Begin Recording
Windmills
Recording by Scribe Ellison
"It was high summer and I was on a mapping expedition southeast of Tenpines. we'd worked out how to connect my Pip-boy to a terminal back in Sanctuary so all I had to do was tell it what I saw and it would log my location. Your friends in Vault 101 know how to make these don't they? I will buy as many as the lady overseer can sell, and for the blueprints she can have anything but my firstborn child."
Shaun is close enough to hear and pipes up, "But they could have Shiloh!"
"I'm not sure we should inflict your sister on a bunch of innocent vault dwellers. What's up, Shaun?"
"Mom, can I build this?" The boy hands over a picture and I lean forward to look. It's a waterwheel. I was expecting a toy cart or a treehouse or something.
The general looks seriously over her son's clumsily drawn diagram. "If you can find all the pieces and nobody else has plans for them, and you have a place on the river where it won't be in the way of something, you can build it. But I think it's going to be harder than you think."
Shaun nods somberly. "I have time. I'll go look for wood."
When he's gone I ask his mother, "A waterwheel?" and see the General glow with pride.
"Shaun's a smart kid, he's got an engineer's mind. And he doesn't like having to chase the brahmin around all day just to have flour."
We glance over at a brahmin lazily walking in a circle attached to a contraption of poles and gears that turns two big metal wheels together. A crooked sign on top that nobody admits to putting up reads 'The Daily Grind.' Dried corn or razorgrain poured in between the wheels comes out as coarse flour. Kayna walks over and taps the brahmin with a thin branch to get it going faster. Both the brahmin's heads complain.
Em says, "So where was I? On the traintracks, Dogmeat's sniffing around and I'm wondering if we could get any of the train cars moving again, if Connie's matched brahmin could move one, but not unless we could also move the car carrying ten tons of marble blocks off the track. And I looked up and saw something just coming out of the haze, down in the valley, sails. I realized it was up on one of the overpasses and it was a windmill.
"My heart just lifted. It had to be another settlement, someone cared enough to try to build something, and they'd figured out how and done it and it worked. I couldn't wait to meet the people who built windmills. They were a fair way south of me though, and it was the kind of scrubby hill that mole rats like to pop out of plus I'd be visible for a long way to any raiders who happened to be around. The quarry down there is a perfect raider den, new groups keep finding it and then they send out parties looking for someone to rob. So I had to make a plan, and the best idea seemed to be to go south and follow the overpass from underneath so I'd have some cover until the point where it dipped down to the ground.
"It took hours to hike down there but at last we walked under the overpass. Dogmeat immediately flopped down for a rest in the shade and I sat down against one of the huge support pillars and got a jug of water and some mole rat jerky out of my pack for lunch. It was quiet, that heavy silence the Commonwealth gets when you can hear every breath of wind. I was hoping I'd hear something from the settlement, but there was no sound of people. We waited in the quiet until Dogmeat stopped panting and perked up, wagging his tail to say he was ready to go.
"So we walked along in the shade, had to whack a few bloatflies that had gathered in the mucky water around one of the supports. Ahead I could see where the road sank down towards the ground, so we had to be close. I walked out to see the windmill, still further east. It wobbled in the breeze but wasn't really turning. About then I started to smell something unpleasantly familiar. And see it too. Whoever lived up top must've been… yep, there it was. Outhouse sticking out over the edge of the overpass so everything just fell down to the ground.
"I still hadn't heard any sound of people, and that was starting to bring down my high spirits. Maybe the windmill builders were gone. They certainly hadn't used their engineering knowledge to figure out a better way to deal with sewage.
"The overpass was broken and a whole section drooped until it rested on the ground. About there someone had sunk a pump into the ground, the same kind Sturges put in before we had the big purifiers. Dogmeat and I were still skirting around piles of stinking mess. I still hadn't heard any sound of people and I was beginning to think I'd come this far for nothing. At least no one up there was shooting at us.
"I climbed up, the slope was so steep I did it mostly on all fours. Soon I was hit with a wave of stink much worse than the smell down below and I knew I was about to see something bad not something good.
"It was a raider camp, or it had been, and they were all dead. Men and women, mostly still in bed but some sprawled in chairs, mostly lying in the dried remains of their own filth. Whatever killed them had wrinkled them up, mummifying them still alive. I only had the required history classes but I remembered something about cholera killing half a city, back in the day when people didn't understand about germs. Something like that must have happened up there. I put on gloves and tied a bandanna over my face and went to look for survivors. There weren't any. I just got to see and smell a lot more raiders bloating in the sun. Couldn't even loot their ammo boxes because I didn't want to touch anything. Dogmeat agreed, he didn't even sniff anything too closely. We couldn't rescue anybody, we couldn't collect the weapons they weren't using anymore, in the end we just left the raider camp as it was. That was a bad day.
"Later on I found other windmills on overpasses, always built by the Gunners so I can only assume those raiders took over an abandoned Gunner camp. The Gunners helped wipe out the Minutemen in the first place, and they aren't interested in talking to us now. I even tried walking up to Gunners plaza with a big sign saying 'I want to hire you.' Of course I walked up wearing bulletproof power armor, I'm not an idiot. That was the last time we bothered trying to reason with the Gunners, after that the turrets were programmed to shoot at anyone wearing Gunner armor. Deacon thinks someone's behind the Gunners, giving them orders to claim more land in the Commonwealth and push out the rest of us, but I'm not sure what the end goal of that could be. Gunners don't farm, and now that there are enough Brothers and Minutemen to guard the settlements the Gunners are retreating before they starve. I suppose someone's going to have to follow them back home and see if there really is someone pulling their strings.
"And that's the story of a normal day mapping the Commonwealth. Hope your friends at the Arlington library like it."