Dear Mr. Fezziwig:

I know you prefer my communications to be embossed on cream-colored heavyweight bond, but paper of any kind is in short supply these days. Anyway, Fed Ex and UPS have ceased operations. The Postal Service is down to that guy with the horse. The satellites have been fried by solar flares. I’m writing this on a flash drive and attaching it to the leg of an albatross, in the hopes that it will eventually get to Idaho.

Last summer you instructed me to see which of your houses would be best for you and your family to wait out what you called The Mayan Troubles. I flew to New York, only to find your Central Park apartment being looted by unpaid traders from your Wall Street offices.

Investigation revealed they had discovered you had bought gold with their paychecks. It’s good you weren’t there. I almost died when a bond salesman recognized me as your faithful go-to guy. If I hadn’t grabbed your Ming vase from its niche and broken it over his head, I would have joined all those investment bankers hanging from Central Park lamp posts.

So on to Oregon, to your big house at Cannon Beach. I was able, by judicious use of the krugerrands you gave me, to board a coal-fired freighter headed for Los Angeles through the Panama Canal, which had been widened and deepened by the Great Asteroid of 2011. The ship, designed to run on diesel, broke down several times. We finally reached Los Angeles on December 21, 2012, the day the Mayans said the world would end.

It was only the end of Los Angeles. We watched from the harbor as the city danced and burned. Our destination destroyed, we headed north, plowing through thousands of refugee-laden small boats, rafts, and surfboards all the way to Sebastopol.

A day after we passed Shasta Crater, I used my last krugerrand to bribe a crew member to lower me and a Zodiac lifeboat into the ocean off Cannon Beach. He gave me a half-gallon of gas and told me I was lucky, as the crew planned to take the passengers to the Vancouver slave market and trade them for enough coal to get to Maui. A nice guy. I hope he wasn’t on Maui when the weaponized smallpox hit.

By the way, you shouldn’t have built your ocean house so close to the water. Fortunately, I was able to recognize its roofline. When I saw movement behind one of the gable windows, I headed right to it. Your new manager Maria opened it and held a pistol to my forehead. It took some time to convince her I was a fellow employee.

Sir, you are right about Maria. She definitely is a hot little Latin number. She was hanging in there for you, too, moving your Picassos up a story with every rise in sea level. She’d even secured your 42’ sailboat to the roof spire. Your Oregon security people, incidentally, have joined the marauders terrorizing the Portland-Eugene corridor.

Within a week, we were hit by the tsunami from the Puget Sound quake. We heard the faint echoes of the sirens at Seaside, and then silence. Maria and I were barely able to make it to the sailboat and cast off. Your ocean house is gone, sir.

I hope you made it to Idaho in your special railroad car and are not sitting on a siding somewhere in Kansas, shooting it out with the local militias. It’s occurred to me that all that gold won’t do you much good if people find out you have it.

With luck, you’ve also made it into your panic-room-cum-wine-cellar, and you brought a corkscrew. I also hope you brought your wife and daughters. They will be more valuable than gold when negotiating with ex-security personnel.

Please don’t go above ground, no matter how much you hate the dark. From what I understand from Radio Calcutta, Sun Valley is besieged by redneck cannibals on four-wheelers.

Maria and I are fine. The boat is quite comfortable. We’ve got the solar still for fresh water, the solar charger for the shortwave and my laptop, and since Typhoon Omega, we’ve been surrounded by thousands of Chinese containers, floating free of capsized ships. We’re in the middle of the world’s biggest Wal-Mart.

We’re eating well, and the Mister Doctor Ultrasound Kit we found in our nets has revealed that Maria is pregnant with twins. We’re calling them Adam and Eva. Good-bye, sir, and good luck.

Your go-to guy,

Tiny Tim Cratchit