Foreword

When I first told my editor at the California Sentinel that I wanted to put together a book of interviews with people about their jobs, she smiled, said it sounded like a great idea, and offered to put me in touch with a friend she had at the only publishing house in the NCR. We talked at length about how I would go about putting together the book, how I would find, record, and transcribe the interviews, how it would ever make it into other people's hands. She gave me her blessing and the Sentinel's sponsorship to go out and start on it a month later—a significant expense for what was then a small, local paper. I promised I would make good use of every cap.

Since that talk eight years ago, we've changed presidents, officially expanded out into the Mojave, and the Sentinel's now distributed all across the NCR. There's a war raging for Hoover Dam, its death toll climbing higher with each day. A thousand jobs seem to have cropped up overnight, most of them involving a gun in one way or another. And in the middle of all this upheaval, I finished my interviews, typed them up, and delivered a copy of the manuscript to my editor at Angel House.

Throughout those years that I traveled all around the Core Region and Mojave, I often found myself wondering why. Why did I spend all this time chasing down word-of-mouth suggestions and recommendations? Why did I spend countless nights walking into bars and striking up conversations with total strangers? Why did I spend every bit of money I had travelling thousands of miles across scorched earth and crumbling roads? What was it all for? Most of the people I came across over the course of my journey asked me the same questions, from soldiers to casino dealers to raiders. "Why run all around just to talk to people?" one soldier asked me, brow furrowed. "Just doesn't seem worth it."

My answers varied over the course of my travels. At first, I was almost overly idealistic—I wanted to make the ordinary into history, preserve the name of "the working folks." Then I wanted to make my own name known for being one of the prestigious few who had their name on an honest-to-God book. Then it was a mixture of both. Some people accepted my explanations, some didn't; some thought I was "some blithering idiot from back west who thinks the world's some goddamn fairy tale." (The bartender who said as much was tipped rather heavily by everyone at the bar that night, myself included.) But it wasn't until I started putting together my manuscript that I figured out the best reason behind why I'd spent nearly a decade of my life putting this book together.

Early on in my travels, I interviewed two teenagers, nineteen and seventeen, who were working at a local library in a small town up in the northern parts of the NCR. It was right after President Kimball sent troops in to occupy Hoover Dam, and three years before the war with the Legion started in earnest. I spent a good hour or two just talking to the two of them, asking them about their families and childhoods. The nineteen year old had dropped out of the local school years ago; the seventeen year old was just starting his final year. Both of them had been working at the library for a few years. Eventually I got around to asking them: Why? Library work didn't seem particularly exciting, and most of the families seemed to be involved in either trading or agriculture.

"Well...who else is gonna take care of the books?" the older one said. "It might not look interesting, and a lot of days it isn't, but it's not like anyone else is gonna step in and keep these books from falling apart."

"We have the largest library for fifty miles," the seventeen year old bragged. "And it's mostly because of us, and Jeffrey"—their overseer, a quiet man in his thirties. "Old romance novels, history textbooks, instruction manuals. There's a folder with almost a hundred handwritten recipes. It would've been tinder had Jeffrey not bought it off a merchant that came through here a few months ago."

I asked them about their pay, and they just turned to each other and laughed.

"Oh, the pay's shit," the nineteen year old said, smiling. "But it's not about the money. I do it because I like reading, and I like helping others read. I do it because I like knowing that at least a little bit of the old world made it into this one."

"Something like that," her coworker said. "I do it for the job, not the money. I want this place to last for years to come. It survived the world getting blown up—who's to say it won't last forever?"

This passion and the hope for the future that usually stemmed from it was repeated time and time again, in jobs from the ragged Pacific coastline to the edge of the Colorado. It wasn't universal, by any means, but where it showed up, it showed up strong and bright. The soldier who did his morning PT drills with a smile on his face; the casino dealer who wore his "fastest cards in the east" title with pride; the travelling saleswoman who sometimes worked long past sunset to deliver her goods along roads she'd more or less forged herself. Thankless jobs with long hours and numerous dangers, and yet the people that did them woke up each morning looking forward to the day.

Exhaustion is a given in our lives. There wasn't a soul I talked to who wasn't tired of something—bad sales, aggressive raiders, the war. A lot of people were unhappy in one way or another; a few of them have likely died since I started working on this book. (I hope they passed peacefully, surrounded by good people.) To many, their jobs were little more than ways to get caps in their pockets and food on the table, hours out of their day that they thought of as "little more than a waking sleep, worthless as taking a piss," as one MP described it.

But in every interview, without fail, there were flashes of hope. Whether it was the prostitute's hope for an easier future with clean water and equal work, or the brahmin rancher's hope that she'd have the chance to go into town and spend a few hours at the bar, everyone looked forward to something. Better land. Working factories. Peace. Power. A fun night. To make a mark on the world, in whatever way they can. The amount of hope that people have, even people who have spent years grinding away at jobs they don't care about in the slightest, is overwhelming. Humbling.

When I typed these stories up, I realized that the reason I spent years interviewing anyone who would talk to me was because that hope was absolutely intoxicating. My own hope about the future seemed to be just about gone when I started my journey; by the time I finished, I was brimming with it, about everything. The world looked like a much brighter place to be in.

I explained all of this to my editor at Angel House, and, a few months later, I explained it again to my former editor at the Sentinel. And after they read the manuscripts, the hundreds of pages of people talking about their lives and jobs and thoughts, they both told me the same thing:

"I never knew people had so much to look forward to."

It's a thought I've carried with me through my travels, hidden or not, and it's a thought I'll carry with me until I die. The world's burnt down, but we've done a hell of a job building it up again. There's a lot to be hopeful for.

—J. Feron, 2282