Patriots

by James Wesley, Rawles

  The night before I left, I heard shooting off in the distance toward old Pueblo, every half hour or so.

  “Parenthetically, I should mention that I had previously carried my M1A in a guitar case whenever I took it in or out of the dorm, because they had a ‘no guns on campus’ rule at USC. It was one of those rules that didn’t make any sense and was rarely enforced. I was hardly the only one who kept a gun in my dorm room. For example, USC had an official pistol team that practiced at an on-campus indoor range, and most of those guys used their own guns rather than ones issued by the ROTC department. So they didn’t fall under the exception in the rule for school-owned guns and ROTC department guns.

  The team members just didn’t bother mentioning to anyone that those guns were their own property. And they didn’t keep them in the ROTC arms room, either. They were just very low key about it. My roommate Javier wasn’t bothered by the fact that I kept my M1A and AR-7 in our dorm room. He even went out to the range with me a couple of times.

  “Well, so much for obsolete legalities. Let’s see, I was telling you about packing up… The power was still on when I was packing up my ’95 Jetta and Ross was packing up his old Chevy minivan. We could hear somebody up on the fourth floor with their stereo cranked up full blast. They were playing that old REM song, ‘It’s The End of the World as We Know It, and I Feel Fine.’ I thought it was kind of apropos.

  “It would’ve been much better to have our cars travel together for mutual security, but I was headed north to Montana, and Ross was headed south to his uncle’s ranch outside El Paso. So after we’d both packed up, we just said prayers for each other, shook hands, and hopped in our cars.

  “I anticipated that the whole I-25 corridor up though Colorado Springs and Boulder was going to be impassable, so I immediately headed west on I-50 toward Grand Junction.

  “I decided it would be best to take US 50 only as far as Salida, then US 285 north to Leadville, basically following the Arkansas River. From 50 I’d then take US 24 over to I-70 into Grand Junction. I knew there’d be less people and less social stress, along that route.

  “My goal was to travel the Basin and Range route north, where there’s hardly any population. I didn’t see any traffic to speak of; just a few people who were obviously refugees, with trailers piled way up high, and a few truckers. I saw several diesel prime movers without trailers. I guess they’d abandoned their loads and were just trying to get home.

  “I usually kept my car’s tank three-fourths full, and I always carried a spare five-gallon can, treated with Sta-Bil. Wouldn’t you know it, but I had a lot less than my usual average when things hit the fan. With what I had in the tank, even after buying the extra six gallons in Pueblo, I calculated I had only about a two-hundred-and-forty-mile range. If I had really planned ahead, I would have found someplace there in Pueblo to store more cans of gas.

  “I checked every station that I came to on the highway, and took some exits to cruise through some of the smaller towns, but they were all out of gas. A few of them still had diesel, but there was no gas left. Man! If I’d only bought one of the later diesel Volkswagen Jettas instead of a gas model, I could have found plenty of fuel and driven all the way to Missoula. You can even run a diesel on home heating oil, since it is basically the same stuff. It’s just dyed differently so that people don’t try to cheat on the road taxes. For that matter, you can even stretch diesel with used vegetable oil if you filter it. Before the Crash you could get used vegetable oil for free at most restaurants… As it was, I had over six hundred miles to go when I ran out if gas.

  “If I had to do it over again, I would have bought a car or truck that burned diesel. It stores better, it’s safer to carry in bulk, and it was available for sale a while longer than gasoline. Diesel will store for a decade or more if you put an antibacterial in it, and don’t let water seep in. I had a friend in Montana who worked for a road contractor. He had a full-size diesel pickup with a big extra tank in the bed, right behind the cab. They used it mainly to carry extra number-two diesel fuel for the graders and dozers. The tank was L-shaped so that most of it went underneath a cross-bed toolbox, so effectively it only took up ten linear inches of bed space beyond the toolbox. He said that it held ninety-eight gallons. You can go a loooong way with an extra ninety-eight gallons.

  “The night my car ran out of gas, I was about twelve miles short of Grand Junction, near Orchard Mesa. When the engine started to stutter, I pushed in the clutch, took it out of gear, and coasted downhill for the last two miles. As I was coasting, I starting whistling the tune to ‘It’s The End of the World as We Know It.’ It was the end of the world as I knew it, all right. No more soft life. No more car. It was time for a long ride on ‘Shank’s Mare.’

  “There wasn’t much left worth salvaging from the car that was light enough to carry. All that I took was a few road maps, a fifteen-minute road flare, some plastic bags, a space blanket, and two two-liter pop bottles full of slightly chlorinated water that I had kept in my car for emergencies. My first goal was to get off the highway so I didn’t get robbed. I left my car out on the shoulder, locked. I suppose that it’s still sitting there. It was pitch dark, and I had quite a time struggling to get my pack on, and getting moving. I had a lot of food crammed in my pack, plus those extra pop bottles, so my pack weighed nearly seventy pounds. My rifle and web gear were an extra sixteen pounds. It seemed unbearable at first, and I wasn’t able to travel very fast. After a few days, my back muscles got used to the weight, and since I was eating up some of the food, my pack gradually got lighter, but not much. Right now, for example, it’s probably still well over fifty pounds.

  “I only covered a mile or so that first night. I thought that I’d follow the Gunnison River. I hiked the first quarter-mile, stumbling around in the dark, when I came up to a railroad bed. I figured that it was safer than traveling on the road, and easier than tripping over sagebrush. Since it ran north-south, it was even going in the right direction. When it started to get light, I set up cold camp a couple of hundred meters off the track, in a thick clump of brush. As I was laying there that first night, trying to get sleep, I made a mental checklist for my walkabout. I decided that since I was on my own, it was best to travel stealthily, to avoid detection. I had to treat everyone I met as a potential adversary. Traveling alone is a very vulnerable situation. I realized that it would be best to travel with no detectable actions like noticeable cooking fire smoke or any firearm discharges unless absolutely necessary, because evasion is always easier than escape or—God forbid—a firefight.

  “I was awakened by the sound of a northbound Denver Rio Grande Western freight train coming, a couple of hours after sunrise. I thought to myself, ‘Great! The trains are still running. Maybe I can catch a ride.’ That train was going at least forty, so I didn’t bother chasing it, but just seeing it cheered me up quite a bit. Now I at least I had a vague plan. I slept off and on until just before full dark, ate a can of beef stew, and started out again.

  “I made it all the way to Grand Junction that night. I was lucky that the ballast was packed nice and level with the ties most of the way, so aside from the weight I was carrying, it was easy walking. I stopped short of town, and got way back into some pinon pines to sleep. I was pretty tuckered out. That day two trains went by—one southbound and one northbound; and that was encouraging. All that I did that day was refill my water bottle from a creek and dose it with a purification tablet. I slept off and on. A couple of those big gray Clark’s Nutcrackers kept waking me up. I thought about shooting one with my .22 to eat, but I was too close to town and I didn’t want to attract attention. As close as they were, a wrist rocket would have worked perfectly.

  “I waited until full dark, and picked my way back down to the tracks. It was strange and scary walking through Grand Junction. The tracks skirted the east side of town, so I just stayed on them. I figured that those big rails would at least offer some ballistic protection if I got into a firefight. The power was out
there, but I could see candles and kerosene lamps in a lot of houses. There were no cars moving on the streets. There was a marshaling yard on the north end of town, where they put together trains. I thought that it would be a good place to catch a ride.

  “Just as I got close to the marshaling yard, a freight train throttled up one of its power units and started heading north. I quick-timed it toward the train, but I couldn’t move very fast with the weight I was carrying. The train picked up speed before I could get to it, so I had to stop and just watch it go.

  “I heard someone up on a knoll at the edge of the yard shouting at me, ‘Hey soldier boy! Did you miss your train?’ That scared the dickens out of me. I dropped down to one knee, swung around in that direction, and clicked off the safety on my M1A.

  “The guy up on the hill stood up, laughing. He said,‘Hold your fire there, pilgrim!’ There was plenty of moonlight, so I ascertained that he was alone, and—at least from a distance—looked unarmed. He walked toward me. He was a crusty-looking old hobo, who introduced himself as ‘Petaluma Bob.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, son. They’ll be coupling together another northbound tomorrow.’ He invited me to his camp, which was two hundred and fifty yards away, back in a stand of mesquite. He was camped out by himself.

  “He carried all of his gear in an old blue Air Force duffel bag. For protection, he had an old .38 Smith and Wesson top-break revolver with most of the nickel finish worn off. The thing looked ancient, but functional. This guy Bob looked to be around sixty years old, and smelled like he hadn’t had a bath in a long time. He didn’t have any front teeth—top or bottom, so it made for a hilarious smile.

  “Petaluma Bob spent half an hour describing the train schedules to me. He had a greasy old railroad map that he kept in a plastic bread bag, along with some passenger train schedules, some road maps, and some handwritten notes on freight train schedules and routes. We used his little stub candle to read the maps and schedules.

  “Bob told me that he was waiting for a train headed southwest. He said that he was going to Ajo, Arizona, where he had a bunch of his things including a couple of other guns and extra ammo in a plastic olive shipping barrel that he buried as a ‘cach-ay.’ Hearing that kind of surprised me. I’d heard the term ‘cache’ used by survivalists and Special Forces NCOs before, but never by anyone else. From what he said, he knew lots of hobos that buried extra food and clothes along the routes that they frequented. He mispronounced it ‘cach-ay’ but from the way he described it, he sure knew how to dig one and camouflage it.

  “We waited there that night and all the next day, sharing stories. It may have been foolhardy, but I trusted him and I slept for a while, and I shared some of my food. Bob said that he’d never had anyone point a gun at him his whole life, but that in the past three days, he’d had guns pointed at him three different times. He said,‘And you just now, Soldier Boy, was the third!’ I had to laugh at that. I pumped him for information on ‘hoboing’— like where and how to catch trains, what cars it was safe to ride on or in, and even where it was safe to ride if you couldn’t get inside a car.

  “Petaluma Bob was right about the next train heading my intended direction. We could see them using a small DRGW switcher engine to hook up the cars for a couple of hours in the evening. The train was scheduled to leave at 11:10 p.m. I wanted to get down there and pick out a car early, but Bob advised me to wait until the brakeman did his rounds checking brake lines and ‘bulling’ the cars. He made his final check, carrying some kind of big lantern, around 10:30. Finally, Bob said, ‘You can go hop onboard now, Pilgrim. Pick out a boxcar marked Northern Pacific, and you won’t go wrong. Good luck.’ I wished him God’s speed. His southbound was due to leave the next morning. I prayed that he made it. He was a nice old guy.

  “I found a Northern Pacific boxcar near the middle of the train with an open door. I got in as quietly as I could. All that was in the car was fifteen or twenty flattened cardboard boxes, great big ones for appliances. I positioned two of them at one end of the car and set my gear down. Then I gathered four more and draped them over the top of me, and my gear. I wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible, in case someone made another ‘bull’ run. The train pulled out right on schedule. I was absolutely thrilled. I was making progress north at a great rate. We went over the Douglas Pass around midnight. Then I fell asleep for several hours. I woke up at civil twilight, and watched the miles go by, praising God.

  “The train’s route took it north though the Salt Lake City area, and that had me nervous, that being a metropolitan area. I couldn’t see any signs of trouble in the Salt Lake area aside for the power being out. There was a stop to switch out some cars in Ogden, late in the afternoon. That was a nervous time.

  Luckily, my car ended up with the train that continued north. I stayed hunkered beneath my boxes the whole time we were in the yard. The train pulled out again around sunset. We had another brief stop at what I suppose would have been Logan, based on the timing. When the train was stopped there, I heard a couple of men’s voices. One guy said,‘Hey let’s try this one—this one’s empty!’ I yelled in my best command voice, ‘This car is not empty! Move along!’ One of the guys answered all meek-like:‘Okay, okay, we were just leaving! Sorry to bother you.’

  “I got off when the train stopped in Pocatello, because it was going to continue west to Boise, and I, of course, needed to go north. So I was back to Shank’s Mare. After the train, it was quite a letdown. It was full daylight by the time I was all the way out of Pocatello proper. A paperboy on his rounds stopped his bike and put both of his feet flat on the ground and watched me walk by. I waved at him and said ‘Hi.’ He must have thought I was from another planet. I often wondered how many more days he was delivering papers. That might have been his last day.

  “I paralleled I-15 up past Idaho Falls. It was pretty slow going, since I had a heavy load, and again, I was trying to avoid contact with anyone. I averaged around ten miles a day. I traveled mainly at night. I could hear shooting and fire engines sirens, and police sirens in even some of the smaller towns, so it was clear that the situation was deteriorating.

  “I cut off to the west, following Highway 28, since it went through less population than if I’d continued on I-15. That route would have taken me through Butte. Highway 28 follows the Lemhi River and the Salmon River, up through the town of Salmon. That’s Elmer Keith’s old stomping grounds. I nearly froze up in the Lemhi National Forest, way up in the Lemhi mountain range. A storm front came through and dumped about five inches of early snow. Here it was the second week of November, and it was already starting to snow at the higher elevations, and I still had over two hundred miles to go!

  “When that snow hit, I had to build a shelter quick, or freeze to death. I found a ponderosa pine that had blown over, and still had a big root ball of soil on it. I cut a bunch of limbs off of some fir trees with my cable saw, and piled them around the base of that tree, weaving them together into a wickiup with a vent at the top, snugging them down with parachute cord. I put my tube tent, a space blanket, and a couple of trash bags between the layers. I got a fire going, hunkered down, and did my best to dry out my clothes. The wickiup worked pretty well, but I don’t know what was worse, the cold or the smoke from that fire.

  “The snow stopped the next day, and it took another day and a half to all melt. During that time, I got busy with my AR-7, and shot a marmot. By the way, I’m glad I have a .22 rifle. The .308 is a lot louder, and doesn’t leave much usable meat on small game. The marmot was pretty tough, but nutritious. I cooked it all in strips skewered on sticks over the open fire. I ate the whole marmot in a day and a half.

  “Also during that time, I melted a bunch of snow in my canteen cup to refill my water bottles with boiled water. You have to melt an outrageous quantity of snow just to fill one two-liter bottle. Of course I could have used water from a creek, but then I would have wasted purification tablets. Besides, I had a fire going all the time, and nothing but time on my hands
. Like my dad used to say,‘What’s tiiiime to a hawwwg?’”

  Kevin Lendel interrupted, asking, “Pardon me, did you say hog?”

  “Yeah, hog. It was one of my dad’s favorite jokes: ‘A traveling salesman is driving through Arkansas. He sees a farmer struggling under the weight of a hundred-pound pig, carrying it from tree to tree, so that it can nibble on the apples that are hanging. The salesman is dumbfounded by what he sees. Finally, he can’t stand it any longer, and he goes and asks, ‘What are you doing?’ And the farmer answers, ‘I’m just a-feedin’ my hawwwg.’ Then the salesman asks, ‘Why don’t you just knock down a bunch of apples?’ ‘I jus prefer to do it this away,’ the farmer says. Then the salesman asks, ‘Isn’t it a waste of time, doing it that way?’And the farmer asks,‘Well, what’s tiiiime to a hawwwg?’”

  Kevin and the others laughed. Carlton took a sip of coffee and resumed his tale. “I slowly worked my way north. The days were getting shorter and progressively colder. It took me fifteen days to make it from Pocatello to Salmon.

  “As I got farther north, water wasn’t nearly as much of a problem as it had been down in the Pocatello and Idaho Falls area. That’s dry country. A couple of times down there I had to purify water that I got out of cattle tanks.

  “I foraged as I went. I shot a couple of rabbits and another marmot. I had some snares and a gill net, but I didn’t get a chance to use them, because I was never in one place long enough. I got pretty good at fire starting, even when things were damp. First you….”

  The TA-1 on the C.Q. desk made its distinctive cricket-like chirp, interrupting Doug’s story. It was Rose. She inquired, “Mike was supposed to have relieved me fifteen minutes ago. Where is he?”When he was relayed the message, Mike apologized profusely for losing track of the time, and then dashed out the door.