Gonggone Gone — Parts 3 & 4

a road trip

By late afternoon, as the stores began filling with panicked shoppers, Doug and Alex topped up the truck at a gas station on Eagle and Pine. Gas pump traffic was heavier than usual. It was sinking in. This could not be ignored or blamed on people you don’t like.

Handing Doug the truck keys, Alex said, “Why don’t you drive?”

They pulled onto Interstate 84 and headed east. The highway was busy but not much worse than a typical rush hour. As they drove out of town, Alex reset his iPhone to its factory default.

“Give me your phone.” Doug handed over his phone. “What’s the passcode?”

He quickly reset Doug’s phone and tossed both phones out the truck window between Boise and Mountain Home.

“What the hell, Dad?”

“We must stay completely offline. I don’t want government goons tracking us with cell towers.”

“Aren’t they busy with — I don’t know — the end of the fucking world.”

“When, in your life, has the goddamn government personally helped you?”

It was Alex’s standard; reduce it to yourself, rejoinder. Thorny policy questions evaporate when reduced to yourself. Simply ask, does action X help or hurt me? Forget about the rest of humanity. What does it do for you? Just you, right now! Thomas Hobbes said we are in a constant war of all against all, and when we forget, we become marks, suckers, drones, tools: meat robots for others.

Doug, used to his dad’s rants, shrugged and said, “Try the radio.”

Alex turned on the radio and tuned in NPR, or Nitwit and Puerile Radio, as he mockingly called it. The NPR ladies, both female and male, were more hysterical than usual. The Earth’s sudden departure from gravity as we know it stumped the NPR experts, and the vibes were all bad. Naturally, NPR trotted out a parade of celebrity physicists, but they couldn’t explain what had happened. Nobody wanted to ask the pretentious NPR what does this all mean questions.

Alex smirked, “I wonder why?”

When one young Hawaii-based astronomer started explaining what might happen if Earth stayed on this course, they abruptly cut him off.

“Had enough?” Alex asked. “Let’s check God Radio.”

The NPR ladies were hysterical, but God Radio was flat-out end-timing it. The rapture was nigh. God had untied the bonds of heaven to punish the wicked and sinful, and you better repent your sorry ass. Maybe this time, God wouldn’t pull a Noah and flood the Earth. Perhaps he preferred to cast it into the freezing dark. God Radio didn’t pussyfoot around. We’re all doomed, and for once, they were right.

Doug laughed, “So the ‘consensus’ is we’re all fucked, up, down, and sideways.”

Expecting roadblocks at any moment, they kept driving east. They passed Twin Falls and followed I-86 to the I-15 junction at Pocatello. While gassing up in Idaho Falls, they joined a group of truckers and other drivers discussing the sudden closure of the Targhee Route into Yellowstone. The cops showed up beyond St. Anthony and blocked Highway 20. They let traffic leave the park but blocked vehicles from entering. The usual louts tried to go around the roadblocks but quickly ran into recently deployed National Guardsmen. Some truckers said they’d been messaging other drivers who reported the northern, eastern, and Jackson entrances were also blocked. All the roads in and out of Yellowstone were blocked.

Back on the road, Alex remarked, “I’m not surprised. Yellowstone is a major geothermal region. Geothermal is now the world’s most precious resource. Yellowstone’s underground heat will keep pouring forth as the Earth cools. If you dig deep tunnels near geothermal features fast enough, it may be possible to survive in them for a while. Long-term prospects are still bleak.”

“I bet governments will seize geothermal sites everywhere. Hell, NATO or the Russians will probably invade Iceland. They better do it before the oceans freeze.”

Heading north, they kept on I-15 until it hit I-90 at Butte. At Butte, Alex took the wheel and turned east on I-90 to start the long drive across Montana. They hoped to reach Miles City via I-94 and turn east on State Road 12 to Baker. Over the border in North Dakota, they would turn south and follow secondary paved and rough dirt ranch roads to Grampa’s Valley. Grampa’s Valley was near the North and South Dakota borders on the Montana side. It was an unremarkable patch of hilly and barren badlands.

Halfway to Miles City, Doug checked the radio for news. The government had just declared a national emergency, and the talking heads were exploding and spewing predictable rants like, “They’re always looking for an excuse to declare an emergency and infringe on civil liberties” and “How do we know Earth is running away?” One polite NSF astronomer explained how “people at home” could check it out.

He said, “Hammer a pole, like a broom handle, into your lawn. Make sure it’s straight. Watch the pole’s shadow. At solar noon, the shadow will be pointing dead north or south. Mark the clock time. Now, check the shadow at the same clock time every day. The shadow will start leaning. The angle will rapidly grow. When we pass Mars, it will be over 45 degrees. At Gonggong, it will be almost 90 degrees. Fun fact: the secant of the shadow angle is the distance to the Sun in astronomical units.”

Alex elaborated. “That’s only true if distances are in astronomical units. See, even on runaway Earth, you cannot escape trigonometry. Good idea, though, we can use this.”

“What’s a Gonggong?”

“It’s a minor Kuiper belt object—a small body orbiting beyond Neptune. It has the coolest Kuiper belt object name. It’s named after a Chinese water god.”

“We need to keep going. I don’t like the sound of ‘national emergency.’”

They pulled into a Super 8 in Miles City at 2 AM. It had taken longer to cross Montana than expected. There were no road closures, but highway repair crews had abandoned their posts along a few interstate stretches. Golly gee, giving up on fixing highways in the middle of the crisis to end all crises. What a surprise. The missing road crews led to confusion on a few single-lane sections, which led to car accidents, traffic jams, and long delays. At one traffic jam, a few four-wheel drive vehicles crossed the median to drive on the wrong side of the highway. This led to more road jams and even longer delays.

Alex wasn’t expecting to find any motel rooms, but to his surprise, the Miles City Super 8 parking lot was almost empty. You know your town sucks when, even at the end of things, people would still rather be elsewhere. Entering the lobby, they pressed the front desk service button a few times, and a sleepy, fat teenage girl with green hair highlights emerged from an office cubby behind the front desk. Alex quickly paid with cash. The girl looked at the bills like she had never seen them before. Taking advantage of the empty motel, they picked a ground-floor room beside the parked truck and trailer. They wanted to keep an eye on their supplies.

Retiring to their room, Alex adjusted the room’s window blinds. Usually, he made motel rooms as dark as possible, but tonight, he only closed the translucent inner blind and tolerated the glaring streetlight outside.

Even though they were both exhausted, they did a few chores. Alex went outside, rummaged in the truck, and extracted the two large powerpacks, his newly acquired power tools, and the light amplification monocular. Usually, new packs, tools, and gadgets need charging. He plugged them into the motel outlets to charge.

Doug flipped on the room’s TV to catch up on any relevant news they missed driving. The national emergency imposed a country-wide curfew, forcibly closed the borders, and deployed National Guardsmen and Army Reservists to “maintain order.” People were to stay in their homes, and all nonessential stores, basically most of them, were to remain closed. Travel was restricted to within a few miles of your domicile. Food rationing was now in effect. You now had to register at several major tech companies and upload images of driver’s licenses, passports, or other valid forms of ID, plus self-administered mugshots, to get a ration hash: a unique, impossible-to-forge QR code needed to buy food.

Even cynical Alex was dismayed. “Looks like the deep state is creaming all over us!”

“What are they supposed to do?”

“Check the local news. See if there are any roadblocks around here.”

Local news proved useless. Face it: the news hasn’t been useful for ages. Alex dug out his laptop and availed himself of the motel’s Wi-Fi. He quickly found the local Nextdoor and other neighborhood websites. By reading through recent posts, Alex found some local live streams. People around town were pointing cellphones and house security cameras at road intersections and live-streaming traffic.

“It looks like the Gestapo hasn’t reached Miles City yet. We’ll have to go if we see any move to block streets. Doug, try and get some sleep. I’ll keep an eye on the streams and wake you up.”

Doug wasn’t happy with stopping. “Why did we stop? You’ve been going on about roadblocks. Why take chances?”

“Without GPS, I’m not sure I could find the turnoff to Grampa’s Valley in the dark.”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t have tossed our phones.”

“Try and get some sleep.”

Taking his dad’s advice, Doug plopped on the bed by the motel room’s bathroom and pulled the covers over his large body. In minutes, he fell asleep.

Alex kept an eye on the traffic streams and indulged himself with what he now realized would be his last bit of web browsing. It reminded him of his earlier reading material conundrum. What do you do in your last Internet session? He checked for astronomy software updates. An emergency runaway Earth sky map update had been released. It projected Earth’s new path through the solar system.

“That was fast?”

He downloaded and installed the update and then gathered PDF manuals for the tools and gadgets they had bought, and then, thinking they would help, he painstakingly collected high-resolution Google Maps images of the lands within 150 kilometers of Grampa’s Valley.

The high-resolution image files were large; it took about an hour to get them all. He lost track of the traffic streams while downloading. Checking stream browser tabs, he was alarmed to see police cars with spinning lights blocking the on and off-ramps of I-94. A few cops were standing beside their cars, directing cars to turn around if they were attempting to pull onto the highway. Cars exiting I-94 were directed into town.

Alex shook Doug, “We have to go —now.”

grampa’s valley

They quickly gathered the items they hauled into the motel and put them in the back seat of the king cab. By the time they had loaded the truck, two more police cars had blocked Highway 59 before the interstate underpass.

Doug pointed out the new roadblock. “We can’t get to Highway 12.”

“How about south?”

“I don’t see anything.”

“If we can get past Cemetery Road, we can take 59 south down to 212 and then come back north to 12 through Albion.”

“That adds over two hundred miles.”

“It’s way off Interstates. They’ll be blocking main roads first. We don’t have a lot of options.”

Alex pulled out of the Super 8 parking lot and headed south. He carefully obeyed speed limits while Doug watched the road behind them in one of the side mirrors. The cops did nothing to stop them. Within minutes, they put Miles City behind them. They saw no cars on the road.

Alex relaxed, “You know what I like about southeastern Montana? No goddamn people.”

Alex was tempted to put on the night vision monocular, turn off the truck headlights, and drive in the dark but decided against it. Cops would stop anyone driving without headlights. They went down to 212 and turned north as dawn light spilled over the flat landscape.

An hour later, bright morning sunlight cast long shadows when they gassed up in Ekalaka, Montana. Doug generously bribed the station attendant. He wouldn’t turn on the pump otherwise. Gas needed hash ration QR codes now. It didn’t take the deep state long to snuff civil liberties. The corrupt fuckers always exploited crises; runaway Earth suited them.

Continuing north, Alex said, “I’m worried about Baker. It’s big enough to enforce this stay-home crap. I’m going to get off at 7 and go through Webster. It connects with the secondary we need to get to Grampa’s Valley.”

They headed east on dirt roads and crossed into North Dakota, where they turned south on a ranch road. After driving almost to the South Dakota border, they headed west back into Montana. In Montana, they crept over a rough ranch road before turning off on an even rougher double-wheeled rut path. After another hour of cautious off-road driving, with the trailer bottoming out a few times, Alex and Doug descended a gentle grade into Grampa’s Valley. It wasn’t much of a valley. It was a small badland laced with eroded washes and surrounded by flat, barren steppes.

Many years ago, Alex’s Grampa and his second wife made a go of sheep ranching here. It didn’t work out because Grampa hated sheep. According to Alex’s dad, the feeling was mutual. His wife managed without his help, but she died of diabetes in the 1960s. After her death, Grampa stayed in the valley, going deeper and deeper into debt. He sold off all the surrounding lands to neighboring ranches but kept a small plot around a catchment pond and reserved a right of way. He remained in his small wood frame house, now a collapsed ruin, until Alex’s dad took him in and looked after him in the years before his death.

Alex’s dad held onto the valley after Grampa’s death, and Alex had fond memories of camping with his dad in the little valley and watching the dark, star-filled eastern Montana skies. Alex caught the amateur astronomy bug in this valley.

Doug pointed at the ridge overlooking the small pond. “There’s Star Hill. Remember when we watched the sky there?”

When Doug was growing up, Alex took him camping here. Alex would set up his telescopes on Star Hill, and the two of them would delight in Saturn’s rings, the bands of Jupiter, and Doug’s favorite, the Hercules cluster.

After Alex’s dad died, the valley passed to him. As part of his nuptial assets, he’d have to sell it after his divorce. Alice started nagging him to sell right after his dad’s death, arguing the valley was too far away for his “useless hobby.” Well, screw her. Let the succubus get her half when the liquid oxygen rains start.

Creeping around the last wash curve, they spotted the derelict ruins of Grampa’s old frame house. The tiny frame house had collapsed years ago and had been steadily picked over for campfire wood ever since. It sat above a small, dirty catchment pond. Pulling in beside Grampa’s rubbled house, they got out of the truck with binoculars and carefully scanned the landscape for others. They didn’t want to be seen. Before doing anything else, they hid the trail cameras: one overlooking the catchment pond, another in Grampa’s ruined house, and the third on an old run of barbed wire fencing, overlooking the rutted truck path they had driven in on.

With the cameras set up, they searched the south-facing hill above the pond for Grampa’s “illegal” mine.

Fifty years ago, when Alex’s dad moved Grampa out of his valley, he boarded up and buried the entrance of Grampa’s “illegal” coal mine. Grampa didn’t start the mine. It probably started years before when rogue miners crossed over from North Dakota. Even today, if you Google abandoned coal mines, you’ll find hundreds on the North Dakota side but none across the border in Montana. Geology doesn’t care about borders. Coal seams don’t check maps. After watching Dr. Rebecca’s YouTube video, Alex realized governments would start “securing and rationing” coal mines worldwide, and lucky for them, Grampa’s mine didn’t appear on Google or USGS geological survey maps.

Alex wasn’t sure why everyone called the mine “illegal.” Alex’s dad blamed it on “rancher ecology.” If it’s not a cow or a rancher, shoot it. Shooting mines is stupid, even for cowboys, but he could appreciate keeping livestock, including the idiot two-legged variety, out of open mines.

It didn’t take them long to find the hillside depression marking the mine entrance. They quickly dug out the loose fill covering a thick, oil-stained wooden door. The door wasn’t locked, but opening it required crowbars. The door didn’t have hinges, so they dragged it forward and set it to one side. Before entering the mine, Alex fetched a carbon monoxide detector and a handful of head strap lights from the trailer.

“Where are the bike helmets? I’m not banging my head.” Digging the helmets out of the trailer took a few more minutes.

Affixing LED head strap lights to their foreheads, they carefully entered the mine. The shaft receding into the hillside measured under two meters high and more than one meter wide. Alex had to duck to avoid hitting his head, and poor Doug had to lean way forward. Seven meters into the shaft, the tunnel branched to the right. The secondary shaft went about three meters and ended in a small pit filled with junk and crushed rock. It looked like miners dumped waste rock and trash in this side pit. It didn’t make sense. Maybe “illegal” miners used the waste pit to stay out of sight.

The mine shaft was dry and sat above the water table of the nearby pond. They were impressed with the nice shaft support work. Somebody had invested a lot of time neatly shoring up the shaft with rail ties. In roughly thirty meters, the mine widened into an oval-shaped room about four meters wide. Further on, the shaft bent slightly to the right and narrowed again. They followed the re-narrowed shaft to its end some thirty meters on. It ended in the coal seam. The seam wasn’t big, about a meter thick. An old metal pan with half a dozen dull steel pikes and chisels sat beneath the working face.

To reassure himself, Alex fetched a sledgehammer and spent a few minutes pounding pikes into the seam. The coal was hard, but it broke quickly. Freeing enough to keep warm would be hard work, and he had no idea how much further the seam ran. It already seemed to be petering out. Mining would be their end-times exercise program.

After checking the mine, Doug backed the truck and trailer past the derelict house as close to the mine as possible. For the rest of the day, they methodically emptied the trailer and truck with the wheelbarrow. They put everything on plastic tarps in the mine, sorting items as they unloaded. Building materials went close to where they planned to use them. Food items went nearby. Tools, propane tanks, and generators also went to handy spots. They had no problems fitting things in. Mine shafts have lots of storage space.

After unloading, they set up a small backpack tent in the secondary side shaft. It was wide enough for the small tent. Exhausted, they squeezed into the tent and fell asleep within minutes of zipping up their sleeping bags.

The following day, they went through the mine, mounting LED lanterns, thermometers, carbon monoxide detectors, and fire alarms on the mine’s support shoring. The thermometer nearest the coal seam face read 49 degrees Fahrenheit: the year-round average temperature of this spot in Montana. That value would drop as the outside temperatures plunged, and the rate at which it dropped would determine how long they could hold on. Fetching his log notebook, Alex recorded the seam temperature. He’d track it, day by day, for as long as he could.

With everything unpacked and the mine prepped for work, they dealt with their truck problem.

“We can’t leave the truck parked here. This will only work if we stay out of sight.”

Doug agreed, “Yeah, parking a big ass truck and trailer beside your secret lair is lame-ass Bond villainy.”

The rutted road they drove in on connected with a ranch road about seven kilometers to the north. Three or four kilometers further to the east, past a few rut road turnoffs, they had driven by a small chain and snow removal turnout. They decided to leave the truck and trailer there. They’d remove the vehicle’s license plates and ensure nothing in the truck led back to them. It wasn’t an optimal solution, but anyone inspecting the truck faced a puzzle. Competent deep-state operatives with access to motor vehicle VIN databases and land deed registries would easily infer their probable presence in the valley, but average roadside dumbasses and local cops probably wouldn’t. Besides, the authorities had bigger problems, like keeping their own fat rears alive.

“I’ll dump the truck if you stay here and keep watch,” Alex said.

Alex waited until an hour before sunset to drive the truck and trailer out of the valley to the turnout. At the turnout, he removed license plates, checked the truck and trailer for rental receipts, and calmly watched the half-sized Moon set. The Moon hung twice its normal distance from Earth. It looked strange and beautiful. When he could no longer make out landscape details, he turned on his night vision monocular and returned to the mine. Without the Moon, it became too dark for anyone without light amplification to see him. It was Alex’s first time using a high-quality light amplification device. His walk back to the mine took most of the night because he couldn’t help looking at the sky with the monocular. The amplified star-filled sky overwhelmed him.