EPISODE 1: Infrastructure
PROLOGUE:
US Highway 61, which runs (or at least used to run) up the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Canada, has many nicknames along its length. In various places, it's known as "Airline Highway", "the Blues Highway", "The Great River Road", and "Scenic Highway". It has seen many momentous events, about which many songs have been written. But this story takes place just off an obscure stretch of it near the SW corner of Mississippi, where the road is just called "Highway 61" or even just "61", and where large sections of it slide off the loess hillsides periodically.
Welcome to Pharqueson Farms.
Here, for a number of generations, the Pharqueson family scraped a meager but sufficient subsistence from the loess using a varying roster of cotton, corn (maize), beans, and scrub cattle. Their proudest accomplishment was preventing their piece of loess from eroding too badly, which was the fate of most of their neighbors. But then came WW2. The 2 older brothers of who survived went to college on the GI Bill and never came back except for occasional visits. The youngest brother missed out on this opportunity and was left to run the farm but his children were inspired by the visits of their "exotic" uncles to leave the farm by one means or another as soon as they were old enough. Except for one who actually liked farming. But nobody liked him so, after living long enough to acquire the moniker "Old Man Pharqueson", he died a childless bachelor and his surviving family members, now all city-slickers, wanted nothing from the old farm except their share of the money for selling it off.
Selling the place proved to be a problem. By now the land mostly grew weeds and the cattle had stomped the upper layers of loess into a concrete-like slab, so it was useless for most agricultural purposes. But it was too far away from the nearest city, which itself was too small to have many jobs, to be attractive for residential development as a bedroom community. This same lack of regional population also scuppered schemes for building an industrial park, a factory for Japanese cars, a nuclear power plant, or anything else useful. Thus, eventually the property went up for auction and was purchased by an anonymous buyer for the pittance it actually was worth.
Most locals assumed the buyer was a rich lawyer or construction contractor from Natchez or Vicksburg, or even a Louisiana politician, who wanted a hunting camp to entertain important clients. They expected that the fields, which had been laboriously cleared by hand so long ago, would soon return to forest. This had happened to many old farms in the general area over the past couple of decades.
But the locals couldn't have been more wrong. Their worst nightmare, so terrifying that it hadn't even formed a coherent thought in their minds yet, was about to come true. Pharqueson Farms had been purchased by a former NFL #1 draft pick who had been forced into retirement at the age of 25 due to repeated concussions. As he had hundreds of millions of dollars in guaranteed money and only a fraction of his brain cells remaining, and being too young to care, he thought it would be good idea to build a theme park in this place. And he also thought Bullethead Sweatshop Industries was the best contractor for the job.
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Bullethead casually side-stepped several canebrake rattlesnakes and wished each one good hunting as he made his way across the nascent construction site. None of them rattled at him, tacit admission that they knew he knew how to behave himself. While Bullethead had never actually lived here, he'd spent way more time than he cared to admit about an hour's drive to the south down Highway 61, in an even more benighted place, so knew how to see snakes with his peripheral vision. Glance down for snakes and wash-unders, take 2 steps rolling the foot on 2 axes so as to make no sound while glancing up to avoid widow-makers, poison ivy, thorns, and spider webs, glance down again, repeat, all the while keeping the other eye, the ears, and the nostrils looking everywhere else. This was the essential rhythm of life as part of the food chain in this part of the world, even for the top predator.
As yet, the goings-on here were the responsibility of the local powers. "Mister Ed" (MRED, Mississippi Rural Electrical District--a fictional entity but a sarcastic colloquialism) and MDOT (Mississippi Department of Transportation--a real thing) were taking care of the site preparation, upgrading both the local electrical grid and road network. It would still be a while before BSI had anything to do itself, so Bullethead's battered and much-travelled trailer office hadn't yet been reclaimed from the Lake Planco junkyard, let alone towed down here.
To date, MDOT had widened MS 642 in front of the property to include turn lanes controlled by a traffic light.
And Mr. Ed had built the necessary 3-phase substation with 100% redundancy and on-site back-up generators, while upgrading the powerline to match.
There was even some preliminary work being done on the parking lot, but Bullethead paid it no mind. He'd change all that soon enough. Meanwhile, he mulled over his vague ideas of how to build a park here. The topography, although mostly flat and open, would still pose challenges. Not least of which was the need for a sewage plant as the local infrastructure had nothing of the sort for miles up or down State Highway 642. Even the old Pharqueson farmhouse, which had been declared an historic structure that must be preserved, had used a septic tank (the green disk next to the propane tank--see 1st pic).
Still, some general ideas were already forming in Bullethead's addled brain. He could already see the vague outlines of the park's areas and was already thinking of how he could work in his catalog of off-the-shelf coasters.
It was still too early, however, to move in Jaysef, Gergas, and Orbles. They were still tying up loose ends in Nepal. Hopefully, the police there had more important things to worry about, just as they did everywhere else. But they'd be needed here soon. Bullethead walked back to his rented 4WD pickup listening to the cackle of the crow spirits with his 3rd ear. They were everywhere here and had been forever so they hadn't been attracted by this project. Thus, their presence wasn't a bad omen, or even an omen at all. Maybe.
PROLOGUE:
US Highway 61, which runs (or at least used to run) up the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Canada, has many nicknames along its length. In various places, it's known as "Airline Highway", "the Blues Highway", "The Great River Road", and "Scenic Highway". It has seen many momentous events, about which many songs have been written. But this story takes place just off an obscure stretch of it near the SW corner of Mississippi, where the road is just called "Highway 61" or even just "61", and where large sections of it slide off the loess hillsides periodically.
Welcome to Pharqueson Farms.
Here, for a number of generations, the Pharqueson family scraped a meager but sufficient subsistence from the loess using a varying roster of cotton, corn (maize), beans, and scrub cattle. Their proudest accomplishment was preventing their piece of loess from eroding too badly, which was the fate of most of their neighbors. But then came WW2. The 2 older brothers of who survived went to college on the GI Bill and never came back except for occasional visits. The youngest brother missed out on this opportunity and was left to run the farm but his children were inspired by the visits of their "exotic" uncles to leave the farm by one means or another as soon as they were old enough. Except for one who actually liked farming. But nobody liked him so, after living long enough to acquire the moniker "Old Man Pharqueson", he died a childless bachelor and his surviving family members, now all city-slickers, wanted nothing from the old farm except their share of the money for selling it off.
Selling the place proved to be a problem. By now the land mostly grew weeds and the cattle had stomped the upper layers of loess into a concrete-like slab, so it was useless for most agricultural purposes. But it was too far away from the nearest city, which itself was too small to have many jobs, to be attractive for residential development as a bedroom community. This same lack of regional population also scuppered schemes for building an industrial park, a factory for Japanese cars, a nuclear power plant, or anything else useful. Thus, eventually the property went up for auction and was purchased by an anonymous buyer for the pittance it actually was worth.
Most locals assumed the buyer was a rich lawyer or construction contractor from Natchez or Vicksburg, or even a Louisiana politician, who wanted a hunting camp to entertain important clients. They expected that the fields, which had been laboriously cleared by hand so long ago, would soon return to forest. This had happened to many old farms in the general area over the past couple of decades.
But the locals couldn't have been more wrong. Their worst nightmare, so terrifying that it hadn't even formed a coherent thought in their minds yet, was about to come true. Pharqueson Farms had been purchased by a former NFL #1 draft pick who had been forced into retirement at the age of 25 due to repeated concussions. As he had hundreds of millions of dollars in guaranteed money and only a fraction of his brain cells remaining, and being too young to care, he thought it would be good idea to build a theme park in this place. And he also thought Bullethead Sweatshop Industries was the best contractor for the job.
-----------------------------------------------
Bullethead casually side-stepped several canebrake rattlesnakes and wished each one good hunting as he made his way across the nascent construction site. None of them rattled at him, tacit admission that they knew he knew how to behave himself. While Bullethead had never actually lived here, he'd spent way more time than he cared to admit about an hour's drive to the south down Highway 61, in an even more benighted place, so knew how to see snakes with his peripheral vision. Glance down for snakes and wash-unders, take 2 steps rolling the foot on 2 axes so as to make no sound while glancing up to avoid widow-makers, poison ivy, thorns, and spider webs, glance down again, repeat, all the while keeping the other eye, the ears, and the nostrils looking everywhere else. This was the essential rhythm of life as part of the food chain in this part of the world, even for the top predator.
As yet, the goings-on here were the responsibility of the local powers. "Mister Ed" (MRED, Mississippi Rural Electrical District--a fictional entity but a sarcastic colloquialism) and MDOT (Mississippi Department of Transportation--a real thing) were taking care of the site preparation, upgrading both the local electrical grid and road network. It would still be a while before BSI had anything to do itself, so Bullethead's battered and much-travelled trailer office hadn't yet been reclaimed from the Lake Planco junkyard, let alone towed down here.
To date, MDOT had widened MS 642 in front of the property to include turn lanes controlled by a traffic light.
And Mr. Ed had built the necessary 3-phase substation with 100% redundancy and on-site back-up generators, while upgrading the powerline to match.
There was even some preliminary work being done on the parking lot, but Bullethead paid it no mind. He'd change all that soon enough. Meanwhile, he mulled over his vague ideas of how to build a park here. The topography, although mostly flat and open, would still pose challenges. Not least of which was the need for a sewage plant as the local infrastructure had nothing of the sort for miles up or down State Highway 642. Even the old Pharqueson farmhouse, which had been declared an historic structure that must be preserved, had used a septic tank (the green disk next to the propane tank--see 1st pic).
Still, some general ideas were already forming in Bullethead's addled brain. He could already see the vague outlines of the park's areas and was already thinking of how he could work in his catalog of off-the-shelf coasters.
It was still too early, however, to move in Jaysef, Gergas, and Orbles. They were still tying up loose ends in Nepal. Hopefully, the police there had more important things to worry about, just as they did everywhere else. But they'd be needed here soon. Bullethead walked back to his rented 4WD pickup listening to the cackle of the crow spirits with his 3rd ear. They were everywhere here and had been forever so they hadn't been attracted by this project. Thus, their presence wasn't a bad omen, or even an omen at all. Maybe.
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