That night Aaron lit a big fire beside the train. Out of the darkness, people started sifting in from all sides. It reminded me of a zombie invasion the way they silently appeared from the woods or from behind the train, and it kind of creeped me out. I could tell Sara felt a little anxious too, because she dragged me down to the river to get away from them. I think she was still freaked out that her brother’s gang might appear. I didn’t blame her.
After a while, Aaron came down to the river to find us. He was carrying a bucket, a big branch lit on fire like a torch, and three long barbecue spits, the ones you roast hot dogs over a fire with. He handed one to each of us and told us that he was going to teach how to gig frogs. He showed us how to creep along the banks of the river, shining the torch in front of us. When we could see the light reflected off the eyeballs of a big bullfrog, he thrust the barbeque spit at it, impaling it. It took us a while to get the hang of it, but once we did we caught several. While we gigged, we talked softly. I had to ask Aaron the question that had been bothering Sara and me since nightfall.
—Who are all those people at the campfire?
—Just folks. Folks that ain’t got a home. Don’t want one neither.
—What do you mean?
—They’re just … well, lost souls. Most of ‘em were let out of the mental institutions after PF Day.
—Why would they just let them out? I mean, they’re crazy, right?
—Well now, we’re all just a little crazy, ain’t we? Take you two. You could be at some nice person’s home with electricity, hangin’ out with your friends an’ all but instead, you decide to hang out here with the crazies.
Aaron started laughing loudly and laughed until he started coughing. When he caught his breath, he continued more seriously.
—Really, though, think about it. What were the authorities supposed to do? They couldn’t leave ‘em all in there to starve to death, to die of thirst or disease. Who was going to be there to take care of ‘em? No, they had no choice but to let ‘em all out. Prisoners too. That’s why the city’s a lot more dangerous now than before.
Sara and I glanced at each other. We knew firsthand how true that last statement was.
After we had caught a couple dozen frogs, we headed back to the fire. Aaron assured us that there were no gangs among the group. We were still apprehensive and stayed back by the trees until we looked everyone over. There were eight men and three women in the group, as far as we could tell. A few of them could have been either gender. They were all dressed pretty raggedy and obviously didn’t fit the gang type, so we cautiously joined them around the fire. Aaron introduced us, and the others told us their names.
We cut the fat legs off the frogs, skinned them, and roasted them over the fire. There were enough to share with everyone and the others gratefully devoured their share.
After a while, three men and two women joined the group. These five were obviously not homeless or mentally ill. You could just tell by the way they walked and talked. They were educated; they had a purpose. Aaron introduced them to us as the keepers of the zoo, who lived in the building down the tracks. They looked exhausted and grim, but their eyes lit up a bit when Aaron told them we were interested in the welfare of the zoo and the animals in it. One of the men, Jim, started to explain to us what they’ve been doing to help the animals since PF Day and how they had made the excruciating decisions they had to.
—After PF Day, most of the zoo personnel came to work every day until the gas ran out. Those who had families naturally had to stay home to take care of them. There were eight of us, originally, who were able to stay to take care of the animals. Of course, at first we had no idea how long the power would be out, so we went about as usual, feeding the animals as we had always done. In some ways that was bad, but in other ways good. They were well fed and healthy as we headed into the winter. But we ran out of food to feed many of them halfway through the winter. We knew at that point the power was going to be off a long time.
Jim paused and stared into the fire sadly. A middle-aged woman named Susan took up the account.
—That’s when we had to make some hard decisions. The zoo director and some of the board members were walking to the zoo from their homes about once a week at that time to check up on things. At one point, we all decided that we would have to make a plan to keep as many animals alive as possible. First of all, we had to make a priority list of the animals that were most important to be kept alive and the ones most likely to survive.
Another young keeper, Kyle, interrupted softly.
—That was a difficult task.
—Yes, excruciating. But it had to be done. Obviously, the most endangered species had to have a high priority. We unanimously decided that the primates were a top priority because of their intelligence and most are endangered as well. The large carnivores like the polar bears, the big cats, and the wild dogs needed meat, and the only way to provide that was for something else to die. I mean, another zoo animal. We couldn’t very well be feeding them beef and pork when people were starving, you know. So the question was, should we kill lesser priority animals to feed higher priority carnivores? It turned out that we didn’t have to because so many animals started dying quickly; so many we had too much meat to feed the carnivores at first. Luckily, the meat kept in the winter. By spring, though, we were running low on usable meat. Especially when the weather warmed up and the dead animals started rotting.
Some of the mentally ill people around the fire began to look uneasy. A few of them got up and retreated into the woods, shaking their heads and muttering softly to themselves. They vanished as quickly as they had appeared earlier, reinforcing my impression of zombies.
Jim spoke again.
—The penguins posed a particularly difficult problem. Many of them were endangered and a high priority for us to try to save, but feeding them and controlling the water temperature was impossible. You see, before PF Day the zoo brought in a truckload of fresh fish and seafood from the coasts every month to feed them. They don’t eat anything else. The warm-water penguins couldn’t recover from the cold temperatures either. Despite our best efforts, we lost all but two penguins last winter.
Now Kyle entered the conversation.
—We had already stored enough hay for the winter to keep most of the herbivores alive. We only lost one of the elephants and a few of the African plains herbivores. We suspect that a few of them were poached, but not as many as we thought would be.
Sara and I glanced guiltily at each other. Even though we hadn’t poached any of the animals, we had thought about it and now, after witnessing their terrible plight, we couldn’t even imagine killing the ones who had managed to survive thus far.
—We lost quite a few of the kangaroos, though. We’re hoping that things will begin to get better soon, now that the electricity is back on. We won’t give up on them, no matter what happens.
Later that night, while Sara and I laid on our beds in the freight car, we talked about how terrible it must have been to make the decisions of which animals to save. Sara looked intensely at me and said,
—You see, Ben; sometimes people have to make decisions they don’t want to. What you think is a choice that somebody made willingly may have been just the best one of a bunch of terrible choices.
Something about the way she said it made me think she had suddenly changed the subject.
—Are you talking about the zookeepers?
—Yes… and others…
She paused then. It seemed that she wanted to say something else, but I didn’t want to hear it so I turned away and told her I was tired.
Chapter 19
Wilderness Survival
The summer and fall were filled with learning valuable survival techniques from Aaron, the keepers, and even a few of the mentally ill people who frequented our campsite. As it had for the past several months, Time seemed to stand still for us, even though it had been restored to the rest of the world through the repair of the power gr
id. We, however, lived as though the power was still off; electricity held no interest for us, except to recharge Sara’s iPod at one of the picnic grounds’ outlets from time to time.
We were able to find many items from the freight cars to help with our survival and make our lives easier. We tried to help the homeless people who, even though they had lived around the train for several months, had not felt comfortable entering the cars to scavenge. Aaron said that most of them were too paranoid to sleep within any kind of enclosure and that quite a bit of their mental problems were actually caused, or at least made worse, by confining them in mental institutions. He worried that it was only a matter of time before the authorities started rounding them up again to institutionalize them for “their own good.” Aaron almost spat out those last three words; there was no question what he thought about the prospect.
We made the train our home base for the next few months. We slept inside the car when it was cool or raining and on top of it when the temperatures soared. The trees shaded our car and a few others around it during the day so the metal never got too hot. On especially hot nights, we brought buckets of water from the river to cool down the roof and ourselves.
We had some intestinal problems due to bacteria and parasites in the water before Aaron told us to boil buckets of river water for drinking. He made us a tonic from the stinging nettle plant to help detox our system.
During the days, Aaron showed us various techniques for trapping animals. He taught us how to make snares from a piece of wire and where to place them on animal trails for catching small game. He showed us how to set up pitfall traps and bucket traps. He even showed us how to dam up a small section of the river or a creek to catch fish. Then he demonstrated how to correctly skin and gut the animals we caught and how to preserve some for eating later. For every two animals we ate, we tried to preserve at least one by smoking and drying it out like jerky.
Aaron also knew all about edible plants. He showed us how to find and use cattails, which he called the grocery store of the wild. Most of its parts are edible: the young shoots and stems taste like cucumber, the flower spikes like corn on the cob, and the rhizomes can be made into flour. Aaron was careful to show us the difference between cattails and its poisonous look-alike, the blue flag iris, which has leaves separate from the stalk, unlike cattail whose leaves sheathe the stalk.
We also learned how to identify and collect lamb’s quarters, dandelion leaves, and nettles for a wild salad and many wild berries and fruits. We collected pine needles to make pine needle tea, which Aaron told us contains four times the vitamin C of orange juice. By the end of summer, we were feeling quite confident in our ability to survive in the wild. Aaron taught us that survival is about finding solutions to your problems. He would always say that people who sit around and cry over their problems usually don’t survive.
Two or three days a week, we went to the zoo and helped the keepers care for the animals that were still holding on to life. Some of the pens and enclosures had bodies of fresh water available to the animals, but others had to be supplied by carrying buckets of water. It seemed a never-ending task and it sounds heartless, but I was glad that there were fewer animals to be taken care of. It was quite a bit easier after the keepers were able to get some gas to run their tractors and ATVs, although there were always dead animals that needed to be butchered to feed the carnivores and plants to be gathered for the herbivores. In return for our help, the keepers taught us veterinary care which, they reminded us, could be used on humans as well, and shared some of the butchered meat with us. It seemed odd eating exotic animals, like kudu and wild boar, but after cooking them over a fire, they all tasted pretty similar in the end.
Sometime in late summer—we had no idea what day, as there was no reason for us to keep track of time—two men from the railroad came walking up the tracks from where they had parked their company truck on the side of the nearest road. Sara and I hid in the woods while Aaron talked to them. One of them questioned him, while the other checked the engine over.
—Anybody living in this train?
—A few lost souls is all.
—Well, the railroad sent us to check out the condition of this train. I’m afraid we’ll be getting it ready to move soon. Tell all your people to get their belongings and whatever they need out of here in the next few days. We’ll be back here with the engineers on Friday to start it up and drive it out of here.
We could tell that the men were kind and concerned about the future living conditions of the “lost souls.” We were worried that they would report us to authorities who would no doubt determine that the best thing for us would be to gather us up and send us to various “appropriate” institutions, like psych wards, prisons, orphanages, and schools. There was no way any of us wanted that and now that we had freedom, we were determined to do anything it took to keep it.
For the next three days, we unloaded anything we thought might help us survive out of the freight cars and carried it to secret caches deep in the woods. We made the caches by burying several large plastic trashcans from the hardware car of the train in various places throughout the heavily wooded areas of the park. The lids were level with the ground, and we camouflaged them with leaves, sticks, rocks, and whatever other kind of natural litter we could find on the ground. Into them, we stashed hardware items such as tools and wire, flashlights and batteries, lighters, pans, medicine and horse blankets, and anything else we found in the hardware and veterinary cars that we thought might helps us. We even found several tents that we distributed among the lost souls and kept one for ourselves. We didn’t feel like thieves for scavenging the stuff from the train because we were in a survival situation and the railroad man had told us to take whatever we needed.
Before the men came back to get the train, we were set up to live in the woods like nomads. We chose places that would be difficult for the authorities to find us and used Dakota pit fires to remain inconspicuous. These are made by digging two holes in the ground a few inches apart with an underground tunnel connecting them. The fire is built in the bottom of one hole while it is fed oxygen through the other hole. The flame is concealed and they’re always built under a tree to disperse the smoke. Aaron showed us how to make them and told us that he had learned it while in a special ops unit in Vietnam.
In the evenings, those of us still living in Swope Park would gather around a communal fire made by Aaron, and he would tell us stories. Sometimes they were Bible stories with Aaron playing the different parts; at other times he told about his various missions in Nam. Many times, a few of the mentally ill people would get uncomfortable and leave, but most stayed and enjoyed the entertainment. Sara and I remained the only young people living in the park.
After Aaron tired and went to bed, Sara and I would slip off to our campsite. Every few days, we’d find a new campsite just in case someone was watching us. We were very paranoid about being found, whether by Matthew’s gang or by the authorities. Either possibility seemed to hold terrifying outcomes for us. Looking back now, I can see that one prospect was infinitely worse than the other.
We slept in the open most nights that summer, setting up our tent only when bad weather threatened. We slept side by side, though not touching, as the nights were usually hot. Lying night after night next to that beautiful girl, my shell-shocked mind and frozen emotions began to thaw, and I felt more alive than I had since my parents’ deaths. Aaron said that we, like most of Americans, were probably suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, like so many of the veterans of foreign wars. Sara was still quite traumatized, I suppose, because every time I tried to touch her romantically, she’d flinch and move further away from me. She always slept with her back to me like she was trying to shut me out. Sometimes, I got so frustrated, I’d have to go off into the woods until I could get myself under control again.
One evening, Aaron went to bed early, saying he had a bad headache and didn’t feel like talking to anyone. A lost soul named Pa
trick decided to take his place as storyteller that night. Patrick was a Vietnam vet also and had always come across as one of the more “sane” ones of the group, even though I could tell that he still suffered from PTSD like the rest of us. He was quiet most of the time and wasn’t prone to muttering or ranting like some of the others, but there was a weariness about him, like he was just tired of living, tired of trying. I think I felt most sad for him because it seemed like he knew what was happening around him, unlike the others, but he didn’t have the heart to work very hard at surviving. That evening, though, he became a different person while telling his story.
Like Aaron often did, he told us a story about the war. We knew he meant Vietnam, because that was the war that completely changed these men’s lives forever; the war that made them lose their sanity or their faith in humanity. I had often wondered what exactly it was about that war that was so unlike the others, but the battles that Aaron and Patrick described were much different than those I’d read about in other wars.
That night, Patrick told us about one mission when his unit was sent to force the Commies back across enemy lines. They believed they were chasing a retreating army but instead, ended up outwitted and surrounded by them and swallowed up by the dense jungle. They couldn’t see or hear the enemy; they could only sense that they were there, like the hundreds of snakes hanging on the branches overhead or slithering through the leaf litter under their feet. Both adversaries were terrifying, although the tough Marines wouldn’t admit being scared to anybody. During the day, the enemy continually fired shots into the clearing where Patrick’s unit was trapped, picking off the soldiers one by one. There was never anyone to shoot back at; the enemy was like armed ghosts in the dense jungle. At night, the exhausted Marines tried to sleep in shifts, but the zillion stinging flying insects and venomous crawling ones made one almost wish to be put out of his misery by the Vietcong. Charlie, which was what Patrick called the enemy, was often happy to oblige, slipping silently past the sentries and stabbing unsuspecting soldiers as they fitfully slept. By week’s end, when the US helicopters finally arrived to liberate them, the Marines were completely spooked and demoralized. As Patrick told the story, his voice became gruffer and his tale more urgent, like it was vital that he get it off his chest.
Teenage Survivalist Series [Books 1-3] Page 24
