The End, as It Happens to Me

By Randy Dolph

He knows the world is quickly falling apart and must take action to protect his small family. Finding refuge in the plains of Colorado, he brings his friends, pulling them away from the terror of the civil war that again grips America. It does not take long for the rest of the world to try and solve their own problems through war. The planet is changed when drastic measures are taken that threaten everyone. Then everyday life becomes about survival of the fittest. Soon the small group in Colorado must reach out for the help of neighbors to protect themselves from the horde in the north. But can they trust anyone with the secret location of their home, and can the mighty group in the north be conquered?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jun 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490738154

Randy Dolph

Randy grew up on the Eastern Plains of Colorado, where he was often found playing in the open grasslands. He now lives in Northern Colorado with his wife and two children. He enjoys camping and hiking in the Rocky Mountains. In his spare time he draws wildlife and paints landscapes. He and his wife like to compete in who loves who more. His wife would like to state for the record that she remains and always will loves her husband more no matter what he likes to think or write! They are soul mates, and together they have a wonderful life. She looks forward to all the fun and exciting adventures Randy will write up next!

Book preview

The End,

As It Happens To Me

Randy Dolph

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© Copyright 2014 Randy Dolph .

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3814-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3816-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3815-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014909816

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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This book is dedicated to;

My awesome wife Davina who is the greatest and that I love more

To my wonderful children Nathaniel and Alexandria,

I›ve never even heard of kids as good as you.

My family has been the very best part of life.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Epilogue

Chapter 1

I sit now at my favorite spot in the world, drinking from my favorite coffee cup. I am watching a sunset that most do not stop and look at, with it extra shades of radi ation.

(The greens really are the nicest.) I can see the long strips of color as the sun slips slowly behind the whole range of the Rocky Mountains from this high-up spot. The radiation stays high in the atmosphere and never comes down. And it does not affect people like they all said it would, though for a long time it was such a great fear. But it affects the sunsets beautifully.

I tell the story as I sit here with paper in hand. As I see it, this all started so long ago, or maybe we all have gone through so much, that it just feels that way. So much has happened that it is hard to start just anywhere. But I think I can start at about three years ago. I hope I can remember it all in a way that will bring it together in some understandable way.

Life gets busy. Yeah, especially this life. And it does not look to change anytime soon. Of course you must know what I mean here. And if you are reading this with the way the world is today, with all of its survival of the fittest, your life will probably be much busier than mine. Finding food is even a full-time job for most, I can imagine. And staying away from those who will take all you have is just as hard, I know.

I will admit I am so very fortunate to have all that I do. And the people around me are the very best kind. I hope, in the time to come, to be able to show you their character and great worth. I will carry paper and pen wherever I go, and as time will allow, I will put the two together. I will also come to this spot when given a chance as the years go by and write all that happens with us from now on. And I will carry about this folder full of ramblings until perchance things around here begin to make sense. I will explain as I go. And hopefully you are not reading this unfinished work you have found on some corpse with an AK-47 strapped under his arm. Please forgive me if this manuscript, if we can call it that, is a little winding. It may be the only thing that keeps me sane.

Much has happened to the world from the way it was, again, as you well know. I often wonder, though, at the very beginning of the fall. How interesting it is how quickly the lines fell out as they did, how quickly the parties of this country watched the other with pointed finger, not knowing that they too were in that same sinking boat? Conservatism or Liberalism both lobbying to win elections and then not standing for a thing. We were all tired of it, but we never dreamed of the way it turned out.

I guess it was doomed from the beginning by not taking the other side out without prejudice at the first hint of their different view. One side filling the other’s boat with water, not able to come to the truth that our way of life, and now our very existence, is that boat.

I will start at the beginning, at least from my point of view. We saw it coming long before it all hit the fan. I think a lot of people saw it coming, though. The question was what could be done about it. Then we pushed it over the edge by trying to stop the downward spiral. At least that is how I see it. What else could we do, though? We had watched long enough. We had worked hard enough at keeping our patience in check, most of us at least. It was not hard to see that things could not go on like the way they were forever. It seemed like they had already been like that for forever. There was one bad thing happening after another. Economy in the toilet, which had gone on for years. Promises of change, which put one more person in a position to take more away. Kids shooting kids and teachers every week. Trusted politicians with lies at every turn. It was not hard to see the end of it all coming, but I guess three years ago is long in global years.

The taxes came again and again with little representation for anything but filling the pockets of those who said they cared so much, comfy in their assigned offices on Capitol Hill. What were we supposed to do, write our congressmen? We all tried showing up at the voting booth asking for new leaders, but all seemed to follow the path of the way things were. Industry stopped here in America. How can a government survive such things? Then the printing presses could be heard running through the night, flooding our market with wet dollar bills that made my bank account worth half as much on weekly bases even though my balances grew.

Thankfully, I owned a construction company whose customers paid mostly in cash. It was not too hard to skim some of that off the top and put most of it away for a rainy day. We started looking for investments that move along with inflation and some buy-and-sell schemes. Buying homes was not a good idea to sink money into at the time as that could be taxed. We then would have to show where we got the money instead of playing poor like we became experts at doing. Stocks became a trap to many as Wall Street continued to be a prowling monster, acting like a sheep but really hiding its many razor-sharp teeth. And I could not bring myself to buy into those companies shipping everyone’s jobs and livelihoods overseas. So we were pretty limited.

A friend of mine, Robert, in whom I will be forever indebted, talked me into looking at some government surplus property outside of the city where we lived. Yeah, I know it’s real estate, right? I told him that. I told him real estate was a worthless buy and values had been on the decline for months. He said it was not really real estate but like investing in my company when you bought this government surplus land. It sounded like he was talking expansion when I was just looking to stay afloat in a changing world. But with the interest rate he was talking about at .5 percent, it seemed smart.

You see, things in the city were getting scary, and I was often talking to him about getting my family somewhere away from the powder cage of it all. We wondered about the mountains, but here in Colorado, they were already so full of homes and people. Of course that is the first place people would head in a time of trouble. Even living in the rural area like we did had its scary side. It was interesting, though, that at the time, the television told us all was okay. They just seemed to want us to go to work and pay our taxes and watch some new interesting sitcom or reality show. (I did like some of those.) So I agreed to have a look at this property my friend spoke of.

A few days later, Robert brought me a load of paperwork on the property. He had told us that government property like this sold often, and they made their own loans at low-interest rates. And after the sale closing of the loan, they just forgot about them, half of them ending up not being paid but not repossessed. The good thing was we could do it as a business loan because the government did not check the credit of such loans. Another aspect of the purchase was they did not care about the use of the land. We had saved a large-enough down payment that the officials in charge of getting rid of the land were instructed not to turn down. They really just wanted the surety of the up-front money. The government was already secretly shutting down by then. That rainy-day fund was about to save my family.

The very next day, we went out with Robert to look at the land. I still had to see it if I was going to invest in such a thing. We lived in a middle-sized town of thirty thousand, which was big for me compared to the small towns where I grew up. I lived among the cows and horses in Eastern Colorado when I was young. It was a slow-paced childhood. The ranching way of life has always been inside of me somewhere, and crowds have always been a problem for me. So my wife, Davina, and I were excited to see what it was going to look like. She too was as worried about city life as I was. On our way out to the land, I had imagined much but truly expected little.

It did not take us long to get there from the city. We left early that day and headed east. When we stopped about thirty minutes later among the flatland of the start of the Great Plains, I could not see why. We had just crossed a bridge with a slow creek running underneath of it when Robert pulled over the car. Craggily limbed trees with few leaves lined its banks on the north side of the road where my friend was beginning to point. The stream cut through some far-off hill hidden at the horizon. It was a land of rolling hills here.

Robert jumped out and crossed the road. He went up to the fence that was about fifty feet down and away from the side of the highway. He pulled at a fence post that looked like all of the rest and opened some unnoticed gate. He crossed back over the highway and jumped back into the car. There was an overgrown pull off that lead down the side of the embankment to the gate. I had not noticed it until we were actually on it. He drove us through the gate and did not look at me, but I was looking hard at him. He got out and closed the gate behind us.

The place was a sea of low-rolling hills and tall grass. After we went through the entrance gate, the car pointing north, the creek being on your left, there is a hill that slopes a little taller than all of the rest about two hundred yards up to your right. The base of the hill is lined with half dead gnarly looking trees and runs parallel to the creek bed bending and winding with it. We drove along the creek bed to where it curved, and the highway we had used to get here disappeared behind us. It flattened out here more, and there was an old metal shed blown-down just ahead, the remains of it overgrown with grass and stacked upon with tumbleweeds. You could see in a hollow just over the hill we had been alongside to our right that the hill angled down just enough to hide two sixty-foot-diameter round water storage tanks. They are flat on top and built on the ground right up against each other (you know the kind with the ladder that circles around them to the top). They were still about 150 yards up the hill, which seemed to make them pretty tall. They were in need of painting as the last coating of prairie grass tan had long since begun to fade. There was nothing else in sight except for the stream that twisted away to the northwest.

We walked to the top of the hill in front of us, which the creek curved around those big tanks being to our right. It was the extension of the hill we drove beside on the way in and was the tallest one around. There was tall grass surrounding everything and dry shrubs that often caught our shoelaces. We had to wind our way around a fallen tree here and there.

As we walked to the top of the hill, I remembered often walking in the country meadows as a kid, hoping to find an arrowhead that would impress my older brother or stumble upon some secret ant farm and watch as they milled about, ever busy doing a day’s worth of chores. The sun would blaze overhead, and we would hear my father’s loud whistle, which meant there were still our own chores to be done.

At the top of the hill, Robert pointed out lines where fences were running and some other areas where tall electric lines ran on until you could not see them anymore as they disappeared over some hills miles and miles away. We were able to see the whole land for miles around on every side from here. I could tell from up here that the water tanks were a little shorter than the tops of the surrounding hills, keeping them from being able to be seen from anywhere around. We looked at the piece of property we were there to buy. It ran about a mile in all directions from this point. I looked at my longtime friend.

He smiled and said a little sheepishly, It looks a lot more colorful in the Spring. I guess I do not know what I was expecting, but open land like this was a beautiful thing to me. I smiled broadly to my friend as I turned and looked around some more.

Far off in the distance to the northwest, about six miles, the hills became more rocky and began to fill with trees. To the northeast, about the same distance away, there was a small farm town, made to look big by the tall grain silos and large eight-story metal buildings used for processing sugar in times past. They ran along two sets of railroad tracks. A train depot used to run through the town, picking up and dropping off the large numbers of sheep that used to be raised around this area, along with the grains and vegetables that the land used to produce so heartily. The town’s smaller buildings disappeared down in the lower part of the hill, beyond what we could see. We could not see the tracks from up here either, just the tall buildings and some of the rooftops of the businesses and homes. We could also see a large water tower, the same kind you always see in small farm towns, with the name of the town proudly written on the side of it. The steeple of the church house was barely visible from the hill that blocked the rest of the town. I remembered driving through that town a time or two, but I am not going to say the name of it here. (I don’t want to give anyone that may find this someday directions to our front door. You may even be the enemy, you know?)

That is all government land from here north to the horizon, Robert started. It runs right up to this property. And along the fence line that runs on the west side of that small town, that is all government land too. And none of it is for sale yet. Everything west of that town is open range, which they have said they are not going to sell, all the way past those hills full of trees. That’s why you see all of the cattle. Farmers come in and gather their herds up at the end of the season. Until then, they are allowed to run their cattle and horses free on land like this. It doesn’t look like any of it has been zoned anything but open range yet, so it will be quite a while before you get neighbors. Another good thing is this property is fenced off from all of that so the cows won’t come in here and tear it up.

We turned and looked south. You could see the road we came in on from here but just barely. Just east about three miles of where we entered the property, a small two-lane road headed directly for the town north of us. It flattened out a lot in this direction. Pockets of trees could be seen here and there but not often. Nothing else was in sight. If you concentrated enough, you could hear a semitruck going by on the highway. But it must have been a loud one because I saw a few and did not hear any of them but the one. I wondered if the creek was always full of water. Yeah, it was flowing three months ago in July, Robert said. I’m not sure about the winter months, though.

Why all of the dry trees, I wonder? Half of them must be dead, I said.

They were pretty full of life then too, he said. They were surprisingly pretty lush and crowded in there.

We finished off our trip, and I went home, hardly able to keep from running to the wall safe for our large cash down payment. My awesome wife took little convincing, and of a truth, she seemed to be as excited as I was. The deal was done a week later. That was the same week the US president was assassinated by those Chinese special services teams, or so they were reported to be. They only shot one of them and showed pictures of the body on the news every night. And of course, the stories about what this meant went viral on the Internet.

We could not wait to show our two kids our new purchase. We have a boy, Chris, who was seventeen, and he can hardly be called a kid anymore. He is tall like his mother, with blond hair and blue eyes. We also have a daughter, April, who was sixteen at the time. She has promised me not to grow up but is failing to keep that promise. She also is tall with blonde hair and blue eyes. She is the nicest person that I have ever met until someone messes with her. When you do, you are on your own (just like Dad taught her).

My wife and I, though probably just me, longed to be at the newly bought property. I hooked our camper up to the truck and loaded up some food and water. With very little prep time, we were off. We kept the camper pretty well supplied already. There was a large set of pots and pans that never left the inside of the camper. Plastic silverware bulged from all of the drawers. We all grabbed our favorite pillows and thick blankets that we always had ready for the very mention of the word camping. We often backpacked the high mountains and had grown used to storing everything necessary for those long trips in the camper, piled up on the long couch that turned into a bed. It took us little time before we were overly excited to get there.

It was warm that October. Snow was not even a hint in the wind yet, even though it is often on the ground by the end of the month. When we arrived at the new property, I pulled the camper in through the gate and closed it behind me. I was so excited I was barely able to close the gate. I rushed back to the truck. The looks I got from the two kids when I got in were much less than enthusiastic.

Dad, didn’t you say something about a stream? Chris said, looking out the window at the slow-moving water.

Didn’t I mention the views? I asked, no longer looking at anyone.

Yes, they said in unison.

And I— I began.

Bet the sunsets are gorgeous, they together interrupted.

Bless my wife, who gave me her always-encouraging smile. We drove ahead and around the curve of the hill by the stream and parked the camper close by that blown-down shed, though I did try to put some trees between us and it.

We all got to work setting up the camper. I had no thought of it ever being moved again. We leveled it up and added the piers to all of the corners. It turned out quite sturdy. I had faced the door southeast away from the wind, and we pulled out the awning. We were around the hill where we could not see the road, and the area seemed pretty comfortable. The hill we followed in sloped in front of our door and those water tanks were off to the left out the front of the camper. I already loved this spot as I put out my favorite lawn chair. We all worked together and gathered rocks for a small fire pit.

I kept everyone close by so we could all look around together. I was the only one that had saw some deer scatter from some brush ahead of us as we had drove in. I was sure they would soon be roasting over our up-and-coming open fire. We got all of our beds pulled out and made in record time and moved on to bugging one another. We decided it was time to look around. All of them, me included, had to get a closer look at those water tanks.

I wanted to save those for last, so we climbed the hill that we had climbed the first time we were here with Robert. This time, there were cattle everywhere on the property neighboring ours. They were all high-quality Angus cows, and I hoped aloud the owner would not miss a few when it came time for him to round them up. I pointed out the boundaries to the kids and turned full circle. We agreed next to go have a look at the stream.

It was nothing spectacular like I had hoped my son would see it to be. We all liked fishing, but him the most. I kept from looking at him as we kicked about its banks. It was lined with trees and larger rocks. Shrubs crowded at times and grew to over six feet. We walked all the way to the highway to where the creek ran under the bridge. The bridge is made of cement and is about forty feet underneath. The fence stops at the bridge so that we do not have to open it to go under. It was not as exciting as I had hoped for Chris, but he seemed to think it was okay. We saw a few smaller fish scatter, and that lifted his spirits. We saw off in the far distance that it emptied into a medium-sized lake. I promised we would visit it soon.

We all agreed that we should make dinner then as the day had passed on with our wondering around. We had made it quite a ways down the steam after we went under the bridge, so it took us a while to get back. We made it back to the camper, and my wife put on some of her awesome slow-baked beans and started the oven for some fresh biscuits, which we all fight over. Then we all looked up at those big tanks.

We looked first at that fallen-over metal shed and found little of interest. We then climbed the hill to the base of the southernmost water tank and saw that they were pretty tall, over forty feet, in fact. They were set in the middle of a purposefully flattened-out space about twenty feet around them on all sides. They had been dug out of the hill so that twenty feet from them, the hill began again its slope back up to its normal height. Only on the west side could you see them from below. The slightly taller hill on the far side of the creek hid them from view from far away. We walked all the way around them. On the east side there was a thick metal square hut welded into the side of the tanks where they met. It was welded half on the one tank and half on the other, and it attached where the two tanks came together. We could see that the tanks did not set side by side but instead joined in the middle, more like the number 8. There was an entrance door in the middle of that small square hut with some flat metal plate on the right of it. The door had no seam or knob or hinges but only a small mirrored window. When we had all tried and failed to see through the window, we continued around and, on the northeastern side, found the base of some steps leading upward. They went around and to the top at the northern side of the northern tank.

We moved back and all looked up. The kids, of course, begged to climb the stairs. I agreed that I would go first, and if all was okay, I would come back down, and they could go. The steps looked quite sturdy, and a few trusting steps proved to reassure me of their quality. At different spots, they were a little worn through, but they all felt fine. We all got to the top safely, and thankfully, there is a small railing all of the way around about two feet from the edge. We still leaned over as best we could, and all got a little queasy from the long drop.

I could only say, Wow, what a view! We could see far to the west, where the sun was getting ready to set over the mountains. The hill on the other side of the creek kept us from seeing the base of the mountains, but that just meant no one could see us from very far away from that end of the property. We sat then backs to the railing, feet dangling over the side, and watched the birds play around in the trees. Flocks of geese flew south overhead, this being one of the major flyways of their annual migration. We stayed quiet at times, listening for sounds of anything and trying to guess at things we heard. Thankfully, my great wife ran down and grabbed our dinner as I think little could have pulled the kids or me from the tops of those big tanks.

We sat that first night atop those tanks and ate until we were stuffed, Chris getting the last biscuit as always, or so he thinks. (My wife secretly slips me the last one, which she always hides for the very occasion. I, in turn, eat it with no one seeing.) We watched the slow sunset from the very place that I sit now and write. I remember each of their faces that night. They glowed orange and yellow, then a deep red. Finally, they glowed a beautiful shade of crimson that I have seen nowhere else. We stumbled, and April fell once on the way back to the camper that night where we all slept in peace.

Chapter 2

We woke the next morning and found the wind had picked up. The rest of the trip seemed to be about exploring the boundaries of our new acres. I had gotten a GPS map with the property, which told us where the lines where and a little bit about the topography. I had bought a portable GPS a long time before to help with all of our high-mountain hikes.

We walked and walked until our children were quite tired of the swaying grass. The fence was down in a few places, but truly I did not mind if a few cows made it in. The cows were good for eating. I thought I may, however, have to chase out any of the large bulls if they came in as they may become dangerous. I had not seen any horses yet in all of the areas around. I guess we all pretty much had it by the time we made it back to the camper.

It truly seemed no one had been anywhere around there for years, even to the property north of ours, except for letting their cattle on the property north of us. They had not used it for anything that we could figure out either. This was fenced-in property in the middle of nowhere. Weird, we thought.

We were all still really curious about those water tanks. We wanted to look inside of them, but we just could not figure them out. There were no pipes coming out with valve to turn off and on. And there was nothing on top that could be used in the same way. We spent some time looking over the little hut that was welded onto them on the back side. It was not clear if this was a hatch or a clean out door. I tried not to let my mind race. It did not look possible to get into these tanks without crashing through the sides. We were not interested in the flood that would follow but started thinking the time may come when we would do just that. On that note, we headed home.

We came back often to the property. It was decided that we should start saving money to build a house that we could disguise to the government as a business office. The government buildings were all but closed by now, with the shutdown mostly complete in all those unimportant offices. I asked about permits whenever I could find someone at work there. I was always laughed at. So I stopped asking. I drew up some plans but did not bother to file them. They were mostly for me anyways.

I started buying more material than I needed when I did an order for a new construction project for someone. (I always paid for the extra out of my own profits, though.) And I made sure that all of the extra got stacked on my trailer at the end of every job I did. Then I would unload it out at the property. It became a quickly growing pile of lumber and everything else you could think of, from nails and screws to a bathtub or two. I covered it all for some up-and-coming day.

We started buying food like crazy too. I did not even care that it looked odd when we walked to the register with six hundred dollars’ worth of groceries in our four carts. I did quickly find that we needed a place to store all of this huge volume of food. So we dug into the side of the hill in front of our camper. We did it in a steep spot hidden well behind some trees. We supported the ceiling with large beams from our new growing pile of lumber. We closed off and framed in the entrance where I took some time and made a sturdy door. It was not that it would keep someone from breaking in if they found it. We just wanted to make it reinforced for longevity. I did not want to be stuck in some up-and-coming winter doing repairs.

We quickly filled the dugout with foods of all kinds. I often made my rounds to the military surplus stores and bought them out of their rations. The sporting goods stores also became one of my stops as they also carried dried rations of all kinds but different varieties. I was not sure I looked forward to the day when we would have to survive on these dried rations, but our food store grew diverse. I bought with an idea of the kind of variety in mind I knew we were going to need. I, of course, did not leave out the fifty-gallon containers of beans and ones of rice. They quickly lined one entire wall. We did have to dig deeper a few times when we were completely full of food, but that was work I did not mind doing.

I also started buying with an eye for self-defense. We already had quite a few guns, but I started thinking of looking at the kinds I did not have. I, of course, bought ammo of every kind. I was pretty proud of my new huge stash, though it came hard with all of the restrictions on bullets and licensing.

I also thought about things like I would need in survival situations and dug my hole deeper in the side of the hill. I filled it with shovels and medium-sized wall tents. I thought basics, such as metal skillets and matches, and stuffed the hole high. I looked around and, finding more room, filled it with knives and fishing nets and things I don’t even remember. It was pretty impressive all that I got to fit in there. My wife often shook her head at me.

I told no one of our secret hideaway but wondered how I was going to build a large structure without help. My wife has always jumped in to lend a hand and was stronger than most men I knew. And the kids treated every construction site as a Lego set and begged to help. But this was a major project ahead. I put that out of my mind for just then. Keeping this place hidden was paramount.

We went to work instead, trying to deepen the stream as it made one of its many turns. We picked an area that it naturally did a small continuous turn that shaped a half-rounded edge out of the side where it flowed. The place we chose was just upstream from our camper, an easy walk away.

It seemed easiest to start in the middle of the U-turn it made. We spent a lot of time moving dirt. Finally, when it became obvious that this was bigger than we could handle, we went and rented a tractor and dug it out perfectly like we dreamed. We used special rubber lining that allowed water plants to grow through and lined it with thick rocks. We had ourselves a small but deep stream-fed pond where we planted cattails and hoped for big fish to come. When that project was over, I was sorry to have to return the tractor.

We thought about what else we may need here and knew we always wanted to have some chickens. They promised a big return, come time to do the egg gathering. And chickens were not hard to take care of, I told everyone, as I had done my share of dealing with them as a kid. So we set about making them a coup, which we decided would have to be put up behind the large water tanks. And we knew it had to be done well as there were lots of coyotes in the area that would love them as a snack. It only took a few days, and we were all happily watching as our new poultry scratched about in their full enclosure. We learned quickly and divided the pin in half so that we could crossbreed and grow our flock. Our initial twenty chickens and two roosters have tripled with little effort, though we have often had our fill of drumsticks.

We thought about getting horses quite a few times. I knew them to be a huge responsibility, needing constant attention if they were going to be the type of riding animal we may someday need. So we held off on them for a time as I was still hard at work with the construction business, and sometimes we were not able to make it back to the property for several days. We knew that we would also someday add a few goats and maybe even a milk cow.

We started then building a permanent area out of our camper. The place we parked it was a good one for it to be able, with just a little help, to blend in with the surroundings. It was right in among some shorter trees, and lots of shrubs grew around by the bottom of it. We had painted it with camouflage before winter had hit, so at least that part was already done. It was full winter by then, and the snow was howling. We stayed mostly in town, but the cold never scared us away from some good camping. On those less frigid days, we got most of the work done, building a fully wooden and enclosed awning off the front of it, which worked as another bedroom. We found a used wood-burning fireplace and put it in the enclosed awning area. It heated the whole place so well we often had to open the windows to keep from being run out. We insulated the camper around the bottom and pulled as much fallen brush around it as possible to camouflage it. We stood up fallen branches in the trees around the camper to fill in where nothing grew. We tied them to the high limbs of the trees, and it started to disappear from view all around. It seemed our job with it was complete.

We turned then to building some enclosures for our two trucks and a few of our trailers, one of which held our three four-wheelers. We built them in among the trees and right up against the hill. We started the far-left wall right next to where we dug the hole for our food storage. It was a quick project, and the weather held to the brisk wind kind that is the perfect Colorado working climate. They needed paint, but they really turned out quite steady.

Then I got back to wondering if there was an easy way do to a project as big as a house with hardly any help. I had indeed done things by myself when I first started my construction business. I rethought my building plans and redrew them several times, thinking I could add on later. When I did, I made orders with the extra stuff being the shorter boards and only bought the thinner, lighter metal siding. I thought maybe I could hire some trustworthy laborers from