Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

Gualala was a good place, though. Still healthy, but well protected from raiders. Evan gave me acrylic wool the traders brought in and I’d sit on the porch of the trading post and knit. I got a reputation as the person to talk to if you were sick or injured or were planning a big journey. People were always planning trips north, over the mountains, following rumors of healthy cropland and even operational cities up in Oregon. I don’t know why they wanted to talk to me about it, since I always said the same thing: Forget it. So many things in the mountains can kill you. I advised against it every time.

Almost every time.

Childbirth

The best way to avoid dying in childbirth is to not get pregnant. If you do get pregnant, pennyroyal tea is an effective abortifacient. It can be dangerous, but the safer alternatives don’t always work. If pennyroyal fails, find a woman with midwife skills and ask her to help. Do not try to perform an abortion on yourself unless all other options have been exhausted.

When Lauren and I were on the road together selling medical care, abortion was the most common service we were asked to provide. We got to be very good at it. We could usually stop a pregnancy with herbs; surgery was not often needed.

We also oversaw childbirth, of course. That was much more difficult. With the toxins people pick up from the infected areas, a lot of women go into shock during pregnancy. They used to call that eclampsia. It will almost certainly kill you. There are many other ways childbirth can kill you, but that one is the most common right now.

If you do insist on having a baby, get to a large settlement the moment you realize you’re pregnant. So many women die giving birth in the middle of nowhere, without a midwife or even another woman around. What if it’s a breach birth? You and the baby will both die.

People get angry at me for talking this way about childbirth. What about our duty to carry on the human species, they say.

People are idiots.

Cholera

The colony where I grew up was wiped out by cholera. It’s a stupid way to die.

It was an early colony, from before things really fell apart. Some smart people saw the trouble coming and pooled their money and bought an island, a little island off the coast of Mexico. My mother was invited to join because she was a doctor. That was a sign of how stupid these smart people were, that they thought one doctor would be enough when things got bad. One doctor and no medical resources except what she brought with her, which fortunately included a little electronic book with a whole library of books inside it.

The colony did all right for quite a few years, longer than it really should have, but some people just wouldn’t dig proper outhouses. A hundred scientists and businessmen and millionaires all died because they kept using the river as a bathroom, and that’s how cholera spreads. So don’t poo in the river.

There, you’re smarter than a scientist.

Diabetes

An old disorder of the blood. Without insulin, the only way to manage it is with a starvation diet. I doubt anyone has diabetes today.

Dysentery (Bacterial)

Don’t get poo in your mouth.

Dysentery (Amoebic)

Don’t drink nasty water.

Normally I don’t have patience for people who lack the common sense to stick to clean water or beer, but I have to admit that accidents happen. For example, a man traveling up the coast might stop and make camp at Clearlake, not knowing that the two settlements that used to be there recently wiped each other out in a war over the last fertile fields. And they sank corpses in the lake to poison the water, and the streams in the area may look clean, but they’re crawling with bacteria. It’s maybe not a man’s fault, under those circumstances, if he drinks the water.

For both forms of dysentery, the treatment is the same as for cholera. It’s not as bad as cholera, but if you’re already sick or weakened it can kill you. I’ve nursed a lot of people through it. I know what to do. When the patrol guards hauled Dr. Spendlove onto the porch of the trading post, I knew.

Dysentery is not a romantic disease.

Exposure

All my life, I’ve avoided places where the temperature drops below freezing. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the best way to prevent death by exposure, just like not getting pregnant is the best way to prevent death by childbirth. Don’t go north. It’s so simple. Especially don’t try a mountain crossing late in the year, when the air in Gualala is already crisp and cold at the height of the afternoon, and there are no stars in the night sky.

But, as with pregnancy, sometimes things happen. Sometimes you find yourself in the mountains of Oregon in December, in a shattered wagon with the snow starting to fall all around and your fibromyalgia acting up. It’s not smart. Maybe it turns out you’re pretty stupid after all. But it happens.

If you’re caught outside in the cold, the first thing to do is build a shelter. Put pine needles or other cushioning between yourself and the ground, because the frozen earth sucks out heat. Get out of the wind and into some kind of insulation. Straw is good. I could use a pile of straw.

Share body heat.

Feral Dog Packs

Anyone who’s ever gone into a city with a foraging party knows to pick up rocks to scare the dogs away. Because most dogs will slink away at the first hint of a threat, people often underestimate the danger of dog packs. People are stupid. They worry about bears and snakes and so on, but when you get down to it, truly wild animals are glad to ignore you. They don’t care about humans. Dogs care. And they know us.

Not all dog packs are scared little clusters of skinny sucker dogs. Some are big and organized and know how to hunt. And I’ve seen normally harmless packs turn dangerous when fighting each other over territory. So play it safe. If you hear barking, turn and walk the other way.

People ask which are worse, dogs or wolves. Don’t ask questions like that. If you’re smart, you’ll never know.

When Dr. Spendlove was a boy, he had a dog as a pet. Its name was Jacob. He talked about it while we sat around the fire at night, watching the trees for movement. Nights like this we could use a warm dog at our feet, he said. I’ve read books with that kind of thing, but it’s hard to picture.

Foraging

Lauren and I were good at foraging. Summer and autumn up in the Berkeley Hills, foraging all day and cooking in the granite-countertop kitchen of some abandoned house at night, those were the best times. With all I’d memorized from my mother’s little electronic library, I knew what to gather and what to avoid.

Without a library, it’s harder. You have to be careful, because lots of things that look good can kill you. It’s as true with food as it is with the rest of life.

What I ought to do here is put in some drawings of poisonous things, mushrooms and hemlock and all kinds of nightshades mostly. But I’m not much of an artist, and I’ve got a deadline coming up fast. Lauren could have done it. That’s why you pull rotten teeth.

Frostbite

In the cold there are so many things that can kill you. Wolves, for example. And things can go wrong in too many ways. Take frostbite. As if it wasn’t bad enough on its own, it can lead to gangrene, which can lead to blood poisoning, which can kill you.

There are treatments, I know. Easy ones. If the frostbite is moderate, you can chafe with snow to remove the damaged skin. If it’s more severe, you have to amputate the dead parts of your body. But still, it bothers me. The skin gets so black, and it feels like fire and ice at once. It’s not a good way to die.