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

Cameron rubbed his bearded face. Beneath the growth, he could feel his skin, thin and papery. Something important was missing in their diet and it made their skin crackly. They could only guess at what it was, but it wouldn’t matter even if they knew. They were already eating everything they could find of any nutritious value whatsoever. They’d taken to eating strange weed roots, without any knowledge of their toxicity or nutritional value.

While Denny fought his parasites, Cameron and Isaiah completed the water project. The stock watering tank overflowed with cloudy river water. But this morning, the flow down the eight-inch pipe slowed. The river must’ve risen to the challenge of their stone impoundment and attacked the pile of rocks they’d stacked against it. That was to be expected. They would need to repair and rebuild the dam almost daily against the stubborn will of the river.

However, the delicate sleeving of forty sections of pipes worked better than Cameron had hoped. Even though they lost splashes at each joint, the bulk of the eager water clung to the walls of pipe, and rushed the hundred yards into their catch basin with a happy willingness that surprised him. The stock watering basin had overflowed before they could stagger back to the homestead to check on it.

The drain spigot at the lower end of the big tank had been repurposed to fit the PVC pipe that stretched down the pasture to the cold frame greenhouses, set in the ground around the one room farmhouse. Cameron twisted the ball valve and the PVC jumped as though electrified. Ruth, at the far end, leapt up and down, waved her arms and shouted.

“Stop, stop, stop.”

Cameron closed the valve and went to see what’d happened.

The PVC tubing stopped just below the cold frames. They wanted to see if it’d actually work before completing the final distribution of the water. Now, a miniature delta of washout surrounded the cold frames. The pipe had delivered too much water, too quickly—what Cameron would call “a champagne problem.”

“It’s good,” Ruth explained. “Just too much. It’s going to wash away all our trenches. We need to divide up the stream somehow.”

A hundred feet across the pasture, the stock tank was already overflowing again. They had no PVC cement nor PVC junctions. The PVC tubing they’d scavenged had flared ends and one piece fit into another, but splitting the tube into multiple runs would require plastic tees and ninety-degree turns. Cameron wracked his brain to devise a way to split the stream coming from the stock tank without the proper joints.

“Maybe we could run the tube into a five gallon plastic bucket and send the water out the bottom into three tubes.” Isaiah scratched his ruddy-blond beard as he examined the washout. “We’d use one of the old five gallon wheat buckets as our three-way splitter fitting.”

“How would we attach the PVC to the bucket without glue?” Cameron asked.

Isaiah retrieved a five gallon bucket. “Maybe we can carve three holes in the bottom with the pocketknife, exactly the size of the PVC tubing. We have plenty of extra PVC. With short pieces, we can run it through the hole with the fitting on the inside of the bucket. The fatter end of the tube will mostly seal the hole like a funnel in a bottle top.”

Cameron could see it now. Isaiah’s solution was really quite clever. It’d split the flow into three streams and any extra water pressure would overflow the bucket harmlessly onto the ground. He considered complimenting Isaiah, but Ruth was there, and his dick wouldn’t allow it.

“That’ll work, I think,” Cameron said instead. Even with the thin praise, Isaiah gleamed. “You can plant your seeds and set the frames now,” Cameron said to Ruth.

Over the past two weeks, the women had gathered together wood for the six frames that would hold the milky sheet plastic around their grow beds. Built with a mishmash of lumber they’d pried off the barn, the cold frames looked like clubhouses constructed by children, but they’d function all right.

The grow beds stretched two to-a-row, and three across, making six ten-foot-long planters. Each cold frame lifted away, to be set aside in the warmth of the sun. Every morning, if the weather was nice, they’d set aside the six cold frames and then replace them at night. Hopefully, the warmth trapped in the earth would keep the tender shoots from freezing.

Isaiah had already gone to work carving the three one-inch holes in the base of the plastic bucket. He removed the tiniest, pinky-fingernail shavings with his Boy Scout pocket knife, and checked progress every few minutes against a chunk of tubing. He kept a flat sandstone nearby and sharpened his knife frequently, swirling the blade in a tiny puddle of spit. The man really was quite meticulous. In a world where no scrap could be wasted, patience had become a survival skill.

But it still wasn’t what got a man laid.

Cameron hated himself for the thought, but he couldn’t deny it: something primeval had taken over, and he stood at the apex of the clan. Isaiah either didn’t know or didn’t care.

The polygamist looked up from his work and noticed Cameron watching him. Isaiah smiled, then returned to his craft. Cam sighed.

He walked away, toward the impoundment dam to check on it. He’d fix it himself this time.

It looked like the water system was going to work, and they’d get water to their garden seeds. What happened then was anyone’s guess, but it was a victory, as was Denny’s recovery.

As he walked, he faced facts: both victories could be placed squarely at the feet of Isaiah. His kooky, Asperger personality had uncovered the solutions, and his dogged work ethic had driven the construction of the water system and the winnowing of the boy’s medicine. Cameron owed him everything, and he couldn’t remember having a more long-suffering friend.

Cam jumped over a dry, weed-choked ditch and came down hard on the other side. His head swam