Ish crosses the United States in search of survivor communities

Ish’s cross-country journey begins as an attempt to find a surviving community, but it becomes a measure of what remains after civilization’s collapse. He drives from San Lupo Drive across the United States to New York and back west, moving through emptied roads, damaged infrastructure, and people unable to share his sense of a wider future. The search gives direction to his fear; its return leg turns that search toward home.

Departure and Preparation

The morning after panic had overtaken him, Ish remains afraid enough to treat ordinary mishaps as potentially fatal. He moves carefully, wary even of a sprained ankle, but having a plan steadies him. He decides to leave rather than remain alone in the house, reasoning that the disaster may not have struck every part of the country and that a community might still be found.

His old car seems less suitable than the hundreds of abandoned vehicles nearby. At a garage he finds a station wagon with a key, tests its engine, and chooses it for the trip. Before driving away, he remembers to retrieve his hammer from his old car and carries it to the wagon. The small interruption shows that, even in a world where property rights have lost their force, particular possessions still matter to him.

He gathers food for several days, along with a sleeping bag, an ax, a shovel, a raincoat, cigarettes, and brandy. From a sporting-goods shop he takes a shotgun, a repeating rifle, a small pistol, and a hunting knife. These supplies turn an uncertain departure into a provisional expedition: he cannot know what conditions he will meet, so he equips himself for food, shelter, and danger. He also leaves a note on the living-room desk in case his family returns, asking them to wait for him or leave a message of their own. By mid-afternoon, he starts out.

The Road as Evidence

Ish follows Highway 99 south through the San Joaquin Valley. The road is empty enough that he can drive without traffic, trucks, or the usual stops at intersections; although most traffic lights still work, their continued operation no longer organizes anyone’s journey. Driving proves safer than it had been in the crowded old world, but the ease is inseparable from the absence of other people. He is not looking for an isolated straggler so much as for a larger remnant of society.

As he travels east, the familiar national routes become records of a vanished system of movement. U.S. Route 66, once associated with migration toward California, lies empty. Ish sees no buses, trucks, tourists, or families traveling with their belongings. He crosses the Rio Grande and drives through Albuquerque, the largest town he has encountered since leaving California, sounding his horn and pausing for a response. He hears none and does not wait long. The repeated absence of an answer turns travel into a series of tests: each town and road might reveal survivors, but each can also confirm that the old traffic network now serves no one.

The landscape beyond the towns is changing as well. Unharvested crops grow among weeds; wheat left standing before the disaster is heavy with grain, while cattle and horses move through fields whose fences are failing. Ish’s search therefore passes through more than deserted infrastructure. It shows him a countryside no longer managed as farmland, where human absence is already changing what the land produces and where animals can roam.

New York and the Limits of Reunion

After crossing the Delaware River into New Jersey, Ish realizes he can reach New York that afternoon. The approach along the Pulaski Skyway recalls a journey he made there as a fifteen-year-old with his parents. Then the traffic had seemed frighteningly dense, with vehicles converging and disappearing down the ramps; now Princess sleeps beside him as he drives alone. The remembered family journey sharpens the contrast between the city he once knew and the silent route into it.

Seeing the skyscrapers explains to Ish why he had been drawn east. New York had represented the center of the American world, and he had expected its condition to indicate what might have happened elsewhere. The city’s scale gives his search a national logic: if a surviving society could be found anywhere, he had looked toward the place whose fate seemed most consequential. But the evidence he encounters there is not a functioning center. The people he meets have little interest in reports from the rest of the United States; their own world has disappeared, and they live in a haze of shock and hopelessness.

Milt and Ann urge Ish to stay, even permanently. They are among the pleasantest people he has encountered since the catastrophe, and he likes them and pities them. Still, he decides to return west rather than make a life in New York. His concern is practical as well as emotional: he doubts that Milt and Ann can survive the coming winter in a city without central heating, where cold and illness could become deadly. As they wave from the apartment-house entrance, Ish nearly turns back, then continues on, grieving the separation without mistaking affection for a shared plan.

The Return West

Ish thinks of the westward journey as going home, though its early days resemble a leisurely camping trip. In eastern Pennsylvania, he passes ripe, unharvested wheat and shoulder-high corn, then speeds around the empty Turnpike’s curves at eighty and ninety miles an hour, exhilarated by the freedom of a road stripped of traffic. He camps in the woods when the weather is fine, cooks on a gasoline stove after gas pressure has failed almost everywhere, and relies mainly on salvaged tinned food while gathering produce when he can.

The return route carries him through high mountains and desert toward Donner Pass on U.S. 40. Near the pass, smoke signals that the forest-fire season has arrived without people to fight the lightning-started fires. By Yuba Gap, fire is burning on both sides of the highway, and a fallen, blazing tree blocks the road. The landscape that once connected regions now presents a physical barrier, with the burned slopes also threatening future routes through fallen trees, landslides, and washouts.

The next morning, Ish is more cheerful despite the possibility of being trapped. He considers California large enough to live in and thinks the southern desert road may remain open. Princess runs off along a trail, however, and when she does not return promptly, he changes his plans and spends much of the day waiting. Her delay postpones the journey, but it also leads into a revealing arrival: at twilight, Ish sees that many of the Bay cities’ streetlights are still burning. He takes pleasure in their unexpected survival and feels a local pride, briefly imagining that he has returned to a functioning city. The lights offer no proof that the system as a whole has endured; their glow instead marks a remnant of the old world amid a journey defined by absence.

Significance of the Search

The journey gives Ish a purpose at a moment when fear and solitude threaten to leave him without one. His belief that a community may survive beyond his immediate surroundings is enough to get him moving, but New York’s isolation prevents the search from resolving into a broader reunion. The people he finds cannot restore the society he hoped to locate, and his decision to leave them shows the distance between companionship and a shared capacity to face what is coming.

His route also makes the collapse visible through ordinary details: unharvested fields, empty highways, failing fuel pressure, roads threatened by fire, and lights still burning after the systems that sustained cities have failed. He returns with no discovered national center, but with a sharper understanding of the disaster’s uneven aftermath. The westward drive becomes a return to the place he calls home, carrying him away from the people he has met and back toward the life he must build with what remains.