John's barber shop

Found myself in town this afternoon with a little time to kill. The Farm Manager had to take the Bubbinator to the hearing clinic to have her new hearing aids dialed in. Thought I'd head over to John's barber shop for that long-overdue haircut.  After all, they just opened up and I'll bet they're hungry for clientele.

Not that hungry. I walk in and there's a guy in the chair and another guy waiting.

"Hey John! Good to see ya! How much wait time am I looking at?"

John consults his laptop. His apprentice, Noah, is busy with the scissors. "Hey Moses, great to see ya!" It's so easy to get the biblical patriarchs mixed up, but Noah is used to it. I've known both these guys since they were kids.

"Well, we're booked solid for today... Saturday's looking kinda tight... but we could maybe squeeze you in next Tuesday."

WTF? These guys just opened the door a couple months ago and they're booked solid days in advance? Tuesday didn't work for me, but I've got an appointment for next Thursday.

The barber shop must be making a come-back, and why not. For far too long too many guys have had to take a chance at their local First Choice, where everybody makes minimum wage and nobody gives a shit.

Back in the Guelph era I used to go to Nat's barber shop on Macdonell. Nat's brother Terry had a great reputation as a quality house builder. I never needed an appointment at Nat's.

Then I was a regular at Rod's barber shop in Walkerton. Rod Dahm was an old-school barber too. No appointment required and none taken anyway. Rod just retired a year or two ago, but we used to have extended (well, extended to as long as it took to get a haircut) conversations about the barbering trade.

When Rod put out his shingle in Walkerton back in the day, there were five barbers in town. Self-respecting males would get their hair trimmed once a week, or every other week on the outside. All five of those barbers made a decent living in a community of three or four thousand souls.

Then the hippy-dippy era arrived...

Hey man!....

Let it all hang out... and by all means, let your hair grow out at the same time. I remember those days. Never mind once a week; I was getting by on one haircut a year for the longest time. You'd start with a buzzcut and you'd have a full hippy-dippy head 'o hair half-way down your ass before you thought about another haircut.

Those must have been lean years for Rod and every other barber. Nevertheless, Rod was able to regale me with tales of his family's adventures on their twin-engine Sea Ray on a regular basis. Even in the darkest times some barbers managed to fare out OK.

I suspect Rod may have been the model for Chilton's books about the wealthy barber. He ran a cash-only business, and as my pal Jimmy Lippert used to say, nobody's the wiser about how much income you report and how much you don't. In Jimmy's word's; "that's gotta be a great business if you don't mind running your fingers through another man's cooties."

I'm guessing the modern barber doesn't run into much in the way of cooties. And the cultural pendulum has swung back to a place where most guys want a haircut more than once a year.

John and Moses just might be in the right place at the right time. More power to ya, lads!


See you Thursday!

Tribulations of a pot-addled hillbilly

I remember, a few years before the Big Crash of '08, there was a scrapyard for sale down Hanover way. Might have been quite a few years... the memory gets a bit hazy as the years go by. Coulda been five years, maybe even ten.

Anyway, the point is, at the time the scrap-yard came up for sale, scrap metal was so low you got next to nothing for it. When scrap was worth next to nothing, Buddy down Hanover way put his scrapyard up for sale for a half million.

For $500 thousands you got the scrapyard, all the relevant permits and licenses, and 50 acres of scrap. If I recall correctly there was a house and a shop on the property as well.

So what's that got to do with pot-addled hillbillies?

Well, first of all, this particular pot-addled hillbilly understands that the market for scrap metal is, like every other commodity, cyclical.

Oil goes up, comes down, goes up again...

Same with everything else from copper to gold to pork-bellies.

Which reminds me; I had a absolutely terrifying incident at the liquor store today.

I've noticed for a few years now that I'm widening out a bit in the middle. If I could be a little more honest with myself I'd probably go so far as to admit that I'm getting fat.

But since I'm still very much in denial, and am getting neither fatter or older, I was shocked at what happened today. Even in denial I should not have been shocked... but let me explain.

For a few years now, it's become evident that as I get bigger around the middle, pants and belts and all that stuff don't fit the way they once did. I used to feel comfy with a 32 waist. Now a 40 feels a bit snug.

But here's where it messes me up; that 40 may feel snug, but give me a couple grocery bags to carry, and for some reason that load makes you inadvertently suck in your gut such that your 40 waist Wranglers want to start sliding down... there's been many a time when I feared the drawers were gonna completely slide off my ass before I got to the car.

Well, today was the worst case scenario, but it was even worse because it happened in the liquor store parking lot instead of the Foodland parking lot.

I've dashed in and grabbed a two-four of Keystone Light. As I'm heading out to the car I can feel the pants starting to slide down. I shift into straddle-walk mode where you try to do that cowboy walk in the hopes that your belt and therefore your pants are gonna stay up.

Almost made it to the car... and then I can feel the belt sliding over my hips... oh my God!

As my drawers are falling off my ass I reach down to catch them, with a hand that was previously holding one end of my case of beer. Wouldn't you know it, the beer case tips wildly and starts spilling bottles all over the pavement.

I don't know whether to save my pants or save the beer, so I'm doing this jig in the liquor store parking lot where I'm trying to do both... and of course, when otherwise reasonable people see you doing this madcap jig in the liquor store parking lot, they immediately jump to all the wrong conclusions.

But I digress.

I saw value in that scrapyard, but I was short about $499 thou on that half million asking price at the time. I tried to interest my pal Kipling, because his daddy had once been in the scrap business and I thought maybe nostalgia would prompt him to take the plunge.

No luck.

I tried to convince my buddy Jimmy Lippert to take a flyer on the scrapyard. I knew he had the resources. All he had to do was sell his country estate and move his family to the scrapyard.

No luck there either.

That scrapyard went to someone else.

About a year later Lippert was telling me about how they took our pal Greg's Ford Exploder to the scrap yard and walked away with over five hundred bucks.

Yup, scrap had gone up. Way up. From next to nothing to well over two hundred bucks per ton.

Fifty acres of it would have been worth tens of millions...

Damn!

Missed the gravy train again!

At least my debacle in the parking lot had a happy ending. Standing in the midst of broken glass and spilled beer with my pants around my ankles, I thought, hey, this is a do or die moment.

The best defense is a good offense. So I hitched up my drawers, cinched that belt up a couple extra notches, marched back into the the store with the empty cardboard case in my hand, and gave them the what-for on their shitty packaging.

Sure enough, I walked outta there with a fresh case of beer.

Never give up!

You know you might be a hillbilly when you have parts cars

We keep a few in the yard behind the barn.

You never know when you might need a random part.

Heck, sometimes you pick up a parts car and it turns out to be in better shape than your daily driver. That's when you swap the plates around and enjoy many more miles of happy motoring without the inconvenience and expense of safety inspections etc.

Guy I knew was in Kentucky when his motor went. Bought another blue Lincoln Town locally, swapped the plates, had his old car towed to the scrap-yard, and drove that Lincoln all over Canada for the next ten years with nary an incident.

But I digress. What's troubling me is that I have failed to fire up the old Allison back-hoe for longer than I care to admit. I'd bought a brand new battery last summer, and when I hook the battery charger to it, it doesn't even want to take a charge.

Meanwhile, the old Montana van behind the barn, where it's been buried in a snow drift for the last six months, fired right up with its ten year old OEM battery.

My old pal Jimmy Lippert, may he rest in peace, prided himself on never driving a car built during the decade he was driving it. I recall him going to the wrecker to find a AC unit for the Buick LeSabre he was driving. Buddy at the yard wants $250 for the AC.

So Lippert says "well whadya want for the whole car?"

After a bit of back and forth they settle on $300 for the entire vehicle, and by golly he drove that car for a good five years!

Snow-plow stories

This isn't really a snow-plow story.

It's a Charlie Hill story. Charlie Hill with a snow-plow.

That was a side deal for Charlie. His main business was well-drilling.

Charlie had that gig down pat. Could do the well-witching trick as good as anybody.

My buddy Lippert maintained that if you dug a hole deep enough you could pretty much strike water anywhere. I think he was right.

My folks moved around a bit in my youth, but three or four times at least Charlie got to drill the well at the new place. That was quite the operation back in the day. They'd set up the rig, and then Charlie or one of his men would be tending the drilling process 24/7 for days and days till they struck water.

Then they'd hoist anchor and head to the next job.

With the wisdom of hindsight, I now realize Charlie probably struck water in his first 24 hours on the property. After that, he just kept the drill rig busy till he was scheduled to start the next well.

Charlie was a business icon for me in my formative years. It was widely known he only had a grade four education.

But he was one savvy chain-smoking smooth-talking wheeler-dealer.

So one winter in my late teens the folks left me in charge of house-sitting while they whisked off to Jamaica or somewhere.

Sure enough, the storm of the century hits. I call up Charlie, because after having drilled three wells he's pretty much a friend of the family, and besides, he's got that six foot blade on the front of his Bronco.

So Charlie comes out, and long story short, he gets his Bronco stuck about twenty feet into the driveway.

The driveway is a half mile long.

I spend an hour with a shovel, shoveling this wet heavy snow that gums up snow-blowers and gets snow-plows stuck.

When Charlie and me finally get his Bronco back to the road, I apologize to him and give him twenty bucks for not plowing out the driveway.

That's how smooth he was!

Testing my boat at the Cargill Mill Pond

Everything about this venture spelled disaster long before I embarked on it.

My boat was an early 60s Arkansas in fiberglass. A fourteen footer. She had, hanging off the transom, a 36 hp Johnson outboard. Pull start. Mid-fifties vintage.

It was "borrowed" from my dad, who'd had it sitting in his drive shed for years. I sold the "borrow" by stressing that the old Arkansas deserved to see water again.

Spent the winter fitting new rings and bearings to the Johnson. That was a pleasant pass-time when my children were little.

"Hey kids, on this Daddy weekend we're going to take apart the motor on that boat to see what makes it work!"

Luckily this was just as the internet generation was finding its feet, and my kids didn't realize yet that they'd have way more fun MSNing their friends rather than passing me wrenches.

The next summer would have been too late. That social media thing swept in hard and fast.

So it was springtime in Bruce County and the ice was off the Cargill Mill Pond, which was the nearest body of water suitable for a test run. Headed out bright and early on a Saturday. Even invited my dear Daddy up to witness the rebirth of the old Arky.

First sign that this was a doomed venture came as I was sliding her off the trailer. Only took a few minutes to notice that she was filling up with water.

I can't say here what I said there, in earshot of my dear daughter, may God forgive me, but in all the excitement of the engine rebuild and the general refurbishment of the hull, I'd forgotten to put the transom plug back in.

The purpose of that plug is to drain water out after an afternoon of boating. You pull her out of the lake, unscrew that plug, and drain out the accumulated spray and wash you collected out on the water.

But that drain hole is just as likely to let water in. So as I'm backing the trailer into the Cargill Mill Pond my little Arkansas is filling up. Unfortunately nobody noticed this till the boat was sitting on the bottom of the boat ramp.

Everything aft of the windshield was underwater.

A boat filled with water is way heavier than a boat not filled with water. There was no way to get the trailer under it, even though it was sitting right there by the launch ramp.

We tried pulling her out by hand. After all, it's only a fourteen footer, but no way. Had to pull her up on the grass with my tow strap.

We drain the water out, put the transom plug in, and relaunch.

Everything is looking good. I've got my dear daughter at the controls and her doting grampa on the shore watching us get the old girl fired up after that near miss.

After numerous pulls on that starter cord, while simultaneously fiddling with various carburetor parts, the old Johnson sputters to life.

Dear daughter takes that as her signal to ram the controls full ahead.

The fifty year old Johnson hits her redline for about half a second.

I go flying over the transom.

The boat sputters to a slow drift, motor deader than dead.

After a few unfortunate words exchanged with my dear daughter while she rowed the boat back to shore I set about to restart the motor.

A dozen cord pulls, nothing.

Four dozen cord pulls, with unlimited carburetor fiddling, nothing.

Finally I called my buddy Lippert, may he rest in peace, who lived not ten minutes away.

And that's how long it took him to get there. Had the old Johnson purring in another ten minutes.

Jimmy left, and the rest of our little crew raced back and forth and back and forth on that little mill pond... till on one of those 180 degree turns into our own wake at the end of the Cargill Mill Pond the motor stalled out.

Pulled on that cord half a dozen times.

Then I pulled it right out of the starter housing.

That was the end of the boat test.

When the wheel of karma gets stuck in the mud

Finally culled enough of the crap in the garage to make room for the Mustang Fifty. She's going to be sleeping there till spring.

There's guys who go all out when they park a car for the winter. Take the wheels off, put it on blocks, drain the fluids.

Bit excessive if you ask me. Besides, thanks to the benefits of global warming, I might be able to take her out for a rip in the middle of January.

My buddy Jimmy Lippert, may he rest in peace, always took the battery out of anything he stored. Claimed that was the only way to ensure that there was no chance of a barn fire. Just disconnecting the battery cables wasn't good enough for him. You take the battery out and store it in another room.

I don't know. If batteries can start fires, wouldn't the fire just start in the other room? Maybe that was a bit excessive too.

Back when I stored the SD 455 Trans Am for the only winter I owned her, I didn't disconnect or remove anything. When it came time to pull her out she fired up and I drove away. Simple as that. Kurtz's barn didn't burn down.

Kurtz's barn was just by Ariss Ontario, which was up the road from me. At the time Ariss had two variety stores and four houses. And Bill Bailey.

I met Billy at Marden Public School. He was the first guy I met my age who bragged about feeling up girls boobs. That was on the school bus in grade six, a point in time at which it hadn't occurred to me yet that I would want to touch boobs.

Funny how things change.

So old man Kurtz had a farm outside Ariss and I agreed to pay a hundred bucks to park the Super Duty there for the winter. There were a couple of camping trailers stored there as well. I knew him because I knew a couple of his youngsters, who were more or less my age.

Five years later I was on the ferry between Vancouver Island and the mainland, and I'm sitting there, and I'm thinking I'm seeing a couple of the Kurtz boys, but I can't be, because they live on a farm by Ariss and I'm on a boat in the Pacific Ocean.

So I'm sitting there staring at them and they're sitting there staring at me and finally somebody says "hey man, you look just like....  "

Sure enough. It was them.

The Super Duty was one hell of a piece of machinery. She'd break the tires loose in every gear if you wanted. If the road was a little damp she had a tendency to do that even when you didn't want it.

For me, it was the right car at the wrong time.

Life does that to you. Right car at the wrong time. Right woman at the wrong time. Great job but I just gotta follow the call of the wild...

Finest shoes you've ever owned but they don't go with your suit. Finest suit you ever owned and you've never looked better but by God here comes a hemroid flare-up... The hemroids fade away and the job's working out and the suit and the shoes are working out and the woman is working out and everything is A-plus and then the cops show up while you've got the mother-in-law over with a warrant from five years ago.

Fuck me!

So I get to talking to the Kurtz boys and they've been in the Okanogan for the last month picking cherries, and they did the math and realized that compared to a shit-level job back in Ariss, home base of the Hasenfratz Linamar empire, it was actually costing them money to pick cherries.

So they buggered off and decided to see a few sights.

I knew a variety of Kurtz's back in the day. Even dated one once. One of the girls. That didn't go anywhere. Right woman at the wrong time.

Bill I ran into years later at a gas station in Guelph. He was back for a visit from a job in the Yukon. He'd settled down.

"Ya can't just loot and pillage yer whole life" he said.

He's right.

But it gets me thinking about how what goes around comes around.

Karma.

It wasn't till I got to Falling Downs that things seemed to work in harmony. The shoes, the suit, the woman, the job, the friends, the life...

The vehicles tend to be older and rusting, but they start up every day and they're paid for.

For a long time everybody I knew eventually got stuck in the mud. You'd get the dream house with the dream kitchen and your husband would leave.

Or the best job ever and a shop out back and your wife would leave.

And hemroids can rear up any time.

So there's something comforting about finding everything fitting into place when you're well past ever hoping that's gonna happen.

Unfortunately this place is called Falling Downs because it's falling down.

It ain't gonna last forever.

Jesus and Jimmie and me

Can't say for sure who it was got me and Jimmie car-pooling.

Pretty sure it wasn't Jesus.

I think it was his brother-in-law Rod.

That would be the brother-in-law of Jimmie, not the brother-in-law of Jesus.

Rod had a gas station in downtown Walkerton, and he was a big fan of German Shepherd dogs. He actually collected magazines devoted to the German Shepherd dog.

I was devoted to my own German Shepherd dog, but I had not the slightest inkling that there might be magazines devoted to such devotion.

Rod's gas station used to be the Ford dealership in Walkerton. Rod's dad had let that franchise go for reasons unknown.

One day I pulled in there for gas with my beautiful German Shepherd in the back of the truck. It was around the time of the Walkerton water crisis.

Folks were dying from drinking the water.

Rod and I get to talking, and before you know it, he's got me calling up his brother-in-law Jimmie, because Jimmie runs up to Owen Sound every day and by God, that's exactly where I'm going!

That's how the homophobic redneck and the queer-friendly commie got to be car-pool buddies.

The one thing I really respected about the redneck homophobe was that he was the best car mechanic I'd ever encountered. He had parlayed his expertise into a teaching gig at one of the high schools in Owen Sound.

They'd take in an engine transplant on a Monday, do the swap by Tuesday, and by Wednesday evening the customer would be driving the car home with the new motor.

In most high school shops you're lucky to have a tire changed in that time, never mind a motor.

So me and Jimmie get to car-pooling. Turns out he hates fags and I've got half a dozen in the extended  family.

It's about an hour drive to Owen Sound so obviously we have to find other stuff to chat about.

Soon we're doing this twice a day.

Turns out there may be a couple of Sodomites in his family tree too...

But what really gets him is I used to be a welder in a shipyard. Had every welding ticket you can imagine. Eventually he asks if I mind going to his home shop to check out the welds on this trailer he's building.

A friendship is forged out of mutual respect, even though these two guys have nothing in common.

He respects my welding skills.

I respect his mechanical wizardry.

One day we're heading to Owen Sound in the dead of winter and the sun is just coming up in one of those polyglotal cloud-bespeckled skies that lets beams of winter sun poke through and it is all looking surreal and majestic and magical.

We drive in silence for a couple of minutes, clouds glowing ever brighter with the back-lighting of the morning sun... till finally Jimmie, looking at the sky, says "you don't think we're gonna see Jesus, do ya?"

Not long after that Jimmie got a transfer to a school closer to home, and that was the end of the car-pooling. But whenever I had a serious issue with an internal combustion engine, be it in a car or a boat or a snowmobile, he'd be there.

All I had to do was make the call.

Some time early last year I went to his funeral.

He was still a young man; early fifties. Didn't smoke, didn't drink. The cancer didn't differentiate.

Keep a spot there for me Jimmie. I'll be along soon enough.

Wheelies then and now

My old pal Barney had a 1969 Nova SS with a 375 horse 396 four speed and 456 gears out back. While I have to admit I never personally witnessed this, rumor around the Guelph street racing circuit back in the day was that this car would lift the front wheels on a 7000 rpm launch.

That Reinhart fellow with the '68 Mustang side-oiler used to lift the front wheels at launch. That's something I saw. Right there on the 86 Dragway.

But for the most part, wheelie land belonged to the gravel pit crowd. I know I used to be able to keep the front wheel of my Honda ATC in the air for miles. Used to be a master of the "side-wheelie" too. I could go from here to kingdom come with one back wheel in the air.

Mind you, with 90 cubic centimeters of pep, that wasn't nearly as exciting as Wild Willie Borsch keeping the left front off the pavement throughout a 160 mph run.

But back to the gravel pit. While I was tooling around back there with that ATC, there were some heavy-duty moto-cross guys sharing the dirt. The Honda three-wheeler was a bit of a novelty so quite often I'd have the opportunity to take the latest two-stroke moto-cross technology for a rip while the moto-cross guys tested out my ATC.

I remember when those bikes hit the power band you were doing a wheelie whether you wanted to or not. On one occasion I traded off for a ride on a 250 Honda Elsinore. We were racing around in the pits behind John's Supertest when one of the local land-owners came out to complain about the noise.

She was an elderly woman and I certainly wasn't interested in picking a fight with her, but as I pulled away I unexpectedly hit the power-band. Suddenly the front wheel is reaching for the sky and the back wheel is showering the old bat with gravel. That was enough to cause her son, who had been watching from a distance, to call the police with a bizarre complaint about drug-crazed bikers spraying his dear momma with dirt.

That was an afternoon that didn't end well, at least not right away. Turned out that the son was a bit of a super-car afficianado in his own right, and used to race stock cars down at the Flanboro Speedway. I  talked this incident over with him years later and by God, had we known then what we knew now, my evening at the police station could have been avoided entirely.

But back to wheelies. My buddy Jim Lippert, may he rest in peace, was one of those old-school hot-rodders who could shoe-horn any motor into any vehicle and make it work. His last project before he passed on was putting a Cummins diesel from a Greyhound bus into a GMC pick-up truck.

Personally, I didn't see the point, but by God there were certain things that 600 foot/pounds of torque could do that your average GMC pick-up couldn't.

Like wheelies.

But Lippert had an even richer wheelie legacy. He used to run the auto shop at one of the local high schools. A few of the shop teachers around the area were getting into bragging about the race cars their students were building. They'd source an old muscle car, canvas the community for donations, and eventually sink twenty or thirty thousand dollars into some piece of crap that might turn a low 14.

They were like those would be street-racers who couldn't figure out why their 350 Nova was actually slower after they bolted on that 950 Holley three barrel. They'd mount a set of wheelie bars just in case that 14 second Nova, which for a couple of thousand dollars they'd just turned into a fifteen second car, was going to go over backwards at launch.

So Lippert gets this old Oldsmobile station wagon. Has his students spend a week mixing cement by hand and pouring it into the back. The old girl must have had two tons worth of concrete behind the back seat.

He takes it to the back parking lot at his school, puts the hydramatic 350 in neutral, sticks the pedal to the metal and dumps it into "drive".

The old girl lurches forward, front wheels about three feet off the ground, and she expires right there.

But he had the students record every second of this launch. What you saw in the pictures distributed around the School Board was this 1980 Oldsmobile station wagon doing a wheelie, and the caption that said "shop teacher builds nine-second racer from junkyard parts."

Sorry to let the cat out of the bag Jimmie!

Zook's sawmill

Not being in the mood to unload the trailer, I took the truck to the woodlot across the road. Last time I had the truck in there was last summer, when it mysteriously quit right at the back, at the edge of the marsh, after I'd fully loaded the box.

That was the time I had to recruit Junior to steer while I towed the truck, wood and all, out of there with the Ford 4000. Quite a scene, that, the poor kid with his under-developed forearms trying to turn the wheel of the truck this way and that with no power steering and me giving him the "are you retarded?" look the whole time.

The climax of that adventure occurred as we were pulling out onto the road. You have to traverse the ditch and then climb a steep incline, and it's really hard to see if there's traffic coming. The weight of the truck and the angle of attack resulted in our merging onto the road in a gigantic wheelie that would have made the old Little Red Wagon pilot proud.

Nothing that exciting today. The maple I dropped gave me a moment's pause just as she was starting to go over. These sixty or seventy footers can find stuff to get tangled up in on their way down, and then sometimes there's trouble.

That's what was about to happen; she leaned to about a 60 degree angle while I still had the saw in the trunk, and it looked for sure like the crown was going to be hung up on a couple of adjacent trees, but just as the saw broke through the trunk she did a slow roll and came crashing to earth.

What I'm aiming for in terms of woodlot management is sustainable firewood in perpetuity. Not that I'll be here that long, of course, but somebody's going to be. There's a lot of past-its-prime stuff both in this lot and the other one on the north side of the property, that by rights should be harvested while it's still worth something more than firewood, but it's not enough to interest the commercial loggers around here.

I think eventually, when I get around to it, I'll strike a deal with the Amish guy, Ebeneezer Zook or Zook Ebeneezer, one or the other, who has a sawmill over towards Keady. I'll borrow a haywagon from one of the neighbors and take a dozen or so 12 foot lengths down there to have sawn into planks. The Amish are pretty good about negotiating the kind of deal where he's got the sawmill and I've got the wood and everybody goes away happy with a few planks.

The first time I visited Zook's sawmill I thought I'd gone through some sort of time warp. I was with my buddy Jimmy Lippert and we dropped by with a couple dozen layed out laying hens at ten in the morning. By the time we came by on our way home at four in the afternoon all those old chickens were in jars and there was a stack of fresh pies awaiting us in payment.

We went around back to find Zook and that's where the time warp experience enveloped me. The guy has a serious sawmill going on, but his clan doesn't allow electricity of any sort, so he's got a big old draft horse going round and round driving the mechanicals of the millworks. There's other horses shuffling backwards and forwards as they lift logs onto the saw bed via a series of ropes and pullies.

In charge of all these horses ropes pulleys and giant saw blades is a kid who looks to be about 13, and he's got a couple of ten-year-old helpers. How these people get around the child labor laws is beyond me. 

Something to do with religious freedom, I guess.

Not that I have a problem with it. Those kids are getting an education in Zook's sawmill that Junior won't come close to at his high school.

And when the internet and the electrical grid and all the other necessities of life crash, these kids are going to be putting in a day's work and sitting down to chicken and pie like nothing happened.