From Lucifer's Hammer

I just finished reading Lucifer's Hammer (by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell) for the second time. Just as good a read as the first time! As SHTF novels go, this one scores the gold. A meteor hits the Earth. China attacks Russia, nukes flying right after all hell breaks loose with the meteor, which has calved and hits all over the world. Massive tidal waves. Rain for weeks. A seriously bad scenario. . . and yet, some folks survive (or we wouldn't have the pleasure of reading how they do it...).

It is a well-written novel, very entertaining at the same time it is pretty scary. Many millions don't survive, of course, and for those that do survive the meteor hits, there are zillions of ways for them to perish.

There is not much that is useful for the survival-minded, really. I mean, if you're in the right place, right time and incredibly lucky, you might have had a chance. In this scenario, there's not much you could do to increase your chances of survival without that supreme luck. So, there's no info on which tool would serve best, nor hints on how best to set up a latrine in a camp, or to live in the woods or even in the cities--there's too much calamity inherent for that.

But towards the end, I did come across a couple of paragraphs which seems worthy to me of copying and keeping. And here they are:

(This is set in the surviving valley belonging to a Californian senator. All the folks in the valley are on his side--lots of bad guys on the outside.)

The children had adjusted quickly to the new conditions. One elderly adult as a teacher, a dozen or more children, two working dogs and a herd of swine: school and work. A different sort of school with different lessons. Reading and arithmetic, certainly, but also other knowledge: to lead the pigs to dog droppings (the dogs in turn ate part of the human sewage); and always to carry a bucket to collect the pig manure, which must be brought back at night. Other lessons: how to trap rats and squirrels. Rats were important to the new ecology. They had to be kept out of the Stronghold's barns (cats did most of that), but the rats were themselves useful: They found their own food, they could be eaten, their fur made clothing and shoes, and their small bones made needles. There were prizes for the children who caught the most rats.

Closer to town was the sewage works, where the animal and human wastes were shoveled into boilers with wood chips and sawdust. The heat of the fermentation sterilized everything, and the hot gases were lead out through pipes that ran under City Hall and the hospital to form part of the heating system, then condensed. The resulting methanol, wood alcohol, ran the trucks that collected the wastes, with some left over for other work. The system wasn't complete--they needed more boilers, and more pipes and condensers, and the work absorbed too much skilled labor--but Hardy could be deservedly proud of the start they had made. By spring they'd have a lot of high-nitrogen fertilizer from the residue in the boilers, all sterilized and ready for the crops they'd plant--and there should be enough methanol to run tractors for the initial heavy work of plowing.

Those are the two paragraphs I found useful and worth keeping. I'll keep the whole book of course, it is a great read and a good novel. Thought-provoking as they say. I'll also hope that no meteor hits the earth, but in the meantime, I found the sewage use interesting.
HM

Beans: A roof over your stomach

I was reading Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck yesterday. It's about a rather lovable group of paisanos, bums, out in Monterey California. The paisanos had decided to help out a widow lady with eight kids, so they went to work thiev...ur...gathering food for her and her family. You see, usually the lady and her kids would go out and glean the bean fields, winnowing the chaff of bean plants and pods that had already been harvested by the farmer. They usually got hundreds of pounds of beans this way, and this was the family's food. However, this year the bean harvest was ruined by rain and the lady's family was facing starvation... so the boys took up steali...er...gathering food for them.

In the midst of all this, is a wonderful paragraph:

“When you have four hundred pounds of beans in the house, you need have no fear of starvation. Other things, delicacies such as sugar, tomatoes, peppers, coffee, fish or meat may come sometimes miraculously, through the intercession of the Virgin, sometimes through industry or cleverness; but your beans are there, and you are safe. Beans are a roof over your stomach. Beans are a warm cloak against economic cold.”

I love it--beans are a roof over your stomach. Isn't that a great line, a perfect description? That's when you know you are in the presence of a great writer, when you read a line like that one. How many times have we heard, "at least they have a roof over their heads..." and that is a cliche. But to twist a cliche to make it true, make it real, is an art and only fine artists can do it.

Tortilla Flat is a fine book, btw. It's a book about a group of "bums," yes, but they are also the knights of the round table, and the book weighs the philosophical questions of materialism vs. spirituality, and how little material goods you need to lead a good life.

It was a nice break from worrying about SHTF and all of that doom and gloom.

HM

New post coming up...

soon. But in the meantime, I want to talk about a book that survivialists should read. It's called Follow the River by James Alexander Thom. It's about a young woman kidnapped by some Indians. They take her away from her husband and kinfolks, to a place about 600 miles away. She knows that to escape and get back to her home, she'd have to walk those 600 miles, following the river. It's been a few years, and I can't remember the name of the river. Seems to me part of it was the Ohio, but I could be wrong. Anyway, she does escape and walks the entire way back, along with a plucky old woman who chooses to escape with her. Neither of them know much about wild plants they could eat. It is early fall when they escape. For a while they had a horse that they stole, and a hatchet, but they lose the horse or it gets killed and they lose the hatchet too. They eat whatever plants they find, most of which make them very sick, puking and hallucinating and feverish. And yet they keep going. The old woman goes bonkers more or less and decides to eat the young woman if she can catch her and kill her. The young woman is smarter than that and one night, crosses the river so that the old woman is on the other side of the river. They both continue following the river. It is a long, brutal, tough story, but they stick to it, and they are found by friends who immediately take them in and care for them. A fascinating survival tale--yes, it is fiction, but fiction anchored in the history, lore and feel of those times. Thom is a master storyteller and you'll enjoy the book. Unfortunately for me, it was before I really got into foraging and finding wild edibles--now I think I would get a lot more out of it. I'll read it again one of these days.