One Man's Opus: A Survival and Preparedness Story Read online

  “Bud Lowell, but everybody ‘round here calls me Sarge.”

  “Nice to meet you, Sarge,” I said, and meant it. Something about him put me at ease.

  The waitress showed up by magic and put down a coffee cup and silverware for him, then headed toward the kitchen.

  “They’ll have your food ‘n mine all set, in a sec; you might want to put your keyboard away so you don’t get it all gumped up.”

  I closed the screen on my laptop and put it on the seat next to me, but I left it plugged in. That way if I decided to head back out I could ensure it was charged. Sarge was right, no sooner had I put the laptop away, than the waitress came back out with a basket full of fresh biscuits and two large bowls of sausage gravy. She set those down, and I was about to dig in when Sarge pointed. She was headed back with two plates.

  “Your bacon will be out soon, hon.”

  “Thanks,” I told her, “this will get me started good.”

  She left again, and I had to wonder, if there were only two cars here, was it just her and the cook, now me and Sarge? My mind tended to dwell on things that shouldn’t matter, but my brain is like a fish net. Trapping everything, relevant or not.

  “So you’re a camper and a writer?” Sarge asked, pulling three biscuits out of the basket and breaking them in half, one at a time.

  I followed suit. “Yeah, I used to write for a lot of online magazines and blogs, but I’ve been selling books lately and it’s… well, it really took off for me. As far as camping goes, yeah. I used to go all over with my dad when I was little, for hunting.”

  “Ah, wrong time of year for that, unless you’re going for turkeys.”

  “No, when my dad died, I gave up hunting. Didn’t feel the same without him,” I told Sarge, surprising myself.

  “Oh, yuh. I know how that goes. Maybe someday the rest of the fun will come back into it and you’ll be ready to hunt again. At least camping is there for you to remember your dad.”

  I never thought of it like that. I was beginning to like this old coot.

  “What kind of books do you write?” he asked me.

  Okay, maybe like was too soon; he was nonstop asking questions. I scooped gravy over my biscuits before answering.

  “Well, I used to write non-fiction stuff. How-to’s. Now I write what they call paranormal romance.”

  “Is that like girls smooching on werewolves and bear shifters?”

  I had been about to take a bite but dropped my fork onto my plate. My jaw must have fell open, and the old man was laughing. I was used to having to explain to people online what I write, but I didn’t worry about telling people in real life because if you said paranormal romance their eyes glossed over if they didn’t know what you meant and just heard ‘romance’.

  “Yeah, how did you—?”

  “My wife reads them. I knew your name sounded familiar. Wait till I tell her I met you. I got her one of those Kindle things last Christmas, and she reads all kinds of stuff. Has that Netflix program for books. Something something. Can’t remember what it’s called.”

  “Kindle Unlimited—”

  “That’s it,” he said, snapping arthritic fingers together.

  I dug into my food, hoping for a chance to eat before it got cold. This guy was a talker, but more than that… this was a first for me. A fan? A real life fan? Well, husband of a fan. Still, that had never happened, and I was gobsmacked. That was when my double order of bacon was brought out. It fit between the plates and Sarge looked at the plate and then to me questioningly. I shrugged and gave him a nod, my mouth full of God’s most perfect food. Biscuits and sausage gravy.

  “It pays the bills,” I told him after a minute.

  He inhaled two slices of bacon and pushed his chair back and wiped his mouth. He worked on his breathing a minute. I started to get concerned and stood up, but he made a motion with his hands that it was okay. I waited and, when his breathing finally calmed, he leaned back in.

  “Emphysema,” he explained, “kicks up bad sometimes. Weather’s about to change. So what area you camping? This is a long way from the local places.”

  “I’m not staying at a campground. I’m doing some dispersed camping on the old logging lease near the creek.”

  “Ayuah,” he said, making ‘oh yeah’ one word, “great hunting over there. Really quiet. It’s also a bad spot to be in if there’s an accident; nobody goes back there.”

  “Yeah, I thought about that, but that’s the kind of places I like to go. I don’t really…”

  “Like people?” he asked.

  “No offense,” I said, but he was smiling and nodding with me.

  “Son, I’m the same way. I spent twenty-three years living and fighting around too many people when I was in the Army. I moved up here from Detroit,” he said it in the old way, Deeeetroit, “to get away from the hustle and bustle. Life just got too damned fast. Hurry to do this, hurry to do that. And people got so darned rude all of a sudden.”

  Huh, that pretty much fit with a lot of my feelings, though I wasn’t in the city proper. I’d never thought about it like that and couldn’t help grinning.

  “That’s it, I never really put it into words like that. I just figured I don’t like to be around a bunch of people. But yeah, I come up to places like this to recharge. Actually, this time I’m scouting places to park my motorhome. I don’t mind camping rough, but it’d be nice to find a place to park and live normal for a bit.”

  “You could rent a cabin?” Sarge offered.

  “Yeah, but I like the idea of having everything I need with me. Almost like a mobile office.”

  “So you’re looking to do dispersed camping with that goliath?”

  “Something like that,” I told him, wiping my mouth and taking a long drink of the coffee that had been cooling.

  I made a mental note to ask the waitress what kind of coffee it was, because it was divine. I took another long sip.

  “You ever look at land to build on or park it?”

  “I hadn’t really thought of it. Why?” I asked him.

  “I’m sitting on forty-two acres. I did a property split, and my son was going to build a house on it. Didn’t end up happening, so I have eight acres listed for sale. Actually, it’s been up for a while now. It’s a little landlocked.”

  “Oh?” I asked, wondering if maybe this was divine intervention.

  “Only problem with it, is that it’s by an ornery old coot who can’t get around much any more. I’d be asking $1500 an acre.”

  “Where is it at, exactly?” I asked him.

  I swear, the old man’s eyes twinkled. “You know that lumber lease you camped on?”

  I nodded.

  “I own the other side of the creek on the north end of the state land.”

  “That’s literally on the other side of where I was camping. Like, right across…”

  He laughed, “Yeah son, I figured as much. I saw the smoke from your fire pit. Figured somebody was out there kayaking downstream or some such nonsense. When I heard you was a camping it, I was wondering if I was gonna be doing any fishing.”

  “Fishing?”

  “Seeing if I could reel in a sucker,” he said, deadpan.

  I snorted. The problem was, I had been taking another sip of hot coffee and well… it didn’t feel good. Thankfully I had a stack of napkins at the table. The old man was still laughing. I did some mental math. That was $12,000 he was asking. That was a lot of cheese, but sales had been good lately. I couldn’t swing it on a month's income, but if he let me spread it over three or four months… I shook my head; what was I thinking?

  “I could give you some good terms, land contract style maybe?”

  “Call me interested,” I told him, grinning.

  I mean, I hadn’t even taken the motorhome out for the first time yet, and I was actually considering property where I could take it. Me. A property owner. Life could be weird sometimes. Was I actually considering this? After a moment, I decided I was.

  “Good, how about you come on out? I can have my Annette walk you through the area, or we could take my quad. I can’t hoof it myself any more.”

  “That sounds good, but can I think about it?” I asked him.

  “Sure. Whenever you’re ready.”

  “I’ve been gone a week or so, I need to check back into the real world a bit,” I said, realizing I needed to, especially to check my bank accounts, “but I’d love to!”

  5

  I’d taken the old man’s phone number, hastily scrawled on a napkin, before I left. That had been a week and a half ago. Apparently, writing like a fiend had motivated my editor to work on two of my stories in a row and my cover designer as well. That left me little time to organize, publish, and then outline and start a new storyline. Especially when I also spent time at the mini-storage giving Tina a belated hand on another unit and filling her in on what I was thinking. Still, I had work to do, and I was splitting my time between my apartment and the motorhome, getting used to the systems.

  In the afternoons, I would go grocery shopping. Instead of the usual camping fare, I would spend the magical hours between the lunch rush and kids getting out of school perusing the food aisles. I was amazed at the different kinds of food that could be bought that I had previously walked by. For example, in the international foods aisle, spices could be bought by weight and not by the bottle. Often times this was at less than half the price. Rice in burlap bags was also priced pennies to the dollar compared to the prepackaged smaller bags.

  Slowly, I bought in bulk, and was going through the bag section looking for something long term when I had a thought. A lot of the preppers were talking about storing in buckets or burlap. I couldn’t see storing more than a few buckets at a time, especially when it was for long-term
camping. That rabbit hole led me to think about the riots and how long they’d lasted in Baltimore, and now they’d spread to other areas of the country. I headed over to the paint section of the store and started looking there, knowing if I went this route I would need to figure out how to seal Mylar bags, or get a gamma lid for these buckets, or a combination of both.

  Food grade, non-food grade? I gave up and went to check out.

  That’s how a lot of my days went, and I just unloaded things into the motorhome on the days I wrote there. Almost hopefully, I checked my bank accounts and researched building permits for the area where Sarge lived. After getting another story published, I picked up the phone one day and gave him a call.

  “Rick!”

  “Hey, Sarge,” I said, wondering if his caller ID had my phone number displayed.

  “Was just talking to the wife about ya. Was wondering if you’d be able to make it up here this coming Friday?”

  “Sure,” I said, remembering it was a Wednesday. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m getting some old growth logged out. They’re offering me enough to pay the taxes on my 32 acres for a long while. I figured if you were interested, maybe while they’ve got the heavy equipment out at my place, you could get an area thinned out for yourself.”

  “Hey, that sounds fantastic. I still haven’t seen it yet, though.”

  “Oh I know that, son, I just have to get you out here and once you see it… Hook, line… sinker,” he cackled.

  I grinned myself. “Sure, what time?”

  “Oh, anytime after about 10am.”

  “Sounds good, Sarge.”

  “Bring your checkbook!”

  I grinned and agreed and hung up. If I was going up north, I was going to have to make sure I was ready. I just needed a couple of sets of clothes to run through the washer and dryer, and I’d be all set.

  My Thursday night found me scratching Opus’s scruff when I wasn’t lugging boxes to the dumpster. Tina and I were working on another unit. It made me wonder if she had any actual paying units, because so far, it seemed like of the two hundred some odd units, we were averaging two to three units a month since I’d started helping her. Still, I was sort of enjoying it. Part of me felt like a voyeur, going through people's abandoned belongings. This unit was pretty much a bust, though, just old living room furniture and extremely old clothing.

  “So you head out tomorrow?” Tina asked.

  “Yeah, I’m going to go check things out.”

  “You haven’t even overnighted in the motorhome. What if you don’t like it?”

  “I’ve worked in it during the day. It’ll be more like… glorious camping.”

  “Glammer camping,” she said with a grin.

  “Glamping,” I agreed, “but… the idea of having my own spot in the middle of nowhere is kind of enticing, even if I don’t use the motorhome. Plus, it’s got a lot of frontage on the creek.”

  “What’s that mean?” she asked, sweat fogging her glasses.

  “Two hundred and fifty feet of creek frontage. It’s sort of the back of Bud’s property line.”

  “That’s Sarge, the old man?”

  “Yeah,” I told her.

  “You didn’t tell me that before, heck that’s a good deal. I heard $1500 an acre up there is good, but if he’s offering you that plus water frontage it’s…”

  “A good deal. Part of the reason is that it’s landlocked by his property, but he’s going to sign an easement to use his driveway if I want it. I’ll be about the other corner of the property from his house once I get on the land, so it will be like living on my own.”

  “Sounds like you got this all figured out,” she said, brushing her hands on the side of her jeans.

  Opus chuffed and walked over, shoving his head under my left hand then pushing up. I got the hint and started petting him again, looking to see that we were basically done. It still had to be swept out, but we had finished.

  “So far,” I agreed. “Hey, you been to that new burger joint? I keep meaning to go there, but I thought it was a takeout spot and it isn’t. I don’t want to be a doofus and go in there by myself…”

  “Sure, let me get cleaned up!”

  I could hear chainsaws in the background. Trees were falling, and some of Mr. Lowell’s grass had been smashed flat by a bulldozer. They had used that to push aside the brush to let the work crews get in there for easier access. Middle-upper Michigan’s woods were often dense with scrub, a brush layer that was so thick you had to walk game trails or almost go through on your hands and knees.

  “So you took her on a date?” Lowell asked me.

  “It really wasn’t a date. We just had ourselves a burger and talked.”

  “What’s she do for a living?” he asked.

  “She owns a mini-storage. It’s where I’ve got my motorhome parked.

  “Ayeah,” he said, and spit.

  He was holding onto the handle of his mobile oxygen machine.

  “Want to get the quad and take me for a lift out to the split section I want to sell ya?”

  “Sure,” I said and followed him into the garage.

  What he had in there made me grin. I’d ridden plenty of quads over the years, but this one just made sense for the old man and this area. It was an older Honda 4-Trax, a four-wheel-drive, with an automatic transmission and it was a workhorse, not a tear up the mounds, go fast, people killer. It was meant to get people across rough terrain, and it had plenty of room to seat two, plus a storage rack on the back.

  “I hauled many a deer out of these here woods on this beast. She’s gonna outlast me,” he said, coughing.

  “You okay?”

  “Sure, just a cold. Annette gave it to me. I think she was cavorting with the knitting club a bit much and gave her ill-gotten gains to me.”

  Grinning, I got on the Honda and Sarge got on behind me. I started it and backed out of the garage before shifting it into forward gear. He pointed and directed me down a trail almost big enough for a car to traverse. It was probably made and maintained by a tractor or a quad-pulled mower, but the canopy of trees overhead was beautiful. He tapped me on the shoulder and pointed after about ten minutes of the trail and I slowed down. A set of white markers had been nailed into trees on either side.

  “Start of the property line,” he said and then pointed.

  He knew I wanted to see the water, and he’d assured me that, although it was a little overgrown, he’d spent time clearing the creekside out some for his son. I wanted to ask why his son had backed out, but something told me that it was a story he’d tell me when he was good and ready. Once I was on the trail, it was less than a minute before the brush thinned out and the trail ended. I rolled to a stop and turned it off.

  “This is where we figured Mike was gonna build. Didn't cut any trees down, just worked on the brush here and there before my breathing got bad. Go on that way, just over that little rise, the creek is on the bottom side of that there ridge.”

  I knew what he meant, and I got off. I took a few steps, and he made a shooing motion. He’d be waiting for me on the quad. I walked toward a small hill, and when I got to it I stopped. This side of the creek was much higher than the area where I’d camped. While it wasn’t directly across from my exact spot, I recognized the land on the other side. I was standing exactly where I would have chosen to camp. High enough to not have to worry about a seasonal flood, with a great view, and even with some old growth choking out smaller trees, there was sunlight breaking through the top canopy.

  I found what I wanted. Now… to dicker.

  If there’s an art to making a deal, I lost it as soon as we headed back to the house. There were two sweaty workmen and a dozer waiting on the gravel driveway near his garage. I parked the quad and waited for Sarge to take the lead.

  “Hey, Uncle Bud,” the larger of the two men started, both were wearing yellow shirts with a reflective vest and hard hats, “we’ve got the big ones down. In another hour or so, we’ll have the crane trucks drag out the logs. Boss says he’ll cut you a check soon.”

  “Good, good. Hey, Steve, this here’s Rick. He’s a writer fella who’s gonna be buying my boy’s eight acres. I need you to run your bulldozer and maybe do some more clearing for me.”