America: The Eagle has Fallen

by Gordon Ballantyne

  “Mary’s friend lives next door and both her parents are home,” she replied. “We know them through the various school and church events. Our daughters have been friends since elementary school and we have been carpooling since then.”

  “Good, let’s go see them,” I said. We went to a similar sized house and lot next door and saw a large muscled man at the side of the house chopping wood using a maul in a practiced steady stroke. He stopped when he saw us and picked up a side by side shotgun propped up next to his growing wood stack. He kept the shotgun lowered when he recognized Miriam and saw that we were armed but not brandishing weapons.

  “Everything OK Miriam?” he asked as we approached.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “This is Mr. Robertson from down the street. He helped Mary with her arm. This is Adam, my neighbor.”

  “You were the guys that helped my daughter out the other day,” Adam said. “I want to thank you. Care for some coffee?”

  “Please,” I said as we walked into his spacious, cozy, rustic kitchen placing our long guns at the door.

  “Darn electricity has shut down my water. I have an old hand dug well and have been using the water in my cistern and hot water tank. I am not too sure what I’m going to do after that goes dry other than using a bucket and a string for the well. I have a camping trailer out back that we use for showers and toilet but I have to carry the water over there,” Adam said. You don’t see too many old hand dug wells but I noticed that the creek on my property ran past Adam’s house.

  Randy sprang from his seat and said, “Let’s go take a look.”

  We walked out to his water shed behind the house and saw an old concrete cistern with a 110AC pump and pressure tank for his house. “Do you have any water pipes and a bicycle pump?” Randy asked excitedly after checking out the set up.

  “Yes,” said Adam. “But I don’t have the ability to run the 110AC well pump. I have a solar panel set for the trailer but I don’t have an inverter to hook up to the pump. My array isn’t big enough.”

  “This keeps getting better and better,” said Randy excitedly. “We are going to set up your panels and pull the DC water pump from your trailer and use it to pump water from your well into your cistern. Then you need to use a bicycle pump to blow up your pressure tank using the nipple on the top. It will only last for about twelve minutes but you can shower and use your toilet if you have a gravity septic system.”

  Adam smiled seeing Randy’s plan in his head. “I even have an emergency car compressor for inflating car tires that runs on DC. If I pull the batteries from my truck and hook it up to my solar panels then I won’t even have to pump.”

  A half an hour later Adam had running water in his house and could not thank us enough. Miriam and Adam’s wife and daughter were in the kitchen staring in amazement as Adam demonstrated the running water. “Can you do my house?” Miriam asked.

  “Do you have a shallow or deep well?” I asked.

  “Deep,” was her reply.

  “Then no,” I said. “The DC water pumps are not strong enough to lift the water from the deep wells. You would need a solar 110AC pump, large solar array and inverter to make that work.”

  “Maybe you and Mary could come stay here until your husband returns,” offered Adam. “We don’t have a lot but I’m sure if we pool our resources and labor we will be stronger together…plus we have running water,” he said with a grin.

  “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is King,” quipped Miriam with a smile. “Thank you guys so much. I will run home and pack up all our food and some clothes. I have been canning for a few years now as a hobby so we should be in good shape.”

  Adam explained that he was a logging foreman and was worried about all the strangers coming down the road and asking for help. “Some of those guys give me the creeps. That’s why I always keep my shotgun nearby.”

  “Well Adam,” I said thoughtfully. “I would suggest that you go talk to all your neighbors and drop some large trees across the road. If you stagger them you can make an Abatis so a vehicle can get through but have to slow down and do two switchbacks. It will also funnel any people to the center of the road. If you can organize your neighbors you can have a neighborhood watch to help with security. You guys are pretty exposed down here and need to cut down the avenues people can take to approach your property. A few trees across your driveway and you will have a fairly defensible position.”

  “How will emergency responders get to us if we partially block the road?” asked Adam.

  “I don’t think they are coming Adam but you do have the skills to open the road if needed with a chainsaw,” I replied. “Better safe and wrong than exposed and wrong.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you guys?” Adam asked.

  “Funny you should mention it,” I replied with a smile. “I see you have a log splitter over there and know your way around a chainsaw. I’d be happy to trade say five pounds of meat and a basket of vegetables for a cord of wood. I have the trees on my property but am a danger to myself and others with a chainsaw. I also see you have a teenage daughter. We have some little ones that need babysitting and schooling for say two dozen eggs a week. How does that sound?”

  “You have a deal sir,” said Adam with a smile, shaking my hand sealing the deal. “I’ll keep you in wood and child minding for as long and as much as you need in exchange for food. I was a little worried about the pantry if this was a long term event and you have taken a big load off my mind. Where do I need to go?”

  I explained how to get to my house and told him to buzz the gate before entering. “Now Adam, my house location cannot be revealed under any circumstance to anyone or our deal is terminated. Do you understand that? Security is everything now otherwise people will kill you even for what they think you have. Take a couple of days to get settled and we will hook up then.”

  Randy and I walked away with a wave. “That was pretty generous of you.”

  “Adam seems like a good man taking Miriam and her daughter in without a thought. He is also helping secure the only road to our house which is critical. The trade was worth it, especially if Miriam is a canning machine. We are potentially going to have a lot of fresh produce that we are going to have to preserve to get through the winter,” I explained while Randy and I walked back to my homestead.

  Our new extended family spent the next two weeks getting the homestead ready for the future. We planted the entire field with winter wheat and corn, sowing the seeds by hand into the loose tilled earth. The chicken coop was expanded using lumber I had hand salvaged from various surplus lumber supplies I had left over from my home building projects. We fenced it using the extra chicken wire Cindy had brought from the feed store in her truck digging the wire into the ground and burying it in a two-foot trench so predators could not dig under the wire into the coop. We also built nesting beds for the chickens to lay their eggs and rigged the coop with heat lamps to keep the chickens warm in the winter. We installed the wood burning stove and flue outside on the patio for the remainder of the summer and fall, preplanning a spot just inside the house to keep us warm in the winter. We constructed a greenhouse on the former upper lawn in an area that had the best southern sun exposure using more lumber and extra windows I had from jobsites. We also wrapped any other areas of the greenhouse with clear rolled plastic I had. We worked hard from dawn until dusk and were bone weary tired by the end of the day. Adam, true to his word, put up ten chords of wood and helped secure our driveway by dropping a few well-placed trees. Amy, our neighbor at the end of the driveway, came over every day with her two kids, a girl who was eight and a son that was six. Amy is a proud single mother and refused the offer to move in with us but was there daily to help with our projects and ate her meals with us. Randy and I set out tripwires on all approaches to the property rigged with noisemakers and flares and he was a godsend with his mechanical abilities, setting up a full irrigation system for our crops by digging up and repurposing our lawn sprinkler syst
em, creating drip tubes for our rows of plants. We constructed a reinforced bunker on the field side of the driveway behind a cedar tree that we had left to block the view of the house from the gate and camouflaged the bunker. I knew the most likely avenue of attack would be down the driveway. We also rigged up a few surprises for any attackers trying to attack our house from this vector. He installed two ingenious hot water coil syphons piped from our stove, one for the house domestic water supply and one copper loop that kept our greenhouse warm using the copper and hot water as a radiator. He explained that a hot water syphon could take cold water from the bottom of our tanks at the drain port, circulate the water through a copper coil in the firebox and add the now near boiling water up to the top of our hot water tanks teeing into the cold water tie in. Randy also assembled a ram pump for the creek to get Amy’s house water stored in a tote we set up on a wood platform in a tree and another one for our house to fill two five hundred gallon water totes for irrigation to keep the solar pump from working too hard. We had to dam off a portion of the creek to create a pool of water to provide us with a steady head of water pressure and installed the drive line with a screen to stop creek debris from jamming up the pumps. The creek is about 1000 feet from out water totes but only had an elevation change of 10 feet. Fortunately we had enough PEX tubing to make the run instead of using garden hose. The rubber garden hoses would have absorbed too much pressure to make the distance providing too much water friction. With Adam’s selective logging we were able to manhandle our large fifth wheel with our tractor so it was hidden in our adjoining five acres. We dug a large hole in the ground and built an insulated rooftop for our generator to shield it from noise and after many failed attempts managed to get it to work on wood gas. We built a gasifier by placing a sealed ammo box for the chipped wood fuel into our stove fire box. We installed a baffle in the ammo box to keep the wood gas fuel out of a sealed plumbing fitting coming out of the ammo box. After many failed attempts we learned we had to install a fan in the wood stove to get the fire to burn hotter and a condenser to cool the wood gas before it entered the generator air intake. We also learned to install pipe dirt legs on the bottom of the condenser grille to capture the oily substance that was gumming up the pipes. The gasifier wood gas to generator connection needed an air mixer valve to add oxygen to the wood gas to achieve combustion. It took us many failed attempts to get the system working properly after ironing out all the kinks in the system. I had researched online and in multiple prepper forums where to purchase a readymade gasifier but most of the companies making them all went out of business for lack of sales. There are only so many off grid preppers out there and using loud generators to make electricity is not high on their priorities with solar panel arrays and micro hydro generators becoming less expensive due to government and utility subsidies available in the marketplace. Randy and I were working on setting up a canning station and wood smoker when the dogs started barking and took off like a shot down the driveway. I was very pleased to see the little ones and Jacob bolt for the house and the adults running swiftly to the rally point with long guns in hand. After meeting the group at the rally point, I cautiously worked my way down the woods next to the driveway under the cover of my extended family. I saw Mr. Jones and some of the people from the neighborhood at the end of my driveway behind the gate. I cautiously approached the group but saw they were unarmed.

  “Can I help you?” I asked. “Did you not see the private property sign as you came down the gravel road?”

  “Um, yes,” stammered Mr. Jones. “But we are here on a matter of some importance. You see, I am the President of the homeowner’s association and at our scheduled meeting last night we took a vote and decided that all the homes in the neighborhood needed to pool our resources in these troubling times. We decided that all food needed to be brought to the community and shared equally amongst all the people based on a pro rata share. Everything needs to be surrendered immediately and hoarding is not permitted.”

  “I see,” I replied with condescending malice. “Did any of you help me plant my field? Did any of you offer to trade me for food? Are any of you helping secure and defend the neighborhood? Do you expect me to just give up what is mine? Because if so I can assure you we have both the will and the capability to defend what is ours and any person who comes to this gate uninvited in the future will summarily be shot; just so we are clear.”

  “You can’t threaten me,” blustered Mr. Jones, puffing out his chest. “I’ll go see the sheriff and have you arrested. I am the President of the HOA.”

  I laughed out loud as he turned on his heel and stormed off in a huff. I noticed that his posse were still standing around shaking their heads in disdain as he stomped up my gravel path. I walked up to my gate and addressed the crowd. “If any of you want to work in producing, processing or defending food then I will either help you or help you help yourselves. We are a community of people that are stronger together but this is not communism, there are no free rides.”

  The group of remaining people huddled together in a conference and finally a consensus was arrived at with all the heads bobbing up and down. A good looking haggard blond lady came forward. “We just disbanded the homeowner’s association. What should we do next?”

  “Well,” I replied. “Anyone is welcome to come work in our field at a rate of one meal per half day. Children under the age of eight can come to our school and receive two meals for the day. Kids over the age of eight can join our foraging parties we will set up. Any person who serves four hours of security at Adam’s blockade at the bottom of the hill or prepares meals will receive a meal. I will show any of you who want to learn how to hunt, forage or grow food, how to do so and will supply seeds to grow into food. We will also set up a trading post at the blockade for people outside the community to trade with ours. For those of you with special skills we can trade as needed. The cul-de-sac will be the place for community meals. We are living in a barter economy and your work is your value to your family and the neighborhood.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me,” said the blond lady. “My husband is a doctor who is still working at the hospital. We have two teenagers, a boy of fifteen and a girl who is fourteen. My eighty-year-old mother in law Ginny is staying with us. What can she do?”

  “Your mother in law might just be our most valuable asset,” I lectured looking at the assembled group. “She is a pre-war depression era child. She will know everything there is to know about canning, gardening, sewing, composting and cooking on a wood stove. People from that era know what it is like to have been hungry and cold. They lived before the advent of supermarkets and fast food. I would suggest your mother in law can give classes to all the neighborhood ladies, share recipes and lessons in homesteading. I’ll bet she even knows how to make things like soap. We will get through this together but only if we work together. I will be up in the cul-de-sac tomorrow morning and we will figure out how to get everyone pulling together.”

  “Wow!” one of the men said. “We can’t thank you enough. When Mr. Jones told us to bring all our food over to his garage I was thinking; what food?”

  “There are always people who will choose to take from others by legal means,” I explained. “They are called politicians. Where else can you take money from people in the form of taxes and spend that money on buying votes and campaign contributions for yourself. Hell, they can even borrow additional money and go into debt to buy your vote with your own future earnings. Crazy system and look how that worked out for them. I’m sure they are all sitting in hardened bunkers with ready-made meals that we bought for them while the people, whose money paid for these meals and accommodations, starve.”

  The procession moved up the driveway and were passed by two people coming in the opposite direction. It was my father in law Marcus and his wife Joy riding their mountain bikes. Avery would be so happy. I gave them a hug as I opened the gate for them.

  “How goes the road?” I asked. As we came into view of the house
, I heard the unmistakable “Grandpa!” shriek from Avery as she came running down the driveway to jump into her grandfather’s arms.

  He laughed. “The migration has begun down HWY 16,” he said. “There are masses of people trying to get out of the City into the country thinking that is where the food is. We took the backroads in and those are pretty quiet. A few people took a try for the bikes but we were faster and a couple of booms from old Betty, my carriage gun, sent them scattering. It’s a mess out there but we at least saw some of the old purse seiners coming out and going in.”

  “Good,” I said. “Gig Harbor is an old fishing village and those old coots know how to catch a lot of fish to keep people fed. I hope they are getting their shit together and blocking the bridges and blockading the inlets and harbor entrances. It won’t be long before the Tacoma masses just across the bridges to the East run out of food and start looking our way.”

  Belle’s parents were both outdoors people who liked to camp and fish. They would be an asset to our homestead and little Avery absolutely adores them. We set them up in the guest bedroom and had a group meeting.

  “It looks like our neighborhood finally wants to come into the fold,” I said. “They just needed a small dose of reality to see the error of their ways. The good news is we might have a doctor in the community when he makes it back from the hospital. The garden is doing well and the crops will have some more hands in the morning to help with weeding and tending the harvest.”

  “You mean except for those darn rabbits and deer that keep eating it?” asked Randy.