A Rocky Demise

by Pete Thorsen

  We started talking and she brought up the recent terrorist shooting. She asked me directly what I thought the answer was. I was not going to lie to her so I answered her with my true views on the matter.

  “Americans have only three choices but will certainly only choose the first one.

  “Choice one, accept that Muslims will, off and on, kill a few citizens. Those killings will gradually increase all the time. This is what they will choose.

  “Choice two is deport every Muslim in this country and not allow any others to ever enter here again. This will never happen.

  “Choice three is simply kill every Muslim in this country. This will possibly happen but not until many, many more Americans are slaughtered and the civilians left alive rise up and do it themselves.”

  “You cannot really believe those are the only choices do you?”

  “Yes. I believe that with no reservations.”

  “But only the very few radical Muslims ever attack us. To punish all the rest is almost bizarre.”

  “First, you have it completely turned around. Radical Muslims are the ones that do not want to kill us. Their religion tells them to kill or enslave those who do not follow Allah. So it would actually be radical thinking for a true believer in Islam not to attack us.

  “And many people here in this country want to ban guns or remove the Second Amendment and that would punish well over three hundred million Americans. Isn’t that more bizarre?”

  “You are only thinking in black and white with no gray areas.”

  “Not really. I am thinking with facts. Muslims have waged active war on the infidels for many, many centuries. That has never changed and history tells us that it will never change in the future. So it can certainly be construed after all this time as a realist fact.

  “We are infidels and we have well over ten million Muslims here in our country. History tells us that they will indeed wage war on us.”

  “You have apparently spent quite some time thinking about this subject.”

  “Yes I have. You could say that I have some motivation for doing so.”

  “Surely you have never suffered an attack from these people, so what would be your motivation? A family member or a friend?”

  I did not answer and instead I reached down and pulled up the leg of my pants. Then she could plainly see the steel leg.

  The shock on her face was real. She never knew that I was handicapped. I have learned to walk and work without a real noticeable limp, though of course there was always some limp. Even the few who know about my leg forget that I have it. But I never forget. And I will never forget how I got it.

  “I had no idea. Were you in the military?”

  “Yes. My country sent me thousands of miles away to kill Muslims and at the same time my government was bringing thousands and thousands of them over here to live among us. Now everyone in America is paying the price for that.”

  “I can certainly see how that would make you bitter towards them.”

  “I guess I am bitter against them and our government. But that does not make my argument any less valid on the subject. I am not really even bitter against the Muslims. They are just doing what they have been doing as long as there have been Muslims. I am really bitter towards our two-faced government.”

  “So your leg is why you hide out in the middle of no where and keep everyone at arms length?”

  “I just like my privacy. And you were the one who said my place was exactly what you wished you had. Do you want to hide also?”

  “Yes, maybe I do. My husband was in the military and was deployed just after we were married. He was killed on his very first patrol. From ‘friendly fire.’ An air strike landed in the wrong place. Apparently there was not enough left to send home. And yes, I too feel bitter towards our government.”

  We just sat and looked at each other for a moment, neither moving nor talking. When she started to cry I moved over and held her until she was cried out. We both learned a lot about each other. And maybe even learned more about ourselves, too.

  I stayed and we talked for some time after that but the talk was different now. It was not just the talk of two agreeable strangers who happened to meet, but real talk about ourselves and our thoughts. This time when I left it was not a kiss on the cheek. It was a kiss on the lips. And it was me, not Donna, that started it.

  I had to drive slowly on the way home because my mind, and maybe my whole life, was now in turmoil.

  Chapter 8

  Now the situation was quite different between Donna and I. We often talked on the phone and we saw each other once or twice a week. It was not uncommon for her to drive out to my place if she knew I was home. She wanted to learn about raising chickens and living in the country.

  Fall came and the weather cooled and I started doing a little hunting. It did not surprise me when Donna wanted to try rabbit hunting and bagged several rabbits without much trouble.

  She cleaned one rabbit after first watching me do it several times. She did a good enough job but admitted that, while she would do it again if required, she would rather leave that chore to me. Fair enough. She had no trouble eating or shooting the rabbits though.

  She also explained to me why she had the big stash of food and now the extra water at her house. She said she was something called a prepper. It came about after her husband was killed, something for which she was totally unprepared. But that made her want to be able to take care of herself, and that gradually led into being prepared for more, and that changed into the preparedness mindset.

  She talked about all the different things that could befall the people of the United States. Everything from world war to Yellowstone blowing up to an economic collapse of the world or just this country. She said that buying her guns was just part of being prepared for whatever might happen.

  I asked her what she did for money and she said most of it came from being an author. I asked about the books she wrote and she said they were just ‘romance novels.’ Like ‘romance novels’ was something derogatory. I told her I was proud of her for being smart enough and determined enough to write a whole novel, which is quite an accomplishment for anyone I would think, and she has written more than one.

  She had received a death benefit after her husband’s death and her house and SUV were both paid off. There was even some money left in the bank. She said that she made way more than what little she needed to live on from the royalties on her books.

  When she asked I told the reason I worked for cash and never took a real job. And she understood why I wanted to take whatever I could from the government after they caused the loss of my leg.

  Sometimes when she came out she would help me work on the house. The outside was done of course but there were still countless things that still had to be done to finish off the interior. She was a major influence in picking out the interior finishes, like the flooring and such.

  By the time winter started to fade I asked her to marry me and she said yes. Just a few weeks later we were married in a very simple ceremony. We eventually moved all her stuff over to my house which, of course, was now our house.

  We put her house up for sale and it sold surprisingly quickly. We invested some of the money from that sale into our house in the country, and eventually everything was to our satisfaction. We also had a fair sized, metal multipurpose building with a cement floor built on the property.

  I had built a chimney on the house during its construction and now we bought a simple wood stove that would heat the whole place during the mild winters we had here. At Donna’s insistence I built a large, metal lean-to on the back side of our metal shed for firewood and we bought enough firewood to fill it, which was a pretty substantial amount of wood.

  She had convinced me of the prepper mindset and we did many things to make the place more self-sufficient. Solar panels were added to the roof of the big new shed so it could have its own power supply. Additional panels were purchased at the same time, to bolster the ones
already on the house roof. Some were also just put into storage, along with some additional solar components.

  We talked about buying additional batteries but when I said these were almost at the end of their life cycle we decided to wait and replace all of them at the same time instead of mixing some new with the old.

  We bought an extra pump for the well just to have on hand and we bought even more of the long term storage food on top of all hers that we had moved to our homestead. We hauled the big water tank of hers out here to our place but we left it empty because there seemed to be no reason to fill it.

  Our first spring together saw us enlarging the garden and more than doubling its size. I again hauled in and incorporated manure into the garden soil. We also planted many more fruit trees of several varieties, along with buying just a few more chickens. And we couldn’t have been happier together. Both of our lives had been lonely and now we had each other and reveled in the fact that we had each found our soulmate.

  When the garden started producing I showed Donna how well the solar dehydrators worked and while she agreed she also bought everything she needed and started canning much of the produce from the garden.

  That fall the older fruit trees I had were really producing. And even though the homemade dehydrators worked very well we could not keep up with the ripening fruit. So Donna convinced me to build two more of them while she continued canning a little of the fruit also.

  We had both put in for deer tags and Donna was the one who ended up being drawn for a license. She had already purchased her own deer rifle (along with a few other guns) and she was anxious for the deer season to start.

  It was the third day of season when she shot her buck, providing us with venison to eat. Among all our other purchases we had bought a freezer and had plenty of room for the deer meat. Donna still took some of the meat and made her own jerky from it, just to see if she could. That jerky turned out great and we both liked it. It did not last long before it was eaten up!

  And then it was winter.

  We used the wood stove for some heating and a couple of times Donna or I would cook on its top just to see how it would work out. But mostly we used the propane for heat. It was more convenient and we could easily afford it with Donna’s book royalties and my occasional jobs.

  When Donna saw that I had to take the propane tanks to town and have them filled she said that was silly and she would fix it. She said nothing more until she said she had a couple of things for me to pick up. It turned out that she had been watching online for someone selling a large propane tank and had just found two 500 gallon tanks for sale.

  When she told me what I would be hauling I took the bigger trailer. I was able to winch the big tanks up onto the trailer with no real problems even though they weighed about a thousand pounds apiece. She paid one hundred dollars for one tank and three hundred for the other. She said both were very cheap.

  On the next trip to town I bought the items I needed to permanently hook up those two big tanks and the smaller one I had bought before but had never used. When I had it all set up Donna called a couple of the propane dealers in the area and got a special, new-customer discount from one of them and had them come and fill all three of the tanks. Even with the substantial discount Donna got us it was still a very large bill to have all of them filled all at the same time with it being about nine hundred gallons of propane we had to pay for all at once.

  We had no payments and the only monthly bill was for the satellite dish that Donna needed for the internet that she loved. The internet was also required for her work so it was deemed a necessary expense, and tax deductible too of course.

  She seemed to spend little time working on her latest book and most of her computer time on the internet just surfing for information and news. I guess she did not like some of the news and she started carrying her small pistol all the time, even though no one ever came to our house way out here.

  Donna also convinced me to buy a pistol (I had never owned one) to carry. Just to keep her happy I bought a nine millimeter Beretta and, when at home, carried it as she asked me to. Carrying a three pound pistol all the time was a small price to pay for all the happiness she brought into my life.

  I admit, even though we had done a lot of the prepping stuff it was almost all Donna’s idea and she was the driving force behind it. I only went along with it. There were a few things I promoted buying or doing, but they were mainly for reasons other than prepping. Like saving money.

  One thing she wanted was for me to make shutters for the windows. She did not want just decorative ones, but very heavy duty ones.

  “Can you make them bullet proof?” she asked.

  “How many people have bullet proof shutters on their homes?”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Let me think on it for a bit and I’ll see what I can do for you.”

  Because the house’s exterior walls were sixteen inches thick the windows were set back several inches, which now worked out well. I made very heavy shutters which were really thin boxes filled with dry sand. They were quite heavy and required special hinges that I made myself using my forge. When shut they were flush with the outside wall and, being full of sand they would stop most bullets from penetrating. I made simple latches to hold the shutters either open or closed. Donna was very happy with how they turned out and the heavy iron hinges looked similar to the ones I had made for the entry doors.

  Chapter 9

  Spring was close and I again got a load of manure to mix into the garden soil. Like before I tilled it in thoroughly then waited for one of our infrequent rains. After everything dried out I tilled it yet again. After a couple years of this treatment the soil was visibly much richer than everything around the garden.

  The basement area I had thoughtfully incorporated into the house design worked great as a root cellar. We had stored all of our potatoes and other root vegetables down there over winter and they had lasted just fine in the dark cool area.

  I had built shelving down in that basement and Donna used those shelves to store all the jars of canned food she had produced. We also stored much of our long term storage food down there with the thought it would last even longer in that temperature-controlled storage area.

  Donna had talked about buying a greenhouse but I asked her just how much longer of a growing season did we need? We could already, without the greenhouse, grow more produce than we could use in a year. I didn’t say ‘no,’ I only questioned the need. She finally admitted that there was no real good reason to buy one other than it was something we didn’t have and she had just read about many other preppers having a greenhouse and enjoying the additional length of a growing season that the green house provided.

  We planted our big garden and it grew better than we expected. We canned, froze, and dried a huge amount of produce; way more than we would ever eat over winter even if we entertained a lot (which we don’t). Donna finally quit buying additional long-term storage food for us.

  While harvesting from the garden we could see the fruit ripening on the trees and this year they too produced considerably more fruit than last year. We expected that due to the trees maturing and next year they would likely produce even more.

  The garden and the orchard were not what really made us happy though. Instead it was just the fact that we had found each other and were now together.

  By the end of summer and through the monsoon season when we had many cloudy days we noticed that the battery bank was failing. The batteries had reached the end of their life cycle and there was no denying that it was time to replace them. When we had cloudy days I had to use the generator to put an additional charge into the battery bank to keep the power up.

  It was a large expense but there was no alternative for it. And we did not want to mix new batteries with the ones that were now mostly worn out. So we replaced the entire lot with a completely new set. Donna had researched which batteries had the best lifespan compared to expense and when that concl
usion was reached she then searched for the best price on the ones she chose for us to buy.

  By early fall we had the new battery bank installed and, at Donna’s insistence, we increased the number of batteries also. By increasing the number of batteries we hoped to get a longer lifespan from all of them by reducing the amount of normal drawdown before necessary recharging.

  We had both put in for deer tags again and this year I had been drawn for a tag. When the season rolled around I admit I had a tougher time getting one than Donna did last year. She tagged along during the hunt and constantly kidded me about my lack of hunting prowess. Finally, and I mean finally, on the last day of season I saw and bagged a much larger buck than she had shot the previous year. Naturally, I explained to Donna that that had been my plan all along—to wait for the biggest deer since I could only shoot one.

  We again processed the deer meat ourselves and this year made more of it into jerky. We also spent more time bagging rabbits, quail, and doves this season than we did last year. We were quite successful with the birds and had many in the freezer, along with several meals of fresh ones.

  Though you were required to use a shotgun for the birds, both Donna and I most often just shot their heads off with a twenty two rifle. No one was around to arrest us and, though we had a shotgun, neither of us liked picking the shot out of the birds when we ate them.

  We also bought a half beef this fall and that, with the other items, filled our freezer. We even turned some of the beef into jerky just to make sure everything would fit in the freezer. We also considered the jerky as being a treat and useful for me to take in my lunches when I worked out on jobs.

  We went into winter with more stocks of food than I think either of us fully realized. All the shelving in the basement was full of canned goods and long-term storage foods, and the corner had a pile of potatoes from our garden. Our pantry was full as could be and we had additional long-term storage food stacked on even more shelves in the garage.