James Rawles - Founders

They turned their horses out into a fenced field that Dale Bennet used for growing feed for his rabbits. Part of it was seeded in an early-sprouting grass variety, so the horses starting eating with gusto, even before they had been unsaddled.

The Bennets were overjoyed to see Graham, and thrilled to receive two lengthy letters from his mother. Graham’s four cousins, ages six to thirteen, were whooping and hollering. The younger ones jumped onto his back for piggyback rides.

The Bennets celebrated the arrival and Graham’s birthday by barbequing five rabbits. The barbeque party went on until late in the evening, as everyone traded stories about their lives since the Crunch.

In relating their tale, Terry mentioned that they planned to continue their journey to their group retreat by way of Montpelier, Idaho. Dale interjected, “Well, you need to talk with my friend Cliff. He’s planning on taking a drive out to northern Utah, real soon.”

Ken was speechless. He asked, incredulously, “Taking a drive ?”

Dale nodded. “Yeah! We’ll walk over to Cliff’s house tomorrow morning, and I’ll introduce you.”

After a night of fitful sleep, they awoke to the smell of pancakes. The Bennets were using some of their precious supplies to make a large breakfast for Graham and the Laytons. After breakfast, just as promised, Dale escorted Ken and Terry on a half mile walk to the trailer home of his friend Cliff.

A 2009 crew cab Ford pickup sat in front of the trailer house. The house was a single-wide that appeared to be at least thirty years old. Old tires held down a blue tarp at one end of the roof.

A man answered the knock on his door with a .455 Webley revolver in his hand.

“Hey, Cliff, how are you doing?” Dale said warmly. “These are friends of my brother-in-law. Meet Ken and Terry.”

Cliff invited Dale and the Laytons into the house, saying, “Pardon the mess—I’ve been packing.” He laughed and kicked a cardboard box out of the way so that Dale and the Laytons could get to the couch.

Cliff immediately struck Ken and Terry as an odd but jovial character.

After just a few more minutes of introductions and assurances of their trustworthiness, Dale joined them as they folded out their maps on Cliff’s kitchen table. “It’s time to talk strategy,” Cliff declared.

They calculated that the distance to Coalville, Utah, was 410 miles. Between his pickup’s main and auxiliary tanks and the gas he had available in cans, Cliff estimated that he had enough fuel to travel 850 miles. Ever the optimist, he said, “So I can make it back here, even if I don’t find a drop of gas around Coalville.”

Cliff explained that he had been a heating and air-conditioning technician before the Crunch. Never married and living frugally, he had dabbled in energy stocks and silver, starting soon after the turn of the century. Cliff was in his late thirties, slightly overweight, and had thinning red hair and a wispy red beard. He lived alone in the sparsely furnished trailer. Neither Ken nor Terry could determine how he’d made a living since the Crunch.

Cliff summed up his desire to travel to Utah, saying, “I got word that they’re alive, but I haven’t seen my cousins or my aunt and uncle since before the stock market melted down. So I’d like to look in on them to see if they’re all right. I’m taking all my stuff with me. Who knows? I might find work there—maybe at a mine, and maybe I’ll even find a wife.”

Dale reiterated that he had heard that there were limited supplies of newly refined gasoline available in northern Utah. He and Cliff agreed that the trip was worth the gamble.

Ken spent most of the day checking on the mechanical condition of Cliff’s pickup. They had access to the inventory of an auto parts store, which had been moved to the owner’s workshop for safekeeping just a mile away. At the shop, he checked the four mounted tires and the spare, adding air to two of them with a hand pump. He replaced the fuel filter and set aside an identical spare. Checking all the hoses, he noticed that the lower radiator hose felt soft. He was fortunate to find a new correct spare in the enormous pile of belts and hoses in the corner of the shop. He checked the belt tensioner and then all the fluids. He added some window washer fluid and coolant. He set aside one more full gallon of coolant to take along with them. Then he lubed the two points of the chassis that could take grease. The rest, he explained, were all “lubeless joints.” Finally, noting the motor oil looked dark, he changed the oil and filter. He kept the old hose and fuel filters to carry as spares. After checking both of the pickup’s fuse boxes, he also set aside an assortment of spare fuses with various current ratings.

Amid the many shelves of mostly disorganized parts, Ken found a spare serpentine belt for the pickup. “This belt runs all the auxiliaries. If this belt ever breaks, you’re totally out of luck,” he explained.

In all, the belt, fluids, fuses, filters, and motor oil cost Cliff just two ounces of silver and some gardening hand tools in barter. Clinching the deal, he promised the auto parts store owner, “If I’m not back here in a month, then you are welcome to my trailer house and everything left in it.” He handed him an extra door key.

After the maintenance on the pickup truck was complete, they headed back to Cliff’s trailer, where they ate a light dinner: three small cans of tuna and a loaf of homemade whole wheat bread that Cliff said he often bought from a neighbor. The paper labels had been removed from the cans and they had been painted in varnish, to protect them from rust. Cliff explained, “That’s a trick that I picked up from a guy I knew that spent four months crewing a yacht in the Bahamas.”

Looking closely at the cans before they were opened, Terry could see that their lids had “Tuna, 11/2012” written in Magic Marker, just visible through the varnish.

Cliff asked Ken and Terry to help him pack for the trip. He had remarkably few clothes, which all fit into just two large cardboard boxes. He also packed a large Tupperware box that he explained contained some photocopies of family history and genealogy documents that his late mother had made before the Crunch.

Then they started digging. Using a rusty shovel with a broken tip, they dug up three hidden caches in the yard. The first was very shallow. A sheet of plywood, a thin layer of soil, and a large pile of used wooden pallets covered it. This cache contained seventeen 5-gallon gas cans painted various colors, mostly red. The cans had been positioned on top of an odd assortment of scrap wood blocks to keep their bottoms from rusting. All the gas, Cliff said, had been treated with PRI-G gasoline stabilizer.

As they pulled the cans up out of the hole, Cliff said, “You know, this gas was the fruit of four months of hard dickering and bartering. I’m hoping that there’ll be gasoline back in production soon. I heard there’s some sort of ‘Provisional’ national government, headquartered at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and that they’re getting things straightened out.”

The second cache, deeper than the first, held more than twenty military surplus .30 caliber, .50 caliber, and 20mm ammo cans containing various ammunition and some hand tools. Atop the ammo cans, there were some canned foods, stowed in two Sterilite brand plastic tote bins. All had been varnished and hand-labeled, just like the tuna cans.

The third cache, nearly three feet down, contained three guns in a capped piece of eight-inch-diameter PVC pipe, and two more .30 caliber ammo cans. The latter, Cliff said, held what he called his “silver trove.”

They spent that night in their sleeping bags on the floor of Cliff’s living room. Ken and Terry were so excited that they were scarcely able to sleep. Cliff roused them an hour before dawn. The gas cans had already been loaded in the back of the pickup the night before and covered with a tarp. They quickly loaded all the ammo cans and the rest of the gear. The heap filled up the entire bed of the pickup truck, most of the rear seat, and nearly all the passenger-side front seat and floor.