Chapter 23: Turkeys

September 30, 2030

For days Katie was still shaken by the shocking experiences to and from Warrenton, especially the life-threatening situation with the rabid dog. It brought back the horrific memories of violence and death in the City. She was too distraught to set out with Clark on the expedition planned for Millbrook.

He wanted to go just to know the lay of the land, see if there were any signs of survivors, and discover potential resources; nothing too specific.

Despite his determination, neither Katie nor Sally wanted him to go alone. He understood their concern and learned the importance of having someone by his side. They decided to postpone the trip until after the birth of Sally’s baby in the spring.

Besides, they had plenty of chores to keep their bodies and minds busy, harvesting the corn and wheat, and picking apples, pears and grapes. The canning and making of preserves were well underway, but not nearly complete.

There was also the mighty task of cutting down trees for firewood. They would need nearly double the amount than what they were used to up at the cabin to keep the kitchen stove and the living room fireplace burning.

Clark chose the trees close to the sides of the narrow, overgrown trail that continued beyond the bend at the mouth of the trail up to the cabin. The trail appeared to have been an old logging road that ran along the edge of the forest preserve and seemed to follow a path farther north into the wilderness.

The tractor came in very handy and did most of the heavy work, making it possible for Clark to haul thicker and taller trees, many at one time, reducing the number of trees to cut and shortening the time to bring everything to the woodshed. He imagined that the steady roaring purr of the engine also helped to keep straying bears at a safe distance.

They rested from their chores only on wet, misty days by going into town to pick up supplies and chicken feed, or going to the brickhouse and monastery to winterize them.

“Daddy, go there,” Fifi pointed to the road leading down past the monastery and disappearing around a tight curve.

“That’s the way to Millbrook and Danville, honey.” Clark said loud enough for Sally and Katie to hear.

“Well, we’re all together,” Sally responded. “But, at the interstate, we turn around. OK?”

He looked at Katie. She stared back and nodded approvingly.

“Fine with me,” Clark said grinning, finally getting the chance to discover what lay ahead.

“Where’s the shotgun?” Katie blurted.

“Right, wait here.” Clark jumped out of the car to get the gun and a box of buckshot from the back of the car. “It’s not loaded,” he said handing everything to her.

As Clark pulled away from the gate of the monastery Katie knew what she had to do. This time she wasn’t going to miss her target if she had to shoot.

For the most part, the desolate road ran parallel to the stream, separated by a steep embankment of rocks and trees, and miles of cabled guardrails. Unlike many of the other roads, the asphalt was in good shape with maybe a fissure here and there. Red, orange and yellow leaves covered most of the road, forcing Clark to drive slowly down the yellow centerline, weaving around a few stalled cars and fallen tree limbs.

Modest, country homes with long porches sat close to the road. Many were barely visible among the advancing vegetation. Except where the gravel had been packed down for a roadbed, their driveways were taken over by an aggressive infestation of grass and weeds. Houses built farther back against the rising terrain overlooked open meadows, small orchards and an occasional horse shed with three sometimes four-rail horse fences. Sadly, there was no sign of human activity, no smoke rising from chimneys, no animals wild or domestic roaming nearby.

They were so focused on the houses and other structures curious to see how their departed neighbors once lived that the stream went unnoticed. It grew increasingly larger and louder. The water spilled down in a foamy rush, crashing and roaring and fighting its way with a magnificent but terrifying force. Here and there it hurled itself against boulders splashing high in a thousand liquid diamonds and kicking up spray that would have held rainbows on a sunny day. The current became swifter in its headlong course downstream, racing to merge with some larger confluence miles further away.

After about fifteen minutes into their uneventful ride, they came to a yellow sign warning them of an approaching T-intersection. It was followed by a green one marked MILLBROOK 20, with an arrow pointing to the right. Fifty yards further, the junction became visible with a secondary road extending southward. A blue sign announced it as a scenic byway.

Clark rolled to a stop at the junction. A rundown convenience store gone out of business long before the Collapse was located near the corner facing the road to Millbrook. Three gas pumps surrounded by a crumbling parking lot stood like solitary sentries, rusting away under a damaged canopy, giving mute evidence to a changed, long forgotten world.

The sun started poking through holes in the clouds, sending down searchlights from the sky. One beam hovered near the parking lot turning the damp, gray vegetation into an oasis of bright colors before disappearing in a blink of an eye. The other beams of light skittered over the ground of rolling fields, gently rising to tree covered foothills skirting the vast forest preserve west of the scenic road. On the opposite side, the ground was more even, and in the distance they could see the fine line of the interstate highway with the silhouettes of hulky semi-trucks stuck in a traffic jam frozen in time forever.

“Oh, look,” Sally remarked. “Why are all those bags and suitcases scattered near the store?”

“ ... and hand wagons, bicycles and overturned wheelbarrows,” Katie added.

“It looks like people who left Farrville on foot used this place as a rest stop,” Clark surmised. “Either some people ditched their belongings to make the journey to Millbrook and beyond easier, or they just couldn’t get any further.”

The amount of useless things that people packed and didn’t need to survive was astonishing. There were furniture pieces, dishes, play stations, books and a sundry of knickknacks.

They stared in silence until Sally suggested, “Let’s drive.”

They didn’t get very far. Less than a half mile further down the highway, they were unable to continue. The bridge which straddled the stream on its course toward some larger confluence miles further away was gone.

Taking the shotgun, Clark stepped out of the car to see what had befallen the structure. The break in the road grew larger as he came closer until he stood only a few steps away from a gaping hole wider than the span of the once proud standing bridge.

It took him a moment for the scene to register in his mind. The abutment on the far side had been washed away and collapsed bringing down that side of the bridge. On his side, the bridge was leaning against its abutment at a sharp angle like a water slide and had slipped a few inches into the deep channel.

Apparently, the torrential rains, which soaked everything non-stop for three straight days back in June, had turned the stream into a raging, out-of-control freight train. The concrete abutment had been ravaged by the force of the water, lashing and tearing at its foundation, making it unstable until it toppled under the weight of the bridge. With each heavy downpour, the gap eventually turned into a wide, impassable gorge and would probably continue to grow.

Clark waved to Sally and Katie waiting in the car to come join him and see the destruction for themselves. Fifi and Trish begged Clark to lift them up in his arms to get a better look only to tighten their little arms around his neck as he took a step forward to the scary abyss.

“Now what?” Sally asked rhetorically.

“We turn around and go back home.” Clark replied with a shrug, which brought a disappointed chorus of “Ahhh!” from the girls.

“It looks like we’re cut off from the world for good,” Katie lamented as they walked back to the vehicle with their heads low. In their minds the word isolation had not yet formed but they could feel it. Their hope of ever seeing other people again was diminished, swept away like the bridge.

Refusing to be deterred, Clark replied, “Well, there’s still the scenic road.”

He turned the car around and didn’t look back as he drove away. At the junction, he stopped again and looked down the quiet, lonely road to Millbrook. He said nothing. His staunch expression betrayed him.

Katie patted his arm. “In the spring,” she said. “In the spring.”

Clark nodded, sedately accepting her understanding and support.

While Sally was entertaining the kids in the back seat, Katie was focused on the rebellious stream looking for calm pools good for fishing. Clark had his eyes on the fields and deserted houses, scanning them from the opposite direction to make sure he hadn’t missed something. Suddenly and without warning, he stopped the car.

“Now what’s the matter?” Katie asked, clutching the shotgun.

“Look over there by that cluster of apple trees,” Clark pointed to several alien shapes moving through the tall grass.

“What are they?” Katie gasped.

“Wild turkeys and a whole flock of them!” Clark responded almost in a whisper as if it were a guarded secret.

“You mean the kind we used to have for Thanksgiving?” Sally asked keeping her voice low, too.

Fifi and Trish had their faces glued to the window to see what the hushed excitement was all about.

“Yep, and look at those three toms with their feathers all puffed up and strutting about to impress the lady hens,” Clark described.

“Like you do sometimes, Daddy?” Fifi remarked, making everyone laugh, except Clark and little Matthew taking a nap. He always fell asleep in the car.

“When am I all puffed up and strut around?”

“When you sneak up on Mommy,” Trish explained, giggling happily.

“Daddy, how are you going to explain that?” Sally asked, smirking.

“I’ll leave that up to you and Katie.”

“What about the turkeys?” Katie wanted to know. “Aren’t you going to shoot one?”

“I’d need to get closer, maybe by that tool shed over there,” Clark pointed to a dilapidated structure set further back from the nearby house. “Besides, we didn’t bring along birdshot.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Can we come with Daddy?”

“We’ll see.”

“Yay!”

He had no experience hunting wild turkeys, except for the stories he had heard from his grandfather. He and his friends were more interested in the challenges and rewards of pursuing large, fury, four-legged creatures.

Before returning to the place where they had seen the flock of turkeys, he read a few articles from Mr. Wheeler’s collection of Field & Stream magazines to get a better insight into the sport. One article described how hens were more delicious and jakes more tender than toms. He was prepared to accept whatever came along.

November 20, 2030

A week before Thanksgiving for three straight days he got up while the air was still damp and gray to slip behind the tool shed only thirty yards away from the small grove of apple trees. The spot was about a half a mile down from the monastery in a hollow with a hillside forest on one side and the county road and stream on the other. There was no wind, no sound. He waited and listened carefully, occasionally making a gobbling sound hoping it would attract a curious hen or an adventurous, amorous jake.

Yelping, chirping, and purring were not in his vocabulary. Gobbling was fun and he had practiced a lot, making Fifi, Trish and little Matthew squirm with laughter.

Clucking, which he learned in copious measure from the chickens, came easy, but nothing seemed to arouse any responses.

Clark was not one to run out of patience or give up easily. His grandfather often told him that the first rule of being a good turkey hunter was patience. Clark understood that so much of living was patience and thinking. But, spending a lot of time just sitting around without any results was not part of his personality.

Besides, there was something of greater importance which kept the gears in his mind turning while he sat idly for hours behind the tool shed. His grandmother’s words of wisdom kept ringing in his head: If you feed your brain, your body will not starve. These and other thoughts were possibly sending the wrong vibes and keeping the feathery gobblers away.

He, Sally and Katie had been discussing plans to homeschool the kids. Centuries before the advent of compulsory public education, children were taught and trained in the home mostly to learn life skills or a vocation. If it worked then, it should work again now. It had to.

Clark’s hunting buddy and his wife had been homeschooling their three kids for years right up to the Collapse and they often bragged how their kids scored above the average on standardized achievement tests and performed one grade level ahead of other kids their same age. They had become fed up with the “cookie-cutter” culture of public education, and ranted that is was the tool of “state controlled consciousness.”

Sally and Katie agreed with Clark to follow a basic curriculum with emphasis on the old, classic three R’s of reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmatic. They would also pass on to the kids practical knowledge focusing on year-round, hands-on activities in farming, gardening, hunting, homemaking, building, and so much more to perpetuate self-reliance and survival.

They were also committed to preserving as much scientific knowledge for knowledge’s sake acquired over the last centuries that led to the great achievements before the Collapse. If they did this right, their grandchildren and their descendants would benefit, knowing why some things existed but no longer worked or may never work again, and eventually how to rebuild or restore the more pragmatic and sensible achievements. In the new world that was forming that would give them the edge to avoid total descent into ignorance and barbarism.

Clark and Katie also encouraged Sally, the history buff, to write their own story. She would be a keeper of their memories, the essence of their intellect and their identity. It didn’t matter if it read like a diary or journal, as long as the memories were solidified in writing, the underpinnings of their future, their new culture.

The history of humanity and events didn’t end with the Collapse. It was important for future generations to know when it occurred, the misery that followed, and how their antecedents struggled and adapted to survive. If they didn’t record these events, no one would understand how they got to where they were and how they could chart their future. Why some ideas and values changed, and what principles people could fall back on to guide and improve their lives.

They also felt it was important to write down rules to live by, the majority of which being simply statements of common sense. Other rules should provide a basis to help make decisions when common sense was not enough, or when disagreements arose about how to proceed. Immediately the Ten Commandments came to mind about where to start.

“We’ll write our own history,” Clark summarized. “But we can’t start a new chapter without knowing how we got here. To bridge the gap, we need to stay in the 21st century.”

But before they could do that, Sally and Katie had to brush up on their own studies where they had left off. The long winter months ahead and for years to come would be the opportune time to immerse themselves in some serious books, as well as read to the kids and introduce them to letters and numbers.

When the world plunged into chaos and anarchy, both Sally and Katie were just six months away from starting their first year of high school. The last time they sat in a classroom felt like eons ago, and would now be preparing to go to college and not milking goats, butchering chickens, tilling land, and having babies. Instead, they had been forced to learn new lessons, the lessons of survival. They had left behind their iPhones and computers, their adolescent fun and games, and were forced to think like adults.

The academic courses they would have taken would have been useless in their new world. Clark, however, believed strongly that gaining knowledge of any kind and amount was the first step to wisdom; sharing or teaching it to others was the first step to humanity.

Sally loved history; Katie, anything that had to do with science. Both equally enjoyed reading novels with heavy doses of romance and adventure.

The collection of books at the farmhouse and at the monastery was mostly outdated or covered subjects like philosophy that was good in theory, but hopelessly boring.

And so, the decision was made for Clark to go on a different hunting trip. This time to the classrooms and library at the Farrville School.

December 1, 2030

He picked a brisk, but sunny first day of December to drive into town filled with inspiration and hope. It pained him to see the decaying road, fallen electric lines, and other ravages of nature on man-made structures, but took them in stride.

He entered the school grounds taking the access reserved for teachers and staff, and parked at a side door with a handicap ramp, but decided to walk to the main front entrance of the building. It seemed like the appropriate step to take on this first important visit.

The large double doors were framed with a white portico, neoclassical pilasters and pediment resembling the entrance to a Roman temple. Datestones embedded on either side of the entrance showed that the school was Erected 1953 and Expanded 1968. The doors were locked as expected, just like at the post office, but without the chains.

The school provided education to children from Kindergarten through high school. Clark was thrilled with the possibility of finding all the necessary books and teaching materials for Sally and Katie and the kids.

He returned to the side entrance. Both the external and inner double glass doors were unlocked and opened to a long, cool, quiet corridor. The floor tiles gleamed, reflecting the light from similar glass doors at the other end of the corridor. A vague scent of floor polish still hung in the air. He took cautionary steps and could hear the echoes stretch away from himself in the long hallway.

There were plaques with numbers next to each door. Narrow windows on classroom doors made it possible to peek inside. Still, he stopped and entered each one to find out what materials were available, but mainly to make sure he was really alone.

Several doors sported oversized decals with clever and amusing phrases like Be Amazing-Be Awesome-Be You and Play nice-Work hard-Stay kind. He was particularly amused to read one that said, Be the reason someone smiles today, and wondered if the world wouldn’t have been in a better place had grownups heeded this motto.

Midway down the corridor, the hallway opened to a large lobby where the main entrance was located as well as the school offices. Across from the main entrance were the doors to the gymnasium above which hung a sagging cloth banner reading Happy New Year 2026! meant to welcome back the kids from their Christmas break. The irony left Clark with an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Although he had never been inside the school, he could tell that it followed the classic E-shaped layout with the gymnasium making up the middle arm. He had designed several architectural plans for schools adopting this model.