Before (pre-collapse era)

Before (pre-collapse era) is the ordinary world Hig remembers after it has vanished: a life of shared routines, familiar landscapes, and living ecosystems that the pandemic and subsequent environmental decline make impossible to return to. His memories do not form a detached history of the old world. They surface as personal scenes, set against present-day absences, and show how loss changes the meaning of home, nature, and time.

Domestic Life and Shared Habits

Hig and Melissa lived beside a lake in Denver, only seven minutes from downtown. From the windows of their small house they could see grass, water, mountains, and geese. The flock included resident birds and migratory Canada geese that arrived in spring and fall, mingled with the locals, and departed again. During evening walks around the lake in October and November, Hig and Melissa tried to distinguish the resident birds from the transients. He believed he was better at identifying them and thought Melissa was wrong, a minor disagreement that gave their shared walks a rhythm of its own. After they got Jasper, the dog’s behavior seemed to confirm Hig’s theory: he chased the wary wild geese, but not the resident ones.

Their old life is also recalled through music. Hig kept recordings in multiple formats and sometimes played music in the hangar, which he had wired to the airport’s wind-powered battery supply. He had to choose the moment carefully, because songs associated with his and Melissa’s listening could return him to grief. Their tastes included singer-songwriters, country, and bluegrass; music that had once seemed heartbreaking acquired a different weight after Melissa’s death. The continuity of the recordings could not restore the life in which they had listened together.

Nature as a Former Home

Before the collapse, fishing was more than recreation for Hig: it gave him a sense of belonging to the places he walked. He remembered fishing with Jasper on the Sulphur, where the creek, cliffs, stones, spruce, and cutthroat trout belonged to a single experience of being at home in the landscape. Melissa, too, belonged to his sense of connection, though in a different way: he understood their care for one another as a mutual trust between lives entrusted to each other.

The old abundance becomes clearest through what is missing. Hig recalls trout as part of the world he loved, and measures their disappearance against the loss of other animals, from elephants and tigers to birds and whales. He distinguishes the grief for a vanished species from the further fear that the creek itself might fail. In the mountains, two consecutive winters had left the peaks with almost no snow; by mid-April, seasonal expectations no longer seemed reliable. The streams warmed, trout disappeared, and Hig adapted by fishing for suckers and carp. That substitution did not erase the loss: he had to accustom himself to different fish and still returned to the water, where he could remember a place that had not yet become wholly unfamiliar.

The Old World Seen from the Air

Flying offered Hig another memory of order. On his first training flight, farms, roads, windbreaks, livestock, houses, and industrial sites appeared from above as parts of a legible pattern. The landscape seemed composed and still, without visible misery or conflict. For Hig, altitude also briefly changed his experience of himself: while looking down, he could feel separated from grief and from the consequences of violence. That perspective belonged to the earlier world, but its apparent completeness depended on distance; it could not remove suffering from the ground below.

Later, Hig’s improvised habits preserve the same tension between memory and present loss. He cooks in the hangar and avoids living fully in his house, as though temporary arrangements might leave open the possibility of returning to a home elsewhere. He recognizes that this hope cannot bring Melissa, the trout, or the vanished animals back. Yet ordinary objects and routines—a woodstove, tea made from dried summer plants, and time spent in the garden—can still offer brief peace. The remembered past is therefore not simply a refuge: it sharpens his awareness of what has been lost while helping him attend to what remains.

From Before to the Aftermath

The boundary between the old world and the collapse is marked by a sequence of failures rather than a single moment. Nine years after the flu, Hig recalls that the disease killed most people and that a later blood disease killed more. Melissa and Hig went to St. Vincent’s Hospital when it was already filling with the dead. In another recollection of the crisis, Pops and Cima left their ranch during the breakdown of public life, traveling with livestock and supplies after news broadcasts had become increasingly frightened and then ceased amid disorder. These accounts show private lives being forced into a new landscape as medical care, information, and safe travel fail.

The years afterward make the contrast concrete. Grand Junction, once a destination for shopping, farm equipment, and movies, appears to Hig and Cima as a burned city marked by widespread destruction. Elsewhere, reports of aircraft passing over Erie offer Hig a brief, uncertain sign that the outside world may still exist, but do not restore the connections or institutions that once made that world familiar. The past persists in memories of geese, fishing, music, and shared domestic habits; the present answers each with absence, adaptation, or uncertainty. In this structure, Before is both a period of life and the measure by which Hig understands the damage done to the world that followed.