Are You Ready?

A Platform

2011-12-07T11:54:00.000-08:00

Almost every candidate for elected office attempts to convince the electorate that they will make this or that happen when they are elected. This annoys me because our system of checks and balances prevents one person from running the show. Understand, the president may take some actions that are not subject to Congress's approval or the Supreme Court's judgment. Some of the items in this platform might fall into that category, but for the most part, they could only all be implemented by a dictator or emperor. Fortunately, we do not have one of those.....yet. Give the American people time, they might opt for one someday.
I did not put much thought into these actions, which would align me with the rest of the gang in Washington, D.C. Some of these actions are minuscule, but have meaningful results. Others are astronomical and would have catastrophic, dynamic shifts in the American way of life.
All, however, are designed to save the country. Here then, for your enjoyment and hopefully enlightenment, is the eleven point platform, presented in the Jay Leno top ten style. Would you vote for me if I espoused this platform?

The number eleven action to take to save the country is:
Stop the production of pennies, nickels and one dollar bills.
10. Eliminate upper limit on social security taxes.
9. Change income tax code to flat tax on all income and eliminate all deductions.
8. Eliminate political parties and change nomination process for president to popular vote by all the voters in a single day primary in July - top two vote getter's run off in November.
7. Make killing unborn infants murder.
6. Criminalize homosexual relations.
5. Eliminate Daylight Savings Time.
4. Get ethanol out of our gasoline.
3. Stop borrowing money.
2. Mandate all employees be paid their net pay (after tax deductions) in cash.

And the number one action to take to save the country is eliminate the Dept of Education and repeal all federal laws having anything to do with education. Our schools is where the lie is perpetuated.

I suppose there are a few more, but these are a good start.
I did not explain why these actions work. Ask me and I 'll try to respond.

Merry Christmas, Mort

save the post office

2011-09-09T05:34:00.000-07:00

Five billion dollars. Were all our problems on that scale.
That is only 11.4 billion forever stamps. Everyone get out there and buy 38 (two books of forty) and the post office will have the money to meet their obligations. Check the math.
See, we actually can pay our own way instead of the feds having to always save us.
Warren Buffet alone could buy the stamps and distribute them to the poor. Kill three birds with one stone. Save the post office, support entitlement programs, and pay his "fair share".

bad news again

2011-07-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

Hi - I get frustrated that I cannot get through to the powers that be, so I will just give it a try here.
Mitch McConnell's latest proposal to allow more borrowing should get him thrown out on his ear!!
One side says not borrowing will cause the collapse of the dollar. The other says borrowing will cause the collapse. Both sides could be right. My gut says the first choice will be less drawn out and painful. I believe the fix is to stop borrowing immediately - the fix cannot wait - it might be too late already. This, however, would require that Congress would have to possess courage and wisdom, scarce commodities in DC right now.
Question: I know it was mentioned in the past, but why isn't anyone suggesting that we eliminate the DEPT of ED and help cut spending by not wasting that money?
Answer: It is the socialists last bastion for controlling our children. Plato, in the "Republic" said the way to control society is to have control of the upbringing of the children. They know this and will hold out as long as they can to indoctrinate our children into believing that the federal government is supreme, that one must turn to the government whenever trouble comes, that the government is our only hope (not God), that homosexuality is not a sin, that killing babies before they are born is acceptable, etc. Getting them to abandon that hold on us would be a miracle. Pray for it.
I hope some Senators and Representatives see this.
Mort

Daylight Savings Time

2011-02-26T05:25:00.000-08:00

Hello. Way too long since I posted, but energy savings are on my mind today.
March 13 we push the clocks ahead one hour to save energy. That raises many questions.
If we save energy by moving ahead one hour, if we move it ahead two hours, will we save twice as much?
If we save energy moving ahead, do we lose that energy in fall when we move it back?
If so, we should not move it back, leave it there and we will always save energy.
If we save energy moving ahead, why wait, the sooner we move the sooner we save.
My father could not wait to save energy so he moved his clock ahead February 13 - he's been saving energy a month longer than we will.
And if we would move the clock ahead one hour every month for two years, we would save a day's worth of energy. But then my birthday would be May 18th instead of the 17th, I think.
Some people credit Ben Franklin with the concept of DST. I always thought him a brilliant man. Now I'm beginning to wonder.
If he would have pushed his clocks ahead more often, he might still be alive today.
Okay, I should not knock him. Even though he started it, it takes a government to perpetuate a lie.
Enjoy your savings, while we still have them.
MORT

Timely thoughts

2009-08-11T09:58:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone, long time no write.
Have a lot on my mind.
Have actually resumed Alyssa's story. I've been admonished by several wise people that I need to finish the story and get the information out there, before it's too late.
Find myself writing in the past now. When I started I was writing in the future. Well, maybe I still am?
Can't resist a couple comments on our current federal government.
1. Just writing this should get me on the White House list of dissenters - glad to be there with the other 200+ million Americans that believe in freedom.
2. The P.O.D. (Party of Deception, as opposed to the G.O.P.)) has to remember if they put all of us in internment camps, we will no longer be able to pay taxes.
3. Health care plan: None of Congress's business (with one exception-see #4), no constitutional mandate that Congress needs to take care of us, actually insults me that they believe we cannot take care of ourselves.
4. Exception - if Congress has done or is doing something to cause our health care crisis, then they should reverse what they are doing or have done wrong.
5. Our health care crisis is not bad or insufficient care - it's just a problem paying for it.
6. We have a problem paying for everything, and the cause of our economic dilemma is CONGRESS SPENDING MONEY THEY DO NOT HAVE!
7. The single best thing Congress can do to alleviate the crisis is stop spending more money than they bring in - more regulation or government intervention will only hurt not help.
8. P.O.D. might have played their hand too soon. They read the vote last fall as America's permission to advance their Marxist (a purer term than socialist or communist) agenda. They deceived enough voters, but can't keep up the deception. It should backfire.
9. If for some reason a health care reform package is passed, it MIGHT SAVE THE NATION.
Because every Congressperson who votes for it will become an immediate target for defeat in their next election which would possibly drastically change the philosophical make up of Congress resulting in some sense, both economically, morally, and idealogically returning to the federal government.
10. OR it's passage accompanied by the enormous tax increases that will probably follow and/or any move to confiscate our guns will certainly be the spark that will start the next revolution. We are ripe for it, but I HOPE IT NEVER HAPPENS!
11. A more peaceful revolution would be if we all stop paying our taxes. I'm not proposing this, but it is more likely to happen not by choice, but because we will not have the money to pay our taxes. However it becomes inevitable if the dollar fails. (Do I see the internment camp in my future for that one?)
12.What's with the town hall meetings? Congress has the ability to pass health care reform. They do not need our permission. We are not voting on it. Unless it is because they actually pay attention to and base their votes in the Capitol on public opinions and polls. Might be the case.
13. OR it is just business as usual for the party that deceived the voters in the first place. They thrive and survive on continuing to deceive us. Bad habits are hard to break.
14. Besides, it's a diversion - all this fuss about health care steals the limelight away from those things that are really important. The federal debt, Afghanistan, failing dollar, school systems that are indoctrinating our children with their beliefs, and failing morals come to mind.
15. And finally, remember their whole agenda is about control. Call it Orwellian if you wish, but it is meant to take control of our lives away from us and give it to our government. It is about CONTROL, CONTROL, CONTROL.

OK, enough said. Just hope I brought a little light into a pretty disconcerting point in the history of our nation.

I'll try to send something sooner next time, Mort

Chapter Twenty-One - Mortality (conclusion)

2008-05-29T14:12:00.000-07:00

One of the last jobs of butchering was rendering the fat. Hog fat was kept separate during the butchering process and then melted in the kettle. It then re-solidified when cooled as lard. Amazingly, unless exposed to summer-like temperatures, it kept very well. We used the lard for frying, making piecrust, or some other uses if butter-churning had lagged behind.
Beef tallow was rendered the same way. Somewhere in their past, perhaps at some folk life fair, Jean and Dianna had both learned how to make candles. The cleanest tallow, that with the least blood or meat clinging to it, was melted separately for Jean, Dianna, and me to make candles. It was a hot job, but I was glad to help. It was fun and a wonderfully warm job during the winter. Finding the right material for wicks was challenging. Baler twine was plentiful, but too thick. Shoestrings were the right thickness, but who wanted to waste shoestrings on candles. We tried twisting straws or other plant stems, but they burned too quickly. We had a small ball of packaging string; you know, the kind you used to wrap packages. It was nice and round, the right thickness, burned at a decent pace, and the hot fat clung to it fairly well. However the supply was soon exhausted. We had to settle on spitting the sisal baler twine and retwisting it. We tried the same thing with plastic twine, but it burned kinda funny, so sisal was the best choice. We certainly had plenty of it, but sometime in the future, the supply would run out because of all the other uses we had for baler twine, like our braided ropes.
“One day,” Jean had said, “we’ll have to find some fibrous plant or weed that we can make wicks out of.”
“We’ll have to experiment next summer,” was my response.
After settling on the wicks, the trickiest part was getting the candles started. Poppop had handcrafted a dozen candle holders that eight wicks could be fastened to. The first dip in the hot tallow was the most difficult because the wicks didn’t have enough weight to make them go down into the fat. So we used a thin stout wire to force each of the wicks into the grease. It was a job we did as a team; more hands making it easier. Even then, when you pulled out the wicks, there was barely any coating on the infant candles. Every dip after that became easier and easier, as long as we waited long enough between dips, so the fat had solidified enough onto the wick to prevent it from melting off the wick on the next dip. That was why we also had to be careful not to get the fat too hot or we’d be melting the candles away faster than we’d be building them up. Grandpop was a big help with that aspect, carefully monitoring the heat. It was neat to have him find a way that he could contribute and for me to spend some time working with him. Plus he really seemed to enjoy it.
We probably had to dip the candles 12 to 15 times until we got the thickness we desired or the level of grease had gotten too low in the kettle to dip. Our finished candles weren’t always works of art. They smoked a little too much, smelled a little, and could have burned more slowly. Our flashlight battery supply would soon be exhausted and even the rechargeable ones would not last forever. So our candles became a valuable asset to the community during the months of fall and winter when we only had nine to ten hours of daylight. In addition, artificial lighting was preserved exclusively for use in the barn where no flames were permitted.
When we had finished dipping all the candles, all the dirtier, poorer quality fat and tallow and any grease leftover from frying (remember, we threw nothing away), was added to the remaining grease in the kettle for soap making. Most of us had never seen soap being made. Dad said Poppop used to make homemade soap when Dad was growing up and Grandmom used to help her aunt make soap for years. But that was years ago and neither of my grandparents remembered the precise formula and method. Fortunately, Wayne came to save the day, because he knew how to make soap.
“There’s a catch,” Wayne said when first approached about lending his expertise. “We need lye to make soap.”
“That figures,” lamented Harvey, “we couldn’t think of everything when we started to stockpile supplies for the collapse. I’m not sure where we even could have bought lye.”
“Could have checked the pretzel factories,” Jeremiah offered. “They use lye for some pretzel products.”
“Or a plumbing supply store,” Aaron said. “They use it for unclogging pipes.”
“Then we have some,” Dad announced.
“Where?” Joe wondered.
“In our bathroom and kitchen cabinets - Liquid Plumber, Drano. Most products made to unclog drains have sodium hydroxide in them – lye. I’m sure we brought three or four quarts from our house. Others could have too. Remember, cleaning agents, soaps and chemicals were high on the list of priorities of materials to salvage.”
“Yes, you’re right,” Jeremiah agreed. “I’m sure I had one or two bottles. We can check our inventory in the upstairs kitchen. Wouldn’t they be stored there?”
“Yes,” Harvey answered, “there might also be some up at Butch’s.”
“And when we need more,” Joe added, “we can have Titus trade some of our meat or flour or even the soap we make for more. Or we can make our own salvage run; check out what’s left behind in the stores in town or in abandoned homes.”
It was a touchy subject. Trading was one thing; others could use some of our produce including the soap we’d make. But was just going into someone else’s home or store and taking what was left behind appropriate, ethical, or moral?
“I guess there are a couple theories concerning scavenging,” Dad said. “Some would say you have to do what you have to do to survive.”
“Others say it would be stealing,” Barry interjected.
“But it’s on abandoned property,” Jeremiah countered.
“It’s just laying there, going to waste,” Bruce offered. “You know how our culture abhors resources going to waste.”
“Not to mention that our situation demands we waste nothing,” Jake added. “And I don’t mean only our little group, but all of society. We’ve wasted too much the last couple generations. That’s part of what got us into this mess.”
“Sounds ethical to me,” Harvey concluded. “Not immoral either.”
“Definitely appropriate,” Joe concluded, “besides, we’d take those resources to turn them into products that we’d eventually share with any folks that needed them. Only makes sense to me.”
All eyes turned to my grandparents and Wayne. I guess this was one of those issues where even my parents and their generation, already in their 40s and 50s, looked to the previous generation for wisdom. The question didn’t even need to be verbalized.
Grandpop spoke first. “You do what you have to do,” he said. “It would be best is we could trade for everything we need, but we might not always be able to do that.”
“Especially if you can’t find the owner,” Grandmom added.
“Choose the crew carefully,” Wayne proposed, “that would venture out on any scavenging missions. Choose men with sound judgment. Have them take trade goods with them and seek out the remaining neighbors first. They should announce who they are, what they’re looking for, and what they’re intending to do with it. Don’t take anything the neighbors might need in the future, but take what they agree to part with. Mention we have things or will be producing things that they might need someday. Use the trade goods as peace offerings. If our men feel it best to compensate the owners – leave them some money. I know the money is practically worthless and that the owners might never return to claim it, but if it brings peace, then so be it.”
“Then so be it,” several echoed.
Turned out scavenging, while important and necessary, wasn’t that big a deal. Many abandoned homes and stores were well emptied when the scavengers arrived. However, there were items that were left behind, like drain openers that were thought of as useless or worthless by their previous owners, but became useful and worthwhile in the hands of the industrious and ingenuous members of our community.
So Wayne helped us make soap. It took a lot of boiling and stirring and somehow adding the lye to the boiling fat enabled it to solidify when cooled. Later when the supply of lye ran out, we learned that wood ashes could be substituted. I don’t know why they worked and it was a more difficult and trickier process, but it gave us the same results –soap. The stuff actually worked, too. It didn’t smell that great though, so we tried adding perfume, after-shave, or cologne (some things we really had no other use for) to a couple batches to spice it up a little. That made it more pleasant to bathe or shower with, which was the homemade soap’s primary use. But soon we were using it for laundry and dishes as well, so we could save all the laundry and dish detergent we had on hand for sanitizing the milking equipment when Larry’s commercially produced cleaners would run out. Down the road, we even had to use homemade soap for that job as well. For the ensuing months it was an ongoing burden – finding homemade products to replace the ones we had been able to purchase just a few months ago.

To be continued……..Mort

Chapter Twenty-one - Mortality (cont)

2008-05-15T15:20:00.000-07:00

Death was not an uncommon experience for us. We had been killing a hog a week for a few months now and had butchered several small steers as well. We still had not tackled a larger animal because of the warm weather and the fact that at this point Joe had not perfected methods of preserving that amount of meat.
One morning Larry discovered a cow lying dead in the pasture. She was part of the nursing herd, those that we let the calves suckle instead of us milking them. Why she died, we didn’t know. That herd wasn’t attended as regularly as the milking string, making it less likely to notice any sick cows. She was old as far as cows go – eight or nine years as best Larry could recall. With no other evidence of disease or injury, we could only assume old age was the culprit. We weren’t about to do an autopsy to determine cause of death….. or were we?
“Shame to see her go to waste,” Harvey began.
“Absolutely,” Joe agreed, “we shouldn’t throw any meat away.”
“But how long has she been dead?” Dad wondered.
“Hard to say,” Larry answered, “she’s not stiff. She’s not bloated from the fermentation going on in her rumen of the last feed she ate. Couldn’t be more than two, three hours. Four at the most.”
“Then I say we tackle it,” Joe concluded. “The meat can’t be bad yet, depending on what she died from. Let’s have a look and if anything looks suspicious, then we’ll abandon the meat. At least Patsy and the cats can have some.”
After hanging the cow in the tree next to the ground cellar with the head up, skinning it wasn’t really that hard. At least not with the skill that Joe had. Next he removed the entrails, carefully inspecting them for signs of infection or any other indications of disease. Nothing seemed abnormal. But when he pierced the diaphragm to remove the heart and lungs from the cow’s upper cavity, gallons of blood spewed into the tubs we had positioned under the animal for the waste to fall into.
“Whoa, that’s not normal!” Joe exclaimed. “This cow must have bled to death. It wonders me what caused it.”
After removing the organs and examining them, he continued, “Look at the heart. Now I know why she died. It’s not easy to see, but there’s a hole, I guess you call it an aneurysm, in a large vessel right where it goes into the heart. Not a gaping hole that your thumb would fit through, but a slit no more than half an inch long. Big enough, however, for all this blood to be pumped out.”
“If it’s an artery,” Josh chimed in. “If it’s a vein, it just leaked out.”
“Either way – she bled to death,” Harvey concluded, “fast enough to make the meat safe to eat, I’d say. Everyone agree?”
No one disagreed, so the cleaned carcass was sawed into quarters and carried into the ground cellar to cool. Much of the fat and tallow was removed from the meat and stored separately in buckets to be rendered later. Under normal circumstances, like the beef we were to slaughter as winter progressed, we would have cleaned up the liver, kidneys and heart and prepared them for supper on the days we killed any livestock. This time, however, because we weren’t one hundred percent sure how long the cow had been dead, all the organs as well as the head and hide were hauled for disposal to a far corner of the farm where no livestock were pastured.
“The skunks, possums, and vultures need something to eat too,” Dad had said. “It’s a shame we couldn’t use the hide, though. Don’t know if we could have turned it into leather or not.”
“We can’t waste the salt we have,” Larry said.
“I know,” Dad agreed. “Maybe someone will show up one day with the knowledge and ability to tan hides. Commercially they use tannic acid; we might be able to use oak leaves.”
“I read once,” Jake added, “that the Indians used the organs for tanning. Some chemical in the organs, when rubbed into the cleaned hide helped the process. The Indians didn’t have salt or tannic acid, but somehow they made soft buckskin. Maybe one day we’ll have to experiment.”
So for the next few days we ate old tough beef at every meal. Joe did learn some things from the incident.
First, he wished he’d have been better prepared. Second, meat won’t keep real long in the ground cellar. At 55 degrees it’s a great place for the meat in the summertime, but the meat’s actually preserved better outside in the winter and the months around it. Third, and fortunately so, the drying racks actually worked. We successfully dried some of the meat that Joe had skillfully sliced by hanging the slices next to the butcher stove on the racks we had used to make the dried apples. Joe knew how to make beef jerky, but lacked the ingredients and the electric dryer he usually used. The dried beef would have to be a weak substitute.
One of the hind quarters was roasted the first day over an open fire outside. Some of the other large pieces were cooked in the kettle of the butcher stove; it certainly made enough heat for the drying racks. Once the meat was cooked and deboned, we packed it in jars and added boiling broth to enable the jar lids to seal by creating a vacuum when the broth and jar cooled. We cooked and canned two full kettles of meat, using most of the jars we had lids for. Joe kept the leftover broth cooking after screening out any small pieces of meat and bone. We carefully separated the meat from the bones, and then using a small hand food grinder, ground it like hamburger and tossed it back into the kettle with the broth. He added a little salt, pepper, our home ground cornmeal, and a little wheat flour until it had cooked to a pasty consistency like the mush we made. We poured it into pans to cool and set-up, and then fried it in the morning for breakfast. Like I said, beef every meal. It really wasn’t that great; later batches we made that winter were a bit tastier because pork was added as well. It became a staple for two mornings after butchering. It was called scrapple, because it was made from the scraps leftover from butchering.
Also, Joe wished he could have made bologna with some of the meat, so steps were taken to have what he needed ready for the next time. Aaron rigged up Joe’s power driven meat grinder with the motor we had used to fill the soybean bin. Then Joe was able to grind the beef, add pepper and salt and a few other ingredients he had saved. The mixture was stuffed into bags that Sandy and Mom had sewn into tubes from old clothing or towels. When these tubes of meat were smoked, they kept for weeks, especially in winter. I don’t know why, but it was called summer bologna or summer sausage and unlike some of the other food we had, it was delicious. We ate it as a luncheon meat or fried it and made a milk gravy with it.
Eventually Joe started making regular pork sausage when we butchered hogs. We usually just fried it as patties, but it also made pretty good milk gravy as well. In freezing weather it kept indefinitely or could be kept a day or two in the springhouse by putting it in a sealed bucket in the cool water, but Joe knew it would keep longer if smoked, like the summer bologna. But we needed casings into which to stuff the pork sausage. The casings we used came from a job no one was thrilled to do. We had to clean the pig’s intestines. Grandmom remembered how to do it and thank goodness, out of the 60 some people in our community, there were a few people willing to tackle the task. At least I didn’t have to. The benefit was great, however, for once the sausage was inside a casing, it could be hung on racks to smoke and then it would keep for days if not weeks if necessary.
In order to smoke any of the meats another project had been tackled. There was no smokehouse on Harvey’s farm, but Joe had one at his old house. One day during the second week of November the men using, Brutus, took a hay wagon, tools, and blocking to Joe’s house and retrieved his smokehouse, cement blocks and all. Somehow they were able to tilt and lay the structure right onto the wagon without it falling to pieces. The smokehouse itself was six feet by eight feet and nine feet high, so it fit in a standard hay wagon. Once again, with some thinking, planning, muscle and extra effort we had taken another step toward meeting the food needs of our community. It was neat watching Joe tend the smokehouse. After starting a fire, it had to be tempered or smoldered to make the fire smoke all the time and not get too hot; you didn’t want to cook the meat, just smoke it. Joe used green wood (not dry), or wet sawdust and sometimes he even had to throw water on the fire itself.

To be continued…………Mort

Hard to Imagine

2008-05-07T07:23:00.000-07:00

Following is a question and answer session between a gentleman at an election rally and a presidential candidate. You pick the candidate, they’re all the same.

Q = questioner
C = candidate

Q: I understand your health care plan will provide health care for everyone in the country.
C: That’s correct.
Q: Well it’s about time. My daughter just received the immunizations for uterine cancer that the media, medical community, and the insurance companies touted so much. Our doctor billed us over $600 for the three shot series. I’m still fighting with the insurance company over getting it paid. How would a cost like that be handled under your plan?
C: Everyone would receive it at no cost.
Q: You mean the doctors won’t charge anyone anymore? And the pharmaceutical companies will give us the vaccine for free?
C: No, not for free. We will pay for it.
Q: We’re paying for it now. What’s the difference?
C: The difference is, the government will pay for it.
Q: Where’s the government going to get the money? They’re broke. There either going to have to get it from us or China.
C: From employers
Q: I thought you pledged not to raise taxes on middle class Americans, those earning less than $200,000 per year. There must be millions of small businesses and farmers that make less than that. Would you still tax them to fund your plan?
C: Well, it wouldn’t really be a tax – more like an involuntary contribution.
Q: Sounds like a tax to me. And where are employers supposed to get the money to pay your “involuntary contribution”?
C: From their profits.
Q: Oh, that’s right. You believe companies make profits they don’t deserve. Did you sleep through all of Economics 101? Companies get their money from the consumers, that’s us. Every cost they entail, including taxes, drives up the cost of their products and services to us. We would end up paying for your health care plan. The consumer always pays. So, who’s going to administer your plan?
C: We have insurance companies doing that now. They can continue.
Q: You’re kidding, right? The same insurance companies who drive up the cost of health care now and have used the money we pay in premiums to contribute generously to your campaign? For your plan to succeed, the extra costs tacked on by the insurance companies have to be eliminated. They’re not part of the solution; they’re part of the problem.
C: Next question.

Next installment, I have some of Alyssa’s story written…. Mort

No Easy Fix

2008-04-21T17:21:00.000-07:00

I said there is no easy fix………but you could try these:

1. Promote industries that produce items we really need like food, clothing, building materials and improvements to our infrastructure such as water, sewer, electricity, roads and railroads, especially if we now import those products.
2. Secure the dollar by eliminating credit – financial transactions need to be made in cold cash, coinage is best even if the metals used are steel, zinc, nickel or copper.
3. Provide incentives for renewable energy sources, especially solar, home grown fuels, and our garbage.
4. Establish neighborhood/community schools in churches, homes, community centers, etc., run by their owners (parents) by completely closing ALL public schools for a couple years.
5. Insure non-interference by government in business, agricultural and financial free enterprises by eliminating as many central regulatory agencies as possible, without compromising the safety aspects of those regulations as applied to the workers and the consumers.

Sorry, I said it wouldn’t be easy. It should be no surprise that the words chosen to begin each of these recommendations were also the ones used by James Madison when penning the Preamble to the Constitution. It would take some super leaders to actually have the intelligence and the courage to take such drastic steps. I guess we can hope.

Next installment?????????????? Mort

The ten main problems with society

2008-04-03T17:12:00.000-07:00

The ten main problems with society
(ignorance/greed and their manifestations)

1. We are a nation of consumers instead of producers.
2. A fiscally irresponsible federal government which has our country 9.4 trillion dollars in debt.
3. Control of the economy (like the stock and commodities markets and credit) by the Federal Reserve and other banking type industries.
4. A valueless dollar, not because it cannot buy as much as it used to, but because it is not backed by anything of real value. (ex.-gold standard)
5. Our dependence on oil and the way our economy is driven by oil.
6. Acceptance as a right to entitlements, even if you don’t work for them.
7. Belief that the government is the savior of the people.
8. Our litigious society and the unwillingness to accept responsibility for our own actions.
9. A state enforced school system that purports the above values, fueled by a system of higher education that supports that indoctrination.
10. Failure of churches and families to instill the proper values.

There is no easy fix
Collapse and start over would be the easiest, and probably inevitable.

Maybe next installment I’ll suggest some ways we could try to fix them.

To be continued……. Mort Stump

What are you going to do?

2008-03-20T05:57:00.000-07:00

The way things look on the economic front, it appears I may not be able to finish Alyssa’s story before the great collapse occurs. That would not be good as I still have so much to share. Perhaps in the future I’ll just run an outline of the rest of the story containing some of the more necessary details we will need to survive. If I see that this medium that I’m using to get this message out is going to die, I’ll try to quickly get something out.
A few weeks ago I commented on the foolishness of the economic stimulus package Congress passed. There has been a lot of talk and advice given about what individuals should do with that money. After hearing much and thinking some more, I’ve come up with a few options depending on your situation and your attitude.
1) If your main concern is the welfare of the United States:
Maybe your best choice is to send the check back or tear it up (I don’t know which of the two creates a bigger or more bureaucratic bookkeeping problem). Anything you could do to limit the amount of money that the US treasury has to borrow would be a step (no matter how small it would be) in the right direction. You could also buy one or two thousand forever stamps. That way the money still goes back to the treasury, but you actually get something in return, albeit when the post office closes the stamps will be worthless. Of course you could sell or trade them to other people prior to that. You know if we bought 50 billion forever stamps, that would put 20.5 billion dollars back into the treasury - might help a little, but just for a while.
2) If you’re well enough off and your main concern is the welfare of others:
You should donate the check to non-profits, the money would still be spent by someone and possibly achieve its purpose. Additionally it would give you a small tax write-off assuming the IRS is still in business in April 2009.
3) If you are barely making ends meet now, making your main concern the survival of your family:
You should purchase as many REAL goods as possible with the cash. Items like fuel oil, coal, food that can be kept safely for a long period, seeds, garden tools, soaps, toothpaste, pharmaceuticals, eyeglasses, rubber boots, raincoats, winter gloves, ammunition, batteries, hand powered generators, candles, matches, metal cooking pots. Purchase them before hyperinflation drives their prices through the roof and /or supplies have been cut-off.
Some are advising using the check to pay as much of your debt as you can, but what difference does it make if you owe $48,800 instead of $50,000? Will it really hurt you if you owe a bank money when it goes under? Isn’t it much better to owe them than have them lose your money in the collapse?
Turn your paper dollars into something real as soon as you can. Yes, and if the end becomes very imminent, I would think someone trying to insure his family’s survival might even use credit to buy those real things. I would even consider buying some items on credit now and plan to pay the card when the US check comes in May or June. Although if things snowball faster than most expect, we shall never see that check.
4) If you are of means and want to preserve as much as you have:
Assuming you have the bases already covered mentioned in #3, buy gold or silver with the check. You can’t eat it, but it will have a real value regardless of what happens to the dollar. My sincere wish is that people of means will be able to aid those of us who do not heed the warnings that are being plastered all over the place.
Sorry to paint such a grim picture. But truly, as rough as the going might be for awhile, the final outcome might not really be that bad. Our world is in need of a major cleansing, and what’s coming down the road might just do that. Please don’t feel pressured by any of my opinions. Consider the facts, draw your own conclusions, and take whatever steps you decide are necessary.
I’ll try to get back to Alyssa’s story, but in the meantime, God bless you all.

To be continued??????? Mort Stump

Chapter Twenty-one - Mortality

2008-03-13T14:18:00.000-07:00

“Joan Wolfe, Wayne’s wife, passed away this morning,” Butch announced.
“How? What from?” Joe inquired.
“She awoke at the usual time,” Butch answered, “appeared a little sluggish, ate about the same breakfast she normally did, and then lay back down. It was her normal routine, not unusual for an eighty-nine year old. About an hour later, Clare went back to check on her, and she was gone. What from? We’re not really sure. Our best guess is some complication from her diabetes. She had been on insulin for years. When her supply ran out, we managed her sugar pretty well with her diet, but evidently her system couldn’t take it. At least it appears she went peacefully.”
“That’s good,” Dad said. “How’s Wayne taking it?”
“So far, really well,” Ben responded. “He’s been expecting it for some time now; he knew he could lose her any day. Right now he has other things on his mind, which is what brings us here. He needs your help.”
“Of course,” Harvey replied, “how can we help?”
“Joan always wanted a big church funeral,” Ben continued. “Had her scriptures and hymns all picked out; even discussed the plans with Reverend Schneider. She and Wayne often talked about it. Wayne says it was important to her, that he had promised her he would carry out her plans, and he intends to do so.”
“Rightly so,” Harvey agreed. “What’s our part?”
“We need to get the grave dug ASAP,” Butch answered. “There’s no undertaker around with embalming fluid; she should be buried tomorrow. We assume Steward’s backhoe is still at the church cemetery. Would you accompany us to the church to run the backhoe and could you spare a couple gallons of diesel fuel in case its tank is dry?”
“I will,” Harvey said, “but are you sure the backhoe still works?”
“No, we’re not,” Butch continued. “We’re planning on taking charged batteries and jumper cables. We’re hoping your mechanic, Barry, can go along as well, and bring his tools. And if we can’t get it running, the men at our farm are gathering shovels and picks, so we can dig the grave by hand if we have to.”
“Do we know where the gravesite is?” Harvey asked.
“Wayne drew us a map and there’s already a stone there; shouldn’t be a problem,” Butch answered.
“Sounds like a plan,” Dad said. “I guess the minister needs to be notified some way as well?”
“Right,” Ben replied, “we thought it would be a good idea if we took your moped along on the wagon so one of us could track the Reverend down and let him know.”
“Good idea,” Harvey said. “Your wagon will be pretty full. How many of us do you need?”
“Just you and Barry,” Butch answered. “It’s dinnertime already. It will probably be after dark until we get back. Your men need to be here to get your work done; we’ll have enough hands.”
“Then let’s get started,” Harvey said.
“Oh, one more thing Wayne could use some help with,” Ben added.
“What’s that?” Dad asked.
“Well, the women are helping Wayne getting Joan ready for the funeral,” Ben continued. “You know, talking out what she’s going to wear, fixing her hair, and the like. But he plans to build a coffin for her, and I believe he fully expects to carry out his plans. Your dad’s really good with woodworking. It would be great if Harold would come up with us to give Wayne a hand. We have the lumber, hardware and the tools. Maybe your father-in-law could come as well. I think it would be good for Wayne if the task wasn’t so solitary and that he’d be in the company of two fellas nearer his own age who could talk things through, if he needed to.”
“Kinda like years ago, when a widow, together with other women family members and friends, would have to devote all kinds of time to the funeral and wake preparations,” Dad said. “It kept her mind off all the grief she was bearing.”
“Yes, like that,” Ben agreed.
“I’m sure Poppop and Grandpop will be glad to help Wayne,” Dad said. “They’re probably getting things ready for dinner. Alyssa, let’s go find them.”
We found my grandfathers with the kitchen crew and shared the news with all the others there. Everyone was glad to comply with Wayne’s wishes and to follow Butch’s plans. The funeral came off without a hitch. We used Brutus to haul some of us to church. Others rode bicycles or rode on the two wagons Butch had hitched up, one of which bore the coffin.
It was a dreary, drizzly day; maybe the way it should be for a funeral. The church was cold and somber; not how I was used to it being. It usually had a warm, bubbly, cheerful, and friendly atmosphere. Mel played the piano for the hymns. She was good, considering the pressure. Though it wasn’t the same as organ music. Of course, Reverend Schneider had successfully been located. We even found Joan’s closest living relative on a farm north of town. It was her youngest sister and a nephew and his family. They sure were glad we did. Countless hours had been spent by thousands of people the last few months, worrying and wondering how distant family members had survived. It was good to have closure for at least one of those families.
That evening I heard Mom, Dad, Jean, Harvey, Poppop, and Grandmom talking about funerals.
“You want to be buried at church?” Jean asked Harvey.
“Why do YOU want to know?” Harvey joked. “I plan on burying YOU first.”
“In your dreams,” Jean replied. “I’m serious, where do you want to be buried? We never did get around to buying plots at the church cemetery like we talked about years ago.”
“I know,” Harvey said. “I’d just as soon be buried here on the farm.”
“Me too,” said Poppop, “hope that’s alright with you, Grandmom?”
“Machts nichts aus,” she replied. “(Makes no difference) where we’re buried; been here for over 55 years. Might as well be here on the farm. Either of you have a spot picked out?”
“I kinda like,” Harvey answered, “at the far end of the meadow, up near the top of the hill, near the pine woods. It’s peaceful; you have a nice view of the whole valley and the farm buildings.”
“Like you’ll be able to see anything after I’ve planted you there,” Jean quipped.
“I know mother,” he replied, “it’s the thought that counts.”
“I like that spot too,” Poppop said. “It’s close to a couple of our deer hunting stands. I shot a few deer up there.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Dad agreed, “good memories.”
“Now ain’t that an important reason to pick a burial sight,” Mom countered. “But in the meadow? You want cows stomping on you for eternity?”
“Don’t worry; you won’t feel a thing,” Dad answered, “I’ll put you in extra deep.”
“Oh, so you’re burying me?” Mom whined.
“Planning on it,” Dad replied.
“Don’t worry; we’ll build a fence around it,” Poppop said. “Maybe even a stone wall. The old limestone quarry is only a few hundred yards from there.”
“Uh oh,” Harvey said, “I wonder how that vein of limestone runs. I don’t want to hit limestone clunkers every time I go to plant one of you.”
“Listen to him,” Mom said, “he’s planting us.” Turning to him she added, “I’d much prefer to sing at your funeral.”
“And so you might,” Dad acknowledged. “I wouldn’t worry about the limestone, Harvey. It’s been years since that pasture ground’s been plowed, so I can’t say for certain, But the field just next to it is shaly loam soil – wasn’t formed from limestone.”
“And,” Poppop added, “in the driest summers you can see a distinct line in both the meadow and the field where the limestone soil switches to the shale. You know, on the shale side the grass or crop planted there dries up much earlier. On the limestone side it stays greener for a couple weeks longer. Your spot for the cemetery is on the shale side of the line.”
“That’s settled then,” Grandmom announced, “another crisis solved. Who wants to be first?”
Of course it was a rhetorical question. We’d have to wait for the future to give us the answer.
“Makes me wonder about the quarry, now,” Dad continued. “If we want to grow crops without commercial fertilizer, could we find a way to mine the limestone like they did a century ago, and then burn the stone in a kiln to make lime to feed our crops?”
“I guess we could,” Harvey replied. “Another project, for another time.

To be continued….. Mort

Chapter Twenty - Agronomics (conclusion)

2008-02-13T05:48:00.000-08:00

We did receive a few dozen eggs from an unexpected source. The Tuesday after Larry had finished combining the soybeans, Titus Weaver returned for another load of hay. True to his promise he brought sweet potatoes for Poppop. He also had a passenger, Sam Burke. Sam brought with him a crude drawing of how he makes power driven hay mowers into ground driven ones. After a little discussion on how we adapted our equipment to sow our wheat, Sam, Larry, Aaron, and Dennis headed up to the equipment shed to show him the equipment and check out his plans.
Titus had very little produce to trade that day. His fields were pretty well cleaned out, yet food was in demand so it didn’t take long for him to move his wares. At least he was able to barter eight dozen eggs from one customer to trade to us.
“Wonderful!” Dad exclaimed. “Now that we have a flour mill and Jean is baking bread, I could sure eat a scrambled egg sandwich.”
“You have a mill up and running?” Titus inquired.
“Yep,” answered Dennis, “it’s slow and has to be tended continuously to function well, but we’re grinding wheat and corn.”
“Any neighbors bring you grain to grind?” Titus asked.
“No, not yet; I mean we grind our grain for Butch and Clare up the road, but no one else has brought any grain to grind. Don’t know that we’d want to anyway; that would tax the machine if we did too much for other people.”
“Yes, I suppose it would,” Titus answered. “However, Sam should take a look at its design and pass it on to some of our mechanically minded brethren.”
“Sure, he should do that,” Dad agreed.
“I see you’re getting your corn in,” Titus offered.
“Yes, little by little,” Harvey said. “It’s a lot of work, but with all the extras around here, we’ll get it done. The challenge is where to put it all. We couldn’t fill silage bags, like we usually do; didn’t have the fuel to spare. How is your community bringing in the corn?”
“Almost the same as you,” Titus replied, “shocking, picking and husking by hand. But we filled silo as well.”
“You filled silo?” Harvey quipped. “Where you find all that fuel?”
“Only used a little,” was Titus’s answer. “Two members of our community had stationary ensilers stashed away in their sheds; you know, the kind that chops and blows the stalks right into the silo. They were once driven by belt from the belt pulley that older tractors had. Both had been converted to be driven by gasoline engines that took just a few gallons per silo. We moved them from farm to farm, until everyone had their silo filled. All the other work we did by hand – cutting, loading on the wagons, hauling in with the horses, and feeding into the ensiler. Sure gave us a valuable source of feed, and all those townsfolk pitched in, too.”
While we were loading the hay on Titus’s wagon the conversation led away from farming when Titus asked, “Everybody know what today is?”
“Sure, it’s Tuesday,” Jeremiah responded. “Isn’t it?”
“Yeah, the first Tuesday,” continued Titus, “after the first Monday in November.”
“Why it’s election day!” a somewhat surprised Harvey replied. “I guess we forgot because for once we didn’t have to listen to all those annoying commercials for months ahead of the election.”
“By golly, your right,” Dad added. “It’s a meaningless election day, however. Today we were supposed to elect county commissioners, school directors and the like. We even had nominees to choose from. Pennsylvania was able to hold its primary in May, prior to the collapse.”
“With no state or county government, there’s no one to run an election,” Barry said.
“But with no government or schools, who needs those public offices anyway?” Joe asked.
“Well, we don’t need them right now,” Dad responded. “Don’t know what the future holds.”
“Do you suppose the current officials just keep their positions, even if there’s no job to do?” Harvey inquired.
“Suppose so,” Barry agreed. “I wonder what all our government officials have been thinking the last five months?”
“I reckon most of them got a wake-up call,” Joe replied.
“How so?” Titus wondered.
“Well,” Joe explained, “most government officials, with a few some exceptions, felt the people existed for the government – not the government for the people.”
“Like Lincoln said,” I interjected.
“Like Lincoln said,” Joe continued. “government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. Too many elected and for that matter, appointed officials, thought the government came first and the people, second. That the people could not exist without the government; that we could not take care of ourselves; that the government was the savior of the people.”
“I guess that proved out wrong,” Barry said.
“Sure did,” Harvey agreed. “The government couldn’t save squat; couldn’t even save itself.”
“But we’re still here,” Josh chimed in. “The people still do exist, without government.”
“The people will always exist, as long as God wills,” Titus said. “It was the rest of that line from the Gettysburg address: ‘shall not perish from the earth’ I believe it went. Governments wax and wane, are born and die, but before and after government are the people.”
“People that are better off without government,” Barry announced.
“Some would agree with you,” Dad said, “those with enough food, water, clothing, and a roof over their heads. But what about those who are cold and hungry right now?”
“Those who were foolish enough to depend on the government for their well being,” Barry countered, “got what they deserved.”
“Or were too lazy,” added Bruce.
“Whoa, that’s pretty callous,” bemoaned Titus.
“But realistic,” responded Harvey.
“Anyway, Barry,” Bruce said, “you wondered what our elected officials were thinking. I wonder what they are doing.”
“Same as before….. nothing!” Jeremiah quipped.
“Oh, no,” Josh offered, “they aren’t doing nothing. In fact it gives me great comfort to presume that some of them, hopefully the ones that got us into this mess, are doing the same things everyone else is doing: finding their own food, carrying water, chopping wood and forking manure.”
“As unkind as that might be, I guess you may find comfort in that thought,” Harvey replied. “Although I’d wager that the officials most responsible prepared for themselves secluded hideaways, like some tropical island, with all the things they’d need to be comfortable for years. But I imagine the vast majority are in the same boat we are and need our help.”
“Which you’ve demonstrated well that you’re willing to give,” Barry said.
“And many others have also,” Titus added.
“You finding people generally cooperative?” Dad asked.
“Unbelievably so,” Titus answered.
“But food is not in short supply yet,” Joe commented. “Spring is a long time from now.”
“So it is,” Titus responded. “We’ll just have to conserve what we have, look for alternative ways to produce food, and keep the faith.”
“Yes we will,” agreed Harvey just as Sam Burke, Larry and the others joined us.
“If Sam’s ready, it’s time we get this load of hay home,” Titus announced, “although I hate to leave this stimulating conversation.”
“We’ll hold the thoughts until you return,” Dad said. “That’s if you’re planning to come for more hay. Or do you have what you need?”
“I believe I’m set pretty well for the winter, but some of my neighbors might have tighter supplies. Do you still have some to spare?”
“We have a good supply, but the pasture stops growing now,” Harvey replied.
“And it won’t take long for the cattle to graze the rye and other grain fields off, so we will have to feed more hay. It’s close figuring, but we should be able to part with four or five more loads.”
“Well, we might be back for some then,” Titus replied. “Anything we should be on the lookout for you?”
“Ideas,” Larry answered, “especially any for making electricity or fuel and for converting other machinery to ground drive. Sam gave us quite a few already, but more are welcome. He can fill you in on the way home.”
“All right then,” Titus answered and down the road he went. No sooner had he reached the end of Harvey’s meadow and disappeared from sight when Butch and Ben came down the road from the other direction.
As Butch eased his Clydesdales to a halt it appeared he wasn’t his usual boisterous self. He dropped the reins, planted his elbows on his knees, looked sadly at my elders and softly announced, “Got some bad news.”

To be continued......... Mort

I'm still around

2008-01-23T15:20:00.000-08:00

Hello faithful readers. I need to apologize for neglecting my blogging duties.
Things have been very busy for me the last couple months.
I haven't given up. Alyssa's story line still exists and I have a little bit written.
I just need some push to make the time.
Joke of the week: tax rebates.
First thing I thought of was - How does increasing federal debt cure the disease,
which is: TOO MUCH DEBT?
They don't have any real money. They'd have to create more - exasperating the cancer.
Second thing - We'd only spend it on food and fuel anyway. How does that stimulate the economy?
Then my elementary economic mind came up with this: Even though our debt is the problem,
the real cause is the belief that government is our savior. In no way shape or form should the feds be setting interest rates. Those rates should be market driven - good supply and low demand should produce lower rates and vice-versa. You know the drill. Our federal government needs to stop borrowing money, period!!!!!!!
Which brings me to presidential candidates. With the possible exception of Ron Paul, is there any candidate, red or blue, who recognizes what the function of the central government is?
Seems like all the candidates are spouting what they would do for us - they should be saying what they are going to stop doing TO US!!!
They don't understand the root of the cancer; they just say things to get elected.
Here I am writing when I said I have no push or time.
Keep looking for the signs.
I'll get back to you.
To be continued.............. Mort

Anniversary

2007-11-14T16:54:00.000-08:00

This is my 53rd post - been at it for a year.
Don't look for any posts the next two weeks - I'll be away.
I'm not sure I'll be able to continue when I return, especially as it appears that no one is reading. If you are reading, please let me know - I need a confidence builder.
Mort

Chapter Twenty - Agronomics (cont)

2007-11-07T17:06:00.000-08:00

Wheat sowing continued into November, when the weather was cooperative and as fields were cleared. The other major agronomic activity that fall was harvesting the soybeans. Larry had over forty acres and we had saved enough fuel to enable the use of his combine to strip the pods from the beanstalks and clean the beans from the pods. He didn’t waste fuel on the road by driving back and forth from the farm to the field. We towed the combine to the field with the Clydesdales and only started the engine to do the actually threshing. We also hauled the fuel to the combine instead of coming back to the farm for fuel. The horses could also haul the beans back to the farm with the gravity bin wagons. In good years, soybeans dry well enough in the field to keep from spoiling, and this year was no different. The beans were stored in a metal bin that Harvey usually filled with an electric driven auger. With some adaptation, the boys rigged up a 12-volt motor to run it. It ran a lot slower than usual, but still got the beans in the bin. Even at the slower speed though, it ran a battery dead in about 30 minutes; good thing the windmill could recharge a couple at a time. The bin held 2000 bushels. When the second to last wagon was being unloaded the bin overflowed.
“Over 2000 bushel,” Harvey commented, “with maybe another 250 bushel in the last two wagons. All from forty acres means the yield was over 55 bushel per acre. That’s the best I think I’ve ever had. The Lord has blessed us.”
He’s blessed us indeed,” Dad agreed. “In that bin we have soybeans for food, feed, seed or fuel.”
“Fuel?” I asked, “we wouldn’t burn them would we?”
“We could if we needed to,” Dad answered, “they are loaded with energy. Dennis and Aaron are working on a way to squeeze the oil out. We can burn the oil in our diesels, we think. The remaining pulp, called soybean meal is a great source of protein.”
“For us?” I asked.
“Us, or the cattle or hogs. I didn’t hear their plan yet; we’ll see the results sometime, if it works.”
It wasn’t a problem having the two wagons remain loaded. They could just be parked in the wagon shed as we had others to use for the corn. However, one problem we did have throughout the whole harvest was flat tires. The first one wasn’t a big deal; Larry would just go “borrow” one, wheel and all, from a piece of equipment we weren’t using. That way the tire would not have to be removed from the rim, the tube repaired, remounted, and then inflated. That method was fine for the first few, but eventually Josh and Barry, using the repair kits for the inner tubes and the 12-volt air pump Uncle Bruce had brought, mastered the task of repairing tires. All along, we had been able to repair any bicycle flats, hoping our supply of glue for the tire patches would not run out. Down the road, to preserve our usable glue for bicycle tubes, we had to put sand in some of the implement tires to keep them inflated. It was an extremely laborious and painstakingly time consuming process that took patience and perseverance to accomplish, but the men got it done. At least for this harvest season, we still had glue and could patch inner tubes. And one BIG tire we did need to fix – the drive tire on the combine.
“Thank goodness you didn’t drive into anything that made a hole too big to repair,” Harvey said to Larry after inspecting the flat tire they found one day when returning to the field. “I knew something was wrong as soon we crested the hill and I saw the combine leaning to one side.”
“Yeah, it’s only a nail or something,” Larry agreed. “We’re lucky too that it went flat at a good flat spot in the field, so we can safely work at it. But what a mess the calcium made.”
Calcium was the word farmers used to call the water that was pumped into tractor or combine tires for added weight, which would give the tires better traction in different situations. Water alone would freeze in the winter, ruining the tube or maybe even the tire, so calcium carbonate, chemically speaking, a salt, was added to the water to keep it from freezing. Unbeknownst to Larry, when he parked the combine for the evening, the hole was very near the bottom of the tire so darn near all the calcium solution had seeped out, making a soggy mess.
“We’re not going to fix it here,” Harvey said. “Don’t even have the tools we need to get the tire off the combine. We need to go back home for stuff.”
The word stuff has a lot of meanings. In this case, it means all the tools and equipment one might need to get a job done, without having to make a return trip home for some “stuff” you forgot the first time. I had seen Dad do it many a time; he’d fill the pickup half full, but only use five percent of it. It was more critical in this instance, with the combine being broke down about 25 minutes from the farm at horse speed. On the wagon they threw chains, five different jacks, wrecking bars, toolboxes, pipes, solvent for loosening rusty bolts, sledge hammers, post irons, the 12 volt air pump, six charged batteries, the inner tube patches, even a brand new tube Larry thought might fit if the old one could not be repaired; and blocking, tons of wooden blocking and long heavy boards to keep the combine from falling further into the ground when the wheel was removed. They weren’t going to have to come back for anything.
Finally, they filled the wagon up with brawn; ten men climbed aboard to make sure there would be enough help. A combine drive tire isn’t small or light; it must have been about five feet high, over a foot and a half wide, and weighed about 300 pounds even without the calcium. Even with all the forethought and muscle, it still took a good part of the day to complete the tire change. It must have been close to three o’clock when the repaired tire and wheel were back on and the combine was being lowered off the jacks.
Larry said, “I’m glad we’re done, but I never thought it would take this long. I’ll only get a few acres combined today.”
“What would we have done if we wouldn’t have been able to fix the tire?” Dennis asked.
“I gave that a little thought,” Harvey replied. “We have some tractors with roughly the same size tire, but not the same wheel mounting. I guess we could have made it work, but I’m glad we didn’t have to. Darn lucky it didn’t rain either.”
And it didn’t rain, especially not that October; it was unseasonably hot and dry. Horrible weather for shocking corn, but great weather for harvesting beans; I think Larry finished November 3rd. Finally, that very next week in November colder weather came, and so did more people. Some to stay, but a lot were neighbors looking to trade for cows. They were in the same boat as us; they had some feed, food, a source of water and had taken in families that didn’t. Several cows had freshened in September and October. By now there were more hands to milk and care for the dairy animals, but also more people to drink milk as our numbers had exceeded 60. All in all though, we could spare some.
“Just rubs me a little,” Larry announced one evening, “that we’re giving away our livelihood.”
“I know,” Harvey agreed. “But don’t fret; I don’t think our total numbers are down at all. We’ve had fifteen calves born since the middle of August, and I believe we only traded or slaughtered thirteen so far.”
“I didn’t realize that,” Larry responded, “and I know the neighbors need food.”
“Also, it relieves us from some work and saves us feed,” Jean added. “Think about it, what good does it do anyone to have a cow if they can’t use the milk? And besides, the cow isn’t gone; it’s just eating and being milked somewhere else - still a good use of a resource. Be satisfied that we’re doing our part. People will remember, when we need help.”
“You’re right,” Larry replied, “I’ll have to remember that.”
But what could the neighbors trade, that we could use? Food, fuel, medicine? It didn’t much matter; few had anything valuable to trade, with two exceptions. One neighbor traded an antique corn sheller that became a real time saver. We had been shelling corn by hand with a small ring-like tool that you had to turn the ear inside of. It knocked the kernels off, but at only one ear at a time, it kept a person quite busy – took maybe a half an hour to shell a five gallon bucket full of corn. The newly acquired sheller had a large crank with a heavy flywheel that one person could keep spinning while another fed ear after ear into the machine. The cob came out the other end and the shelled corn slid down a screened chute. Dirt and fines fell through the screen and the clean corn fell into a bucket. Only took two workers about five minutes to shell five gallons. It was fun, too, and Poppop had another use for it. We could hull the walnuts with it. Beat rubbing the hulls off by hand.
The other valuable trade was two dozen chickens. As the length of daylight shortened, egg production fell sharply. We tried to keep it going by using a car light and battery to make the chickens think it was still light out, but that had minimal success.
“It works in commercial operations,” Mom complained one day. “I just don’t know what we’re doing wrong. The new chickens aren’t laying any better than ours were, but at least five percent of 40 is more than five percent of 16.”
“Just an egg or two extra per day?” Dad asked.
“Yep, that’s all,” she answered, “but it’s worth the effort just to expand our flock. They’ll start laying again with the longer daylight at the end of winter. We’ll be happy for the eggs then.”

To be continued………….. Mort

STRUGGLING

2007-10-31T18:23:00.000-07:00

One of the premises of “Are You Ready” is that this country, if current fiscal policies do not change, is doomed to an economic collapse that, of course, would affect the whole world. Many people pooh-pooh that possibility, having faith, (or is it gullible ignorance?), in our federal government. But many economists think the collapse is inevitable. More information is on Andy Sutton’s website: my2centsonline.com. Educate yourselves and form your own opinion.

I tend to also view the current economic situation as dire. In my story, I used a war in the Middle East and China playing their financial trump cards as the catalyst for the collapse. The cause of the forthcoming regression, however, might not be one of such a grand scale, but instead be very subtle. We can read what the experts write and listen to the media’s perception of the way things are, but that doesn’t mean we can see the signs.

On a personal level, I see the signs and I’m struggling. My wife is self-employed and none of my three employers provides health insurance, so we as a family have that bill to pay. Blue Cross/Blue Shield has just requested a 9.9% increase from the state insurance board for our plan. That’s $885 per year – after taxes. My wife pays 15.3% social security taxes, none of which we ever expect to get back. Roughly calculated, including the tax breaks we receive on our 1040 schedule for paying our own insurance, she would have to earn $1125 to actually receive the $885 to give to BC/BS. At $100 per day earnings, she would have to work eleven more extra days next year to enable us to afford health insurance. Perhaps the Fed or the impotent Congress can legislate the earth to revolve slower around the sun like they get the earth to spin faster that Sunday in March when daylight savings time starts – enough to add eleven days onto the 2008 calendar?

So last week bread at our local grocery chain went up 10%, with other foodstuffs comparably increasing. My first tank full of heating oil was 10% higher than last year’s highest price. With the recent record high crude oil futures, I expect to pay even more for the next. In spite of those record highs, gasoline prices remain somewhat stable, but I can’t see them staying there for much longer. Our electric company’s agreement with the Socialist State of Pennsylvania to limit rate increases expires in 2008. We’re looking for 10-20% increases then. Yet none of my employers are offering the 13.7% increase in wages needed to earn 10% more (after taxes), actually required to give you the purchasing power to offset these forthcoming price increases. All in all, it’s becoming very, very hard to make ends meet. This is not news to most of you.

I’m not bragging, but for the last 16 years, we’ve been very faithful in our giving to the church. I’m actually ashamed to say – that as of right now, we’re failing to do so to the extent we have in the past. Is it me, my lack of faith, or just a consequence of a failing, inflationary, recessional economy? We’re a couple months behind in our rent, owe my brother $400, my daughter $1000, and my son a couple hundred. Should we drop health insurance so we can pay our other bills? Should we let them repossess the car so we don’t have to make that payment? Are we really going to be forced to stop giving to the church? The savings necessary to stay afloat go beyond keeping the thermostat at 62 degrees, burning more wood, changing over to energy efficient fluorescent light bulbs, and driving less. Other people have to be in a similar situation, don’t they? Yes, I know I’m just supposed to give the problem to Jesus and TRUST him for a solution, but even with faith, it’s becoming more difficult and more difficult……….

How are you all handling it? What methods are you using to make ends meet? What do you see coming? Please let me know!

Maybe next week, I can resume Alyssa’s story………….. Mort

Chapter Twenty - Agronomics

2007-10-24T13:22:00.000-07:00

“Looks like all the illegals didn’t make it back to Mexico,” Uncle Jeremiah said when he first saw the Diaz’s. Thank goodness only a few people were near enough to hear him. However, my father was, and shot him that look that you never wanted to get from Dad.
Aunt Lois wasn’t as subtle; even before Dad’s glance had a chance to reach Jeremiah’s eyes, she smacked the back of her husband’s head.
“Schwetz net su dumb,” she said in the dialect. “That’s not a nice thing to say at all, especially in front of the girls. I don’t ever want to hear anything like that again!”
“Ah, I was only joking,” he responded.
It’s good it was only he and Lois, Dad and I, and Amy that heard it. I was pretty sure Amy and I weren’t adversely affected by it; we wouldn’t be scarred for life. But grown-ups need to be more careful what they say around impressionable adolescents. He said he was joking, and I believed him. Our family was a bunch of wise guys, good at joking and teasing, especially politics, but we didn’t always stop and think about the damage it might do. There had been so much talk in the media, like radio call-in shows, about the immigration problem, or at least what some people called a problem. People just like to ride the waves on an issue; becomes the popular thing to do. When some movement gets started, everyone jumps on the bandwagon, regardless of what they really believe about the issue; if they would just stop to think about it.
In any event, comments like that didn’t reoccur, at least any that I heard. But I wondered if the problem could resurface as more and different people joined our community. Bottom line, we made the Diaz’s feel welcome, just like we did any other newcomers. Beyond their cooking skills, they were a valuable addition to our crew; always willing to pitch in, learn new things, and boy could those boys play soccer!
That’s right, we hadn’t given that up; we played every Sunday afternoon. Enrico and Luis had to be on separate teams though, to keep it fair. Benny, as we called their father, was pretty good, too. But we had good players to even it out. Joe loved playing both with them or against them; either way, it was challenging.
Even though we had to wait for the corn to dry to harvest it, that didn’t mean any other farming had not occurred while waiting. Sometime in early September, Larry and Harvey had planted rye in a ten acre wheat stubble field that had earlier been pastured off by the cattle. The fast growing grain could be pastured in late fall if they needed it, but would certainly provide the first new forage n the spring. The planting was possible because of three things: they had a good supply of the summer’s rye harvest remaining to use as seed, they had successfully adapted two pieces of farm equipment to operate without tractor power, and Butch’s Clydesdales.
Larry estimated he had enough rye seed to sow 60 acres, but was determined to only use one half of it, so their would be some preserved for next fall’s planting. When he sowed the ten acres that left him enough to seed another twenty later in the fall in the harvested cornfields that he hoped at least a few acres might be harvested for grain somehow next summer. We would see.
The two pieces of farm equipment that were adapted were a field cultivator and the grain drill. A field cultivator had tines in it with two inch wide shovels on them that dug in and loosened up the earth as it was pulled through the field. The grain drill had a metering system to accurately drop the seed into small seed furrows created by the drill’s disks, which ran through the soil as the drill was pulled. It wasn’t a problem for Butch’s horses to pull the equipment; the problem was disengaging them. Both the field cultivator and the grain drill worked when they were in the down position and didn’t work when raised up. They were designed to be raised and lowered by hydraulics powered by the tractor. Before tractors and hydraulics were the norm, some machinery had a ground driven hand clutch or a lever system to raise and lower the piece, but the boys were not able to locate either of those on any old machinery that could have possibly been fitted onto our equipment to adapt them for use with horses. By good fortune, Larry had some handjacks, a hand powered, screw type mechanism that would lengthen or shorten depending on which way you turned the screw. When the hydraulic cylinders on the equipment were replaced with these handjacks, by shear brute strength, Larry could raise or lower either piece of equipment to the proper operating or transporting height.
He didn’t want to do that very often, so once the field cultivator was in the ground, it stayed there until the field was finished; similarly with the drill. It gave Butch a chance to show off his horse handling skills, making sure they didn’t walk into a situation where the machine would have to be lifted and steering them precise enough to not overlap the seed with the drill or leave skippers (areas of no seed). He and his horses did admirably; even Dad, Jake and Larry took tries at it, and learned well. One team could easily pull the drill; it was on rubber tires and rolled easily, but the cultivator was another matter. Larry’s field cultivator was twenty feet wide and he usually used a one hundred and ten horsepower tractor. While the correlation is not exact, we only had six horsepower, so no way could they pull twenty feet. Speed through the field is the other component in the equation, so the horses, going slower could still accomplish the task when the cultivator was narrowed. Larry’s machine had wings that were folded up for transport; they were taken off. And then, six tines on each side of the remaining frame were removed, bringing the working width down to about eleven feet. They tried it that way, with the intent of taking more off if the job was too difficult.
The first time through the field was the hardest as the soil had not been tilled since October the previous fall, it had been driven on by the combine, tractor, baler, and wagon, baked by the summer sun, plus the cattle had been treading on it in all kinds of weather making it very hard. I don’t know if Butch ever had his six horses hitched as a single team before, but with some chains, our braided ropes, some keen thinking, and the work of all, they accomplished it. Then Larry started them out only lowering the cultivator a little at a time, until the point was reached that the horses could pull without out over-straining, but still do a good job ripping up the soil. One time over the field was not enough to make a good seedbed. Back and forth through the field they went a second time and even with Larry setting the machine deeper, it pulled easier and put good tilth in the soil. But for final seedbed preparation, which required a third trip, Dad added a spike toothed harrow that we used in the garden that leveled off a nice even fine seedbed.
Because the farmers had successfully completed the task of sowing rye in September, when October came and we had cleared some cornfields, sowing wheat was accomplished as well using the same procedures. Harvey and Larry’s farming operation only had about one third of its acreage in hay. With the emphasis on pasturing, some acreage would need to be shifted to some kind of hay crop. Hay was hard to harvest, but easy to pasture. Unlike corn, there was no practical way to manually harvest grains like rye, barley, wheat, and soybeans. We would try some by hand, but needed to cut down on those acres. The necessity of that shift mandated that Larry plant timothy as well in every field of wheat he sowed that fall. Timothy was a grass that was planted in the fall, was excellent horse feed, really easy to dry, not so bad to harvest, and would first produce a crop the following summer after the grain had been harvested and the straw cleared off the field. So to get a crop next year and subsequent years (as timothy is a perennial), it needed to be planted this year. Larry had traded for timothy seed. The grain drill, in addition to having a compartment for the wheat, also had a seedbox for the grass seed. It took very little extra effort to plant the timothy in the same trip we made to sow the wheat.

Chapter Nineteen-Corn (conclusion)

2007-10-18T18:00:00.000-07:00

And corn as a supply of food was becoming evident, based on two developments. Shortly after the corn harvest started we ran out of oatmeal and cereal - no more Cocoa Puffs. And all through the fall harvest and later that winter, more people starting arriving; people we didn’t know – a couple from Bedford, a family from New Jersey, single women, single men, some older than Dad, and quite a few children. They arrived at different times and in different ways. Most walked; a few came on bicycles, a couple even still had their cars, one even came on horseback. Some looked well and brought goods with them, but many were very thin, dirty, poorly clothed for wintry weather, and carrying few belongings. Their arrival was always a cause for suspicion. Questions would go through our minds. Are these good people? Is one a thief? Are they sick? Are they running from something? Will they fit in? Do they understand our culture?
They had questions too, but in almost every instance it was the same one: Can we work for food? Harvey and Jean always had the same answer: First you eat, wash, and rest. Tomorrow, there’s work. Some would pridefully argue they should work first, all would smile. Most would express gratitude immediately; a few would be skeptical and cautious in their acceptance of the farm owners’ graciousness. All would eat, they didn’t all stay. A few chose to settle in at Crystal View, some just moved on. Some came with skills, some had none. Either way we had work for them - in the cornfields, in the barn, in the butcher house. Plenty of help to bring in the corn crop, but also to help shovel feed, move fences, fork manure, milk, cook, sew, do dishes and laundry.
With the increased number of workers, we could even devote time to woodcutting. Harvey’s furnace, Poppop’s woodstove, and the cook stove in the butcher house took a lot of fuel. Up until now they had been using the supply of firewood they had on hand and burning scrap that had accumulated over the years. That supply had reached its end. Now that there had been a frost and the cooler temperatures were prevalent, crews could venture into the woods with less annoyance from the bugs or fear from disease carrying ticks. It took some skill to chop and saw trees up, but it was one that could be learned. Even some of the youngsters could tag along and help by picking up the smaller pieces of sawed branches, stacking the firewood, or loading and unloading the wagon. The crews also spend timing cleaning up fallen branches and dead trees in the fencelines along the edges of our fields.
All these extra workers came with a few challenges, too. Where will they all sleep and use the bathroom? What about meals? Because our houses were getting pretty full and there was a concerted effort to maintain some privacy for the owners themselves, the newcomers were asked to sleep in the top of the barn. We had bedding and mattresses. Like the barn floor wasn’t already overfilled, there was no heat, and what kind of privacy could they have? Fortunately, Harvey’s barn was built in an “L” shape, so one wing was devoted to single women, the other end to single men, with families in the middle. Hay bales were rearranged into makeshift walls or pieces of the plastic from the silage bags that Larry was feeding from were hung as dividers. Small dressers or end tables, boxes or crates from the two houses were provided for the newcomers to keep their few belongings and toilet articles in. Eventually, the milking herd was housed underneath and a little bit of heat from the cows would help, but realistically, it was just like camping out in winter. Our guests needed good sleeping bags or plenty of covers, long underwear and heavy clothing, all of which we were able to find in our inventoried goods. As an added benefit, moving some things out of Jean’s upstairs kitchen made some more room for Lois’s infirmary.
There was one certainty; as expressed by Harvey and Dad in a huge sign at the barn’s main entrance with reminders at other doors. The sign said:
NO SMOKING OR FIRES IN THIS BARN
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD CANDLES
MATCHES OR LIGHTERS BE FOUND HERE
IF YOU BURN DOWN THIS BARN
YOU BURN YOUR HOME AND FOOD
No matter how cold it got that winter, the ban was never lifted. At one point the residents had learned to heat up bricks or stones at an outside fireplace, built far enough away from the barn to provide some light for bathroom trips during the night. They would then put them in their sleeping bags or under the covers like in colonial times. Harvey and Dad allowed that. Also, Barry, Uncle Bruce, and Dean installed a few car headlights in the barn to make some light during the evening and early morning.
There was a schedule made for showering, and as far as toileting, once again, the boys had exhibited some forethinking. A double outhouse had been built about fifty feet from the barn doors, right next to the manure pit. It was not only convenient for those sleeping in the barn, but also for all of us working around the farm. A lot less water to carry to the bathrooms in the houses. Also, it was ecologically sound. For instead of digging a hole and having our wastes go into the ground, the boys had designed the outhouses so the wastes would flow by gravity right into the manure tank, and then eventually be hauled to the fields to fertilize our crops.
Feeding everyone became our major concern. One of the first things was a change in the eating schedules. As soon as our number exceeded 30, meals had to be served in two shifts, your shift being determined by what time of the morning or evening you were needed at your assigned duties, like milking or dishes. I also noticed how happy the newcomers were to have milk with every meal. They might have not drunk milk for months and even though I was almost tired of drinking it all the time, it made me realize I lucky and blessed I was to have some.
As our oatmeal and cereal was gone, we had to come up with a new breakfast menu. Fortunately, the boys finally had a working flour mill built and running. They had carved two millstones from pieces of a concrete feed trough we didn’t need to have and then incredibly created a drive for it by using Larry’s hay rake in reverse. I mean, normally a tractor was used to power a nine foot wheel with six arms and tines on to rake hay. The boys hooked up a gearbox to rotate one of the millstones, hooked up the power take off shaft to the gear box, and then by walking around the hub and pushing the arms on the rake, transferred the power the opposite direction to make the millstone turn. It was rough for one person to do it alone, but two, three or even six people could hop in to drive the mill. Maybe some day they might be able to drive it with oxen or water, but at least for now, it worked!
They had successfully made wheat flour and were ready to tackle corn next to make cornmeal. That was good news at Butch’s farm; they had been smashing corn with bricks and hammers for over a month. With wheat flour, in addition to baking bread, cakes or pies, we could now make biscuits for breakfast. They didn’t need sugar, very little leavening, and were delicious with all that butter we had. They were also the perfect companion for the gravy we could make with all the meat we had, now that we had flour to thicken it. Our wheat supply was finite, so when they had mastered the art of making cornmeal, some could be added to the biscuits or used straight to make cornbread if we had some eggs to spare. The trick with making cornmeal was roasting it properly first. We accomplished this by spreading the shelled corn on cookie sheets on top the butcher stove whenever it wasn’t being used for cooking or laundry.
Roasting and grinding corn became a steady chore for several members of our crew. Of course some times the cornmeal would be cooked and served as mush, which was similar to oatmeal in consistency and served hot, often times for supper.
“I love mush,” Dad said one evening at supper, “especially with this blackstrap molasses on it.”
“Well I don’t,” I replied, “you can have your mush and your blackstrap. I can barely eat it smothered in butter. You know that blackstrap will be gone one day; we don’t grow sugar cane around here.”
“I know,” he answered, “maybe by then we’ll have some honey or trade for molasses or syrup. It’s to my advantage though, that hardly anyone else likes it, so my supply will last a while.”
“That was your theory with candy in the house, too,” Mom chimed in. “You’d buy kinds, like black licorice, that no one liked.”
“Yep,” Dad responded, “that way it would last weeks, instead of all the munchkins eating it in two days.”
“Oh, you’re the most loving father ever,” I crooned.
“You got that right,” he answered. “Now mother, if everyone has had there fill of mush tonight, it’s going to be pretty cold tonight. You can save the leftover for breakfast.”
“Of course dear,” Mom replied, “wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Any leftover mush would be poured into a pan and if put somewhere cold enough, would ‘set up’ overnight. It could then be sliced into blocks and fried for breakfast. Maybe it was a little better that way; at least I could handle it, again with butter and a little pancake syrup which we had fortunately managed to conserve.
One other way we were very glad to eat cornmeal, probably never thought of by anyone in our family, was brought to us by a couple with their two sons who arrived from New York City. The parents were cooks in a Mexican restaurant and could they do things with cornmeal. Not just tortillas, which were excellent, but also other dishes with our homegrown beans, beef and pork. They were immediately assigned to the kitchen crew and were glad to be there. Their names were Benito and Rosa Diaz.
To be continued………….. Mort

Chapter Nineteen - Corn - Part 3

2007-10-10T13:14:00.000-07:00

So once the uses for our corn were established, it shed some light on how to harvest it. The corn harvested as a whole stalk could be utilized by the cattle. The hogs and chickens could eat any ears of corn, even if they had grown a little mold in storage. But the corn we wanted to eat ourselves, feed our horses, and save for seed had to be harvested in the cleanest fashion and stored where there was the least chance of spoilage.
So what did a field’s location have to do with which method we employed to harvest it? Its proximity to cattle. In any field that was close enough to our cattle (or Butch’s) to be fenced off and have the cattle forage in all winter, we would only remove the husked ear from the field. It took a little more effort to harvest, but produced both a clean, safe food for us and left the most forage for the gleaning animals. An added advantage of having the cattle forage all winter in those fields was the manure they deposited there.
Just pulling the ear off the stalk, husk and all, was a much quicker process. We would harvest many more loads per day, therefore we used this method at the end of the harvest season when we were running out of autumn and afraid we might lose some of the crop to winter. Additionally, by the end of fall, the corn was dry enough that it would keep on the barn floor with less risk of spoilage. From the barn floor, as winter progressed, we would husk the corn under roof, feed the corn to the chickens or hogs, and the husks to calves, cows or horses.
By any measure, the hardest and most time consuming method of bringing in the crop was harvesting the whole stalk. It was the method we started with that Wednesday in October and we didn’t actually finish until early spring. For although we may have cut the corn at the beginning of the harvest season, we didn’t need to bring it back to the farm until we needed it, it had dried more fully, and we had time to haul it. The fields that we harvested by this method were those farthest from the farm, fences and water, where no cattle were near enough to use the forage we left behind using the other methods. This method necessitated much more horsepower, as it required less acreage to fill a wagonload of stalks compared to a load of ears only. As a result, many more loads came from these fields, plus it was the farthest distance Butch’s teams had to travel to bring in the corn.
For this job we once again brought out the sickles with their short, heavy, sturdy blades. Scythes would not work well for corn. The cornstalk was way too thick for the scythe’s thinner, flimsier, blade, and it took two hands to swing a scythe. The person wielding the sickle would grab three or four stalks with one hand about shoulder high and then cut the stalks with a couple swings of the sickle with the other hand. Ideally he would hand off the clump to another harvester I’ll call shockers. No, they weren’t electrifying; they stacked the clump of stalks in an upright configuration we call a shock. You must have seen them on Christmas or Thanksgiving cards, or pictured on calendars. That fall we created scores of those shocks immortalized by the poet who wrote:
“When the frost is on the pumpkin and the fodder’s in the shock”.
With the stalks in an upright position, the ears on the stalk could dry, but by strength of numbers, the shock was protected from the devastating effects of wind and weather through the winter. If we had plenty of shockers in the harvesting crew and our timing was on, there would always be a shocker ready to grab the clump of stalks from the cutter. If not, the cutter would throw the clump onto the ground, making it much harder for the shockers to pick them up and shock. One reason we began shocking corn in mid-October was that the stalks were still strong enough to take the handling. Trying to harvest whole stalks after they had become dry and brittle would be both frustrating and unproductive as the stalk would break off in your hand or the ear would fall off. The other reason was that we didn’t have to be as concerned that the corn was not dry enough to keep in the barn. That risk aside, whenever a wagonload of harvesters traveled to a field to shock corn, those that were not engaged in the shocking process (for we conveniently rotated jobs throughout the day), would take the wagon to a different part of the field and pull the whole ear off the stalk to create a wagonload of corn to take back home. No sense wasting the horsepower by coming back from the field empty.
Typically, we’d use a hay wagon that by design had slatted sides that bales of hay would not fall through, but ears of corn would. For these excursions the boys had fastened boards on all four sides of the wagon around the bottom foot or so from the floor of the wagon to keep the corn from falling off. Every trip home, we’d ride on top the pile of corn. It was always a pleasant ride, especially for the older generations who would reminisce about many a ride on the corn wagon they had taken while growing up. We also had a feeling of accomplishment with the fruits of our labor piled under us, not to mention the fact that we would soon be arriving back to the warmth and comfort of home, particularly if the weather was bad. Not being sure if this early harvested corn was dry enough to keep, we were judicious in the placing of it, so that we could use it first, before it had a chance to spoil.
We had to shovel every load of corn off the modified hay wagons. Later in the season, when the shocking was completed and we were harvesting ears only we switched to using gravity bin wagons. They were metal sided wagons that had a sloping floor and would unload by opening a gate at the wagon’s lowest point. Some shoveling was still necessary, but not near as much. Loading and unloading ears were much easier tasks than doing the same with stalks. I never helped much, but rode along a trip or two. It was back breaking work, but necessary to supply our herd with needed forage.
When either shocking or picking corn, gloves were a very necessary tool, primarily to prevent blisters and also cuts. Cornstalks are rough, but worse was their proclivity to tear in string-like strips that had sharp edges. While not threatening amputation, a cut from such a sliver was similar to a paper cut, but worse. It was very annoying, caused much burning and would be susceptible to infection as corn stalks had different molds and fungi growing on them, especially later in the growing season.
Of course the most necessary tool for shocking was the sickle, although a machete would have worked as well. For pulling and husking corn, however, a husking knife was the preferred tool. If you tried to husk corn all day long without one, the whole area between and along the sides of your thumb and forefinger would take a beating. Gloves helped some, but soon you’d wear holes in them. Husking knives were short pieces of metal with just a dull edge on it, that lay on the thumb side of the forefinger and you used to snap the ear off the stalk or the husk off the ear. Once you learned how to use one, you wouldn’t want to be without it. The knife was fastened to and held in place by rings of leather that fit over your fore and middle fingers. That way the knife was always in the right position and you didn’t drop it while husking. Poppop had two such knives in his antique collection so he used them as a pattern to make a couple dozen more from scrap pieces of metal and leather he cut out of old handbags we had found when we inventoried our belongings.
All in all, husking corn was a pretty neat experience. The horses would pull a wagon right through the field. Three people husked the rows of corn directly in front of the horses before the wagon ran the corn down. They threw the ears into buckets outside the horse’s path and then the buckets were dumped into the wagon when the wagon had moved ahead. Someone had the job of carrying the empty buckets back up in front of the horses; lots of times, it was me. On each side of the wagon, eight or ten people would each take a row and throw the plucked ear directly into the wagon. The most athletic, who wanted to show off their throwing skills, would take the rows farthest from the wagon. So they’d miss once in a while or hit someone (accidentally for the most part); ears could be picked up. Taking 18 to 20 rows in one pass down the field could fill a load in no time. It was a great time for fellowship, laughter, teasing, planning. No noise like when working with engine powered machinery. We even used the harvest moon to husk corn in the evening, the days leading up to and the couple nights of the full moon near the end of October, and then again in November. It was spooky, but at the same time peaceful, sensing God’s silent, still and silhouetted creation and knowing you were with people who cared about you.
Other years, Harvey’s one hundred acres of corn would have all been stored in those plastic bags, so there was virtually no space on the farm dedicated to corn storage. At Crystal View Farm there was an old wooden slatted corn crib, facing open air, where cleanly husked corn could be placed to dry with little risk of spoilage. But it only held about eight acres of corn. Our lack of storage space was another driving factor that forced us to shock as many acres as we did. There was space remaining on the barn floors at the two farms, but it was disappearing quickly. Loose hay took up a lot of room and also baled hay and straw had been stacked in both barns in early summer when Larry still had fuel. We used very little of that hay and straw the rest of the summer, preferring to conserve as much as we could by making maximum use of pasturing. Pasturing also negated the need for using straw as bedding – a very good thing as we didn’t want to spend time and labor forking and hauling manure out of barns. We could delay that chore until the worst part of winter. To make as much room for the corn as possible, the men had painstakingly restacked the baled hay up against the roof, and even on top of the loose hay we had harvested. Also, all the equipment and wagons that Harvey usually stored in the barns was taken outside to free up as much space as possible for the corn.
So space had been created for the corn as the harvest progressed. We piled, shoveled and heaped the ears as high as we could so we’d still have room to work at husking for the livestock and shelling for us and the chickens, or for any other purpose that might arise. The cleanly husked corn that was intended for our use was not just piled on the floor. Larry and Poppop made rings of box fence wire about eight feet in diameter and stacked them on slatted wooden pallets in upright cylinders right on the barn floor near the area where a good flow of fresh air was usually present. Similar to the wooden crib at Butch’s, this would promote thorough drying to keep our food supply as safe, nutritious, and palatable as possible.

To be continued…… Mort

Chapter Nineteen - Corn (cont)

2007-10-03T12:45:00.000-07:00

Gathering nuts was both easy and fun. Like Harvey had envisioned, we youngsters did the bending and the picking, while our elders aided by moving the buckets from tree to tree and carrying the full ones to the wagon. To get started, we used Brutus to pull the wagon full of empty buckets and nut-pickers. A carefully thought out route was followed, dropping off people and buckets at predetermined nut-infested areas of the farms. I stayed with Brutus to the last stop, where we only had seven empty buckets and five people remaining. While Brutus was resting in the shade and munching early fall grass, Jake, who drove the wagon, Uncle Bruce, Aunt Kristen, Dean and I filled the seven buckets with nuts and loaded them onto the wagon.
We then retraced our steps, picking up people and loading buckets of nuts all the way back to the farm. It quickly got to the point where there were more nuts than people on the wagon; though Harvey commented once that it was hard for him to tell which were the nuts. Soon every square inch of the wagon floor had a bucket of nuts on it, so everyone was walking back to the farm. Some of the kids, Robbie, of course, clung precariously onto the sides of the wagon as Brutus plodded along. He’s such a show off.
We unloaded the nuts into Poppop’s basement in time for lunch, and then repeated the whole process by another route in the afternoon. They yielded well; we must have gathered over 100 buckets. But the pile of nuts in Poppop’s basement wasn’t the only evidence of our toil. The juice in black walnut hulls possess the powerful ability to stain. Depending on the maturity of the nut or how long it lay on the ground, the stain was either a light greenish-yellow brown or a deeper brownish black. Practically everyone had come across a black walnut tree that day, so Wednesday morning when we started the corn harvest, we all had yellow-green-brownish stained hands. It wouldn’t wash off so I figured we’d have to work it off. The corn harvest gave us just that opportunity.
Prior to the collapse, Harvey and Larry’s corn was harvested by two methods. One was to use a machine called a forage harvester to chop into fine pieces the whole stalk and ear while there was still a fair amount of moisture in it. Then the chopped material was packed into oxygen limiting, tube-like plastic bags where the material would ferment similar to sauerkraut and thus be preserved as what is known as silage. The second was to use the combine to shell the kernels of corn off of the ear, leaving the rest of the stalk, cob and husk in the field. If the right moisture, the shelled corn could be ground into the plastic tubes as well, or if it contained less moisture, could be dried with artificial heat and stored in a grain bin. Neither of these methods could be used this year – we did not have the fuel to spare, nor were there any bags available.
Fortunately there are ways to harvest corn by hand and we had the tools, the know-how, and the manpower to do so. The three ways that we employed were harvesting the whole stalk, the ear with the husk on, and a husked ear. The method we used was determined by the field’s location and the intended use of the corn. There was much discussion about how we should use the corn.
“I recall,” Mel said during that discussion, “a chart I saw in school in an environmental biology class, that compared the amount of grain consumption by various animals to the amount of product produced.”
“I bet dairy cows were the most efficient,” Larry declared.
“I think it’s hogs,” Dad offered.
“Has to be chickens,” Mom chimed in. “What did the chart say?”
“I don’t remember exact figures, or the exact order,” Mel responded. “But I remember their groupings. Raising cattle and sheep for their meat took the most: five to six pounds of grain for every pound of meat produced. Hogs took less, three or four pounds. Producing milk took around three pounds of grain per pound of milk, while egg production took two and a half, I think. And chickens for their meat use two pounds of grain.”
“That’s hard to believe,” Dad commented, “that a six pound chicken only ate twelve pounds of grain in its short lifetime.”
“I don’t believe the figure on milk production either,” Larry complained. “A cow giving 100 pounds of milk per day doesn’t eat 300 pounds of grain.”
“That’s very true,” Mel replied. “I thought about that at the time. I think the two keys were that it measured the grain consumption of the animal over its whole lactation and lifetime and that the figure was a grain equivalent. Think of all the days you feed a heifer before you even get one drop of milk and also the grain a cow eats while it’s dry. All that grain was figured in.”
“That makes sense,” Harvey said. “But what did you mean by ‘grain equivalent’?”
“I concluded that the study was conducted as part of the ecology revolution,” Mel answered.
“You mean the environmentalist whackos?” Joe asked.
“I suppose you could say that,” Mel chuckled. “The study’s purpose was to show that we should be feeding people with the grain instead of feeding it to animals – to show it was an ecological, financial, and moral obligation to not feed animals the grain that starving people could eat.”
“You buy that?” Josh asked.
“No,” Mel answered, “I immediately recognized the results as propaganda and missing a very key element.”
“What element?” Uncle Bruce asked.
“The study didn’t take into account the whole ration the cow, sheep or hog ate. To answer Harvey’s question, the grain equivalent was the amount of grain the animal would eat if you replaced every other ingredient in the animal’s diet with grain.”
“You can’t do that!” Larry exclaimed. “It’s not healthy for the cow.”
“We know that,” Mel agreed. “But they had to compare apples to apples. Chickens eat very little grass or other plant matter, while cattle and sheep can be on all forage diets.”
“So I might have guessed wrong,” Mom interjected. “Almost 100% of a chicken’s diet, at least commercially, is grain. They would eat the most grain compared to what you get from them.”
“True, maybe,” Jean offered, “but I’d rather eat two scrambled eggs or a drumstick than a half pound of corn.”
“Agreed,” Mom replied, “So I guess in our operation, it’s advantage cows – we shouldn’t waste so much corn on the chickens.”
“I don’t know if I would reach the same conclusion,” Dad said. “With your chickens not being cooped up and running free range around the farm, they eat insects, weed seeds and pick at the garbage. As they don’t eat much grain, we can spare some for them. Besides, eggs and chicken are a valuable source of protein in our diets. The cows on the other hand, are producing more milk than we can use without additional grain to their ration. They can grow and produce milk on grass, hay, vegetable stalks and pods, cornstalks and husks, at least this time of year.”
“When it gets colder,” Larry added, “both the cows and young stock will need more energy to grow. You see now, they’re getting some grain in the corn silage we have leftover from last fall. That supply might last until late winter at best. Then they will need more grain to grow, at least until new, rich spring grass is available for them to forage. You think about it: cows, sheep and goats might be our saviors through the next few years. We can’t eat all those forages you mentioned like grass and stalks. They can, and in turn produce food that we can eat. They didn’t mention that in the study did they Mel?”
“Of course not,” she replied.
“Bet they didn’t think of the manure either,” Poppop added. “It’s a valuable fertilizer for us to grow more feed for the livestock and food for us. Our yields would drop dramatically without it. Livestock are indeed a blessing to our operation and a solution to our predicament. Heck, goats will even eat bushes and weeds and poison ivy to give us meat and milk.”
Thinking back on that, we later learned that the several goat farms in the neighborhood had continued to prosper and provide food and work for many guests. It made me think how the Israelites survived and even thrived in the virtual deserts of Midian and Sinai and other arid areas of Palestine. Their goats and sheep could convert any scrubby growth into food, not to mention the value of their skins and wool.
“Yes,” Harvey concluded, “our cattle will keep us going. I look at some of the neighbors’ land that was placed in the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program. In essence, rented to the government to take it out of production in order to stabilize prices and create cover for wildlife. Almost all those acres are seeded in wild grasses that we can’t eat, but our livestock can. When those agreements were still in effect, harvesting those fields was prohibited; there’s lush growth there. Now with the government inoperative and not fulfilling their side of the contract, that is paying the rent, that makes the contract void. That grass may now be grazed and will become a valuable forage, especially as winter progresses.”
“Bottom line is,” Larry said, “even with all the available forage around, when it becomes harder for the livestock to find it and the temperatures get lower, we should feed some corn to our cattle, and use some for the chickens. What about the hogs?”
“I would say,” Joe answered, “only if we have some to spare. They can grow without it, but when you go to butcher a hog fed milk only, the pork isn’t firm at all and annoyingly difficult to cut. So it would be better if we can spare some.”
“I’m sure we can,” Dad replied. “Fortunately, when we run our hogs with the cattle, the hogs can root through the manure for undigested pieces of grain. And they also find roots and tubers in the fields as well. Hogs around here aren’t totally dependent on us feeding them milk and corn; they convert some inedible materials to food for us, too.”
“OK,” Jean said, “corn for cows, chickens and hogs, and don’t forget us!”
“That’s right,” Poppop agreed, “don’t forget us. But there is one group of animals we didn’t mention yet that needs corn, too.”
“Brutus!” I exclaimed, “the horses.”
“Right,” Poppop replied, “Brutus and the horses at Butch’s. They are going to be doing some hard work and need the energy. Our oat supply is limited, so they need corn. Also when our oxen get to working age, they’ll need more grain as well.”
“And lastly,” Larry added, “we have to save some corn for seed.”

To be continued…… Mort

Chapter Nineteen - Corn

2007-09-26T03:43:00.000-07:00

The discussion that evening in the butcher house, while Grandmom and Diana were researching Diana’s family tree, eventually led back to her.
“I can really relate to her,” my Aunt Kristen announced. “I know how I felt when Bruce and Dean went to the city to retrieve my mother. They were only gone a little over half a day and I still had grave concerns that I’d never see them again. This poor woman hasn’t seen her husband for three weeks. So what of it? Why should our feelings be significant?”
“When you study about famous people,” she continued, “and about all the lands of the world and the contributions that were made to the world. About the kingdoms of the past and all the people who lived then and now inherit the Earth. Then compare that vast being of humanity to yourself, a single person with a small mind. Doesn’t it make you feel like an insignificant speck of dust in an endless desert; your mere existence at the whim of God? Like the wind can blow that dust particle anywhere and whenever it chooses? That anything and everything you do can have little effect on the grand scheme of things? So, what’s the use?”
I didn’t get it, at least not that evening. Seemed like the adults did, though, for all the other talk had ceased and eyes were gazing intently at each other.
Then she concluded, “Does anyone else feel like that?”
Sandy walked over to Kristen, sat beside her, put her arm on her shoulder and said, “We probably all feel like that at some time or another. I suppose it’s hard not to feel that way when you consider the billions of people that have existed up to this point in history. But you see, that what makes God great. For out of those billions of people he still knows and loves you, no matter how insignificant or purposeless you feel. So what if you never feel like you’ve made a great contribution to society? What is really important is how you affect those near to you, those that most need your love.”
“It reminds me of my grandmother. Of course, she was the most loving person in the world from the perspective of her spoiled granddaughter. But if you would have talked to my mother or grandfather, on some occasions they might have held a differing opinion. But what brought me joy for years after she passed away was that people would share with me the wonderful, loving things she had done for them. Or the way she treated people. One person from the neighborhood called her a saint, for the way she allowed the neighborhood children into her home on an almost daily basis, fed them, and put up with their shenanigans without ever losing her temper or uttering a mean word.”
Sandy put her hand on Kristen’s heart and continued, “Everyone has something in there – something meaningful – something purposeful – something significant. Just let the spirit lead you and use you. Share your love with everyone around you. And when you remember God loves you, the insignificance goes away.”
Sandy gave her a hug and then Jennifer, Dean, and Uncle Bruce. Others followed suit. It seemed like the evening was wrapping up and just about the time I was ready to hit the sack, Diana and Grandmom returned.
“What did you find?” Dad asked.
“A few things,” Grandmom answered, “nothing terribly definitive though.”
“How so?” Harvey asked.
“I could find no references to a Jonas, William or Gertie Fritz in any of the Hafer or Hepner notes I have,” she replied. “Well actually, there was a William Hafer, but he didn’t fit. His wife was Brenda and they had two daughters. Likewise we found no Jonas, William or Gertie Fritz in the Heffner book, but we did find a Howard and Clara Heffner that migrated to Kansas in 1922.”
“And who were their children?” Dad asked. “Did they have a daughter Gertie?”
“No such luck,” Grandmom answered. “There was no further information listed about them. Tells me they didn’t return to Pennsylvania.”
“Diana,” Dad cut in, “how old is your husband?”
“Thirty-five,” she responded.
“Then he was born in……. 1972?” he quickly calculated.
“Yes.”
“Any idea how old his mother might have been when he was born?”
“Not for certain,” Diana replied, “but he told me he was the youngest child. I recall that she died when he was twenty – before I knew him.”
“So she could have been 40 or so when he was born,” Dad surmised. “Forty from 1972 is 1932, tens years after Howard and Clara left for Kansas. Time wise they could have been his grandparents.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Diana said.
“But not for certain,” Grandmom said.
“No, not for certain,” Dad agreed.
“But,” Grandmom responded, “Jonas did say he had relatives in this area and Howard and Clara do have relatives in Pennsylvania.”
“So it is possible we’ve found his grandparents,” Diana reiterated.
“Yes, possible,” Grandmom replied, “and his relatives.”
“Anyone we know?” Jean asked.
“No one close,” Grandmom continued, “Howard had a brother, Curtis and a sister, Mary Ellen who remained in Pennsylvania. The Heffner book has information on them. Mary Ellen married Homer Groff.”
“We know a lot of Groff’s,” Joe interjected.
“Of course we do,” Poppop replied. “I even remember my dad talking about a Homer Groff. Lived up near Weilers. Can’t say that I would know his kids' names though.”
“Well I do,” Grandmom said. “Curtis and Mary Ellen had seven children between them. If we have the right family, they would be Jonas’s mother’s cousins and be around 70-90 years old. I have a list of their names and the names of their children, at least the ones that were in the book. Found a total of fifteen. Heffner’s, Groff,s, Adam’s, Riley’s; some girls are listed without surnames. They would be around 30-50 years old – Jonas’s second cousins.”
“The relatives Jonas might have come here looking for?” Larry inquired.
“Might have,” Dad answered, “remember, we don’t know if the Howard in the Heffner book is Jonas’s grandfather. And, it’s possible that the relatives he came to find are from his Grandmother Clara’s side. We know nothing about her family, do we?”
“Only,” Grandmom replied, “that her parents were Alfred Schmidt and Naomi Messerbaum. We have no information about their families. Howard and Clara’s family info is what we have.”
“But it’s all we have to go on. Please everyone, look at the list and see if you know any of them,” Diana pleaded.
So we passed the list around with mixed results ensuing.
Jeremiah said, “There’s a Clyde Heffner on the list. I played little league with a Clyde Heffner, but I’d have no idea where he is now.”
Sandy knew a Donna Riley and Mom remembered a Susan Heffner and Thomas Adam, but again their whereabouts were unknown. Joe said he once worked with Tyler Groff.
“He was from the Weilers area, where Poppop remembered Homer lived” Joe said. “Just talked to him about a year ago. Far as I know, he still lives around there, lessen he had to move like the rest of us did.”
“But it’s at least one name to go on,” Diana said. “Won’t you please try to find him. Jonas might be there.”
“Diana, we’ll try,” Joe replied. “But Weilers is over twenty miles from here. It would take a few days to make the trip and start searching farm after home after farm. But rest assured, if we have reason to travel that direction, we’ll be inquiring about him.”
“The best thing we can do is spread the word,” Dad added. “We’ll make copies of the list and have Jonas and your names on it with instructions how to contact us. We’ll pass them around; if anyone from the two farms travels somewhere, they can hand them out. And when the pastor or Doctor Fleming show up, we’ll brief them and they can expand the network. Just don’t give up hope, Diana, don’t give up hope.”
To be continued……Mort

Chapter Eighteen-Preserves(conclusion)

2007-09-19T10:05:00.000-07:00

After supper that evening the discussion focused on Diana. It was late and mattresses and bedding had already been found for her children and they had promptly fallen asleep.
“I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done for my children and me. That warm bath felt terrific, it’s such a pleasure to see the boys and baby so clean and comfy, and you sure have good food here,” she said.
“You’re quite welcome,” Jean replied.
“Do you have work for us to do so we can earn our keep?” she asked.
“Not to worry,” Harvey offered, “They’ll be plenty of work around here when we start at the corn harvest. In the mean time, I believe tomorrow’s laundry day, isn’t it Mother?” he asked Jean. “You can always use help with that, right?”
“Most certainly. We got a poor start today, with so many of us helping in the potato patch,” Jean answered. “Plenty to do tomorrow.”
By now a schedule of activities for the butcher house had been established, though not yet fully implemented. Mondays and Tuesdays were reserved for laundry. Wednesday would be the day a beef animal would be slaughtered and hung in the ground cellar to cure. Thursday a hog would be killed and cut up the same day. Friday the beef would be butchered and any sausage or bologna made or meat canned. Then Saturday the fat would be rendered.
“I’m sure I can help with the corn,” Diana said. “But how can my boys help?”
“You’d be surprised what youngsters can do,” Dad replied. “How old are they? Five and six?”
“Four and six,” Diana answered, “the oldest will be seven at Christmas.”
“They appear to be strong, active, and energetic boys,” Dad responded. “By the end of the week, we’d like to start at the corn, but tomorrow, the young’ns from Butch’s will be coming and we have a job they can all help with.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“There’s a ton of hickory nut and walnut trees on these farms around here,” Harvey said. “Both the ground and the nuts are nice and dry now and the nuts need to be collected before the squirrels eat all of them. It’s a great job for someone who’s closer to the ground, like you.”
“Gee thanks,” I replied, “but it actually sounds like fun, unless we have to be too particular?”
“No, not tomorrow,” Harvey answered. “We don’t need to be picky. Just get them off the ground and into buckets and stored in the dry somewhere. We can finish sorting and hulling them some day when the weather’s too bad for field work, and then crack them this winter when it too ugly to work outside or in the evening when it’s dark.”
“I’m sure Will and Harry will enjoy it,” Diana answered. “But what am I to do with Tammy when I start helping with the corn harvest?”
“No need to worry about her,” Lois responded. “If it’s a nice day, we’ll just take her and a playpen to the field with us. We love babies. We’ll practically fight over whose turn it is to keep an eye on her. On days with poorer weather, she can stay behind; there’s always a babysitter here.”
“Again, I have to thank you. You’ve been so helpful. I hope you can be as helpful finding my husband. You will be able to find him, won’t you?” Diana concluded.
Things got quiet all of a sudden. I could see lips pursed, not knowing what to say. Glances were exchanged, searching for a spokesperson. Mom nudged Dad. I didn’t know if he was the best person to answer her as he was generally noted for being up-front and his propensity to not mince words. But I guess him it was going to be.
“To be truthful,” he started out, “we don’t know if we will be able to find him. What we do know is that we are going to try as hard as we can. Also, we need to have faith that no matter how long we look, we’ll still assume he’s somewhere to be found. And finally, that our chances of success will be increased the more we learn about him and his family. So in order to help you the best we can, what’s your husband’s name?”
“Fritz,” Diana answered, “Jonas Fritz.”
“Well now that’s a start,” Dad continued. “I don’t know a lot of Fritz’s, but there is at least one family at church with that family name. Wendell and Doris Fritz, I believe are there names. Is that right Mom?”
“Yes, I think you’re correct. I seem to remember they live about ten miles west of town. I don’t really know any of their family.”
“Do those names ring a bell?” Dad asked.
“None whatsoever,” Diana replied.
“I remember,” Joe interjected, “you said he was coming up here to locate relatives. These relatives might not be Fritz’s. They might be from his mother’s side or his grandmother’s. What are your husband’s parents’ names and your mother-in-law’s maiden name?”
“His father’s name was William, who we named our oldest son after, and his mother was Gertie, but I can’t just now think of her maiden name,” she answered. “As far as his grandparents, I’m not sure. Might have started with an ‘H’. Maybe it was Hafer or Heffner or Hepner, something like that. I never even met his parents. They lived in Kansas, although they were born around here. My husband told me both their families migrated there in the early 1900’s with several other farmers from this area. Could that help you?”
“I’ve heard stories about that,” Harvey replied. “In fact, I recall that Wayne fellow living up at Butch’s, who told us about making apple cider, once talked about friends that he knew that were born in Kansas, then migrated back here. We’ll have to ask if he knows any Fritz’s.”
“And,” Grandmom interjected, “Hafer, Heffner and Hepner are all names common in this area. In fact, almost everyone here has a Heffner for an ancestor. The immigrant Heinrich Heffner came from Germany in 1632. He must have close to 20,000 descendents by now.” Dad’s mother was the resident genealogist. The Stump’s, Heffner’s, Smith’s, Rorher’s, Wolfe’s, Buchalter’s, and all our other relatives - she knew darn near them all. She had books and family trees on scores of families in the neighborhood. If anyone could help Diana, it would be her.
“I have a whole book of the Heffner clan and some notes about the Hafer’s and Hepner’s,” Grandmom continued. “The book has a great index. If there are any Fritz’s in there, we’ll find them. We can look as soon as we’re done here, if you want to burn some midnight oil, or in our case, candles?”
“The kids are settled,” Diana responded, “let’s go.”
After Grandmom and Diana had left the men started discussing the ins and outs of the corn harvest; what equipment we’d use, which fields we’d do first, where we’d store the corn. There was also planning for the next day: where were the most nuts and which area to attack first. All the discussion made me think about the provisions that were being made. We now had apples and potatoes in the ground cellar as well as the apple cider vinegar and wine in the formation process. Later on we’d add the last of the cabbages, turnips and pumpkins before they froze. All our canned goods stored well in Jean’s kitchen, as well as the schnitz; they didn’t need to be in a temperature moderated ground cellar. They needed a dry place, just like the nuts did. We stored them in Poppop’s basement where there was a wood stove and tables with plenty of room to work on them during the winter. In the barn and bins were hay, wheat, and in a few weeks, corn.
To be continued......Mort

Chapter Eighteen - Preserves (continued)

2007-09-12T18:19:00.000-07:00

Monday was a bright sunny day; time to harvest the potatoes. Poppop had a hand potato plow that he had pulled with a tractor in his garden for years. We had rigged up a well-fitting and strong harness for Brutus from braided baler twine. Because of last week’s rain, the ground was not hard and dry, nor was it too muddy, making it easy for Brutus to pull the plow. It was harder for the plow’s operator to hold the plow in the ground and for Brutus’s leader to keep him in the right row. It got better as it went and in no time at all, every row was dug and potatoes were laying on top the ground all over the patch. Now the real work began. Pick them into baskets. With 30 pickers on the job, it sounded easy enough, but we also needed to sift through the loosened dirt to make sure we wouldn’t leave any behind. Additionally, we had to sort out any potatoes cut or scraped by the plow or Brutus’s hooves. We put them in separate baskets, to use first, as the damage would cause them to spoil sooner. And if one ended up in a basket of good potatoes, it rotting could spread to the others in the basket. We picked the better potatoes into plastic milk cartons that we had.
Joe said, “Any wooden baskets or crates in the ground cellar are liable to mold and deteriorate if left in the damp cellar too long. The plastic will last forever and won’t cause the potatoes to rot.”
While we were picking potatoes we had visitors. A young mother came down the road carrying a baby girl and two small boys clinging to her legs. They were a bit dirty and grubby, looked on the skinny side and immediately grabbed the attention of the motherly types in our crew. Jean introduced herself, “Hello, my name’s Jean.”
“Mine’s Diana,” was the answer. “This here’s my boys Will and Harry and my daughter, Tammy.”
“Glad to meet you,” Jean replied, “you hungry?”
“Not at the moment. Your neighbors up the road, you know, Butch and Clare, were kind enough to feed us a good meal. But we have no food. Clare was sure you’d have some work for us down here, so as we could earn some.”
By now, Mom had turned a bucket upside down for Diana, and then said, “You sure look tired. Set a spell. If you don’t mind, I’ll hold Tammy for you. She‘s sure cute. The boys can help with the potatoes. Bet they’ll love playing in the dirt. Don’t worry; we got soap and hot water. You can all have a relaxing bath tonight.”
“And then,” Jean said, “We’ll have a place for you to stay and maybe some chores for you tomorrow. But tell us, if you want, where are you from?”
“Chesterton,” Diana answered.
“Chesterton?” Sandy responded, “that must be sixty miles from here. You walk all the way?”
“Yes, it was easy at first. Been dragging the last couple days, though.”
“This your whole family?” Lois asked.
“No, I have a husband, but I haven’t seen him since Labor Day.”
“Labor Day! That was five weeks ago. What happened to him?” inquired Jean.
“Lord only knows. You see, things were going pretty well just after the electric went off. My husband had stockpiled bottled water, dried milk for the children, plus other food. Every day he’d venture out to keep us supplied, but the pickins were getting slimmer and slimmer. He finally decided to travel up to your area, where there was farming to find food and work. He said he had relatives up here somewhere. I begged him not to go. He said he’d be back for us as soon as he found a place. After two weeks, he hadn’t returned. We were almost out of water and I just couldn’t wait any longer. I had to find him, don’t you see? I had to find him,” she sobbed.
“Now, now,” Sandy consoled her as she wrapped her arms around her. “Things will be all right. You have food and water here and a nice place to sleep.”
“You say he has relatives around here?” Mom asked. “After supper we’ll talk with my husband, and the other men. They seem to know everyone around here. If you can think of a couple names, we might be able to help.”
Will and Harry had a good time playing in the dirt and potatoes. They still had some energy. Unlike their mother, who had lay down in the lawn, next to the garden on a pile of jackets and sweaters we had taken off when the day had gotten warmer. She was napping while Mom was doing what she does best, playing mom with Diana’s baby daughter. That poor woman was exhausted. She awoke as we were loading the last potatoes onto the wagon we had hitched up to Brutus. When we got to the ground cellar, it was time for the milking crew to head for the barn. The supper crew headed for the butcher house with the newly arrived family, leaving the rest of us to unload the wagon. While we were working Dad and Mom were talking about Diana’s predicament.
“I know you meant well,” Dad told her. “And you absolutely said nothing wrong. The woman does need to have hope, but you know it might be pretty tough to find her husband.”
“I know,” Mom answered. “I know he could be a hundred miles from here. I suppose he could also be dead, but I sure hope not. You will talk to her, won’t you?”
“Sure,” Dad responded, “it’s the least we can do.”
When the potatoes were all piled in the cellar I said to Poppop, “Your crop yielded well. That’s quite a pile of potatoes. How many meals do you think they’ll make?”
“Don’t rightly know,” he replied. “But we aren’t planning to eat many of them.”
“We aren’t?” I said.
“No, the only way I know to get a crop next year is to plant as many of these potatoes next spring as we can. Potatoes don’t grow from seed, remember?”
“Yes, I do remember,” I replied. “I recall how last spring we cut the whole potato into five or six segments before we planted each piece in the ground. You know if every stalk yields five or six potatoes, like I just noticed from picking them, just from 1/5 or 1/6 of a seed potato, that means they yield 25 to 36 times the amount you plant.”
“In great years, 40 fold,” Poppop replied. “You know you calculated that pretty well. Some of that Stump math ability must be in that brain of yours somewhere.” You know he was right. Could I possibly be my father’s daughter and turn out like him one day?
“Let’s test it,” Poppop offered. “There are about 20 bushel of potatoes here. Next year I think we could easy get 120 in here, plus the early ones we would dig and eat in August and September. Let’s say another 20 bushel. How many bushels of this pile should we save to grow 140 bushel next year?”
Now I knew were Dad got it. “At what yield?” I asked him. “We should stay conservative.” I couldn’t believe I just said that.
“Good question,” Poppop responded, “conservatively, then, let’s say 25 fold.”
“Good answer,” I quipped, “doesn’t come out even though. Roughly six bushel. We can eat about two thirds of these and still have enough left to plant.”
“Wonderful,” Poppop replied, “we’ll be able to eat a good portion of these then.”
Potatoes and apples weren’t the only foods we had to eat. By now the garden had been exhausted of beans and tomatoes. All that was left in it were a few cabbages, pumpkins and a huge patch of turnips. In previous years, pumpkins were grown primarily for decorating, although Dad would cook a few for pies, usually using the neck variety as opposed to the round jack-o-lanterns. This year they were all saved for cooking no matter what variety they were. Dad liked cooked pumpkin a lot more than I did, but thank goodness we had butter. Made the pumpkin almost tolerable. Brown sugar would have made it better, but we couldn’t waste it on pumpkin. Some of the adults used a bit of honey on it and Dad would put a little blackstrap molasses on his. Of course he offered us some, but I liked his molasses less than I liked pumpkin. I did like the seeds when roasted, but it was only a treat we had two times. Other than the few seeds we roasted, all the seeds from every pumpkin were dried and stored as seed for next year’s crop. For another treat Mom made some pumpkin custard a couple times later in winter when a few eggs had accumulated. Why not, we had an ample supply of milk. She sweetened it lightly enough with blackstrap that it actually tasted pretty good.
Poppop had smelled the collapse coming and beings turnips are usually planted around August 1st, it allowed him time to plant at least ten times as many as he normally would have. After two weeks of turnips or pumpkin every day, I couldn’t believe how much I missed beets and beans.

To be continued…………..Mort

Chapter Eighteen - Preserves (cont)

2007-09-05T12:56:00.000-07:00

In short order we were home. The truck and wagon were parked between the ground cellar door and the butcher house. The baskets with the best apples were carried one way, into the cellar, while the buckets of poorer ones were carried the other way, into the butcher house. Inside, everyone was already busy as the table was full of people cutting up apples. I watched Mom, Jean and others cut away the worst parts, throw the junk into one bucket, cut nice slices out of the better parts, and then place them in other dishes. While we were away picking, the window screens from the drying beds had been placed on racks behind the butcher stove. Amy and Lynette were placing the slices on the screens.
“Whatcha making?” I asked Mom.
“Schnitz,” she answered.
“Schnitz?” Jennifer quizzed.
“Schnitz are dried apples,” Mom replied. “We can’t eat these partially rotten apples fast enough. Even in the ground cellar they’d spoil, so we have to dry them. They’ll keep over a year, if we do it right and then keep them dry. They’ll taste good next summer, you’ll see. We can do more at a later time, especially if the apples in the cellar keep poorly. Uncle Bruce and Barry did a pretty good job setting up those racks while you were away picking, didn’t they?”
“Sure did,” I answered, “they make the whole set-up this morning?”
“No,” Joe interjected, “I helped with the design; made the racks out of reinforcing rods that were lying around. Plan to hang strips of meat on it to dry when we butcher. We’d been working on them all week.”
“Look’s good,” Dad remarked, “I believe the racks will work well.”
Meanwhile, Dennis and Aaron had the wringer for our wash machine set-up and running with some buckets under it. They had rigged up a kind of hopper or trough on the “in” side of the wringer and were dumping the junky apple parts into the wringer. Using a piece of wood, they pushed and shoved the apple pieces through the wringer. The juice was squeezed out and fell into the waiting buckets positioned strategically under the wringer. Except for one bucket, which caught the pulp that came through the wringer. At the same time, Grandpop, Poppop, and Butch were washing up jugs, bottles and their lids. Most were plastic milk or juice jugs that hadn’t been thrown away. But there were also a few large glass gallon jars that Dad had kept in our cellar.
Again Jennifer asked, “Now what are they making?”
This time I knew. “Apple cider,” I replied.
“You’re going to drink that stuff?” she retorted.
“You know, now that I see how it’s made, I’m not sure if I will,” I answered.
“Well,” Poppop responded, “we aren’t really making the cider to drink as cider. We want it to turn to vinegar. We’re not exactly sure how it will work, but Butch and your Grandpop have a feeling that if we let it go long enough, eventually it will become vinegar.”
“You can have your vinegar,” was my response.
“I know you don’t like it, but we’ll need it to help preserve some of our vegetables next year.”
Dad interjected, “I’m also curious what it might taste like between now and it becoming vinegar.”
“You think it might have a little punch to it?” Dennis wondered.
“Don’t know for sure,” Dad answered. “I do know I like cider and hard cider and vinegar, so which one it is just depends on how far along the fermentation process is. How can I go wrong?”
“You can go wrong by opening up too many jars to sample it,” Poppop answered in a rebuking manner. “We want some finished product left next summer.”
“Same goes for you,” Dad told his father. “You know the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“You sure all we have to do is jar the juice?” Aaron inquired. “Don’t we have to add something to make it ferment?”
Butch answered, “I talked about that with Wayne, that elder gentleman staying with us. And he says apple juice will ferment on its on. They don’t add a thing to cider.”
“What you going to do with the pulp?” I asked. “Throw it away?”
“Come on, Alyssa,” Poppop replied, “you should know by now we don’t throw anything away around here. The heifers could eat it, and the pigs will eat it, but I am going to spread a little in the flower bed behind my house and cover it with dirt. Maybe some of the seeds in the pulp will sprout next spring and then we can replant the seedlings for the next generation.”
When most of the work was done, Josh hooked Brutus up to the wagon to take Butch’s crew home, along with a few apples that they could keep in their cellar this time of year. I went along for the ride and sat next to Robbie. Jennifer stayed behind.
“Did you get to talk to Jennifer today?” I asked Robbie.
“Yeah, a little.”
“So, what do you think? Is she the girl for you?” I asked him, trying to be as serious as possible, even though, I’ll admit, my intentions were a bit devilish.
He leered at me a few moments with a dazed look on his face, quirked a little smile and then answered, “Oh, I don’t know for sure, now mind you.”
Oops, I think I was caught at my own game. “But she’s enchanting, quite a pleasure to talk to, seems to enjoy being around me, has a brilliant mind, gorgeous hair, and that body, why let me tell you, she……..”
“Enough already!” I had been caught in my own web and had to put a stop to it. “You’re just too smart for me to pull anything over on. I’m sorry for trying. Just tell me the truth, please.”
He thought a bit, and then a bit longer, long enough for Brutus to reach his destination. He stood up, and then just before jumping off the wagon said, “The truth? Okay, the truth is: you’re both in the running. See ya.”
“And good riddens!” I shot after him. That boy would be a challenge.
When we got back to the butcher house, everything was pretty well cleaned up except for those four buckets of pears and peaches. Poppop, Mom and the others had removed all the stones from the shriveled peaches. The remaining fruit was mashed, peel and all, and divided into three separate plastic five gallon buckets. Poppop added sugar and water to each bucket and mixed it thoroughly.
With the scraggly pears, they trimmed off the stems, cut them into quarters before again mashing them. Similar to the peaches, sugar and water was added and mixed. We carried the buckets into a corner of the ground cellar where Poppop covered each bucket with a lid.
“I have no idea what you’re making,” I said, “but I don’t think that concoction is going to smell so good after a while. What’s it supposed to be?”
“Wine,” Poppop answered. “Least I hope so. I haven’t made any for years.”
“Will it be ready for communion Sunday?” I asked.
“No,” he laughed, “we have other wine for Sunday. It will take several weeks for this to get there. And then I have to remember how to decant it, and seal it properly so it doesn’t turn sour.”
“Well, if it does turn sour, we’ll have more vinegar then, right?” I concluded.
“I suppose you’re right,” he answered.
Saturday it was still too wet to dig the potatoes. There was plenty of other work, including helping Joe roast another hog and prepare the barbecue. We did it late in the day so we could keep it hot all night on the stove. That way we didn’t have to cool it down nor reheat it Sunday morning.
Communion went off without a hitch. It was a beautiful day and the fellowship was great. We got to see many of our friends we hadn’t seen for months. Quite a bit of business was done, in spite of it being the Lord’s Day. Mom lined up four roosters for our and Clare’s flocks from the Snyder’s, where Dr. Bear was staying. Harvey found a bull available from one of Roger’s neighbors. Larry found a neighbor with a supply of timothy seed, that he traded a young steer for. There was a lot of discussion about horses and oxen. I was amazed at the number of horses at the church that day.
“Where did they all come from,” I asked Dad when he had a moment.
“Well,” he answered, “don’t you recall how it seemed like anywhere you drove the last few years, you’d find a farmette had sprung up with a horse or two? The owners didn’t know how useful the horses would be one day. They were just kept as pets, a novelty, even a status symbol. I’m not condemning them; turned out to be quite a benefit for the surrounding neighbors and the larger community.”
“Sure are quite a few farmers talking to Butch about swapping for his workhorses,” I added. “Aren’t these other horses good enough?”
“They are for pulling buggies and wagons with lighter loads, but when it comes time to haul in heavy loads or pull machinery, they are just not quite built for it. They won’t get as much done and will have to be used carefully. Besides, Butch knows how important his horses are to our operation. That doesn’t mean, however, that he might not travel to some of the closer neighbors with his teams and do some work for them when needed. You know how Butch is such a great guy to work with?”
“Yes, I do,” I replied. Now, while trading horses was out of the question, oxen were a different matter. Dad must have gotten orders for five teams, even though we only had two started and none would be ready to work for months.
“Nice to know we’re not going to all the trouble for nothing,” Jeremiah had remarked.
“And,” Dad added, “we don’t even have to have them fully grown. As long as they are pretty well trained, they can finish growing and training at their new farms.”
“Probably better anyway,” Jeremiah commented, “if their new owners had a part in their training.”
“You’re probably right,” Dad concluded. With the festivities concluded we headed for home.

To be continued……more work?.....Mort

Chapter Eighteen - Preserves

2007-08-29T06:47:00.000-07:00

As we headed into October, the corn and soybean harvests were just weeks away. Vegetable harvest was winding down, however. Poppop’s potatoes were ready for digging, but that first necessitated another construction project. Harvey’s farm lacked a decent ground cellar, where potatoes could be stored in a constant temperature and remain unspoiled for months.
It was another job for Harvey’s backhoe. A bit of thinking was put into the decision as to the location of the ground cellar. At Joe’s insistence, the cellar needed to be high enough to hang a slaughtered beef in, to cool down the carcasses in the summer and to keep them from freezing in the winter. The location had to be somewhere where the ground level was naturally higher, so Harvey could still dig deep, but not so deep as to have groundwater or runoff water be a problem.
They decided on the north side of Harvey’s house, which had a heavy stone wall. Most of the year, the ground cellar would be in the shade, helping to moderate the temperature. There was even a crown at that side of the house, enabling Harvey to excavate the opening as a gently sloping ramp, making it easier to carry a side of beef, a hog or the potatoes into the cellar. Also, just outside the opening was a stout tree that Joe said we could us to hang up the beef to skin and clean it before hanging it in the ground cellar. When Harvey was finished digging, there was a tremendous pile of ground in the yard.
“What are you going to do with all that dirt?” I asked Harvey.
“Oh, I need every inch of it,” he answered. “I might even go find some more to make the roof as thick with ground as I can.”
“What’s going to keep the roof from collapsing?” I inquired.
“Remember last week?” Josh replied, “when we cut down all those trees on the other side of the meadow. They’re not for firewood, although all the branches we shaved off the main trunks can be burned in Harvey’s furnace. We’ll lay the cleaned up poles across the hole, pretty close together for strength. They’ll be supported by the unexcavated soil on three sides, except where the door is. On the side next to the house wall we’ll support them with some heavy metal poles Larry had laying out back. We found some two inch thick planks from one part of the barn floor that we don’t need because we no longer need to drive heavy tractors there. We will lay the planks across the trees and then cover the whole business with ground.”
“What kind of door will it have?” I asked.
“One that’s real thick; one that a little kid like you will hardly be able to open.”
“Who you calling a little kid?”
“You, compared to the door I built. I had plenty of lumber. I made it twelve inches thick with an eight inch space in the middle, where we stuffed straw and some of the insulation from Jean’s stove. You know the one we took apart to make the oven?”
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
“One big chore remains,” he continued.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Framing the door will be a challenge, and then filling in the space between the door and walls with something to keep the cellar as insulated as possible. Don’t worry, we’ll get it.”
And get it they did. It was quite a cooperative effort. Might have been ten men working on it at a time. The finished product looked good. They had screwed some hooks into a few of the tree trunks to hang meat from, and even built some wooden bins to keep the potatoes in. But potatoes weren’t the first thing to be stored in the cellar. We had quite a bit of rain for a couple days, making Poppop’s potato patch way too wet to plow. So we went at harvesting apples instead.
There was a large orchard about five miles north of us. Joe was good friends with the owner. Every year Joe would cut up some of the apple trees that were being culled for his smokehouse. Joe had always maintained that apple wood was the best for flavoring his smoked meat products. On yet another trip with the mo-ped, he had met the owner and we were welcome.
It was the Friday before the planned communion, when we went on our apple picking excursion. Brutus was out of the picture this time. We used Larry’s pickup to pull a wagon stacked with baskets and buckets for the apples. There were six bicycles on the pickup, three ladders, and one hog. We picked up ten pickers from Butch and Clare’s, including Ben and Robbie. I think that made thirty of us in all, so it was more like a wagon full of people.
When we reached the orchard, we found quite a gathering there. We weren’t the only ones who wanted to harvest apples. There must have been two hundred people there, but looking around, I estimated there might have been five thousand trees. Apples for everyone; so I thought. Quite a few people must have been there earlier in the picking season, for all the trees near the buildings were bare. The crowds of pickers were near the top of the hill, way to the back of the orchard. So up the hill we went, looking for apples. Not a problem, there were rows of unpicked fruit for the taking. We unloaded the wagon and the bicycles, and then Joe and Larry took the hog to the owner for his family.
Picking apples isn’t hard, sorting them is a different matter. We put the firmest, nicest looking apples in the baskets and the rattier looking ones, especially if they had brown spots or were getting mushy in buckets. Poppop even picked drops off the ground. Because of all the rain we had, some of them were pretty bad, but this wasn’t the year to be wasteful.
The other people there were friendly. In fact, I believe Dad knew many of them. There were a couple families from church, so we informed them of the communion Sunday. Actually, Dad told everyone they were welcome and not to worry if they had no food for the dinner; they should come anyway.
“Not a problem,” one young woman answered, “we got plenty of apples, a Dutch oven and plenty of flour. I’ll bake a giant pie.” That sounded good, but divided amongst four or five hundred people, we’d all get a pretty small portion. No matter, if she could do it, so could Jean.
We started loading buckets and baskets onto the wagon. It was full in no time. It took quite some doing to stack them, so there would still be room for the harvesters. Of course, Josh, Jake, Dean, Jennifer, Aaron and I intended to head home with our bicycles. Seemed like a much better option than being crammed into a wagon with buckets, baskets, and people. Once again, some preplanning had paid off.
Just before we left, I noticed Poppop and Jeremiah coming back from a different part of the orchard, each with two buckets. They had found the peach and pear sections. It being past the normal season for them, the pears were very soft and spotty. Similarly, the peaches were already shriveled up.
“What are you going to do with them?” Jake asked. “They look awful.”
“Oh, I have a couple ideas in mind.” Poppop answered, “You’ll see.”
Jennifer, the boys and I started down the road. It was a beautiful drive; the road followed the winding creek that later on downstream our little creek flowed into. It was surrounded by lush wooded ridges, just now starting to show fall colors on a tree here and there. We traversed some of our hunting areas. Josh pointed out where he had shot a turkey, where Dad had shot one, and Jake had shot his first buck. This was to be my first year of hunting and I wondered out loud where Dad would take me.
“Well,” Jake said, “I overheard Jeremiah and Dad talking about hunting the other night. The consensus was that we didn’t need to go hunting this year. First, we had enough meat right now. We should let the herd grow; save it for when we need it or if other people need it. Besides, we only have so much ammunition.”
“I could still use the bow,” Josh replied. “I can use the arrows more than once.”
“And probably make some, if you had to,” Aaron added.
“I suppose so,” Jake agreed and then said to me, “but it looks like you won’t get hunting this fall, unless we have to take care of some varmint problems. You really haven’t practiced much either; that takes precious ammunition, too.”
I had been practicing, but not with live ammo. I just practiced holding the gun, aiming, pulling the trigger, and bolting the next round in. But I guess I’d have to wait a couple years until I got my chance.
When we were about half way home, the rest of the crew passed us, waving and jeering. That pest, Robbie, even made a face at me and waved real nice at Jennifer. That boy might need some straightening out one day.

To be continued… Mort

Chapter Seventeen-Communion (conclusion)

2007-08-22T06:09:00.000-07:00

Dad and I accompanied Joe and the pastor in toward the butcher house. Dad turned to Barry and said, “Why don’t you come also? I’d like you to relate some of the technical accomplishments we’ve done around here.”
“Sure,” said Barry. On the way in, Barry, Joe and Dad started filling in the reverend about all the things we had done with motors, the water pump, the alternators, the windmill, and the batteries. They intended to show him the showers, oven and wash machine, but when we entered the butcher house, Mom and the other women took over the conversation. It was the same questions the men had asked, and the same answers. He told them where his family lived, where he got the horse, what things were keeping him busy, how everyone was doing.
Mom offered him drink and food of course and then inquired, “How are people really doing? Are there some specific people we should pray for?”
“Well,” Reverend Schneider answered, “there really are some people out there who are hurting. Not people who are starving or without shelter; the community is meeting those needs, at least so far. But there’s quite a bit of depression. They’re asking questions like: How did this happen? Why did this happen? How will we make it through the winter? There are some who are separated from loved ones and don’t even know where they are. It’s tough. I can only soothe them so much. It’ll take strong faith, perseverance, trust in Jesus, and lots of prayer as you rightly acknowledged. So pray for all those people, but there is one couple who could definitely use specific prayer.”
“Who would that be?” Jean asked.
“You know Jennie and Bob Prince from church?” he asked.
“Sure,” Jean replied, “something wrong with one of them?”
“Physically they’re fine, but you know their son, Mark, is in the Navy?”
“Oh, that’s right,” answered Mom, “where is he stationed?”
“That’s the problem,” the reverend answered, “No one knows. Last they heard from him was in mid-May. At the time, his ship was in the Indian Ocean. Haven’t heard a word since. They’re really taking it hard and just letting the worry get the best of them.”
“They have some cause to worry,” Grandmom said. “He could be dead I suppose, but there hasn’t been mail for two months. How could he write home? He’s probably part of the force we’re using to protect our shores. He’s doing his duty and serving his country and I bet he’s proud to do it. The service probably wouldn’t let him go, the way things are right now. But if they did, how would he get here from whatever part of the world he’s in? He’s probably just as worried about his folks as they are about him. Jennie and Bob and Mark do need our prayers - and everyone else who’s hurting. If you’re finished eating, Reverend, why don’t we pray right now?”
“Great idea,” answered the reverend, “and I am finished. Why don’t we all sit around the table and hold hands? But first, is anyone here in need of healing?”
Joe replied, “My back hasn’t quite been the same since we mowed that last field of hay.”
“Then sit on my right, next to me, and I’ll lay hands on you. In James chapter 5 verse 14 he writes: ‘Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer made in faith will make the sick person well…’. I have a little vial of olive oil in my pocket, just for these occasions.”
Sandy sat on the other side of her husband and laid her free hand on his back as well. Dad coaxed a very uncomfortable Barry in position on the other side of the minister. And then Dad sat next to him. We all held hands and Reverend Schneider anointed Joe with a dab of oil and then prayed. He didn’t pray terribly long, as he sometimes could, but when he finished he didn’t let go of Barry’s or Joe’s hands.
He continued, “I have a strong feeling that someone else here is in pain, too. Physical perhaps, but maybe spiritual as well. Is there someone else in need?”
There was silence as we glanced around the table. Then Barry started sobbing.
“What is it, brother?” the pastor asked. “How can Jesus help you?”
It was hard for him. He stumbled a few words, took a couple breaths, and then restarted, “I’ve known my brother here on my left ever since grade school. Later he was a good customer at my repair business. We’d share a lot of things and he knew what my physical problems were.” He paused, trying to compose himself.
Reverend Schneider aided by asking, “And what is the difficulty you have?”
“My breathing,” Barry replied. “I have emphysema; smoked too many years.”
He paused again, so Dad jumped in, “Jesus can help you with that difficulty; we can pray for you, like the scripture the reverend quoted instructed us to do.”
Barry sobbed again and then took another deep breath before blurting out, “That’s the real difficulty! I don’t know God! Just a few years ago, when my emphysema started becoming more serious, you stood right in my garage. I’ll never forget it. You offered to pray for me, for healing. You quoted those passages from James, but there was more to it and that’s where I fell short. You told me it depended on both the faith of the person making the prayer and the faith of the person receiving it. I told you it was no use then, because I didn’t believe in any of that stuff, or a word similar to that. I could tell you were hurt, but it was the truth. You countered well enough by saying something like, ‘Well, maybe today’s not the day, God’s timing, He can do it. I’ll still pray for you’.”
“I wonder if today is the day?” he concluded.
“Praise Jesus!” Reverend Schneider exclaimed. “Today can be the day! It’s your decision. Jesus is waiting with open arms to receive you. Now here’s the rest of that passage that you heard those few years ago: ‘…the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.’ Have you sinned?”
“That’s an easy one,” Barry replied, “of course I have.”
“Do you believe Jesus is real?”
“That’s harder, I did go to Sunday School and I do remember the stories, but how could I say ‘no’ with all the evidence of Him in this community?”
“Open your heart and think harder. Faith doesn’t require evidence. What you see around here is a product of the faith, not the other way around. Is Jesus real to you?”
Barry looked intently at the minister, and then at Dad, and then skyward and then finally, quietly declared through teary eyes, “Yes, I do believe in Jesus.”
“Praise the Lord,” many voices echoed.
“And that he died for your sins, even if you really don’t understand all this now, and that you will be forgiven by your faith in Him because he loves you, and that He can heal you, and that you’ll be able to abide in Him forever?” Reverend Schneider concluded.
“Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes,” cried Barry. And so did a few other people, Dad included. And more ‘praise the Lord’s' were heard. The pastor anointed Barry and then prayed for healing. This time he prayed longer, a prayer filled with joy.
“How does it feel to be born again?” Dad asked Barry when the prayer was over.
“Born again?”
“It’s what Jesus called it. You have a new life now, the old is gone. It will be different. You will still have troubles, but one thing you’ll always have is Jesus by your side. Relish it.”
“I think I will,” Barry replied.
“I’ll have to be getting on my way,” Reverend Schneider said. “Thanks for the meal. Is there anything I should be on the look out for you?”
“Roosters,” Mom said as she packaged up some pork and string beans for the pastor to take home.
“Roosters?” he inquired.
“We only have laying hens here and at Butch and Clare’s. None of our eggs are fertile. If we’re going to increase our egg production, and we have the corn to do so, we need to hatch some broods of chicks. But we need some roosters to make it happen. If you get my drift?”
“Yes, I understand,” the pastor answered, “I’ll be on the lookout.”
Leave it for Mom to bring practicality into a moving moment.
“Oh, one other thing,” he continued. “The other ministers in the area are making an effort to observe World Wide Communion on its usual date, the first Sunday in October. We feel we need to bring as many followers together as we can that day, not only to honor God, but also to support each other and have a time of fellowship. I’ve talked to a few elders about this and have their support. We’d like your support too.”
“Agreed,” responded Dad, “what can we do?”
“First of all, spread the word, and then bring as many people as you can, by horse and wagon, bicycle, walking, trucks if necessary. Pick up anyone you can along the way. We want to have a big meal afterwards, so could we count on you for a healthy supply of some kind of barbecue? Pork, beef or venison, whatever you have available.”
“Can do,” answered Joe, “for how many people?”
“Hard to say. We’re hoping for a church full. Let the Spirit lead you. Nearly everyone will bring something. You know our culture; a food shortage won’t be the problem. And also, if you have some, we could use some more wine; our supplies are low.”
“No problem,” said Jean, “we’ve some to spare.”
“Okay then, I’ll hop on old Flash and head on down the road. Thanks again for the food and the fellowship. The communion service is in two weeks, so I probably won’t be around before then. See you all there and don’t forget to bring the newborn, Brother Barry.
(Author’s note: to the best of my knowledge, the real life Barry has not yet accepted Christ as his savior. I continue to pray for him and really need to make a harder effort to reach him. I ask that all of you think of the Barry in your life and do the same…To be continued……Mort)

Chapter Seventeen - Communion (cont)

2007-08-15T11:26:00.000-07:00

Harvey pursed his lips a little, scratched behind his neck a bit, and then answered, “Well, according to agricultural historians, in the 19th century one farmer fed six other people. Heck, most of them were his family. With engine powered equipment and technology that number rose steadily through the 1900’s. I recall about the time I started farming with Pop, the number might have been calculated to be about 60. And with further advances the last thirty years, maybe I heard once the number approached 90. There are two farmers in our operation, counting Larry, so theoretically our operation could feed 180 people.”
“Now,” added Larry, “one might have to discount the fact that we won’t have the technology, you know fertilizer, pesticides, and animal health products. But we have the acres necessary to grow a lot of food. We just need the labor. Between Butch’s farm and ours right now, there are twenty full grown men. Applying the 19th century standard, we should be able to feed 120. And absolutely the women and the kids around here work as well as many men, so you have to factor that in, too. Plus, every family that shows up provides at least one if not more workers. It will take some managing, but it’s doable. It also takes some faith.”
“Hey, that’s usually my answer,” Reverend Schneider answered. “But you certainly are on target. Keep thinking that way.”
“You know,” Joe said, “you said earlier you were very busy the last five weeks. What else you been doing?”
“Funerals,” he responded, “you see, not all the news I have for you is positive. In fact, there’s been a lot of trouble.” Then turning to my dad he added, “Remember you and me talking about nursing homes?”
“Yeah, I just thought of Springside Manor, that large one just to the west of town. How did it go over there?”
“Could have been worse. When I realized things were okay at the food bank, it dawned on me they might need help, so I headed over there. Management saw this coming and advised the families of the guests there to take them home. Adequate care could not be provided. As a result, the numbers were down as families took their parents or grandparents home to care for them as best they could. But many remained. Some had no family, or their families just lived too far away and lacked the means to get there. And then some just were in too poor a medical condition to leave. And, I guess, maybe some families just didn’t care.”
“When the electricity ended, the emergency generators they had only had enough fuel for a couple days. Quite a bit was used up the previous weeks when electricity was being rationed. It wasn’t a pretty sight; middle of August, no air conditioning or lights for the inner rooms; preparing food on charcoal grills and propane stoves. Of course it was too much stress for several of the patients. There were heroes though.”
“Heroes?” Jeremiah asked.
“The workers themselves. Several came to work even though they knew they wouldn’t get paid. Some used their precious gasoline, but many just stayed on the job. They became live-in caregivers. Just stayed day after day. One by one, however, they had to return to their families, but that created a chance for more heroics. A few took a resident with them, basically agreeing to care for that person as long as he or she lived. It was amazing. Of course, the local neighbors pitched in too. Bringing, water and food and helping with the care. Some of my family members accompanied me and put in a few days, too. The most able residents ended up in private homes somewhere, another credit to our community. But about a dozen did not pull through. Last Saturday, I buried the last one that had remained. The place is empty now. It’s usable. Perhaps it could house migrants this winter.”
“I did a few funerals at the church, too. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just want to let you know that Steward, the contractor that usually digs the graves, is housing his backhoe there. He says it might have enough fuel in it to dig maybe 50 to 75 graves, unless some other project in the neighborhood requires his hoe and he’d have to donate fuel to that. Bottom line, if you need a grave dug, there’s a backhoe there. You wouldn’t have to run yours up, Harvey, or dig a grave by hand. There are other troubles I could tell you about, if you’re interested?”
“Local or worldwide?” Jake asked.
“Local and what happened in some of the cities. Haven’t run into any preachers with news from China or Europe.”
“No I guess you wouldn’t have,” Josh agreed. “What local trouble? Anything we could help with?”
“Not really; the damage is done now. You know that big dairy west of the church, Gruber’s. Where they have about 200 cows?”
“Yeah,” Larry answered.
“Well, their operation was too, what’s the word? …. intensive. Fortunately, at this farm, your fields were already laid out with pastures and fencing. I look around and see pretty healthy and content cattle roaming around. At Gruber’s the cows were housed in big buildings and cement feedlots. Fans running all the time and silo unloaders needed to feed them. There was only a small lot for them to roam. Well when electricity became scarce, Gruber’s just kept on going. They made no adjustments in the way they were doing things, kept generating their own electricity until their fuel supply was completely depleted. Just kept feeding and milking cows just to pour the milk away. No one came to haul it away, right?”
“No one,” responded Harvey.
“They couldn’t milk or feed 200 cows by hand. No water, manure accumulated, buildings became deathly hot, cows got sick and died. They had no means to bury them. Made a terrible stink. They finally realized they had to release the cows so they could drink at the closest creek and eat in the surrounding fields. Fortunately the neighbors really pitched in by allowing it, though how could they say no. They helped to tend the herd, kept them in certain fields until some fencing could be erected. Others started taking one or two of the healthier ones home to milk and care for. Steward moved in with his bulldozer and buried the dead cows. Seems like everything’s settled now, but I’m sure more than 100 died. What a mess it was.”
“A mess that could have been mitigated by a little foresight and planning,” Jake said.
“Now Jake,” Dad admonished, “not so judgmental. Did you ever walk in their shoes?” It was one of Dad’s favorite philosophies: “Don’t judge a man until you walked a mile in his shoes”. Or is it a day in his shoes? No matter, good philosophy.
“Yeah, you’re right,’ Jake concurred. “I’m thinking a lot of other people had to make tough decisions, too, especially in the cities, perhaps. What did you hear about them, Reverend?”
“Well, a lot, but I’m not sure what’s true. Of course there was some looting. People trying to find water and food. Releasing the prisoners didn’t help.”
“Releasing the prisoners?” Barry asked. “Just yesterday, I had it on my mind how the prisons were managing. What happened?”
“Again, I heard a lot of things, but just last week I ran into a guard from the county prison. He was helping at the nursing home and he verified the story. They couldn’t keep a prison running with no fuel or water. Something had to be done. Here is one instance that shows that the federal government is still functional because they stepped in. The military came and hauled away all convicted murderers. No one knows where they took them, but they’re gone. Everyone else was released. Anyone convicted of theft, bad check writers, marijuana growers, prostitutes, drug users, people convicted of drunk driving or driving without a license or insurance; they are out on the street now.”
“Wow!” Barry exclaimed, “most of those people didn’t belong in jail anyway. I don’t know if that would have really contributed to looting and rioting.”
“Well, I’m thinking it probably did to at least a small extent,” Reverend Schneider responded. “But there’s another theory floating around. This guard said all the released prisoners received a pretty stern speech. They would be completely exonerated and in return for that would be expected to become productive members of society. They would have to learn to live with the other members of society as society needed as many productive members as could be found. It would not be easy, they’d have to learn to work, share, and give as well as take. It was necessary for them to change in order to be accepted. And finally, they would not be protected any longer. If they committed any crime, there would be no criminal justice system to save their butts, no court appointed lawyer to moderate their punishment, no getting out on bail. They would be subject to the wrath, sense of justice, and perhaps the vengeance of the communities they choose to settle in.”
“Do you think that’s working?” Barry inquired.
“Can’t say for sure; but I hear less and less about looting and criminal activities. One interesting story I did hear was about gangs in the city. Seems like when the police stopped doing their job, the gangs took over. They took control of territories and protected everyone living there. Stabilized the situation. Enforced their own law, administered justice, made everyone tow the line. Get along or get out was the dictate. Wouldn’t have been a welcome environment for criminal behavior; perhaps that’s what kept the released prisoners in line.”
“That is darn interesting,” Barry commented. “Perhaps things are working out.”
“You know,” said the reverend, “I’ve talked a lot. I really need to hear what you are all doing around here, so as I can share it with others that have the same predicaments. And, gee, I’ve been holding you up from your work.”
“Work!” Joe exclaimed, “I plum forgot. I wanted to help the girls can that pork we didn’t eat for dinner. And what kind of hosts are we? We offer your horse water and offer you nothing. Come on into the house. Maybe there’s some left for you. And the girls will be glad to see you as well.”
“I’d like that, and I’d like to hear how everyone else is feeling," Reverend Schneider answered.

To be continued….. How is everyone else feeling?.... Mort

Chapter Seventeen - Communion

2007-08-08T07:17:00.000-07:00

Reverend Schneider’s horse was unlike my Brutus, the Clydesdale, and Titus’s workhorse. It was much sleeker, a shiny dark brown, and exhibited a lot of pep.
“Got yourself a racehorse there?” Joe asked the reverend.
“Suppose so,” he answered, “been winning every race, too. Got here first didn’t I?” Looking back up the road he added, “Don’t even see the second place finisher. Do you see him, Alyssa?”
I had a notion to look, but then caught the joke. It was getting to the point I had hung around these wise guys long enough to be aware of their trickery. “I’ll just keep an eye out for him, so you can hop on and head down the road, if’n he catches up to you. Wouldn’t want you to lose your lead. How far back do you think he is? Do I have time to water your steed before he gets here?”
He chuckled, then said, “Smart girl; sure you have time to water old Flash. Thank you.”
“So whose horse you acquire?” Joe asked.
“The neighbor farm, right next to the church; my whole family moved there. They still have a hand water pump, so we can pump all the water we need from their well. Their livestock can drink from the creek. The wife and kids work around the farm and they loaned me old Flash here for me to make my rounds. Miss you all at church. And I’m not being a wise guy. I’m not condemning you for not coming to church; I really do miss seeing and talking to you. Just came down from Butch and Clare. I told them the same. It was great to see everyone there, too.”
“It’s great to see you too, Reverend,” Harvey said. “What you’ve been hearing in your travels? That is, I assume you’ve been traveling.”
“That I have. This is one of the first days in the last five weeks that I could actually just go visiting. Seemed like every other day I had something to take care of.”
“Like what?” asked Dad.
“Well, as soon as we lost power and water, I knew a lot of people would be in trouble, just like you and I talked about a couple months ago. As I was on the board of the food bank in town, I headed into there to see what I could do. You know, it wasn’t as bad as I suspected.”
“How so?” Joe asked.
“When the power went off, the store managers knew that all the food in the freezers and coolers would spoil, so they gave it away. Just opened up their doors and announced any perishable food and fresh baked goods were free for the taking. They had moved most of the dry goods into the back of the stores, thinking maybe they could sell that later. So at least for the first week or so, no one was hungry. Eventually, when they realized that money as we knew it wasn’t coming back too soon, they allowed people to have some of the other food too. As a result, the food bank still has food. The whole thing was pretty sensible too. People didn’t cart away truckloads at a time; just what they needed for a few days. Oh I’m sure they didn’t wait until there was no food in the house before acquiring more. We’re a community of ants, not grasshoppers; food’s being stored for winter. Many are using the food from their gardens or farmers just out of town. Of course there aren’t as many people living in town anymore.”
“Where did they go?” I asked.
“Like I said, out to the country. Found a place with water and moved. Besides, if you had a home dependent on gas or heating oil to keep warm, what good would it do you to stay there? And those remaining had to cart all their water from the reservoir outside of town, at least their drinking water since the creek flowing through town provided some for washing and flushing toilets. But that became a problem too. Sewage treatment plant eventually became non-functional. They had to just allow the sewage to drain into the river.”
“Not so good for the people downstream,” Joe said.
“Not good, however, it isn’t a large volume. Mostly only toilets being flushed. Not near the number of showers and baths being taken and loads of laundry being done. And other people moved north.”
“North?” asked Dad, “What’s up there, cleaner water?”
“Yeah, I guess there is, but really, they moved for coal. They heard the coal mines needed workers to keep the mines open. All the work’s being done by hand, like in the 1800’s. Horses bring the coal out the mountain. They’re using steam engines to power the crushers. Others are chopping wood for the engines or sawing lumber for the tunnels. Whole families are working there.”
“For what?” responded Harvey, “there’s no money to pay workers. What good does it do them?”
“You’re correct, no money; they get paid in coal, or more precisely, coal credits.”
“Coal credits?” Dad asked.
“Yep, they get paid by the hundredweight of coal. Work a day; get ten hundredweight or whatever the going rate is, depending on the job you do. The mine owner just keeps a tab or you can take it home in script.”
“Script?” Harvey inquired.
“Sorry,” the reverend responded, “coal script. It’s a fancy piece of paper that tells others you own so much coal.”
“What can you do with it?” Joe wondered.
“You can redeem it for the coal, anytime and anywhere; anyone with coal will honor it.”
“But you can’t eat coal,” Joe responded.
“No you can’t,” Reverend Schneider agreed. “But you can also trade the script. Of course the main commodity right now is food. So workers are using their script to buy food. Unlike our little town, where the stores are pretty much out of business, in parts of the coal regions the stores are still open. Sure they don’t have all the goods they used to have; actually the dry goods are at a premium. They’re being stashed for winter. The local farmers provide the bulk of what’s being sold. They have produce to market. They’d rather accept the script than U.S. dollars. Script is worth something; you can redeem them for coal or trade them for something else you need, but dollars are worthless.”
“So coal script is their money now?” Dad asked.
“I suppose you’re right,” the reverend answered, “it would be like money. I tell you the other industry that’s flourishing.”
“What’s that?” Harvey asked as Josh, Jake, Barry and a couple others joined us.
“Transportation,” Reverend Schneider replied, “Coal and produce have to be moved. Horses are at a premium. Only so much hauling can be done by them. A lot of hand carts have been built; even heard of some dog carts. Townsfolk that walk to the farms to work or trade, wear baskets as backpacks and always carry something with them – coal out, food back. Or they carry the coal to the river.”
“The river?” Jake asked.
“Oh, didn’t I mention? Some entrepreneurs are building barges to float the coal to market.”
“That’s interesting,” Joe said, “but like I said before, you can’t eat coal. Only so many homes can burn coal, and those that can, like us, can also burn wood. Besides, what commodity could the people downstream trade for the coal? Sounds a bit risky to me. The whole operation might be fruitless. They’re creating a coal-driven economy, just like our country had an oil-driven economy.”
“And look what happened to us,” Josh touted.
“Now fellas,” Dad interjected, “let’s applaud their industriousness; and maybe their benevolence. Just like we share food with hungry people, they might share their coal with cold people. At least their producing something and not sitting around on their butts, waiting for someone to bail them out.”
“Right,” offered Harvey, “we’re all in this together and we’ll all pull through this together, provided we become a nation of producers, instead of consumers. All those people that had jobs manufacturing unnecessary items, like DVD’s, VCR’s, CD’s, video games, TV’s, I-Pod’s, walkman’s, or working at a computer, making movies or TV shows, or advertising, not to mention insurance salesman, lawyers or bankers; you get the idea; they’ll now be working to grow food, provide heat or shelter and the other things we really need.”
“It’s a chance for the faithful to shine,” the reverend added.
“Don’t keep your light under a bushel,” Jeremiah said.
“And speaking of lights,” the reverend said, “the way I hear, some parts of Pennsylvania are doing just fine.”
“How’s that?” inquired Josh.
“Well, there are thousands of natural gas wells drilled in Pennsylvania, mostly in the mountain regions, waiting to be tapped. Property owners, who have wells on their property, use the gas all the time. It’s naturally pressurized so the flow hasn’t stopped. They should have heat all winter and even be able to generate electricity. I hear people are migrating to those regions as well, helping with the harvest where there is farming.”
“Very interesting,” Jake said, “but you keep saying, ‘I hear’. How do you hear all these things? We hear practically nothing here.”
“Good question, Jake,” Reverend Schneider responded. “It’s from the other ministers and the doctors. We are all operating under the same system. Everyday we head out, making the rounds and looking for people to help. We hear stories from all kinds of people we run into and we meet each other both coincidently and on a planned basis, to discuss the needs of the community and to determine what we might do about it. We’re out spreading the word, hope, information and ideas, encouraging everyone to let their fruits emerge.”
“Makes sense to me,” Jeremiah said. “As you brought up doctors, here’s a piece of information we’d like to know. We heard Dr. Bear’s operating like you, but we don’t know how to reach him in an emergency. Do you?”
“Just get on a horse and fetch him. I’d say it’s only four or five miles from here where he’s headquartered. He’s on the farm on Dogwood Road, just north of the church, belongs to Milt Snyder. Know where it is?”
“Sure, that’s easy to find,” offered Joe.
“No guarantee he’ll be there during the day. He makes rounds like me then. I hope you don’t ever need him too quickly.”
“Hope not either,” Harvey said, “but the more people that keep moving in here, the greater the chance.”
“You expect more people?” the reverend asked.
“Yep.”
“How many, and can you feed them?”

To be continued…..What is Harvey’s answer? …… Mort

Chapter Sixteen - Time (conclusion)

2007-08-01T06:20:00.000-07:00

The following week we made quite a bit more hay, but by Friday we had a break in the action to make the excursion back to the old house. It looked pretty much the same. For twelve years, other than when I was at camp or on vacation, I had woken up here. By now, I was just getting used to waking up at Grandmom’s house. Here I had my own room, but it made we wonder who slept in it now.
I got to see Marie and the other neighbors. They all looked well. Dad gave Marie and Bill directions to our new farm. They said they might take occasion to visit someday, especially if some trading was necessary or advice needed. While we were picking the beans, Dad related to our old friends all the technological things pertaining to direct current and batteries that the boys had accomplished at Harvey’s Dairy. Bill said that it might be worth the trip, just to get some ideas. In the meantime he said he’d experiment on his own, and then he’d know what obstacles he might need to overcome. Bill and Marie had become daily workers at our old farm.
There were other changes evident at our old place. The old springhouse now had water running through it and was surrounded by a thick layer of straw bales.
“Not exactly an ice house,” Bill said, “but it cools the milk and keeps the fruits and vegetables fresh.”
“Milk?” I inquired, “Where do you get milk?”
“We acquired three cows from Chester,” Marie offered. “Milk for the whole neighborhood. I’ve learned how to milk a cow. Have you?”
“Not yet,” I answered, “but I’m sure I’ll get my chance pretty soon.”
“There’s a nice supply of fruits and vegetables in the springhouse,” Mom pointed out. “Where do they come from?”
Bill responded, “Jim, Hallie and their family travel everyday by bicycle to a produce farm this side of town. They have baskets fastened to their bicycles and bring produce home every night to trade for milk. It’s been working real well so far. They also bring some dried and canned food as well for winter. We’re supposed to save every jar we open and the lids for them.”
“Just like Titus was telling us,” Jean offered.
“Titus?” Marie asked.
“Titus Weaver,” Dad replied, “he’s a Mennonite from the other side of town. He visited us a couple weeks ago and traded produce for a load of hay. He told us how things were going in his neighborhood.”
“Sure, I remember him,” Bill said. “Chester told him where you were.”
Mom and Jean sorted through our remaining goods that had been stashed in the shed and came up with nothing we needed. There were plenty of things we didn’t need: electric appliances, lamps, light bulbs, decorations, books, toys, pictures, mirrors, TV’s, VCR’s, DVD’s, video tapes, and air conditioners.
Mom wondered out loud, “What if the boys figure out how to make electricity? The lamps would come in handy and maybe even the air conditioners could be used to cool food or something?”
“Or the mirrors,” Dad added, “could they be used to collect solar energy some how?”
“Unanswered questions,” Jean responded, “but if items such as these do become useful, we have ours and your in-law’s to use back at the farm. We can always come back for these or perhaps maybe someone else will need them more?”
“You’re right – just let them here!” Mom concluded. And then we headed for home.
When we arrived back home, Poppop and Joe had the drying beds set up in the yard between Jean’s house and the barn in a spot the shade doesn’t hit.
“Just in case some of the beans need to dry some more. We wouldn’t want any of them to spoil – or spoil a whole batch,” Joe said.
“Good thinking,” Dad commended them. “We’ll let them dry thoroughly before we pack them away.”
We shelled all the beans by nightfall, and then put them on the screens when the sun had risen. Just after dinner on Saturday, I went to check on the beans and found Uncle Jeremiah and Jake with a funny looking table. They were digging the legs into the middle of the yard, near the drying beds and just off the sidewalk that we used most often to travel to and from the barn and house. It had four steel legs, that I suppose were made from some scrap found lying around the farm, bolted to a three by four foot plate of white appliance colored steel. I found out later it was a refrigerator door. On one side of the door was a triangular piece of steel mounted upright. Opposite the triangle painted like the end of a spoke with the triangle being the hub, was a single black line. It was labeled with a large, black, capital “N”. Harvey, Joe and Dad walked over to investigate.
“I get it,” Harvey said. “I saw this laying in the shop before the triangle and line were on it. Now I see what it is.”
“Should work,” Dad added, “if it’s positioned correctly.”
“Good spot for it,” said Joe. “We walk by it so often. With those long legs, it will stay above the snow, too. What do you think, Alyssa?”
“What do I think? I think I’m the only one here that doesn’t know what it is.”
“If you figure out what the “N” stands for, then you’ll know,” Jake offered.
“I’m surrounded by people who talk in riddles,” I lamented.
“That’s how you learn,” Dad said. “You have to figure things out, then you’ll remember. If we just tell you, then you’ll forget. Just observe what they’re doing.”
Just what I needed – more Stump philosophy. So, I watched. Jeremiah and Jake were carefully aligning the ‘door’ so that the shadow from the triangle fell on the line, every so often checking their watches and filling ground into the holes each leg was in.
“Hope it stays for you,” Joe said.
“No matter,” Jeremiah answered, “we can adjust it, if it wanders.”
“Know what the “N” stands for yet?” Jake asked.
“Must stand for ‘no’, I have ‘no’ idea.”
“Ha, Ha,” Jake laughed, “which direction is the shadow pointing?”
“So now I’m a geographer. Just like my teachers – answer a question with another. Well let’s see. Harvey talks about an east wind from that way, of course that’s where the sun comes up. Middle of the day the sun is to the south, so the shadow points NORTH! That’s what the “N” is for. It’s a compass!”
Everyone laughed. “I guess that’s true,” Dad agreed. “But what time is it when the sun is directly to the south?”
I thought a little, and then exclaimed, “NOON! The “N” stands for noon, too. It’s a sundial!” Everyone applauded, but then I added, “But you missed it. Noon was an hour ago. It’s nearly one o’clock.”
Harvey chuckled, “Noon used to be twelve o’clock, Alyssa. But you see in this country we have on omnipotent Congress.”
“Om-nip….what kind of tent?”
“Omnipotent means ‘all-powerful’. You see, back one Sunday morning in March, Congress had the power to make the Earth rotate faster, so that there was a 23 hour day. Remember, we had to get up an hour earlier, once again in the dark, just like it was winter again. They call it daylight savings time. Moved noon ahead to one o’clock. Was supposed to solve the energy crisis,” Harvey concluded.
“That worked just like everything else Congress did. They aren’t omnipotent, they’re impotent,” Jeremiah announced. The men broke up. Harvey rolled on the ground laughing. I didn’t get it.
“Of course Congress is important,” I said. More laughter.
“No, not important,” Joe replied, “impotent, means not having the power to perform.” The men laughed even more.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Impotent has another meaning. Hopefully you won’t run into it until you’re married 50 years,” Dad said.
“Yeeewww,” I answered. “By the way, why did you choose to do this today?”
“Tomorrow’s the autumnal equinox, equal day-equal night, the first day of fall,” Jeremiah said. “We thought the readings would be most accurate today, tomorrow and Monday. Every hour still needs to be marked off. If we miss one, or it’s cloudy, we can add it a later day. We’ll just mark the lines; we can paint and label them anytime.”
“You know what?” Joe announced. “Let’s free ourselves from the tyranny of Congress and go off of daylight savings time today. We actually did a couple weeks ago when we started getting up when the sun did.”
“As it should be then,” Harvey declared. “Everyone change your watches and then pass the word to the others.”
“Give me liberty or give me daylight savings time!” Dad shouted. “Now look who’s all powerful. We just added an hour to September 22nd.”
“And we are important, unlike Congress,” I added.
We left my uncle and brother to the task of firming the sundial’s position. As we walked toward the barn, we saw a man on horseback riding down the road. Why it was Reverend Schneider.
“I imagine he’ll have a lot to share,” Dad said.
“Or preach about,” Harvey added, “I wonder what time he’s on.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Joe cried, “so much for our extra hour."

To be continued..........Mort

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - TIME (cont)

2007-07-25T05:53:00.000-07:00

The mo-ped was also a valuable tool for Dad. Near the end of the week, he said he would be going back to the old house to check on his beans in the garden as well as on our old neighbors. “Is there anything you can think of,” he asked Mom, “that we left behind that you could use?”
“All I can really think of is my sewing machine,” she answered. “Originally we thought it would be of no use without electricity. But the way things are progressing around here, the boys might be able to make it functional.”
“OK,” Dad answered. That struck me as a little odd. How could he bring Mom’s sewing machine back with him on the moped? Although, I recolected, Dad often had a way of making things work. So just after breakfast, off he went.
Later that morning, Uncle Jeremiah, Amy, Lynette, and I were working with Chip and Pepper, our young oxen. We were up to the point where we were actually leaving them yoked together for eight hours. They were getting used to it, were able to eat and drink while yoked, and even had gotten accustomed to being led around by us. We had started to give them verbal commands, not that they knew how to obey already, but they needed to hear the repetition of the commands to learn. The commands were simple enough. Of course, the obvious one was “whoa” for stop. Go was “hup”, left was “gaw” and right was “hee”. The actual word wasn’t that important, the sound of them was. Each had a distinctive ending vowel sound so the animals would not confuse them. We had just finished and Uncle Jeremiah was measuring them for the next size yoke that needed to be made soon, when we looked down the road and noticed a large charcoal gray Ford pick-up with some things loaded on the back approaching.
“Looks like the landlord from the old place,” I said.
“Wouldn’t know that,” my uncle replied, “but it’s your dad driving it.”
Sure enough, it was Dad. As he wheeled into the driveway, he throttled the diesel engine loudly enough to catch the attention of Josh and some of the others who were working close by. As they came out to see what was going on, we took stock of the items loaded on the truck. Of course there was Mom’s sewing machine and Grandpop’s mo-ped. We saw two cases of honey, a basket of beans from the garden and three implements that I wasn’t exactly sure what they were; one looked like a cultivator.
“Nice trade,” Josh said to Dad. “So this is what you got for our coal stove?”
“You remembered?” Dad replied. “This and more.”
“More?” Larry asked.
“Yep, the landlord’s son-in-law is a beekeeper. That’s where the honey comes from. But also in the deal are two hives of bees he’ll deliver next spring. That way we can have our own honey, but more importantly, ensure better pollination for all the fruit and vegetable crops we’ll be growing around here.”
“That hand cultivator is nice too,” Jeremiah said. “It’ll save a lot of hoeing when the time comes.” The hand cultivator had a high steel wheel in the front with wooden handles in the back, similar in design to a wheelbarrow. In between and at ground level was a row of narrow harrow like tines for scratching the dirt, making it loose for killing weeds.
“And look at that!” Joe exclaimed as he had just arrived and peered into the pickup bed. “A foot pedal driven grinding wheel for sharpening knives and axes.”
“And scythes and sickles,” Larry added. “We can sure use that. But what’s this third item?” The third item was shaped like the hand cultivator, but with a smaller wheel and a chain drive coming back to some kind of mechanism mounted under a metal box.
“It’s a planter,” Poppop announced. “One you can just push by hand through the field. It makes the furrow, drops the seed and covers it all in one pass. That’ll sure save us some time.”
“Sure will,” Jeremiah replied. “Do you have different plates for it?”
“Yep,” Dad responded, “in this box here with some spacing gears too.”
“Plates? Spacing gears?” I inquired.
“The plates are the metering mechanism. Round rings of metal with holes in that catch and drop one seed at a time. The holes have to be different sizes because some seeds are large like lima beans and others are smaller like sweet corn or pea beans,” Dad explained.
“The spacing gears,” Poppop added, “change the speed at which the plates rotate, either decreasing or increasing the distance traveled between each seed drop, hence changing the distance or spacing between each seed. You don’t plant every crop in the garden with the same distance between plants. There a chart for it?”
“On the underside of the seed box lid,” Dad answered.
“Good,” Poppop responded, “look here Alyssa. The chart tells you what gear to use with which plate to get the inches between seeds that you want. You’ll see when we use it.”
“Thanks,” I said, “looking forward to it.”
“And,” Dad continued, “got one more thing in the deal.”
“What’s that?” Josh asked.
“A Ford, four-wheel drive, diesel, pickup truck.”
“Neat,” Josh responded, “just for our old coal stove?”
“The truck couldn’t heat the house,” Dad answered. “Besides, what value does a truck have when there’s no fuel to run it?”
“Tank empty?” Larry inquired.
A big smile emerged on Dad’s face and then he said, “No, full. Part of the deal. Landlord filled it with the heating oil left in the tank in the cellar for the oil burner. It’s a forty gallon tank. I figure enough to combine twelve to fifteen acres of soybeans. Sound about right, Larry?”
After a little mental calculation Larry replied, “That would be just about right. No matter, every little bit helps.”
Poppop was looking at the beans and then asked, “This all there were?”
“No,” Dad answered, “they need about a week of good weather to dry well enough to keep. These will either have to be dried more, canned or eaten. If we don’t, they’ll spoil.”
“Either way,” Poppop responded, “these need to be shelled. I’ll take them in and we can get started on them. The cooks can decide later what to do with them. You picked them pretty quickly.”
“Had help,” Dad said, “a few of the neighbors were there. We actually picked more than these. I shared them.”
“Good for you,” Poppop replied.
“Which neighbors?” I asked. “Was Marie there? Did you talk to her?”
“No, she wasn’t, sorry,” Dad said. “But next time we go, you make the trip as well. Then you’ll get to see her. Everyone else seems to be doing fine. A couple other families moved into the house, must be about eighteen people in all. They had to take our things we left behind out into the wagon shed. No problem, I had told them. Next time we go over, I figure we’ll use Brutus and a wagon. Take Mom and a few others to pick the beans. That way we have a way to bring home the beans as well as anything Mom or Jean root out of our belongings that might be useful here.”

To be continued….. Mort

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - TIME

2007-07-18T05:18:00.000-07:00

Haymaking didn’t happen without some consternation. Friday morning Jean was bound and determined to get some laundry done; the job had been neglected for nearly a week.
“Now Mother,” Harvey had said, “we have hay to make today; we need all the hands.”
“Maybe so,” Jean answered, “but you know hay drying weather is also clothes drying weather and besides that, soon all your hands will be walking round in dirty underwear. We need to get started today!”
Now Harvey didn’t rule his dairy farm as a king. On the family level, he was quick to consult Larry about farming matters and his wife as well on all matters. But with the arrival of the additional families, a new triumvirate had been formed. Harvey, Dad, and Joe collectively made the decisions. It seemed to be working so far. This being somewhat of a marital issue, it appeared Dad knew better than to interfere. Joe, on the other hand, had his own thoughts.
“It’s also time to butcher the largest hog we have. We need meat and I can’t have the butcher house full of laundry when I’m working on the hog,” he had said.
“But there’s hay to put away!” Harvey exclaimed.
“We need food,” Joe stated.
“And clean clothes,” was Jean’s response.
“And there’s two days to accomplish it all,” Dad finally interjected. “Joe, aren’t you going to roast the whole hog?”
“Yes, I was,” he answered.
“Well that you’ll do outside. You’ll only need the butcher stove to can the leftover meat. Isn’t that correct?” Dad continued.
“Yes.”
“And that you can do Saturday, instead, aren’t I right?”
“I suppose so,” Joe agreed, “if the tables aren’t being used to fold laundry when I want to go at canning.”
“If they get started right away, they should be done by dinner tomorrow. And Harvey, I believe there’s less than half of the amount of hay to put away today as we did yesterday.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Harvey answered.
“So we can do without ten or so women and girls and still get it all loaded and under roof. If we have to unload the last wagons on Saturday, then so be it,” Dad concluded.
“Then so be it,” Harvey concurred as he once again took the lead. “Mother, get started as soon as you can. Keep whomever you need. Larry and the boys will stoke the fire well so you have plenty of hot water. Joe, we’ll do the hog tomorrow. It will make a great dinner. The canning can be done in the afternoon. The women can finish folding in the house if they need to. Okay everyone?”
It was okay. The hay got put away, the laundry was done, we had a fine hog roast for Saturday dinner, the leftover got jarred in the afternoon for future use, and I guess we learned a lesson on priorities, urgency, and cooperation.
The following week the boys came up with several versions of wringers for the wash machine. They were patterned after the feed rolls on the forage harvester. These were spring loaded cylinders which pulled and guided the crop into the knives on the harvester that chopped the material fine. The rolls had serrated edges and were way too aggressive to use directly off the machine – would have shredded the wash. But they could use the drive and tension mechanism from the harvester and then replace the pair of rolls with smooth pieces of pipe. First they tried “schedule forty” plastic pipe which is about six inches in diameter, fairly heavy and is used for sewage lines both inside a home and underground. Harvey had several pieces lying around from his excavating days. The pipe being hollow, it was quite a challenge to put an end cap on the four ends that an axle could be mounted dead center so the rolls would run true. After a few tries, they had it working. They mounted a big crank to turn the wringer. Unfortunately, the pipe was way too smooth, so it would not pull the wash through; it just slipped, even after making several adjustments to the tension mechanism.
“Remember,” Grandmom said, “how the wringers years ago were made out of a semi-soft rubbery type material.”
“Yes, I believe I do remember,” Jean answered. “The boys really don’t know what they were like.” Then addressing them she added, “Could you find some sort of rubber like coating to put on the rolls or a different kind of roll?”
Aaron replied, “We looked at a lot of rolls from the farm equipment around here, and they were all too rough.”
“Suppose,” Dennis wondered, “we wrapped some of the duct tape that Bruce brought around the pipe. Would that be rough enough?”
“Maybe not initially,” Joe said, “we’d have to rough it up a bit with something like sandpaper, but then it probably would only last a few loads before wearing completely off. Worth a try though.”
They tried. He was right. Waste of tape.
Uncle Jeremiah suggested we stretch a piece of an old inner tube on the pipe and glue it fast. It was a project, trying to get the tube to just the right size so the glue would hold and the rubber wouldn’t be too loose on the pipe. But patience and perseverance won out and after a couple days of sticking to it, we had a working wringer. Finally, Barry and Dennis mounted a windshield wiper motor onto it so we wouldn’t have to crank. Great improvement, but we had to be more careful not to get our fingers caught between the wringers.
About the same time, Barry and Aaron had removed the circulator pump from Harvey’s furnace and mounted it in the line inside the house. They rigged a starter motor from Poppop’s Chevy onto it. After gearing it down, it worked fine.
“Still not sure how these motors will take the continuous use when it gets cold outside and will have to run for long periods. Nor how quickly we’ll have to replace the spent battery with a charged one,” Barry said. “If it becomes too burdensome, we’ll have to rig up another bicycle for people/pedal power.” This question, however, led to the determination as to where to put Larry and Joe’s windmill. On the porch right between the house and butcher house – that’s where we were using the most electricity and needing to have the batteries recharged.
When the windmill was up and functional there must have been a dozen batteries in line for charging at any given moment. They had built little carriers to move batteries where they were needed and we used a toy wagon to take four at a time to the barn for the lights later in the fall when we had to milk in the dark in the evening.
“You know,” Poppop said, “this reminds me of something. Before we had electric companies and wires bringing electricity to the farm, my grandfather Willis used to make his own with a generator. Gasoline was cheap and the generator was only run a few hours during the day to charge a bank of batteries that were stored in that small cellar beneath the butcher house.”
“Is that what those old electric controls in the corner of the butcher house were for?” Harvey asked.
“I think so,” Poppop answered, “remember I wasn’t around now mind you; only heard about it. Then all the lights in the house were direct current, running off the batteries in the evening. Wonder if we’ll regress to that?”
“Who knows,” was Dad’s response. “For the next several months, it might be hard to tell if we’re going forward or backward.”
At least we were going forward on the heating, laundry, and electric lighting front. But on the flour mill, I wasn’t so sure. Grandpop’s mo-ped had become a popular item when it came time to go somewhere in a hurry. The younger men could pedal it most of the time and only kick the engine into gear for the harder hills. It took very little gas. One day Larry had taken it to visit the two old flour mills in the neighborhood. The one was completely abandoned and all the milling equipment had been removed. Strike one. The other mill had been turned into a home and the current occupants were not at all agreeable to Larry’s request to look around. He tried to explain to them that we would be willing to trade for the mill if they desired or that a running mill, if they allowed us to donate to its repair, would be a valuable tool for the community as well as a source of income for them. They weren’t interested. I guess not everyone’s heart had changed. Or maybe Larry was sensed as a threat in these uncertain times. Strike two. Back to the drawing board for the boys to build our own mill.
To be continued……Mort

Stump Family Tree

2007-07-11T04:56:00.000-07:00

This week, in response to requests, and to help the readers keep track of the members of the communities, I’ve decided to list the characters in the story.

I’ll do a Stump family tree first, and then list others who have joined either the Stump community or Butch and Clare’s. – Mort

Willis Stump (Harvey’s and Dad’s great-grandfather)
-- he had two sons: Thomas, Sr. and Joel
---- Thomas, Sr. had two sons: Lester and Thomas, Jr.
------ Joe is Lester’s son
--------his wife is Sandy
----------they have two sons: Dennis and Aaron
------ Harvey is Thomas, Jr.’s son
--------his wife is Jean
----------their son is Larry
------------ Harvey also has a brother, Randall
----Harold (my Poppop) is Joel’s son
------ his wife is Myra (my Grandmom)
-------- their sons are Jeremiah (my uncle) and Dad
----------Jeremiah’s wife is Lois (my aunt)
------------they have two daughters: Amy and Lynette (my cousins)
----------Dad’s wife is Mom
------------ her parents are Grandpop and Grandma
------------ her brother is my Uncle Bruce
-------------- his wife is Kristen (my aunt)
-------------------- her mother is Leticia
---------------- they have a daughter, Jennifer and a son, Dean-my cousins
------------------Dean has a girlfriend, Vanetta
---------- their sons are Jake and Josh (my brothers)
---------- their daughters are Mel (my sister) and Alyssa-that’s ME!

- - - - also Barry, our auto mechanic, has joined us

Our neighbors at Crystal View Farm:

Butch and Clare Rorher
Ben Lukens and his wife Denise
----their sons are Dave, Clark and Ted
Lee Smith and his wife Donna
----their sons are Billy and Robbie
----their daughters are Renee, Karen, Molly and Susan
Dan Parris and his wife Julie (the teacher)
----their daughters are Tina and Leslie
----their twin sons are Blaise and Matthew
------ the elderly couple, Wayne and Joan Wolfe

To be continued….. what’s up next?....... Mort

Chap 15 - We Made Hay While the Sun Shone (conclusion)

2007-07-04T17:00:00.000-07:00

The aches and pains started even before we had eaten supper that evening. Different parts hurt on different people. For some it was backs or legs; others it was arms or shoulders. Jeremiah wished out loud that Dr. Fleming would show up, but it was too early for him to come around again. Everyone had their own remedies. Many, like Dad, just wanted a hot bath, so we kept making and carrying hot water all evening. That meant Amy, Lynette, and I had to pedal a little more than normal to keep water in the milk tank. Jenn, Dean, and Vanetta helped out by taking a few turns on the bike.
Lois was busy dispensing. Rubbing alcohol was a favorite, but she also had some analgesic cream made specifically for muscle aches. Some people just chose that stinky ointment that old people often use. A few people had chaffing in areas like their armpits or in between their legs. A little witch hazel took the sting out of that. Lois often followed that treatment up with some antibiotic ointment or Eucerin cream. The chaffing problem might get worse when we start working in the dusty, dry hay and sweating all the time. Thank goodness we all wore gloves or Lois would have been treating blisters, too.
I think everyone slept pretty well that night, but started slowly the next morning. The stiffness and soreness were more evident now, especially for Dad’s generation, but the younger ones felt it too. Dean likened it to the morning after the first practice of a new sport’s season. After all that running and using muscles you hadn’t used for a while, your body had a way of letting you know. But we got the regular chores done in good time and once again used the Brutus-pulled wagon to head to the hayfield. This time we took along every pitchfork we could find on the place.
“We have to remember to bring several back with us tonight,” Larry said, “to feed the cattle.”
When we arrived at Butch’s, his crew wasn’t too quick to join us. Definitely some of them were not accustomed to working the way we had on “Labor” Day. The job this morning was to turn the hay. With a power driven machine, it was called tedding. To start, we lined up all 35 people along the end of the field, each with either a pitchfork or a couple with Poppop’s rakes. The purpose was to get the partially wilted hay up off the ground, spread it apart, knock the dew off, and hopefully have it end up with the wettest stalks of hay on top for the sun to work at.
In the beginning we watched as Dad, Harvey, Larry, Jake, and Josh demonstrated. Each had their own style. Dad just took a forkful and flipped it over to expose the wet hay underneath. Harvey took every forkful and shook it apart. Larry would hold the fork backward and rake the hay toward him like an oar, leaving it fluffed up. Josh tended to lift every forkful waist high, and then fling it a far as he could throw it, spreading it in a wide pattern. Jake just kept flailing from side to side, scattering the hay in both directions.
I’m sure one way might have been better than another, but Dad said, “Just so we get it distributed and setting up so the air can flow through it. The tricky part is not to step on it after it’s been fluffed.” Therefore, once we were away from the end of the field, it was better if we moved backward, facing the hay we had already turned. We soon caught on – everyone using their own style. It was fun; throwing hay all over the place - had to be careful though, not to get too close to the person next to you. We also found out how poorly we had cut some of the hay the day before. Often, when I’d grab a forkful, some of the individual stalks were not completely severed. It then took a little effort to rip them free.
Our motion took us away from the barn and our water, though. In about an hour and a half we had reached the halfway mark in the field. “Time for water everyone,” Harvey yelled, “let’s take a break.” After drinking, we walked all the way to the back end of the field and worked toward the barn. It gave us a more positive feeling – psychologically - always moving toward our goal. We were done before dinner.
“Looks good,” Larry said, “now let’s mow a bit more, before we eat. What do you think, Pop?”
“Grab the scythes,” was Harvey’s answer. We mowed about an hour, until Clare called us in for dinner. We didn’t need to eat in the hot sun today. She had a tremendous pot of vegetable soup on her outside cook fire, made with the pork from Roger. It had plenty of broth and tons of vegetables, many that Poppop had brought up that morning. After the filling meal, cool drinks, and a short rest, out we went to mow some more.
When we had about six acres mown (about ¾ of what we mowed the day before), Harvey said, “Let’s pack it in. We’ve a little work to do in the barn for tomorrow.”
You see baled hay in its comparatively compact package with twine for handles, can be carried fairly easily to the horses or cattle that you’re feeding. Loose hay’s a bit more difficult, so Harvey needed to find a spot in the barn where it would be both easy to unload from the wagons and convenient to fork down a hole in the barn floor near where the horses were fed. Fortunately, Butch’s barn, like Harvey’s, was of the old style that had two stories – a lower level, we called the bottom of the barn, where the animals were housed, and an upper level, we called the top of the barn, where hay, grain and equipment were stored. In different locations around the top of the barn, holes were left in the floor to drop feed down to the animals below. We called the holes hay holes. To some extent they were dangerous, generally uncovered most of the time. There were few kids raised on a farm that hadn’t fallen through one sometime in their life. I was no exception. Heck, sometimes we jumped on purpose, if there was something soft to land on. The vintage barn that Butch had was a throwback, specifically designed for the handling of loose hay and straw, so he had no problem choosing a spot to store the hay we were to bring in the next day. We only needed to clean up about a half an hour to make the site ready.
Wednesday was the big day - eight acres of hay to bring in - another six laying. The weather appeared like it was going to cooperate – wind out of the west, blowing early in the morning, with low humidity. There was no dew left on the hay by the time we reached the fields. First we turned the hay we had mown on Tuesday, and then jumped to our original eight acre patch.
Now Poppop’s rakes came into play. Because it was mown earlier, the hay around the outside of the field was the driest. In the middle of the field, it had more moisture; the phrase we used to describe it was “it was tough” or “not fit” (for harvesting). In the corner of the field, the eight people with the rakes started shoulder to shoulder, pulling about ten feet of the scattered hay toward them – maybe each person two rake widths wide. That way they took about a 40 foot swath down the side of the field. They weren’t fussy about it; just pulled the hay together, and then stepped over it and took another ten feet. Meanwhile, the rest of us with pitchforks, gathered any hay missed by the rakes and formed it into a continuous fluffy pile, so that the drying air could flow through it. We also kept an eye out for any really tough hay and make sure that it was well off the ground, preferably right on the top of the windrow so the sun could hit it directly.
“You know,” Dad said, “for forty-five years I’ve been calling these rows of hay, that we made with machines, windrows, without giving much thought to why. Now that I’m making them by hand, I can understand.”
“It’s a row of hay, set up so the wind can go through,” I offered.
“You got it,” he answered.
From the time we started raking, it would probably take about four or five hours of good drying to be fit enough to safely store in the barn. It was well past dinner time when we had the whole field raked up.
“No problem,” Dad had said, “it might be pretty late until we quit up here this evening; supper might be late, too.”
After dinner the hay wasn’t as dry as Harvey and Butch would have liked it. “Always a trick,” Harvey told the group. “You want to have very dry hay on the bottom of the pile in the barn - makes less chance of spoilage. Still you want to get started as soon as you can, so you can finish before running out of daylight.”
Just because we couldn’t start loading, didn’t mean there wasn’t work to do. Back to field #2 we went – the one we had mowed six acres of on Tuesday.
“Let’s mow some more,” Harvey directed. “It’ll give us hay to put away Friday. Why should we waste this good weather?” For hay making – yes, good weather; Harvey had hit it. For working – today was the hottest so far this week. People’s attire had changed somewhat, too. There were a lot more long sleeves, wide brimmed hats, and handkerchiefs tied around some necks. A few people had been sunburned the last couple afternoons. I admired the men who grabbed the scythes. They ached already and with a lot more work to do today, common sense might have told them to rest and store up some energy for the looming tasks ahead. But soon the scythes and sickles were swinging away and more hay was being knocked down.
An hour later, with about another two acres cut, Harvey said, “Good enough, let’s start loading.” We all got a fresh drink of water, set a little spell, and then Harvey and Butch headed into the field. Each had a team of horses with a wagon. About 15 people climbed aboard Harvey’s and went to the far end of the field. Butch stopped at the near end. We reversed the roles we had the day before. Today the men had both the pitchforks and the meat of the job. They plunged their forks into the piles of hay and then “pitched” it onto the wagon. As the pile increased, a couple boys climbed onto the wagon to “pitch” the hay higher and get as full a load as possible.
This time, I had a rake, and was relegated to gathering together the last few stalks of hay that the “pitchers” had left behind. The process really didn’t take too long – there were four of us raking and at least a dozen with pitchforks. We actually had to stay out of each other’s way. Before the wagon was full, Clare and Ben came out with the third team and an empty wagon. The switch was easy, but this second load would take much longer to fill, for the eight strongest loaders went back to the barn with Butch to unload the first wagon.
“Just pace yourselves,” Dad said. “From the looks of it, you’re all getting the knack of it.” I watched Butch and company as they neared the barn. They drove the wagon straight into the barn, close enough to where Butch wanted the hay piled and allowing enough room to unhitch the horses from the wagon, wiggle around it, and bring the team out of the barn to yet another empty wagon. They hitched it up, and then Butch drove it right past us toward Harvey’s crew. By the time Butch reached them, their wagon was full; a switch was made and back came Butch with another full load and four more men to help unload it. When he reached the barn the first wagon was empty – another switch and back to the field. What planning. Load after load, teams switching wagons, workers switching tasks. I even tried tossing hay onto the wagon for a spell.
We didn’t work non-stop. A couple times we’d just sit in the shade a few minutes. There were water breaks for the horses and drink breaks for us. Clare had prepared a concoction that was to be like Gatorade, that her family had used long before Gatorade was invented. It was water flavored with lemon juice, sweetened with honey, and some vinegar and a little salt added. It was OK, I’m no fan of vinegar, but it was supposed to keep our electrolytes balanced and provide us with stamina and energy. Must have worked: we just kept going. The job was getting done.
By late afternoon, six of the unloaders left for Harvey’s for milking chores, slowing things up a bit. But I believe we only had two loads of hay left laying in the field. An hour later, the field was clean with all four wagons full.
Inside the barn, the task was getting tougher. The first loads of hay were easily thrown down off the wagon onto the floor. Now, however the hay had to be thrown up for the pile was over eight feet high. Then others standing on the pile threw the hay even higher. I finally got to help in the barn and out of the sun, but now I realized another purpose for those long sleeved shirts and handkerchiefs – the dust. And even though I thought it was hot outside, inside it was stifling. The heat collected under the roof of the barn and the higher the pile of hay grew, the hotter it got. No wonder the men were rotating in and out of the barn all day – another benefit to numbers.
It went pretty fast though, what with two dozen plus forks in the barn at the same time. Right after we started the second to last load, Josh, Jake, and Uncle Jeremiah came back from milking.
“Is it that late?” Dad asked, “that you guys are finished with the milking already?”
“We milked our cows,” Josh said, “then Larry said he, Joe and Harvey could clean-up and feed all the animals. We needed to bring Brutus back, to haul everyone home and besides, we figured you were wearing out.”
“Naw, we’re still in great shape,” Butch huffed. “But appreciate it just the same. Why don’t you two young guys climb up in the pile?”
When the wagon was empty, Ben said, “Fourteen down, one to go.”
“We did fifteen loads today?” Mel asked.
“Yep,” Ben answered, “time flies when you’re having fun.”
Uncle Jeremiah and I got the last forkfuls of hay on the wagon. He stuck his fork into the final remnant, lifted it up and said, “There it is! That’s what I’ve been looking for all afternoon!”
“Did you lose something?” I asked gullibly. “What were you looking for?”
“The last forkful!” he laughed along with everyone else. It was an old joke and I fell for it, but I vowed not to let it happen again.
“The wagons can stay where they are until tomorrow,” Butch announced. “Bring my horses to the front of the barn so we can take off their harnesses, feed them and loose them in the pasture.”
That finished, we started climbing on board the wagon hitched to Brutus for the trip home when Josh said, “Wait! There’s something I need to do, yet.” He ran across the pasture, took off his shoes and leaped into Harvey’s pond. Didn’t take long for the rest of us to follow suit. None of us stayed in very long, however. Harvey’s pond was only a couple degrees warmer than spring water. Most of us jumped in, screamed, and popped right out again. Cooled us off though, and washed off the dust, sweat, and grime of a day’s hard work.
We repeated that day’s hard work on Thursday and Friday, then several more times in the ensuing weeks. A few more acres at Butch’s farm, and then several acres at Harvey’s other rented farm; that hay we brought home for Harvey’s animals. In all, it gave a nice pile of hay in the two barns. Mission accomplished; we made hay while the sun shone.

To be continued……. Mort

Break in the action

2007-06-27T10:24:00.000-07:00

I decided to take a break in the story this week to broach two subjects.
First, in conversation with someone who read quite a bit of this story it was relayed to me that the situation I describe after the collapse would never occur. This person said that the way our society is today, we would simply kill each other for food. So my story should be about how people with food have to defend themselves from the heathen marauders. While I can't rule out this possibility, my heart says (as you probably sense in my writings) that we would overcome those attitudes. This person said there would be a group of people who had food who say, "it's ours and we're not sharing with anybody" and a group of people who have no food and say, "we need food , but no one will share it with us." Perhaps this is realism, but by now you know that I'm not a realist, but an idealist. I would like to see people change to the point where those without would say, "We need food, who will share some?" And those with would say, "We have food, who would like some?" Oversimplification, I guess. None-the-less, it's an attitude that needs to change for the sake of survival. My sincere hope is that my writing changes some hearts. Could I have feedback on this? (which brings me to #2)
Second, I receive little feedback. I do not know for sure if it's because no one is reading "Are You Ready" or if there is some glitch that does not allow readers' e-mails to come through. It is getting to the point that I feel I'm wasting my time, if no one is reading Alyssa's story. If you do read the story, please let my know. I need the encouragement. I do this for you.
By the way, I do have the end of chapter 15 written and a good portion of chapter 16.
To be continued................Mort

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - We Made Hay While The Sun Shone (cont)

2007-06-21T05:48:00.000-07:00

Sunday morning was beautiful, sunny and breezy, still a tad muggy though, wind from the southeast. Dad and I met up with Harvey in the barn. “Rain’s over!” I announced. “Guess we’ll be mowing hay tomorrow.”
“We might be mowing hay tomorrow,” Harvey responded, “but the rain isn’t quite over. Wind’s still the wrong way. It will pump moist air in from the ocean. Besides, the old saying is, ‘When a rain stops during the night, it’s not finished raining’. It will rain today again.”
“You believe that, Dad?” I asked.
“Harvey’s dad believed it,” he answered.
“So did my Uncle Lester and your great-grandfather,” Harvey added. “It held out for them, many, many times.”
“All the times?” I quizzed.
“Well, probably not,” Dad replied, “but just like every other old saying, every time it did hold out, that built up the credibility of the saying. And when it didn’t hold out… well, that was kinda forgotten.”
Harvey chuckled, and then added, “I reckon your Dad’s right, but now mind you, the corollary isn’t true though.”
“Huh?” I went.
Dad explained, “what’s not true is the opposite: when a rain stops during the day, it is finished raining.”
“Right,” Harvey agreed, “then it can go either way.”
“I’m still confused,” I said.
“So, just watch and learn,” Dad exhorted. “Later today we’ll see who’s right.”
We had a little church service at Poppop’s house just before noon, and then, sure enough, a little thundershower came through about midway through the afternoon. Why are these old guys always right? The wind had shifted to a northeast one and by evening from the north.
“Now we’re cooking,” Harvey announced. “I’ll make the final call tomorrow morning, but every one get a good nights rest; I suspect we’ll go at the hay tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow’s Labor Day,” Amy lamented, “won’t we be having a picnic?”
“That’s right sweetie,” Uncle Jeremiah answered. “Tomorrow is Labor Day, and that’s what we’re going to do. And if you call the fine meal that Sandy and Jean will prepare and we’ll eat under the trees next to the hayfield a picnic, then, yep, we’re having one of those too.”
The wind blew all night. By morning it was from the northwest. “That’s the ticket,” Harvey gave the word. “Everyone eat a good breakfast, there’s a lot of work to do today.” Larry almost wanted to skip breakfast, so anxious he was to drive tractor again. “Let the air do its work a little, first,” Harvey told him. “It’s drying the grass and the ground. Everything will go better as the fields dry out.”
With all the cattle taken care of, Brutus was hitched to the wagon of tools and before we could all pile on, Larry started up his tractor and up the road with the mower he went. He was once more in his element. I believe everyone felt happy for him. Before we left, Mom brought out a dozen bonnets she and Jean had made from some old pillowcases that we had plenty of. When they found the time to sew them by hand, I had no idea.
“Everyone keep your head covered,” she ordered. “That’s still a summer sun out there.” Some of the men and boys had straw hats. Others had baseball caps like I wore. The women who weren’t raised working outside on a farm weren’t used to wearing hats, but no one needed sunburn either, so they dutifully followed Mom’s order. In spite of the hot temperature, several of our crew wore loose fitting long sleeved shirts, too, to keep our arms from burning.
When we got to Crystal View farm, we stopped at the water trough and filled up a few water jugs. Mom stayed at the house with Clare to watch the younger children as Donna Smith and Julie the teacher headed to the field with the rest of their families. Poppop drove Brutus about halfway down the edge of the field and unhooked the wagon, then tied him in the shade of the meadow near the creek. By then, Larry had mowed three times around the field and had parked the tractor. This gave us plenty of room to work. He also said the outside of a field is usually the hardest to dry, so it received a head start, plus the grass that had been mowed with the machine was conditioned or crimped by it. That would help it dry faster.
We split into four groups, headed by Harvey, Joe, Jeremiah, and Larry. Each group went to a different corner, so we wouldn’t get in each other’s way. Adding Butch’s tools to the stockpile provided one or two scythes and three or four sickles, for a total of five cutting implements per group. There were seven or eight workers in each group, so there were always two or three waiting in the wings to spell someone, or to run for water if we needed it. I was in Jeremiah’s group with Ben and his wife, Denise, one of their sons, Clark, Dad and Robbie. Everyone started with fervor with the men manning the scythes. It looked pretty awkward at first; only a few had ever used a scythe. It has a long handle with about a three foot blade. It works best with a long sweeping motion. Once they got the hang of it, they could really knock a lot of hay down, but we with the sickles learned to stay out of their way. You see a sickle only has a short handle and blade, so you have to bend over and get close to your work. We didn’t need our noses cut off by a scythe, so we kept our distance. In due time, as the mowers progressed down the edge of the mowed crop, the distance between us lengthened, decreasing the danger factor. As most of us were right handed and because scythes were built that way, the motion was always right to left. Because you wanted to pull the fresh cut hay away from the hay that was still standing, we kept migrating to our left or clockwise around the field. Even though we had started at the corners, we were soon strung out all around the outside of the unmown portion of the field.
While we were mowing it gave a lot of time for talking, even singing. In Larry’s group I heard Mel, Amy and Lynette singing some pop songs, but also a couple hymns. Uncle Bruce’s family was in that group and they were just singing right along. Soon it spread over the whole field for part of the morning.
It was Robbie who did the most talking. First, it was just chit-chat about the food or the cows. Did we still have cocoa puffs? But then his inquiries turned toward my cousin, Jennifer. Jenn and Vanetta both sort of stood out in the crowd. They weren’t dressed like farm girls, but then again, neither were half the other young women in the crew that day. Both had long well-kept hair and very light, smooth complexions. I wondered how long they stay that way after three or four days of hay making.
“Who is she?” Robbie asked.
“My Mom’s brother’s daughter,” I answered. “She’s my cousin, Jennifer.”
“Jennifer…..” he oozed, “a beautiful name for a beautiful girl.”
“What?” I responded.
“Just what I said,” Robbie countered, “she’s hot!”
“We’re all hot today,” I wisecracked back.
“I really must get to know her.”
“Yeah right, and there’s a lot of hot air around here, too,” I retorted. “Do you know how old she is?”
“Was just about to ask.”
“Thirteen. She’ll be fourteen next week.”
“Aaaah, just right,” Robbie spoke like he was in a dream world.
“Get real,” I countered, “she’d be going to ninth grade. We’re only going to seventh.”
“No matter, ain’t no school anyway,” he said. “Yeah, you really have to introduce us.” Now I didn’t think that Robbie was so dense that he couldn’t sense my tone, so evidently, he being enthralled with Jenn was affecting his judgment. He still had the capability of reading the scowl on my face, however, for then he added, “Not that she compares to you.”
“Not that she what?!” I blurted out.
“You know, stacks up to you.”
“What, are we horses on the auction block, now?” I jawed.
Maybe, just maybe, Robbie was coming to his senses. He kinda stuttered a little and even thought a little before he finally said, “What I mean is… you see…. you don’t know….I thought… Well I guess… what I’m trying to say is that I know you. And you’re special. I know what’s inside you, and I like what’s in there. You’re tough and smart. Usually pleasant and very trustworthy and loyal.” (I felt like a boy scout.) “I like that you love animals, how hard you work, respect others and that you’re easy to talk to. I only see the outside of your cousin. Don’t know what’s inside her. Don’t even know if she has a brain. So what if she is a fox? Except she has that stupid bonnet on. You know you do look really good in that baseball cap; always thought you did. I should at least get to know her, though. I should be fair about it. Oh, forget it….. I’m an idiot….. and I talk too much.”
“Now that’s the first smart thing you’ve said,” I answered. “Don’t worry; you’ll get to talk to her.” Time would tell.
Wielding that sickle was both tedious and tiring. I was always glad to hand it off to Robbie or Denise. Whenever we were at the end of the field nearest to Harvey’s water trough, we’d go for water and carry jugs back for the men, who just kept rotating the swinging of those scythes and knocking down hay. That was how the men were spelled – just hand off their hay machine whenever they needed to. It was a chance for a drink, a bathroom break in the cornfield that ran alongside the hayfield, or to just plop down on the fresh mown grass for a rest.
While we were mowing, Butch and Poppop took one of Butch’s team of horses down to Harvey’s to bring up another wagon. On the trip back, they brought Lois, Grandmom, and Jean with our picnic. Would it be hot dogs, potato chips and cold soda? No, but they really did pretty well. Of course, the cold drink was milk – couldn’t escape that. They did surprise us though by using some of our dry packaged and canned food to make a monster macaroni salad that had a few cans of spam cut into it. With our cream, some mustard and some of the sugar Uncle Bruce had bought they created a pretty decent salad dressing. It was garnished with bits of onion and several handfuls of broccoli scrounged from Poppop’s garden. The “picnic” was topped off by the last watermelon we had bartered from Titus.
The afternoon went pretty quickly. I think by 3:00 PM we had the whole field mowed. Harvey said the field was about eight acres and would probably have yielded five to six hundred bales if we would bale it with a mechanical baler. That didn’t sound like a lot until Butch pointed out that an amount like that would feed his six horses for four months. That meant we’d only have to harvest the same amount two more times to provide a year’s supply. Of course, that wasn’t enough to feed all the cattle, but it gave some perspective to our labor; made it all appear worthwhile.
Before we loaded up for home, Larry hopped on his tractor and mowed three times around the outside of another hayfield on the other side of the cornfield.
“More to mow tomorrow?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Harvey answered, “just getting a head start, in case the weather still looks promising. That field is even bigger, so I wouldn’t want to mow all of it. I need to get a feel on how much time it takes us to put away the hay we’ve already mown.”

To be continued……Is that all there is to haymaking? Mort

Chapter Fifteen - We Made Hay While The Sun Shone

2007-06-13T04:38:00.000-07:00

I had assumed the goods Uncle Bruce’s family brought were personal effects, mostly clothing, toiletries, maybe some food or tools. But as we started unloading and inventorying them to their proper location in the kitchen, we found it to be much more than that. We started yanking clothing that was stuffed into the car and uncovered two cartons of toilet paper, each with 72 rolls in. Okay, we had figured out how to do without it, but it would sure be nice to have some in the meantime. Some of the other items came in cartons also. They had cartons of toothpaste, shampoo, Clorox, laundry soap, matches, and duct tape. We found fishing tackle and line, 20 packs of sewing needles, and maybe 50 spools of thread. They had a couple wood saws and axes. It was great, for other than the soap, these were all things that we would have difficulty manufacturing.
In addition, there were a dozen new bicycle inner tubes, four new bicycle tires, and a box of tire repair kits, plus a 12-volt air compressor. We were not using much equipment with rubber tires like we would have with a steady supply of fuel, but we did use bicycles and wagons and boy, would those repair kits come in handy. There were no tire repair shops to take flats to. We even came across two of those flashlights/radio combos. They were the kind you wound up to charge the batteries, so you could keep them charged without electricity. They had some replacement batteries for them and a box of regular “D” cell flashlight batteries. Even if we couldn’t depend on them forever, it would still be nice to have them as the days got shorter.
Of course, they managed to bring us some food, too – canned fruit and canned beans. But not a few cans – a few boxes, maybe 70 to 80 cans. There were six cans of black pepper and even 50 pounds of flour. That would bring joy to the bakers in the bunch, for the boys still hadn’t perfected a working flour mill. And to go with the flour, they had brought twelve, ten pound bags of sugar. Sweet!
Everything had been jammed into the two cars with their clothing, shoes and boots filling in the crevices. I think we found about 30 dozen socks - men’s, women’s, kid’s, brand new, still in the plastic packages. They were used to top off boxes that weren’t quite full, inside of boots and shoes, and stuffed into what would have been any empty space in the load. Near the end, we found three boxes of additional treasures – medical supplies. They contained Epson salts, Kaopectate, Preparation H, Motrin, Midol, Maalox, Benadryl, calamine lotion, antibiotic cream, cotton swabs, band-aids, surgical tape, and gauze pads. Not just one or two bottles or packs of each, now mind you, but one or two boxes of each; six, ten, fifteen or more of some of the items. There was a carton of Vicks Vapor-rub, witch hazel, cold tablets, zinc lozenges, vitamin C, lycopene, and other assorted multi-vitamins. I think we tripled the amount of medicine in Lois’s dispensary.
Finally, under the seats, we uncovered about 75 boxes of shotgun shells and a small cache of silver coins, including a few gold coins and a stack of Euros. Questions abounded. Where did you get all this stuff? Why did you buy that? How did you get the gold? You don’t even own a shotgun; why the ammunition? After supper, we started getting answers.
“The cars full of stuff,” Bruce responded, “originally were accumulated because I heeded some warnings and advice before the collapse. After the collapse, doing some careful and calculated bartering produced the modified bounty that we unloaded this afternoon. If you want, I can relate what happen between then and now?”
“Please do,” said Grandpop.
“Being in the banking business, I could easily see things happening. We’d look at indexes and charts and then predict what was coming down the road. Usually the quirks in those charts or graphs were dismissed as anomalies and considered nothing to worry about. The experts in both the finance industry and the government said, ‘Everything will be fine’. But there were things occurring that charts, graphs, and indexes couldn’t show us. We had to read people – people whose wages didn’t even come close to meeting their financial needs – people who had trouble paying their rent or mortgages. Some were trying to refinance, some were going through the process of foreclosure, or had started to file for bankruptcy. As fuel and food prices soared, people needed to use credit just to pay for those basic needs. And we just kept providing it; it was our biggest mistake. Or perhaps listening to the Federal Reserve was our biggest. We just did what they wanted – ‘Provide more credit,’ they told us – ‘That will pull us through,’ they said – ‘It will stop inflation,’ were their lies. Hell, it made it worse.” Bruce concluded.
“So what really is inflation, anyway?” Jake asked.
“Depends who you listen to,” Bruce answered, “what do all of you think?”
“When prices go up,” Harvey replied.
“And the dollar can’t buy what it used to,” Sandy added.
“When the government puts more money into the system,” Joe said.
“But are the products worth more or the dollars worth less?” Dennis asked.
“Products have the same value, so the dollar must be worth less,” Aaron said.
“Well, I guess it’s all those things,” Bruce responded. “Maybe the best functional definition is when too much of a currency is infused into an economy compared to the value of the goods in that economy. And our government doesn’t even have to ‘print the money’, like some people would say. They just had to expand credit. Heck they had to, so there would be money there for them to loan, too, beings they were always spending money they didn’t have.”
“What actually happened, like I mentioned before, was that families needed more and more money to meet their obligations. At the bank’s end, this is what we saw: First saving’s accounts were closed, and then insurance policies and CD’s cashed in. Next stocks, bonds, and mutual fund shares were sold. U.S. saving’s bonds were redeemed, which by the way, really put extra pressure on the feds. As people’s assets were reduced, they started to use credit, which many had already been doing.”
“What did everyone need the money for?” Lynette wondered
“Why, what did all of you need money for the last six months?” Bruce countered.
“Seed and fertilizer,” Larry said.
“Food and fuel,” said Jean.
“Energy,” Dad answered, “our electric company received an 8% rate increase last January.”
“But none of us got an 8% wage increase!” interjected Jeremiah.
“Nor for the 50% that gasoline had gone up,” Barry added.
“Nor the extra for medical bills and health insurance,” Lois chimed in.
“Nor for the tax increases,” Poppop said.
“Right,” retorted Bruce, “but what really did us in, discounting the war in the Middle East and China’s play, was when the banks were forced to discontinue credit to everyone, including our own federal government. Then when the feds asked foreign banks to extend credit, they just told us to kiss off. Pow – no money supply – that’s when everything stopped and got us to this point. Now here’s the kicker – not everyone needed the money for the present – many were cashing in for the future.”
“The future that is now,” Dad caught on, “you were one of them.”
“Yep,” Bruce agreed, “and some of you did, too. But just the few of us are not responsible for this mess. Millions of others did the same thing. In my case, I cashed in my savings, secured some Euros, and bought food, ammunition, and most of those other goods you saw earlier. Some of the goods you saw I traded for. That’s were I got the gold and silver coins, the air compressor and some of the batteries. We had a lot more food that we traded to our neighbors and some that we left behind for them. I even had more ammunition; some of it I traded for goods. I also used food to barter for gasoline to make sure we had enough to make the trip to retrieve Leticia.”
“Yes, Leticia,” Mom quizzed, “you said you would tell us about her experience.”
Kristen started it. “Most of you probably don’t know, but my mother was city born and city raised. After my father died, we tried unsuccessfully to get her to move up closer to us. As you noticed earlier today, she has a mind of her own and would not leave. She was doing well now mind you – had a nice apartment and a very dependable roommate. The last time we visited her in the beginning of August we pleaded with her to come back with us; all to no avail. We called her every day, and even the last time the phones worked, she still said everything was fine and insisted she stay. When the electricity went out, things were chaotic at home: people coming and going; uncertainties; neighbors in need. Finally, Friday a week ago, we knew someone had to go for her.”
“Deciding who should go was the first issue,” Bruce continued. “I thought it was too dangerous for Kristen to go.”
“Yet we didn’t know if Leticia would listen to Bruce alone,” Kristen added.
“Also, I didn’t like the idea of leaving Kristen behind, unless Dean would also stay to watch out for her, Jenn, and Vanetta,” Bruce said.
“Plus, I’d have been worried sick if they would have left me behind,” Kristen said. “But in the end, we decided to let the men go. We had solid neighbors who would stay with us, support me, and keep the neighborhood safe. As they drove away, I cried, thinking I might never see them again. I’ll let Bruce tell you about the trip.”
“Well the best thing about it was the result. That you know – we rescued Leticia. Driving was terrible. We wanted to get an early start and couldn’t sleep anyway, so we left in the dark of the morning. The moon was waxing gibbous; gave us light almost till the time the sun started coming through the clouds. We needed it. There were no street lights, no billboards shining, no stores lit up, and no traffic signals. I mean our headlights worked; we could see. And we needed to. Every road we traveled had obstacles. There were abandoned cars and trucks, including police cars and ambulances. Run out of gas I guess - a lot were in the middle of the road. There were accidents that had never been cleared away, some with wires down, that we had to drive onto the medial strip or shoulder to get around. Least we didn’t have to be concerned about live wires. Traffic wasn’t a problem though. We might have driven half-way there, about 25 miles, before we saw another moving vehicle. By the time we got to the city limits, it was full light and we started seeing more people on the sidewalks. Some weren’t moving. That kept us sober. Part of me wanted to stop and check on them, but it was way too risky. From the living we sure got some strange looks; looks that made us not want to stop and fraternize with them either. But stop we had to when we reached Leticia’s apartment.”
Dean took over. “That created a dilemma,” he said. “Dad didn’t want to leave me alone with the car. I didn’t want him to go into the apartment alone. Didn’t know what each other might encounter. It was about nine o’clock; we just sat there and started praying, asking God what we should do?”
“And I was praying, too,” Kristen inserted. “Almost the whole time they were gone. But about nine, I got this feeling that they really needed something. I gathered Jenn, Vanetta and a few of the neighbors, held hands and prayed. After a few minutes, I had a peaceful feeling come over me, so we went back to our business.”
“Bout that time,” Bruce continued, “we looked up and saw a gang of youth approaching our van. Now what should we do? Drive away? Sit tight? As they neared, the apprehension increased. ‘Does that one have a gun?’ I asked Dean. He didn’t think so, but then he said, ‘I think one’s a priest.’ And sure enough, one was. Well, at least one was dressed like a priest. What if it was a ruse? One quick prayer later, I decided I’d have to trust Jesus with the situation. The leader positioned himself to the front of the group, came to the driver’s window, signaled for me to put down the window and asked if there was anyway they could help us.”
“I told them they could indeed, that my mother-in-law lived in this apartment building and would they give us a hand. Of course they would was the answer. ‘These are good boys,’ the priest answered. ‘Jose and Elmadeo will watch the car, while I and the others accompany you.’ As the elevator was useless, we took the three flights of stairs to Leticia’s apartment. The door was locked. Fortunately, Kristen had given me an extra key that her mother had given her. We arrived none too soon. Leticia sat in her chair, half asleep, half awake, with an empty water bottle in her lap. Her clothing was soaked with perspiration. We quickly gave her some water that Dean had carried in. And then we opened the windows and let some fresh air in. Her roommate was no where to be found.”
“There was an open pack of cookies on the kitchen counter. She was able to eat a couple and then shortly regained her strength. She was in no position to argue about whether to stay or not. After getting her into some dry clothing, the boys carried her and her walker down the steps to the van. We had two boxes of food inside the van that Dean offered to the youth for their assistance. We also had several empty boxes along that the boys brought back up the steps so I could pack some of Leticia’s things. I was most concerned about her medicines, so I cleaned everything out of the medicine cabinet and off her dresser top. Found some on the kitchen counter, too. Not knowing what clothing she might need the most, we just carried her dresser drawers out intact, piling clothing and shoes from the closet on top. The van was getting pretty full and there were still things in the apartment we could have used, but so could others. I gave the key to the priest and told him to use the contents for anyone that had the need, especially if the roommate returned.”
“We thanked them and wished them luck as we headed for home. The priest told us that we’ve done them a favor, too. He realized there might be other people in the same situation as Leticia was. Just in case there were, he and his boys would search the rest of the building and others in the neighborhood.”
“On the way back, Leticia told us her roommate had gone out Wednesday in search of water. She had never returned. I feel the worst may have happened. We got out of the city as quickly as we could and made it home by three in the afternoon with no problems - truly a blessing from God,” Bruce concluded.
There wasn’t a dry eye in the butcher house. Nor was it dry outside either. All through Bruce’s tale we heard rumbling and saw flashes of lightning outside. Just before Bruce finished, a heavy downpour had started. Grandpop said, “God certainly is wonderful. We’re blessed by Leticia’s rescue and your return to us. Your mother and I were worried about you. We’re blessed by having a place where we can feel safe, have water and food. We’ve Harvey as well as God to thank for that.”
“Thank God,” Harvey said.
Grandpop agreed, “Yes, thank God, and also for the rain and the crops; and that my son had the foresight to accumulate and bring us all these wonderful goods.”
“I just made hay while the sun shone,” Bruce replied.
“Yes,” replied Harvey, “I guess that’s what it was. And that’s also what we have to do … as soon as this rainy spell ends.”
That was our cue to get to bed. It only poured a few minutes and then slowed to a gentle rain; slow enough to head to the house without getting drenched. We were getting a houseful. Jenn and Vanetta had squeezed into my room. Leticia, Kristen and Bruce were set up in the living room. Dean stayed with my brothers somewhere in Harvey’s house. I didn’t sleep real well that night, thinking about the things that were said, wondering if something like that could happen here, and planning hay making in my mind. I’m sure Harvey was too. I should have been able to sleep, though. The rain had cooled things off quite a bit and the steady dripping and easy breeze sounded so peaceful. I just lay there and took it in. I guess around midnight it stopped raining altogether and I fell asleep.

To be continued…. Finally time for mowing? Mort

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - REUNION (cont)

2007-06-06T04:59:00.000-07:00

As things appeared ready as far as equipment was concerned, we headed back to the butcher house to see how the rest were doing finishing up that project. We looked down the road and noticed a mini-van approaching with its rear bumper darn near dragging on the road. It looked like the van my Mom’s brother, my Uncle Bruce had. Sure enough, as it pulled into the driveway we spotted Bruce as the driver, with Aunt Kristen by his side and my cousin Jennifer and an elderly lady in the back seat. There was barely any room for her. The van was packed solid with boxes and clothing and with mattresses and bicycles tied on the roof. “More things,” I muttered to myself.
“Quick Alyssa!” Dad exclaimed, “get your mother, Grandma and Grandpop. These arrivals are going to make them happy.” Mom came running out; my grandparents a bit more slowly, followed by most of the others. There was hugging and kissing and sobbing and crying and praising God. Then the questions started.
“Where’s Dean?” Mom asked.
“About two miles down the road,” Bruce answered. “He’s with his girlfriend, Vanetta. They ran out of gas. We toyed with siphoning some from our van, but we had very little also. Thought it was better to make sure that at least one of us would get here for help. Do you have a pickup with enough gas to go and retrieve them and everything we have loaded in his car? It’s also packed to the gills.”
“No need to use a truck,” Dad said. “Let’s bring the whole car back; we can use the car parts as well, so we’ll just take Brutus down with a few of the boys. He can pull the car here while the others can help push up some of the grades.”
“Could they go as soon as possible?” Bruce asked. “I hate leaving them there alone and Kristen’s surely worried about them.” That struck me as odd. My Aunt Kristen always impressed me as a strong, take charge, doesn’t let anything bother her individual. And my cousin Dean, why he was as strong as they come. He had just finished his senior year in high school where he had lettered in three sports. I couldn’t imagine him not being able to deal with any circumstances that might occur. On the other hand, Vanetta, who I had only met a few times, appeared quite timid. I could see her being a bit frightened stranded in an unfamiliar place and not knowing for how long. Grandpop read his son’s request differently though.
“Is trouble following you?” he asked.
“Not imminently,” Bruce replied, “and really none that we could see; just been hearing a lot of stories in our travels.” Bruce didn’t need to say more. Jake grabbed the nearest bicycle and headed down the road, followed by Dennis.
“Be careful!” Mom yelled after them, as Josh ran to the pasture to get Brutus. At the same time Dad headed to the equipment shed and brought back some of the rope we braided for a tow rope. Shortly thereafter, Larry came out of Poppop’s house with two shotguns that he handed to Dad. When he and Josh were astride Brutus, Dad gave them the weapons and bid them haste.
“You be careful, too,” Dad advised them, “and use your best judgment.” He turned to Bruce and Kristen and offered, “Don’t worry. Those boys can handle anything. They’ll all be fine and back in no time.”
Still sensing fear in Kristen’s and Jennifer’s eyes and uncertainty in Bruce’s he added, “If you really feel the need, you could take the moped and join them, but I advise you not to. You look tired and stressed out. Just take a breather and relax. Let’s sit in the shade. How about a cool drink?”
“Sure could use a cold beer,” Bruce answered.
“Sorry, none cold,” Dad replied. “And we’re really saving anything canned for future needs. We’ve fresh spring water.”
“Actually,” Mom interjected, “Jean made some mint tea this morning, if you need more than water.”
“Iced tea?” Aunt Kristen inquired.
“Course not, we’ve no ice,” Mom responded. “Spring temperature cool, though, and not too sweet. She made it with a mixture of that Blue Balsam tea that grows around the flower beds and some of the wild tea from the meadow. She only added a little sugar.”
“Still sounds like a good idea,” Kristen agreed. “First, let’s get mother out of the van. She’s been crammed in there for hours. I’m sure she’s hot and thirsty. Which house will she be in? We should drive closer to the door.”
“”Don’t know yet,” Grandma responded. “I’m sure she’ll want to be close to where you and Bruce bed down. We’re guests here; it’s really up to the Stumps. These are Harvey and Jean’s and Harold and Myra’s homes.”
“No hurry to decide,” Jean said. “For now just pull your van over to the back porch where we can unload the goods. She and the rest can sit on the porch until things get settled. Meanwhile, I’ll fetch the tea from the springhouse.”
“Thanks,” said Kristen. The van was driven to the door of Jean’s upstairs kitchen entrance. Then I first realized who the fourth person in the van was: Aunt Kristen’s mother, Leticia. Only my immediate family would know her. As my Uncle Bruce’s mother-in-law, I had often seen her at my cousins’ birthday parties and such. In fact, the last time would have been just a couple months ago at Dean’s graduation party. She was a frail woman, who needed a walker to get around. She was still, to her credit, pretty spry for her age. But today, as they helped her out of the van, she looked much different. She had a haggard look on her face, the lines on her face deep and more pronounced. Actually, she looked like she had been through a war. We found out, however, that she still had her spirit.
“Bout time you got me out of there,” she snapped. “After all I’ve been through – and I need to go to the bathroom!”
“Yes mother,” Aunt Kristen answered. I saw Harvey roll his eyes at Jean. She responded with that little quirky smile she had. Oh… this could be a good one brewing. They took Leticia into the house to use the bathroom, jabbering all the way. It had become quite muggy that afternoon and the inside of the house was very hot, so they brought out a chair for her to sit on the porch where a nice breeze was flowing through. She took some of the tea, and then started up.
“This tea sure isn’t very cold,” she complained, “and my, was that bathroom dirty.”
Harvey grabbed Jean by the wrist and I think some of the men wanted to run for cover. There was an instant determination made where Leticia was going to sleep. Obviously not in Jean’s house. Actually, I think at that moment, Jean would have made her sleep in the barn. No, in with my grandparents and me she would go. In retrospect it was a good decision for everything was on one floor in Poppop’s house. Also, as it was very difficult for Leticia to come to the butcher house for meals, Kristen would have to take her meals to her, enabling our meals to remain peaceful.
Humans react quite differently to stress. As Bruce relayed to us later that evening, Leticia had been through a lot the last few weeks. Her way of coping, providing a means of survival, was to bitterly lash out. It wasn’t her normal behavior, but now served as her crutch. It successfully got her to this point, and as she settled in she settled down. As some peace was injected into her life, the more peaceful she became – thank goodness. Her irritability that afternoon did serve a useful purpose, however. You see as Kristen, Mom, and Jean catered to and fretted and fumed over Leticia, their fears and concerns about their sons down the road were assuaged.
Uncle Bruce was a different matter. As we started unloading his van, he would pause at least twice a minute to look down the road, searching for signs of his son’s safe return. Within five minutes, which must have seemed like five hours to Bruce, he caught a glimpse of Brutus cresting one of the little knobs in the road about one half mile away. Relief – brought a suspension to the unloading, for Bruce sprinted down the road, followed a bit more slowly by Joe, Aaron, Jennifer, and me on my bike, each with our own concerns. There were two thinking about their sons, three for their brothers, plus me for Brutus, with Joe having enough foresight to carry a bucket of spring water and ladle. Long before we reached them, as they were in full view of the farm, they had shown good sense and pulled Brutus under a big hickory tree so everyone could rest in the shade. Josh was wiping down Brutus and scratching his neck.
“Is something wrong? Is Brutus OK?” I frantically asked when I reached the crew.
“He’s fine,” Josh replied, “and doing a fine job. It’s almost effortless with us pushing. I would say pulling a car on four rubber tires is easier than pulling a plow through hard soil. We’re probably working harder than he is. We needed the break more than he did.”
“Just the same,” Joe said to me, “beings it’s so darn hot, as soon as everyone’s had a drink, take the bucket over to the creek and get him a bucket of water, too.” While they were drinking, I greeted Dean and Vanetta who were riding Jake’s and Dennis’s bicycles.
“You don’t have to stay with us,” Bruce instructed them. “If you’re well rested, just pedal up to the house. The car’s not as important as you are. We’ll get it there. Besides, you mother’s sure anxious about you.”
“Yeah right, Uncle Bruce,” I chided. “You were more bent out of shape than she was.”
“Naw, it was no sweat,” he said. “I knew they’d be all right all along.”
I thought it was a good cover. Why men have to be so macho is beyond me.
“Jennifer,” I offered, “you may have my bike if you want. Ride home with your brother. I’d like to stay and lead Brutus up.”
“Why thank you,” she answered. “Is that OK, Dad?”
“Sure,” Bruce replied, “it’s safe now.”
“Safe?” I quizzed, “safe from what?”
“Oh nothing,” he said, “just an expression.” He couldn’t fool me. Something was amiss. I guess I’d find out in due time. After I’d brought Brutus his water, we finished the trip home. Dean and Vanetta had been warmly received by the clan. The afternoon was waning. So after a short refreshment break, the boys headed to the barn for the evening chores and the cooks to the butcher house to start supper. That still left us with a nice size crew to finish unloading the vehicles, so we continued pulling the stuff out of Bruce’s van and Dean’s car.

To be continued…… Mort

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - REUNION

2007-05-30T13:11:00.000-07:00

The rest of the week saw some accomplishments. The new calves were doing well. On Wednesday Joe accompanied Butch on the pilgrimage to Roger with our few extra barrels of sour milk for his hogs. Everything was reported as going well over there. When Roger realized he had more of an outlet for the meat, he decided to kill the biggest hog they had. Of course Joe and Butch aided, and then each brought a good portion of meat for each household. Fresh pork for supper; it even gave a few jars of leftovers that were canned for another meal. We also received four new little piglets to expand our swine herd. The ones we had were growing well and Joe said there would be one large enough to butcher next week for ourselves.
Pork wasn’t the only meat we had. Larry had noticed a flock of Canadian geese landing regularly in the pasture behind the spring. Prior to the collapse, if it would have been legal goose season, he would have just grabbed his shotgun and pursued his quarry. With the mindset of saving ammunition he decided to try and trap them instead. Dad and Harvey said when they were youngsters they would try to catch pigeons in the barn by using a stick with a string tied to it to hold up a box. They would bait the trap with a few kernels of corn, hide behind some hay bales, and wait until a pigeon was under the box, then yank the string and catch the bird. Well, it was suppose to work like that. Dad wasn’t sure if they had ever caught one. Harvey seemed to think they had. Ah, what a few score years will do to brain cells. This method wasn’t going to work for the geese, however, which were ten times larger.
Instead, Larry rounded up some muskrat traps Wednesday evening and indiscriminately set them around the area the geese were usually feeding. Of course, he had to stake them well into the ground or any trapped geese would simply fly away with the trap. He knew the geese were arriving every morning just a little before breakfast, so he, Dad and I went to the pasture about an hour before to check the traps. Sure enough, a possum had wondered into a trap. With Dad’s help we were able to release the trap from the critter’s foot and shush it away from the area. The trap didn’t appear to do the possum much harm. We retreated about forty yards from the traps to the closest woods and then made a makeshift blind to hide behind until the geese came.
“Do you think those traps will hold a goose?” Dad asked Larry.
“I hope so,” he answered. “Least ways until we can run out and grab them.”
“You know as soon as we run out, the others will fly away,” I said.
“Yeah, I know,” Larry retorted, “we’ll have to be patient and wait until two or three are caught, and then rush for them all at once.”
“I’m also thinking, as soon as one trap snaps, they’ll all take off, but I wonder,” Dad thought out loud. “Alyssa, run over to the cornfield across the way and bring us back an ear of corn. Hurry!” I did, and came back puffing to where they were now standing out at the edge of the trapping area.
“Here, Dad,” I wheezed out.
“Thanks,” he said. “Now just shell a few kernels,” he said to Larry, “and carefully place them under the trap, right next to the trip plate. Let’s see what happens.”
“Anything’s worth a try,” Larry remarked as he placed about dozen kernels as Dad had directed. Then Dad took a handful of corn and just flung it out beyond the traps. Back to the blind we flew. And just in time, for within ten minutes, I heard the distinct honk of a goose.
“You know,” Larry whispered, “yesterday there was no corn here. Don’t you think that will make them suspicious?”
“Perhaps,” Dad softly replied, “but there was some undigested corn kernels in the cow manure. That’s some of what they were feeding on; it should seem familiar to them. Now don’t anyone move; looks like they’re coming in right above us.”
They did. Amazingly, they didn’t spot us. They circled the pasture twice; surveying the situation. Then finally set their wings and drifted to Earth just short of the traps. They were noisy; there was loud honking and some were hissing. I wondered if we make noise like that when we’re eating. They soon wandered into the area where the traps were set.
SNAP! One of the traps closed right on the head of a feeding goose. And then a tremendous commotion followed. Screeching and honking and as they ran to take flight, more stepped in the traps.
“NOW!” Larry yelled, “just grab them by their necks, Alyssa. Hold them till I can help you.”
The short forty yards we were from the geese seemed like one hundred as we sprinted out. Larry ran for the goose furthest away, Dad for the closest, the one with its head in the trap and I chose one in between. It was a flurry of wings and beaks. Dad secured his in no time. Larry’s wiggled free before he reached it, but he quickly switched his sights to a fourth one before it could free itself. He got it, and I got mine, but not before it nipped me in the hand. It hurt like crazy, but I still hung on though, until Larry had dispatched his and came back to finish mine. Success: goose for supper.
That same afternoon the first water pumping occurred. The milk tank, hot water tank and the shower heads were now in place. The building, including the installation of insulation and the flooring had been completed. The water line had been laid on top the ground and the pump set up in the cellar with a bicycle drive. To prime the pump, the boys poured water into the line before making the final connections. Josh proudly hopped onto the bicycle seat and started pedaling away. Sure enough, it worked, as water started flowing into the milk tank. Not that anyone in the cellar could tell, though. We were too far away.
“One of the disadvantages of this set-up,” Aaron said. “Someone has to watch the level of water in the tank, and then tell the pedaler when the tanks full.”
Dennis added, “But we decided to keep the pump in the cellar, so the person doing all the work would not have to be in the heat of the butcher house. Should make the job a little more bearable. How’s it pedal, Josh?”
“Not bad at all,” he answered. “I’m sure Mel could do it. Heck I even think Alyssa, Lynette or Amy could too.”
“Well, let one of them try,” Uncle Jeremiah said. “Go ahead Amy, hop on.” So Amy hopped on and pedaled away. Lynette took a turn and so did I. It wasn’t that hard. Nor did you have to pedal fast to make it work. Whatever speed you pedaled, the water still flowed.
“I think you girls have won an assignment,” Jeremiah continued. “As a team, keep the milk tank full of water. You can take turns. Remember someone has to watch the water level and another relay the message into the cellar. You have the time freed up because you’ll no longer have to bring as much water from the spring with Brutus. Just some for Poppop’s house, I guess. We’re hoping one day we can adapt a twelve volt motor to the pump and then you’ll be relieved. In the meantime, be timely with the job. The longer you put it off, the more pedaling you’ll have to do to fill the tank, and the greater the risk of the tank running dry. Got it?”
“I guess so,” Amy answered for us.
“Don’t worry,” Dennis added, “we’ll be around here to help you if you need us. We still have some things to finish up. The line needs to be buried and some plumbing completed to make the showers operable. No showers tonight yet, everyone. First we have to install some kind of tub above the shower head. In it, each showerer will have to mix the hot and cold water to his or her taste. They’ll be lines coming from the cold and hot water tanks that will have valves on that you’ll have to open to let the water in. Then you’ll be ready to shower. We should have that ready by tomorrow or Saturday evening.”
Even as we were completing the construction of the showering house, the boys still found time to sneak in some of the other projects. With Barry’s help they had rigged up a bicycle and an alternator on the back porch to charge batteries. It was mobile so you could carry it different places instead of carrying the batteries all over. Plus you could move it to the shade when it was hot, inside when it was cold, or under roof when it rained. It was temporary we hoped, as Joe and Larry were getting closer with their windmill project.
The water pump, furnace, and lights in the barn weren’t the only applications for twelve volt current that necessitated charging batteries. For by Friday they had installed a starter motor from our old Ford Fairmont on the wash machine. At first, the washer ran way too fast, but after some adjustments with the gearing, they slowed it enough to keep it in the building. The agitator ran much faster than it was designed to, but we’d just power it on for two, two and a half minutes at a time, as recommended by Aaron. He just wasn’t sure if the motor would hold up if we ran it continuously. Mind you, only the agitator operated, not the spin cycle, nor any of the automatic controls. It was simply “go” or “stop”. We still had to fill the tub by hand; once with hot water for washing and again with cold for rinsing. We used a set of hoses that branched off from the lines going to the shower tub. The boys had installed a hand nozzle to drain the water out of the tub. And, of course, we also had to squeeze the water out of every piece of laundry; no wringer had shown up. But it beat all the pounding and rubbing we had done to get the clothing clean with just a tub of soapy water the week before. Poppop had done a good job whittling some clothespins for us to use, but then his woodworking skills were shifted to a new project. He started manufacturing hay rakes.
We had garden rakes and lawn rakes, but their tines were too short and way too close together to rake long stem hay like Larry was going to mow. The hay would constantly be sticking in the rakes. Poppop had such an old style wooden rake, so he had one for a pattern. We rounded up every old handle we could find for him to attach a two and one half foot head onto. In each head, he used an old brace and bit to auger holes about five inches apart, and then he inserted some tines he had made from any wooden rod stock he could find. He would have to whittle and scrape them to just the right dimension. In some of the holes he used a little wood glue he had found to keep the tine in place, but usually the fit was tight enough to keep the tine from pulling out when in use. The finished product had seven tines sticking seven or eight inches from the head. We produced eight rakes in all. Saturday morning Poppop, Dad, and I carried the rakes to the equipment shed for presentation to Harvey.
We found Joe there with Harvey, who had his eyes glued to the sky. The last couple days he always had a watchful eye on the weather.
“Something’s going to give,” he said, “I can feel it. We’ll still have to wait before we start mowing. Larry’s sure getting itchy to go at it, but he can hold his horses a little longer. Ah, those are some fine rakes you got there. Looks like what, eight people can be kept busy raking. That’s good. Put them on that wagon over there.”
The wagon already had four scythes and six sickles, all recently sharpened, plus fourteen pitchforks on it, ready for Brutus to pull up to Butch’s. There was also a box full of work gloves and a toolbox with sharpening stones and some other tools that could be used to repair any implement that might break.
“We’ve a few more pitchforks around here to take along. With those that Butch has, we should be able to put a tool into everyone’s hands. It’s a shame we don’t have that old ground drive hay rake that you and my father had when we were kids,” Harvey said to Poppop. “Brutus could have easily pulled it. Do you remember it?”
“I do,” Dad jumped in, “it had a metal seat on it. I spent many enjoyable hours seated on it when my grandfather was raking hay. Isn’t it still here? Up in the woods with some of the other junked farm implements?”
“No, it’s gone,” Harvey replied. “Last winter scrap iron hit $8.50 per hundred weight. Just a year earlier, it was only worth four dollars. So Larry and I hauled three loads of scrap metal to the salvage yard. The rake was on one of the loads. It’s probably being turned into a Chinese missile right now.”
“Probably not,” Joe said. “things have moved too slowly the last four months to get it that far. It could be in the pipeline somewhere on route, but more than likely it’s still at the yard in that gigantic mountain of shredded steel that they had. You are, however, correct about the reason the price jumped so dramatically. China’s need of iron created tremendous demand for the commodity. And not only iron, but also aluminum and copper, like Titus had said on Tuesday night.”
“So maybe in this case,” Dad inquired, “the rise of metal prices was caused by true market factors, increased demand and short supply? And not the currency being inflated?”
“Maybe some of both,” Joe continued. “China’s need of all the metals created the demand. The increased demand caused the higher prices. Because China had to pay more for the scrap, that actually helped lower our trade deficit a little, plus retire some of that debt we owed China. But it might also have irritated them to the point that they made the move they did to change to the Euro and do us in. Yet in this country, we unsuspectingly benefited from the increased prices of scrap metals; least ways those of us that had some to sell. But then again, maybe the price for the metals was rocketed skyward by the inflating of our currency, just like the prices of almost everything else kept climbing. Who knows?”
“Bottom line,” lamented Harvey, “is that we never seem to learn from history. Before World War Two we sold our scrap to Japan so they could build the ships, planes and bombs to go to war with half the world. Seventy years later, we do the same damn thing.”
“Extremely ironic,” Dad agreed, “the richest country in the world, maybe only second to Russia in raw materials, gives the things we now need away to our enemy.”
“Water under the bridge,” Harvey concluded, “no sense looking back; time to go forward. Soon time to make hay.”

To be continued…. Mort

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - THINGS (conclusion)

2007-05-23T04:47:00.000-07:00

“I can’t help but keep thinking,” Jean offered, “about what Harlan said this afternoon about what had happened in his home county. Do you think that could happen here?”
“Hard to say,” Titus responded. “After talking to Harlan’s father, I got a little of the picture on how it went down there. Chaos might be the word to describe it. Not random violence and looting necessarily; just a lack of organization and feeling of community. Everyone lit out in different directions; just looked out for themselves. There’s a much different feeling here. Look how you’ve banded together on this farm and other people have on your neighbor’s farm up the road. I run into farms like that everywhere I travel. At my place we’re blessed by the way our neighbors, despite our spiritual and cultural differences, just bonded for the common good. Then there’s something else that might be to our advantage around here, though it’s awkward for me to talk about.”
“What’s that?” Dad asked.
“You’re armed,” Titus said, “and so are our neighbors that have joined up with us. I overheard them talking about being prepared to defend our ‘town’. Some of the leaders even came to me and said directly that they would provide protection for our families.”
“See,” Jake interjected, “the founding fathers knew what they were doing when they passed the second amendment.”
“Perhaps,” said Barry, “but I always figured it was to protect ourselves from a foreign invasion, not each other.”
“Maybe for now,” Josh said. “In the future, a foreign enemy might invade. And we’ll be ready for them!”
“Spoken just like a young whipper-snapper,” Dad said. “You’ve a lot to learn.”
“Religious beliefs aside,” Joe added. “This country probably has the highest percentage of the populace armed than any other country in the world. And although we’d love to settle all our differences without violence, in this case I don’t see that happening. But I’ll give you and your brothers credit, Titus. I know you won’t contribute to a violent solution. I wish everyone else in the world had the same convictions.”
“So do I,” Titus said.
“I was curious about something else,” Jeremiah said. “How did the idea of using coins as a medium of exchange catch on?”
“Money is only good if the users have faith in it,” Titus said. “I understand the dollar failed because China switched it’s debt over to Euros or something like that; I’m not exactly sure. Euros are paper money, too, but people still have faith in it, so they work as an accepted medium of exchange. If not in this country, at least around the rest of the world. For decades the dollar was backed by gold or silver, so the holders of dollars knew they could exchange dollars for something with a known, universal value. Ever since the US government abandoned the gold standard, that faith has been waning. On the other hand, for centuries coins have been used in exchange for goods. They had an intrinsic value. The metals in them were worth something even if the government that issued them went sour. Several of our brothers are in the wrecking/reclamation business. Last year when copper prices skyrocketed, they became aware that pennies have a value of their own, well above one cent, which is all any bank would give you for them. We all started saving them. Then last year the feds pointed out that it was illegal to melt down coins. So what? We were only saving them. Around Christmas I read that a penny was only 5% copper and the rest mostly zinc; burst that theory. But a nickel was 75% copper. So we started saving them, too. In fact, it was revealed that the government was spending 1.2 cents to make every penny and 7.9 cents to make a nickel. But they sold them for only one cent and five cents respectively. Boy was that bad business. Bottom line is, we have faith in the value of the metals in coins, even if the government issuing them is bankrupt. Metal is metal, coins are coins. We have faith in them, so we honor them. Seems to be working so far.”
“But how did you come up with the low prices for everything?” Lois asked.
“Accidentally, I guess,” Titus responded.
“Maybe not,” said Aaron, “coinage has an absolute value. But what do you base it on? Because it takes so many pennies to buy a Euro, a barrel of oil, or an ounce of gold? What does that matter to us? The value that our coins have is relative. How many pennies it takes to buy a ton of hay, a bushel of corn, a flashlight, or a watermelon?”
“I know that one,” I declared, “five.”
“Yes, you’re right little cousin,” Aaron continued. “Think how people that had tens of thousands of dollars in the bank, now have some metal half dollars and quarters in their pockets. And those who had a few hundred dollars, now have about the same.”
“The collapse was an equalizer,” Dad said. “Like Harvey said earlier today: ‘everyone’s in the same boat’.”
“Isn’t that funny,” Josh remarked. “What the Communists in other countries and Socialists in this country were trying to do for years – make us all equal – was accomplished by our own federal government’s poor fiscal policy.”
“At least when it comes to financial resources,” Aaron said. “There’s a lot of ways we are not equal. Some of us have food or resources to produce food, others don’t. Some have fuel, others don’t. And we all have different skills. But that wasn’t my point. Back to the relative value of our coins. You see there was once hundreds of billions of dollars, if not a few trillion of make-believe dollars in this country’s economy. A large portion of it was just numbers written with ink on paper. Worthless. Now there are a several million, maybe a billion dollars worth of coins belonging to the same group – us. And there is still a supply of food, building materials, tools, crops, clothing, medical supplies, some fuel, metals and other raw materials out there in the same economy. Not quite as much as before the collapse, now mind you, but a fair percentage still exists. Prior to the collapse, those goods’ value was determined by the amount of money that was out there. Goods divided by dollars out there. Now it’s divided by millions instead of trillions, therefore every unit of goods is worth fewer dollars. That’s what gives our coins their relative value; it’s in relation to the amount of goods in the economy. So what Titus’s clan is doing makes economic sense. At least that’s my theory.”
“Not too bad a theory, either,” Dad commented. “Bottom line – it works. Just like some of the other things we do or try around here – if it works: do it. You know people sure have to change.”
“How’s that?” Titus asked.
“Well, we spend our whole life accumulating things. When we’re young: toys, baseball cards, ice skates, or a bicycle. Later it’s a car, stylish clothing, video equipment, or tools. We start saving: for college, to pay for a wedding, for a house, furniture. Always we want more – things. Soon we have to have another hunting rifle, season tickets, that big screen TV, the cable, cell phones, DVD player, a four wheel drive pickup; it goes on and on. Build up your estate, buy another farm. No offense to Harvey and Titus intended – they need farms to grow food for people – that’s honorable. We’re also told to buy life insurance, for the future; IRA’s, for the future; stock portfolios, for the future. Now is the future; what good did it do us? Always more things. And what does it get you? Nothing. In the end you’re back in the ground where you came from. It’s like chasing after the wind. In Ecclesiastes Solomon says ‘everything is meaningless’. He includes wisdom, toil, advancement, pleasures and folly – all meaningless. In fact, what this desire to accumulate things really leads to is stress, frustration, and arguments over more things, like money. And what does it earn you? A hole in the ground. It’s that attitude that people have to change. Do you know what I mean?”
I really didn’t, and from the looks around the room, maybe no one else did either. Or at least they didn’t know what to say. Finally, Titus spoke up. “I think I know what you mean. And it’s something I struggled with my whole life, too. In Matthew chapter six Jesus told us: ‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on Earth,’ yet my father accumulated things, including farms, to provide for his children. And I’ve done the same, providing for my children, just like Jesus told us later in the same chapter, verse 33 that ‘all these things will be given you as well’ by our heavenly father. So sometimes I wondered if I put too much emphasis on materialism. Did I love money more than God? The answer lies in the beginning of that same verse when Jesus said, ‘But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness.’ That’s our comfort. Jesus knows what’s in our heart. It reveals what we really feel about things. So I do know what you mean, people do have to change. Change their heart from one that loves things to one that loves God. Jesus showed us how to do that - by loving others. And also in Ecclesiastes, Solomon tells you a couple ways you can remove some of the meaninglessness and stress of life and bring a little more peace into it. He said ‘A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work’. And on top of that trust and obey God. If you keep those thoughts in your head and heart, you can’t go wrong,” Titus concluded.
There was silence again, just like after Dad had finished his expose`. Joe had a half a smile on his face as he squeezed his lower lip with his hand. He looked at Dad, and then at Titus and said, “When did you two get a chance to rehearse that?”
Dad and Titus looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders slightly, and then Dad said, “Didn’t. I just felt I had to say what was on my heart.”
Titus added, “Me neither. He was on a roll. Just thought I’d try and answer his question and explain why people should change. Did I?”
“I suppose you did,” Grandmom said. “Gave me something to think about. And pray about. But now, I think it’s time we hit the sack. Tomorrow’s another day.”
It was agreed. As I lay in bed, I pondered Dad and Titus’ remarks. Next morning, I hurried out to check on Titus and Harlan, wondering if any more revelations would be forthcoming. I guess they were anxious to get an early start for home, for the wagon load of hay, their horses, Harlan and Titus Weaver were gone.

To be continued….. Mort

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - THINGS (cont)

2007-05-16T18:28:00.000-07:00

“Good horse hay?” Harvey asked.
“Good horse hay I could use the most. I usually try to end up at a farm that doesn’t have livestock. They’re much more willing to part with some. You have a lot of livestock here, so I’d understand if you wouldn’t want to part with any.”
“Our hay is valuable,” Harvey responded. “But no more valuable than the load of produce you started out with this morning. How many bales does your wagon hold?”
“About 85.”
“Good enough,” Harvey decided, “I’ll apply the Golden Rule again. And you know your horses will need a night’s rest to pull over two tons of hay home.”
“That settles it then,” Dad said, “you’re staying the night.”
“I guess we are,” Titus agreed.
Fortunately, during the whole conversation, no one had started to unhitch the horses; so we drove the wagon right over to the springhouse to unload and store the fruit and vegetables. “Put one of the watermelons right into the spring water,” Dad instructed. “Should make it cold enough for supper. Tomorrow we’ll send word to Butch. They can use some fresh produce, too. I think he’s particularly fond of hot peppers. I know you and I aren’t, are we Alyssa?”
“No we’re not,” I answered, “but watermelon I can handle.” After letting the horses have a long drink, we drove the wagon to the barn where the hay was that Harvey had traded. On the way we dropped the honey and the sweet corn at the butcher house. Lois was the cook for supper and was quite agreeable to adding the corn to her planned meal, as there’d be two extra for supper.
Titus and Harlan unhitched the wagon next to the pile of hay. We led the horses back to the pasture, where they could spend the whole night eating grass. Dad brought them each five ears of corn.
“That’ll do them fine,” Titus said. The men folk had started milking; supper, of course, wasn’t near ready, so the four of us started loading the hay. My grandfathers joined us, which led to quite a conversation. Trouble was, I only could understand what Dad was saying. The others spoke in the Pennsylvania German dialect. If Dad listened real closely, he could understand, but he had never learned well enough how to speak in German. Of course he often tried. Usually got some laughs, the way he butchered it, generally messing up the grammar. Today was no different – he tried – the others would chuckle. From what I caught from Dad’s percentage of the conversation, they talked about old times and who lived on which farm. Seemed like Poppop and Dad knew everybody. They talked about the improvements to the butcher house, our plan to pump water, how we divided up the cows and our dilemma with using electric motors. It didn’t take long to get 85 bales onto the wagon. We used baler twine to fasten the load. Didn’t need to use the braided rope Dad and I had made. The load of hay wasn’t going to careen down the road at 55 miles per hour; it would stay on. As we tied on the last pieces of twine, the conversation ended with talk of some of the things we were looking for.
I heard Titus sum it up by saying, “Yeah, when I’m on my trading missions I can keep an eye open for you for those things like a wringer washer, a breeding bull, or a smaller generator.
“Thanks a lot,” Poppop said, “and if you would, we’re going to need something else; seed for next year’s crops. Trouble is, so does everyone else.”
“That’s right,” Dad added, “but one thing I think you do have, Titus, that I hope you can spare, is sweet potatoes.”
“I have quite a few growing,” Titus answered. “I’ll keep a share for you.”
“Thanks,” said Dad. “Well, it looks like the rest are heading in for supper. Let’s go wash up and join ‘em. I can almost taste that fresh sweet corn already.”
“And our homemade butter on it,” I added.
It was a fine supper, and after the watermelon was devoured and the supper dishes were finished, we learned a few more things about Titus’s community. “You know our lifestyle hasn’t changed that much since the power went off,” he commented. “We still farm and travel with horses. We milk by hand and fork silage by hand. We have wood fires and butcher our livestock at home. We’re canning like we did before. We go to church every Sunday by buggy or bicycle. Didn’t have televisions, radios or computers; don’t miss them. The women are making homemade baked goods. And our children are going to school.”
“Your schools are open?” Jake asked.
“Sure,” Titus answered, “Monday was the first day at our one room schoolhouses. Our children walk or bike to school. The teacher goes by buggy and brings a cooler of spring water for the students. We don’t need electricity this time of year. When it turns colder, the heat source is a wood stove. We’ll have to come up with some lighting eventually. There’s time to figure some things out yet.”
“If your school’s in session, how come you’re not there, Harlan?” Sandy asked.
“I’m fourteen, and finished eighth grade last year,” he said. “We only go to school eight years.”
“Learned all you need to know, I bet,” I said.
“Oh, I’m sure I’ve got a lot to learn yet,” Harlan answered, “Just like you.”
“You’re darn right she does,” Mom said. “You said your women were baking. Are you milling flour?”
“No, not yet,” Titus responded, “we still have a good supply. But with sharing our food with all the townsfolk that are helping us, it won’t last much longer. Some of the boys are trying to build a grinding mill.”
“So are we,” Larry retorted, “but it would sure be nicer if we could find one.”
“You mean one that’s operating?” Grandpop asked.
“I was thinking about an unused one,” Larry replied, “if there was one operating somewhere, then that would be even sweeter.”
“I’ll ask around in my travels,” Titus offered. “Wait a minute. On our way here, we passed an old mill near a golf course. Do you know where I mean?”
“Sure,” answered Harvey, “I know where you mean, and there’s one about three miles north of here, too. You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Probably,” Titus said.
“You mean we should investigate them?” Larry wondered. “There could be an old grinding mill in good enough repair for us to use or fix. Or maybe it would work right where it is. They were both run by a waterwheel years ago. We might be able to get them operational.”
“We wouldn’t have to be the operators,” Dennis added. “Someone else could be set up there to handle that chore. Like some of the people migrating from the town or city.”
“Then we’d just have to take some of our wheat there every so often and bring back flour; like my grandparents did,” Poppop said.
“Either way, like Larry said, it’s worth investigating,” Josh said. “It might be easier than building our own from scratch.”
“Something we can do on a rainy day,” Harvey said. “When this weather turns dryer, we’ll be busy here. In your travels, Titus, have you discussed with anyone how they might be planning on putting hay away?”
“Got a couple of ideas,” Titus replied. “First, a few farms north of town have a lot of acreage in hay and only a few livestock to graze it. Been talking with one of them, Amos Adam. We’re already planning to shift our produce workers from town out there when he’s ready to harvest some. He’d also need to borrow a few of our teams to haul the hay to the barn. Last I talked to him he was rounding up scythes, sickles, rakes and forks. When I left him, he was in the shop, sharpening.”
“It’s a shame there aren’t any ground driven mowers around this area,” Harlan added. “Down where my family lived, many of our Amish neighbors still used them. Used teams to pull them, as well as rakes and tedders. If you were lucky, you might find some old ones in a fencerow, in the woods or on a junk pile that you could repair,” he said to Harvey. “Titus, are you going to mention Sam Burke’s idea?”
“That was the second idea I was thinking of,” Titus continued. “Sam Burke’s a neighbor of ours; has a pretty good machine shop. He’s trying to convert some of the power driven mowers we have to ground drive, so they can be operated by horses instead of tractors. It’s quite an undertaking. I’ll let you know how he makes out. If successful, he might be able to convert yours or at least give you the design.”
“Anything like that would be useful,” Harvey said. “You know, Titus, you’re doing a valuable service by gathering and sharing information as you travel about. Keep up the good work.”
“Thanks, I’ll try,” he answered.

To be continued… is there more to Titus’ story? Mort

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - THINGS

2007-05-09T12:42:00.000-07:00

Titus Weaver was an old chum of Dad’s. They had gone to elementary school together for the first five grades. Then the Mennonites built their first one room schoolhouse in the neighborhood and Titus finished his schooling there. Titus was extremely bright. Years later, Titus told Dad that he treated his years of school with Dad as a competition; always trying to better him. Dad had said he really hadn’t remembered, but credited Titus for his ambition and for complementing his ambitious and competitive spirit with a kind, friendly attitude. Titus was very outgoing and not afraid to speak his peace. Dad loved talking to him, about almost anything. They had gone their separate ways for many years. Titus had moved and his farm was at least twelve miles from Harvey’s.
But about 20 years ago, a group of farmers shifted some of their cash grain and livestock operations to produce. Titus was instrumental in leading the way, helping to start a produce auction in the neighborhood. Soon after that, Dad started growing some produce, too, opening the door to seeing more of Titus. Today you could tell Titus was in the produce business, for on his wagon were several boxes of fruits and vegetables, some almost empty. Harvey, Joe, Dad and I walked over and took a look. He had sweet corn, cantaloupes, watermelons, cabbage, lima beans, green and hot peppers, peaches and a few jars of honey. You could also tell he and Dad had a special bond between them, for as Titus jumped off the wagon he gave Dad a hug as fellow believers are instructed to do.
“Glad to see you Titus,” Dad started.
“And you, too,” he replied.
“What in the world brings you so far from home?” Dad asked.
“Well you know my farm and many of my neighbors are growing produce. For years we had an excellent market, but because the people in our sect don’t use rubber tired vehicles, we depended on others coming to the auction or to the farm. Those who had motor vehicles would buy and haul away our produce. When the supply of fuel dried up, so did our market. We’ve got plenty of produce and people still need food, so everyday I load up the wagon and travel to sell, trade, or give it away. Never did intend to get this far from home, though. This afternoon I reached your old place, anxious to see how you were making out. Your landlord told me where you live now. I still had produce on the wagon, so I decided to spend the extra time and drive the extra miles, just to see you.”
“I’m flattered, I guess,” Dad answered. “But how can you take the time away from home, what with all the work you must have?”
“You wouldn’t believe the help we have. Since the power went off, folks from town come to the farm everyday. First they came just looking for water, food and work. Our water pump is powered by a windmill; no problem there. And we were certainly willing to share our produce especially with people who want to work. Now it has become a real working relationship. I’ve had over one hundred people on my farm some days. Men, women and children; they all work hard. Not only weeding and picking produce, but with the livestock, too; we also spend a lot of time and effort canning and drying fruits and vegetables. We’re putting a real emphasis on drying, as we’re running out of canning supplies. Still, everyday the townsfolk bring empty jars and lids they used or found at home. We have a great feast of fruits and vegetables, and of course, all the workers go home with some, too; their earnings for the day. Not only on my farm, now mind you, but almost every farm in our community is operating pretty much the same way. Not all our help is local, however.
“How’s that?” Harvey asked.
“Well, things aren’t going nearly as smoothly nearer the city. You’re aware of the Amish and Mennonite communities located in the counties south of here, only ten to fifteen miles from the city limits?” Titus questioned.
“Yes,” Harvey answered.
“There’s been a lot of trouble there. Unlike our neighbors, who came to the farm willing to work for what they need, seems like the city dwellers think they have a right to everything,” Titus lamented.
“Years of entitlement programs,” Joe interjected.
“I suppose so,” Titus continued. “In my mind, it’s more of a lack of morals and absence of kindness in their hearts. This here’s Harlan, by the way. He’s my cousin’s son.”
“Glad to meet you,” Dad said for all of us.
“And you too,” Harlan said.
Titus concluded, “His family lived near Friarstown, close to the city… too close. They had to leave; came and moved in with us. I’ll let him tell you why.”
“You know our people practice passive resistance,” Harlan related, “so we daren’t lift a finger to oppose someone. Of course, we gladly shared our water and our food with the first refugees who came out from the city. Some paid, some worked for it. We even opened our homes for some of them, if they needed it. But that wasn’t good enough for some; they wanted more. First, while they still had gasoline, they’d come in their cars as they fled the city and want the trunk filled up with all the food they could take. What could we do? We don’t resist. But our other guests weren’t so inclined to put up with such antagonism. Over our objections, fights would break out. Usually they ended with little injury, but a lot of hurt still the same.”
“So they took things; OK it was just things. But next they wanted our horses. I understood they were trying to head south, toward warmer climes, and they knew their gasoline would only go so far. Passive resistance was put to the test. Our horses are our livelihood. But we only fought with words – angry words. Fortunately, they worked for my father. However he knew we had to flee. Loaded everything we could onto our three wagons and two buggies, tied a few cows onto the back and headed north to this community.”
“Others didn’t fare as well. Some of our brothers were beat up pretty bad – two were shot. I know one is healing OK; he made it up to here. I have no idea how the other one fared, or anyone else we left behind, for that matter. Hopefully the worst of society has already been through. I’m certainly glad to be here; it’s so much more peaceful,” Harlan concluded.
“Yes, around here it has been peaceful,” Harvey said. “And we’re glad you made it here, too.”
Joe said, “We have to keep praying for those people; both the members of your community and the perpetrators. Listen, Titus, your horses had a long hot trek already today. Couldn’t they use some water and feed?”
“Feed they can have tonight at home,” Titus said. “They just had rest and some grass along the roadside a few miles back. But water is necessary.”
“Then lead ‘em right over to the creek,” Dad said. “In fact, why don’t you unhitch them? It’s late in the day and a long walk home for them. Why don’t you spend the night? You can get an early start in the morning.”
“Naw, we couldn’t, I mean…”
“Ah, I should have thought,” Dad continued, “your missus and Harlan’s mother wouldn’t know where you are. It would be a rough night for them. We don’t know how to send them smoke signals, like the Indians did.”
“No we don’t,” Titus responded. “And that’s not it, either. When we leave home every morning, the others are aware we might run into some trouble and might have difficulty returning the same day. We know Jesus looks after us. Those at home would be at peace – peace that comes from the Lord.”
“Amen,” said Joe.
Titus went on, “We just wouldn’t want to impose. You’ve enough troubles trying to make a go of it. Why would you want four more mouths to feed?”
“Nonsense,” said Harvey, “the Golden Rule applies here. You’re welcome here just like we’d be welcome at your place. Get those horses unhitched, watered, fed and rested. Besides, by the looks of your wagon, we have some serious trading to do.”
“Titus,” Joe wondered, “you said earlier, ‘buy, trade, or give it away’. Have you been accepting money?”
“Interesting you should ask,” Titus responded. “Not paper money. We started using coins for exchanges between ourselves, not always having goods in kind. And some of the town folks have their pride – hate to accept charity – insisted on paying. They knew their paper money was worthless as well as any funds they had in bank accounts, so forget about checks. However coins still have intrinsic value, so we accept them… at extremely deflated prices.”
“You mean a nickel’s worth something again?” Dad asked.
“It’ll buy you a watermelon,” Harlan retorted.
“Wow!” Joe said, as he looked over the wagon. “Reckon we can buy everything on the wagon for six quarters.”
“I reckon that would be just about right. Unless you have goods to trade?” Titus asked.
“Here we go again,” Harvey countered. “What do we have that you need?”
“Hay,” Titus answered. “When shipping milk as you knew it stopped, the larger dairy farmers in our community spread the cows over all the farms in the neighborhood to distribute the work and the milk. Those of us that had some, swapped back steers. It was important that the dairies have enough animals to consume the corn silage and haylage in their silos at a rate fast enough to prevent spoilage.”
“That’s always tricky this time of year,” Harvey said, “when it’s so hot.”
“Right,” Titus responded, “work wise, it’s holding out really well. Feed wise, it’s a different story.”
“How so?” Dad asked.
“Most of us have a silo or two that we fed our steers from. Some contained corn silage, a few haylage. We can still fork the silage out by hand to feed the cows, steers and heifers. What with the cows from the neighbor, the steers I didn’t swap and the cows Harlan’s parents brought, we have 35 head to feed; more than enough to feed at a rate that prevents spoilage. Problem is - silo’s soon empty. We might try to ensile some corn, but it takes precious fuel to chop it. We also might want the grain for ourselves to eat. Fortunately cattle can eat corn fodder and vegetable stalks. That’s our dilemma; we’ll have to work it out. What compounds the problem is that with so many acres diverted to produce, there were not many acres of corn grown this year and virtually no hay crop acres. We found it more expeditious and profitable to buy the hay we needed at the produce auction.”
“The auction that hasn’t operated since the middle of July,” Joe added.
“Right,” Titus said, “bottom line is – we need hay. Every trip of produce I take out, I try to bring a load of hay home. In my mind, a load of hay is worth more than the six quarters you offered for the balance of the produce left on my wagon. But I had the wagon full when I left home. I didn’t sell all of it; some I traded for the honey and some I gave away. But in the process I collected another two dollars and eight-five cents in coins. You can have it all for a load of hay.”

To be continued… will the trade go through? Mort

Chapter Twelve - Traders - conclusion

2007-05-02T19:45:00.000-07:00

When we arrived, Dad, Clare, and Ben had everything back in order: new clean straw on the chicken house, fresh feed in the feeders and clean water in the waterers; mission accomplished.
“Good job everyone,” Butch said. “Why don’t you wash the sweat and smell off of you, and then I’ll grab a couple fishing poles and you can try your luck in our pond.”
Sounded good to me. I hadn’t fished that often; wasn’t one of Dad’s obsessions. But he went along anyway, with Butch and Ben. Robbie was the fisherman, however, and proudly carried his can of worms to the pond. Now I got it; they were bait. Robbie showed us how to put the squirming mealworms on a hook and how to throw the line into the pond.
Butch said, “Most important part of fishing, least around here, is picking the right spot to sit, so the sun doesn’t hit you.” I guess catching fish wasn’t the main objective. In fact, when Robbie finally did catch the first one, Butch gently removed the hook from its mouth and tossed it back into the pond. “Someday, when he’s a bit bigger, we might need him for a meal. For now, just let ‘em grow,” he concluded.
So in the shade we sat, more resting than fishing, more fishing than catching. While we were there, Dad had a few things to go over with Butch and Ben. He told them about how Harvey and the boys were building the shower house and installing the water pump, tank and lines. He related our trading activities with the Sensenig’s, the training of the oxen, and the plans for the oven and flour mill. He wondered if they had come up with any kind of wringer for the washing machine. They hadn’t. He mentioned how we could charge automotive batteries with the alternators from our cars and trucks.
“Additionally, we still wish we could solve the problem we have with converting our motors from 110 volt alternating current to 12 volt direct current,” Dad said. “You’re the electrical engineer, Ben. How do we do it?”
“With transformers,” was Ben’s answer.
“But can you build some?” Dad inquired. “Or restructure the transformers we have that go the other way, like for the electric fencer or flashlight charger?”
“I could if I had the right materials, tools, and schematics. I just can’t remember from my student days what they looked like, but I don’t think we could find the needed materials anyway,” Ben responded.
Dad kinda pursed his lips tightly together and squinted his eyes. “Well,” he eventually said, “if we can’t convert the motors to 12 volt, we’re back to trying to make 110 volt alternating current. We’ll just have to continue to investigate sources of power that would turn that 45 horsepower generator Harvey has.”
“Or,” Butch said, “find a smaller generator, say 4500 to 6500 watts, that only needs ten to twelve horsepower to turn; one that you might be able to turn with a windmill, waterwheel, or animal wheel.”
“Animal wheel?” Ben wondered.
“Yeah,’ Butch replied, “they used to have one at the folk festival, remember?”
“I do,” Dad said, “It was like the wheel the Philistines made Samson turn.”
“Right,” Butch went on, “you could use some of your steers or heifers, assuming you could train them. Probably would be more difficult, however, than training your oxen when they’re young.”
“Or we could use teams of horses,” Dad added.
“I suppose we could,” Butch agreed, “but first we would need to find a smaller generator.”
“Back to trading again,” Dad said.
“I guess so,” Ben said. “Or if we could trade for solar panels; they would be incredibly helpful.”
“And valuable,” Dad added, “so who would give any up?”
“Someone who needed food more than electricity. We have a source of food,” Butch replied. “Or could we build some panels of our own?”
“Not without photoelectric cells. I don’t know even what to build them out of. The frame, glass, and wires we’d probably have. Look for some of them too, when you’re trading,” Ben suggested.
“Or 12 volt motors; we can make direct current for them,” Dad said.
“Wait a minute,” Ben said, “we have 12 volt motors.”
“What do you mean? Where?” Dad asked.
“On every motor vehicle,” Ben responded, “what we call the starters; they’re technically called cranking motors. They’re 12 volt and direct current. They’ll run off the batteries we can charge with the automotive alternators like you talked about earlier.”
“Wow!” exclaimed Dad, “why didn’t we think of that?”
“Well, I’ll be,” added Butch, “the solution was there all along.”
“Just needed someone to show us. Thanks a lot, Ben,” Dad said. “But Joe said the other day: ‘as soon as we have a good idea, glitches develop’. I guess in this case I have to wonder if starters can handle continuous service. They don’t run that way in a car; just for short bursts. And they run at high rpm’s, I think. Hope we can reduce it.”
“Don’t kill an idea with negative thoughts,” Butch said. “I know in some matters, like safety or health issues, you might have to be surer of things, but in this case, just start experimenting. You might be surprised.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Dad replied. “I’m sure the boys will be glad to hear the suggestion and will run with it. Hey! It just occurred to me; there are other 12 volt motors in our cars. Think about it.”
Ben cocked his head, looked at Dad, and then as if a spark had ignited in his brain, he jolted out, “The power window motors and the windshield wiper motors.”
“Right,” said Butch, “and the wiper motors are designed to run continuously. Oh, we’re going to have fun adapting them to our appliances.”
“I think we will,” Dad agreed. “Now, I have one more matter before we head for home.”
“What’s that?” Butch asked.
“Making hay,” Dad continued. “One of these days the weather’s going to break. Next Monday’s Labor Day; only gives us three or four weeks of decent hay drying weather. Most of the hayfields at Harvey’s are being grazed off. But here and on Harvey’s other rented farm there are some fields that should be harvested and stored for the winter. Especially here, so you have enough feed for your horses; they’re valuable. We’ve thought it through and it’s been decided that we’ll use a little fuel to cut just some parts of the hayfields; you know, get them started and then finish mowing by hand. We have four scythes and a few sickles. Do you have some?”
“Just a few,” Butch answered.
“It will have to do,” Dad went on. “If we have more workers than implements, that gives more opportunities for breaks for the workers; will keep the tools in continuous operation. We figure the hardest and most time consuming part of the operation is the mowing. That’s part of the reason we’re willing to use some precious fuel to mow some of the hay. We think we have enough pitchforks and rakes to get darn near all of us into the field for turning, raking and loading the hay. Hopefully we can keep two wagons and teams busy going back and forth from field to barn. That’s your part Butch; you up to it?”
“Bring it on,” he answered, “three teams if needed.”
“And when we go at it, we’ll need everyone in on the act,” Dad added.
“Don’t know why it wouldn’t work,” Butch replied. “Everyone around here has the spirit of cooperation, knowing we have to, to survive. When might we start?”
“Hard to say. We’ve no weather forecast. Have to rely on Poppop’s, my, and Harvey’s skill of reading the skies. Could be anytime. Once Harvey makes up his mind, things are going to move. Don’t be surprised if Larry comes up your lane in the middle of the night to start mowing,” Dad concluded.
Butch smiled, stuck up a thumb and said, “We’ll be ready.”
We put away the fishing gear. There were no keepers. Robbie said he didn’t feel like cleaning fish anyway. We said our goodbyes and back down the road we went.
“Oh, shoot,” I said to Dad, “we didn’t make arrangements for our next play session.”
“You mean work session,” he answered. “Don’t worry. We’ll be seeing a lot of each other when the weather turns.”
When we got home, Harvey and Poppop were already back. The boys had the milk tank over at the butcher house. They said they’d wait until tomorrow to place it on the foundation. There was cattle work to do now. As we walked out to the barn, we looked down the road and noticed a wagon pulled by a team of horses. Not Clydesdales like Butch had. They were smaller and sleeker; looked much like the horses the Mennonites used. And sure enough, as the wagon got close enough to see the driver, we could see he wore a straw hat and the typical plain garb of the Mennonites. He had a passenger, a boy about half grown, dressed the same way.
“Looks like more traders,” Dad said. And as the team pulled up to us, a big smile appeared on Dad’s face, “Well I’ll be,” he said, “if it isn’t Titus Weaver.”

To be continued… Who’s Titus Weaver? … Mort

CHAPTER TWELVE - TRADERS (CONT)

2007-04-25T15:04:00.000-07:00

You see, fifty years ago there were eight operating farms on our road from where it branches off of Mountain Road to where it meets the main highway. Each had their own farm family with a little dairy herd. Some had hogs, too, and most had chickens or other poultry. Since then, every time one of those farmers died or retired and the farm was sold, it was rare that the farm was passed onto a family member or even to another aspiring young farmer. Prices of farms continually rose and farming just didn’t pay well enough for anyone to afford one by just squeaking an existence from a single, average farm. However, the upper middle class could afford them; therefore many of the new owners were not farmers.
As a result seven of the eight farms, not Harvey’s of course, were owned by someone who did not do the farming on it. Not that the land was idled though, for it was still somewhat profitable for a farmer to absorb the farmland into his existing operation by simply paying rent for the cultivated acres. Harvey farmed three, including Butch’s, Roger farmed two, and another farmer named Roscoe worked the other three, one of which was Reuben’s. Yet each of the farms still had a barn that feed could be stored in and livestock housed. They each had some land that was pasture with the creek running through for a water source. All of the farms could easily support a couple cows or a few hogs or chickens. So Reuben’s request made sense.
“Tom and his family moved in with us from the city,” Reuben continued, “and between the two families, there are four kids under ten years old – milk drinkers. We have the stable, pasture and water, plus Roscoe has baled hay in the barn that he said we’re welcome to use. He’ll give us corn, too, when we help him with his harvest.”
“You sure one cow’s enough?” Harvey asked, always having the thought that we couldn’t use all the milk we had, not to mention the amount we might get as more cows freshen.
“Yes, one’s enough,” Tom said, “so, what would you accept as trade for one?”
In typical Stump fashion Harvey started gently tugging at his hairs on his chin; his eyes showing deep thought. “It just don’t seem right,” he finally said, “taking something from you that you might really need some day in exchange for something we have plenty of.”
“But that’s the idea,” Reuben retorted, “we chose things out of our abundance to trade, just like you would be doing.”
“I suppose you’re right, but I just wish you had something else we could use…that you wouldn’t miss,” Harvey concluded.
“Like nails and insulation!” Josh exclaimed. “You’re a home builder; do you have some to trade?”
“Yeah,” said Jeremiah, “we need insulation for this building. We have none and we hated the idea of using straw, it being so flammable. We were leaning to using old sofa and chair cushions; might be a little safer, but still flammable, and we’d rather save the ones we have for future needs. If you would have regular fiberglass insulation to trade, that would be great.”
“And nails,” added Dennis, “especially sixteen pennies; we’ve been straightening out every used, bent nail we could find. Sure could use those, too.”
“Got both,” answered Reuben, “several bales of insulation and all sizes of nails. Gladly trade what you need for a cow.”
“Now we’re cooking,” Harvey jubilantly declared. “I’ve just the cow for you. It’s Frenchie, that black one Dennis is milking,” he announced to the boys. “She’s in good production and early lactation nor bred back, so she’ll keep producing a long time. In addition she’s a young cow, but doesn’t act it; she’s real calm and will handle well. You want to take her with you, now?”
“I suppose,” Reuben said, “but we haven’t given you the insulation or nails.”
“Ah come on; we’re neighbors, and honest traders. Besides, wouldn’t want to make you carry everything back home plus carry the insulation here. We’ll hitch up Brutus to a lighter hay wagon we have, haul your knapsacks home for you with Frenchie in tow, and bring our building materials home. Larry can run the backhoe while I’m gone if they need to. Alyssa, I imagine you’ll want to go along?”
“Heck yeah,” was my response.
“And your dad and Poppop?”
They nodded and then Dad added, “Was planning on going to Butch’s this afternoon anyway with the young’ns. We can be dropped off on the way.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Harvey said, and then turned to me. “Alyssa, would you fetch a few strands of the rope you were braiding yesterday, oh, about fifteen feet or so. Larry can make a halter for Frenchie and a tow rope. Just bring it to the butcher house. We’ll be heading in for dinner. You boys are invited.”
Tom said, “No thanks. We brought our own; some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
“Sandwiches?” Jake quizzed, “You have bread?”
“More like, we had bread,” Reuben answered, “down to our last loaves. When Tom was getting out of the city, he ran into a fella with a truckload of it.”
Tom continued, “I didn’t ask where he got it. He was trading it with people for things. I traded some gasoline for ten loaves. But like Reuben said: we’re down to our last loaves.”
“We’re thinking we’ll have bread again,” Dad said. “We have the wheat and yeast. The boys are building an oven; still have to fabricate a flour mill. That’s in the future. Right now you can still set with us to eat. Cooled milk goes well with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. But I bet they’re some kids who might want to swap their dinner for them. Either way, join us for the meal.”
“We’re right behind you,” they answered.
Dad was prophetic. When Reuben and Tom sat down to eat, the real trading began. Harvey and Dad had accomplished the main trade and were satisfied to let us continue the haggling with the Sensenig’s. Dinner was clam chowder; mostly milk with butter; had to hunt the clams and potatoes. Must have looked good to Reuben and Tom though, for in short order, they had three bowls of it and Lynette, Amy and I had two packs of gum and two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. That was two thirds of a sandwich for each of us. We needed Josh to cut them as evenly as possible. He got to lick the knife for his effort, plus a stick of gum; made dividing the remaining nine easier. Larry swapped a milk bucket full of wheat for the .22 cartridges. Jean and Mel traded four cans of salmon for the two packs of feminine napkins.
“Meat we’ll have around here when we butcher,” Jean said, “so we can spare it. Besides I’m sure the Sensenig’s will enjoy it.” I didn’t understand then all the fuss about the napkins the women were making that day. About a year later, I found out.
Lois swapped some butter for the ibuprofen. “At least you’ll have some butter for your last bread tonight,” she told them. “You can make your own butter later if you find or make something to churn the cream with; we use a hand-cranked ice cream freezer. And just because we have the ibuprofen now, doesn’t mean we wouldn’t share it later if the need arises.”
“Thanks much,” Reuben said.
After dinner, with the swapping completed, the goods were loaded onto the wagon with Reuben, Tom, Amy, Lynette, Dad and I. Frenchie was tied to the back and Brutus hitched to the front. Harvey and Poppop held the reins. When we got to Crystal View Farm, Dad and we kids got off the wagon. Poppop, Harvey and the Sensenig’s would have no trouble completing the trading trip. Dad told them not to worry about us on the way home; we could walk.
Butch and Clare put us right to work. They were manuring their chicken house and had extra shovels and brooms for all of us. It was a dusty job. We tied our handkerchiefs around our noses. Made us all look like outlaws. It wasn’t really that bad though; the job was almost half finished. Butch had a wagon hitched to a team of horses and parked right next to chicken house door. The men were shoveling the manure onto the wagon; we only had to push and sweep it toward the door. As we worked, Robbie was picking little white mealworms out of the chicken dirt and putting them in an old empty coffee can.
“What you doing that for?” I asked, out from under my kerchief.
“You’ll see later,” was his answer.
It was too hot for this kind of job, but Butch said it needed to be done. In the summertime, chickens are more comfortable and produce much better when their pens are clean and dry. The house was soon cleaned; the next thing to do was empty the wagon.
“Chicken manure is excellent fertilizer,” Dad said to Butch. “You should probably spread it in a field where you intend to grow corn or vegetables next year.”
“That’s what I figured,” Butch replied, “there’s an oat stubble field, that has deep easy working soil, with few rocks. Thought I’d put it there.”
It was a short trip. We all walked along. Normally, I wouldn’t pass on an opportunity for a wagon ride, but I had no desire to jump onto or into the wagon’s stinky cargo. Spreading went real smooth. Butch drove real slowly while Dan and Lee threw shovelful after shovelful of the manure off the wagon in easy sweeping motions. That way the manure was distributed all over the ground, not clumped on piles here and there. Not bad for a chemist and a machinist. When the wagon was empty, Lynette and I climbed onto the wagon and swept it clean. Now the rest all hopped on for the trip back.

To be continued.... see what else Butch is up to, Mort

CHAPTER TWELVE - TRADERS

2007-04-18T13:03:00.000-07:00

Tuesday morning was once again warm and humid; seemed like we just couldn’t get out of the soup. Our family had different reactions to Dr. Fleming’s treatments. Most felt fine, some better, others, me included, felt no different. A few like Sandy and Mom were a little stiff.
“It will work out,” Dad had said.
After breakfast the men started preparing the site for the milk tank and showering area. Harvey had to use his backhoe, but it was a justifiable use of fuel. It didn’t take much to dig a foundation between the butcher house and Harvey’s furnace. He dug down, removing the loose soil until he reached a level where it was firm. Actually, it was pretty rocky there, so he didn’t have to dig very deep at all. The trick was building a strong enough base to hold the weight of the milk tank, 1000 gallons of water, some piping, and the walls and roof the boys planned to build around it. Fortunately, several years earlier, Harvey had some major excavation work done when his liquid manure storage tank was installed. The excavation yielded a large pile of debris that wasn’t needed to complete the project. The pile contained soil, many rocks (some very large), and pieces of concrete that had been broken up and removed from areas where the manure pump, filler pipe, and tank had been placed. Harvey hadn’t hauled the pile away.
He had said, “No sense moving it until we know where we’ll need it.” It appeared we needed it now. The pile was only 150 yards from the butcher house. Harvey adroitly used his backhoe to sort out the larger pieces of concrete that had even, flat areas. He maneuvered them to the foundation and placed them on each corner. The next step took the most fuel. He made about a dozen trips to the meadow and scooped clay from the creek bank. A few scoops he dumped right into the foundation; the rest he strategically placed around the sides. The boys leveled out the clay in the foundation, using it to firm up the concrete cornerstones, while Harvey brought some of the larger rocks to fill in between the corners. Others and I sorted through the now disheveled pile of debris, tossing the smaller rocks we found onto one of Harvey’s dump trailers. When it was full, he towed the trailer to the construction site and dumped it near the piles of clay. We threw the rocks into the foundation where the boys positioned them, imbedding them into the clay.
I wondered out loud, “How is this all going to work?”
Josh explained, “We’ll alternate clay and stone until we’ve reached the height we want for the bottom of the milk tank. Larry found two steel beams from an old farm implement that were long enough to span the narrow end of our structure and strong enough to hold the weight. We have enough lumber to frame up the walls and roof and to attach to the butcher house. Poppop has a pile of used steel roofing to top off the building. We can use a couple four by eight panels from the walls of Larry’s milk house under the floor where the showers will be. They’re strong and are made of waterproof material. They’ll be pitched toward an old cattle watering tank in the corner to collect the water. We just have to bucket it out every so often. We can use the waste water to flush toilets or water the garden. The floor will be slatted to let the shower water drain through; we’re still hunting a material to use that won’t give us splinters in our feet when we shower. And we need to find some insulation to keep the heat in. Don’t worry, it will come together.”
It was hard, thirst-creating work. Our fresh spring water supply was getting low so Poppop and I went to get Brutus to make a trip to the spring. On the way back, we noticed two fellows walking down the road – one tall and one short. They both had immense knapsacks on their backs; the sacks looked as big as the short fellow. Poppop waited until they were closer, then said, “Pretty hot day for a hike, and the local campground is back up the road.”
They laughed, and then introduced themselves. “I’m Tom Sensenig,” the taller one said. “This here’s my brother, Reuben.”
“Oh, Reuben Sensenig,” Poppop responded, “are you the Reuben Sensenig that lives on the last farm on this road before it joins the main highway?”
“That’s right,” answered Reuben, “looks like you’re making a go of it around here. This is the Stump farm, right?”
“Yeah, sure is. I’m Harold Stump. Most call me Hap, cept’n this one here, my granddaughter Alyssa; she calls me Poppop. Get those sacks off and rest a little. Bet you could use a cool drink. We can wander in and check out what the rest of the clan is up to. Less’n you’re on a hot and heavy mission?”
“Well, it’s hot and these sacks are heavy and they’re part of our mission,” Tom answered. “The other part is talking to Harvey. But first, we’ll take that cool drink, thank you.” After the drink, they followed us to the construction site to strike up a conversation with Harvey and company. As we came into view of everyone, Harvey and the others stopped working. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the guests or our fresh water.
“Everyone take a break!” Harvey yelled. “Get a cool drink and we can see what these travelers are wanting.” I still wasn’t sure – probably was the water…
“Do you know Reuben Sensenig?” Poppop asked Harvey.
Harvey responded, addressing Reuben, “I’ve seen you drive by the farm many times. We wave at each other. I know you live on the last farm up the road and have a home construction business, but I don’t recall ever talking to you. Glad to meet you.”
That was sad. Here was a neighbor of Harvey’s, living on the same road, a scant one and a half miles away, with whom Harvey had never had a conversation. But I guess things were no different in our neighborhood or with me for that matter. At our old home there were roughly 35-40 homes within a mile and a half radius of ours. They probably contained 100 or more people, many a lot older than me, but some around my age, that I had never talked to. I can only imagine how people in a city with thousands of neighbors, living within a few hundred feet of each other, rarely get to converse with one another. I perceive it as a bane on our society.
On the other hand, Dad might have spoken to many of the neighbors. He was outgoing and generally civic-minded, often presenting himself on local government or school issues. But that was the extent of it. We didn’t stop and visit, just to talk and be neighborly. At least not until the collapse… which produced a change in people, mostly good so far, as well as I could determine. Now, however, it was apparent that talking to neighbors was becoming more popular, or at least more common. Was it due to selfishness – because we needed “things” they had and so did they? Was it because we needed each other’s support? Or was it to fill a void in our psyches created when we no longer had newspapers, magazines, radio and television to keep our minds stimulated. Probably all three. Would I soon find out?
“No, we probably never have,” Reuben responded, as he shook hands with Harvey. “Glad to meet you. This is my brother Tom. You’ve quite a crew here.”
“Need them,” Harvey said, “got a lot of work here. What can we do for you?”
“We’re thinking it’s more what can we do for you?” Tom answered.
“Or what we can do for each other,” Reuben continued. “We’ve come to trade. Got a passel of goods in our knapsacks; hoping you can use some of it.”
“There are a lot of things we can use, but not many people want to part with the things we need, like toilet paper or food. Everyone’s in the same boat,” Harvey said. “But tell us. What you got?”
The brothers opened up their knapsacks and Tom started off. “There’s some shampoo, toothpaste, flashlight batteries, and rubbing alcohol; a couple wristwatches, two cigarette lighters with a bottle of butane for them; a mess of heavy socks and some work gloves, a utility knife, a large bottle of ibuprofen, chewing gum, a couple of blankets, three leather belts, .22 long rifle ammo, and two packs of feminine napkins.”
“Well,” said Harvey, “I guess we could use most of those things. But so could you. Why would you want to part with them? Or maybe better put, what do we have worth giving those things up for?”
“A cow,” Reuben answered.

To be continued… a cow? ... Mort

Chapter eleven - Visitors (cont)

2007-04-11T15:36:00.000-07:00

We found some pots and pans, spatulas, cooking spoons and mixing bowls that were taken right down to the butcher house. Even found some cans of clams and baked beans that somehow had ended up here; probably gotten packed or unloaded in too much of a hurry. Those went to Jean’s kitchen together with a bag of chocolate covered peanuts. It made Mom’s eyes light up; they were her favorite. Dad had said we shouldn’t worry about bringing too many books from home, but we did find some interesting ones like cookbooks, some self-help manuals for plumbing and electrical work. Lois was tickled to find a half a dozen alternative medicine books, home cure books, and both a first aid manual and CPR booklet. She found a place for them on the kitchen counter right above the ‘first aid’ drawer.
“Look’s like this might as well be the spot for our dispensary,” she said. “And look at this good selection of old or broken eyeglasses we’ve accumulated. They’re going to come in real handy as there’s no eye doctor to go to.”
We found deodorant, shampoo and soap; there were a couple unopened boxes of those fancy little perfumed ones that people kept in bowls on their toilet. We found some jewelry. Didn’t know if any was gold or silver which would have made it worth something. Either way we saved it for some unknown future use. There were also cufflinks and tietacs and even money. Almost every drawer had some loose change in it; some was even collectable coins. Then there were several cans of Dad’s penny collection. Sandy put all the coins in a can as well as the paper currency then stashed it all on the floor of the linen closet as we now had a path cleared to it.
“Don’t know if it will ever be worth anything,” she said, “but you never know.” Soon we had several boxes full and many more started. We had boxes of sweaters, pants, shirts, winter hats, coats, and gloves. All stored where we could find them when we needed them. There was quite an assortment of cameras and film.
“Not that they’ll do us any good,” Jean said. “There’s no place to have film developed.”
“But we can still take pictures,” I said. “The exposed film might keep well enough that it could still be developed if photo labs ever come back into being.”
“She’s right,” Mrs. Smith said, “one day, we might really enjoy having a pictorial record of our life without electricity. Even if we have to wait a few years to get the film developed.”
“And,” added Lois, “we should scrutinize what we take pictures of; you know, wait for special occurrences or for some of the creative inventions we might use. But right here is something that we can use right now to take pictures: Jeremiah’s Polaroid camera. He even went out and bought four packs of film when he smelled this coming.”
“That’s great,” Jean said, “but we should still use it judiciously.”
We found some disposable diapers, tissues, and quite a few handkerchiefs.
“That’s something everyone will have to learn to use,” Mom said. “We have to save any tissues we have for toilet paper. We rarely used tissues when I was a kid. It’s been like two generations now that have learned to be a throw away society. For example, from now on we won’t be able to run out and buy new socks; it’s darning time again. Disposables have become a very bad habit that might even have contributed to this economic predicament we’re now in.”
“Oh Mom,” Mel whined, “you’re starting to sound like Dad.”
“Well, so what if she does?” Jean commented. “Probably more of us should have listened when people like your dad talked. Here I found a few packs of garden seeds I can give him. He’ll be glad for them. What’s that you have there, Alyssa?”
“I found two rifle clips with some ammo in them and a few shotgun shells. I better take them to Larry,” I answered. Larry was in charge of our weapons. He had some of them locked up in his room and others in Poppop’s house. The ammunition was locked in a different location.
“In due time,” Jean responded. “We might find more before we’re done.”
“Oh,” Mom said, “I think we’ve just about gotten enough done for the day. It’s really getting hot and everyone is so very sweated. Why don’t we let the kids go over and splash in the creek before the neighbors need to head for home?”
“That’s a good idea,” Mrs. Smith said. “We really should get started for home in about a half hour or so.”
“But we have no swimming suits, Mommy,” Robbie’s sister Susan said.
“No time for modesty; we’re all becoming family here,” Mrs. Smith replied. “If you want to walk home in wet clothes, then keep them on. It’s your choice.”
“But Robbie’s along,” Molly chimed in.
“Like he’s never seen you girls in your underwear before? You’re all wet and sticky. Go cool off and enjoy yourselves. I’ll bring Julie’s little girls over and wash them as well. Would you have a towel I could borrow, Mrs. Stump?”
“Sure,” four women answered.
“Yeah that’s right, I guess you’re all Mrs. Stump,” she laughed.
“Here, take three towels for all to use; Alyssa can bring them back,” Mom said. We headed for the creek. Because of the cooling rain of the morning, the creek was a little fuller than usual, even a little muddy, and wasn’t terribly warm. That made it all the more refreshing and fun. We probably spent about one half an hour there, and then Mrs. Smith gathered up her crew, toweled the young’ns off, and headed for home.
Lynette, Amy, and I trudged back to the house with the towels and waved good-bye to our friends from Crystal View Farm. As they walked up the road we spied someone on a bicycle coming down the road toward us. He had large saddlebags on his bike. He looked somewhat familiar, but I just couldn’t place him. He stopped and parked his bicycle, pulled a small black leather bag out of one of the saddlebags, and approached us. He was tall, well-built and looked to be around 30 years old. But it wasn’t until he spoke that I recognized him. It was Dr. Fleming, the chiropractor my dad visited.
“Hello young ladies,” he said. “I’m Doctor Fleming. Are your folks around?
“Our mothers are in the house,” Amy answered. “Our dads and the other men are around the farm close by somewhere.”
“We don’t travel very far now-a-days,” Lynette added.
“No, I guess you don’t,” he responded. “I was just up at Butch and Clare’s, and they told me the Stump family lived at this farm.” He looked directly at me and continued, “You look familiar. I think you father is one of my patients. Is your name Lizzie, or Liddy, or Lisa, or something like that?”
“Alyssa”, I announced, “and my dad is one of your patients. I’ll go and get him. I’m sure Mom remembers you. Why don’t you head into the house with my cousins here? Dad and I will catch up.”
“Thank you,” he said, “I’ll do that.”
I gave the towel I was carrying to Lynette and sprinted to the barn to find Dad. I found him, Jeremiah, Harvey, Dennis, and Aaron working in the milk house. They had been dismantling the milk tank and making a hole in the wall large enough to remove the tank to its new home next to the butcher house.
“Dad,” I said, “guess who’s here?”
“How would I know?” he answered, “seems like we get more visitors now that people have no motorized transportation than when they could just hop in a car and drive anywhere they wanted. So who is it?”
“Doctor Fleming.”
“Really? I could sure use an adjustment.”
“So could I,” said Jeremiah.
“Well he’s headed toward the house, if you want to talk to him,” I said.
“Let’s all head in there boys. His visit might be beneficial to all of us,” Dad concluded.
We found the others in the butcher house where things had already been put into motion. One of the tables had a blanket on it as well as Lois. Dr. Fleming was working on her neck.
“What’s going on?” I asked Dad.
“Looks like Doctor Fleming is practicing his trade,” Dad answered. “Doctor Fleming! Good to see you. I see you’ve become an itinerant.”
“Yes, I guess you could say that, and good to see you, too,” he answered. “It got to the point I had to close my office. Few had the gas to continue making visits for my services; nor the money to pay.”
“Hey! What would you need money for?” Harvey asked. “All doctors are rich anyway.”
“Yes and no,” Dr. Fleming said, as he finished with Lois and Sandy hopped onto the table. “I guess some were rich, and then there were others, like myself, who still had student loans and mortgages on our offices to pay. That’s where a lot of my earnings went. But the collapse has evened it out; we’re all in the same boat. Now one of my valued possessions is my bicycle and a few tension hammers and other tools of my trade. But the possession that’s most valuable, that truly makes me rich, is the skill I have as a chiropractor; the skill that I can use to benefit others, by helping them heal. The same way you’re rich, Harvey, because you can use your dairying skills to produce milk to feed others. And Joe can use his butchering skill to put meat on the table for everyone.”
“Guess you’re right,” Harvey said sheepishly as Sandy relinquished her position to Mom for the doctor’s manipulating hands.
“And we’re all rich in friends that care,” Dr. Fleming continued. “Look how quickly you all readily received me, and I you, knowing any money you might have to give me is worthless.”
“But we’ll have something for you, Doc,” Dad answered. “At least a good meal, and some food or other supplies you can take home to your family. By the way, how are they and where are they?”
“Thanks for asking,” Dr. Fleming answered. “We found a farm, just a little out of town, similar to Harvey’s here, with a spring to supply water. The Missus and the kids are fine, helping on the farm, while I’m out applying my trade.”
One after another we jumped onto the table for an adjustment by Dr. Fleming. Dad made sure Barry received a treatment, knowing some of his previous medical conditions. Many of us, me included, had never had a chiropractor work on us before. When it was my turn, I was tense, not knowing what to expect, but Dr. Fleming talked me through, for everyone’s benefit as well as mine.
He started, “You know your nervous system is responsible for helping your body heal as well as stay healthy. All your nerves run through your spine, so anytime the vertebrae in your spine are out of alignment they can possibly rub against or pinch the nerves, thus interfering with the signals that go through them. This can make you feel bad, or feel pain, and prohibit your body from healing. There, you’re all done. Jump off and stand up straight. Do you feel okay?”
“I feel fine,” I answered, “what was wrong with me?”
“Hardly anything,” the doctor replied. “I see you have excellent posture, your back muscles appear very strong. That’s good; keeps your vertebrae in line. You evidently work hard, are careful not to lift too heavy and not from awkward positions. You only had two vertebrae slightly out of line. They popped right back into place. Now let’s see how your dad is.”
Dad lay down on the table. “More than one vertebra out of alignment here,” Dr. Fleming said. “I haven’t seen you for what, eight - ten weeks?”
“Sometime in early June,” Dad answered.
“I could tell,” the doctor replied. “A lesson for everyone: take care with your back and spine, then your spine will take care of you. I’ll probably get around every month or so.”
“Well, whenever you get here, you’re welcome,” Jean said. “You’re the only medical care we have.”
“Not quite true,” Jeremiah said. “Lois is a nurse, remember; she can handle a lot of things.”
“Sorry,” Jean replied, “she is very valuable. I just meant we don’t see any doctors or dentists.”
“But you might soon,” Dr. Fleming interjected. “Both Dr. Bear, the physician in town and the dentist, Dr. Miller have the use of horse and buggies, so they can make rounds like I am. With a buggy they can carry more of their tools and a small supply of medicines with them. Don’t know how often they’ll get around, but at least they are around. Finding them in an emergency might be tough, maybe some system should be created for the future.”
“It would be helpful if we knew where they both live now,” Jean said.
“I guess it would,” Dr. Fleming replied. “Dr. Miller is on his cousin’s farm about three miles from here on Possum Lane. I can’t remember his name.”
“Ed Miller,” Harvey said.
“Yeah, that’s it, thanks. Maybe I can find out till I’m around next time where Dr. Bear is. Well, I should be going now. I’d like to stop a few other places on the way home.”
“Won’t you stay for supper?” Lois asked.
“Not this time. I’ll take a rain check.”
“Can you handle a small sack of red beets and a few potatoes on that bicycle?” Poppop asked. “Or is there something else you might really be in need of?”
“I have some room for a few. Some people gave me a couple cans of fruit and another family some toothpaste. We could use some bath soap, if you’ve some to spare?” Dr. Fleming inquired.
“That we can,” Jean said. “Amy, you know where it is. Would you go get Dr. Fleming what – three or four bars?” The doctor nodded in agreement.
“We’re hoping we’ll be able to make more in the future, after we’ve butchered a few beef. Sorry we can’t thank you more than that,” she concluded.
“Nothing more necessary,” he remarked, “it was my pleasure. You all take care of your spines now.”
As he pedaled back up the road Lois said, “That was some special man.”
“More special than me?” her husband Jeremiah asked.
“Shush, you know what I mean. People like that, with hearts like his, will be an integral part in the survival of many families and the communities of this country.”
“I do know what you mean,” my uncle responded.

To be continued….. Mort

Chapter Eleven - Visitors (cont)

2007-04-04T14:07:00.000-07:00

After dinner the boys went at their projects in earnest. We were low on water so Mel, Lynette, Amy, and I hitched up Brutus to the cart and went to the spring. On the way back we saw that the neighbor kids were coming down the road. How could I’ve forgotten? Robbie led the way, with his sisters Molly and Susan, followed by his mother, Donna Smith, holding the hands of Tina and Leslie, Julie the teacher’s daughters who were just five and seven years old.
“Glad that rain stopped,” Robbie hollered. “They almost wouldn’t let us visit today.”
“I’m glad too,” I answered, “come on everyone. I’ll show you my horse Brutus, and Patsy our dog and all the calves we have.”
“Just for a few minutes,” Mrs. Smith instructed. “And Molly, take special care with Tina and Leslie while I go in to talk to Alyssa’s mother. Remember we came to help with the work.” As we walked toward the pens where the cows and calves were kept, it occurred to me Robbie was at quite a disadvantage. He was the only boy in the bunch. All the other boys, besides Julie’s newborn twins, were much older than he was and getting pretty close to being men, not just because of their age, but because of the situation we all were in. So to stay in his age group Robbie had to associate with us girls. I think he handled it well. Even at eleven he behaved like a leader, not too bossy, which could be dangerous in our group - what with five of us girls between ages 12 to 15. He was smart and I recall many a time at church how he could be a good spokesperson. He had garnered our respect. And I guess he was growing up fast, just like we were.
“The cows we milk are over here,” I said to the group.
Robbie asked, “Do they have names?”
“Yep, I know every one. One’s named after me: Ally; over there she is. And another one’s Jeanie for Jean. Harvey and Larry have some funny names too like Intimidator and Birdbrain.”
“That’s funny,” Robbie responded, “but come to think of it, sometimes ours act like birdbrains.”
“Did you name yours?” I asked.
“My dad did. Butch put him in charge of the cows. He said he wasn’t too fond of them. Dad named them Bonnie and Lassie.”
“Lassie’s a dog’s name,” I quipped.
“I know,” Robbie answered, “just seemed to fit. Dad wanted to give them a Scottish flavor.”
“Well that it did, laddie,” I chuckled.
“How much do you help with the cows, Alyssa? Do you get to milk any?”
“No, not yet,” I replied, “but I will someday, especially if we get a few more to milk.”
“I help already,” Robbie said proudly. “I also get to watch them when we graze them in the hayfield. I like them very much. I like the milk, too. Don’t think everyone does though. Every meal – milk. Milk with eggs for breakfast. Milk with corn for dinner, and tomato milk soup for supper.”
“Milk with corn?” I inquired.
“Yeah, we pick some of the corn from Harvey’s fields. It’s pretty dry though, not like corn-on-the-cob, so some of us crush the kernels with bricks or hammers, then soak it in water. They heat it until it’s fairly soft, drain the water, add milk and butter and warm it up to eat. It’s kinda tasty with a little sugar or syrup on it. Probably pretty nutritious; it would be a lot better with more sugar though. What did you have for dinner?”
“What else?” I answered, “string beans and red beets. Fills you up, but I’m sure getting tired of them.”
“Wow!” exclaimed Robbie. “I’d love to have some fresh vegetables. Butch didn’t have much of a garden. Only thing left in it is tomatoes. We’ve got canned fruit and vegetables, spaghetti, tuna, spam, peanut butter, and beans. But we’re not using any of it until it’s absolutely necessary, whatever that means.”
“Same here,” I replied, “have to eat what’s fresh, they tell us. Sorry about the tomatoes; they’re not my favorite either. At least you get eggs. Our few chickens only lay about six a day. Mom says it will take a week until we have enough to make a breakfast of eggs for everyone. I guess once a week’s better than not at all. So we eat cereal for breakfast, sometimes with dried fruit.”
“Cereal,” Robbie said, “what kind of cereal?”
“All kinds; Dad always had lots on hand. There’s Chex, Cocoa Puffs, Cheerios…”
“Whoa! You have Cocoa Puffs. Do you have a lot?”
“Don’t really know,” I replied, “Lois is in charge. Most of the adults eat oatmeal, so I guess there must be quite a few boxes left.”
“Sure would like to trade for some. Your dad the negotiator?” he asked.
“Knee-go-she… what?” I asked.
“Negotiator, you know, does the bargaining, the trading, talks things through.”
“Oh. That he is. In fact we just had a, what would you call it, a bargaining session this morning, talking about the school.”
“School, what school? I told you that teacher would be trouble. What did he say about it?”
“He said, ‘No, not now.’ He wouldn’t makes us go to school for now.”
“That’s a relief,” Robbie said, “but I think the danger still exists.”
“Oh, get over it,” his big sister Molly said, “let’s get into the house now; there’s work to do.” On the way to the house we passed the calves.
“Those two over there,” I said, “are going to be our oxen one day. I named them Chip and Pepper.”
“Shouldn’t it be ‘Salt and Pepper’?” Susan asked.
“I suppose that would sound right,” I responded, “but I always wanted to name something Chip, so now I did.”
We entered the house from an outside door that led right into Jean’s upstairs second kitchen, the room she didn’t really need as a kitchen as she had one downstairs. The last people to use the room as a home were Harvey’s brother’s family, but they had moved out over twenty years ago. The stove and refrigerator were gone. The sink remained as well as all the cabinets and closets. They were empty, but wouldn’t be for long. For walking into the room was like walking into a mountain. Piles and piles of boxes, dresser drawers, mattresses, box springs, and clothing – piled to the ceiling. Just a narrow path where Mom, Lois, Sandy, Jean, and Mrs. Smith were working around some empty boxes. Four households of stuff; it came from our house, Grandma and Grandpop’s, Joe and Sandy’s and Jeremiah and Lois’s. Everything had just been unloaded in our haste. The women were chattering away, just like five women can when they’re busy on a project.
Amy had a little trouble finding an opening to speak, but finally she asked, “What are we going to do with all this stuff?”
“We going to organize it,” Jean said.
“It sure ain’t organized now,” Mel said. “What’s the purpose?”
“We want to take an inventory; see what we have. And put things where we can find them when we need them,” Mom answered.
“What’s the hurry?” Lynette quipped.
“Don’t know when the need will arise,” Jean responded, “but we want to be ready when it does. Especially with any medical or hygiene items we may find in here. Also, Barry needs a place to sleep. All the beds in the rest of the house are occupied. He can sleep on the sofa in the living room for a night or two, but it would be nicer to have a little space he could consider his own. It won’t be much; there’s still going to be a lot of stuff in here.”
“You kids won’t have to do much sorting,” Lois said, “just the running.
As we decide where something goes, you can get it there for us. There are enough of you that you won’t be overworked. The more carriers, the lighter the load. Sandy found some permanent markers, so we can label boxes. You won’t be going too many places. Some cooking items we think we can use right at this time, we’ll send to the butcher house. Of course any food items we find go to Jean’s kitchen.”
“We’re trying to dig that closet open, so we can put linens in it,” Mom said, “you know, sheets, pillowcases, blankets, towels and washcloths. We can already reach the cabinets above the sink. We plan on putting eating utensils, plates, bowls, cups, and glasses in them as we have enough in the butcher house for now.”
So at it we went. Sandy was busy with her markers. She only had a few empty boxes to start; we’d get more as we’d kept emptying them. One she labeled ‘socks’, another ‘office supplies’, one for men’s underwear and one for women’s. She labeled a big box ‘shoes’. Boxes weren’t all she wrote on. One kitchen drawer she labeled ‘first aid’ for bandages, antiseptics, cough drops and the like. Any more potent medicines or prescriptions Lois put in a special box. On another drawer Sandy wrote ‘toothpaste/brushes’. On one, dishcloths. There was one for flashlights and batteries. Cleaning supplies went in the cabinet under the sink.
You couldn’t believe the stuff we found; think of the things we let accumulate in our closets, desks, and dresser & kitchen drawers. There were small tools like screwdrivers and pliers, plus screws, nuts and bolts; we took those to Larry’s tool shed. Paper clips, thumbtacks, staples, pens, pencils, and crayons were all thrown in the office supplies box. Who knew what purpose they might serve one day. We soon had a good size box that we kept throwing the candles in we were finding. Mom was meticulously gathering a storehouse of sewing supplies in a basket. We kept finding matches; a lot from weddings we had attended. Old shoestrings found a special place next to the shoebox. Discarded handbags, purses, wallets, and old belts were put in another large box; might need the leather for repairing.
“Look,” said Mel, “here’s a pocket knife with a Penn State Nittany Lion on it; it must be Jake’s. Should we take it to him?”
“Not necessary,” Jean answered. “He has one to use I’m sure. Just put it in the drawer with the other knives. If anyone needs one they’ll know where to look.”
“But it’s his,” I declared.
“Yeah!” exclaimed Lynette, “and that pair of socks Sandy just threw into the ‘socks’ box are mine!” The whole crew became uncommonly silent.
Mom looked at Jean. Jean looked at Lois and Sandy. Mrs. Smith just had a bewildered look on her face. Mom held her hand up in front of her face and just kept twirling it, like her fingers were probing her mind, searching for words. Every so often her lips would start, then stop; nothing was ready.
Jean encouraged her. “Go ahead,” she said, “you can explain it.”
“Okay,” Mom started, “I guess the adults and the near adults understand what I’m about to tell you. But you young’ns probably need to hear this. When we grown-ups agreed to move here onto Harvey and Jean’s farm, we also agreed that we would have to pool our resources. Maybe the word you would better understand is share. We knew that in order to survive we’d have to depend on each other; not only with our time and labor, but also our things. So everything that we brought from our old homes or anything that we gather or trade for in the future becomes what we call community property. I know that’s a big word for some of you to understand, but it pretty much means that the things here no longer belong to me or to Jean or to Jake but they belong to us; all of us. Didn’t you notice that when we eat we don’t say these are Poppop’s vegetables, or Harvey’s milk, or my chow-chow? It’s now our food. When you take a bath it’s not your soap, washcloth or towel that you’re using, but they’re ours. And the things we’re store housing in here are ours, for everyone’s benefit. Not to worry though; when you need something, you just need to ask and we’ll find it for you. When Jake needs a knife, they’ll be one here for him, maybe even the one that was his. And Lynette, when you need socks, there will be some here for you, even if they aren’t the ones that were yours. I don’t know what else I can say.”
Amy ventured an answer: “I guess it means there is no place for any selfishness here. That we’re all in this together and we need to support each other, including sharing the things that were once our own.”
“I think you got it, sweetheart,” Lois proudly said to her daughter. “So as we continue to sort, remember that many of these things might be sorely needed one day.” So on we went.

To be continued…. Find out next week what else they find, Mort

CHAPTER ELEVEN - VISITORS

2007-03-28T13:23:00.000-07:00

By lunch time the rain had stopped. As we left the barn, I spied a pickup truck coming down the road. It had a utility body on it and had boxes and other things piled in the bed high above the cab’s roof and covered with a tarp. Into the driveway it pulled and as the driver emerged I recognized him. It was Barry, our auto mechanic. He was an unforgettable fellow. I remembered him as a jolly, smoking fiend and a very foul mouth. He and Dad would vigorously debate politics. Actually sometimes it would seem more like arguing, the way Barry would carry on. Yet in the end he’d be laughing about it. He had long hair and was extremely overweight. I often wondered how he could even get close enough to work in some of the tighter areas of cars. I thought I had heard Dad tell Mom one time about some of the health problems Barry had. Today, however, he looked different. Hard to describe; perhaps more humble, mellow, or subdued. Shorter hair, that was obvious. And definitely weighing less. It looked like he lost a hundred pounds.
“Good to see you, Barry,” Dad said. “What brings you out here?”
“My truck,” he said. So he had some jolliness left in him. “I’m out of business,” he continued. “When the gasoline supply dried up, no one needed their cars fixed, nor did they have money to pay for repairs. But I knew there were people out here, especially farmers, who had equipment that might still be in use and could need repair. So I packed up as many of my tools as I could, at least those I deemed to be most likely to be useful. Put all the gasoline I had in a couple cans, together with some clothing and the little food I had and hit the road. I’ve been going from house to house and farm to farm trying to trade my skill for some room and board. Hasn’t really been working out. I had to trade most of my gasoline for food. Fact is I probably couldn’t drive another ten miles before I’d run out of gas. Didn’t know this was your place. Soon as I saw you, hope returned. Is there something I can do here to earn some food?”
“Not a thing,” Harvey said. Some of the color drained out of Barry’s face. I almost couldn’t believe I’d just heard Harvey say that.
“This here’s Harvey Stump, my second cousin. This is his farm,” Dad said.
Barry remained silent. After a few moments Harvey extended his hand and said, “Glad to meet you, Barry. We’re getting ready to go to the house to eat shortly. Like I said, there’s ‘not a thing’ you need to do, except to join us. If you want to eat, you’re welcome to what we have to share.”
A big smile emerged on Barry’s face as he grabbed Harvey’s hand and shook it. “Thank you, thank you,” he said. He just kept shaking it as he looked at Dad and said, “You put him up to that didn’t you?”
“Didn’t have time to,” was Dad’s response. “But we had the same great-grandfather and they say he was a corker, so I had a pretty good idea what Harvey was doing. Let’s go eat.”
The boys were planning to tackle the project of preparing the butcher house for housing the milk tank after lunch. Of course, while it was raining they had been preparing. Larry had the sprayer pump all flushed out and cleaned up. Jake and Joe had started converting a bicycle into the drive for the pump. Aaron was working on Jean’s oven. Poppop and the rest were pulling the water line from the barn. Dennis had the least success. While we were eating, he explained the problem he was having making the blender run on 12 volts.
“I think,” he said, “the trouble is a battery is direct current and the blender as well as all these other motors around here are alternating current.”
“That would be correct,” Aaron said, “to convert it we need a transformer to go from DC to AC.”
“Sounds like a rock group,” Grandmom said. Chuckles from everyone.
“I guess the transformers we might have go the other way?” Dad asked.
“What transformers?” Dennis wanted to know.
“Like the one for a toy electric train, a re-chargeable flashlight, Mel’s laptop, the two-way radios, or an electric fencer,” Dad answered.
“Yeah, those convert from AC to DC,” Dennis agreed, “but still it makes me wonder…. I guess I should have played a little closer attention in school.”
“School?” Dad said, “did you hear that Alyssa? Dennis learned something in school.”
“Now don’t start that again,” I said.
“Enough already you two,” Mom said, “Boys, I have something on my mind. I’d like to ask you three questions. Address them whenever and in whatever order you wish.”
“What are the questions, Mom?” Jake asked.
“Number one - you are putting a lot of effort into powering our basic machines by people power, what with the bicycles and all. Rightly so, I guess, we need to do something quickly to meet some of our needs. But shouldn’t you be investigating using other power sources such as animals, water, or wind?”
“Number two - Just like practically every other farm and household in the country we have many things like motors, appliances, and tools that run on electricity. Additionally, we have a generator capable of making electricity if we only had a power source to turn it. Isn’t it feasible to spin that generator with one of the power sources I just mentioned? Or wouldn’t it be an even better long term solution to develop an alternative fuel source so we could use our tractors again to run the generator? Then we wouldn’t have put so much effort into converting all these machines we have to mechanical drive or to 12 volt. Number three…”
“Four,” Josh said, “You already asked three.”
“Don’t get picky,” Mom continued. “Number four then - A few weeks from now we are going to have more darkness in a day than daylight. So far we’ve been able to see well enough into the evening with a couple flashlights, lanterns, and candles. Without making electricity, recharging the batteries will end and our supply of them will be depleted. There is only a little kerosene left for the lanterns and it positively isn’t a good idea to have candles in the barn. Have you devised a plan to provide lighting for the winter?”
Aaron, Dennis, Jake, Josh and the others just looked at each other for a few moments, then Joe asked, “anybody get all that?”
“I think I did,” Jake said.
“Go ahead then; answer her. And give it your best shot,” Joe said.
“OK,” Jake started, “If I got them straight --- Yes, Probably, Yes, and Not entirely.” Dad and Jeremiah put their hands other their mouths in a weak attempt to keep from laughing out loud. Harvey and Larry couldn’t help it; they broke up, then the rest of us too.
Mom responded, “What the… what kind of answers are those? Yes, Probably, Yes and Not entirely?”
“Well you asked yes-no questions,” Jake said.
“You guys!” Mom shrilled, “you’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.”
“I’m sure they will,” Dad assured her, “I’m positive I will. Who’d we make fun of?”
“Oh shush,” she finished. “I won’t say another word.”
Joe took over. “Ignore them; those were good questions,” he said. “And Jake’s answers were accurate, but worthy of explanations. I’ll try, and anyone please jump in if I twist things. Yes, we should be investigating other mechanical power sources. Larry and I are designing a windmill and I think your husband has talked a little about damming the creek and building a water wheel. Design and construction might be the easy parts. The trick is getting a way to get that mechanical power to the machines we want to power.
“Probably we can spin the generator with one of those other power sources you mentioned. Problem is the generator requires a minimum of 45 horsepower to spin. Neither a windmill nor a waterwheel could produce that much, unless they were gigantic. Then the problem would be getting enough wind or water to turn them.”
Aaron chimed in, “A decent possibility, besides developing an alternative fuel, would be a steam engine. That’s kind of what the electric companies do. We have wood to burn and the excess heat could be used to heat Harvey’s house. But we haven’t come up with a design yet. It requires large pistons and some sort of control valve system.”
“Unless we could locate one of those old steam tractors that some of those antique farm tractor collectors might have?” Harvey said. “If someone would want to part with one.”
“If they aren’t being put to use already?” Dad wondered.
“Or a steam locomotive?” Josh added.
“Some of them around, too,” Joe said, “some even in museums. But no doubt someone already has claimed them.”
“And that would quite an endeavor to transport one here,” Larry said.
“So you see,” Joe said to my mom, “as we come up with ideas we often run into roadblocks. Now Aaron has already answered your third question. Yes, it would be a better long term solution to develop an alternative fuel for our vehicles. They’re all in the thinking stages for now. However your last question is a more urgent one. We need light. Especially in the barn as we will have to milk in the dark around the beginning of November. You were right about the lanterns. Kerosene’s soon gone. We thought of other fuels; it appears to just raise more questions. In the Bible they used olive oil in their lamps. Could we squeeze oil from the soybeans or render the beef tallow when we butcher? Would they burn? But still we’d like to stay away from open flame in the barn, so we’re leaning toward car headlights. A superficial solution would be to just pull two cars or trucks over to the doors and shine the lights in while we are milking. However, it would be a wasteful use of gasoline, for if we didn’t run the engines now and again, the batteries would go dead.”
“Actually,” Dennis jumped in, “charging the batteries is already a problem we need to solve. Remember we are using one on Harvey’s furnace. In fact we’re on the second one now; the first is too low on juice to keep the control working.”
Josh added, “When we rigged up the bicycle to run the water pump, we also designed it to run an alternator from my old car. But it just doesn’t seem to work right. We think it has something to do with the voltage regulator that’s built right into the alternator.”
“It never fails,” Joe resumed, “as soon as we have a good idea, glitches develop. We’re hoping as more and more people join us, they’ll bring some of the skills we need to overcome these obstacles. Our next step is to get Ben down here; remember he’s an electrical engineer. Maybe he can talk us through them.”
“I can help,” Barry said.
“Yes, Barry!” Dad said. “You’re an auto mechanic. Do you think you know what’s wrong?”
“Maybe two things,” Barry answered. “First, we’ll want to make sure the alternator is spinning fast enough, just to be sure. Second, more than likely your assumption about the voltage regulator is one hundred percent correct.”
“But can you do anything about it?” Jake asked.
“I used to keep that old beat up jalopy of a Pontiac you once had running didn’t I?” Barry remarked. “When I was a teenager back in the 60’s, my buddies and I spent a lot of time converting our hot rods with generators over to alternators. Did it for many farm trucks and tractors, too. We always had to rework the voltage regulators. I’m pretty sure I remember the intricacies of them. I can make it work for you.”
“That would be great,” Harvey said. “then we can remove some of the headlights from a few vehicles and position them right in the barn. We’d just have to keep charging the batteries as they run down.”
“And we wouldn’t have to depend on people-pedal power either,” Larry said. “We could use the windmill Joe and I are working on.”
“Right,” said Joe, “and maybe even rig it up to charge several at a time. Think that can be done, Barry?”
Barry answered, “Don’t know why not. A lot of things can be done if you try; nothing if you don’t.”
“That’s a good attitude, Barry,” Dad responded. “We should all remember that.”
“Yeah we should,” several voices echoed.

To be continued…. Mort

Chapter Ten - Beasts of Burden (cont)

2007-03-21T08:17:00.000-07:00

“And how would you like it if you weren’t able to read the Bible?”
“I wouldn’t,” I answered.
“You learned that in school, didn’t you?” Dad asked.
“Yes, but also at home when you and Mom read with me, and at church when following along in the hymn book,” I said.
“Sure, that’s right. And how are your math skills?”
Dad hit a sore spot; my math was terrible. In fact, I’d probably have liked school better if learning math had not been so difficult. “A problem with school,” I continued, “was that all the students had to fit the same mold. Those that had little math ability were taught using the same methods and were expected to achieve the same goals as those with greater abilities. Someone, somewhere in the educational system, once coined the phrase: ‘all children can learn’. The educational community fell for it, but it’s all a bunch of crap. It would be true if the word ‘something’ would be added onto the phrase, because we can all learn something. But not all the same things and definitely not to the same achievement level. Yet we were still all thrown into the same room with about 24 others of varying abilities and then all were expected to reach the same level. It’s horribly frustrating and not fair. Then they ignore the other skills we have, like music or craftsmanship. No wonder we hate school.”
Dad had a sorry look on his face. He and I were different. He was a great math student; it came easy. But play the piano or type. Forget it! He said his brain didn’t know how to tell his fingers what to do when his eyes weren’t looking at them. And read and consequently play two, three, four notes at a time? Impossible. He said it was physiological - some nerve synapses in his brain just wouldn’t let him do that. I thought it was psychological – his mind just wouldn’t let him. On the other hand, I couldn’t calculate worth a dime, but could play both the piano and the flute. Dad was very glad that I could and once said he’d be willing to trade his ability to do math for the ability to play the piano. That made no sense to my teachers though. So what if I can’t learn math? Let me excel at what I can. Allow me some level of achievement.
“I wonder how many feet of twine I’ve handled in my lifetime?” Dad asked. “A million perhaps?”
“Okay, so you’re going to push your point,” I answered. “How in the world would you know that? And who would care?”
“Well, you wouldn’t really know, we’d have to estimate.”
“Estimate! You know I hate that more than word problems. What good is it anyway?” was my response.
“Just to prove a point, and I’m curious and maybe you’ll learn something. Get that paper feed bag over there. Here’s a pencil. Do some calculations.”
“Oh great,” I grumbled.
“Look at this hay bale,” he started. “Every bale has 14 inches of twine up the end and maybe averages two and a half feet for its length. How many inches total would that be on one bale?”
“Okay, I’ll oblige you,” I said. So on the feed bag I wrote two point five times 12 as there’re 12 inches in a foot. “That’s 30 inches plus the 14 up the end equals 44 inches.”
“Yes, but that’s only one end and the top. How much then for all the way around the bale?”
“88, I don’t need the paper for that,” was my answer.
“Good, but how many strings on each bale?” Dad prompted.
“Two.” But now I needed the paper again. I scribbled 88 times two. “Comes to 176.”
“176 what?” he asked.
“OK, another point; always label your answers – inches.”
“Good,” he said, “how do we change to feet?”
“Divide by 12,” I said. The paper again. “14 point six, six, six, six...”
“How are we going to work with that number?” Dad asked.
“Don’t know,” I said.
“It’s just an average anyway,” Dad went on, “an estimate. Why don’t you round it off?”
He knew I hated rounding off, too. Couldn’t see any use to it. But, on the other hand, it sure would be easier to work with 15 instead of 14.6666.
“15,” I answered.
“So every time I pick up a bale, I handle 15 feet of twine. How many bales would it take for me to handle one million feet of twine?”
“Divide again, right?” I asked.
“Yes.”
This took me longer. It was that stupid repeating six again. “66 thousand, six hundred sixty-six point six, six, six…” I replied indignantly.
“66,666 what?”
“I don’t know…feet?”
“No – you divided feet by feet per bale. The feet cancel out. What’s left?” Dad asked.
“Bales I suppose.”
“You suppose correctly,” he continued. “So how many bales per year would I have to have picked up to handle that million feet of twine?”
“Don’t you ever give up? How would I figure that?”
Dad answered, “If the answer we’re looking for is bales per year, and remembering that ‘per’ means divided by, then we need to divide the number of bales by the number of years I’ve worked with them. This requires another skill – deduction. Let’s suppose I’ve handled bales fairly regularly since I’m ten years old. I’m now 53. How many years is that?”
“That I can answer – 43 years. So if we are looking for bales per year I divide 66,666 bales by 43 years?” I asked.
“That’s correct.”
It took more paperwork and a bit of time. “It comes to 1,558.” I paused. He gave me a funny look. “Bales per year,” I finished.
“Good. So in your estimation do you think that I have handled more than 1558 bales per year and then consequently handled a million feet of twine in my lifetime?”
“Easy,” I answered, “that’s only four or five bales a day.”
“Wow! How did you know that so quickly?”
“I don’t know. You’re just like our teachers who want us to explain our answers. Maybe I learned something?” I sarcastically commented. “There’s 365 days in a year, so four bales times 400 is 1600. Sounded like a good estimate.”
“It was,” Dad answered, “and you rounded off, too.”
“Whoopee!” I exclaimed.
“So do you think I’ve handled a million miles of twine in my lifetime?” he asked.
“You really don’t give up. Do I have to go through all these steps again?”
“No, just add one additional piece of information.”
“And what would that be?” I asked
“The number of feet in a mile. You all ready estimated four to five bales per day for one million feet. You just have to multiply by feet per mile to determine how many bales per day for one million miles. How many feet in a mile?”
“Five thousand and something,” I answered.
“5280,” Dad continued, “can you figure it out now?”
“As this is just an estimate I might as well just round it off to 5000. Times four or five bales comes to 20,000 – 25,000 bales per day. Didn’t happen.”
“No, didn’t happen. What did happen was you learned something about estimating and rounding off.”
“I suppose I did… and without a school!” I jubilantly declared. “So you don’t need to make me go to school!”
“Well, to repeat my answer to your original question. No, not now.”
“OK, I guess. What are we going to do with all this rope we’re making anyway?” I asked.
“Oh, for any need that may arise and for harnesses,” Dad answered.
“Harnesses?” I asked.
“Yes. Butch gave us a nice harness for Brutus, but you never know when it might tear or we’ll need to design some different or stronger rigging to pull a harrow or a wagon to bring Harvey’s crop in,” Just then Harvey walked in the barn. “And for the oxen,” Dad concluded.
“Oxen?” I quizzed.
“Yes,” said Harvey, “we’re going to take two evenly matched bull calves and pair them up to be oxen. We’ll have to castrate them like we do the steers now. Then maybe in a couple months we’ll start a second pair, and a third and so on. Unless we have a return of the fuel supply we are going to have some heavy work to do around here. Brutus and Butch’s other horses are pretty old and we’re afraid won’t be able to do a lot. The oxen probably won’t be able to do any real heavy pulling until they’re 15 months old, so we need to get started.”
“But how will they learn to be oxen?” I asked.
“They’ll have to be trained – taught by us,” Dad said.
That blew holes in my geese theory. “How will we do that?” I asked.
“First, after choosing the pair, we’ll use two saplings and tie the wood across and under their necks with the rope you’re making. At first they’ll hate it. They’ll struggle and bawl perhaps. We’ll have to stay with them diligently the first day so they don’t hurt each other. In fact, we’ll only leave them connected for an hour the first day, then two the second day, then three, until they get used to being yoked together. Eventually they need to learn to drink, eat, and of course, move together. They’ll have to do everything together. And get used to us. We’ll move them, walk them, pull them, talk to them. As they get older and larger, we’ll build heavier, stronger yokes for them. The whole thing’s an experiment. We don’t know how it’s going to work. We’ve plenty of animals here; more than we need for milk and plenty even for meat. As horses are in short supply, if we can successfully train several pair of oxen, we’ll be able to supply some of the neighbors with a pair or two to help with their work. Are you willing to help with the training?”
“Sure,” I answered, “I have Brutus to tend as my first priority, then cooking and dishes. I guess I’ll have some time if Dad doesn’t have me working all the time or sends me to school.”
“School?” Harvey asked, “what foolishness you telling this child? We got a lot of work to do.” It appeared I had an ally.
“Oh give it up you two,” Dad said. “I’ll remember - work first. And you know, Harvey, we can’t castrate all the bulls into steers. You’re going to need one to breed your open cows.”
“What are open cows?” I asked.
“Cows that haven’t been bred and are not carrying calves. They’re not… you know…pregnant,” he said a little sheepishly.
“You don’t need to explain. Between helping with the cows over at Chester’s and from what I learned in school, yes I know I said school Dad, I got the whole picture. Just didn’t recall ever hearing that term.”
“How many cows are carrying now?” Dad asked.
“Twenty-nine, that leaves about thirty that aren’t bred,” Harvey answered.
“How will they get bred, without a bull?” I asked.
“Same as before; Larry breeds them artificially, using semen stored in that liquid nitrogen tank in the milk house,” Harvey answered. I remembered Chester had a tank like that too. He told me never to play with it as it was very dangerous. Liquid nitrogen is something like 200 degrees below zero, much colder than dry ice, and it will burn you just as quickly. But it served its purpose well, keeping the semen frozen until it was needed.
“Do you have a good supply?” Dad asked.
“I think we have 35 ampules. We can split an ampule sometimes and breed two cows or heifers at a time. But then figuring some repeat services, maybe the best we can do is get 25 to 30 animals bred with the supply we have. Who knows? Maybe it will last six months if the nitrogen doesn’t lose its punch. Then we’ll need a bull to keep the operation running. There is one uncastrated bull calf in with the nursing cows, about ten weeks old. We can eventually use him, but he might not be old or large enough to get the job done until maybe next May. It would be best if we could trade for a bull with some other cattle producer in the neighborhood, doesn’t even matter what breed it is,” Harvey concluded.
“We’ll have to keep that in mind,” Dad said.

To be continued…. Mort