To: Martha Klundt, Lindsborg, KS

From: Rod Doornan, Eau Claire, WI

February 4th, 20+4

Dear Martha and Kids,

Hello from Wisconsin!

I’m writing this right now so I have it ready to go first thing when the courier shows up, which will probably be mid-March. There hasn’t been all that much to do for the better part of four months except sleep, cook, eat, sit by the fire and nap or read, and occasionally venture outside to scrape off the solar heater windows, snag more wood for the stove and scoop up some snow for making water. Well, OK, all that does take up quite a bit of time, but I made a damn big batch of stew earlier this week and have been eating it straight out of the pot for the past three days, and not cooking has freed things up. Haven’t made such good stew in a long time. I’m proud of it, actually, and have attached the recipe for you. See, when it comes right down to it we men can take good care of ourselves.

And damn, yeah, those forays outside have been more and more occasional as the winter has progressed. It has just been so cold lately. It’s been a slightly above-average year, snow-wise, and there hasn’t been even one warmish streak since mid-November. So everything’s just piled up outside. So quiet now that you wouldn’t believe it. It’s to the point that I don’t even look at the thermometer on the kitchen window when I get up in the morning. I know that little red knob will still be stuck at the bottom.

I know I haven’t written you for a while, but I’ve had reason. The Chippewa flooded last May, took almost half the town with it. Most fortunate was the fact that only a handful of people around Eau Claire drowned – maybe half a dozen. But it almost ruined the mill we’d just finished building the summer prior. It had been in operation for all of nine months. Sure saw some use in that time, especially the other fall. One of the milliners swore he saw smoke coming off of it after a few really intense days in early September. The good thing is that the millstone didn’t get washed downstream, and the basic structure was still more or less intact. Just needed to clean it all up really good, replace the few lost parts – the water wheel, mainly – and wooden parts and get the mechanisms pieced back together and put into in running condition again. Easier said than done, of course – it took about a half-dozen of us all summer and then a bit into fall to get it all back into working order. What with all the rain that spring there was a hell of a good crop to process, and most of it got put through in good order (before the mice got all of it). Bad part of it was that we weren’t able to get any beer down for the Octoberfest this year. Yeah, we still celebrate it – how else are we going to get our rocks off before everything freezes shut up here? Well, we did have plenty of cranberry/maple brandy, so it wasn’t a total loss. I didn’t feel much like drinking last fall, anyway. I sure hope we have a decent crop this coming year to feed into the mill. (And that it doesn’t flood here again!)

Haven’t heard back from Vernie, have you? I still, for the life of me, can’t imagine why he’d just up and leave like that. Not that I don’t take you at your word. And, for the record, he’s not my brother any longer. I have had no indication that he would do so, but if he shows up here, he’ll get turned away. Forget how cold it is, he’ll not be allowed in this house. If he comes back to you, then and only then will I welcome him back as a brother. Until that point, he is persona non grata up in my neck of the woods. (Yes, persona non grata. All this winter reading is paying off in the vocabulary department.)

Along the same lines, Barb left. In hindsight, it had been a long time coming. She was none too happy when we moved out here from St. Paul, but eventually got used to it. Then, you know, everything stopped working and she couldn’t get her medications and just got really unstable. I told you all about that before, I don’t want to talk about it again. But last spring, when the rain was so bad and the river was rising, things got real bad again. I tried to calm her down, told her more times than I can remember that we personally were safe – living so far uphill and to the east of the river – but she wouldn’t listen. Once we got word that the Chippewa crested its banks she lost it and took some cabbages some beef jerky and cheese and a bottle of brandy and climbed into the attic. She slammed the door behind her and slid something heavy on top of it – I think that old day bed. I didn’t want to get things to get violent again, so I just went out and tried to find Dr. Carter. Well, he was busy with other hard cases, but he said he thought that some St. John’s Wort might help her out. That was all he could recommend, and I didn’t want to take up his time any further. So, I picked up a tincture of the stuff from the local “alternative apothecary”.

When I got home late afternoon, Barb was outside, sitting in that little rowboat we own and holding an umbrella. She said she was going to wait there for forty days and nights, just to be certain, and that I had to bring her food and brandy every day. Well, so again, I didn’t want to cross her because I knew that if I tried to coax her inside or argue that one of us would have gotten hurt for certain, so I went inside and slept by myself. The next day she was chanting “39 days, 39 nights” over and over when I went out to talk to her. I went back inside and fixed a little bit of breakfast for her: an egg on toast and a little pinky glassful of apple brandy. (Brandy is/was all Barb would drink when in an episode, and so I mixed a few drops of the St. John’s Wort tincture in with her aperitif.) She ate her whole breakfast in maybe four bites, and drank her brandy in one fell swoop. I took everything back inside and waited. This all repeated itself every meal for a couple days. Then, she came into the house mid-afternoon and said she wanted a bath. So, I heated up some water on the stove and gave her a decent pan bath and she let me put her to bed afterwards.

I had hoped that I could keep dosing her with brandy and St. John’s Wort. But a couple days after I thought I got her stabilized, I had to go help survey the damage to the mill. When I got back to the house, I found the front door open. Half the cheeses and all the beef jerky in the pantry were gone, and Barb’s bicycle wasn’t in the garage. There was a little note in the kitchen that read, “36 days left, going to Pike’s Peak so I won’t drown. You can come, too. Bring rest of cheese and another bottle of brandy.”

I looked at a map and guessed which road she’d be most likely to take, and bolted down it to try and catch up with her. Violence or no, I’d catch up and bring her back. But I hadn’t caught her by the time I reached Menomonie, and it was so late by the time I got there, I had to spend the night in a barn. I asked the exceedingly friendly farmer whose barn I crashed in to keep his eye open for a woman meeting Barb’s description and to spread the word then took off back towards Eau Claire at first light the next day, stopped at home just in case she’d found her way back, then zipped southeast towards Fairchild. I didn’t see her at all by the time I’d reached Fairchild so I had a quick lunch and asked the local authorities to please remain on the lookout for Barb, then I rode through Osseo on the way home and did the same thing. And I didn’t sleep that night or at all, I guess, for a week or so. It was the worst... it was bad. I still can’t think of where she might have gone, what might have happened to her. The local sheriff had his deputies on the lookout all summer for any indication of where she’d been, but they never found any sign. He suggested a couple things that might have happened to her, but I can’t bring myself to mention them now. I kept riding all over Eau Claire and Chippewa counties trying to locate her, but found nothing, either.

The worst was I rode over to Cadott one day and didn’t find her or get any news of her from anyone there. On the way back I saw a little trail heading off the road. I was pretty much out of my head at that point, so I thought there was a chance Barb had gone off in there and so I followed the trail into a thick tract of woods. After about 15 minutes of slow riding along this track the trail ended abruptly and there, right there was a huge airplane wreck, an honest to God 747 or whatever strewn all through the woods. I’d never heard anything through the grapevine about there being a plane crash out here, it was a saddening sight. Most of it had broken up, just disintegrated, but there were still a few sections intact. It must have crashed when everything went dark, it seems like forever ago. I stood looking at it for probably five or ten minutes. Remember wondering if things this big skip, like a flat rock on a pond. I suppose so, because the tail section had flipped over and into what looked like the center of the wreck. It smelled really disgusting, like melted plastic fused with metal and bodies. I was walking a little more around the perimeter of the whole carcass when I heard something shuffling around. All of a sudden a black bear waddled out from behind a bunch of bushes. It looked at me in surprise for a few seconds then lowered its head and started charging. I’m pretty certain now that it was a sow, and it probably just had cubs in the area and was protecting them. Something to be said for that, but at the time I was scared. And, shit, you know I don’t move all that well, but like I said I was out of sorts and just forgot all the things you’re supposed to do in that situation so I started running in the opposite direction, toward the tail section. I ran past the few seats, occupied by buckled-in and decayed bodies, to the restrooms. The door to one of them was open and I darted inside it, slammed it shut and locked the door. The bear hit the door about five seconds later, growling and pawing. It was pitch black in the restroom, cramped and hot. The body and plastic smell was even worse, but I didn’t dare open the door back up. I don’t even remember how long it was before the bear went away, but by the time I was sure it was gone and opened the door it was pitch black outside. I was disoriented from the shock of seeing the wreck and bear and from the chase, so I decided to sleep there in the restroom for the night. But I could hardly fall sleep, knowing there were bodies right outside the door. Who were they? Their families can’t possibly know what happened to them, like I may never know what... I opened the door the next morning and sunlight flooded in. This helped me get my bearings, as the open end of the tail section was clearly facing east. I peeked out the opening and listened for about five minutes before deciding the coast was clear. Before I left, and I know this is horrible and I still feel bad about it, I rooted through the little kitchen area and took all the bags of pretzels and chips and cans of soda that I could load onto my bike.

So, I – Obviously, fall and winter have been difficult for me. But in addition to the reading and keeping up shop, I’ve tried to keep busy planning new solar heater set ups. So busy I was last spring and summer with fixing up the mill and trying to both keep my mind off what might have happened to Barb and find her that I wasn’t able to continue on with the solar heater business. But I had to prioritize, and the fact that most folks around here are able to put up plenty of wood for winter made the solar heater thing less a pressing issue than having good flour and cracked brewing grain for everyone. I fully expect to get back into the swing of things this April or May, once it warms up a bit. Year before last they were in demand, and I don’t think that will have lessened any, what with the bitterness of the weather right now.

I’ve included some design sketches for you. They’re not blueprints, as such, but they should be enough information to get you underway if you wanted to make one for yourself. The damn things are so simple that chances are you could put together a pretty decent one with just the information here. But, I know there was a good article about these in Mother Earth News several years ago. If you can dig one up at the library, it’d probably help immensely.

So, regardless of what happened last year, I wish you a Happy (and hopefully not belated) Easter! I hope you all had a great passion play, if you’re still doing that. Tell Marty, Yasmin and Betty their uncle says hello, and that they don’t have to share this cheese with their friends if they don’t want to. (It’s too a-Gouda for that!) Also, I’ve packed in a few of those sodas and chips for them – they’re too young to remember what Pepsi tastes like, and I wanted them to have a chance to try it. Just don’t tell them where it’s from.

ROD

Rod’s stew

• Four cups pearled barley
• Two pounds fatty beef (or pork or whatever, just make sure it has a bone in it)
• Three turnips
• Three carrots
• Two onions
• Three or four cloves of garlic
• 2 tablespoons of salt if you have it
• Plenty of black pepper if you can find some
• One gallon or so of water

Bring the water to boil on top of stove and add barley, meat (cubed up best you can) and bone (if it’s whole, crack it open to expose the marrow) and boil for a few minutes. Move the pot to the edge of the stove and simmer it for an hour or two, then add the rest of the ingredients, all sliced up thin as you can do it, and bring it back to a boil for another few minutes. Then let it simmer for another hour or as long as you can stand smelling it before breaking down. You can remove the bone at this point. The stew will look oily on top – soak up the fat off the top with good barley bread and eat that first with a little bit of salt. Keep the pot on the edge of the stove so it will stay warm but not boil off. You can add more water afterwards to stretch it into a soup, if you need to.