white_bear_chronicles

If you are anywhere in the central US you’ve had the opportunity to confirm your choice of location for your fruit wall or garden. The deep cold we’ve enjoyed with snow and rain will have frozen the ground solid which is just now thawing. Your spot should have been among the first to thaw and if your soil is in decent shape will be early in drying out a bit. As it thaws and dries, you have an opportunity to do an informal test for soil type. You probably have a good idea whether your local soils are a clay or sandy type but by simply taking a handful and rolling it into a sausage shape between your hands you can determine which we are dealing with. If the “sausage” easily retains it shape you have a clay soil, if it is slick or slimy it is silty clay, if the shape crumbles and breaks easily you have a sandy soil type . Clay soils will tend to pond or pool water especially when compacted while sandy soils will drain and dry quickly.

Now would be a good time to talk briefly about topography, the specifics of how the ground lays both at your chosen location and that immediately surrounding. Ideally you’ve got a spot that is neither at the top of a hill nor in a swale between hills and further, in the best of all worlds, there is a rise or distant tree line or other obstruction enough distance to the west (or other prevailing wind direction) to block high velocity, cold and dry winds without casting shadow on your garden. This creates an optimum microclimate where frost is less inclined to strike with the coldest air settling in the swale below.

Soils close to buildings tend to be disturbed due the construction process and foot traffic and so may include compacted clays which will require more extensive amendments than required in undisturbed locations. Modern developments are especially bad in this regard. Older developments can occasionally be very fertile and undisturbed so simple tests like the soil type test discussed earlier are well worth doing.  The next simple test to perform is a percolation test by digging a hole about two and a half feet round and at least a foot and a half deep. Pour a five gallon bucket of water into the hole and observe how long it takes for the water to dissipate. Anything less than 12 hours or so is a good result. While the hole is open, before the water test, take note of any stratification layers visible. How deep is the top loamy layer, how compacted is the clay subsoil, is it firm and moist, hard and dry, does it get slick when slightly moist, or is there an apparently bottomless sand pit below?

The optimum soil profile would be a six inch or greater layer of dark brown crumbly loam over a lighter brown uncompacted clay that remains somewhat grainy when moist and as noted, holds it’s shape. This optimum profile is our goal when designing an amendment plan. Whether you have a clay or sandy soil an important starting point is the addition of composted organic material. The key here is the term composted. The art of composting, and it is very much an art, has very specific criteria that must be met in order to provide the soil, and your crop, with the nutrition and disease resistance you want to ensure a pleasant and fruitful effort. If your plot(s) is small or incontiguous there are some perfectly fine bagged products that make for a suitable base for your amendments. If your plot is larger you can purchase compost by the delivered truckload or you can rent a dump trailer and save the haul bill if you have means to pull such a load. We'll discuss why purchased compost is usually only a base for live compost in our next installment.

The art of composting begins with some fairly strict criteria including proportional amounts of raw materials, a narrow range of moisture, a somewhat wider range of ambient temperature, timely mechanical mixing and intentionally variable internal temperature. The ideal proportion of raw materials is expressed as the C/N ratio, carbon to nitrogen, informally referred to as brown to green mass. Carbon or brown materials such as chopped autumn leaf litter, straw, wood chips or sawdust, bark, shredded paper and cardboard. Nitrogenous or green materials include vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, grass clippings and manure. Care must be taken when using paper NOT to include glossy advertisement pages from your newspaper or magazines as these can introduce unwanted chemicals, nor by the same token stacks of wet compressed newspaper as this creates an airless mass that is slow to digest referred to as an anaerobic condition. Preferred among manures are chicken, rabbit and sheep manure. Horse and cow manure tends to be very heavy with weed seeds making it necessary to attain and retain a higher temperature range to ensure that the seeds are inactivated and fully digested by resulting microbes. Straw, corn stalks and newspaper will take longer to digest because of the type of cellulose, high in lignin, which is resistant to biodegradation. This can be offset by careful addition of a higher proportion of nitrogenous/green materials.

As noted above, the more mechanically broken down these components are the faster and more thoroughly your pile will compost. Shredding grass clippings and leaf litter with a mulching mower is ideal as is using sawdust instead of wood chips which increase the surface area of each particle making the nutrients more readily available to the working of active microbes.  Turning of the pile is essential to maintaining an appropriate level of available oxygen for the aerobic microbes and to redistribute the nutrients for maximum digestion. This will also assist with maintaining a well distributed level of moisture. Your pile should be thoroughly but not overly watered with each turning, being careful to take into account any rainfall it has received. Your materials should be damp but not soggy. Soggy compost will also create an anaerobic condition which leads to an overly acidic environment and undesirable microbes.

At the end of the process, which will depend on the type of materials, external and internal temperatures achieved, and level of mixing the C/N levels will reduce from 30:1 to about 15:1 and the ph will range between 5.5 and 8.5.

In our next installment we will discuss encouraging desirable microbes and discouraging undesirable beasties, the benefits of the former and the consequences of the later, and their true functions in what we intend to be the living soils upon which we all depend.
Gawain

Homesteading 2  Gardens

So, you’ve thought about Homesteading and have fallen in love with the concepts of self-reliance and sustainability and you love to garden, but, you live in the city. Perhaps in an apartment building. What can you possibly do in this setting?

There is a fascinating and rich history of urban gardens from not so long ago where the French, in particular, were able to produce tens of millions of warm season fruits and vegetables nearly year round. I admire the French  because in addition to utilizing the abundant masonry structures all around them they used composting horse manure collected from the city streets to fertilize and actually heat their gardens. The combination of south facing masonry, actively composting manure and the elegant glass cloche enabled the dinner tables of millions of Parisians to enjoy fresh, local healthy fruits and vegetables throughout most of the year. The article below gives a brief look into the various techniques from those times.

Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s - Resilience

So take a few hours and survey your surroundings now to see if there isn’t an opportunity to adopt one or more of these methods. You’re looking for a protected spot with plenty of sunshine, one where you can get comfortable and warm is one where your garden can do the same. You will be amazed at how effective and rewarding a small urban garden can be. My last experiment, using a simple cold frame and fresh horse manure placed under a generous layer of topsoil enabled me to extend the production of several tomato plants into October, with the last tomato picked in late November. Not too shabby for a zone 6 garden. The tomato was of course small and bland but I was thrilled with the proof of concept. The spinach and lettuce in the same bed held out until mid-December when it finally froze. The leafy greens, unlike tomatoes, actually tasted better in some ways than those grown in the second planting summer months. For greens a last second or third planting goes in in August, matures until mid to late September and really is “held” in a cold frame, cloche or low tunnel until needed.

Cold frames, cloche or a simple window pane leaned up against a south facing brick wall will allow you plant to earlier and hold crops later which enables you to rotate more plantings and lengthen you season of fresh fruits and vegetables maximizing your yields from you urban garden. So get out there and find that warm, sunny fall or winter spot and start planning for next springs’ fruit wall.

As a gardener you want to be at least a season ahead with your planning so when the time arrives you have everything you need to get your garden started. It’s been said somewhere that the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago and the second-best time is now. The same can be said of composting and soil amendments. Last year would have been the best time to amend, but now is an excellent second best. As in right…now….

We’ll talk next week about the why, when, what and where’s of soil amendments for either your urban fruit wall or rural garden.

For further reading see this list of resources that have influenced and helped me down through the years.

 Elliot Coleman:  The Four Season Harvest    www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/four-season-harvest/author/eliot-coleman

                             The Winter Harvest Handbook   https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/eliot-colemans-winter-harvest-handbook

Anything by Joel Salatin                 Books by Joel Salatin (Author of Folks, This Ain't Normal) (goodreads.com)

Johnny Seeds                    Johnny’s Selected Seeds | Supporting Farms & Gardens Since 1973 (johnnyseeds.com)

Gawain2

Note: edited in an effort to keep the story in sequence, making it a long post. I'll work on a sensible format before the next effort
Gawain 

The times we are living in have magnified a sense that things are never quite what they seem. In better periods we’ve been permitted to settle into familiar routines and lounge a bit in soft delusion. Daydreams that the world and human society are cozy and safe places to indulge in hazy inattention and to defer the hard and dirty work of survival, gorging ourselves on the fat treasure laid up by those that came before us, from toil sweated out by better men and women of robust constitution, in better times.

It's alarming then when the account statement comes and we see just how overdrawn our accounts have become, how frivolous we have been and how soft we are. We are at this point here in the west, with stocks depleted, currency debased, and soft hands forgetful of honest toil. It can be rightly said that we’d built our palaces on the backs of slaves and the graves of ancient indigenous peoples, happy to ignore the more essential stuff holding up the foundations of all that’s been built. The oil and iron, the very water and soil have been abused and debased and we find these accounts and treasures exhausted, replaced with scraps of paper IOUs. All that ignores the virtues and disciplines required.

This is of course nothing new to the earthly experience nor is it unique to the human condition. All life from bacteria and yeast, white tail deer to we humans have the curious habit of overreach until our habitat is exhausted. The accounts are due and we’ve conducted this business of life no better than the cottontail rabbit or locust, we have bankrupted our environment.

One interesting feature with which our particular band of social primates has dealt with the undeniable  is that we label,  shame, deflect and blame an “other” for predicaments as they arise. We’ve used race, religion, language and gender down through the ages be we have a new category just now. The share holder. Let me explain.

The thing that we possess that the bacteria, locust and cottontail do not is the “rational” mind with which we categorize, calculate and extrapolate where, among the many products this mind has produced, is the abstraction we call the corporation. Through that abstraction we’ve reduced the entire world to assets, liabilities,  and shareholders. There is no longer an emotional impetus behind “othering” in this construct. Decisions are now accounting, just doing business. It’s in this perspective I’d suggest that we can make sense of the events of the day. We are experiencing a feature of the corporation, bankruptcy, where the cold, calculated decisions we witness can be reduced to the mere allocation of assets, liabilities, and unfortunately the liquidation of non-performing assets. The balance going to the “receiver”, the shareholder. In this light the inhumane, stark decisions we observe can be explained sans thoughts of demons and other nefarious forces from beyond.

Or, could it be that the corporation is in part a demonic device? There are some interesting synchronicities swirling around the creation of this particular abstraction that we will investigate further down the road. But take heart, if history is any guide, there are other accounts to be settled.

Back to our journey with this tune for your riding pleasure.           The Guess Who - No Sugar Tonight // New Mother NatRex stared at the old farmhouse blinking only when the swirling snow peppered his eyes. It had been snowing for weeks as he and the man next to him had trudged through the drifts and frozen bare patches of ground hard as stone. Nate lay next to him snoring softly as the cold white pebbles piled up over his greying beard nearly matching his wool coat, impervious to the steady breeze from the north. The snow had changed from soft light crystals to the sandy pebbles as they traveled from the southwest some ten days ago. It had been a very long time since either of them had seen grass or leaves on the trees.

Coming Home
Nate had insisted that they double their pace northeast some time ago. Rex had no idea what the hurry was or why they had reversed course or why they had left the sheep behind with the others. They had never once left the flock behind since the long journey began but started the trek at Nates’ insistence without any question. There was a lot that Rex didn’t understand about Nate. What he did know was he was responsible for the flock  and that Nate trusted him and that he always had something to eat. So Rex watched the house while Nate slept.

As the sun began to glow through thick grey clouds he could make out the lines of the old house and something registered deep in his memory. He shook his head trying to clear the cobwebs in his mind which had become dull with his advancing years and blinked his eyes dimmed by the miles of trail he and the others had walked. Nate had never hurried or pushed since the long walk had begun until, without explanation, Nate had reversed course and everyone without a hint of doubt turned with him.

The group had split along the way. Dan, at Nates’ instruction had taken the more southerly route along the Wabash and Molly had gone with him as well as well as a fragment of the flock and a few of the others. It was hard to recall each line of her face clearly and he missed her fragrant blond hair as they would sleep in the warm midday sun after long watchful nights.

When Nate woke as the sun climbed the eastern sky he took stock of the surrounding woods and the pasture, peppered now with small cedars and brambles. The flock had once taken great care of the pasture just as Rex had tended the flock and as Nate had cared for them all. So long ago now it was hard to recall how things had been. It had been warmer then, and wetter. Rex never thought he would miss the summer heat and the warm fall rains and quickly put the memories out of his mind, but Molly remained, a soft ache in his chest until Nate signaled that it was time to work.

Rex rose cautiously and moved along the tree line toward the sheds between their position and the old house and once clearing to the south he sprinted to the broken back door. It was dark past the snow that drifted and dissipated a few yards inside and silent as a cold night. Rex turned to look back as Nate slipped in through the door, nodded at him, and entered the kitchen into the house. Remaining just inside Rex listened while Nate explored. It had been a long time since there was any real trouble and longer still since there had been anything of value in the houses they pilfered. It had been a long, long time since either had seen anyone but the tiny band. Rex drifted off in a daydream of Molly as Nate creaked up the stairs and across the protesting floor above, unfamiliar now to the footsteps of men.

After some long minutes of thumping and shuffling and bumping Nate came down the stairs and appeared in the kitchen door with a book and small medallion in his hand. Brushing past Rex in the back door he grumbled, “Wait here” and crunched through the snow past the iron gate that led back to the pasture. Set in a rise under a bare weeping walnut tree the man struggled and opened a heavy oak door and entered the dark. Within a few minutes he emerged with a small heavy package tucked under his arm and proceeded up to the top of the hill and knelt at the foot of the great tree that crowned the pasture. And the man wept as he bowed over the ground there and wept until the veiled sun of midday began it’s decent. Rex sat down in the doorway and watched.

At dusk a small fire tickled the sides of the rusty iron stove in the back of the kitchen causing pings and pops of delight as the stove swelled and sang out at the return of men and of fire, memories of children playing on the tile floor, of music played and of cornbread rising on its’ smooth black top. Rex began to salivate as Nate peeled back the parchment wrapping of the package he’d retrieved from behind the heavy door. Birthed from it’s long slumber a ham whispered to them both a homecoming welcome.  And they ate and drank snow melt and slept. Rex dreamed of Molly and Nate slept a black dreamless sleep.

The snow had stopped in the night when Rex stepped out the kitchen door to see the first glow of daylight.  After a breakfast of hardtack, ham and warm snowmelt Nate set about gathering the nights firewood, made haphazard repairs against the cold and by evening had settled in by a fire and began to read from the book. Rex sprawled out by the fire dreaming of ham and of Molly, at ease with being home. Rex hailed from west of Cincinnati where his parents had worked a farm on the edge of the great forest there, much like this place. He was grateful to Nate and loved the work. A short time later Nate enlisted Molly to help him. She was from the rolling pastureland of central Kentucky. He never could get over her accent and found it endearing.ure (Running Back Thru Canada) - YouTube

Gremlins                              

Nate closed the passenger door gently as Rolla creaked into his seat muttering to himself. Commissioner Rolla Whitt was a self-made man and the duke of Merriville. He’d rolled the dice and expanded an automobile dealership opened by his father in the depths of a world war when horse drawn buggies where still the norm, parked as they would outside along the main drag every Wednesday. In those days the shopkeepers lived above their shops with an apartment or room to let.  Most of the country was in a bad way back then, especially in the big cities and on the speculative farms out west. The war that came actually helped this farm community with rising prices for grain and animal flesh and timber from the surrounding forest. Almost none of the farms around Merriville needed borrowed money to operate, having been established before the War Between The States a seventy five years earlier and well grounded on the rich soil beneath. Usury was sternly frowned upon by the puritanical Methodist culture that rang out from the pulpit as faithfully as church bells each Sunday morning. God had been good to the obedient in those days.

“What’s this all about Rolla?” Nate asked after the car groaned to life, protesting with pings and clatters at the weak ethanol that passed for fuel these days.

“Dunno” Rolla grunted, irritated at being called out to another urgent meeting in Mineral Springs, the county seat. Rolla Whitt was not a man to be summoned and everybody knew that.” But with authority comes responsibility”, he silently consoled himself. Nate was an irritating young man, All young men nowadays were irritating Rolla reflected.

“I sure could have stood to stay home, Dan’s got trouble with algebra and Mary won’t touch that with a barge pole.” Nate hoped that his sacrifice would endear him to Rolla, but no, one did not endear to Rolla Whitt, one must supplicate.

“The AC as broken as this seat? Won’t do to show up stinking like a pig farmer.” Rolla barked.

Nate reached to the dash and cranked the knob and rolled up the windows. It was August hot this early June evening and everybody was cranky and sticky.

“Corns’ going to stunt again this ye””r Nate chattered

“Yup!” Rolla grunted, he had no skin in that game.

His eyes drifting over the sparse fields Nate mumbled over to his passenger, “The LIFTs’ down again.”

“That thing was never gonna work!” Rolla preened. “Told em from day one.”

The LIFT ran along the roadsides almost everywhere now right where the power and phone poles had been, a freight gondola of sorts that traveled on huge poles and cables which still carried power and coms. LIFT had replaced the OTR trucking sector, delivering consumables to local nodes leaving only city pups with a trucking job. Power generation was mostly nuclear and the few corpses of wind and solar installations left were dusty monuments to the grift and delusion of a bygone decade, quixotic fossils that had mostly been dismantled, smelted and repurposed into the LIFT complex.

Nate quietly chewed a morsel of bitter spite knowing that the LIFT would bury what remained of Rollas’ business just as his father had buried the carter and the whipmaker two lifetimes ago. He felt guilty, some, but enjoyed that thought the rest of the way to Mineral Springs. 

Kenny Hail was a corpulent blob of a man sitting at the center of an arch of white plastic tables in the back of the BMS hearing room, flanked by withered yes men shuffling papers. He had patiently wrangled his way from lowly building inspector, through the County Plan Commission up to the County Council. He held the purse strings of the fiefdom of County Monroe and he had long ago and repeatedly informed anyone who mattered. Tonight though, his round face was sallow and tired as he announced, “We’ve got another problem folks that’s going to take time to fix.”

“How long this time Kenny?” Rolla roared impatiently.

Kenny glared and looking away to the ceiling muttered, “We don’t know Rolla, the engineers are advising that there is another software bug and the whole system needs taken down, debugged and rebooted.”

“How. Much. Time Kenny?!” Rolla had a business to run. Humiliating Kenny had become almost too easy the past year but Rolla had years and years of resentment to vent so he was happy to let Kenny marinate. Nate scrolled through his email on a cold metal chair midway back in the mass of faceless bureau minions, glad to be unnoticed and unaccountable. He looked up just in time to hear Kenny announce

“They can’t tell yet if it’s another hack, a bug or hardware. The problem is erratic so it’s hard to pin down. The directive is to treat this as a disaster, which, Rolla, everybody, means the coordination, the policy comes from this chair, countywide. So until further notice we go to essential only , official only travel and fuel allocation, curfew on residential power. We’ll be rolling available power on the schedule posted tonight on the website and we’re going back to virtual for schools,  non-essential industry. No discretion here folks, no exceptions. All subject to change without notice.  That is all we know.”

:What about deliveries?” Nate asked loudly. Kenny had gotten his full attention, everything moved on LIFT, including Marys’ medications.

“Well, none, basically, till LIFT reboots. There’s been no diesel allocated this year and no trucks to haul on anyway. Same playbook folks, get your constables and VFDs aligned with the Sherriff, everything pretty much like ’19, just more of it. We’ll coordinate with water departments and power directly from here. Make note of the posted procedures. If you have fire, you run your pumps fighting fires, you’ll get thirsty later. Chief Stonner has the outline on the website if you’re new. That’s it folks, no questions at this time. We’ll be in touch.”

A rumble of incoherent questions swelled from the clerks and commissioners who stood waiving arms and papers as Hail raised his hands for quiet.

“That is all” Hail said as he stood and limped through a door in the back.

The grinding complaints of the starved engine was the only break in the empty silence of the ride back.

Nate pecked Mary on the cheek and slipped into the warm bed, staring up into the night he felt empty and tired.

The sound of a tremendous rushing river parted Nates’ soft curtain of sleep. Slowly he opened his eyes to find himself standing on the bank of a cold mountain river. To his right the source was obscured by a thick cloud of frost and steam that rose up from the turbulence. In front was a steep wall of rotting granite, ancient, delaminating from eons of water and ice, stranger to sunshine and warmth.

The wall of stone was too steep to climb and too wide to pass Nate had decided when a man in a coarse linen tunic eased into his awareness. The man looked familiar and motioned to Nate to follow as he placed his foot on a step carved in the stone. Step on step Nate followed as they climbed into the grey cloud above until the fog swallowed up the sight of the man. It was only the slap of the mans’ sandals and a faint whiff of bay, no, sage, that Nate pursued up the mountain until the cloud turned from grey to white, suddenly revealing a bright golden yellow sky, clear and fresh like an April morning. Just as suddenly the sharp granite gave way to a lush green carpet of grass, gently rolling in the bright sun directly above. In the center a large boulder, and on top sat the man in white linen.

Nate lay stretched in the warm heavy grass, leaning on his elbow as the man spoke a most gentle language, words he’d never heard before but understood perfectly. After many hours had passed the man stood up on the great stone and pointed back to the stairs they had climbed. Nate knew it was time to return the way he’d come. He noted that the golden sun above had not moved in all this time. Alone he climbed back down to the rushing river. The bank was strewn with massive boulders covered in slick short moss, black and treacherous. He looked downstream to see the river foaming its way to a huge bay stretched out to the south and on the shore there was a small sailboat. The great Maya Sea rolled out from the bay and in that boat Nate knew he would sail.

What is this river he wondered. “This is all the tears of The Mother, wept for Her children”, came the reply.

Nate woke, his eyes opened to the dark ceiling.  There were no thoughts until the sun began to shine through the east window.

Willow Tribe                      

A warm ray of sunshine woke Nate as it beamed through the east window at the head of the bed. He hesitated to stir from under his grandmothers’ wool blanket and marveled at how soft he’d become in just ten days in the old house. There were two stoves going now and plenty of firewood. The long cold and dark had killed many of the hardwoods that had stood sentry over the rolling hills stretched out southward from here to Kentucky and beyond. To the north were the flat cold corn fields still checkered in drifts of snow and the frozen gray ground.

In the kitchen Alex was sprawled out by the black iron stove, still warm and promising that coals would make a quick and easy fire

 He nudged Alex, today would be busy.

Up and at em buddy, we have company today. Might do to clean up a bit. We’ve turned into pigs on the trail. Need to keep up appearances you know.  Cornbread ok?

That did not set Alexs’ mouth to watering but it was nice to eat every day for a change so he stirred slowly and sat up. Alex was going soft too and was not a bit concerned about it. It was good to be home.

After working the stall latch one last time to confirm it would hold Nate gathered his tools and headed for the tool shed. Just at the shed door Nate caught the shape of a man at the trailhead to the west, standing at the edge of pasture and woodlot. The form was thin and short and in his right hand he held a sturdy staff. Rob Chapman waived with his free hand and waited. Willow Tribe was home.

It took all of his will for Nate to hold his place. Alex, get over here, we’ve got company! Alex took his time, as he always did, and joined Nate at the shed and just as he did saw the form at the edge of the woods.

 Easy, it’s Rob, Nate said as he knew Alex didn’t see all that well anymore. The two of them walked together westward with a steady breeze at their backs to meet the new arrivals

Rob looked behind him at the rustle and bleating of the Willow Tribe climbing the hill through the bare trees there.

Right on time Rob, how was your walk?

Long, but it was good, mostly. How have you been? Rob asked looking between Nate and Alex to the house. It’s good to be home for sure.

Matt? Nate asked nervously

He’s back a bit Nate, bringing up the rear. A couple of hours I’d guess.  

Nate sucked in a deep breath then let out a long slow plume of worry, worry he’d carried nearly two years now.

A sharp booming dog barked from behind the droning sheep and Alex froze, Maddie had winded him. He bellowed his deep answer and sprinted toward the trail, hoisting his great white tail as a banner to welcome his queen home from her long journey.

Nearly every adventure in life is peppered with little disasters. Quirky complications that give the stories we tell one another the drama and comedy we humans crave. Cars breaking down, tents flooding, canoes sinking, getting lost in a foreign city all typify the dramatic comedy needed to prove our personal heroism. They elevate us to champions and masters worthy of legend that in some way approaches the immortal. Without conflict there are no heroes, without sickness there are no healers, without demons there are no angels.

But there are times when disparate little complications cluster and organize and amplify to a point beyond mere drama, beyond human heroism, and the stories we tell turn to Gods of Light and Dark Titans of ineffable blackness, of miracles and curses,  salvation and destruction.

There is normally a point of realization where our quirky and entertaining complications transform into disaster. When the blood runs cold and we find ourselves on the precipice of a terminal fall. There are two important contemporary narrators that may point to just such a realization, dare one say, revelation?

The stunning transformation of Naomi Wollf and cautions of Robert W Malone may indicate that we are at just such a point of realization. You can judge for yourself here https://rwmalonemd.substack.com,  and here https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/thanksgiving-in-a-victim-world.

Some tunes appropriate for the rough road ahead            https://youtu.be/QnIL8AKWRNQ

                                                                                    https://youtu.be/8L82II1lNjo

https://youtu.be/9ywYohqoM60

Gremlins                              

Nate closed the passenger door gently as Rolla creaked into his seat muttering to himself. Commissioner Rolla Whitt was a self-made man and the duke of Merriville. He’d rolled the dice and expanded an automobile dealership opened by his father in the depths of a world war when horse drawn buggies where still the norm, parked as they would outside along the main drag every Wednesday. In those days the shopkeepers lived above their shops with an apartment or room to let.  Most of the country was in a bad way back then, especially in the big cities and on the speculative farms out west. The war that came actually helped this farm community with rising prices for grain and animal flesh and timber from the surrounding forest. Almost none of the farms around Merriville needed borrowed money to operate, having been established before the War Between The States  seventy five years earlier and well grounded on the rich soil beneath. Usury was sternly frowned upon by the puritanical Methodist culture that rang out from the pulpit as faithfully as church bells each Sunday morning. God had been good to the obedient in those days.

“What’s this all about Rolla?” Nate asked after the car groaned to life, protesting with pings and clatters at the weak ethanol that passed for fuel these days.

“Dunno” Rolla grunted, irritated at being called out to another urgent meeting in Mineral Springs, the county seat. Rolla Whitt was not a man to be summoned and everybody knew that.” But with authority comes responsibility”, he silently consoled himself. Nate was an irritating young man, All young men nowadays were irritating Rolla reflected.

“I sure could have stood to stay home, Dan’s got trouble with algebra and Mary won’t touch that with a barge pole.” Nate hoped that his sacrifice would endear him to Rolla, but no, one did not endear to Rolla Whitt, one must supplicate.

“The AC as broken as this seat? Won’t do to show up stinking like a pig farmer.” Rolla barked.

Nate reached to the dash and cranked the knob and rolled up the windows. It was August hot this early June evening and everybody was cranky and sticky.

“Corns’ going to stunt again this ye””r Nate chattered

“Yup!” Rolla grunted, he had no skin in that game.

His eyes drifting over the sparse fields Nate mumbled over to his passenger, “The LIFTs’ down again.”

“That thing was never gonna work!” Rolla preened. “Told em from day one.”

The LIFT ran along the roadsides almost everywhere now right where the power and phone poles had been, a freight gondola of sorts that traveled on huge poles and cables which still carried power and coms. LIFT had replaced the OTR trucking sector, delivering consumables to local nodes leaving only city pups with a trucking job. Power generation was mostly nuclear and the few corpses of wind and solar installations left were dusty monuments to the grift and delusion of a bygone decade, quixotic fossils that had mostly been dismantled, smelted and repurposed into the LIFT complex.

Nate quietly chewed a morsel of bitter spite knowing that the LIFT would bury what remained of Rollas’ business just as his father had buried the carter and the whipmaker two lifetimes ago. He felt guilty, some, but enjoyed that thought the rest of the way to Mineral Springs. 

Kenny Hail was a corpulent blob of a man sitting at the center of an arch of white plastic tables in the back of the BMS hearing room, flanked by withered yes men shuffling papers. He had patiently wrangled his way from lowly building inspector, through the County Plan Commission up to the County Council. He held the purse strings of the fiefdom of County Monroe and he had long ago and repeatedly informed anyone who mattered. Tonight though, his round face was sallow and tired as he announced, “We’ve got another problem folks that’s going to take time to fix.”

“How long this time Kenny?” Rolla roared impatiently.

Kenny glared and looking away to the ceiling muttered, “We don’t know Rolla, the engineers are advising that there is another software bug and the whole system needs taken down, debugged and rebooted.”

“How. Much. Time Kenny?!” Rolla had a business to run. Humiliating Kenny had become almost too easy the past year but Rolla had years and years of resentment to vent so he was happy to let Kenny marinate. Nate scrolled through his email on a cold metal chair midway back in the mass of faceless bureau minions, glad to be unnoticed and unaccountable. He looked up just in time to hear Kenny announce

“They can’t tell yet if it’s another hack, a bug or hardware. The problem is erratic so it’s hard to pin down. The directive is to treat this as a disaster, which, Rolla, everybody, means the coordination, the policy comes from this chair, countywide. So until further notice we go to essential only , official only travel and fuel allocation, curfew on residential power. We’ll be rolling available power on the schedule posted tonight on the website and we’re going back to virtual for schools,  non-essential industry. No discretion here folks, no exceptions. All subject to change without notice.  That is all we know.”

:What about deliveries?” Nate asked loudly. Kenny had gotten his full attention, everything moved on LIFT, including Marys’ medications.

“Well, none, basically, till LIFT reboots. There’s been no diesel allocated this year and no trucks to haul on anyway. Same playbook folks, get your constables and VFDs aligned with the Sherriff, everything pretty much like ’19, just more of it. We’ll coordinate with water departments and power directly from here. Make note of the posted procedures. If you have fire, you run your pumps fighting fires, you’ll get thirsty later. Chief Stonner has the outline on the website if you’re new. That’s it folks, no questions at this time. We’ll be in touch.”

A rumble of incoherent questions swelled from the clerks and commissioners who stood waiving arms and papers as Hail raised his hands for quiet.

“That is all” Hail said as he stood and limped through a door in the back.

The grinding complaints of the starved engine was the only break in the empty silence of the ride back.

Nate pecked Mary on the cheek and slipped into the warm bed, staring up into the night he felt empty and tired.

The sound of a tremendous rushing river parted Nates’ soft curtain of sleep. Slowly he opened his eyes to find himself standing on the bank of a cold mountain river. To his right the source was obscured by a thick cloud of frost and steam that rose up from the turbulence. In front was a steep wall of rotting granite, ancient, delaminating from eons of water and ice, stranger to sunshine and warmth.

The wall of stone was too steep to climb and too wide to pass Nate had decided when a man in a coarse linen tunic eased into his awareness. The man looked familiar and motioned to Nate to follow as he placed his foot on a step carved in the stone. Step on step Nate followed as they climbed into the grey cloud above until the fog swallowed up the sight of the man. It was only the slap of the mans’ sandals and a faint whiff of bay, no, sage, that Nate pursued up the mountain until the cloud turned from grey to white, suddenly revealing a bright golden yellow sky, clear and fresh like an April morning. Just as suddenly the sharp granite gave way to a lush green carpet of grass, gently rolling in the bright sun directly above. In the center a large boulder, and on top sat the man in white linen.

Nate lay stretched in the warm heavy grass, leaning on his elbow as the man spoke a most gentle language, words he’d never heard before but understood perfectly. After many hours had passed the man stood up on the great stone and pointed back to the stairs they had climbed. Nate knew it was time to return the way he’d come. He noted that the golden sun above had not moved in all this time. Alone he climbed back down to the rushing river. The bank was strewn with massive boulders covered in slick short moss, black and treacherous. He looked downstream to see the river foaming its way to a huge bay stretched out to the south and on the shore there was a small sailboat. The great Maya Sea rolled out from the bay and in that boat Nate knew he would sail.

What is this river he wondered. “This is all the tears of The Mother, wept for Her children”, came the reply.

Nate woke, his eyes opened to the dark ceiling.  There were no thoughts until the sun began to shine through the east window.