Establishing the “Year One” calendar

Establishing the “Year One” calendar is Ish and Em’s attempt to preserve historical continuity after the collapse of the world they knew. What begins as a practical question about dates becomes a communal system: the turning of the sun identifies the annual boundary, a carved numeral records it, and a chosen name makes each year memorable.

The need to keep time

Em raises the question of time while thinking about the child she expects to raise. She considers how a person in the new world might need to know what year it is, even if familiar institutions such as voting, passports, and the draft board will not return in their old forms. Her concern reaches beyond the child’s future: if nobody keeps track, the break in the historical record may become difficult to repair.

Ish initially frames the problem through its consequences for history. He comes to regard time as history, history as tradition, and tradition as civilization. Losing continuity, he recognizes, means losing something that may not be recoverable. The seven-day week is one example of a measure whose meaning exceeds practical convenience: even without religious observance, its persistence has helped structure shared life. Em’s suggestion makes him see that preserving a calendar is not merely a way to organize days but a way to keep a link between generations.

Finding a new beginning

Ish considers how to locate the date by using his knowledge of astronomy. He estimates that the catastrophe occurred near the middle of December and reasons that the winter solstice is approaching. If he can identify the solstice, he may be able to calculate backward from the previous calendar and perhaps restore the day of the week. The investigation depends on a natural cycle that can still be observed even when the institutions that once maintained the calendar have disappeared.

He sets a surveyor’s transit on the porch facing west and blackens its lenses with soot so he can look toward the sun without injuring his eyes. The first observation places the sunset south of the Golden Gate, close to its most southerly point. Ish leaves the instrument in position and records the sunset’s angle, turning an approximate sense of the season into a repeatable observation. The solstice offers a boundary the survivors can recognize for themselves.

Em suggests beginning the New Year at the solstice because it seems simpler. Ish hesitates: the calendar, he says, has long been established and cannot simply be shifted. Their exchange holds together two competing needs. They want the reassurance of inherited time, yet the old system cannot be assumed intact. Rather than settle the larger problem of calendar reform, they make a more immediate decision about the years they will count from this point onward.

Declaring Year One

Ish proposes recording each new year by chiseling its date into a suitable rock. The procedure is plain enough to repeat, though cutting the mark will take effort; that labor itself can help the community remember whether it has kept the record up to date. Em questions the choice to begin with a four-digit date. To her, the past year can instead stand as Year One.

That evening Ish accepts the break with the old chronology. He treats the closing months as belonging to the past and understands the present as a boundary between eras: the new life begins with Year One. The calendar does not claim that everything from before the catastrophe can be recovered. Its purpose is to give the society being formed a starting point of its own, so that its future can be recorded rather than left as an unmarked stretch of time.

The rock as record

After a full circuit of the sun, Ish and Em return to a smooth rock near their home on San Lupo Drive. The place had once been a small public park, and its rocks already carry traces of much older inhabitants: holes where people of an earlier age pounded acorns into mash. The new mark therefore joins a long human use of the site, but it records a different kind of community and a different beginning.

Em sits in the sun and nurses their baby while Ish uses his hammer and cold-chisel to cut the numeral one. He gives the upright stroke a serif at its base and a small hook at the top, shaping it to resemble the printed figure he remembers. The mark is both functional and ceremonial: the first complete return of the sun from south to south deserves more than an unnoticed tally. When he finishes, the family plays together, and Ish identifies the year they have completed. Em gives it another name, the Year of the Baby, because names are easier to remember than numbers. From the outset, the system allows a count and a lived memory to coexist.

From a count to shared memory

The calendar develops as the years acquire names tied to what the community experienced. When Ish prepares to carve the tenth year, children suggest that it be called the Year of the Fishing. During that year, San Francisco Bay had teemed with striped bass; catching them enriched the diet and gave the group pleasure. The name makes a common event part of the record, rather than leaving the year as an abstract number. It also shows younger members beginning to participate in deciding how their past will be remembered.

The annual observance gathers these parts of the system together. Near the winter solstice, the community prepares for its largest holiday, combining the Christmas and New Year observances of The Old Times with traditions of its own. Thanksgiving remains marked by a large dinner; patriotic holidays have lapsed; George alone keeps Labor Day according to his own judgment, while children continue to celebrate folk holidays such as April Fool’s Day and Halloween. The surviving calendar is therefore selective: some inherited dates endure, some lose their place, and new commemorations grow from local experience.

At the end of the twenty-second year, everyone gathers at the rock on a fair, warm winter day. Ish carves 22 below 21, and those old enough to speak call out Happy New Year, retaining a greeting from The Old Times within a changed society. But when he asks what the new year should be called, the gathering falls silent. The moment leaves open which experience will define that year; it also makes clear that the ritual is no longer Ish’s record alone. The community has inherited a way to mark time, while the work of naming its history remains shared and unsettled.