Prairie Notebook
When we crossed the border into Nevada, Whitley seemed almost too drained to react, but I felt like breaking out champagne. I contented myself with a quiet sip of water from our bag.
We are now on the western edge of the Great Plains. I wish I could have gone with Captain Hargreaves when he left the train at Ogden, but his world and mine are not the same.
I contented myself with this train’s less scenic route. The going was slow and rough through the Rockies. We used old freight tracks for this part of the run. Now we are south of Denver, on our way to connect with the
The great transcontinental migration passed through this land, and the legendary trains of the Union Pacific and the Western Pacific, their engines gleaming brass and black, their whistles stampeding the astonished buffalo.
That happened barely a hundred years ago. In the time since then, the Rockies have lost perhaps a tenth of an inch of their peaks from the ceaseless wind. Two thousand animal species have become extinct in this land, and the world that extinguished them has slipped through our fingers.
The grandsons of Buffalo Bill and Bat Masterson might well have been alive to see Warday.
We could still get dead drunk on Wild Bill Hickok’s whiskey. In a hundred years a well-sealed bottle will have lost no more than a shot to evaporation.
Long thoughts of the West. How impossibly fast it was discovered and settled. How quickly it matured and grew old.
My mind drifts away from ghost towns and empty ranches to the present, to my own work. I, who wrote books about atomic weapons, find myself writing one about a trip through atomized America. I’ve been shouted at by people who felt that writing about weapons glorified them.
Now is now, the rattling train and the night.
And the past is the past. I was sitting in a private dining room at the top of the Exxon Building in Houston when Warday occurred. My purpose was business; I was working on a book about oil exploration. My host had just lifted a cup of coffee to his lips when, from where I was sitting, his face suddenly seemed to glow with blinding, unearthly light. I closed my eyes. He pitched back, screaming.
We had just experienced the bursts going off over San Antonio, more than two hundred miles away.
It took fifteen or so minutes for the sound to reach us—a great, rolling roar that cracked most of the windows on the west side of the building.
My past had just ended. When I saw the cloud I knew at once what had happened.
I was well out of Houston before the fallout started. It was devastating when it came. The San Antonio bombs were at least as filthy with long-term radiation by-products as those that hit New York and Washington. Fission-fusion-fission bombs.
My only thought was to get on the road, away from any inhabited areas. My car radio wouldn’t work, but every time I looked west I got all the news I needed. Over the course of the day, that cloud got bigger and darker and closer. And I drove on north, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t see another such cloud over Dallas.
I stopped for gas and tried to call my wife in Austin.
There wasn’t even a dial tone.
I couldn’t reach my mother in San Antonio, either.
Reporting is a good job; you can put your heart into it. And the effort is worthwhile when you get something like the attached document. It is useful and important, and it took brave men to gather the information it contains. Even though I obtained it in Chicago, it belongs here, before we enter the great Midwestern plains.
The document concerns only the first few weeks. We have added two recent maps that show how the fallout developed at the end of one year, and which counties are still reporting live particles today.
Before the war we knew very little about secondary dissemination. It caused the famine by destroying so much stored wheat in the winter of ’88–’89, at a time when farming conditions were chaotic. The loss of the grain supply led to local consumption of vegetables that would normally have been shipped to market, and to a massive meat shortage as feed supplies went to make the unforgettable oat bread that was around by the summer of ’89.
It’s too bad there are so many live particles still around the North Central States. I wish we could have seen the Dakotas. A trainman put it very vividly when I asked to be ticketed to Rapid City or Minot. He consulted his timetable, then looked up at me.
“Them places are gone,” he said.
Documents on the National Condition
Before the war, fallout was commonly thought of as a semipermanent devastation that would at the very least doom us to death in a matter of days or weeks.
It didn’t turn out that way. It was more subtle, and it was worse. Most of us have never experienced fallout directly, at least not in what we now think of as significant quantities. Like so many of the effects of Warday, by itself fallout was for the most part survivable. But when you combined it with the economic dislocations that started with the EMP burst, you had a prescription for disaster in the farm belt, a disaster from which we have by no means recovered.
The famine came about because of the negative synergy of fallout that contaminated stored grains and cropland in late ’88 and ’89, and the economic chaos that led to the breakdown of the system of farm subsidy and
