Switched On

by Franklin Horton

  Sometimes, while checking their trap lines, the young men would go visit Hugh, the radio operator who’d recently joined them in the valley. Hugh was a longtime friend of Jim's whom he had not seen in many years. They hadn’t gone to school together but Jim had worked with Hugh at his afterschool job.

  The boys enjoyed visiting Hugh because he was full of stories. The man had an interesting career trajectory that gave him a vast knowledge of survival, weapons, and tactical operations. Hugh was vague about his background and not forthcoming about how he’d built his knowledge base. Jim suspected that Hugh worked around the world as a civilian contractor in the security field. Hugh would neither confirm nor deny, though sometimes if the homemade liquor was flowing, his tongue would loosen and he would tell a new story, redacting and sanitizing it of time, location, and detail.

  At some point in his career Hugh realized that he possessed the computational and electronic skills for being a radio operator. Whatever line of work he may have been involved in, he made an effort to grow and improve those skills. By the time Hugh returned home to Virginia he was quite knowledgeable in the various radio bands and an antenna theory.

  There were several abandoned homes in the valley Jim had been able to offer to Hugh with the approval of the neighbors. It was no surprise to Jim that Hugh picked the most remote home, a trailer located high on the slope of the mountain range bordering the southeast side of the valley. It was an older mobile home that had been dragged into position with a bulldozer and placed on a shelf cut into the side of the mountain. The location required a four-wheel-drive vehicle to access it in the best of times but here, in the worst of times, it was foot-access only, which was fine with Hugh.

  A wood stove took care of heating and cooking. At the border of the property was a mountain stream that ran year-round and allowed Hugh to have a gravity-fed water system in his home. Besides being attracted to the remoteness of the location, Hugh was happy that the elevation of the site gave him excellent options for placing radio antennas.

  When Hugh decided to join them in the valley, Jim made sure Hugh had plenty of muscle for transporting his radio equipment from the superstore. The activity required armed guards since there was still concern of retaliation. Some of the residents of the superstore had been killed by folks from the valley. Some families of the dead were still living in the superstore and the resentment threatened to boil over at any moment.

  Jim had months to ponder that the lack of long-distance radio equipment was a major failure in his preparations. Gary had some equipment but he was a novice and had unrealistic expectations of what he would be able to do with the equipment he purchased. He found it wasn’t nearly as capable as he’d been led to believe.

  When Hugh joined them, it took very little convincing to get Jim on board with putting together a serious ham setup. Soon after his arrival, the folks from the valley conducted a massive push to gather all the equipment Hugh might need. The biggest deficiency was in the area of antennas.

  Besides the radio equipment he brought from the superstore, Hugh also had knowledge of various pockets of radio equipment situated around the county. On scavenging missions they found wire, antenna components, and other electronic components that Jim had no understanding of. Hugh knew of two radio operators who had passed away in the last year and whose widows had been unable to part with their equipment.

  He intended to pay visits to both of those widows and see if he could barter for the equipment, but neither was to be found. Hugh loaded up the equipment, knowing that the original operator would understand. To keep a clear conscience, Hugh left a note in each location vaguely explaining who he was and why he had taken the equipment. He did not leave an address where he could be found, but he did write down a frequency where he could be reached if the equipment needed to be returned or the widows wanted to take him up on the offer of barter.

  On the morning Jim, Buddy, Randi, and Deputy Ford went into town on horseback, it wasn’t long before Charlie showed up at Jim's house looking for his sidekick. He asked Pete if he wanted to check traps and maybe do a short hunt for some bigger game. Even in the cold and snow, checking the traps was preferable to sitting at the house and doing chores. Pete asked his mother and she was agreeable, pleased that Pete had found a role for himself in their new reality. While he didn’t have enough experience that he could do all of the things the men did, he was able to help fill in the gaps by providing security and food. While Jim’s family was doing better than many of the others due to an extensive pantry, there were plenty of people in the valley pleased to find a gutted squirrel hanging on their doorknob.

  "Take a radio, and I want you to check in every thirty minutes," Ellen said. Pete didn't object. It was a small price to pay if it got him out of the house.

  It took Pete a few minutes to pull on his outdoor clothing and grab a rifle. The whole time he was getting dressed he had to endure a lecture on being safe from his mother, Nana, and Pops. He did a lot of nodding and agreeing but was for the most part ignoring the lecture that he’d already heard dozens of times over.

  The boys soon found checking the trap line in the deep snow was no picnic. They complained to each other but at the same time they saw it as an adventure that beat the hell out of sitting around the fire. They checked over a dozen trees where they utilized their squirrel poles, finding three squirrels and two chipmunks. Even the chipmunks would not go to waste. They could feed them to the cats or boil them outside over a fire for dogs to eat. At such times even the domesticated animals became less picky.

  After they slid their last frozen critter into a sack, Pete radioed his mother.

  “This is Wombat calling with required check-in. We’re going to go check on Hugh and see if he spotted any large game high on the ridge.”

  “Acknowledged, Wombat. Be careful.”

  Pete rolled his eyes, but was pleased his mother followed proper radio protocol.

  No one had seen or heard from Hugh in two weeks. While that was not atypical, the boys wanted something to do and visiting Hugh was always entertaining.

  It took them nearly an hour to get from their last trap to Hugh’s mobile home. High-stepping in the deep snow was exhausting. They were forced to stop every ten minutes to cool off and rest their muscles. When they reached Hugh’s home he was standing on the porch, already waiting on them. He had a cup of coffee in his hand and a grin on his bearded face.

  "You think you boys can make any more noise? There won’t be a possum left in this county after all the noise you made.”

  Pete and Charlie looked at each other suspiciously, fairly certain they’d made very little noise at all. Pete took the bait.

  "Noise?" he asked. "We didn't make any noise."

  "Then how did I know you were coming?"

  The boys shrugged. They didn't have a clue. Hugh clambered down the trailer steps, wearing jeans, tall snow boots, and a T-shirt. The steaming coffee mug in his hand read: May Contain Whiskey. “Let's retrace your steps and you can tell me where you screwed up."

  "It took us an hour to walk up here and now you’re wanting us to walk back?" Charlie whined.

  Hugh regarded the boy with hard blue eyes. "Do you want to learn something that might save your life one day?" He didn’t wait for an answer.

  How did one answer a question like that? Of course. If someone had information to offer that might save your life one day, you certainly wanted access to that information. The boys reluctantly fell into step behind Hugh and retraced their path for a good hundred yards back downhill.

  When he reached a particular spot, Hugh paused in the set of tracks they left earlier and gestured around him. "This is where I first became aware of your presence. I would tell you to look for the alarm but you wouldn’t find it if I gave you until summer."

  "What was it?" Pete asked. He was ready to get inside and warm up for a few minutes. If Hugh said he wasn’t going to find it, then Pete wasn’t going to take him up on the challenge and spend more time
outside than he had to.

  "Basic tripwire. Two pound test fishing line. It breaks when you hit it. You’ll never even know you walked through it most days. It was buried under snow so you probably charged right through it and never felt a thing.”

  Hugh crouched and fished around in the snow, snagging the broken fishing line where it passed through an eye hook at the base of a tree. “Knocked down a whole stack of cans on the back porch. That was the alarm.”

  Satisfied that the boys understood what had happened here, Hugh started back up toward the mobile home. Along the way he pointed out two different sets of electronic security that also alerted him to the boys’ arrival. One method used a transmitter and reflector. When the boys interrupted the light beam, a wireless transmitter triggered an alarm in the mobile home. The final alarm used thermal sensors. All of these devices were simple battery-operated devices that come from home improvement stores.

  "If you're just one man by yourself you need devices that are going to be working for you while you're sleeping or doing other things. It's like trapping. The trap is working to gather food while you're doing other things. Even with the state of the world being what it is, you need to automate as much as you can. You need systems that are gathering water while you're doing other things, and systems that are providing security while you're doing other things. You need as much in the way of simple, unsophisticated, and inexpensive automation as you can afford."

  "We've been using the squirrel poles and rat traps just like you showed us. We got three squirrels today,” Charlie said.

  Hugh nodded. “That’s good. I’ve got several squirrel poles set out myself, as well as a few deer snares."

  "How’s the radio business?” Pete asked. “Heard anything else about the power coming back on?”

  Hugh scratched his head and looked off in the distance as he was prone to when collecting his thoughts. It was almost like his own head became an antenna, gathering the information he was preparing to relate. "Just a lot of chatter about what this official transmission really means."

  "I thought it meant that the power was coming back on," Charlie said.

  “Power restoration could take a long time. It can take months to get one city back online after an ice storm. Multiply that by what we have here. They have to assess each area before they restore power and make sure the infrastructure wasn’t damaged due to overload when the grid was collapsing.”

  The boys looked dejected.

  “I was looking forward to playing video games online again,” Pete said.

  Charlie nodded. “Me too.”

  “Maybe at some point,” Hugh said. “I think you had better take it one day at a time. Don’t be getting your hopes up for things that might not happen and most certainly might not happen anytime soon.”

  Pete and Charlie spent a few minutes warming up by Hugh’s fire, swapping stories and updating Hugh on the little that had transpired in the rest of the valley since the snow came. When they left, they promised Hugh they would update Jim on the things he had mentioned. They departed after Pete radioed in again to his mother to let her know they were at Hugh’s. He told her they were leaving for a short hunt before descending back into the valley then signed off.

  Hugh asked, “Where do you intend to hunt?”

  "I thought we'd follow some of these old logging roads," Charlie said. “Work our way up higher on the slope."

  "I've been doing some recon of my own. I think it would be worth setting up a little blind where that power line crosses the top of the ridge. With the power company maintaining a cleared right of way, you should have sight lines down both slopes. One of you could look down the east side, the other could look down the west side, and you could cover a good bit of ground without walking around."

  "It's a good idea," Charlie said, and Pete nodded.

  "There's some bear moving around too," Hugh cautioned.

  "Shouldn't they be hibernating?" Pete asked warily.

  "They don’t always go into deep hibernation around here anymore," Hugh said. "The winters don't stay cold long enough so the bears take little naps and then get up and move around. They’re moving around in this snow because I've seen the tracks."

  "You need a dog," Pete said. “You’ll be overrun with bears in the summer.”

  "That's high on my list for spring," Hugh said. "Tripwires and electronic measures are nothing compared to a good dog."

  They boys departed with a wave and the promise they would return in a week or so.

  “Let Jim know if I hear anything of interest,” Hugh told them, “I’ll venture down into the valley to pass on the information.”

  The flat ledge of earth Hugh’s mobile home sat on had been carved out by a dozer during a logging operation. It was part of the landing and staging area where knuckle-boom loaders stacked logs on trucks. Because of the logging operation, there was a network of trails and skidder roads starting immediately behind Hugh’s home leading deep into the hills. The Clinch Mountain range had steep shoulders at this level, becoming even steeper as you crested the summit. The logging roads were the best way to get around whether you were on foot, four wheeler, or horseback. The boys headed for a logging road cutting away from Hugh’s backyard, trudging into deep snow.

  Slogging through the snow, their muscles already sore, the boys began to question the wisdom of their hunting trip, of climbing the steep ridge in the deep snow. Turning around was not an option. Had they been older they may have turned around and gone home, but these were young men on a young men's adventure. Retreat was not an option.

  The logging roads allowed them to reach the top of the mountain much sooner than if they had been following a game trail or bushwhacking. Still, it took them an hour and a half to reach the crest of the ridge. They were tired and sweaty, despite opening zippers and shedding layers to keep from soaking their clothes. Although it was already late afternoon and the days were short, they were not concerned because they knew that going downhill, with gravity assisting, they could descend in half the time.

  The ridge top was not a jagged peak, but a broad, rounded, densely-wooded plane strewn with boulders the size of shipping containers. There were magnificent views of the snow-covered valley below them and they stared, taking it in through the clouds of their puffing breath. When his breathing slowed, Pete radioed his mother again to let her know that they had reached the spot they were going to hunt. Pete could almost see the house and hoped he could reach her.

  He keyed his microphone. "Wallaby, this is Wombat, come back?" Pete was always coming up with new call signs. He and his sister Ariel thought it was hilarious but no one else found it as entertaining as they did.

  He repeated his message twice before his mother responded. "This is Wallaby," she replied dryly.

  Pete cracked up hearing her say it. Even Charlie thought it was funny.

  "We’re on top of the ridge, right where the high tension line clearing is. You can probably see it from the front porch because I can nearly see the house."

  "Roger that. I'm standing on the front porch right now and I can see exactly where you're talking about. Don't stay long because you need to allow yourself time to get home."

  "We have lights if we need them but I expect we’ll only hunt for about an hour or two. It’s really cold and windy up here."

  "That's fine. Check-in before you start down."

  "Got it. Wombat out."

  While Pete was on the radio, Charlie was wandering around examining vantage points and scouting the area. He pointed at something on the ground.

  "What is it?" Pete asked.

  "Hugh was right. Bear track."

  "No kidding?" Pete got up from the rock he was sitting on and went to examine the track. He had seen a few bear tracks over the years and this was indeed a bear track. "Can you tell anything about the size?"

  "Looks like a yearling. Not massive, but if he's wandered around in this mess he’s probably hungry. Keep your eyes open. You might not hear him coming.
”

  Pete looked at Charlie with a frown. "That’s comforting."

  Charlie shrugged. "It is what it is."

  "So how you want to do this?"

  Charlie pointed at the massive high tension tower approximately fifty yards from their position. "Let's go to the clearing. You can watch one side and I'll take the other."

  "Fine with me."

  "If you spot something, give me a heads up before you shoot. That way I know I won’t think I have to rush over and stop a bear from gnawing on you."

  For nearly two hours they maintained vigilance, each watching the cleared right-of-way beneath the dead power lines. Pete realized that if something drastic didn't happen, if the country didn’t recover and get the power back on, these clearings would grow back quickly. It didn't take long for trees to overtake an area that wasn't taken care of. Pete fished a cut of jerky out of a crumpled plastic bag and shoved it in his mouth. Before they split up, he and Charlie split some food Pete brought. There was jerky, old Halloween candy, and a couple of biscuits with homemade blackberry jelly.

  Neither saw any deer or other game moving around. Perhaps the deer were smart enough to know it wasn't a good day to be out wandering around in deep snow. They were probably bedded down somewhere waiting this mess out. Perhaps Pete and Charlie should have been doing the same thing, but it was still better than a day at home. Pete had to keep reminding himself of that as he began to get cold. He would have been doing chores, sawing and splitting firewood, spreading ashes on the garden, and whatever else his mother came up with. He didn’t mind helping out at the house but there was certainly no adventure in it. This was adventure.