Congress approved the waiver that the counselor had talked about, so none of us had to attend summer school. The decision was more about the financial burden of keeping the schools open rather than any concern for us students, but who cared? We were off for the months of July and August. The school board also allowed most of the senior class to graduate since they had already completed all of their required courses, and that included Alex and Robin.
The only thing good about school, as I mentioned before, was seeing Skylar every day. For the first time in my life, I had a girlfriend. I was part of a couple. School made it a lot easier to see Skylar, but the summer break gave us even more freedom to really be together. Skylar and I both got our driver’s licenses, and we still had access to horses when we couldn’t borrow our parents’ cars. It was fun to each ride our horses and meet halfway.
As for Jenny and Calvin, they didn’t end up dating, but they were still friends and always came with us when we met by horse.
One new development that made me very happy was that my parents decided to let me start dating, and I mean going out on a date, as in taking the car and picking up Skylar to go out. Of course there wasn’t really any place to go except Tipton’s Diner and a pizza joint called The Dog House in another town a few miles away. We usually went there to eat and then drove down to the river and hung out with a few other couples. Skylar and I couldn’t believe that her parents were letting her date, but she said they liked me and thought I was a nice kid. I guess they knew I’d keep her safe.
Dad was able to get a crop in the last two weeks of May. He was only able to get enough fuel to plant half of our acres. Alex and I helped him every day after school and on the weekends. He was also able to sell most of the grain he had stored from the last harvest and got a very high price for it. Unlike most Americans, we were doing okay money-wise, but the high cost of diesel and the fact that Dad could only plant half his usual acreage meant much lower profits for the year. We knew the harvest would be late this year, since we had planted a month late, and if the weather was bad in November and December it would make matters worse.
Mom decided that she wanted to build a greenhouse so she could start a home-based business growing and selling herbs and herbal remedies. Robin was very enthusiastic about it too, and Mom said they could go into business together. It got Robin to thinking about studying herbalism in college. Dad and Alex helped them design and build a big greenhouse and a cold frame for them in an open field on the south side of the barn. It was really nice when it was done, and Mom and Robin got right to work planting herbs and making places to hang the harvested herbs for drying and work tables for preparing the herbal remedies.
Mom had traded some grain for a whole box of past issues of Mother Earth News at one of the trading markets in town and she and Robin had been reading them from cover to cover, finding all sorts of great information for living “off the grid” and being self-sufficient. Even though scientists didn’t think we’d get another CME for a hundred years or so, Mom said that being informed never hurt anybody and there were a lot of other disasters that could deprive us of electricity.
Dad agreed with her about that and said, even if we still had electricity, to think about the money we could save by using the free energy from the sun. He found articles in the Mother Earth News magazines about building a solar water heater, a solar collector, and a solar bottle light bulb. When he was done with the greenhouse, he set to work on making them for our house, barn, and tool shed. He had us boys help him so we would learn how to do it. Calvin was especially intrigued and made some really cool design modifications to the plans that made them fit our situation better. He decided that would be a great science fair or 4H project for next year when he would be a freshman.
Our barn has a long side facing south with no doors or windows. We built two large solar collectors and attached them to that side of the barn. We built two smaller ones and attached them to the side of the house, one for heating the kitchen and the other for the living room. Basically, this heater is a flat, rectangular box, framed by 2x6s and attached to the south side of the building with a black wire mesh screen, or black piece of metal, on the back and a clear glass panel on the front. You then put a slot in the building both at the bottom and the top of the rectangle for the air to circulate over the heated surface and bring that heat into the building. If you’ve done it right, the sun is too high in the sky to strike the solar collector in warmer weather, but in winter, when the sun is low in the sky, the angle is perfect to warm it up. We weren’t able to test them out since it was summer, but the chance would come soon enough.
Next, we built a solar water heater. It was a trapezoidal shaped box lined with foam insulation, which has a reflective surface (Dad had to get this from a neighbor who had built a new house last year and had spare pieces left over). We got an old water heater tank out of our trash ditch and laid it on its side in the bottom of the box, then attached pipes to bring the water to and from it, and enclosed the top of the box with a double-paned glass from a sliding glass door (also salvaged from a neighbor). Calvin made the suggestion to add a connection for the cold-water intake to the outside pump so we could pump water to it without electricity. Like I said, Calvin was really into these projects.
Last, we added a quick and easy solar bottle light to the tool shed to light it without electricity. This was one cool and easy project. You take an empty, clear, two-liter soda bottle and fill it with distilled water and a little bleach to kill bacteria, and then fit it into a hole in the roof of the shed. There’s a little more to it than that, but that’s the basic idea. You would not believe the amount of light it brings into the shed. It glows just like a light bulb during the day and, except for the price of the caulk to seal it in the roof, it’s free energy.
We were all really proud of our projects and it got us thinking about other ways to save money and improve things around the farm. Dad thought we should try to figure out a better way to pump water without electricity so we wouldn’t have to go outside to do it. By the time we had started back to school right after Labor Day, the Internet was back up somewhat, although only some of the sites were available, and Dad was able to find plans for a hydraulic ram pump that uses only gravity and water to pump. He worked on that on his own, but we helped him connect it to the outside hand pump and run the pipe underground, in through the basement and up to the kitchen sink and to the solar water heater, as well. Dad also built a better shed for the whole works with it’s own solar collector to keep it unfrozen in the winter.
Dad was spending every evening on the computer in his and Mom’s bedroom searching the web. Calvin wondered if he was watching porn or something, but that wasn’t in Dad’s nature. You never know, though, so one day I got up the nerve to ask him what he was doing. He answered that he’d been bitten by the survival bug, whatever that meant, and he showed me some of the sites he was visiting and some of the plans he had downloaded. They were all ways to live “off the grid,” that is, without electricity, and there were pages and pages of some really cool things—things I’d never even thought about.
Dad had printed off hundreds of sheets of plans, ideas, and information, hole-punched them, and put them into binders, all indexed and sorted. He had also gone through the Mother Earth News issues and torn out the pages that pertained to living without modern power and had included them in the binders, as well. He had one binder for building improvements, another for farming without petroleum products. In another binder, he had medical information, from first aid to medicine alternatives to emergency surgery techniques. In the fourth binder he had alternatives to food, cooking products, and cleaning supplies, like using roasted barley instead of coffee and how to make vegetable oil, candles, and soap. Lastly, he had a binder on animal husbandry—how to raise animals and use their products. One thing he was especially interested in was how to raise bees for their honey. “I don’t want to be without something sweet to eat,” he told me with a grin. But then he
went on to explain that honey is a powerful product for medicinal purposes too. Its antimicrobial properties are great for treating coughs and sore throats, as well as an antiseptic for wounds.
We were pretty well set up for any event that we would lose electricity, like a storm, power plant failure, or even an act of terrorism. I had learned from one of my teachers that terrorists could, in theory, detonate a bomb above the U.S. and cause pretty much the same thing that the CME had. That was a scary thought.
Anyway, by the end of the summer break, Alex and Robin had registered for college and Calvin and I had to go back to school. Mom let Alex and Robin take her car to the university, which was 35 miles away, and I drove Calvin and me to school in Alex’s car. Again, I found it hard to concentrate on my classes and this time it didn’t have anything to do with Silky Henderson. After all, I was in a serious relationship and Skylar was all I could think about. I struggled to keep up my grades, but then so did everyone else. The teachers understood the problem and explained to us that we all had been through a very traumatic time, kind of like being in a war. They said it would take some time to get over it and they were pretty lenient that first month of school.
Chapter 12
On October 12 of that year, almost a year after PF Day, the unthinkable, the thing that scientists called a million to one chance, happened. It was on a weekend this time, so we were all at home. Dad and Alex were out in the field checking the corn that they hoped would be ready to harvest the next month, and Mom and Robin were in the greenhouse working with their herbs. The grandmas were tending the flowerbeds and Papa was lounging on the porch swing, joking with the ladies and giving them a hard time.
It was late afternoon and I was taking a shower, getting ready to go out with Skylar that night. Calvin had just come in and flipped on the TV to watch Jeopardy, which he was really good at. At some point, he started hollering something, but I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying until I turned off the water. I’ll never forget what he said or the sound of fear in his voice as he shouted it on his way outside to tell everyone else.
“Another one’s coming! Another one’s coming!”
I wasn’t sure what the words meant exactly, but the sound of his voice told me enough. I ran to the TV and stood there, dripping wet and with nothing but a towel on, trying to absorb the news. Then suddenly, the TV popped and fizzled and the screen went blank.
Like the last time, I noticed right away the absence of the hum of electricity flowing through our lives. The silence was profound and I was scared. The last time this happened, we had had every reason to believe that electricity would be restored quickly. This time, I knew what was in store for us.
A crackle and loud pop brought me back to my senses, and I ran to my room to pull on some clothes. Then I ran downstairs, skipping three steps at a time, and out the back door.
The dogs were barking frantically down by the side of the barn. Mom and my grandparents were hurrying toward the barn, dragging the garden hose with them, while Robin was frantically pumping the hand pump to start the hydraulic ram pump. Once it had enough water pressure to start pumping on its own, Robin and I ran to the barn where Mom was spraying water at the small, drum-shaped transformer attached to a power pole, which was on fire near the corner of the barn.
A strange blue ripple of flame traveled down the power line toward our house as we all held our breath. Luckily, it went out before it got there. After the fire was out, we all stood around and hugged each other, with disbelief and worry reflected in each other’s eyes.
Calvin had grabbed one of the horses in the paddock and had galloped toward the cornfield to find Dad and Alex. In a few minutes, Calvin rode up on the horse while Dad and Alex drove up behind them on the four-wheeler. They all had the same anxious look in their eyes. Even the horse was spooked, and he ran over to worriedly nuzzle his buddy when Dad put him back in the paddock.
All of us then went back into the house, where Dad turned on the battery-powered emergency radio to see if there were any stations still coming in. As he turned the dial up and down the face of the radio, it became obvious that the radio waves were disrupted, as well, as there was nothing but static.
The most important thing on my mind was Skylar. I ran to try the phone but, of course, it was dead too. I stammered out some lame excuse to my family, “I —I mean we—need to go to town.”
Again, Dad came through for me. “Yeah, we probably should go and see what we can find out.”
Mom just shook her head. “I can’t believe this is happening again. What are we going to do?”
Gram put her arms around Mom and said, “We did fine before and we’ll do fine again, honey.”
Mom cheered up a little then and we all got ready to go to town. We had to take both cars to fit us all in. We hated to waste the gas, but no one wanted to be left behind.
Everyone in town was in the same state of disbelief as we were. Some of the women were sobbing as we gathered once again in the town square. Skylar’s mom was one of them. When I found Skylar, she was shaken but not crying. The thing she was most worried about was her parents’ emotions.
“I don’t know if they can take another one of these,” she told me quietly. “They were so depressed before. The diner is their life, you know.”
Robin was standing near us and overheard what Skylar had said. “With some help they could still run their diner,” she offered. “I’m sure they had diners before electricity.”
This cheered Skylar up immensely, and she hugged Robin. I also promised Skylar that our family would come help her family with the diner.
No one could understand why we had not been given more warning of the coming geomagnetic storm this time. Mr. Andresen and our other science teacher, Mr. Johnson, thought that maybe the space telescopes were not running at full capacity yet, or perhaps predicting such events relied on satellites, all of which were disabled by the last storm. In any case, we Midwesterners were not notified until minutes before it hit.
Skylar told me she had tried to call to warn us, but it must have been after I had gotten into the shower and right before Calvin had come in. It wouldn’t have helped much anyway, but at least we could have tried saving the TV by turning it off. Now it was probably fried.
The Aurora Borealis was in the northern sky again as the sun set, and the lights seemed even brighter than last year. The glow was so bright you could read by it, although it was like reading by flickering candlelight. They were also more red than blue-green this year.
On PF Day and for several days after, the lights had danced eerily in the night sky on every clear night, but had faded after a few days until they had been barely visible. I didn’t see the beauty in them this time, only the omen of tragedy they foretold. Mr. Johnson wondered if they were brighter because the atmosphere had been compromised, a thought that was even more frightening.
I was reluctant to leave Skylar in town with her grieving parents, but she insisted she had to stay and take care of them. I promised I’d be back the next day, and every day thereafter, to help them prepare their house and the diner for the worst-case scenario—the electricity off for good. It seemed likely that things would be even worse, since there hadn’t been enough time to manufacture goods such as transformers, and the strategic oil reserves used by the government to keep some semblance of order were almost used up.
Skylar and I held each other for a long time, right there in the square in front of our parents and everyone else, before I had to leave. She couldn’t hold back the tears by the time I pulled away, and my own eyes were stinging.
Dad was worried about the harvest first and foremost. He had planted about 320 acres in corn, soybeans, and wheat. On another 30 acres, he’d grown a mixture of grasses, like timothy, brome, and rye, with some clover and alfalfa mixed in, for hay to feed our horses and to sell. He had also been experimenting with planting other grains and, on another 30 acres of tillable land, had planted oats and barley. He had been hoping to get en
ough fuel for the harvest before November, but hadn’t been able to get more than enough to harvest a third to half of the crop. He knew now that getting any more was out of the question and he had to figure out how to harvest without fuel.
The next day, Dad took his farm pickup, to the Caruthers’ house and brought us boys with him. I had wanted to go into town to help Skylar’s family first thing in the morning, but Dad insisted that he needed my help first.
Mr. and Mrs. Caruthers were not nearly as upset by the absence of power as the rest of us were. Mr. Caruthers said that he’d always felt that life was better in the old days when people didn’t rely on electricity. I guess that’s why he collected what others thought of as junk, stuff that would be needed now to live a decent life. Dad was able to trade grain and the promise of physical labor for a horse-drawn reaper and a steam-powered thresher.
Mr. Caruthers asked Dad if he would be interested in taking over the rest of their livestock except for a couple of horses to pull their own wagon. They had a dozen horses, two mules, a couple of male donkeys, and two milk cows. Mr. Caruthers said it was just getting too hard for him to care for them, and he knew we would take good care of them. Dad agreed and said we would be back in a couple of weeks to get them. We would have to build more fences and stalls in the barn to keep all those animals.
After we had loaded the reaper into the bed of the pickup and the thresher onto the small flatbed trailer we’d brought along, we drove back to our house and unloaded them. Dad said that Calvin and I could go to town for the rest of the day to help Skylar’s family, but we’d have to stay home and help build the fences for the next several days. I loaded up the trunk of Alex’s car with firewood, some tools, and an axe, and we left without even eating lunch, instead taking a couple of sandwiches with us.
Teenage Survivalist Series [Books 1-3] Page 8