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Telluride 2058

By Rob Schultheis

To those very few Four Corners locals who had been around long enough to remember the last few years of the Beforetime, that vanished past must have seemed like the fading of an ancient bittersweet dream.

Was it really true that huge aircraft carried people through the skies back then, around the world and back again? One of the unforeseen side-effects of Global Warming had been unpredictable tsunamis of intense turbulence that swept the skies from a few thousand feet up into the very edges of the troposphere; "levitating tornados," some called them. Any aircraft that ventured into that zone stood a way better than average chance of coming back down in shreds and tatters of aluminum scrap. Small planes could sneak around beneath the turbulence, but even then tendrils of violent air often reached down without warning and tore craft apart.

But what really put a crashing end to the Industrial/Oil Age were the terrorist attacks of Black August, in 2029. No one really knew who pulled it off: most likely a consortium of extremist groups, millenialists from all of the world's great faiths, who hated each other but loathed the realities of the 21st century even more. For decades, scientists had been developing oil-eating microbes, to clean up spills on land and sea; a few ounces of the most effective of these could devour a hundred thousand gallons of oil in 12 hours, and, if not neutralized by a anti-microbial toxin, continue eating and multiplying, multiplying and eating, until all the oil within range was reduced to a chemically inert sludge of water and dirt. The terrorists had evidently developed a kind of anti-oil microbe immune to all antidotes. Agents of the conspiracy dropped tubes containing the microbes down wells leading down to all the major oil fields on earth; in some cases, when the well bores were wide enough, they leapt in clutching sacks full of the stuff. Others injected the microbes into refineries storage tanks and pipelines.

Within a few days, life as Modern Man had known it was over. But not soon enough, alas, to ward off the effects of Global Warming: there was still enough gunk in the atmosphere to raise temperatures, enough to melt most of the polar icecaps and engulf most of the world's major cities in melt water. Away from the coastlines, the terrestrial areas of the Earth experienced Global Warming in a wide variety of ways, many of them unpredictable. While places like "Texas" became even hotter and drier, the high country of the "Four Corners" area of the "United States" experienced Global Warming in a more complex way: overall temperatures rose, summers grew noticeably longer, while snows and rains actually increased.

With roads now virtually impassable, the tarmac overgrown with grass and saplings, and motorized travel a thing of the past, the old tourist Mecca of Telluride, with its grandiose vacation homes (one, occupied for less than a month each year, had no less than 17 bathrooms, all luxury-sized), upscale restaurants, galleries and recreational facilities, shrank to a small village with less than one-tenth its pre-Apocalypse population.

The deeper snows meant the place was isolated for half the year.

After one huge mid-winter blizzard that dumped over 60 inches of snow and caved in the roofs of two of the abandoned palacios up in the ghost town of Mountain Village, one old old-timer said, "Way back when we all called each other ?ski bums,' we would have been hooting and hollering for days." His listeners looked at him blankly: "skiing," which had come to mean anything from snow-shoeing to traveling crosscountry on boards, was now a strictly utilitarian activity, carried out by hunters, trappers and the like.

It was during one of these snowed-in winters that a message reached Telluride over the single frail, patched-together phone line that led south to Drango and the other settlements along the border with Dinetah, the Navajo Nation.

It warned of a new disease that had appeared over the last few days, brought by refugees from Texas, which was having one of its periodic civil wars.

So far, none of the local medicos, hakims and curanderos were able to diagnose it or treat it, The Drangers wanted to know if Washingpaws, the ancient healer who lived in a cabin overlooking Telluride, could help.

to be continued . . .