The Final Day (After, #3)(12)
Gone as well was the essential knowledge of anyone 150 years back. Seasoned hickory and oak put into the fire would last through the night; maple was easy splitting; pine was good for a quick start-up fire but didn’t last for heat; locust became fence rails; the now-extinct chestnut could be burned but also made excellent furniture; in a pinch with the wood pile running low, unseasoned ash could be harvested and used; and, if out on a cold, rainy day, one could carry some rolled-up strips of birch bark, which would burn like a torch to get an emergency fire going. Information essential for living, which nearly all had to relearn to survive.
The Melton brothers, after months of backbreaking work, rebuilt a long-ago dam face while the rest of their family labored for weeks to shovel out the silted-up marsh behind the remnants of the dam. Dams long ago built to block off once bubbling mountain creeks often fell into eventual disuse as decades of summer storms and the floods of springtime thaws trapped hundreds of tons of silt, the narrow valley pond behind the dam turning into a marsh and then eventually abandoned … and besides, who needed a waterpowered mill dam with all its labor and headaches when first steam, and then a twenty-horsepower electric motor, could do the same amount of labor?
In this new world gradually being rebuilt, the Meltons were the first in the valley to actually get a waterpowered sawmill up and operating just below Ridgecrest, along the aptly named Mill Creek, because down its tumbling length, there had once been a dozen small mills for wood cutting, grinding corn for—among other things—making mash for a still hidden nearby. They built it on a site where a great-grandfather had once run a similar mill, which, when the “revenuers” were not poking around, supplied mash to stills up and down the valley.
Ernie and family tried to argue they now owned the land and had the surveyor plats to prove their modern legal argument. It had nearly turned ugly until John helped negotiate a deal that whatever logs Ernie dragged down to the Meltons with his old reliable Polaris off-road vehicle the Meltons would cut up for free. And if a few mason jars were mixed in with the returned firewood as well, no further questions would be asked.
The historian in John loved the sound of that mill, knowing he was hearing the echo of a long-ago age of waterpower … the creaking of the slowly turning waterwheel, the rasping of the saw driven by the wheel, the redolent scent of fresh-cut wood and cool mountain water cascading over the waterwheel. And although corn for actual food was still a “national” priority, in this the third year of harvest since the start of the war, he was learning to turn a blind eye toward the thin columns of wood smoke rising up from nearby valleys and the occasional whiff on humid fall mornings of corn mash fermenting. He would ease his sense of duty with the thought that “as it was in the beginning, so it is again…”
Farther downstream, Paul Hawkins’s team was waiting for the community of Old Fort to finish rebuilding what had been their original dam for a waterpowered turbine so that he could set a generator in place and get the small community of survivors down there back online. The villagers of Old Fort, all but wiped out by the Posse attack, planned to run a wire along old Route 70 toward Marion and sell the power for trade items and food.
In this the third year since the Day, an economic trading system was again back in place, and it did include white lightning brewed in remote mountain valleys, but now included much else as well. Those with foresight to stockpile some precious metals found they indeed had real worth again; in fact, by the standards of this terrible new world, they could be counted as wealthy, the silver and gold not just something to be locked away in a safe for “just in case”—“just in case” had indeed arrived at last.
Increasingly scarce was .22 ammunition so that it was hardly on the trading market anymore, worth far more per round than the rabbit or squirrel it could put on the table. The weapons to be valued for hunting were the old flintlock rifles, once the realm of history buffs, reenactors, and muzzle-loading hunters. Lead salvaged from dead car batteries and saltpeter from manure pits provided two of the ingredients. Sulfur came from the old resort spa of Sulfur Springs down in Rutherford County, which long ago had provided the crucial element for gunpowder manufacturing from the colonial period and the Civil War. The Peterson family, old man Peterson once a good friend of John from Civil War roundtable days, had set up the family business, which tragically killed his daughter and grandson, who had made a fatal mistake several months back out in the mixing shed, blowing up themselves and the entire building.
There was even talk of scrounging up enough bronze or brass to make several small cannons for defense, a strange thought given the town had endured air attacks from Apache helicopters and now had a precious Black Hawk in their possession, a world of retro weaponry mixed with surviving remnants of a prior age.
Beyond the trade in gunpowder from Rutherfordton, and networking out to other communities struggling to come out of a dark age, a viable economic system was indeed emerging.
It was not until after Fredericks’s defeat that John had learned that within Asheville, Fredericks had actually attempted to impose a mandatory confiscation of all silver and gold coins that had once been government minted. Unknown to those areas outside of Fredericks’s brief period of control, he claimed a decree from Bluemont had ordered such, with a so-called fair trade of a hundred dollars in printed money for each silver dollar and a thousand dollars of paper money for each one-ounce gold coin. Only those caught with silver or gold on them complied under duress, meaning, “We caught you; give us the coins—here’s your paper, now go and keep your mouth shut, or you are under arrest for illegal trading.”