Expatriates (3 page)

“You can kid the world, but not your sister.”

—Charlotte Gray

J
anelle Altmiller was depressed. She had spent the last hour on the Internet, checking on comparable houses for one of her real estate clients. What she found confirmed the continuing deterioration of the real estate market in central Florida. Despite all the talk of “recovery” in the market, prices were still down everywhere she looked. Even more depressing were the huge number of foreclosed properties, and the average time on the market for homes that sold—thirteen months to sell a house in Lake County.

If Janelle and Jake had been forced to rely solely on her property sales commissions, they would have already been bankrupt. Thankfully, Jake had the income from the hardware store that he'd inherited from his late parents. The store was small, and its location at the south end of Tavares was not optimal, but visits from their regular local customers were still fairly steady.

Jake Altmiller's willingness to go the extra mile for his customers was almost legendary. He would special-order parts from anywhere in the country for just about anything. He even had the knack for sweet-talking manufacturers into providing uncatalogued parts for machinery that were not normally available individually and sold only as assemblies or subassemblies. Jake had also developed extensive contacts with dealers in secondhand equipment and parts, which saved his customers a lot of money.

The other thing that kept the hardware store going was their small assortment of firearms ammunition and gun accessories. While most other hardware stores had dropped firearms from their lines many years ago, Jake had kept this part of the business running. He did so more out of his personal interest in guns and his stubborn nature than with much profit in mind. For his regular customers, Jake would special-order guns at just twenty-five dollars over cost using his Federal Firearms License (FFL). He also served as an FFL transfer dealer for any of his customers who bought guns online through websites like GunBroker.com. His willingness to do so attracted all of the serious gun hobbyists in and around Tavares. The walk-in business and the pace of special orders had gotten frantic after the Newtown massacre in 2012. With calls for bans on manufacture and importation, many American gun owners who previously had little interest suddenly wanted a semiauto rifle and a big pile of spare 30-round magazines.

The biggest customer for Altmiller's gun department was Tomas Marichal, a former Marine who was semiemployed building custom AR-15 and AR-10 rifles and carbines. Marichal was practically a fixture at Altmiller's gun counter. Although he ordered a lot of AR-15 and AR-10 lower receivers through Jake's FFL, Tomas spent most of his time shooting the breeze about guns and telling war stories about his five deployments—three to Iraq and two to Afghanistan. There were times when Marichal waxed on a bit too long, and Jake regretted ever purchasing the pair of tall padded stools in front of the gun counter.

To bolster his business at the store even more, Jake also sold photovoltaic panels and inverters. Although he discovered that some of his “off grid” customers were illicit marijuana growers, which he took steps to “weed out,” the photovoltaic part of the business soon developed its own loyal clientele. Over the past year, Jake had installed twelve photovoltaic panels on the roof of their house and another twenty-four panels on top of the store, more as a demonstration of the capabilities of a PV system than out of any desire to save money on his utility bill or to “go green.”

He chose an OutBack brand inverter that was slightly larger than they needed, in part because he planned to eventually add more photovoltaic panels for the house, and because he wanted to have an inverter with 220-volt AC capability so they could run their well pump. The panels were mounted on racks facing southward at a thirty-degree angle, to roughly match the twenty-eight-degree latitude of Tavares.

Jake Altmiller's right-hand man at the store was José Valentin. José, a thirty-one-year-old former U.S. Army radio repairman, handled most of the photovoltaic power sales and service issues. He was a third-generation American whose grandparents had been born in Cuba but had emigrated to the United States shortly after Fidel Castro took power. Jose stood only five feet eight inches and had the wiry build of a bantamweight boxer. Since Tomas Marichal was also a Cuban American with prior military service, Valentin often joined in the Bravo Sierra sessions at the gun counter. Because Valentin had served in the Army, and Marichal's prior service was with the USMC, there was plenty of good-natured interservice rivalry and ribbing between them.

Peter and Rhiannon Jeffords helped run an orphanage in Quinapondan on the southeast coast of Samar Island. Shortly after they arrived from the United States, they had added a breakfast program and after-school ministry for local children. These children all lived with their parents but were so desperately poor that many started the day without breakfast. So in addition to feeding the orphanage residents, they began feeding more than 150 local schoolchildren.

At thirty-two years old and 135 pounds, Rhiannon's petite five-feet-three-inch stature had grown plump, though her light brown hair looked the same as it did when she first met Peter. She dressed modestly and never wore any jewelry other than her wedding band. She always felt mismatched when standing next to her husband, who was two years older, six feet three inches, and lean, and had handsome, chiseled features. Aside from a receding hairline—for which he compensated by often letting his dirty-blond hair grow bushy—Peter Jeffords could have had a career in modeling. Peter tended to wear jeans and Ban-Lon short-sleeve shirts in subdued colors. He always carried a CRKT brand B.U.L.L. pocketknife but refused to wear a wristwatch or carry a cell phone.

The Jeffords' house was a simple nipa hut, locally called a
bahay kubo
, with only 280 square feet of floor space. It sat on tall, almost stiltlike piers and had a steep-pitched roof that was thatched with a long grass called cogon. The gables were left open for ventilation. The hut was built almost entirely of nipa palm wood,
kawayan
bamboo, and rattan. (The latter was called
yantok
by the locals.) There were eight steps up to the high porch. The area beneath the house—the
silong
—had a table for kitchen chores, but Rhiannon disliked working there because of the pig manure that was underfoot.

Recently, they had learned of a new lighting technique that was being used in many homes in the Manila area to save electricity costs during the day and they decided to use it in their home, too. They took clear, empty one-liter soda bottles and filled them with water and two cap measures of bleach; then they cut holes in their roof in strategic locations. The bottles were then installed so that they were half inside and half outside of the hut. During the day, each bottle provided the equivalent lighting of a 50-watt lightbulb.

The family's most valuable possession was a dark blue Mitsubishi L300 minivan. It had come to them providentially—a gift from a wealthy friend in New Hampshire who had heard that the Jeffords were in need of transportation on the island. It was one those “God Things”—a wire transfer for twelve thousand dollars arrived just a day after Peter and Rhiannon had prayed together for the first time about their need for a vehicle. Peter often said that the Mitsubishi L300 was too fancy a vehicle for a humble pastor. The modern boxy-looking vehicle seemed incongruous parked beside their modest nipa hut parsonage. The Mitsubishi was just one year old and had only fourteen thousand miles on the odometer when they bought it two years before the Crunch, when their daughter, Sarah, was only five years old.

In the months leading up to the Crunch, and in the first week of the hyperinflation, Rhiannon spent many hours on the phone and on Skype with her older sister, Janelle, who lived in Florida. The sisters had grown up together on a remote cattle ranch outside of Bella Coola, British Columbia. Though they now lived a world apart, they still felt a very close bond. With the unlimited calling provided by Janelle's voice over IP phone, they were able to talk for about an hour each weekday. It became a daily ritual for Janelle to call at eight
A.M.
—which was eight
P.M.
for Rhiannon. They would both do their household cleaning, laundry, and dishwashing while they shared news and stories.

Rhiannon also received care packages from Florida and British Columbia via balikbayan boxes. These two-cubic-foot boxes would take between thirty and sixty days to arrive. Many of these packages containing clothes and other essentials were sent by her brother, Ray McGregor, who lived in Michigan.

Ray was definitely the oddball of the McGregor family. He was a Canadian Army Afghanistan war veteran who had gone on to study military history at Western University in London, Ontario. In his senior year, however, he had dropped out to work on a book about World War II veterans in Michigan.

Often living in a fifth-wheel “toy hauler” camping trailer towed behind his pickup truck, Ray had first lived in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and later relocated near Newberry, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Most recently, he kept his trailer parked on a sprawling farm that belonged to the Harrison family. Four generations of the Harrisons had lived on the farm. Ray had met the Harrisons when he began a series of taped interviews with Bob Harrison, who was a B-24 bomber pilot in World War II.

With the exception of a few of his articles that were published in
Military History
magazine, Ray was a failure as a writer. He had never found a literary agent who was willing to work with him, and his four uncompleted manuscripts had never been published. He made most of his meager living cutting firewood.

The last e-mail Rhiannon received from Ray before Internet service was disrupted read:

Dear Rhi:

Things are getting bad here, even in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I parlayed the last of my cash into food and fuel. The inflation is so crazy that to wait just one day would mean I'd only get half as many groceries for my money.

I talked with Mom and Dad via Skype. I'm not sure how it is in the P.I., but here in the U.S. the phone lines are getting flaky AND are jammed with calls. Dad said they are doing okay, but they sound befuddled by the economic situation. Dad asked me for advice on finding a stock that would be safe to invest in. Ha! I suggested putting all of their remaining cash in food, fuel, salt blocks, bailing twine, and ammo.

My old friend Phil Adams told me that I need to “Get Out of Dodge” ASAP. The plan is for Phil to meet me at the ranch. I'm not sure if I can get enough fuel to get out west, though. I think I can trade some ammo for fuel. . . . I also have a few silver dimes and quarters, but those are effectively now my life savings. They are worth a fortune, at least in terms of the Funny Money U.S. Dollar.

I'll be praying for both you and Janelle and your families.

May God Watch Over You,

—Ray

“I was born and raised in that religious atmosphere which for three hundred years has never varied in its extreme devotion to peace. Yet I know that peace comes in the modern world only to those nations which are adequately prepared to defend themselves. The European Allies are now paying in blood and disaster for their failure to heed plain warnings. With adequate preparedness they might have escaped attack.”

—Herbert Hoover, radio address, May 27, 1940

O
ne of the Altmillers' full-time employees, Lisa Schoonover, worked as their ordering clerk and accountant. Because the store was independent, they didn't have the advantage of the automated ordering systems that were common at chain hardware stores. This made Lisa indispensable to the smooth operation of the store. It came as a shock when Lisa announced her resignation just after the stock market crash. She explained that she and her family were “bugging out” to live with relatives in Oneida, Tennessee. The town was on the Cumberland Plateau, an area that Lisa had predicted would be safe, if times ever got desperately bad.

In recognition of her five years of faithful work, Lisa was given a store credit in lieu of her final paycheck for her choice of merchandise at twenty percent below cost. She carefully selected a shopping cart full of batteries, ammunition, nails, screws, garden hoses, gardening seed, and rolls of kerosene lantern wicking.

Altmiller's Hardware was on a commercial street, but their house, at the back end of the same deep lot, faced onto the residential street of Magnolia Avenue. The house was bigger than they needed since they had only one child. The 2,500-square-foot one-story house had a very gently sloping roof, which was typical for Central Florida. It had been built in 1973 by Jake's father on the site of the original 750-square-foot house, which his late mother had called the Swelter Shack.

When Janelle married Jake and they moved in, she learned to love the house's breezy open-floor plan. Jake remodeled the house in 1998, and with his handyman's flair continued to work on the interior, changing most of the major appliances and adding two zone air conditioners. Their home's water supply came from a grandfathered shallow well that also supplied the store.

Soon after they were married, piles of lumber had begun encroaching farther and farther into Janelle's garden in the backyard. After repeated requests to remedy the situation, she reached the breaking point—every husband knows when this has happened. She spent an hour moving lumber by herself and then insisted that Jake move the rest of it and construct a white picket fence to divide her yard from the store's lumber storage area. This solution kept peace in the family, interrupted only occasionally, when the fence was smashed in forklift mishaps.

One afternoon, just as she was finishing up the comps for her client, Janelle's son, Lance, came running into the room. He was eleven years old but had the intellect of a seven-year-old. The experts told her he would probably not advance any further, intellectually. In addition to his learning disability, Lance had difficulty conversing with both children and adults and rarely made eye contact. He spent many hours with a pencil or small felt-tip marking pen, endlessly repeating the same simple drawings and doodles.

Jake and Janelle loved their son very much and gave him lots of attention. They chose to homeschool him rather than send him to public school, an arrangement that gave him the best chance for full development while sparing him the agony of being teased and bullied by other students. Though he never said it, Jake was disappointed that Lance would never grow up to inherit the family business.

—

T
he media called the economic crisis the Crunch. It was a credit collapse and economic depression that made the Great Depression of the 1930s seem small by comparison. The global credit market had come unglued. All around the world, markets were in free fall. Credit had completely dried up. Cities, counties, states, and even national governments were in default. Consumer prices soared. Interest rates skyrocketed. Firearms, ammunition, and precious metals prices soared simply because they could not be printed. While Helicopter Ben was busy convincing the world that the Treasury goose could continue to lay golden eggs, bonds collapsed. Derivatives contracts cratered, leaving counterparties for trillions of dollars in contracts twisting in the wind. Corporations of all sizes announced huge layoffs. The crisis started in the United States, but it quickly spread to other countries and paralyzed the global economy.

As the world plunged into chaos, Janelle and Rhiannon found comfort in comparing their experiences of the economic crisis from their different vantage points in Florida and the Philippines.

One thing they had in common was the abundance of tropical fruit just outside their doors. Janelle's backyard in Tavares had six large orange trees, two tangelos, and a forty-year-old avocado tree that had grown to overshadow nearly half of the yard. Meanwhile, in the vicinity of her nipa hut on Samar, Rhiannon could locally pick an abundance of durian fruit—a local favorite despite its strong odor—as well as lychee, pineapple, banana, santol, malunggay leaves, and guavas (
bayabas
).

—

O
nce the mass inflation started, Jake, Janelle, and José had a meeting. Jake realized that unless something changed quickly, their store shelves would be stripped clean, and they would be left holding nothing but worthless dollars. José suggested a “cash only” policy and regularly ratcheting up prices, but Janelle wanted to go a step further and post a “silver only” sales policy. The discussion was fairly brief. Janelle pointed out that their entire inventory would be irreplaceable until normal industry and transportation were reestablished. As Janelle put it, “We should think of what we currently have on the shelf as our
legacy
inventory. If we replace it with anything that we pick up in barter, it will mainly be used, secondhand stuff, and it should be priced accordingly. It would be foolish to sell what we have now cheap.”

The others agreed.

After a two-day period while they were “Closed for Inventory,” they reopened with a carefully hand-painted sign on a four-by-eight-foot sheet of plywood displayed inside the front door, hanging from the ceiling on chains. It read:

 

Altmiller's Hardware Payment Policy:

ONLY Silver or Barter Accepted for Payment.

NO Paper Currency, Credit Cards, or Checks!

NO EXCEPTIONS!

Until further notice, we now accept ONLY pre-1965 U.S. silver dimes, quarters, half-dollars or silver dollars, at 10 times face value, or 99.9% silver trade dollars and bars.

No pennies or clad coins accepted.

To calculate your prices in silver:

Take the shelf tag prices and divide by 10. That is your price in 90% silver (pre-1965) coins. So a $3 tagged lightbulb will cost 3 silver dimes (30 cents).

99.9% silver trade dollars and bars are also accepted at the following ratio:

0.0715 troy ounces per silver dime or 0.715 troy ounces per dollar of face value (10 dimes or four quarters). Hence, a 1-Troy-ounce trade round or bar equals $1.40 face value in pre-1965 coinage. (Loaner calculators are available on request.)

Nickel Small Change Policy:

As needed, we will make “small change” in real nickels (pre-composition-switch vintage nickels), at the ratio of 50 nickels per silver dime (500 nickels per silver dollar). We MAY at our discretion take nickels in payment for small purchases, but only if nickels are in full 50-coin rolls.

Note: Some choice hard goods such as guns, ammunition, high-cap magazines, clean steel hardware, batteries, and sealed liquor bottles MAY be considered for barter, on a case-by-case basis. See Jacob Altmiller for details.

Sorry for Any Inconvenience
J. Altmiller, Owner and Manager

The only items that had their prices recalculated and retagged before the Altmillers reopened the store were irreplaceable guns, ammunition, gun accessories, empty gas cans, cans of two-cycle mix and four-cycle TRUFUEL, and charged propane cylinders. Those prices were all tripled or quadrupled.

—

D
uring one of their regular calls, Rhiannon and Janelle were discussing the Crunch and how things were obviously getting much worse in America's big cities. The riots and looting were spreading. After recounting a long list of cities where riots had occurred, Janelle moaned, “I'm really worried, Rhi.”

She took an audible breath, and continued, “On Fox News they're saying that in a lot of cities, the police and firemen aren't showing up for work because they're too worried about their own families to leave their homes. There's also reporting that some of the telephone and power utility workers are staying home, too. Nobody knows how much longer the power will stay on.”

Not wanting to upset her sister even more, Rhiannon adopted a reassuring tone. “Well, just know that we'll be praying for y'all and—”

Their connection unexpectedly went dead. They both made dozens of attempts to reach each other in the days and weeks that followed. At first Janelle got “All circuits are busy now” automated messages. But a week later, there wasn't even a dial tone. It was then that Janelle feared it might be years before she'd be able to speak to her sister again.