George: The Columbia, Part 1

George sat for a moment, pausing in his search for a way down to the Columbia. He watched the wind turbines spin. There were several hundreds of them, and someone had to maintain them, so that Seattle could have light and heat. He wondered who still lived out here, on the blasted plains. The blades swung, glinting in the sun, still bright white over fifty years after the last had been built. He found their presence reassuring, guardians over his, and everyone else’s future.

He began to walk along the edge of the gorge again, half his attention on where he was walking, and half on the turbines. It was odd, George felt, that he should think of them as guardians. They had been too little too late. The wasteland that was Washington, a vast desert, dotted with abandoned towns and farms, was only a small corner of the totality of the world, but there was no part of it that had not been affected by the environmental collapse. The guardians had failed, economies had followed the collapse, and humanity had retreated to live in sustainable enclaves.

A fissure opened before him, taking his attention from the turbines spinning across the gorge. It was formed from pillars of dark stone that had detached from the plain he had been walking on. Far below were the remains of thousands more of the same formations. There was a trail, narrow and sandy that ran into it; George hoped that it would take him to the valley bottom, where the river ran, and he could fill his water bottles and wash his feet.

His boots had been chaffing for the past month during which he had walked from Old Seattle. His boots were done, but he was not. His journey had taken him from that city on the West Coast and would end on the desolate east coast, ravaged by the effects of the Expulsion, amidst the ghostly towers of Manhattan. That was one of the greater disasters of the 20’s, a huge Carbon Capture project had ruptured, releasing hundreds of thousands of metric tones of carbon monoxide and dioxide. It caused the death of millions on the eastern sea board before dissipating into the ocean and atmosphere, triggering the collapse of dozens of species.

His would be the first traverse of North American by foot since the Melt. George would be the first to see the Columbia Icefields—though it felt wrong to call it such anymore—since the last snow had disappeared.

He stumbled, and ran a few steps, hopped over a stone, and came up short of a large hole. "Remember George, pay attention," he told himself, "it would be pretty poor form to die here, before even leaving Washington." George needed to cross the Columbia before he could follow it to its source. With the glaciers gone, all the rivers relied on rain to feed them; they were all seasonal, and George needed to be finished this leg of his journey, all the way to the Rockies before summer set in and he was left without a source of water for four months.