Prepping

Some prepping subjects are sexy, and some are decidedly not. But the one thing you always have to remember is that you have to eat and drink, first and foremost. Then it comes down to what you think is going to happen. I spoke to a guy this week who has been a prepping expert for years, including some cool alternative energy stuff. But when pressed, he admitted to me that he isn’t prepared for anything longer than a month or two. That’s great, and it’s way better than sticking your head in the sand and doing nothing, but I think we have a long time of off grid living coming our way, and if you have a bunch of people to feed, that means you would have to grow and regrow some of your own food at the very least. That sounds simple, but gardening is not as easy as you might think. Even if you get things to grow reliably, pests will come along and eat them all up. And then you have to save seeds for next year. That is the spectacularly nonsexy topic of this week’s article.

The first thing that many survivalists buy is often a gas mask, but they seldom ask themselves why. “NBC” stands for nuclear, biological and chemical, so the answer is obviously “well duh, that. Hello!” But what do those scenarios look like on the ground if/when they happen, and what help will a gas mask be if they do? Also, what’s the budget? You can find gas masks with NBC filters on Ebay for $10 up to $700 sometimes. Which ones work? Can you get away with the cheap models? I heard Russian filters have asbestos? And what about kids? Are there any gas masks for traveling with children?

The “disposables of life” is what we talk about this week in Prepping 101. It is kind of an icky subject, but these are things that you have to think about in a post collapse world. Nobody can foresee all of the pitfalls of survival, but as the end approaches it is important to tie up the details of things that are unavoidable as potential survival disasters. Dirty is dead in a survival situation. Most of the alternatives we look at this week are affordable, and they work!

If there is one thing I have learned since starting this column, it is that survival is very detailed. The byproduct of this is that survival can also be very expensive, because the cheaper options, while they look viable, fail in the details. To stay on the topic of bugging out which I started three weeks ago with pack basics and essentials, I got to thinking about family tents. In any disaster scenario, a large percentage of those who survive will end up displaced, and third only to food and water is shelter. And while small tents may be the way to go if you are lighting out alone or as a couple, if you have a family, with supplies, being able to drop everybody and everything into a dry single secure shelter is going to be a very big deal.

I love finding useful things that handy people can make themselves, and that the rest of us can buy cheap. If you follow this column, you already know that I fell in love with the StoveTec “Rocket Stove.” I still see them from $75 to $150 on Ebay all the time, and as a stay at home stove, I don’t think you can beat it. But as I discussed last week in my overview of bugout bags, if you are stuck on the road, the StoveTec is just too big and heavy. I have been on a quest for some time for a smaller, lighter, more portable contraption that does the same thing as my StoveTec. Right now I have a few products on the way, but in the meantime, I’d like to share a cool stove I got a few months ago that I just tried last week. It is made from square tubular steel, and the guy who makes them on Ebay adds legs, as well as a baffle, so that the stove burns reliably.

I have avoided the subject of “bugging out” in this series until now, and it was intentional. Most bugout articles are absolute garbage. I even saw one in a large format news stand magazine that compared **children’s backpacks** because in the same issue were several advertising spreads from Columbia. Bugging out is a great topic if you want clicks and magazine purchases, but few people address what it means to actually bug out, and the different scenarios that may force you to leave a secure location. Think about it. Are the roads jammed? Am I going to be on foot at some point? I can’t hide that I am carrying resources, and at some point I may have to deal with “the authorities” who are going to make sure that I am unarmed. How do I maximize the money that I can spend right now, to perhaps survive at some point out on the road to somewhere.

I like to ask myself regularly, what do I take for granted? Because when I asked myself that three years ago, the answer was “everything.” These days I don’t take for granted that there will be food in the supermarket, electricity to pump water out of my well (or from city waterpumps), or that there will be any 911 to call should I need help…with anything. But one of my last pillars to fall was the fact that I really thought that I had enough knowledge, and what I didn’t know I could easily put my hand on, because of the internet. But the more I have thought about how much I rely on the internet, the more I have realized that it is time to downloading information about things I needs. The problem is, re-finding it all and downloading it is time consuming, so I decided to start buying CD and DVD compendiums on things I might need.

What would you do if survival arrived on your doorstep? Would you become part of the rescue effort? Or would you just hunker down and wait to see if the next wave is coming to wipe out the people who did rush in to rescue the survivors of…whatever? I recently got a sample of a really cool product from our friends at BriteStrike, and their multi-colored APALS personal light system made me think about the subject of triage. Back in August I wrote an extremely substantive article on “Survival Medicine,” in which I copied the title of a book you absolutely have to get. My approach is meant to be a compliment to the book, because I go through where you can actually buy stuff. Good intentions and knowledge are great, but you need the tools to do the job. And like everything for this column, I try to find useful stuff on the cheap. These APALS lights are not cheap, $50 for 10 of them (retailers discount them some), but even if you can only afford the much less expensive alternatives, this is a good chance to talk about triaging the wounded. It is hard to admit to yourself that someday you may have to label someone as “Expectant,” because that means expected to die, but that is the reality we all face.

We are all living in a potential radiation hotzone of the future. Radiation is silent, invisible, has no smell, and there is a good chance that we all will have to deal with radiation in our lifetimes. It could be, as NWO kingpin George Soros says, an all out nuclear war with China and Russia. It could just be that a few nukes pop a couple hundred miles in the air, using our nationwide electrical grid as a giant antenna to wipe out our power stations (an EMP). That would lead to a meltdown of our nuke plants plants all over the country, which need a power grid to cool themselves. If you think you are “prepping,” but you aren’t prepared to measure both high and low levels of radiation (two distinct issues), it might be time to take a look at your options.