I mentioned over in the Dreams thread that I often day dream about my life post-collapse. I use it as a kind of decompression technique to escape the thoughts of my over-civilized job and to imagine myself, my friends, my landscape and how we will all work together after the collapse.
When I lived in NYC, my daydreams mostly consisted of trying to get out of the city to make my way back to Arkansas to be with my family.
Now that I’m back in Arkansas for real, I often day dream about places that I see around me (often that I scope out) where my tribe can hunt or fish or find other resources to use and interact with.
The other night, I thought about some of my good friends who are still down in Arkadelphia where I went to school. Most of my college friends are up in Fayetteville (NW Arkansas) where I live now. But one family with a new baby and my sister are still down there.
It was easy enough to imagine my son (about 8 or 9 in my day dream) and I heading down through the Ozark and Ouachita mountains to get to Arkadelphia. It would be a long journey, but there would be plenty of foraging on the way.
Once we got there, though, and found the friends and family alive (barely–in my day dreams, everyone who hasn’t made a tribe yet is always gaunt and skeletal) my son and I realized that we were going to have a hard time getting everyone back to Fayetteville. Moreover, we found lots of items that we wished we could take back to Fayetteville with us but that would be too ridiculous to try to carry. I didn’t imagine any details about these items, or if I did, I don’t remember now. It was just a stack of nondescript “things” that we though would be cool to take back with us.
So my son and I set out to get some food for our new little sub tribe. We got everyone to put some meat back on their bones, and then were ready to head back before the summer ended.
My sister has had knee and ankle problems (in real life) and would have a difficult time hiking that (or any) distance. She has a real affinity for horses, however, so she suggested that we ride back to Fayetteville.
My son and I loved the idea. We even thought we could make some travoises to carry the supplies we wanted to take. But the friends weren’t so excited about it–what with their baby and their fear of the horses (Note: in real life, their daughter and my son are only a few months apart, but for some reason, their daughter hadn’t aged any in my day dream.)
Then my sister had another brilliant idea: a wagon. Lots of local farmers and ranchers had “hay wagons” that used modern tires and axles but were pulled by horses. I don’t know if these are some kind of novelty (they usually have an orange, reflective triangle on the back to make them “street legal”) or if they serve some kind of benefit. We don’t have any Amish around these parts, and I don’t think the local Baptists and Church of Christ are that luddish.
So, now we had ideas for getting everyone and everything back up to Fayetteville. We found some horses that hadn’t gone very feral. They still remembered what it was like to be ridden. Perhaps their owners had only recently passed away–as the tack in the barn where they hung about was still in good repair. We also found one of those buggies that we needed.
Then we realize that the horses were not shod and that if we tried to drive them on the roads, they would end up with spilt hooves. I have no blacksmithing skills–much less any shoeing skills, so I though my dream was about to end.
Then I remembered Thomas Elpel’s sandals. He got tired of his moccasins wearing out, so he made some outer sandals out of tires and wore them over his moccasins. I also thought about the donkey basketball games they used to have at our high school and how the donkeys hooves were covered in some kind of rubber slipper to enable them to walk on the basketball court (or, more likely to protect the court).
So we found some old tires and made some sandals for our horses. We got home a lot faster, being able to carry lots of potable water and meat with us as we went. My sister was in heaven at having horses to care for, and they relished her attention to them.
Problems:
As I typed this I thought of several issues that I hadn’t realized as I daydreamed it:
- How would we cross the Arkansas river (which runs diagonally through the state)? I checked the map, and the town of Ozark has a bridge across the river. So as long as the bridge held out, we would be alright. Although, with the lack of repair after the collapse, what would happen with all the locks and dams and bridges on the river?
- Those buggies have modern tires on them. Surely they would have either rotted or at least gone flat. How would you pump up a tire without an electric compressor? Would we be able to find a compressor or tank that had enough pressure left in it after all that time? If not, could we make some kind of crank to drive the compressing motor manually? Those things make a hell of a racket and seem pretty heavy duty, so I bet it takes a shit-load of power to compact a bunch of atmosphere into a metal tank or rubber tire.
- How could we harness the horses to the buggy if there hadn’t been any usable tack around?
I think if I were really in the situation I described, my sister could have ridden a horse and we could have used travoises to pull our “supplies”. Also, it seems really unlikely that there would have been anything that we really needed badly enough to haul that far. Quantities of meat and water would be nice to carry on hand to eliminate the need to stop and hunt or stop and find/filter/purify water on the trip. But other than that, what the hell would be worth it that we couldn’t put on our backs or in saddle bags?