Keeping on top of things.

I flipped through the recent No Greater Joy newsletter, which I very much enjoy, and a couple of articles caught my interest right away, one on corn and one on being prepared.
My family has been interested in surviving disasters for as long as I can remember. When we lived in the mountains there were times when floods would wash the roads or bridges out and we would be stuck for days at home with no outside help and no way to get it. So far in North Dakota we haven’t ever been totally snowed in but there have been times when it has been close. I remember on the night that the airplanes flew into the World Trade Center we got a phone call from a friend in town to let us know that there was a run on the gas stations and they were shutting down the pumps and raising the prices. Cenex went well over $5 per gallon that night even though they had plenty of gas in their tanks; they kept people in line for quite a long time waiting until they figured out how high they were going to raise the price! It didn’t bother us much because we were prepared for whatever might have happened, well, not quite everything but we could have at least survived being stuck at home for the next year or two with no outside inputs.
I remember the mad few years before January 1 2000 Y2K scare and how many people were madly gathering and putting aside everything imaginable in way of preparation for THE day when the world would shut down. We prepared to but in different ways than most people did because we already had food stored up and survival gear handy. The bulk grain sales went through the roof during 1999, we would see on the co-op how everybody was ordering sack after sack of wheat, oats, corn, rice and beans for their food storage. I remember Mom coming home from getting the co-op order with a little sly grin and saying something to the effect of “Well, when all of those people finally have to start using all of that food they will still starve to death because they won’t have a clue of what to do with it!” Hard red wheat in its bagged form is a long way from a nice loaf of bread. Whole oats are not much good unless you know how to cook them or make granola out of them and everyone storing already rolled oats will find out sooner or later that they go bad after a while if they are rolled! I’ve grown up rolling them by hand just before we threw them in the boiling water. I can picture the look on a woman’s face as she looses her corporate “career” and ends up having to go to her food storage to eat, opening a 5 gallon bucket full of whole corn and just staring at it with a look of terror because she doesn’t know the first thing about making it edible!
I don’t have all of the answers. I don’t even have half of them. But I do recommend being a little more prepared than the average American. Who knows what may happen in the next few years. So far my family has worked on being somewhat prepared for about 15 years so we do have a little experience with some things. We have also used what we prepared with and have had a couple of times when it was necessary to fall back on our food storage or some of the other equipment we had on hand. After all of these years and with what experience I have had I think it is far more important than when I started thinking about it years ago, it’s proved its worth to me many times over.
I’m not going to write a training manual here, I’m not qualified for that. I won’t even write out a list of everything I think you should have or stock up on or learn how to do. What I am going to do is list a few of the things that I have learned that may be useful to someone. Things that I probably have learned the hard way!

I don’t want to go into scenarios so let’s just say something happens and you are on your own with a couple of kids and you can’t get help. This could be anything from a nuclear war (unlikely at best) to getting caught in a blizzard in your car a hundred miles from anybody (very possible where I live).

I think the number one thing after going to God in a situation is DON’T PANIC! I have heard story after story of people in a not to difficult situation but since they panicked they lost their lives and often others. Whatever the situation is, God is bigger and will take care of you.

Know what to do with what you’ve got at hand. You could be setting in a warehouse full of food and supplies but if you didn’t know how to use them it would do you no good. Know what you have in the trunk of your car when you are out and about. I keep a plastic tote in back with a few things like tools, extra gas or diesel depending on the car, jumper cables, tire chains, a tire pump, dishes, instant food, a package of foil and a bunch of other useful things. I can’t tell you how many times I have needed that tote and what is in it! If not for myself, for another stranded person on the side of the road! I also pack extra things around the spare tire like a can of Fix A Flat, more tools, rope, and anything else useful that will fit, oh, and when was the last time you checked the spare tire? Mine was flat once because I hadn’t checked it in years, now I like to rotate it in with the regular tire rotations so it is as fresh as the others. And please make sure you have a proper lug wrench, you can have a great spare but if you can’t get the flat tire off you are still stuck, we had that problem once, I even broke a ½ inch drive breaker bar trying to get the old tire off, which left us stranded on the side of the very busy freeway where nobody stops to help a stranded motorist anymore. I remember one family trip we took years ago while looking for property. We had an old van that had a new engine but everything else would have been easily classified as antique. The trip was from Western Washington to South Dakota so it was quite a distance. Before we left Dad got a big box of good used parts from a donor van and then he took the door panels off and stashed parts in the doors out of the way. A distributor cap here and a water pump there and a coil in another spot. I remember a spare alternator, distributor, thermostat, hoses and belts and I am sure there were many other parts. We got to somewhere desolate in Wyoming a long way from anything at all and something went wrong with the van. I think it was the fuel pump. Dad stopped where the van died and took off the door panel that hid the spare fuel pump and while we played in the grass on the side of the road he put it on. In no time we were on our way again. I’ll never forget that time, now I try to keep a strict maintenance schedule for my vehicles, when it is close to time to change the belts and hoses or a thermostat I change them and keep the used but still good parts in the new parts boxes. When a headlight goes out I change both and keep the good one as a spare, when I found that I had two bad glow plugs on the car I changed all five of them and kept the three good but used ones for spares in an emergency. They have as many starts on them as the bad ones did so I know they are not going to last long so I might as well change them all now. Not only does this keep my vehicles in good running condition but I have spare parts for emergencies or if commerce is halted from some catastrophe and I can’t get the parts I need at the store.
I’ve had quite a few occasions where I have been really starving hungry out in the middle of nowhere Montana and I was able to stop on the side of the road, wrap some food in foil, put it on top of the engine and drive for a half hour or however long it takes until the food is cooked. I have eaten a lot of meals that way and it works great. Oh, from experience, if you are in a hurry and have a turbocharged car or truck, that is a hot spot but not a good spot to cook a burrito! It is an excellent spot to burn a burrito though! Remember, stay away from the turbo. It’s hard for me because on both my car and truck the turbo is by far the easiest place to put something. I think the best meal we had on the road was burritos that we had made up and froze a week or so before the trip, I had all 6 children with me at the time in the truck so we stashed about 20-25 burritos wrapped in foil in every available spot around the engine and I drove for a while, as soon as we could smell them they were done and we had a feast! You can bake potatoes, cook soup, heat water and just about anything else on an engine, just don’t try to heat water in a plastic canteen, it will melt and you will know it! A stainless steel or aluminum military canteen full of water heats up nicely though.

Oh, and guys, learn how to cook. It’s ridiculous when young men can’t even boil water to make a cup of tea. Even a simple pot of soup or some rice is a mind baffling operation to some guys I know. I’ll have no sympathy for them on the day they have to fend for themselves, but I’ll be sorry to see the fate of those they are with.
I know a couple of young men that can cook nothing. Not only can they cook nothing but they can’t even whip something together raw from the refrigerator or pantry! There is a good reason for this. Their mother feeds them like kings and their older sister spoils them even more than their mother! One time we were off on a trip for a week with none of the women around and they would have starved half to death except for the fact that they shared what I was fixing. It’s silly and it’s unsafe in my opinion.

If we have food and shelter we should be content. Food is not too hard if you use your brain, shelter isn’t either if you think for a minute or two. Unfortunately, our bodies want more than just food and shelter. We want good tasting food and comfortable shelter! Being comfortable is another thing that I have learned from experience is a very important thing to consider if you are stranded somewhere or in trouble. You can often better your condition with whatever you have handy if you take a moment to consider what you have. One thing that is almost essential is a good night’s sleep. I can sleep most anywhere and I have slept in some very strange places, one time in the rain and half buried in fir needles and moss to keep warm. I didn’t have to that time but I wanted to try it out. Some simple things that I have learned about that are.
Stay dry. You won’t know how essential this is until you get wet and then spend the night in the snow with no sleeping bag. I tried it and won’t ever do it again if I can help it! It was so miserable that if I could I would have chickened out and gone home but I couldn’t since I was miles and miles back in impenetrable country in 15 feet of snow. It was cold and there was nothing I could do about it except freeze and wait until daylight. There was no dry wood and the fire smoldered nicely and that is about all it would do, not nearly enough to dry anything out. The best thing is to just stay dry, but even more importantly, when it is cold like that out, DO NOT REMOVE YOUR SHOES! I made that mistake and I couldn’t get them back on the next day. They were frozen into nice solid blocks that defied all of my attempts to get them on. The shoelaces were even sticking out like wires. Just leave them on.
Speaking of shoes, get good ones and replace them with more good ones before they wear out. I have a stash of boots that I have worn since I was about 14 years old and I can still fit into all of them. Today I was wishing I had a better pair of warm boots instead of freezing cold shoes and I remembered a really nice pair that I had about 10 years ago. I found them and they will work nicely for the rest of the winter and still be good enough to put back into my stash for emergencies. I think about all of the horror stories I have read about refugees and prisoners in different wars going without shoes, wearing rags taped together, trying bark, old shirts, and anything else that would protect their feet. If your feet are not in working order not much else of you is. You can’t get out of where you are and if you are in a situation where you need to travel on foot you are in trouble. Even if the car gets stuck in the snow 10 miles from anywhere and you have to walk to get help you will be glad for appropriate footwear. And if you have ever walked very far on an icy road or in the woods with ice you will value a small hand full of small machine screws, the kind that have the ¼ inch socket heads on them or something similar, as long as they are short. Just screw a few into the tread of your boots and you will not slip and fall all over the place. Don’t walk in the house with them though or the person in charge of keeping the floors in good condition will get very angry. I have used the same trick with tractor tires and it works great for ice traction. If you live in Arizona I suppose this idea isn’t going to do you much good.
Water! We can’t go far without water. This time of year I don’t worry too much about it because there is snow everywhere and that melts nicely into perfectly palatable drinking water. In the summer there is a bit of a problem though. You don’t want to get sick from drinking dirty water. I used to wear a belt buckle with an 1878 Morgan silver dollar on it for water purification in disguise. I still have it but hardly wear it anymore, though I probably should. Actually, I like to wear that along with my pocket knife in a pouch and a fire starting kit in an old knife pouch both on the belt. It’s like a survival kit in disguise wherever I go. For those who don’t know, silver is a great killer of bacteria so when you stick that dollar coin in your water and shake it up for a while it goes to work killing all of those little bugs in there and helps make the water safe for drinking. It may not be a perfect solution but it is far better than nothing! Another great aid is plain old charcoal that you can either find or make by just burning hardwood. You should get the wood good and burnt and than seal it in an airtight container so it can burn until it runs out of oxygen but if you don’t have that option it will still work ok. Just powder it up and put it in the water. It looks nasty but doesn’t taste at all so you wouldn’t know it was in there if it were not for the gritty feeling. Charcoal absorbs all kinds of toxins and passes them right through you without hurting a thing. I have seen a guy that used charcoal to clean up water from a mud puddle with deer droppings in it and he didn’t have any bad effects so it works well. Another option if you are able is to boil the water. Boil for quite a while though because some things can survive a surprising amount of time.
If you can’t get any water at all then you are in real trouble and it’s time to think of plan B. I won’t go into all of the ways to get water when there is none around because I don’t have much experience with that sort of thing. I always figured I would build a solar still or something but have never tried it. This is getting too long and I have a lot more to write so I’ll save the rest for later, that probably means I’ll add another 5 pages and have to make part three as I usually start writing and can’t quit. Oh well, at least you don’t have to read it if you get bored!