We dipped our fingers in the wet cement, and we wrote the truest, simplest things we knew - our names, the date, and these words: We were here. Here the remnants of clothing and dishware, here the burial grounds, here the mounds of earth that were once people's homes.īut among the artifacts that will never be found - among the objects that will disintegrate long before anyone from elsewhere arrives - is a certain patch of sidewalk on a Californian street where once, on a dark afternoon in summer at the waning end of the year of the slowing, two kids knelt down together on the cold ground. Here the deposits of iron where giant steel structures once stood, shoulder to shoulder in rows, a city. Here the indentations suggesting a vast network of roads. You can choose one of three directions and save yourself and your shipmates. Imagine youre a shipwrecked sailor adrift in the enormous Pacific. We wondered what thise visitors would find here. In telling the story of the whaleship Essex, novelist Karen Thompson Walker shows how fear propels imagination, as it forces us to imagine the possible futures and how to cope with them. “Seth and I used to like to picture how our world would look to visitors someday, maybe a thousand years in the future, after all the humans are gone and all the asphalt has crumbled and peeled away.
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