by Pete Thorsen
After another month of work they now had a cook stove and oven and a sink with very low pressure running water in the house. The water tank was mounted near the roof line and had to be hand filled but it was still a huge improvement. The drain for the sink just ran outside about twenty feet from the house.
They ended up with quite a few propane tanks so they would not run out of gas for quite some time plus there would be farther away they could get when necessary. Cal also built many shelves in the barn for better storage.
They now had nice sets of pots and pans, silverware, and dishes from the RVs. The mattresses were like heaven after what they had been sleeping on, both on the road and here at home. They discussed whether they should bring a small propane refrigerator to install at the house but decided that it would use too much of the precious propane to keep it running all the time.
Cal had previously made a ‘camp’ refrigerator by taking a plastic crate and covering it with a couple layers of burlap and setting a five gallon pail on top of it with a small hole in the bottom of the pail so it would drip down on the burlap cover soaking most of the burlap. Here in the dry southwest when the burlap dried it cooled the inside of the crate, while not as good as a refrigerator it did cool whatever was placed inside by many degrees.
One day Cal shot a deer and they jerked all the meat then he shot another and they dried all the meat from that one. The books he had brought from his trips paid off in many ways. He had traded for several more books and had read them all at least a couple times. They had salvaged and traded for many different seeds and while too late this year they would plant a garden in the spring.
They both knew that with older seeds they would not all germinate but they had plenty. They ended up with several books on how the Indians lived years ago and a few on how to find, identify, and use wild plants in the southwest. Cal had found a couple bows and had many arrows though he had yet to use them.
He converted an area inside the barn into a very nice shop and was constantly working on one idea or another in there. There was a large anvil already at the place when they came and one large vise and he brought a smaller vise from a salvage trip. He did not have a forge but had a book on blacksmithing and was determined to build something that would work. Over winter he built a very large but rather spindly looking wagon with four bike wheels. This he used to haul full sized sheets of plywood taken from the walls of semi trailers and a few new unused sheets that he found in pickups.
He also used the trailer to haul the thin metal sheeting from the sides of trailers to reroof all three buildings at his place. The roofs had not leaked but the extra metal over the tops of each would make them last for many years. He completely rebuilt the old outhouse with new walls and a new roof. He also insulated it and sheeted up the inside and added a ceiling. Now the wind would not blow through there all winter long.
Tia had been busy also bringing many rugs and mats back to cover the floor in their house. They had found rolls of carpet and other floor coverings but without any vacuums the rugs worked better because they could be brought outside, hung up, and beat to clean them, just like in the old days. She had learned long ago how to bake bread and did so now plus she had always enjoyed cooking and made some spectacular meals.
Tia was careful with portions because with no refrigerator she tried to make just what they would eat at one sitting. She had salvaged paint and brushes and painted both the inside and the outside of their house. She didn’t think Cal had any idea just how much food they had now. They were set for a very long time and by supplementing their stored food with fresh meat and hopefully their garden and wild edibles it should last for many years.
She read in many of the books and set snares out for rabbits so they soon enjoyed fresh rabbit on occasion without using any of their ammunition. She had found some of the scrub trees that still had acorns on them and after rinsing repeatedly to remove the tannins she was able to make them into ground meal or course flour and made acorn pancakes. She had read that you could use acorns to make flour also but was late picking them this year so had only a few to work with.
There were mesquite trees around and she knew the seed pods from those could be ground into a sweet flour and even soaked and the resulting water distilled down to a sweet syrup for pancakes and other uses. Besides deer and rabbits there were many cattle that could be seen wandering around here also. Barring any catastrophe they should be able to have a long comfortable life here.
Chapter Twelve
They didn’t get any snow that stayed at all during the winter but they did get a little rain a few times. When it started to get warmer in the spring they worked on the garden area so it would be ready. They picked the spot for the garden very carefully so a simple little ditch could be dug and water would run to their garden, so to water it they only had to divert the water from the windmill to the ditch and it would flood the garden area. When working the ground up for the garden they worked some of the old manure from the barn into the soil at the same time. When they both guessed it was late enough in the spring they planted their first garden.
They had always been sleeping in their separate bunks but it was obvious to both that they had feelings for each other and would never part. Finally Tia told Cal that she wanted to rearrange the inside of the house and he would have to remake the bunks. He wasn’t sure what she wanted until she said there should be only one wider one. He just stared at her for a minute or two then ran over and hugged then he kissed her. Both were grinning like kids seeing a full cookie jar. Without any more ado they considered themselves married. Cal did make one larger bed and brought a new full sized mattress home for it.
They did not make any long trips that summer but did travel on the highway some to bring more supplies up to their place. Cal built a lean-to on the storage shed and on each side of the barn. They collected all the propane tanks for many miles in each direction which was considerable.
They hauled home many building materials for future projects and a host of other things until even the new lean-to areas were full to the brim.
Their garden was coming along very well and they knew they had to let some of each plant go to seed so the seeds could be collected to plant next year. Between the two of them they built a small hand turned mill to grind their own flour from the acorns, mesquite, and other wild bushes that had beans that were edible and had been used by Indians forever.
Cal built a nice porch in the front of their house and brought a couple lawn chairs and a patio table for them to enjoy. He also built an outdoor wood-fired grill to use when they did not want to use the small stove in their house. They wouldn’t need a whole lot of wood for it and wood was easily gathered from the surrounding area (and scraps from Cal’s constant building).
One day Tia said on some of Cal’s many trips back to the highway for more stuff he should bring back a good supply of diapers. This was quite a shocker for Cal and he just stood there with his mouth hanging open until Tia told him that was a poor way to catch flies. He then grabbed her in a major embrace and started a hundred rapid fire questions while trying to talk with the big smile on his face.
The End
A
Collapse to a
Fresh Start
By
Pete Thorsen
Formerly Published
Under the Pen Name
Jack Forester
Originally Released
On Kindle November 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except that brief selections may be quoted or copied for non-profit use without permission, provided that full credit is given. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely accidental.
Ch
apter One
Delbert Morgan lived in Chicago, Illinois. A place he thought might be the worst place to live in the United States. But he had a good job that paid him a very good wage. Almost everyday he asked himself if it was worth living in this place just to make more money that was itself getting worth a little less every single day. So far he had stayed but he knew the day he was leaving was getting closer with every hour he worked.
His job was anything but glamorous. He worked in a cubicle in an office building. His view everyday was the grey cubicle walls or looking across the isle into someone else’s cubicle. The work he did was the same everyday. He used a keyboard and a mouse and that was it. On rare occasions he would jot something down on a post-it note. In those times he got to use a pen and paper. That was an exciting change.
His job required little of his brain power anymore so he was able to multi task and think about getting away from this life (if you could call it that) that he was living. He was strong and lean (which had nothing to do with his job) and only twenty four years old. He did not party. He did not drink or smoke or toke. He did have a part-time girlfriend whom he actually liked. Her name was Eve (he even liked her name). They had a strange relationship that neither tried to analyze. They liked each other and were friends and that was enough.
Del rented a very small one bedroom apartment. It was almost a one room apartment it was so small. Del slept there and that was about it. It was twenty three point six miles from there to work. Most days he put less than fifty miles on his thirteen year old Dodge compact car. In the warm months he ran for exercise and in the long winter months he used the treadmill that took up a very sizable portion of his apartment.
He almost never went out to eat and did very little that would cost money. He did have a secret that only Eve knew about. And he had only shown it to her a month ago even though they had been good friends for two and a half years. Even then he had shown her only the big half of the secret. His apartment was very barren as he had very few possessions. He did have a small safe securely bolted to the floor in his only closet and it was always covered by clothes and other junk.
He had no weapons other than a couple of knives and an old wood baseball bat. He did know a little about fighting as he had taken a class in Taekwondo for about a year and a half. That is where he met Eve as she was taking the same class and still was. Del had quit to save money. He still practiced some to help keep his flexibility and to remember the moves. He had two backpacks full of junk and one he kept in the trunk of his car. He had a newer laptop and used it daily.
Del was a junkie when it came to the news. He was on the internet a lot of time. He watched current events very closely and always tried to dig deeper into everything. And the news was all bad everyday. The stock market was up and that seemed to be enough for most people. But overall things were dismal to say the least. The Federal Reserve was printing money as fast as possible and buying US treasuries with some of that money. Del thought there was a fair chance that if the fed did not buy the treasuries no one else would either.
The National debt was well over seventeen trillion dollars with no end in sight and the idiots in Congress thought nothing of it and kept spending like a drunker sailor. Of course it is a well known fact if you are in Congress that spending buys votes and budget cuts lose votes. And with everyone in Congress the main priority was getting re-elected to stay in office so the spending continued year after year.
Then against most of the citizen’s wishes Congress had passed a bizarre health care bill that was now coming into effect. It had proved to be a job killer and it had caused millions of full time workers to drop down to part time workers. It raised almost everyone’s health insurance costs and often dramatically so, like double or more. Then there were the millions of people going on Medicaid. This all had to be paid for and just where was that money coming from? A large number of people were also getting subsidies on their health insurance premiums. Where was this money coming from? A health insurance tax credit of up to ten thousand dollars per person that was obviously going to be full of fraud and also had to be paid with money the government did not have. And that was just one program.
The number of people working in the United States continued to drop. Less working meant even less paying taxes and only half were paying taxes now. And millions received government aid and that was climbing every single day. More people were getting government aid than were working. You did not have to have an economic degree to figure out that could not continue for very long. Spending is great until you run out of other people’s money and in this case it was the taxpayer’s money. The whole situation was untenable and every single person in Washington DC knew that simple fact and yet was choosing to ignore it.
Del knew the facts and was not ignoring them. He knew without a single doubt that it would all collapse someday and he thought that day was getting closer. He was preparing for that day even though you could not tell that from looking at his apartment. His food storage was maybe two weeks of a starvation diet. And way less in water storage. But he never let his car get below about three quarters of a tank of gas. He planned to run when things got bad. He figured any place would be better than staying in Chicago.
Chapter Two
Del was surprised when he actually got a raise at work. Not that he wasn’t good at his job and he never missed any days of work but he knew most businesses were struggling financially the same as regular people were. But the raise was surely welcome and he made a point of thanking his boss for it.
Like all the employees he already received health care from work. This company was over fifty employees so they were now mandated to offer health care (they always had offered it) but they did tell all employees that when the current insurance contract was up in June, the new contract would have substantially higher premiums that they would have to pass down to the employees. Del perfectly understood this simple fact even though many of his fellow workers did not and complained often about it even though it would not take effect for many months yet.
The winter rolled on and was awful just like every winter in this awful city. Del was saving a little more money now with his raise but everything was costing more even though the government kept saying there was virtually no inflation. The economy was continuing to get worse even while the government was saying it was improving. Who were they trying to fool?
The health care rollout was a continuing fiasco from day one when the government web site did not work. Apparently our government could not find a single company in the United States to make a simple web site so they had to use a foreign company at a cost of over a half billion dollars? And when the web site did not even remotely work and they said it would take two months at least to fix, that company still received the full payment even though they obviously broke the contract by not delivering a functioning product at the specified time? Plus they were to get paid more just to fix what should have worked in the first place! And the media said nothing about it other than to laugh a little about how bad it was. And no out rage about spending that huge amount of money to a foreign country instead of using a US company. And naturally the site never worked very well after the two month ‘fix’ for which they received even more money for.
When the Federal Reserve said they were going to bump up their economic stimulus no one was surprised at all. The Fed had mentioned it several times in the past to get everyone used to the idea. So they went from ‘printing’ about three billion new dollars per day to almost five billion dollars per day. Of course the stock market took another leap up but not as much as most thought it would. And then the market kinda sunk a little bit for several days eating up almost all the bump.
The Middle East was still in turmoil, same as always. And the civil war in Syria was going into three years and still just as bloody as ever (you would think they would run out of people to kill pretty soon). Saudi Arabia was mad at the United States for doing nothing about Syria and had been making noises about break
ing ties with the US over it for a couple months now.
The White House was still doing everything it could to alienate Israel and were having some success. Though Israel had always played things close-to-the-vest now they told the United States nothing and no one blamed them as the White House always ‘leaked’ everything bad that they knew or suspected about Israel. It is amazing that they were still our ally.
Europe was still having massive economic problems and their unemployment continued to rise. The only question on most economists’ minds was who would collapse first, the United States or the European Union? Not that it mattered as if one went the other would follow very shortly after.
Europe was also having the same problem as the US with huge numbers of illegal immigrants coming into their country. On both sides of the Atlantic the result was the same, the illegals were sucking more and more money out of the economy and causing at the best just civil unrest and usually way more crime and violence.
Del knew that it could last a couple more years or a couple more days but he knew the collapse was coming. He really hoped he would be smart enough to know when to run. The news was so bad all the time he thought it might be easy to miss a trigger event until too late.
It was already dangerous here in Chicago with many shootings pretty much every single day. But if he was going to get shot, Chicago would be a great place for it because the doctors here had so much practice saving gun shot victims lives that they were likely the best in the United States for emergency gun shot care. His first choice would be not to get shot in the first place and he was safer than some because he was almost never out at night though many shootings also happened in the daytime. In the mean time he just kept working and saving as much as he could. He was very tired of looking at those cubicle walls though.