Chapter 212: Screaming, Stomping and Gnashing of Teeth

By: Emmeran, 27 July 2022

Editor: nnpdad 28 July 2022

The tour of the warehouse and food stocks took up that entire afternoon, just watching the processing of the sun-dried fruits and vegetables took the better part of a half-hour. Granted that was a half-hour also spent snacking on fresh sun-dried raisins; it was a personal sacrifice for the greater good and all that.

Every bit of it was labor intensive work. You didn’t just hang things out to dry and then forget about them, you had to bring the racks out of storage every morning and return them at night. Constantly monitoring the humidity was key and technology helped us there.

I had a small box of cheap thermometer/hydrometers from one of the farm stores I shopped at, costing something like four bucks each. Those were cheap and handy when camping and hunting in any century. Normally I’d hand one out to every tent and have one in the general camp area. Now they were being deployed with care into all of the storage locations where we needed them.

Sometimes the simplest of technological advances turned out to be the most useful - the can opener being a perfect example. Though canning started before the Napoleonic wars, a decent can opener wasn’t invented until the 1920’s. The first design for the pocket version known in the United States as the P38/P51 appeared in Popular Mechanics magazine. Before that it was pretty much a man, a can and his knife, not exactly the safest way to open a can.

Of course we didn’t have the resources for canning yet so, once dried, everything was stored in barrels or clay pots. The clay lid would be sealed with the least amount of wax possible and then with liquified lard, tallow or some other oil pooled over that to keep the seal air tight. In controlled temperatures the fully rendered lard or tallow would stay good for more than a year.

The capper to all the storage was the testing that was going on. One of the previously enslaved ladies was walking around testing the pH and fluid density of the pickling brine and saline storage and charting the results. I could see the hidden hand of our resident chemical engineer at work and truly appreciated it. The pickled items needed to be checked often anyway; you had to press the food down and insure the weights were keeping everything well underwater so nothing could introduce bacteria to the stored food.

By the time spring came I knew I would be well sick of sauerkraut with pickled sausage.

From our over-sized larder I went straight home to supper with my family, my strange and suddenly oversized family. From dreams of living alone in Wyoming with maybe a few drinking buddies and a nice woman or two, I went to full blown insta-family with teenagers, adults and babies on the way. It was a strange and messed up world I had ended up in. I never dreamt of babies let alone being happily married.

As for the two incoming babies with my friends Michelle and Matilda, well those ladies were just my friends and I guess I simply performed a delivery service of sorts. Our relationships remained platonic with the extremely odd exception of Matilda crawling into my bed whenever she liked. But outside of Matilda’s highly-sexed hijinks you would think we were simply friends. In the end those were my kids and I’d do right by them and their mothers as best I could. Amos and Madeline had taken over my tent, Sheriff and Lucinda were using the other. We had installed the artic lining in both tents so they would stay cozy even if the temperatures were down well below sub-zero. They had built two lodge houses in our little walled compound, a small hut that Sonya and Holder were sleeping in and a larger hut where Matilda, Michelle, Esther and all of the dogs kept house. The larger hut was our main cooking and eating place, it would also do in a pinch to sleep all of us in the event of a really bad storm. I wasn’t sure what to think about Holder and Sonya sharing a hut, for the most part I just ignored it.