Honor Road by Jason Ross (best non fiction books of all time TXT) 📕

Snow had begun to fall in dribs and drabs in La Grande. It was early December and, while it hadn’t “stuck” yet at that elevation, they got a few light frostings every week. The sky clamped down around the valley, a sullen gray lid to a powdered sugar pot. The primary focus of the town was winter food production.

The agronomy professor from the tiny Eastern Oregon University oversaw the construction of fifty hoop greenhouses, clad in heavy, clear plastic, along the settlement ponds of the Grande Rhonde River. Ten of the greenhouses were to be dedicated to winter greens, but the majority were being tasked to grow russet potatoes in trash cans that were, even now, being collected from every home in town. The town subsisted on the last of the fall harvest, the local herd of beef cattle and twelve grain elevators alongside the railroad tracks. They would need more than that to make it through to the next harvest, and nobody in La Grande, so far as Sage could tell, had any illusions about the federal government coming to save them. This far from urbanity and this close to the furrow, people accepted a harder existence. They probably always had.

But not everyone was a farmer in La Grande. In the other towns of Union County, the ones off the “beaten path” of I-84, almost all the residents tilled the ground or ran cattle. A good number of those grew stupid stuff like golf course-ready Kentucky bluegrass, or peppermint for essential oils—stuff not even the cattle would eat. No matter what they grew, though, the majority of Union County grew something.

In La Grande, what they called “the city,” there was another class of human, and Sage could pick them out of the work crew like picking green jelly beans out of the bowl. Only this bowl was mostly green jelly beans.

They were the people who had once provided services for the people who tilled the ground: waiters at the local eateries, drug dealers, furniture salesmen, pizza delivery guys, even the tellers from the local bank. They were people who didn’t make anything anyone could eat, and they fell into a new class that the farmer class called “Klingons,” as in “freeloaders.”

What struck Sage as particularly strange; he and the other militia guys called them Klingons too, even though most of the militiamen didn’t plow either. The police department, which had combined with the county sheriff’s department and ballooned from thirty men to almost four hundred camo-clad warriors, hovered over them in a class by itself. Not even the farming class dared challenge their dominion over the county.

Chamber’s militia made sure the farmers were left alone to grow whatever food they could with winter looming. That meant keeping the Klingons out of their pastures and from stealing their livestock. It also meant keeping the rest of the world out of the Grande Rhonda Valley.

Captain Chamber’s uncanny foresight, prior to the collapse, made it all possible. He’d been locked, cocked and ready-to-rock when the curtain fell on the modern world; a bona fide prepper with guns, ammo and even a solar system powering his ranch at the edge of town. His forethought and personal magnetism had unified all law enforcement under his control: city police, sheriff’s department, even the two forest rangers who lived in La Grande.

The day the stock market closed, the other deputies whispered to Sage, the captain ordered every shop, store, gas station and storeroom buttoned up tight. He pulled his department back into La Grande and put a gunman in front of every store and ordered them closed indefinitely. La Grande, Oregon entered the apocalypse without even a run on toilet paper.

When it became apparent that the crisis was permanent, it was the most-natural thing in the world for the police to assume control of all manufactured goods and gasoline in Union County. As a result, nobody went hungry and they had reserves of fuel. Chambers organized soup kitchens and bread lines in eleven locations around La Grande, and shipped out regular deliveries of red winter wheat to the outlying towns. A lot of modern amenities, like fresh veggies and disposable batteries disappeared, but everyone ate, assuming they got with the program.

Unless they produced food on a farm, every Klingon checked in, every morning except Sunday, with their assigned work crew. Mostly, they built greenhouses, rounded up trash cans and assembled watering system for the potato project. Sometimes, they were trucked out to help farms with mission-critical manual labor. Of course, the Klingons bitched. They had no way of knowing how bad it was outside their valley. All they knew was that they were now the lowest social class, and they were being forced to work with their hands and backs.

Sage grew accustomed to getting the sideways stink-eye from the Klingons working the greenhouse project. It was part of working for the department.

He overheard their complaints about the captain “robbing the town blind,” but as far as he could tell, Chambers took nothing extra for himself. He didn’t need anything—his ranch was sitting pretty.

Sage caught remarks, tossed over shoulders, about “getting run out on a rail.” When break time was over, the Klingons would say passive-aggressive shit like, “Better get back to it, boys, or the captain’s henchmen, here, will run us outa town. Won’tcha?”

It came as no surprise to Sage; the first men he’d met coming out of Union County had been exiles. If a man couldn’t bring himself to cooperate in the game of bare-knuckle survival, he was sent away to try his luck against the elements. Goodbye and good luck. The captain’s force was on-track to deport all malcontents, for one reason or another. Being unskilled wasn’t a crime in Union County. Being a bitch about it was.

Hovering over the work crews alongside the frigid river, Sage had a lot of time to listen, observe and think, and it began to make sense why the captain sought out-of-towners for this band