Chapter 5

It was too dangerous for one person to wander around alone, so all of us needed to go on the trek for salt. We decided to take the wagon so that Jean could ride if it became necessary. We took several pots to use for evaporating the sea water if we were lucky enough to find it. To be on the safe side, we took all of our weapons: the rifles, the pistols, and the crossbows.

Angie and I pulled the wagon while Jean ranged ahead a few hundred yards to try to find the smoothest route for us. She always stayed in sight so that we could provide support if she needed it. Likewise, Jean would help us if we needed it. Jean found a fairly flat route for us, not necessarily the shortest, but the one requiring the least amount of work on our part pulling the wagon.

On the second day, we had a stroke of luck that bordered on the edge of a miracle. We came to a swamp of very brackish water that looked clean enough to be useful. Actually, brackish was hardly the word for it; the water was so salty that it seemed that we could taste the salt just by looking at it. There was even a crust of salt around the edge of several of the smaller ponds.

Jean went around gathering as much of the salt crust as she could manage while Angie and I set up to evaporate the water in our pots. Angie gathered wood while I fetched water in the pots. We built a rather large fire ring and set out to make a bed of coals to use for evaporating the water. We decided to try an experiment of flashing off the water, rather than trying to evaporate it in wholesale quantities. Our idea was to put a small amount of water in a pot so that it would evaporate quickly. When the water level got very low, we dumped in more water. This caused the salt content to go up quickly. After a few hours, we pulled the pot off the coals and let it cool. The salt crystallized out of solution and we only had to dip it out of the pots with a strainer. Over a period of four days, we managed to obtain several hundred pounds of very pure salt. Our trip home was a parade of pure triumph!

This bounty of salt was a great load off our minds. Not only did we have a year's supply of salt, but we knew where we could get more very easily. We decided to make as many trips as we could to collect salt. We could easily store it in our cave and have it available when the asteroid finally hit. I hoped to collect several tons before we quit.

We had found several streams nearby stocked with fish as eager to bite as those at my original fishing hole by the boat. I dug a couple of pools as best I could with the homemade shovel I made from a scrap of steel and a small tree limb. These pools were within easy walking distance of our cave, so I could fish for an hour or so almost every day.

Jean and Angie set up racks to salt and dry the fish that we didn't eat right away. These fish were put into storage in our cave so that we could build up a reserve of food for when the asteroid struck. Of course, this food would tide us over if we ran into trouble before then.

Likewise, we built up a supply of salted meat for our larder. Previously, we had thrown away a lot of food simply because we could not eat it before it spoiled, but, now that we had plenty of salt, Jean and I made a point of hauling in as much meat as we could manage in the cart so that she and Angie could preserve it.

The one thing we worried about was the current equivalent of rats showing up and living off our meat and fish stores. We built a platform of wood to store the food on and tried to make it so that the varmints would have a lot of difficulty reaching it. Also, we put in a solid door over the lower part of our entrance to keep them from sneaking in. They were going to have to gnaw a hole in the door to gain entrance, and I checked every day for signs of that. So far, I did not find any indication that we were under attack, but I wondered how long that was going to last.

I realized that, eventually, I was going to have to make some barrels, or equivalent, for storing food. I didn't know how I was going to do that, but we batted around ideas. Eventually, we would come up with something that would work.

The rainy season finally hit, or maybe I should call it the monsoon season. The wind never seemed to stop blowing, and the rain rarely stopped falling. The only good thing about this was that the temperature dropped to a much more comfortable level, I guessed about 75 degrees Fahrenheit.

It seemed like the world turned to a sea of mud. We gave up on hunting and foraging and lived off our stores. Dammit, I never realized how tired I could get of salted fish!

Being stuck in the cave did one good thing for me: I was induced to start work on improving our front door. The wall was thin enough along there that I did not have much rock to remove as I enlarged the doorway. I had a small sledge hammer and a chisel that I could use to chip away the limestone. Michaelangelo, I'm not, but I was able to do a decent job of squaring up the opening and enlarging it enough so that it was possible to enter the cave without wading through the stream.

I was able to cut some planks smooth and square enough to frame the doorway and hang a door with some hinges that I had found aboard the boat. I put in ventilation holes along the top of the door frame so that we did not have to leave the door open to let in fresh air. I completely filled in the part of the doorway that was over the water, barely leaving enough room for all of the water to escape. I figured that this was enough to seal the doorway against almost any conceivable animal, except water snakes, and there were none of those as far as we knew. I planned to put in a set of concrete stairs outside the door as soon as the rain let up.

The monsoon lasted for a couple of months, and I, for one, was going stir crazy! I had gotten to the point where I was stripping off all my clothes and walking around in the rain just to get out of the cave for a few minutes. By my third or fourth trip, Angie and Jean were joining me, but we were having to help Jean up and down the ladder, because she had started to bulge so much. Not realizing that I was the only one who thought it was funny, I sometimes teased her about having sextuplets, until Angie told me to shut up in no uncertain terms.

The arrival of the baby occurred almost simultaneously with the end of the rain. Jean went through about 20 hours of painful labor, since we had nothing but Tylenol to help her, and Angie was reluctant to use much of that, since she did not know how it would affect the baby. The women had ordered me to build a birthing chair, since that was supposed to be easier on the mother, even though it was harder on the midwife. Apparently, the chair was a good idea, because James, Jr., dropped out with a minimum of fuss, once he decided to come. No, he was not circumcised because it was not necessary, and none of us knew exactly how to do it.

Jean's breasts had grown significantly during her pregnancy, and she had no problem manufacturing a large quantity of milk. JJ never suffered from lack of food the whole time he nursed. I have to admit that I like to look at large breasts, so I was not unhappy at the increase in size; secretly, I hoped that would happen to Angie, too, when her turn came.

Speaking of which, seven weeks after JJ was born, Angie announced that she was pregnant. We all wondered if she had just been waiting until Jean delivered before starting one of her own. Whatever the reason for the delay, we all appreciated it, and we were all delighted that Angie finally had a baby on the way.

This looked like a good time to make a trip to the boat. There was good drainage so that the mud was gone. We loaded Jean and JJ on the wagon and headed out for the boat. Angie and I pulled and Jean rode shotgun. Nothing happened to slow us down, so we actually made it to the boat in three days of hard work.