On 25 October, 1997, weather in neighbourhood of Fu-Manchu was of the soft autumnal variety found in England at this time of year. Trees retain their leaves despite a change in colour, though some have fallen at approach of winter. Dark clouds lower in the sky, dripping mist and sometimes rain. Enough cloud covers the city to make the day dark and lights of cars, shops, and houses shine. It is not cold just moist, and the air is filled with the fragrance of rotting leaves and ageing vegetation. Weather today makes a Saturday afternoon indoors reading a book a special pleasure.

Blizzard Closes DIA

Number One wife reported news of a strong blizzard closing Denver International Airport¹, known in colloquial parlance as DIA. Not Stapleton International, but the new one out standing in it's field with eight runways inactive and the possibility of building four more.

At a distance, DIA looks like a Bedouin encampment except its tents are white instead of black, made of strong man-made fiber instead of wool. Fifteen to twenty inches of snow fell on Denver, drifting in wind to disrupt communications by road and air, trapping nomads in their airport encampment.

Historical Event

Fu-Manchu's last passage through DIA was while en-route to Bannock Street, Englewood, a suburb south of Denver. Ensconced in an hotel on Wadsworth Boulevard, the third-floor room looked out across the plain to mountains. Fu-Manchu whiled away the hours reading Dashiell Hammett's novel The Thin Man.

In Hammett's story there is an insert in the middle of the book, it seemed not to belong there, but there it was, an extract from Duke's Celebrated Criminal Cases of America describing what happened when a group of people got beyond reach of their civilisation. Alfred G Packer and his companions became cannibals.

Looking out from the hotel room window, across the plain to the mountains, 124 years after the pioneers left Chief Ouray's encampment for the Los Piños Agency, Fu-Manchu imagined the precarious nature of their life at that time. In the hotel room, Fu-Manchu has supporting services; whereas, standing in this same spot removed by 124 years, he would be entirely dependant upon his own resources and knowledge of the land. As a pioneer, Fu-Manchu would be equal to Packer, Swan, Miller, Noon, Bell, and Humphrey, and just as likely to starve in this spot as at DIA stranded by snow, or in the middle of the Sahara desert. Even in the Sahara there is evidence remaining of systems that supported ancient civilisation.

Desert Civilisation

Ancient Saharan civilisation was supported by Foggaras, which are man-made subterranean channels built in the manner we know today as cut-and-cover. Foggaras supply oasis with regular, though limited, amounts of water with the help of gravity. Gravity has changed little in two thousand years. Even though human life in the Sahara is severely attenuated, it survives on ancient engineering with little or no maintenance. What caused the decline of people living in Sahara?

Decline Around Denver

A sharp decline in human life around Denver could be rapid after a major disaster. Hardly any essential services rely on gravity. Most things rely on electricity to pump water and sewage. Short time is all that would be needed for life around Denver to return to nomadic, tented encampments along banks of convenient rivers.

Fear Not

Nowadays, we are self-sustaining and have been so for a very short time. Yet, even when beset by the largest of natural disturbances, human civilisation is so well entrenched world-wide that it takes local populations little time to recover when supplied with help from farther afield. Yet again, it is well to remember that we are not so far removed from barren wastes, snowy mountains, blizzardly mornings.

A Reminder

One blizzardly October morning in Denver rapidly cut off those wandering souls from the rest of their tribe, confining them to their tents in the middle of a barren waste. Within a matter of hours they had exhausted their supplies of food. These nomads trapped in the airport encampment ate all available nourishment: all pizza, all hamburger, all french fries, all corn dogs on sticks, all popcorn, all ice cream.

Fu-Manchu received no reports of human desperation under those vaulting canopies at DIA, no reports of blood running across those marbled floors, or of the strong stalking the weak as food. Fu-Manchu did not hear of people braining each other with hatchets. No, there were no stories of ample buttocks being run through the bacon-slicer at McDonalds.