But for now, she has game in the forest, and a bit of a garden hidden away by her horse’s barn. She has enough grains, sugar, and salt for a couple of years, provisions her grandmother had taught her were vital no matter how rich your lifestyle seemed to be.
Her stores will be crucial, for according to the local radio station, before it went off the air, within just a couple of weeks locals had broken into the Meadowvale grocers, looting its contents, leaving just the shattered shell of a once proud family-owned store.
Her only close neighbors, a young couple, usually kept just enough food for a week, venturing into town for munchies when the mood struck. She had tried to be cordial when she moved in, even going over one night to their house right by the main road, with cable and all the other fineries of living closer to town to let them know the coyotes were coming in a lot closer in the cold and letting them know that they might want to keep their appetizer sized dogs close by them rather than just letting them out to roam the open back yard.
The neighbor looked at Lisa and said, “It’s okay, we have an invisible fence.” Lisa couldn’t even BEGIN to explain the flaws in that reasoning to them. Good luck getting that collar on Mr. Mountain Lion. The world is not a safe and happy place, something some people find when they least expect it.
They were one of the first in the area to abandon this new “utopia” to flee down to the cities.
Look back into history, cities disappear, countries realign. Whole societies grind to a halt, the precise cause of death uncertain. The stars somehow align overhead by political alliance, high priests of nuclear ability, climate, and promise. All running like fault lines underneath what appears to be placid landscape. Disturbances ignored by the media as larger things erupt and spew black, cumulative movements unseen. The sheep graze placidly while the Tectonic plates of divergent cultures and religion, rub, shifting, jockeying for power until one day something gives way. A city will vanish, a state, perhaps an entire way of life lost as easily as a set of car keys.
We believe that because we’ve always been the dominant political and economic power on this planet that it will always be so. Legions nod in affirmation to change and power shifts, believing that because it always has been, it always will be. For so many years we lived as a nation on credit, buying with plastic, borrowing on faith. Her grandparents paid cash for everything, not expecting their government or their neighbor to bail them out, and as such, they survived the Great Depression. Her mom and dad had the same mindset. If it was broken they fixed it. If they worked hard to earn it, they took care of it.
Lisa’s family owned their own land and measured everything by soil and water and sweat; not stopping and whining if the tractor broke or the mule died. They themselves were raised by a generation of men that went to war, leaving their legacy to a generation of strong women who would tend to it until their return. To their children, they passed on something you could hold in your hand, not press into an ATM machine.
As a young girl, she loved the old John Wayne movies her parents had recorded. She could never forget the climactic moment in one film where the grizzled old marshal confronts the four villains and calls out: “I mean to kill you or see you hanged at Judge Parker’s convenience. Which will it be?”
“Bold talk for a one-eyed fat man,” their leader sneers.
Then Duke cries, “Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!” and, reins in his courage, rushing at them while firing both guns. Those four outlaws did not provide a threat at the next sunset.
When did her homeland change so? The west Lisa grew up in is now more socialized and urban, more of the citizens pining for things they cannot afford while looking to others to fix their problems. Where she grew up, gardens were tended and food canned, and when threatened by others the wagons were circled and folks cared for themselves, providing for their own, from the land and their hard work.
Her Dad was a third-generation farmer, her mom coming to the San Joaquin Valley as a young bride, and she often told her daughter that she learned fast. There were stories of spring snowstorms thawing into mucky puddles from which a season of new life came. There would be drought and there would be searing heat. Sometimes the crops were abundant, other times not so much. There were a few years that in addition to tending to the almond trees and other growing things, Dad worked as a telephone lineman, just to keep a roof over their heads.
It was not an easy life, especially when sometimes Mom and she were left during the day to do everything themselves. To do otherwise would have left the place in ashes, abandoned, another failed dream. Duty and honor weren’t archaic promises; they were words she was raised to live on, no matter how bad things got. Being so small, the idea of ‘too big to fail’ never made sense.
You saw it there in those last days of California as part of the nation, in the eyes at the feed store, you see it in the determined step of those buying supplies and learning the use them. You saw it in the questions of the many that may have been in the minority with this whole secession idea but were not willing to leave the land where they had lived their entire life. People that are beginning to understand that we have a right to be heard, not silenced because the majority disagreed with us.
Because we’re NOT too big to fail and this Calexit thing has a big fail written all over it. She thinks of the movie War of the World’s wherein the monolithic war machines of Mars were felled by something as simple as a sneeze.
She is intensely proud of being an American. She refused to say was proud of being an American, the being and cadence of a life of freedom, to work, to arm oneself, to defend and expand that which you personally worked for. Influenced by a bygone era of good guys and bad guys, it is part of who she was, defining both fury and faith.
Because in coming days she is afraid she will find what she is made of.
She’s been out here on her own for two months now. There is still electricity and she hopes it continues through the looming winter. From the distance, she has heard at least one car, but no one has attempted her rough dirt track up the hillside into the forest; it is almost impossible to see from the road now. Even when she first moved here, with empty cabins near that might invite a break-in; she laid out tree limbs and such to partially block the narrow path that behind the trees widened to the long dirt road to her home. It was easy enough to clear out when she had a dog grooming client expected but reduced the chances of a home break in. Now she has no clients and she has let the undergrowth take over, but she still had room to get out in an emergency.
She was afraid to take her truck onto the main road into town, which was miles away, after one late night telephone conversation with her neighbor John who lived about a mile down the mountain from her. He was in his sixties, divorced, his grown kids living near Sacramento.
He had told her, “Lisa — don’t take your truck out on the road. My kids told me they are taking vehicles from the middle and upper classes, and giving them to the poor, redistributing them for those that are joining the militia.”
“Militia?” was all she could stammer.
“The Militia is preventing people from leaving except with what they can carry and they have to walk out. It’s been reported that some people were shot when they tried to drive over the border.”
She was stunned, not believing such things were happening. She’d heard gunshots from a great distance, but she convinced herself that was a neighbor who had hunkered down out hunting for food.