should I stay?

SHOULD I STAY?

Should I stay, or should I go now?  If you stay there will be trouble…( okay, sorry, no more Clash ).  The problem you have is that mobility is good, as far as avoiding trouble.  But you can’t have too many luxury items like, you know, food, if you stay mobile.  But if you stay in place you have to defend all your food.  And before you say, Tribe Up, yes obviously this is the only solution.  It isn’t like we are very smart figuring out that a stationary plot of land needs defending.  A bunch of half naked grunting barbarians figured that out eight thousand years ago. 

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But, let’s face it, lice scratching morons with bones through their noses were highly motivated to cooperate and get along with others as everyone figured out this new thing called agriculture.  Soft and gooey Americans with their central heat, two hundred channels of TV and two SUV’s in the driveway have no interest in getting together and actually sacrificing anything in a cooperative venture.  Survivalist groups seem to be about as successful as South American religious cults serving Kool-Aid as the refreshing beverage of choice. 

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So the average bear prepping is probably on their own, and faced with the age old conundrum of indefensible dwellings verses mobility.  To stay mobile, you cannot stockpile many supplies.  Now, granted, a lot of preppers are silly and are protecting a McMansion which becomes a molding pile of sheetrock and warped wood the moment the power grid fails, or if not displaying an unnatural sexual attraction for an extremely overpriced piece of suburbia they still follow the usual practice of getting their supplies close by in whatever dwelling they do inhabit.

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And here is the issue.  You can’t count on anyone else, because finding someone with their head out of their ass is near impossible.  So folks go loner.  They keep supplies in the only spot they can watch over and defend.  If they are attacked, they lose their supplies.  If they are smart, they have a nearby cache that will keep them alive.  But were they smart?  Is that cache big enough?  If you leave your home with your supplies there, you have in effect been killed and you just don’t know it yet.  Should you die slowly after the cache runs out and you starve, or should you die quickly defending your place?

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There is really only one answer, and that is to hide your supplies.  It can be at your home, or it can be a cache ( which, after a certain size, just becomes a Bug Out Location ), but you need to forget about the two standard supplies storage solutions of Making Furniture or Warehousing.  I’m just as guilty as the next person, although I am half way towards caching only because I ran out of room inside.  You can excuse the warehousing by claiming “rotation and package care”, and there is nothing wrong with that.  But the food isn’t secure ( or the ammo, or whatever ). 

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The ideal is that when you are attacked, you tactically retreat a safe distance away.  After a few days of camping and using a small supply cache, you snipe or ambush or firebomb at the intruder.  As there is only enough food inside for those few days and a few days he can stuff in a backpack, he should in theory be happy enough to leave rather than be killed.  It is the same principle of a throw away gun for a cop or a bait gun for a gun confiscation.  He might know you have more food but he can’t find it.  Now, that brings us to both where to hide supplies and your shelter itself.

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Your shelter can either be a hovel or it can be a castle.  A castle is a strong shelter meant to last generations and must be defended at all cost.  A hovel is disposable shelter.  It is meant to  be used and abandoned as needed.  A McMansion is ( mistakenly ) perceived as a castle, a travel trailer or old enough mobile home to have zero value is a disposable hovel.  Most guys, if successful dragging along the wife off grid, must build a castle for their queen.  If you are lucky, you get a good redneck wife that understands that disposable housing can still make a good home, but isn’t worth dying over.  The Scots-Irish came over with a strong culture of disposable housing, whereas most other cultures-English, German, etc., never were able to appreciate the value therein.

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You see, if you are too attached to a home, you do stupid crap to keep it.  You take a far worse job to keep up the mortgage, you allow the ghetto to creep closer and closer every year until you are the only one on your block who sunburns.  You risk your life defending it from hordes.  You then risk your life again by trying to shoot it out with a squatter rather than just torching the place to drive him out.  This strategy probably means you need a nonattached buried room for your supplies, rather than false walls or hidden rooms.  Unless you can figure out how to light the flammable stuff inside a fireproof outer structure, with no risk to the hidden supply room.  It seems easier to just bury a room in the back yard.  It contains supplies and is also an underground shelter if the main one burns ( good to have anyway, invaders or not ).

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You can figure out other methods such as a buried root cellar on another property or such.  A septic tank full of buckets.  A pit with a big food grade tote ( and shored up walls ) full of wheat.  It shouldn’t be hard or too expensive.  Yes, there is a risk in this.  It is a hard sell to yourself to surrender your hard won stash to the ravages of nature and entropy.  No matter how much axle grease you slop on your buried gun, you worry about rust.  But the easier it is to access your goods, the easier they are to be captured.  It is also going to be dangerous to be constantly going back and forth to the hidden room for more supplies, when you start using them. 

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Now, once you become a farmer, you then have a group helping protect the land.  Then, you have a much larger supply on display, because no one will believe it if you don’t.  But then you’ll also have an organized method of retreat and return to attack, a grain silo hidden to feed the village after a raid or a famine, a way to shelter up in the hills as marauders attack, etc.  This is your initial strategy, for when you are alone and trying to survive the die-off.  You need to think alone the lines, metaphorically, of keeping the cash in the bank rather than under the mattress.

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