**** Chapter Thirty – A Stitch in Time ****

When I was a very young boy I thought these dawns were people when my father mentioned them at the dinner table. I would wonder why the person named Dawn came to our house every morning, why did a false Dawn come first on certain days?

Was it Ms. Dawn the lady from church? She was pretty and very nice but I didn’t think she came to our house every morning; Mom didn’t seem to like her very much for some reason. I liked her, she was pretty and she smiled a lot, she was a nice lady. But who was this False Dawn? I was confused…

False dawn, I had awakened too early; that was my first thought.

Dawn itself would follow quickly behind.

Morning.

It was cold.

I got up and looked around, it wasn’t raining; but it was far too cold for the beginning of summer.

I wrapped the blanket around Michelle and shook her awake, we needed to get back to the camp.

She was as confused as I was, she asked me why it was so cold.

Dawn broke on the horizon, we could start to see.

I focused my thoughts.

It wasn’t easy.

There was a tree line where the road was supposed to be.

I decided I needed to wake up. That didn’t work.

I decided we needed to ignore the new tree line and get back to camp. That did work.

First order of business; don’t panic, get coffee.

“Michelle, please make coffee.” I gently asked.

“Of course.” Came her reply.

Why hadn’t the fire died down overnight?

I looked at my watch, 10:45 it reported. The auto-winder must be broken.

I pulled out my phone and checked the time there, 10:45PM it said. Now I was confused, according to my time pieces only about an hour had passed since we lay down to watch the meteor shower. Something was wrong.

Michelle checked her phone, same problem; also, no signal. I went to the tent and checked my good watch, ditto. Even my wind-up alarm clock reported it was 10:45ish. Something was very wrong.

Second order of business: Count heads, every person and every critter accounted for.

Third order of business: Check the news.

Fuck no signal. No signal on any device, even satellite was down.

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Fourth order of business: Give everyone coffee.

I had to dig inside the storage to find my winter coat, it was chilly. Everyone seemed upset, everyone except the chickens. The chickens merely scratched around foraging for food and complaining about the hardships of their life.

This wasn’t good, the girls looked like they were in a minor form of shock, I suppose I was the same way. Action, normalcy – let’s start with that.

I started issuing orders:

“Matilda, we need breakfast.”

“Michelle, check the livestock.”

“Sonya, check your phone, check the internet, warm up the truck.”

I started digging into storage to see what we had for coats for the girls to wear.

We pulled together some warm clothing and everyone sat down around the fire to watch Matilda cook.

It was too strange; I went to my gun safe and pulled out my pistol and loaded up. I didn’t like carrying, but until I figured out what was going on I didn’t want to be helpless. I shut down the truck, it worked but without roads there was no reason to leave it running.

Sonya was able to pull up a video from the library but the internet was gone.

We ate breakfast, kind of. Nobody seemed hungry. Everybody kept checking their phones.

I handed out odd chores and then saddled up Abigail and road out to have a look, I took Brin with me.

**********

Everything was exactly the way it was the night before, or an hour ago if you believe my watch, until you got about two hundred yards from the camp site. At about two hundred yards the new tree-line started. I rode along the tree-line trying to take it all in, I was baffled and worried.

The field road we had driven into the campsite on had a huge Linden tree growing at the end of it. The barbed wire fence that had surrounded the field ended suddenly, three strands of wire just laying there on the ground.

The creek was actually a problem, upstream at the new tree-line the stream was flowing at least twice as much as it had before, probably more. The surrounding area was beginning to flood and the creek had pickup speed and was carving a new bed as it forced all that water through. I worried about the culvert and the drive-over, I followed the creek down to the camp. The creek bed was rapidly widening into a pond at the culvert.

That didn’t last long, as I watched the creek ran over the road and started to carve out the culvert. I gave it about two hours and it would be gone; the pipe might still be there at the bottom of the creek bed but the drive-over was doomed.

That was a problem for the future, I simply headed back over to the camp and put-up Abigail. It was time to do some thinking and some talking, something had changed.

***********

The women were gathered around the fire and were simply staring at it and checking their phones occasionally. They were all wearing horse blanket ponchos that I assumed Matilda had fashioned. I refilled my coffee and joined them.

I sat there and smoked my cigarette trying to get a mental handle on the situation; nothing I could come up with made any sense. I kept hoping that this was all some elaborate prank, but the Linden tree and that tree-line told me different. And why was the weather different?

I decided it was best to let everyone see the situation for themselves and led them off down the field road to see our new tree line. The dogs accompanied us, staying close to heel; even the rooster followed us for a little while before losing interest and scurrying back to his hens. It was a five-minute walk, and everyone was looking around in wonder, but that huge Linden tree finalized the situation. Something serious and permanent had happened; maybe the Wizard of Oz wasn’t just a children's story after all.

We walked back down to the creek and arrived in time to witness the last of the drive-over giving way and our new pond began to recede as the creek ran free again. I’d have to figure out something for crossing it, a future problem.

On the other side of the creek was mostly field with another tree-line visible in the distance. Whatever happened to us sure seemed to be good for the local tree population.

We retired to the campfire and resumed our individual musings; it was a lot for everyone to take in. I smoked another cigarette and decided I wanted a shot of bourbon in my coffee; everyone seemed to agree with me, and I spiked the coffees all around.

The faces around the campfire looked drawn and anxious; the clock on my phone told me that it was getting close to 1:00AM so I suggested that we all probably needed a nap as we didn’t seem to have slept. I set an alarm on my phone for four hours later and we all trundled off to bed.