living in a cave 2 of 2

LIVING IN A CAVE 2

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note: this coming week you will see at the bottom of the article a Amazon link to the book "USA Urban Survival Arsenal".  Ignore that.  You can get a much cheaper copy from Delta Press.  click here .  I have a copy from way back, probably from Loompanics.  It won't teach you much-although I love it didn't give a salty rimjob to the M16-but it is a fun read and better than most of its kind.
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note: free books.  YA zombie https://amzn.to/2tg37cG .  Another https://amzn.to/2tq2CvJ . Zombies https://amzn.to/2JVyXG7 .  EMP https://amzn.to/2tdCvZW . 
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Living in a cave is not the same as living in a van by the river.  Van living is pretty luxurious.  All the modern conveniences, such as paved road access, close proximity to shopping and requisitioning, friends and neighbors.  Cave living by necessity almost guarantees that you’ll be a lonely hermit, talking to yourself because your cat got tired of the monolog and went to go sleep in a tree.  It is a hard row to hoe.  It is one of those theories, like semi-automatic arsenals, that sound good on paper and don’t translate well into reality.

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So you decide to bug out.  Now, I’ve said before that I detest the concept of bugging out.  To avoid that, I spent almost a years wages buying multiple properties ( hermitage lot, reduced commute lot, semi-secluded lot ) and moved to my current location.  The thought of road blockages and a three hundred mile walk in the desert made the whole idea of bugging out ludicrous.  However, if you do need to bug out, far better to vastly reduce the distance, such as living and working in town, a junk land lot with cached supplies about a day’s walk away.

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That is the key.  You must have clandestinely buried your supplies.  If you have to bring any more supplies than what you need for the hike, you have pretty much assured you are going to fail.  It will be great if you can get there after a half hour drive, or a two hour bike ride, but you must assume you’ll be reduced to hoofing it and that it will take three times as long as you planned.  Three days water and food, heavy on the protein, fat and calories ( four thousand calories a day is combat conditions rations ), and you can’t carry any more than the needs of that hike. 

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Caching doesn’t have to be a huge problem.  If you bury three five gallon buckets of wheat, one bucket full of canned meats, another with a grain grinder and water filter and ammo and such, and one or two with water, it takes one trip with the car or two with a bicycle trailer to have enough supplies to go back and forth getting to your main stash ( to be clear, you want years of supplies out there, but start out with the assumption after just one provisioning trip the ass falls out of civilization and plan accordingly ).

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You can’t build a cabin out there.  Vandals will discover and mutilate it.  I would suggest that you half bury a cement dome and leave the opening to it simply covered, such as a piece of plastic or a tarp.  Bury the rest of the materials to finish that up once you move there.  Have a fire pit, as if this was your camping spot.  Since there are no windows to break, no exposed wood to burn or cut, and no door to bust, in theory there should be no damage to your “camping vacation spot” ( it might not hurt to have lots of steel shell casings about-let them ponder if you’ll show up unexpected and armed for target practice ), and no need to suspect the land has any other uses.  The cement dug-out is just a tent substitute.

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I would suggest a dome fastener kit from Stromberg’s Chickens.  Dig four feet or so down, placing the dome frame inside the hole.  Cover with chicken wire, except the door, and drape cement saturated blankets or sheets over the dome.  Or, cover with cardboard and then add the chicken wire and do a ferrocement structure for much better strength.  Cover lightly with dirt.  The door remains open, hence the dug-out rather than a buried structure.  I would hang up the cement fabric on the inside to cover the exposed wood, ideally with insulation between the two walls.  Several hundred bucks should cover it all.

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A cheaper way to do this would be to mound up dirt, say the upper half of a tube ( like a military Q Hut ), lay down wire and ferrocement it.  Then dig out the dirt from under the dried cement tube.  No lumber or fasteners needed.  It can be as small as a two man tent or big as a room.  A perfect stash might be to ferrocement the floor, but in one spot don’t lay down the wire.  Have the cement unreinforced on one spot, which you can easily break up and pull out a shallow buried cache of supplies.  Wool blankets, food, etc.  What are the chances someone will think to check for a buried cache under a cement floor?

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This SHOULD in theory alleviate scumbag vandals and the issues unemployed unlayable youth present to a bugout location.  Now we have to circle back to timing the departure.  Here is where a close location really comes in handy.  If it is a mere thirty miles away, you are never bugging out.  You are going for a weekend camping trip.  If it is three thousand miles away, you’ll never get there.  If it is three hundred, you’ll find an excuse to avoid the travel time that takes up all the weekend.  If it is thirty miles, it is easy peasy to visit and enjoy as a getaway.  Take some more supplies each time to bury, go shooting, camping, get away from people.

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If there is no nearby junk land ( don’t forget to check all the county tax delinquent sales ), perhaps you are living in the wrong place. I understand you cannot NOT work, and the wife doesn’t want to rough it.  Just get a job in a city much closer to cheap rural land.  You can have your cake and eat it too.  City job and luxury, secluded affordable spot nearby.  You don’t need to live there if you make it a bug out location.  But that doesn’t work if it is too far away.  Not being far away, you don’t lose your job when you panic bug-out.  Being close, you can afford to panic bug out without endangering everything in the city, so you won’t hesitate to bug out.  Sure, you’ll panic on Monday and then have to wait until Friday, unless you have sick days, but that beats the three thousand mile away bug out where you dare not leave for under any circumstances unless your workplace is on fire from mobs.

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The reason I suggest for a shelter a dug-out is because some time in the future you might lack transportation, material or even calories to construct another kind of shelter you put up post-collapse.  And underground is usually better in most places.  Some places, you just need a buried hatchet and you can work from the lumber around you.  You don’t want an underground bunker in the swamp, after all.  But most places are better earth sheltered.  Soon, a van down by the river will be a luxury.  Go with living in a cave instead.  It will be much safer.

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