Guest Article Part 3
Adjust the Bison Plan in the 2nd
guest article to fit your needs but hit these points.
Junk Land – your FIRST purchase.
What is
“junk land”? This is land that few people want. It is usually outside city
limits (good for us, less laws) It usually has few or no utilities ( good for
us, we won’t be relying on them come the collapse) It may have limited access
(mixed bag, road access helps you get to it, but may help raiders, tax
men, and bureaucrats find it too). It is often smaller (or bigger!)
than other more valuable lots in the area, making it less usable. My lot
is too small (at 20+ acres!) for any of the farmers or ranchers in the area to
have any interest in, and too far from town at about 10 miles to interest most
others, it was a state land auction sale and no one else even tried to bid.
Junk land should be your first
significant purchase. IF you can’t find any land in your price range in the
area you are now? Expand your search area. Plan to move to where you can
buy outright cash on the barrel head or with simple, low payment, short-term
owner financing. Don’t even try to bother getting a bank loan on it even
with stellar credit. If no place within biking distance of employment is
available in your price range in your state, you probably have to change states
or give up the bike element of the plan (bad idea but can be worked around if
you are VERY careful). MD Creekmore, James Dakin, and others in the survival
blog sphere all recommend this as the primary element of your long term
survival plan.
If somehow you are in worse
financial shape than Jim, you can do the tent or vehicle camping while
squatting on public land or changing parking lots every few days. Yes this is
basically being homeless. But while working even part time collecting cans you
should be able to eventually find yourself a legal place to park your shelter.
Better yet, if you can save enough to get the junk land you can build your own
earth sheltered shack like Jim (the BPOD) to supplement or replace your other
shelter. This should absolutely be your first goal while hitting up the soup
kitchen for your meals.
If you are in better shape financially
than Jim don’t spend a lot of it on land, keep your property purchase small/
near junk in value. Taxes will eat you alive when you lose your job if the land
isn’t ‘junk’ enough. Instead use your money to secretly improve the
utility of the land, and get your other preps in order, or get multiple lots of
junk- you can always sell or abandon to the state ones you don’t want/can’t
use.
Avoid any place with a lot of zoning
rules or an HOA or nosy neighbors that will interfere in your use of the land.
They mean you are too close to town or in too populated of an area.
If you get a windfall or can
otherwise arrange it, see about legally ‘homesteading’ or otherwise protecting
your land for the future, maybe with a living or revocable trust? That calls
for a lawyer but if you have the money knowing a lawyer is good practices
anyway. Just making certain that your descendants won’t lose it by
accident or easily sell it for 3 magic beans, give you a legacy that will
survive you, and the descendants may acclaim or curse your name for it, but
they won’t forget you.
Shelter – What to get next.
Unless you are willing and able to build your shelter out of local materials on
your junk land in less than a month you will need to find some sort of
affordable shelter right away. Or if you can’t find the junk land at this time
for some reason, you will still need shelter, and a travel trailer or RV
fits this bill pretty well. It also allows for some element of mobility should
your junk land become completely untenable. You can park it in a parking lot at
Wally mart, or a theme park, or at a rest stop, or a campground or any other
vacant land you can find. Heck you can use it to take vacations in if you have
that sort of luxury! Almost no one thinks twice about your buying a travel
trailer – they certainly don’t think it makes you a survivalist unless you make
it obvious with armor and gun ports.
Since I am still on the hunt for one
myself I won’t get into travel trailers further other than to say to check
thoroughly for leaks and other suitability (if your allergic to mold, or
formaldehyde, or….).
But travel trailers have some major
draw backs. For my situation, -40 degree winters for months at a time is one of
them. So you will also likely find the need for other shelter beyond your
trailer. An earth sheltered structure of some sort is usually ideal; it can be
a hole in the ground with a roof, or a deluxe 4000 sq. ft. concrete
bunker bermed with 6 feet of dirt on all sides. Your available resources will
mandate what you can get. I highly recommend doing as much of the work yourself
as you can and use as much local materials as you can. Avoid zoning, keep it
small and simple especially if you have to deal with a building inspector, and
don’t initially call it a residence. Call it a ‘root cellar’ or ‘storm cellar’
or garage, or tool shed, or whatever you can to avoid the bureaucrats
attention. You can always add on later if you plan for it initially. More than
likely the first draft building you make won’t be completely to your liking and
you will have to rebuild it or build another elsewhere on your junk land so
plan for that too.
80 year olds, and pioneers with no
experience, both built their own structures - you can too.
Plan, plan, plan, and take advantage
of the current surplus of our industrial age, plastic, glass, metal, and most
of all insulation are the things you should be bringing to your land to
build with. Lumber, siding, stone, and concrete should all be minimized
(expensive, hard to haul, attention getting). Junk yard and salvage finds
are your friends, as are auctions and social networking. Lots of people throw
out things even now at the start of the collapse, that you can make lots of use
of.
I personally like the idea of bermed
earth bag buildings and passive annual heat storage, but your plans need to be
yours and need to take local conditions and resources into account...
Your shelter needs to be water
proof. Ventilated, freely draining (no water proofing can survive water pooling
against it all the time) and easily heated (small is good here). I also
recommend making it fire resistant, above the likely flood level, easy to
clean, easy to maintain, and disability friendly- you will get old and infirm
eventually.
Something you can enclose quickly is
a good idea. Once enclosed you can work on finishing the interior, making it
pretty for the mate, etc.
And since you own the junk land, if
you decide the structure isn’t to your liking for some reason, use it for a
while as you build what is more to your liking. Then utilize it as storage or
for a relative or tenant!
Water/Food – to be building up
slowly
Don’t go spending thousands of
dollars on freeze dried foods. At least not until you are done with the junk
land and shelter! Instead pick up a couple hundred pounds of untreated whole
kernel wheat at the local feed store, and some pounds of rice and beans from
the grocery store every shopping trip. Also double up on any good priced shelf
stable goods you are already consuming. If there is a sale on something you
usually buy that can last a couple months on the shelf, pick up 2-4 times as
much as you usually would. This will quickly build up a cushion of food.
Slowly introduce you family to the wheat rice and beans as a diet staple a
including it in a few meals a week at least.
Spend the money for a couple of slow
drip water filter elements Berkey, Katdyne, etc. These use no power , should be
cleanable, and good for thousands of gallons of drinking water. You will
probably also want to use the 5 gallon water jugs used on water coolers for
drinking water storage. 1 gallon per person per is the recommendation so a
single person needs 30 gallons for a month. I found this is incorrect. It is
easily double that just to drink and cook with. If it is hot out and there is
no available lower quality water you can triple or quadruple it! That is a lot
of water storage. BUT you don’t have to have it all in special containers. Know
how to turn off the water to your house, hot water tank, and other such things
and you suddenly have more water for emergencies (and obviously you need to know
how to get to the water.) If you are living on junk land, you will want a
cistern. As big as you can afford to make. Read up on it, there is lots of info
on cisterns. Do not rely on just a well with a pump – drought and power outages
could leave you dry. Have rainfall collection supplies, even if, like in
much of the west, it is illegal to harvest it now- as the collapse accelerates
it are unlikely anyone will care eventually.
Rain fall collection supplies are
easy- a couple of screens, some barrels, and a modification to your rain
gutters will work. Or rain collections can even just be a tarp draining into a
kiddy pool until you can afford or make better.
Once your Junk Land is bought and
Shelter is built. You should begin caching extra water and food supplies.
Cache, cache, cache.
The tax man, raiders, nosy
neighbors, nosier relatives, etc. They WILL find you on hand and most
convenient preps. They will use, abuse, seize, and steal them. Fire Flood and
pests will destroy them. You will be left with nothing but hopefully the
clothes on your back. A cache or dozen of your most essential supplies will
allow you to withstand these sort of setbacks. And of course all those
setbacks can instead be visited on one or more of your caches instead, or, as
well as your prime storage! So more than one cache is recommended.
Some future continuous source of
food is recommended and needs to be planned for. Expect the hunting to be
extremely picked over as the collapse accelerates, same with the fishing, and
for gardens and livestock to be targets of theft. Trapping and guerilla gardens
may be an option for your enviorment, look into them and plan for them in
advance. Eventually the hunting and fishing will return and gardens and live
stock will be less targeted. Plan for that as well.
Security
Lord Bison goes on at length about
the advantages of a bolt action rifle.
I will not go over that much here
other than to state that I mostly agree with many of his reasons. And AMMO,
AMMO, AMMO, AMMO, AMMO- you can’t have enough.
But security is NOT just a matter of
guns. You need to also defensively landscape, setup alarms, watches,
traps, etc. Also make yourself look poor. Really poor. Like 3rd
world landfill squatters would pity you poor. And if events around you
have negatively affected others (raiders, plagues, etc.) make it look like you
too have been effected (burn marks above any windows, trash strewn about,
quarantine signs, etc.
Don’t be a target, and be the
hardest poorest target you can be.
I recommend a side arm be worn at
all times, concealed or not. In your hovel, or working in the garden. Also a
knife, the biggest you can that doesn’t violate law or get in the way too
much.
And don’t neglect the ‘archaic’
weapons. Swords, staffs, canes, bows, slings, axes, hammers. The government
might come for a few of them as well as the guns and ammo, but so many of them
are ‘tools’ or can be easily improvised and or disguised. Know the basics of
how to use them all, practice a little every once in a while, you don’t need to
be a ‘master’, just competent with the basics will put you well ahead of most
muggers, etc. and able to cost an attacker more than they intended to pay for
their assault. Remember your rock paper scissors game as a kid? It applies to
weapons for defense too.
For example a knife beats a fist, a
cane beats a knife, a staff beats a cane, a hammer beats a staff, an axe beats
a hammer, a sword beats an axe- from a range a thrown stone beats them all, a
sling beats a hand thrown stone, a bow or cross bow beats a sling. And a gun
beats them all close or range- if, and only if, it has AMMO!
But what wins against even a gun is
running away and hiding before the fight! Keep your shoes in good repair and
leave if the situation seems a little risky. Only fight when your back is
against a wall and no other options are there. Remember – “violence is the last
resort of the incompetent”. (If you think about it that quote can mean many different
things…)
Bike and Transportation –
I personally find it hard in my
situation to completely give up motor transportation. Small town rural living
and building on my junk land need at least something to haul stuff from a
hundred miles away. But when I am not hauling from a hundred miles away I am
using a bike. So is the rest of the family. It is a weaning process for
us. We have just started biking to the homestead (junk land); it is far
enough out of town we only do so for the ‘adventure’ of it for now. But I
am going to be in good enough shape next year (unless I back slide over the
winter) to start doing it weekly.
Bikes should be kept simple – few to
no gears. Flat free tires, big enough for you to ride comfortably.
And they need to be tuned up every
so often. Chains tightened and lubed. Tires inflated. Brakes checked. Etc. Much
of this is do it yourself. There is no need to pay a mechanic for most things.
Then you need to ride the bike.
Daily. Bikes are still cheap enough you will find things you do and don’t need
and will be able to afford to get now as the collapse is just starting. Get
them as you discover them. Expect to need to replace your bike a time or two as
you wear it out, and discover exactly what your environment calls for.
The good news is you can put down
using it to “getting in shape” which is half true after all. You are getting in
shape. Shape for surviving the PODA both physiologically and financially.
I personally found fenders (aka
splash guards) a use full addition. A Trike with a basket behind the seat keeps
the spouse happy to go grocery shopping via bike. Cool bling keeps the kids
happy to be riding.
Places to carry cargo that are
removable are nice. As is a bike trailer.
But you MUST use the bike daily
ASAP. You can phase into it. A couple days a week to start with. Then go weeks
then months with all your routine trips done mostly by bike. Then reduce your
car bills (tell the insurance company it is just for driving on special
occasions less that 1200 miles a year and get a big cut) - and eventually
eliminate the car.
Or just sell it immediately if you
are afraid you don’t have the necessary self – discipline.
Also don’t neglect your
footwear. Business loafers and most sneakers are purely for appearances
sake. Get work boots, hiking boots, snow boots, and heavy duty work shoes that
fit well and are made with quality from a company with a good reputation.
Two sets of boots if new should set you back at least as much as the bike. If
you luck into some used ones, that is great, then you have less pressure on
buying the new ones. But you must have the new boots. You can expect post
collapse, even with repairs, to be going through a pair of cheap foot ware
every 6 months or less. For quality you can extend that to at least 3-4 years
with minimal repairs. Don’t forget the footwear repair parts and tools.
Once you find a brand of boots you like after wearing for a year or two buy
some new ones, and polish and treat the old pair before putting them back as
spares, get a new pair every year or so when you can afford them and you will
soon have a stockpile of footwear to last your life. Don’t forget also
woolen socks, nylon inner socks, and laces. Stock up now, they will never
be cheaper.
Actually that last line applies to
many, many, things.
The cheapest time to buy groceries
was? Answer: yesterday (actually last century about 1960 –ish.)
The best time to get _____ was?
Answer: Well before you needed it.
Medical
I am not a medical doctor. This is
for educational and entertainment purposes only. That said-
Everyone has already told you to buy
first aid supplies, bandages, painkillers, anti-biotics, etc.
You should also have been growing
medicinal herbs and collecting some, and learning first aid, firefighting, and
general emergency response.
Keeping in shape and having a
healthy diet is probably the cheapest thing you can do to prevent medical
issues. Don’t forget to wash frequently and brush those teeth!
Now while there is still a decent
infrastructure is the time to get any bad teeth pulled or filled, and any other
medical things dealt with that you can.
Don’t wait to have that odd growth
checked out- if it is cancer this year it can probably be treated. If it is
cancer 2 years from now it could be fatal. The same goes for any slight medical
issue. Address it now while you can.
If your doctor wants you on
prescription medicines find out if you can supplement or reduce the dependence
on them with holistic or herbal remedies or lifestyle changes.
I had a good friend who died young
because he would always refuse the lifestyle changes his diabetes needed him to
make. He obviously was not a survivor. Learn his lesson. Make the lifestyle
changes you need now.
A diet of daily leafy greens and
vegetables. Low fat high protein in your main meals. NO processed junk. Simple
whole grains and beans for your basic calories and bulk of your diet when leafy
greens and veggies aren’t available. Don’t go hungry but don’t eat more than
just enough to satisfy your apitite.
When you can do it by hand, do so.
When you can’t, do as much of it by hand as you can.
Try not to eat more than you expend
in calories- until post collapse, then staying ahead of calories expended might
be harder, but that’s why you prep, right?
Don’t focus on weight – focus on the
ability to DO- to lift, carry, bend, stretch, walk, bike, row, run, etc.
Lord bison tosses around weights all
day as part of his job. If you are a cubicle drone (like me) find other things
to do on the side that helps make up that lack. Building your shelter and other
improvements on your junk land would help fill that bill.
Your Homework-
Your homework is simple, take the
headings we hit on over and over again above. Write in how you plan to survive
in that category when you get laid off in the near future. Imagine it happens
in a way that means you will probably never again find good paying full time
work. Now, use your plan and survive, and leave your children more than
they would have had otherwise.