Influenza pandemic

The influenza pandemic is the catastrophe that gives the novel its defining historical divide: nine years after it began, nearly everyone is dead, and a later blood disease has killed still more. Its reach is measured not only in lives lost but in the breakdown of hospitals, communications, and ordinary movement, and in the private grief that survivors carry into a world where familiar acts—fishing, travel, burial—have acquired altered meanings.

Scale and Aftermath

Hig places the story nine years into the aftermath. The flu killed almost everybody; the blood disease then took more of those left alive. The survivors are few enough that Hig and Bangley believe themselves to be nearly alone, yet the surrounding area is not empty: other people remain, and Hig describes many as dangerous. The pandemic’s aftermath therefore combines extreme isolation with the continuing threat posed by other survivors. It is why he patrols the plain each day, not evidence that the danger ended when the initial wave passed.

The disaster also unfolds through institutions and infrastructure failing at different rates. Hospitals fill with the dead, while news broadcasts grow more frantic as anchors and correspondents disappear into hospitals, makeshift wards, or silence. Eventually the broadcasts are cut short by mayhem. The account preserves the bravery of those who continued reporting, but also shows the limits of communication: news can witness a society coming apart without being able to hold it together.

Illness, Survival, and Grief

Hig remembers the flu through a prolonged fever: two weeks ill, including three days with a temperature of 104 to 105 degrees. He suspects that the illness affected his brain. Afterward, his thoughts still function, but under stress they can feel displaced, sad, or unreliable. His comparison is to Norwegian ponies transported to an unfamiliar Arctic environment, where even those given food at a research station died. The image gives form to his sense of being mentally out of place, while his qualification that this may be normal for their circumstances keeps the memory unsettled rather than turning it into a diagnosis.

Melissa dies of the flu in an Elks Hall converted into a hospital, less than five hundred yards from their home. The closeness makes the emergency ward part of their immediate world, not a distant institution. Hig says they had considered flying west, but by the time they went to a hospital building, it was too late; that building, too, was filling with the dead. His account identifies St. Vincent’s Hospital as across the lake, where orange helicopters landed, but does not equate every hospital in his memories with the same site.

After Melissa’s death, Hig is not allowed to bury her; she is cremated with the others. The pandemic thus deprives him not only of his wife but of the burial he might have performed for her. Fishing recurs through his account of the crisis: he fishes after learning of disease among the trout, as supplies dwindle and riots grow, and after Melissa dies. In the aftermath, he fishes for carp along a creek whose curves he knows as intimately as he had known Melissa’s body. The practice does not undo the loss; it gives grief a repeated, familiar form.

Disrupted Lives and Movement

The collapse reaches beyond hospitals into the routines and routes that had connected communities. When the crisis worsens, Pops and Cima leave their ranch at night with cattle, sheep, horses, dogs, and provisions. Their attempt to reach the canyon involves passing three barricaded ambushes and further violence in the cedar hills; attackers also kill a horse and two sheep. The journey shows how movement for safety becomes perilous, and how a family’s ability to travel depends on livestock, supplies, and the capacity to defend itself. Once they reach the canyon, Pops uses dynamite to destroy the ford, making the crossing impassable to vehicles and limiting access to foot or horseback travel at low water.

The later view of Grand Junction makes the scale of ruin visible without reducing it to a single cause. Cottonwoods still shade the river parks, but the city is scarred by fire: cars are scorched, neighborhoods have burned, and human bones lie in heaps and scattered remains. Cima, who had left before the worst of the crisis, vomits at the sight of the place where she and Pops once shopped and went to movies. The pandemic’s aftermath is therefore encountered unevenly: some survivors remember the broadcasts and the worsening emergency as it happened, while others meet the devastation only after leaving their refuge.

Memory and the Long Aftermath

The novel’s account moves between a clear timeline—nine years out—and memories that return through Hig’s illness, bereavement, and habits. His reflections on fever do not claim complete certainty about what happened to his mind; his recollection of Melissa’s death, by contrast, is anchored in concrete losses, including the crowded ward and the denied burial. That difference makes the pandemic both a historical event and an ongoing condition of memory.

The catastrophe also changes the meaning of ordinary practices. Fishing remains available when writing, supplies, and companionship fail, but it cannot restore the people or world that have disappeared. Years later, the sound of two passing 747s prompts Hig to run to the Beast and call repeatedly over the radio. He hears a conversation in Arabic and learns that the aircraft are heading west, probably toward California, but receives no reply to his calls. More planes pass in the following weeks, then stop. The brief contact offers evidence of activity beyond the silent landscape without establishing who is aboard or what future, if any, lies there. In that uncertainty, the pandemic’s defining consequence persists: survival is possible, but it does not by itself answer whether a larger human world remains.