To Split Rock Lighthouse-02

(From a mid-January 2013 entry)

Keeping track of time is difficult now. I’m glad to have my watch, but tracking the days is quite difficult now. If I didn’t have the calendar, I’d be totally lost as to when in the season it is. Instead, I’m aware that it’s mid-January and Spring is just over six weeks away. Supplies are enough to make it, but it means eating a lot of soups and stews. Fishing is not an option right now, so hunting is all I have for getting fresh meat and there’s been just one deer close enough for me to take. Dressing that was a bit of a chore, but it’s done and the venison tastes great.

The light works, and I run it regularly just to keep it in working order. The machinery will work, for now, and keeping up maintenance is what I do to keep busy most of the time. The rest of the time I either check on the traps while hunting or I plan on what needs to be done once Spring arrives. There’s been no sign of life on the radio, and there is no Internet access, so I presume that the disaster’s effects are truly catastrophic. At this time, I presume that there is no help coming; anyone that comes here is a survivor, not a rescuer, if they are not a marauder.

If this is so, then I must commit to making the lighthouse my base of operations hereafter. The old world is gone forever.

(From a late January entry)

It’s been somewhat lonely here. I haven’t so much as a dog for company, and I’m so far north that anyone that could get here is likely fleeing a collapsed shelter from nearby—relatively speaking—and now seeks someplace more solid, as I did, in coming here. That changed today.

A co-ed from the Cities arrived, a foreign exchange student from Japan, who came here for a year abroad. Her name is Yuki, and she arrived during a snowstorm, by herself. Once I took her in, I saw that she’d gotten Frostbite and Hypothermia, but she seemed unaffected by either condition. I insisted on treating her, and she (wisely) relented when I explained the gravity of her situation. When she finally warmed up and recovered, I got her some stew and bread, and that got her talking.

Yuki explained that she had some friends with family in Duluth, and she was with them when the disaster struck. She tried fleeing south back to the Cities, but I-35 got cut off early on and then they couldn’t stay in or near Duluth so they fled north. They stayed ahead of things, fleeing Two Harbors just a week ago, but ran out of gas some miles south of here; she was in the best condition, so they told her how to get to the lighthouse.

When Yuki felt up to it, we got into the Land Rover and went after them. We found them dead of exposure and returned immediately. Yuki wept.