Yesterday's Tomorrow, Nathan Wolf, Wolf [jenna bush book club .TXT] 📗

please give me a call. Thank you."

Darlene frowned as she hung up the phone. She looked at me, turned slightly, and examined the calendar hanging on the refrigerator door before returning her eyes to mine.

"That was our last best lead; we're screwed." She slumped in her chair.

We sat across from each other at the kitchen table as, like an unwanted house guest, a shroud of gloom settled over the room. Out of options, we ran out of clock. Eviction day was less than seventy-two hours away.

Darlene's posture suddenly changed as she sat upright in her chair; the corner of her mouth turned upward, and a smile twinkled in her eyes.

"Yikes! I can't believe I forgot 'em!" She slapped the table top with the palm of her hand and let out a laugh. "Dennis, how would you like to live on a commune?"

"Huh?"

What kinda random question was this and where was it going? Darlene's exotic view of life trended toward the spiritual rather than the religious. Oh boy. I braced myself for her answer.

"What kind of hippy village are we talking about?"

"Hippy? I'm not talking about Woodstock, my love. My friends from college are living in an off-the-grid cabin in the Rockies. They owe me some money ... maybe we can stay with them."

"What's their address?"

If you learn where someone lives, you can start to guess as to their culture.

"Honey, they don't have an address, and they're not on a road."

Darlene moved to the living room sofa and I followed.

"How far are they from civilization?"

This was getting interesting. The closer to the road, the more connected they were to conventional reality. I had visited many communes in my younger days, and each had a personality ranging from boring to batshit crazy. We sat together on the couch.

"Fifteen miles, give or take." She leaned into me as she sat next to me. "We've been buddies a long time. We were friends back in college."

"What kind of friends?" If they had been living off the grid for fifteen years, this gang had something going for it

"You know, friends who help friends. Anyway, they are heavy duty into the survivalist movement. They might let us stay with them."

Any community holding its own for fifteen years might be an answer to our current housing crisis, depending on the depth of the batshit. Too deep would be too weird.

"Okay, you got my attention." I gave her a kiss. "Tell me everything you know. Who are these guys?"

We talked until there was no more to say.

"Stay or go. Your choice. Do you want to give them a try, at least for a few weeks?" Darlene asked.

Living as amateur survivalists, her friends occupied an off-the-grid cabin located somewhere in the Rocky Mountains about two hundred and fifty miles west of Denver. The more I thought about it, the better it sounded. Living off the grid far from civilization was an attractive alternative to living in a cardboard box behind a Safeway Supermarket. Besides, I liked the high country and I had made several hiking trips into the mountains while stationed at Lowry Air Force Base prior to shipping out for an all-expense-paid tour of Vietnam.

"Hum, I'm in. Let's see if your friends will let us stay with them."

I watched and listened as she dictated a text message requesting sanctuary for us, and shared her joy when she received an affirmative response a few minutes later.

"Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, off the grid we go," I sang, and Darlene joined in with a verse of her own.

"Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, off with clothes we go," she sang as she turned the dwarf song into a stripper-gram for two.

More efficient than artful, she had me barefoot from my toes to my chin within a minute. Bare ass and laughing, we sealed the deal by morning with a wild session of lovemaking. We were going to make a new life for ourselves. We were going off the grid.

The next two days passed in a blur as we raced to pack what we needed for our new lives. Our Rav4 got a new set of off-road tires along with a complete tune-up and oil change. We sold everything we couldn't take with us. What we couldn't sell, we gave away. We were done with Denver.

We departed a few hours after sunrise and followed US-70 out of Denver. Within an hour, we were up into the mountains, and four hours after that, we hit the town of Rifle and stopped for lunch. I asked Darlene to stop at the local smoke shop. I had learned that our new home wasn't only remote, it was in the ass-end of nowhere. The idea of running out of cigarettes a million clicks from resupply was frightening.

I assumed our new off-the-grid home had some power, so I purchased an electric rolling machine. I then covered my bet; I bought two hand-powered rolling machines to be safe. I then cleaned the shop out of their inventory of Zen rolling papers (three cases), along with sixty pounds of tobacco, two hundred cheap disposable lighters, and five tobacco pipes. Darlene stood next to me as the cashier rang up the largest single purchase in the shop's history.

"Are you out of your mind? Who spends that kind of money on tobacco? My God! We're broke and almost homeless." She shook her head.

"Sweetheart, my VA check is a direct deposit and it hit my account last night. Where we're going, money ain't going to be of much use, so why not?"

I added another handful of Bic lighters to the pile of merchandise. The total bill of sixteen hundred and forty-seven dollars and twenty-eight cents wiped out half my available cash.

The Zen cigarette tubes and sixty pounds of tobacco were too bulky to fit in the Rav's cargo bay. I secured my newly acquired stash to the vehicle's roof by wrapping everything up in a tarp and triple tieing it down with rope and bungee cords. The car looked like a band of gypsies owned it by the time I'd finished.

We turned north on Route 13, passed the town of Meeker two hours later, and turned on winding dirt road leading up into the mountains. About forty-five minutes later, Darlene announced, "It won't be long now" for the twentieth time.

Darlene was a bright young lady. She had programmed a series of waypoints her friends had emailed her into her vehicle's satellite navigation system. We followed the dirt road through a thick pine forest until the road devolved into not much more than a poorly marked trail. The trail shrunk down to a path as we ventured above the tree line, and soon our pathway became nothing more than a series of GPS waypoints connected by miles of barren rock.

I asked Darlene after an hour of driving ever deeper into the highland wilderness, "How long is not long?"

"We should be there within the hour," Darlene said

"Christ Almighty! Your friends aren't only off the grid, they're off the damn map. Do you have any idea of where we really are?" I complained.

Darlene shrugged, smiled, and kept driving.

An hour later, our Rav4 reached a ridge crest which afforded us with a splendid view of a long, thin U-shaped valley nestled between two towering mountain ranges. We could see a building almost lost in the distance at the far end of the vale.

The structure was considerably larger than it had seemed from the ridge as we approached the dwelling. The rustic cabin looked like it was growing out of the side of the rocky slope upon closer examination. It was as much a log mansion as it was a log cabin. Solar panels covered the south facing steel roof, and a farmer's porch wrapped around three sides of the cabin. Buck Rogers meets Davy Crockett.

The sun had disappeared behind the snow-capped mountains. Night and the thermometer were both falling fast by the time we rolled to a stop in front of the cabin. A welcoming committee of at least two dozen women gathered on the porch erupted in shouts of joy and hand waves when Darlene emerged from the vehicle. However, the boisterous welcome turned to a frosty silence when I stepped out of the car. It was as if someone had pulled the plug on the PA system.

Chapter 2

 

Darlene stepped around the front bumper and gave me a hug as she whispered, "Did I mention that this is an all-woman survival commune?" in my ear.

"You forgot to share that little detail with me. What the hell we gonna do now?" I whispered back.

Darlene was like that. She tended to skimp on the details and fill the void with trivia or useless facts. Darlene held my hand as we broke from our embrace, and spoke to the assembled women on the porch.

"I would like you to meet my lover, Dennis Richards, everyone. He's old, but he's kinda cool once you have a chance to know him."

An older woman, who appeared to be the group's leader, stepped forward and said, "I'm Sheila Carson, Mr. Richards. Please come inside. I think we need to have a talk."

I had the same, uneasy "Oh crap! Now, what?" feeling that I used to have when I got summoned to the principal's office as a kid.

Sheila turned on her heels, walked inside, and the rest of us followed her into the cabin's great room. If the cabin appeared big from the outside, it went on forever standing in the middle of the hall. It was enormous. A massive freestanding stone fireplace dominated the center of the room, and a blazing fire radiated heat and light in all directions. A cathedral ceiling towered over the open space and rustic balconies ringed the wall on four sides at the second story level. Thousands of LED icicle lights hung from the balcony railings and stairways. A soft, comforting glow bathed the room.

Sheila directed us to follow her to her office upstairs. She stood about five feet six and was a good looking woman about my age. Streaks of red highlighted her short cropped brunette hair, and she appeared to be in excellent physical condition.

Her skin had the bronze tan of someone who was no stranger to hard outdoor work. Her face was more handsome than beautiful. She was wearing faded work jeans and a low-cut wool sweater, which allowed an excellent view of well-tanned, medium-sized breasts and ample cleavage.

Sheila's office featured a giant oak desk and a stone fireplace. A picture window filled one wall with a breathtaking view of the frosted mountains painted silver in the light of an almost full moon. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase crammed with books covered the opposite wall. There were several oriental rugs scattered about on the wood floor.

"Make yourselves comfortable, I'll be right back." Sheila made a quick exit through a side door.

Her abrupt departure startled me. Something was brewing. Darlene and I took a seat on a small loveseat in front of a coffee table and exchanged worried glances while we waited.

I leaned close and whispered, "What the hell is going on? This ain't the warm and fuzzy welcome we expected."

"I know. I don't understand. I told Sheila's assistant that you were coming with