“Before”: Life Before the Collapse

“Before”: Life Before the Collapse is the remembered world that Hig carries into a life reshaped by the pandemic. It is not presented as an abstract golden age, but through particular routines and attachments: a home beside a lake in Denver, evenings with Melissa, fishing, and the expectation that familiar places and living things would continue. As those expectations fail, recollection becomes a way to measure the scale of loss—personal, environmental, and material.

The remembered world

Before the collapse, Hig and Melissa lived beside a lake in Denver, only seven minutes from downtown. Their small house gave them a view of grass, water, and mountains; the nearby city still offered a bookstore, restaurants, and movies. Their life combined access to urban amenities with the daily presence of the lake, making home a place where the ordinary and the natural met without seeming in conflict.

The Geese on the lake were part of that shared routine. A resident flock remained through the year, while migrating Canada geese arrived in spring and fall, mixing with the locals before departing again. Hig believed he could distinguish the transient birds from the resident ones. During evening walks before dinner, he and Melissa would point out the different groups; he thought she was wrong, and she sometimes grew annoyed with his confidence. The disagreement was small, but its return in memory preserves the texture of their life together: intimacy expressed through observation, teasing, and repeated walks.

When they brought home Jasper as a puppy, Hig took his behavior as confirmation of his theory. Jasper chased the skittish wild Geese but not the more settled residents. The inference belonged to Hig, and he acknowledged it as his own theory rather than an established fact. In the later world, where Jasper becomes part of his survival routine, this remembered episode also holds an earlier version of the dog: not an alarm or companion against danger, but a puppy in a household whose concerns still included the habits of birds.

Fishing and belonging

Fishing gives Hig’s memories of the old world a deeper sense of belonging. On the Sulphur, fishing with Jasper, he sometimes felt that the beauty of a particular place exceeded what he could contain or explain. The small cutthroat Trout, the creek, and the surrounding land were not merely scenery or resources. In Hig’s recollection, being there and fishing were ways of fitting into a world that did not require him to justify his presence or turn every activity toward survival.

Melissa belonged to that same world, though in her own way. She disliked hunting but loved fishing, and she sometimes joined Hig by the creek. He considered her a better reader of Trout than he was: less focused on casting distance and accuracy, more attentive to the fish and to the insects around the water. Her practiced preparations with a rod and line, and her simple question about what to use, survive in memory as details of a shared activity rather than as grand declarations. Fishing was a pastime they could inhabit together, each bringing a different kind of attention to it.

That remembered intimacy makes the later disappearance of Trout more than a change in what Hig can catch. He recalls having loved fishing for them, and later describes them as gone from the waters he knew. His grief over their absence is bound to his memories of place and of life with Melissa, but it is also grief for the species themselves. The loss cannot be reduced to a symbol for his private bereavement: the fish and the conditions that sustained them are part of what has actually vanished.

Marriage and the hoped-for future

Hig and Melissa had no children for a time because she could not conceive. They consulted a doctor, but declined the treatments offered and were content with one another. When Melissa became pregnant, Hig experienced it as an unexpected change in a future they had thought they understood. He remembered watching her sleep and recognizing the depth of his love for her. The pregnancy therefore belongs to the account of Before not only as a biographical fact, but as the arrival of a possibility neither had expected.

They discussed names after deciding during the second trimester that they wanted to know the baby’s sex: Spencer if the baby was a boy, Sophie if a girl. The child is remembered as Hig and Melissa’s Unborn Child, a future they began to imagine but did not get to raise. This possibility stands alongside the couple’s settled life rather than replacing it; they had already regarded each other as enough, and the pregnancy enlarged the future they pictured together.

What remains after the collapse

The later world repeatedly intrudes upon recollections of Before. After nine years, Hig notes, many runways have become unusable, with some requiring exact knowledge of potholes to land safely. He remembers a television program, Life After People, whose imagined distant future for New York City was an estuary, marsh, river, woods, and hills. What had once thrilled him as a transformation unfolding over a thousand years becomes, in his present, a much faster process of decay: exposed steel corrodes, roots break structures apart, and unmaintained tarmac deteriorates within years. His comparison gives the collapse a physical timescale. Nine years may sound brief, but it has been long enough to alter both infrastructure and the conditions of daily life.

The seasons and waters also lose their former reliability. Hig recalls that some recent winters brought little snow to the peaks, and that old seasonal expectations had become unreliable. The disappearance of Trout and the possibility of losing the creeks make ecological damage a continuing fear, not a single past disaster. In the mountains, he still fishes, adapting to the changed waters and different fish; elsewhere, he seeks surviving or recovering woods rather than places already marked by extensive die-off. These later practices contrast with the remembered ease of fishing before, while showing how attachment to the land persists even as its character changes.

Memory as a measure of loss

The narrative presents Before through Hig’s acts of remembering rather than as a complete account of the old society. Domestic routines, bird migrations, fishing trips, and the prospect of a child come back in fragments, often as the present gives him reason to compare what once seemed stable with what has disappeared. That structure keeps the past specific: the old world is not simply a condition of comfort, but a life made up of particular relationships and places.

Memory also carries contradictions. Hig can recall contentment with Melissa and the unexpected hope of a pregnancy, while living with the knowledge that neither can return. He can remember the streams as places of belonging while confronting their warming and the loss of Trout. Before therefore names both an ordinary life and the distance separating it from the present. Its emotional force comes from the details that remain available to memory—and from the recognition that remembering them cannot restore the people, animals, or landscapes that have been lost.