We didn’t vote on blowing the bridge until the end of the first month, when it was clear anybody coming or going would have moved their asses. Of our 300, a good 218 made it home. So we cut the umbilical cord, separating Mt. Desert Island and Acadia National Park from the rest of Maine and what’s left of the country.
Sammy, who just completed a tour in Pakistan, got the honor though the whole shebang for taking out the bridge had been diagramed and entered into the master plan years before. Most of us were trained and could have laid the charges. The Coast Guard, or what was left of the Southwest Harbor Station, was none too pleased. But fuck em, an apocalypse is an apocalypse and you’ve got to shit or get off the pot; besides we’re taking their ship next week so they’ll have nothing left to piss and moan about.
My name is McCrae Lawrence, call me Mac, and this is the first opportunity to write since the undertow began. I’ve always been the inside man, long before it was Martha’s estate. I was at Skylands, on top of Seal Harbor’s money mountain through three previous owners-a Hollywood producer, an investment banker and a whacked, new money oil family from Dallas-as head of the caretaking crew, hiding my creds and always suggesting improvements suiting my, or our, the Stone Soup Group’s end game--motion detectors, a bomb shelter, a guest cottage “would look great there”, storage tanks, -always updating the estate into a fortress as technology and gullibility allowed. I’d even talked Martha into going green with solar panels and a windmill, which was an eyesore to other residents of the harbor, sat a year with the planning board but eventually was featured on her show… the one after jail time and well into the attempted image change.
Our preparation, training, stores and armament have multiplied over the years. As have suspected scenarios: nuclear, biological, financial, natural and the combinations. As Don Henley said “we live in such a graceless age.” Never enough was always the watchword and then back that up. Some coups were major; as when Dana rerouted a Katrina FEMA truck of generators giving us fifty in three of our depots on island. She also scored a mobile hospital and 18,000 gallons of water. Since the mid ‘90s she’s been in a quasi competition with Carl, who had risen to supply commander with the NY National Guard. Among his offerings were three humvees,18 RPGs and a tank. And this kind of activity only justified our original argument: who can trust a government that loses a tank and a hospital?
The island, Mt. Desert is, or was-- I keep forgetting-- home to Acadia National Park, and two of the group had Fed Jobs there, Claudia as a Ranger and Lars in the foresting crew-- before the ax came down. Being inside the machine was integral from the beginning-rearranging life goals to concentrate on the big picture, what lay down the road when there wouldn’t be any roads left.
The Stone Soup Group presently occupies 37 summer estates within our Seal Harbor perimeter, including five that used to belong to the Rockefeller clan, and luckily, it being April, nobody was home and no blood was spilled. We had the foresight to what was coming and the talent, the planning and willpower to stake our claim and we’ll hold it. Nothing short of an airstrike will take us out.
Not all is rosy within the group; there’s been subtle infighting and outright brawls. Amanda says most of it has to do with loss and is to be expected; the tales some brought with them of the rioting and attacks down below haven’t encouraged any warm fuzziness.
I try not to think about it and stay on task. We’ve come along way from an off-hand discussion after a Poli Sci class at B.U. in ’85 to what we predicted, prepared, recruited for and hoped against. Amanda once compared us to hospice for the end of the world. Now that things are starting to level out I’ve asked others to compile their experiences—where they were when the shit hit the fan, how they made it home to this place, their role, their fears and their fights, how their coping and their hopes for a new beginning.
So now I sleep in Martha’s bed and it’s a good thing. Within this moment I’m king of the mountain.
