Solarpunk - A story of the new ovens of California#
The sun ran through the openings in the window. :sun:
It was going to be hot, being late August the weather was still pretty hot and the Santana Winds would probably come in sooner than later.
Being ready was a necessity after the eventual “end” of civilization, or whatever was that had actually happened ten years ago when communications were cut and population centers became rapid tombs for those unprepared.
Alberto was none the wiser to stay back inside the metropolitan area, “It will pass” he thought. By pass, he kept thinking, that everything would stabilize again after a year or so.
The first year passed, things did not improve or changed for that matter, the city was relatively dead and he was slowly running out of canned food.
By the fifth year he began to wonder if maybe he should have gone out with the rest to wherever was it that they went.
From what he had heard from neighbors, news and any source he could pick on there had been three main routes that the majority of the population had taken, with some very minor routes being taken by those with more resources to do so.
The core route, the *most logical one, was the road north throughout the border and into California by the way of San Ysidro and San Diego, the United States being the safest bet for everyone thinking of moving out.
That had been the initial case until CBP had an intervention from the National Guard and FEMA, after an emergency was declared in Southern California, which gave coyotes a golden opportunity to make themselves rich.
This was until the second year, when CBP and the National Guard left their reinforced positions and for the first time in decades the San Ysidro Border Crossing Gates were devoid of life.
People returning from California talked about the creation of smaller communities around the state and how larger communities were more common up north up to Oregon and Washington.
These communities, Alberto was made aware, were most of the times in the hundreds or the thousands, with even larger portions of the population moving to the Midwest where rumors came about enormous communities forming.
This was surprising to Alberto, it made him shiver the more he heard about this, as he had lived in Tijuana for thirty years up to that point and remembered when the city had been one of the largest in Mexico.
California, in general, had suffered the same fate, to his knowledge anything up to San Jose had depopulated to a point where cities had become redundant and useless, or at least that is how he perceived this.
The remaining routes proved to be far more complicated, even after many years Alberto would not dare go through them unless he had a vehicle capable of withstanding such a travel.
These routes involved getting through to the central portion of Mexico, one way had to go through la Rumorosa which provided to be a risky move for the inexperienced or those who were not aware of how dangerous it could prove to be to traverse it.
If there was no snow covering the road one could make it to Mexicali, a city where temperatures could reach the high 40 to 50 Celsius and as low as 5 Celsius during the night.
Then having to go through San Luis Rio Colorado, and the Sonora Desert, was an additional step that could end anyone’s travel instantly if their vehicle decided to drop dead right there and then.
The last route was through the whole peninsula, going through could be potentially dangerous even in optimal conditions and the Baja desert could be deadly for the unprepared.
Alberto kept wondering what exactly where those people going to do, go to Cabo San Lucas or maybe La Paz?
Then what, swim through all the way to Sinaloa?
There was no guarantee that there would be a boat there that could easily take them to the other side, or rather one that was still working or had fuel to get them across.
Any of the three options was bad enough considering that one would eventually have to walk, but having put everything in the balance Alberto decided to stay back and hold the fort.
He did this for ten years and it worked far better than he had expected, he had managed to get a reliable underground water source from an abandoned warehouse that held what seemed to have been an ice manufacturing facility.
The procedure was not as simple as he had hoped but having enough water to hold up for weeks at a time helped him go through the toughest of times.
Electricity came from solar panels he had gathered around the city, he had learned everything he could from the manuals and other books he had found, this task proved to take far much longer than a year as he had no knowledge of electricity or electronics.
With enough patience and perseverance, and with some reverse engineering from houses that already had systems installed, he learned how to install and remove the systems, even managing to get a van setup for his personal use as a mobile house until it became too complicated to find and store gasoline to keep him moving.
Besides, a vehicle that used gasoline caught the attention of a lot of people still living in the city and this was not something he wanted, he kept his distance from most of them but the community in Otay built around the University grounds.
Trading had been complicated since the first days, some people kept using money and tried to implement ways to use it even after there was no real currency moving around.
Gold, silver, jewelry, coins of some value, everything had been put in circulation but hoarding had made it hard for these to be used in trade, being rather hard to put a value into it and with counterfeits coming into this circulation it forced the largest community to adapt a barter system.
Bartering could be for goods and services, and it went both ways, if you had something that someone needed an agreement would be reached between both parties, either by a set amount of items or a set amount of hours of labor.
Manual labor was a commodity that proved to be rather expensive but doctors and security eventually came at the top of the chain.
Medicine had become scarce fast, but medical knowledge proved to be invaluable to find alternatives to treat injuries or other ailments; security proved important because wild life began moving closer to the population centers and dogs turned feral before the end of the first year.
Balance, as usual, was complicated but the communities in Tijuana managed to find a way to coexist, adapt and eventually find a way to put some of the required infrastructure in use to help facilitate life or make it as close as possible to something that resembled anything before the “Dissolution” as they had come to call it.
Alberto, for some time, had decided to join the Otay community, as it was the best situated in the city, but it was too far from everything that he had setup for him to permanently join.
Two other communities, while not as large, had caught his eye. The Centro and Presa communities.
Centro was in old Downtown, not too far from the border, and while they did not have large swats of growing lands they had the newest buildings and best preserved areas of the city.
The Presa community, on the other hand, had come to control the Tijuana Dam, which in recent years had filled up considerably even with the small amount of rain that came every year.
With minimal consumption throughout the years the dam, and the surrounding areas, became irrigated and proved to be an essential location for the growing of crops, but this had only happened by the third year when the community had finally come to being and established itself as the most important community of the city.