The Danged Rocks

[bretf]

The Danged Rocks
A story of Hard Times in the Greater Depression

Part I: Amanda’s Story, Part 1

Chapter 1: Amanda

March 2, 2018

I’ve held it all inward, God knows I’ve tried
But it’s an awful awakening in a country boy’s life
To look in the mirror in total surprise
At the hair on my shoulders and the age in my eyes

Amanda, light of my life
Fate should have made you a gentleman's wife
Amanda, light of my life
Fate should have made you a gentleman's wife

“Amanda” Performed by Waylon Jennings
Written by Bob McDill


A light breeze blew stray strands of Amanda’s brownish-blonde hair into her face as she finished the last notes of Amazing Grace and flowed flawlessly into Ookpik. The plaintive notes from her fiddle brought tears from her reddened eyes and from the eyes of a number of other people at the gathering as well, but she played to the end. Her Dad deserved nothing less on this day- it was one of his favorite tunes. And what a day it was. It was one of those perfect spring days: the light breeze blowing; mourning doves were calling from the top of the cottonwood tree; the sun was bright in a cloudless sky, raising the temperature so the gathered group could almost remove their jackets. It was the type of spring day that made gardeners want to dig in the dirt after a gloomy winter; it made the kids want to start an outdoor game to burn off pent-up energy; it made housewives want to open the windows to air out the house and hang the sheets on the clothesline. In the past, men would be getting out dusty golf clubs and fishing poles, taking to the fields and streams. It was that kind of spring day.

After she finished playing, Amanda took a few moments to wipe her eyes while she looked into the hole in the ground and fought to maintain her composure. She pulled her eyes away from the sight as a sob and shudder went through her. After a bit she handed her fiddle and bow to her Aunt Carla and picked up a nearby shovel and, carefully avoiding the river rock mixed in the dirt pile, she gently poured the first shovelful of dirt onto the shroud wrapped body at the bottom of the grave. “That’s not Dad,” she thought to herself. “That’s just his shell. Jesus has a new helper in His garden now.” Amanda handled the shovel with practiced ease as she continued to move dirt into the hole; tears running down her face that mixed with the dust she raised and made dirty tracks down her face. She was 18 years old, tall and slender with an athletic build from playing basketball, running cross country and lots of hard work following the crash.

Amanda’s younger brother Brad reached out and held Amanda’s arm to stop her action, then took the shovel from her and began to add more dirt into the hole. Bob and Alan took up additional shovels and stepped to the grave and added their efforts to the process of burying their brother.

 
Amanda’s Cousin Melissa looked her sister in the eye, nodded, and they started to sing in clear voices that reflected their many years of practice. Melissa’s contralto harmonizing with Tammy’s lower voice in a lovely blend:

“I come to the garden alone
While the dew is still on the roses
And the voice I hear falling on my ear
The Son of God discloses.

And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.”

“Well Dad, it’s as you wished,” Amanda whispered to herself, barely hearing the song. “You always said that when you went to just turn you into fertilizer for the garden, so that we might still get some good out of you. Well, here you are.”

It wasn’t exactly as he had often joked. They were in a corner of the garden that was used now just to grow flowers, where his parents had also been laid to rest. “This was all so unnecessary,” Amanda thought. “If we just had medical care in this country, we could be out here together, planting seeds.”

The medical system had crashed with the rest of the economy nearly five years earlier. After years of reckless government spending and corporate greed where most good jobs had been sent overseas, government and personal debt skyrocketed. To fuel ever more spending, the Federal Reserve commenced with unprecedented flooding of the system with steadily more worthless “money”. The President, who would only fight with Congress on the budget with no intention of compromise, made spending reductions strictly on the domestic side. He was trying to cause the most pain possible at home in order to get the other party to agree to raise taxes. Most people continued their lives as if all was well, too deeply immersed in reality TV to see reality, although there were some astute folks who recognized the economy was on a precipice, just waiting for the right nudge to push it off. And then the real damage had struck. With the government so crippled and dysfunctional, some less than desirable people that had escaped their overseas cesspools felt the time was perfect to turn America into a cesspool. They started by hitting supermarkets and other places where large groups of people gathered. But the primary targets were the supermarkets; bombing them in locations all across the country, making most people afraid to go shopping. That was followed with bombs at other targets where they could affect many people at once. Then they disabled the majority of the power grid. It was so simple, blowing up a few key locations in the system that was linked together nationwide. Little food and no power were the ingredients necessary for a catastrophe. Commerce came to a lurching stop. It was merely symbolic when the Meadowlands was blown up prior to the Super Bowl being held there. Most games had been canceled leading up to the date of the game; the winner would not have been the true champion even if the game could have been played. The economy was so bad – not to mention the lack of television - it was questionable if the game would be held anyway; even as it was hoped to give an emotional lift to the hurting populace. Not that many people even heard about it. But it definitely put an exclamation point on the bombings.

*****
The song ended, the men finished filling the grave and stepped away. Amanda, her mother Amy and her Aunt Frances went to the fresh grave with a box filled with small plants – wild phlox and lupine, arrowleaf balsamroot and sage brush - and trowels to plant them in the freshly turned dirt.

 
“I…. can’t…. do…. it,” Amy said as her body wracked with sobs and the trowel fell out of her trembling hand. Brad went to his mother, helped her to her feet and wrapped her in a strong embrace. Amanda and Frances continued to plant as their tears flowed. All of the plants were native plants that Brad and Amanda had scoured the nearby foothills for that morning. “Dad sure loved the smell of sage brush,” Amanda remembered as she tenderly planted a small bush. “I just wish we could have found some wild onions. He always pointed them out when he would see them and loved their delicate little blossoms.” Amanda was momentarily lost in memories of hikes with Dad in the foothills looking at the spring wildflowers. A few of the plants were also planted over the graves of Amanda’s grandparents. Amanda and Brad had looked for plants that would grow without care in the hot, dry summer conditions of the area.

*****
While the teens had been in the hills, Alan and Bob had dug the grave. Alan was humming lightly while they worked. The tune running through his head helped him to deal with the gravity of the task at hand; it also helped distract him from the rocks that were growing ever more numerous as they went deeper. “Who decided graves had to be six feet deep?” he asked. Before the crash, they had just taken grave-diggers and their backhoes for granted. This was definitely a back-wrenching job.

 
“Beat’s me. But what’s that song?” Bob asked. “I can’t quite place it.”

“Just a song for this morning,” Alan replied. “It’s The Hollies,"He Ain't Heavy... He's My Brother”.”

 
“Yeah, that fits.” Bob answered as he paused in his digging to pull a handkerchief from his pocket and wipe the sheen of sweat from his forehead and stand straight upright to stretch his back muscles. While he rested, he thought back to some of the hunting and fishing trips the three brothers had been on together. Even when they were all busy with jobs and family, they had managed to get together for a few outings each year. He smiled when he remembered that someone usually had a fish brushed across their face or dropped down their shirt collar - totally on accident of course. He replaced Alan in the hole and continued to dig. They had learned that when the hole became too deep to work from above, a grave for one person was dug by one person at a time.

Both of them hummed the melody, cursed the rocks and talked sparingly of some of their more memorable trips. Those trips often included rain down-pours, poor night’s sleep, unexpected snow storms and packing elk out of some brushy hole they regretted going into. The trips that went without a hitch just weren’t as memorable.
“You know,” Bob said as he was working around a particularly big rock, “He could have at least got the danged rocks out of his garden.” Actually, Bill had developed a nice layer of fertile soil over the deeper layer of river rock and sand, though he had continued to haul buckets of rocks to the driveway each year that managed to work their way up as he tilled the soil.

Once the hole was adequate Alan clambered out with Bob’s help and they looked down at the hole together. “This really bites,” Alan said with obvious anger in his voice. “First Mom, then Dad, and now Bill. Is this what we have to look forward to now, burying our family. Welcome to the new American dream! We shouldn’t be burying our youngest brother. Thanks Mr. President and the rest of the SOB’s before you!”

After an awkward silence, Bob picked up both their jackets, handed Alan his, and put his own on. “That just might be what we can expect now,” he said. “Between the Prez, Congress and the puppet masters that pull their strings, they’ve pretty much screwed everything up big time. I just hope it’s not permanent but I won’t hold my breath on that.” After another pause, he finished, “We better go get cleaned up.”

*****
Amanda’s neighbor Mike led the gathering in a final prayer. Mike was a large man with a full bushy beard. Like most of the populace, he was a much slimmed down version of his former self. Prior to the crash he had been the information technology director of a small company – a dyed in the wool computer geek - and knew nothing about providing for himself without takeout food – even a supermarket stretched his boundaries. Bill had seen the sorry state Mike and his family was in and had taken them under his wing. Mike had become fiercely loyal to Bill and sorely missed his good friend.

Mike’s booming voice concluded with “Amen” and the group slowly left the garden and proceeded to the garage, Amanda and Brad lingering at the gravesite a while longer. Mike’s wife Leslie and some neighbor women had laid out a modest but filling meal for the group. Brad had butchered two roosters the previous afternoon and had started them slowly cooking in a Dutch oven before he and Amanda had gone into the hills. The chicken had simmered in a sauce Amy had concocted from Bills homemade wine – Amy had told him his wine was better for cooking than drinking - , butter and onions and garlic. A second Dutch oven was filled with scalloped potatoes. The ladies had put together a nice salad of a variety of greens, green onions and radishes, harvested that morning from the mounds of dirt that had only recently been beds in the greenhouse. A platter was laden with sourdough bread, made from Amanda’s Grandpa’s starter; he had claimed it was over one hundred years old. The meal was accompanied by quart jars of peaches, picked from the garden orchard and canned late the previous summer. It was all washed down with well water and fresh goat milk.
During the meal, which Amanda and Amy were not inclined to eat,- “It all smells so good but I don’t think I could hold anything down,” Amanda thought, the two went to their friends to thank them for coming to the service. Both struggled to put on a calm demeanor. They heard the same message echoed from all of their neighbors, “We don’t know what would have happened to us without Bill. Either we would have starved or gotten some disease from drinking bad water, or something else. He taught us so many things to help us get through. It was a true honor to know him and he would be deeply missed.”

 
Amy thanked them for their kind words. However, instead of comforting her, many of the comments added to the sense of dread that was growing inside her with Bill’s absence. She also had little idea of how to cope with the changed world. She had just followed his lead. It had been such a struggle; more mental than physical, although the physical change was evident. Her hair had gone totally gray in less than a year. Her clothes now hung loose on her even though she had the best muscle tone of her life. It was only through Bill’s calm guidance and knowledge that they had come this far. The prospects of continuing on without him terrified her so much that she was afraid she would begin screaming at any moment if she dwelled on it.

Amanda also thanked the neighbors for their kind words then took her mother by the arm and led her to the makeshift table where much of the extended family had gathered. The family’s talk was centered mostly on the final preparations for the following day. Amanda’s eyes began to tear again, thinking of leaving her home so soon after losing her Dad. “Jesus,” she murmured, “Please help us all through this time and give us the strength to bear the burden. It is so hard without Dad and now, to be leaving home feels nearly overwhelming. So Father, please give us your blessing on the move and travel mercies tomorrow. It is through your Grace that we are here at this time and I thank you for all you do in our lives. And please make sure Dad knows how much we all miss him! Amen.”
Bob looked at Amanda and said, “I’ve got my stuff pretty much loaded, just a few things yet to grab in the morning. I’ll be here just before first light so I can help get the livestock loaded.” “Get here” wasn’t that difficult since most of the family lived within a short distance of each other on the same street. The four siblings – Bill, Bob, Alan and their sister Carla - had all grown up there and as the crash deepened, the two that had moved away had both returned. All of their children were also there so they would be leaving as a large group.

 
“Thanks Uncle Bob,” Amanda answered. “We can definitely use your help. Mom and Aunt Fran will be getting the rest of the house stuff put together so it will be up to you, me and Brad to finish up outside. The animals probably won’t like leaving their beds that early so I’m sure we’ll have our hands full.” They continued to discuss the next day’s plans while Bob worked on emptying his plate of food.

 After the meal was cleaned up, the neighbors again offered Amanda’s family condolences and wished them well on the impending move as they began to make their ways towards home. Amy, Frances and Amanda gave Mike and Leslie hugs as they were leaving. Mark, their son, a pained look on his face, looked on with teenage awkwardness; hands deep in his pants pockets, his weight shifting from foot to foot; avoiding eye contact with everyone, not knowing just what to do or say. Mark had idolized Bill and hung on his every word. When the crash hit and Mike was bewildered in how to care for his family, Mark had gravitated to the quiet confidence Bill showed in teaching the family about beginning self-sufficiency. His hurt was as deep as if for one of his own family.

 
Amanda looked at him until he finally made nervous eye contact. “Mark, thank you so much for being here with us. My Dad was so proud of you for everything you did and learned to help your family.”

Mark looked back down at his shoe tops and tried to shove his hands even deeper in his pockets as if it were possible. He was barely audible as he mumbled, “Thanks Amanda. I’ll really miss him.”

 
Brad held out his hand to shake and Mike grabbed it and pulled him into a bear hug. “You’re the man of the family now Brad,” he said, as he released the embrace and held Brad by the shoulders looking him straight in the eyes. “It’s going to be up to you to take care of these ladies. I know any son of Bill’s will be up to the task.” Brad gulped hard at the thought, doubtful that he could ever fill in for his Dad, but thrilled at the recognition Mike gave him. With that, the families bid one last good bye and Mike’s family went to the road and started walking to their own home, the air noticeably cooler as the sun descended in the western sky.

After the last of the neighbors had gone, Amanda and Brad changed into work clothes and set about taking care of the evening chores. Amanda got the milk bucket and a bucket of grain and went to the goat shed to milk. While Amanda was milking the goats, Brad gathered the day’s eggs, gave hay to the goats and cows, chopped some mangles that he mixed with grain and soured milk to feed the pigs, then made sure the animals all had water. The feed had been loaded onto a trailer, secured for leaving the next morning, making it less convenient than it had previously been, slowing the process. Brad was still at the water pump when Amanda turned the second goat loose and joined him. Amanda took over the hand pump and pumped a final bucket with water for the house. They walked to the house enjoying each other’s companionship. They had that special sibling relationship where at one moment they were each other’s best friend and the next moment worst enemies, although always in a playful-bickering-pestering mode. The crash had drawn them even closer together. The bickering had slacked off and they now relied heavily upon each other.

 
“Amanda,” Brad said tentatively, “You know, I’m scared about leaving. This is the only home we’ve ever had. It is just so, I don’t know, . . . unknown at the cabin.”
“Yeah, I know. But we’ll all just work together and get along fine.” She rested her free hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently, reassuringly, as they walked. “It’ll be tough, for sure, but probably not much tougher than what we’ve already been through. I’ll cover your back – you cover mine, and we’ll both look after Mom and Aunt Frances. Dad always said that if the two of us pulled together, we could pull anything off. I’m finally starting to believe it.”

 
Once in the house, Amanda strained the milk while Brad cleaned and cartoned the eggs, then she cleaned up while he took the milk and eggs to the root cellar. With the temperature staying so cool at night, the root cellar was as effective as the refrigerator had been in the past at keeping things cool. It wasn’t nearly as effective in the hot summer months, but it helped.

 
After using the hot water from the pot that was always on the wood stove to clean up, Amanda re-filled the pot from her fresh bucket and set it back on the stove to heat. She returned to the sink and looked out into the gloom for a minute, then stood with her eyes closed tightly; thankful the day was nearly over while dreading the coming day.

[biggkidd]

Glad to see you finally joined us over here Bret. Guys you will enjoy Bret's story here it is pretty darn good.

Larry

[ydderf]

I'm not sure where you came from to get here. Welcome! I'm sure I'll enjoy your writing if this first chapter is a sign of things to come. Thanks for sharing it with us.

Fred

[kaijafon]

Ok, I think I'm hooked.... but I need a dozen or so more chapters to know for sure

thanks!

[biggkidd]

Guy's & gal's I first read this story over at homesteading today. It's real good. I suggested Bret come over here 6 months or so ago. The story over there is not in a post by itself it's in with a group of other stories called five years after or five years later something like that. Bret said when he was writing this it was his first attempt at writing. Well I thought it was a darn good story. If you all get to impatient for MOAR I can & will dig up a link. Long as Bret doesn't mind. I know he's posting it here to get some feedback from you all.

Larry

[bretf]

Thank you for the nice comments.

Larry, I don't know if you saw my other post, but I have been going back through this.  I edited it as I was writing but didn't know the ending until I was about 2/3 though it. Some things that looked pretty good at the time now makes me go Huh? so I have reworked some spots to make it more clear and added a bit here and there.  When I started the edit, it was 264 pages in my word document.  I'm at page 127 in my edit and it has grown to 278 pages.  So there will be some changes, just not drastic or story line changes. 

So after that, here's chapter 2.  I hope you enjoy.

Chapter 2: Falling out of Heaven

The farmer stands out in the corn
All dried up from drought
Says oh Lord what can I do
The sun's gonna burn us out
You've been faithful to provide
And I believe you will
Just give me some kind
Of sacred sign
And I can pay my bills

“Falling Out of Heaven” Performed by Kate Campbell
Written by Kate Campbell and Walt Aldridge


With the day’s activities and evening chores taken care of, Amanda put the last of the chicken meat on a slice of sourdough bread. Her nerves had finally calmed enough to eat something; it was amazing how therapeutic it could be to milk the goats. She and Brad joined Amy and Frances where they had settled into the sparsely filled living room. Bob and Bill had already moved most of the contents of the house that would be needed to the cabin. Much of what still remained would stay at the house.

The room was faintly illuminated by the flickering light of a single candle and the fire-light through the glass door of the wood stove. Amanda sat on a folding chair, mesmerized by the dancing shadows on the wall as she began eating her light meal. Amy looked to her and asked in a voice that skirted the edge of panic, “Amanda, really? Are we really doing the right thing, leaving home? Can we really make it isolated up there on the side of a mountain? There is still some functioning government. They have to get everything cleaned up before long. Are you certain this is the right thing?” Amy still desperately clung to the hope that things would right themselves any day; that the last five years would turn out to be just a dream – a very bad dream. “It couldn’t have changed things forever, could it?” she asked hopefully.

Amanda slowly chewed her mouthful of bread and chicken while she collected her thoughts on how best to answer – a trait she had inherited from her father. He had held to the saying “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt,” and always made sure of his answers before talking. Judging by the unsteady nature of Amy’s voice, the words needed to be just right this time.

“I’m not certain of anything, Mom. However, I feel in my heart we are doing the right thing, but I don’t like leaving any more than you do- this is the only home I’ve ever known. I know Dad thought and prayed long and hard about it. When the canal failed last year it really changed things. To go from having the water flow to us to having to carry water just to finish the growing season totally altered our circumstances. You know Dad and the other men couldn’t get the washout fixed. Unfortunately we live in the high desert. And it will return to desert without irrigation. He said it would need heavy equipment to fix the washout that we just don’t have access to. The government farms are getting all of the priority now. A bunch of subsistence growers just don’t have the same clout.”

 
“But I just want to go back to how it was before. I want to turn on the faucet and have water flow. Flick a switch for lights. I want to get in my car and drive to Wal-Mart or Albertsons and buy what I want, and I don’t even like Wal-Mart. I want to take a hot shower without heating water first on the stove. I want to sit down with a box of your Girl Scout cookies and veg out to some mind-numbing TV show. I just want . . . things right and . . . your Dad back,” she said in a quavering voice as she wound down, sobbing as the weight of it all closed ever tighter on her.

Amanda handed the remains of her meal to Brad and went to her mother and pulled her tight. “I know Mom, I wish things were the same as before too, but they’re not.” Amanda released the hug and held her Mom at arm’s length and looked her in the eye as she forcefully continued, “I miss all those things too. I miss my friends and I pray they are still safe. I wanted to go to high school – I dreamed of high school and everything I would do there. I wanted to do a lot of things besides working so hard to eat.” To herself she added “and I wanted to see Dad with my children, loving and teaching them as he taught me,” then had to fight hard at the emotion that flooded her before she could continue. “But that world is gone and we have no idea if it will ever be back. Dad thought this through and decided it would be best for us to leave, so that’s what we are going to do. And remember, with the spring and the generator at the cabin, we will have running cold water and some electricity again. Until the day comes you can jump in the car and go to the grocery store for what we need, we’ve got to keep providing for ourselves. The government isn’t going to do it – they can’t do it. It’s up to us. Dad and Uncle Bob have got the fields set up to irrigate at the cabin. We can still grow our food without spending every waking hour packing water to the plants.”

The shadows cast on Amanda’s face, coupled with the tone of her voice gave her words extra weight. Amy was buoyed by the strong confidence in Amanda’s response and looked back at her. “You know Honey, I always said I was there at your birth, but from then on you were your Dad’s girl. I can just hear him making those same statements. You are wired just the same as him and it is really showing through now. He would be so proud of how you are dealing with everything,” Amy told her daughter. “You two adapted to the changes effortlessly while it has been such an ordeal for the rest of us. If he just could have made his medication work effectively,” she finished in hushed tones.

“I still don’t want to go, but I guess I don’t have much of a choice at this point,” she continued in the same quiet voice. “Besides, I’m not sure how much I’d like the house now without . . . . It would just feel so empty.”

Amanda didn’t respond as she wiped at her eyes, but her mind was active, “Yeah, I’m trying so hard to comfort you but I sure wish Dad was here to do it. I’m nothing but knots inside. I don’t know how I’m going to be the strong one when I miss him so much. But it’s like he always said, ‘Somebody needs to do it and I don’t see anybody else stepping forward’,” she told herself.

Brad and Frances looked on quietly, each fearful about the coming move. Brad was nearly 15 and had been the typical pre-crash kid: more interested in video games and skateboarding than learning anything about the garden or animals. Bill had been especially proud of the transformation he had made. Prior to the crash, Bill had seriously wondered how Brad would make it in the real world without someone to pick up for him. He had certainly persuaded his mom and sister to cater to him. However, he had learned a lot since the crash, but didn’t embrace the change the way Amanda did and longed for the easy life he had led. Amanda had always been the one interested in every project Dad had gotten into: the garden, chickens, and the goats; Brad looked at them as distractions. Then after the crash, she was Bill’s number one helper and sounding board, even more than before, learning new skills to cope like she was born to them. Brad had made great strides but still, he would much rather go the pantry and grab a bag of chips than nurture some plant or chicken for what he could get out of them. As much as Amanda had emulated her father, Brad had developed many of the habits and attitudes of his mother.

Frances was like her sister Amy – a city girl through and through. She had fled to her sister’s house “in the Idaho sticks”, barely escaping Las Vegas when the riots erupted and torched most of the city. She had come to Amy and Bill’s house for safety with only what was in her car and wasn’t looking forward to leaving their home. The road had been a very fearful place. She felt it was providence Bill had called her and insisted – no demanded – that she make up what he called a bug out bag and have it and twice as much spare gas as was needed for the trip on hand as well as a full tank in the car. Not just on hand, but in the car, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. He had tried to talk her into coming to their house right away but she brushed him off as being reactionary. So he badgered her to have the BOB, gas and an escape plan with alternate routes – and those routes better be on physical maps, not some computer or GPS program. Then he called numerous times and would not let up until she sent him photos of her preparations. He still wanted her to come right away, but relented after reviewing everything she had ready.

Amy and Frances also had a brother who lived – or had lived - in Ontario, California. No amount of badgering him or his wife could make them prepare for an emergency escape from their home, not even giving them a guilt trip to at least plan for their kid’s safety. They flatly stated that the President would send the necessary help if there were problems. Besides, all the stuff on the news about FEMA’s response to disasters being inadequate, “Well that was just stuff the media made up to make them look bad.” Bill decided if they stocked up at all it would be at the liquor store. They were rarely short on that provision. They hadn’t been heard from after the cell towers lost power, when everything else lost power. Bill had learned through shortwave radio that the entire Los Angeles area had deteriorated into a burnt out war zone with the gangs having better fire power than the authorities. “Good thing the state government enacted all those gun control laws”, he thought. “That definitely made the law abiders safer, yeah right!” Soon after that, even shortwave transmissions from the area dried up. Added to everything else, not knowing if their brother and his family were safe or alive had Amy and Frances’s nerves raw and constantly on edge.

Amy, though she had been married to Bill for nearly twenty years had rarely understood his actions. She would rather not know the state of the world and just stay within her own cocoon, insulated from whatever was going on. She would humor Bill in most of the stuff he did – it was definitely better than his co-workers that spent their free time at the bars, but she didn’t “get” him. She grudgingly agreed to some of his purchases, but then would spend an equal amount on the kids, just having fun. His efforts at self –sufficiency were also a challenge; she would much rather pick up a chicken from the deli ready to eat than have one of his home raised birds. And raw milk; she said that stuff was even worse than those stringy chickens. But he had eventually convinced her on many vegetables. When they were first married, she called him a veggie snob. But after eating the fresh produce from his garden, she had to admit the flavor far surpassed anything she could buy. She also preferred his free-range chicken eggs, but didn’t know why he needed so many hens.

Following a long awkward silence, Amanda finally said, “We should all get to bed. We have a full day ahead of us tomorrow.”

 
Brad and Amanda made the final evening trip outside to secure all of the livestock for the night and check that everything was locked up. They had locked up the chickens at night prior to the crash for raccoon and fox protection. Now they were more concerned about two-legged predators for all of the livestock; and raccoons were viewed as just another food source. They were a lot scarcer than they had once been.

 Their dog, Maggie accompanied them as they made their rounds. She was constantly vigilant, watching over the house and stock pens for intruders. She had earned her keep; her menacing bark had frightened off night-time visitors on numerous occasions. Amanda and Brad each gave her some pats taking comfort from her presence.
When Amanda and Brad finished and returned to the house, Amy had banked the wood stove for the night and everyone made their evening bed-time preparations, and bid each other “Good night” and retired to their beds.

*****
Amanda went to her bed and stretched out looking in the dark towards the ceiling. Her mind was filled with the events of the day and the upcoming move. And then she broke down, tears flowing and sobbing at the loss of Dad and home. She had tried to keep herself in control for her mother and Brad’s sake. Now alone she finally let herself totally go. “It’s not right, God,” she moaned. “We still need him here. It’s only been a couple of days and I miss him so much, I’m empty inside. I don’t know what we are going to do without him.”

Amanda cried until the well of tears dried up and she sniffled, wiping her nose often. Finally she closed her eyes, just to see the image of the shroud covered body at the bottom of the grave, prompting even more tears and nose wiping. She lay awake into the deep hours of the night with the same image returning each time she closed her eyes. Eventually exhaustion won out, and she fell into a fitful sleep.

 
Amanda awoke with a start at hearing her Dad’s pained voice. She jumped from her bed and rushed to the living room. He was there, sitting hunched over in his chair, an agonized moan coming from his lips. His forehead was covered with sweat and his face was twisted in pain. Every muscle was rigid. She rushed over to him and knelt at his feet. She reached up to take his head in her hands; if she could just hold him, she knew she could help relieve his pain; and he dissolved into blackness; then she was again standing, looking down at the shroud in the bottom of the grave. The shroud wrapped unmoving shape.

Amanda rolled and tossed in her bed coming instantly out of sleep, gasping from the vivid images of the dream. She sat upright and tried to breathe but she couldn’t catch her breath. She frantically sought peace – realizing it had just been a dream, and slowly started to calm down and bring her breathing back under control. She lay back down, her open eyes staring at the dark ceiling, willing the images to fade; Dad in such pain, his body in the grave. Slowly, ever so slowly as she closed her eyes, her mind shut down and she eventually dropped into sleep once again.

 Amanda finished milking the goat – where are the rest of the goats – and looked into the bucket. What a pitiful amount of milk. She shook her head at the thought and let the goat out of the stanchion. The goat got stiffly off the milk platform, its usual nimbleness absent. Amanda stepped out of the goat shed and started towards the house. She felt a tugging on her leg and looked down to see a cocklebur attached to her frayed jeans, the well-maintained pasture overrun by burrs and thistle; where did those come from? As she looked up, she froze in her tracks. The roof of the house was caved in and an elm tree was growing from somewhere in the living room, rising above the walls. Every window was broken out and there were large holes in the walls. What happened to that? I just came out a few minutes ago. She slowly turned seeing disrepair and neglect everywhere, all evidence of Dad’s hard work gone. Her gaze fell on the corner of the garden; the burial corner was overrun by poison ivy. She dropped the bucket, milk splashing onto her legs as she pulled away from the burrs and hurried through the garden gate, and to the corner. Heedless of touching the plants, she reached for the base of the first plant to yank it from the ground; a vine snaked out and wrapped around her wrist. As she fought it, another vine wrapped her other wrist. The vines began exerting pressure, pulling her steadily down, down, down.

Amanda awoke in a sweat, fighting for breath. She looked around the dark room illuminated only by a slight gloom from the window and recognized she was in her bed in her room. It was just a dream. She sat up in the bed and leaned against the wall, afraid to fall asleep again; afraid of what her mind would conjure up next. Slowly she calmed down, sleep coming on her stealthily as the frightening images slowly faded from her mind.

Amanda slowly got out of bed and walked to her door. What had disturbed her sleep? She opened her door and looked around. There was bright light from the kitchen. She hadn’t seen that much light at night since the power had gone off. It was incredibly bright, but oddly, it didn’t make her squint. She stepped to the kitchen and saw a familiar sight: Dad was sitting at the table with a coffee cup in his hand, his head bent over his Bible, reading by lamp light. That kerosene lamp shouldn’t put off that much light. He looked up, saw her and smiled, his face seeming to light up, to glow like the lamp. “Amanda, come sit with me Darling,” he said.

 
She did as he said; confused after the dreams, this feeling so real, but in the back her mind thinking it couldn’t be; didn’t we bury him?; and sat in the chair he pulled out. “Uhh, . . . D . . . Dad, w . . . what are you doing here?”

“I’m really not sure. But I’ve been reading about Joseph. You know, he was a great prepper. He understood God’s message that in the times of plenty, you put aside for the times of little. I’m now at the section where the rest of Jacob’s, also known as Israel’s sons, except for Benjamin, have gone to Joseph and asked to purchase food. If we read far enough, the sons of Israel will leave Canaan and stay in Egypt. I’m wondering to myself if there are any parallels here to them and you leaving home. I don’t know; that’s too deep for me to figure out. But I would like to think we are being guided by The Lord in this. And if we continue reading, we will see that eventually, they will need Moses to deliver them from Egypt.

“I still think it is right for you to leave and go to the cabin. But be cautious and when the time is right, return home. Think your situation through and be ready to change your plan if it looks like you need to. As Joseph’s people would come to learn, what is your deliverance one day may turn out to be something else later. The answers are all here,” he said, gently tapping her forehead. “Just look deep for them and always ask The Lord for guidance. If you need help with Mom, read this section together and reason with her. I’m sure that if you lay it all out to her after going over this, it will be easier for her to accept. But she is right to be concerned. Nothing is a sure thing. Now give me a hug and go get some rest. You have a busy day tomorrow.”

 
Bill kissed her softly on her forehead and Amanda wrapped her arms around him and they held each other tight. A tear ran down her cheek as she relished the feeling of his strong arms holding her and drifted into her first peaceful sleep of the night.

[biggkidd]

Bret that sounds great once you get going good I'll read it again here and see how the changes go. I've read it twice over there. Thank you for bringing it over here and sharing.

Larry

[2medicinewoman]

Thank you for the new post. Good story. I, like Amanda, have conversations with people who are not physically here any more. I never think too much about it. It is who and what I am. I am pleased her Father directed her to a Bible reference. Although, through the years of my life, I have learned even if we make the wrong decision, God can make it right. I was so self-driven..I heard no God. Consequently, the prices for my education were high. Life got a lot easier and calmer when I finally sought God's direction.

duh . . slow learner - - - >me

[kaijafon]

Thank you! nice update! I can understand how editing a story can be especially one that was intertwined with other people's writing. Did that with my story about Coon. "Abuse it or Lose it".

I look forward to more....opps! I mean MOAR!

[fightheat]

Great read so far can't wait to continue.

[bretf]

Thank you for the nice comments. Bret

Chapter 3: Leaving


When you see that you're leaving
And you see that you're gone
And you see there's no saying
Goodbye

All the trees are in mourning
The light is late from the sun
Casting shadow on shadow
Now and from the sky

And it's hard not to want to turn around
It's hard not to want to back on down
We're only as strong as our hearts within
Only as strong

And all you know of where the road goes
Is someplace far and unknown
You would think you would have gotten
Used to it all by now

But each day just gets harder
Every journey alone
Never knowing if you'll make it
Back home somehow

“Leaving Song” Performed by Mary Chapin Carpenter
Written by Mary Chapin Carpenter


All too soon the first light of predawn came through Amanda’s window waking her. She groaned, looking outside, remembering fleeting bits and pieces of her dreams. She dismissed the first two as anxiety from losing Dad and her home, troubling but explainable, but the last one; was that really him coming to talk to her? She didn’t know but it had felt so real and comforting to sit with him again; to get the last hug in and hear his words of support. She got out of bed, stretched and went to the kitchen, her eyes lingering at the table and wondering, “Was it real”?

She went to the wood stove, opened the draft, then the door slowly, giving the smoke a chance to vent up the chimney and not into the room. She placed some fine kindling from the bucket onto the coals and blew on it lightly to get the flames started. The flames hungrily consuming the small kindling, she added some larger pieces of kindling, and sat back and watched the growing fire for a few minutes. With the dancing flames growing rapidly, she put two larger pieces of wood on the kindling – wood to take the chill out of the house and provide heat for cooking breakfast. Thoughts of cooking reminded her of other days. “Mom and Aunt Frances sure had trouble learning to cook on wood heat. I didn’t think they would ever stop burning the food. And Dad could shift three or four pans around on the stove without missing a beat and it all came out just right”, she remembered wistfully.

She went to the sink, filled the wash pan with water and washed her face, the shock of cold water draining some of the weariness from her. She rubbed at her eyes, feeling like they were full of sand; then dumped the water in the herb bed outside the door and refilled the pan and set it on the warming wood stove. Her Mom sure detested washing with cold water.

A mischievous smile came to her face as she went back to her bedroom for a packet. The family had been officially out of coffee for nearly two years. Dad had taken her aside and showed her one last sealed one-pound package he had hidden in an out of the way place. He had explained that someday Mom might need an extra pick-up treat; Amanda would know when the time was right if he wasn’t around to brew it. She had stashed it in her bedroom anticipating that the day of leaving would be the perfect time.

 
Amanda located the coffee pot where it had been packed away; her Mom didn’t think it would be needed it any longer; cleaned it and filled it with water and coffee and set it on the stove to heat. Personally, she didn’t understand the appeal of coffee. She had tried it once and nearly gagged on the bitter taste. “And the look on Brad’s face when I spewed it over the floor and then he helped me clean it up before Mom saw it. I’ll take an herbal tea over that stuff any day. No wonder Mom always filled her cup half way with cream and sweetener,” she mused.

As Amanda dressed the aroma of coffee began to fill the house. Well, at least it smells better than it tastes. She went to her Mom’s room and gently shook her awake and told her there was a treat waiting for her. She could hear Aunt Frances stirring in her room. She woke Brad, and then went outside to begin the morning chores. She had liked to sleep in until her Dad had started getting her up early to help him post-crash. He said that early morning was the best part of the day. She came to treasure their early mornings together, seeing the sun rise over the mountains. She paused and looked at the eastern sky, the mountains still a dark silhouette.

*****

Amanda was milking the second goat when Maggie let her know Uncle Bob was coming. It had been such a relief to see the goats and the pasture, all normal. It had only been a bad dream, but still, . . . She was still feeling the effects of lack of sleep and crying during the night; her throat burned from sinus drainage and her eyelids felt raw, but she was feeling better with the solidness of the goat. It was a familiar feeling, accompanied by the odor of the fresh milk mixed with the earthy barn smells; a welcome comfortable feeling after going through the previous day and night in a partial stupor. It didn’t totally free her mind, but the familiar activity went a long way to soothe her frayed nerves.

The other two does and the jersey cow hadn’t yet freshened. Bill had staggered their breeding so he could always have at least one animal in milk. Amanda finished milking and turned the doe out as Bob came in. “Good morning, Uncle Bob,” she said, her breath condensing in the air. Despite the glorious conditions of the previous day, the early morning air was brisk enough to remind everyone that winter wasn’t retreating without a fight. “Brad is getting the chickens crated and we can work on getting the animals loaded after breakfast. Mom is getting something ready, and I know she has a plate for you. She called out that we all need to start today with a good breakfast. She didn’t know when you would let us stop to eat again. You’re such a taskmaster,” she told him with a grin. “We have the pickup hooked to the trailer and ready to load; the wood is all ready to go in the gasifier but we haven’t lit it yet.”

 
*****

After the bombings began, Bill reasoned that if the terrorism continued – “Yes, Mr. President, I consider it terrorism even if the FBI has yet to declare it so, political correctness be danged”, he had thought – that gasoline could become very scarce for the common people. He had set his father Cal up to watch a YouTube video on how to make a wood gasifier for a vehicle to run on wood produced gas. He had also given him a book with full plans, descriptions, and photos; written by one of the most experienced users of wood gas. Cal was a die-hard tinkerer and was starting on the first unit the next day. By the time Bill’s concerns about fuel shortages were proven accurate, the family had five working gasifiers on their pickups and they were only slightly impacted by the lack of gas. It also became a great barter tool, trading ideas and labor on additional gasifiers to some of the farmers in the area.

Bill had stumbled onto an article in the Mother Earth News archives years earlier about the magazine staffs’ efforts to run their pickup on wood and been very intrigued. He spent a lot of time researching the process and was especially impressed to see that many farmers in Europe had converted their tractors to wood gas during World War II. He continued to print and file every article and ‘how to’ he could find on the process and had accumulated a large collection of materials that could be used to make one. By the time he needed one built, between his and Cal’s junk piles, they had most everything needed to make numerous systems.

 
*****
Amanda and Bob met Brad returning from the chicken house and they went together to the pump house and pumped a bucket of water that they took to the house. Packing water seemed to be a never-ending chore. They were greeted by the aroma of fresh sourdough pancakes – “Aunt Frances must have mixed it up while we did the chores last night, how did I miss it” Amanda wondered - smoked salt pork, fried eggs and . . .

“Is that coffee,” asked Bob? “I haven’t had any of that in a couple of years, if not longer. Where’d you get it?”

 
Amy handed him a mug full and explained about Bill’s secret stash and Amanda brewing it that morning. “I think she’s just trying to make the trip uncomfortable,” Amy said with a grin. “Drinking coffee always made me need to pee, so it will make for a long trip to the cabin. I hope you are planning on making a couple of rest stops.” Amy’s puffy red eyes told a different story than the happy smile she fought to maintain.

Despite the red eyes, Amanda was happy to see the emotional lift the coffee had given her Mom after she had been such a basket case the previous evening. Comfort food sure is a good thing. Just the idea of something from the past has lifted her up, and judging by Aunt Frances, and Uncle Bob, it’s contagious. Just wait till we get to the cabin and I give them the Hershey bars Dad had squirreled away.

Bob raised the cup to his nose and inhaled deeply. “Wow, that smells good,” he said and lowered the cup and took a sip. The contented look on his face transformed into a grimace. “Okay, as I said, it’s been quite a while since I had coffee, but is this stuff just old or lousy? I remember it tasting a lot better.”
Amy chuckled and handed him the jar of milk. “Well, didn’t you always drink that foo-foo stuff? You better try doctoring it up. You can sweeten it with honey. That’s what I put in mine; it sure tastes different than the Sweet and Low I used to use.”

Bob added milk, honey, took a sip, and added more honey. With the next sip, he declared, “It’s not what I remember but I think it will do.” He emphasized the statement with a long satisfied sip from the mug.

Amanda quietly observed her mom and Bob’s byplay while she took care of the morning’s milk. “She’s trying too hard to be cheerful,” Amanda decided. “But at least she’s not weeping.” The thought coincided with another blank stare by Amy, the smile sliding away.

They all sat down at the table, joined hands, and Brad led the family in asking the Lord’s Blessing and then they dug in. The smoked pork wasn’t quite like the bacon of the old days, but it was a more than acceptable substitute. And the pancakes were nearly like Bill used to make them. Brad would have preferred store-bought syrup to put on them but there was none to be had. Bill didn’t stock it once all of the corn was genetically modified “Franken Food” as he called it. Instead he stocked lots of cane sugar and recipes for making syrup from juices they could harvest. That morning they had chokecherry syrup - Bill’s favorite – and honey. The honey had been such a blessing, becoming the main sweetener as the stores of sugar ran out. The bees had seemed to get stronger as the use of chemicals in homes, gardens and fields had dropped off as the crash deepened.

Amy and Bob each placed over-easy eggs on their first pancake, and spread the runny yolks all over them. They all ate heartily; Amy and Amanda hungry from little to eat the previous day. No one was sure of when they would be able to eat again with the busy day ahead of them. Brad ate with the gusto of a growing teenage boy involved in hard work; one hollow leg and the other with a slow leak. His appetite made Amanda wonder if there would be enough pancakes for everyone to get their fill before he was done.
Bob took the final drink from his coffee and ended up with a mouth full of grounds, courtesy of the old-fashioned percolator. “Amy, don’t you know the grounds are supposed to stay in the basket, not in my cup?”

“I thought you needed more fiber in your diet. Besides, you’re becoming a mountain man; it’s time to toughen up.”

“Nope, it’s not gonna happen. I’m planning on sitting on the porch and letting you ladies serve me nice meals like this one. Tough is over-rated.”

After everyone finished, Bob thanked Amy and Frances for the wonderful meal, quickly echoed by Amanda and Brad. The three washed and headed outside to load the livestock; leaving Amy and Frances to clean up from the meal and pack everything that was left in the house that was going with them.

The day was looking like it would be another nice spring day. In the growing morning light, the sky was mostly blue with a few light wispy clouds. The air was already beginning to warm. Amanda was thankful for the nice weather; inclement weather would have made an already stressful day nearly intolerable.

 
Mark was standing at the cow and goat pen as they went out. “Good morning Mark. It’s great to see you, but what are you doing here,” asked Amanda.

Mark took a deep breath, shored up his courage and looked directly at Amanda, “Well, I just thought you could use some help; not that I’m in a hurry for you to leave or anything,” he added sheepishly. “And you don’t think I’d let the goats leave without seeing them off, do you?”

Amanda flashed him a smile, her vivid blue eyes twinkling in pleasure, as she started for the gate, making him stumble and turn red as he started to follow. She noticed that was the longest sentence he had spoken to her in some time. She smiled again at the effect of her smile and said, “Seeing the goats off, huh? Thanks, Mark, your thoughtfulness means a lot to me. And we could sure use the help. I’ve never seen a cow or pig yet that will do what you want, and very few goats that will.”

The livestock consisted of a jersey milk cow and a shorthorn bull calf; a boar, sow and gilt; the goats: four does, a buck and two weathers; and about forty chickens. Besides the two does in milk, the rest of the female animals were heavily pregnant. Amanda prayed that the trip and relocations wouldn’t cause any problems. Soon after the dry goats kidded, Amanda would dry off the two remaining does in anticipation of their own kids.

The cow and calf were loaded into the front of the stock trailer. The divider gate was closed and the pigs and chicken crate were loaded into the rear section. Amanda was sorry to be disrupting the chickens; the daylight hours had lengthened enough that egg production had greatly increased, and she guessed the move would set them back again, as well as mess up the goat’s milk production. Oh well, it can’t be helped.

The goats were loaded into the back of the pickup with their leads secured. For years Bill had been training the weathers and the young does as packers. Each time he would remove the pack saddles, he put a scoop of grain in a feed box in the pickup, making the goats jump in for a snack. They were so well trained to jump in that the weathers always jumped right into the pickup hoping for a snack even when Bill had not set one out for them. The only one that gave them any trouble was the buck – of course. “It’s just plain orneriness, him making us grab him to load and getting his stink-pretty on our hands,” Amanda stated. The milk stand and the feeders were secured on the feed trailer. The remaining household items were loaded onto the back of Bob’s pickup with his gear and tarped over, and then they hooked the feed trailer to his pickup.

When Amy came out of the house, Amanda took her hand and asked Brad to accompany them. Mark stayed behind and talked with Bob and Frances, not wanting to intrude on the family but following Amanda’s every move with his eyes. Amanda, Amy and Brad took a slow walk through their home noting the emptiness that now greeted them. Amanda tried not to let any of the disturbing images from her dreams creep in as they looked through the house, pointing out some of the things Bill had done to remodel it over the years as the family grew. Going out the back door, Amanda looked at the area where the bee hives had been and remembered taking the introduction to beekeeping class with Dad so many years ago. They looked where the greenhouse had been and could picture Bill sorting his collection of sliding glass doors and building the greenhouse from other peoples cast offs. They could imagine him inside it, working at the benches, transplanting young seedlings; working at nurturing more crops he could harvest during the cold months.

 
They walked through the deserted work shop, missing the clutter of tools Bill always dropped on the bench, instead of returning them to the tool box, until it was too piled to work on a project. Amy had always wanted Bill to clean up his “clutter and junk”. Now it seemed so empty to her without his many projects scattered around. They noted the silence at the chicken coop with no roosters telling them the day was here. They walked through the garden noting Bill would have cold frames out and cool weather crops starting to sprout by now. They saw the blank areas where the hoop-houses had stood before being taken down and packed to the cabin. Bill had done so much at the home, that seeing much of his work dismantled and already looking neglected, it was just another harsh reminder that he really was gone. They walked to the corner of the garden where he had been laid to rest and joining hands, each said their own prayer and personal good bye. They silently went to the pickup, joining the waiting family members, still holding each-others hands. Amanda noted the anxious look on Mark’s face before he turned away from her gaze, blushing.

While Bob and Amanda had been loading up, the rest of the family had been loading the other pickups. All told there were twenty one members of the extended family making the move, ranging from Carla’s five year old granddaughter to sixty three year old Alan. They would travel in five large pickup trucks- extended and king cabs - all equipped with wood gasifier units; four of them pulling trailers.

 
Neither Amy nor Amanda felt comfortable pulling the trailer so Alan’s son Ken would be driving their pickup. Each pickup carried at least two semi-auto rifles with high capacity magazines at the ready. Bob didn’t think they would be needed, but since they had them, they might as well be handy. Most of the thieves working the area were opportunists that preferred to work under cover of darkness. Then they came out in steadily increasing numbers, carrying off anything that wasn’t secured. During daytime, however, they kept hidden. There had been a few gangs in town that had operated openly during the early days of the crash, emboldened by the lack of police presence. But they hadn’t counted on the local National Guard unit remaining intact. The Guardsmen had formed up and dealt with the problems in a decisive manner. They were determined to defend the area and not let it slip into anarchy like had happened in so many places. They managed to maintain communication with the governor obtaining official approval for any actions they undertook. Prison was no longer an option following the crash; most law breakers died quickly of lead poisoning. The actions of the Guardsmen had sent a strong message to other thieves to stay hidden.

 *****
With the vehicles pulled onto the road, Brad was securing the gate when Mike joined his son standing with the group. “I know we said goodbye yesterday but I wanted to see you off,” Mike said. Mark had shuffled behind and slightly to the side of his Dad during the conversation, his awkwardness at the situation returned, hands deep in his pockets, looking at his feet, but would glance up and quickly look away if anyone was looking in his direction.

Amanda dropped Amy’s hand and stepped in front of Mark. “I really appreciate your help this morning Mark. It means a lot and you have such a way with animals. You’re a very special friend.” She reached out and grasped Mark’s arm, feeling it stiffen at her touch. “Take good care of Belle now.” Belle was a goat that Mark had gotten from Bill. “And take good care of yourself. Now here’s a goodbye you won’t get from the goats,” she said with glistening eyes, then surprised Mark by giving him a hug and a lingering kiss on the cheek, her lips brushing softly across his ear as she pulled away. Mark stood petrified in place. Holding his gaze with her own, willing those eyes not to tear up, red cheeked Amanda backed away and turned and got into the pickup after her Mom.

 
While Amanda had talked to Mark, Amy had given Mike the keys to the house and the locks on the gates and outbuildings. She also told him the milk and eggs in the root cellar were for his family to use. Mike and Mark would watch over the home and use anything they had a need of that had been left behind.

[willc453]

Thank you.
Chris

[kaijafon]

Ok, I'm confused ...I thought Mark and Amanda were married and Brad was their kid... I'm going to have to reread this.

thanks!

[bretf]

Sept 8, 2014 17:23:02 GMT -6 kaijafon said:

Ok, I'm confused ...I thought Mark and Amanda were married and Brad was their kid... I'm going to have to reread this.

thanks!

Chapter 1 paragraph 3 Brad is Amanda's younger brother.

Same chapter close to the end, Mark is the neighbor kid.

It expands on some of this later, but if it is confusing, I better do something about it.

Please re-read chapter one and let me know.  I'll look over it again and change it if I need to.

Thanks,

Bret

[ydderf]

Thanks for the new postings.

[kaijafon]

it's just me Brad, I'm working and super tired.... so no worries... just keep on keepin' on!

[bretf]

Chapter 4: Starlight on the Rails


“Oh God, we have been in exile in our own country and a stranger in another land.
We walk down little roads in Cumberland, stooped because the sky hung down so low,
And no place that we went was far.
And always returned to us that terrible hunger that haunts and hurts Americans
And makes us exiles in our own land and strangers wherever we go.

“Starlight on the Rails” Performed by Rosalie Sorrels
Written by Utah Phillips


Bob pulled away first, towing the trailer with the stock feed, followed by Amy and Amanda’s pickup with the stock trailer. As they passed Carla’s family’s home, another pickup and trailer pulled in behind. Further down the road, Alan and his son Jim were each waiting with their families in front of their houses to join the caravan.

It was quiet in the pickup as Ken pulled away, a grim look on his serious face, each person reflecting upon leaving their homes. Amy looked at the empty house and remembered Amanda and Brad coming home as infants and growing into the fine people they were now. Could it really be eighteen years ago that we brought Amanda home from the hospital; fifteen years since Brad had first come home? Bill had been so nervous that first drive. Always a careful driver, he was strung tight on that trip. While Amy had just wanted to hold the baby tight but had to content herself with looking into the back seat child carrier, Bill drove like someone embarking on his first solo drive. He was so cautious, white knuckled on the steering wheel, making sure they made it home safely with their precious cargo. The usually twenty minute drive had stretched to more than thirty; extra-long stops and checks for traffic at each signal light and stop sign, slow gentle starts, driving under the speed zone. The horns honking and single finger waves never phased him. Amy clutched Amanda’s hand – her rock of support and comfort.

 
They drove slowly down the road, Amy so familiar with it, more memories coming to her. She and Bill had taught the kids to ride their bikes on that road, running alongside them, ready to catch them after the training wheels were removed. In winter Bill had taught them all to cross-country ski there, before tackling the hills. Grandpa had pulled them on their sleds with his 4-wheeler. She looked at Bill’s parent’s house as they passed; dark and lonely. It had been the location of so many boisterous gatherings; birthday barbeques that evolved into water fights, Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas gatherings, Easter egg hunts. So many of the family activities had taken place in the home; it looked so sad now. She reached to her pocket and found it empty. Amanda saw her action and pulled out a clean handkerchief for Amy and another one she used to wipe away her own tears.

Amanda couldn’t keep her thoughts in line. She was thinking of Dad and something they had done in their home when thoughts of Mark replaced it. He was extremely nice and polite, but he had gotten so quiet. It was exasperating. She would walk out to where her Dad had been working with Mark, teaching him something, and they were both talking away. Then, as soon as Mark saw her, he clammed up. He would sometimes ask Amanda about something to do with the goats or gardening that he didn’t understand, but it was so hard to engage him in a real conversation. He seemed to think two or three stammered words strung together made a sentence. They used to have long conversations but something had changed; he had grown muter by the day. For the life of her, she couldn’t figure him out. “Boys!” she thought, then amended it. “Not boy, young man.” He had turned into a remarkable young man in her view; she just didn’t know why he had gotten so strange. Men truly must be from Mars; he was just so confusing. With her mind spinning, she barely saw her grandparent’s house when they went past.

A solitary figure stood in the road at Amanda’s house watching as the last vehicle turned onto the connecting street and was lost from view. One hand was jammed deeply into a pocket, the other lightly touching his cheek. He slowly turned, looked dejectedly at the empty house, back at the empty road, and then, head down, made his way back towards his own home with slow shuffling steps. His hand continued to lightly touch his cheek.
The caravan of pickups and trailers made the turns on the connecting streets and eventually turned onto the main north-south state highway. The roadbeds were cracked with dried up stalks and vines from last summer’s weeds sticking up through the asphalt and encroaching from the sides, slowing making their way across the roads. Some of the weeds had been crushed, but traffic was sparse allowing the weeds to get a strong hold. The roots were making steady progress breaking down the pavement. Some low spots were marred by large broken up sections where rain water had settled and frozen, breaking the asphalt with ease. This had been helped by the heavy truck traffic of the past that had worn deep grooves in the roadbed. Nature was flexing her muscles without the constant maintenance of the road crews. Bob set a slow pace over the rough roads. No need to jostle the load and animals more than necessary. We don’t want the goats to give whipped cream tonight.

*****

The family was moving to Bob’s cabin in the low mountains about forty five miles to the north of town. Bob had bought the forty acre site many years ago as a place to get away to but still relatively close to home. It was on the south east slope, up a long gravel road that in some places felt like it was just clinging to the side of the mountain face. Many first timers over the road refused to look out the side windows when going up the road, before it “flattened out” on gentler slopes of rolling hills. The road led to six other private parcels besides Bob’s. The road was impassable during the winter and Bob had routinely snow-shoed in to make sure the load on the cabin roof was not too heavy. While the state highway could be seen from a few vantage points in the area, the spot was secluded due to the steep brush covered slopes and its location across a major river from the highway.

 
Bob had made the trek up the mountain and used his bulldozer to push the snow off the road. It had taken a fair amount of the precious remaining diesel, mixed liberally with sunflower oil, but he thought it was worth the effort. Pushing most of the snow off the road allowed them to make the move about a month sooner than waiting for the snow to melt on its own.

Bob’s forty acres abutted the national forest on one side. On one of the other sides was a forty acre parcel whose owners had never been seen in the twenty years Bob had owned his place. The property on the other two sides was owned by a snowbird couple. They had not returned to the mountain since the crash. Two of the other homes were occupied: one by an elderly woman who had lived there for sixty years; “and I’m going to die up here, by God”, she said; first arriving on the mountain as a young newlywed. She was grudgingly helped by a grandson who was torn between duty to Grandma and the lure of an area with more people. The other home was occupied by a couple that had escaped the rat race and had been homesteading for about ten years.

 
The cabin was in a vegetation transition zone where the sagebrush stingily gave way to light pine forests, with a good mixing of the two. There were heavy concentrations of thorn brush, alder and choke cherry mixed in. The ground was very steep in some places; other places were gradual sloping, covered in low grasses and patches of brush. Two spring fed creeks flowed through Bob’s property; both fed into cisterns that sent piped water to the tillable areas. Over the years, Bob and Cal with some occasional help from the rest of the family had run water lines to the open gentle slopes, creating irrigated meadows during the summer. Bob had also purchased a big pile of sprinkler pipes at a farm auction. He had a double row of sprinkler lines around the cabin area that he kept green and succulent in the summer in case of wild fires. Bob had always grown a nice garden at the site, but once the crash hit, the family had increased its size substantially and grew a large amount of their produce in the surrounding meadows. A barn had been added early on where Bob kept his small bulldozer and Ford 9N tractor. After the crash hit, Bob and Bill had built a second barn to be ready if they ever had to take the livestock up.

One of the cisterns piped water to a building next to the cabin. Inside it was a small hydro-generator that charged a bank of batteries. It didn’t produce a large amount of power but had always produced more than was needed for Bob’s needs when he stayed at the cabin. Another buried water line ran from a spring-box to the cabin to provide clean drinking water. The cabin itself was a single bedroom when Bob purchased it. The family had built onto it, adding four bedrooms and a larger kitchen – dining area. Travel trailers had been pulled in and set up to be the bedrooms for everyone else. It wasn’t ideal living conditions, but it would work.

*****
The line of pickups moved up the highway without problems into the town of Horseshoe Bend, roughly the half-way point. The town had been populated with a large number of commuters that drove across the hills to their jobs in the city. After the crash, the population had dwindled to a small number of highly self-sufficient individuals and families. They provided what they could to the sheriff so he could continue to keep tabs on the county.

Few people were out as the group went through town, but those few that were looked at the line of vehicles with interest. As Bob came to the sheriff’s office, he braked to a stop when he saw the sheriff’s pickup parked out front. Bob and Cal had fostered good-will with the sheriff; they had come to him with material and equipped his pickup with a wood gasifier. They wanted to do what they could to keep the route to the cabin as safe as possible, and what better way than guarantee the sheriff could still get around the county.

That first gasifier had led to a large number being made until there were no scrap tanks or pipe to be had in the town or the surrounding farms. The people were extremely grateful, being able to run much of their machinery while so many elsewhere were idled without fuel.

When Bob entered the office the sheriff looked up and smiled in recognition and stood up from his desk, offering his hand. “Bob,” he said, “Good to see you. Is it moving day?”

“Hi Joe,” Bob said, taking the sheriff’s hand and shaking. “Yep, we’re going up today with everyone and the livestock.” Bob stopped in each time he went through town, checking on the general status of the area and sharing his plans and any news with the sheriff.

“What about Bill? Is he with you?”

“No. We buried him yesterday,” Bob answered softly.

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Joe said. “He was a good man. I don’t know what would have happened to everyone up here if he hadn’t gotten all of that gasifier information that you guys shared with us. Not to mention his greenhouse ideas and off-season harvesting.”

 
“Thanks Joe. He would tell you that none of those ideas were his own; he was just drawn to it by God. But I know a lot of the stuff was his adaptations and some of the stuff he came up with on his own. We sure will miss him.”

After a bit of silence, Bob asked, “So how do things look here and up-country? Anything we need to be concerned about?”

“Well, we had a real gulley-washer a few days ago but I haven’t been up that way since. It caused some washing and slides around here. There’s a good chance you might run into a slide where that fire cleared off the hillside a couple years ago. Other than that, things have been pretty quiet.”

“Sounds good, Joe, thanks, I appreciate the information. I better not stay around and chat. If we have some road to clear it might make for a long day.”

Joe accompanied Bob outside and looked at the line of pickups and trailers. He saw Amanda and Brad where they were checking on the livestock after making sure the rest of their and Bob’s loads were secure. He nodded in their direction and asked Bob “Those are Bill’s kids aren’t they?”

“Yep. And you won’t find two better kids anywhere. If I’d have had kids of my own, I could only hope they would’ve been near what those two are. They’re holding up pretty well considering. It’s a heck of a burden that’s been laid on their shoulders.

 
“Well, we better get going. You make it up our way, I’m sure we’ll have a pot of soup on if not something else. You’re welcome anytime. I probably won’t be back this way for a few weeks.”

 “Alright”, Joe said. “You guys take care and drive careful. I’ll swing up the hill next time I’m up your way.”

They shook hands again and everyone got back into the pickups. Alan and Jim had also been checking loads, making sure nothing had shaken loose.

Bob led off the group again and once they were underway he took his CB radio mike and let everyone know what Joe had said. Besides the CB’s mounted in each pickup, they had three portable CB’s and ten FRS radios. They kept all of the radio batteries charged with solar chargers, although the charges didn’t last near as long as they used to.

Bob drove slowly up the river canyon, avoiding as many of the broken spots as he could easily. As he went around a bend in the road and looked ahead, he let out a groan. Sure enough there was a slide. He radioed to everyone what he saw: a patch of mud, rocks, and brush with at least two large pine trees. The slide was at least forty feet across. He called for everyone to grab shovels and for Alan to bring the cross cut saw. They had some hard work to do before going any farther.

Everyone joined in and started digging. Being too crowded for everyone on one side, Bob and Alan managed to make it through the mud at the lower section of the slide so they could dig from the opposite side. Ken and Jim picked up the cross cut and waded into the muck. The sucking action of the deep mud engulfed their lower legs and tried to pull the boots off their feet with each step. Mud past their knees and breathing deeply, they made it to the first pine tree. After catching their breath they started cutting the tree into manageable sections. “Man, what I wouldn’t give for some good chainsaw gas about now,” Jim said between strokes with the saw.

Despite the cool temperature, jackets were quickly shed under the effort of digging the muck. In no time at all, the sticky clinging mud was coating boots, pant legs shovel handles, hands. Brad went back to the trailer and found some empty five-gallon buckets that he could use to carry mud off the side of the road. After a fair amount of mud had been moved, Brad called for some help. “I need a couple of you to give me a hand rolling these rocks out of here. They’re bigger than I can handle.” Amanda couldn’t resist the comment and started to clap for Brad.

“Bigger than I can handle” was an understatement. The largest rock required the winch on Bob’s pickup to drag away. The rest were moved out of the road with three people straining and pushing on them.

 
It took nearly three hours to get a track through the slide wide enough to drive through. A tired, muddy crew went to where Amy had set two buckets of water with the instructions: the first bucket is to get most of the easy mud off, the second bucket is the rinse water. Still, the second bucket was full of grime when it was dumped and packed away. With everyone’s hands somewhat clean, Frances passed around bags of dried fruit for a snack. Amanda decided the group needed a pick-me-up now and went to her backpack and pulled out her stash of Hershey Bars, then went back to the group and started breaking them; a half bar for each person.

“Is that what I think it is?” Amy, a devoted choc-oholic asked. “Where have you been hiding those? Don’t you know you shouldn’t keep secrets from your mother?”
“Where you couldn’t find them, obviously. Dad thought you might need an emergency infusion someday so he let me know where he kept the real crisis food. It just seemed like this is a good time.”

The chocolate had a white powdery outer layer from being in storage for so long. Some of them were globs, some sticking to the wrappers from melting in hot weather but no one complained; it had been a long time since they had eaten a candy bar.

A half hour later, after no further delays, the family turned off the highway to begin the slow trek up the mountain road. There had been two more minor slides on the highway, but they could be driven around and through. Bob stopped and everyone put the drivetrains into four wheel drive. As they drove up the hill, they encountered a few patches of snow that remained in the shady sections. They were able to drive right over them since Bob had run the bulldozer through it. The water bars Bob kept in the road had done their job, diverting most of the water from the recent rainstorm and melting snow. Some of them were shaved off when the stock trailer crossed, the wheels dropping into the ditch while the back end scoured away the top level of dirt and rock. There were places where accumulations of forest litter and rocks would need cleared later, but the vehicles were able to make it through.

At last they reached the cabin and parked and everyone got out. Ken backed the trailer to the pen next to the stock barn. The women went to the cabin to get the fire started and start heating wash water and a meal. Amanda stayed at the trailer and helped get the stock unloaded, penned and settled and the chickens moved into the barn. Bob and Brad walked the fence from opposite directions after making sure the solar fence charger was operating to check for shorts in the line or breaches wild animals might have made. Once the fence was given the okay, they straggled wearily to the cabin, anxious to wash, get into clean clothes, and fill their stomachs.

Amanda lingered at the barn, absently scratching the old milk goat Mischief and looked slowly around. She would give the animals a chance to get settled better while she cleaned up and ate before she came back and did the evening milking. She had a wide view down toward the river canyon and the hidden highway. The tree covered slopes behind her were showing lengthening shadows as evening was rapidly approaching. It comes on so much faster up here. She pulled her jacket tighter and closed the zipper to the top. She had gone to the cabin many times with her father for various activities: cutting firewood, working in the garden, hunting elk, family picnics, but she had never anticipated that she would one day call it home. It would be so strange, living there without her dad. Every memory she had about the place was associated with him. But he was gone, and Mark, was, well, he was so far away now. As she looked out across the hills; not registering the majesty before her; she wiped away a tear and thought of everything had transpired to bring them all there.

[bretf]

Part II: Bill’s Tale
Chapter 5: Brigham Young

Brigham, Brigham Young
It’s a miracle he survived
With his roaring rams and his pretty little lambs
And his five and forty wives.

Number forty five’s about sixteen
Number one is sixty and three
Along such a ride how he ever keeps them quiet
Is a downright mystery to me.

For they cackle and crow and they jaw jaw jaw
Each one has a different desire
It would aid the renown for the best shop in town
To supply them with the half they require.

“Brigham Young” Performed by Rosalie Sorrels
Written by Rosalie Sorrels


Thursday, September 11, 2013
Bill had just completed his latest project and decided to go on the web for a bit before starting on his next job. He wanted to go on the fish and game website and see if there was any information on chukar counts – the season was opening in a little over a week; and he also wanted to see if there was anything worth reading in the news. It was September 11th and he was sure the news would be dominated by stories commemorating the 2001 bombings, but there might be something of interest to see. He was still embittered at each news story of another of America’s bravest dying in Afghanistan when most of the bombers had been Saudis. That is, when he could find the real news that was hidden behind all of the mind numbing pabulum from Hollywood. Oh Well, that’s our modern culture for you. Hadn’t one of the presidents made a great show of proclaiming victory years ago, yet our forces are still over there? I have all the respect in the world for the people on the ground there, but I sure question the reasoning of the ones that make the decisions to send them over.

 
Bill opened the browser to Fox News and saw a distressing photo that dominated their home page. It was the front of a supermarket with a large section of the front missing, thick black smoke boiling out of the opening, fire fighters spraying water into it. It was accompanied by the headline “Apparent Firebomb at Waterloo, Iowa Wal-Mart”. He clicked on the story and began reading the very incomplete early account of what authorities believed happened and the suspected injuries and damage. There were thumbnails for a number of other photos attached to the story. It was bedlam. Numerous photos showed medics attending injured shoppers. It was reminiscent of the triage scenes from the old MASH television show. After being pulled totally into the news, Bill promptly forgot about the upcoming chukar hunting season.

Bill was nearing the end of the news story when the browser refreshed and a new photo appeared with a headline in bold red copy: “Second Supermarket Bombed” with the tagline indicating a store in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico had just been bombed in the same manner as the Waterloo store. He noted wryly that Fox had dropped the “apparent” from the headline. Was the change because of information from the scenes or an executive decision by Fox? He opened the story and quickly scanned it, noting the similarities to the other bombing. Details were still scarce, but there were enough from each location to determine they could very well have been coordinated attacks. “Lord, they’re at it again,” he thought, “And I think they might have raised the ante in the game.” He continued reading with a sickening feeling rising inside him, a feeling of empathy for those hurt and a nagging feeling of dread about what it all meant. He also felt extreme anger for the perpetrators. Jesus had said to love his enemies, but man, they just made it so hard.

Bill clicked back to the Fox News homepage and linked to the live streaming thread and switched from his ears buds to his external speakers. While the page was loading he said, “Hey guys,” over the room divider to his co-workers. “There’ve been some stores bombed.”

“Bombs? Where?” Steve asked as Greg was saying something at the same time Bill couldn’t make out.

“Waterloo, Iowa and Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Hold on, I’ve got the news coming on to streaming,” he said as he adjusted his speakers so everyone could hear. The guys got quiet as they listened to the disturbing news, making curses at the perpetrators quite regularly as events unfolded. The news wasn’t good. Whoever had set the bombs had done a very thorough job of it, the entire front of the stores engulfed as well as the back entrances.

Bill’s feeling of dread strengthened as he listened to the news report. It began to overwhelm his thinking to the point he could no longer concentrate on what the news was saying. He stopped listening and concentrated, mentally arranging his thoughts; then turned to his shelf and pulled out a binder. He often carried it with him between home and work and added to it constantly from items he found on the internet. He thumbed through the dividers to the section labeled “Emergencies”. He opened the section and began to read through the material he had put together over the years.

 
     *****

Bill had once been accused of being a survivalist by his friend Steve at work. Steve had been telling Bill all about his Saturday golf game and the NASCAR race on Sunday when he asked Bill what he had been up to over the weekend. Bill told him he had canned a few things from his garden and tried to leave it at that, but then Steve asked, “So what are you, one of those nut job survivalists that are planning on sitting out the end of the world in your bunker?”

Bill groaned. Of course all of the information Steve had about people that didn’t rely solely on grocery stores and restaurants was from that TV show where those fools went on and showed the world everything they had. Bill had never watched it but he had heard it didn’t portray survivalists and preppers in a flattering way. “Survivalist, what are you talking about? I just like to grow as much of my own food as possible and save some for eating later. The Good Lord gave me a curiosity to learn how to do for myself and I sure don’t want to argue with Him. Besides it tastes so much better than that stuff you eat that was trucked in from Mexico, and I know what’s in the food I grow. I’m sure not in a hurry to poison my family with all of the chemicals that the big ag-companies are polluting your food with. All that goes in my veggies is sunshine, water and good old chicken manure,” he said with a smile. I sure can’t explain cost savings to someone that eats out two meals every day. Getting what I did from Mom and Dad’s garden was the only way I made it through the lean times.

Another friend, Greg who had been listening to the conversation and was a Latter Day Saints jumped in, “No, Steve, Billy’s not a survivalist; he’s just a good Mormon, working on his two years supply.”

 
Bill wanted to move the conversation away from him possibly being a prepper so he answered Greg, “You know, I admire and respect many of the things you Mormons do, but I just can’t believe in a faith that was started by such a lunatic.” Not to mention there some doctrinal issues too but I’ll keep those to myself right now.

The reaction Bill had hoped for was immediate. Greg naturally took offense at the remark and demanded “And just what do you mean by that?”

 
“Well,” Bill said with a twinkle in his eye, “You know I love women, but only a lunatic would think he could be happily married to more than one at the same time, let alone thirty-something.” Bill took a wild guess at the number of wives Joseph Smith had taken. “It’s one thing to admire them, but to come home to a whole houseful every night? That’s not for me. And then there were what, fifty or sixty that Brigham Young had. That guy had to be a total nutcase; either that or he was stone deaf. Shoot, it’s a full time job for me with just one wife.”

“Boy, you aren’t kidding there,” Greg began, eagerly jumping on the change of subject. He was currently unhappily married to wife number two, both “sealed in the temple”. Bill had no idea what that even meant, but he was pretty sure it didn’t necessarily mean longevity.

Greg barely stopped for a breath. “Wait till you hear what my wife pulled last night. You won’t believe this crap.” Bill smiled inwardly at getting the conversation away from his busy weekend. And they don’t know the half of it. I guess next time I’ll just tell them I tinkered in the kitchen all weekend. Greg and Steve started trading gripes about their wives spending too much money, and making demands of them.

 
Bill thought to himself as he slipped away from the two, leaving them to their complaining, just how glad he was that he was married to his best friend. He and Amy might not see eye to eye on everything but they were always able to discuss issues together and come up with agreements that both could accept. He actually felt sorry for Greg and Steve that they found the need to gripe about their wives. It’s too bad they can’t have honest open discussions with their wives and work that stuff out instead of airing their dirty laundry.

Bill truly didn’t consider himself a prepper, much less a survivalist. I’m just trying to be as self-sufficient as I can like I grew up, but he had worked diligently on his garden and the chicken flock, adding milk goats and honey bees to his place when he was able. At the same time he continued to read and research other aspects of self-sufficiency, but with money always tight for his growing, active family, he didn’t jump full into everything. He did regularly check on Craigslist for certain building materials for projects he hoped to build, purchasing them when the price was right, and picking up some items at the local auction house. Amy had accused him of never passing a barrel or piece of PVC pipe without getting lustful looks in his eyes.

Something else that kept Bill focused on self-sufficiency rather than jumping into full prepper mode was certain members of his family that lived in the same neighborhood. His brother Alan was among the many people who decided that once Barack Obama was elected access to guns and ammunition would become threatened for the general public. So Alan began purchasing ammunition at every chance he got and added a few guns he had wanted. He had purchased so much ammo, that when the shortages began following the Sandy Hook shooting, accompanied by the gun control talks, Alan had no need to add any more to his stock. Barring all-out war, he was stocked for life with plenty to share.

And then there was Jim! In a family of gun owners, Alan’s oldest son was considered a full-on gun nut. Jim had been fascinated with guns at a young age and that fascination had only intensified as he grew. Once he started working he spent nearly all of his paycheck on different guns and the ammo for them. When his best friend tried to get him to start dating, his stock answer was “I don’t have any money for a girlfriend. Once I get all of the “toys” I want, then I can start looking for the right girl.” He stuck with that strategy until one day he saw a young woman in his favorite gun shop. She was deftly handling an SKS rifle and asking the salesman about accessories. Jim already had four SKS’s so he was more than happy to lend his opinion. The two of them left the store together to go shooting and he had been wrapped around her finger ever since. He decided he had enough weapons and ammo collected to keep him satisfied – at least until it was time to pick out his bride’s annual birthday and Christmas gifts - and settled contentedly into marital bliss.

 
For his part, Bill had his basic guns: a big game rifle, 12ga shotgun, a pistol and two 22 rifles. For his preferred hunting methods he also had a muzzleloader and a longbow. He kept enough ammo on hand for hunting and a little plinking but not much beyond that. He knew he should probably have more but held back after a conversation with Jim.

 
“Hey Jim,” Bill said, “I’m thinking about getting one of those so-called assault rifle. What do you recommend?”

“Well, that depends, what do you want if for? Do you want it for just fun shooting, hunting, or what?”

“I want to have one at hand for emergencies, home defense type stuff.” Bill answered. “I don’t want one for hunting; I’d rather rely on marksmanship than one of your drum magazines for elk.” Jim took a lot of good-natured teasing about needing a full ammo can just for one deer. “And I’m too cheap to go run through thousands of rounds of ammo just for fun. I don’t see a lot of promise in the direction our economy is headed. So I just want the rifle and ammo for regular practice and a good supply of ammo if the world goes haywire.”

Jim took about thirty seconds to think, and then said, “Come with me.” He took Bill into his spare bedroom and started opening gun safes and taking out rifles. “Okay, which ones do you want to borrow?”

“Huh, what are you talking about,” Bill asked?

 “Well, you know I love to collect guns, but other than the Barrett and the Uzi, there isn’t anything special about these. I just like them, and the different versions. So here’s my deal: I’ll loan you enough of these for your family, but only after I’ve taken all four of you out and taught you everything about them. Then we’ll all go shooting every couple of months. That way you stay proficient with them. They’ll still be mine, just kept somewhere else. If your emergency ever happens, we all have to stick together and I can’t use all of these guns. Unlike the movies where Arnold carries twelve different guns, I would prefer to have one gun and twelve magazines. Well, and a pistol too I guess, but anyway. I would much rather have the other guns in use helping protect the family than getting dusty in the safe. I have enough AK’s or SKS’s now that you could each have one, then all of the magazines and ammo would interchange. If you wanted the AR, then you are getting into different ammo, although its ammo fits the Ruger Mini 14. Personally, I would recommend you take those four AK’s to make everything simpler for you. They might be a little big for Brad and Amanda but they’ll grow into them. So what do you think? Oh yeah, you need to get the ammo for whichever you choose. I only have about five thousand rounds on hand.”

“Only five thousand?” Bill had laughed, thinking about the two twenty-round boxes of 30:06 he had been using for the last five years. And then he said, Wow, Jim. I’d be pretty foolish to turn that deal down.” So he had given Jim money for more ammo, learned all he could about the AK’s with the rest of his family and taken four to store in his gun safe. Brad was pretty small for shooting them, but he learned to dis-assemble and re-assemble faster than anyone else in the family. After the first day of shooting, Bill could see how easy it would be to get hooked and run up a big bill on shooting. No wonder Jim waited so long to get married.

Bill borrowed the guns and locked them up in his gun safe. Then he went outside and weeded the garden. No, he didn’t consider himself a survivalist.

*****

Bill did a thorough review of his “Emergencies” information, put a marker in the page and closed his binder. He went to his supervisor’s office and tapped on the open door as he entered the room. “Hey Tom”, he said, “I finished up that project I was on and I was hoping to get the rest of the afternoon off.”

Tom looked up from the papers he had been reviewing and acknowledged Bill, then pulled out his production schedule and scanned it. “Yeah, that’ll be alright Bill,” he said. “It looks like we’re ahead of things right now. You wanting to do something fun?”

Bill didn’t want to seem like an alarmist or reveal too much of what he was going to be working on. I could always be way off on this anyway. If it does escalate, I‘ll talk to everybody about getting some things set aside. I don’t think they would pay any attention now. And I sure don’t want to hear their “I’ll just come to your house” nonsense.

 “Turn your radio on. Some lowlifes have bombed a couple of grocery stores to celebrate 911. I’m not sure I could concentrate on work while I’m listening to it and I want to be fair to you. Plus I’ve got a few things I want to pick up before I make it home this afternoon.”

“Those dirty rat–bags!” Tom exclaimed, coming to an immediate conclusion. “You want to make any bets on their religion? Just when will the stooges in Washington learn those curs aren’t coming to our country to embrace us and our way of life. Our borders should have been tightened up a long time ago. And they should have rounded up every one of them after the Boston Marathon and kicked their collective butts right back to where they came from. So where’d they do it?”
While Bill explained what he knew at that point, Tom leaned over and turned his radio on. Bill cringed at what he might hear, but Rush Limbaugh’s over the top ranting had been replaced by another man; one that was covering the bombings. Bill thanked Tom and excused himself and returned to his desk.

[bretf]

Chapter 6: Hold it up to the Light

Now as soon as I'm moving - my choice is good
This way comes through right where I prayed that it would
If I keep my eyes open and look where I should
Somehow all of the signs are in sight
If I hold it up to the light

I said God, will you bless this decision?
I'm scared, Is my life at stake?
But I see if you gave me a vision
Would I never have reason to use my faith?

“Hold it up to the light” Performed by David Wilcox
Written by David Wilcox


Bill returned to his desk and resumed looking over the information in his binder. As he looked over the material, he began to put small check marks by the items he felt he had covered and highlighted the items that he knew he was lacking. Then he consolidated much of the information into a needs list and prioritized it.

Bill had his priority list mostly arranged when he heard Greg loudly exclaim “Those dirty rotten camel-jockeys!” He instantly pulled his attention back to the news and checked the screen. Another store had just suffered the same fate as the previous two, this one in North Hollywood, California. Bill read the latest posting then bowed his head, closed his eyes, and clasped his hands together and began to pray. He prayed for healing and comfort for those affected by the devastation as well as for their families. He prayed for skill and knowledge for the care givers. He prayed for safety for the emergency personnel on the scenes. He prayed for guidance on his own thoughts and actions. Then he prayed for the wrath of a vengeful God on the perpetrators of the day’s activities. He was still struggling with “love your enemy”. He prayed that his own family would remain safe in the midst of the craziness.

After he finished praying, Bill looked back to the list before him with a new clarity and resolve he had not had before. He turned to another section in his binder and found the phone number for his financial advisor. He muted his speakers; Greg had turned his computer to live streaming. Bill punched in the phone number and waited while the line rang.

“Good afternoon,” a cheery voice answered. “This is Gretchen, thank you for calling Bradford investments. How may I help you?”

“Hi Gretchen,” Bill said. “This is Bill Moser; I need to talk to Jack please.”

“He is on another line right now. Can I take a message for him?”

“Sure,” Bill replied. “Please let him know that I need him to cash out my IRA today, pay the taxes and penalties and get everything that’s left into my bank account.”

“Ohh-kay….” Gretchen replied, not nearly as cheery. “I think you will have to discuss that directly with Jack.”

“All right, but he needs to call me within the next few minutes. I’m going to be unavailable for the rest of the day,” Bill answered. “You have a good day, Gretchen, and I’ll talk to you later.”

He hung up and studied his list planning out the rest of his day. He wondered just how irritated Amy was going to be at him for closing his IRA. Please Lord, give me the right words to make her understand and accept this when I tell her. She was always urging him to contribute more to the account and his 401K. He countered to her that his garden and everything associated with it was his retirement fund, besides it was better to go into retirement with no debt. It had remained a sticking point for them, neither able to sway the other. So he contributed some to retirement savings, but also put money toward his projects as he was able.

He would like to cash out the 401K also, but reasoned at this point if the bombings did not lead to an escalating problem, he would still have that account. If the violence did intensify, the account he was closing should finance everything on his priority list barring a sudden total collapse.

Bill could pretty much anticipate how the conversation with Jack was going to go. Once Jack had someone’s money invested, it was extremely difficult to get him to relinquish it. He held onto investments like a dog held onto a fresh bone. He used all of the reasoning he could come up with: not enough money at retirement, extra taxes now, penalties, loss of earning power, a down market and laced it with as much emotion, doom and gloom as he could muster. Jack was generally very persuasive: he could paint a mental picture of his clients ending up destitute on the streets that made many of them change their mind and allow the money to stay in place.

In a short time Jack returned Bill’s call – he was always quick to return calls when someone wanted to do what he didn’t want - and it went pretty much as Bill had envisioned. Bill stood his ground however; he didn’t make up a story nor did he tell Jack his reasons, just stressing to Jack that it was vital that he had his funds. He would, however, re-establish another IRA at his earliest opportunity. Eventually, Jack grudgingly relented and began the process to liquidate the account.

When the conversation with Jack was finished, Bill found the phone number and called his family doctor. He asked for an appointment at the earliest convenience and was able to schedule one for the following week. He asked about Amy’s annual visit and found she was close enough that they scheduled her for the slot following his own appointment. Bill finished the call and wondered if he would be able to convince Amy to keep the appointment. “I just need to trust in God’s guidance,” he thought, “And that the right words will come to me.”

Bill looked back at the news to see if there was anything new, and then turned in his binder to the “Gardening” section. He found the page with his seed inventory he had compiled during the summer and started making notes on a scratch paper. He tried to keep at least two years’ worth of seed on hand but some varieties had dropped below that level after planting his garden and hadn’t been replenished. He turned to another page titled Amounts of Vegetables to be Grown and Preserved for a Family of 4 Persons and thought about quantities and decided that if the bombings escalated two years supply of seed wasn’t enough.

He thought long about what would happen in the neighborhood if the local stores were destroyed or shut down. Finally he started calculating the quantities he thought he would need of each variety.

After compiling a partial shopping list based on the first chart, he turned to two other charts that contained vegetables that weren’t all listed on the first chart.

The first chart he referenced was the fall-winter planting guide. Ever since he had discovered Elliot Coleman’s books and articles he had been inspired to expand his gardening. Mr. Coleman was harvesting fresh vegetables year around in Maine, without heated greenhouses. Although Bill was a long way from obtaining the kind of results as Mr. Coleman, he had made modest gains each winter. A fair number of his plants had overwintered – with one winter being exceptionally harsh for the region. He allowed as many plants as possible to develop seed that year. He was slowly adding more seed from plants that could survive the winter weather.
territorial.commercev3.com/lettercast/b_lc.php?c=E__IeaOUA
www.territorialseed.com/product/14108


Going through the three separate charts was pretty time consuming. He mentally kicked himself for never putting all of the information together in an excel spread sheet. If he had just done that, it would only require a few numbers of in-put to show him how much seed he needed. Oh well, live and learn.

Once his notes were complete, Bill opened the web site of his favorite online seed company and began pulling up seed types and filling a shopping cart. He stuck to heirloom seeds on everything but had a mental battle with himself at the sweet corn. He was very fond of one of the sugar enhanced hybrids and would like to have some of it, but for this order he stuck with heirlooms only. The old corn was good, Dad just always said to have the water boiling before you went to pick it. The heirloom seeds would produce plants that would be the same as their parents, unlike hybrids that crossed different varieties.

Bill had been working at saving seeds for a few years. Most of his annuals were from his own seeds, but he was still having trouble with some bi-annual crops. He had managed to get some seed, but for the most part it seemed his storage conditions were never just right for holding them over the winter. Carrying the vegetables over was critical, as they produced seed the second year. “That has to be remedied if this escalates and things start to unravel,” he thought. “I guess I’ll have to be more careful about fencing off sections and turning the chickens in the garden in for the winter.” So his order, while covering a lot of crops, was heavy in bi-annuals. One thing he was hoping for but could not get was asparagus crowns. They were sold out for the year and would not have any more until spring. Well, if I can still order in spring, I’ll get some then. Instead, he ordered enough seeds to plant a large field.

Bill liked asparagus and other plants in its special category; plant once, harvest for years. Besides asparagus he had artichokes, rhubarb, grapes, berries, fruit trees, walking onions and oregano that provided each year from the same established plants. Every year he tried to add more to that category. The artichokes were something he had enjoyed experimenting with. While they sold locally as annuals, he knew they were perennial in California. But they didn’t overwinter in his climate. So he tried to fence around them and add a thick insulating layer of leaves over them each fall. He had achieved about 75% carryover –when I can keep the chickens from messing with the leaves – and was able to harvest much sooner on the established plants than with new replacement plants.

Besides vegetables, he ordered a large amount of a variety of green manure crop seed. His current garden was fertilized with composted manure from the chickens and goats. If he had to expand his growing, he reasoned that the soil would need more nutrients than he currently had available.

After he completed his order he lowered his head to ask the Lord’s blessing once again on his actions. The final amount owed just about floored him. Well, one more thing to include in the Amy talk tonight. If the other stuff won’t make her think I’ve gone over the deep end, this just might do it. But if the power stays on and I can freeze all of this, I don’t think I’ll ever have to buy another seed. With that thought he clicked the “Confirm Order” button.

He went to two other seed company websites before he was done. One was a small company he had found that sold heirloom field corn – wasn’t that an endangered species in the modern farm world. The other company sold mangle seed. The large beets had high sugar content and made great winter stock feed. He had grown some of each the last two years for his animals since it was getting so hard to find non-genetically modified organism feed around home. Bill just couldn’t bring himself to trust that stuff. It seemed wrong to introduce botulism to the seed to break down their barriers, and then flood the feed with glyphosate. He just couldn’t do it, wouldn’t use it, not for the animals that produced his family’s food and especially not for his family.

After those two orders he looked at some of his collected material in his binder for a bit more and thought. “Oh why not,” he finally said and found a company where he ordered hoop house poly cover. If he needed to provide all of his family’s food, the greenhouse-like hoop houses would be invaluable. They could be erected with a lot less labor and material than a regular greenhouse. He had piles of steel and PVC pipe at home that could make ribs to support the poly cover. In a pinch he could use clear visqueen for the cover, but the poly cover was much more durable.

The next site he went on was Amazon. He ordered Eliot Coleman’s books on “Four Seasons Harvest”. He had one that Amy had purchased for him on the Kindle, but it was just not the same to him. He liked to hold the book in his hands, put book marks in it and highlight important parts. The Kindle just seemed like more trouble, but he did admit Amy had a lot of information stored in a small package. I’m just too old school I guess. While he was on Amazon, he remembered a blog entry he had read by a man that went by “Ferfal” on the internet. He had gone through the rough times in Argentina when their money became worthless. Someone had asked him what he regretted not having. He had replied that he wished he had more DVDs. They had spent a lot of time inside and he would have liked to have some time fillers. So Bill searched and found a number of videos he added to his cart. A few of the videos were music instruction. He and both kids were playing – to varying degrees – the guitar, fiddle, mandolin and banjo. If they were stuck with lots of time on their hands, he thought playing music would be a great distraction. From another website, he ordered Jackie Clay’s books on canning. What he had seen of one of them, Jackie had a number of meals that she made up and canned and then they were just heat and serve. Jackie had been writing articles and blogs about her self-sufficient lifestyle for years.

Bill again referenced the Amounts of Vegetables to be Grown and Preserved for a Family of 4 Persons sheet. After more calculations, he made a search for Tattler lids prices. The Tattler lids were unlike normal canning lids that were thrown away after use. The Tattlers could be re-used. He found a decent – in comparison- price from a company he had ordered from before, so he placed an order for eight cases of twenty four dozen wide mouth lids, and eight cases of regular mouth. Wow, that’s a lot of money, again, but if we are all doing our own food, they will be invaluable.

Bill made one more online order; a solar fence charger. He had desired one for years but never felt he could justify the cost. All of his fences were within an extension cord of one of his outbuildings. Well, if I don’t use it at home, I can always take it to Bob’s place and we can use it to keep his garden safe.

Bill looked over his priority list and decided he had done what he could from the computer; it was time to go shopping. He looked at the things he wanted to get done before making it home and jotted down his order of stops. Then he compared notes on the stored foods he had at home and did a quick comparison with the LDS worksheet on food storage. www.thefoodguys.com/foodcalc.html His personal list wasn’t up to date, of course, but it gave a reference point to start from. He made some guesses and put together a shopping list.

The Mormon Church recommended they have at least two years supply of food on hand. Bill thought about Greg, muttering curses behind him at the news. Greg had confided that he didn’t have anything close to that, in fact he would be lucky to have a month worth of food on hand. “Oh well, to each his own,” Bill muttered.

After checking the news-site one final time he shut down his computer and gathered his lunch box and binder and left the office. He had debated whether to go to Costco or Cash and Carry and decided on Cash and Carry. It was about twenty minutes closer, the prices were comparable and it was quicker to get in and out. He liked the large restaurant size quantities sold there, especially for what he had in mind today.

Bill owned a small car that got excellent gas mileage that he generally used to commute to work. He also owned a Ford F350 king cab pickup that sucked down fuel like guys at a frat party sucked down booze. The pickup was parked most days but he had driven it that day so he could get chicken and goat feed after work. Providence or coincidence? He definitely didn’t have an answer to that one. He got in and drove to the store.

At the store he loaded up heavily on the items from the LDS sheet that did well in long term storage. He bought 400 pounds of cane sugar – I hate to buy cane when so many beets are grown locally, but they made the decision to get in bed with the devil, dang you GMO companies. He found everything on his list and made a large number of spontaneous purchases. Once he was done shopping and had everything loaded, the back seat of the pickup was packed. There’s just enough room for “one thin wafer” he thought and chuckled that that thought would come to him at this time. He was afraid a sudden stop would unload some of the contents into the front seat.

Bill got into the driver’s seat and took a long pull from his water bottle, wiped his brow and looked at his to do list, started up the pickup and drove to his credit union. He left the checking account alone but withdrew everything he could from his savings, leaving just the minimum balance. He asked for a large amount of smaller bills. If it came to paying cash for everything he didn’t want to overpay if someone couldn’t make change for large bills. The teller, always chatty, wanted to know what he had planned with all that cash. Bill just grinned and said he was planning to find some real deals over the weekend at yard sales. Frankly, it’s my money and none of your business! And it’s going home to be locked up in the safe.

After leaving the credit union he entered the freeway and checked his watch. Amy would be leaving work in a few minutes and picking up Amanda and Brad at school. He debated with himself for a while about calling her. He decided not to. She could stay oblivious to what was happening for a while longer. Once he got home would be soon enough to tell her what was happening and his fears of what it could lead to. The Bible said you should not fear but put all faith in the Lord. Sometimes that was pretty hard. Okay, then, he would tell her his concerns of what it could all mean.

Bill turned the radio on, a 70’s tune blasting from the oldies station, and tuned in the station that carried Fox News and listened to the ongoing reports as he drove. He had exited the freeway and was traveling down the country road through farmland when the news reader issued a breaking news bulletin. Bill let out a rare curse when the report came across. Those dogs did it again. This time they had hit sin city itself; a supermarket in Las Vegas was fully engulfed in flames following an explosion. As the news started to unfold Bill suddenly felt sick to his stomach. Lord, please let Frances be safe. Amy’s sister lived there! Saliva was flooding his mouth as he pulled off the road; he barely made it to the side away from traffic when he began to heave. He emptied the contents of his stomach, sweating heavily, holding the side of the pickup for support. Finally, his stomach empty, the retching stopped; he went to the passenger door and reached in for his water bottle. He rinsed his mouth and spit, and then did it again before swallowing a sip. He dug out a napkin and wiped his face and took several deep breaths. Feeling better, he walked back around the pickup and got in. Maybe I should just turn the radio back off. But he didn’t; he started the engine, listening to incoming reports from each bombing location as he went to the ranch where he bought his grain.

The ranch grew a lot of grain and bought grain from farmers in the region for re-sale. They also made regular trips to Walton Foods and brought back truckloads of storage food that was very popular with the local LDS population. Bill went into the office to make his order. Usually he told them what he wanted, wrote a check, and then loaded. Today would be different. “I don’t know how much I want,” he told the woman at the desk. “I want to get a full pickup load of oats, barley, wheat and some home storage food, but I don’t know how much I can carry.” In the past he had also fed corn but he had stopped that when the farmers all switched to GMO. “How about I leave you a signed, blank check, load up, then finish filling out the check at the end?” he asked.
“Sure, that’ll be fine. I’ll just give you a note for the guys when they load you.”

Bill drove to the building where the bagged grain was stored and they started to load. He kept a careful eye on the space available and the springs. The back end was full with the springs still looking pretty good when he called a stop. I’m glad the guy I bought the pickup from put those overload springs on for his camper.

At the storage food building and they filled the remaining space in the cab with twenty five pound bags of pinto beans, rolled oats, hard red wheat, white and brown rice and pearl barley.

Bill wrote the check, thinking yet again about the upcoming conversation with Amy. After he heard the news of the latest bombing his resolve had strengthened. He was now sure of the right words coming when he talked to Amy and just hoped she would be strong in the coming days.

The front seat was crammed, but Bill had left just enough space to sit. He started slowly for home. “Okay, there might be more weight on here than I thought, this thing is soft on the steering wheel,” he thought as he drove slowly down the road; the rear end was sitting lower than normal, the front lifted.

As he drove his mind was running through what else he wanted to get done that night. It might turn out to be a long night, but I don’t want to wait on this. He turned the radio volume down and took out his phone and called Amy. She answered after the first ring and said, “Oh bill, have you had the news on? When are you going to get home? I can’t get ahold of Frances.”

“Wow,” he thought, “And I was sure she wouldn’t have heard.” “Yeah, I’ve been listening to it. It sounds pretty bad. I would guess that a lot of people are trying to call in and out of Vegas so the lines are overwhelmed. Vegas is a big city. Why don’t you go online and find where the store is in relation to Frances’ house, and her office. At least it will give us a clue on her status.

“I’ll be home in about forty five minutes. When I get there I’d like to talk with everybody at Mom and Dad’s. Would you be able to make the calls and see if everyone can get there? I’ll call Bob and Alan but I don’t have anyone else’s numbers. Maybe in about an hour?”

“So you think this is going to get worse,” she said quietly, between a question and a statement.

“I’m concerned that it might, so I’d like to have the family discuss the possibilities and our options.”

“Okay, I’ll try to get ahold of everyone. Be careful out there, and get home safe. I love you.”

“Love you too, and I’ll be careful. Bye.”

Bill made the calls to his brothers. Alan lived two doors down, across the street from their folks and said he would be there. Bob was already on his way to their parent’s house and would hang around. As the folks were slowed by age, Bob had made himself available to help them out with anything that needed done. This was easier for him, being single and recently accepting early retirement from the revenue-strapped county emergency medical system.

At the last gas station before home Bill pulled in to fill up. It was busier than a normal Thursday, more like what he saw at the start of a three-day weekend. Some of the vehicles were loaded as if the drivers had just finished a large shopping trip. The people waiting were all patient, though many had concerned looks on their faces and glanced often at their watches. “Well, I don’t think everyone here are sheeple. It’s nice to see that some people are paying attention,” he thought. One man looked a little closer at Bill’s load and gave him a nod. Once his tank and spare gas cans were topped off he pulled away from the pump island and parked. Then he walked back to Bill to inquire where he had bought the grain and how the prices were. The man wrote it down, thanked Bill and left.

A sigh of relief came from Bill as he pulled onto his road. When he stopped in front of his driveway gate, a blind moved in the living room window and Amanda ran out of the house and beat him to the gate. She waved him through, closed the gate then followed as he drove to the feed shed. “What a great girl,” Bill thought, “Lord, I don’t know how I ever deserved those two kids, but I am so grateful to you for them. Now please help me keep them safe.” He nearly started to cry right then, thinking of how wonderful his life had become despite his best efforts to make it otherwise, and to know there were people out there trying to destroy it all. Amanda and Brad were such a pleasure for Bill. He was still shocked that he had such a wonderful wife and children. He had given up on that ever happening.

[2medicinewoman]

wow. interesting chapter. Good thing he went shopping. Doesn't seem like he had done much of that by the size of his orders.

Well done. Thanks for sharing your gifts with us.

[ydderf]

Thank you

[bretf]

Chapter 7: Red Solo Cup


Now a red solo cup is the best receptacle
For barbecues, tailgates, fairs and festivals
And you, sir, do not have a pair of testicles
If you prefer drinking from glass

Red solo cup, I fill you up
Let's have a party, let's have a party
I love you red solo cup, I lift you up
Proceed to party, proceed to party

But I have to admit the ladies get smitten
Admiring how sharply my first name is written
On you with a sharpie when I get to hittin'
On them to help me get lucky

Red solo cup, I fill you up
Let's have a party, let's have a party
I love you red solo cup, I lift you up
Proceed to party, proceed to party

“Red Solo Cup” Performed by Toby Keith
Written by Brett and Brad Warren & Brett and Jim Beavers


Bill was forty one years old when he first became a father. He had been married to Amy for a little over two years at the time. That fabulous moment was followed by the birth of Brad nearly three years later. It shocked him to think that everything had come together as it had so many years later than most of his schoolmates and friends. For some reason he could not fathom, God had blessed him although he had taken a rough road to that realization.

Bill was nearly married once before, at the age of twenty. Like so many decisions he had made in that time period, he was just doing something without thinking about it or the consequences of his decisions. He would look on that time period later in life and wonder “Where did my brains go?” He had moved in with a girl he thought was his girlfriend. She wanted more, he didn’t. Why buy the cow when the milk’s free, right? As she pressured him more and more to get married, using every weapon in her arsenal, he relented. Then as the time of the wedding approached, his job needed him to work out of town for a time. Of course he had do go. Needless to say, his decision was not well received. The relationship ended as soon as he told her he had to leave. Later he would reflect on this as one of the luckiest moments of his life. He was going to marry for all of the wrong reasons and would have ended up as just another statistic in divorce court. And her temper! I really wouldn’t want her raising my kids. He also came to realize he most likely triggered that also. She was really a wonderful lady, just not The One.

Looking back, that part of his life seemed to him like it must have been someone else’s life. When he was in his early teens, he had a good idea of what he wanted to do in life and had it all planned out how he was going to get there. He had researched his chosen field, knew where he needed to apply for college and what scholarships would be available; those scholarships would be essential. It would be hard work, but he knew how to accomplish it. Bill’s parents had never had much money, but he never considered them poor. They grew a large garden, raised chickens and beef, milked cows. “Poor people” went hungry. Bill’s family never went hungry; they just didn’t have any spare money. He had grown up with a strong work ethic instilled in him.

Then he had gone to high school, discovered girls and beer and all of his earlier ideas disappeared like burned off fog. He sleep-walked his way through high school without direction, then had gone on to college with no plans or directions. No plans, enjoying beer entirely too much, and he drifted even farther off course. He took a job with a construction crew and loved the money but he managed to spend most of what he made. The job conflicted with school so he never went back – what was the point?

At a party one night he met a girl that he moved in with two weeks later. Life became a cycle of work and party, and then more of the same. When the relationship ended, Bill really didn’t care. There were always more girls at the parties; they loved the guys that earned a paycheck. He was mostly bummed out about the inconvenience of moving.

He did good enough at work that he eventually became a foreman of his own crew. Now instead of the guys being his drinking buddies, he had to reprimand them for the same behavior he had enjoyed so much himself. He clashed with his friends and he clashed with his boss while defending his friends. The first time he had to fire a man for unsafe performance, he bought a bottle of whiskey and drank until it was gone. The rotten feeling in his gut from the firing was just pushed aside, but not replaced. The man had a wife and two kids. Bill knew they had lived paycheck to paycheck like most of the people in the trade. Bill woke up with a pounding head and was lucky to make it to the toilet before he started throwing up.

Bill became more and more morose, spending his free time alone drinking. He managed to be mostly sober for work but his job performance was rapidly plummeting with the rest of his life. If a positive could be found in his life, it was that drinking alone at home cut down on his alcohol bills substantially. He could go through his entire paycheck in a week at the bar. That was much harder to do when buying beer at the grocery store.

*****

Bill woke slowly, his body aching, a rank smell in his nostrils. His mouth had a taste like something had crawled in and died. His head pounding, the odor nearly overwhelming, he tried to open his gummed-up crusty eyes to try to locate the stench. He managed to get his eyes open and could not register what he was seeing. Finally the eyes and brain got in synch and he realized his left eye was seeing an up-close view of rocks and dirt laced with vomit. He retched at the realization that the side of his face was laying in his own vomit. He pushed himself shakily up to his hands and knees, dry heaves wracking his body, lightning bolts of sharp pain stabbing his brain, not registering the rocks scraping raw tracks across his hands. At last his body stopped revolting and he slowly lifted his head to look around. The view spun and he dry heaved again. When the retching stopped he looked around, even slower in an attempt to keep from further upsetting his stomach. “Where in the heck am I?”

He grasped a nearby bush to help pull himself in lurching stages to his feet. His fogged over brain did not register the shiny poison oak leaves as it spread down both arms. Involuntarily, he reached up to rub his gummed up eyes and scrape the crusted vomit from his face. His eyes and face started to itch and burn as he tried to focus on his surroundings. He came to the realization what the bushes were, and stumbled away, his foot rolling on an empty whiskey bottle and falling back to his hands and knees. He jammed his wrist, pain shooting up his right arm as he fell against some lava rocks. “Dang rocks,” he exclaimed as another one ripped the knee out of his pants and cut a long gouge through the skin. He struggled to his feet again, dizzy, barely managing to stay upright, but mindful of rocks and anything else that might trip him.

Slowly as he looked around at the rocks and bushes surrounding him he registered the sound of running water. He turned to it and a slow to form realization came to him. “The Snake River? What the heck am I doing here?” His face and arms burning and itching, he found a track that led to the water and started down it, stumbled, and then tumbled down the embankment into the water. As he went under, he cracked his bleeding knee on a rock at the water’s edge. Gasping and sputtering he got his head out of the water and grasped the rock. He hung on and got his breathing under control and his thoughts back in line. Dang this water is cold. Despite the cold, he remained there, the cold water soothing the burning in his arms and knee and his pounding head. He remained there clinging to the rock until his body began to shake from the cold. After cleaning his face the best he could, he crawled on hands and knees out of the water, a jolt of pain shooting up his arm each time his weight rested on his jammed wrist, quickly echoed by the lacerated knee. There was a pile of driftwood nearby so he crawled to it and found a stick that would serve as a staff. He pulled it free of the pile, stood it on its end and began to try to get upright. His knee threatened to buckle at any moment and his wrist was nearly useless, but he struggled to a standing position.

The embankment Bill had rolled down was about twelve feet high, and with the aid of the staff he managed to stagger to the top, falling once. He let out a cry of pain and cursed the God-forsaken river before he managed to regain his feet. After he was at the top he again tried to figure out where he was. Although his face still burned and he could feel a tightness as it was swelling up, he could see better than he had all morning – or was it still morning?

Stumbling through the brush to the spot where he had awoke; Bill stopped and looked around, searching for anything familiar, anything at all. Something blue caught his eye and he staggered towards it, eventually making out the top of his pickup. He managed to make it to the pickup, and then checked his pockets. Dang, where are the keys? He opened the door and breathed a sigh of relief to find them in the ignition. Bill climbed into the seat and slumped with his pounding head in his hands against the steering wheel. He dozed in that position until the pressure in his bladder aroused him. He half rolled out of the seat and promptly fell to the ground when his stiffened knee refused to bend properly. He retrieved the staff from where he had dropped it and pulled himself to his feet and relieved himself where he stood. The foul taste of vomit in his mouth registered through the pounding in his head, he leaned back into the pickup looking for something – anything – to drink. All he found was a couple of cans of warm beer. He grabbed one and shuffled to the other side of the pickup and opened that door. After a short search, he dug his aspirin bottle out of the jockey box. He fought with the child proof lid, mentally cursing the people that had brought about that change in packaging. Finally, the lid popped off and aspirin showered the ground. He bent, nearly toppling from the bum knee, and picked up four tablets, mixed with a liberal amount of sand and dirt. He popped them in his mouth and took a chug of the beer. The beer hit his churning stomach and immediately made an about face and he heaved it back out onto the side of his pickup. Not just the beer and aspirin, it felt as if he was trying to expel everything he had eaten for the last week. He grasped the side of the pickup to keep from falling while he spewed as spasms wracked his body. When he finished puking, he carefully kneeled to the ground, not able to keep the dizziness away, and located two aspirin, left mostly whole and dry, and popped them in his mouth and chewed them up with a handful of grit and swallowed them dry. With his head pounding and spinning he located the beer can where it had fallen, now just a mass of foam, picked it up and angrily threw it into the brush.


Bill considered the last can of beer, and decided to keep it, stumbled around the pickup again and climbed into the driver’s seat, reclined it and closed his eyes. He passed out rather than falling asleep, but it was rest nonetheless.

Sometime later Bill awoke; he had no idea how much later. His head didn’t pound as bad so he was able to string some thoughts together. Whatever he was doing there, he needed to get home, clean up and get some real rest. He started the engine, put it in gear and let the clutch out. Nothing happened. He revved the engine, but the pickup still didn’t move. He put it in neutral, slowly got out, still unsteady on his feet. He carefully lowered himself to the ground while clinging to the door and looked under the pickup. The rear axle was resting on a rock, just high enough to keep one wheel off the ground. Looking carefully, he couldn’t see any other obstructions. He grasped the door and pulled himself upright and returned to the seat, shifted into four wheel drive low range and slowly eased off the rock. A sickening screech of metal on rock sounded but he kept going until the sound stopped and he was clear of the rock. He wanted to just keep driving, but a voice in his mind made him stop and get out and make sure he hadn’t damaged something that would make him regret going on. He eased himself out, walked gingerly to the back and slowly lowered himself to his hands and knees. The knee didn’t make it easy and the jammed wrist barely support him, but he gritted his teeth and fought through the pain. Once on his hands and knees he looked under the pickup and couldn’t see anything that appeared damaged. Lurching back upright, he walked unsteadily to the cab and got back in. Putting the pickup back in gear, he slowly pulled away, not hearing anything to cause concern.

Bill could see faint tracks in the dirt and followed them through the scrub brush, avoiding rocks while the brush scraped the paint on each side as he went. Following the track, he got to what passed as a road in the river canyon, put the pickup back into two-wheel drive and started up the road. He began to recognize landmarks of an area he went to to fish for channel cats. Well, at least I know where I am and how to get home. He drove to a paved road and went to a nearby store. Luckily there was some cash in his wallet, so he went in and purchased bottled water, saltines and more aspirin. The cashier wrinkled his nose and gave him a funny look. If he looked as bad as he felt he could understand it.

Back at his pickup but not getting in he opened the water, rinsed his mouth and spit. He tried just a slight sip and it settled so he climbed into his seat. He slowly ate a saltine making sure each nibble would stay down before having another. After eating three saltines he chanced washing down three aspirin with water. It stayed, but left him unsettled so he didn’t try to eat or drink more right away and started for home. On the way, he occasionally nibbled at the crackers and took tiny sips of water.
Slowly as he was driving, he began to remember the day before. He had gone to work with a better attitude than normal for a change. Things were going well until the company bookkeeper came to the job site. The management group had just been arrested for defrauding customers, all assets were frozen, and the company was officially defunct. As everyone cursed, they picked up their tools and left. Bill had driven to the liquor store, bought a bottle and proceeded to drink himself into ignorance as he mindlessly drove. He wasn’t able to recall going to the river canyon.

By the time Bill got to his apartment, his headache was down to a strum rather than a pound and his stomach was much settled. He went in and took a long shower, ate a bowl of soup, took more aspirin and collapsed in bed.

When Bill awoke and looked outside, he saw it was close to night, long shadows being cast by the setting sun. Okay, the drinking is getting out of hand. If I don’t stop now, I never will. He went to the fridge hoping for something to eat. All he saw was an open case of beer. He went to the cabinet and was greeted with one can of sardines and a can of stew. Stew it is. He warmed it in the microwave and sat down to eat and think. A full blown pity party was about to blossom and he was considering how deep he could get into the case of beer when the voice in his head stopped him. Drinking put you here; it’s time for another approach. He looked wistfully at the fridge then filled a glass with water and sat down to figure out how to proceed.

The following morning, Bill showered, shaved and made himself look as presentable as he could. He filed for unemployment, getting all of the information on jobs he could. Unfortunately the recession was getting worse and construction was on life support. He had considered himself lucky to still have a job for some time. Now it was obvious how lucky he had been. He went back home and went online to look at job prospects. As the day drew on, he went to his sister Carla’s house to enlist her help in making a resume. That was something he never had, starting work out of school and never having a need for one.

Bill slipped into a routine; unemployment office looking for job opportunities and online searching. With no prospects, he signed on with a temporary agency taking small jobs as they came. While he still wanted a beer, he didn’t feel like the need to drink into oblivion each day. But he knew if he drank one, it would never be enough. He wouldn’t stop until he passed out. What a contradiction; one beer was both not enough and also too much. So he stopped drinking altogether. His bank account was shrinking; drinking was for guys with money to throw away.

As the bank account dwindled, he came to the decision that given his current situation, without wholesale changes he would soon be broke and homeless. If he didn’t fix it now – right now – he was in for some very tough times. It would be better to go into it as he directed rather than be forced. He thought hard about how he had grown up. Dad never seemed to have extra money, but they always got along fine. The more he thought about it, it boiled down to two main points. Dad did everything possible he could do for himself, not relying on others for services, and made as many things as he could himself, reducing purchases. And all purchases were needs, not wants. Sometimes it was convenient to blur the two, but he was going to have to stick very strictly to the NEED principle.

He made out a budget with expenditures as tight as he could feasibly come up with. The first cuts were easy; the cable went first. It was bundled with his phone line, high speed internet and TV. He really didn’t want a cell phone with the monthly bill, but needed to be reached instantly if a job came his way. So he ditched his old phone and service at the end of the contract and went for a prepaid phone. In place of the internet, he became a regular at the library, using the computers there for job searching. He also read and checked out magazines and movies and books. The library was certainly different than it had been in his youth.

Also cut was his newspaper and magazine subscriptions. He could get magazines at the library, although not always the ones he had subscribed to. Oh well. He had considered keeping the newspaper for the Sunday coupons, but after checking them closely, the majority was for prepared foods. If he bought basic ingredients and cooked himself, he could still save even more than if he bought the coupon items. It just took more time, and he now had that in surplus. He quit eating out, bought basic ingredients and went to produce stands for his fruits and vegetables. If he was going to be out, he made something at home and took it with him to eat later. Though he longed for beer, he continued to refrain from drinking any alcohol, sticking with water and whatever the cheapest coffee was when he went shopping.

The next big item was his pickup – the payment and insurance. He listed it and sold it for less than he owed, leaving him to make up the difference, but it still helped with his cash flow. He couldn’t find a car he could buy for cash, so he bought a slightly used bicycle at a thrift store and began peddling everywhere. Not only was he saving money, he was getting healthier, the beer belly dropping off rapidly with his changes. He found two laptop computer bags at a thrift store, that when combined with some webbing from the Army-Navy Store and some heavy sewing soon became bicycle panniers.
He had never been much for clothes shopping, but now he watched for items his size at thrift stores. He wanted clothes that looked good for job interviews. Most of his wardrobe consisted of worn work clothes.

Another benefit of his changes was the relationship with his family. While he was drunk, he had avoided his family, embarrassed to show them how far he had fallen. Although awkward at first, his parents were happy to have him around; he began working most days in the garden and helped in the hayfields. He was able to stop buying at produce stands. His mom always sent him home with fresh vegetables from the garden.

Occasional temp jobs came to Bill, and less occasional were real job interviews. He stopped looking at jobs just in construction and began filling out applications for any job. He was to the point he needed a job not a career.

[ydderf]

Thanks for the updates

[kaijafon]

keep up the great work! love the story!

[bretf]

Chapter 8: Busted


I called up my brother to ask for a loan cause I was busted
Now I hate to beg like a dog for a bone but I was busted
My brother said, "There ain't a thing I can do
My wife and the kids are all down with the flu
And I was just thinkin's 'bout callin' on you
Cause I'm busted

Now I'm no thief but a man can go wrong when he's busted
The food that we canned last summer is gone and we're busted
The fields are all bare and the cotton won't grow
Me and my family's gotta pack up and go
I'll make a livin', just where I don't know
Cause I'm busted

“Busted” Performed by John Conlee
Written by Harlan Howard


Despite all of the spending changes Bill had made, it was not enough. He had been unable to get any steady employment and his savings was continuing to decline. He was running out of options. The apartment would have to go; he just didn’t know where to turn next. He started searching for a studio apartment. He certainly didn’t need the large apartment any longer. About the only good news was his employment benefits had been extended. This really galled Bill. He had finally begun to grow up. He didn’t want to be taking unemployment; he wanted to earn his own way but couldn’t.

Bill was riding his bike to his parent’s house from the opposite direction he normally went when he saw a “For Sale” sign in the yard of a neighbor’s house. What a dump. They better have a low price or they’ll never sell that dog. When he got to his folks place, his dad was hooking the baler to the tractor so he helped get it attached and the power take off hooked up. While his dad checked the twine and put in two new spools, Bill took the grease gun and pumped all of the certs full. Bill watched Cal start baling, and then hooked the trailer to the pickup and drove to the field and began loading the bales. His mom joined him and took over driving so Bill stuck with loading the bales orderly on the trailer. His mind drifted from the mundane repetitive action, and kept going back to the house for sale. He pictured the lay of the property and began to picture it planted with a large garden. He continued to paint a mental picture of the place, where the fruit trees would go, the grape vines, the hen house and pen. The place looked to be about three acres; with proper planning and layout, it could be very productive.

When Bill had stacked the first trailer load of hay and was loading the second, Cal, having finished bailing, joined him at the trailer. As they worked, Bill asked his dad about the neighbor house. “Well, I think the inside looks even worse than the outside. But look close, it’s solid built. The outside just needs cosmetic work. The inside however, needs gutted and totally redone.”

They continued to load hay in silence and drove to the hay yard to unload and stack. “So what are you thinking about that place?” Cal asked.

“I’ve got to get out of the apartment, the rent is killing me. I don’t know how I could ever get a loan to buy that place, not having a job and all. I could do the entire remodel and turn it into a livable house. But I still couldn’t get the loan. Just thinking out loud I guess”.
They got the last bale on the stack and returned to the field for the final load. “What about you make payments to me?” Cal asked. “I could buy it and you could pay me.”

Bill was shocked. “Thanks Dad. I don’t know what to say. But I can’t let you do that. If I can’t get a job, you’d be stuck.”

“Well, some months back I would have let you end up on the streets. You were a drunken jerk. And that was your better side,” he chuckled. “But you’ve changed. Your head had been in the clouds for years; I haven’t known who you were. But this has made you into a better person. I’m betting it sticks this time. Don’t disappoint me,” he looked Bill sternly in the eye.

“Let me throw something else out for you. Consider making a living; not a paycheck. Suppose you can’t find a steady job. Have you noticed how organic produce sells at those Farmer’s Markets now? And free range eggs? There is a real market for good food; people are willing to pay premium prices for it. You could probably make that place pay for itself if you didn’t waste money.” Cal watched Bill’s nod of acknowledgement.

Bill and Cal finished the hay, went to the house and washed up. “I need to run Dad, I’ve going to go to the library and see if there are any new job postings.” Bill said.

“Okay, I’ll see you later. And I’ll look into that house.”

Bill got on his bike, noticing the panniers had been stuffed with fresh produce from the garden. There was enough there to feed him for nearly a week. Thanks Mom.

As he was nearing his apartment to drop off the vegetables, his phone rang. He stopped at the side of the road and got the phone out and looked at the number. He didn’t recognize it. “Hi, this is Bill” he answered.

“Bill, this is Tom Roberts. I work with your brother Bob at the county.”

“Hi Tom, what can I do for you?”

“Bob tells me you’re looking for a job and know something about construction. I’ve been moonlighting on my days off and the thing is getting too big for me. I need some help and Bob said now that you’ve gone on the wagon, you were a good hand”.

There it is again. First Dad says I was a jerk, now Bob recommends me since I’ve quit drinking. I must have really been a piece of work. Maybe it’s good that I don’t remember a lot. “Tom, I would love to talk with you about it. Just tell me where and when.” Bill got the information, pedaled quickly to the apartment and put away the vegetables, then went to Tom’s house.

Tom had a small operation that had continued to grow despite the recession. He did remodel work, handy-man work, and general small construction projects. The job Tom offered was Jack of all trades. Bill would work with Tom on job sites doing all phases of work: rough and finish carpentry, plumbing, electrical, drywall, painting, and roofing. He would learn to do hand drawings; not nearly as detailed as an architect’s, yet with enough detail to pull permits and be fully understandable to perform the work.
He would learn Tom’s methods of purchasing. It was an invaluable position that would give Bill knowledge in most every aspect of building with overlap into other industries.

Bill took the job on the spot. The pay was less than he had made in the past but he didn’t care. The way he had changed his lifestyle, he could do quite well with the pay. He started working for Tom the next day. The only drawback he saw was transportation; he would have to carry tools and materials to jobs. He found a bike trailer at a thrift store that would get him by while he saved some money. By the time the weather turned cold, he hoped to have enough saved up to pay cash for a reliable pickup. But no drunken driving this time.

When Bill called his Dad to say he had a job and would like to go ahead and purchase the house he got another surprise. Cal had known about the job offer before Tom had called. Tom had talked to both Bob and Cal numerous times to be sure Bill would be up to the job and be a dependable worker before talking directly with Bill.

Cal made a cash offer on the house that was accepted right away in the down market. Cal closed on the house and Bill moved out of his apartment. When he stepped into the house for the first time, he wondered if he had made a mistake. “Dump” was a kind word for what was behind the walls. He didn’t think animals could live worse than the previous occupants. He wondered if the stench would ever leave, even with gutting the house. But the stench did leave as Bill gutted and rebuild the house. The exterior repairs went fast; the interior not so fast.

Bill continued with his stingy spending habits, sticking to needs only and used that same philosophy on the house. An auction house in town regularly had building products. Bill had priced most of the items he needed for the house at the big box store and had it all written in a pocket notebook. He was able to pick up much of the material he needed for a reduced price, including a full set of kitchen cabinets. They weren’t perfect, but with some effort they turned out fine.

Bill spent all of his free time on the house. He was living in his Dad’s wall tent in the back yard while doing the work. He really wanted to be done before winter. When he saw he would never beat the changing seasons, he made sure he completed the plumbing and the bathroom. He could do one room at a time and make do as needed. With one paycheck he picked up a used woodstove. He had to purchase new triple wall chimney that ended up costing more than the stove, but he gladly paid the price. Every scrap of wood was saved from his job as well as the house remodel and would keep the house above freezing through the winter. He would consider comfort heat the next winter. He also picked up any pallets he saw with a “Free” sign in the warehouse part of town.

By spring, the interior was complete, just in time to work on the ground. During the more mundane parts of Bill’s work, he continually thought about the ground layout and had a full plan when spring arrived. He borrowed his Dad’s tractor, ripper and disc and worked up a section of ground for fruit trees and garden. He laid out areas for the shop-garage he would build and the area he hoped to put up a green house.

One weekend was spent building a simple chicken house and pen. He purchased broiler chicks and Rhode Island Red pullets and a rooster chick from the local hatchery. He spent more than he would have liked and put up strong, tight fences around his pasture area so he could supplement their feed by allowing the chicks to free range. The broilers didn’t grow as fast as they could have if they had been confined and stuffed with feed, but he liked the trade-off of money saved on feed, for in his opinion at least, healthier birds than confined ones. He planted the garden with a wide variety of vegetables, with enough to can or freeze the surplus. He bought a new upright freezer. He bought hundreds of Mason jars at thrift stores. When the chickens were large enough he butchered and froze them. The young pullets had begun to lay eggs. When the garden started producing he began to live mostly on what he produced.

With the garden in control and growing, Bill built the shop - garage with bays to park two cars and that much more area as a work shop. One section was built with heavily insulated walls with closeable vents and shelves to store his canned produce. On one outside wall of the shop, he added a lean-to for wood storage. He went with his Dad and brothers on weekend trips to the mountains and they all got enough firewood for the winter. Bill would have comfort heat that winter.

Having been employed by Tom for a full year, Bill secured his own mortgage and paid Cal for the home on top of the payment’s he had made to Cal for the previous year. Bill tried to pay him more but his dad kept tearing up the checks. Bill’s mortgage was for fifteen years. Each payment he sent on it contained whatever he could afford to pay extra. Some months it was a substantial amount, other months not. He wanted to work as hard as possible to never be faced with losing the home. In the end, his extra amounts cut four years off the mortgage.

When fall came, Bill went elk hunting with Bob and Alan for the first time in many years. Wow, I missed these trips. They had success, getting a spike bull and a three point. They split the meat equally between the three brothers, their folks and Carla. Along with the chickens and garden produce, Bill’s freezer contents looked impressive. The trips to the grocery store would be minimal.

Bill was sitting in his rocker by the wood stove one evening sipping an herbal tea when he reflected on his life changes. He had been on a path of self-destruction when he lost his job. Out of that he had grown and matured. He couldn’t remember being this content since he was a kid. He didn’t feel complete, but he did feel contentment.