The Main House was a large, three-story, ten-bedroom home. Yet with forty-eight people living there, it was an incredibly crowded place with no privacy.
As a general rule, people hate change. And the move to Elwood's was a HUGE change for everyone.
All of us had lost so much. Friends, carriers, freedom, homes, property, privacy... So devastating was the agoraphobia apocalypse, even the survivors were victims.
The first two months were particularly hard. Tensions were high, and the learning curve was steep. And we had many immediate concerns...
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Feces was our first problem. A huge poop pile, marinated in urine, had formed outside under the downstairs bathroom window. It attracted swarms of insects and reeked! Uncle Peter and I had to shovel it into wheelbarrows and haul it away.
About four-hundred feet from the house, there was a six-foot deep, naturally-formed, pit. A deep, wooded valley was on the other side. We dumped our feces into the pit, and it was given the name, appropriately enough, the "poop pit". The pit's shape and lay of the land made it ideal for dumping feces. Whenever the pit became full, or it would rain, the excess would overflow down into the wooded valley. The valley grew thick and green from that steady diet.
We kept a wheelbarrow under the bathroom window at all times, emptying it frequently.
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Water was our next concern. For a while, we hauled muddy water all the way from the river and gave it to Dad to filter and boil. It was labor-intensive and exhausting. We decided our time would be better spent digging a well. We started surveying for a good place to dig and soon discovered a well already on the property. It was just covered up. We attached Great-Uncle Jimmy's pump and soon had relatively clean water available to us about forty feet from the house.
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Trash was our next problem. Uncle Peter decided we should dump trash in a different place than where we dumped poop. (He never explained his reasoning behind this to my satisfaction. But he was the boss, so a good reason was not always required.) Behind "poop pit valley" was a large pit surrounded by a fence. We surmised the pit was formed from a collapsed mine and fenced off to protect the unwary. That became our dump.
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Food was our next concern. There was a Walmart Supercenter only seven miles away. Frank, Uncle Peter, Bryce, and I went there to go "shopping". (Again, Uncle Peter insisted I use the uncomfortable booster seat.)
We started to load up on food. We were fairly indiscriminate with our selections, grabbing large quantities of whatever.
It didn't take long to load up both vehicles. Before leaving, Uncle Peter wrote out an "I.O.U." for $1,000 and placed it on a register.
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Firewood was needed for cooking. And, come winter, we'd need it to heat the Main House. We found a "cord" under a tarp. But it was hardly enough to last until spring. At some point, we knew, we'd need to fell trees.
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Bedding was our next concern. Almost everyone in the Main House was sleeping on the floor. We appropriated a couple U-Haul trailers and made multiple trips to a furniture store. All the beds were kits, which were left to the agoraphobics to assemble. To simplify things, we only brought two types: Nine "queen sized" beds and seventeen "twin xl" bunk bed sets. The bunks saved a lot of space.
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Fresh fruit was needed, but easy to come by. The orchard produced more apples and pears than we could ever use.
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Fish was the next thing we wanted. It was here we found a job suited to Frank's abilities. To be honest, there was little else he was good at or willing to do. Even before becoming wheelchair bound, Frank was never a man for hard work that was not limited to words. After the peak he became a constant complainer living in a land of half-empty glasses.
You'd think a man with such an affinity for animals would find fishing appallingly cruel. But Frank didn't "believe" fish felt pain. When Uncle Peter asked Frank to explain his reasoning, Frank replied, "Beliefs don't require reasoning."
Frank usually fished off Elwood's long, wooden dock, jutting out into the Kaskaskia River. He routinely employed techniques once considered illegal, such as putting dozens of hooks on each line while casting dozens of lines at a time. Later on, he added "gill nets" to his armaments. Frank seemed to enjoy fishing and became more proficient as time went on.
Large fish were cleaned and gutted by Ellis, then cooked, cured, or pickled for later use. The smaller fish were fed to Bryce and Bender.
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Milk was something we thought we'd have to live without. But we ran into some luck. Frank was fishing and spotted two cows and a calf wandering around the highway. In a rare display of initiative, Frank roped and led them to the farm. We had no practical way of fencing them in. So, for lack of a better term, they became "truly free range" cows. They voluntarily remained on the property, eating grass. Every day, they were milked.
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Fire Safety was a BIG concern for Uncle Peter. What happened to the Westwoods haunted him. If a fire broke out in the Main House, it's unlikely any of agoraphobics could survive.
So on a scavenging trip to the hardware store, Peter appropriated twenty extinguishers; one for each room. He had Lenny install them, along with eight smoke detectors.
Lenny also ran fire drills, giving everyone detailed instructions for what to do during a fire.
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Sending out an S.O.S. with the CB radio became a daily tradition. Every day at noon, Lenny would broadcast the following:
"This is a general S.O.S. broadcasting on all frequencies. This is NOT a recording. My name is Lenny Guerrero. I'm an outbreak survivor living on Elwood's farm located on Highway #13 in Belleville, IL with over forty-five other people. We have three people who are immune. We have shelter, food, and medicine we can share. If you're out there, please respond... I'll repeat this message again tomorrow at noon."
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Protein came next. Elwood's once had chickens and a petting zoo. But the animals either had escaped from their small enclosures or died. We prepared the chicken coop by removing the dead former occupants and their rotten eggs, then moved the coop out of the cage and closer to the house. We made Elwood's playground into a large pig pen. Our plan was to appropriate chickens and hogs from the Cedar Hills Hog Farm. Before leaving, we received lots of advice from Marta and Ittel who lived there.
"Don't worry about injuring the animals," they advised. "If you break one of their legs, we'll just eat that one first."
Grandpa Kevin saw my appalled expression. "I know it sounds harsh, Samber," he sympathized. "But you'll need to get used to it. You're a farm girl now. Hogs and chickens are not people. They're not pets. They're meat."
By noon, we had a trailer full of squealing hogs and poultry crates full of clucking chickens.
We returned to Elwood's and unloaded the hogs into our pen. We had an "organic waste" bucket in the kitchen for scraps and trimmings. Apple cores, chicken guts, fish heads, contaminated canned food, cow placenta, eggshells, etc... These were mixed with water and boiled into hog slop daily. However, the majority of what the hogs ate was surplus fruit and fish.
Next, we released the chickens into our yard. We gave them a generous amount of chicken feed to start with, so they'd think of the farm as "home". These were to be, what Donna called, "truly free range" chickens. No fences. They would wander around the property and could leave whenever they wanted. (Like Frank.) But the nature of chickens is they will stick around because there's food and shelter. (Like Frank.) Truly free range chickens also don't need to be fed much because they hunt insects and eat grasses, seeds, leaves, fallen fruit, and other treats they find outside.
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