Time Machine: a 25-year-old first draft of the WIP

I might have mentioned that I started the idea of the current WIP, Whose Hearts are Mountains, twenty-five years ago. I might not have mentioned that the inspiration for it was a long nap necessitated by a kidney infection with no codeine for the pain.

I found my old notes for the jokingly-named Dirty Commie Gypsy Elves, which read more as background notes than as the first chapter it was intended to be:

*****
 I stood at the edge of the desert, wondering if a legend was worth risking my life for.

I was leaving nothing behind. My parents were killed five years before in a Klan raid of the Underground Highway for smuggling blacks accused of "insurrection" out of the white supremacist territories. When they died, I was half a nation away, snug in the coccoon of academia.

Two years later, my coccoon was destroyed in the Blue Collar Riots of 2012. I was taking a coffee break in a faculty lounge discussing fast-food horror stories of the 1970's as folk legend, when the building fell under siege. After three days of being held hostage by some nameless faction, I was one of five hostages to survive. I did not, however, survive unscathed.

The Blue-Collar Riots were the beginning of the final collapse of the nation. The world economic failures brought the riots and the local wars to a stunned silence. Meanwhile, I had acquired a truck, tooks, and survival gear through barter and black-market trade, and became a wandering anthropologist, studying the drastically-changed society for no one but myself.

I first heard the legends in the District of Columbia, where a shell-shocked militant struggled to keep the remnants of the States together. I had shared bread and cheese with a black transient on the charred steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He told me stories he had heard, in a voice as thick and dark as the nights in Washington: stories of a shining city in the desert, where wild and beautiful folk lived, enchanting people with their soft songs and wild abandon.

*****
Notes from 20 years later:

1. When I first wrote this, three people thought I was a prophet, and one wanted to rush right out and create the commune. I passed on both. However, I look at the current state of things in the US and wonder if I was just a few years off.
2. I apologize for my clumsy handling of race. Did I really need to state the transient was black? Does it serve the story any? A description of him would have accomplished the task much more sensibly and sensitively.
3. Speaking of description -- Where is it? This reads more like notes, but my name and address are at the right side of the document as if I wanted to submit it for query! I'm pretty sure that each of these paragraphs is now a whole chapter in the current book, which is why I'm not offering a "then and now". 
4. Questions that should be asked: What is the main character thinking? How did the Blue-Collar Riots progress to wars? How did the financial situation worldwide create a "bang" scenario and not a "whimper" scenario -- in other words, why did the US fall apart in a few years with bomb damage instead of just wither away? And what was she doing in those three years?
5. The mysterious folk in this version were supposed to be Sindarin who didn't go over to where the rest of the elves went. Elves have shining songs, but have the wild abandon of a Presbyterian elder. 

My husband asked me why I didn't complete this twenty-five years ago, and the answer is stunningly simple: Because I knew it needed detail, and I couldn't get my hands on it. To be more specific, I didn't have the Internet and I was totally stymied as to what deserts in the US were like.  And, as a grad student, I didn't know how I could arrange, much less pay for, an educational trip to the desert. 

So I'm writing it now. With more detail. As two books.