Only when the Anthropocene ends

A Thursday Prompt for April 13, 2023
By SiriusDF

Prompt vision: Vast darkness, a lone light on a pole, and a rumbling sound. I got out of work super late at night, last week, and had a surreal moment in the parking lot, where it seemed like the night, a parking lot light in the near distance, and the sound of a freight train on the nearby tracks were the only things in existence. The cool thing about the light was you could actually see the cone of light it cast, looking almost like an oasis.

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What happened to me then, now seems more surreal than an incident straight out of the Twilight Zone. Almost thirty years ago, I worked as a test tech in Tukwilla for that aircraft maker in Seattle. I was pulled into an assignment to provide test data on old wiring harnesses as part of an NTSB investigation into a 747 passenger plane that exploded over the ocean. My boss had provided wiring harnesses leading to the center fuel tank from retired aircraft, but nearly the same age as the one that crashed.

I drove into the gated shack guarding a tilt up concrete warehouse near Tukwilla, showed my ID. The guard remarked. "Ya know that big thicket by the fence?" He pointed to the north facing cyclone fence where a dense growth of blackberry bushes had long taken over the landscaped rhododendrons, "There's a fox in there. Saw it last night."

Nodding, I drove on, parking my Celica underneath the lone light pole in the small asphalt lot. Went inside, ID clicking against the door reader, vanishing into the wolf gray concrete structure like a swallowed vole.

Timeless ages spent at the test rigs applying working voltages, DC and high voltage 440 Hz AC to supply and sensor wiring within the harness. And out of four, one showed characteristic dips from brief stray currents in the Kapton insulation.

That type of early Kapton insulation was now known to deteriorate long before it's expected lifespan, allowing tiny, fleeting arcs flowing through insulation cracks at either low air pressure and/or condensate on the wiring. I worked methodically. Taking care to accurately log the data. Don’t speculate. Leave the post thinking up to the Analysts and for Dog's sake, ignore the conspiracy nutters yelping in printed articles and books by Truthers.

Finally, after breaks and a bag lunch for supper, I turned off the data loggers, packed test articles and equipment away. Said good night to the night watch guard inside and left for the parking lot.

Outside, Seattle evening weather of drizzle arcing down in drifting, broken lines. Surrounding the warehouse was cobweb thin greenery of fir trees and bushes. One could mistake it for an oasis of wilderness, but glaring lights leapt from nearby urban Renton, turning the cloud deck corpse gray. Warehouses and office buildings destined to finish off the last houses of a once town. Westwards was a black ravine, the storm drain fed remains of the Black River that had vanished 80 years earlier when Lake Washington was lowered to allow it's only outlet to the Ballard locks instead of the little river.

Quite artful, was the light cast by the solitary pole of Mercury arc lamp upon my car. Underneath, drizzle outlined a lit cone staining the car's color to an indistinct gray. Instead of getting in my car, I seated myself on the front, rubber bumper, coated in drizzle. Damp butt be damned, content to taking in ambience of night that soon became the thundering clatter of a nearby freight train. Wild life extinguished by urban artifacts.

Just then, I spotted something in the thicket. A pair of glowing dots, amber yellow. The orbs emerged from the thicket. Becoming the eyes of a thick furred canine stained by the light into a bluish silvery tone with melanistic spots. Fox proportions with a slenderness that suggested a vixen. She wore what I mistook as a collar, the type placed by Wildlife biologists for tracking. She padded out out of the thicket, boldly heading in my direction.

Now closer, instead of a collar, the vulpine from the thicket wore a metal neck bracelet that glowed silver under the vapor light. A clearly seen silver Sigel shaped like a crescent moon hung underneath the bracelet. Her casual diagonal stroll across the wet asphalt took her closer to me.

She casually trotted to within a five yards from me, when she paused. Head raised, yellow eyes locked with mine.

The silver furred fox, called up to me, my name.

Stunned, I sat frozen and mute at being addressed.

Under cold mercury light, midst the clattering of freight train wheels, she spoke my name again and asked,

"When will a saner Epoch return once more?"

A sigh, thin as the drizzle, drifted around the parking lot.

She made her own reply, "Only when the Anthropocene ends."

She spun about, short legs galloping back to the Thicket. Diving in, a bushy furred tail, the last bit of her, vanishing into the green.

Silence.

I stood up, unlocked my Celica and drove off, passing by the guard shack and raised gate as if nothing happened. I finally found voice at last, an answer to the vixen and replied out loud in the car,

"You'll have to wait a long time then…"

No doubt she will outlast all of the edifices we've built and at last will have more than a thicket to roam about.