Drop City

me.”
    Her hands were in the water and it was as hot as she could stand it. The scrub pad moved mechanically against the crust of the blackened pan. “That's what I mean,” she said. “You have freedom out here, and not just freedom to do what you want, but freedom from that kind of crap--he was just walking his dog, for God's sake.” For some reason she couldn't name, she was on the verge of tears, and she wondered about that, about how she could let herself get so wrought up when this was what she'd wanted all her life, this place, and maybe this person, and the rest of the world, with its nose-slitters and dog-kickers, could sink into the ocean for all it mattered.
    “Pamela,” he was saying, “come on, Pamela,” and she felt him lifting her arms out of the sudsing water till she was open to him and he pulled her close. “You're never going to have to think about any of that ever again, not for the rest of your life.”
    People said she was crazy, wanting to live out in the hind end of nowhere, ten or twenty miles from the nearest store, church, roadhouse or post office, and another hundred sixty from anything even approximating civilization, if you could call Fairbanks civilized. And they said she was crazier still for willingly putting herself in the hands of some grizzled, twisted, sex-starved fur trapper with suet-clogged arteries and guns decorating his walls--in fact, that was exactly, word for word, the way Fred Stines, the man she'd been seeing in Anchorage, had put it--but she begged to differ. What they didn't understand--what Fred couldn't begin to imagine--was that everything they knew, the whole teetering violent war-crazed society, was about to collapse. On that score, she hadn't the slightest doubt. And the riots in the streets were just a prelude to what was to come, because if nobody worked and they all just sat around using drugs and having promiscuous sex all day, then who was going to grow the food? And if nobody grew the food, then what would they eat? To her, the answer was obvious: they'd eat your food, and when they were done with that, they'd eat you, just like in that science fiction book where all the dead and dying were made into potted meat. Sure. But you could work in an office building every day and go to the store in your new shiny car and then come home to your gas heater and your woodstove, and never think twice about it, and that was where the Fred Stineses of the world would be when it all came crashing down. Not her, though, not Pamela. She was going to live in the bush, and she was going to be one hundred percent self-sufficient. Anything less, to her mind, was a form of suicide.
    On the afternoon of the second day, after breakfast and the embrace that became a clinch and then a kiss that went on till the blood was singing in her ears, Sess walked her around the place, showing it off. He demonstrated the clarity of the Thirtymile where it crashed into the opaque Yukon, which ran heavy with its freight of glacial debris, showed her where he planned to build a sauna and a workshop, lectured her on the garden that was already showing green against the black plastic he'd laid down for heat retention. He was growing cabbage, cauliflower, turnips, kohlrabi and Brussels sprouts, potatoes, onions, peas, lettuce, Early Girl tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, squash. “Everything has to be in the ground by the first of June,” he was saying, “though you risk a frost, which is why I keep that wood stacked up over there, just as a precaution, because we get a growing season out here of maybe a hundred five or so days, what with the influence of the river keeping things a tad less frigid, and every day counts, believe me, and round about February you'd kill to have a little pickled cabbage or stewed tomatoes with your six thousandth serving of moose--”
    She was listening, because this was the information she needed, this was the knowledge that was proof against anything, but most of what he said drifted right through her--it was his voice she was listening to, not the words. His voice mesmerized her in a way Fred Stines's never could. It spoke to her in a tone that was like a current flowing through her, like the electric charge in a wall socket or the balky lamp she'd clumsily rewired when she was in college. He talked--and he wasn't shy anymore, not shy a bit--and she listened. “So,” he said finally, and they were down at the river staring into the canoe, “should we maybe