Not long after we left the pig farm the next morning, we came back to Highway 52. I groaned. We’d spent two days skiing in a circle, damn it. At least we’d found the pigs-even though it had been disgusting, I felt a lot better with a full stomach and a heavy pack stuffed with pork on my back.
We weren’t at the same place where we’d crossed 52 before. There was no sign of St. Donatus or the two sentinel churches. “You think we’re north or south of where we hit 52 the first time?” I asked.
“South, probably. We were heading east, and we mostly turned right.”
“Those roads were pretty twisty, though.”
“Either way, if we turn right, we’ll eventually hit Dubuque. I’m not sure where 52 goes if we turn left, but I think it follows the Mississippi River.”
I thought about Katie’s mom and her failed attempt to cross the Mississippi. “I don’t want to go to Dubuque.”
“Me, either. Left it is.”
The highway ran along a ridgetop for a few miles and then veered left and began a long decline. We picked up speed as the slope grew steeper-I raced along behind Darla, trying to stay in her ski tracks. The wind felt icy on my face, but still it was fun; soon we were laughing and screaming as we shot down the hill.
We flew past a green road sign: Welcome to Bellevue, Population 2337. Then the road flattened out, and we were coasting through a quaint riverside town. Or rather, the buildings were quaint with lots of dark-brown brick and an old-fashioned main street. The town itself was weirdly deserted. There were no tracks in the snow, no signs of people. We skied past Hammond’s Drive In, Horizon Lanes, and a Subway. The storefronts gaped like monstrous maws, shards of glass in their smashed windows forming transparent teeth.
Darla and I had fallen into an uncomfortable silence, mirroring the eerie quiet of the town. To break it, I asked, “Where are all the people?”
“I dunno. Crossed the river to get help from FEMA, maybe?”
I saw a drugstore, Bellevue Pharmacy. Its windows were smashed, too. “Let’s go in there and look around.”
“You think they have some food? We’ve got plenty of pork, but I wouldn’t mind some variety.”
“Well, um…” I felt the blood rush to my face and looked down.
“Condoms.” Darla shook her head, but to my relief, she was smiling. “Okay. Look for sanitary supplies, too. I’d kill for something better than rags.”
The drugstore had been thoroughly picked over. We searched for over an hour, even pushing two fallen shelving units upright to look underneath. We found nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. If we’d wanted to know what the latest celebrity gossip had been in August, there were plenty of magazines in the rack to inform us. The small electronics aisle was pretty much untouched. Hair dryers, curling irons, electric shavers, and electric toothbrushes were there for the taking. But everything useful-food, condoms, sanitary supplies, and drugs-was long gone.
“That blows,” I said as we gave up the search.
Darla squeezed my hand. “We’ll figure something out.”
We skied down a hill to the river. The Mississippi itself had changed. A few years ago, my family had taken a three-hour riverboat cruise in Dubuque. Back then, the river had been wide and powerful, filling its banks from tree line to tree line. Now it was a narrow silver thread winding through a gray plain of ashy sludge. Upriver, I could see two barges, both partially grounded in the ash.
The area at the bottom of the hill was fenced-off. A sign on the chain link read: Mississippi Lock and Dam Number 12.
“Maybe we can cross here,” Darla said.
“How? If the lock’s closed, sure, but-”
“Let’s check it out.”
That made sense-it couldn’t hurt to take a look. I climbed the fence. Darla tossed our skis over and followed me. The dam started at the far bank of the river and extended about three-quarters of the way across. Between us and the dam there was a lock, a huge channel over a one hundred feet wide and six hundred feet long, defined by massive steel and concrete walls at each side and a set of metal gates at either end. The upstream gate had been left wide open. The downstream gate was open, too, forced ajar by a barge stuck within its jaws. Atop both the gates and the walls ran wide metal catwalks. Dead fish lolled belly up in the water below us. It smelled atrocious, like the time Dad had brought home a bunch of bass from a fishing trip, gutted them, then left the trash in the garage for three weeks. (Actually, I was supposed to take the trash out. Whatever.)
“How are we going to cross that?” I said.
“We’ve got rope. We’ll climb down onto that barge.”
“The drop looks like twenty-five or thirty feet. How will we get up the other side of the lock?” From where I stood, it looked like a long drop onto the barge’s hard, metal deck.
“I’ll improvise something.”
We climbed over another chain-link fence. That put us on the open-gridded metal walkway alongside the lock. We stepped along the catwalk, lugging our skis, and made a forty-five-degree turn as we followed it over the top of the lock gate. The ash and snow had fallen through the grid of the catwalk, but it was still slick with ice. I felt uneasy; there was nothing but a low, metal fence between me and a very long drop to the water below.
When we reached the end of the gate, directly above the stuck barge, Darla dug the rope out of my backpack. She bundled the skis and lowered them to the barge’s deck, where they landed with a clang. Then she looped the other end of the rope around the top bar of the railing and lowered herself down hand over hand, clutching both strands of rope.
Darla yelled “Come on down!” just like a game show host.
I wasn’t too sure. It looked like a long way down. And I wasn’t very comfortable with heights. When I was in fourth grade, Dad had taken me to a huge sporting-goods store that had a climbing wall. He had needed new ski goggles, or something like that. Anyway, I bugged him ’til he let me try the climbing wall. It was easy and fun-I scampered up in no time. But when I stood at the top and peered over the edge, ready to turn around and rappel down, I just… couldn’t. Couldn’t turn around. Couldn’t step backward over the edge. Couldn’t even pull my eyes away from the drop. One of the store’s employees had to climb up and pretty much drag me off the edge so another guy could lower my rigid body. I spun on the way down, slamming my ankles into the wall, but I couldn’t move-I was frozen in terror. As far as I knew, Dad never told Mom or Rebecca about that incident. But he’d never offered to take me back to that sporting goods store, either.
I climbed slowly over the railing and got a good grip, holding the ropes with both hands. I didn’t want to step off the metal platform. A little voice in my head screamed at me: Don’t do it! You’re going to fall! You’re going to die!
But I couldn’t let Darla show me up. And this was the best way across the river. Plus, I wasn’t in fourth grade anymore. I’d faced far more dangerous situations over the last six weeks: the looters at Joe and Darren’s house, Target, the plunge into the icy stream. I could do this. I would do this.
Darla yelled, “Any day now.”
I scrunched my eyes closed and stepped off, slowly lowering myself hand over hand.
I let out a sigh when my feet touched the deck. Darla said, “You’re afraid of heights, aren’t you?”
“Uh, not really.”
“It’s okay.”
“Just a little, I guess.”
“You did good, Alex.” She kissed me. If she’d asked me to join a Mt. Everest climbing expedition at that moment, I might have agreed.
Darla pulled on one end of the rope so it snaked free of the railing above us. On the far side of the barge, the other half of the lock gate loomed above us. “Hand me the hatchet, would you?”
Puzzled, I pulled it off my belt and passed it to her.
She tied the free end of the rope around the handle. “Watch out.” She backed up a couple steps and threw the hatchet, aiming for the rail above our heads. The hatchet glanced off and fell back onto the deck with a clang. Darla tossed it again. This time the hatchet went over the top rail, but when she pulled on the rope it came free and clanged back down to the barge. “This may take a while.”
I wandered away, both to avoid the tumbling hatchet and to check out the barge. It was really nine barges connected by chains with a tugboat at the back. I saw a large hatch in a nearby deck and tried it-it was heavy, but I could lift it.
I expected to find coal or iron ore, something like that. Instead, it was full to the brim with golden-brown grain. I scooped up a handful and let the hatch crash shut. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it looked edible-and there was a lot of it.
Darla yelled, “Hey, I got it!”
I hurried back to her, clutching the grain in my hand. She’d thrown the hatchet up over the railing so that its head had caught on the middle rail and the rope looped up over the top rail. It didn’t look very safe to me: if the knot came loose, or the hatchet broke, or the haft disconnected from the head, or it slipped off the rail, then the rope would come loose, pulling the hatchet down with it.
“What’s this?” I asked, holding out the handful of grain.
“Wheat. You get it out of that hatch?”
“Yeah. This barge is packed full of it.”
“Nice-if we had a way to grind it, we could make bread. Or tortillas, at least.”
“You think Jack would eat it?”
“I dunno, wouldn’t hurt to try. I’m pretty much out of cornmeal to feed him.”
We walked back to the hatch, and Darla held it open while I scooped out kernels of wheat. My backpack was full of pork, but I fit in some wheat by dumping it over the top and letting it fill the cracks around our other supplies. I dumped some wheat into Darla’s pack, too, right alongside Jack, but he didn’t seem interested in it.
“Maybe we should stay here for a while,” Darla said.
“I want to find my family. Besides, there will be food at my uncle’s farm. They have ducks and goats and stuff.”
“There’s literally tons of food here, enough to last until it spoils-a few years, at least. Plus, it’s hard to get down here-probably nobody will bug us. We could shack up in the tugboat’s wheelhouse, build a grinder for the wheat, and we’re golden.”
My chest felt suddenly heavy. I didn’t want to choose between my family and Darla. “I need to find my family. Maybe we can come back here and get more wheat after we find them. And I bet there will be other people after this grain soon enough. Surely there’re a lot of hungry people out there who need it worse than we do.”
Darla shrugged. “I guess so.” We walked back to the precarious-looking rope Darla had rigged.
“You’re going to climb that?” I asked.
“Yeah. If the rope comes free, catch me and dodge the hatchet, okay?”
“Um, right.”
“Kidding.” Darla climbed the rope slowly and steadily. She used only her arms, pulling herself up hand over hand to disturb the setup as little as possible. Damn, but she was strong. Maybe it was all the farm work. I couldn’t have climbed the rope like that without using my legs.
When she reached the top, Darla untied the hatchet and fastened the rope to the railing. I tied the skis onto the other end of the rope, and Darla hauled them up. Then we repeated the process with my backpack. When we finished that, I grabbed the rope and started laboriously climbing.
“Want me to pull you up?”
“No, no-I got it.” No way was I going to ask for help after watching her slink up the rope so easily. I made it, too, even though I had to wrap my legs around the rope to climb. I was glad I hadn’t needed to go first-all my thrashing probably would have caused the hatchet to come loose.
Now we stood on a narrow metal walkway atop the other half of the lock gate. We followed the walkway until it dead-ended against the dam. There was yet another catwalk atop the dam about twenty feet above us. An ordinary metal door was set into the wall of the dam. I tried the knob; it was locked.
“I think I can use the hatchet trick again to climb to the top of the dam,” Darla said.
“I’ve got another idea.” I took the hatchet and reversed it, so I could use it as a hammer. I whaled on the doorknob, raising the hatchet high above my head in a two-handed grip and bringing it down hard. It took ten or eleven blows, but then there was a ping and the knob finally broke. It bounced on the metal walkway and fell into the river, leaving a round hole in the door where the knob had been. I stuck my finger in the hole and pulled. Nothing-the door was still locked.
“Let me try something.” Darla took the knife off my belt, knelt in front of the door, and jammed the blade into the hole. She dragged the knife to her left. There was a click, and the door swung smoothly open toward us. “You broke the lock, but there’s a slide in there you have to operate.” She never stopped amazing me.
A metal staircase inside led upward to another door-fortunately unlocked, at least from the inside. It opened onto the top of the dam. From there, crossing the Mississippi required only a short hike along the last catwalk.
We had to climb an eight-foot, chain-link fence to get off the dam. When I looked back toward the lock, I saw a sign on the fence: Hazardous, Keep Out! U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. On this side of the fence, there was an earthen dike with a narrow, snow-covered road running atop it.
We put on our skis and followed the road roughly east for a couple of miles until we’d left the river completely behind. Nobody had been here for at least five days-no tracks marred the snow.
We came to another fence. The gate across the road was chained and padlocked, but it was easy to climb. The sign on the far side read: Keep Out! Hazard! Superfund Site, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. That seemed a little confusing-was it an army site or an EPA site? At least everyone agreed it was hazardous, although we’d come through it fine.
The road continued past the gate and over a railway embankment. At the far side of the embankment, the road teed into a highway. We stopped and stared: the highway had been plowed.