Gonggone Gone — Parts 5 & 6

heat boxes

In the morning, they installed infrared battery-powered motion detectors in the mine shaft. The alarms would warn them if anyone entered the mine while they were inside working. As a further precaution, Alex carried his little Scheel’s 9mm pistol in his snap-up overall pockets.

“Paranoid much?” Doug teased.

“Hey, it’s a statistical fact that mine shafts are catnip to end-of-the-world zombies.”

Before doing any work, Alex fetched his logbook and quickly sketched what he had in mind. Doug approved with some caveats.

“That’s a very long exhaust line.”

“That’s what the little fans are for.”

“Ah, I wondered about them. Well, let’s get started.”

They set up one propane-powered portable generator near the mine’s entrance. Using a power saw, they fashioned two twelve-foot poles by cutting and screwing some two-by-fours together. Lying the poles on their side about four meters apart, Alex attached one of the short-wave radio’s external dipole antennas and two webcams. One cam faced north and the other south. On the northern pole, Alex nailed in plastic streamers to gauge windspeeds. Then, they gently raised the poles and dropped them in anchor holes, aligning them north and south on the solar noon meridian.

Alex said as they raised the poles, “I’m glad we heard about the sun shadow yesterday. We had to set up the antenna anyway. This kills two birds with one stone.”

By timing when the southern pole’s shadow hit the northern pole, they’d use the Earth’s rotation to measure the astronomical unit secant angle. By simply timing a shadow, they’d know the Earth-Sun distance.

At solar noon, they checked pole alignment, packed the anchor pits with crushed rock, and reinforced the poles with guide ropes. Using insulated wiring, Alex attached the pole’s antenna to one of the short-wave radios. The radio worked beautifully. Relieved to hear the outside world, they diligently listened to the radio from them on. To listen inside the mine, they ran a cable along the mine shoring and connected it to the outside antenna.

After checking the radio, Alex attached the pole webcams to his laptop with active USB extension cables. The webcams also worked beautifully.

To finish the Sun angle and antenna poles, Alex fastened an entire spool of insulated copper wiring to the northern pole. Above the wire spool, he securely attached an outdoor thermometer. After checking he could see the temperature gauge from the webcam view on his laptop, he unraveled enough wire to lead back into the mine. On their apocalypse shopping run, they had picked up a variety of wall-mounted thermometers, but the coldest gauges they could find only went to -60 degrees Fahrenheit: not cold enough! How do you measure temperatures of -100 degrees Celsius and colder? Then Alex remembered a bit of physics. Electrical resistance decreases with temperature. They would use the multimeter to measure the resistance of the mounted copper spool. With some calibration, the resistance would yield an estimate of outdoor temperatures. Even better, pure copper metal does not exhibit superconductivity at cryogenic temperatures. They could measure extremely low temperatures as long as they stayed alive.

“We’ll have to do a little temperature and Ohm curve fitting as things cool down.”

Next, they dug a series of meter-deep latrine pits west of the mine entrance. They would slowly fill the pits with feces, urine, and mine tailings. They arranged the pits in a north-south line so they wouldn’t have to walk past potentially snow-filled holes when disposing of waste. They planned to fill the pits furthest from the mine first and slowly move closer and closer to the entrance as it got colder and colder. To find the active latrine pit, even when buried in deep snow, they marked it with a two-by-four pole.

After digging the pits, Doug cut plywood and two-by-fours to build a small, sturdy, open-ended box. Exhibiting saw skills Alex didn’t know he had, Doug cut a beautiful toilet lid-shaped hole in the box lid.

“I not going to spend my apocalypse squatting over freezing holes.” They both laughed.

For the next two weeks, they worked nonstop. After measuring the oval bend about thirty meters into the mine, Alex figured it was big enough to build an oblong, heavily insulated box large enough to hold the tunnel tent, one of the stainless-steel hot tent stoves, and a small crawl-through storage pantry. By keeping the box narrow, they could squeeze around it and get to the coal seam deeper in the mine. The gap would also let air flow in the mine shaft.

They laid out cinder blocks around the oval. The inner heat box, as they now called it, would sit on the blocks, leaving an air gap under the box. The mine floor was uneven. They did their best to level things, but it was hopeless. The floor was going to be up and down. Cutting two-by-fours, they quickly put together a frame on the cinder blocks. Using six-by-one fence slabs, they fashioned a rude floor on which they stapled plastic vapor barrier wrap. Flipping the floor frame, they covered the vapor barrier with bubble wrap. Then they stuffed the frame with rockwool, which they stapled down with more fence slats. With one layer done, they built another frame on top and repeated the process. This resulted in a floor insulated by over a foot of rockwool and a few more inches of bubble wrap. They finished the floor by cutting plywood panels and stapling them down. Finally, they covered the plywood with yoga mats. Yoga mats make excellent soft insulation.

They did the same for the walls and ceiling. It was the first time they had worked with quality power tools. Power staplers and screwdrivers speed things up.

“I should have done this for my day job.”

“What day job? Call of Duty.”

“Be nice. Or you’ll be end-timing alone.”

They finished their crude oblong box in less time than expected and covered the outside with tarps, which they stapled in place. To control possible moisture problems, Alex made basic wall vents. The vents were small, well-insulated boxes they could put in or out of the walls. In the LED lantern light, the oblong box looked like an underground homeless encampment.

The hardest bit of the entire build was installing the little stainless-steel stove and its ducting. Alex ran the exhaust pipe inside the top of the box to capture as much heat as possible. Fresh air would be a problem. Normally, hot tent stoves draw air from inside large tents, which can be opened to let in outside air. This wouldn’t work underground, so they ran two 8-inch metal ducts, intake and exhaust, from the inner heat box along the top of the shaft to the mine entrance. The long ducting run lowered the already low shaft ceiling.

Doug complained, “I’ll be stooping for the rest of my life.”

Alex almost reminded him he wouldn’t have this problem for long, but they had stopped talking about the inevitable future.

They finished the intake and exhaust ducts by wrapping the first fifteen meters from the box with aluminum foil. The foil served as a radiator. It transferred heat from the exhaust pipe to the intake pipe and the surrounding mine shaft air. Alex and Doug aimed to keep as much stove heat in the mine as possible. Having anticipated air flow problems back in his Meridian bedroom, Alex installed T-joint ducts every five meters. They sealed the T-joints with aluminum foil. If needed, they could peel back the foil and insert small battery-powered ventilation fans.

When they finished their heat box, they set up the tunnel tent inside it. There wasn’t a lot of room in the box. The floor and ceiling were about one and a half meters apart, enough space to comfortably sit up while leaning against a wall but not enough to stand. To move around, they’d crawl.

The box was longer and broader than tall: about eleven and two meters, respectively.

There was just enough room to leave an air gap between the tent and box walls. On one side of the tunnel tent, the gap was large enough to build foot-wide shelves from the floor to the ceiling, which they packed with canned foods and other freeze-sensitive items.

They covered the outside of the tent with one of the king-size electric blankets. Inside, they covered the tent’s floor with multiple high R-factor sleeping mats. On top of the high R-factor mats, they set up the folding camping cots. The cots opened a six-inch air gap between the floor mats and the cot frame. They packed the gaps with cheap sleeping bags and placed their highest quality cold weather sleeping bags on the cots. With the cots in place, they were left with about a meter of free space at the end of the tent. Alex stored notebooks, Doug’s Manga, his laptop, their books, two eight-plug power bars, and the two 1500-watt-hour powerpacks there.

The powerpacks took up more space than he liked but keeping the powerpack batteries warm was almost as important as keeping themselves warm. They finished decorating the tent by hanging four rechargeable camping LED lanterns from its support struts. The tent was advertised as three-person, but when packed, there wasn’t a lot of space.

After furnishing the tent, they screwed dozens of hooks into the walls beside the stove and in the gap between the curve of the tent and the ceiling. On the hooks, they hung pans, towels, knives, extra LED headlamps, the ceramic heater, and other odds and ends. Finishing up with their cozy box, Alex deployed all thirty-kilogram silica gel canisters. Putting some in the tent and some outside on the yoga mat floor. The canisters would control humidity in the box.

With the inner heat box done, Alex wanted to start building the “airlock” box near the mine entrance, but Doug objected.

“Once the airlock box is built, it will be a pain to haul things into the mine. We need to collect as much wood as possible from Grampa’s house. We can use the big planks for shoring and burn the rest.”

Alex agreed.

For the next four days, they sledgehammered and pulled apart what remained of Grampa’s old frame house. Before raising the house ruins, Alex moved the house trail camera. He put it on the southern antenna pole. The webcams already covered the south, but the webcams only worked when plugged into his laptop. The trail cameras were always on. Most of the wood in Grampa’s house was rotten and covered with asbestos shingles. Hammering raised so much dust they both wore COVID masks while bashing. Some floorboard planks were in good shape; they dragged those back to the mine and stored them in the little waste pit side shaft they were now calling their “closet.” Smaller broken boards were stacked in loose piles in the waste pit. There were many nails in the wood. At first, they tried to yank the nails out but soon gave up.

As Doug unloaded a wood-filled wheelbarrow in the closet, he said, “We’ll have to be careful when cutting this stuff. Wouldn’t want tetanus to spoil the end of the world.”

After salvaging what they could from Grampa’s house, they leveled what remained. As the last partially upright wall fell, Alex said, “I’ve been worrying about Grampa’s house attracting people looking for things to burn. Now, with a good snowstorm, nobody will ever see it.”

After demolishing Grampa’s house, they started working on the airlock box.

The airlock box was not as well insulated and much smaller. It sat about four meters back from the mine entrance door, which they had reworked. The original heavy wooden door was hard to handle. So, they broke it apart. They removed most of the planks but left a few to frame plywood, which they stapled down. The new door was much lighter. They opened it from the inside by swinging it inwards with ropes and suspending it on hooks drilled into the first shaft rail tie. Air gaps around the outer door and the mine shaft walls were sealed with Velcro and cut-up yoga mats. Alex called the space between the outer shaft door and the airlock heat box their “garage.” They kept the wheelbarrow and other tools they needed for outside work in the garage.

The airlock box behind the outer door measured about a meter wide and two and a half meters long. It had insulated front and back doors with pool noodles filling the gaps between the box and mine shaft walls. Opening the outer mine door and the airlock box doors allowed fresh air into the mine. They could limit the loss of warmer air when going outside with one door open and the other closed. It pained Alex to think of losing precious heat.

They set up the second stainless steel hot tent stove inside. The second stove connected to the same ducts used to vent the first stove via jury-rigged T-joint valves. It was a squeeze getting past the stove to where they fashioned bare floor-to-ceiling shelves to hold canned foods, pots and pans, water purification kits, towels, and other utensils. The airlock box was taller than the inner box, but neither could stand up without ducking. From now on, they would be stooping and ducking everywhere in the mine. Alex hoped to do most of their cooking, water filtration, and other “hot” activities in the airlock box. It would also serve as an observer warm-up room.

In front of the airlock box, in the “garage,” Alex built a small plywood Styrofoam-lined box to store his astrograph. At the bottom of the scope box, he placed two thick sheets of Styrofoam to set the little telescope with its tripod on. Alex covered the instrument in the box with an electric blanket and a cheap sleeping bag. On freezing nights, he would turn on the electric scope blanket to warm it up before use. He’d spent many freezing nights fiddling with painful-to-touch telescope controls, and the coming days and nights would be beyond cold.

radio and video

While Alex and Doug worked on the boxes, they listened to the radio, paying close attention to nearby FM and AM stations. The first week after runaway, as everyone called it, people panicked. They looted stores. Rioted over food, fuel, and travel restrictions. Governments imposed stern curfews, warned about “hoarding,” and implemented rationing schemes. Troops backed up local police. Governments closed borders. Banks closed and reopened with limited hours and strictly enforced withdrawal limits to curtail black market transactions.

There was much bad news but also, inconceivably, good news. Many pointless wars around the world just stopped. It’s hard to motivate fighters when everyone is going to die anyway. Long-sought and previously impossible-to-negotiate ceasefires just spontaneously took effect. When the shooting stopped, many combatants just walked away, sometimes behind the very commanders who had been threatening to shoot them days before. It was wild.

On the short-wave bands, it was more of the same. About two weeks after runaway, things calmed down. The Sun appeared only slightly smaller in the sky. You needed some astronomical expertise to see the difference. And the weather, while cooler than usual, hardly reached cryogenic levels. Maybe this whole thing was just another World Economic Forum-style COVID conspiracy to strip people of their rights and implement the repressive measures global commies are always seeking. Of course, the tides were still absent, and the Moon was so far away it looked like a bigger Venus. How the global deep state managed that was glossed over on conspiracy radio, and naturally, gun sales reached all-time highs.

“What are they going to shoot when it’s 200 below?” Doug asked.

“I’ll take each other for whatever the fuck I can eat, Alex.”

They also amused themselves by watching trail camera videos. Every few days, they checked the cameras and swapped memory cards. Before going to sleep, Alex copied video files onto his laptop, which they both watched. Doug paid close attention to the north-facing camera overlooking the rutted road, the most likely route strangers would take to enter the valley. Some nights, the camera recorded truck headlights turning on a ranch road about seven kilometers away. Alex noted this traffic in his logbook. So far, nothing has moved toward them.

The other cameras were equally interesting. Every night, coyotes prowled beside Grampa’s demolished house. Alex counted all animal sightings. He expected the counts to drop as animals, fleeing the ever-increasing cold, headed south. One day, the catchment pond camera caught a massive flock of ravens: thousands of birds, vibrating like an oil slick on the surf while frantically taking sips from the pond. They took flight when Doug and Alex emerged from the mine. It bothered them that innocent animals would freeze.

Four weeks into runaway, about halfway to Mars’s orbit, the weather shifted. The poles cooled faster than ever, and it started snowing at mid-latitudes months early. Even the tropics saw frost. The end of tides had unexpected knock-on effects on global weather. Tides flush vast volumes of seawater from one place to another. The heat transferred by tides easily dwarfs all human emissions. It was a huge, taken-for-granted heat transfer mechanism that had stopped. The impact was greatest in the tropics. Wind patterns shifted worldwide. Snow started falling outside the mine, and it kept falling. Within days, an entire winter’s worth of snow fell around them.

Alex welcomed the snow; his biggest worry—other people. As the inevitable sunk in, he expected mobs to scour the countryside, looking for shelter and things to eat.

Doug disagreed, “You’ve expected the worst for your entire life.”

Alex didn’t respond to Doug’s shade; they were taking care not to irritate each other.

But it was still too early for mobs. Four weeks was hardly enough time to starve your average American porker. Hell, a little starvation would improve the health of many lard butts, but in another month, things would be different. Windblown snow around Grampa’s Valley and unplowed ranch roads would deter vagrants, but skis or snowmobiles could easily reach their location, so they stayed out of sight in the mine.

“If we get caught in the mine, it would be easy to smoke us out. Just light a fire; we’d be helpless.”

Until temperatures dropped below -50 degrees Celsius, they would be at extreme risk of discovery. They’d be safer once things really froze: -100 Celsius or colder. Snowmobiling at -100C is extremely difficult, and skiing is almost impossible. Nobody would be pushing shopping carts down the roads of a -100 degrees Celsius world. People would freeze before they had to resort to cannibalism, which, oddly, would make it easier for the remaining cannibals. They’d find lots of frozen meat; no need to hunt the living.

Radio news slowly pivoted from histrionic partisan bullshit to somber useful news.

Doug noted the change in tone. “Everyone’s coming to grips with the idea that they can’t escape.”

As the polar ice caps started expanding, many governments, realizing everyone was equally screwed, made some intelligent moves. Even flatworms will turn from pain. Icebreakers in the Arctic were ordered south before the pack ice would trap them in northern seas. Russia and the US allowed all such ships to pass through the Bering Strait. They redeployed along the advancing ice front and planned to move south with the expanding ice pack and report on the rate of ocean freezing. Around this time, governments took over satellite radio and decrypted transmissions. You could pick up crystal-clear FM satellite broadcasts with a regular radio. It only took a global catastrophe to fix satellite radio.

Alex welcomed the clear FM signal; he even enjoyed the tranquilizing elevator music played between bouts of government propaganda and weather reports. The weather reports were the main reason people listened to the radio. Every few hours, a long list of temperatures, wind speeds, and precipitation levels were read out for locations worldwide. Alex recorded temperatures for nearby locales in his log notebook. Local temperatures helped calibrate their copper spool resistance thermometer.

Government FM was clear but insipid. However, the ham radio bands were an absolute delight. While installing ducts, they listened to a novel solution to the Fermi Paradox. Maybe the universe is a living thing, a cosmic Gaia, with an immune system. Look at the mess humans have made on Earth. Imagine us infecting the galaxy. Perhaps Earth’s runaway is a cosmic white cell ingesting a noxious pathogen. Maybe the universe is littered with quadrillions of runaway planets, all harboring the frozen crystal remains of unworthy aliens.

Yes, the FCC had lost control of broadcasting and would never reclaim it. Everyone would die entertained.