At the ranch, it felt as if the pace of life was simply slowing down, and they were returning to the isolation of frontier ranching life from a century ago. The newspaper ceased operation and mail delivery was halted. The local CBC station went off the air. The landline phone stopped working. And even if they had been in a cellular coverage area—and they weren’t—that service would have been unavailable as well. Nimpo Lake Internet—their local affiliate for Galaxy Broadband—ceased operation once the Galaxy satellite system went offline. (The satellite system required the continuous operation of ground segment stations.)

The shortage of gasoline and diesel meant that visits by neighbors and friends became infrequent and were now mostly medical or veterinary emergencies or involved problems with water systems. (Living a long way from town in times of fuel scarcity meant that neighbors had to depend on one another’s help and expertise.) And suddenly, there were not enough horses to go around, and the asking prices for horses and saddles—all priced in terms of silver or barter goods—seemed astronomical.

Feeding the cattle required no power, and their water came from a shallow well that was serviced by a pump powered by their PV panels and their battery bank.

Hot water for the house had always been provided by a set of coils in the woodstove and a thermal siphon tank in the attic that had been nicknamed “the rumbler” many years before. They had a lot of books and had never become addicted to television. So, unlike many other families, the transition to Crunch living was not traumatic for the McGregors. (Alan had lived off-grid for most of his life, and Claire for all of her married life.)

Perhaps the greatest change for them was the overwhelming sense of being out of touch with the world beyond their fences. They missed getting regular local news. They missed being able to talk on the phone with their daughters in their far-flung locales. They realized that there was something special about being able to open a fresh newspaper, and the absence of that made them feel wistful. The new lack of citrus fruits and coffee was often mentioned. They also had to go back to the old standby of checking their barometer each day, since they no longer had access to regional weather forecasts.

The daytime AM radio reception at the ranch had always been poor, and their FM reception began only when they had driven halfway to Williams Lake, or in the other direction more than halfway to Bella Coola. (CBC Radio One in Prince George had a translator station in Bella Coola. Alan hated the CBC, invariably calling it “a bunch of socialist propaganda.”) So for most of their years at the ranch, it was only in the evenings or during predawn milking sessions that they had good AM radio reception. (Alan had enjoyed listening to the news on KOMO at 1,000 KHz, a fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel station, in Seattle.) But now, even that was gone. Apart from Phil’s shortwave radio—which Alan and Claire found difficult to hear clearly—their world had gone silent.

With their cow now back at the ranch full-time, they milked her twice a day. She had recently been bred by a Dexter bull and was due to calve again in the spring. For a city boy like Phil Adams, the cow-milking routine was a new experience. He eventually enjoyed taking his turn milking, although he never became as efficient as Claire. (She always seemed to get at least one more pint out of Tessa than Phil did at each milking.) At the ranch they drank their milk raw and simply filtered. When they ran out of paper filters for their funnel, they substituted cotton fabric squares, cut from new dish towels.

The cow produced more milk than the four of them could drink, and the skimmed cream made more butter than they could use, so the extra all went to five bantam hens that they obtained by bartering some extra salt blocks. The chickens were fed through the winter with milk, cream, and some oats from their cattle bins. The five hens were messy—inconsistently choosing odd places in the barn to roost each night—but the eggs that they produced were a blessing. Alan made plans to build a proper chicken coop in the coming spring or summer.

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As recently as 2005, they had run up to six hundred cattle on the McGregor ranch, a number considered a “small operation” by local standards. Some of the ranches nearby controlled hundreds of thousands of acres of range pasture. But after their children had grown up and moved away, knowing the high cost of hiring ranch workers, they cut down to just twelve Coriander cows and heifers, and sixteen Coriander-Longhorn crosses (a mix of heifers and beef steers). They also had a Longhorn bull named Tex and Tessa, the Jersey milk cow, which were both often on loan to neighbors. In the two years before the Crunch, most of their income came from cutting hay. Because of Alan’s numerous back surgeries, they switched to contracting out the hay cutting, keeping some of the round bales for winter feed for their own livestock. As the Crunch set in and fuel became scarce, the price of hay skyrocketed, even after being redenominated into silver coinage. A gallon of gasoline or diesel now sold for the equivalent of two or three days’ wages for a laborer.

The Coriander-Longhorn crosses sold well, both before and after the Crunch. They were cold tolerant, making them a good breed for the region. They also knew how to use their horns, which meant they had a decent chance of fending off wolves, bears, and mountain lions—but they were by no means invulnerable. The Chilcotin Range had a notoriously dense population of predators.

After their children moved away Alan and Claire McGregor had stopped raising a vegetable garden. And while the larder was well stocked by local standards, aside from beef, they would be lacking many staple foods by the following spring.

They contacted a neighbor who was famous for her sprouting and traded a quarter of beef for an assortment of sprouting seeds and sprouting jar lids (stainless steel screens mounted in Mason jar lids).

As Phil, Alan, and Claire helped Ray unpack his pickup and trailer, a bit of a show-and-tell session began. Each item that they carried into the house or shop seemed to have a story behind it.

Once they had unloaded the trailer and parked it alongside his father’s stock trailer, Ray planned to put his camper shell (which had been stored in the barn) back on his truck.

He had two almost identical Stihl chain saws, both with twenty-two-inch bars. One of the saws was stored in a factory orange plastic case, and the other was in a plywood box that Ray had constructed himself. For these saws he had a spare bar, a spare recoil starter assembly, and seventeen spare chains (although a few of them had been resharpened so many times that they were nearly worn out). He also had a lot of two-cycle fuel mixing oil and chain-bar lubricating oil in an odd assortment of containers—perhaps ten gallons in all. He had all of the usual safety equipment, including an integral helmet/earmuff/mesh face mask, and Kevlar safety chaps. He also had innumerable pairs of gloves, plastic wedges, files, tape measures, rolls of flagging tape in various colors, and other chain saw accoutrements, all stowed in a set of mesh bags mounted to the inside walls of the trailer.

The largest items in the trailer were his enduro motorcycle and a hydraulic woodsplitter. The motorcycle was a KTM 250 XC and had a two-stroke engine, so its gasoline had to be mixed. Ray had repainted the orange parts of the bike with brown truck bed liner paint three years earlier, but the rough-textured brown paint had held up remarkably well, with the original orange color appearing only in a few small spots. The KTM was considered street legal in both the U.S. and Canada, although he had let its registration lapse while he was in the United States.