Jacqueline Druga - Under the Gray Skies

Once we docked, we walked into a mess. It was a slum consisting of poor sewage, tents and rodents. It wasn’t that the government of Argentina wanted the refugees to live that way, there was no choice. They were dealing with their own problems in the aftermath.

I envisioned that south of the equator would be bright and sunny. While it was indeed much warmer and brighter, the sky was not blue. It was gray, almost as if that was our new atmosphere. At least the sun was trying to break through.

There was chaos and lawlessness in the camp, and I was glad to leave. After three weeks I was moved to a permanent refugee camp. I labeled that the starting point.

It wasn’t easy, or advised to go to other camps.

In the early stages, the remaining US government was trying to work with the Argentinean government to give us temporary homes until we could return to the United States. I was told by one official they would have a reliable refugee registry in place within two years.

Two years?

After several months, I was granted a work permit. It enabled me to travel to nearby camps. There I secured a list of the location of every camp, and then I slipped away one night.

It went unnoticed. No one registered me.

I made friends easily with the local people and they were all very friendly and helpful. I grew accustomed to my new lifestyle. Sleeping where I could, staying with host families that took me in, and walking wherever I needed to go.

Thousands of miles of walking.

The first year was so disorganized that I had to make my way back to several camps, because they kept moving people around due to their skills.

Year two, when longer range communication was restored, they started moving people once again. This time to larger camps, trying to migrate all Americans together for when it was time to leave. Things were beginning to recover, the world was healing, technology was slowly returning.

After two years, I was still searching. Every tent, every hut, every face. When I met anyone I showed them my pictures. It seemed as if Davis, his children, and the other people who helped Lacey never existed.

Seven hundred camps became two hundred. Two hundred camps crammed packed with people.

Every time they migrated people, I had to start over.

It was funny, I ran into the same people over and over, but never ran into Davis or the others.

The world had been thrust into a mini ice age, and I wandered a cold earth looking for people I had never met.

Then after three years, finally the clouds began to part. I remember seeing the first speck of blue sky, the first inkling of the sun. The temperature went from an average forty degrees a day to sixty. That first day of sun, everyone gathered outside, staring up to the sky, waiting, wanting more.

The truth was finally discovered.

Everything up to that point was ‘he said she said’, relayed information and speculation. With the revealing of the sky came the reality of what happened.

There was no planetary body that slammed into the moon, no meteor passing so close to earth that it threw us into a tizzy, it was just a longer, overdue cycle that caused a chain reaction. A simple natural burp of earth ignited a firestorm in the Pacific Ring of Fire. That in turn triggered the major eruptions of the Long Valley Caldera, and thirty days of continuous small eruptions at Yellowstone. All of that shot so much debris, smoke and ash into the air that the entire earth was shrouded in a gray cloak. It was more concentrated north of the equator.

It blocked out the sun completely in the north, freezing the landscape.

After three years, the sky started to clear south of the equator. The earth literally spun out of it. Just like a cataclysmic event created the moon, this event created a ring around earth.

Once the clouds parted it was visible. During the day it looked more like a cloud, but at night, it was illuminated, breathtaking and beautiful. I would stare at it for hours. In a strange land, I felt as if I weren’t even on earth any longer.

However, with the bright sun came the dark news. My search would once again take another turn. Not only were they integrating more camps, they were preparing to send people back to America, repopulating and rebuilding the southernmost areas first.

I had befriended a woman named Genevieve. She worked really hard for the new government office, The Department of American Migrants.

We fought a lot, I accused her of doing a poor job of keeping track of people, and she called me insane. I was the biggest pain in her ass at first. She threatened to have me arrested for abandoning a government issued job. Eventually we became friends and she was the one who told me about the merged southern camps and how they were scheduled to ship back first. She suggested I go there and start, at least if I didn’t find Davis, I knew he was still in Argentina.

The camps were named after states in the US and the first one scheduled to return was the Alabama camp. Under the agreement that I would deliver documents and reports to the camp commander, I caught a ride with a military unit and following a two day ride, arrived at the Alabama camp.

One of the soldiers in that unit told me that he believed the camp had registered everyone.

I didn’t believe it until we pulled in.

I honestly didn’t want to leave. It was the first time that I entered a camp that was organized and clean. The tents were dismal, but they were in order and straight.

I knew that this particular camp had been there for a while and was once smaller. I was there in the beginning. It had grown and matured. Gardens were planted on the perimeter, children ran around, and down the main path people set up vendor stands, bartering fresh cooked food for other needed goods.

It wasn’t a camp, it was a community. It was life.

The command center was no longer a tent, but a small building. I wanted to get in there, drop off the information and find out if they had a registry.

Just as I opened the door, I heard the call of my name.

“Madison!”

I turned around and to my surprise it was Callie.

She rushed my way and greeted me with a huge bear hug, nearly toppling the items from my arms. I was so shocked I couldn’t register the reunion.

“This is amazing,” she said. “I just got here last week. How long have you been here?”

“About five minutes. I just got dropped off.”

Callie looked at the things in my arms. “Are you working for the administration?”

“For today,” I said. “Let me drop these off and we can talk. I missed you. It’s so great to see a friend.”

Callie opened the door for me. “I know. Where’s Lacey? Did she find her family?”

I stopped cold.

“No,” Callie groaned out. “Not Lacey. I thought you were carrying her backpack.”

“Never leaves my side,” I set down the box of folders on the secretary’s desk and told her it was from American Migration. I took a deep breath and faced Callie. “Lacey died in an accident. She never found her family. That’s what I’m doing. I’m searching for her family.”

“What about yours?” she asked.

“Bruce and the boys didn’t make it.”

“I’m sorry. I am so sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“How long have you been searching?”

“Three years, two months, six days.”

“It can’t be easy. They keep merging camps and moving them.”

“Tell me about it.” We headed back out. “That’s why I’m here. I brought the papers here so I could look. I heard this camp was moving back to the US.”

“Yeah, it starts in three weeks.”

“This place is amazing,” I said as we walked down the main road through the vendors.

“Most of the established camps are now.”