Winter Kill - War With China Has Already Begun

by Gene Skellig

  Because her sewing room was so well established, Tanya had no regrets as she abandoned her shopping plans and carefully drove out of the parking lot of the fabric store. She stayed in the right-hand lane to avoid the faster, panicky traffic buzzing about. She wondered if she would ever see the shop again. As Tanya drove the forty minutes back, she reflected on how much they had accomplished in the last six months since moving in.

  Casey had promised her that this move, unlike some of the moves in the past, would be into a finished house. They would never again move into one of his renovation projects. Their last renovation project had been a disaster. Casey had moved the family into the basement when the main floor and bedrooms were all in various stages of completion. It had only been a matter of repainting the bedrooms and refinishing the floors before she could settle the children into their bedrooms, but the main floor had been a much bigger project. When they moved in that August the kitchen had been completely gutted by Casey and his trusty Russian helper, Yuri.

  Casey had been working on that house for all of July and most of August while Tanya had been back in Yellowknife seeing to the final packing and arranging the move to Winnipeg. But even with the military-provided moving contractors, it had been a big job for Tanya. Combined with caring for their three children at that time, and Tanya had had enough of moving. Casey had made the family move four times in the last eight years, after all. So this time, he had promised, he would get the HOTH to completion before moving the family from Winnipeg to Vancouver Island.

  This meant that Tanya would be alone with five children for weeks at a time while Casey spent three out of every four weeks in British Columbia, returning for monthly one-week visits to Winnipeg. When in Vancouver, Casey would source materials in the lower mainland, but he spent most of the time out at the job-site on the Island, getting things done. When back in Winnipeg, he would spend as much time as possible with the children and then be up late into the night researching all manner of topics on the internet.

  Tanya stayed involved in the construction by demanding that Casey give her all the receipts, invoices and bank statements so that she could try to keep the costs under control, and rein in Casey’s spending as much as possible. So even though she was not out at the HOTH site, she could understand the construction process. She already had a very good understanding of the acreage that the HOTH was built on.

  They had chosen the actual HOTH site together when Casey took Tanya and the children for a walk in the forest acreage he had bought. The site had spoken to both of them. It was a rock bluff overlooking a nice flat area with creeks in the gulleys on both sides of the bluff. The two creeks demarcated the sides of the property and the rear of the property disappeared in the rising forested terrain behind the bluff.

  The low side of the property, where the road access had been cut into the forest, was at the end of a paved road. This road was at the edge of a semi-rural area of small properties not far up the hill from the Island Highway, just above the town of Qualicum Beach. The nearby properties were attractive and well-built homes. Many of them were that type of hobby farm that had nothing to do with farming and had everything to do with a comfortable quality of life.

  Tanya had discovered that many of her new neighbors were wealthy enough to not require an income. They wanted a lifestyle where they could grow old watching their children ride horses, or they could get their hands dirty playing in their gardens, or they could keep chickens or llamas or whatever was their retirement dream. It was a very eclectic and energetic area that she had quickly come to love.

  After each of Casey’s stints out in BC, Casey would come home and excitedly show his latest pictures and talk about what had been accomplished. The pictures told the story of how Casey was bringing their dream into reality. The smile on his face in many of the pictures, as he stood near some large machinery or construction scene, revealed how much fun he was having.

  From the videos and pictures, and the excitement in Casey’s voice each time he had come home to Winnipeg, Tanya had started to be more and more envious of his time away working on the HOTH. So Tanya had broken her own rule and suggested that they move the family out west before the HOTH was completed. Casey had already anticipated that she would be willing to move soon and had given the relocation personnel at the base in Winnipeg the 30-days notice required to activate the move entitlement of the Captain Callaghan (retired) family. The paid move was the final gift that the military was to give them, after Casey’s 20 years of military service.

  He had retired a year earlier, and taken a cash-out of his pension. He promptly invested much of it in that gold mine in Yellowknife. Not long after that, Tanya remembered with pride, they had purchased the acreage and started working together on the details of the house plan.

  The investment of their nest egg in the gold mine, while very risky, had turned out beautifully. Then Casey began spending money like a drunken sailor. At first it was on survey and geotechnical work, and then on design work. But the gold mine was now in production, with every ounce being sold at ever increasing prices. Their investment was gaining equity faster than Casey could spend it. It was as if they had hit that perfect timing, when a synchronized succession of traffic lights switched to green and sped you along nicely.

  The House on the Hill itself was not a house at all. Even though it had seemed silly to her when Casey first showed Tanya the initial sketches of the HOTH, Tanya had gone along with him.

  She thought of herself like the wife in that film “The Mosquito Coast”. It was a story about a creative man who went a bit crazy and took his family on a risky adventure into a jungle only to have it all end in disaster. The wife in the story had appealed to Tanya as the kind of woman she saw herself as. She had stood by her man, helped him as he pursued his vision, and then tried to mitigate the damage that his risk-taking brought home to their family. He had died in the end, but their love had never faltered. That’s what a wife should do for her man, no matter how goofy his vision was, Tanya had decided. Tanya would never forget the way that the wife had looked at her unfinished dishes as she took one last look at the kitchen sink she left behind, at the start of their adventure.

  Tanya was confident that her adventure with Casey would not end in disaster. Casey’s crazy vision was to survive disaster, after all, not seek it. From Tanya’s point of view, Casey was going about it in the most suitable way. He was using his military planning skills, spending countless hours researching on the internet, but most importantly, Casey was welcoming the advice of his wife and partner in life.

  In fact, thought Tanya, in the last few years as Casey had come to the conclusion that the future did not look good for humanity, and Casey had shared his thoughts with Tanya. He had told her bits and pieces of his vision as he worked it through in his mind. As he developed the essential design elements of the HOTH, he had incorporated many of her ideas. In the end he had designed and built a facility that would enable a way of life that she was in full agreement with.

  The plan was to outfit their home with every advantage that could be of assistance in the worst disaster imaginable. Tanya had no issue with his obsession of designing a way of living which could be sustainable in a hostile environment. As long as Casey lived his life with energy and a positive outlook that things may not go to hell after all, Tanya would allow him his obsession. After all, a man with purpose, no matter how ridiculous it may seem, is a man in full.

  There were many side benefits to this particular obsession, Tanya knew. She would have a wonderful house that combined some of her own personal vision with Casey’s. Tanya believed that the world would not come apart at the strings as she liked to say in her delightfully Russian-accented English. Rather, life might become more difficult, but would never end in disaster.

  Nope, her dream was to live in such a way that when she was an old woman with grey hair she could still have her children and her ten or so grandchildren living with her. Her vision for the Callaghan family was more like
a Russian derevniya, or old style village. A large extended family should live together on family land and yet be tied to some nearby village where they could find husbands and wives for their children, and trade in the community marketplace. The fact that Tanya had never lived in such a village, coming from an urban way of life in Moscow, was not important. She knew that some families, particularly in her favorite European countries like Spain, Italy and Germany, still lived in extended families and not as isolated individuals in suburbia.

  Casey’s design for a “house” that could cram in and support forty or fifty people during a crisis was just fine. Thinking of so many guests in her home made Tanya imagine that it would be close quarters in the HOTH, like those conditions her father experienced in the Russian Navy.

  Tanya knew, or at least hoped, that Casey’s worst case scenario would never happen. So she would never have to deal with so many strangers in her home. She believed that life would keep going on just as it had before. There would be no calamity or war. Their children would probably not want to live in a crappy suburban way of life when they could live with Mama and Papa in an enormous home on a very nice acreage.

  It was important for Tanya to infuse Casey’s design with some practical touches that would lend themselves to her vision of the future, yet still be consistent with his. She had insisted on a full 25-meter single-lane indoor swimming pool, and Casey had relented. He had the pool incorporated in the lower-level under the greenhouse & barn complex adjacent to the HOTH. It would be accessible from the interior of the HOTH through a connecting hallway from the rec-room in the basement.

  By putting it on the down-hill side of the large barn structure, under the feed and equipment storage areas on the opposite side from the animal spaces, there would be enough extra space. With Rob’s help, they were able to include a fitness room with a large mirror wall for the girls’ dance and fitness workouts, space for the hot-tub and sauna combination, and still have a decent glass wall overlooking the lower terrace. The pool and recreational spaces were important quality of life issues for Tanya, and “must have” items.

  Casey and Tanya also added a large area of concrete just outside the fitness rooms, for tennis and basketball. Casey went so far as to install a field of Pex lines in the concrete, so that he could use the Ground Source Heat Pump to freeze this surface into a small outdoor skating rink in the winter.

  Tanya also ensured that the HOTH could be evolved to suit the needs of their children when they become adults. Perhaps the children will move away for a few years and then come home to live with her and Casey when their children had learned for themselves what was really important in life. Even if they come back with spouses and children, Tanya had decided, the family home should be able to accommodate all of them with as much privacy as possible. She dreamed of the HOTH being filled with their large extended family with lots of screaming children and chaos, with her and Casey at the center.

  The bedrooms were designed large enough to hold a couple or a small family, like a small apartment. She and Casey could rent the rooms out during the summer as a type of very comfortable bed and breakfast, with suites designed for visiting families. Then, when the need arose, she could stop running the bed and breakfast business, and welcome home her children and grandchildren. Yes, Tanya had long ago decided, let Casey make it a survival facility for the worst case scenario imaginable. As long as it can also stand up to the mess their grandchildren will make when she serves them Russian “bleni” for breakfast!

  Perhaps this duality of roles, between her vision and his, accounted for the unusual nature of the House on the Hill. It looked like a fortress. The way it seemed to grow out of the rock outcrop gave it a sturdy appearance. With its rough-textured granite finish and the bastion-like footings towering over the terraced lawn below; the HOTH looked like some kind of ancient Irish keep.

  In fact, some of the features had been inspired by the family visit to Scotland and Ireland two years before. In particular, the fortified appearance of the overhanging roof features, the stone wall around the roof-top deck, and some of the decorative walls and structures here and there on the grounds made a powerful statement. The matching log-work and pervasive use of granite stonework around entrances made for a consistently heavy architectural theme. The theme was also applied to the various outbuildings.

  The entire complex reverberated with a timeless strength and permanence. But the modern windows, the external lights and lamp posts, and the tear-drop security cameras revealed that this Keep was also built with the most modern of technologies.

  There was warmth in the architecture as well. It started with the striking visual impact of the lovely curved road swinging around through the low area in front of the impressive structure, after following a serpentine path through the trees from the main public road. The entry road had been built with security in mind, however. It was subtly designed to keep the HOTH invisible from the main road while making any visitor immediately observable form the HOTH and from every outbuilding and activity area of the complex.

  As so many visitors had commented upon their first visit to the HOTH, it was a beautiful setting. The house itself, while large and unusual, seemed to be at home in its surroundings.

  There was a variety of well-conceived activity areas, each with its own functional identity but all following the same general style. There was a field-sized lawn area in front, an orderly fire-wood cutting area in front of a large wood-shed, a small orchard just beginning to grow in, and a large chain-link fence-enclosed garden area with a few small sheds associated with it. The property was all about a large family enjoying an active life in a beautiful, natural setting.

  Some of the more delightful features included an unusual chicken coop that looked a bit like a prison designed to keep animals in, but was in fact designed to keep hungry predators out. The roof-tops of the outbuildings, as well as the unusual penthouse level of the HOTH, were steep metal-clad roofs much like you would find in areas of heavy snow. This was one feature that did not suit the local climate, as the east coast of Vancouver Island rarely saw any heavy snowfalls.

  All of the buildings were built of brick or concrete, or ICF covered with stucco. The pervasive heavy grey color, along with the granite stonework here and there, went well with the green metal roofs. The decorative cedar logs used as posts and beams adorning the entrances to all the buildings put a nice touch on the consistent, although eclectic theme. It all came together in a rugged, yet warm and harmonious, way with just a touch of craftsmanship to lighten the Spartan functionality.

  In April of the previous year, when Casey had flown the family out from Winnipeg for a pre-move orientation trip, not all of the finishing touches had been completed. When Tanya first laid eyes on the nearly completed HOTH it surpassed her expectations. What captured her attention after taking in the way the HOTH dominated its landscape was the half-dozen or so fruit tress planted in what looked like a promising little orchard on the right side of the property. The newly established trees were located on a knoll above the lawn area. A few trees sported cherry blossoms in full bloom.

  As the Callaghan children got out and ran around with the family’s Blue Healer, Limbo, going berserk chasing a Frisbee on the fresh looking lawn on that perfect sunny day, Tanya stood still for several minutes taking it all in. She could smell the soft aroma of the coniferous forest, feel the cool breeze coming down from the mountain, and hear small streams on either side of the clearing.

  It was simply breathtaking, like a dream.

  7

  guns gold & grub

  15 March: 26 Months Before NEW

  For Casey, the fir and cedar forests of the Sunshine Coast brought back memories of childhood visits to his grandparents log house in Central Saanichton, near Victoria. For Tanya, the forest reminded her of her family’s dacha outside of Moscow, where she and her father spent countless afternoons collecting mushrooms for the “gribii” soups and “gorshochki” meals that were a staple in Russia
n cuisine.

  They visited the region on several camping trips, with Casey dragging Tanya and the kids up and down both sides of the Sunshine Coast. Tanya decided that the Oceanside area of Vancouver Island had the most to offer the family, and had all the shopping she really needed in nearby Nanaimo. As long as their new home was on at least five acres and had that lovely forest smell, Tanya was not too particular. Her focus was on her future garden and the home that Casey would build, not on Casey’s complicated military factors.

  Casey, however, could not rely on his personal preferences. He had to research it all again from scratch, and carry out the full Environmental Assessment stage of the Operational Planning Process. He arrived at the same conclusion as Tanya, but for entirely different reasons.

  Casey established a set of criteria, researched the attributes of the Sunshine Coast communities and plotted the scores in a weighted decision matrix. The most heavily weighted factor was the balance between isolation and accessibility. Other factors included: distance to a source of hydro-electric power, local food production, capabilities of local contractors, vulnerabilities of the region’s geography, local micro-climate, access to fresh water, and proximity to military facilities and other strategic nuclear targets.

  Casey’s review of census data amounted to an in-depth analysis of the economic, social and cultural information. He also spent a lot of time on “Lines of Communication”, in the military sense, referring to the logistical infrastructure of road, rail, airports and port facilities used to move people and supplies into the region. Telecommunications were also assessed, but eliminated from the scoring because they were universally available but also very fragile, and probably unavailable in a major crisis.