Dwindling Down

"The clocks stopped at one seventeen one morning. There was a long shear of bright light, then a series of low concussions. Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. I think it's October but I can't be sure. I haven't kept a calendar for five years. Each day is more gray than the one before. Each night is darker - beyond darkness."

We finally saw The Road this weekend. It's not very often we get to see a movie, so we try to make them good ones. Although it was devastatingly sad, it's such a fantastic story and the movie followed the book closely. There is something so real about humanity stripped down to it's bare essentials, where survival of the most basic kind takes over and you really see what we're made of and where we came from. And in the world of this book, the only thing missing is where it will all end. Nobody wants to think about that.

One thing this movie doesn't have is hope. It depicts a world bereft of it. What little glimmer the father and his boy (they don't use names anymore) have are dashed when they reach the sea and find that it is just as gray and lifeless as the rest of their world.

What makes this story so compelling to me was that this could really happen. It's not at all out of the question. It basically depicts what scientists theorized would happen after a full nuclear exchange, a complete collapse of the food chain as sunlight is blocked out across the world and Nuclear Winter sets in. People on the move by the thousands or millions, spreading disease and destruction until they could move no more. By the time the ash cleared from the atmosphere, maybe a year or two later, all plant and animal life would be extinct or well on the way there.

The little boy in the story is about Zach's age and I couldn't help making that connection over and over and wondering what I would do in a situation like that, all hope lost as the world's life slowly winds down and the gray takes over. Worse still, if that's possible: The father is dying and he knows it. Just imagine what that does to him, knowing he's going to leave his little boy all alone in this terrible world with nothing more than a handgun, one bullet, and the advice to "keep going south".

I wondered in my post about the book if they would screw the movie up but I think they did the book justice. Now I think I need a nice light comedy to recover.

 "I told the boy when you dream about bad things happening, it means you're still fighting and you're still alive. It's when you start to dream about good things that you should start to worry."