One down side of Forks’ remoteness was that the government decided to try out a new program on the town and a few isolated towns like it.
The government turned off the electricity. One day, the power went off, which was not uncommon, but then it didn’t come back on. Don got on his ham radio and verified that power was on in Seattle and even in Port Angeles, which was the closest town.
After twenty-four hours, things started getting serious. It wouldn’t be long before all that frozen food would start to go bad. The water plant in town needed electricity. Steve wasn’t panicking, but he was very concerned. He couldn’t sleep.
Day two of no electricity was even worse. People in town were getting nervous. The last thing Steve and the town’s leaders needed was for people to panic.
Later in the afternoon of the second day, a few guys came to see the town leaders at the school. They had a crazy idea. There was an old steam generator in town. It was wood fired and had been used until the mid-1980s to provide back-up power to the town. The guys were determined to fix it up and get it running. They had all the firewood they needed.
Steve remembered that line again from the Hank Williams, Jr. song, “A Country Boy Can Survive.” Referring to rural people, it went, “ain’t too many things these ole’ boys can’t do.” That was certainly true in Forks. After about ten hours, they tested it, and sure enough, they had that old steam generator running. The only problem was that, due to some switches not working, the steam plant could not send electricity into the town’s grid. This required people to bring whatever it was they needed electricity for, like a freezer full of meat, to the old steam plant. Someone rigged up some car batteries to be recharged at the steam plant and then taken over to the one gas station in town to get the pump working that got remaining gas out of the underground tank.
People started getting neighbors to help them load some freezers onto trucks and drive them to the generator. They plugged them in at the power plant and then brought in food they needed to refreeze. They rotated out the now-refrozen food and the next person did the same.
This went on for eight days until, one day, the power simply returned. And it stayed on.
Chapter 149
Battle for the Fence-Sitters
(June 5)
Grant and Lisa had a marvelous moped ride to the Grange that evening. They felt like they were back in college, except for Grant’s AR-15 slung over his shoulder.
As the Grange came into sight, they both knew that the fun times of the day were over. Tonight was serious business. It was the final vote on whether to have a trial for the tweakers.
Grant noticed that the Grange was packed. There were far more people at tonight’s meeting than the many ones leading up to it. It seemed that, since the raid on the tweaker house, the usual people were at the Grange meetings making their arguments about the trial. Now just about everyone seemed to be at the Grange for the final vote.
Grant wanted to win this vote; he wanted to get going with the trial. But, he was proud that the community was coming together to vote on this. He knew that, no matter the outcome of the vote, the community would feel like a fully discussed and fair decision had been made. The previous accusations of Grant and the Team “ram rodding” things had dissipated. People could see the decision making process was fair, even if it took too much time and discussion from Grant’s standpoint.
The Team had just arrived at the Grange. They were in full kit and getting out of Mark’s truck. It looked like they’d been out all day on patrol or training. They waved when they saw Grant and Lisa. It had been weird for them to have spent a whole day without Grant.
As Grant parked, he saw Dan and Rich with a crowd around them. As Grant got closer, he could hear that they were telling the crowd about the gate guard schedules. Dan had a clipboard and was calling out names and shifts. He was an absolute natural for this.
Rich saw Grant and came over to him. He had a smile on his face.
“Well,” he said to Grant, “This is it. The final vote. Supposedly.”
Before Grant could say anything, the enemy arrived: Snelling and his little followers. They traveled together, undoubtedly rehearsing their arguments on the way over. They were mostly the “cabin people,” the upper income people who owned cabins at Pierce Point, as opposed to the “full-timers” who were the year-round, middle-class rural residents.
The “cabin people” were more likely to cling to the idea that the Collapse was temporary and would end soon; the “full-timers” were more likely to acknowledge that things would likely never be “normal” again. There were plenty of individual exceptions to this, but the basic dividing line was that people who’d had it better in the past, the “cabin people,” were more likely to wish that the past would come back. The “full-timers,” who by and large had been economically struggling in the years leading to the Collapse, were more likely to understand that things weren’t coming back. Some of them were even OK with that because the bad times leading up to the Collapse had been brutal on them. And, by and large, the “full-timers” were rural people who had usually been more independent than the dependent suburbanites.
Grant realized that this dividing line at Pierce Point between the dependent and formerly prosperous suburbanites and the independent, but economically hurt, rural people was just like the divide in America. Great, Grant thought. Pierce Point was a microcosm of a bitterly divided America. This was a big political problem, but Grant felt like he was there to attempt to solve it, at least on a tiny scale. “One millionth,” he muttered to himself and became calmer. By that, he meant that there were several hundred people at Pierce Point, and several hundred million in America, so the political mess facing Pierce Point was only about one millionth of the mess facing America. That made him feel better that he wasn’t supposed to fix everything, just a tiny little piece of it. It made it a little less overwhelming to think about. It was still a big task, but he thought of all the other big tasks he’d accomplished recently. He mentally shrugged. He knew it would work out because he had tons of help doing whatever it was he was supposed to be doing at Pierce Point.
Snelling and his followers would not acknowledge Rich, Dan, or especially Grant. They stopped doing that a few weeks ago, after Grant demolished Snelling in a verbal exchange at the Grange. Snelling didn’t show up for a few days after that. When he returned, Grant got nervous. Grant knew at that point that Snelling was in this to win, and that Snelling was going to be a big problem.
Just as Grant suspected, when Snelling returned he was the most cheerful and polite person at the Grange. He was downright charming. He lost the superior air of being an architect from Seattle; now he was acting like a regular guy. His little followers were doing the same. They now talked apple pie recipes with the Grange ladies instead of complaining about “macho” men with guns.
Snelling and his people fanned out and started glad-handing everyone, except Rich, Dan, Grant, and the Team. Snelling was focusing a lot of his attention on the Morrells; Mary Anne in particular. Grant was afraid of this. Mary Anne was such a decent person that she would want to find a way to not execute neighbors and let things get back to normal. She was a tough bird, but her heart was in the right place – and that place was being humane to people and getting things back to “normal.” John Morrell was suspicious of Snelling’s sudden interest in apple pie, but wanted to support his wife.