Having lived in the American Redoubt for 26 years gives me hope that I chose the right place years ago to spend my final days on earth. In this article I will relate my upbringing, a story that happened on May 27, 2024, and two other incidents that occurred around this location in April, 2024 and July, 1996. These happenings demonstrate how ill-prepared the general populace is for any coming catastrophic event. We all know that absolute chaos will ensnare all major and minor urban enclaves when the SHTF.
I am a 79-year-old, somewhat crippled. I have had drop-foot on my left side for 13 years due to a spinal disc rupture and nerve damage. I’m white Christian straight un-vaxed right-wing conservative meat-eating AR-15, AR-9, and AR-10 owning male. Those are all factors that are sure to enrage contemporary liberals.
My birthplace was Cleveland, Ohio but my early youth spent near my grandparents in rural southeast Ohio near the West Virginia border where my parents were born. You might say, “I was brought up on the fringe of Appalachia.” Everybody was poor. We lived in an old company house from a defunct coal mine that my maternal grandma’s neighbor bought during the Great Depression. We had no indoor plumbing, an outhouse out back, coal-fired heater, and a handpump on the back stoop. The train ran on tracks out the back of the house. Grandpa lived the same way high on a nearby ridge and farmed a small piece of ground.
We were financially poor. My dad chased jobs. Mostly truck driving and operating heavy equipment. Mom raised crops and chickens for food. I have vivid memories of her killing chickens, plucking feathers and cooking. It took all day. I got bathed once or twice a week in a galvanized wash tub in which my mom plucked chickens and did the wash using a washboard and Fels Naptha soap. We were backwoods people. But these days I can leave my house, visit Costco, buy a roasted chicken for $4.99 and be home eating it in 45 minutes even though I live in the country.
All of my grandparents were born around 1884. My maternal side was from rural Kentucky, West by-God Virginia, and other country parts. My fraternal grandparents were from Poland. There were no modern conveniences back in the day. We were rural people. I remember talking to elderly people who were alive during the Civil War. They were children during the war, as was I, when they spoke to me.
Just before I entered first grade we moved back to the inner city of Cleveland. I grew up here attending both public and parochial school; until graduating. During summers and after high school, I worked as a laborer for my dad who was superintendent of an asphalt, sand, and gravel plant. I went to work full-time at a local steel mill for a year to raise money to attend college.
After spending a year at Ohio State University, I entered the United States Marine Corps as a heavy equipment operator. In boot camp, we washed our clothes on wash racks using a washboard and Fels Naptha soap. Not a big deal when you grew up with that in your background.
I married while in the Marine Corps. My duty station was in rural North Carolina. My wife’s maternal side was from very rural Alabama. After separation from the Marine Corps, my wife and I moved to a small rural township between Cleveland and Akron. We would spend the summers on the farmstead in Alabama. Granny lived in an old sharecropper shack with a hand pump on the kitchen sink for water. The privy was outdoors. Heat was a fireplace in granny’s bedroom. The aunts and uncles would joke at my father-in-law being a city boy. One uncle, who owned half the county, would charge my father-in-law to fish on his property. We would laugh around the fireplace while spitting tobacco juice and drinking moonshine. I killed my first deer in Alabama.
After an honorable discharge from the Marine Corps, I went to work for the Bell System as a phone installer-repairman and completed college on the GI Bill and company reimbursement. At the time, the pay wasn’t great at the phone company, so I went back to work in the steel mill as a manager. We lived in the country and camped as much as possible after we had children. Living in the city didn’t appeal to me, so after two years back in the mill, I had the desire to move to Arizona.
After a brutal winter in 1977, I used all my accrued vacation days, and we went to Tucson to look for work. Four days later, I was offered a manager position at a copper plant in the mountains north of Tucson. The company moved my family to Arizona, and we began a new adventure. Arizona was still somewhat primitive at the time, except for Phoenix, and we fully embraced a new rural lifestyle. A lot of time was spent in the outback due to my job being off the grid.
My neighbor told me that he had just been hired by the local telephone company and I decided that I had enough of smokestack industries, and I went back to work for the local phone company, Mountain Bell. I was hired as a lineman at 32 years of age and was assigned to work in Nogales on the Mexican border. I loved the work. We hardly ever worked in town. We were always in some remote area along the border, working outside and loving life and the people. I worked at this for 18 months and transferred to Sierra Vista as a splicer. Sierra Vista was also a border town and adjacent to Fort Huachuca — a U.S. Army Communications Center and later also a major Army Intelligence Center.
We also worked mainly along the border, and very seldom were in town. If I could die and go to heaven on earth, then this would be the place. Most of the time in Nogales and Sierra Vista, we worked off the grid. I knew that I would be a manager again within a short time frame while working with this company. A certain religious group was the predominant workforce in the area and I didn’t conform to their life goals, so my big boss asked me if I wanted a construction manager position in Yuma, Arizona. I’ve always thought it was a good way to get rid of the gentile. Boom! I was gone.
The company moved me to Yuma, Arizona. There had been six managers in the past six months in this position. My old boss told me there was no coming back to eastern Arizona. Yuma learned a lesson when I arrived: You’ve messed with the rest, now try it with with best. We had a great deal of city work, but we also performed much rural construction. This position as a construction manager actually launched my life career with Bell System. While at this location, I was able to obtain a Masters in Management and Human Relations degree. The company paid for this. This education would hone my “BS Meter”, in the following years.
A friend from Phoenix asked me to look at some property in Crown King, Arizona. We bought the property and subdivided it and built two cabins in the mountains. It was a great place for the kids to grow up and learn to shoot and be off-grid and survive. We built water systems and lived a rural lifestyle away from the city. We were away from city life and taught the kid’s survival skills.
My daughter, who is fifty now, still remembers a wilderness trip into the Grand Canyon where she begged me to carry her pack when she was four years old. I kept telling her no. She is now an avid outdoor survivalist. Crown King was one of the best life experiences these kids could have had. My son is now in Oregon and lives life to the fullest outside the city. Some of the survival skills practiced and taught were to have or know how to access potable water, shelter from the elements, and how to acquire sustenance.
Job changes sent me back to Tucson and then to Colorado. I obtained another degree in Environmental Compliance courtesy of the company. After 25 years of service, I retired and moved to Idaho to assume Plant Manager/Operations VP duties at an independent phone company.
My brother-in-law lived here, and I thought this would be a good transitional place to move to should an opportunity present itself. On one of my visits on July 2, 1996 prior to moving to the area, an event happened which shook this part of the world to its core. A western states brownout occurred affecting several states. Being an observer of human nature, I watched as a four-hour afternoon blackout happened. Automatic doors on grocery markets would not work, fueling stations could not pump fuel, and credit card point-of-sale processing machines could not work. Some people in this small town began to panic and hyperventilate. I was amused. As a homebrewer of beer, one of our mantras is, “Don’t worry, be happy—relax have a homebrew.”
I retired again ten years later only to engage in staying continuously busy doing construction projects, and obtaining another degree in Cabinetmaking/Furniture Building. I also did some volunteer campground hosting, volunteering on the local Planning and Zoning Commission, volunteering on the local Park Board Commission, and working seasonal part-time at a local tourist attraction which brings in several thousand tourists each year. I did all of this while I have supposedly been formally “retired” for 17 years.
The tourist attraction charges a $5 vehicle entry fee. When I’m on the gate, I prefer cash. In April, 2024, there was a power failure in town affecting about one-quarter of the city. Townspeople and tourists visiting the attraction were surprised that we had power. Amazing, since we were located about the length of a football field from a hydroelectric plant. In my 79 years, I never cease to be in awe of how stupid some people are. To their simple minds, food comes from the market, fuel from the gas station, milk comes from plastic jugs, water from the faucet, et cetera.
On Memorial Day, May 27, 2024, I arrived for the afternoon shift and the Internet was down. Cars were backed up coming into the attraction all day until the end of my shift. So, the Internet was down, BIG DEAL! “Do you take cards?” “Not today, the Internet is down.” “We don’t have any cash money.” “Too bad, so sad. Do a U-turn right here and go into the observation parking lot or back up the hill.” “But we’ve been waiting in line for half an hour.” My reply: “No money, no entry.”
If I had time and wanted to educate, I would ask them: “What are you going to do when the whole world is without the Internet and your credit card is just another piece of plastic?” Most did not have a cogent response and there were hundreds. Some were nimrods — teens or young adults with not a clue, multiple piercings, tattoos, and weird colored hair. Five teens were in one car and not between them could they come up with five bucks! I tell them to go home and ask grandma for $5. Listening to tales of woe sets off that BS meter that I mentioned earlier. I find it impossible to communicate with some people how not carrying some form of wealth will help them survive an emergency.
Though we live in the country and close to a mini-urban center, we do have close contact with a lot of like-minded neighbors. We have access to our well water and know how to get it during a power failure. We own our sewage system. Our block is one of the most armed in the state. A significant number of residents belong to a religious group that advocates food storage. We have some too although my strong point is making beer and distilling spirits. (For medicinal purposes—ahem, ahem, wink, wink.) In the event of total societal collapse, there is enough food processing, storage, and ranch animals to sustain survivors for a long time. The Snake River is less than a mile away. 80% of the country’s farmed fish are raised in the area. We have natural geographic barriers all around to thwart an invasion. Transportation and/or fuel is not an issue. Best of all and last, we all have some form of wealth to get by we’re not surrounded by abject stupidity.
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JWR Adds: This article underscores the importance of always carrying a small wad of cash in various denominations, including a few $1 bills. I should also mention that southern Arizona outside of Tuscon and Phoenix was very rural, even in the mid-1980s, when I was stationed at Fort Huachuca. In those days Sierra Vista was a small town and most of the side streets were still unpaved. But when I visited there again in 2010, I was amazed to see how the population and conveniences had flourished. With affluence and leisure comes complacency. And complacency brings vulnerability.