(Continued from Part 1. This concludes the article.)
Keeping warm will be another area where we revert back to old ways. I see lots of prepper articles and YouTube videos about sawing wood for heat. Back in the bygone days, one of the daily chores of children was picking up “sticks”. Many of us may remember the old nursery rhythm with the line “five, six pick up sticks”. These sticks were used for cooking. Heat from the daily food preparation was just an added bonus in the colder months. We may want to lower our expectations of post-TEOTWAWKI comfort. Trying to maintain our home’s temperature to 70 degrees may be a waste of resources. (Fuel, oil, wood, and time).
So how did our ancestors stay warm if not by keeping the home at 70 degrees? I remember questioning the rating of the old down-filled U.S. Army “Extreme Cold” sleeping bag. There was more than one occasion I remember being cold in West Germany in that sleeping bag. One of my Sergeants quipped that the army’s specification of extreme cold sleeping bag was not that you would be nice and toasty warm but rather that you would not get hypothermia. So when TEOTWAWKI happens, we may have to adjust our expectations as to what we consider “warm”. Besides warmth from a source of flame, we should consider body heat retention.
There are a lot of man-made fibers out there but in my opinion nothing beats wool. Wool is one of the few fibers that can still keep you somewhat warm even when it is wet. Wool can be fashioned into hats, gloves, sweaters, vests, socks, blankets, and other clothing. One of my many stockpiles includes a vast array of wool sweaters and socks. Besides a good insulating cloth the layering of clothing with also be important. One of the main ways people kept warm long ago was by sheer physical work. This is why layering is important. As a person starts a physical task they can remove layers and when they are done or the job becomes less physical layers of clothing can be put back on.
At night, people warmed their beds by heating pieces of soapstone by the fireplace or stove and then putting them under the covers of their bed to take off the chill. Similar stones were used to help keep a person’s feet warm while riding in a buggy or sleigh. Other variations of bed warmers included filling a pan full of hot coals (not recommended) and containers full of hot water. Another way of keeping warm at night was the use of poster beds. Cloth would be draped down from the posts to enclose the bed and help keep the draft out and the body heat of the occupants in.
Maintaining a daily supply of water will also use methods and devices from the old world. For us rural folk, our well pumps may not work but there will still be fresh potable water in our wells. We might not have a nice iconic well house with a hand-cranked system to lower and raise a wooden bucket but we will use the same principles with a baler bucket. Our well is only 45 feet deep so pulling water up will not be as hard of work as for those with 100-plus foot deep wells. Perhaps building one of those iconic well houses with a hand crank, or some variation, will be a post-TEOTWAWKI project. Rain catchment is another way of collecting water.
One source of water that I will be avoiding after TEOTWAWKI, will be all surface water. Besides the bacteria, viruses, and protozoans that inhabit surface water today we can expect massive contamination from sewage treatment plants that no longer treat millions of gallons of sewage before being put into our waterways but we can conceivably have to deal with chemical contamination from factories that are damaged, abandoned, vandalized, etcetera. The sad truth of the matter is that our ancestors didn’t understand the need for water purification. For many years this is why people drank ale, mead, beer, and wine since the alcohol or brewing process would kill bacteria. To stay healthy we must ensure that our water supply remains as clean as possible from the time we get it out of the well until we consume it. Having glass containers, water jugs, canteens, and the like will help keep the water pure.
Controlling Pests
Pest control will also be an important task to help ensure our health in a post-TEOTWAWKI world. Fancy plug in bug zappers and chemical repellants and poisons may not work or be available. The common mosquito is responsible for more deaths throughout history than anything else. Keeping bugs as bay will be important. Keeping food covered is vital. Back in the day screened pie safes and wire/screened food tents were common. Today nylon mesh food tents are still available, usually found in camping departments. We have several sizes stored in our preps. We also have lots of fly ribbons packed away. Headnets are great ways of keeping the mosquitoes and gnats from biting you. I have being buying the hats with the mosquito netting sewn right into the hat. A good supply of rat and mouse traps will be needed but a good ole barn cat will earn his/her keep. An old timer told me once about eating match heads to keep the bugs away. When I was in the army I did this and in my opinion it seems to work. The idea is that the sulfur in the match head will be sweated out your skin pores and the smell would keep the bugs away. One or two matches a day is fine, but more than that might start to affect your stomach. [JWR Adds: Maych head compositions have changed considerably in the new century. I would not recommend doing this now!]
Sweeteners
Sugar may be in short supply for most of us that live far away from the sugar beet and sugar cane fields. Although sugar/fructose consumption by Americans is a problem today, the extra energy provided by sugar will be needed and burned by reverting back to manual labor for almost every daily task. Having bee hives is a possible way of replacing common sugar after TEOTWAWKI. Besides replacing sugar as a sweetener, honey has numerous health benefits and is mentioned in the Bible as well for its useful health properties. The added benefits to having bee hives include having good pollinators for your garden, crops, and orchards and a renewable source of wax. Bee’s wax is well known for making candles that do not produce a lot of smoke/soot. If you have hives your preparedness planning should consider how you will protect your bee hives (or at least a few hives) from the impacts of TEOTWAWKI such as radiation and temperature extremes.
Besides honey another alternative sweetener is maple sugar/syrup. Again this will be dependent upon where you live but can be a relatively easy way of putting back lots of high-energy sweetener. We store several taps and tubing that we can use to tap maple trees with post-TEOTWAWKI. We live around so many maple sugar shacks it does not seem worthwhile now to make our own.
Over the years, new materials such as vinyl and nylon have replaced leather as a common household material. Understanding how to tan a hide will be very important post-TEOTWAWKI. Think of many things you use today that are nylon or vinyl or some other man-made fiber. Footwear, gloves, work aprons, hinges, bags, ax and knife sheaths, are a few items that can be made of leather post-TEOTWAWKI. We keep a decent leather crafting tool kit with cutters, hole punches, awls, needles, various waxed threads and rivet and grommet setters. We also keep lots of hardware, like snaps and buckles, for leather projects on hand as well. My axe sheath that I made would not win any prizes at the county fair but it will protect my axe head.
I really like the improvements over the years to cordless tools. No more running 100 feet of extension cord or carrying out a generator to use a corded drill or saw. Lithium battery technology is amazing but we need to be honest that even lithium batteries of a life cycle. So what happens when the local hardware store still is not re-opened or stocked 5 or 7 years after TEOTWAWKI and our lithium batteries start to die? I suspect that the utility of corded power tools will not be much better after 5-7 years either.
Traditional Tools
Being able to make or repair things of wood will be essential. Long gone will be the cheap 2x4s at the local lumber yard or hardware store. Being able to fell, limb, cut and hew a tree to make lumber or a beam will be needed to re-build society. Having tools like a two-man saw, broad axe, adze, brace, and auger bits will be needed to build things like barns. Other useful tools for the our new world will be draw shaves, planes, gouges, chisels, files and yankee drills. These tools are just the common tools needed but long-forgotten tools for such by-gone trades like wheelwrights, coopering, blacksmithing, tin smithing, and cobbling will require their own specialized tools.
As the flow of cheap clothing from China stops, the importance of the simple needle and thread will become apparent. Being able to repair and make our own clothing will be needed and probably quicker than most would expect. Sure your blue jeans might last several years now but when those jeans are now worn for days doing hard labor and washed less seldom they will need repaired or replaced quicker. Around our homestead we do not wear jeans for working in but rather the duck canvas type of pants made for those in the trades today. They last longer but even so I have had to make repairs to them. Sewing items are so cheap nowadays. You can pick up a pack of needles for 99 cents and thread is not expensive either.
My personal favorite way to pick up sewing items is from the Salvation Army, AMVETS, or other thrift/second hand venues. Like my leather crafting skills, I probably will not win any prizes at the county fair but my sewing gets the job done. We have a few quilts that have been handed down over the years and unlike today’s quilts where the cloth was bought out of a few bolts of brand new cloth these old quilts used anything and everything to make them, flour sacks, old clothes, you name it. We have one quilt where old baby clothes and a wedding dress were used. It will be wise to have lots of needles, thread, zippers, buttons, snaps, Velcro, elastic bands as well as material for repairs and clothesmaking.
Gaining Knowledge
The last thing is knowledge. As much as we try and would like to have everything put back for our Post-TEOTWAWKI life we cannot do it. The next best thing is knowledge. Perhaps you will not have an anvil and a forge but a basic knowledge of blacksmithing and metallurgy may help you in a pinch. Being a “jack of all trades, master of none” will have a lot of value post-TEOTWAWKI. Being able to couple your basic knowledge with some experience and tools of the trade will be priceless.
So the next time you are looking to add some type of capability to your preps think about how a task was done in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th Centuries. Then go to a flea market, garage sale, antique shop, or your grandfather’s garage and find the tools that you need.