Snow, Cabins, Preparations
Old man winter is knocking at the door. Though I do not welcome him in, he imposes his presence anyhow with 2-3 inches of snow covering the ground this morning. Keeping the outdoor boiler chucked full of wood to heat the house. We hauled in a load of wood Saturday evening after making herd share deliveries to Marion and the Abingdon Farmers Market. A lot more wood hauling in the weeks ahead.
After church on Sunday, Amy cleaned one of the cabins while I made the rounds for the farm. Then we brought about 20 head of cattle into the barn to sort out the biggest for harvesting on Monday. Given the pigs unpredictability when it comes to loading on the trailer, we went ahead and loaded 8 hogs on the trailer Sunday evening for an early departure Monday morning.
Rather than farming projects, we devoted much of this week to cabin projects. A couple months back Amy ordered a king size bed to replace the bed in the Old Rich Valley Cabin, but with steady bookings and busy farm schedules, swapping out the beds and other furniture hasn’t been super high priority. With some vacant days at the cabin this week, we finally got it done.
Amy and two youngest delivered meat to Knoxville on Monday, while Hallie and Hasten stayed back with me. Amy made a batch of chicken bone broth and beef bone broth this week. We both made the trip to Bristol and Kingsport yesterday afternoon to deliver ORVF meats to families down there. Our Transit van meat hauler is still out of commission from the break down along the highway several weeks back. The old Suburban is still thankfully keeping the meat moving.
On the way down to the processor, I finished listening to “One Second After” by William R. Forstchen about a nuclear air strike that wipes out everything electrical. I listened to it the whole way down and thought about it the whole way back. More than simply an entertaining and compelling story, it’s a story that could become our story. I’m generally optimistic and hopeful about our future, but mere hope and wishful thinking do not prevent hard times. We should always be ready for hard times because hard times are always a very real possibility. More than think about the events in this hypothetical story, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to better be prepared for hypotheticals in our future story. Amy just finished listening to this one as well, provoking several discussions concerning changes and possible preparations we will make.
Here’s a couple more quotes from the book:
“The web of our society, John thought, was like the beautiful spider webs he’d find as a boy in the back lot after dawn on summer days… vast, beautiful, intricate things. And at the single touch of a match, the web just collapsed, and all that was left for the spider to do, if it survived that day, was to rebuild the web entirely from scratch. And our enemies knew that. And planned for it. And succeeded.”
“What about farms though?… The old farms are nearly all gone. When something like this hits, everyone seems to think people living in rural areas are up to their ears in food ready to be given away. But even the farmers now are dependent on the supermarkets.”
“People are hungry, scared. We were spoiled, unlike any generation in history, and we forgot completely just how dependent we were on the juice flowing through the wires, the buttons doing something when we pushed them.”
“America, the breadbasket of the world, which could feed a billion people without even breaking a sweat, was dying now of starvation.”
“It died from complacency, from blindness, from not being willing to face the harsh realities of the world, died from complacent self-centeredness.”
In afterward by Captain Bill Sanders of the US Navy: “Our technologically oriented society and its heavy dependance on advanced electronic systems, could be brought to its knees with cascading failures of our critical infrastructure. Our vulnerability increases daily as our use and dependance on electronics continues to accelerate.”
Coming from a retired United States Air Force General, “It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when.”
Have a good week.
Will