This article is my personal story of how some early childhood lessons helped me G.O.O.D. from Southern California in June of 1994. I have added a few links using today’s technology, but advise you to plan on keeping things as low-tech as possible. I traveled half way across the country in 1994. I was a single woman with a ten year old child, no cell phone or gun. W.T.S.H.T.F. you may not be able to get as far as we did as fast was we did, but by learning to face your fears, and being prepared, you will eventually get to where you need to be, even if it isn’t where you planned.
Growing up poor on the South Dakota prairie in the 1960s, I learned to survive with very little. When my parents relocated to Orange County, California in 1972 it came in handy. For the first time in my life, my parents had money. Both my parents also worked for the first time and when I turned fifteen I began roaming the streets on my brand new 1977 Peugeot 103 moped. I kept trying to find open sky and usually never stopped until I hit the beach. There I learned from the Mexican fishermen and locals to forage for clams, fish off the pier, observe people and snorkel. I put over 200,000 miles on that moped before it died three years later and I began practicing my mechanical skills on my 1966 Plymouth Belvedere with a slant six. That car would never have had any issues with an EMP event.
A voracious reader with straight A grades, I was bored stiff, and soon after getting the moped I began ditching school. When I turned sixteen I was finally able to get a job and with more spare change I began paying rent, and became really good friends with some of the panhandlers on the boardwalk. They taught me who to watch out for, how to stay safe on the city streets and they watched my back because I watched theirs. The streets in Southern California were much safer back in the seventies but very important lesson about fear, learned on the prairie kept me safer on the city streets than some of my peers.
My father and grandfather taught me to hunt, fish, start and tend fires and to stay warm and dry even in a snow bank, by the time I was ten. During summer stays at my grandparents’ house, chores and personal roaming taught me to recognize and avoid threatening situations and I soon learned who I could trust. I was taught to walk like I had somewhere to go, but also to stay concealed when I had to. I was also taught to not be afraid of people because they were different. My grandfather had many Dakota friends who lived on the nearby reservation. These experiences and learning not so show visible fear also helped convince others they could safely follow me into and out of trouble. I had learned by example and experience to trust my gut, not to believe everything I was told or saw the first time and to ask myself how something worked the way it did. That led to a great self-confidence, and even if I was afraid I would fail, I never allowed it to show.
Learning at an early age the importance of never showing or allowing myself to be crippled by my fears, helped me gain respect. I also know that it made me a much tougher prey. Even in a small town I quickly learned that bullies control by fear and intimidation. Several times I watched bullies back down when confronted by the perception that were not as are not as frightening to me as they thought they were. That said, self defense classes also taught me how to fight dirty, move out of the way, or escape and hide if I had to.
After I dropped out of high school, my filing, typing and bookkeeping skills and positive “I can do it or will figure it out” attitude got me a job as a receptionist. Within two years I became the office manager of a union electrical contractor in a really bad part of town. My boss, who was fourteen years old when the stock market crashed in 1929, began getting buckets of gold coins delivered to the office during the 1981 gold bull market.
His explanation of how his personal wealth and ability to purchase physical gold, finally made it possible to manage his fear of another stock market crash, reinforced my grandfathers lessons and with the price of gold as high as it is today, I think about him often. Like my grandfather, he was also never afraid to try something new and mastering that IBM 8080, the first ever PC, I talked him into purchasing gave me problem solving and employable skills I use today. These lessons taught me that knowledge is my best tool over fear. If I really know what is happening and why it is happening, it doesn’t seem like such an insurmountable task.
In 1983, to be as financially independent as possible, and wanting a bucket of gold of my own, I got my G.E.D. With my boss’s blessing, I started my own bookkeeping business on the side and he helped me gain some clients. I also talked to my grandfather about how he had earned extra cash to support his family. He then told me the story of how he hunted skunks to earn a dollar a pelt to buy flour, clothes and other things they couldn’t grow or catch themselves.
The earliest photograph I have of my father is of his parents and four siblings in front of a one-room tarpaper shack on a South Dakota slough in 1943. This picture made such an impression on me when I first found it, after a trip back to visit my grandfather in 1989; I hung it on my office wall. With a hammer, a saw, a few dollars, and supplies, my grandfather and his brothers and their skills built a one-room house. That my grandparents and four children survived two South Dakota winters with no running water or electricity in that shack continues to amaze and inspire me to not be afraid of surviving wherever I find myself.
After grandpa’s death in the winter of 1996, I asked my father if he remembered more about the skunk story. My dad told me that at the age of six, he was the one who had to crawl inside of the culvert pipe to lay the traps. Before and after school, in all kinds of weather, he would also have to pull the stake chain and traps out when they caught one. According to my father, road culverts are prime trapping territory and the more he did it the less afraid he got. My grandfather, his uncles and brothers, would get together and fry up the skunks and collect the rendered skunk oil. They in turn would get another $1 for each gallon sold to the perfume makers as “civet cat” musk oil. It is also very good to add to varnish for treating and preserving wood.
Practice was not the only reason he was not afraid to do this. From the time he was able to walk, he was following his father around, watching, trying and learning how to do different things in all kinds of weather. He was not sheltered and protected from everything by technology or his parents. I have not needed to trap anything since I moved back, but I have a greased foothold trap in a cloth bag, in my T.E.O.T.W.A.W.K.I. storage closet and know how to use it, just in case.
In 1986 I toyed with the idea of leaving Southern California but was afraid to think I couldn’t cut it in the big city. I was afraid of what my peers and grandpa would think. When I found a dog-eared copy of Calvin Rutstrum’s instruction book, The Wilderness Cabin at a yard sale, the summer before, seeds planted in from childhood stories began to sprout.
On the isolated South Dakota prairies, there aren’t very many trees and you have to learn about the weather and how to see bad storms coming. If you are prepared, like my parents and grandparents and most rural South Dakotans are, you plant large trees to protect yourself from the north wind and your house has a storm/root cellar or basement to hang out in when things get dangerous. In Southern California we didn’t have to worry about tornados but had an earthquake barrel with three days worth of supplies and knew how to duck, cover and shut off the gas lines.
I began planning in earnest in 1992. The spring morning I woke up to news that Los Angeles was on fire, I realized earthquakes were the least of my worries as a parent. I watched the violence for six days before authorities got things under control. I realized that the only way to protect myself and my daughter from man made storms like the Rodney King Riots was to G.O.O.D. and my fear of being thought a failure by my peers was not as important as survival.
Most of my friends and relatives thought I was nuts. One client, when he found out what I was doing, asked me if I was running away from the IRS. A client who had turned me onto Atlas Shrugged the fall before the riots got it. My grandfather and father understood, but not too many other people did. Knowing it had to be done and showing no fear, I laid off the housekeeper. Over the next two years I cut my expenses as far as I could, sold my business, house, furniture, business suits and other excess accoutrements of big city life.
I put all my favorite books, heirlooms and what I thought I had to keep, in storage to be shipped the month after we arrived at my grandfather’s house. He had died the winter before and I was planning on buying his house from the estate, when we got there. We rented a bedroom from a lady for a couple of months before we packed our car and left for the prairies of South Dakota. Two weeks before we were going to leave, I called the city office to get the water turned on and found out that one of my father’s brothers, unbeknownst to the executors of the estate had sold the house to pay off a business debt of his. Note to self: Never give an open-dated, general power of attorney to someone you think can be trusted.
Because I had a plan, and several backup plans, I wasn’t afraid. We had money, we had time and knew I could get myself out of most situations I found myself in. With six highway maps, campground information and several alternate routes planned and provided by the AAA Automobile Club, and double checked by me, we packed our car and left the day after my daughter finished 3rd grade.
Even before I found SurvivalBlog and learned about B.O.B.s I had been taught to be sure I had all we needed to survive and to always have several contingency plans. We had a tent, pillows, quilts, canned and dried food for a month, ten gallons of water, hermetically sealed milk, juice boxes, clothes, cooking utensils, rain gear, some small hand and car tools, Goldie the goldfish, fish flakes, traveler’s checks and cash. The two gold coins I had first purchased back in 1982 from my boss, were in my blue jeans pocket and knew I had more stored away. I left the fears I had about my daughter’s safety behind me and the family feud in the hands of my father and infuriated aunt.
The trip was over 1,900 miles, and as my father had done it before, I knew it could be driven in less than 40 hours if need be. I had done it in three days once when I drove back by myself. We didn’t need to drive straight through and we stayed away from people as much as we could. Taking it slow enabled me to begin my daughter’s survival lessons and to figure out how to deal with the housing situation. We dealt with a deep shin cut at the Grand Canyon, foraged wood, tinder, and some wild strawberries in Utah, started fires and cooked in downpours, and 40 mph winds. After talking with my great-uncle, one of my grandfather’s friends and the local mayor, I knew we would have a place to live before the snow flew. The small community welcomed us home and even though we later relocated, we still keep in touch.
My fondest memory of the experience happened the day after we arrived. My daughter and I had walked the few blocks uptown from the city park where we had camped to get our forwarded mail. When we got back I realized we had forgotten to get milk. I handed my daughter a five and told her to go get a gallon of milk and a treat for herself at the store next to the post office while I cooked her lunch. Never having been allowed to walk anywhere alone in ten years, with wide eyes she asked me, “By myself?” She eventually learned many of the lessons my grandfather taught me and is now teaching my grandchildren to face and conquer their fears.