The Trip to Raptor Bluff (20 page)

Joshua Zeem refused to leave the Pacific Northwest and started repairs on his home, office, and production sites as soon as he could.  He created a new Zeemercise workout from his temporary headquarters in Nevada in the interim, and sales were good enough to enable him to pay his employees, although many of them were still unable to work from their remote locations.  He would have paid them from his personal savings even if his new workout did not meet sales forecasts.

In the first lengthy phone conversation between Joshua and Rick after the earthquake, Joshua questioned Rick in minute detail about Lucy’s behavior on the trip to Raptor Bluff up to the point where the teams split up.  Rick did not mince words when he matter-of-factly described Lucy’s refusal to help with survival chores, her food and toilet paper thefts, and her demand that she and Dakota be exempt from carrying their own supplies.  Joshua confirmed the facts with Brenda, who gave him the same information in a much more heated response.  Joshua had only one question for Dakota; he wanted to know why she sneaked away from her team and walked to Port Fortand by herself.  After a moment’s silence, during which Dakota clearly struggled to put words to her thoughts, she said, “Grandpa, Mom thought God made a mistake when He put her in such a hard position.  She was waiting for Him to fix it for her.  I ran away to make her follow me.  I was afraid we were all going to die if I didn’t.”

Joshua thought through the night before he shared his plans with Lucinda, who whole-heartedly agreed with him.  They would begin an immediate search for a qualified Chief Operating Officer to replace Lucy, and give Lucy two choices: she could work her way into management by starting as a salesperson, with a salesperson’s salary and commission; or she could earn a business degree, after which she would be offered a junior management position.

On Rick’s advice, Joshua also hired an experienced Human Resources Director and encouraged his employees to speak freely to him.  Brenda did not get the opportunity to correct her treatment of employees as she had resolved to do during her talk with Diana.  Her past abuses stacked up so quickly that the HR Director told Joshua he was lucky he had not been sued.  Brenda was forbidden to have face-to-face or phone conversations with non-management staff.  Instead, all conversations went through Rick on the IT side, a Sales Manager on the sales side, and a new Accounting Manager on the accounting side. 

Brenda was given the daunting task of writing technical and user documentation for both the inventory and accounting systems: a task that would take her two years.  She had to laugh at the irony when she was given the assignment; during the years when she ran the company, she had prohibited formal documentation of any kind.  Documentation provided too much knowledge to employees, and she couldn’t have anyone learn enough about the systems to threaten her absolute control.  Joshua insisted that she work from home, and he kept her on her pay and bonus schedule. Brenda had helped him start the company and was a loyal employee whose dedication and hard work he valued.  When her documentation task was finished, he would find another big project for her.

Brenda told Rick about her resolution to treat employees better, and lamented that since she was not allowed to interact with them, she could not prove that she had changed.  He listened respectfully but did not believe she was capable of real improvement.  She was extremely selective about whom she bullied, but there was no denying the brutal bully streak in her personality.  She proved that over and over when she called Rick to rage about small transaction errors made by sales assistants and accounting staff.  That she even knew about the transaction errors was evidence that she was sniffing the system in areas where she no longer had any business, for the sole purpose of finding employee mistakes.  Rick knew full well that she would be raging at the employees themselves if she were allowed to.

Andrea was fired for multiple reasons, but her HR record cited only one: she told two St. Mary’s students that they did not have to perform their community service work at Raptor Bluff because Zeemercise would lie for them and sign paperwork showing they had.  She was given six month’s severance pay on the condition that she sign a letter stating the reason for her dismissal, and also stating that she agreed with the action.  Andrea signed it.  She was back on her medication, and truly believed that it was only a matter of time before she was forgiven and taken back into the bosom of Joshua’s family.  Her sobbing phone calls to every member of his family, and the floods of apology cards and flowers she sent to their homes and businesses were ignored. When she showed up unexpectedly at Joshua’s temporary home in Nevada, he called the police, and then had his legal team work with the authorities to prepare a restraining order.  Later, when Andrea’s prospective employers asked Zeemercise for references, they were told to ask Andrea for her copy of the letter she had signed when she was terminated.

Tara completed two stays in drug rehabilitation facilities but they were unsuccessful.  She switched to heroin, which was much cheaper than OxyContin, but she still could not support her addiction.  She was thrown out of her home for stealing money, jewelry, and electronics to pay for her habit.  She disappeared into San Francisco and did not finish high school.

St. Mary’s did not reopen for over a year, so Reba’s senior class graduated from different schools throughout the United States.  Those classmates who thought about Reba in later years could only describe her as ‘Tara’s fat and mean friend’; there was nothing else they could think of to say about her.  Tara and Reba never spoke again after their rescue from Hammer Mountain.

Libby, Pepper, and Shelly developed a friendship that would carry them through their lifetimes.  At least once during every reunion, one of them would mention the utterly fabulous latrine they built behind Diana’s house.  Shelly had snapped a picture of the latrine with her cell phone, and Brenda had copies blown up and framed for Diana and the girls who helped build it.  All of them proudly displayed the photograph on their own bathroom walls.

Diana recovered well from her foot and ankle injuries after multiple surgeries, but would walk with a limp for the rest of her life.  She made good on her commitment to stop defending impaired drivers, although it substantially decreased her income.  Even with her diminished resources, she refused to sell her house on the Oregon coast.  Edward stayed buried in the raised garden beneath the cairn that Pepper, Shelly, and Brenda built.  On each anniversary of the Great Cascadia Earthquake, Brenda and Shelly helped Diana place fresh flowers on Edward’s grave.  They always added one flower stolen from the neighbor’s prized perennial flower garden. 

Little Molly from the Port Fortand refugee center became Molly Zeem soon after her fourth birthday.  She had no recollection of the wave that stole her family, or of the days she spent with the other orphaned children at the center.  She remembered Dakota, Kate, and Jason vividly; however, and shouted and pounded on her bedroom window when she saw Dakota step out of a car parked in front of her foster home.  Molly became a cherished child and the only daughter of Joshua’s son, Patrick.  Molly’s older brothers became her protectors from the moment she entered their lives.

Jason’s and Kate’s families were invited to Molly’s fifth birthday party, and Jason’s family flew in from Indiana for the celebration.  When the festivities were over, talk turned to the days immediately following the earthquake.  Lucy quickly left the room.  Earlier that year, she confided in her father that Jesus forgave him for placing her last on the Port Fortand evacuation list, and for demoting her at work, but that she still had not found forgiveness in her own heart. 

Everyone at Molly’s birthday party laughed at the Sarah stories, and Joshua laughed the loudest.  Soon after Sarah’s rescue, her father contacted Joshua about the abuse his daughter suffered at the hands of Lucy, Dakota, and Kate.  Joshua gave him Colonel McCoy’s phone number and said, “Ask the shelter commander how Sarah behaved when they asked her to leave an infirmary bed so a woman with blood poisoning could have it.  I believe Sarah’s worst ailment was a couple of blisters on her heels.  If you have further complaints after speaking to Colonel McCoy, I suggest you go through your lawyers.”  He never heard from Sarah’s father again. 

Rick cut his hours at Zeemercise and quietly groomed a responsible subordinate to eventually take his IT Manager position.  What consumed him, and what he loved above all else, was his rapidly expanding canine rescue.  Thousands of animals were abandoned or lost their owners during the earthquake, and he took in strays from shelters in the Pacific Northwest as quickly as he could build accommodations for them. 

During the long nights when the humans and animals slept peacefully beneath the vast Idaho sky, Rick poured his grief for his wife and three daughters into his own personal story of the Great Cascadia Earthquake, which he titled ‘
The Trip to Raptor Bluff
’.  His firsthand account of driving a bus high on Oregon’s coastal cliffs when the earthquake occurred, his view of the tsunami from Hammer Mountain, and his walking trip inland with two children and a dog, sky-rocketed the book to international best seller lists.  That he lost his own family in the tsunami, and took three abandoned dogs with him when he was finally evacuated from the small Oregon farming town, turned him in to a reluctant folk hero.  He refused to do interviews centered on his own personal experience, but happily agreed to talk publicly about the stray pet crisis occurring in the Pacific Northwest.  During those interviews, he shamelessly promoted his own and other animal shelters trying to deal with the deluge of homeless pets.  Volunteers from across the country helped him place rescued animals in good homes.  Book sales and donations funded his rescue effort, and also allowed him to hire specialists who could train dogs from among his strays as veteran companion dogs.  Dante, Rambo, and Joey were considered family pets and joined Caleb in the ranch house.

The bodies of Rick’s wife and daughters were not recovered, but he never gave up hope that someday, someone would find their remains.  He wanted them with him on the rescue ranch that had become his life’s mission.

Abby’s parents quickly agreed to let her spend the summer of the earthquake on Rick’s family ranch, but she got some surprise resistance from her father when she told him she planned to finish high school in Idaho.  He cleared his throat and said with tears in his voice, “Your mother and I had four children in four years, Abby.  We were unable to give you girls the attention you deserved.”

“I am happy where I am, Dad,” was Abby’s only reply.  There was no need to burden him with her true feelings.  Her mother had never wanted children in the first place, and deeply resented the ones she had. 

Abby and her father spoke regularly after that, but the conversations with her mother were perfunctory and stilted.  Her father made plans to visit her, and she looked forward to that time. She also hoped to build better relationships with her three younger sisters and her brother, but had no intention of ever returning to Cleardon City.  She went to bed each night with Dante by her side and slept in peace.  She was home. 

Leanna sent Lucy birthday and Christmas cards every year.  The cards were never acknowledged and Lucy never attempted to contact Leanna, but it did not matter.  It was Leanna’s role as Lucy’s foster child that enabled her to take the trip to Raptor Bluff, and that trip was the turning point in Leanna’s life.  She would be forever grateful to Lucy for introducing her to the people who became the only family she had ever known.

It was a decade before the Pacific Northwest fully recovered from the Great Cascadia Earthquake.

Thank you for reading The Trip to Raptor Bluff.  I sincerely hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. 

Being an Indie writer, I depend on word of mouth and your online reviews to help me get my books ‘out there’.  Please take a few minutes to write a review; even a few words mean the world to me.  

http://www.amazon.com/Trip-Raptor-Bluff-Annie-OHaegan-ebook/dp/B00W0GKI72

Thank you again!

The Trip to Raptor Bluff is a work of fiction and all of the characters and their roles in this story are products of the author’s imagination; characters are not based on anyone who lived or is still living. Raptor Bluff Rehabilitation Center, Cleardon City, Port Fortand, Hammer Mountain, and Coopers Bay are also products of the author’s imagination. 

The Cascadia subduction zone is real, locked, and loaded for a rupture.  The author’s description of a modern-day megathrust earthquake originating at the Cascadia Fault is based on reading and lots of imagination.  Imagination was used freely to embellish on information gleaned from multiple online articles, particularly the two listed below: 

Sources:

Cascadia Subduction Zone Earthquakes: A Magnitude 9.0 Earthquake Scenario
.

Cascadia Winter 2012 The 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami: Lessons for the Oregon Coast