To the north is a farm commune or perhaps a dozen families with which we have made trade accommodations, their produce serving to augment the vegetables we grow in gardens and our potato patches. For this food, we pay in trinketry—beadwork, badly constructed jewelry, leather goods—which they, in their simple-mindedness, are avid to obtain for their personal adornment. To such an extent have we fallen—that a once-proud university should manufacture and trade trinkets for its food.

At one time, family groups may have held on to small homesteads, hiding from the world. Many of these homesteads no longer exist, either wiped out or their members forced to join a tribe for the protection that it offered. And there are always the nomads, the roving, far-wandering bands with their cattle and their horses, at times sending out war parties to pillage, although there now is little enough to pillage. Such is the state of the world as we are acquainted with it; such is our own state, and sorry as it may be, in certain ways we are far better off than many of the others.

To a certain small extent we have kept alive the flame of learning. Our children are taught to read and write and cipher. Those who wish may gain additional rudimentary learning and there are books to be read, of course, tons of books, and from the reading of those, many in the community are fairly well informed. Reading and writing are skills that few have today, even those basic skills being lost through the lack of anyone to teach them. Occasionally, there are a few who make their way to us to gain the little education we can offer, but not many, for education apparently is not highly regarded.