Farther back, a converted firetower kept an eye out in all directions.\u00a0 And, shielded by forest and the natural curves of the rolling land, farms and houses formed the heart of her community.\u00a0 Parker\u2019s people.<\/p>\n

First came the end of the world.\u00a0 The government, always, lying.\u00a0 The people, always, fighting.\u00a0 First came the lies, the corruption, the downfall.\u00a0 Then came survival.\u00a0 Every person for themselves.\u00a0 Guns, food, water, life.\u00a0 Every pretense of a civilized world dissolved in a heartbeat.\u00a0 A heartbeat is all there is between regular broadcasting and static.\u00a0 Between the panicked voices on the airwaves and…well, nothing. The end.\u00a0 Silence.<\/p>\n

When it happened, Parker was home, in Glover Park, trapped in DC, wondering if her end had come.\u00a0\u00a0 What do you do when the world stops spoon-feeding you?\u00a0\u00a0 Despite the malaise, she couldn\u2019t complain. She had a nice life, a nice house.\u00a0 Her little city car, so useless now that she finally needed it, was parked against the curb outside a home that political lobbying had built.\u00a0 A career that needed an apocalypse in order to escape.\u00a0 She was privately thrilled.<\/p>\n

Her backyard stared down, with sublime manicured poise, at the forested expanse of Glover Park in the Northwest quadrant of the city.\u00a0 The TV and radio shouted static, half the neighbors had fled and the other half were hunkered down and sandbagged in.\u00a0 Next, the lights would go.\u00a0 The water.\u00a0 Before all that, law and order.\u00a0 What possible future did she have when the power died?\u00a0 When the cars wouldn\u2019t start?\u00a0 When the natural wildness in Humanity took hold of her neighbors and dog walkers and baristas turned into rapists and murderers?<\/p>\n

Parker wondered if she was the sort of person they would talk about in history books\u2026if there was going to be a future history.\u00a0 She became the leader among leaders.\u00a0 The tough brunette who fought her way out of the city, gathered supplies and followers, and led them to safety in the sad rural expanse of western Maryland, where the winters now killed in a world without technology and the summers were about prayers for crops, for rain, for survival, and for fewer and fewer raiders\u2026<\/p>\n

The latter prayer had been answered.\u00a0 Ten years now of tenuous survival off of the land and even more strained political infighting.\u00a0 The raiders were thick at the start, forcing Parker to post scouts behind blinds along I-68 and the parallel mother road, Route 40.\u00a0 A jury-rigged radio tower allowed coded communication, until too many parts went bad.\u00a0 Time took its toll.\u00a0 But so did the angry new world, and the raiders started to vanish.\u00a0 Every spring, lives lost.\u00a0 Both out there in the dead world, and behind the Hen House sign.\u00a0 Until recently, Parker had maintained one last blind, conveniently placed on a now crumbling overpass that had been consumed by nature.\u00a0 Young Oak trees grew on a decaying concrete span 12 feet in the air.\u00a0\u00a0 That, along with the two guards behind the now faded and illegible Hen House sign, was all that was needed.\u00a0 More than was needed.\u00a0 It was a boring job now.\u00a0 The short straw job.\u00a0 Chatting or snoozing for endless hours, cold coffee from a thermos, picnic lunches, almost tedious enough to make the guards wish they were out in the fields, repairing the community\u2019s buildings, or perched in the watchtower mentally playing king of the hill.<\/p>\n

What everyone wanted was to be part of the raiding party.\u00a0 God, wouldn\u2019t that be awesome?\u00a0 The guard jeep could no longer move.\u00a0 Tires had been removed, the engine cannibalized, a tree was growing through the hood.\u00a0\u00a0 Everything was used to make the community\u2019s patchwork Land Rover run.\u00a0 The pride and joy of Charlie Gates and Lance McGavin.\u00a0 Parker\u2019s raiders.<\/p>\n

Gates and McGavin had held up in an old warehouse between Fort Totten and Takoma, in DC.\u00a0 They\u2019d stockpiled and hoarded.\u00a0 They defended with man-traps, Molotov cocktails, and crack shooting from a thousand hiding places.\u00a0 How Parker had managed to coax them out was a mystery to all of her people.\u00a0 Leading her flight from the city along the railroad tracks, she and her people were pinned down by Gates and McGavin who, apparently, tried to murder anything that moved.\u00a0 In the early days after the fall, that\u2019s the sort of thing city raiders inspired.\u00a0 Kill or be killed.\u00a0 Live and let die.<\/p>\n

Parker finally told her people to hang back.\u00a0 She tied up her hair, stripped off her gunbelt, and walked leisurely into the kill zone.<\/p>\n

Gates and McGavin don\u2019t talk about what charmed them from their snakepit.\u00a0 Within an hour, they were out apologizing, and two hours later they were loading up their 18-wheeler with supplies and joining Parker\u2019s people, her rag-tag party leaving the tracks, taking over trucks, and painfully threading their way through suburban streets and onto the Beltway.\u00a0 Though Gates and McGavin never really socialized.\u00a0 They stuck together, brought up the rear, and snarled at everyone except Parker.<\/p>\n

She knew the need for compromise.\u00a0 She was a politico.\u00a0 It was her genius.\u00a0 She let the boys slide when they didn\u2019t want to become farmers.\u00a0 She told them: Pull your weight or get out.\u00a0 They became the raiders.\u00a0 They went out in a Ford and came back with a Hummer full of supplies and dragging a U-Haul.\u00a0 Parker and her people gave them shopping lists and, once a week, they\u2019d drive off.\u00a0 Maybe for an hour, maybe for three days.\u00a0 They\u2019d check off every item on the lists.\u00a0 From candy to gasoline to books to penicillin to Legos.\u00a0 As the years took their toll, they traded out the Hummer for an old school Land Rover, which seemed to welcome creative mechanics and bubble-gum patches.\u00a0 The old beast craved hard roads.\u00a0 The boys once returned with a flat tire and, when one of Parker\u2019s people pointed it out, the boys looked down surprised and shrugged it off with a grin.\u00a0\u00a0 Real cool cat shit.\u00a0 If they wanted to, Gates and McGavin could take over.\u00a0 Retire Parker to a cottage, snicker at her graying hair, tell her that the harder world needed harder people.\u00a0 Angrier.\u00a0 More violent.\u00a0 And they were violent.\u00a0 When they pulled onto the broken remnants of I-68, or US 40, or Finzel Road, they became raiders.\u00a0 They became what everybody hoped would go away.<\/p>\n

Gates and McGavin were no threat.\u00a0 They weren\u2019t leaders.\u00a0 And they could never lead Parker\u2019s people \u2013 the weak and scared, sheltering under their savior\u2019s wings, hunkered down in the forest, dousing the lights at sunset, baffling chimney smoke, always keeping out of sight.\u00a0 Parker\u2019s people dreamed about the old world.\u00a0 They wanted it all back.\u00a0 It was owed to them, it was their birthright.\u00a0 They wanted to walk down crowded streets with music in their ears, to live thoughtless pleasures, nose to the grindstone, check\u2019s in the mail.\u00a0 They knew it would never return.\u00a0 You couldn\u2019t live through The Fall and not see the truth.\u00a0 You couldn\u2019t battle your way from the dead capitol to unincorporated Finzel without seeing the full pantheon of human horror.<\/p>\n

But everyone lives in the past.\u00a0 Everyone is always coming home.<\/p>\n

Parker gave them what they wanted.\u00a0 Behind the Hen House sign was a miniscule mockery of civilization.\u00a0 Rural chic.\u00a0 The sun rose on bustling farms, men split logs for fires, women made bread and prepared meals, both toiled in the fields.\u00a0 A small police force manned the firetower, the overpass lookout (now just on occasion), and the decaying Jeep forever watching I-68 westbound for refugees fleeing the eastern cities.\u00a0 A fear that was becoming imaginary.\u00a0 The stuff of nighttime tales to the new batch of young children, schooled by Parker herself who acted as teacher, scientist, judge\u2026monarch.<\/p>\n

There was routine.\u00a0 In a way, the anarchic Gates and McGavin might simply be the final touch on Parker\u2019s brilliant canvas.\u00a0 The traveling minstrels with tales to tell.\u00a0 Her indulgence in the increasingly esoteric shopping lists was necessary for the survival of her community.\u00a0 When the storytellers returned from the empty world, they not only entertained, they brought gifts from the past.\u00a0 Relics of the old world, which Parker allowed to become a commodity, a currency.\u00a0 The collector of useless machine parts became rich, a day\u2019s work bought for a bottle of scotch that had festered on a forgotten shelf for a decade, an extra ration at suppertime for a rusty can of shaving cream.<\/p>\n

Parker was not immune.\u00a0 She had the boys get her a plasma TV three years after The Fall and the flight to Finzel.\u00a0 She even plugged it in, though the socket would never again feed it electricity.\u00a0 She found herself lonely without a TV hanging on the wall, dominating the room.\u00a0 It was her concession to her empty life before everything fell apart.\u00a0 When people met with Parker, eyes moved towards the TV.\u00a0 The unspeaking great eye, another member of the conversation.\u00a0 Almost everyone wished it would flicker to life, throw up a comforting face telling them it was all over, it was all a dream, a new America had begun and they were welcome.<\/p>\n

The children weren\u2019t drawn to it.\u00a0 Those born after The Fall, and those who don\u2019t remember.\u00a0 They treat the TV like children would treat a picture on the wall.\u00a0 It just didn\u2019t register.\u00a0 Parker gave them books, also trucked in by Gates and McGavin.\u00a0 They found more life in the yellowing pages than they did from the black box on Parker\u2019s wall.\u00a0 She marveled at children reading and enjoying classics, she prided herself on the brave new world that sprang from her mind fully grown.<\/p>\n

Parker\u2019s people were happy.\u00a0 Well, as happy as they could be, considering.\u00a0 They all carried ghosts with them, many still cried themselves to sleep.\u00a0 From the shadows, Gates and McGavin dealt briskly in long-expired pills and moonshine.\u00a0 Somewhere, out beyond the Hen House sign, they harvested marijuana.\u00a0 No doubt a local\u2019s old field grown wild and free.\u00a0 The world, for them, was easy pickings, and they traded on nostalgia and escapism.<\/p>\n

But every community has these problems.\u00a0 Parker turned a blind eye.\u00a0 What happened behind closed doors, and under cover of darkness, was private business.\u00a0 That, too, was part of her genius.\u00a0 It takes a village, yes.\u00a0 It takes a village to ignore sins and suffering.\u00a0 That truism remained from the old world.<\/p>\n

The majority found escapism in work.\u00a0 After a decade, mourning was fading into simple survival.\u00a0 Working a farm, cutting wood, maintaining the community was an all-day business.\u00a0 Working together without distractions, building new families, and no longer polluted by passive or aggressive inhumanity helped.\u00a0 Everyone worked for something, everyone pulled their own weight.<\/p>\n

Freedom from the chains of the old society came with a problem.\u00a0 Waking up, seeing the world, surviving the horrors, and carving a refuge to start again only served to illustrate one thing\u2026 The fragility of life, of peace, of expectations.\u00a0 The old society\u2019s stock and trade was immortality.\u00a0 Health care, anti-aging cream, artificial hearts, miracle cures, vitamin waters, and an infinite array of snake oils sold by massive corporations.\u00a0 After The Fall, mortality became a bedmate.\u00a0 Jack Otongo broke his leg in the seventh year repairing the side of the firetower.\u00a0 He died of a simple infection.\u00a0 The flu took little Lucy Rich in the fifth year.\u00a0 In the ninth year, 35-year old Martin Cleary drunk himself into a stupor and fell asleep under a tree when a cold snap moved in.\u00a0 A fever took him ten days later.<\/p>\n

Rural chic indeed.\u00a0 But could they complain?\u00a0 They had survived the impossible.\u00a0 They should all be dead.\u00a0 Their continued existence was a fluke.\u00a0 Attitudes changed.\u00a0 People didn\u2019t think about hair loss, or hiding the grey, or covering up wrinkles.\u00a0 Humanity had returned.\u00a0 And, with it, the stoic rural realization that every story must have an end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Parker’s People Two miles past the exit for Finzel, MD on Interstate 68 was a billboard.\u00a0 Not the usual screaming ad mounted on a column, drawing attention for miles.\u00a0 This was a homemade affair, the sort of thing only a …<\/p>\n

Finzel, part one<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[126,405],"class_list":["post-478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-serials","tag-finzel","tag-serials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=478"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":799,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478\/revisions\/799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}