I’ve written a few (I dunno, maybe ten? A couple more?) stories in the same “swamp gangster” setting that I first posted here back in February of 2016, a post I just called “fiction experiments”at the time. I used that swamp gangster setting to support me through multiple flash fic challenges that year. Those additional stories changed the world a bit from that first post. It has grown more since then.

Despite the fact that the setting is fueled by my own read on a world that’s deep into the suffering imposed by a climate crisis, something about the stories I’ve written for that setting usually gives me hope. I think it comes back to how characters stand up for each other, and how they treat those who would try to screw others over. That social dynamic is, in some ways, fueled by my experience of growing up in Vermont.

These swamp gangsters are pro-social, even when they’re in the business of selling drugs to the community (cue Black Dynamite). They take care of others. They protect their community members (form each other and from the larger world). They lend a helping hand. Why?

I don’t have a good explanation, beyond “anything else would depress me too much” or maybe “I grew up in Vermont.”

The first seems pretty clear, but for the second… let’s go on a side jaunt, for context:

I was running a D&D game about a crew of post-apocalyptic looters using the decaying teleportation network of a long-dead civilization to gather resources from across the universe (and maybe from other dimensions). One of my friends asked me, point blank, why the community of looters—living on a godforsaken rock with few resources of their own but a bunch of teleportation nodes—were so “socialist“ and strict about enforcing pro-social norms instead of being more individualist and laissez-faire. I shrugged and said it was what made sense to me.

Not much of an explanation, I know.

Several years later, after my friend had lived in Vermont over a couple of winters, he said that he finally understood.

Further south he said, even just in Massachusetts, you could be an asshole and hate your neighbors and not help each other out. Even if things got really bad in winter, you would probably be okay. In Vermont, doing that might get someone killed—it might get you killed. When you’re snowed in and the power goes out and something breaks and no one comes to check on you… you’re dead.

So you do the neighborly thing. You check in on each other. You take care of each other. You might not like your neighbors, you might be pissed at them sometimes. But you will help each other out. You never know when it will be your turn to need the help.

That help can be big or small.

My sibling made a stressful cross-country trek in an RV, going west to east. They knew they’d made it home to Vermont when, as they pulled into a gas station, two total strangers immediately hopped out of their truck to help my sibling back into a narrow spot at the pump. Then those two smiled, nodded, got back in their truck, and left. Sometimes it’s the small help that matters most.

When that experience becomes baked in, when the assumption that everyone will pitch in and help doesn’t need to be stated, you get those weird socialist Vermonters.

This isn’t unique to Vermont. This willingness to help comes up time and again in Rutger Bregman’s book Humankind: A Hopeful History. While we—and by “we” I mean especially the wealthy and influential—tell stories about how people turn on each other when the world goes awry, human history is full of people seeing each other in trouble and reaching out a helping hand. It takes a lot of work, a lot of cultivated cruelty, to undo that instinct. That is especially true in times of disaster. Not everyone helps, but enough people do. Heck, the story of Lord of the Flies is directly countered by the real life survival of a group of Tongan schoolboys shipwrecked in 1965. Cooperation, not dog-eat-dog competition, is the story of humanity.

So we come back to my swamp gangsters. These are people who know precarity. Their lives include violence, and conflict, and competition. There are assholes aplenty. But most people of the flooded lands are more interested in helping someone else up than in pushing others down into the muck to get an inch taller. Maybe they know that they might need help too someday. Maybe they want to make the world better. Or maybe they just know there are enough assholes out there, and helping out is the right thing to do.