how Mother Nature is pushing back with acid rain and resource depletion and desertification, and how a global environmental apocalypse will be the only way people finally learn their lesson. While listening to herself talk, she wonders if it’s cruel to describe the world’s imminent end to a man who’s just regained it after so long a time away.
“There were some good years in there, though, right?” Everett asks after she’s talked herself out. “Other than that Second Great War?”
“Sure, things were fairly comfortable for a while after that.”
He nods. “Sorry to have missed it. Not the war, I mean. But all the years in between.”
I WON’T MENTION IT AGAIN
AT DUSK, THEY pull off at another logging road for dinner. To settle her persistently gymnastic stomach, Willow brews nettle tea on the van’s propane burner. Everett accepts his clay cup, clutching it intently, like it’s brimming with liquid gold. She picked the nettle herself with cowhide gloves from one of her secret spots, and the tea is rich with tannin and chlorophyll, almost creamy.
“I prefer simple foods,” she says later, stirring tahini into the chickpeas that she’s boiled before ladling a scoopful over his brown rice. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“I can’t imagine a meal I’d rather sit down to,” he says, taking his bowl.
“When we depend less on industrially produced food and live in the world’s quiet spaces,” she says, quoting something she read in the Whole Earth Catalog, her mouth still turbo-charged by the pills, “our bodies become vigorous. We discover the serenity of living in sync with the rhythms of the Earth. We cease oppressing one another.”
“Makes sense,” he says, slipping his fork into his mouth. She still can’t tell if he’s capable of sarcasm.
For dessert she offers some of the soymilk she makes, heated with honey stirred into it. Everett sips approvingly as she details the process: boiling the beans, blending them, and straining the mash through a muslin bag.
“Even when you were just a little thing, you never could stand cow’s milk,” he chuckles after he takes an approving sip, his voice suddenly alight with the past. “I used to give you goat’s milk, whenever I could find it. But this bean milk is a fine alternative.”
“Funny, Harris never mentioned you being around when I was a baby. When was that, exactly?”
“Oh,” Everett says, a hesitant gaze cast into his cup. “I’m getting things twisted up. Sorry. Your father was right. I wasn’t around. All that about the goat’s milk was something Harris once told me.” Still, the warmth of his recollection moves Willow, even if he invented it. Harris never reminisced fondly over the past, and especially not over memories of her childhood.
After they finish, Everett insists on washing the dishes in the van’s small basin while the sun’s salmon light falls fast behind the mountains.
“So why do you choose to live this way?” Everett asks as he scrubs. “I imagine you could afford to live otherwise, if you wanted.”
“I don’t live in my van full time,” she says. “I used to stay in a communal house in Vancouver during the winters, except now I need to figure something else out. But out here in the forests, I’m constantly reminded that I’m no more important than any other organism, and that nature is the greatest force of all.”
Everett nods affirmatively. “As a younger man I never had much use for proper houses, either. Or people.”
“Do you know that there were once six trillion trees on this planet?” she replies. “And now there are three trillion? How long do you think they’ll last at the rate we’re going? So I guess I’d rather be with them before they’re gone. And maybe even save a few in the process.”
By the time the dishes are done it’s dark. But Willow is still too high to sleep, so she declares it best for them to keep moving. She’s eager to get to Greenwood Island as quickly as possible; it’s the only place she’ll be safe from the black sedans, including the one that followed them briefly on the highway. She’s realized there could in fact be many sedans, because their surveillance could be part of a coordinated investigation. She climbs behind the wheel, and though the engine starts fine, when she flicks the headlights nothing happens. Given that she rises and sleeps with the sun, it’s been ages since she’s driven at night. And with no moon, the winding mountain roads will be suicidal without lights.