Dear Diary, It’s Me, Jessica: Chapter 3 (Book 2)

By the Author of Dear Diary: It’s Me, Jessica

Dear Diary,

It’s me, Jessica.

I woke with a start as Rae gently shook my shoulder.  

Samson gave me a good morning kiss and tail wag as I crawled out of the tent with my sleeping bag in its dry bag and stuffed it into my pack.  Savannah was already up and out of the tent, donning her pack.  Jack quickly took down the tent we slept in, put it in its dry bag, and strapped it to the bottom of my pack.  In the pre-dawn twilight, stars could still be seen in both the East and West.  It was that early.  I would still call it “night” as I stretched my back.  

Rae gave me a nod as she stretched her arms over her head with a yawn and then put on her pack.  

Jack said we would eat on the road. He split a loaf of lard bread into chunks for each of us.  He had already fed Samson and the puppies.  Hard to think of them as “puppies” as they had to be close to fifty pounds and still growing.  

“We will hump for about twenty minutes, then stop for a boot and pack check,” he said. It was essential to adjust our boots, check for hot spots that would later become blisters, and shift weight in our packs if needed.  Savannah said she would check our feet at the end of the day for blisters, too.  Jack said we would hump for fifty minutes, then take a ten-minute rest and hydration break.  Even though it was cool, under the exertion carrying packs we could still become a “heat case.”  We could remove clothing layers as needed.

The rest of Four Corners was fast asleep as we made our way through the blockade of vehicles to the bridge over the river rushing under it.  

Jack led with the dogs, me behind him, Savannah in the middle, and Rae bringing up the rear as we carried our rifles in the patrol carry.  As we scanned left and right, our rifle muzzles followed our eyes.  

After about twenty minutes on the road, we stopped for the boot and pack check.  Jack, Rae, and I were fine, but Savannah needed to adjust both her boots and pack.  We finished our lard bread, drank some water, and set out again.

Jack set a good pace.  Not too fast, as he factored in one, maybe two additional days we would need to get to the City HAM Guy’s place.  The woodlands and hills surrounded the road on either side.

Jack called a halt for a hydration and snack break.  We sat down on the side of the road, sipping water, and pulled out a few pieces of jerky.  Jack gave the dogs several pieces each.  

I was chewing on the dried meat and noticed there was grass growing out of a crack in the pavement.  

“Natural expansion, contraction of the pavement, and the ground heaving forms cracks,” Rae explained in between bites of her jerky.  “One of our accounts was a pavement contractor.  I insisted on knowing who I was dealing with and what their business was.”

“Good policy,” Jack nodded. 

 “They took me out on a job for a day, and the owner explained as they went.”

“What is it going to look like in a few years?” Savannah asked.

“Well, without regular maintenance, depending on the weather conditions, there will be more and more cracks.  More and more grass, weeds, flowers, even trees might sprout,” Rae answered.

“In five, ten, or more years, you might not even know a road was here,” Jack added.  

Jack signaled it was time to resume the hump.  I took another pull of water to wash down the jerky.  

Diary, it seemed so strange to see the crack in the road, the grass, and the idea the road could be gone, taken over by nature as time passed on. 

Entry two

Jack “called the ball” on that day’s hump, leading us into the woods to the South of the road as the sun dipped low on the horizon.  A brook ran parallel to the road, flowing down toward the river and Four Corners behind us.  Jack and his team used the brook as a place to bivouac for the night on their trip.  It was far enough off the road that Jack thought we could have a fire.  Jack set up the tents as we gathered firewood.  The dogs helped themselves to the brook drinking water.  While Jack got a fire going, we set up our sleeping bags in our tent and organized our packs in the small covered area outside the main part of the tent.  Savannah asked us to take off our boots and socks and she would check for blisters or other possible foot issues.  

“An infected ingrown toenail could be a life-threatening situation without antibiotics,” she said. 

“Chicken and biscuits.  Who would have ever thought we would be at the point where an ingrown toenail was life-threatening,” Rae asked, mostly to herself.  

While airing out my feet felt good, given the all clear from Savannah, we put our socks and boots back on, but left them loose.  After Savannah checked Jack’s feet, he suggested one of Rae’s canned meals and some lard bread for dinner.  With the extra food he was carrying for us and the dogs, his pack had to weigh close to fifty pounds, maybe a little more.  It did not seem to affect him in the slightest.  

Jack built up a good-sized fire that felt good as the sun sank below the horizon and the temperature dropped.  He said the key to a good cooking campfire was a proper bed of coals as he raked out some of the red-hot coals and built what he called a “log cabin” of interlaced pieces of wood over the bed of coals forming what kinda looked like a pyramid of wood with a flat top.  He then placed a pot that was small but could hold two of Rae’s canned meals in a water bath to heat them for a hot meal on the top of the pyramid.  As the coals heated and burned the wood, the heat would bring the water up to a slow boil and heat the meals through.  After about five minutes, Jack pulled the pot off the fire and gave the water and meals a few minutes to cool.  He then used his tactical gloves to pull Rae’s canned meals out and divided them into our bowls.  He then made one for the dogs, adding some jerky.

Diary, I did not realize how hungry I was after humping for the entire day I was ravenous once the food hit my camp bowl!  I used a hunk of lard bread to soak up as much of the rich brown broth as I could.  The hot meat, the carrots, the parsnips, the bread were all fantastic.  

After dinner, we washed our dishware, our utensils, and the jars of Rae’s canned meals out.  Jack had us put on a clean pair of socks, wash our dirty ones.  We would sleep on those to dry them out.  He said we wore a pair, had a pair drying, and a clean pair.  With the remaining hot water, we would take a sponge bath in our tents.  

Diary, with a full belly, feeling clean, we all fell asleep seconds after we crawled into our sleeping bags.  

Entry three

The next two days were uneventful.  We took our breaks, ate jerky or lard bread, drank water, and resumed the hump.  We would bivouac next to the brook, have a hot dinner and a sponge bath, and sleep well.  Jack would always wake us at pre-dawn twilight.  He had a watch with a solar-charged battery but always woke up five minutes before the alarm went off.  He said it was a trick he learned in the Marines.  It’s just like sleeping sitting up in an MRAP or in the back of a five-ton, whatever those are. 

By the end of the third day, Jack said we had come farther than he expected, but we were still just short of the city itself but passing through a few sub-burbs.  He felt more comfortable with us finishing the hump in the early morning the next day.  Less eyes, he said.

After a thorough search of one of the abandoned homes, we set up camp in the living room.  The house was huge, easily twice as big as my home.  It reminded me of the homes I would see on some of those sitcoms on TV.  Really lovely house, belonging to a rich family.  I thought the first floor was strange with all the space.  Rae called it an open floor plan.  She explained they charged more to do less work, like putting up walls for separate rooms.

It looked like whoever lived here just up and left.  Everything was intact – nothing out of place.  In the bedrooms, there were some empty drawers and hangers missing clothing.

Jack said not to go into the kitchen.  The fridge and freezer had food in it when the power went out.  Despite being closed, he could still smell something had gone bad.  

Jack used his camp stove to cook dinner on the back patio.

There was a formal dining room that was separate from the rest of the floor.  The all-wood table and chairs look like they had never been used.  There was a fancy wooden cabinet with glass doors.  Inside were white plates, bowls, and wine glasses, all arranged like they were on display.  In one of the drawers, we found nice cloth napkins.

“This feels weird,” Savannah said between bites of her smoked ham.

“What is it, honey?” Rae asked before taking a bite of her ham.

“After three days on the road, it feels weird to be inside.  Sitting at a real table.  Eating dinner.”

“That happens sometimes,” Jack said, wiping his mouth with one of the napkins.  “After being in the field for an exercise for weeks or deployed to a war zone for a year, that becomes the new normal.”  

“Since I came to Four Corners,” Savannah continued, “Normal is sleeping in something like a shack, on a bed roll made up of blankets.  Sitting in a camp chair, on a log, or even on the ground to eat.  This,” she looked around the dining room, “Seems almost foreign.”

“Do you feel lost?” Rae asked gently.

Savannah thought for a moment.

“No.  I feel different.  But in a good way.  I feel like I am doing something real.  Important.  Helping the people of Four Corners.  Making this,” she glanced at Jack, “hump to help someone I don’t even know.  Compared to what I was like-”

Savannah looked right at me, and her eyes went wide.

“I was so mean to you,” she said, looking remorseful.  I went to say something, but she cut me off.

“No.  I was. To lots of people.  I was a bully.  Even to my parents!”

“Do you remember when I first saw you at Four Corners,” I asked her.  “At first, I did not recognize you, you had lost so much weight.  Now, I don’t see the bully anymore.  You have changed.  A lot.”

“You have, too!  The hero of Four Corners,” she teased back.

I looked up at the ceiling and sighed, “I am never going to live that down.”

“She is not wrong, Jessica,” Jack stated.  “When I first met you, you were just a teenager.  Now, not even in your twenties yet, and if I didn’t know any better, I would think you were.”

“We have all changed since the power went out,” Rae said.  “Some of it has been awful.”  She paused,  “This is  going to sound terrible and I know it, but I sometimes cannot help but wonder if life is not better now.  Thinking back on it, some things I thought were important before the power went out were so dumb!”

“The number of ‘likes’ I got,” Savannah exclaimed.

“Having the eighty-dollar pre-ripped jeans,” I added.

“A TV in every room,” Jack chimed in.  “I worked with a guy with a forty-eight inch, HD, smart TV in his bathroom right across from the toilet.”

“The large double decaffeinated half-caf, with a twist of lemon, two pumps of sugar-free salted caramel, almond milk, and dry foam macchiato,” Rae rolled her eyes.

“Oh, I could really go for one of those right now,” Jack said.

“Are you serious,” Rae tilted her head to one side and looked at him like he had a cabbage for a head.

“Yes,” he replied, but shook his head “no,” at the same time.

We all began laughing.

Entry four

Jack let us sleep in, and I woke up to see it was light outside through the bay window.

I found Jack under the awning on the patio, using the camp stove to warm up lard bread and some of the smoked ham.  He thought we deserved a hot breakfast.  The dogs got some of the warm ham too.  

It was raining.  Jack said the rain was a good thing as there would likely be fewer people out in the cold, wet rain as we made our way to the City HAM Guy’s place. 

We ate our hot breakfast and packed away our sleeping bags and things.

Diary, I agreed with Jack.  I would not want to be out in the cold rain.  And then we put our wet weather gear on and went out into the cold rain.  

We made our way from the suburbs into the city.  The lovely homes gave way to stores, mini-malls, restaurants, and gas stations.  Many of them appeared looted, with busted windows.  A few were untouched.  Some were burned out.  Vehicles clogged the street.  Some sat in perfect condition, and others had been in violent wrecks.  A few of the cars were burned out, too.

Jack checked his watch often now.  At the appointed time, he took out a handheld radio and turned it on to signal for City HAM Guy.  City HAM Guy immediately responded.  Even through the small radio speaker, we could hear he was anxious.  Jack let him know we would be at the back loading dock door in about half an hour.  Jack said he remembered the knock code from the last time.  

We resumed making our way through the street between the vehicles.  The only sound was of raindrops on the roofs and hoods of cars and trucks under an ash-gray clouded sky.  Nothing moved.  It was eerie.  

When Jack had described the damage of City HAM Guy’s apartment building he was not kidding. Where the entrance and the area above for two floors looked like they had been bombed out.  Same with one of the upper corners.  Most of the windows had been busted out.  A few had bullet holes in them.  

Jack led us around back to where the loading dock was.  He made knocks in a pattern.  Paused.  Then made them again.  Immediately, we heard the sound of metal on metal, and the door opened.  

City HAM Guy was short, thin, balding, and wore thick glasses. He looked very glad to see us.

“Oh, thank you!  Thank you for coming!”

To be continued…