“Hi, are you the electrician, the one who is skilled at getting ancient equipment up and running?”
“One and the same, Will’s my name,” he said, as he reached out to shake the hand of the old man who greeted him.
“I’m Mike. Good to meet you. The chairlift is over here.”
Mike and Will walked together from the rutted, dusty remnants of a parking lot past the crumbling foundations of burnt out buildings to the lift. Will looked around. “What is, I mean, what was this place?”
“A ski area, or so I’m told,” Mike replies. “I’m 80 and it’s been out of operation since before I was born.”
“A ski area, huh,” Will said somewhat circumspect. “I’ve seen movies that show people sliding down, what did they call it… uhh, snow, that’s right, snow.”
“My grandad used to tell me stories about skiing, back when there was still regular snow. In the early 21st Century, when he was young, there was enough snow here in winter to slide down the hill. He always had a glint in his eyes when he told me ski stories. Seems it was a thrilling sport.”
“Here?” Will said a bit confounded. “This place is a desert.”
“It didn’t used to be,” Mike replied. “Before the ‘Years of Fire,’ there were forests and meadows here. There were still some here when I was young, but the fires kept coming until most every tree was gone.”
“You stayed here through it all?”
“Where were we supposed to go? During the 'Climate Wars,' the whole world was in turmoil. People killing each other for water, for food, or just for the hell of it.”
“But how did you survive out here?”
“How did people survive anywhere? Fire takes a random path driven by the winds of the moment. We lucked out. Lots of fires got close, but the gods were with us. Our property remained unscathed. The spring we relied on has kept percolating. Generations of our family have been growing crops and raising livestock to stay alive. We did our best to stay hidden from the world. There are a few other families like us out here.”
“Well, you are among the luckier ones.”
“I’ll say. Five billion dead,” Mike said as he shook his head at the thought of it. “The wars only abated when there were few enough people that the remaining ones could survive in our compromised climate. But, with fewer people, and the outlawing of most uses of fossil fuels nearly a century ago the climate has finally started to cool. We’ve even seen some snow here in recent years. The new owners of this facility think there might be enough snow in the coming years to support some skiing again.”
“I’d be surprised if people wanted to do something as frivolous as skiing after all we’ve all been through,” was Will’s response.
“Ah, you’ve got that exactly wrong. Because of all they’ve been through, people are desperate for just such a frivolous activity.”
Will allowed that maybe Mike’s years gave him more insight into the human condition than he had and he turned attention to the rusting hulk in front of him. “They want me to see if I can get this thing started. What’s it supposed to do?”
“Run skiers up the mountain, so they can slide back down, is my understanding,” replied Mike with a shrug as he was a little unsure himself.
Will looked at Mike, then back at the hulking machine and its long cable and towers that were still in place. Mike sensed that Will wasn’t getting the complete picture, so he pointed to a dilapidated concrete shed some distance away. “You see that shed, it’s full of chairs that attach to that cable. The skiers sit on the chairs. My grandad explained all this to me when I was little. That’s the last time I was up here.”
“Is there a town nearby? I mean, who is going to use this chairlift if I can get it restarted?”
“There’s a small village down through the bottom of the canyon. Bozeman. It burned a few times, but some homes and businesses survived, some others were rebuilt. There used to be an airport nearby too. If you can get this going, they may send you over there to see what equipment you can get working.” Mike hesitated for a moment, then said, “It’s been a long time since anything other than a tumbleweed flew through here.”
As Will looked over the machine, he came across a rusty nameplate. He took a rag out of his pocket and rubbed as much of the rust and dirt off it as he could. Then read it aloud to Mike, “Virginia City.”
Mike said, “If you look around, there’s other chairlifts up here in various states of ruin. The aim is to get just one running again. Some sign that we can restart the world.” With a catch in his voice Mike finished, “I’d sure like my grandkids to grow up in a different world than I grew up in.”
With that Will got to work.
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