Chapter 24 — Summer
A serial novel in the form of correspondence among a family while the world as we know it collapses around us. I recommend you start at the Introduction:
https://readmedium.com/climate-for-change-introduction-5331d5ab9313
But you can start anywhere you want.
— -
Chapter 24 — Summer
Handwritten or printed on computer paper (delivered back and forth by Charlie):
Dear Mom, Mel, Grandma, and Grandpa,
Summer is finally here. No more mud, no more cold. We have the windows open in the cabin most days, and it doesn’t smell so bad anymore because they have been letting us bathe in the lake. It has been weird to see all of us in our underwear when we go swimming. We are all so skinny! I wouldn’t say we have fun swimming, but I have seen some smiles. Even though it is warm out, the water is still very cold! The best way to get used to it is to jump off the dock. We start at the beginning and then get a big running start. Then we scream and make a big splash. You have to scream, partly from the cold of the water, and mostly because it is a good release. The camp has dozens of old car tire inner tubes that they have inflated to be flotation devices. We climb into the tubes and float around, splashing each other and enjoying the cool water. We can almost forget we are in prison, except there is a guard tower on either side of the beach with soldiers with machine guns.
Charlie was assigned to our cabin again and we resumed our nightly classes, because her crew is friendly. We take turns teaching about something we know about. I have been learning more Spanish. I want to be good at Spanish the next time I see Daisy. I teach about history one night a week. I am surprised how much I remember. It helps for me to decide on my topic ahead of time. Then every time I remember something, I write it down. Over time, my memories jog other memories. I also ask my cabinmates if anyone else knows about the topic and I invite them to a planning meeting. In our meeting, people share snippets they remember from a class they took or a book they read. Sometimes the people contradict each other during the planning meeting, but usually we come to a consensus. Then later, I present history to the group, with an understanding that history is written by the victors.
After my presentations, we usually have discussions about what the history might have been if another party had emerged victorious from the situation. There are rules to our discussions. You have to summarize the point of the person you are responding to before you can make your own point. If you don’t understand the other person’s point, then they get to clarify things before you say your point. It is slow, but it ensures we are all part of the same discussion. It is a way for us to learn from each other, without the internet or books or even pens and paper.
Summer has brought with it new food options. The prison director has sent teams out to collect berries, and other teams go out on the camp’s old pontoon boat and bring back fish when they are lucky. It is good to have fish back on the menu. We have also been foraging wild greens and looking for edible mushrooms. We found a jackpot of chanterelles last week. There is still not enough food, but what we have is a little better for all of our efforts.
I think the prison director has been sending us out foraging because there is not much work to do. There are more prisoners every day. We are crowded again. There are so many prisoners that we have more people than jobs. We have plenty of firewood collected; the trenches and defences are all completed; the log cabin barracks we were building last winter are complete; and there are only so many jobs in the laundry and kitchen. Most of us work about 4 hours a day. The rest of the day we just hang out. We talk, we sing, we argue, we play cards, we teach each other skills. It is boring.
The big news today is that the prison has been divided down the middle. We had been mixed gender as a camp, with each cabin either male or female. The work crews were mixed and we had time during the day when we could mix in the common space. Apparently, some people did a little more mixing than the prison director wanted. We have had about a dozen young women come up pregnant. According to Charlie, the pregnant women are to be moved to Daisy’s camp soon. I gave one a note for Daisy yesterday, before they divided the camp. Now they put up a chain-link fence down the middle of the camp. We share the dining hall, but they stagger the times when we eat, so we don’t interact with the women. Charlie’s crew has been re-assigned and replaced with an all male crew, but she said she would ask them to continue to allow our nightly university classes. She has a trusted friend on the new crew, who has been taking our notes to her for you.
I wish I had better news for you. I do keep up my noticing project when I can. This week I noticed that I can just let a mosquito bite me and take some of my blood. The bite does not hurt so much as annoy me. So I decided to try not being annoyed. I watched all morning as mosquitoes came and each took a small snack. There weren’t so many that I was in danger of losing a lot of blood. Each time one landed on me, I greeted it, and when it flew away, I wished it well. None of those bites have swelled up or become itchy. This is a trick I learned from a friend here, David. He said that it is our distress around being bitten that causes our inflammation around the bites, especially when we slap the mosquito. I didn’t believe David, but I am bored, so I tried it. I don’t know why it works, but it works.
I love you all,
Ben
— -
Dear Benji,
This is Mel. Mom says it is my turn again. You are going by “Ben” now? Does that mean you are all grown up? Too old to be Benji anymore? Well, whatever. Since you’re in prison, you get to decide what you want to be called by everyone else, but I’ll still call you Benji.
Our news this week is that General Stewart has pulled us out of the U.S. He said that the Circle had not been acting in the best interests of the people of the Upper Midwest. He declared an independent state, which will be seeking coalition partners. It was scary. Mom stayed home from work. We were all ready for war or something after that day, but nothing really happened. We just stopped getting texts from the Circle and now we only get information from General Stewart. The soldiers on block cut the US flag patches off their uniforms. There is an empty spot there on each uniform. But that is pretty much it, from what I can tell.
Your friend, Jorge’s cousin Antonio is a full-on soldier now. He came by the other day to say he is being deployed and he can’t tell us where because they haven’t told him. He assumes it has something to do with the Declaration of Independence. We don’t have much for news besides the texts that Stewart sends out and Grandpa’s relaying of information from the EBG. The EBG has stopped any reports from inside America, since their reporters were expelled by the Circle last month. Now with the Declaration, maybe we will get more information. Or less?
Our chickens are doing well, and the vegetable gardens on our block are producing a lot of food. Summer has meant that we are not so hungry all the time. We have so much zucchini! We planted a lot of potatoes, and we have been picking potato beetles for the last two weeks. We have to defend our plants! The plants are big and are flowering, and I think we will have our first red potatoes next week.
Mom has been less depressed lately. She doesn’t cry every day. But sometimes I catch her looking at her phone and I see she is just looking at family photos from when you were here. She has been acting like a second mom to little Alex, who is growing fast. I say “second mom,” because yesterday when I said she looks like a good grandma, she got mad at me! She doesn’ think she is old enough to be a grandma. I think having Alex around has been good for all of us. It is hard to be sad when you have a toddler who is discovering the world right in front of you.
VeRU is taking a break from publishing this month. Jorge and I are gathering material about Stewart’s secret police. There is nothing to be found. It is like they don’t exist. They are never mentioned in the texts. They drive around in black vehicles with windows tinted black. Our block soldiers have never even met one of them.
I have started to try my own noticing project here in the city. Today I noticed that there is a family of rabbits living in the park near the Bank. I see them every day when I make my deposits. Jorge and I have been thinking about trapping them to make a stew. Now, the more I watch, the less interested I am in rabbit stew. I like when I sit there in one place for a long time, that the rabbits just get used to me and go about their rabbit lives, eating grass and chasing each other.
Gotta go! Mom sends her love.
Mel
— -
Dear Ben,
Your grandpa is off training with the militia today and it looks like your mom needs this letter today, so it is up to me to give you the updates. I wish I had more good news for you. Life is complicated here on the farm. Last week a group of Greens drove up the driveway in a bunch of pickup trucks. They all had guns drawn and the leader asked to see your grandpa. The leader is someone we have known all of our lives. We have had them over for dinner and attended their kids’ weddings. When Grandpa came out, we were told that they were taking our fuel reserves. We were advised not to interfere, and they started up a pump and took a hose to our fuel tank. They pumped it dry. Grandpa told them that we need the fuel for our tractors, and he was told that they need it more.
When the Greens drove up, I was in the yard with some of my high school students. We were working on a project to press juice from the sorghum plants that one of them grew. The students and I made clump in front of the first truck. I have been teaching all of them how to shoot, and one of the students made a move to go get his gun. I gave him a stern look and he stopped. Part of working with firearms is learning when you are outnumbered and when not to engage. Before the Greens drove away, the leader looked me in the eyes and apologized: “I’m sorry Eloise, but we had to do this.” Your grandpa and I think that this is part of proving their loyalty to General Stewart.
We are adjusting to life without any fuel. Every farm from our gift group was hit on the same day. We do have a few cans of fuel stashed, but we don’t want to alert the Greens that we have it by running our tractors. Luckily we have the high school and the gift group. So we have created a work crew to go from farm to farm. The crew consists of a few teams of horses and a couple dozen people with hand tools. Each farm that hosts the crew commits to feeding us when we work. We can get a lot of work done. We sing in the fields and we tell stories. We use a wagon to get around, that a horse team pulls. We all get off the wagon and walk when there is a hill.
We have taken the color red for our gift groups. Many people have t-shirts and hats promoting the Wisconsin Badgers football team or red bandanas. It was hard to give up the green color, because we all also have gear from that other football team in Wisconsin, but red suits us. Your grandpa made a flag out of a red sheet. I think he thinks this is all a little bit funny.
The summer has been hot. We have taken to working in the early mornings and resting through the hottest part of the day. We strung up a bunch of hammocks in the woods and people go out and take a siesta. It is hard to get back out and work in the afternoon, post nap, but it is luxurious to work in the late afternoon, as it cools off. We have hats made out of mosquito netting, and that helps.
We have not heard anything from our Circle friends since the General declared independence. It feels like we are out on our own. We are surviving. But we are wondering what about next thing the Greens will do. They have already proven they can come and take anything we have.
Love,
Grandma
—
Next chapter:
https://readmedium.com/chapter-25-fall-b99b3889852a
— -
Author’s note: And if you are not yet a Medium member and want to find out what happens to Benjamin, you have two options:
- Join Medium. I think it is worth it! Use my referral link: https://gaertner-andy122.medium.com/membership
- Email me, and I will send you a friend link: