Each Thursday was movie night. Using Kevin’s wide-screen Mac laptop, they clustered chairs in the living room and watched one of the eighty-three DVDs in the combined collection at the retreat—most of them came from the Grays or Kevin Lendel. Saturday night was “movie rerun night,” for the benefit of those who missed the Thursday movie because of LP/OP or C.Q. duty. The Saturday nights were nearly as well attended as the Thursday first showings.
One of the regular chores at the retreat was grinding wheat and corn, roughly every other day. For this, the group members took turns using Mary’s Country Living grain mill. It was a well-made and reliable unit that verged on being overengineered. The mill’s body was die-cast. Mary said that she would have preferred a cast iron body, “But of course it would weigh as much as an anvil,” she said with a laugh. The mill was adjustable from very coarse (for simply cracking grain), to very fine, for making bread flour. The internal parts could be removed for service or repair. It had ball bearings on the shaft, which was a nice feature that most other small mills didn’t have. In addition to the hand crank, the unit had a steel v-belt pulley wheel. Soon after they arrived, Lon fabricated a mount for the mill on the bicycle/generator with an adjustable travel to provide proper belt tension. Pedaling was far easier than turning the crank by hand. Mary bought the mill in 2002. It cost three hundred and forty dollars, and Mary soon spent an extra seventy dollars on spare parts, “just in case.”
Once every two weeks, Mike had each member take turns at leading a practice patrol or ambush. Their performance was critiqued after each training session. Within a few weeks, the group’s patrols took on a heretofore unknown level of precision. Noise was minimal or nonexistent, hand and arm signals were relayed expertly, and operations orders were given professionally, using the Army’s standard five paragraph “op order” format.
The only problem that arose in the weeks after the new members were added to the group came when the septic tank backed up. From the day that the Nelsons arrived, Mary had insisted that everyone collect their used toilet paper in paper bags rather than flushing it. The contents of these bags were burned daily. The bags were euphemistically called “clothespin bags,” in reference to the clothespins that were used to keep them shut to control odors.
Even though there was no toilet paper going through the septic system, Margie surmised that the large number of people at the Grays’ house was over-taxing it. The first sign of this problem came when the kitchen sink drain started gurgling ominously. Margie recognized this symptom and alerted Todd.
Resolving the problem took several days. First, the lid to the septic tank had to be found. This involved nearly a full day of probing with a pointed steel rod to determine where the outer edges of the concrete septic tank were located, and then digging down to the pumping cover.
A quick inspection showed that the tank’s sanitary tee was clogged, and there was a fairly heavy layer of “cake” or “scum” in the upper potion of the center section of the three-section tank. The color of the liquid in the tank was almost black, which Margie said was a good sign that the friendly bacteria were doing their job. The blockage was soon cleared with a length of one-inch galvanized pipe. So that not as much digging would be required the next time the septic tank had to be inspected or worked on, Todd and Lon cut a fifty-five-gallon drum to the proper length to use as an inspection hatch. A piece of quarter-inch plate steel was laid on top, with the realization that the thin sheet metal drum would eventually rust out. With the new hatch in place, only a six-inch layer of soil had to be removed rather than twenty-five inches.
The inspection of the septic tank confirmed Margie’s suspicion that the increased number of people living at the house had exceeded its carrying capacity. Todd consulted with the rest of the group members about their options. Two suggestions were made: frequently pumping the tank or constructing an outhouse to supplement the septic tank system. The first option was out of the question because they did not have the pumping apparatus available to empty the tank. So they built an outhouse.
The outhouse was constructed a hundred feet from the house, far downhill from the spring, and away from the natural course of rainwater runoff. Mike mentioned that he had once seen an easy way to build a privy, at a hunting camp. His design suggestion was the one that was eventually used. All that had to be done was to bury two-thirds of the length of a fifty-five-gallon drum into the ground. An oval-shape hole was then cut in its top with a cutting torch. Then the entire bottom of the barrel was also cut out. After the jagged edges were filed off, a used toilet seat was mounted with its bolts through the top of the drum. To make it a private privy, a movable wooden shed was built over the top of it.
The new outhouse had several advantages. First, it took the burden off of the house’s flush toilet septic system. Second, it would provide a valuable source of fertilizer for the flower garden that had previously been wasted. Todd soon instituted a rule that the group members would use the outhouse exclusively—except in cases of illness or when there was a certifiable blizzard blowing. This was not a popular rule, but it was heeded.
With the exception of Rose, all the group members maintained good health during the first winter at the retreat. A few of the members caught colds in the first weeks, but there were no cases of the flu or other illnesses that winter. Mary surmised that their isolation from other people was keeping them away from the infectious diseases transmitted by personal contact. All the original group members had received pneumonia vaccinations, in anticipation of eventually having a large group living in cramped quarters.
The group kept busy, even in the winter months. Since the house had an electric hot water heater—now defunct—they heated water on the woodstoves for washing dishes, laundering clothes, or bathing as a daily chore. Water for baths was hauled in kettles from the kitchen to the bathroom. Luckily, it was only a few steps away. Laundry was done twice a week in a James hand washer and wrung with a hand wringer. Mary had had the foresight to order the James washer from the Lehman’s Amish mail-order catalog. Kevin Lendel picked up the wringer at a farm auction in Clarkia, the summer before the Crunch. On the “non-laundry days,” it was a couple’s turn to have bathwater.
Saturdays were bath days for the bachelors. All of this water heating and hauling made Todd wish that he had installed hot water coils in the heating stove.
Most of the group members kept in good spirits as the winter set in. Unlike millions of their fellow Americans, they weren’t wet, cold, or hungry. Each evening before dinner, group members took turns saying a blessing. For anyone who was forgetful, it was there that they enumerated their many blessings. Only two members had any significant difficulties adjusting. One was Rose, who frequently got depressed worrying about her family, or thinking about the situation in general.