Death in the Pines by Thom Hartmann Page A

minutes, though it seemed longer, she said softly, “Do you see what is around you?”
    I kept my voice as low as hers: “I see the forest. I see some places where the snow has drifted or melted and the ground shows through. I see where the snowmelt froze over there, making a little rivulet of ice. I can’t see the river, though I think I can hear it under the ice.”
    â€œSo would you say we are surrounded by nature?”
    â€œI might.”
    â€œAnd you know that in the distance are roads, houses, and cities, stores and businesses.” She paused. “Telephone poles and electric wires. Airplanes. Cars.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œImagine that none of those things actually exist. There is only this nature, this wilderness, and it covers the entire world, each climate and place different. Forests give way to savannas, jungles huddle against mountains, volcanoes steam and rumble, the seas wash the shores of islands, but nowhere is there anything built by humans.”
    â€œOK.” It wasn’t easy, but I tried.
    After a moment she said, “Now it is a later time. Now there are people out there, small clans who move from place to place and live in tepees or mud homes or even in caves. It would take a week to walk between one settlement and another. We are here but we are, in any meaningful sense, alone.”
    â€œAdam and Eve,” I said.
    She rocked her right hand side to side in her “no” gesture. “We are not the first people. There have always been people of one sort or another, and there always will be people. But none of them are here now. Here there are only you and me, and perhaps a few of our relatives are a day’s walk away. And all around is this that you call nature. Now can you imagine that?”
    I gazed downhill, and in my imagination the road that had been bulldozed through the forest and around the hills filled in with vegetation, went back to woods. My car vanished. Route 12 vaporized and the trees reclaimed it. The houses turned to mist and drifted away. I envisioned the whole state of Vermont reverting to wilderness, and saw the wilderness spread across all of New England and Eastern Canada, and before it went a green wave that swallowed nearly all the humans and every trace of modern life. “I can imagine that.”
    â€œSee the entire world in its primal state.” Her voice sounded joyful, like someone remembering a happy time.
    And so I did, letting the wild spread over the continent, then over the planet: cities, roads, airports all vanishing, millions of people evaporating. The world was as it had been twenty thousand years ago. And then a terrible solitude gripped me and I said, “We’re alone.”
    â€œYes.”
    I had an absurd moment of existential panic, as though I had somehow, by an act of will and imagination, erased all of modern civilization. I glanced up at the pieces of sky I could see between bare interlacing limbs, hoping to see a jet or at least a vapor trail, but I looked into a blue abyss.
    â€œYou are feeling how it would be if you had really made the world of men vanish,” she said simply.
    â€œIt feels very lonely,” I replied. I felt a curious division: part of me was five years old and worried about stepping on a crack and breaking my mother’s back, and the other was a detective, an adult who looked at my childish fears and smirked, hiding his own concerns.
    â€œNow how will we survive?” Sylvia asked suddenly. “We need food, shelter, warmth, medicine, tools.”
    â€œWe could hunt.”
    â€œWith no guns or technology. You are born naked. Your parents must make your clothing from the stuff the world around us provides, the world you call nature.”
    â€œWe could make spears. Bows and arrows.”
    â€œWhat would you hunt? Where are the animals you would hunt?”
    She made me acutely aware that for some time I had heard no bird sounds, no crows. No