09141 Old Ways, New Ways

Mid February, Year 1 of the New Future 13 months past the first days of the Change.

It is a cold winter morning in Kansas City. We get up with the sunrise. Everybody climbs out from under layers of blankets and quilts, already dressed warmly (flannel shirts and sweats). We put on our pants and shoes. As the sun rises, we open the curtains and insulated interior shutters on the east-facing windows to let in light and warmth.

Breakfast comes out of a hot-pot packed the night before. Last night, a small propane stove converted to run on methane gas brought breakfast to a boil in a cast-iron Dutch oven. When boiling, we put the pot into a box lined with aluminum foil and insulated with grass and straw harvested during the summer, where it slowly steamed overnight. It's a tasty breakfast — oats and raisins and dried apples, all grown and harvested in the summer, served with a thick Greek yogurt. We trade with a farmer for the oats, apples from our back yard and raisins from up the street. Besides our porridge we feasted on slices of home-baked sour dough whole wheat bread brushed with real butter (from the neighborhood dairy cooperative, which is the source of the Greek yogurt), toasted on a cast iron skillet on the methane stove. Yesterday breakfast was biscuits and gravy. We baked the bread and biscuits in a woodburning brick oven we built in our back yard.

After breakfast, Jennifer starts the day's batch of bread dough while James, David, Sean, and Nick go to work in the greenhouse. The greenhouse began as an improvised plastic cover on the back deck. Now sunlight streams in through windows salvaged from ruined houses. It has a pleasant homemade look about it, with several different sizes and kinds of windows patched together to fill the wall spaces. Nobody in the house had ever built a greenhouse before, but hunger is a good teacher. It is really amazing how fast you can learn stuff when the pressure is on. There were times in the past few months that the learning curve seemed almost miraculous. It needed to be.

My name is James. When the shit hit the fan, and the old system of doing things crumbled, I was a convenience store clerk in Kansas City, Missouri.

Several of us hourly wage slaves rented an old two story house with a full basement on a hillside street that ran into Truman just east of Hardesty close to the St. Paul School of Theology. We played a bit at being anarchists. We would sit around, drink and smoke and talk about what might happen if civilization collapsed. For all our talk, we were as surprised as anyone when the flying feces hit the ventilation devices. We were as unready as everyone else. You hear about people who had big stashes of food and tools and stuff like that. Not us. We were not Mormons and we didn’t know any.

But we learned quickly. Everyone did. Those who didn’t, died. There was not much margin for error.

We built a greenhouse because one of the local churches had a class about how to do it and why we should. When we heard “heat for the house” and “food to eat” we were ready to get started. We had little to eat and no heat, so what was not to like about this greenhouse schtick?

We were hungry. We were cold. The church people gave us seeds for radishes and greens and said come back when they are growing and we will explain how to get seed from the plants so you can plant more. We went home and got to work.

Our house was on a hillside, two stories with a full basement. The basement opened out onto the back yard, the first floor of the house, ground level in front, opened out to a deck in back. There was a long room facing south on the 2nd floor. We took the siding and inside sheetrock off the south walls of that second floor room. We nailed window frames over the inside and outside of the now naked frame of the south wall. Some of the windows we put in we fixed so they would open or shut, to allow for ventilation as needed. It looks way amateurish, but it makes for an extremely sunny place which was exactly what we wanted. Putting it together was labor intensive, which was fine because labor and time we had. We grew radishes, lettuces, and onions at first.

We got the windows from abandoned houses in the neighborhood. This area did not lack for abandoned houses, even before things collapsed. That was why we were here, rent was cheap. We didn’t ask our landlord for permission. He lived in another state and we mailed him money orders for the rent. Since the phones and the internet and the mail weren’t working, we just did what had to be done. If he comes by and complains, we will throw lettuce at him and feed him ham steak sandwiches on sourdough bread with homemade mayo and our own pickles. I bet he takes the food and is glad for it.

There was an illegal dump just behind our house. It turned out to be a gold mine. We found a bunch of clear plastic and some miscellaneous lumber there which we used to put up a framework on the first floor back deck which we covered with plastic. It worked for us that first winter as a “low mass solar sunspace heater.” At first we couldn’t use it for growing anything because without a real roof or east/west walls, it got too cold in there at night. Now that first floor deck greenhouse extends all across the south face of the house and has been enclosed and roofed, we grow lots of stuff.

As we ease from winter into the second spring of the Change, the two levels of our green house grow salad crops and starts for the early spring garden (onions, peppers, cabbage, broccoli, and tomatoes, mostly). The vegetable plant starts are in trays, the salad crops are in columns made from chicken wire and burlap. We had herbs and a few specialty items, like the little cinnamon tree and the miniature orange tree that yielded tart little oranges and a miniature lemon tree. Bob — we used to call him “he who likes house plants” — had seen them advertised in the back of a Sunday supplement in the newspaper, and ordered them just for kicks. Everyone wishes he had bought more edible plants. As I said, we weren’t prepared for anything that happened. Even so we are still here! We aren’t hungry any more and we weren’t cold this past winter, well, as long as we stayed inside. It was plenty cold outside.

We lined the back walls and floor of the greenhouses with concrete blocks and bricks (all salvaged) which, together with barrels of water painted black, act as heat sinks during the day and heat radiators at night. Also at night, we put covers made from blankets and quilts and insulated interior shutters over all of the glazing. A small propane heater converted to run on methane gas is available for the really cold nights. Our final line of defense is an alcohol stove. We hate using the methane and alcohol though, because they are scarce and valuable, but we’d hate losing the greenhouse crops even more.

Why don’t we use wood, you ask? Well, we are in a city. There isn’t enough wood to go around. Everyone wants wood. There’s a lot of concern about deforestation, so once we made it through the first scary winter, everyone worked hard to minimize our use of wood as fuel. Our only wood use is for the brick oven in the back. We’ve bought a couple of coppiced trees in a woodlot two blocks from here, although it will be a year or so before we can start harvesting the wood poles. Eventually though we will have a sustainable source for wood for our brick oven.

About three hours into the morning, the water cooperative truck comes by. The Kansas City Water Cooperative is a joint venture of people in neighborhoods and the former employees and management of the city’s old water department. Each household provides five hours of labor per week, plus 20 Neighborhood Bucks and we receive water delivery twice a week. We get 2,000 gallons/month for our household of six people.

Everyone is a “water conservative” as we say these days. Yes, we get our showers but we heat the water with the sun and we are quick to wash and rinse. We painted our old hot water heater black, and put it on a platform beside the back deck. The book we read on the subject called this a “bread box” configuration — it laid on its side, with a slanted piece of glazing on top, which was an old glass storm door we salvaged from a ruined house. We built a box, put glazing on one side, painted the tank black, lined the interior of the box with aluminum foil. It’s hooked to a shower in the basement. For washing dishes in the kitchen on the first floor, we put out buckets we painted black, which heats five gallons reasonably quickly on a sunny day, even in the winter. The church people had a class about that too. None of us were religious, but we sure went to church a lot once they started those classes about how to live now that civilization collapsed.

In our particular case, everybody uses the shower in the basement, as besides the fact that our hot water tank is on the first floor, we built our water tank (out of cement) on the main floor, so we get good pressure is the basement.

We only buy purified water for drinking, cooking, washing dishes, and showers. Any water we use in our garden comes from our water harvesting system, which has two parts. Part the first is a series of earthworks to capture, slow down, and spread out the rain and water runoff entering our yard.

As we learned in another class at one of the neighborhood churches, we started at the highest point and dug a series of ditches and built raised beds. We designed them such that when one ditch and basin filled, the runoff flowed into the next lower, and so on all the way to the lowest part of our property in the back yard. The guy teaching the class said that these were swales, which seemed to us to be a rather fancy word for what amounted to a ditch. We like our ditches in our yard that catch water. It’s really nifty to watch how it works from the top floor of our house when it rains. You can see the water fill up the top ditches and then flow down a little to the next rank and on down the slope and around the house and into the back yard. It has to rain a lot for any water to escape out of the backyard spill-away we made. You bet we got great ditches on Oakley Street.

Our house already had gutters. They used to just empty into the yard. Now they empty into cisterns we built from chicken wire, rebar, and ferrocement. That was another class at a church. We had to buy cement and we did that by trading our labor. The cisterns were worth the expense and labor because the gardens need the water and we need the garden food. Also our fish need extra water but I will say more about that later. Plus they are pretty. They looked like large jugs. Someone traded us some paint for some work: we painted them in a somewhat gaudy fashion.

The water cooperative truck runs on soybean oil, which they get from farmers, trading them either Neighborhood Bucks or barter certificates or other items of value traded to them for water. In the days before the system crashed, the truck had run on diesel. It smells a lot better now, sort of like baking bread.

Tomorrow is one of the two weekly neighborhood market days. Everybody is busy working on whatever it is they plan to market. Jennifer, Nick, and Sarah prepare packets of dried herbs, while Bob and James look over the salad crop to see what is available and ready that we won’t eat and thus can be sold at the market. The Truman Street Market is in the parking lot of a former grocery store, now (literally) a ghost of its previous self. Like many corporate owned properties, its owners abandoned it. Some people in the area homesteaded the property, and organized market days for the neighborhood. A sociology professor I ran into at the market said it was an example of “spontaneous order at work.”

If you didn't mind a bit of walking, or had some silver or something to trade for a ride, there was a market every day of the week within a couple miles of the house. With transportation being the way that it was, going five miles was something to think about. It was either ten miles worth of walking (five there, five back, half a day's work easy), or alcohol or methane fuel and wear and tear on a vehicle. Most people walked, as there were other more important uses for methane and alcohol fuel.

Everything we needed was right here in the neighborhood anyway. No one had to drive 30 miles to a Home Depot (that 60 mile round trip would be a two or three day round trip walking journey now!) We have bars and theaters — little restaurants with different kinds of music, storytellers, public and private libraries, it's kind of amazing really, when you think about this area being such a slum in the old days, with stores that had bars on their windows and bullet proof glass, and those stores being few and far between anyway. Now people live in the back or second floor of their house and run a coffee shop in their living room, with jazz on Mondays and Wednesdays, blues on Tuesdays and Thursdays, reggae on Friday, rock on Saturday and gospel on Sunday, seven days, seven different artists or musical ensembles. Live music is a lot more pervasive these days, especially since most people are out of batteries.

The Greenhouse, Continued

I should tell you more about our greenhouse.

In the summer of Year 0 (the first year of the Great Change), we extended our deck across the entire south-facing back of the house. For materials, we harvested six tall metal utility polls that were in the alley behind our house. We rented an acetylene cutting torch and cut them down just as if they were big trees. Then we cut them so that we had eight sturdy pillars the height we needed plus crossbeams.

This was a major turning point for us and our entire street. We debated doing this for a couple of weeks and we decided that since there was no news about any return of electricity or phone service, we would just take them and use them. We harvested quite a bit of the cable strung on the lines. None of us are construction workers or engineers or architects, so we over-engineered everything, relying on brute force and not worrying too much about elegance of appearance. Not knowing how to calculate how much load a wall could or should bear, we relied on common sense and trial and error. We only collapsed the floor once. When that happened, we went and got another pole for that spot.

Having expanded the deck on either side of the existing deck, we built insulated walls on the west and east and an insulated roof on top. We used salvaged windows floor to ceiling for the south wall. Most all the materials came from abandoned houses. In those days there were a lot of those, including one right next door to us which we knew was owned by an absentee landlord who lived on the west coast. The house had been empty for years. All the wiring was gone; the windows were intact as were the doors. We ended up practically dismantling the entire house and either using it or selling it and now we garden that empty lot. As we learned, an abandoned house has a lot of useful resources — wood from the frame, windows, doors, nails, bricks, chunks of concrete.

On the ground floor below the kitchen, there was a room in the basement with a door that opened to the outside. We converted this room to our waste processing and energy generating center, and expanded it by turning the space below the deck into another room. We used cob construction for the non-load bearing walls for that addition. This involved mud and stones and a little bit of scavenged cement mixed in with the mud. This area contains the biogas methane digester that we built in the summer.

Our only household toilet is in the back deck greenhouse. The toilet simply empties into a bucket in the room below. After using the toilet, we drop a little crushed dry material down the chute (shredded leaves, straw, sawdust, whatever we have.) On a scheduled household rotation, we empty the bucket into the digester. We have a continuous process digester which means we add stuff and it produces gas. Later this year, we will clean out the sludge. We’re not looking forward to that, but it will be a doable job and in the meantime, we need the methane. The sludge goes into the compost, and we’ll watch and maintain that so it gets hot and kills any pathogens in the sludge.

We would like to rig something up to automatically empty the toilet into the digester. That requires plumbing! We will negotiate with one of the plumbing contractors who comes to the Truman Market for the work. The south wall of the digester room is mostly glass which helps keep the digester warm during the winter. We cover the windows at night during the winter with insulated shutters.

We could build a wood stove out of bricks, but wood is hard to get. While that wasn’t true in the old days, now everybody wants wood. It seems to us that it is too valuable to burn, except of course for baking bread and pizza and biscuits.

As for other trash, well, we don't have any. Paper is way too precious to throw away (I'm writing this story on the backs of pages of information I printed in the old days with my computer printer), and the same is true for tin cans, lids, plastic containers, bottles, all the other usual American trash. We use and reuse everything until it can't be used anymore and then we still save it because you never know what you will need in the future and what possible use it might have. Even the illegal trash dump in the wooded area behind our house was useful, as we found all kinds of handy stuff in there (especially tires, cans, and bottles, all of which have many uses in this new world.)

You might be asking, how do we get all of this work done? We now have eight adults and three kids in our household, and everybody works at something. It's not that we don't have time off — we do — but some things have to happen several times every day and attention has to be paid to details. Otherwise, we lose an entire digester of methane, or a batch of sprouts, or a gallon of alcohol, and we can't afford losses like this. Bread has to be baked every day. Food has to be cooked every day.

But you're right, there's no way that one or two people could keep an operation like this running. Around here, nobody lives alone anymore and few people live as single couples in a dwelling. The few one and two person households link with others in community arrangements with their neighbors, or they wouldn't be able to survive. This is one reason there is so much raw material available for harvesting. In the first place, a lot of people left the cities, especially the suburbs in the early phases of the collapse. They had family or friends elsewhere and that’s where they went to ride out the situation. They aren’t coming back. In the second place, all this living alone and as single couples by themselves has passed from the scene because of the logistics of our new ways. In the third place, a lot of people died. The medically fragile. The elderly without family. People dependent upon medical technology. Criminals, thieves, and fools thought they could make crime pay forgot that this being Kansas City, everyone had guns. So many of the targeted victims shot back that the criminal population was greatly reduced in the first weeks of the Change. So there is lots of surplus housing available for deconstruction and repurposing.

Surprisingly, apartment buildings are still in use, although most of them were initially abandoned. As we developed better ways and became more experienced in what we were doing, people began to rework apartment buildings to make them practical for the modern situation.

Our diverse energy operations are interdependent. We distill alcohol fuel (we traded our mechanic some food and labor in the late spring to convert our old pickup carburetor to run on alcohol). We make and use methane gas (mostly for cooking). We heat water with the sun. We walk, fetch, and carry a lot. We only use the truck if we have to haul something or if there is a dire emergency that requires carrying wounded, sick, or injured people to medical care. Anything else, we walk.

All of our organic waste goes to one of four places: methane digester, compost pile, alcohol mash, or the livestock (pigs, cats, dogs, chickens, fish). We never have enough organic waste; everyone is always on the outlook for more.

By the end of that first February, farmers were bringing animals to town, live and on the hoof, cattle, sheep, even pigs. They came the old way, driving them across the land (or in this case, down the interstates). I tell you, we were right glad to see those cowboys on horses driving their pigs down the street, — it's funny how the old cowboy shows never showed them driving pigs to market. My great-grandfather used to do it all the time. I'm glad they remembered. We heard on the shortwave that farmers elsewhere had frozen to death bringing grain, soybeans, and oats to cities.

Little Susie spotted them coming. She went running down the street to tell us, and we all moved fast to see this amazing sight. I asked a cowboy where he thought he was going with his pigs, and he said, well, if you want some, we'll sell them right here and now. They drove the pigs into the parking lot of the abandoned Thriftway, and made a pen by pushing abandoned cars around and started dickering with the crowd.

So we went back and ransacked the house, coming up with $5 in assorted silver change, four old silver dollars someone’s grandfather had given him for Christmas many years ago, and some miscellaneous cheap gold and silver plated jewelry, and the cowboy said, "You can have a breeding pair plus one.” Best deal I ever made. Each of the occupied houses on Oakley got at least a pig to slaughter and eat, and there were six breeding pairs acquired for the street. We were in the pig business — and that meant we could look forward to barbecue, which as most folks know, is a necessity in Kansas City. Maybe this new world wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Our problem became immediately apparent. We had our pig to eat. The problem was that none of us had ever slaughtered a pig; the most I had ever done was a chicken, and that had been about 25 years ago. We were hungry, and the idea of fresh meat was rather appealing after two months of canned and dried foods. I could already taste the pork roast, but a live pig is a wiggly and inconvenient thing and this one weighed a couple hundred pounds anyway, and we never got around to buying a shotgun or any kind of gun.

Just as someone said . . . "Well, my grandfather said they used to hang them up by their hind legs and then slit their throats,” a guy came down the street, shouting, "Pigs slaughtered, Thriftway parking lot, for a share of the meat.” The former butcher of the Thriftway had heard what was going on and was setting up in the parking lot. He'd butcher the hog for 10% of the meat, plus the hooves, hide, bones, and innards. He hired some of the guys in our household to help, and they brought home ground meat for sausage as their pay. We had to bring our own containers for the meat, as he was low on butcher paper. It was still cold, so refrigeration was immediate. We got busy making sausage and we built a smoke house in a day using plans and instructions in one of the books I found in the library for the hams.

Remember what I said about always being on the lookout for more organic matter? None of the manure from those cattle and pig drives went to waste. People followed along behind the herds and scooped the poop to take home. Even in the early days, we had already learned the value of animal poop. When the animals were all gone out of the Thriftway parking lot, within a day you would not guess that a herd of animals had been there the day before. It might not have been spotless, but there was no manure to be found.

We hear things are about the same all over. We listen to our shortwave for the news every day. That radio and the rechargeable batteries and the solar battery charger were practically the most useful items we had in the house, other than our tools and the citrus and cinnamon trees.

One thing we have to do is work with our neighbors. They know us and we know them. The old way of living in isolation, two or three people in a house just doesn't work anymore. Everybody lives in small extended family-like communities, in both cities and the rural areas. Our area, Blue Valley, is about 2 miles wide and centers on the intersection of Truman and Hardesty, where there is a supermarket and big parking lot/commercial area, plus the St. Paul School of Theology, whose large open spaces are now gardens and little shops/markets. There is a second center at Hardesty and Independence, centered on the old now-defunct Price Chopper supermarket/strip mall lot and the area's public library (one of the most important buildings these days).

But right here on Oakley Street, you can buy all sorts of things, we even have two cafes, each of which has music on various evenings. Up on Truman, there is a veritable mall. It's obvious that no city planner has been near what's going on up there. There is little traffic. Truman which formerly was six lanes, has become two lanes plus some walking trails amid the new "urban spaces" (mini-gardens with benches and tables and other amenities). Sure, there's plenty of existing construction, but already by the end of that first summer after the Crash people decided that it was easier to tear down some of the buildings and use the materials to rebuild more sensible structures. The really old ones (1920s or so) weren't the problems, it was the new stuff, especially anything built since the 1960s. Windows don't open. Everything depended on centralized heating and air conditioning. They are cold in the winter and stifling in the summer humidity. Brute force energy made them habitable once upon a time. We don't have that kind of power anymore. They are great sources of raw materials though.

Now we have to work with our environment — what a concept! If we had thought of this years ago, we wouldn't have had so many troubles that first winter! Fortunately, there are plenty of raw materials around. When we needed something to seal parts of our greenhouse, we dug up some asphalt from the edge of a street and melted it. No Asphalt Police showed up to arrest us.

What do we use for money you ask? Well, we use Blue Valley Bucks, or silver, labor, barter, whatever it takes to get the deal done. We work for the church people for a while and they usually pay in Catholic Bucks. It is not anywhere near as simple as money used to be. Somehow it seems more personal, and being someone who has always liked to shop, it is a lot more fun. At the markets, there are people who make a living by making deals — putting buyers together with sellers and taking a small percentage on the initial deal. "Whatta you got?" is as common as "how are you" on Market Day.

Plus, we don't need money as much as we used to. I have no clues as to what happened to my landlord. He has never showed up. If he does, I'll offer him a ham, I bet he takes it. He lived a long ways away, in another state. Our need to pay rent just disappeared and we acquired our house by default. Not everybody was so lucky. Some people, evicted by greedy landlords, ended up better off, because they got a jump start on building sensible dwellings and urban spaces. Most of them simply homesteaded vacant land. Churches who owned properties made them available and people considered the grounds of government buildings as fair game for places to build housing for desperate people. Here in Kansas City, most such people dug in — literally — building earth sheltered homes using scavenged materials, dirt, and human labor. I've had dinner in some real nice places that people built like this. A book circulated around the churches — “The $50 and up Underground House Book” gave a lot of people ideas.

We use a variety of scripts for money. The monopoly of the United States dollar is gone. There is no one money that everybody accepts. While some people will take the old US dollars, they sure won't buy what they used to. Catholic Bucks, on the other hand, backed by the full faith and credit of the Catholic Diocese of KC-St. Joseph, and in accordance with the emergency legislation of the city council can be used to pay local taxes, buy water, medical care, and as a result, are a valuable medium of exchange for other things (no the local taxes did not go away, although nobody pays much attention to the federal taxes anymore, since there isn't much federal government these days). The same is true of Blue Valley Bucks, authorized by the Blue Valley Community Association. Both of these programs were authorized as an emergency measure in the early spring that first year, to help jump start some economic activity.

Local government hasn't gone away. It has changed. The most important governments are the neighborhood associations, which evolved to take the role of the old cities and towns. Each neighborhood became an urban village. These group into some regional associations, which are like the old counties, and the city council is like the old state government. Police, courts, and regulating the issuance of money are its most important jobs. That’s about all it does. As to the original federal and state governments, they seem to have just disappeared.

The Crash Begins

You're probably wondering what happened at the beginning of the Crash, early in January that first year. The first sign of bad news was a stock market meltdown crash. Due to frequent suspensions in trading, the stock collapse unfolded over several days. By the time the Wall Street Stock Exchange closed permanently, the Dow Jones was down 95%. I wrote down the final close, 592, down from somewhere over 12,000.

People freaked.

Some of the cable television shows were riots. They had screaming politician and sobbing bankers and freaked out stock brokers. “Don’t panic, don’t panic” was their mantra, often juxtaposed with quick shots to that clip from the movie 2012, where the protagonist says, “When they tell you not to panic, that’s when you should panic,” just before the earthquake hits and Los Angeles begins its slide into the sea.

A studio audience rioted and murdered the secretary of the Treasury and the CEO of the NY Stock Exchange live and in color during prime time after they made some particularly stupid remarks.

As the stock markets collapsed, the banks teetered on the edge of the abyss. People began withdrawing their money, all of it. Every bank had a line of people waiting to withdraw money. Banks shortened their hours. When they closed for the day, people didn’t go home. They camped out on the steps.

So the banks announced a limit on withdrawals. This sparked riots all over the country. Unfortunately quite a few bank people were unfortunately killed. The government stepped and announced an indefinite bank holiday. A lot of banks burned over the next few days.

Being in a two-story house on a hill, we had a good view of downtown Kansas City and a huge swath of the area. It was really eerie — like something out of a sci-fi movie — to see columns of smoke all over town, as far as we could see.

Meanwhile, shopping runs on the grocery stores followed the bank runs. That lasted all of a week and ended when the grocery stores emptied out and the warehouse supply trucks failed to show up for resupply.

The next shoe to fall was the collapse of the cell phone network, then the internet went down, and soon there was no more dial tone on the landline phones.

I know everyone reading this went through something similar. Things sure got weird.

The lines at banks persisted for a week after they closed. I guess people expected a financial miracle and they wanted to be first in line. You’d see people obsessively dialing their cell phones, putting them up to their ear, as if they expected something to magically happen and their call would go through. I watched a young man obsessively texting a dead phone who then slammed it into the ground, stomped on it, and hit it with a rock before running off sobbing and crying.

Seventeen days into this situation, the power went out throughout Kansas City. The next day, the natural gas stopped. We noticed immediately because we were cooking breakfast with the last of our eggs on the gas stove. We watched the burner dwindle and die. Fortunately we cooked with a cast iron skillet and the eggs were almost done so they finished cooking with the heat of the cast iron and we ate the last of the eggs. No one said much during that meal and afterwards, we just sat there for a while looking at our empty plates.

Water was the next aspect of modern life to go away.

Later that day, the water pressure seemed noticeably less. We got quickly busy and filled every container we could find, the tub, and washed all the dishes. By the 19th day, there was nothing but a drip at the faucet and that was gone later in the day.

None of us had any family in the area. We were just anonymous 20-something urban wage slaves. Some of us had drifted to KCMO from rural areas elsewhere in Missouri. Others were from surrounding states. We had no place to go around here. We had no family in the area where we could find refuge. One of the roommates was from a farm in southwest Missouri. He thought about going there but he and his folks didn’t get along and he wasn’t sure they would take him in even if he walked all the way down there.

So it came to pass that we watched and waited as things went from bad to worse. Nineteen days was all it took to take us from 21st century affluence to 19th century penury. Worse, because people in the 19th century knew how to live in the 19th century and we didn’t.

Surprisingly, once the bank thing got closed down, and the grocery stores emptied out, and the liquor stores had been looted, the riots and violence died down. There was a burst of crime as things fell apart. That died away as their intended victims, or outraged bystanders, started shooting back and they were surprisingly accurate in their aim. The thing about Kansas City is that nearly everybody had a gun. Everyone seemed to instinctively understand that if not confronted, criminal violence would get out of hand, so an injury to one really was an injury to all. The police couldn’t be everywhere. They had no fuel and the phones weren’t working. Ham and CB radio operators transmitted messages to police dispatch locations but it wasn’t as quick as dialing 911. This communal response to crime was one of the early large-scale manifestations of spontaneous community solidarity to emerge as our world fell.

I think the magnitude of the disaster helped suppress violence.

No one could quite believe what had happened.

No one knew why it happened or why things weren’t getting better.

It was OK to have a disaster, but after the disaster, the Red Cross and FEMA and all the other cavalries were supposed to come to our rescue and bring us meal packs and blankets and teddy bears for the kids and cases of bottled water.

That wasn’t happening.

Here we were in the midst of Kansas City, a major metropolitan area, hundreds of thousands of people with no power, no natural gas, no leadership from City Hall. On Oakley Street, there are 36 addresses housing 140 people before the Crash. About half of everybody on our street left within a week of the power and natural gas going out. It was cold. There was snow on the ground, which was good because we figured out we needed to drink melted snow pretty quickly once the water stopped. The ones who left had some place to go, or at least, that’s what they thought when they cleared out.

We took a household inventory at the end of the first week, after we went to the grocery store and found it empty. We managed a little panic buying before the stores closed. We had some rice, peanut butter, Ramen noodles, macaroni and spaghetti, instant oatmeal, and some canned veggies.

It wasn’t going to last long.

I still had the keys to the convenience store where I worked. We went over there to see if anything was left and found the owner inside, with his family. He closed the store when the banks closed. He and his family defended it with shotguns, so it hadn’t been looted. I noticed some new stains on the concrete out front, but he was quite closemouthed about what had happened. The building was built like a bank vault, with iron bars on the windows and a sturdy metal front door and bullet proof glass. Yes, it was that kind of neighborhood. He and his family had loaded up a pickup, trailer, and a car. There was still quite a bit of stuff left. He said we could take what we wanted of the rest. He owed me two weeks pay and said that should clear it.

So we stocked up on convenience store food, which included a few good things like pickled eggs, bananas, and oranges. The owner had taken all of the beer and soft drinks (we saw him later in a parking lot selling his stock). We got jerky, and peanuts, sunflower seeds, raisins, a few canned goods, and chocolate. Not exactly chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes, but hunger is the best sauce.

Our most immediate need was heat. We had none. It was winter, there was snow on the ground, it was cold. We went around inside fully dressed as if we were outside — layers of clothes, hats, gloves. We congregated in one or two rooms all day when we were inside. At night we slept close together, several people in the same bed, all in the same room. We were so cold we didn’t even make any rude jokes about guys sleeping with guys. Nobody cared. It was that cold.

The problem with the cold was that it didn’t go away. Before, it was nothing to be cold for a short time, because you knew you would shortly be back in a heated building and could warm up. We no longer had the luxury. No natural gas, no electricity. There was no respite from the cold.

At first there were a dozen houses on the street with heat. Being a poor neighborhood, people often had to cope with utility shut-offs. People had kerosene and propane stoves and some fuel and there were a few houses with fireplaces or wood-burning stoves. By the end of January, though, we were down to three houses with heat, using wood heat. Everyone else was out of propane and kerosene and there was none to be had anywhere. We got the “several people in a room are warmer than one or two people in a room” really quickly and people crowded in with each other.

January was bad but endurable. People still had some food. February was another story altogether. The population of the street climbed back up as people from neighboring streets drifted in and some families came back after finding that they weren’t welcome where they thought they could go. We ended up with 20 people in our house, huddled in two rooms. Someone said that each adult body was the equivalent of a 100-watt heater, so ten people in a room are collectively a 1 kilowatt heater. We hung blankets over the windows, doors and walls and put layers of newspapers on the floors. We lucked out and found a newspaper truck that had overturned up on Truman. Newspapers are really useful in a situation like we were in. They are excellent insulation.

Nobody resisted the thought of taking in their neighbors. This neighborhood wasn't particularly close and happy. Before all this happened there were feuds, fights, disagreements. I was the only resident of the street who attended the neighborhood association meetings. Just a month before all this happened, three houses on our block burned in some kind of a gang feud. People knocked on the door late at night, offering cocaine and pot for sale and there was a steady supply of cheap electronics that flowed through the area. Now there was no TV, not much radio (most people lost battery power by the first week of February), no gas or other transportation, no jobs, no money, no government benefits, and people were very, very scared. Even the remaining criminals were too freaked to do anything. Many of their crime pals were dead. What was the point in stealing a television if there wasn’t any electricity to run it nor cable to hook it up to? As time wore on with no good news, people wanted company, and managed to put up with quite a bit of discomfort, especially as things went from bad to worse.

People started to die. People ran out of their meds. An older guy had a stroke and died quickly; he was on blood thinners and he ran out. One of our neighbors, an older woman, had diabetes and was dependent upon insulin. She went into a coma and died. One of her friends walked to a hospital, to see if she could get some insulin — none was available. Three children got sick and died quickly. We never knew what happened with that. The parents carried them to the hospital and were turned away. The Catholic parish for the neighborhood turned its lawn into a cemetery. Being young and strong, we helped dig graves and the church people would give us a little food. Someone would come by, pretty much every other day, and tell us that one or more graves were needed at Our Lady Queen of Peace.

We found one of our roommates out back, dead. He had cut his own neck and bled to death in the woods behind our house. I had seen him sharpening a knife earlier and didn’t think anything about it. He hadn’t seemed any more upset than anyone else. I guess he reached his tipping point and went on over into the abyss.

None of us did much at first because we all expected the power and the TV and the radio and everything else to come back on and get back to normal. Surely the Government would do something about this! By mid February, that attitude was pretty much gone. People were scared enough that they listened to sensible talk about what needed to be done. In January, about the only thing that managed to happen was that we dug latrines to take care of the human waste (the digesters were a summer project), and we quit producing trash.

When the first house ran out of kerosene, those people moved in with other houses. We had been wracking our brains trying to think of what to do about heat, and that was when the church people came by and invited us to the class at the local Catholic parish about how to build a greenhouse/solar sunspace.

By the second week of February, everybody on the street was crammed into a handful of houses. This was strictly a lifeboat arrangement, and very troublesome, but people put up with it, because the alternative was death by freezing. The preaching theme from the church people wandering around during this time was that spring is on its way, things will get better, we have to make them better. No cavalry seems to be coming to the rescue. We must rescue ourselves. They didn’t just offer platitudes, however, they had classes on how to do things so we could learn how to help ourselves. Not many came at first. As time passed, and people got more desperate, there was more interest.

Food was already a problem. By the end of February, it seemed to me there would be no more food. I think it was the second week of February that everything seemed the most hopeless and I came near to giving into despair. We were down to one meal a day of watery beef jerky soup with a couple of miscellaneous cans dumped in it and a little rice or pasta. Portioning out that soup was done carefully. First we drained the liquid. Then we carefully divided the solids among the bowls, one bowl per person or animal (we had 2 dogs and 1 cat and they got a share too). We poured the liquid equally into the bowls. We drew lots for the order in which we would pick up the bowls. That way everyone got an equal portion. As the food declined, that equality of suffering became important to our household morale.

It was a starvation diet, that much was evident. Everyone lost weight. We were tired all the time. I wondered when we would get scurvy or some other weird disease caused by poor nutrition, but I didn’t say anything about that. There was enough trouble on our plates without adding speculation.

People wondered if it was time to cut and run. Everyone was sick of people everywhere, no privacy. You invite 20 people to move into your house and restrict yourselves to two rooms so you can keep each other warm, and not have much water to bathe in, and see how comfortable this is.

If we left, where would we go? The plain fact was we had no place to go — and no energy to get there anyway — so we stayed home.

But there were fish in the river, and we even managed to catch some of them, and within two miles of our neighborhood there were huge grain storage elevators. The third week of February, a police car with a loud speaker came through the neighborhood saying that wheat, corn, and soybeans would be distributed the following day at all public school buildings in the area. We went out in the street and gawked at the cop car like we had just fallen off the turnip truck and had never seen such a sight. It seemed so normal, yet we knew it wasn’t. Surely its message was not something we would have thought possible just a month previously.

We were in line early at the closest school with every container we could find and I was glad they handed out some instructions with the wheat and soybeans since none of us had ever seen raw wheat or soybeans or dried corn other than little bags of popcorn, not to mention the fact that we had no idea how to cook with them. We were as excited about this as if they had handed out fully cooked turkey dinners with stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy and pumpkin pie. What they gave us didn’t look anything like we thought food should look. We were so hungry, we didn’t care that it didn’t look like food. One way or another, we would figure out how to eat it and that’s exactly what happened, with a little help from the church people of course.

There we were, the third week of February, people huddled in houses, drinking melted snow, avoiding the yellow snow (harder to do as time went on), using latrines in the backyard, and now we had 500 pounds of wheat, corn, and soybeans and wondered what to do with it. I remember the last time I had tried to deal with a whole soybean in the kitchen was in 1975, using a soybean casserole recipe from the Laurel's Kitchen cookbook during my vegetarian phase. As I recall my roommate and I ended up going out for hamburgers that night.

But we met this challenge too. The church people had been at the school and they had instructions as to what to do with soybeans, corn, and wheat.

We carried our goods home, grabbed a hacksaw, and followed the instructions.

We cut three steel pipes into 3 ft lengths and duct-taped them together. Sean poured a cup of grain into a can, sat down with the can between his feet holding it in place, put the steel pipes, sharp edges down, into the can and twisted it. Pound — twist — pound — twist and in about five minutes, the cup of grain was a cup of rough ground meal. We kept doing this — we made a chant up to go with the rhythm — until we had enough to feed all of us. We built a fire in the back yard with some scrounged wood, put a grill on it and a cast iron skillet on top of that, and made some flat breads with water and salt. They tasted wonderful. Starvation no longer seemed imminent. We ate them all and then ground some more and made more. We ground more flour and using the instructions from the church people, set it up to ferment so we could make sourdough bread in a day or so. In the meantime, the unleavened breads were wonderful.

Actually, they were probably terrible. Burned on one side, nearly raw on the other. Hunger is the best sauce and we were on the edge of starvation.

Now that the edge had been taken off our hunger, the question of the hour was — "What do we do with this big bag of soybeans?"

When it comes right down to it, there are actually a lot of things you can do with soybeans. True, we never managed tofu. We did learn to make soy grits, and soy flour, and soy milk. As it turned out, we didn't have to manage tofu, because some Vietnamese folks who lived two blocks over brought ten different kinds of tofu and other curious concoctions made from soybeans to the first Truman Market in March. They even kindly explained to us what we should do with it.

We ground some corn just like we did the wheat and mixed it with water and cooked it like pancakes in our cast iron skillet. The church people called this “johnnycake” and although it wasn’t technically corn bread, it was pretty good even. They handed out instructions on making hominy, which none of us had ever tasted, but we listened carefully and learned how to make our own lye and the make the hominy. Posole was tasty. I wondered why I had never tried it before!

Now that the immediate threat of starvation abated, and no other emergencies were at hand, we needed something to do. We decided to start publishing a newspaper!

How did that happen you ask?

One of the people who sheltered at our house was an elderly retired school teacher who lived up the street alone. She moved in with us as things went bad. It was like having our own in-house granny. She knew a lot of things that we needed to know. We picked her brain about how they did things in the old days before modern conveniences. It was her idea to make the jerky soup. She said, “We used to live on that kind of soup during the Depression, that and corn bread.” We had no corn but we mentally drooled at the thought of corn bread. It would be so good! The smell! The taste! With melted butter! And peach jam!

One day someone asked her about how people made copies before copy machines. She explained how to make a “jelly duplicator.” We later learned this was a “hectographic duplicator,” and people referred to it as a jelly duplicator because it was made with unflavored gelatin and glycerin. Voila, we had a way to publish a newspaper if we could find some Jell-O and if we could find some glycerin.

She had some gelatin and glycerin and we were in business. As for hectographic ink, well, we had our own in-house tattoo artist who went into the Crash well-stocked with hectographic tattoo inks, which work just for hectographic duplication. So we hand wrote, in passable calligraphy, the first edition.

Here is what we had to say on our first front page.

Civilization Crashes, Blue Valley Survives!

In the first weeks of January, modern civilization collapsed due to a “perfect storm” of economic problems that undermined the nation’s technical infrastructure. Many people left the area. More died of cold and hunger, but if you read this you are alive! Congratulations! You survived the end of the world as we knew it. Most of us ask, "What do we do now?" According to the instruction book, "After the End of the World, immediately begin to build a new one. Remember the mistakes of the old, and do better with this one." Here's some ideas on how to get started.

The rest of Volume 1, Number 1 consisted of information on what to do with soybeans, how to make an expedient grain and soybean grinder from metal water pipes, and the importance of starting a compost pile immediately. It had an advertisement for the Better Times School, which would offer classes in gardening, composting, and surviving in new circumstances starting the first week of March at Our Lady Queen of Peace Catholic Church. It announced the First Ever Truman Road St. Patrick's Day Parade for the upcoming March 17th.

The parade story was a total bluff. We didn’t know of anyone planning to do a parade. The Irish do like to parade on St. Paddies’ Day, and we figured that people would just show up if we announced a parade and sure enough we were right.

We printed 100 copies and took them to each of the churches in the neighborhood, plus the other houses where we were aware of people sheltering. We gave a copy to a policeman on a bicycle who came down Truman, and asked him to pass it along to whoever was in authority downtown. We nailed some copies onto makeshift sign boards we put on telephone poles up on Truman and down on Independence.

The churches were all doing important work. They sheltered large numbers of people. Initially, most of them had access to some kind of propane heating, usually brought in by church members. As propane supplies depleted, they cobbled together wood barrel stoves. Most of them had started schools to keep the kids busy, many with teachers from existing schools in the neighborhood.

But we had another problem looming and that was water. It was a more difficult problem than cooking soybeans. The reason cowboys brought the cattle to town at the end of February was that the snow was melting (we didn't have a meteorologist handy to explain why this was happening so early). We filled every possible container with melted snow (and it's amazing how many containers you can find when you go scavenging), for drinking and washing and other such purposes. It wouldn't last forever.

We were only a couple of miles from the Missouri River, but that water was dirty. We lived on a hill, and thus were dubious about the possibility of digging a well. There was an artesian well in a park, it was actually further away than the Missouri River. It was pure water though. We had about 10 gallons of gas but any way you looked at it, driving back and forth to the Missouri River or the artesian well was a temporary expedient.

Then it rained, and as I looked out the window at all of the water pouring out of the gutters into the yard and running down the yard to the valley behind, I thought, “Sometimes you miss the most obvious solutions.” We quickly put everything we could outside to catch rain water (including a kiddie wading pool we had in the basement) and started plotting how to make some larger tanks to catch rainwater.

We poured the water through cloth to catch any floaties, and boiled it before drinking it.

So we went into the spring using rainwater, supplemented with an occasional drive to the artesian well when it didn’t rain.

As it turned out, we only had to do this for about three months, because later that summer, the City’s water department reinvented itself as a water delivery cooperative. When they came by and made their offer, we were quick to agree. You could pay with all labor, or with labor plus other value (such as the neighborhood bucks which had just been authorized by the city council, which turned up in March.)

By the first week of March, we had several things going for us. We had food and water — you would not believe how good soybean grits, sausage, and sourdough biscuits can be, even if you eat it every day. The weather warmed up. We still had some gasoline if we needed it. People were going back to their own homes so the house wasn't so crowded. And most importantly, people started to adapt to their new circumstances.

It was like somebody exploded an "Idea Bomb" in the neighborhood. There was little time wasted on meetings, everybody wanted to learn. Someone found the methane digester idea in some old Mother Earth News magazines that somebody had in their basement. It seemed like a really good idea to everyone, as the whole outdoor latrine situation (or carrying buckets outdoors to pits) just grossed everybody out. Pouring the buckets into methane digesters that we had built ourselves was marginally less gross. At least we would get something back from our efforts. To use methane in propane or natural gas appliances, the jets had to be adjusted. We found people to do this, and most of them accepted a future favor for doing it right now. It only took a few minutes.

So you can see that early in all of this — March — we started developing new economic arrangements. Labor was already specializing and commerce was commencing. OK, it wasn't the Kansas City Board of Trade, but it worked for us.

Green houses and cold frames sprouted everywhere. It's amazing how much seed is available in a neighborhood, and this was before people from the University Extension and Kansas City Community Gardening Association came through in April. Everybody was ready for fresh vegetables.

I remember the day I saw the first early flowers peeking through the ground. I found myself thinking, Look at this, all of our technological infrastructure crashes, here is this flower, doing what flowers do, poking its way through the ground. If that flower can survive, so can we.

The First Spring of our New Era

In March we had soybeans and wheat and everything we could make from that, plus we had sausage and some beef. The cattle came into town after the pigs, and while we couldn't afford a whole beef, we got some anyway as pay for helping the butcher in the parking lot. We even had a small freezer, which ran off a battery, which we charged at a neighborhood charging station that opened up in March. This was just in time for the beef and the end of the winter freezing temps so keeping meat was an issue. Now we have a methane-powered freezer and an ice-powered refrigerator. I'd say the opening of the Truman Road Market was the major event of a busy month.

Despite the food and improving weather, everybody needed something (usually, some things). No stores were open. The shopping rush to end all shopping rushes happened as the stock market crashed and banks went under. There's no doubt that this last minute movement of goods from producers to consumers saved a lot of lives. The wholesale pipeline pretty much emptied itself out in the last panic, which meant the supplies were more evenly distributed nationally than would have been the case if stuff had been left in warehouses.

So a market was essential to rebuilding our community. Fortunately, a market is easy to organize. All you need is space, merchants, and buyers. We had lots of space. Nearly everybody became a merchant and we all were buyers. Never underestimate the ability of human beings to get together and make deals.

About a week after we put out our little newsletter, some people knocked on our door and asked how much we would charge to print them some announcements for a new market they were organizing at Truman and Hardesty. So, the famous phrase, "What-ya got?" came into play. As far as I was concerned, probably the most useful thing for us at this point was livestock, and it turned out that they knew somebody who had some chickens. We ended up with a rooster and four hens and they got their flyers plus I threw in showing them how to make their own hectographic duplicator. The first market was set to coincide with the St. Patrick's Day parade.

Believe me, we treated those chickens like they were gold, certainly, their eggs were more useful than gold, at the time anyway. We gave them their own bedroom until we could build a secure coop. We had to chastise the cats severely, to keep them under as much control as you get with a cat. The dogs were better behaved. They were glad to have some beef or pork flavored mush. They had their bowl of soup with the rest of us during those terrible days in February, once we ran out of dog chow. It wasn’t enough for them either.

Anyway, with the news of the upcoming market, we immediately began to plot how we would win fame and fortune for ourselves at the new market. It's not that we expected we'd become the J.P. Morgan's of Old Northeast Kansas City, but what’s not to like about shopping? We had a printing press (it was faster than Gutenberg's), with limited paper, so we would ask more if somebody wanted something printed and needed paper than if they had their own paper. At that first market, in fact, we did a brisk business printing, "JOHN SMITH WHERE ARE YOU" and "MARY SMITH IS AT (WHEREVER)" handbills. We printed sign bills for tailors, carpenters, plumbers, and several other trades. Nearly every street had sprouted a signboard, and people would come by and tack notices on them. People read everything posted — it was a substitute for the daily news on the TV.

We did some printing business on credit for "future favors" (especially the advertising, one never knows when you will need an expert at something) as this was just before the neighborhood bucks program began (about which more will be said presently). We took a little US money, although if you paid with dollars, prices were sky-high, which is another way of saying that the value of the dollar was low. The government had really let people down, most people figured, and so its money was suspect.

A barber showed up and was busy all day cutting hair. People did hair wraps and weaves. Others offered "consulting" services and announced meetings and classes. People brought drums and musical instruments. A dozen bars operated in various areas of the lot and of course, there was all the typical Irish craziness. The end of the world may come and go, the Irish will party on St. Paddy's Day. I guess all the Irish stockpiled green dye as part of their emergency preparations because there sure was a lot of it around. Imagine crossing the parking lot of a Grateful Dead concert with a St. Patrick's Day parade and throwing in a large flea market/garage sale, and you'll get the picture. Much more interesting — and fun! — than any mall ever even thought about being.

The parade began with three processional crosses carried by altar boys accompanied by others carrying candles and winging incense, followed by a statue of St. Patrick carried by the Knights of Columbus (in full regalia), with the bishop, the priests, and the parish banners. Then followed the Irish setters, leprechauns, and lots of clowns, Chinese and Vietnamese dragons, Native American dancers, Korean drummers, the Guadalupanas were out in force and there were bagpipes. Anyway, one didn't have to be a rocket scientist to know this was a diverse area. It was nice seeing it all together marching down Truman Road. In the afternoon, a military truck pulled up and some National Guard troops started handing out MRE's. They were liberally repaid with beer (there were some potent and raw homemade beverages available). I hope they didn't get into too much trouble when they got home. We wanted them to think kindly of us and remember the potency of our beer if they had more food to distribute.

After the day's business wound down, the party intensified. People brought instruments, and pretty soon there was a large orchestra carrying on (with minimal direction, but great enthusiasm, and there were some experienced players there), everything from a plastic wastebasket drummer to a flute, clarinet, several string players, and one group even hauled a piano down on rollers, so I got to get in a lick or two. People danced, sang, everybody went home quite happy and satisfied. I noticed the next day that there wasn't any trash at the market site either, not even the containers of the MRE's. Circumstances forced us to learn about this new world, and it would appear our learning curves were due for some rapid acceleration.

Getting ready for the first post-Crash Winter

One of the differences about these new times is that you have to pay attention to what's going on. You can't wait until it rains to buy yourself an umbrella, because there might not be somebody around with an umbrella to sell you when it starts raining. We have to think ahead and plan and it helped that people had formed themselves into large extended families to work together on the basics of life. No one single person had to think of everything; indeed, it would be impossible for one person to understand, plan, provision, and accomplish all the tasks necessary for life these days. Thus, our extended families and the localized neighborhood and community links and networks took on major importance for everybody.

As we came out of the initial shock and emergency reactions (better weather really helped a lot with this), we began to think about the summer and about the next winter. Having just had a particularly miserable one, we were highly motivated to make sure the next winter was better. It was possible that the next winter could be worse, much worse. No one was sure how much grain and beans were still in the storage elevators or whether the farmers would be able to harvest their crops this summer and get them to town. This knowledge helped focus our attention and keep people on task.

As summer progressed, the question about the harvest answered itself as more and more farmers brought produce to town — in the most amazing parade of alternative fuel vehicles that you could possibly imagine. It was like all the rural tinkerers-with-machinery in the entire country had just become some of the most important people around. And all those people out there who have dabbled with alternative energy for years and years suddenly found that their experience and knowledge were important to people.

The farmers were happy to take Blue Valley and Catholic Bucks, as well as US dollars, or silver, or other informal barter deals. People would post signs at their market stalls, "Need gasoline" or a generator, or hair pins, or whatever. Trades happened.

The farmers also recruited labor. Half our household spent three weeks on a farm helping with the wheat harvest. They came home with enough grain to feed us for a year, more chickens, some jars of honey, seed packets, a ticket good for a late fall meat delivery, and a deal for straw bales which caused the rest of us to whoop with glee. They had interesting stories about farmers’ daughters which made the rest of us decide that next harvest we would go to farm country for a few weeks. Those farmers wanted to make sure they would come back again next year.

One of the things we learned from the church people was that we needed straw bales. They would be important to getting us through the next winter. We could no longer afford the obscenely expensive energy expenditure required by our typical American urban houses. The homeless population had skyrocketed, and many of them had become "urban squatters" on public properties, and in the spring they were already dug in, often literally. We weren't the only people to harvest utility poles for building purposes.

When the cowboys brought the pigs to market, the church people asked them about wheat, because often where there's cattle there's wheat. Everyone wanted grain, and the church people wanted straw bales. The cowboy’s ears perked up. What's this about a new market? They told them that I thought they could sell or trade every single bale of clean wheat straw that they could bring to Kansas City. The strawbales were for construction or retrofitting of houses and buildings to make them energy conservation. Straw bale construction is ideal for this country and climate. Cool in the summer, warm and cozy in the winter, cheap, do it yourself, accessible, not rocket science.

Nobody in my neighborhood felt up to tearing down their old house and building a new house, while at the same time putting in a garden and gathering and preserving other food enough to feed yourself for the next year, and etc., all in one summer. Plus building a new house involved a lot of trades like plumbing and such that would drive the price way up. It seemed possible and practical to put a layer of straw bales on the outside of the house, and cover this with plaster, and get many of the advantages of straw bale housing while maintaining the familiarity and investment of the existing structure. Think of it as a red neck urban housing make over, a “bale-wrapped house.”

As the Kansas harvest began, grain and straw bales began making their way to Kansas City, on vehicles powered by methane and horses and mules and steam and ethanol. We got bricks and chunks of concrete (we call that urbanite) from ruined houses and laid a foundation for the bale wall right next to the original construction. Rebar and cement seemed readily available; I guess there is a lot of this laying around all the time, and with the sudden end of all major construction projects, a lot of product was left sitting around waiting for a purpose. We did our street the old-fashioned way. The farmers delivered the bales as scheduled and we just went down the street, doing each house as a series of neighborhood bale-wall raising projects. The farmers brought extra people with them, and they stayed to help, mostly (they claimed) so they could see how it was done and learn from our mistakes.

So here is Oakley Street, late August that first year. The houses have all grown new exteriors, plumped out with straw bales covered with white washed plaster exteriors (except for where a couple of our more artistic neighbors decided to add some bits of color.). No lawns, most of the surface area was covered with vegetable gardens or animal pens amidst a series of swales and berms for catching and controlling rainwater. Everybody’s claimed part of the street in front of their house for container gardening, and people put in curb cuts to allow water to drain from the street into their yards.

Houses sprouted greenhouses and passive solar sunspaces on their south sides — the idea was too good and useful for people to ignore, an interesting twist to keeping up with the Joneses I guess. Several yards have outdoor bread ovens (these were mostly built in the spring, one of the first construction efforts). Typically, each oven serves about 4-6 families. You can hear cows, pigs, sheep, chickens. You don't hear the roar of traffic, or any gunfire. You do hear people talking, music, and other ordinary noises at a bearable audio level.

You can hardly believe it was the same street.

To tell you the honest-to-God-truth, it was in August when I looked around, and realized that I liked my new life. I was no longer a piece-of-grit-scum-urban-wage-slave convenience store worker. I was part of a family that was part of a neighborhood tribe. We had our own enterprises. We worked hard and we had a lot of fun. We know all of our neighbors, not just casually, but everything there is to know that close friends would know. We’re all different people, we are neighbors, and that means something these days. The guys that used to knock on our door to sell cheap televisions and cocaine rocks helped us put the foundation down for our new straw bale walls. We went over to their house, and helped them do theirs. They made barbecue for us and we brought homemade pruno — an alcoholic beverage made from dried prunes. It tastes better than it sounds and kicks quite satisfactorily.

One of our housemates had spent some time in prison. He worked in the kitchen and learned how to make alcohol from anything available in a prison kitchen, from raisins and prunes right on down the list to dried bread and sugar. (We only tried that once.) Before, he was just another ex-con looking for a job. Now people come and talk with him from all over Blue Valley asking his advice about brewing. He’s the Brew Master.

We did a lot more than this in getting ready for that winter. The straw bales and greenhouses were two of the most important activities that summer. I like the straw bales. Gives the entire street an interesting look. Maybe it’s kind of an art deco-ish southwestern appearance. We just put plain whitewash on over our plaster. Some people on the street got really creative and there are some brightly colored and patterned houses on Oakley Street. You should see the Deadhead’s house up the street. It’s a work of art!

We learned something that summer that we should not have forgotten during the years before. Build your house so that in the winter you hang onto the heat and keep the cold out. What a concept! And also, build your house so you keep the heat out in the summer, which in its own way is as important as keeping warm in the winter. When we put the strawbales up, we weren’t actually thinking of keeping cooler in the summer, even though Kansas City was plenty hot. Finding out that our inside temperature was cooler in the summer because of the thick insulation of the walls was a nice additional surprise benefit.

Our first Christmas

About ten PM on Christmas Eve we could hear them coming. Drums and trumpets, a bagpipe, many voices raised in song, O Come All Ye Faithful, We wish you a merry Christmas, the First Noel, Silent Night, a big crowd of people coming down Truman. Outside on Oakley Street, people walked up the street, carrying candles and torches, to join in the procession. The route wound through the entire neighborhood to maximize participation. Little Susie, dressed like an angel for the Christmas pageant at church, was already at the front door, inviting us to hurry as if we didn't they would leave us behind.

As we passed churches — Baptist, Disciples of Christ, Assembly of God, some people would drop out and go in, our group ended at Our Lady Queen of Peace Catholic Church, where we entered a church gaily decorated with holly and evergreen branches, lit with candles and torches where we had more singing and listening to choirs while we awaited the hour of midnight. At midnight, the bells began to ring, and the pipe organ and small orchestra began to play (courtesy of a big battery and an inverter) and we sang Adeste Fideles as the procession entered the Church, led by acolytes with incense, a processional cross and torches. We paused between the second and third verse and the priest blessed the Creche, finishing the third and fourth verses with a loud crescendo of bells, organ, trumpets, and cymbals.

It seemed so normal — the golden vestments, the decorations, the music — that it was hard to comprehend how different things were now compared to last year. We still had Christmas, and what a joyous time it was.

We had been preparing since November. After working frenetically through the spring, summer, and fall, we discovered that these new days and their new ways provided extended times for a change of pace, when work wasn't so hard, and what needed to be done could be organized so no one had to work real hard.

Extended leisure time? Who would have thought that would be a characteristic of post-collapse KCMO. We weren't working 9 to 5 wage slave jobs anymore, and so when the winter's food is laid into the pantry, and the fuel is gathered for the winter, a community can afford to shift its focus from survival to other things — like parties, celebrations, and holidays. Talking, reflecting, thinking. Laying around and doing nothing. Reveling in the feeling of not-being-afraid of what the future would bring.

By Christmas, we were ready for some feasting, and feast we did on Christmas Day. We had ham and roast chickens, deviled eggs (with homemade mayonnaise), pumpkin and pecan pies, green bean casserole (made with green beans we canned, mushroom sauce we made, and French-fried onions that we French fried), a dressing side dish made with corn bread, biscuits, and various dried vegetables, a variety of pickles and relishes, in other words, a traditional American Christmas dinner. The end of the world may come and go, Americans are gonna feast on Christmas.

We gave and received gifts, some hand made, some bought or bartered at the Truman Market. A big part of our giving was among households on our street. We gave each family on our street some herb seed packets, including some of the rare plants that we had collected. We received a nice bolt of hand-woven wool cloth from a cooperative of women up the street that had built looms and spinning wheels and traded with farmers for wool and cotton. In the old days, like us, they worked at various minimum wage jobs. Now they are among the leading families of this neighborhood. The cloth is nice and soft, and most ingeniously colored in a rainbow progression.

We had given them some seeds for dye plants as a gift when they showed up at the Market wanting some hand bills made to announce that they had thread available. We did their handbills for free. We needed a local source for cloth. They in turn had helped provide resources for another cooperative that started raising sheep for wool and meat right here in Blue Valley. There was a lot of this kind of thing going on, growing a new and sustainable economic network, one enterprise at a time, with a lot of mutual support, solidarity, and cooperation.

We carefully unwrapped the packages and saved the wrapping and bows for future use. The days of Christmas being the Big Trash Day of the year are long gone. Many packages were wrapped with actual cloth of some sort or another. I was happy I got two packages wrapped in diapers (fresh and clean, of course). Diapers are about one of the most useful all-around pieces of cloth in existence. It's a pity so many people used disposable diapers in the old days; there was a real sudden scarcity of diapers early on in this transition. If I could send a message backwards in time to the days before the Crash it would include — "Buy cloth diapers!"

On the Feast of St. Stephen (the day after Christmas), the Blue Valley Winter Festival kicked into high gear, complete with a Good King Wenceslaus (people from Eastern Europe settled here in the early 1900s) presiding over games, concerts, speeches, dances. Square dancing is back, like most things, it's evolved a bit, especially in terms of the music. It always retains that Celtic ancestral sound, there were some new rhythms and harmonies. Quite a few new dance steps have been developed. Swing is popular, in fact, there is a type of square dancing that uses swing steps. It’s very aerobic. I sit in on the piano sometimes with a swing ensemble, and we do a little blues. Anyway, it was kind of like a Christmas-Epiphany/neighborhood party/medieval revel.

We drank the last of the alcohol from the old days, the rums and whiskeys and wines. We weren't too worried, as just about everybody had jugs of wine and kegs of various kinds of beers, wines, and distilled spirits aging in their basements. The area’s Brew Master lived at our house, so we were especially well stocked. When you're making alcohol for fuel, it's not a problem to make alcohol that's primarily for social purposes. So far no sign of revenooers, even though the whole neighborhood was making "shine.” We had tasted some of our first whiskey, at the stage when it's raw enough to cure what ail's you. I'm sure it will be a lot better after it's had a chance to age in the oak barrels we learned how to make at the library.

The whole Kansas City area seemed to be one big festival, in different, localized manifestations. Down at 18th and Vine a huge Kwanza festival was a going concern, and they truly had the best barbecue and the best jazz. We walked down there one morning and had a great time before heading back in the late afternoon.

So these are a few of the snapshots in our family album of memories of Christmas in the first year of the Change. It was a time of renewal, and certainly we needed it, because the depths of our second winter were still ahead of us.

Give us this day our daily bread.

As our lives evolved, we learned to make pancakes from cornmeal and how to cook dried black-eyed peas instead of just opening a can. We cooked them initially on a propane camp stove, bringing them to a boil and putting them in a crockpot insert which we then put into a box packed with newspaper (we got this idea from the church people). We were still learning how to do this, so we pulled the peas out a couple of times and heated them to boiling again, which wasn't necessary, oh well, all of our mistakes should be so minor.

It was necessary to get busy on making some yeast-raised bread, however. When the government distributed wheat, and we made our own flour, the church people taught us how to make a sour dough start using flour and water.

Our first bread oven was in the back yard, made from several stones. We used a flat piece of broken concrete for the base, stacked stones around three sides, and covered the top with a final stone. We built a fire in it, heated it up, and brushed out the ashes and coals. We baked our first loaf directly on the hot stone. We burned the first three loaves, the next three were delicious. Even the burned ones were good with the burned bottom cut off. That's the secret about homemade baked goods. Even when you make a mistake, they taste good.

But we knew that we needed something better, so we started accumulating materials. The church people had plans for a homemade outdoor oven which were pretty straightforward. We scrounged some concrete blocks and ordinary building bricks, some concrete reinforcing wire and chicken wire, a few boards, and traded for cement. In retrospect, I wished that we had bought a dozen sacks of cement and just stacked them in the basement for use afterwards. None of us expected anything like this to happen. If we had thought about it, our whole house would have been stocked to the max, since the signs of the coming collapse were everywhere in the years leading up to the great change.

In any event, cement was readily available in the spring, although people wanted a lot of value for it. Why would I have bought it before all this happened anyway? I wasn’t into home improvement. It wasn’t even our house then. It was just another old and cheap rent house in a dingy KCMO neighborhood inhabited by losers and left-behinds. We had no place in the modern world order except as wage slaves in service to our “betters.”

The construction of this oven was a community event, as everybody was curious as to what we were up to, and while it did provide a large baking area (about 2 feet by 3-1/2 feet), it wouldn't be big enough for the whole neighborhood. Many experts were present and helped supervise the process. Even so we were able to get it built. Within a week, there were a half dozen other ovens in various stages of construction. This added another item to our agenda, as the increased demand for wood for both heating and cooking would eventually put a strain on our wood supply. This suggested a need for cooperative wood lots and other structures for a sustainable wood and energy supply and we had to find ways to keep warm that did not involve burning wood. When we got into methane, we started thinking about how methane could be used to fire an oven like this.

If it's not one thing it's another, as they say, and it was as true on this side of the Change as it was in the before time. Then, it was one bill after another, this money for that expense to satisfy whatever need. We still have those needs and wants, but we're meeting them in ways that often don't involve money. We take knowledge and combine it with creativity and work and some resources to put the daily bread on the table. We are still interdependent with our community and those interdependencies concentrate at the neighborhood level and ripple outwards from there.

A big factor is that we have to really think about the design of whatever systems or processes that we create to replace our old ways. In the past, we were just too rich for our own good. We had unimaginable wealth and power, and we made bad choices. We designed things to fail and wear out, converting capital goods into consumables. Then, when we were finished with it, we just tossed it — out the window of the car, into the trash can, and didn't think any more about it. We actually threw glass and paper into land fills, mixed up with all kinds of other useful materials, in such a way that the end product was pretty useless for anything!

One of the things I worried a lot about in the beginning was trash disposal, since trash service stopped just before our trash day. In retrospect that was a completely backwards way of thinking.

If you don't think of useful items as trash, but rather as useful items, then you don't think about ways to get rid of them. Instead, you think about ways to use them to maximize the security and quality of life of the household. The trash problem disappeared really fast, as people just couldn't afford to throw things away anymore. The various illegal dumps in the area cleaned up quickly as people foraged for useful items and things they needed. Some of the earliest enterprises that developed in the summer of the Change year involved mining the city landfills.

What we did with our basement.

Our basement is large. The back of it opens onto the ground level of the backyard. I've already told about how we turned the area under the back deck into our biogas digester room. Here's what we did with part of the rest of the basement.

There was one large room and several smaller ones. We lined the walls and ceiling of the large room with aluminum foil (making the walls and ceiling light reflective). We set up tables and gathered up all of the little containers that we could find (yogurt, cottage cheese, egg boxes, etc.) We transformed those little cartons and containers into seed starting containers, and placed them on the tables. We hung two fluorescent light fixtures down low over the tables (four bulbs total) and planted our seed. We prayed a novena to Sts. Isidore and Maria, patrons of farmers and gardeners. What can I say, I hadn’t been to Mass in a long time before all this started. When civilization crashed . . . suddenly going to church seemed like a good idea. We would have gone down the tubes if it hadn’t been for the church people.

The truth about our little basement greenhouse was that one of our housemates used to grow pot in a basement and so he was an expert in growing things indoors. And we needed such an expert. He was hungry too, so we were all motivated. So we created the classic indoor marijuana garden in our basement, only instead of growing marijuana, we grew veggies under lights.

How did we run the lights? We didn’t have a generator, we did have a lawnmower and we had several vehicles. We rigged the lawnmower engine to run one of the automobile alternators, which charged a battery. Our roommate the former pot grower had grow lights and a small inverter from his previous residential “garden.” I know it sounds crazy, it worked. One of our housemates was a pretty good mechanic, and he rigged it up for us. He claimed he had seen something on the internet about how to do this. Now we use the neighborhood charging station. Actually, we sold them our lawnmower-alternator system when they opened up.

That gave us enough power for the radio and in the early days, we listened to a lot of CDs. Now that there is so much live music everywhere, CDs aren't as important nor as interesting. It really is amazing how many university trained musicians there were out there working at non-music-related jobs, until civilization crashed. We occasionally brought one of the light fixtures upstairs if we needed some good quality extra light after dark.

When we started making alcohol fuel, the charging station up the street converted the lawnmower engine to run on our home-brew. We traded a half gallon of gas for additional light fixtures, and expanded our basement nursery as much as space allowed, moving beyond using it for starting to growing vegetables full term to harvest. We had a bunch of squash and pumpkin seeds saved from squashes we bought grocery stores when we dived into the panic buying spree early in the devolution. We used five gallon plastic buckets for the larger plants (tomatoes and winter squash). We filled them to within a few inches of the top with dry leaves, with about 4 inches of topsoil on the top. We fertilized regularly with a compost tea we made in the backyard. These buckets did not have drain holes; instead, we stuck a wooden stick in each bucket. As long as about 4" of the stick above the surface of the container was wet and glistening, the bucket was OK. If there were five inches, it was time to drain the bucket a bit; if there were 3 inches, water was needed. We fertilized with our own urine, diluted one part urine in ten parts of water.

You'd be surprised how much food you can grow in buckets. We were.

We were even more surprised when we learned about aquaponics. By the second winter, we had reconfigured the basement growing area as an aquaponics system. We fished catfish out of the river and stocked tanks we built in our basement with them. One of the housemates had some goldfish in a bowl that he had managed to keep alive. They grew pretty big in the aquaponics tanks and are not bad eating. The catfish and goldfish do what fish do and that fertilizes the water, which we pipe into growing systems we built that produce greens and radishes all winter long plus we get fish. Instead of going to the river to fish, we just head down to the basement.

When we go shopping, our trade goods include some gold and silver we'd accumulated in the summer, various Bucks currencies, some US currency, spare parts, and shoots from our cinnamon tree plus some other useful seeds. We have rabbits, chickens, pigs, fish, and we participate in a beef, geese, and dairy cooperative. Our membership in these cooperatives entitles us to a division of the production, and requires us to furnish labor each month. Most of our labor share is the gathering of forage for the livestock or helping with the milking and cheesemaking.

Here it is February, about a year after things began to collapse, and we have green salad and fried catfish for dinner tonight, from our basement and back porch, with sourdough bread and a dried peach pie for dessert.

We weren't doing this well in February a year ago. Our margins were dangerously thin. We had to jump out of our box and do some new thinking about these radically changed circumstances.

All the vitamin pills in KCMO were eaten last year and these days you can’t find manufactured medicines like that. All pharmaceuticals are hard to find and expensive and so we have to pay attention to our nutrition and avoid accidents. The thinner your margins, the more careful you have to be, the less room you have for carelessness. Throughout all of the first year, except toward the end, there was a real sense of uneasiness, as though we were perched right on the edge of a precipice, and could go falling over it to utter doom with the slightest of provocations. The danger was its own stimulation, in that it helped to concentrate our minds and make us creative, plus people worked hard. There was a brief fad that blew up in midsummer, when everybody told Donner Party jokes. People would laugh — it was hard not to shiver thereafter.

Many things that we used to take for granted now require attention and work. And some things that we thought were important and took a lot of our time and attention and money in the old days are no longer relevant. That's just the way things are in life. We are all on a journey together, and the road has taken a curious twist.

Dinner tonight was a salad plus stove-top noodles and cheese. We made our own egg noodles from our household’s eggs and whole wheat flour we ground in the kitchen. The cheese came from up the street as did the cream and butter. I am sure I have never tasted anything so good in the old days as that homemade stove-top noodles and cheese. I like my life now. It seems more honest.

Homelessness

As the collapse proceeded, the homeless population in the United States mushroomed. People were stranded all over, sometimes with only the clothes on their back and a couple of suitcases, maybe a car emergency kit. If your credit card doesn’t work, you can’t buy gas. If you can’t buy gas, you are stranded wherever you run out of gas. Shelters immediately opened in churches and schools, but the experience was tremendously dislocating for all concerned.

McCoy School in my neighborhood was one such shelter. It was an old building, fortunately, built solidly in a previous era, its chimneys were still in place. The place was kept warm initially with a combination of propane, kerosene, and wood. The food — especially after the first week when the MREs ran out — wasn't anything to write home about.

The psychological effects of this were immense, especially on those caught in holiday traveling. Many of these people were not accustomed to inconvenience and disaster on this scale. Their cell phones, portable computers, and credit cards wouldn't work. They couldn't buy gas, airplanes weren't flying and the buses and trains were shut down. At the McCoy school, I met bank and university presidents, politicians, and various other members of the A list, who now were refugees in a public grade school in a part of town they probably didn't even know existed before this happened. Most were hundreds of miles away from family and home, and had no prospects of getting there in the foreseeable future, and no way to contact their people to let them know what was going on.

McCoy School had a cross-section of American society, and they all had one thing in common: their status was "homeless refugee.” Fortunately, there were poor people among them ("fortunately" for the upper class, not necessarily for the poor) so there was an opportunity to share "poverty skills" with the New Poor. The average upper class person in the United States doesn't know much about how to go about being poor, so it was a true culture shock.

As January progressed, the numbers of homeless people swelled. By the end of January, the public soup kitchens menu was a porridge made from cracked wheat, raisins, powdered milk, and oil. They fed the people in the public shelters and others who had access to a heated shelter but had no food.

The Harvesters organization, which in the old days supplied pantries and soup kitchens with the excess of the cities' restaurants and markets, continued to supply food throughout January to pantries and soup kitchens, although increasingly it was wheat and soybeans, and deliveries were only once a week. Many people gave them gasoline and diesel, which enabled this ministry to continue, as well as food. Harvesters remembered the large terminal grain elevators along the Missouri River first of all, in fact, the general manager of one such operation was a volunteer, and was quick to open the doors and fill up the Harvester's trucks with wheat, soybeans, and other grains. There were millions of bushels of such grains within the city limits, so it was an obvious solution for the entire region. The problem of course was getting it around. That was managed, just barely. Typically, all of the soup kitchens in a given area would send people to a central distribution point, and then the food was hand carried back to the soup kitchen.

Many factors contributed to the homelessness problem. Some landlords illegally evicted people. At first, the courts were open. They operated under a special martial law, and concentrated on criminal matters, with all civil cases, including legal evictions and foreclosures, put on "hold" for the duration. What would happen is that a landlord would show up with some toughs and put the people right out on the street. This continued to the end of January, as few people in the poor part of town could pay their rent — government benefits such as section 8, TANF, Social Security, and food stamps did not arrive that month.

After a family froze to death after being put out on the street, the military and the police started to arrest landlords for making such evictions and the practice stopped. Landlords either abandoned their properties or worked out new deals with their tenants. The good landlords came out in a positive way, because they already had good relationships with their tenants. The slumlords, however, lost everything. In this new world, being a jerk was not a positive survival value, and jerks who got people killed were seen as criminals.

Other people couldn't heat their dwellings, and went into public shelters or (as happened on Oakley Street) found refuge with neighbors. Some people suffered fires — with all the improvised heating arrangements, there were more house fires than normal, and without the ability of fire departments to quickly respond or water pressure to fight the flames, most such fires completely destroyed the dwellings. There were some serious apartment fires, which hastened the exodus from the big apartment buildings.

Thus, by the first of February most emergency shelters were packed. They were orderly, the big ones had a small military unit attached, and people were cooperative. All of the shelters were equipped with CBs, and most managed to have radios tuned to the remaining stations, especially short wave. There was a certain amount of huffing and puffing the first week. That disappeared quickly. A lot of high stress corporate survival strategies (e.g., backstabbing, non-cooperation, winning through intimidation, extreme cynicism, radical selfish autonomy/individualism, whining/pouting/tantrums, being a general jerk etc.), became sudden liabilities. Big liabilities, as in, you could get put out of a shelter, so people behaved, not just out of fear, but rather because most people are better than most people will concede.

We always worry about what "other" people will do — that is, people don't worry that "we" will riot and rape. They think that “others” may riot, turn lawless, act violently, and be criminal. Most of the possible "theys" are just people like you and me, and certainly we aren't lawless rapists, rioters, and criminals, even when we got a bit on the hungry side. In some respects, civilization turned out to be fragile. In other respects, it turned out to be more durable and stable than we thought. We had made the mistake of assuming that our technology and material goods were our civilization, when in fact, they are only parts of who and what we are. We are a clever and industrious species, and when one set of tools and toys was taken away from us, we immediately started building new tools and toys, and perhaps this time we will learn something from the mistakes we made in the old days.

The new important survival values were the abilities to get along with others, to cooperate for mutual support and security, to improvise and be creative, to put up with inconvenience and problems without undue complaining, to see both the long and short term, to break out of existing envelopes and modes of thought in favor of new thinking about the new problems of life, the universe, and everything, and to see the spiritual realities that are far more stable than any mechanical construction.

All of the shelters organized program activities; given the eclectic groups that ended up in most places, there was staff for a pre-k through university school, plus all kinds of specialized skills that could be shared or used for the benefit of the group. Self-help groups organized and met regularly; Alcoholics Anonymous was there, and schools started. Babies were born and people got married. In short, people started to put their lives back together again, adapting to their new circumstances.

Many soup kitchens that were not equipped with grain grinders improvised them from metal water pipes — three bound together with duct tape. They ground the grain by pounding and grinding with the ends of the pipes. It was very labor intensive, but there was a lot of labor. They used sausage grinders to grind soaked soybeans.

Some of these homeless people, perhaps sensing immediately that something was up beyond the traditional electricity blackout, went out and "homesteaded" parks, and other out of the way public spaces. There was so much going on that the police and the military left them alone. Typically, these people would scrounge tarps, sheet plastic, plywood, poles (utility poles, trees, etc.) and tires and build earth sheltered homes that when heated with wood, were actually quite cozy, if unconventional in appearance. People from churches and community groups visited and provided expert advice about issues such as sanitation. New little villages and neighborhoods were born.

We helped one "improvised" family (a number of single travelers who met in a shelter and decided to hook up as a survival household for the duration) build a nice and cozy home. Here again, there were lots of experts present,. Even so we managed to get the place built. Swiss Family Robinson had nothing on us northeast Kansas Citians! As spring bloomed, there was a mass exodus from the homeless shelters in schools and churches in favor of this kind of construction, plus many occupied abandoned properties and structures. There were new people in our neighborhood, and many of them lived in unconventional dwellings.

In a disaster situation, people often fall into a "monkey-see/monkey-do" behavior. If there is a line waiting to ask for necessary supplies, it is not unusual for people to ask for exactly what the person in front of them asked for, even if the first person's list has items that aren't needed by the second person (an extreme example would be the first person being a woman asking for sanitary napkins, and the second person being a man and asking for the same thing). This kind of behavior was often observed in homeless situations in the old days, and thus it wasn't surprising to see it happening in these new and stressful circumstances. It has some advantages in the present situation. The example set by those who exited the shelters early to take control of their circumstances by building improvised housing on public lands, was followed as the weather got a little better by virtually all of the others in the shelters.

This same kind of creative thought and smart work went into other things needed by these refugees. People modified blankets as ponchos — which, by the way, were de rigueur for post-Crash winter fashion. Everybody wore them. People made those large #10 cans into stoves, ovens, and buckets. We discovered a thousand uses for wire coat hangers.

Thus, as the year progressed, the homeless problem resolved itself through poor people being empowered by their circumstances to help themselves. This isn't what most people thought about when they thought about solving the homeless problem. In the old days, many systems operated to keep poor people poor. In these new days, all of those disappeared. People were free to use creativity and hard work to make their lives better. Many people experienced a larger return from their personal effort or work after the Collapse than they received during the before time. It was different work than they were doing before, but like the minimum wage workers up the street who became respected and skilled weavers, honest, hard, and smart work brought success in the new world. Hey, look at us! We were mostly peon convenience store clerks. Now we run a newspaper and printing business and have a successful market stall.

Of course, people's definitions of "success" radically changed, and not a moment too soon, if you ask me.

Civil Society and how it saved our bacon

Throughout that first January, there was a gradual slow down of activity, especially for the government. Mail delivery stopped in the third week of January, the last of the services to go.

Here in Kansas City, except for the police and fire departments, local government was pretty much gone by mid-month, the offices were closed. I wasn't too surprised about that. I was glad to see the police remain active. That thin blue line never looked so good. In the best of times, Kansas City government was pretty dysfunctional; our entire emergency preparedness department consisted of a single administrative assistant, whose primary resource was a big book full of phone numbers. The KC Star had recently run an investigative report that claimed that many of the phone numbers were wrong.

So I wasn't betting any farm on Kansas City government as an active player in the recovery, and was right in that judgment. The most useful thing they contributed wasn't until March, when the city council managed a meeting and, in response to a request from a coalition of civil society organizations, authorized the "bucks" alternative currency program. If the water department had waited on instructions from city hall, there would never have been a resumption of water deliveries to city residences and businesses. Indeed, if it hadn't been for the support and organizational skills of civil society organizations, it is possible that city government could have disappeared entirely.

The myriad of community and religious organizations, ethnic associations, clubs and etc. that exist in our communities saved our bacon on many occasions. As politicians deserted their responsibilities, civil society stood firm in the breach. Churches opened their doors as shelters and soup kitchens, ethnic associations organized self-help and rescue operations, specialized clubs contributed their expertise — the ham radio associations as usual did a major service by providing communications. Ministers, priests, imans, and rabbis reminded us of our duties to our neighbors. Gardening associations taught people how to build greenhouses, cold frames, and start seeds inside for early planting. As snow melted, they assisted in selecting large community garden locations and helped prepare them for planting.

In the beginning, there was little or no coordination among groups except for those closely associated geographically (such as churches and schools). It would have been nice if there had been some coordinated plan that everybody could have implemented from day one. Nothing so prudent had been attempted locally. Instead, these groups and organizations each looked to the situation it was immediately in, and took action to resolve the challenges and emergencies as they presented themselves. As people knocked on doors of churches for help, shelters were born. Custodians and deacons went in search of propane and kerosene heaters. The Altar Society started cooking dinner for 500 people. The Knights of Columbus went door to door, together with the Mormon elders and the evangelicals and Jehovah's Witnesses. People took things one day, sometimes one or two hours, at a time. "Let's get through this and then see what we need," was often heard in those early days. We never borrowed any trouble from tomorrow, because we had enough trouble with each day as it presented itself to us.

The advantages of civil society in the situation were many. There were on the ground, in the neighborhoods, and had existing communications structures that could be utilized in the present emergency. Most of all, they had structures of trusting relationships and action that could be brought into play. Times of great stress are hard times to build trusting relationships; it's better to get to know people in advance, and community organizations were full of people who already knew and trusted each other and had a track record of working together on projects.

Religious and civil society organizations had authority. In a time when "we the people" had truly been let down by major authorities and structures in our lives, this residual religious and civil authority was precious. It's hard for a devout Catholic to say "no" when his or her priest gets insistent, for example, and many priests got downright insistent in January and February with their congregations. The same was true for religious leaders of other denominations. All religions have a core set of beliefs and practices that derive from past emergency situations, and the institutional memory of such organizations is long. In a time of grave trouble, one of the most important things is for leadership to set an example of strong, proactive, and positive response to an emergency, especially in a situation where there is a serious possibility of a cascading series of events that lead to a highly dysergistic and negative outcome.

One government agency that showed strong leadership was the Outreach Extension of the U of Missouri. They provided all kinds of assistance regarding food production and preservation. I found myself wishing many times that we had had the foresight to build a community canning kitchen before all this happened. Oh well, hindsight is always 20-20, it's foresight that is hard to resolve to a correct focus. Before all this happened, I didn't know how to garden, I barely knew what canning was, so the thought of building a cooperative community canning kitchen would not have been on my radar even as a remote stoner thought.

Schools made significant contributions, both as shelters and as resources for learning and rebuilding. There are many teachers, and they did not disappear when the phones went dead and the electrical system failed. The same is true for the librarians, whose presence suddenly became one of the most important factors in a positive recovery. Libraries opened early, and some only closed for a week or so. If we ever get around to building memorials, surely there will be several to the librarians who helped us find the knowledge and data resources we needed to dig ourselves out of the hole we had gotten ourselves into.

We know on many levels (spirituality, instinct, experience) that structure is necessary for human community to work. And we know how big a problem this has been in our history. Knowing the mistakes that have been made in the past, people were frightened early on as to what might happen with the government. Should we be worried about the national guard patrolling the streets? Or should we welcome this as a sign of stability and commitment to law and order? . If the old structures go away, what shall we replace them with? Who's to say we won't end up in a worse situation than before?

Civil society played an important role in processing such fears by reminding us that our civilization is much more than mere technology and that most people are better than we think they are. We have been taught by repeated exposure to advertising that we are nothing more than the sum of the products we consume. If we don't have X new and pricey gadget, or a Nike "swoosh" on our clothes, or possess some other substitute for a real life, we are nothing at all. Unless we obey our corporate masters, we fail our civic duty. Spend More — Buy More was the mantra of the old ways.

This dysfunctional structure created an unstable and unsustainable economic system that was little more than a stack of cards waiting to be knocked over. Everybody was locked in — credit card payments, mortgages, new clothes every fall and spring, new car every third year, insurance payments every month, student loans — wealth constantly transferred from the productive to the idle rich, all of life being monetized and politicized by a myriad of structures that rewarded those with political access and punished those without power. Government had become a zero sum game where for one group to prosper, another must be impoverished, and the only ones coming out ahead of the game were at the top of the pyramid. A constant and unrelenting war of aggression and theft raged against the poor. In the old days, the bankers and politicians squeezed the middle class to death — a small portion made it into the upper 20%, the rest slowly dropped into the working and poor classes. Government statistics suggested that 45% of white families and 75% of African American and Hispanic families would be in danger of homelessness within 60 days if their incomes stopped.

And then our economic and technological infrastructure collapsed. Suddenly, there was a great equalization of poverty. Civil society helped us to focus on what was immediately necessary — shelter, heat, water, food — and the religious organizations, in particular, helped us to remember our duties and obligations to our neighbors. In the Old Days, there was some thought that people, as individual families, could stockpile food in their basement and survive a crash when all around them starved. Even in those days, this was a fantasy. Some people thought they could get away with it. Sure, it was vitally important that people store food. People who thought they could eat while their neighbors starved were mistaken about the way things work. Fortunately, when push came to shove, there was little of this kind of behavior. Those who rejected helping others were left alone, and most all of them had a pretty hard time of it in their fear and isolation. Their thinking was mired in the old ways; they didn't realize just how necessary it was to be part of a functioning community. Their attitudes were influenced by the arrogance common to the Old Days, "I've got mine and that's all that matters." Those who couldn't adjust to the new and more cooperative way of life tended to leave the neighborhoods; who knows what happened to them, I hope they found someplace where they could live in peace with their neighbors.

We needed to repair and re-create our technological infrastructure and our ways of thinking about ourselves and other human beings. In religious terms, this became a time of great metanoia — a turning from bad to good. It's a shame it took something like this to bring us to our senses. Sometimes a bit of world-shaking is in order, especially when a system is as ruthless as was the America Empire.

So just in the nick of time, the cavalry did ride over the hill and save civilization, but it wasn't necessarily the government's cavalry. As it turned out, the cavalry was from the Lion's Club, the Queen of Peace Catholic Church, and the Northeast Kansas City Women's Literary Association.