Compiled by the Settlement Records Committee from firsthand accounts, salvaged news fragments, and what we can collectively agree probably happened. Accuracy is approximate. Objectivity was never the point.
How It Happened (Short Version)
Nobody agrees on the exact date, which tells you something. The best consensus is late autumn 2026. The long answer involves derivatives, sovereign debt, algorithmic trading, a series of cascading bank failures across three continents in 72 hours, and a grain shortage that turned out to be the thing that actually mattered. The short answer is: the money stopped being real on a Tuesday, and by Thursday the supply chains stopped too.
We call it The Correction because someone — a former hedge fund manager now residing in what used to be rural Montana, according to Radio Log intercepts — used the term in an early broadcast and it stuck. In financial parlance, a “correction” is a decline of 10% or more. This was a decline of everything. But the name has a certain dark poetry to it, so it stayed.
The Sequence
Phase One: The Unraveling (Weeks 1–3)
The banking collapse triggered the expected responses: emergency sessions, bailout attempts, currency interventions. None of it worked this time because the problem wasn’t liquidity — it was faith. When three major central banks admitted simultaneously that they could not guarantee deposits, the faith died. Not gradually. All at once, like a light switching off.
Credit cards stopped working on Day 4. ATMs on Day 6. By Day 10, most grocery stores in urban areas had been emptied. The trucks that restocked them were not coming because the fuel that moved them was priced in a currency that no longer meant anything, shipped from refineries that had locked their gates when their employees stopped showing up because their grocery stores were also empty.
It was not dramatic. That’s the part nobody expected. There were no mushroom clouds, no asteroid, no pandemic finale. Just a slow, quiet, systematic failure of every system that depended on the idea that a number on a screen represented something real.
Phase Two: The Scattering (Weeks 3–12)
The cities emptied. Not all at once — some held together longer than others. Portland made it two months. Anchorage lasted about six weeks, which surprised people who thought Alaska would do better. (Alaska did do better. Just not in Anchorage.)
People moved toward three things: water, food, and distance from other people who wanted their water and food. The coasts filled up first. Then the rural areas. Then people started looking at maps and asking questions like “what’s on that island?” and “how far is it from the nearest highway?”
The Alexander Archipelago — over a thousand islands scattered along Southeast Alaska’s coastline — suddenly looked less like the middle of nowhere and more like exactly the right place to be.
Phase Three: The Landing (Months 3–6)
The first arrivals on Heceta Island came by fishing boat from Craig, about 31 nautical miles to the east. They were three families — the Petersons, the Okamotos, and a couple who went by their first names only (Dale and Bev, still here, still not sharing their last name, still nobody’s business). They chose Heceta because it was uninhabited, had freshwater streams, and was large enough to disappear into if they needed to.
Over the next three months, others followed. A floatplane pilot from Ketchikan who landed with four passengers and a crate of antibiotics that would later save at least six lives. A marine biologist from Juneau who had been studying salmon streams and simply… didn’t leave. Two college students whose spring break kayaking trip became permanent when there was nothing to go back to.
By Month Six, there were 31 of us. We had built four shelters, lost one person to hypothermia (Margaret Chen, who is remembered), and discovered that the Chuck Lake area on the eastern shore had been continuously inhabited by Indigenous peoples for nearly 9,000 years. This was not an academic observation. It was a survival instruction.
What We Lost
Everything you’d expect. Electricity (initially). Medical infrastructure. Supply chains. The ability to buy a thing by pressing a button and having it appear at your door in 48 hours. The news. Social media. The comforting fiction that someone, somewhere, was in charge.
Also: two-thirds of us lost family members in the first year. Not to violence, mostly. To distance. To silence. To the simple impossibility of crossing a continent when the systems that made crossing a continent trivial had all stopped working at once. We don’t talk about this part much. It’s in the silences.
What We Kept
Knowledge. Tools. Each other. A surprising number of books — someone had the foresight to grab a complete set of U.S. Forest Service ecological surveys from the Craig Ranger District office. Those documents, it turned out, were worth more than every stock portfolio that ever existed.
And the island itself. 178 square kilometers of Tongass rainforest. Sitka spruce and western hemlock older than the nation that used to claim them. Salmon streams. Deer. Bears (too many bears). Shellfish. Berries. Rain. So much rain.
It was all here. It had always been here. We just hadn’t needed it before.
“The Correction was not the end of the world. It was the end of a particular idea about the world. The world itself is fine. It’s been here for 4.5 billion years. It will be here long after whatever we build next.”
— From the Year One Archives, author attributed to Dale (last name still withheld)