Post-Apocalypse Dead Letter Office (15 page)

To: Thom Whitesall, Broadview Hotel, Wichita, KS

From: Dick Wesley, Hotel Fort Des Moines, Des Moines, IA

May 4th, 20+4

Tommy-

Greetings from the Hotel Fort Des Moines.

I was thinking about you the other day. I really appreciated your support when I was working through my Hotel Management program and thought maybe I could return the favor with an idea. I can honestly say, though, that that program never really prepared me – or probably you, for that matter – for what happened the other year.

The year after the lights went off, we had a couple riots here in town: the big one at the capitol and a way smaller one a month or so prior. It wasn’t even remotely a surprise. No electricity, no gasoline. It was a wonder to me that thousands more didn’t die that winter. Well, of course, once the weather got hot in June, people started getting really pissed off and it wasn’t too long before they stormed the steps. I don’t know what they expected to accomplish. Frustration’s understandable. Nobody could plant corn or soybeans – en masse, anyway. Couldn’t water them even if you did plant them. You couldn’t get around without having to walk or ride a bike or, if you were really lucky, ride a horse. Couldn’t take a shit inside because the plumbing didn’t work. Couldn’t eat enough to make you have to shit, anyway. Not like the state folks hadn’t tried everything they could. What little news we got from DC, Minneapolis and elsewhere indicated that it wasn’t just a Des Moines or an Iowa problem, but that it was everywhere. Now how is the state government going to fix things that the eggheads the feds have at their disposal can’t even figure out?

Sorry, I just get irked about it. Frustrated at the frustration, even though I never was a real patient person. I guess I was more than a little peeved about life in general that summer, too. Since none of the guests could effectively leave town once everything stopped working, we turned into a kind of halfway house for them. I guess some did leave, and I hope they got where they were going. But most stayed at the hotel. Yeah, non-paying guests staying in your hotel while you can’t really pay your workers. It was stressful, although quite a few of the guests are now pretty much working tenants. (Also, I can say that I’m glad the previous management never removed the fireplace out of the lobby. It’s saved dozens of lives these last few years.)

Well, so a couple hundred people stormed the capitol mid-day. It was the third week of June. June 18th, a Tuesday. And there was no one there to stop them. A couple weeks prior a smaller mob had taken over a Wal-Mart, carted off basically everything they could get away with and beaten the lone security guard there to within an inch of his life. So, there was a feeling that worse things were on the way. But the Guard, the Highway Patrol, sherriffs and police had no way to communicate with each other, no way to get around other than the options everyone else had. They didn’t even have any bullets to fire had they known to be there AND been there when things got really out of hand at the capitol. And they did. A couple dozen congresspeople got pretty much hacked to pieces, ten raped beforehand, and then the idiots gutted the capitol building with fire. Twenty more died in the blaze.

Meanwhile, the mob just dissipated. Nobody tried to stop them. Nobody ever got called on it or brought to justice.

The Des Moines Disgrace.

The only fortunate thing about the whole mess was that the capitol building is pretty well isolated from other buildings nearby and so the fire didn’t spread. The entire city could have gone up, what with no functional fire department. What was left of the government scrambled to get a hold of themselves, and reconvened outside City Hall a week later. By that time most everybody else had gotten completely fed up and there were almost three thousand people there. State, city and county law enforcement finally got somewhat organized and showed up, too, even though half of them were out of uniform. I was there, and the whole scene was hair-raising to me. The Congress took roll call, and called out each missing member twice. Once the roll had been taken, they got down to business. They met for all of thirty minutes, then dissolved. Nobody really knew what was going on until the congresspeople started filtering into the crowd. Groups formed up around them, just pretty naturally. Everyone listened to what each member had to say. I wasn’t there, but it all filtered down to me quick enough. The gist was that folks were told that the lights weren’t coming back on, the sugar water wouldn’t turn itself back into gasoline or diesel, the Wal-Marts weren’t going to fill up again with cheap food and clothing, and that this sucked but, regardless, the outcome of the situation was ultimately up to them. Some folks thought they were being patronized and so they left, but the majority stuck around and started talking about how to improve things.

Shit, I’ve already rambled on too long about this. Here’s the upshot. Folks got organized and started working instead of bitching. All our park space downtown and all along the river, for that matter, is now a community farm and orchard. The first year it was corn and soybeans, because that’s all anyone really had seed for. But vegetable seeds made it around the next year, so the locals actually started raising something halfway tasty to eat.

We’ve gotten in on the act. There’s a huge pool here at the hotel, but after the power went out we drained it as best we could to keep the whole thing from stagnating. Well I’d like to say that this was my idea, but the Embassy Suites thought of it first and we copped it from them. Anyway, the fire department set us up with a couple manual pumps. We seined what seemed like a few thousand hatchlings out of the river, pumped some fresh water into the pool and dumped them in, and started feeding them surplus corn. So we raise catfish. Channel cat. They seem to do best given the size limitations of the pool. I’d ask if you’ve ever eaten it, but you grew up in Missouri, so you had to have, right? I was never really a big fan of it – muddy tasting – but now it’s on my dinner table at least twice a week. So, I’ve gotten pretty used to it. We use what we don’t eat to barter for firewood, filtered water, veggies, etc. Don’t know how things are down in Wichita, but I thought you might like to know that this is being done and maybe give it a shot.

It’s difficult work, and the whole place can get pretty damned smelly. Fortunately, the pool area doors seal well. The main thing, aside from feeding and harvesting the fish, is keeping the pumps active to get the waste out and fresh water in. It’s a pain, and it’s dirty. But it’s a job everyone does every now and then. Even me. I’m just thankful that the tenants are pitching in.

Life is still hard here. We had another bad winter two years ago. My daughter, Eileen, died of the flu that January. Things got so bad between my wife and I after that, so pointless everything seemed, that sometimes I wished the whole town... Sorry. There’s not much else to say except that I hope you and yours are well. Take care.

- Dick Wesley

P.S. - Almost forgot. Congress moved back into the capitol building later that year, but they’re still renovating the building even today. I don’t know if you ever made it up to Des Moines, but the capitol building was a beaut, with a shiny gold-hued dome atop it. Now the dome’s tarnished. It’s been left that way. For the best, I think.

To: The Maxwell Family, Warrensburg, MO

From: Roger and Megan Dickson, Wenatchee, WA

March 31, 20+4

Dear Jeff,

Hello from the big W.

The three sisters garden/farm idea didn’t take off last year as we’d hoped. The beans and peas did pretty well – you may never have liked them, but we ate a ton of edamame last summer and had a whole bunch of beans and split peas dried for using over the winter. They turned out to be our saving grace. The corn didn’t do so hot – maybe we hadn’t planted it in the right way, or too far away from the other two to benefit from the root nutrient interactions. Roger thinks that, whatever the other problems, we overplanted the corn, and he’s very probably right about that. The squash almost all crapped out on us. We think there was some kind of parasite, but without any real way to properly test things we’ll just have to wonder. We’re pretty sure it wasn’t fungal, as you can see and readily identify that. Anyway, we saved the seeds of those few squash that did live through the summer and torched the fields and brush last fall, hoping that fire would get rid of whatever the problem was. Dirty work.

So yeah, last winter was pretty lean. We had split pea soup pretty much every day from late November through mid-March. It’s good stuff, and we were able to mooch / trade beans for some beef and ham bones and bacon from various neighbors to give it a little more richness. But four months of one type of soup accompanied by some cornbread is more than a little monotonous. Guess I shouldn’t bitch – others elsewhere have been through so much worse. We did have a nice crop of apples from the trees surrounding the house, too – but don’t we always? – so there was a bit of sweetness to be had. The Jonathans turned out especially well, this year, and we ate them quick as we could – they don’t keep for anything, but we’d learned that long long ago. Cider, too! Our “neighborhood” had a big community pressing and we came away with almost ten gallons of the stuff. Fermented virtually all of it, because, man, it’s nice to have that keeping you warm through the cold months.

I guess, in light of the fact that we had cider, things weren’t too bad at all. We holed up in early December. Roger had laid up a good supply of wood, played banjo and tinkered with the bikes and I cooked the soup and baked and mended clothes and fumbled around on the piano. And we both slept a lot, and tripped out a bit (but I’ll get to that). The weather was cold, but not overly so. Less snow than usual, but other than that, a pretty typical winter.

We haven’t given up on the three sisters farm idea, though. We’re hoping the plants that grow from the seeds we saved will also have some resistance to whatever the problem was. Roger’s been hanging out with some of the older farmers at the co-op, drinking some horrible coffee mixed with dandelion roots and talking shop. He got some ideas about rejiggering the size of the crop clusters, so hopefully our yield will improve this year.

Here’s some of the best news, one of the things I really wanted to write to you about. We’ve got morels! YEE HAW! I’d really like to say we planned it, but you know the deal with morels. There’s just no telling when or where they’re going to show up. Well, so we were out surveying things just a couple weeks ago, trying to plot where each crop cluster would go. I was sketching the layout of the field, spacing and such, when I heard Roger start cackling. Well, you know Roger’s quick to laugh, so I didn’t make much of it. But he walked around behind me, held my head between his hands and shifted my gaze up. I’d never seen so many morels in one place. It was the mother lode.

We knew we’d never be able to gather them all, so we biked all around to the different farms quick as we could and rounded people up. We had seven families come out to help with the picking. All told, we brought in over 250 pounds of morels! (We left quite a few in the field, in the hopes that they’ll come back next year.) We took the lion’s share, of course, but everyone else left more than satisfied with a couple dozen pounds of mushrooms to each family. We probably could have kept more and still had people go away happy, but those other folks had been so decent to us over the winter it felt like we should return the favor.

So now we’re up to our eyeballs in morels. Roger has set up a few old, salvaged screen windows and is trying to dry most of them that way. I’ve been breading them in corn meal and a little salt and pepper and frying them in leftover bacon fat. Good god, they’re just amazing. Roger almost ate himself sick on them the other day. We’ve even been adding them to our soup – they make it a lot better, but I feel like the mushrooms should be on their own.

We’re reasonably certain it was last fall’s burn off that sprung them. I’ve been reading up a bit on them lately and a good scorching seems to be a fairly common precursor to a big fruiting. I don’t think we ought to burn again this fall – I’m afraid we might damage the mycelia. But, we’re encouraging all our other neighbors to burn, staggering them year to year. It’s doubtful we’ll get mother lode type fruitings, but hopefully we can get decent ones regularly, as heading out to pick wild morels is such a pain in the ass. (Not nearly as dangerous as it used to be, though.)

We’ve also been gathering and using some psychedelics. As the squash failed last year, I took to helping out at Rob and Heather Montgomery’s farm. There’s not a whole lot one can do when a crop just sputters like that, so I figured I’d make myself productive. By mid-November, after all our harvest tasks had been accomplished, I was working almost full time out there. Feeding and watering the cattle, general maintenance, stuff like that. (Built up some goodwill for us, which made mooching bones and a little bit of meat from them over the winter that much easier.) Anyway, I was out in their pasture to load up the cow patties. Most of them that I saw had clusters of little brown mushrooms poking up out of them. I picked them out and kept them separate from the dung, and asked Rob whether I could keep them. He eyed me for a few seconds, then laughed and said to just be careful, as he knew for a fact that they were pretty potent. Ended up with almost two pounds of them, dry weight! I took a few ounces back to Rob; he was happy to have them. And he was right, they’re phenomenal. It made me want to tie dye things again, but without a good source of dye we’re probably out of luck. They’re psilocybe cubensis, according to the couple guides we consulted (and we did consult them before consuming the shrooms).