On the next day he was crossing the wide high plains of the continental divide. This was rich sheep country, and again he saw more bodies where coyotes had harried the flocks. Once, on a far-off hillside, he saw what seemed to be scattered sheep running wildly, but he could not be sure.
Again, however, he saw an even stranger sight; in the rich meadow along a stream, he saw a flock of sheep grazing peacefully. He looked around, half expecting to see the wagon and the sheepherder himself, but instead, he saw only two dogs. The shepherd was gone, but by long habit the dogs were continuing their task, keeping the sheep together, maintaining them in the good pasture along the water of the stream, doubtless fighting off the marauders that came sniffing in the night. He stopped the car and watched, keeping Princess beside him on the seat, so that she would not disturb the situation. The two sheep-dogs grew excited when they noticed the car; they barked excitedly, and rounded up a few stragglers. They kept their distance, a quarter-mile away, and seemed hostile. Just as in the cities the electric power was still pulsating through the wires after man had passed, so here upon the far stretches of the grass lands, the dogs watched the sheep for a little while. But, he thought, it could not be for long.
The road led on across the wide spaces; U.S. 66 read the signs beside the pavement. It had been a great highway, he remembered, in the old days, the road of the Okies to California; there had been a popular song about it; now, it lay empty. No bus roared by with
He dropped into the valley of the Rio Grande, crossed the bridge, and went up the long street of Albuquerque. This was the largest town he had seen since leaving California; he honked his horn as he went, and waited for a response. He heard nothing, and he did not wait long.
He slept that night at a tourist-court on the eastern edge of Albuquerque, from which he could look back down the long slope toward the town. It was all in darkness; here the power had failed already.
In the morning he went on through the mountains, and came out on the other side into a country of scattered buttes with broad plains between. A frenzy of speed came upon him again, and he drove the car at its limit on the straight roads. The buttes fell away behind; he crossed the state line, and was in Texas, in the flat country of the Panhandle. The day was suddenly blazing hot, and around him lay endless stubble fields from which the wheat had already been cut before the death fell upon the harvesters. That night he slept on the outskirts of Oklahoma City.
In the morning he skirted the city by a by-pass, and went on. He followed 66 toward Chicago, but after a few miles a tree across the road blocked him. He got out to consider the situation. There had obviously been one of those sudden wind storms which sweep the plains country. A tall poplar standing before a farm house had tipped and gone over, hiding the whole highway in a clutter of leaves and branches. It would be a labor of a half a day to chop any kind of passage through the tangle. Then suddenly he realized that here was a significant scene in that great drama which he had set himself to watch. Highway 66, that famous road! Here it was, blocked by the chance falling of a tree! A man might cut his way through this obstruction, but there were, or would soon be, others. In the thunderstorms, mud would wash across the road and earth slide from the cuts; a bridge would go in the summer freshet; in a few years, to take a car from Chicago to Los Angeles on Highway 66 would be a task for a pioneer in a covered wagon.
He thought of detouring through the fields, but the sod was soft and mucky from recent rains. Consulting his road-map, he saw that he could go south ten miles and strike another paved road, which would bring him back to the highway. He turned the station-wagon around and started back.
But when he reached the other road, he saw no real reason why he should return to 66. The secondary highway led on directly toward the east, and so far as he could tell, that direction was just as good as another. “Perhaps,” he thought, “that fallen tree has changed the whole future course of human history. I might have gone on toward Chicago, and something might have happened there. Now something different will happen.”
So he went eastward through Oklahoma, the country empty everywhere. On the rolling hills the scrubby oak-growth looked just as it must have looked before. On the level cultivated stretches, corn and cotton were growing. The corn stood high, head above the weeds; it would bear a fairly good crop. But the cotton was rapidly being choked out.
The full heat of summer was upon him now, and was breaking down more of his remnants of civilization. He still shaved daily, more because he felt comfortable that way than for any sense of his appearance, but he had not had his hair cut, and it hung shaggily about him. He hacked at it with a pair of scissors. He had reverted merely to a pair of blue jeans and an open-necked shirt. He threw the shirt away every morning, and put on a clean one. Somewhere he had forgotten his gray fedora, and from an Oklahoma general store he picked up a cheap straw hat, the kind that any tenant farmer might wear in the summer.
That afternoon he crossed into Arkansas, and though he knew that state lines were only imaginary, he suddenly be came conscious of another change. Here all the dryness of the plains country was left far behind, and the weather was hot and humid. As a result the growth was everywhere pushing in upon the roads and buildings. Runners from vines and climbing roses already dangled across windows and hung swinging from eaves and porch roofs. The smaller houses looked as if they were shrinking back shyly and beginning to hide in the woods. Fences also were being obscured. There was no longer a sharp line between the road and the surrounding country. Grass and weeds were showing green at every little crack in the concrete; blackberry shoots were pushing in from the shoulders, breaking the clean white line. In one place the long runners of some ivy reached clear to the white line in the middle of the pavement, and met others advancing from the other side.
Peaches were ripe, and he varied his diet of canned food by raiding an orchard. His entry scared off a few hogs which had been eating the fallen fruit. That night he slept at North Little Rock.
An hour on the road next morning, at the edge of a small town, he started, as his eyes fell upon the unaccustomed sight of a well-weeded and tended garden. He stopped, went to investigate, and found for the first time what might, by generous interpretation, be called a social group. They were Negroes—a man, a middle-aged woman, a young boy. By the obvious look of the woman, there would soon be a fourth member. They were timid. The boy kept in the background, curious but frightened, scratching at his head in a way that suggested lice. The woman stood, stolidly silent except to direct question. The man took off his straw hat and stood fingering its broken rim nervously; beads of sweat, from nervousness or the heat of the morning sun, ran down his shiny black forehead.
Ish could hardly understand the thick dialect, rendered more unintelligible by embarrassment. He made out, however, that they knew of no one else in the neighborhood, and in fact knew very little of anything, not having been beyond walking distance from the spot since the disaster. They were not a family group, but merely a chance association of survivors—three, against the law of chance, having survived in one small town.
Ish soon realized they were suffering not only from the shock of the catastrophe but also from the taboos carried over from before it. They talked with diffidence in the presence of a strange white man, dropping their
