Most people, including Steve, were doing OK with food. “A country boy can survive,” as the song said. Despite being cut off from the rest of the country, Forks was actually pretty lucky, Steve thought.
There was plenty of fish and game, especially deer. There had actually been an overpopulation in the years leading up to the Collapse, but that was just because the government started charging outrageous license fees for hunting licenses. Steve knew fish and game would become harder to find as everyone started going after it. The goal was to get as much as he could now and store it, which was the same goal that many people had. They froze it and smoked some. It seemed like most houses had a little smoke rising from a shed as they built smokers. Some people went in together on smoke houses and had a kid attend them and keep a small fire going. The first batches weren’t great because people had forgotten how to smoke meats, but after a couple of batches, they had it down. There was nothing more delicious than freshly smoked salmon.
There were a few things that they were running out of in Forks. One was toilet paper, so they started using alternatives. Steve remembered his grandma telling him that, back in the old days, they used a page out of the Sears catalog. These days, however, the Sears catalog was on the internet. And any catalog that came to a house was glossy and wouldn’t work. Steve knew this because he had tried.
One thing he didn’t have any experience with was an alternative for feminine hygiene products. Those, too, were in very short supply. Steve wished he had stocked up on those before the store in town ran out, but he was so focused on food and other supplies and…guys just don’t want to buy those things. Looking back, he should have manned up and gotten many of the things that the female members of his family needed. Luckily, they started coming up with alternatives, thanks to tips from their grandmothers about how they did it back in the old days.
Another thing they were running out of was shaving supplies. Some guys had electric shavers, but most men just quit shaving. Steve had always hated shaving. He remembered his grandpa and the beard he always had. It made sense now. He and his grandfather were pretty much living in similar conditions.
They were running out of canning supplies, too. Steve should have seen that coming, since he anticipated the Collapse. He tried to prepare all he could, but he could only do so much. He did a very good job, but didn’t get everything his family needed. Oh well. They were still doing OK.
Gardening was providing a surprising amount of food. Quite a few people in Forks gardened before the Collapse out of necessity as the economy was getting worse. Most people had plenty of space to grow things and there were still enough old people around who remembered how to do it.
But people were still only getting just barely enough to eat. Everyone was losing weight. Even out in a rigorous lumberjack town like Forks, people had been getting fatter and fatter before the Collapse. They still ate like country people, but weren’t physically exercising before the Collapse like country people used to. And bad foods, starches and sugar were cheaper. So the hard times before the Collapse meant even worse diets and more weight gain.
That was changing. People were now physically working hard. Instead of sitting in an office or store, they were out patrolling, gardening, hunting, or building things. They were eating better, which surprised Steve at first. He had assumed that being largely cut off from store-bought food would mean people wouldn’t eat as well. It turned out they were cut off from junk food and were switching to homegrown food.
What about the winter? Steve kept thinking about the inevitable changing of seasons. He knew that all kinds of bad things were coming for Forks. He knew that disease was on the way. As people were weak from malnutrition and stressed out, their bodies would be more susceptible to disease. People would huddle together indoors when it got cold. Easily treatable illnesses would go untreated since there was no medicine. Steve prayed that the utilities stayed on. If the water system failed, third world diseases like cholera were a real concern.
Food was Steve’s biggest worry for winter. His family needed to have enough food stored up to make it through the long months ahead. Most people were doing a pretty good job of hunting, fishing, and gardening, but it was early June. People were eating what they were gathering and growing. There wasn’t much of a surplus now. Maybe in the fall there would a surplus, but probably not a huge amount. Not many people realized how they needed to gather and store food now because nothing would grow in the winter.
Some people in town were not even trying to hunt, fish, or garden. A sizable number of them were still sitting around waiting for people to take care of them. Generations of an entitlement society where everything was handed out created expectations that were very hard to break. The people of Forks were very generous to each other. The lazy people kept getting things from others. Why would the lazy think he or she needed to do anything? Food just showed up all the time. Why worry?
Steve realized that the charity would stop when the food was getting low, which would likely be in the fall. The older folks and disabled would still be taken care of, but the shitbags, as Steve called them, would not. They would be stunned. And hungry. And pissed. It would get nasty. Steve urged the people in town to stop giving food to able-bodied people now. Some listened to him, others did not, especially those with a family member who was a shitbag.
Rifts were already forming along family lines. This was the security concern that Steve had.
Two days earlier, some shitbag teenagers got drunk and decided to steal again. This had happened earlier and resulted in one of them getting shot. It was the same group of kids. Steve didn’t understand why they didn’t learn their lesson the first time around.
The problem was that the kids were the children of some of the guards. The guards whose kids were out stealing didn’t want to do much about it. They had a “kids will be kids” approach to some serious crime. The other guards, who were not related to the shitbags, didn’t see it that way. They thought the crime needed to be put down, hard. Not killing the kids, but definitely putting them in the makeshift jail for as long as it took. Probably until things got back to normal, if that ever happened.
It came to a head during a shift change of the guards. Members of the two factions started arguing loudly. There was pushing and shoving followed by a fistfight. Guns came out. Steve realized he needed to take control of the situation. He fired his pistol into the air, just like in the movies. It worked; everyone stopped in their tracks. After they all calmed down, Steve announced that the kids would be picked up and the town would decide what to do with them. Any guard who didn’t agree could go home and not come back. Steve realized that he was risking a civil war in the town, but something had to be done. Some of the relatives of the shitbags left. That was about ten percent of the guards. Fine.
Steve was also worried about external threats. What if a big gang came down Highway 101? Would the town’s few dozen guards on duty at any given time be able to repel them? Some of these roving gangs were beyond comprehension. They had a hundred or more vicious killers. The hams told stories about them. Steve attributed the stories to the rumor mill or grand exaggeration. But still. A hundred bikers, or Mexicans, or Russians, or ex-military, or whoever was a serious threat.
Remoteness was Forks’ best asset. Steve knew that it took more fuel to get there than it was worth. Why would a gang drive a few hundred miles to take down a town of 3,500 when they could pick off a town or even neighborhood of that size by driving two miles from wherever they were? Besides, why would a gang want to fight gun-toting hillbilly lumberjacks when they would have such an easier time with suburban office workers who didn’t own any guns? It was an easy choice. Steve hoped the gangs kept making that easy choice.