Gold River Lodge, Requa
By mid afternoon we arrived in Klamath and soon after the turnoff to the tiny village of Requa. Just after we made that turn we had an unexpected surprise. There was a man on a farm tractor not a hundred yards away tilling a large field. This brought us to a quick stop. Not certain what to do we put on or gun belts, the women following suit and walked towards him. He was driving away from us and didn’t notice us until we were ten yards away.
He pulled to a stop. “Howdy folks, woe, you won’t need those here. We’re all friendly”.
He was a middle aged man in farmer’s clothes and calm in his words as if nothing unusual was happening and the world had never changed from decades ago.
“How’d you find us here? We haven’t seen strangers in two years”.
“A man named John Chambers, a friend of mine, left us this address a while back” I replied. “Is he here?”
“No. He’s not been around for a long time. But I’m dying to hear your story. Just drive down the road to the inn on your right. You can’t miss it. There are others there. I’ll put my tractor away and meet you there. And you can put away those guns. You’ll scare the children”.
We parked our guns in the back and drove around a bend and saw it. There was a large dirt driveway and two children playing with a ball. As we pulled in a man and three women came out of a lodge, one of the women calling the children to her side. There were four or five campers at the further end of the huge, empty lot.
We greeted each other and were invited inside to a long table in the spacious lobby with its A-frame high ceiling. Soon the farmer appeared and the children ran off and brought back another man and two more women. We were all seated and exchanged names. Two of the women were wearing dark clothing and the white bonnets the Amish used to wear.
The oldest person in the group, a man also wearing dark clothes, began with a serious look on his face and a question, “none of you dream, do you?”
“No, not anymore” I answered. “We found that by electrocuting ourselves briefly we could burn out the chip in our heads”.
“Never heard that one before, interesting. You’ll have to tell me more about it. I’m a doctor. Where are you from?”
“The Bay Area” Tina replied.
“We thought everyone was dead down there” the farmer said.
“Almost everyone is” I continued. “We escaped two days ago. John Chambers left the name of your town in a notebook of mine. That’s why we came. But we didn’t see a single living soul along the way. We’re so happy to have found you people, other human beings, still alive, after so much death”.
“Good man, John, good man. He left us two years ago, when the war was still raging, when the drones were flying, saying he had to save others”.
So the conversation began, long and intense, winding through the rest of the afternoon and through a delicious meal of real meat and fresh vegetables and fruits, far better than our canned experiments. As the first dish was served, the whole group said grace, while we bowed our heads. But it wasn’t an Amish community. It had been but just four of them were left. The others just happened to be miraculous survivors of the holocaust and brought here by John, so he held the status of a savior, with a halo around his head in their imaginations.
Now they blessed him for saving us four at the dinner table. We were the first addition to this clan in three years. But this gave them hope there might be more and that he might be alive. The fate and whereabouts of John were unknown, the topic of their frequent prayers. After the candlelight dinner, the farmer and doctor walked us by lantern to two empty campers. We told them we only wanted one, which seemed to puzzle them both. Then in the most polite terms he could master, the farmer asked that he lock up our firearms for the night. He told us he would explain this request in the morning, privately, that it wasn’t a topic for the women and children’s ears.
We complied and cramped together on a single queen size mattress, without light, and soon fell asleep.
