Chapter 10

Dammit, I had not realized how much grunt-work there was in this kind of construction. It took nearly a month of chipping and grinding to get enough limestone powder for my dirt composition. It only took two trips in the largest pickup to move enough of the red clay for that first wall. Thank God, I had a lot of help with this work: it seemed as if the other people were as interested in a successful outcome from this experiment as I was. Eli and Suzy spent the most time helping me, but that was because they had the most spare time.

The rest of the work was easy compared to the problems and sweat that were generated by getting enough limestone ground up for that first wall. I only had a little more than a vague idea of how to go about constructing a wall, so we built a mold to the full size of the wall I had in mind. I was smart enough not to fill the mold completely before I started compacting; instead, I put in about a foot deep of powder that I wanted to compact and pounded that down until it was only about 6 inches deep and hard as a rock. I could not even drive a nail into the hardened mix, and I figured that was enough pounding on that layer.

Another foot of the powder mix was dumped into the mold and it was compacted until it passed the "nail test." I then checked to see if the two layers had bonded together before going any further in adding to the wall's height. As nearly as I could tell, the bond between the two layers was not as firm as either of the layers alone, but it seemed adequate for the job.

I was forced to stick with these relatively thin layers simply because I did not have anything beyond human muscle power to do the compacting, and I was afraid that a thick layer would not be compacted uniformly all the way through. In any case, this appeared to be an adequate method of construction for a wall inside the cave. The wall was a foot thick and was projected to be 8 feet high. I planned to interlock the walls at the corners with some steel reinforcing rods that we had found to keep the walls from tipping over. It also dawned on me to put some dimples in the top surface of each layer to make them interlock in a manner similar to Lego blocks.

This first room was 12 feet by 12 feet and had three doors, one in each wall. Not knowing what else to do, I had Jake fashion three doorframes from two-inch-thick and 10-inch-wide wooden planks. The same technique of wall construction was used after a doorframe was set in place. This seemed to work out very well, so it set the pattern for the rest of the apartment. It took a month to complete the construction of the apartment, all except for the roof. For safety's sake, I put in an exterior door diagonally opposite the first door so that there would be two exits in case of an emergency.

Temporarily, the roof consisted of several pieces of salvaged canvas that had once served as boat sails. I found these at a marina and had saved them on speculation. At last, I had a use for them. Of course, they did not do much for sound deadening, but they did provide a sense of completion for the house. The walls turned out to be very good at keeping exterior noises from creeping into the house, so Sue and I decided to go with this level of construction until we had had at least a month to evaluate any possible changes.

At this stage, the house was much larger than Sue and I really needed, but it did provide room for family expansion, which we expected to happen pretty soon. In the meantime, I used one of the rooms with the exterior door as an office, since I did need a place to hold meetings. We managed to find enough furniture for our new house by scrounging through the few buildings that had survived the firestorm following the earthquake. One of the other rooms was fitted as a guest room with the usual bedroom furniture, and the fourth room was temporarily utilized as a storeroom.

We now had a different kind of problem to consider: the house was roughly 26' x 26', and we would be hard-pressed to get many more structures this size into the main chamber of the cave. We needed five more houses this size to accommodate the rest of our population, and there simply was not room enough in the main chamber for that many apartments, considering the fact that we wanted at least 10 feet of separation between buildings. We felt that streets any narrower would be a problem later on. The only solution appeared to be enlarging at least one of the smaller side-chambers.

Everybody was given a chance to try out our guest room, and everybody agreed that they wanted a similar house for their own use. We decided to construct three more houses identical to the first one in the main chamber and two more similar houses in one of the side-chambers. We did decide to save ourselves some work by sticking to the canvas roofs. Once everybody had moved into their new house, the noise level within the cave should drop to the point where no sound proofing would be needed on the roof.

The new homes became the priority project for our community. We started work on a second house identical to the original one, and we also began enlarging one of the side-chambers. The limestone chips from this side-chamber were to be pulverized to be used in the construction of the new houses.

We already had the forms necessary, so we saved considerable time in constructing the next house. The total construction time was reduced to three weeks, and we congratulated ourselves on such an accomplishment. A lottery was held, and Jake's family won. They moved in immediately, but that did not delay the construction of the third apartment. The next two apartments were constructed in approximately the same time frame, and Bill and Jess were the winners of these lotteries.

We still needed to do some work to complete the conversion of the second housing chamber, but Hank and John were anxious to move their families into their new houses, so we stopped work on the chamber conversion long enough to put in the two new houses in that chamber. We got the houses built over the next six weeks, and the last of the families got moved in.

We all breathed a sigh of relief when John's family moved into the last of the new apartments because it was obvious that we were going to need more living space. Every one of the women who could be so were pregnant, and we were going to have a population explosion within a few months. That made all of us happy, even though it did mean there was going to be extra work for everybody.

We were all kept very busy during those months of housing construction, because we still had other jobs that we could not ignore. For one thing, there were continual trips to towns as much is 50 miles away, to gather foodstuffs that we could not hope to produce for ourselves for some time, if ever. A major effort was made to stock up on flour, sugar, and coffee. We managed to find a food distribution warehouse where we found a number of the products we needed. These were moved to semi trailers that were used to transport the items to our cave. The tractor used to pull the trailers used diesel fuel, of course, so we had to scrounge for a lot more of that than we had ever needed for the houseboats.

The trailers were arranged on the paved road in a line with enough space at the rear of each one for a small unloading dock. That way, we were able to use the trailers for permanent storage. Before the end of the summer, we had searched as far as a 100-mile radius for toilet paper and tampons. Along the way, we salvaged an electric-powered forklift truck to do our unloading.

Each of the tiny unloading docks had a ramp that the forklift truck could negotiate, so we only needed one to do all of our unloading. Pickup trucks were used as intermediary transportation between the trailers and the cave entrance. A second electric-powered forklift truck was used for moving heavy items around the cave and for unloading pallets of material from the pickups. Eli turned out to be our most skilled forklift driver, and his services were almost constantly in demand.

The next winter was spent much more comfortably as each family had its own housing, and the newly arrived babies did not disturb the community with their crying, etc. We had a surplus of food, so that the only thing people could complain about was that we still had to use the outdoor toilet facilities. It was something of a nuisance to use, but one complaint was answered by the indoor shower which had hot water available.