ThinkPint2

Margaret, everyone called her Greta except for a few older relatives, surveyed the room and its scattered contents. It looked like this when she was preparing to go someplace, but this was a bigger trip than usual. This trip would take her into the past of her ancestors, a time that looked better than the present, or at least that is how she saw it now. Greta wondered if her relatives felt the same way when they were her age. Perhaps it was just how it was at young adulthood, being the skeptic and realist that she was.

Most people stopped traveling in the 2030’s when it was clear the change to renewable sources was not going as well as hoped, at least for transportation. Gas cars no longer existed, and the alternatives did not allow for long trips. Greta remembered gas cars, but just vaguely. They were outlawed when she was 2, in 2038. Public transportation had not lived up to its promises, and everyone saved their ICS (Individual Carbon Scheme) points for important things.

This was important, at least to Greta.

At 28, she wanted to see the places her mother and grandmother described. This could be her only chance as it took so long to build up ICS points to do anything. The trip would take a few days to get to Illinois.

The last several months Greta reviewed all the material she could gather about family in Illinois; how they lived; where they lived; and trying to understand the history from 1850’s until most of them left the area in the 2030’s.

Her family had long and varied roots in the central U.S. which started with migration from Europe to the Midwest. The end destination would be around Rt. 66 in Central Illinois, the road and the land surrounding it had a long history. Her ancestors were a part of all of it. Even now when you mentioned Rt. 66 people knew vaguely where it had been even if highways were viewed skeptically because of their influence in encouraging travel during the Fossil Fuel Frenzy time as she now called it.

Her family migrated from the U.S. north to Canada after the events of the 2020’s and 2030’s. Several hurricanes in Gulf Coast and others on the U.S. East Coast, moved people up from the South and over from the East. The Midwest grew faster than other regions at that time. The white population, as predicted, was becoming a minority. The landscape was changing in many ways. A major earthquake, long expected, happened in the Pacific Northwest, but most of those people made a different life staying in the NW to renew and rebuild. For the NW people options to move elsewhere in the U.S. did not look appealing, very understandable with how the world looked at the time.

One of ‘Big Heats,’ as they were called, is what finally convinced many of Greta’s relatives in Illinois to consider moving. Her father’s grandfather died in one of the major heat summers when the energy grid collapsed and the renewable energy existing at the time could not produce enough power to keep people cool for the extended time needed. After that and with all the movement of people from the South and East and the continuing unrelenting summers, the family decided to go North. The floods had been frequent and awful, but in the end, it was the heat and allergies that clinched the family decision to move. Greta’s sister’s allergies were horrible five months out of the year in Illinois.

Her family became a part of the climate diaspora in the 2040’s when she was preteen. It was happening everywhere at the time.

Greta had a desire to travel and know the world. That had been true since she was very young and imagined she was going to all the places she read about in history, a favorite subject for her. She delved into history of all eras and places and sought particularly to understand where her ancestors had lived. She wanted to go to all of those places. That was out of the question, she knew it. No one went that far from home anymore. Most travel took place by 3-D glasses being put on and a partner in the hosting country having on their 3-D glasses and you had a virtual trip complete with a guide. In time she wanted to ‘3-D’ to Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Austria, and Bosnia and many other places as well.

But now it was going to Illinois for ‘real’. Real travel in real time. Greta prepared for the trip by reading stories saved by her grandmother. In old times ebooks were the way to share stories. How quaint. Her grandmother had printed out all the stories as few people now had a device which could read the old stories on those original devices. Paper had lasted as the way for posterity.

Yesterday Greta read her great, great, great grandfather Ripley’s words during the last week of his life, written by his daughter. She knew the farm described was adjacent to Rt. 66. Here is what she read.

“Dad dropped out of school after the ninth grade to help his father farm. All in all, Dad had been chief steward of our 200 acres for 46 years. I learned early that to be able to say, ‘the crops are in’ was to report the greatest accomplishment possible. After each field was harvested, the family tradition held that Dad would stand at the end rows and give his ‘vast acres’ speech. This amounted to a wide, opening gesture of both arms at shoulder height and saying something about the grandness of this particular field. For all of us it was the exclamation mark that acknowledged the work was done, and we had done it together.

“Dad brought in his last set of crops in the fall of 1976. His health had not been good for years. A heart attack 25 years before started the decline that was exacerbated by having Parkinson’s disease for 15 years. It was the shaking tremors of Parkinson’s, more than aging, that forced him to change his farming style. A man with a shuffling gait and shaky hands has great difficulty operating farm machinery and doing the many necessary tasks required of farmers. Simple chores like changing implements behind the tractor had become difficult. My mother and brother took up some slack, but it was always very clear who was in charge. Dad.

“By my assessment 1977 is a year better forgotten. By year’s end both my father and mother were dead, neither one of them seeing the crops in. Now, more than two decades later, the events of 1977 are beginning to be history and a bit blurred as far as sequence, but not in overall impact.

“Dad’s more rapid decline began in January 1977. By the end of June I made the 2000-mile trip home twice during Dad’s 3 or 4 hospital stays, 2 short-term nursing stays, one surgery, and several minor strokes. Family hopes ran up and down like a roller coaster. A hopeful time was at the end of May when Dad left the hospital and the outlook was brighter. He rode out of the hospital in a wheelchair sporting his farm cap and told the nurse he was going home to supervise the rest of the spring planting, and he planned to be ready for the fall harvest.

“June followed with more minor strokes, surgery, and another nursing home stay. The next time I saw my dad he was thin, unable to move by himself. His speech was slurred. It was during that visit that Dad looked at me and said, ‘No more corn or beans.’ He died within the week.

“That was July. In August my mother died in a house fire. That left my brother in charge of getting in the crops, a seemingly overwhelming task now. As often happens in rural communities, the neighbors came through. In a surprise two-day blitz, dozens of neighbors came with their own equipment and helped. As I heard the news 2000 miles away, all I could do was cry. It was over, my dad’s vast acres could rest for another year.”

Greta thought it seemed like the soil and crops were in his soul. Ironic, she thought, how prophetic he was, not only about his own time as it was ending, but what the so-called Corn Belt of old would no longer hold. ‘No more corn or beans’ was now true for the entire area. Initially crops had more yields with climate change, but eventually it was just too hot, or too wet to count on a crop. The soil further north, even though the weather conditions were better, could not raise these crops. The soil was everything. Everything. The Corn Belt now was not even a Corn Bracelet.

But Greta wanted to see what remained…of the land, buildings, and even Rt. 66.

She continued packing and preparing for the upcoming trip.