Chapter 10: Summer time in district 11

Summer was in full swing, school holidays had started some time ago, and everybody was enjoying the warm temperatures. Actually, contemplating that, maybe those who had to sleep in houses heated up during the day did not enjoy the heat so much – I was lucky because my mansion was fully air conditioned.

Over time, the heat actually increased even more, and I could see people sweating a lot. I wondered where they would have a chance to cool down – was there a lake or pond in the Seam for swimming? Thinking about it, there wasn't, and I decided to talk to Haymitch about it; I found him in his office, and he told me: "No, the Seam residents do not really have anything to cool down, and it has been like that for decades at least. There is a nice lake further down in our forest, and a few brave people have ventured there for fishing and swimming. I bet Katniss and Gale at least know the place. However, there is no path or road going there, and most locals would not find their way to the lake."

I pondered that and asked him: "Is that lake large and clean enough to potentially serve as swimming place for all?"

Haymitch quickly confirmed: "Yes, as far as I know it is, although you might also want to ask Katniss. Maybe we should ask her right now, as she is next door looking at some maps." With that he left and soon came back with Prim's sister. I repeated my question and she confirmed: "Of course, the lake is great, it is reasonably clean and large enough. If we had a good path to get there, most Seam people would welcome the chance to cool down in the water, I guess."

I asked for more details: "If we wanted to clear a path, would we be able to wind through the trees and just have to remove some bushes, or would we have to fell a lot of trees?"

Katniss thought about that for a minute and then told us: "At least most of the way we just needed to clear bushes and scrubs, but this would have to be done on a distance of maybe two kilometers."

I suggested: "We just happen to have a machine I recently purchased which can clear a path through forest quite quickly, if no trees are in the way. I had planned to use it for creating some small paths to get to places we need to get more frequently, like to the blackberry bush area, and clearing that path has already started. I will give the order that a few hands get to work with the path to the lake starting tomorrow. Katniss, can you please be around and show the men where to start and where to go – let's get this done!"

The machine I had purchased had arrived recently from one of the companies owned by my family. The device was a prototype and they were field testing it, and I actually did them a favor by operating it and providing some feedback on how well it worked. Thus, I spent part of the next day observing the path clearing operation, and although not everything worked perfectly, the path to the lake was cleared and changed into a nice forest track within less than a week. I left it to Prim and Katniss to inform everybody that they were welcome to go swimming or just relax around the lake anytime they wanted to, and soon the offer was readily accepted.

Reviewing my work so far this year in the evening, I concluded that I had started quite a few helpful activities for the Seam residents, namely the herb garden, the soup kitchen, access to the forest lake for swimming, and hiring Katniss as hunter. In addition, the site now had a first wind generator, a battery storage unit, and street lighting along a few Seam roads for a start, plus some experiments with different seeds. I knew that this was only a start, but it was a good start.

After a few very hot weeks, summer was almost over. Prim had visited me two or three times a month, and I had arranged a few visits from Rue as well, when she could take the same school bus as Prim, join me at my place, and I was to drive her home in the evening. Rue claimed that she could do her homework better when doing it together with Prim, and sometimes I also joined them – it never hurt to see what the school taught nowadays. During one of those visits Rue told me that her parents were soon going to attend a funeral of some relative in another district and were going to be away from home for a few days. As the Madisons did not have close friends in their district, they had contacted Mrs. Everdeen, and Prim´s mother had volunteered to take Rue for this time. I was happy for Rue and Prim as I knew that they liked to spend time with each other.

While Rue stayed with the Everdeens, I was invited there for one evening to join dinner and conversation, and I gladly accepted. I arrived there in the late afternoon, and as this was a very nice and sunny early autumn day, we first went for a walk around the Seam and spent some time at the herb garden. Timing was perfect, as some of the late berries were ripe and ready to eat, and the sinking sun bathed the leaves with golden rays. When we got back to the Everdeen house, we had dinner together, and soon Prim and Rue went up to Prim´s room for some girl games, while Mrs. Everdeen, Katniss and I talked about various topics, like my further plans, Prim´s grades at school, how Katniss' hunting was going, and such. Soon Mrs. Everdeen went upstairs to bring Prim and Rue to bed (Rue was sleeping on a second bed in Prim´s room), and we continued talking. I really enjoyed being here, and Mrs. Everdeen had interesting insight into what happened in the Seam. But of course, with herself being a healer, she would know a lot about people. I had actually heard from Prim that her mother had almost collapsed after her husband´s death and not gone out much, but that had changed again during the last couple of years.

Just when I planned to take my leave, some commotion could be clearly heard from upstairs. Mrs. Everdeen went up to have a look and came down soon again with Rue at her hand, and she addressed me: "Rue has had another nightmare and now refuses to get asleep again. Now she insists to sit together with you. I do not know if this helps, but could you please stay for some more time and sit with her here on the sofa? Thinking back of the time at your house, this might help."

I nodded and agreed to that proposal: "Sure, I am not in a hurry at all." Addressing the girl, I asked her: "Rue, would you want to sit here with me for some time?" The petite girl just nodded and jumped on the sofa, pushing herself close to me. Mrs. Everdeen handed me a blanket and said: "Thank you for doing this for Rue." I replied: "Not at all, Mrs. Everdeen. Rue is always welcome to sit at my side."

Mrs. Everdeen lighted a small candle on the other side of the room and left us, and I put my feet up on a low stool and tried to relax with Rue at my side. After a few minutes, the girl apparently got sleepy again, and her upper body slowly moved to my side; I put my arm and part of the blanket around her and hope that she would be able to get to sleep soon. About half an hour Mrs. Everdeen got back to check on us, while I was still awake. She whispered: "Rue seems to be asleep, but it will be difficult to get her up without waking her, as she is cuddled so close to you."

As I was now also quite tired and felt very comfortable in my current position, I whispered back: "Yes, I have noticed. If you don't mind, let us both sleep here on the sofa, so that I can make sure to comfort her if another nightmare plagues her."

Mrs. Everdeen nodded and said: "All right, and thank you again."

Soon after that sleep claimed me, and I only woke up when somebody started to laugh. Slowly opening my eyes I saw some sun rays shining into the room, and Prim was there, smiling and smirking: "Hey, good morning you two lovebirds!" I may have blushed a little, because I actually had been very comfortable with a sleeping Rue at my side and her body pressed against mine, but I was spared a reply because Mrs. Everdeen came in: "Prim, stop antagonizing our guests! I asked Mr. Sinterguth to stay so that Rue could enjoy a peaceful sleep."

With all the commotion and talks Rue now also woke up and rubbed her yes, and Prim´s mother asked her: "Rue, did you sleep all right? I asked Mr. Sinterguth to stay, and he was kind enough to take care of you – I hope that this was all right."

Rue yawned and claimed: "I had such a good sleep again, with no bad dreams at all", and smiled at me in a very nice and touching way, which somehow made something my heart stir.

Naturally, I stayed for breakfast, but then I started my walk home. During the walk I was thinking a lot, mostly about Rue. I knew that I liked kids of her age, from my youth group time at home, but I was not used to thinking abut them that much. Rue however kept my mind busy more times than I liked and expected, and I started to feel that we had some kind of special bond – what kind of bond, I did not know at all, except that it was a good one. But anyway, I was happy for her that she had been able to sleep after all without any bad dreams.

Fortunately the next days provided enough distractions for me, so that my mind was not always busy thinking about Rue. A second wind generator was about to arrive, and my workers were preparing the foundation. The standard wind power plants all had a horizontal axis and three blades, whereas the new one to be coming to the site had a vertical axis. Actually, we had ordered several different ones with vertical axis, as there wasn't a standard concept for the blade shapes yet for those types, and I planned to experiment with efficiency and also noise generation. The first one would be a 'Savonius' type, with a kind of enclosed rotor having several blades inside. It was in total smaller than the first system, but I was curious to see it in operation.

It turned out that the two ex-miners I had recently hired – Thom and Bristel – showed some interest in the power plants, and while they had initially been working on mechanical tasks like the foundations, they were asking many question on the electrical side, so that Haymitch had decided to let them work together with the experts part of the time.

In parallel, crop harvesting was in full progress on some fields, and the first batches of flour were ready from different types of wheat and rye. Remembering my deal with the Mellark bakery, I loaded a few sacks of each in a large pick up truck and drove the load down to the bakery. Peeta and Mr. Mellark came out to greet me, and I showed what I had, explaining the different type I had and how they had been processed. Besides the different crop species, we had also experimented with different ways of grinding and milling, so that there were some sacks with pure white flour and some with whole grain flour. We worked together to move all sacks into the bakery store room and talked about payment. As I had suggested earlier in the year, I asked for about half the normal flour price in exchange for getting detailed feedback on the suitability of each type of flour for baking bread and pastries.

"Mr. Mellark", I told the baker, "as I had mentioned to your youngest son earlier this year, we want to find out which species of wheat and rye can be best grown in the local climate with moderate cost. Peeta mentioned that you have to pay a lot for flour imported from other areas, and we want to find out if we can offer that for a lower price. Ultimately, if we succeed, you should be able to offer cheaper bread for the customers who cannot afford the expensive one. My company does similar experiments in different areas of the country, and this is part of the foundation´s goal to provide better and more food for those who need it."

The baker nodded: "For a long time I have regretted that we can't offer cheaper bread, specifically for the Seam residents. What you do may change this, and as my son has said before, we're fully behind you."

A couple of days later the installation of solar cells above a smaller field started. As we had discussed before, a few scientists had had the idea to only cover a small part of the field with solar cells, so that less than 10% of the ground would be shaded at any time. The solar panels were supposed to be built at least five meters above ground, so that the tractors and other vehicles could still pass unimpeded. In order to allow construction of the support pillars, nothing had been planted yet on the test field, and today the slender but robust pillars were to be erected. The pillars were also used for testing, as each row was planned to be made of different material. We wanted to find out which material was suited best, judged by cost, aesthetics, resistance against all kind of weather (rain, storm, snow), and maintenance effort (like applying anti-rust paint for metal struts). For a while we had even thought to plant trees for support, but had discarded the idea for the moment; we might get back to that later on and plant some in a different field, but we'd have to wait for quite a few years before the trees were large enough to not move too much in string winds.

Anyway, the first pillars were delivered via truck, and a team of workers started to put them into the ground at the designated places. Again this was something I did not actually need to supervise, but did so anyway, as it was quite interesting. This first set of pillars were fully made of steel and could be kind of drilled into the ground with some special machinery the truck had with it. At the end of the day three rows of six pillars each were set, and tomorrow the structures with the solar cells were going to be delivered and mounted. Mr. Brown had brought his tractor to make sure that the pillar height was good enough, and there was enough room to spare. The distance between the pillars was optimized in a way so that the tractors with the typical tools like plow and harrow or a fully loaded harvesting trailer could easily pass. Furthermore, the pillars had integrated beacons the tractors could 'listen' to, and this should eventually enable fully autonomous driving.

After all of this work I remembered that I had promised to visit Wiress again at the hospital. She had been Rue´s roommate and felt somewhat lonely when we had visited Rue. Of course I did not know if she was still there, but a call to the hospital confirmed this. I sent a letter to the hospital asking for visiting permissions for Prim, Rue, and myself, to be signed by the hospital administration, as Wiress did not have parents alive any longer. Soon enough, as Dr. Aurelius knew me, permission was granted, and I checked with Rue´s parents and Prim´s mother about a good day for the visit.

Meanwhile, Haymitch had done some research into the geology and usage of the area around district 12, and he had something to report when we had our regular meeting: "The coal mines have moved from time to time. That is, they had started to extract the coal from places where it was most easy to get, but eventually, when the supply was exhausted, they had to move on and drill mine shafts in different places. The second coal mine, which was abandoned a couple of decades ago, is right adjacent to our lands and has not been used since. I asked a few inconspicuous questions, and the land is for sale if anybody is interested."

I did not quite get the point and asked him: "Why should we want to purchase an old coal mine? Do you think we can get more coal our with modern technology? This is not really what I plan to do."

Haymitch shook his head: "No, indeed not. But we are looking for a good location to construct a plant for pumped storage hydro power. The coal mine is quite deep and extensive, and we might be able to use the depths as lower basin."

Now I got it: "Ah, this is indeed interesting. If this works out, we might be able to construct such a plant with minimal changes to the environment on ground level, and we will be able to take advantage of the significant altitude different between the lower levels of the coal mine and open ground."

Haymitch nodded and continued: "Yes, even more as there is a lake higher up in the hills we might be able to use. The area is completely unpopulated, it is close enough to the former coal mine, and likely also available for purchase. The lake is not huge, but big enough and deep enough for a good start."

Now I was really interested: "Haymitch, please ask our plant engineer to write an expertise on the feasibility based on the data we have, plus a summary of cost if we went ahead. If this looks good, we will do it. In addition, we might want to check to what extent some of the lakes on our ground can be used for recreational purposes, like fishing and swimming. I know that there is at least one lake in the forest which we already have dedicated to swimming, but some other lakes probably have more fish in it, which should also contribute to nourishment. Eventually, we might look for one or two dedicated fishermen, I guess."

Haymitch nodded again: "Yes, indeed. Let me get some more data on the lakes, and we can talk about details later on."