“I was able to buy some gas before the stations in Pueblo ran out. I had to wait two hours in line. They were limiting everyone to six gallons, positively no filling of cans, and strictly greenback cash. It was thirty dollars a gallon for premium and twenty-eight for regular. I always kept a few hundred dollars or so in cash on hand for contingencies, and the gas wiped out most of that. I had to try three instant teller machines before I found one that had any money left. I took out six hundred of the six-hundred-and-two dollars that I had left in checking, and I got a cash advance on my VISA card. The maximum I could take was nine hundred, so I took the max.
“It started getting weird in a hurry. At this point the power was still on, the water was running, the phones were working, and the central heating co-generation plant for the campus was still running. Most of the classes were still meeting on schedule. But each successive night it got a little stranger in the dorms. One gal on the third floor of our dorm had a gallon jar full of coins, and she used it to empty out all the candy machines. Most of the people who were left in the dorms were starting into some stage of mental breakdown.
“My roommate, Javier, packed a few things and went to stay at his girlfriend’s apartment. When he was packing up he kept chanting to himself, ‘What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?’ There were some students from Taiwan on our floor that were crying and practically screaming: ‘We go home now! We go home now!’ What a lousy situation for them. Here they were in a foreign country, they could hardly speak the language, and suddenly things got terminal. It made me count my blessings. At least I had a clear destination with some way of getting there, a couple of practical rifles, and a pretty well-stocked bug-out bag.
“The night before I left, a few of the football players started cleaning the food out of the dorm Dining Commons and the Joe O. Center, and stockpiling it all, plus a bunch of water, up on the fourth floor. They thought they were pretty smart. They disabled the elevators and had the fire escape doors barricaded with couches and desks. Those dumb bunnies mainly had baseball bats for self-defense. Talk about having no clue about eventualities. It was just a matter of time before somebody with guns came and cleaned them out. And even if they had the necessary coercive force to hold their position, what were they going to do for heat that winter? Once the co-gen plant was down and the electricity was kaput, they’d be S-O-L.
“With all this going on, I could see the handwriting on the wall. It was going to get very ugly once people started getting hungry, and that was going to be real soon. I figured that it was definitely strength-in-numbers time, so I started going through the ROTC department phone roster, starting with the MS-4s and working my way down. The cell phone system was down, and nobody answered their land line phones. They had all bugged out. All that I got was either continuous rings or answering machines. I remember Cadet Pickering had a funny message. It just said, ‘Will the last student leaving Escalante Hall please turn out the lights?’
“Finally, I got hold of somebody, but it wasn’t a cadet. It was Ross, I guy that I knew who lived on the first floor of the dorm. Ross was in my Wednesday evening Bible study class. One time he happened to mention to me that he kept a Model 12 shotgun in his room, that he used it to shoot skeet. I made a little mental note of that. So he was the first guy I called after I went through the cadet roster. He answered on the first ring. Our deal was that I would guard him while he hauled his stuff to his car, and then he’d guard me.
“It worked out just fine. Ross had his Model 12 all right. The night before, he’d used a tubing cutter to cut the barrel off at about nineteen inches. A shame to butcher a collectible gun like that, but ‘desperate times call for desperate measures.’ Nobody messed with us. By that time there was no campus security left around, and the Pueblo police and County Sheriff’s departments had bigger fish to fry. You could hear lots of sirens, any hour of the day.
The night before I left, I heard shooting off in the distance toward old Pueblo, every half hour or so.
“Parenthetically, I should mention that I had previously carried my M1A in a guitar case whenever I took it in or out of the dorm, because they had a ‘no guns on campus’ rule at USC. It was one of those rules that didn’t make any sense and was rarely enforced. I was hardly the only one who kept a gun in my dorm room. For example, USC had an official pistol team that practiced at an on-campus indoor range, and most of those guys used their own guns rather than ones issued by the ROTC department. So they didn’t fall under the exception in the rule for school-owned guns and ROTC department guns.
The team members just didn’t bother mentioning to anyone that those guns were their own property. And they didn’t keep them in the ROTC arms room, either. They were just very low key about it. My roommate Javier wasn’t bothered by the fact that I kept my M1A and AR-7 in our dorm room. He even went out to the range with me a couple of times.
“Well, so much for obsolete legalities. Let’s see, I was telling you about packing up… The power was still on when I was packing up my ’95 Jetta and Ross was packing up his old Chevy minivan. We could hear somebody up on the fourth floor with their stereo cranked up full blast. They were playing that old REM song, ‘It’s The End of the World as We Know It, and I Feel Fine.’ I thought it was kind of apropos.
“It would’ve been much better to have our cars travel together for mutual security, but I was headed north to Montana, and Ross was headed south to his uncle’s ranch outside El Paso. So after we’d both packed up, we just said prayers for each other, shook hands, and hopped in our cars.
“I anticipated that the whole I-25 corridor up though Colorado Springs and Boulder was going to be impassable, so I immediately headed west on I-50 toward Grand Junction.
“I decided it would be best to take US 50 only as far as Salida, then US 285 north to Leadville, basically following the Arkansas River. From 50 I’d then take US 24 over to I-70 into Grand Junction. I knew there’d be less people and less social stress, along that route.
“My goal was to travel the Basin and Range route north, where there’s hardly any population. I didn’t see any traffic to speak of; just a few people who were obviously refugees, with trailers piled way up high, and a few truckers. I saw several diesel prime movers without trailers. I guess they’d abandoned their loads and were just trying to get home.
“I usually kept my car’s tank three-fourths full, and I always carried a spare five-gallon can, treated with Sta-Bil. Wouldn’t you know it, but I had a lot less than my usual average when things hit the fan. With what I had in the tank, even after buying the extra six gallons in Pueblo, I calculated I had only about a two-hundred-and-forty-mile range. If I had really planned ahead, I would have found someplace there in Pueblo to store more cans of gas.
“I checked every station that I came to on the highway, and took some exits to cruise through some of the smaller towns, but they were all out of gas. A few of them still had diesel, but there was no gas left. Man! If I’d only bought one of the later diesel Volkswagen Jettas instead of a gas model, I could have found plenty of fuel and driven all the way to Missoula. You can even run a diesel on home heating oil, since it is basically the same stuff. It’s just dyed differently so that people don’t try to cheat on the road taxes. For that matter, you can even stretch diesel with used vegetable oil if you filter it. Before the Crash you could get used vegetable oil for free at most restaurants… As it was, I had over six hundred miles to go when I ran out if gas.