Connection and solitude

Connection and solitude are competing answers to how a person can live after catastrophe. Hig depends on Bangley’s practical protection yet resists the isolation that Bangley treats as safety; he looks instead for the possibility of trust, companionship, and shared responsibility. That divide reaches beyond their partnership into Hig’s grief for Melissa, his bond with Jasper, and his attachment to streams whose disappearing fish make environmental loss feel personal and communal at once.

Two ways of surviving

Bangley and Hig have complementary roles: Hig has the plane and serves as their eyes, while Bangley supplies the armed defense. Each relies on the other, but their partnership is also a conflict of principles. Bangley’s rule is to assume guilt and act before a visitor can become a danger. Hig’s preference is to leave a stranger alive long enough to show whether they are human. The difference is not an abstract debate: in a world where an encounter may threaten survival, deciding whether to approach or keep distance determines what kind of future remains possible.

Hig understands the cost he sees in Bangley’s approach as a solitude without limit: if everyone acts only for themselves, each person is left alone with the universe. The alternative is not a restored society or a secure promise of friendship. It is smaller and more precarious: someone asks for help and receives it, a smile crosses a yard, or a wave answers a wave. Hig imagines such gestures as signs that even a damaged human community can still exist. The contrast gives their disagreements moral weight: caution may preserve a life, but treating every person as an enemy risks making isolation the only surviving social order.

The companionship of one

Hig’s reflections on home reveal that connection cannot be reduced to the number of people nearby. He wonders whether he would feel more at home if he met a pilot from Grand Junction, if Denver had become a thriving city, or if Melissa were still sleeping beside him. His questions turn from those absent possibilities to the more unsettled question of who he would be with himself. The pilot’s radio voice has suggested both competence and a longing to connect, and Hig regrets not flying to find out who was calling. Yet the imagined journey also means risking the discovery of more dead people and running out of fuel far from his airstrip. The wish for contact and the fear of what contact might reveal pull him in opposite directions.

His meditation on Amelia Earhart’s disappearance sharpens the value he places on companionship. Hig considers the evidence that she and her navigator may have reached an island, and imagines survival reduced to shells, rain, and the company of one other person. The thought shifts attention away from fame or public life toward the presence of a single companion. For Hig, solitude is not merely being physically alone: it is the prospect of enduring privation without anyone beside him. The possibility of one surviving relationship can matter even when nearly everything else has been lost.

Storytelling against silence

Hig also distinguishes his way of facing solitude from Bangley’s. He wonders about Bangley’s inner life, imagining him as comfortable with and protective of his isolation, unwilling to communicate what death and beauty mean to him. In their first week together, Hig takes him up to reconnoiter the perimeter. Bangley directs the flight toward a place he identifies as Druids, then says nothing for the rest of the trip. The scene establishes that sharing a view does not necessarily create a shared account of it: Hig notices and wonders; Bangley does not explain himself.

The need to tell what he sees becomes Hig’s response to that silence. He asks himself why it matters to animate profound stillness through narration. His telling cannot undo death or make another person answer, but it can make experience communicable rather than leave it entirely private. The act is especially significant beside Bangley’s preference for eliminating threats: Hig’s attention to what remains alive is a counterpractice, preserving observations and meanings that a purely defensive account of the world would leave out.

Ecological loss and belonging

The longing for connection also attaches Hig to places and species, not only to people. Before the collapse, he loved fishing for trout. Their disappearance brings a grief so strong that he associates waking from a dream in tears with the loss of every kind he remembers. The scale of that sorrow places the trout among a wider pattern of vanished animals. Their absence is not simply a shortage of food: it marks the loss of a familiar relationship with the landscape and of a future in which those fish might still be encountered.

Hig continues to go into the mountains, where he hunts deer and hopes, without success, to see even one surviving trout in a creek. The trip has the character of a visit to a sacred place, but its significance is rooted in the specific possibility of meeting what remains. His attachment to the streams makes environmental decline inseparable from belonging: as their conditions change, the places that once drew him out of isolation become reminders of what has disappeared.

The changing seasons deepen that unease. In mid-April, an unusually warm spell seems like spring, but Hig knows that older seasonal markers have become unreliable. Some recent winters brought little snow to the peaks, and the prospect of losing the creeks frightens him more than attacks or disease. He still fishes, adapting to warmer streams by catching suckers and carp instead of trout. The change requires him to accept unfamiliar fish and their different qualities, but adaptation cannot replace what has been lost. Nor is fishing free from danger: streams are routes used by animals and wanderers, and attention absorbed in the water can leave him exposed.

Care as resistance to isolation

Hig’s fishing is both a practical activity and a way of sustaining a bond with a living place. When the trout are gone, he continues to set out his four-piece Sage pack rod, given to him by his father for his sixteenth birthday. His father died the following year before teaching him to use it; Hig taught himself and learned from Uncle Pete. The rod thus carries family memory into a practice that Hig has made his own. Its use links a lost parent, remembered instruction, and present attention to the water without suggesting that any of those losses can be reversed.

Later, Hig catches five carp and realizes that even these replacement fish are starving. Rather than keep them, he carefully releases each one into the current and stops fishing. The gesture does not restore the stream or guarantee the fish will survive; it shows care persisting despite the evidence of decline. His fear extends to the possibility that even the carp may vanish. Across these scenes, connection remains vulnerable and incomplete, but it is not merely a comfort Hig recalls from the old world. It is a choice expressed in how he treats strangers, remembers the dead, tells what he has seen, and responds to the lives still within reach.