STARTING OUT WHEN THE SHTF

So you made it to the country, you got your retreat-homestead, and you are ready to survive. You have surely made good progress. But life is not stasis but rather dynamic and you have to go on with your survival program. Some people think that getting a piece of retreat land and some stored food is the end of the struggle. Well, it ain't. In fact, you are just getting started. What you have done is bestowed upon yourself the honor of proceeding further. It will surprise you how many people will not make the advancement and will fall by the wayside. And that which falls along the wayside is called litter and is recognized as trash. Do not be so stupid as to become trash. Litter is used to make a fire by those smart enough to do it. The smart guy keeps warm and cooks his food and boils his water. The stupid jerk is consumed in the fire. Five hundred people are going to read this. How many will understand it? Survival is an ongoing process. You never quit. It becomes the pattern of your life. It becomes second nature and what you do every day. You get a life support system and you tend it and care for it and live it and try to grow it. It is what you do for a living, in the most basic of terms.

So you start assembling this life support system. The first thing you do it get yourself some water to drink. Ain't any sense in doing anything else until you can get a drink of water when you need it. If you are under attack you have permission to forgo the development of water supplies until you get the bad guys properly disposed of but that is about all you let get between you and having water. A fire for warmth can work itself in there too. Man! You're busy already!

But say you do your work well and you drive off the bad meanies and you get yourself some water coming on a regular basis. You have located some firewood and have the ability to cook food and other essential things like boiling your water, if it is questionable. What's next? How about a little bit of shelter? I know your wife is a very accommodating woman but are you prepared to do it dog style forever? You want to engage is Shakespearean sex. You want to create the beast with two backs. You need a shelter, a home, a place of some security and privacy. You need a place to get in out of the rain and snow and the high cold winds of Winter. Did you bring a travel trailer? Do you already have a shelter on the property? Or are you reduced to living in a tent or a makeshift shelter until you can get something put together. It all has to work together, you see.

So you dutifully trudge off into the surrounding area to find the materials to build a home. But before you do that you must make the decision as to where you want to build the home. This is more important than you might think. Can you build it close to your water source? Can you build it out of a flood plain? Can you build it where you are not too visible to nosey people passing through? Can you put in an outhouse where the sewage will not get into your water supply? Many things to consider when building your home. Even to the point of where you could build additional homes for friends and family. And remember, this is your SURVIVAL machine. This is what is going to keep you alive!

You are living off of the food you had stored in the event you had to go into survival mode. But what are you going to do if it runs out? Did you bring non-hybrid seed with you for a garden that will produce seed for next year. You do understand the treachery of the seed producers in this country that sell hybrid seed and terminator seed and all that crap don't you? They want to sell you seed that has no advantage in production over non-hybrid seed and it does not have the capacity to produce seed that will be used the following year. Quite clearly spoken, it is a (censored) rip-off. It makes your survival dependant on some Dr. Strangelove in a laboratory somewhere. In the words of my friend Charles Bell, DO NOT BE FOOLED. You get seed from someone who will sell you the real thing and not some Frankenfood corruption.

So you are building your home and you have water and now you surely have picked out a garden spot. After making sure you had good seed and a chance at keeping enough seed for the following year, you gotta put in a garden. By golly, you're a busy man now! You've driven off the interlopers, got your water supply figured out, and you are building a shelter and putting in a garden. In your spare time you have figured out your sewage disposal system. You have become a system genius! You have become what the wise guys of the world call a hillbilly, a country yokel. Of course the wise guys are are back in their McMansions watching their kids getting sodomized by bad meanies while you are leading an existence free from this sort of stress and strain. You are free of taxation, conscription, forced labor, police, lawyers, judges, medical systems, bureaucracies, and stupid stop lights. You do not have to support bail-out plans, multiculturalism, diversity, stupid wars and queers that want to take down your kids. This makes you an ignorant country yokel, you understand. Is this where they get the saying, "Ignorance is bliss." You must be ignorant because you are not partaking of what the main body of the herd is experiencing. Oh well!

You must be coming along with your home by now. And you have the rudiments of a garden in the ground. You and your wife together have figured out a system for washing your clothes. Do not try to do this on your own. Let the wife have input on this. It makes for a better world. If you have the house built and some sort of water-shedding roof over it you might consider putting in a fireplace and chimney. Without the convenience of buying bags of premixed mortar you will have figured out how to get the rocks in the chimney to get sorta sealed off with a mud and straw mixture. Use the best clay you can find for this work. The plant filaments will dry inside the clay and make it into brick. Heated brick is a very nice thing. It lasts a long time and does not break down when you need it the most. But time is passing. The leaves are showing signs of getting ready to turn their Autumnal colors. The garden is finishing up like crazy. You are drying food all day long. When you are not harvesting you are gathering firewood. The end of Summer and the beginning of Fall are beautiful times but it is not the time to take nature hikes. You have the task of getting your Winter and Spring food supply safely tucked away. I hope you brought plenty of gunny sacks and other substantial bags with you because you are damn sure gonna need them. Beans and corn and peas and dried tomatoes and dried apples from an old tree you found and Walnuts and Persimmons, maybe even some Maple syrup. Man! Some sweet Maple syrup would really brighten your cold Winter days. And peppers hanging about on your walls, drying to perfection so that you might season those beans and corn to your liking. Even good food like beans and corn can get awfully boring after a while and some seasoning helps so much!

I know your wife has grown some Mint for hot tea throughout the Winter. She has probably picked lots of pine needles for the same reason and for the wonderful Vitamin C they contain. You soaked up a lot of natural Vitamin D in the sunlight you received throughout the Summer and so now you merely need to eat the carrots you saved and the sweet potatoes you are storing to keep you "D" level up to snuff. Good thinking on your part. Don't waste much time with regular old potatoes. I catch hell for saying things like this but I consider a regular potato to be the bane of the human existence. You can't eat them raw and get a damn thing from them. They must be cooked or your body cannot even digest the damn things. Ask any diabetic of any intelligence what a potato is good for and he or she will tell you they are good for raising your blood sugar to very high levels. There is some nutrition in the skins. Potatoes are gut packers. They are vehicles for salt and butter and sour cream, or if you are warped like my wife they can be french fried and served with brown gravy. YECH! And don't get me wrong. I am as much a victim of my teachers as anyone. I was raised to love steak and a baked potato. And there was nothing better than Mom's Fried Chicken and mashed potatoes. Loved it! And still do. Just don't be fooled into thinking a potato is real food, that it is good for you.

And I am sure you and the wife have read all the foraging books you could get your hands on and have been eating wild food and getting your immune system really built up. And I am sure you brought lots of little containers to hold all these precious survival amendments to your diet. No question about it, you are among the smartest people still walking about free of most restraints and I know you have not pulled an ignorant boner and neglected natures pharmacy. Whew! I am so glad you aren't a Walmartian! You are a cog in the life giving machine of our Father's creation and you wouldn't go into the zone and forget something important like your immune system. I know you just wouldn't do it! And you won't do it because you have the brains to know that part of being a survivalist is taking care of the very thing that will do the greatest amount of keeping you healthy, YOUR OWN BODY!

So winter is coming upon you and you are going to be inside more than usual. All that food you have put up will serve you well. Like the Handmaiden says, all animals have a tendency to eat more in the Winter. You sit around and work on your bow and arrows, getting ready for the time when your ammo will run out. You start your second compost pile because the one you have built all year needs time to finish and the second one needs started for the next year's fertilizing. Winter is mostly a time of chores unless it is mild and you can do a lot of hunting. Those compost piles need to be within easy shooting distance of your home. Tweety bird will come looking for an easy meal and you can pop him with a 22 and have you some protein come dinner time. Furry critters that come nosing around can be harvested and used for clothing and paraphernalia you will be needing. I know you brought a 'thunder bucket' when you made your trek out of civilization. The contents will make excellent fertilizer is you let it compost long enough. That e. coli outbreak we had the Summer of 2008 was from hogs getting loose in the field of vegetables and fouling things up with their manure. No fresh manure on your crops! For the love of God don't do that! You might not survive. There is a proper way to handle most anything and that is your job, to know the proper way. And it is kind fun learning it. You can bet your life that the wise guys in their McMansions will not know the proper way or they would be out doing it instead of populating FEMA camps. I will close now and let you go on about your preps. Stay alive.

Michael

mboone@rtccom.net