Jeremy rose late on a Thursday with an erratic rap-style rhyme thumping arrhythmically through his brain. He had been at a meeting of the MAG (mutual assistance group, not a MAGA political rally) he hoped to join until almost midnight. A few of the members had watched the latest videos of their favorite YouTube prepper and survival channels describing primitive skills, basic trip wire perimeters (clothes pins and shotgun charges), snares and native deadfall traps for small animals like squirrels, chipmunks and snakes or birds: the figure 4 or Paiute deadfall, and others he had already forgotten. By reliable accounts from anonymous, well-placed sources (people who knew people, contacts in law enforcement, government (think garbage collection and animal control)), along with one or two who had relatives in the military or a distant cousin in one of the alphabet intelligence agencies. “Oxymoron” is the term that comes to mind. Doomsday was nigh. Time to double-check the GoBag, weapons, ammo and food storage. The sources were unclear whether they were concerned about SHTF, WROL, an EMP attack on the grid, a tactical nuke over the desert in Nevada or a dirty bomb in San Francisco or Manhattan. Whatever the threat, the entire MAG needed to finalize their preps; as usual, the end was nigh and preparations needed to be completed. Any event might be the final trigger, the last disaster. Maps with routes to their bug-out camp were distributed, and everyone pledged to secrecy. Op Sec.
Jeremy struggled to keep track of the various threats, the military terminology and the acronyms for them. He just knew that none of the threats were good, so he should prepare for each as best he could. The Go Bag cost $50-100 after you bought the bag; the bag alone could cost as much as everything loaded into it. Add $30-50 for freeze-dried food that could last 25 years despite the need to eat within three days or less. The eternal shelf life confused Jeremy, reminded him of embalmed Egyptian royalty who took all their needs with them into the next world. He thought his Go Bag was supposed to last him three days, so a can or two of beanie weenies supplemented with Spaghettios that he could spoon cold into his mouth without need for a bowl or plate, along with some potato chips, a few candy bars, and beef jerky seemed they should be sufficient and much cheaper than MREs.
A weapon set you back a few hundred (pistol or shotgun) up to well over a thousand for a Glock and an AR or AK. Add a gun belt, holster, rifle sling, a fully fitted out plate carrier, first aid blowout kit and fill the thing with full ammo magazines and backup tourniquets, then you’ve blown another several hundred. Almost as bad as owning a boat. All the best advice recommended that you buy “as much ammo as you can afford”. Bullets are heavy; a thousand rounds of pistol plus rifle ammo cost several hundred and weighed as much as the weapons combined. Jeremy lost the tally before the numbers sent him into a panic. He was beginning to conclude that he could not afford to be prepared. Plus, how would he carry all the weaponry hardware and still have room for water and food, a tent or tarp, a sleeping bag and a basic change of clothes? Rudimentary hygiene, fire starting tools, a stove, pot and utensils? His head began spinning into a disorientating whirlpool of information and priorities. Where to begin?
Jeremy considered the requirements for preparation. “I work construction for chrissakes, and winter is a slow season because we can’t pour concrete, so any project not already closed in can’t start. Can’t dig a foundation in frozen soil nor cure the cold concrete without expensive additives,” he mused to himself. “No money for the surplus I need to accumulate. Rent, food, gas. I can barely cover the basics, and my pantry is winter thin.” What could he do? Where would he get the money to buy more ammo? (Or did he have enough?) It seemed he was perennially lagging on his preps and confused about the priorities as well. Every week, each of the prepper channels highlighted a new “must have” piece of gear or a smart new idea for being properly prepared. Shit, even his truck was not the right color. It was an oxidized dull white that left a dusty smear on anything that rubbed against it. The rust was the best part of the color. Still, he needed to buy some brown, green and black spray paint if he was going to camoflage it.
Then there was lots of discussion about being a “gray man”. Not black or brown or white. Gray. Someone who passed through a crowd unnoticed by society. But didn’t camoflage stand out as different from all other vehicles? So, how did the gray man plan work with trucks and campers? And what were the trucks for anyway? Jeremy thought they were supposed to be hiking cross country to the bug-out camp. Trucks required fuel that was difficult to stockpile safely, plus vehicles could easily be followed, roads blocked by local law enforcement, FEMA, or renegade, unregulated militias locked and loaded to steal supplies from the prepared who passed their way unprotected.
Guns, surplus food that can last a quarter century, body armor, underground bunkers with specialized air filtration. Bug out camps, hidden caches of weapons and food. Water filtration systems, gas masks. Basic camping skills, HAM radios. Escape vehicles (otherwise known as pickup trucks or campers and RVs) painted in camoflage. MAGs (mutual assistance groups, not MAGA). Military tactics for Boy Scouts. Bushcraft shelters. Campfires. Snaring wild game (small rodents like squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits and rats). Jeremy tried to remember what SERE meant. Too many acronyms cluttered his mind. Sure, S for Survival. An E for Escape. Another E for what? And he could never Recall what the R stood for.
One YouTuber discussed the value of having a dog to alert you if someone trespassed on your property; if not an actual dog, maybe scatter some dog toys and chews around the yard behind a Beware of Dog sign hung on a fence. Jeremy thought it was a capital idea, so he decide he would find a dog no one wanted. Jeremy picked a dumb bitch barely recovering from a mean case of mange. He rescued her from starvation at the local dog pound, a charitable facility chronically short of funds for proper medical care or the varieties of food to match the menagerie of breeds that the Animal Control Officer captured as he wandered the rural county roads where pets wandered freely, untagged, unvaccinated and vulnerable targets for a friendly whistle from a public servant with a catch quota. Although most of the dogs were common mutts of uncertain origin, the county gene pool for canines was as shallow as the human gene pool with results to match.
The pound charged him $25 for an adoption fee. Jeremy had not anticipated paying money for an unwanted and abandoned cur, but scraped together $23.12, much of which was spare change scavanged from under the seat of his truck, the remnants of fast food drive-throughs, which the lady at the pound said would be good enough since he was taking on all future expense of the poor animal. “All future expense” sounded like a lot to Jeremy, and a shiver ascended the seven chakras along his spine and left his third eye spinning wildly.
The pathetic bitch wagged her tail weakly when Jeremy scratched her head. Having never owned a dog or grown up with one, Jeremy named her Mary the Merry Mutt, a name impossible to stretch into a long, loud call but a name filled with promise or at least hope. He also failed to connect the hunger of the poor animal to his own dearth of funds for food for anyone or anything beyond himself. His first thought was that both could share cans of Dinty Moore beef stew. After all, the contents resembled the only canned dog food Jeremy had ever seen. Mary vomited her first meal. Seeing the partially digested ingredients piled beside her bowl, Jeremy followed her example and threw up his half of the can. Who knew a pet could be so much trouble? What he had expected was a guard dog, camping companion, a protective beast riding shotgun in the truck, an existential being he could talk to at night without personal recrimination for his shortcomings or daily failures. A silent and uncritical friend.
Among prepper survivalists, Go Bags are de rigeur, essential equipment, the appropriate contents of which were subject to endless debate and speculation. The idea is to carry enough critical gear to get you three days cross country to your bug out camp. Three days of gear should cover the basics and a couple of days worth of food; otherwise, caches need to be preplaced along the route to resupply every few days. Naturally, survivalists add their own personal needs to the bag: pizza ovens, band instruments, beer kegs, an infinite supply of ammunition for all seven types of weapons they carry. For the primitive bow and arrow crowd, the true survivalists can make their own arrows, but those seeking the deadly silent killing release of a high powered cross-bow or ultra compound bow, prefer to carry a passel of perfectly machined and fletched aluminum shafted arrows, approximately one per day for the duration of their anticipated need to survive. Forever? As for firearms, there was no amount of ammunition that defined “plenty”. The prevailing logic argued that with more ammo, a man could kill all the food he required. Overlooked in the dispute was the need for non-meat food and the reality that, within any certain radius, a MAG would likely extinguish all game in short order. One hundred squirrels in an acre of woods could provide two squirrels per day (a meager caloric source) for fifty people, half that if the people ate what their bodies required. Sure, meat could be stretched in the form of stew with breading and root vegetables filling caloric voids. But the ultimate point was that there would never be enough wild meat for a moderate population of a basic MAG, much less a village. Ammo could not provide an effective substitute for producing food.
For making fire, there are a few key elements. First and foremost among the regular denizens of forest camping is the ubiquitous Bic lighter. Butane on demand until it is not. Empty. (Or if it becomes cold enough to squelch the flammable fumes; keep the lighter close to your body). Close behind are the primitivists who prefer the anguish and frustration (break a sweat) of spinning a carved stick dowel between bow and board to ignite an ember by friction and a fire by placing the nascent ember into a handful of dry tinder, huffing and puffing until the ember ignites the tinder, possibly inhaling a lungful of smoke while burning the hands and fingers of the firemaker. Lastly, and in some ways the most modern method, is the use of a ferrocerium rod. Mischmetal, an alloy of magnesium that responds to the strike of a steel edge with the shower of 5000 degree sparks that might light anything not wet. Scrapings of lightwood, punk wood, pine resin, birch bark all provide better than average opportunities for lighting whatever kindling you gather. Naturally, there are matches (regular, waterproof, windproof, hurricane proof), wax-impregnated rope, cotton balls soaked in petroleum, and a plethora of creative products whose materials offer an almost infinite combination of these ingredients. The biggest lesson for a survivalist to know is that there ain’t shit will burn when wet. The pros claim otherwise, but I dare you to light a fire during a downpour of torrential rain. It ain’t gonna happen, unless you have prepared a shelter ahead of time, overhead protection for your pate and the desired flame.
Fire is just one example of where prepping parts from surviving. Prepping connotes advance planning and, therefore, acquisition of necessary supplies. Survival suggests the opposite, an unprepared person who finds themselves in the woods without the gear they wish they had, so they must substitute knowledge, experience and creative common sense for what they should have planned to pack with them. Oddly enough, none of the expert advisors suggest bringing a book, neither for pleasure nor for reference nor as firemaking matter. Personally, thought Jeremy, I would carry a library, but that exceeds the intent of a Go Bag and belongs alongside a permanent, long term supply of durable foodstuffs and water catchment cisterns -- a well -- in a Bug Out camp, a remote farm with a pond for fish and water storage, a fenced area for vegetables, a pen for chickens, rabbits, guinea hens, ducks, geese, and goats beside woods for trapping and shooting protein on the hoof and wing. Wild game. The development of a secret remote retreat that provides the appropriate conditions for all of these food sources can be unspeakably complex and require an expert in each edible species. Such is the price of surviving without a grocery store.
Compost. Composting toilet. Fecund fuel. Neat stacks of split wood forming a rough pattern wall between trees. A stump, a wedge, an ax. A stout-hearted partner who can cook on an open fire. An outside oven for wood-fired bread and pizza, casseroles in camp (dutch) ovens.
Where a Bug Out camp hides off the well-traveled path, a community struggles to create a new world with a modicum of modern on a foundation of primitive. Solar panels and deep cycle lithium ion batteries. Light. Except when there is darkness, long winters of short days, cold clouds and dull midday sun.
Peace settles over the land at night, lightless night, trip wires strung for alerts to any movement through the woods. Night vision for the lookout. Fox or foe? Deer or drone? Weapons ready, knives honed.
When Jeremy joined the MAG, he knew few of the people who were members, but two were family, second cousins (once removed? he could never keep ancestry straight), and they vouched for him. Others were skeptical that he was a suitable acquisition. They questioned his skills and his commitment to principle. Would he fight for their group? Would he risk his life? Would he work his heart out in the gardens, the groves, the compost piles and the trap lines? Or would he slack at the hard work? Sleep long hours? Run when danger arrived in theory or fact? None would admit it, but his commitment could only be established to their collective satisfaction when he faced the worst that the community would face. The cousins attempted to explain the nature of a MAG to Jeremy, but even they could not be sure that he grasped the depth of devotion that MAG communities needed and demanded.
On the other hand, Jeremy could not see in the personae of the members that there was the kind of commitment that they questioned in him. He did not know how those principles manifest to be measured in any person, much less himself and the others he met. Was their standard for him higher than any they could meet? That always seemed the nature of politics. Those in control defined and determined who was and who was not acceptable without ever demonstrating or defining how they themselves met their own self-serving criteria. The outside appearance generally indicated that the “controllers” failed to meet even the most basic conditions that they claimed were critical to qualify for membership. But they controlled, so they could exempt themselves from the qualities they expected of those they considered beneath them in the hierarchy of the group.