About nine miles outside of Fort Hope, between a cemetery and Wills Pond, lives a man called West. He refused the relocation, preferring instead to live a hermetic lifestyle miles away from what passes for civilization these days. The Ensuring America’s Future Act, which if I remember correctly passed the Senate with a unanimous 13-0 vote, made this sort of thing illegal, but in practice no one who avoids relocation is pressed on it. I’ve never met West myself, but by all accounts he’s a pretty scrappy guy in his late 50s who was quite content living off the grid long before everything went to hell. He’s skilled with his hands, woodworking and metalworking and the like, but until just recently he wanted nothing to do with us. The Fort simply kept tabs on him as a matter of diligence.
Well, old West struck up a bargain with the Fort recently. He’s been running short on certain supplies and doesn’t have gasoline anymore to go looking for them in his truck, so in exchange for those supplies, he’s going to repair a bunch of our equipment, teach a number of classes, fabricate machine parts when we need them. I think it’s a pretty good deal, and I signed up immediately for an electrical course, in part to learn the material, but also because I just want to meet this dude, who sticks it out alone in the wilderness.