A Lifetime of Survivalism, by Allon

I was fifteen years old when the Sylvester Stallone movie, First Blood was released.  I identified with John Rambo in an adolescent way, as I too had many times escaped to the woods near my Appalachian home.  I was raised in a fairly violent household and learned at a young age that rage is only temporary.  If I could just make it to the door, my long legs would carry me to the high grass where all I had to do was fall down to become invisible.  I was afraid to stay out all night when I was in grammar school.  Instead, I would sneak back into the house as stealthily as possible and sleep under the basement stairs.  A few nights under the stairs taught me the value of having a cache of food and blankets.  As I got older I came home less and less and began reading magazines like American Survival Guide and the few available books on the subject.  I still have one of those self-published books written in the seventies.  Before I could even drive, some friends and I converted an old tobacco barn, which had become landlocked when a new highway was constructed, into a cabin.  I even tied old metal gas cans filled with rocks to trip wires to alert us if anyone hiked in from the highway. 

My grandfather’s home was another refuge during this time.  He was raised on a farm during The Great Depression where he would walk to the railroad tracks and flag down the train to town to trade his butter and eggs for sugar and coffee.  He dug his basement with a team of oxen after buying his home for $1,700 in 1934.  That basement contained a modern furnace, a backup coal stove, and two deep freezes filled with produce from a large garden and meat from hogs we slaughtered ourselves.  I always wondered why he had flashlights hanging in every room of the house.  It was not until he died in 2010 at the age of 99 that I found out he was afraid of the dark.  His Depression era carnival glass kerosene lamp has a prominent place on my dresser. 

As a teenager in the eighties I expressed myself with surplus camouflage pants and a black T-shirt proclaiming ‘Kill Them All – Let God Sort Them Out.”  Sometimes I included a defused hand grenade on a chain around my neck as seen in the movie Uncommon Valor.  Times were different then and instead of getting into trouble, the chemistry teacher used it as a chemistry teaching point to describe to me how the grenade could be armed.  It was also around this time that I bought my first gun, a Charter Arms AR-7 survival rifle, with my Christmas money.  My first revolver was a .38 which I found (with ammo) while cleaning out someone’s basement in exchange for $50 and anything I wanted to keep.  This revolver is the reason I was asked by local authorities if I was a survivalist.  A friend and I returned from a day of shooting in the woods to be pulled over by the local police for a routine traffic stop.  When these rookies saw the weapon laying in the back window of my sedan, we were placed in handcuffs and brought to the police station where my cousin, the police captain, gave me a good talking to and ordered them to take us back to my car.  This experience taught me a valuable lesson about OPSEC.  It was not until I owned a retreat separate from my primary residence, that I again revealed my lifestyle.  By then I was a mature adult.   

I attended college locally which I paid for in part by making lye soap and selling it at craft festivals.  I took every ROTC class that I could without committing to accepting a commission.  When I finally went away for graduate school in the nineties, I rented an apartment on a man-made lake for water security.  I brought along a generator and kerosene heater and plenty of firearms.  The linen closet was re-purposed for an extra pantry and lacking outdoor storage, I risked driving around with several cans of fuel in the back of my truck.  I returned home well ahead of Y2K and started a business with a large Amish and Mennonite customer base.  While not a member of their churches, I attended on occasion, visited their homes, and were invited to their weddings and funerals.  I learned a lot from those relationships.  I learned to live out my faith.  I learned that simple living brought independence regardless of income.  I learned the value of community.  When asked to complete a questionnaire by his government employer about his Y2K plan, my best friend merely wrote that he would come to my house.  I had done nothing differently to prepare. 

After Y2K I worked part-time as a firefighter and summers teaching wilderness survival and shooting sports at a high adventure camp for the Boy Scouts of America.  I owned a lot of real estate until I relocated to my current state, got married, and started a family.  I married a city girl who is not a prepper, but recognizes the value and supports my lifestyle.  She had just purchased a home in this small city before we started dating.  Since we cannot sell her home without paying down the mortgage, I added rain barrels and backup heat and sold my free and clear home on the outskirts of town to purchase land on which I built our wood-heated, solar powered retreat.  Using an asset protection trust, I purchased secluded acreage near the national forest.  It sits on a former logging road off a dead end road forming an easily defensible community of about twenty homes which sit in a hollow.  The logging road is inaccessible in summer without 4WD and tire chains are necessary in the winter.  I formed relationships with my neighbors who heat with wood and hunt on their own land.  This seclusion is just an hour from our home via the primary route or longer secondary routes in my EMP resistant tri-fuel 4WD.  I can even get my family out of Dodge by riding my dual sport motorcycle on the trail that parallels the local railroad.  I would prefer to live year-round at the retreat, but that would mean giving up our income stream and health insurance and expending savings, precious metals and food storage.  Checking for trigger events is the first thing I do in the morning and the last thing I do at night.  When the markets are open, I will get an automated text message in the event of an economic slide.  Hopefully, this proactive approach will allow us to bug out while the desperate masses are still paralyzed by their ingrained normalcy bias.  The benefit of a government job is one can leave for up to three days without advance notice in the event of a perceived trigger event.  Not only does one not get fired, but usually gets paid for those days.   

When I decided to purchase retreat land a few years ago, I inquired within my spheres of influence about buying a large tract together.  No one was interested in doing so, but many were interested in using the land afterward.  For this reason, I elected not to disclose the location to anyone other than my wife.  I will not have to make the decision of who gets in the lifeboat and who does not that so many who have prepared will be forced to do.  Two years of food storage only lasts a dozen people two months.  As the real estate market continues to collapse, I look for the opportunity to pay cash for a rural foreclosure with several tillable acres.  This would give my friends, who passed on the opportunity to become my partner, a chance to work the mini-farm as sharecroppers.

I have seen survivalism gain and lose and rise again in popularity during my lifetime.  I was drawn in by personal experiences and memories of gas rationing and popular movies.  For a while when the economy was booming, I quietly lived my lifestyle while watching other people become increasingly reliant on long, just-in-time distribution channels.  At first I was encouraged by this latest surge in the popularity of my lifestyle choice because I felt I was no longer alone.  As I dug deeper, however, I became disappointed.  It appears anyone with $9.95 can point a domain name at a blog and become an ‘expert’ by assembling misquotes of published authors on particular subjects.  Some popular pundits admit in their biography that they became interested in the movement after the 2008 crises.  Would we hire a surgeon who became interested in medicine just three years ago?  I would hope not, yet many people are betting their lives on someone who may not have actually done many of the things they are espousing on the web. 

I know the terms survivalist and prepper are used interchangeably, but it is starting to appear that a prepper is someone who prepares for some future cataclysmic change while a survivalist actually lives the lifestyle today.  Many preppers I have met remind me of those who play fantasy football.  They know all the terms and discuss online what one should do, but never actually ‘play the game.’  I am starting to fear for those who shoot at paper targets, but never at anything that is shooting back even if only in a paintball tournament.  I don’t recall anyone ever getting attacked by a paper target.  Preppers are not rotating out their food storage.  The other day I had to teach someone how to cook dry beans!  Many have never killed and butchered anything.  If one cannot live off-grid for a month during normal times, how are they going to fair when the utilities don’t come back on?  It is almost as if this movement is becoming a religion where we talk about the good we should be doing instead of actually doing it. 

I realize that people have busy lives and understand the argument that some provision is better than none, but believe many preppers are giving themselves a false sense of security.  My concern is that they are making preparations that will ultimately belong to someone who is better prepared to fight for them or knows how to utilize them properly.  The other day I was in a forum where a prepper was bragging about where he kept his money.  Using just his user name, I visited two public access web pages where I viewed pictures he posted of the interior and exterior of his retreat and sent him a link to a satellite map of his rural retreat.  He was unconcerned that someone with different values than me might be doing the same thing and their SHTF plan may include his provisions.  I know that sometimes I seem a little harsh, but if I can convince one person to transition from being a prepper to being a doer, it is worth it any criticism I might endure.