299 Days: The Visitors

Chapter 148 “Ain’t Too Many Things These Ole’ Boys Can’t Do” (June 5)

Strawberry shortcake never tasted so good. Steve Briggs hadn’t had anything this sweet in…what? Weeks; not since the Collapse started.

It wasn’t traditional strawberry shortcake, but Steve didn’t care. Instead of fresh berries, which hadn’t quite ripened yet, it was made with strawberry jam from the previous summer. The shortbread was biscuit mix with extra sugar added. The whipped cream was amazing. Steve hadn’t tasted anything like it since he was a kid and went to his grandma’s house. It was real cream, like from a cow and everything, whipped with a hand blender.

Steve ate it slowly, wanting to savor it. He wanted more. He wanted the whole tray of it, but there were other guards to feed and he couldn’t hog it up, which would be extremely uncool.

Steve was eating dinner at the school in Forks like he always did. It was where the guards and other volunteers ate when they were working. He ran the day shift of the guards. They were bubba guards securing the entrance to and from town on the only road to the outside world, Highway 101. It was about 100 miles from Forks to the nearest decent sized town to the south, Aberdeen. It was about fifty miles to Port Angeles to the east. They were pretty much in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of forest land on the extreme northwest tip of Washington State.

Very few vehicles came down the highway from either end, usually about one a day. They were people passing through to get to bug out locations or to find relatives. The travelers were always relieved when the Forks bubba guards didn’t kill them or steal their things. Some bubba guards at other places were rumored to do that. All it took was one or two stories of that and everyone thought it was a daily occurrence.

Because there was so little traffic at the gate, the main duty of the Forks guards was as a police force inside the town. Almost everyone in Forks was armed. Attempting to break into just about any house was a very foolish thing. The guards patrolled the residential parts of the small town on foot, but mostly concentrated in the downtown part, which was where the businesses and anything of value were located.

Guards were purely volunteers, of course. There was no set period of time guys would commit to doing it. They might show up one day and not the next. Some guys did it full time. It depended on their supplies at home. If they had enough, they could do things like guard duty. If they had pressing matters at home, such as working on a garden or fishing, then their time to do anything else was limited.

Forks, which was one of the most isolated towns in the whole country, was entirely cut off from government food supplies. The Feds didn’t even attempt to come there. Why waste precious diesel to drive food a few hundred miles round trip just to get some food to about 3,500 hillbillies? They were probably all militia whackos, anyway.

Forks was cut off from the traditional means of communication. There was essentially no internet. Long distance phones were spotty and cell coverage was, too. Texting still worked pretty well because it took up so little bandwidth, but it was very hard to stay in real contact with the outside world with such limitations.

Luckily, there was a ham radio operator in town, Don Watson, so Forks and thousands of other little towns were not cut off from the outside world. The government wanted to shut down hams, but it couldn’t. Too many official recovery operations were dependent on ham radios, so they had to let people talk to each other, even if they were saying things the government didn’t like. The government monitored the ham frequencies for anything overt, but ham operators weren’t stupid enough to directly say things that could get them a visit from the FC.

Don had ham contacts all over, but particularly in the Seattle suburbs. They told him that they actually were doing OK around Seattle. The grocery stores were reasonably well stocked. There wasn’t much meat or produce, and there were almost no luxury items, like chocolate, but there was enough to eat, like mashed potato mix. “Truck stop food,” as everyone was calling it. He also got reports from hams across the country on evenings when the atmosphere was just right and could skip a radio wave a few thousand miles.

The hams described the gangs. The white-collar gangs sold gas and other things. There was also a problem with the violent gangs, though it wasn’t yet total chaos and anarchy. Don couldn’t get the hams to say anything critical of the government on the air, although disdain for the government was implied in almost everything people said on the radio.

The hams verified what the Forks people thought: rural areas were being abandoned. The government was concentrating on the big cities. There were rumors from the hams of entire military units standing down all over the country. Half of the troops just weren’t showing up for duty any more. Most of the other half, who initially stayed in the barracks, eventually went AWOL.

The hams would speak about this sensitive topic in semi-code. References like, “the teams are staying in the locker room instead of taking the field.” Don knew some of the hams well enough from years of talking to them to know what they meant, and that they didn’t exaggerate things. Don was getting the same reports from every ham, so he was certain they were true.

Steve’s interest in the outside world was waning. Who gave a shit who the President was? The Southern and Western states were pretty much out of the union? OK. That had zero impact on life in remote Forks, Washington. Steve only cared about two things: food and security.

Most people, including Steve, were doing OK with food. “A country boy can survive,” as the song said. Despite being cut off from the rest of the country, Forks was actually pretty lucky, Steve thought.

There was plenty of fish and game, especially deer. There had actually been an overpopulation in the years leading up to the Collapse, but that was just because the government started charging outrageous license fees for hunting licenses. Steve knew fish and game would become harder to find as everyone started going after it. The goal was to get as much as he could now and store it, which was the same goal that many people had. They froze it and smoked some. It seemed like most houses had a little smoke rising from a shed as they built smokers. Some people went in together on smoke houses and had a kid attend them and keep a small fire going. The first batches weren’t great because people had forgotten how to smoke meats, but after a couple of batches, they had it down. There was nothing more delicious than freshly smoked salmon.

There were a few things that they were running out of in Forks. One was toilet paper, so they started using alternatives. Steve remembered his grandma telling him that, back in the old days, they used a page out of the Sears catalog. These days, however, the Sears catalog was on the internet. And any catalog that came to a house was glossy and wouldn’t work. Steve knew this because he had tried.

One thing he didn’t have any experience with was an alternative for feminine hygiene products. Those, too, were in very short supply. Steve wished he had stocked up on those before the store in town ran out, but he was so focused on food and other supplies and…guys just don’t want to buy those things. Looking back, he should have manned up and gotten many of the things that the female members of his family needed. Luckily, they started coming up with alternatives, thanks to tips from their grandmothers about how they did it back in the old days.

Another thing they were running out of was shaving supplies. Some guys had electric shavers, but most men just quit shaving. Steve had always hated shaving. He remembered his grandpa and the beard he always had. It made sense now. He and his grandfather were pretty much living in similar conditions.

They were running out of canning supplies, too. Steve should have seen that coming, since he anticipated the Collapse. He tried to prepare all he could, but he could only do so much. He did a very good job, but didn’t get everything his family needed. Oh well. They were still doing OK.

Gardening was providing a surprising amount of food. Quite a few people in Forks gardened before the Collapse out of necessity as the economy was getting worse. Most people had plenty of space to grow things and there were still enough old people around who remembered how to do it.

But people were still only getting just barely enough to eat. Everyone was losing weight. Even out in a rigorous lumberjack town like Forks, people had been getting fatter and fatter before the Collapse. They still ate like country people, but weren’t physically exercising before the Collapse like country people used to. And bad foods, starches and sugar were cheaper. So the hard times before the Collapse meant even worse diets and more weight gain.

That was changing. People were now physically working hard. Instead of sitting in an office or store, they were out patrolling, gardening, hunting, or building things. They were eating better, which surprised Steve at first. He had assumed that being largely cut off from store-bought food would mean people wouldn’t eat as well. It turned out they were cut off from junk food and were switching to homegrown food.

What about the winter? Steve kept thinking about the inevitable changing of seasons. He knew that all kinds of bad things were coming for Forks. He knew that disease was on the way. As people were weak from malnutrition and stressed out, their bodies would be more susceptible to disease. People would huddle together indoors when it got cold. Easily treatable illnesses would go untreated since there was no medicine. Steve prayed that the utilities stayed on. If the water system failed, third world diseases like cholera were a real concern.

Food was Steve’s biggest worry for winter. His family needed to have enough food stored up to make it through the long months ahead. Most people were doing a pretty good job of hunting, fishing, and gardening, but it was early June. People were eating what they were gathering and growing. There wasn’t much of a surplus now. Maybe in the fall there would a surplus, but probably not a huge amount. Not many people realized how they needed to gather and store food now because nothing would grow in the winter.

Some people in town were not even trying to hunt, fish, or garden. A sizable number of them were still sitting around waiting for people to take care of them. Generations of an entitlement society where everything was handed out created expectations that were very hard to break. The people of Forks were very generous to each other. The lazy people kept getting things from others. Why would the lazy think he or she needed to do anything? Food just showed up all the time. Why worry?

Steve realized that the charity would stop when the food was getting low, which would likely be in the fall. The older folks and disabled would still be taken care of, but the shitbags, as Steve called them, would not. They would be stunned. And hungry. And pissed. It would get nasty. Steve urged the people in town to stop giving food to able-bodied people now. Some listened to him, others did not, especially those with a family member who was a shitbag.

Rifts were already forming along family lines. This was the security concern that Steve had.

Two days earlier, some shitbag teenagers got drunk and decided to steal again. This had happened earlier and resulted in one of them getting shot. It was the same group of kids. Steve didn’t understand why they didn’t learn their lesson the first time around.

The problem was that the kids were the children of some of the guards. The guards whose kids were out stealing didn’t want to do much about it. They had a “kids will be kids” approach to some serious crime. The other guards, who were not related to the shitbags, didn’t see it that way. They thought the crime needed to be put down, hard. Not killing the kids, but definitely putting them in the makeshift jail for as long as it took. Probably until things got back to normal, if that ever happened.

It came to a head during a shift change of the guards. Members of the two factions started arguing loudly. There was pushing and shoving followed by a fistfight. Guns came out. Steve realized he needed to take control of the situation. He fired his pistol into the air, just like in the movies. It worked; everyone stopped in their tracks. After they all calmed down, Steve announced that the kids would be picked up and the town would decide what to do with them. Any guard who didn’t agree could go home and not come back. Steve realized that he was risking a civil war in the town, but something had to be done. Some of the relatives of the shitbags left. That was about ten percent of the guards. Fine.

Steve was also worried about external threats. What if a big gang came down Highway 101? Would the town’s few dozen guards on duty at any given time be able to repel them? Some of these roving gangs were beyond comprehension. They had a hundred or more vicious killers. The hams told stories about them. Steve attributed the stories to the rumor mill or grand exaggeration. But still. A hundred bikers, or Mexicans, or Russians, or ex-military, or whoever was a serious threat.

Remoteness was Forks’ best asset. Steve knew that it took more fuel to get there than it was worth. Why would a gang drive a few hundred miles to take down a town of 3,500 when they could pick off a town or even neighborhood of that size by driving two miles from wherever they were? Besides, why would a gang want to fight gun-toting hillbilly lumberjacks when they would have such an easier time with suburban office workers who didn’t own any guns? It was an easy choice. Steve hoped the gangs kept making that easy choice.

One down side of Forks’ remoteness was that the government decided to try out a new program on the town and a few isolated towns like it.

The government turned off the electricity. One day, the power went off, which was not uncommon, but then it didn’t come back on. Don got on his ham radio and verified that power was on in Seattle and even in Port Angeles, which was the closest town.

After twenty-four hours, things started getting serious. It wouldn’t be long before all that frozen food would start to go bad. The water plant in town needed electricity. Steve wasn’t panicking, but he was very concerned. He couldn’t sleep.

Day two of no electricity was even worse. People in town were getting nervous. The last thing Steve and the town’s leaders needed was for people to panic.

Later in the afternoon of the second day, a few guys came to see the town leaders at the school. They had a crazy idea. There was an old steam generator in town. It was wood fired and had been used until the mid-1980s to provide back-up power to the town. The guys were determined to fix it up and get it running. They had all the firewood they needed.

Steve remembered that line again from the Hank Williams, Jr. song, “A Country Boy Can Survive.” Referring to rural people, it went, “ain’t too many things these ole’ boys can’t do.” That was certainly true in Forks. After about ten hours, they tested it, and sure enough, they had that old steam generator running. The only problem was that, due to some switches not working, the steam plant could not send electricity into the town’s grid. This required people to bring whatever it was they needed electricity for, like a freezer full of meat, to the old steam plant. Someone rigged up some car batteries to be recharged at the steam plant and then taken over to the one gas station in town to get the pump working that got remaining gas out of the underground tank.

People started getting neighbors to help them load some freezers onto trucks and drive them to the generator. They plugged them in at the power plant and then brought in food they needed to refreeze. They rotated out the now-refrozen food and the next person did the same.

This went on for eight days until, one day, the power simply returned. And it stayed on.