Rock Fall Revisited
Copyright© 2021 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 7: Rock Fall Plus a Month
The morning was late arriving as the clouds had returned in force and they were leaking snow. At first it was snow pellets, but by ten, it was fluffy flakes again. Herb, Josh, and I finished moving the guns and ammunition into the vault and closed it up.
We’d hardly finished when a half dozen cars and trucks came across the bridge. I had Sarah and Emma take the kids down below, while I went out alone.
Mark alighted from the lead vehicle and shook my hand. “Can we camp for a night in your barn?”
I was torn between offering them the comfort of the downstairs or keeping it secret.
Mark continued, not knowing about my quandary. “We’re going up to the Frazier’s place. He has a bunk cabin that will hold twenty, and he has lots of food and wood cut. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t try to go back into town ... at least for a while.”
There were laughs from some of the men.
“What happened?”
“The bulk of the townspeople didn’t like the chores we gave them to do and they refused to do them last night. Early this morning I told them that only those who worked would eat and that was it. They called a meeting and voted the ‘fascist huns’ out. Pierson and a couple of the local farmers had been helping us out and they laughed at them when they were told to get to work. We all pulled out. Last seen, they were trying to decide who was going to feed the main fire, and no one was volunteering. About now the fire will be out, no one will have made anything to eat and no more wood will have been cut.
“If they haven’t learned their lesson by tonight, I told them that we won’t be back for seventy-two hours.”
“Let them stew in their own juices!” someone said and spat on the cold ground.
Someone else laughed. “You can’t stew anything in ice water!” There was a roar of laughter.
It was, of course, the eternal conflict between those who lived — and worked — in the country and the town dwellers who took everything for granted. I motioned Mark and Jim off to one side and told them what we’d heard on the radio overnight.
“I can’t be sure if it was a hoax or not — it was the KOMO transmitter, though,” I concluded.
“And it does explain the preemptive nature of Oregon’s governor,” Mark mused. “Still, it’s going to leave a lot of pissed-off people up here in the Northwest when the word gets out — and it will get out.”
I snorted. “It’ll leave a few pissed-off survivors, Mark. We’ll be small communities, without good communications, and when they want to gather us back in, we’d never be able to resist.”
Sarah and Nita arrived with their children, and while they visited with their husbands, I went and helped the others get set up in the barn. The outside temperature was in the upper 20s, but barns always seem colder. Still, the men were well prepared, having pads, mummy bags, and their own food and equipment.
Sarah came to see me after a few minutes. “Mark says we can’t invite just him and Jim for dinner because it wouldn’t be fair to the others. I did invite anyone who wanted to come to be guests for Story Time.”
“Good for you!” I told her.
It was an odd thing because most of the men invited themselves to Story Time, listening to the tale of Toad and Toad Hall. They were, I realized, the married fathers who had children of their own at home and who were, rightly, I was sure, afraid for them.
Emma finished up, and the kids all trooped towards the bedrooms, and I blessed my decision having left everyone upstairs. The men from town went back out to the barn; it was still snowing, but it wasn’t very heavy snow and hadn’t been.
In the morning, Lynn reported that the men were up and about when she read the thermometer, and a few minutes later, they moved out again. The five children stayed at the window downstairs, waving hard as the vehicles drove away; their mothers draping their arms around them.
I realized in that cold, crystal moment that I had been shying away from my duty and my responsibilities in this. Oh, in my heart and in my head, I knew what I’d undertaken, but it was more unconscious than conscious. Now it was conscious. I wondered how people in the past dealt with the stress of knowing that if you screwed up, a whole lot of innocent people would get killed?
Josh came up to where I was standing and stood patiently waiting until I turned to him.
“You only have one wheelbarrow?” he asked.
“Only one that works, anyway,” I told him.
“That’s going to be a problem. The ground is soft enough, and I can brace it safely with plywood sheeting. But having only one barrow means that digging has to stop while the barrow is rolled out, up the lift, down the lift, and out to the spot you showed me to dump the dirt. That’s just about going to double the digging time.”
Sarah turned to me. “There is a wheelbarrow at Briana’s father’s place. We didn’t take it. Maybe it’s still there.”
I nodded. “We should go back and make a thorough sweep of her house and the Dwyer’s. Things are going to get iffy. Let’s take the pickup, though. I don’t think there’s likely to be more than that. And if there is, we can take two loads.”
“You’re worried about gasoline?” Josh asked.
I met his eyes. “No, when my father put in the water system, he buried a gasoline storage tank and filled it. Call it five thousand gallons.”
“Once upon a time, we thought all the survivalists and preppers were crazy,” Sarah told me. “Clearly, we hadn’t looked in the mirror to see who was crazy.”
So, I drove the pickup, with Josh riding shotgun and the three young women crammed into the back. We found virtually nothing in the Dwyer house but some of Leslie’s books and some board games; the Lewis house was still untouched, and we helped ourselves to more tools, besides the wheelbarrow, including three chain saws and two dozen chains, chain sharpeners, chain oil, and all sorts of things. We got back to the house, and most of the tools went into the tool room, while the wheelbarrow and two shovels went downstairs with Josh.
I checked on his plans, nodding. His father had taught him well, and while Josh had wanted to go in other directions, he was more than willing to turn his expertise to our use. He’d laid canvas drop cloths along the path the wheelbarrows would have to take, then put one by twelves on top of them to keep from tearing up the canvas.
He had carefully cut away a two-by-six-foot hole in the outer concrete and had scooped out enough dirt so that there was a sump so that the water from the saturated ground outside would pool there.
He was working on forms for pouring the concrete and had already prepared for coating the exterior walls with tar, even the floor. “It’s not perfect,” he told me. “We’ll cut about eight feet wider than what we need, and three feet deeper. We’ll be able to work around the base, using rollers to apply the tar. It’ll be stinky for a few days down here, but there’s nothing we can do about that.”
“Once we get the floor done, we’ll do one wall at a time. We’re putting in a hole in the roof, about two feet on a side, dead center. We’ll in-fill between the walls and the dirt outside, leaving the forms in place for support. Then we paint the outside of the ceiling, then lift the ‘lid’ into place, then fill in the last few inches with concrete. Unless you helped build it, you’d never be able to tell there’s a door there.”
He met my eyes. “I can’t tell you what to do, but it might be an idea to put some weapons up there before we close it up. A last-ditch, ultimate fallback. A secret cache in a secret cache.”
I contemplated that for a couple of days. I didn’t have longer than that because the work progressed much faster than I thought it would.
The reason for that was the snow. On the seventh day after Rock Fall, it had started snowing in earnest and didn’t stop for a long time.
The kids thought it was great fun at first because they could make snowmen, snow forts, and had hugely fun snowball fights. But after three days, the fact that you got cold came to dominate the experience. Sledding took over for a day, and after that, they mostly exclaimed about how pretty it was outside, and then either curled up with a book or played some of the many board games we had.
There was school work as well. I was amused that after a few days of being shut in the house, groans about having school on what was obviously a snow day turned pro forma, boredom being more of a problem.
Ginny came up with a clever idea, one that the half dozen older kids competed for.
The house was well insulated, but some heat did leak through the roof. Except on the very coldest days, that would mean there was a thin layer of water under the snow, that would seep down the shingles to the eaves, and drip off. It was slow, but after a day or so, an icicle would form, and a few more days, the icicle would grow from six inches to a couple of feet.
We started an “icicle patrol” that consisted of someone walking around the second-floor deck, using a broom to knock off as many icicles as they could see before they could get long enough and heavy enough to really hurt someone if they came off naturally.
There is a little destructiveness in all of us, and knocking the icicles down appealed to a lot of young imaginations; they competed for the right to do the job, and it was amusing to watch.
One thing my paranoid father hadn’t thought about, though, was what to do about six feet of snow on the roof of the house. Five thousand square feet is a lot of feet to have to shovel, and a snow blower wasn’t really practical. Not to mention that while the eaves of the roof were only eight feet above ground in the back of the house, they were twenty feet above ground in the front. A slip and a fall on the front half of the house would be catastrophic.
I remembered him talking about shoveling Mount St. Helens’ ash off the roof, but I had no idea how he had done it.
We ended up with a safety harness and two people belaying the rope and one pushing snow. Murphy was evidently elsewhere, and no one had a serious fall, but a lot of snow did.
Then the snow on the ground was the problem, as afterwards there was a three-foot mound of snow around the front and back of the house. Then Josh came up with a good idea, covering the now-bare roof with tarps with ropes attached to the grommets. We could be below and peel the tarps off when the snow got more than a foot or so deep. This made the piles of snow on the ground worse, but it was a lot safer.
After that, it was a nuisance that we put up with through the rest of December and part of January, when the first big snowfall stopped.
It is a measure of the mind of modern man that stupidity became king in the first decades of the new century. The second night the townspeople were stuck in the high school on their own, they started freezing, and none of them knew enough to get the stoves working right — the fires they laid either wouldn’t catch, or the smoke would come into the room, driving people out. I never imagined people who weren’t smart enough to lay a fire; neither did Jim or Mark.
The townsfolk couldn’t figure out what else to burn — so they burned the school.
In two hours of hysteria, they destroyed the one building that could feed and house them and destroyed the stoves that could have kept them warm.
Jim and Mark went back to town when they heard, along with their supporters. It was cruel, brutal work, but they gathered up those who’d been at the school and chivied them across the Lewis River bridge — then dynamited it behind them. With the men, women, and children of the townsfolk on the wrong side of the river. Maybe a hundred townspeople were on the right side of the river, but they knew the six hundred or so people ejected had, like as not, killed them too. Tears, pleas, even holding infants up, begging for mercy — they didn’t get it.
I knew about the school burning, but not the rest until Jim came the next day. He stood by his car and I went to him. When he saw his wife, he waved her back inside, saying he’d be there in a minute. Then he told me.
“Mark made me promise that if any of them come back, via the other route over the Lewis River, we’ll take them in ... but it’s twenty miles that way. In the cold and rain — not many of them will try. Vancouver is closer and that’s where most of them will head. I talked to Mel Giffords up at the Shell station at the freeway; he says only a half dozen cars a day go by now.”
He paused and touched my arm. “Mel has two thousand gallons of diesel he’s keeping for us, plus five thousand unleaded ethyl. He was terribly exposed before and now he’s basically cut off as well as exposed. I talked to Kyle Richards — he drives a water tanker truck with a five thousand gallon tank. He’s going to make two trips up to Mel’s and get the fuel, come back the long way and pump it into the Kim’s tanks.”
I took my life in my hands. “Jim, I have an untapped five thousand gallon tank of gas here.”
He was quick. “Does anyone know?”
“The adults here — and now you.”
“There are times I’m insanely jealous of Mark and his wife. My wife and I love each other deeply, but nothing like how those two feel about each other. Nita says you are well-provided for and for me not to worry about them.” He laughed. “She won’t tell me what she meant.”
“I don’t think Sarah has mentioned anything to Mark either, Jim. I said it once earlier. My father was a paranoid moonbat. When I saw what was happening — I made him look like a piker.”
“I suspected as much. Still, it’s a bit of a shock when you realize that your wife has secrets from you — and that you’re better off not knowing what those are. Mark would nod and understand. I fret.”
“Jim, anyone who isn’t fretting right now is a fool.”
“So, we are tolerably prepared for fuel — but the fact is, from now on, if we use it, we lose it. We’ll never see any more.”
“That’s right.”
He waved at my barn. “We have about two hundred horses to find places for this winter. I’d like to board some of them here. We can provide a couple of stoves to help heat the barn. I remember you telling me once that while it’s unheated, but that it’s not un-insulated.”
“My father prepared for a lot of things, but this was still a work in progress. He hadn’t progressed that far. But yes, if you have stoves, we have the wood to warm it.” I laughed. “I even have a few city folks who can learn to shovel horse manure and stoke the stoves. You know about the timber cutting stuff I have?”
“Yes. Mark is working with some of the older residents, finding any of the old logging equipment. Jack Caswell told him that, push comes to shove, he can take some of the metal from cars and make saw blades again. It’ll take him a couple of months to work it all out, but by spring we should have some two-man saws.
“Then it’ll be the job of a lot of the old farts to teach the rest of us how to do it safely.”
“And a good job that will be. Still, the odds are with the people we’ve got, someone out there can figure out a way to power that portable mill with something besides gas and the splitter can use the same thing.”
“We have a lot of splitters,” Jim told me and I nodded.
I looked him in the eye. “I don’t want to sound bossy, but I think you need to get with Mark and go over the plat maps you have. Mark all the timbered areas and who owns them. Come up with a plan to convert areas that don’t have local ownership to “public” lands — and then develop a harvest plan. Wood is an economically valuable fuel, and fuel is going to be critical for the future.”
“That it will.”
He hesitated. “Mark told me a couple of times over the years that I lowballed you. I was impressed at first when you went into the army — but then I learned that you were a supply weenie. That’s not so impressive. You got out when there was a need for skilled officers ... that didn’t impress me either.”
“I had my reasons.” I laughed. “Actually, the army let me go ... they had their own reasons.”
“A warehouse manager for Costco — I’m afraid that didn’t count very high on my list of career choices either.”
“Then one day, right after your divorce, Mark handed me your public records. I looked at the numbers, and I could only shake my head — that was true shock and awe! You realize that you are the richest man around, right?”
“I’ve never thought of it like that.”
“Yeah. I had no idea. I’m sorry, Evan. I assumed you inherited it. Then I looked more closely at the numbers. You’ve doubled what you inherited.”
“Well, those numbers must have been before the economy went south — like everyone else, I took a bath.”
“Like you said, everyone took a bath. Yet, most of us lost more than half. You didn’t lose that much.”
“I came close.”
“When it comes to bucks, Evan, close doesn’t count. I’m trying to say I’m sorry.”
“Jim, we’ve been friends since forever. That’s the only currency I care about. You, Nita, Mark, and Sarah — I value you and your friendship more than all the accounting marks on all of my financial statements. Statements that today are just pure, unadulterated BS, because most of those companies I invested in no longer exist. Except for this place, everything else I own has pretty much evaporated.”
He nodded, reached out, and gripped my hand. “We hold the lives of all that we hold dear in our hands. We can never forget it. Now I need to talk to Nita. You can tell the others about what happened.”
“Gosh, thanks, Jim!” I said, and he laughed.
I walked with him to the house. “Kids downstairs,” I told them. Lynn looked at me and jerked her head at her friends and then shook her head.
The rest of the kids went downstairs, and I spoke to adults and the three older young women.
“Last night, the high school caught fire — the people there didn’t know how to set a fire in their stoves and burned the entire school to stay warm ... they were too stupid to have availed themselves of the help offered by their fellow townsmen.
“The sheriff and the other responsible adults of the town have kicked them out. All of them. They took them to the bridge out of town and put them on the road. Then Jim and the rest blew up the bridge behind them. The only way for them to return involves a very long walk in the cold and the rain.”
Sarah and Nita both blanched.
I focused on a spot on the fireplace mantle, high over their heads. “It’s a hard thing, but you have to understand that in one night, those people destroyed the one building that could shelter all of them and destroyed the means whereby they could have been kept warm. What those fools did will adversely impact all of the responsible townspeople’s odds of survival.
“Those people refused to do chores; they refused to learn the basics of what they needed to do to survive in the situation we find ourselves in. Let there be no doubt about it in your minds — most of those people will be dead in a month. Before you feel pity for them, remember that they have made survival of those of us who are left far more problematic. Moreover, it hasn’t helped the odds for your children’s survival either.
“None of us in this room is a shirker; even the children do the chores they are given without any demur. We need to impress on the kids that things are going to be different now for months and years. We all need to take the lessons to heart.”
“You’re okay with this?” Josh asked.
“Who could be okay with sentencing hundreds of people to what amounts to death? I’ll repeat this. My goal is to get us all — every last one of us — through this. On top of that, I want to leave us a future where we have a chance at recapturing something of what we had before. Not everything, because our leaders were as screwed up as the people in town were.
“We need to think about everything we do — we need to be as sure as we can about the projects we undertake.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat things. We are in very serious trouble. Things are falling apart far more rapidly than even my most pessimistic view of a few weeks ago expected. We aren’t that far from Portland and push comes to shove, Seattle, Tacoma, and all of that are just up the road as well. There are a lot of people going to be sloshing around for a few months. They are going to be focused on their personal survival — they aren’t going to be concerned about the destruction they wreck on those in their paths. We will have to be careful — and we are going to have to do what we have to do. Odds are it won’t be pretty.”
Sarah spoke up. “Logan, we’re with you. Whatever we have to do.”
“Yes!” Herb added, and Emma nodded.
Lynn spoke up. “Logan, the littles are going to want to know what’s happened. You can’t hide this.”
“Be truthful. A lot of people in town misbehaved — and the town’s leaders made them leave. You don’t need to describe what will happen to them. They shirked their chores and didn’t want to learn anything new. Don’t dwell on it; this isn’t to be an object lesson on what happens if you don’t do your chores. I better not ever hear that you used this to try to get someone to behave. Tell them about what happened — but never use it as a threat. If they ask again, tell them to talk to their parents.”
I was pleased when Lynn nodded. “Now, we need to give Jim and Nita and the boys some time together,” I told the people at the house.
People had chores; I felt guilty because right then I had none. Sarah appeared at my side. “We need to talk, Logan.”
I nodded and since the only place at all private was outside, we went outside. It was downright chilly.
“I need to have a ‘private time’ room, don’t I?” I told her.
Sarah smiled. “It will be a tough row to hoe, Logan. A lot of the women are going to be looking at their hole card and deciding you’re their best hope. I think you’ll want to be more careful.”
“I never wanted to be the captain of the Titanic. Now ... I’m him. If you want to be my conscience, that’s fine with me.”
She blinked and then grinned. “I can be the conscience of even more people than you, Logan.”
I had to laugh; she’d taken my simple idea and twisted it all out of shape. “It’s done, then,” I told her.
She blinked, clearly startled at my easy acquiescence.
We ended up in the one unused bedroom.
“What now?” she asked.