The Priest

Formerly known as Bob. (part 6)

Jerome, Arizona
In the number four position on the list of the top ten weirdest things about the apocalypse is bugs or insects. I know there’s a distinction, but I can never remember what it is, so I’ll just refer to them all as bugs. Before the collapse, there had been a drastic reduction in bug populations. People commented on how there weren’t as many little squished creatures on their windshields anymore. I found out why when I started my walk.

They had all moved to the mountains.

I was plagued by clouds of gnats and mosquitoes the whole time. I didn’t understand because I was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a treat, but there they were, flying around my head going in my nose and ears and stinging the shit out of any exposed skin. They were a lot more aggressive than they had been before, maybe the bugs that were left were pissed off about all their relatives that had died on car windshields.

The walk from Ash Fork to Jerome took a little less than the week I had planned because I was getting a little tired of walking, so I slept less and walked more.

Jerome was started as a mining camp and at the height of the boom, in the early 1900s, over 15,000 people lived there, but by the 1970s it was a ghost town. In the 1990s it reinvented itself as an artist’s community and just before the final abandonment over one million tourists descended on the narrow streets to visit the quaint little shops and gawk…