THE WINTERMEN TRILOGY

The Wintermen III: At the End of the World

Life after climate catastrophe is a dystopian nightmare. Brit Griffins’ series The Wintermen wraps up as Johnny Slaught tangles with new Talos strongman Eton Love over who the future belongs to: the people and the land, or the same old capitalist profiteers. With a slim promise of spring on the horizon, megalomaniac Love is gearing up for a cut and run replay of business as usual, and that means grabbing the wealth that lies within the Wintermen’s territory. But the forests, deep snows, and wolves, have a different idea about the fate of the northern landscape. Caught between these two powerful forces, Slaught and his community have to decide which side they’re on. Can they salvage a liveable future from the winter-swept remains of the planet, or is human greed just too powerful?

The wintermen II: INTO THE DARK DEEP

Into the Deep Dark is the second in Brit Griffin’s eco-catastrophic adventure series The Wintermen.

The north has its share of legends. On long winter nights, whispers of violence and madness can descend on those who get isolated in the deep, dark cold. Johnny Slaught and his ragtag group of climate change refugees are just trying to survive in a world plunged into endless winter. But Johnny’s world is about to be rocked by the most ancient menace of all – human greed. The beast of winter is knocking at his door and has slicked back hair, a sheep-skin coat, and a pump action.

Chumboy wasn’t sure of much right now, but of all the things out here in the night, he trusted the tree at his back. And he knew in order to understand what was going on, and what might happen, he needed to go back to that dream, that dream of the creature. He had only glimpses, its hunched over back made of ice and bark, the pools of the black eyes below the intricate jack frost tattoos on the wide forehead, the feel of the cold gripping him, and then it taking him, taking him and dragging him along in the snow. He wanted to know that dream, and he wanted to sleep beside that tree. He sat back, liking the feel of the spruce along his spine, ready to go into the deep dark with the bending trees and the roaring snow and the night.

The wintermen I

The Wintermen is a near-future western, with snow machines riding into town and a showdown in the snow. Johnny Slaught and his Algonquin buddy Chumboy Commando didn't set out to lead one of the most notorious bands of rebels in recent history. But after the world descended into climate change chaos, the government did some serious triage, forcing wide-scale evacuations and abandoning rural areas to the non-stop snow. Soon enough, Slaught is forced by circumstance to stand up the the muscle of Talos Security Corporation, setting in motion a rebellion of average folks fighting to rebuild their lives in the abandoned snowscape of the northland. Can a mixture of scrap snow-machines, gasoline, and the military wisdom of subcommander Marcos be enough to let them rebuild their lives?

And then it started to snow.

That was over a year ago and it hadn’t really stopped. It just kept snowing, staying cold all the time, getting a few weeks of warming up but not enough.

That’s all it took, a few years of seriously pisspoor weather and it was all fucked up.

Now, they were shutting down the last of the government service depots. He hadn’t really thought about it, but it was Talos’s trucks that were hauling everything out, goods, people, machinery, everything on that last scrap of rat’s ass highway heading south. Guess Talos was totally in charge now – it was some bullshit.

Slaught felt the metal of the gun bumping against his leg, reminding him it was there. He took a deep breath, and reaching the boxes, slid the crowbar off the top of the crate and with his free hand pried open the lid. The screws squealed in the cold as the lid popped up. A security guard standing at the side of the truck glanced up, then Reitman turned to look.

Grabbing a pair of gloves, Slaught said, “I think these are mine.”

Reitman rolled his eyes, looked to the security guard beside him and said, “Deal with this asshole, in fact, shoot him if you want, shoot anyone, just leave enough to load the truck. I’m sick of this bullshit, I have a schedule, and I have clients waiting for their merchandise.”

“Sorry buddy, shop’s closed,” Slaught said, pulling up the pump action and pointing it down at the guy’s head, almost seeing himself doing it, like he was in a movie, playing a role. He hoped it had a fucking happy ending.

I had been thinking a lot about symbols of hunger while writing Wintermen II. Thinking too about the disorder in nature driven by greed, how we got to this place of a warming climate through our insatiable appetites and consumptions.

Most cultures had myths addressing hunger and famine - this seemed like a good avenue of exploration as some sort of creature was emerging as an element in the book. The boreal landscape had local tales of Sasquatch sightings – plus the Windigo, a well known being belonging to Indigenous cultural/spiritual beliefs. They might be interesting beings to consider (see Cecil Chabot’s work on Witiko possession & starvation) but they didn’t walk in my cultural imagination. The Irish had the fear gorta or the Man of Hunger. A Harbinger of famine. The Celtic tradition also had the Cailleach (gaelic for ‘hag’) – goddess of winter and often associated with starvation and the power over life and death. Stories of the Cailleach were prevalent throughout Ireland and Scotland; she was a fearsome presence with her long white hair and wolf companion. I was drawn towards this linking of the female spirit with the land. As historian Ashley Cowie writes, in the Gaelic tradition “… myths evolved organically over thousands of years and were forged by people’s experience of nature.” This was moving me closer to the kind of creature I imagined.

The idea for the creature evolved – this is the first incarnation of it to appear in any of my writing (combined with a ghost story about Cobalt I was once told):

Starvation Timiskaming
– Cobalt mining camp, 1909

 The thing bends to tighten the laces on her hobnail boots

makes her think of the corsets she once wore,

her mind wandering like a hand fingering the ties of red ribbon.

She is very tall, pale,

now plunging through the snow with rangy strides,

her dirty yellow hair long since grown into hoar frost,

tattooed patterns of ice scarring her back.

She sniffs her way towards the small cabin

she can smell everything:

boiled down birch bark, small bones gnawed dry, a trash heap, the miner’s hunger,

 a man – dead - outside the cabin.

Their gristle in her nostrils arouses her appetite,

she pauses to exhale slowly,

watching her breath harden into ice crystals.

Then she is moving again,

teeth clacking together like some roused bear,

not from the cold, but in anticipation.

Inside the cabin, the man lies near the bottom of the rough wooden stairs,

woodstove just beyond his reach,

outside the wind sucking hard on the chimney pipe.

He had feared blizzards and wolves –

but most of all he feared the thing that was whispered about in a language he did not know,

that haunted the boreal imagination in the deep of winter.

His partner had said he’d come back for him,

had said, ‘take the gun, go upstairs, scatter tacks on the stairs – no one will get up there’.

He promised he’d be back. But that was hours, days, weeks ago.

So the man is alone, eyes focused on his prospector’s axe in the far corner.

The cabin smells of chewing tobacco, animal hide, the half-frozen bucket of his piss in the corner.

He curses himself for coming to this place of greywacke and pine,

to the lake they had said was rimmed in silver.

He shuts his eyes tight against the fading embers,

sees Rorschach images of snarling martens tangled red-orange on his eyelids.

Outside, the thing is tapping along the cabin wall -
clickety-clack
clickety-clack
but the man is still unable to drag himself up the stairs;

thinks of his axe, but does not have the strength to leave the fire.
.
The thing is patient,

imagining the untying of her dreams that were bound to the promises made then broken:

to see sidewalks of silver, to stroll under violet street lamps, to listen to the aching violins from the opera hall.

The man waits for the sound of her hobnail boots kicking at his door.

He knows she is coming for his mind but will go through his body first,

her arms taking hold of him to carry him up the stairs,

her boots not noticing the tacks,

the stairs barely creaking under the weight of what is left of him.

By the time my creature finally made it into Wintermen II: Into the Deep Dark, it had changed a bit again. More of a presence than a singular entity, something larger and more tied to the landscape. It also negotiates that twilight region between sleep and waking, reality and myth.

RUMINATIONS

What I was reading during the writing of Wintermen II: 

Margaret Atwood’s Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature.

Also the riveting The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin. The tragic story of a blizzard that swept across Nebraska and the Dakotas in January, 1888. The storm hit while school children were trying desperately to get home from school, leaving over 100 children dead. This account from 15 year old Allie Green: “We could see the blizzard coming across Spirit Lake. It was just as still as could be. We saw it cut off trees like it was a white roll coming. It hit with a 60 mile an hour wind. It had snowed the night before about two or three inches. It just sucked up that snow into the air and nearly smothered you.” [pg. 128]

I have to be honest: action movies were much more influential in the evolution of The Wintermen than books. Epic films such as Terminator pushed me towards apocalyptic thinking. It isn’t far to go from Sarah Connor’s nuclear nightmare to begin considering the post apocalyptic fallout of something like a nuclear winter. And The Day After Tomorrow (2004) gave rise to more thinking about climate change and the idea of pervasive extreme cold as both cataclysmic and as an unexpected consequence of global warming.

Also wandered around other catastrophic historical weather events. Thought a lot about 1815, the ‘year without summer’ that gave rise to some of the darkest and most enduring characters in western literature: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (that went on to influence Bram Stoker’s Dracula) were written that year. That was something worth thinking about, this gathering of writers, trapped in a gloomy, slow stirring summer of rain and dark . Byron wrote his grim ‘Darkness’ that summer:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

This excellent article by Chris Townsend in the Paris Review provides a great overview of this compelling time.

So, ultimately, I settled on perpetual winter as the frame in which to ponder climate change.

RUMINATIONS

Spent some time reading works by Subcommander Marcos as a good starting point for revolutionary community. The Zapatistas, with their humor, commitment and ultra radical politics, part dream, part brass tracks, have always been inspiring.

Returned to some classic myths. Demeter, bringer of winter. And Cailleach Bheur, the Celtic winter hag, dark mother. The old stories are sometimes the best ones.