No Stone Left Unturned

by Kenneth Ramsley

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February 16, 2023

With drops from the next Great Flood already falling we didn’t know it yet, but a joke had been played on everyone of us – even as we sat safely inside the Arc like Noah and his family – justified and entombed by the truth. The heckling outside didn’t matter anymore. ‘All that timber to build what kind of boat? What a waste of capital! What a drag on profitability!’ That’s what Noah’s neighbors might have said until they raced off to save their seaside properties.

By then, we’d established the truth and won the climate debate. Yet we could not celebrate with rising seawater flooding the poor far worse than those naysayers able to relocate on a whim by comparison. Our victory had been hollow. Win or lose there was no going back either way. The melted ice caps and glaciers could never be refrozen, and while sitting inside the Arc of our victory in principal – we’d felt nothing but betrayal in practice – betrayed by those who could have kept the melting at bay—until it didn’t matter anymore – not one bit – because a joke had been played on everyone of us – naysayers and victors alike.

What was the joke? – that the Earth we’d known and made predictions about and argued over and wanted preserved – that Earth was about to be changed in ways vast and unimaginable by something no one saw coming.

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September 13, 2022—that’s when the Earth as we once knew it began to sing its final swan song – signaling the end of the line – the death of our own ‘dream time’ as the ancient Aboriginals might have described our situation. That morning Dr. Gregg called saying how he’d been delayed. Hours later I phoned back for an update and by then our satellite links were gone along with my hopes for a wintertime companion.

Why no working backup up like a good ol’fashion ham radio? After tearing through every storage room and prying every box open, I could fathom no answer to that question beyond the obvious—we’d simply never planned for the unimaginable – which is no indictment – just stating facts in a Universe where almost everything happens without any imagination at all.

Soon after, earthquakes began and continued off and on for weeks – tremors rolling and growling up and down the river valley as though traveling a great distance from their original source – rising and ebbing like waves coming ashore to shake the land, driven by swells from a passing storm of immeasurable power. Barely able to sleep, I began to envision the Titans of old escaping to ravage the far north, chased through the night by Thor himself wielding his vengeful mallet. Sometimes the river ran backwards sending loose chunks of fractured ice skyward as I watched for any sign of daylight at noon. Yet instead I saw only starlit trees shedding their starlit snow in unison under a sky no brighter than midnight.

When the quaking eased, I finally slept – days later awaking to a world deceptively peaceful – almost healed from the madness, almost right and normal except that everything was still entirely wrong. The plague had merely hatched a new and darker form – first seen among amorphous clouds gathering and spreading from distant volcanic rifts to fill the once star-filled sky. With starlight entirely blotted, overhead the firmament fell into utter blackness inconceivably painted silent, mordant and calm upon a cave-like canvass draining what little life and warmth might have remained in the land. By mid-October I recorded minus forty on the old Fahrenheit scale. At the end of November temperatures were hovering at minus eighty.

I didn’t want to believe that we’d lost the sun like this. I wanted normality. I wanted natural light to return – blue sky to glow again – communications with the outside world to reconnect – life once more rising from darkness. When the sun did not appear or show itself in any way by mid-January – I could stand it no more, imagining ways to end my existence in some painless way – until I began to gather hope later in the month. The clouds were beginning to part! Yet instead of newly minted daylight, the old celestial vault reemerged, still moonless with nary a hint of twilight or any other light except the same stars slowly rising and setting and rising and setting.

And this is where I stand this night – aboard a wayward planet with the sun circling among the dead. Overhead no horsemen ride – yet little else would disappoint even the most ardent and steadfast believer in the Apocalypse.

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February 18, 2023

After months without a human counter-balance, my mind wanders into senseless hallucinations—conjuring sunlight from a sun that does not shine, ideas spoken by voices that are not my own. ‘Ghosts’ I call them – invented to fill the inscrutable void of the unknown from an imagination desperate to dispel the undeniable uncertainty of my existence. I live in a Twilight Zone, I say aloud, except worse—because where I live there isn’t any twilight at all.

Will anyone ever benefit from my observations? Or am I merely collecting measurements and notes for historical posterity – like Scott’s icy journal waiting decades for rediscovery after his Antarctic demise?

Despair drags my remaining will to live to the rim of a widening abyss – black with depth – carved into the foundations of the earth torn open before me – a scene both real and imagined. I slide. I grab. I claw. I cry out for help, and in the last instant before I plummet into utter madness, I stab an anchor into the lip of the deep, listening. Just listening, then sorting, then filtering the cacophony swirling about the howling maw – until I hear a familiar voice above the din – my grandfather’s voice – counter-balancing my despair – adding teeth to my last best anchor of hope. He’s saying something I’d heard him say many times many years ago – something about the essence of wilderness survival. I tease. I probe. I parse the syllables one by one sifting for sense above the senseless and raging gods of the night.

Don’t guess.

You’re not that smart.

Nobody is.

Don’t force a solution.

That’s even worse.

These are the only words I can find – and for hours I use them as a hammer and chisel battering and hacking my way into a crypt of wisdom I can feel within my reach, chipping and bashing at the door with the only words I can remember.

Don’t guess.

You’re not that smart.

Nobody is.

There is no other hope. He must be my companion now. There will be no one else anytime soon. And then, all at once, the crypt yields, its gateways breaking apart to pour an avalanche of words and memories more than I can imagine filling into and overflowing the chasm bringing it level with the land once more… I breathe. I pause.

There’s always a way ahead.

…even when no clear steps can be seen.

Yes, that’s right. He was talking about his work – how he kept people alive.

This should help.

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