Holiday Road

NVDL: Below is the final paragraph of Cormac McCarthy's post apocalyptic novel, The Road. It was while reading this book that I was inspired to write HOLIDAY, a far less gloomuy, brighter, more tropical version that explores the theme of global disintegration/collapse and our human response to it ('Is it really happening...?')

"Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

He is talking about the post apocalyptical world here. ONCE there were fish in the very mountains where this father and son crossed to get to the sea. But no longer. And things will never be put back right again. In the deep glens where the fish lived, all things were older than man. But yet man - the newcomer on Earth - the last to arrive here - is the one who ends up taking control and eventually destroying the planet. And it can never be made right again. Because the conditions that existed in the beginning when man evolved from the sea will never exist again.

This is a warning. This is the point of the book. This is a work of speculative fiction. It is taking a situation in the present and projecting it into the future. He is saying that if man continues on his present course, this will happen. But you will notice he is very careful never to actually tell you what happens that kills the majority of the people on earth. We only know that something happened and happened fast and simultaneously all over the world. You can really make one of two choices. Either man destroys itself through bombs or pollution. Take your pick. The result is the same. Once we destroy the world, we can never get it back again.

From Yahoo.com