Liberators

by Rawles James Wesley

  Hearing of their plight, the clerk said, “Those bastards in Dubois have been doing that ever since the Crunch. And the deputy sheriff and city council in Jackson are complicit, since they get a percentage of the gasoline. The County Board of Supervisors and the sheriff up in Lander claim that they can’t do anything about the organized highway robbery down in Dubois. The sheriff’s deputies in Dubois and Jackson have officially been fired, but they’re still wearing their uniforms and badges. The police in Jackson haven’t done anything about it, either. They’re also still on the job, and also on the take. It’s a lot like back when the federal government used to hand out free cheese. Nobody speaks up about it when they get a piece of the action.”

  Megan noted that the clerk pronounced Dubois “Dew-Boyce,” rather than the French style, and that made her cringe.

  The man continued, “You’ve got to understand that Fremont County is about the size of Vermont, but it isn’t unified. Mormons control some of the towns. Here in Driggs, like in the rest of southern Idaho, the majority of us are Latter-day Saints, but we respect other people’s property and the law. I’d say that’s true for the majority of Mormons. But just like with any other group, there are a few bad apples. In Dubois they started out just trying to defend their town from outsiders, but they pretty quickly slipped into their gasoline banditry. It is basically no different from what national governments do, on a grander scale, even in normal times. They systematically rob you, but they call it a tax, and they have the police to back them up.”

  Megan asked, “So folks are law-abiding here?”

  “Yes, indeed. You will find that Driggs is a world apart from Dubois. There’s a famous retired actress who is the mayor here. She now has the nickname Mayor Furiosa. But that’s kind of a joke since she believes in constitutional government.”

  Joshua asked, “With winter coming on, there’s no way that we can make it all the way to northern Idaho on foot. Is there anywhere near here where we could find work?”

  “What are your skills?”

  “I’m a former Air Force security cop and NSA security officer, my wife is a former Marine and NSA intelligence analyst, and her sister was a millwright and mechanic.”

  “Do you folks know how to shoot?”

  “Yes, quite well.”

  “Well, there are some big ranches up the valley that might need a mechanic and a security guard or two.”

  “Where should we ask?”

  “Up in Alta. That’s about six miles east of here. There are a lot of wealthy ranchers and retirees up that way. But for tonight, I can put you folks up at my house. I wouldn’t want you camping out in weather like this.”

  • • •

  The small town of Alta was just across the Wyoming state line. Alta was preferred by some of the more wealthy residents of the Teton Valley because Wyoming had no personal income tax. Many of these families had been preparedness-minded before the Crunch, and hence were well stocked.

  They learned that there was only one church in Alta: St. Francis of the Tetons Episcopal Church. An Adventist church used the same building on Saturdays. (People from around Alta who were of other religious affiliations attended various churches in Driggs, up until gasoline became unavailable.)

  The elevation in Alta was 6,400 feet, making it a slightly colder, snowier climate than Driggs, which was at 6,100 feet. Driggs had a population of 1,675, while Alta had just under 400. Driggs was the county seat of Teton County, Idaho, while Alta, Wyoming, was ostensibly still policed by the Fremont County Sheriff’s Department. With the deep rift between Lander, Wyoming (the county seat), and the outlying sheriff’s offices in Jackson and Dubois, the residents of Alta considered themselves self-policing. As one resident put it, “We’re a libertarian enclave, sort of like Galt’s Gulch.” If a Fremont County Sheriff’s Department vehicle were to drive through Alta, Joshua surmised it would probably be engaged with rifle fire.

  There seemed to be very little commerce going on in Alta. There was a sign up in one disused parking lot that read, FARMERS MARKET & SWAP MEET 10:00 A.M. TO DARK ON SATURDAYS. But that wasn’t much help since it was Tuesday, so they made inquiries at the Alta Branch Library. The librarian suggested that they look for work at the Sommers ranch, which was less than three miles north of town. The librarian said, “They’ve lost two of their sons so they’re short-handed.”

  The walk to the Sommers ranch was memorable. The ranch was on Alta North Road. It started to snow as they trudged down the road. They began praying aloud as they walked. There was a burst of sunlight just before they reached the mailbox. They decided that it would be Megan who would approach the ranch house alone, since she was the savviest negotiator. They didn’t want to alarm the residents by arriving as a group. While the others waited at the mailbox, Megan walked up the house, which was nine hundred yards away.

  A woman named Tracy Sommers answered the knock on the door. Megan and Tracy spoke with each other for ten minutes through the intercom before Tracy opened the door, with a big Colt Anaconda .44 Magnum in her hand. Ron Sommers was behind her, holding an M2 Carbine. Their conversation continued through the open door as it started to snow again.

  It was not until after they had made eye contact, and after Megan had spoken the magic words former Marine, that she was invited inside. They talked for another twenty minutes before Tracy said, “Your husband, sister, and sons must be freezing their tails off. Go fetch them.”

  The deer carts were soon dripping dry in the garage, and Joshua’s party was warming themselves near the Sommerses’ big Hearthstone Equinox woodstove.

  The Sommerses were in their late fifties. They had one adopted grandson who was living at home. His name was Chad, and he was nine years old. (Their estranged daughter, who was a drug addict living in Dallas, Texas, had dropped off the roly-poly grandson with them six years earlier, and they had not heard from her since. Chad formally became their ward just before the Crunch.) Ron Sommers tearfully described how one of his two sons had died of a burst appendix at age twenty-six, six months after the Crunch. His other son had never returned from college at Norwich University, Vermont, where he was in his junior year. With no word from him, he was presumed dead.

  As they continued talking, Chad brought out a plastic tote bin and was quietly building Legos with Leo and Jean. Tracy apologized for not having any coffee or sugar, but she did have some tea bags. She brought out mugs to fill with hot water from the teapot that was constantly on the woodstove.

  Oddly, there was no formal interview or job offer for Joshua’s party. Their three-hour conversation with the Sommerses just gradually shifted toward their new responsibilities at the ranch and what bedrooms they would be sleeping in. They were hired.

  The ranch was a 320-acre rectangular half section. They raised registered Black Angus. They had no bull of their own (they had used artificial insemination for breeding before the Crunch), but they now had the use of a loaner Angus bull from the other side of Driggs to cover their twenty-five cows, in exchange for one weaned calf per year—with steer calves and heifers in alternating years. Although it would have been better to have their own unrelated bull to ensure that every cow was bred, they lacked a bullpen. Building a bullpen was on Ron’s lengthy to-do list.

  Ron was a former Marine Corps 3002 ground supply officer, who after leaving the service worked agricultural credit and later in investment banking. Their move to the ranch in 2011 was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.

  The Sommerses’ ranch house sat on a bench that had been cut on a shallow slope. The main barn sat on another terrace slightly above and beyond it, and the open-sided hay barn, beyond that. The elevation of the ranch was 6,420 feet at the west end, and nearly 7,000 feet at the heavily timbered east end. They had sixty acres of cultivated hay ground, and the rest was in pasture and timber.

  West of the house was a six-hundred-square-foot hand-built greenhouse that had been constructed over a framework that was originally designed for a small pole barn. Ron c
alled their greenhouse the Monstrosity. Ron had built it just after the Crunch began, using dozens of used windows that had come from condemned buildings—mostly old trailer houses. The roof was covered in corrugated translucent roofing plastic. The west, east, and south walls of the building were covered in an odd assortment of old window units with various-color frames. Very few of the window panes matched and they were pieced together like a quilt work, with four-by-fours and scraps of corrugated translucent roofing plastic in between. Only the north wall of the greenhouse was solid and insulated. The greenhouse was drafty and leaked badly whenever the snow and ice melted, but it had kept them well fed since the Crunch. Tracy kept the greenhouse garden going year-round. A rusty old woodstove in the center of the greenhouse was kept burning continuously from November to April of each year.

  The water for the house and barn was gravity fed. The only electricity was provided by a pair of fifty-five-watt PV panels, which charged a bank of eight golf-cart batteries, cabled together series-parallel in a system that Ron had crafted after the Crunch. Because it had no proper charge controller, the system had to be watched closely in the summer months to prevent overcharging the batteries and boiling off their distilled water. This battery bank was used primarily for charging smaller batteries, powering the intercom, and charging Ron’s assortment of DeWalt power tools. It also provided power for intermittent use of their CB radio, which was their only link to the outside world.

  The Sommers ranch would be Joshua, Megan, Malorie, and the boys’ home for the next one and a half years. With the ProvGov stretching its tentacles westward, they started to feel as if they were living the lives of NOC clandestine agents. Their false IDs were flimsy, since they had no other documentation. Once UNPROFOR troops passed through Driggs for the first time, Megan explained their situation to Ron Sommers, and he was sympathetic. It was decided that henceforth, only Ron or Tracy would make trips into Alta or Driggs.

  Their two summers at the ranch were frenetically busy with moving cattle, hay cutting, wood cutting, constructing a henhouse, building a bullpen (with stout cedar posts buried at three-foot intervals), and gardening. Joshua’s party more than earned their keep all through the year. Their main security problems at the ranch were four-legged, rather than two-legged. Their war with the mountain lions, bears, coyotes, and wolves was endless. With the help of Joshua, Megan, and Malorie, only two calves were lost to predators, and none were lost to rustlers.

  36

  HOOFING IT

  We have the illusion of freedom only because so few ever try to exercise it. Try it sometime. Try to save your home from the highway crowd, or to work a trade without the approval of the goons, or to open a little business without a permit, or to grow a crop without a quota, or educate your child the way you want to, or to not have a child. We all have the freedom of a balloon floating in a pin factory.

  —Karl Hess

  Alta, Wyoming—April, the Fourth Year

  In early April, Tracy had heard that UNPROFOR Homeland Security investigators were asking questions around Driggs, making lists of “anyone suspicious.” According to Rumor Control, this included anyone with a military service record, anyone who refused to accept ProvGov currency for payments, anyone who had made disparaging comments about the ProvGov, and anyone who was not originally local to the area. Though Megan matched all these criteria, the last category concerned her most.

  Megan, Joshua, and Malorie decided that it was time to leave the Sommers ranch, and with the snow off, the timing was good. They had been able to help Ron with some of the most intense work for two summers, so they felt that they had contributed enough labor to justify their upkeep.

  On the day of their departure, they had their deer carts packed much more efficiently than when they had arrived. Over the past seventeen months, they had systematically acquired an assortment of gear that was better suited to cross-country travel than what they had arrived with. They also had three carts now—one for each adult. All three carts had been spray-painted in flat green and brown blotches. The heavy canvas tents that they’d inherited from the chaplain had been replaced with a pair of forest-green Fjällräven Singi lightweight nylon three-season backpacking tents. These Swedish-made tents were well used but of very good quality. Ostensibly two-man tents, they had just enough room for the five of them to sleep comfortably. The same retired backpacker in Driggs sold them several small waterproof dry bags to protect their gear from the elements.

  Joshua’s party had also upgraded to better-quality sleeping bags for the boys, lighter-weight cooking gear, and four army surplus green foam sleeping pads that Joshua trimmed to match the interior profile of the tents. Their food was mostly beef jerky and freeze-dried Mountain House backpacking foods that they had bought at great expense with some of their pre-1965 silver coins. Anticipating a diet that was heavy on meat, they laid in a supply of Metamucil powder and an acidophilus-blend probiotic powder to maintain digestive regularity.

  The boys had new broken-in boots instead of tennis shoes, and everyone had olive-green or woodland-camouflage ponchos.

  After making their good-byes to the Sommerses, they headed out on the morning of April 10. The boys were crying. They were going to miss Chad. Their life at the Sommers ranch had hardened them in some ways but softened them in others. They were physically much stronger, given the exertions of wood felling, bucking, hauling, splitting, and stacking as well as hauling hay. (Nearly everyone in the region had switched back to small bales, since they didn’t require the use of tractors.) But they had become accustomed to regular meals and sleeping in warm beds. Roughing it out on the road would be much different and their mental stress level would be much higher.

  Their progress through Idaho was slow. They made it to Driggs the first day, but then transitioned to night travel for the sake of stealth. (They were traveling armed, and not only were most of their guns in the ProvGov’s banned categories, none of them were registered.) Their intended route through the Banana Belt and up Highway 95 was 685 miles. After reaching the outskirts of Rexburg and averaging only 4.5 miles a night for the first week, Megan “did the math” and realized that their trip would probably take them five months if it was all done on foot.

  Their modus operandi was to sleep during the day in brushy or wooded areas, cook their “breakfast” at dusk, and then be on the road by full dark. From Rexburg all the way to Payette, they were in open, arid country. Since the power grid had gone down, much of this erstwhile farming country had reverted to desert and had become largely depopulated. They looked forward to seeing windmills as their associated stock-watering tanks were often their only source of water after being filtered.

  They became experts at dodging off the highway whenever they saw approaching headlights. This happened infrequently, since southern Idaho had just recently been occupied by UNPROFOR troops and fuel was still scarce. Whenever they saw headlights, they just assumed that it would be a UN vehicle. During the day, while the others slept, Joshua would often hunt rabbits and birds with a folding slingshot. He even became adept at stunning or killing trout with large pebbles from the slingshot, once he learned how to aim low, to compensate for the refraction of the water. Starting in Rexburg, they were also able to buy food to resupply their party, paying in silver dimes and quarters.

  By May 7, they reached the strange town of Arco. The cliffs behind the town were painted with huge, gaudy, two-digit numbers representing high school class years. It was now nearly a ghost town. The most difficult stretch of their trip was the forty-three miles between Arco and Carey, since it took them through the dusty Craters of the Moon National Monument. They averaged seven miles per night, and found water only once, at Lava Lake. They rested, fished, and filtered water there for two days.

  On May 14 they passed by Carey, and were able to refill their canteens again at Carey Lake and at the Little Wood River. From there on, water was less of a concern since they passed by water sources nearly every night. Often, however, the water had
an alkaline taste even after being filtered. On June 10 they reached the outskirts of Mountain Home, Idaho. Because of an obvious UN troop concentration in both the city and the adjoining Air Force base, they took a circuitous route, via Mountain Home Reservoir. They slept in abandoned houses each day and averaged only two miles of travel each night. The daytime heat was becoming oppressive and they longed to get into the mountains.

  They cut between Nampa and Meridian, Idaho, on small farm roads. Here, the population density was higher, but the people were friendly and generous, even though they had obviously been suffering since the Crunch. Most of the families here were Mormon. Rather than staying on Highway 95, they took Highway 55 north from the town of Eagle. It was here that they heard their first resistance firefights in Idaho. One of these was within a mile of them, and a few stray tracer rounds from UNPROFOR machine guns passed over their heads. Jean and Leo seemed more excited than frightened. The adults, in contrast, felt exposed and outgunned.

  They quickly climbed into cooler, more timbered country, which was how they had always imagined Idaho would be. It was 155 miles from Mountain Home to the former ski resort town of McCall. On the way, they passed through the derelict sawmill town of Cascade, which still had mountains of sawn logs.

  On July 12, they made it to McCall and camped just one hundred yards from Payette Lake. There, they were surprised to witness a drunken contingent of Belgian troops partying by the lake, teaching themselves how to water ski. They were using a pair of stolen ski boats that they had brought back to life with UN-supplied 94-octane gasoline.

  The next ninety miles, which brought them back onto Highway 95, en route to Grangeville, took them through some scenic mountainous ranching country and forest lands. On July 20, Joshua shot a young cow elk with his .270 rifle. They rested for the next four days, gorging themselves on elk steak and making as much jerky as they could carry.