02/03/2019 0:55:07 ¶ ●

## 143 - Pioneer Days

We are thirsty. We cannot see.
We don’t know what time it is, we are nearly here.

Welcome to Night Vale.

Pioneer Days are upon us again. This is, of course, just the folksy rebranding that the public utilities department gives to randomly selected days throughout the year, when they cut all services without notice. The lights go out, the air conditioners grow warm, the food spoils, the water supply dries up. All residents are required to dress in the costumes of early settlers to make the whole thing feel festive and patriotic. Failure to dress in era-appropriate clothing, such as overalls and soft meat crowns, will result in punitive measures. Including being called a time traveler in a pejorative tone of voice, as was traditional punishment for all real time travelers back in the early days of Night Vale.

Polls show that these civic holidays are increasingly unpopular, but this time it’s going to be different, the utilities department promises. “It’s going to be way more fun, we swear. Just bear with us, you’re so brave. You’re all my brave little pioneers,” the pamphlets scattered around town assure us. “After all,” the pamphlets continue, “what is bravery but endurance? What better way to honor the struggles of our ancestors than through personal discomfort and grim acceptance? These are the values our town was founded on, aren’t they? Aren’t they?!” the pamphlets shout. The pamphlets writhe on the ground. The pamphlets inhale sharply and become still. In an effort to sway public opinion on pioneer days, the utilities department has unveiled an interpretive boardwalk and historical display, set up in an open expanse of desert miles from town. The intention of the display is to bring a sense of local pride and education to the community, and to be a fun family centered activity that can take people’s minds off the panic inducing existential questions that come from being so very alone in the dark.

And now traffic. You had a dream when you were young. In the dream, you woke up on the couch after a nap just in time to see your family driving away, leaving you alone in the house. They’ve never done that before, you’re much too young, too small to be left alone. There are no lights on and everything is soft with shadows. You see a brown paper bag on the table. They must have left it there for you. Is it food? You don’t know how to feed yourself yet. The bag suddenly lurches and tips over onto its side all by itself. A snake slides out onto the table, drops to the floor, and slithers rapidly toward you. You try to scream.

This is the moment you were supposed to wake up, but it isn’t a dream, is it? Your whole family really did abandon you. You grew up in this house alone after that, just you and the snake. It wasn’t poisonous but that doesn’t mean it was a good companion. It came and went without consideration for you at all, sunning itself on rocks or squeezing rodents to the death whenever it pleased, sometimes not coming home for days. You cleaned up its discarded skins during the molting season. You let it sleep curled next to your body for warmth in the winter months, even though it could only give back cold indifference in return. But you had no one else, that’s just how it was. You still see each other once a year during the holidays out of a sense of duty. You follow each other on Facebook, but neither of you check that site anymore.
You waited to wake up from this dream of your youth to find your family had never left, that they were still there with you. You are still waiting to wake from this dream.
This has been traffic.

I’m getting more details about the Pioneer Day’s display and celebration. Along the interpretive boardwalk, visitors will come to several viewing platforms where they will see the bleached bones of select citizens’ ancestors, scattered across the sun scorched earth. Those who won last night’s raffle must remit their ancestral bones by noon in order to be featured in the display. Further along the walk, spectators will be treated to an animatronic re-enactment of the battle for the scrublands, an event in which several key town founders bravely fought against the giant benevolent arthropods that used to exist in this area. As visitors will see, the beasts were all slain easily by our intrepid settlers, as the animals were unaccustomed to violence of any kind and regarded the human newcomers with only gentle curiosity.
“They had to die,” intones the robotic voice of a mechanical man in a waistcoat, as he stands triumphant among piles of enormous multi-pointed legs. “For they were too visually disconcerting to live,” he booms.

There will always be a booth sponsored by the historical society displaying repurposed slide film from random strangers’ family vacations that have ben collected at garage sales over the years. Accompanied by plaques with made up historical narratives about the pictures. For example, there’s one of an elderly woman playing shuffleboard on a seniors’ cruise entitled “Griselda Fords the River”. It tells the tale of when pioneers first got to the sand wastes and there was a big scary river running through it, and how they had to risk their lives just to reach the land that we now have the privilege to take for granted. A lot of plaques have a kind of passive aggressive tone like that, actually.

If you make it to the end of the walk, you will be greeted by Earl Harlan, who will demonstrate how to make cherries jubilee, a staple dish among the early Night Vale frontiers people. “You feed a goose cherries until it can no longer walk or stand on its own,” Earl explains. “Then you light the goose on fire until its screams become whimpers, and when it’s finally silent, you extinguish the flames. The goose’s blackened flesh is full with tar enzymes that are very good for your skin and eyes. The red liquid pooling around it is only cherry juice. Only viscous cherry juice,” he explains as he dishes out samples of the boiling native cuisine directly into people’s outstretched ravenous hands.

That’s not all. The fully immersive interactive theater segment is last. You’ll be blindfolded and placed in the back of a cargo truck. Hours later, you will step off of the wooden blank and be free to enter into the desert, to try and find your way back home. Just like the pioneers did it. You don’t realize how the boardwalk is designed to be completely disorienting until this moment, when you step into the endless desert and look to all horizons and see only identical sagebrush and chaparral and nothingness. As if you’ve entered a mirrored fun house made only of hot dirt.

More on Pioneer Days, but first
The weather.

[“Vines” by Super Boink
https://superboink.bandcamp.com/]

As you wander lost in the desert, you first experience a dizzying sense of freedom. You can go wherever you want, the future is yours to shape. The possibilities seem as endless as the vast wasteland in front of you, but when you look behind you and realize you can no longer see the interpretive boardwalk or any other sign of human life, that sense of freedom becomes abject despair. You realize that taking risks is only fun when you have safety net. When that risk is a choice. Now that you’ve been swallowed up into the blistering wilderness, you learn that choice has always been an illusion. You must go forward. The sun sinks lower. The dark air blurs the edges. You feel a cool breeze sweep over the sand – and you are grateful for that. Your lips bleed.

It’s nightfall when you come to an old homestead. It has no roof and leans to one side. There is no door, but there is the shape of a door, the black rectangle of absence. You feel compelled to go in, as would anyone confronted by a structure with an entrance, but you hesitate. You recognize this place, yes. You saw it in the slide film display by the historical society. There was a picture of it taken many years ago. It depicted the same house, only it had a roof back then. It did not lean to one side, and two children, barely toddlers, were standing out front. They had no heads, they had chickens roosting on top of their necks instead. The accompanying explanation said that it was a double exposure, a photographic art form that early Night Vale settlers dabbled in to pass the time. There was a whole collection of these photos displayed: a bath tub filled with blood. A levitating skull on fire. A baked ham with long luxurious hair.
“The first Night Valers were incredibly adept at trick camera work,” the historical society insisted nervously when questioned. “Cameras had come to town at least a hundred years before cameras were invented, due to the rampant time traveler problem back in those days,” they explained.
“We found the pictures in a locked trunk buried near the railroad tracks,” blurted a younger historical society member who was immediately shushed by the elders and relegated to selling merch.

You hesitate in the yard, until you can no longer ignore the siren song of the wind through the broken bones of this place, screaming at you to enter. Inside, the only piece of furniture left standing is a kitchen table. On top sits a sealed jar packed to the brim with pickled eggs. Your child asks if she can have one. Your child is with you, she’s ben riding on your back the whole time and you forgot all about her. That’s incredibly alarming. How can a parent just forget their own child like that?
“Yes, honey,” you say, trembling with the effort of keeping your voice calm. “You can have one.”
You set her down and she scampers across the dusty boards, and she feeds. She feeds ravenously. She asks for a bedtime story next, it is her bedtime after all. At least she says it is. You don’t know what time it is, but somehow she senses it and you trust her instincts. Habits are comforting, rituals are important. It’s what keeps us grounded. It’s what prevents us from shouting uncontrollably and clutching at our eyes.
“Once upon a time, there was a child who looked very much like you,” you begin.
“No,” she interrupts, “the child looks like you.”
“It doesn’t matter,” you say, “because it was actually a dog, not a child, be quiet now. Here’s the story. A dog ran away from home and had many adventures and then returned to its family and everyone learned lessons.”
“What kind of adventures?” she asks.
“Unspeakable adventures,” you say.
“Is this a true story?” she asks.
“Every story is true,” you say.
She’s still awake. You point through the roofless void and tell her to count the stars, hoping to bore her into unconsciousness.
“There are no stars,” she says. You acknowledge that the thick dark air obscures any light that might be in the sky, but “we can see them anyway,” you tell her, “because we know the stars exist.”
“How do we know?” she asks.
“Go to sleep,” you say.

After she’s asleep, you walk through what’s left of the old house and wonder if this is your new home now. There are many things you think you see standing in doorways or huddled in corners. Luckily, most of them are not real. The only thing that’s truly there is a nest of baby arthropods, bedded down in the tattered remains of a blood stained prairie dress. They appear to be orphaned, but they are together, intertwining all of their legs and blinking all of their eyes and wriggling as one large familial mass. You know you don’t belong here. This is their home now, as it was their home before, long before there was ever a house. You lift your child’s sleeping body and enter the desert once more. You look behind you and see the silhouette of a chicken-headed toddler standing sentinel in the yard. It’s not real, it’s just a double exposure.

As light lifts itself above the horizon, something shiny catches your eye in the distance. You move towards it, because it’s the only thing to move towards. You don’t feel hope or motivation, only the pull of a random focal point that keeps you going forward. Eventually you come upon an enormous parking lot full of vintage cars. Some are early models made of skin and mud and some are mid-century coupes with fins and hardtops and spinal columns. Hundreds of chrome bumpers glare in the blinding half-sun of dawn. What’s all this? you wonder in the daze.

“Hear yee, hear yee!” shrieks an individual in a tricorn hat, ringing a handbell.
“What is this?!” you shriek back, grabbing them by the lapels. They do not acknowledge you.
“Hear yee!” they cry again, but do not elaborate further.
Suddenly the pounding of drums and deafening squawk of brass, a marching band is playing. Colorful streamers trail through a clear blue sky. It’s the city parade. You made it to the end of the Pioneer Days interpretive display and celebration! You accept another liquid handful of scalding cherries and stumble home with your drowsy young still clinging to your back.

As you enter your own silent house, completely free of all public utilities in celebration of Pioneer Days, you are overpowered by the scent of rotting kale in the stuffy air. And you breathe it in deeply. You rejoice. You weep. The only source of water is the puddle on the kitchen door, fed by the constant drip of the defrosting freezer. And you kneel down and drink from it, until you are satiated.

Things don’t look as bad as they once did, do they? The walls aren’t closing in on you anymore, they embrace you. The dark screens of your electronic devices no longer reflect your own boredom back to you, they reflect only relief on your haunted face. The inconvenience of no public services pales in comparison to the night you spent merely surviving in a howling unstable universe. It’s all about context. It’s all about managing your expectations. That’s what the utilities department pamphlet was trying to tell us all along.
And of course about celebrating the Pioneers spirit, something something forefathers, vintage cars and other stuff like that.

But now that I think of it, we do spend a lot of our days distracting ourselves from physical reality. Maybe we really can use this time to experience life more solidly in the physical world, the way our ancestors did. Who needs modern conveniences when we have each other, right? Hold your loved ones close tonight. After all, you have nothing better to do.
I’m coming home now, Carlos. I know you can’t hear me. No one can hear me. The power’s out here in the station just like it is everywhere else. We haven’t been broadcasting anything for days now. And even if we had bee, your radios don’t work anyway. but habits are comforting. Ritual is important.

Stay turned next for – whatever you think you hear.
Good night,
Night Vale,
Good night.

Today’s proverb: The leading cause of death is having a body.