Monthly Archives: March 2023

Field Notes

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.  

The Black Rider

The rider, dressed in black, journeyed west across the plains as spring arrived fitfully across the land. He encountered all manner of weather, the wind always at his face, sometimes bitterly cold. There were blizzards and rain and days so bright and warm it seemed impossible it could turn cold again. Snow lingered in most places, especially on the north-facing sides of hills and valleys which the sun only reached for a brief time each day. The rivers he came to were largely open, though ice still clung to some of the banks and they were swollen with runoff. The ground was damp and soft everywhere, even where it was bare, making his evenings miserable affairs. The temperatures would plunge below freezing, sometimes far below, and he would wake up covered in frost, his blankets and clothes stiff.  

He passed along roads – wagon trails more accurately – before leaving them behind and following buffalo and cattle trails that had a wandering westward trajectory. Sometimes there was nothing to mark a way forward, only the snow and the dormant grass of the vast plain. An empty place by all appearances, though he knew that to be deceptive. He had come from a place of towns and villages and farms and people and now encountered such signs of civilization only intermittently. The great tribal nations that had once commanded the immense sweep of the prairies were banished now and newcomers were taking plows to the grass. There were towns and homesteads here and there, but mostly he found only surveyor stakes buried in the still frozen earth waiting for warmer times for someone to pull them up and claim them. The ranchers had taken their cattle to southern valleys and would not return until spring had truly come to stay.  

This suited him, for he preferred to stay away from people. The presence of magpies, strutting and chirping and preening, would alert him to their nearby presence before it came into sight and he would go out of his way to avoid them. Sometimes it could not be helped. He passed by homesteads with families blinking at his sudden appearance as though they had just awoken from a winter slumber. One time, in trying to ride around a town he came upon a group of children with their sleds making the most of a steep hill while the snow stayed upon it. Their screams of delight, heard before he caught sight of them, startled him initially and he was still tense and frowning, with a hand at his belt, as he rode by.  

What people saw, when they noticed him at all, was a man in a long black coat with mud-spattered black boots. His shirt and pants were faded, almost absent of colour. As was his face, his expression always distant, his soft eyes looking past anyone who tried to meet his gaze. Some caught a glimpse of a pistol at his belt, a flintlock. A large cumbersome thing out of all time. Those who saw it wondered at it and dismissed it, for no one would carry such an antique across a land where wolves and bears and worse things than that lurked. 

Notes on the Grippe

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Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day One Thousand Ninety Five

Three years since the Dread Lord Grippe Reborn arrived upon these shores. When I think back on that time I can recall walking past a shuttered bar advertising a St. Patrick’s Day party that never arrived. It is a BBQ place now, the bar never reopening through all the turmoil of openings and closings, limited seating, and outdoor only. Certainly not all of us made it through the last three years. None of us made it through whole. We are not who we once were, but that is always the case.

I have noticed lately people referring to pre-pandemic times and post-Grippe (for that is what everyone has come to feel the last six to eight months has been), but never to the plague months themselves. That was a time outside of time, when we stood apart from ourselves. I went back and read the first few weeks of entries to these notes, when I was writing each day, and the disorientation I was feeling is obvious. I hardly knew what to say, how to put into words what was happening. Even now the feeling of both how tenuous and unsettled those days felt – when truly we did not know what might come next – and how numbingly same each day was is hard to explain. I lived it and yet it doesn’t feel a part of my life. It is separate, off on its own, not sewn into the fabric of my existence.

There were people who lost the thread of themselves during these longest of three years. For some those terrifying and numbing days became an identity. They found solace in remaining ever vigilant for the next shoe to drop, for the Dread Lord to take upon his next guise. It is the only way they could feel safe from that fear we all felt. Others spent years proclaiming the Grippe Reborn a hoax, a plot, nothing but a cold. They rejected the inoculations, denied even having been touched by the Dread Lord and proclaimed malaria drugs and worm paste and other things miracle cures. Though they loudly declared that everyone else was living in fear, they were the most frightened people I have ever encountered and they are living in fear still.

Life, after all, is capricious and our fates are not our own to command. That is the hard truth we were all forced to see during the Grippe Reborn’s terrible reign. Some of us did not want to.

I never lost hope during those discomfiting months, though my patience was sorely tested. My expectation was always that the days of the Grippe Reborn would be finite, an interregnum. As life began its slow return to normal I felt a kind of bitterness at the time lost when we were unable to do so many of the things that brought us pleasure. That was combined with an urge to not waste any of the days remaining, for I understand now, as I only thought I did before, that there are no guarantees.

For a long time in my youth I was very focused on the future that I was working toward, when my life would be whatever I imagined it would be. That changed as I grew older and I realized that the future is always waiting but our lives exist in the now. So many of our dreams will never be realized, so better to find pleasure in what we already possess. Yet in the abysmal now of the Grippe Reborn, when the present seemed a morass from which we might never escape, I found myself again lost in the future of what I would do when all this ended. It was like a promise to myself that it would. Some of my most distinct memories of those early months are of walking with my love and talking of our futures. Did we want to live here or move? Did we want to change careers? What did we want to do? We were driven by restlessness, but also by our fundamental need to believe there are still good things to come. That our lives would not just be marked by the Dread Lord Grippe Reborn.

Field Notes

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.  

Regarding Monuments

There are few monuments to be found in the Quarter. It has never been that sort of place. The wooden grain elevators that used to tower above each town would seem to qualify, yet they are unremarkable in the sense that every town in the surrounding regions had one as well. Most are gone now, fallen into disrepair or torn down, replaced by concrete elevators that loom far taller on the landscape. That is the fate of every construction in the Quarter it seems. So many of the railroads that once crisscrossed these parts have been pulled up, replaced by highways that pass by abandoned homesteads, with houses that are slowly falling into disrepair, being reclaimed by the landscape. The first inhabitants of this place left only stone rings where their tipi’s stood, before they were driven into exile.  

It seems that will be the fate of much of what has been built by Those Who Came as well. The home I grew up in will certainly not stand for centuries, marking the passing years as homes do in other places. It will be torn down or left to disintegrate, depending on the inclination of whoever comes to possess it. Even the towns and villages cannot hold here. They are abandoned slowly, street by street, building by building. People move to other towns, but most leave the Quarter altogether. Few return, for the ways back are difficult and slowly being forgotten by all who once passed along those roads.