The Ugly Side Of Survival

Death...that is what survival is all about avoiding...or is it. Life or death is a something that we all think about but seldom talk about. The thing is that in the event of an apocalypse of any kind death is going to walk the roads again as it has not done in the first world nations for a century or so except during WW2.

Having to deal with death on a personal level and among those of us near to our hearts is going to be a trauma that most people now days are not prepared for. Also the mass death that will be all around will not be for the weak hearted. How will someone that can't imagine picking up a chicken, killing it with their hands and then cleaning and eating it going to deal with people dying all around them? Will they be able to kill in order to survive and protect their family?

There is a big difference between urban people and country folks. One of those differences is the ability to deal with death as just a part of life. I have bottle fed a calf that in a few months I would kill and eat. We raised rabbits, chickens, cattle, quail, ducks and almost any critter that we might like to eat. This involves caring for them and then killing them. I understood death. My animals took care of me and I took care of them they taught me a lot. I buried my dogs and cats and grieved them. When the time came I did the same with my Mama and Daddy. You are not really a grown up until you have buried a loved one. It changes you and the way you see the world. You either learn how to say goodbye and move on or it will kill you.

There is no sort of apocalypse that isn't going to involve lots of death and to expect you and yours to walk away untouched isn't realistic. You need to deal with it as much as you can before it comes up and slaps you in the face. You need to talk to your kids and loved ones about the fragility of life. I had a woman want me to haul off a pet one time so her son wouldn't have to see it dead. I refused and explained to her that this is a gift our pets give us. That some day he would have to deal with her death and this is how he can learn to bear the loss and pain. She understood and when the little boy came home; he and I buried it.

Death used to be a lot more personal than it is now. People died at home and they were washed and prepared by their family. They dug a grave and the body was buried near the home place. Now people go into hospices where they can die alone with strangers because their family can't bear the pain. Then the undertaker takes them and they see the body one more time and it is gone and buried in some cemetery. I have watched people suffer for long times and part of it is that the death just wasn't real to them. They never really said goodbye. This used to be a life skill that people understood. Now it is like the butchering of animals and made into a sanitized sort of thing that you can distance yourself from. This is the way it just is now but I'm not sure that a lot of people even in the survival community are prepared to deal with it.

 

Why is it that some assume that all country folk are capable and all city people are useless?

I have met useless country people and some very capable city folk.

Dealing with death is not a problem for me at all, though sometimes the putrid smells get to me and I heave up

 

Dealing with death is something that you learn, I've had more difficulty with the burocracey that comes with an unexpected death than the emotional fallout. When it is the death of a loved one or close family member it is often only later that certain triggers can set off an emotional response. I have found that certain smells set off the strongest memories, the key is to manage those memories so that they remind you of the love or humour of your loved one and not the pain or circumstances of losing them.
While I find the death of a stranger sad and feel sympathy for their family I tend to shrug it off quickly enough. I'm not particularly emotional.

 

No generalization can be applied to any individual. The country people that I am in general referring to are not just people that live outside of the city limits. I'm talking about people that live a rural life. The thing that I'm talking about is a closeness to the land and a different type of worldview than you generally find in someone that was raised in an urban environment. You just get to experience things that aren't available to most urban raised kids.

In a city everything is easily and closely available. The trash man takes away your garbage. If you have a problem the police are a call away and even though they may be slow they get there. A store that sells about anything that you might want is somewhere close. School is in your neighborhood. Life is just convenient. Where I live you take care of your own things and a trip to town is a 30 mile round trip. You tend to think ahead a little more and keep more food on hand. Delivery is a joke unless you can talk your spouse into going and getting it for you.

Most people that live our in the countryside don't like crowds. We don't need a lot of people around us to feel safe. We don't need lights on every square inch around us and don't deal well with all the noise that goes with urban living. It isn't that we are in any way better than city people but in the area of survival we just have a lot less to lose. We will adapt faster because we won't suddenly have every small part of our life turned upside down at the same time. There is also a little time for rural people between a collapse and it getting to them. The riots in the cities will start in a matter of days...maybe hours. When the lights go off the rules seem to go out the door.

There are indeed some totally useless country people. The thing is that there are not nearly as many of them as there are in the cities. There aren't as many people of any kind scattered out through the hills and woods. I could probably shoot every useless person that lives within a couple miles of me with a couple boxes of cartridges. I won't have to deal with roving swarms of thugs wanting to steal and burn everything I have in the first few days of a collapse.

If I lose my power it is nothing new and not an especially troublesome problem. I'm not dependent on grocery stores for my food. I have a nearby water source. I'm in no way better than a person in a highrise in a big city BUT my chances of surviving a major systemic collapse are a lot better.

I just don't have as far to fall. I kill my supper pretty often. I am just closer to the bone than a city person generally is.

 

While I'm closer to a town than you are TexDanm I'm in a similar situation and lifestyle. Your enthusiasm for learning crafts and skills will stand you in good stead when self sufficiency is the only way you're going replace what wears out.

 

At one time I was a 50 mile round trip to town and at one time I was 7 miles of mud dirt road from a paved highway. I was stuck in a valley one time for almost 4 days because I couldn't get up the iced hills to get out. I lived in town for about 8 years. It had its good points but when I moved I got out of town again. My daughter had horses and animals. We could hunt in our yard. There are places in Texas where it is a hundred miles to a real city. THAT would be a little too much of a good thing even for me.

 

I am stuck in a big city now, 12 lanes of highway out front but I have also lived where our driveway was 250km long and a three hour drive just to get to the front gate and another six hours and 550km in good weather to the nearest town.
A trip shopping involved a two ton refrigerated trailer as summer temps were in the high thirties C to the mid fourties C.

Nice to have a supermarket at three hundred meters in those temps

 

WOW!! Talk about a change in surroundings. My big city was not a mega sort of place. It was about one hundred and fifteen thousand. The town I go to now has someplace between twenty and thirty five thousand. The town I live in the suburbs of is about five hundred. Even the big town I lived in I lived sort of the edge of town and could walk to hunting and fishing. I really hate those huge 12 lane highways. How in the world can a highway be that big and always be backed up??? In Houston you are either stop and go or driving 10 mph over the speed limit trying not to get run over by the majority of people that are driving 25 mph over the speed limit. It is like a Nascar race track!! Petal to the metal until there is a wreck and then stop and go for an hour or two.

 

Kelly McGillis to prep for the movie "Witness" lived with the Amish for a short time. One day she was walking with a little Amish boy (5-ish?) on a farm road. A horse & buggy rides by and the big horse stepped on a kitten mashing it flat. Kelly lost her breath. The boy went over to what was left of the kitten and kicked the mess off the road. The boy didn't break with his topic, he kept on talking uninterrupted by the cat's dire misfortune. That was a lesson for Kelly, for in a moment she realized that the child had already made peace with the ugly realities of life. Farm life will do that.

 

Very nearly completely accurate

 

Wait a second. 45 minutes for just 20 miles? Am I reading that right or is it 40 miles each way? That would be averaging roughly 26 miles per hour and if your kind of rural roads are anything like mine, I'd be going a lot faster than that lol

 

There are some rural roads in Wales that are a bit like that as well, most are fine, 60mph with a good surface and visibility but some are just too dangerous to go above 25-30mph. Tractors, heading animals being driven down narrow lanes, morons who park in the passing places, caravans etc....if that's summer in the country, roll on winter.

 

Ok I can see that
My area however is more of the 60 mph and higher type lol

 

Are you actually Scots?

 

Nope.
Irish

 

But I do prefer most Scottish weapon designs

 

Designed for fighting their arch enemies, the Scots.

 

yup pretty much

 

but hey if were getting technical, the Irish were a bit more powerful in the defensive realm

 

lol most of that makes sense if you get what I mean.

 

I think these are all good points. I also understood that "city people" was more a mentality than actually people that live in the city.

Personally, I think that cities are time bombs waiting to happen.

That's not saying that the countryside won't be affected. But I think cities will be affected first.

Actually, I'd be more inclined to go into the wilderness rather than stay in even a country home when things go south.

 

Be careful about your wilderness. A lot of them will have many of the same problems that the big cities will have. Lots of ignorant people running into the woods will eventually mean forest fires. Also really fast there will be more hungry mouths than there is available food. The idiots will pollute the water really quickly because they are too stupid and lazy to dig propper latrines. Where I live is cattle country with lots of cattle, horses, goats, pigs and chickens. There will be a great economy in trading for meat and food. Without freezers there is no way a single family can handle all the meat from a big calf so they will be amenable to trade. One of my skills and tools sets that I have is butchering. My stuff is old school. Hand meat saws, big old high carbon knives and cleavers. I also have manual meat grinders and old sausage stuffing equipment.

I like the fact that where I am has enough people to have a good spread of talents. 500 people that are mostly blue collar will mean that we should be pretty able to offer each other a little help. We are a riverside community so we can easily shut down traffic if we have to. They literally put up a roadblock after the last big hurricane to control the traffic. I honestly don't know anyone that doesn't have guns. Most of us have a concealed carry license. If you are alone in a wilderness if things get ugly you don't have much in the way as alternatives.

 

Been around a lot of death myself. For one, my grandma was at hospice in our own house where she died. Pretty damn emotional since it was just a few days after Christmas and the tree was still there where she was placed on the gurney for the mortician to wheel her out of our house for the last time.


I look at it in a scientific way. Stars are born and they die. Everything has a birth and a death. The celestial objects spin as well as their atoms. There is good and evil, high pressure, low pressure, light and dark, cold and hot, negative and positive particles, etc, etc. Yin yang. There is a rhyme and a reason to it all and something set it all in motion.

What I find interesting is that we come into this world crying and we leave this world crying. We didn't want to be born and we don't want to die. Like in my case, I don't want to go to sleep and yet I sleep and I don't want to get up. We humans are unlike animals. Odd spices we are.

 

I bring this up a bit because I think seriously about this. Most everything in preparedness is serious. To me this is no intelectual exercise. There's no prize for simply hanging with the discussion and making everyone think you know what it's all about. You fake it; you're probably going to die during your first possession.
We deal with these things well because we ponder, think, and realize it's going to be real. Lots of ugly stuff. That's why we pray it doesn't come. Ptophesy states otherwise though.
You prepare for the ugly by training. Hike in the frigid cold soaked. Swim in freezing water. Hike 14 miles in hot weather with 16 oz of water. Train in miserable conditions. And know what to do with the dead so that you don't get sick. Yes your not just going to see it happen. You'll be the undertaker too.
Now...that's ugly.

 

retreating to a remote area may or may not work . My experience , I took my young son to a remote swamp about 80 miles from New Orleans , for opening day of squirrel season . I had been to the swamp several times before and always loved the solitude paddling my canoe through the giant moss covered cypress trees . I had never seen another human in the swamp . It had been a few years since my last excursion , when I took my son to my special retreat . WE put up a tent and slept beside the water , waiting for daybreak . All night long we heard other people driving up. When dawn broke and we stepped out of the tent we found ourselves in a city . People were everywhere we looked . WE tried to get away from the crowd by paddling our canoe deep into the swamp but that didn't work either because since my last trip to the swamp the government had cleared the channels of logs so the lazy could run up through the swamp in motor boats . We found a squashed snake that we only half joked had been trampled to death . I have never returned to my ruint swamp . The point being that remote bug out location you have in mind might turn into a city when S.H.T.F. .

 

I can definitely relate to that story. I used to have a deer lease and hunt a lot. One thing that I NEVER did was hunt the first two weekends of deer season. As you experienced everybody showed up for opening day and the second week end was only a little better. What bothered me was that most of these people were not very good hunters. They spent the night before opening morning hanging around camp drinking and partying and then dreary and hung over they went out and crawled into stands. The number of hunting accidents in the first couple of weeks usually is more than the rest of season all together.

I fear that in the event of a end of the world situation that the woods everywhere are going to be like opening weekend for a fairly long time. People will be shooting at anything that moves and building bond fires to hold back the dark and repel the dangerous animals that novice outdoorsmen will be sure are out to get them. These fires are eventually going to set the woods on fire and that will be a mess.

 

I loved going out to the deer lease after the rest were done with it. I usually had it pretty much to myself 10 months out of the year. There was a creek that ran through it and a couple of ponds with fish in it so even when the hunting season was past I still got to have my own private patch of woods to just go to hang out. There was a snug little logs cabin on the creek and I probably camped there more in the spring than the fall. I always felt a close connection to the woods and the animals there. I hunted but never killed for trophys.

I like fresh meat and we ate what I killed. I honored my prey and appreciated their sacrifice. I watched them a lot more than I hunted them. I have never felt alone when I solo camped and never was lonely. There was so much life around me and I was always sort of more comfortable with that than I ever am surrounded by people. Animals are easily understood and don't do things just to be mean. I never felt threatened by any of them and often actively drew them to me by feeding them. I especially liked to hunt rabbits and then share my kill that night with the coyotes and maybe a wolf or two. I always fed the deer and didn't mind too much about the hogs getting their share. Those were good days...