Read Online The Slow Road by Jerry D. Young - Free Book Online Page A

during the height of the harvest, but with their stored reserves they didn’t want for food. They chose to eat on the stored foods and sell or give away the small amount of produce they got after the water went down and Jasper was able to mud his way through the garden in tall rubber boots to recover everything he could when he finally got a few daytime hours off.
    With all the overtime Jasper was making, Millie was able to make two more double mortgage payments and still have money left to have a nice Holiday season that fall. They talked it over and decided to build up some cash reserves again, putting the increased salary from Jasper’s promotion to crew chief of one of the maintenance crews.
    Millie was still able to pick up a Super Pail or two every month of long term storage staples. And though they’d always kept plenty of toilet paper in the house, Millie began to double buy it at the buyer’s club they were now members of, and stacked it in the attic of the house. There was plenty in the shelter and Millie and Jasper both thought with the rodent proofing Jasper had done when he built onto the park model trailer, plus poison out in the attic, the paper products would be safe from rodent and bug infestations.
    Jason had two more projects he wanted to do, while there was still space in the back yard. He’d guttered the roof of the house, piping the run off toward the street, since the rear of the property was higher. He hated loosing that much water, so rented a tiny excavator and dug a hole to put in a seven-hundred-fifty gallon stock water tank for a cistern to catch the roof runoff.
    That was one half of one of the projects. The other half was an identical cistern buried beside the well. Jasper had obtained a couple of small electrical centrifugal pumps that didn’t cost too much to run at the low volumes they pumped. The system allowed Jasper to run the gas engine pump to fill the garden cistern and do the actual irrigation with one of the low flow pumps out of the cistern.
    The other pump was in the roof catchment cistern so the water could be pumped to the garden cistern or directly to the garden for irrigation if more rain came than the cistern would hold without pumping it. And it gave a couple of options that Jasper liked to have for their water usage.
    The city water system was very old and in the past year the water had been off several times for repairs to the system. It didn’t bother Millie and Jasper much, as they had stored water in addition to the hand pump on the well if they needed it.
    But the quality of the water worried Jasper, and especially Millie, both that of the city lines and the well. After researching it on the internet, they decided to get a Crown Berkey drip water filter with the black filter elements. They got a big discount when they bought four sets of eight cartridges for the filter. They should last for years, as neither the city water nor the well water was actually bad. They just wanted that extra bit of protection for the water they drank and cooked with.
    The other project was a sanitation project. Jasper had equipped the shelter with a good high capacity chemical toilet. They’d used it from time to time in the shelter and Jasper always emptied it into the city sewer cleanout at the back of the house. He wanted an alternative, since if the city water system was old; the sanitary sewer system was ancient.
    He didn’t want to install an outhouse. They were no longer legal for one thing. What he did do was fill another area of the yard near the north hedge and dig a pair of outhouse pits side by side, and line the sides of them with hollow concrete blocks. He made metal covered, tight fitting lids for them.
    If the city sewer ever failed for any length of time, Jasper would dump the chemical toilet into one of them until it was full and then switch to the other, allowing the first to compost the human waste to useable form. Then he’d empty the first, ready for use when