A Troubling Turn of Events

by Darrell Maloney

  A dozen full-grown chickens ran here and there and everywhere.

  “The hardest part was lugging all the dirt up here, two backpacks full a day. It’s only two inches thick, but that’s plenty to grow food for the chickens.”

  “So, what’s all the green stuff?”

  “Heck if I know. We brought up a bunch of bags of wild bird feed from a pet store a few blocks away. We sprinkled it on the ground just before a spring rain, and it took root in the mud. It’s bloomed ever since and the chickens have plenty to eat.

  “Truth is, they’d probably have enough to eat just from our food scraps. But the wild seed they get from their feed bed makes them fat and their meat juicer.”

  “You feed them food scraps too?”

  “Oh, yeah. We didn’t know until we actually started raising chickens, but they’re a lot like pigs or billy goats. They eat all kinds of stuff. We thought they had to have chicken feed but it’s not true at all. Between their food bed and the scraps we bring up, they’ve never needed even one sack of chicken feed.

  “Somebody told us that without proper feed or chicken scratch their egg shells would be so thin they’d break when the hens sat on them. But we haven’t had any problem.

  “As you can see, we’ve got plenty of chicks running around at various stages of development.

  “What kinds of scraps do you give them, exactly?”

  “Oh, all kinds of stuff. They love watermelon rinds and cucumber peels. Potato skins and any rotten vegetables we pull out of our balcony gardens.

  “They even love peanut shells and orange, grapefruit and apple peels. Once a week on Saturdays we fill up our backpacks with coffee beans and squash and eggs and ride our bikes over to Brackenridge Park to the farmer’s market. We trade our stuff for fresh oranges and apples, and if there aren’t any available, we trade for other stuff we need.

  “If we have any room left in our backpacks after we do our trading, we stop at the Home Depot on the way back and grab some more fertilizer or potting soil.

  “As I told you before, we never come home with half-empty backpacks.”

  John was incredulous.

  “Oh, gosh. I have so many questions…”

  “Then ask them.”

  “Did you say you grow your own coffee beans?”

  “Oh, yes. And tobacco too.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. Some of our best friends are horticulturists and vegetarians. They live a couple of miles from here and have their own greenhouse. They’ve had it for many years to grow their own food, even before it was required.

  “They grew not only their own spices and herbs, but also their own coffee and tobacco, and they were able to provide us with everything we needed to get our own planters started. That’s where we got the peanuts and potato starters, and the expertise to grow them.”

  “How many planter boxes do you have?”

  “Forty-two. Most are on the river side of the hotel, because it tends to get less wind than the other side. Sometimes the wind on the street side gets so high it blows the blossoms off the plants.”

  “And you’re able to raise enough chickens to feed you?”

  “Oh, yeah. And not just in the nice weather months either. San Antonio’s climate is such that the feed bed never dies. Even if it drops below freezing a couple of times during the winter, the bed doesn’t die. It just goes dormant for a few days, then springs right back.

  “In fact, we have one chicken every three weeks. There’s only two of us, so we can make four meals out of one hen. After we have chicken four days in a row, we’re tired of it enough to not want it for awhile. So one hen every three weeks is about right.

  “We’re also able to raise a few extras for our friends who have their own grow space, although we have to sneak them out in our backpacks.”

  “How come?”

  “Well, we’ve been afraid that if anyone sees us carrying live chickens through the streets of San Antonio they might try to take them from us.”

  “Good point.”

  “So we sneak the extras out in our backpacks. They remain pretty calm when the lights go out and don’t make a lot of noise or try to get out.

  “We give them to trusted friends and they raise their own chickens.”

  “And you don’t have any problems with the chickens flying off the roof?”

  “No. You can see that in addition to the three foot wall which encircles the roof Julio lined it with another four feet of chicken wire.

  “The main reason we’re able to keep them here, though, is that Julio breaks their wings while they’re chicks.

  “I personally think it’s barbaric but he claims it doesn’t hurt them.

  “You see, a lot of people think that chickens can’t fly but it’s not true at all.

  “They can’t fly very high or for very long because their wings are too small to carry the weight of their bodies. But they can fly for short distances.”

  “But not,” Julio quite accurately pointed out, “when their wings have been broken.

  “How in the world do you haul enough water up here to keep everything watered?”

  “Oh. Well, that’s a completely different conversation. If you want to see how that works we’ll have to walk over to the other side of the roof.”

  “Lead the way. I can’t wait.”

  -22-

  The western side of the hotel’s roof, perhaps another half-acre in size, was covered almost entirely in… garbage cans.

  Many were quite small, round in shape, and capable of holding no more than a couple of gallons of water.

  Others were as tall as John’s waist.

  Each of them, every one, was covered with a plastic cover and topped with a brick.

  They were lined up in nice neat rows like soldiers marching off to battle somewhere.

  Only these soldiers weren’t meant to fight.

  Their intent was to catch and hold water.

  It was, perhaps, the largest and most complex rainwater collection system John had ever seen.

  “The hotel has five-hundred rooms,” Maria began. “Each of them was equipped with two small trash cans. One in the bathroom, the other in the main portion of the room.

  “We gathered them all up and brought them up here and lined them up. Just doing that took more than a week.

  “The larger cans came from all the common areas of the hotel. The lobby area, the hallways, the dining rooms, the kitchen, all the back rooms and employee work areas the guests never saw.

  “The lids came from an abandoned tractor trailer on I-37 about a quarter mile from here. It wasn’t looted much, once people saw there was no food or water on board. But the plastic dinner plates no one wanted were the perfect size and shape to cover our cans with, so we brought back over eleven hundred of them.”

  “One backpack at a time,” Julio proudly added.

  Maria continued, “The bricks came from a construction site on Houston Street.”

  “Carrying those was a definite pain in the ass,” Julio opined.

  “Shut up, Julio. Stop interrupting me.”

  They were the first harsh words John heard Maria say, and she apologized immediately.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to John.

  “I’m sorry,” Julio said to Maria.

  “It’s okay,” John said to anybody who’d listen.

  “Every time it looks like rain we come up here and take all the lids off the containers. When the sun comes back out we come back up and recover them so the rain they catch doesn’t evaporate.”

  “I thought you collected all your water from the river.”

  “No. That’s how Julio stays in shape. He does that instead of lifting weights. I think he’s crazy, but he says it keeps his arms and chest strong. And I guess it probably does. I mean, the river is our emergency backup, in case we go more than a month without a significant rainfall. But it hasn’t happened yet.

  “So, how do you get the water down to the ni
nth floor?”

  “Every third day is watering day. Come here and I’ll show you how we do it.”

  She led the way to a fifty-gallon plastic barrel in the center of the roof.

  It had been modified and had four hoses coming from the bottom of the barrel, each hose about an inch from the floor of the roof.

  “It helps to have a husband who has worked in building maintenance all his adult life. My Julio can fix anything. Or, in this case, make anything.”

  Four water hoses led away from the barrel. Two went over the street side of the building, two over the river side.

  “All in all it took over eight hundred feet of hose. We got them from the hardware store and carried them back two fifty-foot rolls at a time.”

  “Let me guess,” John said. “One in each backpack.”

  “You catch on pretty quick.”

  “Just one of my many talents.

  “Where do the hoses lead?”

  “We’ve got similar drums in four of the hotel rooms. The ends of the hoses rest inside each of those drums, and Julio attached a spigot at the end of each hose.

  “On watering days Julio comes up here first thing in the morning and starts picking up the small trash cans one at a time. He dumps the water from the small cans into the drum here, and it runs through the hoses into the drums in the hotel rooms.

  “I stay down there and monitor the room drums.

  “As they get full I turn off their spigots.

  “When Julio notices the water is no longer draining as fast as he can pour it in, and starts backing up in this drum, that’s an indication to him that all the room drums are full and I’ve turned off all the spigots.

  “That’s when he wraps things up. He covers the drum so the excess water doesn’t evaporate. He’ll leave the lids off the small trash cans he emptied, since there’s no longer any water in them to evaporate anyway, and that way he’ll remember where he left off the next watering day.”

  -23-

  “What about the larger trash cans? The ones that came out of the lobby and common areas?

  “Each of those has a bucket inside. The cans are too heavy to drag back and forth when they have water in them. So he dips the water out with the bucket and lugs it to the drum.”

  “The hotel also has an outdoor pool, on the north end of the second floor. When the spring rains come it’ll fill the pool most of the way up, and that provides us quite a bit of water. Of course, we’ll only dip out of that when we have to, because we can’t count on gravity helping to move it, like we can with the roof water.”

  “That’s a real pain,” Julio added. I can’t haul up the pool water over the balcony, like I do the river water.”

  They went back down the stairs, back to the ninth floor, where they walked from room to room.

  Each of the balconies was lush with plant growth. Each one sported a different type of vegetable or melon.

  “As you can see, we grow far more food than we can ever eat. We take the excess to the farmer’s market on the weekends, where we barter it for the things we don’t have.

  “Or we give it to friends who have made their own gardens and need seeds to plant their own vegetables. All the seeds in the stores, you see, have been taken. The only way to get seeds these days is to find someone with the vegetable you’re looking for and to ask them for some.

  “So far this season I’ve been canning a lot as well.

  “You see, we didn’t plan ahead the first winter after the blackout. We saved seeds for the next planting, and a second set of seeds in case our crops failed due to a late freeze. But we didn’t can any of our extra vegetables.

  “For the second winter we canned some, but not enough.

  “This year I’m canning even more. And I’m saving the seeds, in case you know anyone who wants them.”

  “You’re saving the seeds?”

  “Yes. I have thousands of seeds I’ve been drying out and putting aside. I’ve tried to give them away, but only a few of our friends have gardens.

  “Most of the other people we see at the Alamo and on our excursions are like us. They live in hotels or abandoned office buildings. And they don’t live as high as we do.

  “It’s more convenient, you see, for them to live on the lower floors. And the problem with that is, if they tried to grow food on the first or second floors it would constantly be stolen.

  “So they typically don’t even try.”

  “I can help you get rid of the seeds if you’ll accept my help.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. The city is trying hard these days to create more growing space for the survivors.”

  “Really? How?”

  “Well, for one thing they’re trying to create more vacant lots.

  “They’re using eminent domain laws to seize abandoned houses and properties. Mostly from people who have died or moved away and don’t need them anymore.

  “They’re going street to street with demolition crews. When they come to a house that appears vacant they knock on the door and announce themselves.

  “If there’s no answer they break in. If the house looks like it hasn’t been occupied in a while they declare it abandoned and condemn it on the spot. Then they start demolishing it.

  “They’re stacking the wood neatly in the street for the survivors to use, either to burn as firewood in the winter or for cooking their food and boiling their water.

  “Everything else they think might be of use to somebody else is placed in the street for the taking as well. An example is carpet for burning, pipes for making rain gutter systems, bath tubs for catching rain water.

  “The stuff nobody wants, like busted sheetrock, is placed in a different pile for pickup by another city crew. They only have three dump trucks running now, so it might sit there for months. But eventually it’ll be carted away.”

  “The older homes were built using the block and pier method. They have no concrete slabs, so they’re demolished much quicker and easier.

  “But even more modern homes, with full concrete slabs, are broken up with a little sweat and muscle, using generators and air compressors and jack hammers.

  “Instead of hauling away all the concrete, they’re breaking it into chunks. People are using the chunks to outline their gardens, place on the pathways between their crops, and to block the storm drains in the streets to channel more rainwater into their gardens.

  “The city’s goal is to create two vacant lots on each city block that the survivors on that block can use to plant crops.”

  “Wow. That’s a great idea. I’m surprised somebody on the city council had the brains to think up such a plan.”

  “Oh, that’s not all. They’re doing much more.

  “They’ve got the University of Texas at San Antonio working in partnership with them.

  “It seems UTSA has an agricultural department which owns several greenhouses on the west side of the city.

  “They used to grow plants so they could study the effects of various herbicides and pesticides on them.

  “Now, though, they’re using the greenhouses to grow seedlings. Thousands and thousands of them.”

  “What kinds of seedlings?”

  “Fruit trees. Apples and citrus specifically. You see, San Antonio’s climate is warm enough to grow orange and lemon and pomegranate and grapefruit trees.”

  “I knew that. We had an orange tree and a banana plant in our back yard before the blackout.”

  “Then you know orange trees grow well here, but require a lot of water.

  “The UTSA Ag Department says they don’t have to be watered as long as they’re planted next to a semi-permanent water source.

  “So they’re going to line the banks of the San Antonio River with seedlings.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes. And not just on the Riverwalk. The entire river, both north and south of town.

  “And all along the banks of the playa lakes in the city as well. All the permanent rivers and
streams.

  “In a generation there will be thousands of tons of fresh fruit all over town, free for the taking.

  “And the best part is, once they’re planted they’ll require no care. Their root system will seek out its water from the river or the lake. They won’t have to be watered.

  “In twenty years the downtown section of the San Antonio… the Riverwalk, will look vastly different than it does now.”

  Julio was an eternal pessimist.

  “That’s okay for the next generation. But what about those of us who are alive now?”

  -24-

  “Oh, they’ve got plenty of other projects going on for us older folks too,” John said.

  Maria smiled at the way he grouped the three of them together, as though intentionally overlooking the thirty-odd years which separated them.

  “All the park space has been fenced in, including all the space at Brackenridge Park.”

  “Even the golf course?”

  “Yes. Even the golf course. It’s been divided into sections which are forty-feet by forty-feet, and assigned to people who don’t have green space on their blocks.

  “It’s mostly apartment dwellers and people who live in the inner city, where there isn’t much space to grow gardens.

  “It’s guarded by the city twenty four hours a day to prevent theft, and to get a plot all somebody has to do is show a photo ID. They have to have their ID each time they show up to tend their garden in order to be allowed access.

  “Everything is there for them. Agriculture student volunteers to tell them how to plant and care for their gardens. Fertilizer, gardening tools including tillers. Herbicides.

  “They even provide water. It’s brought in by an eight thousand gallon tanker truck they got running and the water is pumped from Calaveras Lake. It comes three times a week to Brackenridge Park and on other days it goes to other parks that are set up the same way.

  “The problem is seeds. As you said, there are no more available in the stores. Novice gardeners have a learning curve, and a lot of them are killing their crops as they learn. Every time somebody’s crops die they need more seeds, so they’re constantly running out and asking for more.”