The First Storm

Photo Credits: Jeremiah Barber Photography

"...I wondered if that was it ... the beginning of the end of the world and we were doomed to watch it all through the back window of a Dodge Ram van."

I didn't really understand what it meant to be red flagged or why it had happened, but I could plainly see that something had changed.  One minute there was a slurry of activity, people climbing around on what would eventually become the space for my bedroom, men hollering directions to one another over the squeal of circular saws and the thumping of hammers, visual progress taking place at a rapid pace toward a normal life with a television and privacy … and then it just stopped.  A cold blanket of silence fell over everything on that hot, surprisingly humid day and suddenly my parents and our friends decided that we would all go to St. George for something to eat.  As we sat at a table reminiscing with old friends and marveling over one of the boys' Elvis impressions there was a seriousness among the adults that was utterly lost to us kids.  I had always assumed that the reason for the sudden and spontaneous trip to town was to distract ourselves from the bad news but, in hindsight, I suspect that it must also have been for my dad to use a pay phone to call Dave and discuss the predicament we had found ourselves in.

Later in his life my father grew to profusely declare his hatred for phones, but I don't think that was always the case, though I couldn't blame him if it had been.  Looking back, it seemed like he'd always received some of the worst news by phone.  When I was five or six years old my dad's only surviving brother, his wife, and their oldest daughter were flying to Roy, Utah from their home in Colorado in my uncle's single engine Cessna for a visit.  They were to call us when they arrived at the tiny airport within shouting distance of my dad's work and we would pick them up and take them to meet up with my grandma for dinner at their favorite restaurant with the giant fried shrimp that had been pounded flat until they were the size of a chicken fried steak.  We waited, and waited, and the longer we waited the more nervous my parents became until my dad began making phone calls to find out what had happened to them.  He called the airports in Denver and Roy to confirm both that they'd left on schedule and never landed at their destination, then I'm not sure who he called after that but eventually there was nothing more for him to do, no one left for him to call, and he simply sat there in my mother's wing-backed blue velvet chair, clutching the phone in his lap while he waited for it to ring.  When it did, his physical appearance changed, and he did something that I'd only ever seen him do one other time, at my grandfather's funeral – a single, silent tear slid down his cheek.  I used to wonder how horrible it must have been for him to receive such awful news over something as cold and inanimate as a phone.  How could anyone not hate phones after receiving a call such as that?  I know I began hating them shortly after the first time I received really terrible news through one.  Perhaps that's something we all have in common – those of us who shun the social norms and prefer the company of others in person over talking on the phone – perhaps it's because we've all experienced a moment of utter betrayal by them; a moment when, instead of bringing us closer to others through conversation, they've isolated us through devastation.

The rain started while we were in St. George and, at first, it just seemed like a normal thunderstorm.  We loaded back into the Pickler family van and made a beeline for the property because my dad was worried that we'd left power tools out to the elements.  We'd not expected it to rain when we left; there'd been little more than one or two fluffy clouds in the sky and we'd not yet acclimated to the local climate enough to have been forewarned by the humidity.  The closer we got to the property the heavier the rain became and the fatter the drops got until they pelted the roof of the van with a ferocity that sounded like driving through an old carwash.  As we crested the top of the hill toward the property the wind greeted us unexpectedly, howling and gusting at speeds that I had never witnessed before in my life and we began to understand why the town below and the mesa above were both named Hurricane.  In less than an hour the hard-packed desert earth that had been so unyielding before had become a sludge pit that clung to the tires of the van and sucked and slurped around my parents' shoes when they stepped out.  All of us kids were ordered to stay inside the van while the adults handled the battening down of the hatches.  We gaped out the windows as the rain came down in sheets and giant fingers of indigo lightning cleaved the sky into fragments, spreading and crackling with an unusual sort of delay that gave you time to actually watch them grow.  There was a massive boom as one of the strikes of lightening impacted in the distance and the fear began creeping up in me.  Was this the end of the world that my father had talked about?

After the accident my sister and I had each received a small insurance settlement to help with medical bills as well as an additional small annuity in case there were any unforeseen complications for either of us later in life.  Neither amounted to very much, especially with inflation to consider, but as kids we didn’t quite see it that way.  We thought we were going to turn 18 and be instantly rich but my dad had told us numerous times that it didn't matter because neither of us would ever see a penny of the money.  He was utterly convinced that the end of days would come long before either of us turned 18 years old; that the banks would collapse, throwing the world into utter chaos, and that the government would force everyone to receive the mark of the beast or go into hiding.  He believed that we were already among the final times and that, in his lifetime, Armageddon would occur and that if we lived righteously we would see the second coming of Jesus Christ to the earth.  I was too young to be either objective or skeptical.  He was my dad and he sounded so certain when he said it, and no one ever seemed to challenge him when he did – at least, not in my presence – so I believed him.  It didn't really seem to be a matter of if the world came to an end but one of when it would.

As we huddled in the giant blue van I looked at the time displayed in blue light on the radio and saw that it was only just after 3 o'clock in the afternoon but the clouds were so dense that they utterly blocked out any sunlight and the sky was as dark as it if had been late twilight.  I remembered a Bible passage about the days becoming as dark as night, the moon turning to blood and the sun appearing as black as sackcloth of hair – whatever that is – and I wondered if that was it; if the reason that my parents were running around out in the rain like crazed chickens was because this was the beginning of the end of the world and we were doomed to watch it all through the back window of a Dodge Ram Van.

Obviously, the world did not come to an end that day and, ironically, the storm subsided just as suddenly as it had begun only moments after the adults had finally climbed back inside with us and closed the doors.  The weather in the southwestern desert has a real knack for being ironic, as anyone local to this area can avow.  Listening to the locals here you'd think that meteorology was a crackpot guessing game akin to voodoo or that one uncle everyone seems to have who swears his left kneecap can predict the weather: 'when it starts aching, you can bet there's gonna be rain a'comin''.  I genuinely feel bad for the local weathermen and weatherwomen in this area and give them major kudos for even making the effort because no one here trusts them and with good reason, they're hardly ever right.  Here the weather just sort of has a mind of its own and it can turn on a dime.  You can wake up to clear blue skies and singing birds, witness a torrential downpour and 40 mph winds, and be back at cloudless sunshine all before lunchtime here.  I've seen a 70% chance of rain amount to what we call a Navajo 3-inch Rainstorm which is where you can measure the wet spots on the ground and they'll be three inches apart; and I've seen a 20% chance of rain become a deluge.  In a place that actually has a bonafide monsoon season twice a year, anything is possible.

I don't recall much of the Pickler family's visit after that storm, but I do know that they bid us goodbye and returned home on schedule, and that it was the last time that we ever saw them.  I also know that it became painfully clear after that fateful weekend that our previously behind schedule housing project had just been cast firmly into an utter standstill.  With one tiny piece of paper we had gone from being a well-to-do family living in a temporary situation while building their dream home to a homeless family living in a camper with no idea what the future would hold.  My dad learned that the reason for the red flagging had been because the property had been illegally subdivided between Dave Seich's portion and ours.  To put that more simply, the city didn't approve of how my father and Dave had agreed to split the land.  My father tried multiple times to draw up a new version of the divide that would appease the city and allow us to get back on track with building but every effort he made was soundly rejected by Dave for one reason or another and having our home already partially constructed certainly complicated matters. 

It wasn't until then that we began hearing stories from other locals in the city of Virgin that had experienced their own tragic run-ins with Dave.  There was the Mulea family that had agreed to buy land from Dave a bit higher up the canyon from ours, that had trusted him just as we had done, and that found their dreams and their savings utterly swindled into a hopeless and endless legal battle until they'd eventually given up, turned their back on the property, and moved into a trailer just up the street from the church.  There was also the Bird family that had a nearly identical story to ours and had also been forced to walk away from the encounter with nothing more than their skills as educated professionals, forced to rebuild from the ground up on new land and living in a massive geodesic home that was unfinished and unlivable except for the basement, surrounded by boxes of belongings that would never be unpacked.  It quickly became painfully clear that we'd been had by a seasoned con-artist who had grown quite accustomed to winning at his own game, but my dad was determined that justice would eventually prevail.

Changes had to be made then.  The trips to town for movies and restaurants subsided, a more permanent set of arrangements had to be made for our belongings in the giant tarp-covered trailer which had begun to sink into the ground as a result of the rain, and the money was running out.  The biggest hit came when the city made the decision to cut off our utilities, not because we couldn't pay the bill but because some of the people in power in that town didn't like outsiders and they wanted us to leave.  I was in the middle of a shower when it happened, inside the tiny waterproof box in the camper putting shampoo in my hair and listening to the rhythmic growl of the water pump when suddenly it stopped and the water from the showerhead ceased.  It was dark outside and my mother took me, wrapped in her bathrobe, to the very back of the property where a large metal tank that looked like it had once been a water heater laid on its side with the top cut off, was serving as a trough for the horse.  In the cover of darkness, I disrobed and climbed inside to rinse the soap from my hair under the magnificently dense stars that people who live in the city never get to see.

The stars are probably my favorite thing about living in the desert in the middle of nowhere.  Billions of them, everywhere and all different levels of brightness and shades of white and blue.  Grandpa Wilkins taught us how to recognize the satellites orbiting above because they looked just like stars, but stars don't move.  We learned constellations and my favorite quickly became the Seven Sisters, more commonly known as The Pleiades Cluster.  In the city the ambient lights on the ground make it too difficult to see the majority of the stars but in the middle of nowhere the Milky Way is everywhere, like a big swath of densely glittered ribbon streaking over the sky.

The morning after the water stopped flowing my dad began a crusade against the city, accusing them of persecution and cruelty.  Red flagging the structure was one thing but denying basic needs such as water to a family with two small daughters was just plain inhumane and they eventually awarded us groundwater for the horse but refused to reinstate the power or the drinking water.  Fortunately for us, my dad had been preparing for the end of the world and that had included survival without power and running water.  My dad loaded two 50-gallon drums into the back of the truck along with several brand new plastic jerrycans and we learned of a freshwater spring in La Verkin, 20 minutes away, that expelled thousands of gallons of clean, clear, suitable drinking water every day.  We began making regular pilgrimages to the spring, filling the jerrycans from the runoff and carrying them back to the truck to be poured into the drums until they and the cans were full to the brim.  My father bought a hand-pump for getting the water back out of the 50-gallon drums and would use the jerrycans to pour the drinking water directly into the camper, but it was to be used only for drinking and cooking.

For other things like showering and washing dishes we would utilize the groundwater and my parents erected a small outdoor shower of two-by-fours and plywood with large flat stones and concrete as a floor.  My dad purchased a solar shower kit which was a bag that we filled with water and left in the sun to warm throughout the day, then hung from a hook on the roof the shower and washed ourselves by the grace of gravity via a piece of rubber hosing, a showerhead shaped nozzle, and a clamp to stem the flow.  The bag only held enough water for one proper warm shower which always went to my mother so my sister, father, and I quickly adapted to short cold showers that lasted just long enough to clean the essentials.  During the summer months it was too hot, even at night, to need power for anything more than light and cooking so my dad retrieved our kerosene lanterns from the trailer by climbing the tallest ladder we could find to get up over the top of the metal walls and scale down the other side.  At night my mother would read to us by lantern light from books by Lee Nelson called The Storm Testament series and my sister would practice crochet on my parents' bed while my dad and I played 5-card stud at the table using matches as poker chips.  For cooking my dad dug a pit in the ground outside the camper where he would build small bonfires for roasting hotdogs or wrapping meat and veggies in tinfoil which my mom called 'hobo dinners'.  Sometimes they would light the fire early and let it burn down to embers and then my mom would throw a bunch of ingredients into her cast iron pots to cook Dutch oven style.  One downside of not having power was that the small fridge we had in the camper had become utterly useless, but we learned to live without things like milk and cold beverages.  To this day I rarely buy milk anymore and I always order water 'without ice' at restaurants.

One thing that my dad's trip into the trailer to retrieve the lanterns made clear to him was that our belongings were being ruined.  He found rat droppings near the food storage and knew that we had to do something quickly to get the food out of there and into a more secure location if we wanted to avoid losing it entirely.  He purchased two large septic tanks, brand new and never used of course, and had them both buried on the property.  The first was buried near the camper and the house so that we could hook the camper to it and empty out directly instead of having to drive down to the nearest RV park in La Verkin once or twice a week, and eventually – if we were ever permitted to finish it – it would become the septic system for the house.  The second was buried at the farthest end of the property near the horse trough.  If you're not familiar with the construction of septic tanks, here's a crash course in what ours was like.  It came in two halves, each of them large rectangular pieces of concrete that fit together as top and bottom to make a single massive box tall enough for a man to stand upright inside, just wide enough to touch fingertips on both sides with both arms stretched out, and long enough for several people to sleep end-to-end.  The seam between the two halves was lined with dense rubber to seal it from anything getting in or out and there were small round holes at each end about halfway up the wall which are typically connected to drainage pipes so that the sewage can seep into the ground as it breaks down and becomes liquid.  In the top there is a hole just large enough for a fit adult to squeeze through for maintenance in the event of a backup or blockage and this is plugged by an obscenely heavy cork-shaped piece of concrete with rebar handles.

This septic tank, however, was not intended for sewage which, since it had never been used, made it nothing more off-putting than a large concrete box.  To the two drainage holes my father connected PVC piping which ran some length away from the tank and then curved upward at a 90-degree angle so that the ends peeked just above ground level for airflow.  He capped these with fine wire mesh to keep bugs and rodents out and covered them with little plywood umbrellas to keep out the rain or snow.  Finally, he surrounded each one with haphazard rocks as camouflage.  A piece of large galvanized pipe was placed around the manhole in the top of the tank to keep the opening clear of dirt and, again, a plywood lid was placed over the pipe to keep the rainwater out.  I was given the task of building the ladder, but it wasn't until after my father saw my atrocious attempt and confessed that it was much better than he had expected it to be, that I realized my dad had only done this to keep me busy and had no intention of using my Gilligan's Island version made of two-by-fours and twigs lashed together with piece of bailing twine.  My father made a proper ladder, and, in true engineer fashion, it was perfect.  The perfect size to fit down the hole, the perfect height, each step perfectly spaced, the legs cut at perfect angles for a nice sense of stability.  It seemed like everything my father did somehow managed to be perfect.

With the new bunker in place we began the extremely exhausting task of moving our food storage.  This consisted of me climbing down inside the trailer with my dad because there was actually a time in my life when I was not afraid of either heights or ladders.  It was my job to tie one end of a piece of rope to the handles on the five-gallon buckets of food storage so that my dad, who remained on the ladder near the top of the trailer, could hoist the buckets up over the top of the wall and lower them down the other side where my mom and sister would untie them and put them into the bed of the truck.  Once the truck was loaded my dad and I would descend the ladder on the outside and he would drive the truck to the back of the property to be unloaded and, again, he would lower the buckets to my sister and I with rope while we untied them and shuffled them to the opposite side of the bunker.  Later he would always come inside to move everything around and restack it when we weren't looking.  In addition to the food storage, we also moved the guns.  We didn't have a lot of guns, though I suppose what constitutes 'a lot of guns' can vary significantly from one person's opinions to the next.  If memory serves there were probably fewer than 10 in total and one of those was an antique rifle that my grandfather had built himself.  It was more of an heirloom than a weapon and I'm not entirely sure anyone in my family would have actually dared to try and fire it.

In addition to the buckets of wheat and rice and the giant church cannery cans of powdered milk and eggs, my parents had also purchased cases of canned goods ranging from corn to carrots and from tomato sauce to vegetable juice.  Unlike the buckets and cannery cans, these cases had been purchased at stores like Costco and Walmart and, as such, each can bore a UPC or Universal Product Code Label aka a 'barcode'.  My father had worked on one of the barcode design projects during his engineering days, working out the best system for making a seemingly unlimited supply of unique patterns from black and white lines so that they could be used as unique identifiers for retail purchases.  He'd become convinced that the barcodes were more than ink on paper, detectible only by scanners at cash registers and in warehouses.  He believed that they were a way for the government to track and monitor the mass private collection of certain items, specifically non-perishable foods, so that large stores of food could be easily detected, and the owners or creators of such stores could be placed on a list of primary targets.  These targets would be among the first subdued when the shit finally hit the fan and Big Brother decided to enact martial law and starve the people into submission.  The cans were not taken directly to the bunker from the trailer.  Instead, my father gave my sister and I each a razorblade and set us to the task of carefully cutting the barcodes from every label on every can.  He and my mother helped, of course, but the task still took days and is easily one of the most bizarre things that I can ever remember doing in my life. 

The barcodes weren't the only instance of my father's Orwellian paranoia over Big Brother and the concept of 'he's always watching', though.  I remember when the Federal Reserve first started putting the magnetic strips in paper money here in the US.  I was probably around the age of 7 or 8 years old and it was not long after the Lindsey Williams seminar where we'd held the microchips and heard how they would be implanted in pets, livestock, and humans.  One of my dad's friends pointed them out to us by having my dad take a twenty-dollar bill from his own wallet and hold it up toward the sun so that he could look through it.  He told us that if you wiggle the paper in just the right way you could work that magnetic strip loose from the paper just enough to get a good hold on it with a pair of pliers and pull it out.  My dad handed me the twenty so that I could see and as he and the man stood there talking, I took the mans instructions as a personal challenge and glowed with pride when I presented my father with his tracker-free twenty in one hand and the liberated magnetic strip in the other a few moments later.  From that moment on it had become my job to de-bug all of my dad's money as well; I'd had no idea that I was potentially committing a federal offense every time I did it.

With the food, money, and guns properly secured my father's next project became water storage.  Sure, we'd found a passable solution to our immediate problem of drinking water and the city had turned the ground water back on for us but those were both best-case scenarios.  In my father's mind, what would happen if the world went to shit and we were forced to hide out in the bunker on the property for any length of time?  Under these circumstances it wouldn't be safe to drive 20 miles down the road for drinking water or be exposed for hours out in the open at a public and well-known fresh water spring while filling up.  During the end of days places like that would become campgrounds for looters, rapists, and violent people looking for easy targets, not to mention the roads themselves would likely be watched by highwaymen, black helicopters, and 'they' or 'them'.  That was a worst-case scenario.  Somewhere in the middle there was also the possibility that the city would change their mind about the ground water and even if we could haul water for ourselves from the spring, we had a horse and a dog to take care of and we needed to ensure that we could get water for them if that ever happened.  To solve this problem, my dad purchased an enormous length of PVC piping which he buried on the property and filled with water.  It ran nearly the full length of the acre, connected directly to the city's groundwater line at one end, had a well concealed spigot with a tap at the other that only our family knew about, and held 3,000 gallons of water that could be boiled or chemically treated in a pinch if worse came to worst.

Amid all of this prepping and planning, however, one very significant factor was lacking: anonymity.  In an ideal world the property would have been isolated enough, like the cabin had been, for there to be no one around to watch our goings on or, at the very least, we would have been surrounded by likeminded individuals that we could trust and cooperate with.  Neither of these were the case for us and there was one very big cog in our wheel, watching our every move with her proverbial nose pressed to the glass windows of her trailer at every opportunity: the real storm that I would eventually come to loath more than even Dave Seich himself: Sharon Felton.