Founders (25 page)

As they crossed the Utah state line, Ken did some math in his head. In just over eight hours, they had covered more distance than they could have traveled by foot in more than two months.

Late in the day, they reached the junction of Interstate 80 and Interstate 84. In the distance, they could see the odd blue color of Echo Reservoir to the south.

“Well, here you are,” Cliff announced.

He slowly brought the pickup to a stop in the right lane of the
freeway, not bothering to pull onto the shoulder. They had still not seen another vehicle in motion all day long. Cliff turned off the engine.

Ken and Terry thanked Cliff repeatedly. After pulling out their packs, they helped him refill the pickup’s main fuel tank, emptying six of the 5-gallon cans. Ken dug into his backpack and pulled out a brown twenty-round box of Federal 5.56mm ball ammunition and handed it to Cliff, saying, “This is just a token for all the gas that you burned today. Thanks.”

Cliff nodded, accepting the gift, and said, “Don’t mention it.”

Ken and Terry shouldered their packs. Cliff started the pickup’s engine and shouted, “Thanks for the ammunition, pardner!” He gave a wave, and drove away.

“What a lunatic,” Ken said with a laugh.

“Well. Let’s thank God for the kindness of the lunatics in our lives,” Terry said.

“He doubted whether they could survive the winter, even though they piled broken furniture into the fireplace. Some accident would quite likely overtake them, or pneumonia might strike them down. They were like the highly bred spaniels and pekinese who at the end of their leashes had once walked along the city streets. Milt and Ann, too, were city-dwellers, and when the city died, they would hardly survive without it. They would pay the penalty which in the history of the world, he knew, had always been inflicted upon organisms which specialized too highly.”

George R. Stewart,
Earth Abides
(1949)

Again on foot, Ken and Terry walked on the rough service road paralleling the railroad and highway. They walked two miles before making camp for the night. Nearby, the Weber River roared in a spring torrent. Ken had developed a hot spot on his left foot.

After they had set up their camp, he pulled off his boots and socks. A blister had formed on the projection at the widest part of his left foot, near the head of his right-most metatarsal bone.

As he powdered his feet, Ken told Terry, “These new boots haven’t been broken in well enough. I think that we’re going to
have to take it easy and only do a couple of miles each day for the next couple of days.”

He decided that the left boot needed stretching to improve its fit. So he spent ten minutes walking around barefoot, looking around the campsite at various small rocks. He eventually found a lozenge-shaped rock that was just slightly wider than his foot. He carefully inserted the rock into his boot, wedging it in, just where he thought the boot was too tight. As an afterthought, he wet that part of the boot leather to help it stretch.

They awoke before dawn. Ken applied moleskin to the blister on his foot. As they rolled their sleeping bags and packed their gear, he consulted their Utah road map. A tiny dot on the map ahead on their route was marked “Henefer.” Just after sunrise, they skirted around the small town of Henefer, following Echo Road. The town appeared to have just a few hundred residents. Two dogs barked at the Laytons, but otherwise they attracted no interest. Their progress was slow, both because of their stealth and because of Ken’s blister. They camped up a side canyon, two miles from Morgan City. The canyon was steep, so it took them an extra half hour to set up camp, arranging rocks to make level spots for their sleeping bags. A seasonal creek trickled down the draw. Ken muttered as he pulled off his left boot. The blister was larger and starting to redden.

The next day they decided to hunker down, in deference to Ken’s blister. It was a pleasant spring day, and they had fresh water close at hand. There were a few spring wildflowers dotting the hillsides. They took turns napping and nibbled at dried fruit and jerky. In the afternoon, they watched Blue Bellies—western fence lizards—dart around the rocks. Terry thumbed through her well-worn Missal, saying, “Well, there are worse ways to spend a day.”

Ken roused her at 4 a.m. the next morning. By the light of Terry’s tiny LED light, they could see that Ken’s blister hadn’t improved, and that it now extended beyond the moleskin. So he applied
a larger piece of the protective covering, hoping for some improvement.

They buried their trash beneath some rocks and erased the signs of their camp. They were back on the trail by 4:30 a.m. Their progress was slow and agonizing. Ken winced each time his left foot hit the ground. In six hours, they advanced only one and a half miles.

They set up camp in the afternoon in the tall grass of what had been the Round Valley Golf Course. In the distance, they could see that the west end of the golf course had been fenced, and now contained a flock of horned sheep. Terry took the first watch while Ken tried to sleep. The blister was very painful and looking even more red.

The next morning, Ken declared, “I think it is infected.”

He put on a clean sock and then painfully put on his boot.

“We need to find a place to stay and let that heal,” Terry suggested.

“Maybe we can do some more security work. Let’s head for a farm that reeks of prosperity,” he answered.

They made slow progress toward Morgan City. Ken was in agony. The verdant fields of the valley floor contrasted the brushy and sparsely wooded hillsides above them. Most of the fields appeared to be hay grass, but there were also some row crops. They were surprised to see and hear tractors operating.

Spotting a tall, gleaming grain silo north of town, they headed for it. The silo was at a tidy farm with several large fields. A sign at the county road proclaimed, “L. & L. Prine Farm, Hay Sales By Appointment Only,” with an 801 phone number. The stylized outline of a beehive was painted beneath the phone number. Ken knew that this symbol indicated that the family was associated with the LDS Church.

Down the lane, on the porch of the farmhouse a dog barked, already aware of their presence. They walked slowly with their
rifles slung muzzles down. Another dog joined in on the barking. A teenage girl stepped out onto the porch, armed with a lever-action carbine. Another girl, slightly younger, soon joined her armed with a Mossberg .22 rifle. The front door opened again, and a portly man stepped out, carrying both a scoped rifle and a holstered revolver. “We don’t want any trouble,” the man warned.

“We’re not trouble,” Terry said. “We’re the
antidote
to trouble.” She and Ken made a show of laying down their rifles, packs, and web gear.

Larry Prine interrogated the Laytons for twenty-five minutes. While they spoke, Larry’s wife, Lynda, and more and more of their family emerged from the house. Soon, six children ranging from five to sixteen were lined up, listening intently. Larry was curious, and seemed to take pity on the Laytons. He read the letters of introduction from Durward Perkins and Carl Norwood.

After their interrogation, Terry asked, “How are things here in Morgan City?”

Prine leaned back against the wall casually and replied, “We’ve gotten by a lot better than most towns, since we have irrigation water from the river. We’ve prospered, but we’ve been shorthanded. When those derivatives imploded and the dollar collapsed, the town Elders panicked and got a little overzealous. They sent home
every
student enrolled at Weber State, and they ran all the migrant farm workers out of town. They did the same to the druggies and drunks at the halfway house. At least that move made sense. But as it turned out, we could have used the help from the college kids for the next summer’s harvest, and for security, too. If they hadn’t been in such a rush, they could have taken their pick of the students from the college. For instance, they could have kept all the ROTC cadets and criminal justice majors, and some of the ag students. That was very
shortsighted of them. But like I say, everyone was very panicky when the hyperinflation kicked in and the riots started in the big cities.”

“So how have things been recently?”

Prine scratched his chin and said, “The last few months, things have been getting dicey, with the looter gangs that have come up from Nevada and west from the Plains states. Some of ’em have armored vehicles—mostly old bank armored cars. I heard that St. George and Vernal both nearly got destroyed. More than half the houses in both those towns burned down. And in Richfield there was a gang that moved in and stayed for
months
, just brutalizing everyone in town. Then that same gang moved on to Price, and did the same thing, and they’re still there. Hopefully the new government in Kentucky will send the Army to come and clean them out.”

“What about here, around Morgan?” Terry asked.

“This is an agricultural community, so we apparently draw from quite a large radius. Burglaries, mostly. But once in a while there’s a really wicked home invasion. Looters will sneak into farms in the middle of the night. They catch a family sleeping, and then . . .” He glanced down at his row of children and said tersely, “. . . Well, you know what happens. It ain’t pretty.”

After glancing at his wife, Larry said, “If you are willing to both put in eight-hour guard shifts, you’re welcome to stay for at least a couple of weeks while your blister heals up.”

It took a full week for Ken’s foot to heal. Then he spent many hours each day in the Prines’ fields, weeding with a hoe. He developed a technique that he called speed weeding. His goal was both to eliminate thistles and other weeds, and to toughen up his feet. He would sprint to each weed he spotted and then come to a sudden stop and start hoeing. Then he would sprint to the next patch. It looked comical, but it worked. Day after day of this exercise toughened up his feet.

Just when Ken felt that his feet were ready for him to resume their journey, Terry had an accident. After more than a week of doing her guard duty from ground level, she decided to try manning a shift from atop the Prines’ silo, just as she had done at the Perkins ranch. Coming down the ladder at the end of her shift, she reached the bottom of the caged section, turned, and absentmindedly hopped off the ladder. But unlike the ladder at the Perkinses’ silo in Iowa, the transition to the caged section of the ladder began eleven feet off the ground instead of six feet. She landed on her right knee. Recognizing the intense pain, she realized that she had broken it.

She shouted for help, and soon Ken and several of the Prine children were standing over her. “I feel like an idiot,” she said, grimacing. “There’s nothing stronger than habit. At the Perkins place, I got used to turning and jumping off the ladder just when my head got below the caged part.”

Five weeks after Ken and Terry’s arrival, Mrs. Prine’s sister Kate, her husband, Roy, and their two sons arrived from Oak City, Utah. They were seeking refuge because the town had been savagely attacked by looters just a few days before, and it was feared that the looters would return and burn the rest of the town. Their arrival made the already crowded house even more crowded. Several of the children were sleeping on the carpeted living room floor in sleeping bags.

For two weeks, Ken and Terry had been trying to get a message through to Todd Gray’s retreat group in Idaho, via the regional CB radio network, but they found that it didn’t extend any farther than southwestern Idaho and Bozeman, Montana.

Next, Ken and Terry spent several hours composing a letter. It read:

Dear Todd, Mary, and Whoever Else Arrived:

Terry and I are writing to let you know that we are safe
and living temporarily at a farm three miles north of Morgan City, Utah (twenty-five miles northeast of Salt Lake City—see enclosed strip map). We walked most of the way here from Chicago. We had planned to stay here only a week to rest up and then press on to the retreat, but Terry took a bad spill off a ladder, breaking her kneecap. That was nearly two months ago. I’m afraid that the break is not healing properly. I don’t believe that there is any way that we will be able to continue on, at least not on foot. We hope that all is well with you. This is the third letter that we couriered up your way. If you got either of the previous ones, I apologize for the redundancy. However, we figured that sending multiple letters by different couriers would be the best bet in getting our message through to you.

We are staying in a spare bedroom at the Prines’ farm. They are wonderful people. Like most of their neighbors, they are Mormons, and thus were relatively well prepared for the collapse. To earn our keep I am being employed as a night security guard on the farm. I also help out with the heavy work during the day (mending fences, splitting wood, etc.). Terry is still confined to bed most of the time.

Because of Terry’s injury, the Prines have agreed to let us stay on as long as we’d like, but we don’t want to wear out our welcome and their stock of supplies. (Mrs. Prine’s sister and brother-in-law and their two teenage boys moved in three weeks ago, and the stored food supply will soon be critical.) Is there any way that you could provide transportation to the retreat? I realize that this is asking a lot, and would involve considerable risk, so feel free to say no.

To avoid missing you, we promise that we will stay here until we either hear from you or somebody shows
up. Please send word via courier or by radio if you get a chance. Do you have the nighttime CB voice message relay network set up? Well, that’s all for now. Once again, we hope that all is well with you. God bless you all.

Ken Layton and Terry Layton

D.V.—Ps. 37

Terry then wrote out five copies of the letter and map by hand. Her hand felt cramped when she was done. She and Ken added their signatures and Ken appended his characteristic stylized “D.V.—Ps. 37” logo, which was short for “
Deo Volente
, Psalm 37.” For many years, he had penned this logo on all his personal letters.