By itself, San Juan could not serve the entire western grid. Efforts to reconstitute the grid were almost comical. Only the hydroelectric plants of the Pacific Northwest and a couple of mine-mouth plants like San Juan stayed online during the reconstitution attempts. All of the smaller plants were off-line, mostly due to lack of workers, many of whom were striking in an attempt to get inflation indexing of their salaries. The nuclear plants all went off-line. Frustratingly, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission refused to recertify the plants for operation unless a three-day checklist restart procedure with umpteen inspections was strictly followed.
Wholesale payments to the San Juan Generating Station from the power utilities—averaging 2.5 cents per kilowatt/hour—had already become a joke, so the grid collapse was actually a relief to the plant management. With inflation raging, the break-even point for the plant would have been somewhere north of fifty cents per kilowatt/hour in the inflated dollars.
The adjoining coal mine, wholly owned by the Navajo Nation, stayed in operation for just two days after the San Juan Generating Station went offline. This production filled their staging area to capacity: 178,000 tons in open-air piles. It was decided that this coal would be designated a “tribal asset” and that it would be made freely available to “any registered Navajo Nation member, or anyone else who spoke fluent Navajo.” All others had to pay cash. The rate was eventually settled at twenty cents in silver for a pickup load or one dollar in silver for a fifteen-yard dump truck load. Although the coal was inferior to hard anthracite, it sufficed for home heating.
Despite the collapse of the larger power grids, the lights stayed on almost continuously in the Farmington-Bloomfield region because the FEUS had its own generating capacity.
When Lars, Liz, and Kaylee gathered for breakfast one morning in November, they decided to put their preparation in high gear. On three legal pads, they created three priority lists, titled “Urgent,” “Important,” and “Tertiary.”
The “Urgent” list had just four items:
Alps Prosthetic Skin Lotion (or maybe a safe oilfield goop silicone equivalent that will work with chafing for prosthetic arm?)
Detailed topo maps—preferably 7½-minute or 15-minute scale; need our local map sheet and the eight contiguous sheets
Gas lamp mantles—need 20+
Contact lens saline solution and spare glasses for Kaylee
The “Important” list included:
More batteries—especially need NiMH rechargeable; prefer later low self-discharge (LSD) type
Extra chains and spark plug for chainsaw
Distilled water for battery bank (Can make a solar still, if need be.)
The “Tertiary” list included:
Tampons
A LOT MORE salt for preserving meat and attracting deer
Playing cards
Books
More spices
More kerosene—any extra would be great for barter or charity
.22 LR ammo for bartering
Elk hunting calls
The Laines and Kaylee Schmidt were only able to work their way through part of these lists before they ran out of cash. After that, they successfully bartered for a few items, using ammunition and pre-1965 silver coins.
17
Buckaroos
“You’ve got to understand that we had a big ranch but we only got money once or twice a year out of it. The money wasn’t very free. All the money you got was in gold coin. I remember I was nearly fifteen or sixteen years old before I saw much paper money. It was all gold and silver. They didn’t have any greenbacks that I remember. My dad would take the wool and mutton to sell, and he’d come back with some tobacco sacks full of twenty-dollar gold pieces. He used to drive three or four hundred head of sheep down to Cloverdale. They only brought about $2 a head. A big four horse [wagon-]load of wool taken over to Ukiah would pay for the groceries and clothes for the next winter. That was the big trip of the year, when I was a boy. That was when the money came in. That was the way that we used to get paid for things. Gold and silver coins. As kids, they used to let us play with the gold coins now and again. That was quite a celebration.”
—Ernest E. Rawles (1897–1985)
Their trip to Berea Baptist Church on Sunday was memorable. Kaylee, who attended church only infrequently because of doctrinal differences, stayed at home to guard the roost. Lars, Beth, and Grace drove to church in Beth’s Saturn Vue, since it got better mileage than Lars’s Dodge Durango. They expected a light turnout. From what they had heard, the gasoline shortage had spooked many people into extreme conservation mode. Others were afraid to leave their homes unattended for fear of burglary.
As they pulled off of Blanco Road into the church parking lot, Lars chuckled and pointed to the overflow parking lot behind the church, which now had fifteen horses hitched up to a newly erected rail. Saddles were draped over a row of fifty-five- gallon drums resting on their sides, lined up in a phalanx. After they parked their car, they stepped over to the fence to look at the horses and saddles. Grace exclaimed, “Oooh, Daddy! Are we gonna get a horse?”
“Probably very soon, Anelli,” Lars replied, using her pet name, which was Finnish for “Grace.”
Beth pointed and said, “Notice that three of those are packsaddles?”
Lars replied, “That’s odd.” He made a mental note to donate some more drums, since if the trend in transportation in this new era of insanely expensive gasoline continued, the church would soon need room for more saddles. He could spare the drums, since he had a dozen that had been painted white for use in horseback barrel racing back in the 1970s, but they were now useless for storing fluid, since their bottoms were badly rusted.
After walking through the sanctuary to the building’s multipurpose room for their usual pre-church cup of coffee, they saw that the room was newly lined with two rows of pallet boxes on both sides, for donations. These were marked “Canned Food,” “Perishables,” “Women’s Clothing,” “Boys’ Clothing,” “Girls’ Shoes,” and so forth. As they walked by them, Beth said, “Let’s sort through some extra clothes and shoes that Grace has outgrown, to donate.” Lars nodded in agreement.
Ray, the leader of their adult Sunday school class, was there as usual, but he looked a bit self-conscious, carrying a SIG P250 in a hip holster, with four spare magazines in open-top pouches on the opposite hip. Lars said reassuringly, “I’m glad to see you’re packing. Thanks for making everyone feel safer. Even though the police department is right across the road, we can’t be too careful.” As they sat down at one of the classroom tables, Beth asked quietly, “Is there any way we can still buy handguns?”
Lars shook his head. “No way, hon. You’d have to trade a couple of new cars to get a decent pistol these days.”
During the “Prayer and Praise” time before the class began, when prayer requests were made, a black teenager who the Laines didn’t recognize stood up, and announced: “You folks don’t know me—or us. My name is Shadrach Phelps. My friends and I would appreciate your prayers. The three of us come from an orphanage over in Rio Arriba County that was closing down. We don’t have anyplace to go, and we’re looking for work around here, even for just room and board and hay for our horses. We’re all hard workers; we each got our own horses and tack. We can buck hay all day long, split wood, butcher deer, and we know which end of the shovel goes in the ground. Oh, and a-course we’re Christians. We’re trusting in God’s providence. Thing is, we all want to get hired on somewhere together; we’re tight, so we don’t wanna split up. Anyway, again, we’d appreciate your prayers.” Phelps gave an embarrassed grin as he sat down. As he did, there were murmurs throughout the classroom.
After the Sunday school class, the Laines approached the Phelps boys. They were talking with a widow that Lars recognized as the owner of a ranch near Bloomfield. Shad Phelps was gesturing,
pointing to his friends. “I’m sorry, but if you can’t take all three of us, then I’ll have to say no, but thank you.” The woman nodded and turned away. Lars approached Shadrach Phelps and shook his hand. He looked Shad in the eye and pronounced, “My father always used to say, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, then go together.’ I’d like you young men to come work for me and my wife, at our ranch. I think that we’ll go far, together.”
Hiring the boys was a straightforward arrangement, but feeding their six horses was a bit more complicated. When Lars and Beth first took over the ranch, they found that Tim Rankin had not done a very good job of maintenance. The little brush and roller painting that he had done had left copious spatters, and the spray-painting had left obvious overspray. The elder Laines’ saddles were still there, but Rankin had “borrowed” and never returned their girth straps as well as several horse pads and blankets. At least Rankin had been vigilant about poisoning the mice and pack rats, and he had done a decent job of weed control in the pastures.
Lars and Andy were both away on active duty when Tim Rankin moved into the house. When they asked about their father’s guns, Rankin said that he hadn’t found any in the house. This made Lars and Andy suspicious, because they knew that their father owned several guns. Since these guns had mostly sentimental value, they didn’t push the issue with Rankin, who pled, “Well, if they were in the house, they musta been burglarized before I ever got there. There were a lot of strangers in the house after your dad passed on: the paramedics, the cops, the coroner, and probably more. Any one of them could have lifted your dad’s guns.”
When Tim Rankin left, there were still two tons of year-old alfalfa hay in the hay barn and about three tons of baled straw in the stable loft. As soon as his job offers to the Phelps boys were accepted, Lars started to make inquiries about hay, grain, and firewood. After much searching and dickering, he bartered a mint-condition U.S. $5 gold piece in exchange for nine tons of alfalfa, five cords of Pinyon Pine firewood, seven salt blocks, and two hundred pounds of molasses-sweetened COB—a mix of cracked corn, rolled oats, and barley. Lars felt that he got the worst end of the deal, because gold was then selling for $8,460 per ounce. Since not even counting its numismatic value, the $5 gold piece contained almost a quarter ounce of gold, Lars felt cheated.
The ranch’s pair of fifteen-acre irrigated pastures were in decent shape, but to be useful to their full capacity once again, they needed to be reseeded. The local feed store still had some sacks of orchard grass pasture blend seed on hand. It took some dickering, but Laine was able to get fifty pounds of the seed blend in exchange for three silver quarters and a box of fifty .22 Long Rifle cartridges.
Laine soon put the Phelps boys to work, broadcasting half of the sack of seed with a hand-cranked broadcaster, primarily in the pastures’ many bare spots. But the more difficult work came in the next two weeks, when they laboriously raked the seed into the soil. They also had to be vigilant in scaring off any passing birds until after the seed had sprouted. Like so many other things that had previously been taken for granted, grass seed had become a precious commodity.
It was after the orphans arrived that Lars also discovered that Tim Rankin had pilfered most of the horse-care tools and veterinary supplies for his father’s horses. There was little left other than a couple of half-empty jars of Swat fly repellent. Luckily, the boys had brought with them a pair of hoof nippers, a hoof rasp, a brush, and two horse combs. Diego Aguilar had also providently sent along a sixteen-ounce bulk can of horse wormer. Instead of using a mouth syringe like the one Lars had previously used, the boys heavily coated a mouth bit with the paste and attached the bit, just as they would do for riding. Giving a horse a double-handful of sweet feed then ensured that the medicine went down. While the “Diego method” of dosing was less accurate, Laine presumed that it was effective.
18
Rock ’n’ Roll
“Note that Finland’s five million people own four million personal firearms. Just wait till Congressman Schumer finds out about that!”
—Jeff Cooper, Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries, Vol. 3, No. 2, January 1995
Stowing the boys’ tack and moving into the bunkhouse didn’t take long, as they hadn’t carried much gear. The bunkhouse was utilitarian but well insulated. The interior walls were covered with unpainted plywood. It had two narrow rooms that sat side by side, each with its own door, off the foyer. One of them had a window at one end with some gauzy curtains, and two sets of bunk beds that were positioned end to end. The other room didn’t contain much except for about thirty boxes, most of which contained National Geographic magazines that had belonged to Laine’s maternal grandmother. Some of these dated back to the 1930s. Both of the rooms were heated by a barrel woodstove on a low flagstone pedestal in the foyer.
Soon after moving in, and starting their monthly rotating “OP” duty shifts, the boys realized that one of them would have to sleep during the day, but the daylight would make it difficult for that individual to sleep. So Shad asked Lars if they could move the bunk beds to the other room, which could be kept completely dark. Lars gave his consent. But just ten minutes later Shad returned to the house, looking confused.
“Mr. Laine, there’s something wrong with that other room in the bunk house.”
“What do you mean, ‘wrong’?”
“When the bunk beds were in the south room, they fit fine, but now, when we moved them into the other room, they don’t fit. That’s weird, because the rooms are supposed to be the same length. Can you come and take a look?”
Lars pulled a twenty-five-foot tape measure from his desk drawer and followed Shad to the bunkhouse. With the tape measure, they found that the windowless room was six inches shorter than the other. Lars chuckled. Pulling the bunk back from the far wall, he began rapping with his knuckles in various places on the plywood, listening for differences in sounds.
Lars half sang, “Methinks my dad did some creative carpentry here.”
“So it’s like a fake wall?” Rueben asked.
“Yes, I suspect that it is. Give me just a minute.”
Leaving the boys, Laine walked briskly to the shop and soon returned with his Makita cordless screw gun. Starting at the middle of the wall at chest level, Lars began backing-out the Sheetrock screws that held the plywood in place at sixteen-inch intervals. He was surprised when the first screw dropped to the floor after just a few turns. Looking down at the screw, he saw that it was just a stub.
“That’s odd. Must have broken off.”
The same thing happened with the next screw.
“What the . . . ?” Lars exclaimed.
Reaching down, he picked up the two fallen screws. They were both just three-eighths of an inch long. Examining them closely, he observed, “These didn’t break. These were sawed off, with a hacksaw.”
Lars resumed removing the screws from the plywood sheet in front of him. He found that most of the screws had been shortened and installed just to give the appearance of functional fasteners. But only six of them—four in the corners, and two that were at the midpoint of the plywood sheet—were a full two inches in length and went through to the studs behind.
“Oh, Dad! You clever Finn. Take a look at this, guys: this panel is designed to be removed, with only six screws to take out.”
“Here, help me with this,” said Lars as he backed the last screw out of the upper left corner.
Laine and the boys bounced the three-quarter-inch-thick sheet of plywood loose and pulled it away, revealing a cavity behind that was crammed full of stacked ammo cans—mostly U.S. Army surplus cans originally made to hold .30 caliber ammunition—and several odd-shaped items wrapped in heavy black plastic trash bags, sealed with Priority Mail packing tape. Starting with the third row of ammo cans, all of the items were either held in place with hardware wire attached to screw eyes or hung from closet hooks.
It was now obvious that his father had added a framework of two-by-sixes at the far end of the room, and covered it to look like the original wall. Given the dimensions of the rooms, the difference in their depths was almost imperceptible.
Lars began laughing as he starting pulling the contents from the wall cache. “You boys may have heard that us Finns are the quiet, stoical type. Well, my dad—his first name was Robie—fit that description to a T. My mom said that my dad would go for days at a time without much more than grunts and a ‘Good morning’ and a ‘Good night.’ He never told me about this wall, and my mom and my brother never mentioned it, either, so I suppose that he kept it all to himself.” After a pause he added, “And since he died suddenly of a heart attack after my mom died, he never got the chance.”
It took the better part of the afternoon for him to inventory the gear. Meanwhile, Shad and Reuben used the Makita to remove other sheets of plywood throughout the bunkhouse, checking for more hidden compartments. They found none.
Starting first with the plastic-wrapped guns, Laine found four Finnish M39 bolt-action rifles, almost identical to his own rifle, except that one of them was built on an early hexagonal receiver, and they had barrels from different makers: One was a Tikka, two were made by Valmet (marked “VKT”) and the other was made by Sako. Always thorough and safety-conscious, Robie Laine had attached tags to the trigger guard of each gun that read “Grease in bore and chamber. Remove before firing!”
Inside one of the plastic bags was a zippered green canvas case that, when unzipped, revealed an M1 Carbine equipped with M2 conversion parts. Lars exclaimed, “Son of a . . . This thing is rock-’n’-roll.”
Shad asked, “You mean it’s a full auto?”
Survivors - A Novel of the Coming Collapse Page 14
