Free Founders by James Wesley Rawles Page B

looked up to see Ken and Terry walking by on the raised railroad above him. Their boots were at his face level. In the dim light, Ken could see that the stranger was carrying a holstered handgun. Ken shouldered his rifle, and centered the HK’s ringed front sight on the man’s chest.
    Startled, the man asked, “Who the hell are you?”
    Ken replied in the most macho voice he could muster, “You don’t want to know, mister. Just leave us alone, and we won’t waste you.”
    The man stood petrified, wondering how many people were traveling with Ken. Little did he know that there were just two of them.
    As they passed the man, Ken and Terry turned and walked backward, keeping their rifles trained on him. The man stood still, apparently afraid to move or raise an alarm. Once they had walked this way for another forty yards, they turned and ran for about 150 yards, and then left the raised railroad ballast and cut across a field. At the far side of the field, they helped each other over a three-strand barbed wire fence and then sprinted again to take cover behind a cattle loafing shed.
    Terry gave Ken a hug: “That was close!”
    Ken asked, “Do you think they were looters?”
    “Might’ve been. Maybe just refugees. Whoever it was, that sure scared me.”
    “Ditto,” Ken added.
    They waited a few minutes. There was no sound of alarm inthe camp. When they resumed their march, they paralleled the railroad for nearly a mile.
    This necessitated crossing several barbed wire fences. After a while, they got good at it—not snagging their pants, and not leaving a trace. Ken always made a point of wiping off any mud clinging to the wire from their boots.
    Despite their stealthy movement, they had a few unexpected scares. Twice, stray dogs darted across their path. They were gone even before they had the chance to react. Another time, Ken almost tripped over the feet of a man who was lying in a sleeping bag. The man had positioned himself with the foot end of his sleeping bag protruding into the trail. Either he was sound asleep, or dead. The Laytons didn’t linger to find out which.
    They reached the banks of the Mississippi during a heavy rain—the first significant rain since they had left Chicago. There was virtually no ambient light. The railroad bridge was several miles north of East Moline. It connected East Clinton, Illinois, with Clinton, Iowa. Crossing the bridge was frightening. It was dark, the bridge was wet, and it hadn’t been designed for foot traffic. They knew that the chance of a train crossing the bridge was slim, since there hadn’t been any trains running in days. Nevertheless, the prospect of being caught in the middle of the long bridge had both Ken and Terry very anxious.

7
Wheat Berries
    “The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New