Shaky Business

by Foster, Ron

  “I got tons of advice and I got lots of answers for what it is folks ought to be doing but the problem is that there are just too many people to try to take care of now. I am having difficulty even trying to think about what to do to take care of myself past tomorrow if you know what I mean. Now the only question in your mind should be what are you going to do now this instant to make it better and who do you need to get to, friends or family to help your survival and theirs last longer than the rest?” Donald had said with a deadpan expression waiting for her to realize just how bad this crisis was going to get for her to realize we were all in a “Nothing means nothing” society.

  “Well I only have me and my husband Murphy, he runs the park’s convenience store up there and is trying to figure out what to do with what little bit of food is in there in the coolers so it doesn’t spoil and become rancid before the power comes back on.” Phyllis began before Donald leaned over towards her and said bluntly “Read my lips, The power is never coming back on anytime soon and possibly NEVER means frigging NEVER, you got it? It takes a whole industry in several states to even turn the power on down here when a normal hurricane passes. For some reason, as far as we all are concerned, the big man in the sky has hit the Frankenstein switch on every single transformer in America. Its lights out and no mutual assistance treaties or pacts will be honored for quite some time. It’s like one county or city agrees to come to the aid of another when you have a disaster like a hazardous chemical spill or a hurricane impacting your infrastructure and you used to be able to depend on outside help committed to respond to you before an event, now we all are paddling our own canoes and every one’s got a major leak in theirs.” Donald said pointing out that everyone as far as he was concerned was left to their own devices for the next year or two or three or whenever.

  “I told you I was an emergency manager; I told you I made plans for disaster at the federal and state governmental level at one time. I can also tell you right now most assuredly there is no plan for such a monumental disaster which is occurring now. Now I haven’t listened to any emergency broadcasts and I don’t know what kind of bullshit they are telling you is going to happen or what kind of relief efforts are supposedly going on but that is crap. I have studied academically and in the field the parameters of many types of risks like hurricanes, pandemics, dirty bombs, etc., and this particular one we don’t even have a hypothetical reset switch for. But a year at the very best it’s predicted to last and according to the powers that be in their studies, they say ninety percent of the population will be dead before they get the lights back on. Now I don’t agree with that particular figure, I’m a bit more optimistic, I think a third of us will get by but on this particular beach if they were all locked up in those condo canyons the death toll will be much higher. Water is the biggest risk we are facing because in three days without a source, you will have the majority of the people dead or dying.” Donald said solemnly pointing out a well known fact about the human body’s resilience to the effects of dehydration from numerous studies and the military survival schools’ predictions that demise was certain.

  “Well I need to get in touch with my superiors some kind of way. What they did last night was send out patrol cars from the city and beach police to inform everybody to evacuate the area but I see your point. I’ve been through enough hurricanes waterspouts etc around here to know what a cluster you-know-what it is going to be like. Like Homestead, Florida got totally wiped off the map or when a normal hurricane knocks out power three hundred sixty miles inland.” Phyllis said thinking this fiasco was going to be much more short-lived than Donald was saying but also realizing the fact that water had almost stopped running immediately for the entire beach after the geomagnetic storm had hit.

  “No, it can’t happen like that! You are thinking of localized events where they can get extra power workers from other states around mobilized or other federal assistance. Just one of those giant transformers they need to support the power grid in New York state and the areas surrounding it requires at least one year’s time in a rush to manufacture and they aren’t built here! They used to be built in South Korea and Germany and they can only be moved by ocean freight. Did you know that there are only three locomotive trains in America that can haul those office building sized things? The logistics of moving them as well as finding anybody that knows anything about how to do it is problematic enough without even considering the plant that makes them is truly operational. By the way, did they say which side of the earth was under the sun when this occurred because usually most of the damage would just happen there, of course it could also be a worldwide event.” Donald concluded trying to even guesstimate which countries possibly still had power or did not.

  Phyllis was quiet for a moment considering what Donald had said and thinking she had no clue or thought about which side of the earth was facing the solar storm that had occurred and instead wondered what she was going to do for her and her husband as well as their two small dogs in the coming days with the grim knowledge that Donald had just presented.

  She had been living what she considered the life of Riley in a condo with retirement in just two years and it was just a short pleasant drive to the park every day. Now, she concluded, that fantasy life as she knew it was ended from now on. Hell, they couldn’t even survive for a week with what was in their condo and then what would they do? The answer was obvious, as Donald was so wisely trying to explain to her. She would look for the first and best place of natural resources to survive and the country girl in her told her that place was where they were standing now in this very state park that seemed to have what they needed if they could prevent others from consuming their resources too fast. Why the deer and the rest of the game around this place were so used to people that it would be no problem hunting and supporting yourself for a long time right here and like Donald said people will be seeking out and gravitating towards the easiest natural resources, Phyllis concluded reaching towards this worldly stranger who seemed to possess a lot of the answers that she needed to hear right now.

  “So I think you realize by now, that if push comes to shove, everybody and their brother that wasn’t down here on vacation or lack of gas or other means of getting home, is going to be moving towards this resource like a flight of locusts. You can have anarchy or you can have measured starvation, meaning that this place is the most likely resource to help everybody. Look at it this way, every local around here knows that the deer are tame, guess where they are going to want to hunt first? Every fisherman knows that fishing is best on the jetty if you can keep your gear together and not get hung up on the rocks. This is the closest forest thing we got for firewood and possibly the easiest place to secure against other survivors seeing that it’s only got one road in and one road out if you are not counting the folks on the beach.” Donald said trying to formulate his own plan of survival as well as what appeared to be the one person that could possibly help him out at the moment without a confrontation.

  “OK, cowboy, when you going to start shooting my deer? I’ll run your ass off now!” Phyllis said with a smile.

  “Where did we get this ‘my deer’ thing when we been talking about helping each other? I think our deer sounds better. See why you need me to stick around the post while you are doing things and kind of watch it for you? I tell you another thing, not only do I have experience with crowds and the threat of what we have coming, I have administrative skills directing people in a disaster as well as military and country boy skills in survival.” Donald said returning her smile and actually enjoying her listening to him and he might actually be allowed to stay in place.

  “What are you going to shoot at deer with? You know you are not supposed to have guns out here!” Phyllis said one eye twinkling with mirth that she knew that self-avowed prepper folks like Donald tended to travel with theirs even though that wasn’t on her hit list to arrest people for as long as they were not open carried in the park.

  “Well actually I
have my handgun which is permitted for concealed carry and I have a breakdown .22 rifle but I know snaring skills and have what I need to take a deer or an alligator for that matter.” Donald had advised.

  “So if I leave you here and deputize you as you requested, what are you going to do with the hordes coming down here wanting to poach them some semi-tame deer, Donald? You got an answer to that?” Phyllis asked looking smug.

  “That’s a no brainer for me darlin’. I ain’t the only one that’s got access to guns and knowing what’s what around here. My plan is to go knock on some doors and organize some campers and advise them of just how we plan on dealing with that contingency. Now in my mind there’s two things we can do: one is anticipate the locusts and greet them with fire and pestilence and run them off and the other is to try to keep helping the populace by allocating some of these natural resources to prevent starvation as a whole. In other words, if I shoot a deer and everyone staying here eats half of it and guards the gate for would be trespassers we can also offer half that deer to whoever challenges our rights to protect this place as well as attempt to provide for them in some form of official manner like you might do if you are around and didn’t deputize me to make such decisions. Now on the other hand, that sort of handouts can only last so long as we both know until judgment day declares there is nothing to share so the smartest thing in my opinion is to allow anyone willing to fish at the jetty and the state docks be allowed in without their weapons and a moratorium of sorts be understood and loudly explained that hunting will be forbidden around here from now on.” Donald said considering that a line in the sand had to be drawn somewhere in order to prevent masses of starving people from banding together and directly attacking what he felt they had to declare as theirs because of limited wildlife and humanitarian resources.

  “So Donald, I see that you have been thinking about this a little bit and I’m trying to agree with you that we all are going to dread the day that we have to turn away others and that plan has some merit, I give you that but when do we decide that there will be no allowing anybody on what was formerly considered public property?” Phyllis asked looking at him adamantly and considering the number of people in this modernized society vacationers and locals that would turn to the state parks as a means of sustenance eventually.

  “You ever been to war, I didn’t think so. People don’t want to die and when people get desperate they run from aggression first and then they focus their aggression themselves on their last possibility of salvation. What we got to do is make this place the first place they run from or not approach and not end up being the last chance that anybody considers on this earth. We bark, we bite, we raise hell and we stay avoided. People will forget that this place even exists after a while; most people aren’t from here or even know about any woodland skills to help them survive so they are going to be seeking out any type of larger population centers to save their sorry butts. We are going to have to as I said before, draw a line in the sand and say this area we claim is too dangerous to approach eventually.” Donald said knowing that there will come a day when a community survival is more important than being kind to just humans. We will try to do community as well as Park service as long as we can until it jeopardizes our own survivability and we need to retain the wildlife for our own cooking stations.

  “Well Donald you convinced me, you can stay here and we will just try to play it by ear and make the best of it.” Phyllisdeclared.

  8

  Movers And Shakers

  “Well Hobe I know you are in hog heaven down here and I must say for the most part I have really enjoyed this trip. But the thing is we have to first locate one of those plant nurseries you was talking about and attempt to raise us some sunflowers, if that’s practical, and that Donald character is living on top of that old turpentine still I thought you could use to do the job as a refinery. That son of a bitch I can guarantee you if we did have to borrow that facility will be counting every drop or the number of people that was required to twist a cap on the bottle if he allowed us to rent it in the first place.” Crick said.

  “Now Crick, you don’t understand everything that goes on in that old man’s mind I’m thinking, but I got your point. Since he’s squatting on nothing more than a historic big ass welded boiler tank I don’t think it would take much to move him off of it if we made it particularly advantageous for him to make the move. First thing to consider is why is he up there to begin with. I say he’s lazy and got an opportunist mentality about things to claim it as his own to begin with. Otherwise he would have just located in one of the new RV’s still parked down here that had their computers fried. I call him an opportunist and admittedly as everyone and himself included has told us he immediately started identifying targets of opportunity to abscond with goods before anybody realized the needs or appropriateness of such items for day to day long term survival living before they disappeared. He is a survivor and he will do what’s necessary to survive regardless of anybody’s beliefs that whatever is not nailed down is safe from any form of so called thievery. Now I’m not calling him a bad man, I’m just saying don’t leave nothing laying around in front of him for very long because he might just decide himself that it needs repurposing before he tells you about it.” Hobe said thinking about the old rascal sitting on top of what he formerly thought was a piece of property nobody else wanted and now Hobe had to figure out how to get it.

  “Now Hobe, I kind of go along with that way of thinking but me and you both know that if he gets one whiff of you needing them old ancient boilers he’s sitting on at that historic site, the price would double no triple, no erase that from your mind quadruple if he tried to add any kind of royalty on for their use. What we need to do is get him to move out of that place on his own choice and think he is going to profit by doing it.” Crick said contemplating how to nudge somebody into doing something when hard cash really didn’t matter.

  “Well how are we going to do that? I mean the man has lived down here five years or more and seems kind of set in his ways. I suggest we give him what he wants if we can identify it and he would gladly vacate that property for a new opportunity but what is that?” Hobe said looking towards the assembly and Donald’s evidently animated point he was trying to make because he was waving his hands around about something important to him talking to Randal.

  “Well he likes food, he’s too old to tempt him with women maybe and besides that we ain’t got none so let’s tempt him with inventions!” Crick said with a grin and mischievously hollered at Donald to come join them for a moment.

  Donald just waved at them carelessly and evidenced he would be there in a moment and particularly at that moment Phyllis evidently had pissed him off by something because he appeared even more agitated and eventually stormed off in their direction asking them a bit abruptly what it was they wanted.

  “What you so mad about, Donald? I was telling my friend here, Crick, that maybe that inventive mind of yours could help me out with a little problem we got on the boat to wrap your head around.” Hobe said playing with the old resourceful character they just met.

  “Oh, that woman Phyllis, she was telling me that I should mind my own business and not push questioning to ya’ll about your ice machine and such too much until you all settled in down here and shared some of them oysters you had for trade.” Donald said waving at the woman that was studying him with open aggravation from a distance.

  “We don’t mind you asking us about that a bit. It’s pretty simple actually, the only thing you might not know about how those things operate is simple electronics. Either you got A/C or D/C electricity coming in to operate anything, mostly boats operate off of either twelve or twenty-four volt D/C systems. If you haven’t had any success in playing with them it’s because you didn’t know where the power switch was or the inherent voltage regulators were located at. Take for example, if you just wanted to light a light bulb it takes two wires and I know you understand it takes positive and negative energy
to do this. There are many forms of anti-theft devices on these things connected to boats just like an ignition switch but it all boils down to what I call “The goes inzas” meaning that power goes into one thing and comes out the other to make it work. If you break the circuit at any point the thing won’t work, so what you’ve got to do is what is called “The half-split method”. You ever heard of that?” Hobe said.

  “Half-split method? Split what, do what? If you ain’t got any power the thing simply don’t work to me. I’m not sure what you are getting at.” Donald declared.

  “Half-split is simple as pie. When you don’t know where to start diagnosing the problem, you rely on your goes inzas. That means that when power comes in it goes into something and comes out to give you the desired effect. That can mean audio, voice, or a myriad of other things. By starting in the middle of a problem, the first thing you want to determine is has power reached this point. If not, you check for problems to the left. If you determine that you have power at that point, you check to the right. That methodology will save you a lot of time and misery trying to figure out how to isolate your repairs. For example, if you had a transistor radio that as far as you know had good batteries in it and wasn’t producing a sound, you would try to establish if the speaker was getting power or not and instead of trying to figure out if it was your volume switch or not that was causing the problem, you would first try to figure out whether or not it had enough energy to produce the sound you desired. So in other words, start in the middle and work your way backwards and forwards by indications. Power goes into here; it’s supposed to come out of there. That’s the goes inzas. Once you know where to start at to isolate the problem, you can more effectively repair the deficiency and save a lot of time by knowing which direction to look forward or backward to. Now in your case, I think you need a change of scenery. I’m not saying move off this peninsula or get closer to the mainland but like fixing a radio you need to apply your talents and knowledge to make something work better and more efficiently for yourself and others. We need someone with imagination and the where withal to attack a problem intelligently just like we’ve been talking about and direct your talents towards resolving a problem in an expeditious manner. Case in point: you all were super happy about us having ice, I take it that electricity and electronics ain’t your long suit but innovation and management is. So what I propose is that like a gathering of engineers in many different areas of expertise you combine with us to put the polish on the apple you might say.” Crick said.