Deliverance - James Dickey [15]
doors and stocks of bouillon and bully beef for a couple of years at least. We've got games for the kids, and a record player and a whole set of records on how to play the recorder and get up a family recorder group. But I went down there one day and sat for a while. I decided that survival was not in the rivets and the metal, and not in the double-sealed doors and not in the marbles of Chinese checkers. It was in me. It came down to the man, and what he could do. The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there." "Suppose there was a lot of fallout, and there was no way to breathe? Suppose the radiation didn't have any respect for your physique?" "In that case, buddy," he said, "I'd be prepared to throw in the jock. But if it comes to a situation where I can operate, I don't want to crap out. You know me pretty well, Ed. You know I'd go up in those hills, and I believe I'd make out where many another wouldn't." "You're ready, are you?" "I think I am," he said. "I sure am, psychologically. At times I get the feeling that I can't wait. Life is so fucked-up now, and so complicated, that I wouldn't mind if it came down, right quick, to the bare survival of who was ready to survive. You might say I've got the survival craze, the real bug. And to tell the truth I don't think most other people have. They might cry and tear their hair and be ready for some short hysterical violence or other, but I think most of them wouldn't be too unhappy to give down and get it over with." "Is this just something you think about on your own? Does your wife know all this?" "Sure. She was very interested in the shelter. Now she's learning open-air cooking. She's doing damned good, too. She even talks about taking her paints along, and making a new kind of art, where things are reduced to essentials -- like in cave painting -- and there's none of this frou-frou in art anymore." I had the clear sense that he'd both talked this up too much with his wife and maybe a few other people, and had never really talked about it at all. "Where would you go?" he asked. "Where would you go when the radios died? When there was nobody to tell you where to go?" "Well," I said, "I'd probably head south, where the climate would be better. I'd try to beat my way down to the Florida coast, where there'd be some fish around, even if there wasn't anything else to eat." He pointed ahead, where the hills were moving from one side of the road to the other, and growing solid. "That's where I'd go," he said. "Right where we're going. You could make something up there. You could make something, and not have to build it on sand." "What could you make?" "If everything wasn't dead, you could make a kind of life that wasn't out of touch with everything, with the other forms of life. Where the seasons would mean something, would mean everything. Where you could hunt as you needed to, and maybe do a little light farming, and get along. You'd die early, and you'd suffer, and your children would suffer, but you'd be in touch." "Oh, I don't know," I said. "If you wanted to, you could go up in the hills and live right now. You could have all those same conditions. You could hunt, you could farm. You could suffer just as much now as if they dropped the H-bomb. You could even start a colony. How do you think Carolyn would like that life?" "It's not the same," Lewis said. "Don't you see? It would just be eccentric. Survival depends -- well, it depends on having to survive. The kind of life I'm talking about depends on its being the last chance. The very last of all." "I hope you don't get it," I said. "It's too big a price to pay." "No price is too big," Lewis said, and I knew that part of the conversation was over. "What's the life like up there, now?" I asked. "I mean, before you take to the mountains and set up the Kingdom of Sensibility?" "Probably not too much different from what it's liable to be then," he said. "Some hunting and a lot of screwing and a little farming. Some whiskey-making. There's lots of music, it's practically coming out of the trees. Everybody