The Survivors

Memoir: Montana, 1985

MEMOIR

Bigfork, Montana

Autumn 1985

One fall, I was permitted to leave our village for a short trip for supplies. I had gone with two of the elders, Anne and Jane, and another girl from my generation, Beth. It was the first time I had ever left the city walls except for running around in the green mountain pasture right outside of town. This time I was really, truly leaving. Beth and I were the first two aside from the elders ever permitted to go.

  Anne and Jane were making their biannual trip for clothing, and Beth and I had begged for so long to be able to go outside the walls that the elders had finally complied.

  Some time in the early twentieth century, several of the elders explored the world outside. They liberally took the step of dressing like humans while they were walking among them, and they brought back clothes for us all to wear. Every few years, there would be more trips by only a select few, and we would get more updated. They did this with technology, too, to an extent. In the 1980s, they brought the first computers, and they spoke of the existence of phones for years but never brought any to us. There were no lines running to our town, and we had no one to call. We had radios as early as the 1950s, but they kept them away from us, likely shielding us from news of the world outside. Soon we had record players, and cassette players, and, eventually, we would even get CD players. Of course, none of that compares to the amazement of the iPod. It turns out that "60 gigabytes" of music...whatever that means...is a lot. I don't think I could ever live without it now.

  So when they let us out, Jane, Anne, Beth, and I visited Bigfork, a town about a hundred-mile run from our family's settlement. Its most noticeable feature was its location, nestled on the northeast corner of Flathead Lake, just above the Flathead Indian Reservation. There wasn't too much there in the eighties, but there was enough for me. The majority of the town concentrated on Electric Avenue, a tiny main street comprised mostly of small cafÇs, tourist shops, and art galleries. I wandered the town's narrow sidewalks, astonished by the tiny galleries that dotted the lane. I stopped in front of several and just stared, completely in awe. I had never seen anything so beautiful. I had never known art.

  Beth had been unimpressed by the town and by the art, and she ventured away from me to join Jane and Anne. I continued, walking in each storefront, overwhelmed by all I saw. Then I came across the bookstore. It was at the bottom corner of an old two-story building with aging dark shingles and a glass front that touched Electric Avenue. The building backed up directly to a cove of Flathead Lake, with an alley on one side so that you could see the lake from the front of the building. The glass door had an OPEN sign hanging in it, and the numbers 480 printed over the doorframe, tucked under a narrow overhang. At eye level, hand-painted words read:

Books & Ladders

  Inside, the shop was small but lined floor to ceiling and wall-to-wall with books. I had read only four books in my life-the Bible, the book of Hesiod works that Lizzie had given me, Noah's copy of Macbeth, and Ben's old Beowulf. But inside this tiny shop there were thousands of books, some tattered and some shiny and new, and each one different. There was a standing shelf imprinted with glossy, hand-painted words that read "New York Times Bestsellers" (now I know what that means, but I didn't have a clue then) and there were a number of books on the stand. I chose the first one, The Cider House Rules, and flipped through it, reading a few pages. I wondered if these words were written about real people or if someone had imagined them. It was all so foreign-even the few pages I read standing there-but it was so intriguing. Humans were so complex! They felt things so strongly, and they had such conflicts! I sat in an old chair in the corner with the book in my hands, flipping madly through it, my eyes flashing across the words, taking them in at a supernatural pace. Twenty-five minutes later, I had read the entire book, and I was hungry for more.

  Lizzie was the only one I told about the book when we returned. She listened patiently as I repeated the whole story back to her, nodding politely for me to continue through some embarrassing or confusing parts, smiling at my enthusiasm. I asked her if I could go back to the bookstore to read more. She had said the other elders wouldn't approve of what I had done, but I could tell she felt sympathetic as my enthusiasm faded quickly into disappointment. She said she would speak with Andrew about it, and, privately, they would decide. The next day, she told me they would allow it if I didn't mention my miniature vacations to anyone else. I agreed, thrilled.

  I returned to the bookstore countless times after that. Lizzie had given me some bills, explaining to me how they worked, so that I could purchase some books. It was my first glimpse into the world of human procedures. I wasn't sure I understood the idea behind the money, but I tried it the next time I was there. The shopkeeper was excited by my enthusiasm for literature and hadn't seemed to mind that I sat in her store for hours every day, just reading the books. I never bothered any other customers, so she was patient and kind. But, after Lizzie gave me the money, I bought one book to take with me each night. I read those books with care, much more slowly than I stormed through the others since it had to last me all night. I always returned to the shop the next day with the book read, and offered it in trade for another used book. That first summer, I read everything from Jane Austen to Karl Marx.

  That's how I learned of wars and violence I never knew existed, of other religions, of things people would fight for. I began to understand love as it applied to mortals. In some ways it was so much scarier and unpredictable than the kind of love those in my family felt for each other once they mated. Some parts of it seemed inappropriate or embarrassing, but none of it was without passion. I was confused by the feelings that came to me the first time I read a Danielle Steel novel. There were descriptions of things I hadn't imagined, and they caught me off guard nearly as much as the idea of weapons and fighting in wars had. It became clear to me that all of human life was foreign to me. All of it, a mystery.

  Each book was its own experience for me, and each experience was a new feeling. I wanted to feel each of those things in my life and not just in the pages of the books. I suppose my desire to become a mortal began there.

  In just a few short months in my century-and-score of living, I had learned so much about the world outside our walls. That was when I made a promise to myself that I would end up in the human world as I had always wanted to, living among them, as one of them, some day.

  Another promise kept.