White Wasteland by Jeff Kirkham (best color ebook reader .txt) 📕

front of the bay window that looked out into the snowfield between condos. The realtor had pointed out the “open kitchen layout” when they first visited the condo. Richard still didn’t know what that meant.

The countertop was clear of all appliances—there was no coffee maker to take up space, because of their LDS faith, and Melinda spent her days cleaning and organizing their dwindling kitchen resources. The only thing to interrupt the perfect order of the countertop was an open cardboard box stamped Meal, Ready To Eat, Individual. To President Thayer, it almost vibrated. He hated that box. He could not conceive of a reason why Melinda would leave it out. Why not tuck it under the sink or put it in the walk-in cupboard?

As much as Richard Thayer wanted to be the kind of man who took full accountability for his lapses, he couldn’t stop the blame from slipping around the dam and pouring out the spillways.

In the daintiest manner conceivable, Melinda ate her food. But even the petite smack of her lips and the tiny clink of her fork against the plate drove him mad. The sound of every bite rolled over him like a noxious wind and buffeted him with gusts of annoyance. He could feel his ears getting warm.

Richard forced himself to eat. Quiet. Measured. He betrayed none of his exasperation. He rose, got them both napkins from the cupboard and returned to his seat one place further away from her on the countertop. He hoped she hadn’t noticed.

Before the collapse, Melinda had gone every five or six weeks to have her “platinum bob” hairstyle trimmed and touched up. After nine weeks without stylists or hair products, it looked like she had a mop on her head.

Richard scratched the side of his head so hard, it probably left red claw marks in the scalp. It was the side she couldn’t see. He took a deep breath and smiled at his foolishness. Even after all these years claiming to follow God, he could be such a buffoon.

He forced himself to reach out for her hand. He moved back to the chair beside her and slid his plate next to hers. She was a woman, after all, so there was no doubt she knew he was struggling.

Once upon a time, he’d hoped that the longer he was a churchman—a man of faith and religion—the easier it would be to tamp down the impatience that sometimes roiled over him. But it hadn’t become any easier, and he’d resigned himself to practicing self control forever.

He squeezed her hand and she looked up from her spaghetti. Her eyes smiled. He knew that she knew, and she honored him for his effort and his silence. So often, during a marriage of forty years, loving one another meant shutting your darn mouth.

The wave of irritation passed and Richard returned to his meal.

After his ten o’clock meeting each morning, the Thayers were usually left to themselves for a few hours. They ate lunch in peace, then they’d both step to the sink and wash their dishes in the two buckets that’d become a fixture in their kitchen: soapy water and rinse water. They’d discovered through a little trial and error that rinsing dishes with cold water didn’t lead to sudden death from dysentery. Heating water for dishes burned too much energy in this new, old world.

The business of the church required less these days, owing to the spotty communications. Like heating water, in-person meetings weren’t worth the energy.

President Thayer had pulled down the big color photo of their family in his office and replaced it with a giant map of Salt Lake City and Ogden. Next to it, he hung a smaller map of the world. Whenever they made contact with an LDS stake over ham radio, they stuck a pin in the map.

A “stake” was an organizational building block of the Mormon Church with around fifteen hundred souls. A green pin meant that a stake had gathered and was surviving—avoiding starvation through food storage, agriculture or access to scavenge. A blue pin meant the stake had made contact, but their survival remained tenuous. A red pin meant that the stake was experiencing life-threatening hunger.

A few dozen green pins, a hundred red pins and a sea of blue pins stood out like beard stubble from the map. They’d received word from about a third of the stakes in the Salt Lake Valley. The incommunicado stakes were likely in the most dire straits of all—probably wiped off the map.

In the first weeks, President Thayer routed the FEMA and church emergency supplies to the red pins—the stakes hardest hit—by sending the Blue Army with supply trucks. That lasted about two weeks before the hundreds of hungry neighborhoods burned through their relief supplies. Then, he went to work collecting and distributing information, “best practices” from the stakes with green pins. By sharing what had worked, Richard hoped to unlock the death grip of famine.

Early on, they learned that stake presidents shouldn’t attempt to force members to share their personal food storage. Doing so led to angry and sometimes violent conflicts. Instead, stake presidents were instructed to allow neighbors to help neighbors however they saw fit. President Thayer gave broad discretion to state presidents in the valley, with one exception: they must distribute food and information to members and non-members the same. In the end, information proved more valuable and long-lasting than food.

So much had been forgotten about the simple maxims of human self-reliance. President Thayer found himself scrabbling for every scrap of information he could find about primitive living and basic survival. When anyone asked him what they could do for the Church’s survival effort, his response was always the same: learn.

Learn as much as you can, as fast as you can about growing food in winter, purifying water, collecting solar power, washing clothes, grinding wheat, handling human waste, fighting infection, defending roadblocks, delivering babies, and staying warm. Learn everything you can about surviving without modern conveniences.

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