The lunch call came none to soon, cutting and trimming saplings is physically demanding work and the three of us needed a break. Naturally I had joined in on the work, standing around watching would have to wait until I was an old man; Brin took care of guard duty for me.

Harvesting saplings isn’t as easy as it sounds, occasionally you’ll find a large stand you can thin out but you can’t take all of them and there are never enough of the size you need in a single stand. We ended up with piles of cut and trimmed saplings all up and down the near side of the creek.

We didn’t use the chain saw in order to avoid un-necessary wear on the chains and battery, I only had one back up chain and a couple of batteries. All of our advanced technology had an End of Life somewhere in the near future with zero chance of replacement parts coming available anytime in the next two centuries. Mind numbing thought.

So the work was done with axe, hatchet and hand saw. As I looked around at some the the larger tree’s I’d need to fall I ran my new favorite fantasy through my head: “If only I had known I was coming here, I would have bought such and such instead.” It was a pointless and harmless mini-day dream but it was also the sort of day dream that had led me to purchase lottery tickets to begin with. I had never actually thought I would win the lottery, those tickets just gave me something to day dream about while I parked on the Southern California freeway every afternoon as part of my daily commute.

My logging arsenal was pretty sparse, I only had what you would need at a camp site or to remove a medium sized downed tree from a trail. I had a logging axe, a woodman’s axe, several hatchets, a maul/sledge, a machete or two, a cant hook and a single man cross-cut saw. I’d figure out when and where to use the chainsaw going forward but I knew it was best saved for emergencies.

Lunch was a welcome break and the food was good as always, not as much meat as I would have liked but meat was fast becoming a luxury; our bacon wasn’t going to be replenished from a magical bacon bush down by the creek and I couldn’t see a sausage tree anywhere. Story time went to Esther and her version was entertaining as well; kids see everything from a different perspective and that came through in the story also. Holder was fascinated and even asked a few questions about these far off places, he was still a young man and hopefully not completely set in his ways.

School came next and this was a new one for Holder as also; watching him sit there and struggle with the alphabet was eye opening. We took literacy for granted in our future-past, this young man had a long way to go. As at the start of every learning session we reminded them that freedom came from knowledge and the more you knew the freer you were. Yup, philosophy type shit but the absolute truth was that the greatest treasure I had was that digital library; knowledge of unequaled proportions in that day and age.

The afternoon work started with a quick accounting of our new pole inventory; our harvesting had ranged down the near side of the creek and made it about a quarter of the way around the near treeline. We had managed about fifty good poles in our first pass out. Obviously this was the easy stuff, with easy access that didn’t require us dragging a fresh cut sapling through fifty yards of forest or fording the brook.

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I decided that we should collect and sort these for use in “Immediate Projects”, things such as the roof of the root cellar and fence posts for the meadow. It was time for a little show of technology and I thought a truck might be just the thing.

Holder jumped when I fired up Michelle’s truck, the idling diesel was a noise he had never heard before and he was a bit skittish. I let the engine warm up a bit while we sorted out some proper tow straps and then I put both him and Amos in the back of the truck and went out to collect our sapling poles. The look on Holder’s face when I put it in gear and started moving was priceless; horseless carriages and locomotives existed in that day and age but they were very few and very far between. He may have heard some stories about them but a modern four-wheel drive diesel was an entirely new level.

I kept it slow and easy as we crept along picking up poles and stacking them in the bed, most of the poles were ten to fifteen foot in length and as long as we kept them strapped we didn’t have a problem. Two trips was all it took to collect our first harvest. We took them back and built sorted piles next to the root cellar, it seemed as good as place as any other.

For fun I went through Michelle’s CDs and cranked a little Blue Grass music, it seemed to fit the theme and fit right into my “Shock and Awe” campaign. That brought work to a halt for a few minutes while both of them looked on and listened in wonder; I could make music come or go and louder or softer just at the touch of a button. For the history record Amos and Holder seemed to really like Ricky Skaggs.

Poles collected and sorted it was time to put the truck away, we wouldn’t be using it like this often but “Shock and Awe” was really necessary. Just for fun I took one pass up and down the field road at a fairly high speed with them in the bed and the music blaring, we hit almost fifty miles an hour in that short stretch; most importantly it was faster than a horse and faster than they’d ever gone.

We still had time left to finish the root cellar, with the poles sorted out all we had to do is place a few logs on top of the walls and then add a layer of poles and follow on with sod. I decided that the chain saw was our friend for this bit of work and after we axe felled four small trees I quickly cut them to length.

Now it was tractor time, more “Shock and Awe” technology on display. Amos loved the tractor almost as much as I did, he was thrilled to help do the pre-op maintenance while Holder simply stood and stared. We strapped the tree trunks together and to the backhoe bucket, I then lifted them and gently placed them on the cellar walls. We used sod to set them in place and ended up with four sturdy rafters to build the roof on. I then lifted a bundle of sapling poles and placed them perpendicular to the rafters; from there it was simple work to spread them out and branch them over after than. We filled the bucket with trimmed foliage from the saplings and layered them on the poles. Then we filled the bucket with sod and lifted it up to roof, as we laid out the sod our silly looking fort type structure suddenly became a root cellar.

The women came over to watch as we finished it up, the cellar still needed time to sit and stabilize before use; it would also need a real door but for the present we would make do with a door made of overlapping canvas panels. Inside it was dark and cool; again it needed some clean up work but it was a good start. Eventually we would begin to make clay bricks and brick in the interior walls and we would need to install posts to shore up the rafters but this would do for a least a year.

We had our first building.