Everything Has Changed

by Darrell Maloney

  “While you’re waiting for them to come back, go over to Section 4. It’s on the other side of the lake.

  “You’re looking for two men: Tony Carson and Melvyn Lupson. They’ve started a labor co-op.”

  “What in heck is a labor co-op?”

  “Men who can help you with the heavy lifting. Once the logs are notched it’ll take three or four strong men to lift them up and place them. As the walls get higher it’ll take as many as six men to lift them over their heads.

  “The way it works is like this: You tell Tony and Melvyn when you expect to place your logs and how many men you’ll need.

  “That morning he’ll show up with the men and turn them over to you. You’ll keep track of how many hours you used them and it’ll go on your debt log.

  “Say you use four men for six hours each.

  “That’s twenty four hours you’re indebted to the project.

  “Tony and Melvyn will keep track of your hours, but you won’t be expected to pay them back until your cabin is completely finished and you have some free days.

  “When you get to that point, you go to Melvyn and Tony and tell them you’re ready to start repaying your debt.

  “By that time you will probably owe a couple hundred hours, maybe a little more. I think the average is two hundred ten.

  “On the days you’re free to work you just show up over there and they’ll take you to where you’re needed. Once you pay back what you owe your debt is wiped out and you can relax.”

  “If you’re interested, there’s a second way.

  “A few of the sections aren’t using the co-op. Instead they’re just pitching in, neighbor helping neighbor. Sometimes that works well, sometimes it leads to some disputes because nobody’s keeping track of who worked where and some folks think they’re being taken advantage of. But it’s an option if you want to go that route.”

  Sid checked his watch again.

  The chopper should be arriving any time now with his second load.

  He certainly didn’t want to start his Monday morning behind schedule and spend all day trying to catch up again.

  “Two more things before I go,” he said. “The blue tarp is yours to keep. It’s forty feet by forty feet, and big enough to cover your partially built cabin to protect it from rain and snowfall.

  “What most people do is just roll it up and put it off to the side of their cabin, where they can unroll it over the top of the structure any time rain or snow starts to fall. It’ll keep everything nice and dry and prevent delays while you’re waiting for things to dry out again.

  “As far as the net, just leave it there in a pile. I’ll swing by later in my pickup and get it back to Anchorage so it can be reused.

  “Any questions?”

  “No. Thanks a lot, Sid. Don’t forget to drop by for that beer when you get a minute.”

  “Don’t you worry about that. An offer for a free beer is something I never forget, and never pass up.”

  He checked his clipboard and saw that the next home site due a delivery was site 7403.

  As he made his way along Lakeside Drive, more commonly called Perimeter Road by the locals toward Area 7, he passed another truck headed the other way.

  He exchanged a wave with the other driver, who was ferrying a team of four lumberjacks to the Marshal home site.

  As Sid neared Area 7 he heard the very distinctive sound of a heavy lift Sikorsky. The big chopper sounded like no other. A few seconds later it appeared just over the treetops to the west.

  Darn it. He was already running behind. By the time he got to the next home site the drop would already be made, the chopper on its way back to Anchorage for its next load.

  That was okay. He’d move a bit faster on this inventory and be ready for the next one.

  Some would say Sid’s job was too routine. Too orchestrated. Too repetitive. But Sid loved it. People looked forward to him coming around. For they knew his arrival meant they were finally getting close to having their own log cabin.

  He really did feel like Santa Claus.

  During the week his world was an endless series of helicopter drops, joint inventories and briefings.

  Each evening he drove back to his RV, where he collapsed on his bed well after dark.

  Except on Friday afternoons.

  On Friday afternoons he knew ahead of time which would be the last drop of the day.

  Come hell or high water, he’d be there for that one.

  For it was his ride home; if he missed it he’d have no other choice but to spend the weekend at the RV.

  Now it wasn’t that bad. He had food and shelter there, and the other RVers welcomed him as an old friend.

  But it was like sleeping on a cot in the corner of your office. As Sid saw it, work was work and home was home and the two shouldn’t be mixed.

  Things would soon change for Sid, though.

  Things would change drastically.

  Chapter 13

  In the back of the same attaché case which held the inventory and instruction sheets for twenty seven families just like the Marshals were several sheets of paper with Sid’s name on them.

  Sid had decided three months before that he was bored living on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson.

  It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the base and its people.

  The amenities were amazing, as were the people that ran the base.

  It was just that… well, Sid felt an attachment with the refugees at Etlunka Lake that he didn’t quite feel with the people at the base.

  For the people at the base, their ordeal was over. They’d been relocated to a safe place with adequate and comfortable housing. Most of them had already found work at one of the base facilities and were getting back to the business of having and raising a family.

  People at the lake, on the other hand, were still in transition mode. They were huddled together with many others like them, who’d also fled the eruption.

  But their ordeal was far from over. They were still living patiently in recreational vehicles. They’d been given their parcels of land, and were still awaiting their building supplies. Some of the newer arrivals would wait for three, maybe four months just for that to happen.

  In the meantime they were roughing it, for lack of a better term. They were crammed into the RVs, which were not designed for long-term living. Some of the larger families were sharing living space with five or six people.

  Even when they got their shipment of building materials, their ordeal was far from over.

  A lot of people thought FEMA had unlimited funds for the Yellowstone project.

  Several missteps early on, like agreeing to buy up every RV in America at an exorbitant cost, reinforced the belief.

  The truth was, though, that they were given eighteen billion dollars in preliminary emergency funds from Congress. And now months after the eruption, that money was already gone.

  They’d gone back to Congress four times, each time asking for additional money.

  Congress, ever conscious of public scrutiny, acted the role of a spendthrift old auntie, doling out money to her nieces and nephews a few pence at a time.

  Or, in this case, one billion dollars a pop.

  The problem was, everybody knew this was to be an expensive proposition.

  But nobody knew exactly how much.

  Congressmen are very good at funding pork projects like bridges to nowhere and highways with their own names on them.

  They’re very good at giving themselves automatic pay raises based not on how they do their jobs, but rather because they’re greedy freeloaders. And they earn a lifetime pension even if they’re so bad they’re voted out of office after a single term.

  No congressman is worth the dirt on the soles of his shoes. Not a single one. And it’s been that way for a very long time.

  Thankfully, though, most civil servants are hard working and dedicated people who strive to do the best job they can despite being hampered by poor decisio
ns made by the heads of their agencies.

  The head of FEMA was a political appointee who was an old golfing buddy of the president’s.

  An old golfing buddy who donated two million dollars to the president’s election campaign, and was rewarded by being put in charge of an agency he was not qualified to run.

  It was his decision to take the millions of refugees and shove them all into Alaska, where they’d be out of sight, out of mind.

  The trouble was, Alaska, as big as it was, couldn’t take all of them. Plus, it was very expensive to move all the refugees up there.

  He backtracked and tried to change direction midstream, building hundreds of thousands of homes in the high desert of California and the plains of New Mexico.

  Then fresh drinking water became a limiting factor in both areas.

  Next came a deal with the Department of Defense, in which the DoD would close or downsize many of its bases and enlist only single men and women for a period of five years.

  That would free up thousands of units of military housing on bases around the country.

  Sid and thousands of other FEMA professionals did the best they could with an ever-evolving plan, sometimes being told of changes of plans with mere hours of notice.

  And through it all they knew it was the Yellowstone refugees, not themselves, who suffered the most from FEMA’s constant starting and stopping and ineptitude.

  Sid felt empathy for the folks patiently awaiting their turn to build a log cabin and settle at Etlunka Lake.

  He spent his days with them.

  He spent his weeknights with them.

  He began to feel like one of them.

  So much so that three months before he decided he wanted to join them.

  He could have pulled some strings. Gone to the head of the line. Been given the very next available home site and delivered the very next big blue bundle of materials.

  But Sid wasn’t that way.

  When he signed up for his own cabin he insisted he go through the process just like everybody else.

  And no, he didn’t want to pick one of the premier home sites on the best part of the lake.

  He appreciated the offer, he said, but he’d rather be treated like everybody else. He’d pick a number, like everybody else. And he’d wait for that number to come up.

  Just like everybody else.

  The paperwork he held in his attaché said he was the owner of plot 4863.

  Plot 4863 was unique, in that it had been the subject of a great mystery.

  Chapter 14

  The Etlunka Lake community was growing by leaps and bounds.

  The month before Yellowstone blew its top and unleashed a world of hurt upon the world, it had no official residents.

  Oh, there were a half dozen squatters who’d built cabins or homesteads within sight of the lake.

  They had no legal claim to the land, and were much like a thousand other off-the-gridders around the state who just arrived one day, decided they liked the place enough to stay, and built upon it.

  The government allowed such practices, or at least tolerated them, because they recognized the need for these people to be somewhere. They figured as long as they didn’t try to claim someone else’s land, and as long as they minded their own business and behaved themselves, might as well let them stay.

  Until the land was needed for another purpose, that is.

  The Great State of Alaska agreed to donate the lake, and the acreage surrounding it, for the Yellowstone relocation project, with the understanding that FEMA would not take action against the squatters.

  FEMA, when they came through and divided the acreage into individual plots, did the squatters one better.

  They offered each of the squatters free deed to whichever plot their buildings occupied. No charge, no strings attached.

  Of the six squatters, only one took them up on it.

  The other five left for greener pastures.

  As one of them, an old Grizzly Adams-type who called himself “Clint. Just Clint” explained on his way out:

  “We live out here far from civilization because we like our solitude. Now you’re bringing all those people out here to be our neighbors, and we don’t want no damned neighbors. Our neighbors are the mountains and the forests and the lakes.

  “If you take those away and replace them with people, I’d just as soon go elsewhere.”

  These were people who lived off the land. They needed no one else. They could survive on their own, anywhere they landed.

  And Alaska had plenty of other places for them to roost.

  In Area 4, while Hannah was cooking lunch and feeding baby Samson, Gwen sat at the table knitting the young lad a hat and scarf.

  “He’ll need these when the weather starts getting cold.”

  “It’s so nice of you to do that for him,” Hannah said. “I sure wish I could knit. I can’t even sew. My mother promised to teach me once, but she passed away before she had a chance.”

  “Not a problem, dear. That’s my project this winter.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Hopefully our cabins will be built by then. And the cold will keep us indoors most of the time. So that’s the way we’ll while away our winter hours. I’m going to teach you how to knit and sew.”

  “Be careful what you promise, Gwen. I’ll all thumbs. You may give up on me after I’ve pricked my finger for the twentieth time.”

  “Everyone I’ve ever taught has said that same thing, dear. Yet every one of them is able to knit and mend their own clothing today.”

  “Can you teach me how to sew my own dress?”

  “Sure I can. When we go into Anchorage to shop next week we’ll visit the fabric store. They have some wonderful new patterns I saw the last time I was there. More your style than mine, but I think you’ll be able to find something you like.”

  The door to the RV opened up. Melvyn announced his presence at the same time.

  “You girls stop talking about me. I’m coming in.”

  He walked over and kissed Gwen on the lips. She smiled slyly and said, “Well, darn. If we have to stop talking about you, we’ve absolutely nothing else to talk about.”

  “Talk about Tony. I have some good gossip to add to the mix.”

  Tony was outside, still scraping mud from his shoes.

  Hannah’s curiosity was piqued.

  “What kind of gossip about Tony?”

  “Oh, don’t worry. He hasn’t misbehaved or anything. Just ask him to see his socks.”

  “His socks? But why?”

  “Just ask him.”

  Chapter 15

  Tony walked through the door and hugged Hannah from behind.

  “Oh, honey, yuck! You’re all sweaty.”

  “Well excuse me. I’ve been lifting logs all morning.”

  “Whose site were you working on?”

  “John and Becky Stillman. We ran the fourth, fifth and sixth courses of the walls. Should be able to start putting the roof on by Wednesday or Thursday.”

  “You going back after lunch?”

  “Yep. Gotta log in those hours so you don’t have to build our own cabin yourself.”

  She turned around to face him.

  “Excuse me, Bucko?”

  “Well, that was my evil plan all along. When we finally got our bundle I was gonna start going fishing or hunting every day. You know, to start building our winter meat supply.

  “And since I don’t know anything about building log cabins, and since I can’t build a log cabin while I’m fishing and hunting anyway, it would have been up to you to build the cabin yourself.

  “And then I thought to myself, what kind of husband would I be if I went fishing every day and made you build our cabin?”

  Melvyn interjected, “A smart one.”

  Gwen swatted at him with her knitting needle.

  “You hush…”

  Tony continued, “So then I had an epiphany. I would build up a bunch of hours at the co-op, so that
when we finally get our bundle I’ll have two or three hundred hours built up.

  “That way you won’t have to build our cabin all by yourself. I can send three or four guys over here every day to help you. And then I can do my fishing and hunting, which after all is way more important.”

  “Oh, is that so?”

  “Of course. We have to build our winter meat supply. You wouldn’t want to run out of meat halfway through the winter, would you?”

  “How are you gonna eat the fish you catch when you have no teeth?”

  “Now, now, honey. We don’t need any threats. Now you have to admit, it’s a good idea. Right?”

  Hannah thought for a moment, then smiled.

  “Yes,” she said. “As a matter of fact I think it’s a great idea. Do I get to pick and choose my helpers? So I don’t get any lazy ones, I mean?”

  “Uh… yeah, I guess so.”

  “You’ll need to make sure they’re young and muscular,” Gwen said. “You know, you wouldn’t want someone who’s not strong enough to pick up the logs.”

  Hannah responded, “Oh, right… we’d have to make sure they were young and strong and handsome…”

  The last word grabbed Tony’s attention.

  “Why on earth do they have to be handsome?”

  “Well, honey, I suppose they don’t have to be, necessarily. But if Gwen and I are going to be sitting in lawn chairs and watching them work…”

  Gwen added, “With their rippling muscles...”

  “Yes, Tony. If we’re going to be watching them work with their rippling muscles, we’d really prefer to look at their handsome faces as well.

  “Ugly men with rippling muscles are okay, I guess. But handsome ones are much more fun.”

  Tony looked to Melvyn for help.

  Melvyn, way smarter than Tony, was staying out of the fray.

  Hannah said, “Don’t forget, we’ll have to stock up on rubbing alcohol… so we can massage their shoulders at the end of each work day. It’s the least we can do, because they’ll be working so hard.”

  “That’s right,” Gwen said. “You can’t expect a man to rub his own shoulders, now can you?”