Chapter 8 — From Bad to Worse
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.
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Chapter 8:
Email:
Dear Benji,
Thanks for your email. My little commune? I like that name. I really loved meeting your friends, too. It was nice to have you all out here to welcome our hurricane refugees. They all seemed a little shell-shocked from their long drives, but your enthusiasm helped them feel right at home.
Today I went to the feed mill. I bought a literal ton of winter wheat seed. I figure we might want some wheat for bread next year. We only plan to plant about 400 pounds. The rest we will store and run through our mill to make flour as needed. I really like fresh ground flour for making bread and pancakes. After going to the feed mill, I stopped at the natural foods coop in town and picked up my order of a 55-gallon drum of organic sunflower seed oil. It seems like a lot, but the price was right, and we have plenty of potatoes in the ground. I’m looking forward to french fries all winter.
I listened to the English Broadcast Group after you left. The hurricane that is coming for D.C. is about to hit. The freeways are clogged with people finally fleeing the city. The traffic is so bad that people are running out of gas on the freeway. They are leaving their cars on the side of the road and continuing on foot out of the city. The shelters within the city are all full. There are helicopters constantly in the air as diplomats and high-ranking officials are getting shuttled out. The EBG reported that the PFL and his cabinet have been moved to a bunker in the mountains of West Virginia. There are military vehicles patrolling the streets of D.C. protecting stores and houses from the looters that they fear will come when the city is abandoned.
Your grandma has decided to pray for the people who are trapped in D.C. I, for myself, am hoping that this is finally a wake-up call to the climate change deniers who are in charge over there.
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Wow Grandpa,
That is scary about D.C.! Did the EBG say anything about Florida or the Gulf? It was cloudy and windy here all day today. The wind was warm and wet. The weather website said it might rain all week here.
Daisy just texted that her family loves all the vegetables. They are making Honduran pickles right now with the carrots and cauliflower and onions. She said their refrigerator is so full that she can’t find the milk behind all of the apple juice and veggies.
My run today was almost like being in your sauna! The sweat was pouring out of me. The hot, wet air from the Gulf must be pushing up into the Midwest! I feel like I am getting in much better shape, too. And the winds must have shifted, because the smoke that was in the air last week is mostly gone.
Tell Malik and Erika that Melody and I would like for them to come and visit us in St. Paul. We are afraid that you will have them working too much on the farm, and they are going to want to go home to Mississippi. I remember what the first week out there was like for me. Mel and I would like to give them a little break.
Daisy said that they still have no word on Antonio and his family. Did the EBG say anything about deportations?
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Dear Benjamin,
The EBG has not said anything about deportations. I’m sorry. If you had three families go, just from your soccer team, then this is probably a big move by the PFL. They were probably planning it for a while. It is odd that Daisy’s family hasn’t heard anything from Antonio’s family. If they were deported, they might be in Honduras by now and would have found a way to communicate back north. My guess is that the families are being detained in a prison or a camp somewhere where they don’t have access to a phone or the Internet. I’ll do some digging. There might be someone on my email networks who knows something.
The EBG news is all about hurricanes and fires and icebergs and refugees. The massive ice shelf in Greenland has fallen into the ocean. The entire ocean system is going to rise a few centimeters over the next few months, they say. This is a bad time for that to happen because with the hurricanes coming, we don’t need any additional ocean rising. D.C. is taking the brunt of Hurricane Justine right now. Hurricane Imelda is heading to Florida and is over Cuba right now. Whole cities are being destroyed in Cuba. The winds are like nothing they have ever seen. Luckily, Cuba has storm shelters everywhere. The people are waiting out the storm and hoping for the best. Hurricane Harold in the Gulf is going to hit Texas somewhere between New Orleans and Houston. The industry and refineries that are up and down that coast are bracing for a direct hit. New Orleans is finally evacuating. The people of Houston have been told to shelter in place. The two biggest fires in California have joined up. They have no idea how many people have been killed. Cal Fire is focusing on evacuating people and has given up trying to stop the fires. They are hoping for rain. The head of FEMA was quoted on the EBG saying that they are unable to help people until after the tropical storms and the fires stop. They are giving all their authority over to the military.
All of this is creeping into the mainstream news. I turned on Government News, and there were pictures from D.C. from a couple days ago showing people stocking up in the grocery stores. They were still calling Justine a tropical storm, but the announcers were telling people to take it very seriously. They said that their camera crew left D.C. two days ago, but they were hoping to return as soon as the storm passed. They reported that the PFL was safe in an undisclosed location. They posted photos of his most recent message congratulating the Southeast on the coming of their “much-needed” rain (cue my sarcastic smile). Government News had stories from the wildfires, too. They were feel-good stories about children in schools banding together to send money to the firefighters. They posted a link to places where viewers could send money.
We went to the nursing home and brought your great-grandmother home to the farm. She has plenty of meds to last a few months, and she gets around okay with her electric wheelchair. We are building ramps and smoothing out pathways. I worry about what might happen to the other people at the nursing home if there are food and fuel shortages. I wish I could have brought them all home.
In other news, Malik and Erika would love to visit you. Contrary to your assessment, they are not being overworked. In fact, the only people who I routinely overwork are myself and maybe you and your sister. Other people think of the farm as a great retreat. Erika is getting to be a pretty good shot with the .22. I do think they might get bored if they are idle here for too long without other people their age. A trip to the city will do them some good.
It is getting a little more crowded out here. Yesterday six more people arrived in a van from the Gulf Coast. They are a sight for sore eyes — all tired from the long drive. They said it took much longer because there were long lines at every gas station. The prices for gas have doubled overnight, they said. They are friends of Roy’s family, and they were very glad to be reunited. We welcomed them right into the little commune. There is a section of the yard where the Gulf Coasters are all camped that we are calling Mississippi North. Grandma has organized everyone into cook crews and cleaning crews. We have a campfire every night, and one of the new people brought a guitar. Now we have some songs as well as stories around the fire. People are in good spirits, despite the struggle.
Stay safe!
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Dear Grandpa,
If it were not for such a sad reason, your little commune sounds like a really good time. It has started to gently rain here, so it should probably be raining at your place in a couple hours. I’m hoping this is good for the crops and not too much rain.
School was canceled again today, and Jeremy and I rode our bikes to the library. There were big trucks outside the library, and a steady stream of military men and women were walking out with boxes to put in the trucks. It looks like I might not need to return my books any time soon. I am a little worried that they have my home address, and they might come looking for the books after they find out that all the books are not there.
The rain has pushed away any remaining smoke from the air and cooled things off considerably. Melody and I are on the porch right now, and the smell of the wet earth is amazing. I have been practicing what you said about noticing the good and the beautiful as well as the terrifying and the numbness-inducing. I have a glass of your apple juice here. Between the smell of the rain and the delicious sweet-tart tang of the juice, I might be in heaven. It is also quiet enough that I can hear birdsong right in the heart of the city. There is a bird cooing that I don’t think I have ever heard before.
I think the quiet might have something to do with the hurricanes. I heard on the radio that hundreds of flights have been canceled because airplanes are being stranded at airports up and down the East Coast and Gulf Coast. People are probably driving a lot less, too, now that gas is selling for $9 a gallon. When Jeremy and I stopped at the gas station to go to the bathroom on our way home from the library, there was a long line of cars, and they only had one pump working. I have never seen grown adult people so upset. The teenager who was behind the desk eventually turned off the pump to spite the people who had been swearing at him. They have bulletproof glass protecting the workers at that gas station, and I think maybe he was glad for it today.
Don’t bring Malik and Erika if you think the fuel will be too expensive. I don’t want you and Grandma going broke to help our social lives.
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Dear Benji,
Don’t worry about us. We bought a whole bunch of diesel fuel right before this, so we have plenty for the whole next year. The prices should bounce back down well before then. It will be nice to drive into the city without so much traffic. I might not bring them for a few days though. We have gotten very busy here.
Roy and Sarah, Malik and Erika’s parents, have asked if they could stay for a while longer. They don’t know when they will be able to go back home or what they will find when they go back. So we have been improvising some more permanent shelter for them and their friends. I also went to the neighbor’s farm and bought a dozen dairy cows and ten male calves from them and walked them back over to our place. Ever since his help left, he has been selling off the herd. He said we could come by and get silage whenever we want — he has enough silage for 2000 cows to make it through the winter, and he plans to thin the herd down to 50. It is great to have cows in the barn again, although I did have to move a bunch of junk out. We also contracted for another neighbor to fill our grain silo with some organic corn. He came with a big semi-truck and loaded the big silo in one hour. We can feed it to the pigs and chickens and fatten the calves, and if we get hungry, we can eat cornbread and tortillas ourselves. Roy helped me get the old grain mill functioning again, so we can grind chicken and pig feed for ourselves. I’d gotten lazy getting everything from the feed store. We are going to need gasoline to run the mill though. I went to another neighbor’s and traded some diesel for gasoline. We have plenty of diesel, and they have plenty of gas.
The EBG has said that the hurricane in the Gulf has turned north and east and has been slowly scouring the Texas and Louisiana coast with sustained winds of over 180 miles per hour. The places where the hurricane has already passed have been flattened. Not a single tree or wood frame house is left standing. Thousands are likely dead. The news from D.C. is not much better. The storm has moved inland and stalled out over Virginia. Rivers are rising fast, and the rain keeps coming. In Florida, Key West is bracing for impact as masses of people try to drive north. The biggest news is that prices for gas have gone to over $15 per gallon anywhere near the hurricanes and are averaging $12 per gallon elsewhere, and that is where fuel can be found at all. Most gas stations are just simply closed, with signs saying “out of gas.” People in major cities that are nowhere near the hurricane zones have started to make runs on the gas stations, the grocery stores, and the banks. The EBG reporter was in Tucson, Arizona, and the big grocery store there was emptying out of non-perishable food, and the ATM there had run out of cash, even though Tucson is nowhere near floods or fires. Yikes. People are panicking.
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Dear Grandpa,
Maybe I should come out there to help build shelters. It actually sounds like a lot of fun. I could bring some more friends and get them some real country life experience. It is boring for my friends here. The school is shut indefinitely, and it has been raining constantly for the last three days. We text each other, and we are all bored. We have been betting to see when gas prices will hit $20 per gallon. All of my friends’ families have been rationing food. Since the grocery stores ran out of food yesterday, people have been freaking out. Not every family has a full garden and stocked freezer and pantry like we do. Thank you, Grandma and Grandpa, by the way. Even though our pantry is full, I know we will eventually need to ration, too, if the grocery stores stay empty. Right now I only miss bananas and clementine oranges, and I can do without those for a while.
Daisy still hasn’t heard from her cousin Antonio. They are thinking about traveling to Texas. There is a rumor that there is a huge tent city set up in the desert somewhere near the border. Daisy’s dad has been laid off from his job, so he thinks maybe he will head down to see what he can find out. With fuel costs being what they are, they are going to wait a few days to see if the craziness passes.
We actually had soccer practice today in the rain. The rule is that if there is no lightning, then we practice. It was really good to see everybody who came. Of course, we all talked about Antonio, Marco, and Andres. The rest of the team were surprised at all of the detective work Jeremy and I had done. Coach said she would write a letter to our Congressperson. Although knowing what I know from the EBG, I didn’t think anyone would be opening mail in D.C. anytime in the near future.
It was a memorable soccer practice. I noticed how nice it was to play on mud instead of the rock-hard drought-stricken fields we had been practicing on. I got so dirty. At the end of practice we had a mud fight. It felt good to blow off steam. I noticed how cool the mud felt on my face. I enjoyed the slick feeling of mud in my hair. Grandpa, have you ever been covered in mud from head to toe? It is pretty awesome. Coach hooked up the hose and sprayed us all off before we went home. It was beautiful to ride my bike home right down the middle of Lexington Avenue, which usually is a major road. There were only a few cars on the road. One car came up fast behind me and honked at me, and I moved to the side. People must be self-rationing fuel.
Did you see the weather website? The “tropical storm” that hit the Gulf Coast has moved inland and is slowly creeping up into Alabama and Tennessee. The Florida storm has moved into Georgia after pummeling the whole state of Florida. The D.C. storm has moved west into Kentucky. The weather channel said that people in the Bible Belt should start praying and packing because it looks like all three storms were going to crash into each other and make one big one, which could cause intense flooding and hundreds of tornados. That seemed honest for a change! They have given the combination of all three storms the name: Stormzilla. Stormzilla! Where will all those people go?
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Dear Benjamin,
I heard about Stormzilla on the EBG, too. It is dumping rain on the Bible Belt, and they are predicting a slow slog north and east from there, ending in New England and the North Atlantic. All through Tennessee and Alabama and Georgia, there are hydroelectric dams run by the TVA. The EBG reported that the TVA is discharging water from the dams as fast as they can to prevent them from failing. If the reservoirs behind the dams overflow, the water might find ways around the dams, which could weaken the structures and cause them to collapse. There is a massive evacuation happening for all people in the potential flood path of the any of these dams. Almost every river east of the Mississippi is already well past flood stage, and evacuation plans are complicated because many bridges and roads are flooded or washed out. It is weird to watch all this from the Upper Midwest, where the worst that has happened to us is a big rain and a gas and food shortage. As far as the EBG reporter could tell, the military is setting up tent cities on high ground throughout the whole eastern side of the country and shuttling people to those refugee centers using school buses and helicopters.
Your whole soccer team is welcome to come help build. We took the machine shed and pulled all the equipment out and then built a sturdy end wall for it with a good insulated door. We bought a bunch of insulation and lined the metal walls. We replaced the single-panel windows with some salvaged double-panel windows, which will keep the cold out better. We took the wood stove out of the sauna and made a brick pad for it in the machine shed. Now we have a large living space that we can heat. We will miss having the stove in the sauna, but we need it for a higher purpose. The machine shed is one big room right now, and we don’t have any beds yet, but Roy is working on that. We went out and thinned dozens of trees out of the white pine plantation. Each trunk is about ten inches around. Roy, Malik, and Erika have been stripping the bark and cutting the trunks into eight foot lengths. Roy’s plan is to let them dry out for a few weeks and then fashion them into rustic bunk beds. Your grandma has made a test mattress cover out of that big roll of fabric that she bought years ago, and we stuffed it with straw. It will work for beds until we get some good foam or something.
So you see, we are quite busy out here at the little commune. Plus we now have cows to milk and cheese to make, and, of course, there are many rows of potatoes left to harvest. We are also building walls around the outdoor summer kitchen, and I can see how we will need to make some sort of attached dining hall on the summer kitchen for when the weather turns cold — they can’t all eat in our little house kitchen. We also just had another carload of refugees come up from Mississippi. There are more mouths to feed and more hands to help build. My neighbors think I am crazy, but we can’t say no to people in need.
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Dear Grandpa,
I saw a military convoy drive right down University Avenue today on my way to soccer practice. It went on for over a half an hour. There were armored personnel carriers and trucks and Humvees, all with mounted machine guns. The soldiers had helmets on and looked like they were going into battle. Did you hear anything about this?
Government News has stopped showing news at all. They are on continuous reruns of reality shows. The episodes of Survival Island are particularly on point because there are lots of hungry people out there. Yesterday there was a rumor that farmers were coming into the city to sell food at the farmers’ market. This morning tens of thousands of people drove, walked, and rode the bus to downtown Saint Paul. Jeremy and I rode our bikes down to try to get close. There were people everywhere. The military was out in force, maintaining a driving lane for the farmers to get through. At seven a.m. they started to arrive: Hmong farmers with trucks and trailers loaded with vegetables; maple syrup and honey producers with all the sugar that the people are craving; farmers with every apple they could find in their orchards; cattle and pig farmers with freezers loaded with meat. There were dozens of vendors, each with a trailer piled with food. We watched as the military people allowed the vendors in and then started issuing tickets to the people who were gathered outside the gates. People went in one-by-one and had full access to the market. Soon there was a group of people pushing up against the south chain-link fence. Jeremy and I were on the hill looking down at the market area. We saw the whole south fence wobble back and forth and finally fall down. People flooded into the market, buying whatever they could. It might have become a full-on food riot, except there were soldiers everywhere. Within an hour there was nothing left on the tables and trailers. Not one scrap of food. People were crying. What happened Grandpa? Where did all the food go?
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Next chapter:
https://readmedium.com/chapter-9-the-coup-f0a1291c6f8d
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