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Post by patience on May 26, 2012 15:47:43 GMT -6
Chapter 63 LEADERSHIP NEEDED Late October, 2012
Dan Wilkins held another meeting at the Saturday Market. Attendance was larger than average, probably because the approach of cooler weather had people thinking about winter. He got right to the point. "I need some help. Not deputies, not law enforcement, but leaders. Our City government is gone. Everyone in City government, except Larry in the Water Department, is missing or known dead. Somebody has to take up the slack, and I can't do it all. I'm not calling for an election, I'm making a few appointments. Volunteers would be welcome."
"First, we need somebody to oversee the orphan kids at the school, and I'm appointing Mabel Schuck, since she has been doing that anyway and this makes her officially a County Employee. She needs some help, so volunteers are needed. See me, or Mabel after I get done here."
"Next, I need somebody to help plan food supplies for this winter for the town and county. Their first job will be a census, because we can't do the job without it. I will have deputies assist in that. We are short of needed pencils and paper. Help me find some. The official Census Taker will be Larry Holmes from the Water Department, since he can't do much more with water for now. He is the first Planning Commision member. Now, I need a couple volunteers to do some serious planning for food, and other needs for the immediate future. We need a big-picture planner, and we need at least one farmer. See me after the meeting."
"Also, I am formalizing a Citizen Militia. I will head the Militia, and recognize the efforts of all those who have contributed up to now. We're doing this like Switzerland, that means EVERYONE age 12 and up is a member of the militia! Everyone will have a weapon of some kind and know how to use it. I don't care if it is no more than a steak knife or a ball bat, find SOMETHING, and find it TODAY! I'll find somebody to teach those who don't know how to use whatever weapon you can find. Common Law still applies, so don't anybody get any big ideas about this.
"Last, we need to do the best we can to preserve any resources we have now. That means the salvage work we do must save everything possible. You may not know what something is good for, but somebody will, so take care to get anything remotely useful in a shelter of some sort, so we don't lose it or let it go to waste."
"County Property will be used for the benefit of the public. Unclaimed buildings that have been taken as County Property will be salvaged for their materials if we can't use them as they stand. Some of the important materials are glass, plumbing, wiring, and hardware. Think about this, because for all we know, there won't be any more of those things made in the next hundred years! So, take care of what we have now."
"I need volunteers on the Planning Commission to figure out what we need, what we have, and what we should be doing with it. One thing I thought of was salvaging windows to make a greenhouse. If we have a volunteer to build a greenhouse to supply winter food and plants for next year's gardens, the County will provide all the glass we can to help make that happen."
"Come see me about any of this today. First I want a general idea of who wants to do what, then I'll sort you out into groups to deal with it. Each Market Day, we'll want a report from each group."
"You people have to take on responsibility for yourselves. It ain't my job to wipe your nose, or any other part of you. That's all I have for now." ______________
People came to the Sheriff slowly at first, then more came a few at a time as the day went on. He had what he needed long before the day was over. As he more or less expected, the ones who volunteered were those who had been doing things already. There was Perkins, the dairy farmer he had been working with already, who became a Planning Commision member, along with Jeff Walters who would build a greenhouse, beef, grain, and hog farmers who would advise on those matters, and Earl Richards, who would advise about milling flour and cornmeal.
These people had been thinking about the problems and had an impromptu meeting on the spot, since getting together any other day wasn't practical. By evening, Dan knew they had greenhouse plans formulated, there was an adequate supply of beef, the farmers were worried about keeping their equipment working without parts available, and there was the fuel shortage, of course. He also learned that there would be some seeds available for next year's planting, but not everything they wanted. Another issue brought up by the planners was about salvaging in the further reaches of the county, and also exploring the situation in nearby communities.
Dan had more questions than answers at the end of the day.
Frost was heavy on corn stubble throughout the creek bottom fields, but the sun had popped out and was making it disappear. Alan could see his breath on the way through the woods to get Jeff's truck. He seldom drove his own truck now to save gas, since Jeff's got twice the mileage and used diesel that they could make. He regretted his lack of foresight when he bought his gas-guzzler, but there wasn't anything to be done about it. His trip today he hoped would show better judgement about the future. The objective was to come up with some heavy horses for farming. He hoped to get some help with that from the Amish community 10 miles to the South.
He had planned the trip carefully to be as short as possible and then come back through town to haul a load of windows for Jeff's greenhouse project. Jeff had to wait on constructing the thing until he had all the materials on hand, because he had to fit the building to the available windows, not the other way around. These days, that was the way of it. You made do with what you had. The Sheriff had begun salvage operations on the oldest and poorest empty houses and buildings, carefully taking houses apart, piece by piece, and storing the materials in the now defunct furniture factory near the Fairgrounds. The last time he was in town on Market Day, the County employees had torn down 3 houses and had an impressive stack of lumber and other materials there. It was only Wednesday, but he hoped they would have another load of windows for him.
In any case, he needed to talk to the Sheriff about the Census, hoping it was finished so he could work on planning next year's crops. There was no point in planting vastly more than was needed, and he had to be sure they planted enough. They would try to finalize those plans when the remaining major farmers met over the next few weeks on Market Day. There was a lot to be considered, and required everyone's input to get it right. Seed, fuel, and machinery were precious resources that had to be used wisely. What fertilizer was left had been appropriated by the County, since the owners were long gone, casualties of violence, starvation, and disease that had decimated the population. Once a farming plan had been put together, the County Planning Commission would allocate fertilizer according to where they thought it would benefit the most. A couple of the farmers had objected to the "communist ideas", but came around when they understood the scarcity problem of all resources.
Jeff was ready when Alan got there, coming out of the barn after finishing the feeding. His hogs were doing well, from the looks of them, Alan thought, and said so.
"Hi Dad! Yeah, those sows all had big litters, and we only lost a few baby pigs. We got 64 pigs out of the 6 sows that are doing real well. Not had any sick, and they are growing like weeds. You ready to go?"
"Yeah. I've been worrying on the way over about everything. I hope the Amish community is still THERE and doing okay. We haven't seen any of them on Market day, nor anyone from that area. Of course, they may be going to market in Scottsburg, if they have one there. They surely heard about trouble around here, so maybe they are just avoiding us because of that. And if they are okay, will they be willing to sell any horses, or get ours bred, and if so, what can we trade them for it?"
"I've been thinking the same things. And I hope we don't get shot when we show up. The Amish are supposed to be non-violent, but the way things are now, that could change."
"I'm not worried about them shooting us, but I want to take Oliver along in case there are still some bandits in the bushes. Besides, he knows everybody, and he's done business with them for years. And we all want to see what's going on in that end of the county, too."
Oliver met them at the highway, with rifle in hand. He picked up his pack out of the tall grass and put it all in the back of the truck. They were all big men and the cab was too crowded for long guns. Alan had his shotgun on a rack behind their heads, and they all had handguns tucked out of sight. Almost everyone carried a handgun now.
"How are you folks doin'?" , Oliver asked as he got in.
"Pretty good,"Alan said. "Everything okay at your place?"
"Yeah. I've been workin' with those ignorant horses some. Got 'em to where they can drag a log and not hurt anything or stumble over each other now."
"You got enough hay for 'em?"
"They'll be on grass at least until snow flies, and prob'ly most of the winter, since I'm using that piece behind me where those city folks used to live. Said they was goin' to their folks in the city back when this all started, an' I ain't seen hide nor hair of 'em since. I don't want that field growing up where I can't see over it, so I turned them horses in there. It's about 10 acres and it's good Orchard Grass and Timothy. I'd cut hay off it next year if we need it."
Jeff said, "There's too many empty places like that now. Most of them will just fall apart if somebody doesn't take care of 'em, too."
Oliver replied, "I went over there a few days ago and they hadn't even locked the doors! Anyhow, I found the water system and drained it so it don't freeze up and bust. We might need that later for somethin' if they don't come back, but I figger they're gone fer good. Doubt if they could make it in the city, from what I heard about it."
Alan was taking back roads to the South, since there were no highways going anywhere close to their destination. The County Road Department had been on a campaign for the last twenty years or more to pave all the back roads, so there were few gravel roads left. Along the way, the lack of road maintenance was already evident. Weeds and grass were tall along all the roadsides. A few potholes hadn't been fixed. Fallen tree limbs had not been cleared away making some stops necessary to get the worst ones, always keeping a wary eye out for a possible ambush. As they drove slowly on, most houses were vacant, at least the ones they could see from the roadside. They looked vacant, anyway, although nobody mowed lawns now, and abandoned cars sat everywhere, a few on the roadsides where they ran out of gas. Invariably, those had the hoods up, batteries and other parts missing now.
They saw no tractors or other vehicles running. The bigger farms they passed had the remnants of gardens near the houses, but nobody was in sight. One farm had beef cattle in a large pasture field with a pond in the low center of it, but it was impossible to tell if anyone was living there and tending them, or not. A large turkey farm still had a stench of dead animals as they passed it. When they got to a crossroads where once had been a small village, they saw one small boy duck out of sight as they approached and turned at the intersection. Some of the houses there had some windows broken out, but none had been patched with anything. Alan got the feeling that there were unseen eyes watching them.
Leaving that behind, Alan almost missed the turn onto a gravel road to the heart of the Amish community. The weeds were tall and some still green, and made the country side look a lot different than the last time he had travelled there. It felt like he had never seen this desolate
place before, until he turned into the lane of the harnessmaker, William Yoder. Their farmstead looked like it always had, the grass in the yard kept short by sheep, and the vegetable garden neatly tended, now only showing some late cabbages, onions, and greens of some sort, looking wilty from the frost this morning. Nobody was in sight when Alan shut the truck off and they all got out. Oliver spoke loud enough to be heard in the house. "Hello! Anyone home?"
From the harness shop to his side came, "I am here. Hello Oliver."
William looked more somber than usual, Oliver thought, but he appeared to be in good health.
"Hello William. Do you remember Alan Walters?"
"Ah, yes, I remember. I made a halter for your bull. Is it holding him?"
Alan smiled at him and said, "Yes, it holds him, even when we have to give him medicine!"
William said, "It is good to see you are here. So many have died. We lost some neighbors who got sick and there is no doctor at the hospital now."
Alan expressed his condolences, adding that, "Everyone has suffered. The town lost many people, and we are afraid it isn't over yet. This winter will be hard for those who don't have heat, or enough food."
"You need food? We have food."
"No, we came about horses. We have some riding horses that we are training to work, but we need heavier ones."
William considered that, then said, "There is a young family who might sell some. The parents had just moved to Berne, Indiana, up North, before the trouble started. They have no way to move the horses there, and there are four they don't need now. Two horses are middle aged, getting up to 12 or 14 years now, but they are good. Three of the four are mares, and could raise you more. I don't think they have enough hay for them all this winter."
"The next thing is what we may have to trade for them," Alan said. "With money being no good, I hope we have something they would want."
William looked at Jeff's truck and asked, "How is it you find diesel fuel for the truck?"
Alan said, "We had a tank on the farm, but then we got into making biodiesel out of soybeans."
"AH! You make diesel fuel! I have heard of that, but never seen it. How does that work?"
"We have a special screw press that you feed the beans into, a small diesel engine runs it, and the oil comes out a drain, and the soybean meal comes out the end. It is kind of a slow process, but it works. Then there are chemicals to treat the oil so it isn't so thick and runs better. The chemicals are the problem now, getting methanol and lye to do this."
"Hmm. You make soybean oil, then it gets turned into diesel fuel, eh?"
"That's the basic process."
"Maybe you could sell some soybean oil and it would be good for cooking?"
Alan saw where that was going and said, "Yes, we use it to cook with. I have a filter machine to gets the hulls and dust out of it. We could trade some of that."
"We would buy some cooking oil, for a few families here. And I need diesel to run an engine. We have a threshing machine with a diesel engine, but could get no fuel, so we have wheat bundles in the barn, and no way to thresh it. I think the battery is low, too. Maybe you could help with that, you think?" "Yes, we can get your engine going and sell you some fuel. But how do we work this out with the people who have the horses?"
William said, "I will take care of that. I will trade with the horse owner. We thresh wheat, and oats, and you get horses and we get fuel. Yes, we can make a trade. But you need to see the horses, so we go there now."
Jeff drove to the neighbor's farm, a mile or more away where they found the horses. William talked with the young man who owned them for some time in German, then came back to the three other men.
"Yes! We can make a trade! Now we must learn what things are worth. What is the fuel price now, in old dollars?"
That seemed to be the way everyone was thinking now. Alan said, it is $14 a gallon, like before the crash. If it is plain soybean oil for cooking, that is $10 a gallon. What are the horses worth in old dollars?"
William asked the young Amishman in German. They talked a while and William said, "The horse market was not so good last year, but now we think they are worth more, because people have no fuel for farming. But not too much more. The old mares, they are 14 and 16 years old. They were worth $1,200 last year for the team. This year, we sell with their harness for $1800. They are good horses, and not sick. They have good feet and can work. The young horses are a mare and a gelding, both seven years old, and good for many years work. They sell with their harness for $2,400. Their harness is good, I made it just 2 years ago and it was $800 for the harness then. This is a good price, we think."
Alan asked, "Do you want to trade for all fuel and cooking oil? I have cattle and pigs, too."
There was more deliberation in German, longer this time. William asked, "What pigs do you have?"
"I have 62 feeder pigs, but some I want to keep. I could sell maybe 20 of them at $35 each, and they are good Yorkshires, just weaned a couple weeks ago."
More talk in German, and more discussion ensued, then a bargain was struck. The 2 teams of Percherons and their harness and collars were valued at $4,200 total. William would get 16 feeder pigs for $560, 240 gallons of biodiesel fuel for $3,360, and 28 gallons of cooking oil for another $280. They did the figuring with a pencil on the wall of the white painted barn, and shook hands on the deal. Alan would use Jeff's truck to pull Oliver's stock trailer and move the animals. He would come back with the pigs, the cooking oil, and the fuel, then help them start their diesel
engine. All the goods were subject to approval on sight, before the bargain was final. They planned to be back in two days time, because it would take that long to get the fuel in a spare tank that Oliver had and load everything up. William would provide some 10 gallon milk cans to store the cooking oil, so they had to take him home and get the cans.
On the road again in the truck, they went over the deal. Alan would come to Oliver's to get the stock trailer and the spare fuel tank then go home and fill it tomorrow, loaded in the bed of Jeff's truck. Alan had a 12 volt pump to transfer the fuel to William's tank when they got there. Jeff would help round up the pigs and get them loaded the morning they left for William's place. Only Jeff and Alan would go to make the trade, unload pigs at three different farms, unload diesel at William's, and pick up the horses at the last farm who got some pigs. And the trade would be done.
Alan would take the trailer and horses to Oliver's farm, since he had plenty of barn space and hay left over from his downsized cattle operation there. Oliver would winter the horses and get them in shape to work in the Spring, in exchange for using one team to do his Spring plowing and discing to save his fuel supply. He said he'd do some logging this winter, and hoped Jeff could haul the logs on the truck he now had.
Jeff commented as they rode toward town, "Life is a lot more complicated than it used to be, ain't it?" All 3 men got a good laugh out of that. The truck was loaded with windows on the way home, hopefully enough for Jeff to build the greenhouse. They didn't get to see the Sheriff, but did learn that the Census wasn't finshed yet.
They learned later that the 2 older mares were bred to a Percheron stud, and would foal next Spring. William and his friend had treated them right.
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Post by patience on May 26, 2012 15:50:48 GMT -6
Chapter 64 WINTER WORK November, 2012
"I'm going to build a forge," Alan announced at breakfast. "We're going to need it, farming with horses." "That makes sense, I suppose," Margaret answered. "I don't know much about horse farming, but I guess the hardware on the harness is going to be hard to come by now." "The equipment, too. Like cultivators, harrows, plows, and all the small hardware to hook them up. There's hooks and eyes for singletrees, and no end of small chains and rings, clevises, and all that. And a lot of things are going to need repaired. My shop depends on electricity, and that won't do. I have to come up with other ways to do things. I wish I'd seen that a long time ago, when we could go to all those antique shops and flea markets to find that sort of thing." "No point in crying over spilt milk, my grandma used to say." "Yeah. It's just so much harder now to do things that would have been easy a year ago. That's what Nathan did. He shopped all the antique spots he could find and has a huge collection. I get to play catch-up, dern it. I know that he won't be able to do all the work we will need done. There is just too much to convert the county to living like it did in Civil War times."
So, I started the day sort of feeling sorry for myself, but then I got into the project and looked around at what I had to work with. There was a pile of junk parts outside I'd been meaning to scrap out, but now they looked more valuable. The old brake drums left from fixing Rich's truck looked sort of like a forge pot. There were old drain pipes we had replaced in the old house, where I found a 2" pipe and elbow that just about fit the hole in the brake drum. Aha! We have the hard part of a forge pot, or tuyere ,pronounced 'tweer', according to my Dad. Now to get something for the hollow ball that goes inside to bust up clinkers. I didn't have anything that looked likely for that, so I might have to do without and just use a poker to clean the fire out.
I had no bricks to build a forge, but I did have a lot of rocks. Previous owners of the farm had been picking rocks off the fields for generations, and had a monster rockpile down along the creek. I had stone chisels, so I went down there to see what I could find. I spent the rest of that day and the next squaring up the largest stones to where I thought I could lay them into walls to make a square foundation for a classic old blacksmith's forge. It took that week and the next to get it all fitted up with the firepot, or tuyere, in place, and all cemented together. The stone box I built was hollow inside, which I filled with rock rubble and clay, tamped in place, then covered the surface a couple inches deep with some really gooey gray clay we had back in the deep gullies on our place, mixed about half with wood ashes and just enough water to make it sticky. As it dried over the next few days, the drying clay shrunk and cracked, which I filled with more clay mix, tamped in as dry as I could work it. The top was now 3 feet square, which I hoped was big enough to support any project I would need to heat in the forge.
While the mortar was curing and the clay drying, I set to work building a bellows. I had a book I'd bought some years ago that showed how to make a double chamber bellows. I had some plywood from the run to the building supply place, and this was as good a use for it as any. I laid out the teardrop shaped pattern on old newspapers, and traced it onto the plywood, and got all 3 pieces out of one sheet by turning one piece opposite the other two. Margaret had kept a bunch of old work clothes of mine, so I had her choose enough denim from those to make the sides of the bellows. We spent a couple days at this, but when we finished, it worked just fine. The double chamber bellows would supply an almost perfectly continuous air blast. Getting it connected to the pipe was something of a pain, and involved cutting up some old tin juice cans to make the fitting, then rivetting it together with bits of copper wire on the horn of the anvil. The bellows was located far enough away from the forge fire that I hoped I wouldn't burn holes in the denim covering. Thin flexible leather would have been nice, and more fire resistant, but I didn't have any. It occurred to me that we would need leather to keep the horse harness patched up and working, too. Somebody needed to start making leather. I wondered what they were doing with the hides from the cattle they butchered in town each week?
I had a big sheet metal hood made for the forge fire, and a piece of 16" culvert pipe above it sticking out the roof now, so it was time to cure that clay. I built a wood fire on it and built it up slowly until I had a bed of coals. I spread that out all over the flat surface and let it burn out slowly and cool for a couple days. There were more cracks in the clay, but they were very small. I worked in some more clay mix and built another fire on it. That time, it came out pretty nice. That top surface was utterly fireproof now, and big enough to be useful. I noticed that where the fire had been the hottest, the clay had turned dull brownish red, and was hard as a brick. Well, maybe it was brick now, I thought, and then it occurred to me that maybe we had clay we could use to make pottery, if we could find anyone who knew how it was done.
I had a pretty good anvil, although it wasn't real big at around 110 pounds, it did have a good welded-on, hard steel face and was in good shape. I didn't have any more than the hot cutting chisel, called a 'Hardy', for the square hole that held tools, but I could make what I needed there. As the weather began to get colder, I looked forward to having a coal fire in the forge. That meant I had to find some good hard coal, but I was pretty sure that guy in Palmyra would have some, where Nathan got his coal. Time for a trip up there in the truck, I supposed, but if we were going that far, we should make the trip count and probably should at least take my small utility trailer in case there were other opportunities on the way. I didn't want to make a 25 mile trip alone, either. _____________
The planer made a distinctive howl until the boards began to go through it, then changed to a raucous noise as the knives bit into walnut at 12 feet per minute. Chips flew in a steady stream out the deflector chute, keeping Charlie busy shovelling them away between the times he was catching the boards as they came out. There was a neat stack of them, 2" x 3", with a ledge cut in both edges where glass would fit. The last board came out and Jeff idled the engine back, then went out to shut down the draft on the wood gas generator, but left it open enough to keep smoldering inside. Jeff shifted the wood gas from the intake to the vent and the engine quit immediately. Charlie was still shovelling walnut chips.
Jeff said, "That should do it for the greenhouse material. Let's get that stuff in the kiln, and we can start on yours." The two men pushed the lumber down the roller conveyor and onto the outfeed table, then each took an armload to the kiln. After four or five trips, they had it all. They both walked to the log deck and grabbed cant hooks to roll logs into the ready position. Jeff had carefully staged the small logs with the team the day before, so it was a matter of getting them rolled closer to the saw carriage. together, they rolled one on the carriage and dropped the head block dogs on it to clamp it in place. After making adjustments to the carriage, Jeff added some small wood chunks to the gas generator, opened the draft and let it draw for a few minutes before firing up the engine again. In a few minutes, they were sawing again.
Charlie was off-bearing slabs and piling them in the new slab shed where they would dry and be ready as fuel for the next sawing job. They squared each of these logs, making them all 8" thick by sawing off boards as needed, then made them of varying widths depending on how big the logs were. Michael had brought the paint horse over to drag out the heavy timbers onto farm wagons positioned on the lower level by the back dock. When they finished, there was a stack of squared timbers of 12" and 16" heights, all of them 16 feet long on each wagon. It had been a long day, but there were enough timbers cut to build the walls of a 16 ft. x 32 ft. cabin, and enough 3" thick by 8" wide planks to frame the front and back doors, and 4 windows. The loads were too heavy for their light horses, so Jeff would pull them with the Massey diesel tractor to where Charlie was building his cabin.
Things had gone very well between Charlie and Allison Kemper, enough so that they had a wedding planned, but the cabin came first. He had already laid up a stone chimney before the weather got too cold, and had the site ready to build on. Large stones had been dragged into place for foundation pillars and carefully levelled for the first logs. The sawmill could cut a maximum of 16 feet in length, so Charlie had borrowed a broadaxe from Rich to hew those bottom logs from tall, straight White Oaks that grew on the north slope of the hillside across from the home site, part of the ten acres that Alan had deeded to him. He hewed another pair of 32 foot long logs for the top course on each of the long sides of the cabin, and was getting pretty good at it by the time he was finished.
Benny Davis had also been deeded ten acres. Alan and Margaret said simply that it was appreciation for their ongoing security work, but the young men each gave them 10 gold Kruggerands and would not listen to their objections. The well was technically on Charlie's parcel, and the root cellar was on Benny's, but they had agreed to share those and avoid the work of digging more.
The RV was showing it's age, and next year there wouldn't be any gas to heat it, so the two men had planned to have 2 cabins up within the next year. Benny hadn't said anything about it, and neither had Melinda, but all signs were pointing to them becoming a couple, also. The men had gotten a half acre garden spot worked up this year, and the two women had some canning going on with Margaret's help. That canned food got stored in Benny and Charlie's root cellar, along with their other goods.
Charlie had some reloading planned for when the weather was too cold to work on the cabin this winter, and he had been talking to Rich about making some furnishings for the inside, in particular, some shelving and cabinets of hard Maple. He also wanted a bookcase, and a big cedar chest. The lumber for those things was in one of Jeff's kilns getting dry. ________________
There was little business for Nathan and Jeannie's shop, so Nathan had hunted up some salvage parts and was banging away on a big stainless steel tank when John walked in one day. When the noise died down, John spoke. "What'n the devil are you makin' so much noise about?" "Oh! Hi, John. Uh, I'm gonna be a moonshiner," Nathan said with a grin. "Yer gonna make likker? Here I thought I was gonna corner the alcohol market with wine, an' now I got competition! Now that's a friend fer ya!" John's grin belied his words.
"Naw, it ain't likker. I'm thinking alcohol to run my welder engine. But, you could drink it, I suppose, if you're a mind to. Prob'ly make your eyes bug out, though, 'cause I need it as pure as I can get it to run an engine. I already got a shed for it built down by the pond, so I can cool the coils in the pond water. I got enough copper tubing to run it over the pond bank and catch it in something. That'll work better in the winter, so this is something that will give me work when nothing else is going on. And there is all that corn around, most of it not even bein' picked for lack of fuel. Down there in the river bottom, there must be thousands of acres on the North side that nobody picked yet. That couple that the raiders killed ain't gonna pick that corn, so we been snapping it by hand and haulin' it home a wagon load at a time. It's a lotta work, but not as much as growin' it."
"Where ya puttin' it?" "In the barn, so far, but we need a crib real bad. I got some poles cut and laid out for a floor, and set some posts around in a big circle. I'll find some wire fence someplace and cover the outside of it. Don't know what to do for a roof yet." "Huh. Well, they's a lot of wire fence down in the bottoms, too. Some of it's pretty new. I'd say help yerself, 'cuz ain't nobody livin' there now." "I don't want to tear up something that could be needed, but I suppose you're right. There ain't enough people to farm all that now, let alone fuel or horses. I guess a lot of it will just grow up and be woods again." "Dern right it will. There'll be bushes in it next year, you watch. An' ten years from now, you won't be able to walk through them fields." "That's a real shame, after all that work makin' that ground into farm land, but I don't see any help for it." "Me neither. If times get better an' we start havin' more people, they;ll be wantin' that ground and have to clear it all over again."
Nathan thought a whle as he worked, John helping hold things in place. Then Nathan had an idea. "Hey! The indians used to burn off whole counties down in Kentucky. I read about that. It kept the trees out and then grass would grow up. They made pasture for the buffalo herds that way, so they knew where to find the buffalo when they went huntin'. What if we did that?" "They ain't no buffalo around here! I s'pose you could run some cattle out there and round 'em up in the Fall like they did out West. I don't know if there's enough cattle to do that, though." "Well, we haven't been to Brownstown, or anywhere North of here. There could be cattle up there and no people. I heard that Louisville got hit with Cholera and there ain't much of nobody left over there. We probably need to do some exploring, John." John nodded agreement. "It'd be nice to find out what's there, fer sure. Hard tellin' what's up there. Wasn't too many people to start with, bein' all farm ground fer 10 mile er more." "Well, right now I gotta get this thing goin' if I'm gonna do much welding next year. I only got so much gasoline, and the forge just ain't the same as having a welder." John asked, "Where you gonna find weldin' rods? They likely ain't makin' them now, neither." "I asked the Sheriff about that shop in town, and he said to go get what I want, since there ain't nobody got any way to make power for it. I brought home enough welding rods to last for years. And there's a bunch more stuff in there, too. A lot of heavier steel and such, and tools galore. I guess old man Blevins that owned it died when he couldn't get his insulin anymore. The place is a heckuva mess, but I need to get in there and get whatever I can pretty soon before somebody tears the place up, or the roof leaks or something." "That'll be a job! I hate to think how heavy all that steel is. How you gonna haul that?" "There's a big flatbed trailer there that he built, and I think Jeff's truck will pull it. We might have to recruit some help, but there's a lot to had there. Wish I had a bigger building to store it in."
John thought for a minute and said, "How about the Williams place? Ain't nobody livin' there now?" "That little girl Marissa owns that, by rights." "Yeah, that's right, but I bet you could work somethin' out with her. Ya oughta talk to Micah an' Nancy an' the girl, they bein' her guardians now, I guess you call it." "Good idea John! I think I'll do that."
John left to go home and Nathan started to the house for supper. He was almost to the front door when he heard the shots down the lane.
#320 on: April 26, 2012, 04:51:38 PM
WINTER WORK, cont'd.
Out came the .357 Desert Eagle and Nathan was off at a lope through the trees along his lane. Another shot sounded as John came into view, then two more. John was firing at 4 or more departing dogs. One lay dead at his feet, and two more at intervals down the lane. The one closest was a large woolly black dog of uncertain heritage. There was a Chow mix, and a lanky Shepherd-looking one farther away.
It was too late for Nathan to shoot by the time he got there. The rest of the pack had disappeared into the woods. "You okay John?" "Yeah! Yeah, I'm okay. This $&*^@#!! tried to attack me! He ran at me and lunged and was in the air when I shot him! If I hadn't had my gun cocked and locked, he'd a got me 'fore I could shoot! Dang! If'n it ain't some gang raisn' hell, it's sombody's dogs! I need more ammy'nition! If I shoot 'nuff of 'em, mebbe I'll have some peace!" Nathan said, "Looks like you got a good start at it."
John didn't say anything for a minute, as he walked around to the dogs he'd killed and looked them over. He kicked each one as he held the pistol ready. "Just makin' sure they're good 'n dead! You see any more?" "I saw about 4 of 'em run off, but too far away for me to get a shot." John was calming down a little. He said, "I guess we better bury 'em. They'll git to stinkin' if we don't." "Somethin' don't smell too good now," Nathan said. They both looked over the woods until they spotted part of a torn up deer carcass. As they walked toward it, the slight breeze came from that direction and John said, "EW! That's nasty! You reckon they was eatin' that?" "More'n likely. Prob'ly seen you comin' and was defending their meal." "They can have anything that rotten. How come we never smelt it before?" "Well, the wind is out of the North today, and it usually comes from the West or South, so I guess it coulda been there for a while. We better be more careful walkin' down the lane, it looks like." John said, "I think we better do some huntin' fer dogs." __________________
I was frustrated after we made a trip to Palmyra to buy coal. Jeff and I had taken Julie's car, since it got great mileage on diesel, and I wanted somebody riding shotgun in case of trouble, and I couldn't think of anyone I'd rather have than Jeff. Yes, the guy had coal, and yes he wanted to sell it, and he would take canned food, or silver, or gold. He didn't need any large livestock, since he had no way to keep the meat, nor any place to keep it until he could trade it off, or split it with someone. They were trying to get a Market Day set up with a couple other small towns, but it was just getting started, and there wasn't much floating around in the way of trade goods yet. He preferred silver, or small denominations of gold coins, which I didn't have. I had taken along four of the one ounce gold Kruggerands, but he was afraid he couldn't spend those coins when he needed small amounts.
This was a serious stumbling block for both of us. He wanted $400 a ton for coal, and I wanted 3 or 4 tons, if we could haul that much on Jeff's truck and my utility trailer. But gold was accepted to be worth $3,200 an ounce, the last closing price on the market before the internet crashed. All we could do was go home, so we did, wiser maybe, but not happy. Why the devil didn't I keep some of those junk silver coins I had sold? I thought furiously on the way home, but got nowhere.
When we got to Oliver Rice's lane, I decided to stop and see how those Percherons were doing. Oliver had the older mares out dragging in some small logs for firewood, so we sat and watched as he handled the team expertly, bringing the logs into a neat side-by-side group in front of the barn where he was storing firewood. He called, "Whoa" and the mares stopped on a dime. He unhitched them and they stood still for him, even backing a step without being told, so the trace chains would be easy to unhook. They knew that when they got unhitched the work was over and they would get fed. Oliver had taken it easy with them, allowing for their being pregnant and not being used to working that much.
"Hi there Alan," He said, "What're you up to today?" I told him about our ill-fated trip and he listened until I finished. "I can help you with that. I've got some small gold coins and some one ounce Silver Eagles. I don't want to get rid of much of that, for the same reasons you ran into, but I could do it once for what you need here." It was a Godsend for me, and I told him so. Oliver said, "You'd do it for me, an' I know it, so let me get these girls put up and we'll fix you up." The horses were getting a little impatient, but they had stood where he left them. He led the pair to the barn stall door and unharnessed them one at a time, then turned them into their stalls. He hung the harness over a jutting piece of 2 x 4 nailed to a barn post and gave them a ration of shelled corn with their hay.
In his kitchen, Oliver opened a 5 gallon lard can in the corner that was filled with flour and dug around in it, coming out with a small plastic bag full of coins. He gave me change for the 4 Kruggerands and I thanked him profusely. "I don't keep all I got in the same place, in case you were wonderin'," he said, grinning. "That's what I'd expect out of you," I told him. We talked for a while, basking in the warmth of the kitchen wood range. "Those mares are looking good," I told him. 'Yeah, they are just fine, and work like a dream, too. They were a little antsy for a day or two, but they got used to the place and we get along real good now. Say, there's more to be had down West of town in that other Amish settlement, I hear. Might be worth a trip down there some day soon. Prob'ly best to buy horses in early winter, so they don't have to feed 'em through cold weather."
We worked out a deal to where the three of us would make a trip with his stock trailer. We could first load all the coal we wanted in Jeff's truck and some in the front of the trailer, then go see about horses. If we were able to buy some, we'd have room in the back of the trailer for up to three using the angled gates in it. I thought I'd take along four 5 gallon buckets of soybean oil, in case we found some interest in that, too, but I'd want the buckets back. Buckets and other good containers were sought after items now.
The next day, a Wednesday, we made the trip. Jeff's truck got full at a ton and a half of coal, so we had to shovel another ton and a half into the front of the trailer. That took a while. On the way to the Amish community, we passed the old limestone mine I had fond memories of from my first date with Margaret, and told the story, with assurances that it would not be revealed to my wife that I mentioned it. On into the hills beyond, we passed my cousin Tim Stewart's farm, so we stopped to visit and exchange news. His family was about as old fashioned in most ways as we were, so they had weathered the trouble pretty well. Time being short, we didn't stay very long and were on our way.
The Amish fellow we talked to sent us on to another man's place where we found what we sought. It was late by the time the bargain was struck, but we went home with a young Percheron stud horse. He was a dapple gray beauty, and the price was right. We bought him and a pair of decent mares for 1 ounce of gold worth $3,200 and 10 gallons of soybean oil at $10 a gallon, for a total of $3,300. The black mares he said were 8 and 10 years old, and Oliver agreed from looking at their teeth that was probably about right.
Jeff had to take it slow going home, with almost 6 tons of load not counting the trailer. It was getting really late when we got the 2 mares put away in Oliver's barn, then took the stud horse to mine. Unloading all that coal would have to wait until tomorrow.
#322 on: April 27, 2012, 09:22:35 AM
WINTER WORK, cont'd.
I had given my cousin Tim 5 gallons of soybean oil for cooking. They had finally gotten some pigs and were looking forward to having lard to cook with, but had been getting by with beef tallow, and it left something to be desired. There was a good market for the cooking oil, but I had a huge supply of soybean meal to deal with now, too. Jeff and I used some for feed supplement for our cattle, hogs, and chickens, and Scott Barger was using a fair amount, too, but we had a big supply of soybeans after this year's crop and would have to find a bigger market for the meal.
But today, I had to unload 3 tons of blacksmith coal. I knew that if it was left outside in the weather, over a period of years it would disintegrate into dust, called "slack", and be near useless for the forge. I wanted to keep it off the ground on a floor of some kind, so Rich and I had built a crude bin for it in a corner of the Biodiesel building using rough lumber from the sawmill. The coal had been piled outside at the seller's bin, so it had weathered slightly and was a little dusty. Rich and I put on dust masks and spent a good part of the day getting the it all shovelled out of the trailer and truck into the bin. I had guessed fairly well at the bin size. We had built it 4 feet wide by 8 feet long, and had removeable boards at the door to it, so as we added coal, we added boards at the door to suit. When we finished it was about 5 feet deep in there. A forge doesn't use much coal per day. A bucket full would probably last me for a couple days of average use. I wouldn't use it every day, so this should last us for a lifetime doing our own work and some for others.
Our new Percheron stud was another matter to deal with. Any breeding male animal can be a problem to deal with. It required some sensible management to prevent problems. We didn't want to breed the new mares until late next Spring so we would have colts drop the following Spring when it was warm weather. By keeping the stud at our farm, we didn't have to worry about that. I also had to keep him away from the quarter horse mares on our farm, so he had to have his own lot. For now, I decided he could have the orchard lot back by Benny and Charlie. I could run the paint gelding with him for company so he wouldn't be lonesome. But I'd have to get him access to the barn when cold weather came, and that was another problem. A stud horse is always a problem.
He'd be less of a problem if I kept him worked down, too, so he was going to get plenty of exercise this winter doing some logging. If we kept him tired, he would be a lot less dangerous. We would need more horses, too, if we were going to both work and breed them. You can't use a heavily pregnant mare to do Spring plowing. Luckily, we had the tractors to do most of that, except for gardens where using horses would save gasoline by not using the small gas tractors. It was management nightmare.
I didn't get the trailer back to Oliver's place until the next day. When I took Jeff's truck he and Michael were on the South facing hillside behind their house working on the greenhouse and had the back wall put up. They would be putting glass in pretty soon, and he had figured out he could cut up tiny triangles from tin cans to make 'glazing points', the little things that kept the glass in place until you got the putty put in and cured to waterproof it all. He had no idea how to come up with enough window putty to do this. He'd been asking around at Market Day, and had no luck. He needed some good paint for all those windows, too. Same story.
Walking home, I stopped to talk to Benny and Charlie. They had borrowed cant hooks from Jeff to roll the squared logs in place for Charlie's cabin, and had a couple in place. Rich had gone to hitch up the Paint horse for dragging logs into position, but they would need help lifting them as the walls got higher. We were ready to have our first cabin raising, so we'd have to gather some men to do that. I could use the front loader on my tractor to pick them up, but we would have to figure out how best to get them precisely located and fastened in place.
They had decided to cut simple lap joints at the corners to join the logs and peg the logs together. Charlie had borrowed my small chainsaw to cut the joints and trim ends. They needed a bigger wood chisel to cut those lap joints, so I went off to the new forge to make one. There would be more use for it, I was sure.
Rich had a shaving horse made. It was a small split log with legs. He sat astraddle of it, using his feet to push on the bottom end of a lever, while the top end had a hook shape that clamped his work piece while he used a drawknife to shape it. He had been making some wood handles if he wasn't otherwise occupied. From what I'd seen, he was getting pretty good at it, too. So, I stopped by where he was minding the biodiesel chemical unit and asked him to make me a chisel handle. He'd have to fit it to the chisel when I finished it. We had a wood stove going in there now, where Rich tossed his shavings, but it was too cold now to do any oil pressing. This would be the last batch until the weather warmed up next year. That was okay, because we had all our tanks full anyway. We desperately needed some more oil storage capacity.
He had plans drawn up to build a treadle powered wood lathe, based on what he'd measured up at the Museum. Earl Richards had a key to it, being part of the old Historical Society, which got Rich in there to measure and draw to his heart's content. Rich had some 4" x 4" pieces cut to size for the lathe frame, but he'd been too busy to do more. He was setting up his wood shop in the upstairs of our old house, since it was there, and had good light from the big windows. The family lived in the downstairs, so he had 3 big rooms up there for a shop. It wasn't really heated, since they kept the stairway door closed, but it beat working outside and his wood stayed dry in there. It just meant a lot of carrying materials upstairs.
He had seen a 'sash saw' at the Museum, a sort of foot-powered bandsaw that worked up and down with the saw blade in something like a window frame. He had drawn it up, and was waiting for time to build it when cold weather came. With that, a wood lathe, and his collection of hand tools, he planned to build furniture, kitchenwares, and whatever else was needed.
I got back home a little early for lunch, but it was cold outside and had been a long walk from Jeff's, so I was ready to warm up by the kitchen stove and have a hot drink. I sat there thinking about all the different aspects of how life had changed. It was a shame to tear down usable houses in town, and be building a log cabin out here, but there were not enough jobs and resources in town to employ that many people now, and there weren't that many people left, either. Everyone needed to have enough room now to raise a lot of their own food with at least a big garden spot and some chickens so we didn't have to haul food to them constantly. That meant speading people out again, like they had been 150 years ago, and have villages instead of big cities. We needed manufacturing, and soon, but it would have to be on a much smaller sale than before. If the country were ever able to get heavy industry going again, it would take a long time to develop the supply chain to make that possible. Without oil for transportation, there were some severe limitations on what we could do. It simply wasn't possible to produce enough biodiesel, or alcohol like Nathan was setting up, to fuel a society like we had once known. I doubted if we would ever see that again.
When our cast iron kitchen ranges were all burned out beyond repair, we would be reduced to cooking in fireplaces again, because there was no way to get the coal, iron ore, and limestone all moved to one place now for making cast iron. The steam engines that had once done that were gone now, and there was no fuel for the diesel trains. There was simply too much that had depended on oil for too long, so alternative means were beyond our ability now to get going. Another thing worried me very much, and that was the loss of knowledge of how it all had worked. We had books, but that doesn't take the place of practice. When our current generation of people died off, if we hadn't gotten industry started again it may not happen for a very long time, if ever.
I got a piece of paper and a pencil and began thinking of what we needed that we didn't have. Window putty, paint, leather, masonry cement, hardware of all kinds. I made a second sheet for hardware. Cutting tools of all kinds, steel to make those hardened cutting tools, bolts and nuts and the dies to make them, water pumps, buckets, barrels, and other containers, hand tools, wheelbarrows and the wheels for them. When all the rubber tires had rotted beyond use, we would need wheels of some kind to keep things moving.
We needed chemicals of many sorts, although homely substitutes could be had for some of them, such as making lye from wood ashes by leaching it with water and boiling down the result. We needed means of supplying water for all purposes, and water is heavy, so transporting it without pipes and pumping stations was out of the question now. People would have to settle where there was a water supply. Well digging was going to be a profession of the future, and land with a water supply would be worth the most.
Within a generation, we would use up what clothing and textiles still survived. Something would have to take the place of the cheap fabrics we had been accustomed to having for the past couple hundred years. Even thread to repair repair clothing could becone very scarce before long. I wondered if we could find any seed to raise flax for linen. It was a durable fiber, and had been processed by very simple means in the past. We were too far north to grow cotton here. Wool was a possibility, but it made poor thread and sheep were scarce around here. I had no idea what we could use for ropemaking, unless we could discover a forgotten patch of hemp. I knew how the simple machines worked for twisting rope, but you had to have the fibers and spin them into strings first.
Without readily available plastic wares and sheet metal, basket making would have to spring up again for the simple uses of gathering eggs, fruits, and vegetables, and for simple containers to hold many things.
Farm machinery would give out first, probably, because there was such a demand for food. Combines are very complicated machinery, far beyond our abliity to make replacement parts now. Without them, we would be using scythes to cut wheat, oats, and soybeans, and we would have to snap corn by hand then find a way to shell it. I wondered if I could help get our family, and the community, for that matter, set up to live in some way that was sustainable within my lifetime. I was the only mechanical engineer I knew of in the area, so I felt a responsibility to make that happen if I possibly could.
A thought came to me about the clay I used in the forge, so after lunch, I would walk back where I found it and try to determine the extent of that deposit. I had seen some by an old pond on a farm up the valley, too. I wanted to investigate that for possible use as pottery clay. _____________
Jeannie had the house hanging full of drying herbs of many kinds. She had transplanted a good collection of wild herbs near their house long ago, and continued to do so. She guarded it like a junkyard dog, too. There was Ginseng, Yellowroot, Blue Cohosh, and Vervain along the hillside. Mayapples, Indian Turnip/Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Lily of the Valley, and other medicinals grew wild that she gathered and dried in quantities now, knowing there was no other medicine available, and this would come to be highly valued. Her solar dryer had worked admirably to speed things up there, but a lot of the herbs wanted to be dried in the shade to conserve their essential oils, like mints, mullein, sage, and various peppers she raised.
She had talked to Nathan about how to chop, grind, or otherwise reduce the dried herbs to a more useful and more easily stored condition. He was full of ideas about that, but they ran into the problem of containers to keep the products. There was a limited number of canning jars and lids, and they needed to be used for food. For the moment, she had a supply of plastic bags that would do the job, but they wouldn't last forever. It was something she was concerned about. Labelling it all was going to be a problem, too, when they ran out of sticky labels and the markers all dried up.
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Post by patience on May 26, 2012 17:27:50 GMT -6
WINTER WORK, cont'd.
The weather was cold enough by Thanksgiving to do butchering, so that chore began in earnest. Our feeder cattle had done very well this year. I estimated their live weight at 1,100 to 1,200 pounds, based on girth measurements. I decided to keep another 6 heifers to breed when we were able to trade bulls with a farmer South of town that would prevent inbreeding for our herd. That was a real concern now that the artificial breeding service was no longer an option. In years to come, we would have to seek new genetics farther from home for all our breeding livestock.
So, we butchered 3 steers for our clan and 6 hogs. The big gain for us this year was rendering lots of tallow and lard from the fat animals. We would use tallow for softening and waterproofing harness leather, and making candles, a new venture for Cindy Hammond. The lard was used for cooking, with any leftovers from last year that went rancid going to be cleaned for soapmaking or for general lubication uses and rust preventative on metal.
John Avery had gotten into beekeeping after salvaging hives and a few colonies of bees from a deserted farm. He had augmented his colonies of bees when he found a hollow tree with wild bees in it, tracking their swarm until he could capture them and bring them home. He had as many hives as he thought could be supported by the available forage for them, so he moved three hives to Julie's rental house across from our farm. He had a boon of beeswax and wild honey as a result, even after leaving ample supplies for his new colonies for winter. The bee tree must have been huge. He had harvested gallons of wild honey. He then boiled the beeswax in water and strained it to clean it, coming up with a full two gallons of the wax. Rich Hammond traded some hand tools to Micah for a share of the wax he could use on handles and furniture as a waterproof finish.
I had an old book on leathermaking and tanning, which Roy Bates devoured when he learned about it. Roy got busy on the laborious process of removing the hair with lye from wood ashes, repeated washing in the creek to remove the lye, then stretching, bark tanning, and smoking the cowhides and pigskins. It wasn't a perfect answer, but after later treating with melted tallow over the spread out coals of a wood fire, he had an acceptable product, but at the cost of an immense amount of labor.
He said he didn't have anything better to do in cold weather. There were long periods of soaking, stretching, and drying that allowed him to keep up with other work and his daily chores, tending the chickens and a couple pigs they had acquired. Roy had a market for his product, and he knew it. He was learning as he went, hoping he could make the process easier as he learned more. Rich traded him some tools for his first cowhide to make flat leather drive belts for his wood lathe and other small shop items. I traded him cooking oil, ground flour, and cornmeal, plus made him a fleshing knife for another hide.
Every time Jeff sawed any oak or walnut, Roy was there to strip the bark off for use in tanning later. He had constructed a wood vat lined with sheets of plastic for soaking the hides in boiled oak liquor. He hoped to have a watertight wood vat next year and was talking to Rich about how to construct that.
Chapter 65 WINTER COMES December 2012/January 2013
The town was not ready for a cold winter. There were inadequate heating means for most people, if they had any at all, almost no medicines available, and inadequate nutrition as the last of the fresh vegetables were used. Some had dug crude root cellars in the ground, but few had enough to fill them. Pneumonia took its' toll. The very young and the very old who had made it thus far, had a much harder time of it and many died. Jeff's green house was producing, but not nearly enough for eveyrone's needs. It would take two dozen of them to make a difference.
Nathan had built a big wood cook range to use at the school. The stove pipe was directed out through a hole cut in the cement block and brick wall, cut by hand with chisels, then stuffed around the pipe with fiberglass to block out the wind. It warmed what had once been a large classroom adequately. Many people sought refuge from the cold at the school building, since even unheated in most rooms, it was better than their homes. They could at least gather together for warmth with many other people and have hot meals twice a day, eating in shifts in the converted classroom. The old cafeteria was used for a communal bunk area. One woodstove was kept going most of the time in the room reserved for children, orphaned or not. By the end of winter there were more orphans.
A bout of severe influenza went through the population at the school, thinning the ranks significantly. Some house fires claimed more victims, probably due to bad chimneys or escaped sparks from whatever they used for cooking or heating. Luckily, the fires did not spread to other houses, except in one case in the oldest section of town where houses were very close together. There, five houses in a row were destroyed.
More people died from infected injuries that would never have happened when proper first aid was available. Dog packs killed a couple people and injured several, some of whom died later from infections. Thankfully, no sign of Rabies had been seen. One man was killed cutting a tree when it turned unexpectedly and fell on him, probably as much due to inexperience as anything. The grave diggers stayed busy all winter. In all, the winter claimed nearly half the 2,100 counted in the first Census taken in the Fall. Less than 1,100 would see the next Spring, despite the best efforts everyone could make. ________________________
Market Days were shorter and less well attended in winter. More people were trying to salvage what they could from the old life's remnants to trade and get through the cold time. Their pickings were much slimmer now and less in demand. Warm clothing, food and heat were sought by all.
The survivors had learned to get their drinking water from the cleanest sources and boil it. Those who did not, invariably got sick and many died. Those who would see the next Spring were a wiser and a hardier lot.
Nobody reported any travellers after the cold hit. __________________
Charlie's new cabin wasn't perfectly complete, but it was livable and it was warm. It had excellent windows with storm windows and storm doors salvaged from deserted homes. The floor was shiplapped Oak planks, insulated underneath and the foundation closed off with boards, similiar to the underpinning done on old mobile homes. He had foregone the idea of indoor plumbing, opting for a sink with a drain as the most modern convenience. He and Allison were wed in a simple ceremony at the church, the union only recorded in the church records and in a Bible presented to them by our faithful Minister.
Wedding gifts were simple, practical things, yet more deeply appreciated than had been typical in years past. Their friends gave them food, cooking oil, spare clothing for Allison, tools for Charlie, a handgun for Allison who had become familiar with the need for it and its' use. Cindy and Melissa had made them a couple quilts, and Jeannie and Nathan provided a crane for the fireplace, a Dutch Oven, tools for tending the fire, and a screen to assure no sparks got out of it at night. Rich
made them a high-backed bench to sit before the fireplace and enjoy its' warmth.
Benny had been used to living with his friend for years, so we all worried about him being lonesome, but Melissa spent a good deal more time with him. It looked like we might have another wedding before Spring came. Benny was spending more time with the horses and was becoming a fast friend of the Percheron stallion. The two of them did a lot of logging and brought in firewood in excess. We had all learned the need for really dry firewood, cut a year ahead and well cured. Benny had logs ready to saw for a cabin in time for Jeff to saw them up square while he had time before Spring work would interfere.
WINTER COMES, cont'd.
It was cold in the millhouse, but at least it kept the wind away, Greg thought. It had been a cold trip to the mill on his bicycle, and hard pedalling with that sack of wheat tied on the carrier platform, but he was doing everything he could think of to save what diesel fuel and gasoline he had stored. Part of that saving was getting flour ground at the gristmill. "You got grinding for me Greg?"
"A sackfull is all. We need some flour ground and bolted."
"I'll get 'er goin'! How have you been lately?"
"Oh, we're doing pretty well, all considered. Nobody's sick, and we got enough to eat."
Earl Richards opened the water gate and the big wheel began to turn. He poured the sack of wheat into the hopper and threw the lever to let it trickle into the mill. Earl watched as the grinding progressed. Flour began to come out of the chute in small puffs with each turn of the millstones. When the wheat had all gone through and the flour stopped coming out, he flipped the flat leather belt off the mill to let it stop, then started up the stairs to the bolter.
"You got another sack for the bran?"
"Yeah. Here you go," Greg said and handed it to him.
Earl hung the sack of unsifted flour on the sharp hook of a 150 year old beam scale and adjusted the weight until it balanced.
"Looks like...48 pounds, so I get 4 pounds and 8 tenths...lessee, that'd be a little over 4 and 3/4 pounds."
He reset the weight until it said 43 1/4 pounds and scooped out flour until it balanced again. His portion went into a partly full barrel on the floor. The flour went into the hopper on the bolter, a large machine with a 12 foot long wooden frame covered with cloth, forming a cylinder. He flipped a flat belt on it's wood pulley and the drum began to turn slowly as flour dribbled inside the cloth cylinder. Vibration of the machine caused the flour to sift through the cloth, the coarser bran remaining inside. The cylinder was tilted slightly toward the opposite end, allowing the bran to travel the length of it on the inside. By the time it got to the other end, only bran remained inside
the cloth, the flour having sifted out into the trough below. Earl raked the flour out with a wooden tool into one sack while the bran came out slowly into Greg's second sack as the cloth drum emptied itself.
"There you are! All finished."
Earl hustled back down stairs to shut off the water gate and stop the mill wheel. Greg followed with the sacks of flour and bran. Earl had gone into the mill office to record his transaction, then came out again to talk.
"You better come in the office and warm up before you start home with that," Earl said with a smile.
"Don't mind if I do," Greg said. They sat by the small stove and warmed their icy fingers.
Greg asked, "You got any interest in the flax I grew for the Historical Society this year?"
Earl rubbed his chin and said, "I hadn't even thought about it, but we did promise to buy it, didn't we?"
"I'd like to sell it, but I won't hold you to it if you don't have a use for it. Things have changed."
Earl thought for a minute then said, "I wonder if we could sell thread? The stuff is all still upstairs, carding machine for wool, spinning wheels for flax, and the flax heckle and all. All I need is some women that can make it work. Tell you what. Are you willing to wait till I sell some thread to get paid? I just don't have much right now to buy it otherwise."
"Your word has always been good. That suits me. Besides, nobody else wants it. Now if I can figure out what to do with the seed, that would help."
Earl asked, "How much seed do you have?"
"I planted about a half acre, in case it didn't do too well so you'd have enough demonstrations. I combined the seed and baled the straw, and got about 15 or 20 bushels of seed, and a couple dozen bales of straw for you."
"Talk to Alan Walters about the seed. He' got that oil press that he uses to make soybean oil. I bet it would press that flax seed, too, and you get linseed oil! Nobody's making paint now, and linseed oil is the start of some good oil paint! I'll see what we can do with the flax straw. First thing is to get it in the creek to rot the chaff. I think I can find some women that might want to work at this and get some of the thread. The weather'll have to warm up before that stuff will rot much, though. It's going to be Spring before we can get it retted, and dried, and combed to start spinning thread, you know."
"Let's do it. My wife is worrying over how to get some thread to fix our clothes. She used some kite string to make up these sacks. No idea what happened to all of it in the stores around here."
"Some fool stole it and didn't know what to do with it, most likely." _____________
The next Market Day, I told Greg I would surely try pressing his flaxseed. He wanted to keep half
what he had for seed. If this all worked out for him, he would plant a bigger patch next year. I took it home and told Rich to try running it through, but don't over tighten the oil press to start with, since this seed looked to be pretty hard. He found the "sweet spot" in the press adjustment that made oil in two passes through. He ran the 600 pounds we had and spent half a day taking the oil press apart to clean it out. I had told him it would dry like paint in there and he'd never get it off if he didn't clean it right away. Without any suitable solvent to wash off the linseed oil, Rich resorted to boiling the parts in soapy water, and that worked pretty well. He rubbed everything with soybean oil before he put it back together, to prevent rusting.
My old Process Engineering textbooks said that there was theoretically about 25% oil in flaxseed. I figured in that linseed oil is 92.9% as dense as water, and water weighs 8.345 pounds per gallon. So, Linseed oil weighs 7 3/4 pounds per gallon, and a full 25% of the 600 pounds of seed would be 150 pounds of oil, or 19.3 gallons if our pressing was perfect.
Rich had heated the press, a smoky process, and screwed it down tight on the second pass through. He got almost 15 gallons of oil, so I thought he did very well. The mill cake that came out felt pretty dry. We had to strain the oil through an old window screen and let it settle for a few days to get the foreign matter out of it, then it looked like it was store-bought. I was tickled pink with the results.
Greg and I talked the next week at the Market. He needed diesel fuel. We agreed to trade diesel for all his linseed oil, gallon for gallon. We were both happy. Now, I had the basis for oil paint, varnish, window putty, and caulking putty, and we sorely needed them all. I needed some pigment, but I thought the clay we had would do for that, if we could get it dried and ground up fine, and I needed a way to boil the linseed oil to make it dry faster.
I found a metal barrel at the market that would do just fine for boiling the oil after cutting it in half lengthwise. The hammermill did an acceptable job of grinding up the clay after we dried some over the woodstove in the diesel building. It had some grit in it, but I didn't mind. Refinements could come later. I mixed a gallon of the ground gray clay with linseed oil the hard way, and kept adding clay until it was as thick as I could make it. It was still soft enough to work with a putty knife so I packed it in an empty paint can. I took it down to Jeff, not having said a word about it to him yet.
"Where in the world did you find glazing putty, Dad?"
"I made it."
"You MADE it?!"
"Yep."
I told him the story and he found it hard to believe, but he was really glad to have it. I told him that he should mix some thin with the other gallon of linseed oil I brought, to paint his greenhouse window frames before he put the putty on. That way, the oil would seal up the wood and the putty would stick better. Jeff was anxious to try it out, but it would have to wait until dry weather next summer. The wood was too wet for it to stick now.
Rich didn't have that problem. His woodworking projects were nice and dry, so he took a gallon of the linseed oil home and boiled it until it began to thicken. He used it to finish some handles and a workbench he had made. Even putting 3 or 4 coats on this lot only took a small amount. He found that it took longer to dry than he expected, something like a month to harden up very well, but then it polished up nicely by rubbing it with a rag.
Then, Rich began to mentally kick his own butt for not saving all those bristles they scraped off the hogs at butchering time. He could have made a lot of paint brushes out of those. It bugged him so much that he walked out to the butchering area behind the machinery shed and looked around.
The rains had washed a lot of the hog bristles down into the grass there, but he found enough to fill his coat pockets and his hat. Relieved, he went back to the house to an incredulous Cindy who thought he'd slipped a gear when he began to dump dirty hog bristles in her sink. He explained and convinced his wife that he had not lost his mind, but she still evicted the hog bristles from the sink. Later, he rejoiced by himself as he made his first paintbrush, a round one with the stiff hog hair fastened around a wood handle with wire wrapped around and twisted tight. The next one was better, and the tenth one looked like a real round artists' brush. Rich then decided he needed a screen wire basket for washing the bristles and made that. He had a new product line.
We had made one small step back towards civilization as we once knew it.
WINTER COMES, cont'd.
The river was thinly frozen over except for the middle where the channel was deepest. Micah didn't try to fish in this weather, but went trapping instead. They were tired of dried smoked fish anyway. He had set some traps upriver in the low lying ground that was too wet to farm. Marissa went along to run the trapline, and helped drag home the take on a small sled Micah had made with a frame and runners of willow limbs. Today they got a couple rabbits, a raccoon, and a starved coyote that had come after a trapped rabbit. Apparently, that coyote had company, because the rabbit in that trap had been eaten. Micah dispatched the coyote with a single shot from his .22 rifle. Since he was afraid of disease the coyote might carry, he refused to eat it. They skinned it and left the remains as bait, resetting the traps. The more coyotes and wild dogs he could kill, the better he liked it.
The racoon they would eat, and the rabbits. It was cold enough out now that all they had to do was clean the meat and hang it in a tree to freeze at night to keep it until it was wanted. The hides he would salt and dry for now, then try to learn how to tan them later. He'd heard that Roy Bates was doing some tanning, so he needed to talk to him about it. Planning for this, he had made a run to the County Highway garage and brought home a couple plastic barrels of salt. It seemed like good use of the gasoline when they were already going to the Market that day.
They loaded the coyote hide and the field dressed game on the sled and went toward the house. Micah saw a deer, a big doe, across the river, feeding in the cornfield there. Two yearlings were not far away. The deer had gotten fat this year on all that unpicked corn. He hoped they wouldn't become a plague in his garden. Marissa watched with him for a few minutes, then they each grabbed one end of a stick he'd tied to the sled's rope and started for home again. Smoke was rising straight up from the chimney, indicating a calm day, and cooking breakfast. They were both hungry, bellies rumbling in anticipation when they went into the house. The food smelled good, fresh biscuits, fried squirrel in white gravy, and fried eggs. They both had a big appetite, so Nancy had made plenty.
After breakfast, Micah skinned the raccoon, "casing" the hide, that is, pulling it off like a sock without splitting it. He had cut and brought home a Willow limb the size of his thumb to bend into a U and stretched the hide over it, inside out. Marissa rubbed salt into the hide then hung it to dry on a small peg in the big shed near the chickens. They had a good collection of dried hides in there already, several raccoons, many rabbits, dozens of muskrats, three dogs and another smaller coyote. Marissa had been thinking about a fur coat made of muskrat, and had learned all Micah had to teach on the subject of trapping them and other things. Rabbit fur mittens would be really nice, too, she thought.
They had trapped the squirrel they had for breakfast, too. Micah had several big jars of peanut butter, and had used some for baiting rat traps nailed to trees that had a squirrel nest in them. The squirrels loved peanut butter, it was cheaper than .22 shells, and they could grow peanuts. Micah had grown them every year to roast and hand out in their Bait Shop, and saved some unroasted for seed each year. This year, he hadn't roasted any, but saved the big sackful all for seed.
The corn across the river had been tempting him since Fall came and nobody came to combine it. Micah knew the river bottom over there would flood in the Spring and ruin it, so he thought about how he could haul the most on his truck. The Williams' farm had an older pickup truck, but it was out of gas. It did have a stock rack, though. Marissa had told him about that when he was ruminating about hauling corn home. Micah had seen how Nathan had built a wire crib out of two overlapped layers of fencing to make the openings small enough to hold the ears of corn. Making it round meant that the wire was what held the weight of the corn, not the framing. Micah knew a good idea when he saw it and copied it.
With two large cribs built, Micah hitched up his 12 foot utility trailer and he, Nancy, and Marissa all dressed for the cold and made a trip to the Marissa's old home. She had insisted she wanted to go. Nancy thought about it and decided that the girl had to put some old ghosts to rest in her mind, so she had agreed. But Nancy expected the girl would have some troubled days and nights to come. They had talked about what they should bring home for her. Marissa had been to Market Day enough times to see what was valuable now, and told them to get everything they could before someone else got it. The truck, now with the stock racks on it, and trailer were both heavily loaded on the way home. Micah found a couple plastic tarps and covered the loads then left them covered until they could figure out where to put it all.
Behind Micah's pole shed where they kept the chickens and much more, there was an old barn on higher ground further from the house. That distance made it more of a chore to go there, so they had used what was once a machine shed for everything thus far. It was time to change that, he decided, and began to move things out of the shed to make room in it. There was a collection of chicken nests, old milk cans, two wooden chicken coops for transporting birds, live traps for various sized animals, fishing nets, rope, twine, a 14 foot aluminum Jon boat and oars on its' trailer, antique farm tools, a crank grindstone on a wood stand, a stack of plastic buskets and some galvanized ones, dog chains, rolls of wire, a push lawn mower, plastic buckets of nails, and jars of assorted hardware.
It all went to the barn and cleared out two bays in the machine shed 12 feet wide x 24 feet deep. Micah simply backed the trailer in one bin and the truck in the other for now. When they got things organized and the stuff unloaded, they could start picking corn and hauling it home. He was pleased with how much they had gotten done with only a couple miles of driving. He still had over 3/4 of a tank in the truck, and there were some cans, too. He was trying hard to get all the good out of that gas he could, because he didn't think he would ever get any more. He had to save most of it for the chainsaw, because he would be 60 years old this Spring and chopping enough wood for them when he got older was worrying him a lot.
For now, he planned to burn a lot of corncobs in the kitchen stove when they got that corn in and shelled some daily for the chickens. It should be about enough to do the cooking. That would save a lot of time and work. The corn would save him from having to plant any this year, so he would have time to patch up the pig lot and get some pigs from somebody up the valley. Pigs would eat almost anything, so that helped, too. And they would provide much needed lard. Micah wanted a milk cow badly. If he could get one and get it bred, that would make a beef for a winter in the future when the deer might not be so easy to come by. And he knew that Marissa was still growing and needed the milk to make strong bones. He would be willing to trade a new rifle and ammunition for a cow, but he'd have to be real careful who he dealt with. He didn't want to be arming a potential enemy.
Somehow, he had to find some metal roofing or something else to get a roof on his corncribs, lest the corn rot after all their work getting it home. Nathan had found some metal roofing and cut it into pie wedges and screwed it together to make round roofs on his cribs. Maybe he would cut some for me? He had to get a garden spot worked up this Spring, too. He would need some hay for a milk cow. Looked like he needed a horse. Come to think of it, the girl owned 3 horses that were loaned out to Alan. Maybe they just needed to get one of them back. He could probably work something out with Alan. There was a lot to think about.
WINTER COMES, cont'd.
There was a lot of talk at the Market. The latest news was that a man from up on top of the Knobs above the Ohio Valley had been talking to the deputies on the roadblock. He was riding a horse, and was chock full of news. The stories varied, as they do after they have been told a few times, so Benny sought out a deputy he knew who was supposed to have been there and talked to the man. It was enlightening, but left him with a lot of questions, too.
It seemed that the man's farm was where he could see over the hill to the valley several hundred feet below, and he had paid attention to what went on down there. Last summer, there had been a lot of shooting and fires in the whole valley for a while, especially in Louisville where fires burned for weeks. There had been a lot of smoke in the area of the Malls in Jeffersonville, but he couldn't say for sure if they had burned, or if it was nearby houses. The shooting had calmed down after about 2 weeks. Then he saw cars and trucks leaving town, loaded down. It got quiet after that, except for hearing an occassional shot or two. There had been a few smoking chimneys he'd seen this winter, but no vehicles moving. He had no inclination to go down into the midst of all that, not knowing what he'd find even after 7 months and a cold winter.
He had ridden through the county roads and fields to get to our town, coming out on the highway as he got closer, exploring and looking to trade in a safer place. In his travels, he had also talked to a man who lived east, up near Charlestown. He had been over near the Ohio River and said he had not seen any traffic on it since about 3 weeks after the electricity went out last summer. Everything was quiet now on the outskirts of New Albany, Jeffersonville, and Clarksville, and also inside those cities, from what he could see. Everyone was speculating on whether there was anything in the cities worth going after now.
The Planning Commission met and suggested that volunteers be sought for trips to learn the situation in that metropolitan area and the smaller towns in other directions, particularly the farm country around the town of Mitchell, that had Spring Mill State Park nearby with it's restored 3 story
water powered gristmill. If any community was making it, they had a good chance. Alan had suggested at that meeting for people to search out certain antiques for him to restore, especially crank powered corn shellers, grindstones, burr mills, and blacksmith tools, all sorely needed now.
With far less people to feed, the Planners laid out the minimum amount of farm and market crops they thought should planted this year, and started a search for enough seed to do that. Garden seeds were in short supply, since there were mostly non-reproducible hybrids planted last year, and not much of that. Any biennial garden plants, like beets, kale, onions, and cabbages were to be watched closely this Spring for the possibility of them making seed this year.
All unused or rancid animal fats should be saved and collected for soapmaking. Wood ashes should be kept dry and stored to make lye for the soap. Those who contributed to a group soapmaking project would get shares of the product according to their contributions. The town beef butchering detail should trim the meat of excess tallow to render for candlemaking. A couple women had expressed an interest in making candles. The reccomended projects should be conducted on a business basis to promote local industry, except the initial soapmaking that would take longer to get started.
Dan Wilkins liked the Planning results and said that the County would provide what organization and assistance they could to any efforts to provide locally made necessary products.
Benny had already figured on making a venture to the New Albany area and had in mind to look for certain things. He began to look for people to accompany him, beginning with Kenneth Porter, who was very familiar with the cities. Roy Bates was another good candidate. He wanted to talk to Oliver Rice and John Avery, too. All of them were cool headed, knew the cities and what they wanted to find there. It could be a dangerous trip, but the first ones to foster trade with urban areas would have the best chance of finding what they needed. It was the subject of long discussions, and much concern. _____________
Every blacksmith needs an apprentice, so Alan had put the word out that he would accept an apprentice or even several. He found one quickly in Kenneth Porter. Ken had worked office jobs most of his life, but had tinkered with many things in his spare time, fixing things, working on his cars, and making small projects with metal and wood. He readly acknowledged that his was not the best background for it, but he was motivated to find something besides guard duty for the rest of his life. Standing by a coal fire in winter sounded better than walking throught a snowy woods, too. Ken was 42 years old, and Alan enjoyed working with him. He would do for a start. If more candidates came along later, that would be good, since a more advanced apprentice could help teach the others. They got started right away, the weather being unfit for much outdoor activity. Meanwhile, Ken's wife Carolyn was spending time with Cindy Hammond, Margaret, and Melissa who were learning to quilt and sew.
Alan began teaching about steel and its' many varieties. He had a fire in the forge and planned for Ken to make his own set of tools as a means of learning the trade. Finding him an anvil of his own might be a challenge, but they would get by somehow.
"We're going to start by making a cold chisel, so we need to select the right steel for it," Alan told him, "and because we will be using salvaged steel, we need to find something that was made with the same properties we need in the chisel. It has to be hard enough at the cutting edge to cut steel, yet tough at the top end to keep from shattering when you hammer on it. So, we need something that was that hard in its' first use. A spring would not get hard enough, and a file would get too hard, so we need something in between. I have a junk farm truck I took apart and here is the axle from it. It has just enough carbon in it to be able to harden it like we want for several of your hammers, but we need something harder for a cold chisel. This broken pry bar should work, and it is near the right size so you don't have so much work to do to get what you want."
Ken asked, "How do we get it cut to the size of a chisel if it is that hard?"
"When steel gets bright red hot, it can be cut a lot easier. The heat not only changes it by taking out all the "temper", or hard crystal structure, it also makes it plastic, or moldable. Let's try it first with some of Margaret's floral clay. It's a lot softer, but it works just like the hot steel and you don't have to hurry your work before it cools off."
Alan kneaded the soft green clay to the shape of the pry bar and gave it to Ken.
"Now, set it on that chisel tool, called a hardy, in the anvil and hit it lightly with the hammer on top, driving it down onto the hardy. Okay, now turn it over and hit it again. It should cut off. That's what you can expect out of the hot steel, only you'll have to hit it harder."
Ken tried it again, and cut the other end.
"Now, think about how to hit the clay to make the shape of this chisel."
Ken did a few trial blows and said, "It's too wide and thin. Can I fix that?"
"Yes, but it's easier to not get it too thin to start with. Hit it lightly on the thin edge." Ken made a few mistakes, got it right finally, and then reshaped the clay like the pry bar and tried it again with better results, holding with tongs like he would the hot steel.
In half an hour, he had the steel cut and shaped right. Alan waited until it cooled off slowly and said, "Now check it with this file and see how easily it cuts compared to the rest of the old pry bar." Ken was surprised to see that his chisel was quite soft.
Alan talked about rehardening the steel.
"The carbon in this piece now is arranged between the iron atoms, so it is in a soft state. When the iron gets to a certain temperature, the carbon dissolves into the iron crystal lattice and if we cool it quickly, it gets trapped there, making hard crystals. How hard it will be depends on if there is enough carbon to dissolve in all the iron. If not, it will only harden partially. This will get pretty hard because it is high carbon content. So, get it cherry red, touch it with this magnet and if it is hot enough, the magnet won't stick to it because of the disorganized structure when it's hot. That is hot enough to harden, somewhere around 1,000 to 1,200 degrees depending on what other ingredients the steel has. When you reach that temperature, stick it in the water in the quench tub there, and cool it quick and thoroughly. It will come out hard."
It did. The file would hardly scratch his chisel now.
"The steel is fully hard now, so it is too brittle for what we want, and could shatter in use. So, we need to soften it some by warming it up to a lesser temperature so some, but not all, of that carbon can come unstuck from the iron. The hotter you get it, the softer it will end up. You can judge the temperature by colors that form on the steel as it is heated. To see those, we have to get the black scale off the surface, so grind it until it is shiny. I'll turn the wheel for you."
Ken ground the flat near the cutting edge until it was clean.
Alan told him, "The colors won't glow like when you shaped it because the temperatures range from about 300 degrees to 700 degrees. This is only surface discoloration. There is a definite sequence of colors that appear as the temperature increases, ranging from pale yellow to dark blue, then if it gets even hotter, those colors disappear, so heat it slowly. You want it to be a definite yellow, like bright straw when wheat is ready to cut, or blond hair."
Ken didn't have to work the bellows this time, The smoldering coal fire got it hot enough. The yellow began to appear and he quenched it until it was cold again.
"Okay, now we need the end you hammer on to be even softer so it doesn't chip and send a piece into your eye. This time, heat only the top end of the chisel, and let the color get past yellow until it is a bright blue."
Ken did that, quenched it again, and then ground the chisel sharp. When he tried it on a scrap piece of steel, the chisel cut nicely. He was a proud fellow, and had to take it home to show his wife what he'd made that day.
In the next couple weeks, he made tongs, punches, hammers of several kinds, a hardy, and more tools. Alan sent him to Rich Hammond to learn how to make his own wood hammer handles. When he had done that, he wanted a drawknife of his own, so they made that from an old planer knife blade. In the weeks that followed, Ken made everything he needed except an anvil. That was too big a project for the size forge they had, so they would search for one to buy.
By the time the weather was getting warmer, Ken had made a wide variety of hardware and learned a lot about how to choose steel for the job. The appearance of his work was getting better and he began to get more done at a single heating before it cooled to much to work.
Alan grinned and told him, "My Dad told me there are only two serious mistakes a blacksmith can make. The first is hammering steel too cold so it cracks, and the other is not charging enough for his work. Make sure you don't do either one."
Ken vowed he would abide by that and smiled back.
WINTER COMES, cont'd.
"I'm here. Be out in a minute."
Benny, Roy Bates, and Ken Porter waited at the door to the shabby storefront in Hamburg. It had been a cutrate dented canned goods store in years past. Oliver Rice lay behind a big tree out in the vacant lot with his .30-06 trained on the doorway, just in case. The little town lay a couple miles outside New Albany, almost rural, but not quite. They heard deadbolts and chains coming undone. They figured he was killing time to let his backup person get in place. Everyone was very polite, assuming they were being watched over gun sights.
"Hi. What can I do for you guys?"
"We're looking to trade for some things. Here's a list we made. If you have all or part of it, we'd like to talk about it," Ken told him.
The middle aged man looked the list over and said, "Yeah, I got most of it. What have you got to trade?"
"We brought some soybean oil, cured tobacco, good grape wine, honey, and a couple smoked hams. There are other things we could bring later, depending on what you want. Farm produce, lumber, dried beef... "
The storekeeper shook his head no and said, "Mostly what I want is silver, or gold coins. You have any?"
We all shook our heads no.
The store owner said, "Silver and gold coins are how I price things and what I look for, since some people are starting to use them around here and I can buy what I want that way. I suppose I can use some of your goods, depending. Let's have a look at it."
Roy fetched some samples out of the truck. "We need containers back," Ken told the man. "Everybody wants their containers back," the man said. He inspected and tasted everything before he made up his mind.
"I don't have enough bottles to take much of the wine. The honey I can come up with some plastic buckets, I've got boxes to put the tobacco in, and I think I can find a bucket for the soybean oil. Okay. Let's see how we can do this. I've got pound boxes of iodized salt that costs a dollar in silver. The baking powder is a dollar in silver a can. Don't have any cloth or sewing thread, no fuel of any kind, no fertilizer, no paper. Got some aspirin and Ibuprofen, but no antibiotics. Got some Band aids and gauze, but no first aid cream. Got 4 pound bags of epsom salts, but that's not on your list. I think I still got some baking soda. Got black pepper, but no other spices. Don't know where youd look for leather. That's about it. You can look around in there about anything else you might want. Let me look over what you have and I'll give you a silver price on it. My stuff is all priced in silver, so that'll make it easier to figure out."
The prices compared to what we brought and what he offered didn't look that great to us. They traded soybean oil and honey for some black pepper, salt, epsom salts, baking powder and baking soda, but thought the rest of what he had was all too expensive in terms of what they brought. It looked like a long trip for not much.
Then he showed them a printed note. It said that the Delta Queen, the restored steamboat from Saint Louis, would be coming upriver in May, and bring goods for sale. They would stop at Evansville, a couple small towns, and at Tobacco Landing in Harrison County, a spot that where it had docked 150 years ago. Locks were not operating at Louisville, or it would have gone farther upriver.
The good news was that they were bringing some manufactured goods that had been warehoused, and the list was very appealing. The bad news was, they wanted up to 40 cords of dry split firewood 3 feet long, tobacco, silver, or gold in payment. That explained why the storekeeper wanted the coins. He told them the note had arrived by a messenger on horseback a couple weeks ago. He had made it clear that the steamboat would be heavily armed.
The store owner tried to be helpful. He told them they could find all the mortar and Portland cement they wanted a few miles North in the tiny town of Speed, Indiana, where the manufacturing plant was. It wasn't operating, but there was a trainload of the stuff there and he knew the men who were selling the stuff and told the group how to find them. He said the tannery down in New Albany might be running now, but he wasn't sure. They were looking for a way to power the machinery the last he heard. The group thanked him and headed for the cement plant.
Most of what they had was bulk cement and bulk lime. Some was already mixed cement and lime and bagged as mortar, and there were some bags of cement, but only a few skids of it. The party traded the last 5 gallons of John's wine and 2 cured hams for a pickup load of bagged mortar and bagged cement. It wasn't that much. Cement is heavy. They were dealing with a shift supervisor and a forklift driver, past tense. Now, they were unemployed like every body else. They didn't drive a real hard bargain because everybody knew that the cement would eventually draw enough moisture to start getting hard in the bags and be ruined. They wanted to sell it as fast as they could for what they could get.
They had a heavy load in Jeff's diesel pickup, so they headed for home. The information they had learned was probably worth more than what they were hauling home, or would be if they could make use of it. ________________
Alan had the Portland cement and mortar stored in the diesel building, wrapped in a plastic sheet to keep moisture at bay. The trading team had done very well, he thought, considering. What bothered him most was the demand for silver and gold in payment. There just wasn't that much around.
That steam riverboat was built to be fired with fuel oil. He doubted that it would last long with limited maintenance, if any, and being fired with wood instead of oil. Wood was more corrosive on the boiler pipes. The conversion to wood fuel had to a cobble-job. That was a disaster waiting to happen, in his opinion. It might make many trips, or it could fail soon. Prudence would indicate they should not depend on it, but get anything they could from the first voyage. The owners may not be planning any more than this one voyage. There was no way to know.
At 40 miles one way, it was too far to Tobacco Landing to haul firewood for trade, and other people who lived closer would likely be planning to do that. Jeff's tobacco was a good bet for trade, but it would sure be nice to buy some quantities of things. Alan had 16 gold Kruggerands left from what Charlie and Benny had given him for their land. He was sure they had more. They had told him they had plenty more. Benny had told him they planned to spend some gold and would need a way to haul what they bought. Alan recalled that Nathan had that big flatbed trailer parked at the old Williams farm, and his truck would pull it, although it would take a lot of gas, maybe 8 or 9 gallons with that much of a load. He decided it was worth using the gasoline. It wouldn't last forever anyway, even with the Stabil treatment in it. ________________
"You could take the big truck down there and haul back a big load," Julie said.
"All we have to trade is the tobacco, and we don't know how much they will buy," Jeff countered. "I cashed out what gold I had and spent about all of it getting the farm going."
Julie said, "You have tobacco and I have some gold. We are going to need your big truck." _________________
Oliver had been thinking about the riverboat coming and conculded that this would be the time to become a storekeeper. He wasn't getting any younger, and this looked like the time to do something about his retirement. He needed enough gasoline to drive his truck there pulling his stock trailer. Maybe he could get some from Alan Walters. When the riverboat came in a couple months, he would spend his gold. He needed to make some secure storage space for what he bought.
WINTER COMES, cont'd.
She had been grazing behind the old farmhouse when Micah first saw the cow. She looked to be an Angus, and had a yearling calf beside her that had a white face, probably a Hereford cross. Micah tossed a few ears of corn in her direction from the load on his truck. She ambled over to investigate when he didn't throw any more, then picked up an ear and began to gnaw on it endways, expertly shelling the grains with a crunching sound. The calf followed suit.
Micah had only driven to the farmhouse to turn around before going home with their load, when he saw the cow. Marissa said, "I bet I could pet her!"
Nancy cautioned her, "You watch out now, a cow can kick in all directions!" "But look! She's wearing a halter! She's gotta be somebody's pet, or a 4H cow some kid took to the Fair. You watch."
Marissa walked slowly toward the cow, but not directly at her aiming somewhat to her side. The calf acted spooky when she got closer, but the cow didn't seem to mind. The girl spoke softly to her and held out an ear of corn as she got closer. The cow stretched her neck out to reach the corn, and took a tentative step closer. She took the corn and began to chew. Marissa stepped closer and reached her neck to rub the cow, who peacefully chewed her food and seemed to enjoy the attention. Marissa tossed another ear to the calf. It came closer to get the corn, but stayed on the other side of its' mother, looking at the girl while it ate.
Micah looked over the deserted farm. No smoke came from the chimney, and the grass was grown long around the house. An old farm truck was parked in the machinery shed, but no car was in evidence. Beside the truck was a John Deere 3020 tractor that looked like it had been used last year, from the relatively fresh greasy dirt on it. There was a 3 bottom plow, a pair of hay wagons, and other implements alongside it, parked in a row. He saw that the cow was fenced in a lot of maybe 4 or 5 acres with a pond in the back. There was a broken down gate in front of a pole framed hay barn where the cow and calf had been rummaging in the baled hay. That explained what they had been eating during the snowy winter.
He looked around the farm and found no indication that anyone had been there for some time. He knocked on the house door and waited, but there was no sign of life there.
An old framed barn stood behind the pole shed and off to one side. Micah walked out there to look around, but stopped when he saw a pair of fuel tanks behind the pole shed in the grass. He took a closer look. Using a tall dry weed as a dipstick, he found one tank was 2/3 full of diesel
fuel and the other was about 3/4 full of gasoline. The filters on both tanks didn't look that old, either, and the tanks had pretty decent aluminum paint on them. He cracked the drain fitting on one filter and got a few drops of water out, then fresh smelling gasoline. The tanks were the more or less standard 300 gallon size commonly found on local farms.
The barn had a collection of the usual junk found around a small farm. The roof didn't appear to be leaking, but it had been a long time since it had any paint on the siding. He walked around the other side of the barn and saw a row of three empty wire corn cribs with metal roofs. Micah thought, "I know where those are going, just as soon as I can get it done."
Nancy had been looking at the house. She came back to where Micah was by the barn and said, "It's no wonder nobody's here. The place has an electric stove in the kitchen, and must have had electric heat, because there is no propane tank, or oil tank. I didn't see a wood stove of any kind. They must have moved out, because I saw some drawers pulled out of the chest in the bedroom. I didn't see a well anywhere, either, so it must be a new well with an electric pump. Can't live like that now."
Micah said, "It don't look like anybody is comin' back, from what I can tell. I say let's take what we can use from here. I can't understand why nobody else has been here already."
Nancy had thought about it. "It's 12 miles or more from town, either direction, and not much of anything out here but farms. I guess that gang that came through here just thought other places looked like better pickings. Not many people left now, after the cold weather, so there's probably a lot of places like this, all scattered out in the country."
They began to make plans about how to get some things moved home, starting with the cow and calf. He found a pair of jumper cables hanging on a nail in the shed by the truck. He didn't need them, because it started easily. He backed it out of the shed and let it run to charge the battery back up. The cow and calf ignored him. They had their heads in the hay barn tearing out bites from the big round bales inside. Micah drove the truck to the gas tank and filled it up, leaving the engine running. Then he went back and tried the tractor. The battery in it appeared to be new, and it started after a shot of ether from the button on the dash. It clattered for a minute and then smoothed out and ran evenly. Micah fumbled with hydraulic levers until he found the one to raise the front end loader bucket, and backed the tractor out of the shed and headed for the fuel tanks.
By the end of the next day, they had loaded the fuel tanks on the truck with the front loader and set them up at their own place. Micah had loaded a mowing machine and a cultivator on the truck to haul home, and put the plow on a wagon that he pulled home with the tractor. It was a long 4 mile ride in the early March cold. He would make more trips with the tractor when they had a sunny day. __________________
Benny had been taking apart the old pickup in the gulley on the Walters farm. He had salvaged the rear leaf springs, the front coil springs, the front wheel spindles, valve springs, and the radiator. The steel he took to Alan's shop, where Ken Porter was busy making things out of it. The leaf springs became garden hoes, garden trowels, and the two long ones were reshaped to hold seats on forecarts for the horses. The front coil springs were straightened and made into wood chisels, singletree hooks and other horse related hardware.
While Ken was busy making things, Alan had rebuilt an old buzz saw found in the barn on Julie's rental farm. He had polished the shaft and melted out the worn Babbitt bearings, then repoured them with added metal to make them fit again. He got the rig mounted on his tractor and belted up to power it. With the saw blade put on backwards for safety, he rubbed it with a big rock while it was turning to get the worst of the rust off the sides, then put it on the right way and filed it sharp. This stationary saw setup would allow using the diesel tractor to cut firewood to length without using the gas powered chainsaws. It would cut anything a man could lift onto the frame, but the unguarded saw blade was very dangerous.
Alan spent a day fashioning a guard for it from junk metal. The rubber and canvas flat belt that drove it would last for years, and could be replaced with a leather one, if necessary. He could grease the bearings with lard oil, the portion of lard that melted at lower temperature after cooking it. The cast, lead alloy bearings could be tightened several times before they were so worn they would need to be recast again.
Cindy was pouring candles in a mold that Nathan had made for her. It was a lot faster than dipping them dozens of times to make them. She had plenty of tallow from this winter's butchering, but it tended to soften too much in hot weather. She had gotten some beeswax from John Avery when Rich repaired some behives for him. A small amount of beeswax mixed in the tallow kept the candles from sagging in summer heat.
The wicking was the hardest to come by. She and the other women had spent long hours braiding cotton string into candle wicks. They only had a couple balls of the cotton string left, salvaged from the remains of the hardware store after it had been broken into. Nobody knew what had happened to Clarence, the owner. Somebody had taken all the kerosene lamps from the store, but as far as anyone knew, there was no more kerosene to be found now. Thankfully, Rich had laid in a supply for them, so the candles were for sale, and she hoped she could trade for things they needed, especially shoes for her and Jonah, and boots for Rich. ___________________
Alan was thinking as he worked on machinery. There were many things on the list the steamboat was bringing for trade that he wanted to buy, but the prices would be high and their gold was limited. He wanted to bring home all he could, afraid that it could be their only chance for more manufactured goods. It was still on his mind when he went in to supper. He told Margaret it was a shame they hadn't hit the lottery in time to lay in a supply of goods.
She said, "You found some money once when it made a big difference to me as a teenager. I suppose we've had our share of free money. We're doing all right. I'm not worried about it."
"Yeah, I know. It would just be so nice if we could lay in a big supply of things like paper, cloth and thread, bolts, and drill bits and all the other things that make life so much easier."
The next day he was thinking about that conversation, and something was bothering him about it, something half remembered, but it wouldn't come to him. He was helping Ken cut up a fender from his old junk pickup, and it was hard going. They were using a cold chisel to shear out pieces when Ken said, "This thing is tough as an armored car!" And Alan had a thought. When he was a kid, there was a big armored car robbery in Louisville. The robbers were never found, and all the kids had talked about how neat it would be to find those millions of dollars. It hadn't been very long after that he and Margaret had found money laying in the old limestone mine. What if.... He decided he was grasping at straws. Even if the robbery money was there and if he could find it, that was paper dollars and they weren't any good now. ________________
Alan knew they needed more horses to farm the amount of land they owned. For that matter, he needed more horse machinery for the ones they had. It was time to revisit some Amish friends and check into the horse situation. Horses were more important now than anything that might be on that riverboat, so he needed to deal with that first. Jeff shared his views on that, and they both knew that the screw press would wear out eventually, and that would put an end to their tractor farming, if the tractors didn't give out first. Horses were the way of their future, so they had better be ready for it.
Jeff agreed to make another trip with Oliver's stock trailer and try to buy all they could. Julie also understood and would contribute some gold toward buying all the good stock they could find. He and Jeff set out early one day to look for horses to buy and scout for machinery on the trip. They revisited the Amish folks where they bought the stallion and mares. He had no more to sell, but directed them to a man nearer to his cousin Tim Stewart's farm.
This old fellow was not Amish, but had been fairly wealthy and a horse fancier. He had the same problem of trying to feed his stock with no diesel fuel for his farm tractors. He had no horse machinery, except for a couple fancy wagons, a buggy and two carriages. He got interested when Alan mentioned 50 gallons of biodiesel, and gold coins. Alan bought 6 mares, all related that were Morgan/Percheron crosses. All were blacks, tall with heavy legs and feet, the Roman noses of the Arab blood in the Percheron stock showing plainly. They were beautiful animals. They made a deal. Alan came away without his 50 gallons of fuel, and he'd paid the man 6 gold coins. He would sell the two wagons for another 2 ounces of gold and another 50 gallons of fuel, but that would be another trip. One more coin got the fancy show harness and shiny leather collars these horses had worn in parades.
He thought Julie would want one of the wagons, a pair of horses and harness, which had cost him 3 1/3 ounces of gold, and 25 gallons of fuel. He had still spent 4 2/3 ounces of his own gold. When he and Julie settled up, he would have roughly 9 ounces left. It was costly, but he had some excellent breeding stock. He hoped to be able to breed and sell horses in his old age, so this was a long term investment.
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Post by patience on May 26, 2012 17:30:39 GMT -6
Chapter 66 PROGRESS April, 2013
The second trip was uneventful buying the wagons, loading them in the stock trailer. They had measured to make sure they would fit. It was still early in the day, so Alan stopped to see his cousin and see how they were doing. He and Tim told stories about when they were kids, the family doings, and sharing memories of better times. He had brought Tim and his wife a jar of instant coffee and they were overjoyed. They sat on the porch and drank some of it.
Alan had to know about something. "Tim, can you still get in that old limestone mine up the road?"
"Why, yeah, I suppose so. Nobody to tell you not to. There's an old metal gate across the front, but it's about rusted down. What do you want in there?"
"I'm just curious to about something. It's been bugging me for 50 years and I want to settle it in my mind."
"Well, let's go up there. It ain't far, just around the the corner of the road."
Jeff said, "Let's unhook the trailer and we can drive."
They drove to the gate and with a little effort the gate came away. Alan drove into the mine very slowly, trying to remember many years ago. He parked 50 feet from the end of the tunnel with the headlights shining ahead. They got out and let the truck idle. Alan picked around at the rocks, and then saw what he thought was where he had found money back then. He picked up a few of the rocks from the tumbled pile and tossed them back, then began to dig purposefully into the pile, laying aside the bigger stones.
"Dad, I see something shiny back there."
Alan looked where Jeff was pointing, off to his right. He dug away some stones and saw what was plainly a bumper buried in the pile. The 3 men worked steadily at it for a time and saw the corner of a gray pickup truck bed. It was covered with a rotted canvas tarp. They removed some stones, but then had to start higher on the pile to keep more from falling down. The license plate said Jefferson County Kentucky, 1954. Alan's heart began to race. HE WAS RIGHT, AND HE KNEW IT! He tore open the tarp and found crumbly cardboard boxes under it and inside the boxes were canvas bags. Money bags, with bank names on them.
They all were excited now, and dragged out a bag, cut it open and found bundles of 20 dollar bills. Tim laughed heartily. "All these years, I coulda been a millionaire and didn't know it! Well, it ain't worth spit now, but it's quite a find anyway!"
Alan and Jeff laughed with him. Tim grinned and said, "I guess I oughta keep a sack of those bills just so I can say I'm rich, huh?"
Alan had another thought, and said, "Banks used a lot of change, too. I wonder if there's any coins in here?"
Jeff caught on right away and said, "If there is, they will all be 1954 or older. It was all silver back then, until they changed it in 1964, right Dad?"
Alan nodded and started digging again. It took them all a lot of work to get the big rockpile moved off the truck bed, but toward the front they found bags of coins. Lots of bags.
Then Tim looked up from the truck bed and said, "OH!"
The others looked and saw the dead man's head laying inside the truck cab. Tim ran back away from the truck and leaned against a stone column, looking sick. Alan backed up and looked at it for a while, then started digging again.
Jeff joined him and told Tim, "He's been dead for 60 years. He ain't gonna hurt nobody now."
Tim wasn't so sure and stayed where he was for a long time. Alan and Jeff methodically dug to the front of the truck bed. They found many sacks of coins and carefully sat them on the mine floor away from the rockpile. Tim screwed up his courage and began to help. The sacks were about half rotten and tore easily. The heavy coins threatened to spill all over the place, as one ripped bag showed. The diesel exhaust smoke was getting thick in the mine by the time they got it all loaded in Jeff's truck. Nobody objected when Jeff got behind the wheel and said, "Come on."
Everybody was a little woozy from breathing the truck exhaust for so long. They were all glad to get outside again for several reasons.
Back at Tim's house, he only told his wife that it was time for another cup of that good coffee. They sat and drank it in silence, then Alan told Tim, "There's a steamboat coming upriver next month from Saint Louis. They're bringing goods to sell, and they want silver and gold coins, mostly. You need to find a way to get there to meet it. They are going to stop at Tobacco Landing, down past Laconia. You got any way to get there?"
Tim said, "Well, not for sure. Wait. The man you got the horses and wagons from has a big Ford Dually pickup that's diesel, and he's got fuel now you said. I can get him to run me down there for a price. He's got gold from the horse sales, so he'll be going too, I expect."
Alan said, "Let's go see him and make sure before we leave for home. If you need a ride, we'll come get you."
Jeff said, "Let's get those bags out of the truck first. I counted 36 of 'em, so let's take 12 inside for Tim's share."
Tim objected, "But you found it Alan, it ought to be yours."
Alan said, "You should remember from when we were kids how stubborn I can get. Now just get busy and take your part inside."
On the way home with the bags safely stowed in the stock trailer, Jeff did some figuring out loud. "Those bags are all marked $250. Twelve of them is $3,000 face value. The last price of silver before the market closed was $68 an ounce. I think junk silver was trading at 44 times face value. That makes those 12 bags worth $132,000."
Alan grinned and said, "That's not bad for teenager on a date, is it? Especially when you get a girl like your Mom out of the deal too."
PROGRESS, cont'd.
"It's a good thing we have warm weather and the pasture is up," Margaret said. "What are you going to do with all the horses? How many are there now?"
Alan was already worrying over the problem. "For today, I just turned them out in the front pasture with ours, but I'll have to move a bunch out soon or they will eat it down to nothing. How many, uh, we have the stallion and Buck, the paint horse, back there by Benny's place. I just brought 6 more home, so that makes 8. There are the 2 black mares I bought with the stallion, which makes 10 on our place."
"We have the old mares, the bay and the black that are bred. I got those from the harness maker's neighbor, along with a mare and a gelding that are younger, about 7 now. Those 4 are at Oliver's for now. I have to work something out with him about them. He wants to use a team this year. Anyway, that brings the total to fourteen, and there is the pair loaned from the Williams family that are down at Jeff's right now. He's using them to work up the garden, and such, I think. That's 16 total, 3 of which really belong to the Williams girl. I need to ask Micah if they can take those back, so the girl gets the benefit of them."
Margaret said, "And Julie gets 2 of the ones you just brought home, right?"
"Yes, and she said she'd put them on her farm across the road from us and have Roy Bates use them there. We'll have to get some grain over there to feed them. That will help our immediate situation some, but not enough. And we could put some on her other farm where Ken and Carolyn are living. We can make it work."
"Can we use that many horses?"
"We'll need more if we are going to farm the bottom ground on down the creek. That was all absentee landowners from our place on down to Micah's, and nobody knows what happened to them. Oliver farmed that a couple years ago, but when he slowed down, somebody else rented it and I heard they are no longer among the living. Oliver said the ground is up for grabs, because the landowners lived in Louisville. That whole city is pretty much history now. The Sheriff said that they aren't letting anybody cross the bridges in either direction since the Cholera broke out over there. Even if the landowners are still living, they can't get here, and they would be a disease risk so we don't want 'em."
Margaret said, "What if they show up and want it back?"
"Then they should thank us kindly for keeping it from growing up in bushes and trees. My thinking is, we use it until somebody says different. If the owners show up and can prove who they are, then they can have it back. They won't be in any position to farm it, so we can work out a rental agreement later."
"So, you and Jeff and whoever are going to farm all that?"
"We're going to need hay and pasture worse than grain now. With a limited market for grain, the best we can do is raise beef and horses and some hogs. The horses mean we'll use more ground for hay and pasture. I figure we'll raise the grain mostly on the other farms and keep the hay and pasture all close to home so we can keep a closer eye on the stock. Some of the more distant ground we can put in market garden crops. The Planning Commission is still trying to work out how much of what and who will raise it. And it is time we stuck some plows in the ground. It's too late to do the plowing with horses this year, and we don't have enough horse machinery anyway. That's another headache I have to solve"
"You're biting off a big chunk, Alan."
"Nobody else to do it, and you know it. Those town folks will work, but they can't manage farms. I want to hire several people this year, but I'm afraid I'll have to teach 'em every last thing to do. Well. Enough talk. I have to get busy. First, I want to get that pair of horses down to Julie, and take her wagon. Just as well hitch 'em and drive 'em. You want to go along?"
Margaret decided she did. "Yes, I need to talk to Lynn and Julie about what they want to buy when that steamboat comes."
Alan asked, "Where's Melissa today? She might want to go, and Allison, too."
"Melissa is helping Benny plant some garden, and I think its' a group project back there. I'll go see what they say while you get the horses coralled and hitched up. I need to put that stew on the back burner for lunch. I'll get Cindy to watch that."
Margaret went out the front door and saw Jonah playing with the dogs in the yard. "Jonah, would ask your Mom to come over here please?"
"Yeah! I'll get her!" He got up and ran with typical 5 year old enthusiasm. Margaret went back in and got the stew started.
The new horses were feeling good and a little hard to catch, but Alan knew that the way to a horse's heart was reached through their stomach, and took a bucket of feed along. Soon his other horses were greedily eating out of the bucket and the new ones came right up to see what they were missing. They knew all about buckets with good things to eat in them. Lead ropes were attached and the pair he selected followed him willingly to the barn and the tack room. With their shiny synthetic parade harness on, the pair strutted their stuff, marching with heads held high.
They were well acquainted with their wagon, too, and hitched up like pros. Alan had seen his wife go back to Benny's place and drove the team there down the farm lane. Allison came out of their cabin and said, "Wow! We get to go in style today!" "Nothing but the finest for our favorite people," Alan told her. "Are the other's ready?"
"Yeah, here they come."
The women arranged themselves on the bench seat in the wagon, put there for parades, but handy for the purpose. Alan drove to Jeff and Lynn's farm with the team at a fast walk and was surprised how fast they covered the distance. These horses were bred for travelling.
Julie was expecting him and came out of the house with a beaming smile, followed closely by Michael. She told Alan, "Looks like you found some top quality stuff!" "Wait till you get the bill," Alan said with a grin.
"Jeff told me. I think it was cheap. And they are gorgeous!"
The horses tossed their heads, acknowledging the praise.
"They act like they know how good they look," Margaret smiled and said. "A little bit snooty, if you ask me."
Alan tied the driving lines to the brake handle and got down from his seat. "You just as well get acquainted with them now. I'll show talk you through unhitching and unharnessing."
"Let's put the wagon in the machinery shed," Julie said.
"Okay. Get up there and show 'em who's boss."
Alan guided her through driving the team and backing the wagon in the shed where they unhitched. Michael tagged along and held the horses while they were working. Julie said it was love at first sight. She led the team to the barn where they got the harness off. The horses followed her like a couple pet dogs to the pasture behind the barn where she released their lead ropes. They sniffed the grass and took sample bites, then looked at her briefly and wandered on out into the grass.
Alan watched from a distance. "Looks like you're getting along with them."
Julie had an ear to ear grin. "I've wanted horses since I was a little kid! Now it's not a luxury. We need them. Yeah, we're going to get along just fine."
Michael asked, "Can I drive 'em sometime Aunt Julie?"
Julie smiled and said, "Probably more than you will ever want to!" ______________
Micah said, "I gotta do somethin' about that spring. I keep havin' to dig it out, and it keeps fillin' back in. I need to lay up some rock around it."
"It'd be nice to have a springhouse to keep the milk and butter cool," Nancy said.
Micah thought out loud. "I need mortar for that. Hey! Alan's got some mortar, an' I can dip sand outa the river up by that sand bar. Not much rock here though. Likely easy enough to find, though. You go on up the valley an' the ground's pretty rocky. There's piles on all them old farms where they picked it out of the fields. Have to be careful, though. The snakes will be awake now, an' I don't need no copperhead bites."
Micah, Nancy and Marissa went to see Alan about some mortar. When they drove in the Walters' lane, it was right behind Alan riding one horse and leading another.
Marissa yelled, "There's Jack and Bess! Oh, it's been so long since I seen them!"
Alan tied the team to the pasture fence by the house and greeted his visitors. Marissa ran straight to the horses, hugged necks and rubbed noses.
Micah said, "Nancy wants a springhouse 'cause we got a cow, an' I was wonderin' if I could get some mortar off you? I'll pay you somehow, whatever you want for it."
"Yeah, I got enough to do quite a bit, since the boys got some down at Speed at the cement plant. How much you want?"
"Well, I dunno exactly, I want to lay up a wall about 3 foot high and make a box of it maybe 3 foot wide an' 6 feet long. If I use rock, it's gonna take more mortar, 'cause they don't fit so good. Might take 6 or 8 bags. What do you think?"
"Yeah, something like that. We need to save trips, so how about you take a dozen bags and then bring back what you don't need?"
"Yep, that'll work. Now, what d'you want fer it? I still got guns and ammunition, and fishin' stuff."
Alan thought a minute and said, "We can settle up later. I want some of that smoked fish for next winter."
Then he turned to the girl and said, "Marissa, would you want those horses back now?"
Her look said it all. She asked Micah, "Can we take 'em home now? We've got hay and pasture, and they know how to work now!"
Micah said, "Uh, we could use 'em, that's fer sure. Oh, Alan, I got a tractor that was on a farm up North of us. Nobody there fer a long time, it looked like, so we got that an' a farm truck an' some gas an' diesel. We c'n do some farmin' now, but the fuel is gonna run out some day. They had big round bales of hay there, too, an' we hauled a mess of it home, so we got plenty of hay for a coupla years it looks like."
"That sounds pretty good. Say, Marissa, would you want to sell your paint horse? He's back at Benny's place, and he's taking good care of him."
She said, "That was Dad's horse. Bess was mine and Jack was my brother's. They are the ones I want. I guess I would sell Buck if you want him. You're good to horses, so I know he'll have a good home."
"Yes, we'll take good care of him."
"What would you give me for Buck? I don't know what horses are worth now."
Alan said, "I've paid a lot for some heavy work horses, but Buck isn't that big. I could give you more than half what they cost, because he is a good riding horse, and can do farm work, too. I'm thinking about 800 old dollars. I can pay you with silver that will always be good, and that comes to 18 dollars face value of silver, plus a quarter. If I get the saddle and tack with him, I'll make it an even $20 in silver."
Nancy told Marissa, "You make up your own mind, but I can tell you that's more than a fair price for him".
"Yeah, I'll sell him for that. Some people want silver for stuff now. 'Specially stuff that's hard to get. I could spend that when that boat comes with stuff. We need some things."
Alan shook hands with the girl and said, "I'll be right back with the money".
After a trip to the house, he gave her fifty dimes, twenty quarters, and 20 half dollars.
"If you have the right size coin for what you want to buy, you'll come closer to getting a good deal," He told her. He added then, "Jack and Bess have shoes on now, and are okay for a while, but when their feet grow out some, they'll either need them taken off and trimmed and re-shod, or you could save the shoes and let 'em go barefoot for the summer if they aren't on the road too much, or pulling too hard. When they need attention, come see Ken Porter and he'll fix 'em up and treat you right, okay?"
"Thanks Mr. Walters. You've been real nice to me," Marissa said.
They loaded the harness in the truck with the mortar for Nancy to drive home, then went to the barn for the saddles. Micah and Marissa took it easy going home, enjoying the ride while Micah looked around for a likely place to get rocks for his springhouse. He saw a pile he'd forgotten
beside an old barn that had fallen down. It was closest to home, so he'd go there for stones. He had some lumber and some good metal roofing he'd gotten at the farm across the river, but he'd have to hunt for some tin snips to cut it with. There might be a pair at the farm, if he hunted for them. That would build a roof over the springhouse so he wouldn't have to clean the leaves and junk out of it so often.
PROGRESS, cont'd.
"That's outrageous! A whole silver dollar to PARK, for goodness sakes!" Margaret was fuming. "They will only have one chance to collect, so they are taking advantage of it," Jeff said. "Hard telling if that boat will be back again."
Jeff, Lynn, Michael and Julie had all squeezed into Jeff's big truck for the trip. Oliver and his wife had brought Marissa Williams in their pickup pulling his stock trailer, and Margaret, Melinda, Allison and I had crammed into my pickup pulling our utility trailer. It had been a cramped 40 mile ride for all of us. The women were not in a particularly good mood. It was about 100 yards to the nearest woods where anyone could find privacy for bodily functions, and that didn't help matters any.
The farmer had his pasture mowed, and was allowing people to park and stay as long as it took to do their trading. He had the advantage of having the field closest to the dirt track that led over the bluff and down to the riverbank at the spot known as Tobacco Landing. I didn't think it was all that high, since he had hired a crew to clear the old roadway down the steep wooded bluff and had filled in the worst of the 100 year old washout gulley. It was almost too steep to walk on, and far too steep to drive any vehicle down there. Whatever people brought from the boat would have to be hand carried to the top of the hill.
I had heard from the crowd that the boat was supposed to stop many places along the river, including Mauckport, not far downriver. But the toll for parking was even higher there.
On the chance that the boat was late, we had brought food and some water to do for a couple days, if necessary, and left people in charge at home in case we were delayed. That was a good idea because the boat didn't get there until a day late and it was near dark when they tied up to some huge trees. The boat pilot did a good job, but still some mud showed on the stern wheel when they got it tied off. The river had changed some over the years. The big flat that used to be the boat landing was now 15 or more feet underwater because of the dams in the river built about 70 to 80 years ago that raised the water level.
Excitement was running high, anticipating the first shopping trip for most people in almost a year. Every form of conveyance was parked in the field, bicycles, horses, big trucks, old cars, and some pushcarts. When the boat blew it's whistle approaching the landing, a throng descended the steep trail, mostly dressed in their best clothes. They were disappointed that it was getting too dark to see inside the boat, so trading would begin the next morning. The boat crew was invited up the hill to the shopper's camp for food and drink, so there was a fine party that evening, as the crew told of their adventures coming upriver. Lots of inquiries were made about goods and prices, but deflected as being too numerous to tell about. The goods were all arranged in what had been fancy guest rooms and prices were marked.
Somehow, local folks had gotten a huge stack of firewood moved down that steep hill to the small flat below. Bargaining began the next morning on the price of firewood and tobacco they would accept in trade, and on the prices asked for goods on board. The boat Captain had heard of the Cholera scare around Louisville, and refused to land on the Kentucky side above Brandenburg. This was his last stop before going back down to Saint Louis and points South. There was more stock left on the boat than I had expected, after hearing that we were tail-end Charley on his route. The prices were high, but I had expected that. By evening of that day, the Captain announced that they would stay one more day, "to allow everyone a chance to buy".
Oliver, Jeff, Julie, and I had made the rounds of the displayed goods and delayed buying anything until the crowd thinned down some. Some deals were struck at a small discount for quantities of items, and the larger the quantity, the better the deals got toward the end of the first day. Our group hadn't bought anything much yet. We talked it over and began to see that we had the upper hand in bargaining, since the crowd had begun to dissipate and there was still a lot of stuff on board the boat. There just hadn't been that much silver and gold to be had around here, or anywhere, it looked like. We decided to wait until the next day before buying anything.
Fully half the crowd had left by that evening, and some of those remaining said they would spend the night, but they were done trading. Some, like us, were hanging around waiting for better deals the next day. The Captain and his crew took their meals separately from the main group, and some disgruntled sounds came from their camp late that night.
The four of us approached the Captain the next morning, after it was clear that 3/4 of the crowd was gone, and told him we had gold, silver and tobacco to trade, and we were looking to buy large quantities of goods to resell. He was not happy, but he agreed to cut his prices by 40% to avoid having to haul it back with him. It would be up to us to move the goods, and he wanted it done as fast as possible so he could get moving again. He had paying passengers waiting at Brandenburg and other stops to pick up on the way back and he was 2 days behind schedule. We made our selections and began to move it all to the lower deck. The Captain was businesslike as we paid him, if not congenial. The trip had not worked out as well for him as he had hoped. We were hoping the trip was worthwhile for him so he would continue to bring supplies, but he said nothing about it.
Julie located some local men to help move goods off the boat and up the hill. They proved to be worth the money, and took their pay in goods from us. We all worked hard the rest of the day, moving our goods up the bluff and getting it loaded in trucks and trailers. By dark, we were all exhausted. We cooked and ate, then settled down in truck seats and on bundles of clothing to get some sleep. The crickets had even gone to sleep. There was no breeze to speak of when the sun set. Through that stillness, we heard a distant muffled BOOM. Everyone sat up and wondered at the sound.
Margaret looked at me across the trailer where we had had laid down. "What was that?"
I sighed and said, "I think we just heard the boiler blow up on that steamboat. It was never intended to burn wood, and they probably couldn't control the fire that well. I think the Delta Queen has made her last trip."
The next day we met a fellow from Mauckport on our trip home when we stopped along the road to cook, and learned that was indeed the case. The boat was still tied up at Brandenburg when it happened. What we bought would undoubtedly be the last for a long time to come. ___________________
We had bought a load, though. My truck was loaded heavily with salt and mineral blocks for livestock, and 50 pound bags of salt for preserving meat and for pickling, and a couple dozen 50 pound bags of sugar. I had paid dearly for four 5 gallon buckets of motor oil. The trailer had lighter items, but more value in things like military surplus boots, socks, Tee shirts and underwear. There were boxes of hand sewing needles, pins, thread, bolts of fabric, combs, hair clips, makeup, and other feminine niceties. I had bought a big box of candles on speculation, mainly for the paraffin wax. I hoped it would mix with tallow to make harder candles that wouldn't soften in hot weather.
The women bought all the canning jar lids in sight and a lot of quart jars. We had to fill a lot of jars with other small items to make room for everything, and make sure the tiny things didn't get lost on the way home. Needles and pins were too precious to lose, or let them rust.
Margaret and the other women had chosen the seeds. They were in the small paper packets and were from 2 seasons ago, but would probably germinate. They got a pile of it. My interests were different, and I hoped I had chosen well. I bought their entire stock of small bolts, nuts, washers, screws, cotter pins and other small hardware, about half a ton of it. And I bought all the drill bits he had and several sets of taps and threading dies, plus a confused mixture of small tools I had raked into boxes in the hurry of bargaining.
Margaret bought all the antibiotics and first aid items she could find, although it wasn't much. We had spent about $300 face value in silver. Oliver had spent a lot more and loaded his truck and trailer full. Jeff and Julie had spent some serious money, too, and had his tandem truck with the stock racks full to the top. Julie and Lynn were overjoyed at the fabric and sewing things they had been able to buy, but Jeff was even more happy to get some rolls of clear plastic for covering temporary greenhouses. Those things I'd heard them talk about, but I had no idea what else was in his truck. It might be years before we figured out what everyone had bought.
All these items had been in warehouses in Saint Louis and Memphis. I could not help but be amazed that we bought canning jars and lids that were made in Northern Indiana, had been shipped to Tennessee, and were now back within a couple hundred miles of where they were made. The glass for those jars had been melted by natural gas from Canada, and goodness knows where the metal and rubber for the lids came from. Our old system of business made no sense at all to me. _____________
We had learned from talking to the boat crew that Saint Louis still had electricity, at least most of the time. Some of the South had power, from the TVA and a few nuclear plants still operating. In fact, several states had put desperate efforts into keeping those nuke plants running, fearing Japanese style meltdowns if the systems failed for any reason. Because the supply lines for repair parts and equipment had been devastated by the wars and economic crash, major efforts were underway now to remove stored fuel from the remaining nuke plants and get rid of it any way they could think up. Some was going to old salt mines, and more was being sent to old capped oil wells. Some was destined for old underground mines of many kinds, as long as they were deep. A few plants had been shut down and fuel moved to the newest ones, resulting in rotating blackouts in some areas. Individuals could no longer pay for electricity anyway. Power was strictly a State government problem now.
I doubted that we would see anything shipped into our area again on any regular basis. There was little oil, very limited refinery capacity, no functioning currency, and few surviving people to run
it all. State governments were trying to patch some things together, but it could be years before we had a functioning economy again beyond our local area. Without a central government, miltary command had reverted to State control and was fragmented. If what I had heard was reliable, we were on our own for the foreseeable future. The people on the boat had no news from outside the continental US.
Jeff had Michael and Julie listening to the shortwave radio at night, but heard only bits and snatches of conversations and none in English from abroad. In the US there were a few surviving HAM radio operators, but their information was also limited to local things and described situations very much like our own.
I decided that we needed to meet with Sheriff Wilkins and relay that information so we could better plan for our future. Everything we had started to dream about with the coming of the steamboat was not going to come to pass. Trade was not going to resume in any significant way. I had once read an estimate by some official that if the electric grid went down, 90% of the US population would be dead within a year. Our community was doing a lot better than that so far, but we would have to do all we could to keep things from getting worse. We had some hard decisions ahead of us and we lacked some critical skills and knowledge, in particular, appropriate medical and veterinary skills, small scale agriculture, and small scale manufacturing. Soon, we would have used all the leftover goods from those who had not survived, and would be left to our own devices.
I had a thought and resolved to make it happen. We needed to preserve the knowledge and skills of our oldest people who still remembered how to live in the old ways, before electricity, mass production, the computer age, and just-in-time delivery. We needed to create a brain trust and use those people to teach those who needed to learn. We needed a broad spectrum apprentice program. We just needed some guidance in that direction. Getting an education was going to take on a whole new meaning.
Margaret and I made a list of needed skills. Farmer, blacksmith, doctor, midwife, dentist, veterinary, dairyman, spinner, weaver, miller, herbalist, carpenter, mason, gardener, butcher, baker, and candlestick maker were high on the list. It got to be a long list.
Chapter 67 NEW THINGS May, 2013
At the next Market Day, business was booming for us, Oliver Rice, and others who had found new crafts to exploit. Salvaged goods were still a big part of it, but we traded a few things from our purchases, mostly personal care items that Margaret had picked out. I knew people were wasteful by nature, so I refused to let any important things be traded off. I had a better idea. I sought employees for the summer, and offered wages in farm produce, a little silver, and some basic items like soap, needles, thread, cloth and candles in limited amounts.
I put out the word that I wanted to talk to someone who knew about making pottery. It was late in the day when a woman about 50 years old came to see me. She had been the art teacher at the school and had a personal interest in pottery and textile arts. She was currently working at the school caring for children there, and doing a lot of the cooking as a County employee.
We talked for an hour and arranged to meet again the following week. I gave her a weeks' worth of cooking oil, cornmeal, and wheat flour to pay for her time.
Based on what she told me, I did some experimenting with the clay I had dug from the back of our farm. First I dug away all the non-clay dirt until I had an exposed layer of clay. I dug a couple bucketfuls of the grayish clay, keeping it as pure as I could, and lugged it out of the woods. I then dug 3 pits about 2 feet square and 6" deep, all in a row. I lined the first 2 with plastic trash bags we still had left, mixed a couple buckets of clay with water until it was a thin soup and poured it into the first pit. I covered it with a scrap of metal roofing and left it until the next day. After lunch the next day, the clay had settled in the pit and clear water remained on top. I carefully followed the woman's instructions to skim off any floating debris and then siphon out the water into the second pit and scrape up only the top 2/3 of what clay mud was settled. That went into the second pit and got thoroughly stirred into a milk-like slurry. That was covered and allowed to settle for 2 days.
This process let the coarsest particles of grit and sand to settle to the bottom in the first pit and be eliminated. The second pit had mostly fine clay particles in it and took longer to settle. By the 5 day, what I got out of the third pit was really slimy stuff. The water had soaked into the ground under the unlined pit and leaving only pure fine clay on top. I took the top 3/4 of that out, still very soft, and put a thin layer in a large flat pan to dry in the sun, saving the rest in a clean bucket. The almost dry clay was now pliable and leathery feeling.
Per instructions, I left a thin square of this clay to dry thoroughly in the shade on a board. It was dry by evening so I built a fire in the forge and warmed it slowly laying it on 3 small stones over the fire. I baked it progressively hotter until it was glowing a clear bright orange, almost translucent-looking, with a somewhat greasy look to the surface. I slowly let the fire cool, reducing the air supply until the piece cooled to a bright red, then covered it with coal ashes and left the fire to cool and die out on its' own.
The next day was Market day again. I pocketted the burned clay piece from the forge, now a brick red and somewhat cracked. I covered the bucket of the remaining cleaned clay with a lid and put it in the wagon with our trade goods. Sheryll Grace came by late in the day to inspect my work and got very interested.
"This stuff is very nice," she said, rubbing the soft clay between her fingers. "Let's see that piece you fired again. Yes. It needs more refining, and some tempering with grog, then we can make some nice pottery with it!"
"Would you be interested in a full time job working for me as a potter?"
"Yes! I have a lot of questions, but yes! That's what I want to do!"
Our first trade school had its' teacher.
NEW THINGS, cont'd. May, 2013
Jeff had hired two young fellows to help him plant potatoes, and had two acres total in 4 different patches. Each was located as far from the others as possible so if he got an infestation of Colorado Potato Beetles in one, hopefully they wouldn't find the others. They had grown a lot of Cayenne peppers the year before and had the barn hung with strings of those, so if bugs appeared, he would make a concoction of tobacco and peppers infused in water, with soap for a wetting agent and sprinkle the plants. That combination seemed to drive out just about any sort of pest.
The two guys had brought a tent to camp in for the week they were working and Jeff provided food. They stayed on to set out tobacco and cabbage plants, then another few days to plant more of the market garden, being expanded this year to most of a ten acre field on Julie's nearest farm. It was becoming clear that Jeff would need more summer help, and the 8 miles to town was too far for them to go home each night. Jeff, Lynn, and Julie discussed it over breakfast and concluded that they needed someplace for their hired help to stay for at least 5 days a week.
The deal was, hired help could ride either to, or from town with Jeff's family on Saturday when they went to Market. If they stayed in town Saturday and Sunday, getting back to work was their problem. They got paid a small amount in silver on Saturday morning before they left for the Market. The family thought that most would choose to come back with them for the free food over the weekend, which it turned out they did.
Jeff and the two hired men cleaned out the well on the Wilson farm and dipped many buckets of water out until it was clear and clean. They roofed over it and made a wooden cover, then built a windlass for a rope and bucket to draw water. The ancient stone lined well was 22 feet deep, and held a constant 6 feet of water, no matter how much they dipped out.
The sawmill was fired up again and timber logged out with the horses to build 4 new small cabins and outhouses on the Wilson place next door. The leftover treetops were worked up into firewood for cooking by the hired men. With the hired men helping, the 4 cabins went up fast, built of squared logs to save precious nails and roofed with metal salvaged from old farm buildings in the lower valley. They also built a communal summer kitchen not far from the well. It was an open sided post framed structure with a stone fireplace, some shelter from rain and wind being given by tall ricks of firewood along the outside. It was floored with rough flagstones set in gravel, both hauled in from the upper part of the creek.
There was no provision for heat or cooking in the cabins, only eating and sleeping space with some loft storage, and bedding was limited to four built in wooden bunk beds per cabin. A table and two benches were made for each cabin of planed lumber, and finished with linseed oil to make cleaning easier. The floors were shiplapped, planed 1 1/2" thick lumber left unfinished. Jeff bought windows from the County salvage team and made thick plank doors, hung on heavy wooden hinges with hickory pegs for pivots. A simple wooden latch bar was made with a peg to release it from the outside. There were enough big shade trees around that the cabins were fairly cool in summer.
When word got out of the facilities they had for their employees, Jeff and Lynn had people lined up wanting to work. ______________________
Despite the heavy load of Spring work, Benny had made good progress on his cabin earlier in the Spring, and had it finished now except for the fireplace and chimney. He worked on that a little at a time as he had the chance. Not being an expert at laying stone, he had watched and helped with Charlie's fireplace, so he was learning more as he went. The hard part was done, and only the chimney height had to be increased. The most difficult part of that had been a trip to the river to wash enough sand for the mortar and haul it home.
Benny's one day a week of guard duty as a deputy left him time to work for Alan as needed, and lately that had been pretty steady as crop ground was being plowed and disced. They would be planting next week, so he would have time to finish laying his chimney. He and Charley had a big garden they had put in together. The root cellar was still pretty full of food, and he had what he needed in other goods now. Margaret had bought him the dishes he wanted on their trip to the steamboat, and he had traded for a big cast iron kettle and a dutch oven he wanted. He told Rich he needed a pair of wood candlesticks, and asked Cindy to make him up a couple dozen candles. As soon as he could get the fireplace laid up, he and Melinda were going to get married.
He and Charley had talked about what had been State Forestry ground behind their land. The State government was so small now and had so many other priorities, they sent letters by messenger of their latest policies to each county seat, if they still existed as a town. One of those policies was to allow settlement in State Forestry land, as needed by citizens on a homesteading basis. Both men filed letters with the Sheriff of their intent to homestead Forestry land adjoining them. Any "Improvement" of that land over the next 5 years would give them title to it from the State. That could be as simple as setting corner posts with their names on the designated plots. Charley and Benny had that done in a week, and now owned about 300 acres each of timberland.
The Forestry land had once been small hill farms that the State had bought back during the last Depression as a financial aid and conservation program. The plots they were claiming had each once had a farmstead on them. The remains of those were known to Alan and others in the community, consisting of some remnants of old fenceposts, a dug well, and the foundation stones or cellar of an old home. A vague dirt road wound through the forest from Alan's farm lane, passing each old farmstead in turn before ending on the county road above Scott Barger's farm. That dirt road ran roughly a mile from, and parallel to the county road that followed the creek in the valley.
Where once had been some small cleared fields near the old home sites, were now grown up in brush and trees, but some advantages remained. Both properties had overgrown orchards, persistent plantings of Daffodils and Tiger Lilies, and level ground that had lain fallow for 60 or 70 years. Both men saw those home sites as something for their descendants, and would work slowly at clearing the old fields again.
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Post by patience on May 26, 2012 17:52:08 GMT -6
NEW THINGS, cont'd. Summer, 2013 Jeff and Rich had been scouring the countryside for old horse drawn farm equipment in any condition. Sickle mowers were high on their list, along with cultivators, discs, and small planters that could be converted for horse use. Alan helped rebuild the machinery so that when their tractor powered things finally gave out they would be ready to do without it. His present worry was how to lubricate the mowers especially, because they, too, would eventually wear out and people would be reduced to the drudgery of cutting hay with forge-made scythes. Fortunately, that would be a long time, because most of the old mowers could use the knife sections and wear parts from newer equipment. Alan's first attack on the lubrication problem was to build a centrifuge for cleaning what used lubricants they had for reuse. There were a lot of the gasoline fueled vehicles of all ages sitting where they ran out of gas. He paid in silver for used engine oil, gear oil, and transmission fluid from every unused car and truck anyone could find. That was delivered to the gristmill where the centrifuge would run during wet seasons of plentiful water power. The miller did the work and was paid a share of the proceeds when lubricants were sold. It was a stopgap measure for as long as used petroleum products could be found, but a necessary one. The second line of attack on the lubricant problem Alan made was experimenting with making oils and greases from animal fats and vegetable oils. Grease could be made by partially converting lard or soy oil to soap with a limited amount of lye. The product was good for light duty applications. He continued to work on how make something for heavy duty uses. Shelling corn, haymaking, grinding flour and meal in a suddenly energy-deficient world were all problems he labored over. Alan knew that hardenable steel for cutting tools could be made from low carbon soft steel by the crucible process, but it took a lot of labor, time, and coal. To make the best use of what they had, he taught Ken and Nathan how to carburize mild steel on the surface, called casehardening, to produce useful cutting tools. Mild steel was "baked" at glowing yellow heat while packed in a mixture of charcoal and protein based materials such as hoofs, horns, hair and feathers, to get the carbon and nitrogen from those to penetrate the metal and make it harden when quenched from red heat. It was a smelly process, but it worked. File teeth could be cut with a very sharp chisel into soft steel and hardened that way, when the supply of files ran out. It had been done before. Old knives once traded to native Americans had been casehardened and only sharpened on one side to preserve that hardened surface. He reinstituted that process with some success. Until somebody got a relatively modern steelmaking process going, it would be a necessity. To further extend the supply of steel for cutting tools, Alan revived a process used long ago, where a small "bit" of hardenable steel was either forge welded or brazed onto a body of soft iron. His supply of forge coal was extended greatly by using dry wood and charcoal for heating unless the more concentrated heat of coal was required for large work, or for welding heat. Nathan had built a compound leverage press mostly of wood for John Avery to press cider. Nathan and Jeannie had taken over farming the Williams place, paying a share to Marissa. The property had a nice orchard and John's trees were beginning to bear apples too. John had collected all the plastic barrels he could find and was planning to make cider, hard cider, and vinegar. Some grape wine would also be allowed to ferment into balsamic vinegar for table use, a premium product. John's bees were doing so well that he had to establish homemade hives at Micah's place where the bees could range across the river for more pasture. Micah had begun to do a little business dredging out sand and gravel from a sand bar on the Muskatatuck River. More people wanted to build springhouses and fireplaces, forges, and other masonry projects. Micah had found a slip scoop the horses could pull from shore with a long chain, and dip out a good sized pile of material in a day. In winter, he continued to do some trapping, trading the furs to Roy Bates who tanned them into usable leather for many purposes, especially winter coats and mittens. Marissa was growing and maturing while she found her niche training animals. She had convinced the Angus cow to let Marissa milk her, and got the growing calf to pulling loads, harnessed with an inverted horse collar that fit his neck in that manner. She had collected more chickens that were running loose across the river, and had a several hens setting on eggs to hatch. Micah set traps around the henhouse section of the machine shed and caught a couple coyotes, a fox, and several weasels. That would be an ongoing battle. Rich, Alan, and Jeff had copied from some illustrations in old farming books from the library to make a "Bull rake" for gathering hay. It was largely made of wood, with very long tines that slid along the ground to collect hay. The hay was first raked into windrows with a conventional rake, then the Bull rake could go down a windrow and make a large pile, the begining of a haystack. It was pulled by 2 horses, allowed the driver to ride, and saved a lot of pitchfork work. Haystacks saved a lot of hauling hay to the barns and eliminated the use of a hay baler. They would use the haybine to cut hay as long as it could be done, but they had an answer for when some machine breakdown put a stop to that. Although the combines were still operating, now almost entirely on biodiesel, harvesting the small grains like wheat, oats, and barley would be a problem when it had to be done by manpower alone. Nathan was a really good blacksmith, and was applying himself with some success to the problem of making very long scythe blades for cutting those grains. Rich Hammond had learned about bending wood for a curved scythe handle, and had made his first grain "cradle". Copied from an antique, it had long thin fingers of bent hickory above the blade that "cradled" the grain into a small bundle as it was cut. Another laborer would follow the cradler and use straw to tie the grain into bundles for transport to the barn for drying before it was threshed. Threshing would have to be accomplished with a flail, or trod out with animals walking over it, the straw raked off, and the grain swept up. Everyone dreaded the day the combines quit working, but they had to be ready for it. Rich could see a coming demand for a lot more pitchforks, something that seemed to be in short supply. He was sizing up some trees he thought would be suitable for making them of wood, with the tines split from a single piece and bent to shape. He had seen one in the Museum, and was sure he could make it. Chapter 68, THE NEW NORMAL Fall, 2013 The pottery experiment had been pretty successful. Sheryl had directed the construction of a wood fired kiln, 2 potter's wheels, and a large system of clay refining pits. Her first firing was mostly successful, with some cracked pots, but most were sound and the glaze of salt and wood ashes had worked out pretty well. She had concentrated on drinking mugs and storage jars of one gallon capacity, both of which sold as fast as she got them to market. The coming of cold weather had shut down the operation until next year, but Alan promised to expand the operation next season and build her a better place to live, since the old RV was starting to fall apart from age and wear, and it had no provisons for cooking indoors without LP gas. Two antique looms had been set up on the second floor of the Mill, where Sheryl Grace spent part of her day teaching a couple women how to use them. She would spend the winter months at the Mill, also helping out there when Earl Richards needed it. They worked well together, and were becoming good friends. Sheryl had hopes for the relationship getting even closer. Earl did too, although he hadn't brought himself to let her know it yet. Rich made a trip to see the looms and made a lot of drawings. There was another loom at the Museum, but it was in very poor condition. He had a ready market for looms when he could get them built, but his other work kept him busy most of the time. Rich found a young fellow who wanted to learn woodworking and took him on as an apprentice. With his help, Rich's shop began to turn out more work. The apprentice slept in the almost unheated upstairs, took his meals with Rich and his family, and was generally a part of the household. Alan's horse herd had grown by 2 new Percheron colts last Spring, and he had every mare he owned, plus Julie's pair bred to his stallion. The herd would nearly double next year if all went well, and in 3 or 4 years, he would have several to sell. Nathan's alcohol still was working round the clock with some hired help. There was a lot of demand for medical needs, especially making medicinal herb extracts and sterilizing uses, besides what some wanted to drink. His shop stayed busy now, with people bringing him blacksmith work as they tried to convert to farming with animal power. The supply of methanol and lye had just about run out. Charlie and Benny were on a scouting mission to find more, much to the chagrin of both their pregnant wives. Jeff wasn't ready to give up his combine just yet, nor would Alan easily give up the use of the screw press which needed fuel for its' small diesel engine. The two big dairy farms South of town had partially resumed operation, after downsizing dramatically. They both delivered milk to town each day after cooling in the bulk tanks that had been moved to the creek, using a tank agitator powered by the current with a small water wheel. Both farmers had sold off 3/4 of their herds to individuals. Without power, it wasn't feasible to milk that many cows and handle the milk. They had worked frantically to get enough hay put up for their remaining cows. Even so, they made a good living because of starting butter and cheesemaking operations. Trade went on, without the benefit of much money in circulation. IOU's were the new paper money, and were circulating like paper money had in the past. The confidence in those IOU's varied with the names on them, but they were generally accepted. There were rumors of the State of Indiana discussing a new currency, but no agreement had been reached with adjoining states yet. There was no formal schooling yet, the children being taught the 3 R's at home, plus whatever skills could be passed on to them by their families. There was no unemployment problem. If you didn't work, you didn't eat, and people were addicted to eating, so they were motivated. Those who were too young, too old, or had infirmities that prevented them from working, were fortunate if they had someone to provide for their needs. Even the very old were adept at cooking, child care, and the other roles traditionally handled by their age group, so extended families living together was what worked now. Life got harder, closer to the earth, and more precious for its' uncertainties. _________________ Micah and his family had gone to Nathan and Jeannie's for Sunday dinner after church. Having eaten all they could hold, they were relaxing by the cooking fire. Micah opened his fiddle case and made an effort to tune it. When he stopped to rosin his bow, Nathan said, "Do I hear an echo?" Listening closely, they both heard another violin playing faintly. Micah said, "That's gotta be Oliver. He always did flat some notes." Jeannie, Nancy and Marissa came outside and heard it, too. When the music stopped for a minute, Micah began to play. He stayed at it for several songs, then stopped playing. He grinned and said, "Let's see what happens!" They sat in the Indian Summer sunshine and visited for a while, catching up on the news they'd heard. About half an hour had passed when Oliver and his wife rode in on horseback, Oliver's violin case hanging around his shoulder on a strap. ____________ Up the valley at Roy Bates' place, a Sunday community picnic was in progress when they heard the violins, and everyone stopped what they were doing to listen to the faint music from the distant hilltop. Alan and Margaret sat in the stillness and listened to the last notes of "Peace in the Valley". He looked at his wife and said, "Y'know, somehow I think we're gonna be all right." Margaret smiled and said, "Yes, I'm sure of it." ________________ THE END Fiddle playing Peace in the Valley: LINK www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWqVjc8Mw3Q
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Post by crf78112 on Jun 2, 2012 8:41:09 GMT -6
MAgnificient! ;D
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Post by patience on Jun 2, 2012 9:56:21 GMT -6
Thanks! ;D
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Post by clarasmithh001 on Jan 31, 2013 1:28:40 GMT -6
Thanks a lot for sharing this useful information.It contains wonderful and helpful information. I have read most of them and learned a lot from them. You are doing some great work. Thank you for making such a nice topic. pumpcoseptic.com
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Post by benjamindean on Jun 7, 2013 4:03:33 GMT -6
Great topic you have here.
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Post by millwright on Dec 14, 2013 17:52:32 GMT -6
Good info.
Good read.
Good job!
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Post by jerngen on Apr 7, 2014 15:40:00 GMT -6
I really enjoyed reading this. I hope you are working on another story
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Post by patience on Apr 7, 2014 22:00:48 GMT -6
I wrote the 4 posted now in a little over 2 years, and they range from 87,000 word to over 220,000 words. I have a sketch down now of only about 2,500 words, so it is going to be a while before I get another one finished.
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Post by papaof2 on Apr 8, 2014 16:23:53 GMT -6
Knowing how long it sometimes takes me to get one chapter done, I can only hope your writing goes faster ;-)
Occasionally there are rather long dry spells, with little more than an outline being produced over days (or weeks). But there are those all-too-rare days when inspiration flows freely and a couple of chapters appear. That's always good, even if the content is weeks ahead of the current point in the story.
The next chapter of my story is in progress, but needs a lot more meat on its bones...
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Post by hamrad on May 9, 2014 13:35:46 GMT -6
Thank you Patience, I really enjoy your work, it is whole some and filling.
kev
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Post by ydderf on Aug 28, 2014 12:40:18 GMT -6
Thank you patience. Your characters feel real. This is my second time through your story I enjoyed it as much this time as the first time.
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Post by gipsy on Jul 9, 2017 12:42:52 GMT -6
Hope more people decide to read this story. I am sure patience would enjoy know his work is still being read.
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Post by papaof2 on Jul 9, 2017 16:09:31 GMT -6
I've read all of Patience's stories more than once. He left a great legacy.
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Post by freebirde on Jul 10, 2017 17:21:27 GMT -6
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Post by 9idrr on Jul 10, 2017 20:29:12 GMT -6
I've read all of Patience's stories more than once. He left a great legacy. I think I've read all of these at least thrice. Sure am glad he shared 'em with us. You ain't no slouch either, papaof2. I've enjoyed most of your stuff immensely.
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Post by papaof2 on Jul 10, 2017 21:40:34 GMT -6
You ain't no slouch either, papaof2. I've enjoyed most of your stuff immensely. Thank you.
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Post by dwbscb on Jul 15, 2017 13:00:46 GMT -6
Any way to get these in pdf???
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Post by papaof2 on Jul 15, 2017 13:47:15 GMT -6
Any way to get these in pdf??? No, but you can click-and-drag to select all the text, use Ctrl-C to copy it, use Ctrl-V to paste it into Notepad, then go to the next page and do the same. Then save it under the story title. Faster then reading online and you still get to see all the comments. If you don't get to finish reading the story in Notepad, you can always mark your place by adding --place-- after the last line you read (just remember to save it) so you can easily find your place when you return to your local copy of the story.
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Post by bunyip on Sept 16, 2019 18:45:51 GMT -6
I've read all of Patience's stories more than once. He left a great legacy. Sure did. Vale patience, this is for you. youtu.be/7QGKlZLgz3w
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Post by bunyip on Sept 17, 2019 4:39:43 GMT -6
One of my favourite characters (and she was DEFINITELY a character) in this story was Sidney the cockatoo. Patience clearly knew something about these birds, and may have based Sidney on a bird he met? They are intelligent, long lived birds. It is not uncommon here for them to be passed on generation to generation of owners, or be the resident character in a business like a pub. youtu.be/BoiJ_KRjB2Myoutu.be/PRQebpwoOg8youtu.be/K41IMe28zhg
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Post by txkajun on Sept 7, 2020 19:25:37 GMT -6
I am waaayyyyy late to the party, but wow! But this is an ageless story. Thank you and well done!
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