The Slow Road

by Jerry D. Young

  “Steaks! I was expecting brats or chicken. Not steak.”

  “Means a lot to us to get this well in,” Jasper said quietly.

  “Aw! No big deal. I punch these in all the time.”

  Millie took out a bottle of Greg’s favorite beer from the cooler, opened it, and handed it to Greg when he walked up to their small patio at the back of the trailer.

  “Thanks, Millie,” Greg said shyly.

  “That is quite a process you’ve come up with,” she said, fussing a little over the food set out on the picnic table.

  “Once I figured it out, it is pretty easy. There’re lots of guys doing it. But I think I do it better than anyone else.” There was no false modesty there. Greg had a point. He did have a good system. He’d never had a failure. At least, not when he’d been allowed to dowse.

  Jasper and Millie were surprised and pleased when Greg limited himself to four beers while he was there. He seemed to thoroughly enjoy the steaks, baked potatoes, and boiled corn, helping himself a little sheepishly to a second steak.”

  “That’s fine, Greg,” Millie assured him. “I got two for you.”

  Jasper yawned about that time and Greg finished up his meal. “Thanks for having me over, guys,” Greg said, turning to the couple. They’d carried the leftovers and the rest of the beer out to the truck. Jasper was standing with his left arm around Millie.

  “No,” Jasper said. “You’re a good friend. Thank you for helping us out.” Jasper grinned then. “We’ll save a bean or two from the garden for you.”

  Greg laughed and climbed into the truck. Jasper closed and locked the alley gate when Greg pulled out. He yawned again as he and Millie walked back to the trailer to begin that cleanup. Jasper marked off one more project on his mental list. “Getting that well was a key element to our continuing preparations.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  -

  Jasper got the pump connected and running on Thursday. Alvin had called and scheduled a wood cutting run for Saturday. The barn raising was put off until the next week. Jasper smiled when a disappointed Alvin said he just couldn’t depend on his family. Jasper got a pickup and trailer load of cut and split wood for helping Alvin, whose son, who should be doing it, lazed around the house.

  Alvin met Jasper at the trailer, Jasper having stopped coming in from work just long enough to pick up the food that Millie had prepared for him for the day. Jasper took a quick nap at lunchtime and was able to work safely until they quit just prior to sunset. They had been cutting up the trees they’d downed and trimmed out early that spring. The day had been spent cutting the wood to length and splitting it with Alvin’s portable hydraulic splitter.

  When they climbed wearily into their respective trucks, both men were tired but satisfied with the day’s work. Jasper had his pickup and pickup trailer loaded to the gills. Alvin’s one-ton dump bed was loaded to overflowing, with the heavy duty tandem axle mesh sided trailer almost full to the top of the sides. There was another load for Alvin to pick up on Sunday, but he would do that alone, knowing Jasper really didn’t like to work on Sundays.

  Millie had picked up a ride to work since the truck wasn’t available, but waited and did some additional work at the Consignment shop while she waited for Jasper to pick her up. They stopped and had dinner at a café, Jasper barely able to stay awake during the meal. Millie drove the truck and trailer home when she insisted Jasper was too tired and she needed the practice with the trailer.

  Jasper unloaded and stacked the wood Monday morning before he turned in again to get his afternoon sleep for the graveyard shift. He and Millie didn’t have a wood burner yet, but they fully intended to get one at some point and wanted plenty of seasoned wood for it. The wood was stacked on a metal rack Jasper had built and covered with scraps of tarps that he’d salvaged.

  The following Saturday Alvin’s relatives showed up and he called Jasper early Saturday morning to ask him to help with the barn. Jasper and Millie packed lunches and headed for Alvin’s. They were a bit amused at the confusion of the group and Alvin’s exasperation with them. Alvin took Jasper and Millie aside and quietly apologized.

  “There is no need, Alvin,” Jasper said. “We’ll do what we can to help. If we can’t get finished, I’ll come next Saturday and help you finish up. Millie works next Saturday.”

  “I feel like I owe you for coming out into this mess.”

  “Oh, no,” Millie replied. “You’ve been good to us. We owe you a great deal and want to help here. We’ll be doing some construction ourselves one day and need the experience.”

  “Well, that’s a switch. Half my family thinks I should just hire this done. But I really want my family to learn to work together. There are some bad times ahead of us and I don’t know if my family will be able to live through them without my help. I need them to be able to help themselves as much as possible.”

  Jasper had never heard Alvin speak about bad times ahead. He seemed to have plenty going for himself and his immediate family. Alvin and his wife both had good jobs. They had the place in the country where they kept the horses for the girls and a very loud motorcycle for their son.

  Millie and Jasper exchanged glances when Alvin wasn’t looking. Was Alvin a closet prepper?

  One of Alvin’s relatives came over and Alvin turned to Jasper and Millie again. “If you’re still willing to help, I guess the rest are ready now.”

  It took the rest of the morning and all afternoon and evening before the new horse barn framework was up and secured, and the roof and external sheathing applied. There had been a break for lunch, but it had been a short one. But Alvin did take everyone that helped out to dinner.

  Tired, but full of good food, Millie and Jasper went home, wondering if they might have not only a friend in Alvin, but a fellow prepper that might be an ally in the future if the future brought some of the things Millie and Jasper thought it might.

  That winter Jasper was finally able to conclude a deal he had been working on for several months. A small factory near the outskirts of town had been shut down for years and ownership of the property had been in dispute ever since. Jasper had no intention of trying to start the factory back up. What he wanted were the materials that made up the building.

  The ownership had been established and the owner wanted the property, without the old building. Jasper got the salvage rights and eight months to clear anything he wanted from the building before it was destroyed and the remains taken to a landfill.

  Every spare moment Jasper had for those eight months was spent stripping the building of copper wire and copper plumbing to pay for the laborers he hired to carefully dismantle a portion of the structure itself. He took truck load after load of masonry block and brick to the property. He had to hire a high lift, long reach forklift to get some of the structural steel from the roof system.

  A self-contained high lift work platform, also rented for a couple of weeks, allowed Jasper’s workers to take out almost all of the metal framed glazed windows that went around the building just below the eaves.

  The only breaks he took during that time, other than observing the Sabbath and Christmas, were three hunting trips with Alvin, each one a quick one. Alvin would have loaned Jasper a rifle and a shotgun for the trips, but Jasper and Millie decided it was time to arm themselves for future hunting trips they would do on their own.

  Jasper researched defensive guns as well as hunting guns on the internet. He and Millie ruled out the high dollar semi-auto main battle rifles because of expense, and the lightweight combat carbines because of their less versatile cartridges. Jasper wanted something in a versatile, powerful cartridge that would do for hunting, but had at least moderately good defensive capability. Alvin suggested a military surplus bolt action, but Jasper found an alternative on his own.

  He narrowed the rifle choice down to either a used Savage 99 lever action in .308 Winchester or a used Marlin 1895 Cowboy lever action rifle in .45-70. As much as he liked the old west appeal of the Marlin,
and the short and medium range power of the .45-70, he decided on the Savage 99. The .308 was more versatile, and according to some of the preparedness forum entries on the internet, it could use an adapter to shoot .32 ACP pistol rounds for small game that the .308 was too powerful for.

  He paid a bit more for the gun than he wanted to, with Millie’s approval, but there just weren’t that many around that were for sale. People with Savage 99’s seemed to really like them and didn’t want to sell.

  Jasper didn’t know how lucky he was to find the rifle with an original Pachmayr Low-Swing side mount scope mount. The original scope was fogged and would have cost more to repair than the used Bushnell scope Jasper got in another deal. Again, due to his research on the internet, Jasper had a receiver sight added to the rear of the action to use with the existing front sight when he wasn’t using the scope.

  For the two duck and goose hunting trips, Jasper, with Millie’s help, picked out a twenty gauge Stoeger side-by-side coach gun. It would be Millie’s last ditch defensive arm and she wasn’t too sure she could learn to use a pump and a semi-auto was out of the question.

  Having talked to their Minister, Millie and Jasper decided that recreational shooting was okay on the Sabbath, so they took a couple of Sundays in a row to learn to shoot both weapons, in plenty of time for Jasper to go on the hunts.

  Though they went hunting fairly close to where they lived, it was easier and cheaper to stay overnight two nights to get in two full days and one partial day of hunting. It was well that they had the time, for it wasn’t until the Monday of the deer hunt that Jasper got his doe.

  Alvin helped him dress it out, and it was with some pride that Jasper took the dressed meat home to Millie for her to finish cutting up and freeze. She had studied up on the internet while Jasper was gone, just in case. Jasper would prefer to have jerked most of the meat, but they just weren’t in a position to do it, so it went into their small freezer.

  The duck and goose hunting went great. Jasper was able to get his limits each day. They were able to keep the field dressed birds in Alvin’s ice chest until they got them home. The birds, too, went into the freezer, which was full by Christmas. Jasper had gained a great deal of confidence about being able to supplement their food supplies by hunting. The following year Alvin had invited Jasper to go rabbit and squirrel hunting with him.

  The Stoeger shotgun would have been adequate for the rabbits and squirrels, but Jasper wanted Millie to have something besides it with more firepower. He found a well used Ruger 10/22 through the newspaper ads and picked it up cheap. The stock had been broken, and the barrel was rusty. Millie and Jasper invested in a new barrel and stock, along with a few factory ten-round factory magazines.

  The rifle had come with an even dozen high-capacity magazines. Jasper checked the prices on the internet and smiled when he got the price down to less than a third of what everything would have been new, even considering the new barrel, stock, and magazines. The guy was craving a new Bushmaster M-4 and was selling everything else he could to get the money for it. Jasper picked up a couple of nice field knives and a very good compass in the deal.

  Jasper and Millie put back a couple of boxes of the .32 ACP for use in the Savage, as well as an initial purchase of ammunition for each of the weapons. They then began to buy a box of twenty-two rim fire, .308, and twenty-gauge ammunition every month.

  The garden was a moderate success that first year. Millie and Jasper were still learning. But they were intent on growing as much as they could in the space they had using the least amount of commercial fertilizer and pesticide. They were using the companion growing method they’d learned about on the internet. The strawberries did so well that the pair put in another five level tower of them in the front yard.

  And Jasper began hauling dirt. He kept the trailer hooked to the truck all the time, much to Millie’s unvoiced dismay, so he could stop any time he had time at the local sand and gravel pit. As long as he loaded it himself, which he usually did, he got the dirt for free. The sand and gravel he was going to need he had to pay for. But they loaded it into the truck and trailer for him.

  As time rolled around the following fall for the garden to get another layer of manure, there were piles of dirt, sand, and gravel here and there on the property. Stacks of cleaned used brick and block were along each hedge along the sides of the property. They had recovered lumber piled on top. The windows from the salvaged building were stacked, layer by layer separated with lumber, in an out of the way area and covered to protect them.

  Millie found a canner and more jars in time to fill up all available storage space with home canned vegetables from the garden and jar after jar of strawberry preserves. They still gave away the majority of the produce from the garden for lack of a way to process and store it.

  While the weather was still nice that fall Jasper dug away the sod from the area where they were going to build the double wall shelter shown in the MP-15 pamphlet Jasper had down loaded. The design was for the shelter to be set down in the ground a couple of feet, but with the high water table and possibilities for floods, Jasper used some of the dirt to fill in where he’d dug the sod away, and build the level up over four feet high.

  He used plenty of water to keep the soil moist as he layered it in place. It was going to take a long time to finish, so instead of renting a one man tamper, Jasper bought a well used one from the rental agency and worked on it until he got it running. That let him tamp each four inch lift of soil as he built up the area for the shelter.

  Realizing that it might be a good idea to have some of the other projects he and Millie were planning raised higher than the surrounding ground, he expanded the area he was building up. It took double the amount of dirt he’d planned on, and two months of extra time, but he had a large area of compacted soil four feet higher than the rest of the property, the edges protected by interlocking retaining wall blocks.

  He thought about digging the footings for the shelter that fall, but Millie talked him out of it. He didn’t dig primarily for fear the edges of the trenches would slough away in case of bad weather. Millie didn’t want him doing it because he had lost so much weight that summer and was always so tired. She just wanted him to slow down some.

  But she worried as much as he did about what they were seeing on the news nearly every day. If there wasn’t a major natural disaster going on somewhere, there was a new battle between old foes happening. And the weather was so unpredictable.

  There were times that summer when the rain had just poured down and others when the irrigation well saved the garden from total loss. Since the shelter was some months from being completed, Millie and Jasper headed for the shelter in city hall when tornadoes threatened that summer. They simply rode out the one minor earthquake shock they felt three days before Thanksgiving.

  Thanksgiving was quite a celebration. The two had much to celebrate. Most of the food for the meal was from their garden and Jasper’s hunting trips. Things were even relatively peaceful and there were no major weather problems or natural disasters to worry them.

  That changed before Christmas. Southeast Missouri suffered the worst blizzard and ice storm on record just before Christmas. The area shut down for four days. Jasper’s truck was one of the few vehicles capable of traveling through the mix of snow and ice. He chained up all four wheels before the storm hit and with the Minister riding shotgun, delivered food and water to trapped parishioners of their church. They wrapped several of them in blankets and took them back to the church for the duration.

  Jasper had shut off the water to the trailer and drained the lines to keep them from freezing underneath. He then took Millie in to the church to help out, as well as be safe and warm. He wasn’t too worried about the trailer. Their underground propane tank was half full and the furnace in the trailer didn’t require electricity to operate. He turned down the thermostat to its lowest setting to keep things in the trailer from freezing, and still not use up too much propane.

>   Jasper didn’t limit his help to his own church members. The county Sheriff’s deputies asked his help to get to some outlaying citizens of the county to again deliver food and water, and to bring people in to shelters that didn’t have heat for whatever reason.

  When the worst of the situation was over Jasper was able to make quite a bit of extra cash using the truck with the snowplow he’d built for it. He bought a commercial dispenser for the bed of the truck to spread ice control material on parking lots after he’d scraped them with the blade. Even with the cost of the spreader he came out well ahead.

  He was still going after most of the city and county vehicles shut down for lack of fuel. Between the loss of power and lack of deliveries to those stations with generators, there was simply no fuel to be had until the main roads cleared and the trucks could run again. Jasper’s one hundred gallon plus capacity kept him going.

  They shivered for a while, until the temperate rose after Jasper turned the thermostat back up when he took Millie back home. They looked the place over and there were no signs of any damage from the wind and cold.

  Jasper and Millie had a quiet Christmas at home, exchanging only small gifts. They were trying to avoid the commercialism of Christmas and get back more to the religious holiday it was supposed to be. They did gladly accept the Christmas bonus the company gave all the employees, including the watchmen.

  The New Year holiday came and went. With it came a small increase in salary for both Jasper and Millie. Millie was getting a few cents more an hour for her alternate Saturdays, and Sara offered her Wednesdays as well. She gladly took it. They were doing okay, but every penny helped. There was no way to substitute anything for the concrete that was going to be needed for the shelter and Jasper hadn’t found a way to trade for it. They would have to pay for it out of pocket and it wasn’t going to be cheap.

  Besides getting the garden in that spring, Jasper began on the shelter. He used the rototiller to loosen the soil he’d so carefully tamped down the previous summer and dug the footing by hand. Jasper had hoped to get rebar from the building he’d salvaged, but that had not worked at all. But the steel shop in town needed some extra help for a month that spring and Jasper took rebar in pay.