drawers and boxes in my closet. We can come back here and stay inside and lock the doors. The lights
“I think it would be a mistake to stay here,” Grant said. “I mean, we don’t have to leave immediately, but we’d better get ready. I don’t think we can count on this being resolved or back to normal any time soon. If we didn’t have the option of going to a well-stocked cabin within a reasonable distance, it would be one thing. But I know we would be safe there, and we would at least have a supply of food and water. We wouldn’t have to worry about the angry mobs of looters that are bound to start roaming the streets here when they figure out no one’s gonna bring them what they need and the police are powerless to stop them from taking it wherever they can find it. If I’m wrong and it turns out to be no big deal, then there will really have been no harm done, and we will have had some good exercise riding up there.”
“But this isn’t the Ninth Ward, Grant,” Jessica said. “This is
“I know it’s nice here now. And yes, it’s relatively safe. But this kind of stuff would happen anywhere after a disaster like this. When people get desperate, they’ll do anything. And besides, the people in the truly bad areas like you’re talking about know that with everything shut down, nothing is going to stop them from coming here. And they know there’s money and other goods here.”
“He may be right, Jessica,” Casey said. “He’s been through hurricanes and lived all over.”
“But why us, Grant? You hardly know us—well, me anyway…. Don’t you have other friends or family that will need to go there?”
“Not now, I don’t. My parents are much too far away to get any good out of it. And as I already told Casey, after Katrina all my close friends left New Orleans and never came back. I suppose I would go alone to the cabin if I didn’t know anyone who wanted to go with me, and I still will if you two aren’t interested. I’m certainly not staying here in the city, regardless. Casey and I just kind of ran into each other today; it’s been a really weird day, and, well, here we all are at your apartment. I don’t really have anyone else to spend the first day of the total shutdown of the grid with.”
“We don’t know that it’s a
“No, but we should assume that it is in the immediate region, anyway. Look, I don’t want to try to talk either of you into anything. But I’ve got a few of the things we need over at my apartment, and whether you leave the city with me or not, it would be safer to stick together for now. I’d like for you to both come over after you get your things together. I’ve got battery-powered lights and candles in my camping gear. At least we’ll be able to see after dark at my place, and we can talk it over tonight and see how things are looking in the morning. What do you say?”
“That’s fine with me,” Casey said. “I hate blackouts even when they’re just for a few hours. It’d be scary over here with no flashlights or anything.”
“I’m okay with that too, I just don’t know about going to some cabin in Mississippi,” Jessica said. “And what about Joey? If I go, can he come too?”
“Of course,” Grant said.
“If he would even want to,” Jessica added.
“He may stop by here looking for you before he goes home tonight,” Casey told her. “Why don’t you leave him a note telling him we’ll be at Grant’s place and that he can find us there?”
They locked the door to the apartment at dusk, slipping a small piece of paper with Grant’s address in the crack just above the deadbolt, where Joey couldn’t miss it. Jessica and Casey had both emptied their backpack/book bags and stuffed them with as many items of clothing as they could possibly jam inside without breaking the zippers. The groceries were still tied on the bikes in the plastic bags. They walked them on campus, to the bike rack near the theater where Jessica had left her bike the day before. Grant’s place was an efficiency apartment in back of a house on Freret Street, so after a short ride of a few blocks they were there.
“Wow, you’ve got some cool stuff in here,” Casey said after Grant let them into his apartment and lit up the living room with a battery-powered Coleman lantern he dug out of a closet.
“Thanks. It’s mostly stuff I traded for during summer field study in Guyana. These things are all that made it home. A lot of the artifacts I shipped got lost, or more likely stolen, somewhere along the way.”
“What were you studying?” Jessica asked as she looked around the room at the collection of carved wooden drums, masks, blowguns, and bows and arrows hanging from every wall.
“Grant is an anthropology grad student,” Casey explained. “I forgot that I hadn’t told you. He spent three months last summer in the Amazon jungle.”
“Actually it was in the highlands of Guyana, not in the Amazon Basin,” Grant said. “I was working on a project our department is conducting among an indigenous tribe called the Wapishana on the upper reaches of the Kamoa River.”
“That’s crazy,” Jessica said. “Do those people still use this stuff? Are they cannibals or something?”
Grant laughed. “No, they’re not cannibals, but they’re still mostly naked. And yes, they do use primitive tools and maintain most of their ancestral ceremonies. They are true hunter-gatherers, and really don’t need anything but what the rainforest provides.”
“Hunters? That’s just wrong!” Jessica said. “Why do they still do that? I thought the jungle was full of tropical fruit and stuff.”
“It is, but not enough to live on and get a balanced diet. They eat everything the forest provides, from the smallest insects and fish, to monkeys, snakes, wild pigs…you name it.”
“It must have been an awesome experience staying in their villages and seeing how they live,” Casey said, before Jessica and Grant could get into an argument about the ethics of eating animals.
“It was quite the experience, but this particular subgroup of the tribe has such a nomadic way of life they don’t even live in villages. That’s one reason we know so little about them. Our department is the first group of anthropologists to study them. Their first contact with the outside world was just in 1995. Anyway, there’ll be time to tell you more about it later, if it doesn’t bore you to death. I need to sort out some stuff and we need to talk about a plan, that is, if you two are still in with me after seeing all my jungle headhunter gear.”
Casey and Jessica waited while Grant pulled a large duffel bag out of the same closet where he had gotten the lantern. He said it was the gear that he took on the jungle expedition and also occasionally used for weekend canoe camping on the river near his parent’s cabin.
“The problem is, we can’t carry all this stuff on the bikes, plus the food and water we’re going to need for the trip. I can carry much more on mine, since I’ve got a rack on it and it’s a lightweight bike anyway, but you two are going to have a hard enough time just pedaling those heavy clunkers you have even without any weight.”
“Can’t we just wear our backpacks?” Casey asked.
“Yeah, but it’s not ideal. If you keep them light with just your clothes and things like that, I suppose it will have to do. But too much weight that high up will wear you out and keep you off balance. It’s better to let the bike carry the weight. I think if you both carry your clothes in your packs and we strap some of the lighter, bulkier stuff like sleeping bags on the handlebars and under the seats, I can manage everything else we need.”
“Didn’t you say the cabin would have everything we need?” Jessica asked.
“Yes, but we can’t head out on a trip that far and count on getting there in a certain length of time. A lot of factors could delay us, considering what has happened, so we need to be prepared to be as self-sufficient on the road as possible.”
“I would have never thought like that,” Casey said. “I guess that comes from what you learned in the jungle, huh?”
“Just travel in general. I learned more from my parents than from anywhere else. We were always on the move, it seems. I learned that real travel, not the tourist stuff, requires flexibility in your thinking and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. We’re not going to be tourists. If we go anywhere while the grid is down, we’ll be
THREE
