Schwertler Swabians (Cumberland saga)

“It was good that you came” Sig said to Blain. “What did you think of our Sabbath worship?”

“I wasn’t expecting it to be in German. I understood very little of it” Blain said, honestly.

“We are Schwertler Swabians*” Sig explained.

Blain looked at Sig blankly.

“Schwertler Swabians are ethnic Germans who migrated to Romania to farm the land abandoned by the Ottoman Empire. We left Germany to escape religious persecution and because there was good land to farm” Sig explained.

“My family left Romania in 1996.”

“How old were you when you left Romania?” Blain asked.

“I was fifteen, just a little bit older than Lliam is now and Sarah was two-years-old” Sig said.

“Sarah?” Blain asked.

“Yes. Sarah is my sister” Sig said.

"Well, shit. Wasn’t that just jolly!" Blain thought.

“Changing subjects” Blain began “I want to ask you if you would consider using fertilizer on our fields?”

Sig frowned. “We do not conduct business on the Sabbath. We will have this conversation after the sun goes down and the Sabbath is over.”

Not an auspicious start to the conversation Blain hoped to have with Sig.

That evening, after supper and at least a half-hour after the sun had set, Blain went looking for Sig. He found Sig smoking his pipe on his front porch, waiting for him.

Sig invited Blain on to the porch and pointed at the other rocking chair. It seemed like a strange place to have a conversation, outside with only a kerosene lantern for light.

“Tell me why you think we should use fertilizer” Sig started the conversation.

“You said that we are likely to need twice as much food next year. Sally said that we could grow FOUR TIMES as much corn if we use fertilizer. It seems like a no-brainer to me” Blain said.

Sig took a tug on his pipe and held the smoke in his mouth for a second or two before answering.

“Been there. Done that. It didn’t work. Tried it twice, in fact” Sig said. "Failed both times."

“How can that be?” Blain asked.

“Folks new to Copperhead Cove came up here and assumed they knew more about farming than we did. Figured they would educate us. They were smooth talkers, too. Convinced most of the others to go along” Sig replied.

“Happened in 2000 and again in 2009. Just when we needed more food the most the crop failed” Sig said.

“But why did it fail?” Blain wailed, aghast.

“I don’t know. I got more work on my hands than I can do already. I can’t go diggin’ into every little puzzle or I wouldn’t get anything else done” Sig said.

Blain knew that was true. Nobody worked harder or longer hours than Sig. Not even Blain.

“But if you feel strongly about it, I can let you have a garden plot to experiment on. It won’t be a good garden plot and it won’t be close to the houses, but it will be yours to succeed or fail on” Sig said.

“How big will it be?” Blain asked.

“Same size as all the others. About 75 feet by 70...pretty close to an eighth of an acre.**” Sig said. “Roger and Alice are getting up in the years and they can’t keep up with the ones they have. It will be a relief to them to have somebody else pick one of them up.”

“Would you reconsider if I can figure out why the fertilizer didn’t work?” Blain asked.

“I don't have time for lazy people” Sig said. “Don’t bother talking to me if you ain't finished your work. And don’t bother me if you are expecting me to solve your problems...like spending money we don’t have. You gotta have that all figured out BEFORE you talk to me. I just don’t have the time.” 

“So who can I talk to who can tell me about 2000 and 2009? I need clues” Blain said.

“That would be Sarah” Sig said. “She was here. She worked in the fields. She saw what happened. She went hungry, too.”

Sarah was the last person in the world Blain wanted to approach. His emotional state was in turmoil and he did not know how he felt about her.

As he was passing her house on his way back to his Conex, he noticed a light was on inside near the back of the house.

What the hell? If his situation was untenable, it was better to know it now than to draw it out and get booted out of Copperhead Cove in the dead of winter.

He knocked on the door.

Sarah opened the door. Blain could see that the door opened into the kitchen.

“Yes?” Sarah asked. She seemed taken aback to have him knock on her door in what passed for “the middle of the night” in off-the-grid Copperhead Cove.

“I had some questions. I asked Sig and he told me that I should ask you” Blain said.

Sarah nodded. If she was surprised by Sig bunting the questions her way, she showed no surprise.

“Lliam! You can start your studies. Sit at the table. Blain will finish drying the dishes” she said.

And that his how he found himself standing next to Sarah as she washed the dishes and he dried.

Sarah handed Blain the first dish and Blain laid the dish on the counter and carefully dried the top. Then Blain looked over at Sarah.

She was suppressing a smile. “You have to dry both sides” she informed him.

“Now what?” he asked after he had flipped the plate over and dried the bottom.

“Place it in the drainer” she said, pointing to the rack next to the sink.

Slowly, very slowly, Sarah washed each plate and dish and handed them to Blain. He was so involved that he neglected to ask his questions.

Sarah started talking about the day. Blain listened with half-an-ear.

The quarters were very confined and “cozy”. Lliam was two steps away keeping an eye on them as he studied in the light of a small LED lamp. The space around the sink was so tight that his hip occasionally bumped Sarah’s.

She talked about the gardens and the tree-clearing. She talked about the older couple and the cold that was going around the Cove. She mentioned the need to split more firewood.

At first, Blain was distressed. At first, Blain thought she was giving him work. After all, she was his “boss”. He bristled at the huge amount of work she seemed to be assigning to him.

But then he was lulled by the gentle cadance of the information and he realized that she was simply describing the work that would have to be done by somebody and she was bringing him up-to-speed on the neighbors who were not capable of putting in a full day’s work.

Blain mastering the idea of HOLDING the plate and drying it. The concept was transformative.

The tiniest seed was planted in his head that bosses do not assign work but that the work can organize itself.

As Blain dried the last bowl, Sarah asked “You had some questions?”

Blain said “Sig told me that we need to increase how much corn we grow because he expects a lot of people to want to move here.”

“I have been working with Sally and he showed me a way to get free fertilizer to increase our production. I mentioned it to Sig and he said “NO!” He said the last two times we tried it that it was a disaster” Blain shared.

“Maybe I pushed a little bit harder than I should have, but if Sally can use fertilizer and make it work, we should be able to as well” he said. “I asked Sig about details of when you tried fertilizer and he told me to ask you.”

“So, the two times the people in the Cove used fertilizer and it failed...what happened? Sig said you harvested even less corn than when you used no fertiizer at all.”

Sarah looked at him for a minute. His impression that she was tall was spot-on. Her eyes were about an inch below his...and then he glanced down and saw she was barefoot. 

“A summer storm came along and blew the corn over. It knocked it all over. After that, the corn didn’t ripen like it was supposed to. It was damp and moldy when we picked it. Even the animals would not eat it” Sarah said.

*I am very deeply indebted to Alma Boykin who kindly offered me insight into some of the nuances of Europe's tumaltous ethnic and religious history. Alma is a top-notch author and her Carpathian Campaign (example) and Empire Series (example) are likely to appeal to many of my readers. She does use "magic" in her books but as Asimov once noted, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Alma uses magic with a light hand in those series and it is not a distraction.

Alma blogs at Cat Rotator's Quarterly.

I exercised artistic license and all deviations and errors are mine.

If it helps, think of the Schwertler Swabians as being like the Harrison Ford character in the movie Witness. "Schwertler Swabians" .Equals. "Ohio Amish".

The 20th century was not kind to the minority, ethnic German populations behind the Iron Curtain. The last of them fled after the Iron Curtain dropped. The ones who survived the 20th Century did so by becoming invisible. Chameleons: Master Class.

**The agricultural lay-out of Copperhead Cove is broken up into 1/8th acre parcels with each family-group having control of approximately 20 parcels. That was done to facilitate crop rotation and work-assignments.

The woods are in the ravines that surround three sides of the Cove with the flat, tillable area at high elevation. The region where the flat starts to slope into the ravines is rough pasture, mostly endophyte-infected Tall Fescue.

Next Installment

What's UP?

 

What is the Michigan UP? It is the Upper Peninsula where men are men, the women are purty and so are the dogs.

Quicksilver has a new favorite video. She loves dogs.

Copper Dog 150, 2020 The video has a 13 minute run-time but I shaved off the first three minutes to get to the racing. 

Dogs! Excitement! Beautiful country! More dogs. What is not to like?

More fun with Google Trending

 

Term "Martyr" with the most interest coming from Virginia in the last 30 days

Term "Suicide bomber" with Hawaii demonstrating the most interest in the last 30 days

Term "Mother of Satan", colloquial term for acetone peroxide, a non-nitrate explosive that is undetectable by conventional methods. Let's hear it for Minnesota and Maryland.

How bad are Blue-Hive school districts?

The SAT is one of the two, nationally recognized tests that measure student's readiness for college work.

A perfect score is 1600.

While looking through the most recent scores that have been published, I noticed that less than 5%* of the students who attended Flint Public Schools had scored as proficient. That is, less than 5-in-100 students from Flint Public Schools who took the SAT are prepared to start college without taking remedial classes.

It gets worse as you dig more deeply.

Flint has a population of 81,00 and a life expectancy of about 72. That means that there should be more than 1100 kids of an age to graduate in any given year. Only 103 of that 1100 attended Flint Public Schools and took the SAT.

103 students took the SAT and five (or fewer) "passed" it. The real performance metric is that 5 (or fewer) out of 1100 demonstrated college readiness.

How many people need to attend college to maintain a First World economy?

The devil is in the details, but assuming that every person who attended college was enrolled in a high-demand field and that the student's intellect and interests matched up with the requirements of that field, the "right" number might be as low as 17% (one-in-six) or as high as 35% (one-in-three).

Going with the low number, 17% is 170-in-1000 which is much, much greater than 5-in-1100. In fact, it is over 30 times greater.

Incidental lessons from "Gaza"

Imagine a densely populated island of people surrounded by a nation who the island-people loath and hate.

Furthermore, imagine that the island has no tangible resources. No fuel. No power-plants. The surface water is polluted and the ground-water is suffering from salinity, but even that is problematic if there is no electricity to pump it out of the ground. Not enough land-area to grow even 10% of the calories required to sustain the population. No harbors. No neighbors willing to accept "refugees".

They pick a fight with the nation(s) that surround them.

Imports from the surrounding nation(s) drop to zero. Military action from the surrounding nation(s) destroys what little internal infrastructure exists. The transformers that feed solar power into the grid are hit. The potable water pumping stations. The sewage plants. Tank farms holding petroleum.

The island prepares for a Stalingrad type invasion.

The surrounding nation(s) do not invade. General Thirst, General Hunger and General Cold/Heat do not need to invade. They already lurk in every corner of every apartment complex.

Satan laughs because our actions creates the future that we most fear.

Manhattan and Detroit and Minneapolis and Chicago and Washington D.C. fear an uprising by the unwashed masses...the unwashed masses outside the city limits.

The elites in those cities seem to be intent on provoking the surrounding "nations". Media (the mouthpiece of the big-city elites) informs us that the average guy wearing camo, driving a pickup or who grows a large garden is a terrorist the full equivalent of Hamas.

What could go wrong?

Guardians of Virtue (Cumberland saga)

“Tomorrow is the Sabbath” Sig said. “We do not work on the Sabbath.”

His tones were tinged with iron and quartz. There was no “bend” in his announcement.

“What would you have me do?” Blain asked. He was new here. He would go-with-the-flow until he had better options.

“You are invited to our worship. It is optional. You do not need to attend” Sig said, stiffly. As if Blain (or perhaps Sig) was unfamiliar with the concept of ‘optional’.

“What time does worship start, and where will it be?” Blain asked.

“It starts at 10:30 and if you want to attend, Sarah will show you where it is. There will be food afterward.”

Blain understood that there were no street names or addresses in Copperhead Cove. Of course Sarah would know where the worship was.

Blain presented himself to Sarah at 10:10am on Sunday, dressed in his meager “best” suit, brushed clean and as presentable as he could make himself. He was a firm believer that you only have one chance to make a good first-impression.

She scrutinized him with all of the care of a drill-instructor about to parade his troops in front of a four-star general. She dusted one-or-two imaginary flecks of dust off of his shoulders and suggested that he was almost presentable.

They arrived at one of the outlying dwellings in the compound. It was a bit larger than most. Sarah parked Blain just inside the door and a bit to the right of it. Then Sarah and her two children Lliam and Mary moved to the front-center of the room. Clearly, she did not expect him to participate to any significant degree.

Blain looked around with interest. This was not what he had expected.

The room, undoubtedly a parlor, had been cleared of its furniture. There was no place to sit. Everybody was standing. He hoped that the service was not too long.

A small podium was positioned at the far end of the room. People coming into the room filed past him.

Sig entered the room, noticed Blain and nodded to him. Then Sig proceeded to the front of the room and stood behind the pulpit. He opened the book that had been placed there and started to read.

It took Blain about five seconds to realize that Sig was reading in something that sounded like German to his untrained ears.

Looking around the congregation...maybe twenty people...Blain saw that they fully comprehended what Sig was reading.

It was an “a-ha!” moment for Blain. He had subconsciously thought of his hosts as backward hicks. And all this time they were fully multi-lingual. Even Mary, Sarah’s six-year-old daughter seemed to be fully engaged by the text Sig was reading.

To Sarah’s family’s left was another family with what appeared to be twin daughters about Llaim’s age. That is to say, in their mid-teens. They seemed to be VERY interested in him. They kept sneaking glances back toward him and whispering comments to each other.

Blain’s sense of self-preservation kicked in. “JAIL-BAIT!!!”

In his mind, it did not matter what the norms were in this community. The young ladies were well below the age-of-majority and he could not afford to piss-off any of the adults in the community. He shifted from foot-to-foot, obviously ill-at-ease in this strange environment.

And then he saw Sarah look over at the two very-young ladies. Her glance rested on them for just a fraction of a second longer than might have been a random scan of the congregation. Her brows may have contracted a millimeter or two.

The young ladies reacted as if they had touched an electric fence.
 

Blain was relieved. Sarah had solved his problem of overly-amorous, under-aged suitors.

Unable to follow the flow of the worship service at an intellectual level due to not knowing German, he was reduced to studying the body-language of the participants. It was clear from the previous interaction that Sarah was an Alpha female.

The body-language was disconcerting. It did not add up…the shifts in posture, the glances, the whispering...and then it struck Blain, Sarah was publicly announcing that Blain was her personal property and to trifle with him was to trifle with her.

Blain. Was. Shocked.

Sarah had a forteen year-old son. In Allendale or Kalamazoo or Ann Arbor, women with 14 year-old children were 45 years-old or older. And Blain was not even thirty. But then he started thinking...how young could a woman be and still have a 14 year-old child. And the answer startled him.

Oh!

Oooohhhh!

Sarah appeared to be a single parent. He never asked. It was awkward.

She didn’t wear any make-up and didn’t dress to flatter her assets. He had no clue as to her age.

She fed him. She had even offered to repair a shirt he had torn.

Thinking back, Sarah had been the one to suggest that Lliam go with him to town.

Oh my!

It would have been a simple matter of taking two steps to walk out the door. He could have walked to his bicycle in a matter of five minutes and been riding toward Dayton in ten.

He COULD have done that.

But Blain was a man in his twenties with all of the needs and desires of a very healthy, very physical twenty-eight-year-old man. Those need were both physical and emotional. It had been a long time since those needs had been met. It had been a long time since his needs had been met and an eternity since he had been needed.

There had been other women in his life. But they had been fungible, just as he had been a warm-body-of-convenience to them. He could not remember a time when a woman had picked him out of a crowd because he was the-one.

Being needed for who he was as a man was an itch that had not been scratched in such a long time that it was a need he had forgotten he had.

He was not sure if that was flattering or creepy. He would have to ponder on that.

The food after the Sabbath service included real coffee and cinnamon-hickory nut crumble made with white-flour and served with infinite amounts of butter. Next to  the crumble was a plum-cake

Blain stood at the back of the line with the children so he could see what the typical portion size was and whether anybody took a slice of each or just chose one.

Sarah stood to the side and kept an eagle-eye on each child as they cut their portions. Waste was not tolerated.

Blain cut a meager sliver of the crumble and reached to pour his coffee when Sarah interjected, "Working men get more" as she stepped in front of him and cut a healthy slice of the plum-cake and added it to his plate.

The crumble was OK but dry. The plum-cake was exceptional. The batter was dense and slightly sweet. The plum-halves were small and not overly-juicy...with more than a hint of having been soaked in some kind of liquor to preserve them.

He was finishing the plum-cake when the mother of the twin girls approached him.

"Did you go to college?" the woman asked.

Blain nodded that he had.

"Do you understand algebra?" she continued.

Blain responded "I was in pre-Pharmacy and we did reviews of algebra every semester. Yes, I am very familiar with algebra."

He was glad she had not asked if he had graduated college. He would have had to say "No."

"We home-school our children at Copperhead Cove. We need somebody to teach our teens about algebra, somebody who knows what they are doing and will not make them more confused" the woman said.

Oh crap! The last thing he wanted to have happen was to get trapped in a closed room with the twins!

"I work for Mr Sig and for Mizz Sarah. It is up to them whether I can help teach algebra" Blain dodged the question.

Hearing her name, Sarah came over. "What is going on?" Sarah asked.

The woman turned to Sarah and said "I think we found somebody to teach the teenagers math if it is OK with you."

One thing Blain could say about Sarah was that she was decisive.

Sarah made a curt nod in agreement.

"You will work a short-day on Thursday and teach the teenagers math for two hours in the evening. It will be in my house. The boys, including Lliam will sit on one side of the parlor and the girls will sit on the other side. All of the doors to the parlor will be left open at all times" Sarah commanded.

Blain smiled a smile of relief. He knew that the girls wouldn't get any of the wrong ideas as long as Sarah was there as a guardian of everybody's virtue.

Next Installment

Fine Art Tuesday

James Howard Kunstler was born in 1948 and lives in the Hudson River Valley north of Albany. He graciously gave me permission to post some of his paintings.

Mr Kunstler is notable more for his personality than for his raw, artistic ability. It is fair to compare him to Winston Churchill in that regard. Mr. Kunstler was among the first to point out the overwhelming likelihood of societal overshoot in the era of cheap energy in his book The Long Emergency. The Long Emergency was notable for Kunstler's systematic demolition of the most popular pie-in-the-sky soft-landings the pollyannas kept parroting.

These paintings are for sale and might cost more when Mr. Kunstler is no longer in a position to dilute their value by making more of them. If you are interested in purchasing one of these fine works of art, his email address can be found at his website. He blogs there every Monday and Friday. 

The content of Kunstler's paintings is notable for the frequent inclusion of rivers (symbolic of rebirth), bridges (a sign of hope connecting what is with what could-be) and the intensely local scenes that he paints.