The Meeting At The Wharf Cafe'

 

So What Do You Say?

It was about 5PM when we reached the old Wharf Cafe’ out on the dock at the north end of the waterfront. The whole area looked deserted except for a few guys standing quietly under the awning at the door. There were no lights on inside except for a couple of candles in jars up at the counter when the cash register had been. I wondered briefly what happens to things like cash registers which are stolen when nobody needs them anymore. In fact, there were no streetlights either, so it was pretty dark inside and outside.

I could see that there were already about fifty people inside. They had pulled chairs up near the candles, in a rough semi-circle. As we came in through the door which had been blocked open with a rock, the room felt like the people were just waiting for someone. There was lots of quiet chatter. Looking closer, I saw that there were no older people. It was all the under thirty crowd, such as it was these days, and only five or six were girls. We had the only dog present. Lou looked a little scared or shy and she hung onto Buddy’s collar. She hadn't been saying much today.

There was some business with Doug and Elvin gathering four chairs from further back in the dining room and bringing them up to the front of the crowd. People scootched back and made room for us. I noticed some of them sitting forward in their chairs. Smiling and serious faces turned toward us, well actually, toward Doug.

Doug left his chair and stood in front of the counter facing the small crowd. He smiled and looked at all the faces carefully for a full minute it seemed. Everybody who had been to this group before stood up then. He said, “are we all together?” quite loudly. “Yes!” the people facing him yelled. Lou and I looked at each other in surprise. “Are you sure?” he said firmly and loudly. “Yes!” roared back at him.

“Ok, good, sit down, would ya?” said Doug, and everybody settled back into their seats noisily. He hopped up to sit on the counter by the candles in jars.

“Why are we here?” he asked the crowd.

“To start again!” said the people in return.

“Do you like what you see?” asked Doug. “NO!” they answered him.

“Do you want more like this?” he asked. “NOOO!”.

“Will you obey them, PSec and the rest?” “NOOO!”

Doug didn’t look so much like a dusty kid right then. He spoke as one with authority. His eyes ran back and forth over the crowd. Even Elvin looked serious. I felt something unfamiliar in my throat, something tight and a little frightening. I don’t know if I had been expecting anything much, but whatever it might have been, it was not this solid crowd answering him back as one.

“We must do this. They have nothing for us. They nearly killed all of us. Our parents are gone, mostly. Many many of our friends and our brothers and sisters are dead. Our whole society is broken. Even if we marry and have children what then? How do we feed them? There are no jobs, there is no economy. We live like lab rats at PSec’s negligent pleasure. Will they keep putting food in their ratty store down on the highway? Who knows? We don't even know why they do that.  How many of us even know how to live like a land bound peasant, if we even have access to land.

We don’t even get real news. I don’t know what is happening in this country, let alone the world. Do you? No, you do not. All we know is what we see, and it’s not good, is it?

There is no medical care. There are no schools. There is no culture to speak of at all. Anything done like music or art is done at home by us. But we have a bigger job before us also. It's nothing less than making a country from what and who is left alive.

The first order of business is making connections with others who survived the Pandemonium and want to live again as a real people.” He fell silent then, as if waiting.

A short red headed stocky man all in denim, top and bottom, stood and spoke. “Doug, I can go. I know people in Bellevue, and I have a horse. Can I carry some message to them?” His name turned out to be Jerry. With that offer the whole difficult business of building a movement began, with no trustworthy communication mechanism, no media at all. I could not see how it could possibly work. Maybe there were some things I didn't know, such as how all these people had come to meet here in the first place.

This was at the beginning of the NO party, and now I knew who had been making those stenciled signs on the sidewalks. Of course, it had been Doug and Elvin.

(I know what is going to happen next, but oh dear...lol)