Agoraphobia

Day 27 - 34 (Life on Elwood's)

The Main House was a large, three-story, ten-bedroom home. Yet with forty-eight people living there, it was an incredibly crowded place with no privacy.

As a general rule, people hate change. And the move to Elwood's was a HUGE change for everyone.

All of us had lost so much. Friends, carriers, freedom, homes, property, privacy... So devastating was the agoraphobia apocalypse, even the survivors were victims.

The first two months were particularly hard. Tensions were high, and the learning curve was steep. And we had many immediate concerns...

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Feces was our first problem. A huge poop pile, marinated in urine, had formed outside under the downstairs bathroom window. It attracted swarms of insects and reeked! Uncle Peter and I had to shovel it into wheelbarrows and haul it away.

About four-hundred feet from the house, there was a six-foot deep, naturally-formed, pit. A deep, wooded valley was on the other side. We dumped our feces into the pit, and it was given the name, appropriately enough, the "poop pit". The pit's shape and lay of the land made it ideal for dumping feces. Whenever the pit became full, or it would rain, the excess would overflow down into the wooded valley. The valley grew thick and green from that steady diet.

We kept a wheelbarrow under the bathroom window at all times, emptying it frequently.

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Water was our next concern. For a while, we hauled muddy water all the way from the river and gave it to Dad to filter and boil. It was labor-intensive and exhausting. We decided our time would be better spent digging a well. We started surveying for a good place to dig and soon discovered a well already on the property. It was just covered up. We attached Great-Uncle Jimmy's pump and soon had relatively clean water available to us about forty feet from the house.

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Trash was our next problem. Uncle Peter decided we should dump trash in a different place than where we dumped poop. (He never explained his reasoning behind this to my satisfaction. But he was the boss, so a good reason was not always required.) Behind "poop pit valley" was a large pit surrounded by a fence. We surmised the pit was formed from a collapsed mine and fenced off to protect the unwary. That became our dump.

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Food was our next concern. There was a Walmart Supercenter only seven miles away. Frank, Uncle Peter, Bryce, and I went there to go "shopping". (Again, Uncle Peter insisted I use the uncomfortable booster seat.)

We started to load up on food. We were fairly indiscriminate with our selections, grabbing large quantities of whatever.

It didn't take long to load up both vehicles. Before leaving, Uncle Peter wrote out an "I.O.U." for $1,000 and placed it on a register.

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Firewood was needed for cooking. And, come winter, we'd need it to heat the Main House. We found a "cord" under a tarp. But it was hardly enough to last until spring. At some point, we knew, we'd need to fell trees.

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Bedding was our next concern. Almost everyone in the Main House was sleeping on the floor. We appropriated a couple U-Haul trailers and made multiple trips to a furniture store. All the beds were kits, which were left to the agoraphobics to assemble. To simplify things, we only brought two types: Nine "queen sized" beds and seventeen "twin xl" bunk bed sets. The bunks saved a lot of space.