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scrap material in jig time, and we soon realized that among the crops that the men were so enthusiastically planning for the spring must be cotton. Where they were to find the seed, we didn't know, but we knew that we must resurrect the art of making cloth, though, thanks to our invaluable back issues of Mother Earth News, we wouldn't have to reinvent the spinning wheel and the loom.
    Three times we ventured the long trip into Nicholson, agonizing over the amount of gasoline we used each time. Though the pickup would eventually have to be made to run on alcohol, we feared that its advanced age might make it choke on a drink so different.
    There were some few people still there, though they were fewer and shyer each time. Where they lived and what they ate we never found out, for the grocery stores had been cleaned out before our first trip in. The hardware stores had been picked over, but few had seemed to realize the value of nuts and bolts, nails and cotter keys and hacksaw blades, the small things that make the difference between a slick fast job and a long slow one. Screen wire was one of the things we collected by the roll, for Zack remembered his grandmother's tales of the hell every summer of her girlhood had been in the pre-screening days when mosquitoes came and went as they would.
    We poked and pried into old storerooms and found remnants of obsolete stock–plow tools, harnesses and parts for them, clevises and pulleys for well ropes and all sorts of things that a machine-oriented life had found no need for. They were worth more than gold to us. We appropriated one of the U-Haul trailers from the lonely Gulf station and loaded it up with long-term necessaries every time we made the journey. But there were other things.
    We cleared the paperback book and magazine racks of all the stores that had them.. I picked up this typewriter and boxes of ribbon and ream after ream of paper; pencils and pens and notebooks and every sort of textbook we could find anywhere. Dyes and thread and needles and extra bobbins and parts for my very old treadle sewing machine. Aspirin from the drugstore, where the large generic bottles had sat undisturbed by other lookers, protected by the forbidding "acetylsalicylic acid" on the labels.
    But so many of the things we needed had been either taken for use, which was as it should be, or they had been torn and burned and destroyed, as if some of our fellows had taken out their terror and insecurity on anything that came to hand. And, strangely, we found that the doctors, as they left (whatever their reasons), had taken with them their most-used and valuable medical books. Perhaps they had gone or been called to places where there had been survivors ... on the edges of the devastated areas. Whatever the case, none of them left family behind, and not one has ever come back.
    It is difficult, from our unusual situation, to speculate upon the fates of those who left this area.. When we arrived on the scene they were, by and large, already gone. Mom Allie had not been able to make any useful sense of the fragmentary and garbled bits she had picked up on her battery radio. The celebrated emergency broadcast system had evidently been left high and dry, with nobody who knew what had truly happened or what to do about it. They had tried, but they were useless.
    So we scavenged, now and again, creeping like mice in an abandoned house about the town that had been a bustling college town of 30,000. As the winter went on, however, we found that there was no longer any need for these expeditions, and we abandoned them. Still, I thought with satisfaction, now and again, of my deed on the last trip in.
    Nicholson had been blessed with a really first-class library. It had an excellent variety of books, well arranged. It had art prints for lending, along with records and tapes. Its building had been built, in the early twenties, for a post office, and the construction was solid and likely to stay that way. When