Groundlings

After three weeks of moving in their slow thundering herd, the Sequoians left the forest behind. The landscape beyond seemed barren in comparison, though there was life aplenty in the last straggling trees, some of them only a few feet taller than a person.
Cate, as always, recorded this as she walked. The trees outside Sequoia are small, she scribbled in her book. While some of them could support a simple one or two room dwelling, they are not fit to live in as a whole. This is, to my understanding, what all trees except the Sequoias are like, and the concept baffles me. If this is what the average tree is like, why are the redwoods so extremely large in comparison?
It is something I will have to look into when we find a library. I have reason to believe that many of the old world libraries were simply abandoned, and have lain untouched for these many years. I firmly believe I will learn much there, even if we stumble across a small one. It will be guaranteed to be larger and more extensive than even my own archive at home.
The concept of being in a real library is almost exhilarating. I feel as if I have waited for this my whole life long.
It begins to feel like this is what I was born to do.

She lifted her pen from the paper, pausing for a moment. This was Cate’s official logbook, and she was getting alarmingly personal in her accounts. She snapped the book shut and stowed it in her bag for later. She needed to take a break from the stuffy formality with which she had written thus far, and it showed in how her thoughts bled onto the pages. She sighed, tucking her pen into her hair and looking around as she walked.
The open sky above her was grey, and it made the rest of the landscape seem desaturated. Shrubs grew among the smaller trees, most of them brown and half dead with the winter fast approaching.
Among Cate’s documentary supplies was a relic she had had to fight for-- and make some sacrifices along the way too. And in this one moment, it all seemed worth it. She rummaged in her box of clerical things until she found it, then fished it out triumphantly. An old camera. She had used them before, for special ceremonies in the city, for the headshots in the census files, and for her own personal accounts of current events. And now, to make history with.
Cate fiddled with the battery cover. She usually kept the batteries separate from the camera itself, to make sure the precious things did not go to waste just sitting in the thing. The cover popped off and she quickly thumbed the batteries in, snapping the cover back into place and turning the camera on.
This was it. She raised it to her face, peering and angling for the right frame to show how alien the landscape truly was, to show it off in all its strange glory. It took her several minutes of carefully adjusting every single aspect of her stance, and then it happened. The perfect picture of stark abnormality. Cate pressed the button, the camera made a clicking noise, and it was done. She took one more, then turned it off and took the batteries back out, sliding them into a special pocket in her bag.
Knowing that everything beyond this point would be new, she figured it wouldn’t hurt to keep the camera in her own bag now. Just in case, she told herself. In case anything interesting came up. But that was the problem with being a curious mind and a deep thinker in an unfamiliar place-- everything was interesting. Cate would have to curb her curiosity somehow, but she slipped the camera in her bag’s main pocket nevertheless.
It was a good decision. After another half hour of walking, a road became visible. A real, old road that had been used for fast travel to and from the forest. Cate took a picture of it, a long strip of some kind of uniform rock mixture with lines painted on it to direct traffic. It fascinated her, how a simple set of lines like his could be standardized to a point where it could orchestrate the commutes of thousands of people at once.
It was still difficult to imagine that many people in one place. In one city, with unlimited space and room to keep growing and growing on forever. And Sequoia was a community that had outgrown its home, like freezing water expanding and bursting through whatever contained it. The overflow had to go somewhere.
The overflow was here, trotting down the road that led seemingly to nowhere, for now. But Cate recognized it on her map, she knew which way to turn from here. She would lead these people to a new home, to a new beginning, to a new world all of their own. And it all began with this one single road to nowhere, with the sad dead trees that lined it, with the tall poles suspending ancient power lines that had stood in disuse for half a century.
It began with a blank slate. With unlimited soil they could grow produce in, with new trees to build with, with new life all around. Rising from the ashes of the old world, there they were, ready to continue to persevere, ready to grab on to their purposes and never let go again until they died.
The concept brought tears to Cate’s eyes. Their ancestors had lost everything except that which they had built with their own hands, left half finished in hopes that their children would continue the work they had passed on to them when they died before their times. When they died for a future they had no idea would even be worth it.
As far as Cate was concerned, it still was not worth it. The way she saw it, it was their job to make it so. They had a lot of corpses to burn and a lot of weeds to clear, but in the end they would have fertilizing ashes on plants that grew without being choked out. It was their time now, their time to cultivate what was left of the world and to usher in a new era of rebirth.
It brought tears to Cate’s eyes as she walked on, surveying the landscape. Already, she could see the touch of years spent untouched. Grasses grew rampant and long, and what few signs stood by the side of the road were rusted away and overgrown with climbing plant life. Nature had done a fantastic job of reclaiming what had always belonged to it. Nature could have the rusted road signs, nature could have whatever it damn well wanted.
It could not have them, not until they had accomplished what they set out to do.
It could, however, have those rusted lumps that began appearing on the road here and there, where it stretched out in the distance. It took Cate almost the entire walk to the first one before she recognized it as a car. It was so rusted through that the original color was unintelligible. Cate called a groundguard to her side to help her pry the door open. It would not budge, no matter how hard they strained against it. The window was intact, so eventually she had the groundguard smash it in. They both put on gloves to shield against the broken glass, and Cate reached in to take pictures of the interior. Her breath caught in her throat from the excitement. A car. A real, actual car, a remnant of the society that came before them. The society that, even though it had only died so recently, had been lost forever. She had grown up learning about cars, but they had been a myth to her-- much like dragons or mermaids or fairies, the concept of something that could safely transport people at such speed had simply seemed too farfetched to believe most of her life.
And here Cate stood, her hand jammed straight into the belly of a myth, a legend in its rusted flesh, taking pictures of its innards to study later on. The seats looked to have been constructed of leather, or at least some synthetic imitation of it, for the texture that showed through the dust and grime and plant matter was smooth and nearly shiny, even after all these years of standing forgotten by the roadside.
It was absolutely perfect. Cate removed her arm and stepped back to snap another picture-- this time of the outside of the car, then turned the camera off, took out the batteries, and slipped it back in her bag.
When they made camp for the night a few hours later, Cate forgot to cook for herself in her excitement. She stayed up well into the night, furiously writing in her logbook by candlelight.
A car, she wrote, is like a large steel cage on four great wheels rimmed with rubber. Its interior has soft seats for up to five people, finished with leather. It seems like a very luxurious item to own. In front of the driver is a wheel about three handspans wide, with grips on either side. It appears that this somehow controls which way the wheels turn, and in turn, in which direction the car moves.
Behind the wheel on the driver’s side of the dashboard, there are a great many dials and meters. One has a symbol like an empty box stacked on top of a full one, and a rope by it. The dial is simply marked with “F” and “E”. I have no idea what this means. One of the others, a larger one than the first, was clearly used for speed, as several of the tick marks are labelled “X MPH”, in which “X” stands for a number. The top end of this one was labelled “150 MPH”, which I find absolutely astounding. It is difficult to believe that anything could move at a hundred fifty miles per hour, but I have read that cars were incredibly powerful machines. The meter, however, might have been broken, as the needle pointed to roughly 67 miles per hour when it had been standing completely still for an estimated fifty years or so.
It is almost too early to say so, but I believe there was an amount of respect to be had for a car that was well decorated. From the ceiling in the front hung a mirror that could be adjusted in its settings to give the driver a view of what was behind them. And from the neck of the mirror hung a green and yellow tassel perhaps five inches in length with an old metal charm that said “14” on it, a piece of thick paper roughly the size of my palm cut in the shape of an evergreen, and a few feathers on beaded strings. I have yet to discover anything about the meaning of these decorations, but I suspect whatever I find will be a great insight on the cultural climate before the collapse.
The car’s metal exterior hinted in spots at having all been painted the same color once. I suppose decades of standing alone and being battered by all the weather that pulled through over all those years has worn it off, or at least turned metallic particles in the paint to rust. The whole thing had an ugly sort of brown and blistered appearance, and even as I inspected it trying to be careful for preservation’s sake, a few small sheets of rust flaked right off the surface where I touched it. This aspect of the car was certainly far less impressive than the rest.
Still, I am in awe. Today I brushed shoulders-- quite literally-- with one of the great mysteries and legends of the past, and I am left wanting far more. How were these incredible machines operated? What do the decorations mean? What does the E-F dial mean and how could this thing ever reach a speed of a whole hundred and fifty miles per hour? It is, put purely and simply, fascinating.
Cate paused, setting her pen down for a moment, and scanned over what she had written. It would suffice for now, she supposed. She had to get some sleep tonight still. Perhaps they would see more cars tomorrow, given that they were now travelling along an already established and well used road.
Yeah, Cate thought. This’ll do just fine. She capped the pen and stuck it in her bag’s pen pocket, then placed her page marker-- a thin thing made from a few braided strings with some knots and beads at each end-- into the crease where page met page and closed the book, careful to not let it make noise.
She tucked the book away inside her bag and fastened the flaps closed, then set it on the end of her bedroll to use as a pillow. Yawning, she stretched and blew out the candles in her lanterns. Cate laid herself down on her bedroll, pulling a thin blanket over herself and rolled over, asleep almost before her head hit her writing bag.
She dreamed of driving down a highway at a hundred and fifty miles per hour, her hair whipping wildly about in the wind.