Stan Morris - Surviving the Fog

“Mrs. Brown will try to grow lettuce and chard in her solar room this winter,” said Hector. “And she’s going to try to grow cucumbers and tomatoes in five gallon buckets. But she said that she didn’t expect a lot of production from the tomatoes and cucumbers until after the twenty first of March. That’s when the plants will get twelve hours of sunlight. She will make bread from her wheat crop and freeze it. The road will be passable some of the time by early March. I think she will replant her wheat and oats in April.”

“I should be able to get into the forest and hunt in March,” Jacob added. “And I can still get into the forest for a few weeks more. What I bring back, we need to eat first, and save the canned supplies for later.”

“You mentioned the trout pond at the Brown farm, Jacob” said Jean. “Fish should be a good source of protein. And I’ll start classes on edible plants that grow around here.”

“You think that you know which plants we can eat?” Kathy asked, giving the woman a dubious look.

“Hey! United States Forest Ranger here,” Jean responded, giving Kathy an annoyed look in return.

“When that calf grows up, it will give milk,” Eric said. The rest of them looked at him.

“No bull, shit,” John said. The guys looked disgusted, and the girls giggled.

“That wasn’t nice,” Desi admonished her lover.

“Sorry, Eric,” John said with a grin.

“Is there anything else we are going to run out of by the end of winter?” Mike asked.

“Toilet paper,” said Yuie. “Sooner or later we will have to use worn out cloth. Which we will have to wash and reuse.” She shuddered.

“Holey crap,” John exclaimed.

“Knock it off, John,” said Mike. “Some of you haven’t heard Jean’s story, so I going to have her tell it now.” He looked at Jean.

“All right, but first, I want to thank you girls for offering me Jackie’s clothing. I know that can’t have been easy for you,” Jean said.

“This is what happened to me. I was sent by the Forest Service in the middle of May to visit an old lookout station, Baker’s Point Lookout. The idea was to see if the Service needed to destroy it to prevent possible injuries, or to restore it as a National Historical Monument.

“It coincided with my plans to take some vacation time, so I spent a few days up there, kicking back and relaxing. When I left, I ran into the gunk you call, the ‘Fog.’ I didn’t want to drive through it, so I thought that I would take a roundabout way and bypass it. Only I couldn’t. Everywhere I went, I ran into it again. And before I realized, I stupidly ran out of gas. I left my jeep and tried to make my way down to civilization. I spent a month going this way and that backtracking again and again. I had my sidearm with me, so I managed to kill and eat game at first, and sometimes I managed to catch fish from a stream. But then I ran out of bullets. Later, I found myself northeast of here. That’s where I ran across a lodge called, ‘Eagle’s Retreat.’

“Now, at first I thought I was saved. But as I made my way down the hill toward the lodge, I saw two men beating the hell out of another man. So, I got a lot more cautious. I went down closer to see what I could find out, but I stayed out of sight. By the time I got close to the place, the three men were gone. I waited until the next day, when I spotted a woman pinning clothes on a clothesline. I got close enough to call quietly to her, and when she sidled over to me, I had a very revealing talk with her. She told me she was a nurse.

“It seems that there were two different groups at the Retreat. There was a group of student nurses and their instructors, and there was a group of artists doing their art thing. And there were some other people staying at the lodge, besides the owner and his wife. Two of these other people were elderly ladies.

“The woman I talked to said that after people realized they were trapped, things started turning ugly. A group of men stole some firearms from the owner, took over, and started ordering everybody around. They threatened the owner when he protested.

“At first, they said that they were organizing things so they could survive. But then one day, the owner and his wife disappeared. They haven’t been heard from since. The men said that the owner had decided to leave. The other borders didn’t believe them. Then the two older women disappeared. The men didn’t even bother to explain that. They just said that it wasn’t their problem. The woman I was talking to said that one of the male nurses had disappeared the day before. Also, one of the female artists had been forced into a sexual relationship by the men. They withheld food until she agreed to sleep with them.

“Anyway, I hung around for two weeks. The nurse snuck some food to me every couple of days. Then, one day, as she was coming to give me some food, I saw a man following her. I don’t know if she told them about me, which I doubt, or if they thought that she was stealing and stashing food. I got out of there, right then. I spent two more weeks stumbling around in the forest before your hunting party found me. I had lost all my gear. I’m sure that I would have died there at that spot, if Nathan hadn’t found me.”

“More people,” Eric murmured.

“More bad people,” Desi added.

“Sounds like some of them are good. But right now they’re trapped,” Howard said.

“There’s nothing we can do for them now,” said Mike. “But, when spring comes, who knows?”

“One more thing,” said Jean. “They had goats and sheep. I saw some of both, mostly sheep, wandering around.”

Erin wanted to do something for Halloween, but no one had any good ideas, except for telling ghost stories. That didn’t seem like such a good idea given their predicament. In the end, they asked a few people to sing songs to mark the night. So October turned into November. The days grew colder. Jacob brought in a few more rabbits, and to the surprise of everyone, a pig.

“A boar actually,” Jacob said.

“It’s pig out time,” Yuie yelled.

“I was going to say that,” John complained.

The next morning they sliced the boars belly in the deserted dining hall and ate bacon with the eggs that Mary Brown had sent.

Snow began to fall more and more. Hector made a last trip to the Brown farm. He reported that things seemed to be fine at the farm. The two little kids were happily forcing their new older companions to play with them. He had helped Mary winterize her machinery.

The campers broke apart some of the cardboard boxes in which the kitchen equipment had been delivered, and they used the cardboard as sleds. Some of the kids wanted to use the emergency bathroom, but Mike declared it off limits. They had to use the outside toilets as long as possible, he said firmly.

At the beginning of November, they experienced some days when the temperature rose into the seventies, although most of the time the high was in the fifties. By the end of November, they were glad to see an occasional day when the temperature reached sixty. It became a game to see how low the temperature would drop. One night at the end of November, many of them stayed up after midnight, and at four am they watched the temperature gage drop to five degrees.

The solar heating system was working well. On days when the sun shone for several hours, it became so warm in the small cave, that the boys who preferred cooler air would take their sleeping bags into the central area of the Lodge to sleep. Some boys, who had been assigned bunks in the boys’ room, traded beds with some of the boys who were sleeping in the small cave. Mike knew that eventually it would be cooler in the girls’ rooms than in the cave. He was worried that a girl would request that she be allowed to sleep in the cave. What would he say ? What should he do ?