108 replies to this topic

[TVCasualty]

This is the gov's idea about what y'all need (or your kids, anyhow). Check out Rory...mmm, purrr. Looks almost like she's stockpiling Marlboros. And it's funny how her eyes are blue, I wonder who the daddy-kitty is?
Your tax dollars at work...
http://www.ready.gov/kids/home.html"

[danfromabove]

maybe because if you start to depend on a particular item, the moment you don't have that item you will be up the creek! if you know how to live, like tvc says, with just the shirt on your back, you have nothing to lose? at least thats what i understood from what he said. i agree with him on that point...but it maybe is easier said than done for most of us who have been bred into a society/day and age where the concept of 'saving food for the winter' is foreign, and any type of food i want is a block or two away. warm shelter is a few hundred dollars a month and a steady job to pay for it all is 40 hours of no-thinking-required work a week. i, for instance, wouldnt know where the heck to begin when living in the woods. i suppose thats a wake up call for me that i should start taking this kind of thing seriously. how did you get started with your survival training tvc?

[Hippie3]

Looks good. Thanks. It'd be great if you were carrying spare clips for the rifle, I could probably trade 'em for some moccasins. :pirate:

if he had a clip of ammo
he would just
take your moccasins
:evil:

[TVCasualty]

Some questions: When does your Air Conditioner break? Your central heat? When does your computer crash? My guess is, When you need them most. Hmmm. Remember, we're talking about times when taking your Whisperlight stove back to the store is not an option, and even knives break/rust/fall in the river.

danfromabove:

Some back-story you requested...

I was born and raised in a large Southern California suburb. I was as out of touch with nature as I could be. I ate a big bunch of mushrooms. My thoughts changed direction. After meeting a former student of the Tracker school, I was intrigued, then began living with a woman who grew up riding horses and getting milk from the neighbor's cow every morning. She was also into hiking, and I spent many days under the burden of a backpack in some serious wilderness. I wanted to go further, as I had continued to eat big bunches of mushrooms, though by then only outdoors. Girlfriend's father dies, she gets some money, we buy some acres in the Southeast (long story) and move into a tent. We figured it best to spend ALL the money on land; get it while we could! We were the first 'outsiders' in a serious hillbilly area, and suffered the usual lack of respect (which ultimately led to the confrontations with poachers). We first built simple structures out of lashed saplings and tarps. The 'kitchen' was ripped apart by bears twice. Slowly a strawbale/found items/rammed earth tire hybrid house emerged, with no electricity service at all, ever (and still; we used chainsaws and hand tools and rough-cut lumber). Poop was composted as in The Humanure Handbook. Tapped a spring to fill cistern providing gravity water, enough for shower heated w/ RV water heater. We called our designs "Contemporary American Refugee."

The experience nearly destroyed me. Mentally. I was unencumbered by practical experience and therefore naively enthusiastic about bailiing out of society and living independently. Then reality, like 3 degree nights before the walls were finished, isolation from social contacts outside a VERY few, and total opposition from our families. Among other things. What is hard to describe is the mental wear of day-in-day-out freedom. I hated being told what to do, yet out there in the woods no one told me anything but I was no happier. It was WORSE! It was a 6 year Vision Quest, as what I was confronting every minute of every excrutiating day was MYSELF. I had to tell myself what to do, and didn't know how! She had no problem; it wasn't a theoretical experience to her. Thank God for her patience. I vowed to stick it out no matter what. We finished the house, and our time together ended as we had learned all we could from each other and it was time to move on. We literally said that to each other one morning. Then I moved back to a city.

Now I have one foot in each world; urban and wild. I'm trying to lean more weight on the wilderness-foot but cannot deny my city mind. I apparently require both for my purpose here on Earth. I still go to the land often to visit and practice (she's a tracker too now), but after my theory confronted reality I realized that NOW is indeed the time to get our heads straight about a new way of living. Going full survival brings this awareness very quickly relative to other methods I've explored, and doing it now allows for mistakes or temporarily quitting and getting a pizza if it becomes too much to bear (it occasionally will if you have an urban background). This, I believe, is the most underappreciated challenge of a radical paradigm shift in one's lifestyle: you nearly or actually spend some time going insane.

You don't gotta be psychic to see trouble on the horizon; science is quite adequate to describe various un-ideal scenarios for the future. I see a breakdown coming in my lifetime, though I cannot guess it's scope. It might be total. I am trying to cover my bases, plus I have found practicing full survival to be unparalleled in fun, for me. My urgency is based on my experience: if I hadn't had a friend's heated house with a shower to retreat to occasionally, I would likely have gone (or stayed) mad. Mad I tell you! Not everyone suffers this pattern, but if you've never tested your theories about living outside the mainstream you best do it now while the consequences for failure are manageable.

The End of the World is relative and personal. It's happened many times; Mayans, Aztecs, various sundry Empires throughout history, and Native Americans can probably tell us a thing or two about it. There will be no "line" crossed where we all know that the crunch has arrived. It will arrive at different times in different places for different people, and failure to recognize YOUR time to get out can result in your inability to escape. Your family/friends will tell you you're crazy. You might hesitate, and perish. My ex grew up in Germany. Her grandfather was a prominent lawyer in 1930, soon to be a judge. He read a book by some dick named Hitler. Her grandfather was Jewish. He believed that Hitler guy meant it. He uprooted the whole family and went to Israel just before the Reichstag fire. They thought he was NUTS and fought the move, but he was adamant. His story was enlightening. I remember it always. Follow your heart and don't listen to naysayers. There are precedents!

[maliki]

Better weapons then your enemy is how the US has stayed in power..
Be it physical or mental weapons...
If it worked for Uncle Sam itll work for you too...

[Hippie3]

the loner living off the land scenario
while romantic
ignores certain basic realities
like the fact that you will die
if you sprain your ankle badly and no one is there to help you.
the whole notion of going into the woods like rambo, with just a knife,
presumes excellent health, a suitable climate,
and damn good luck.

[anticheffy]

I too prefer the lead spraying survival tools.
I have many.
Thee are bigger gun nuts than me but not many.
Up close defensive weapons, raiding weapons, street sweepers, sniping weapons, I got them all.
Muwahahahahahahahahaha............come get ME !!

USA rocks

[Raul del Angelo]

TVCasualty, your story was very interesting
thank you for posting it. I wonder if it's
appropriate to call your experience pioneering?

In an earlier post I made a mistake, and at the
rate that anything I say is contradicted it's
amazing that the opportunity wasn't seized
this time.

In an earlier post in this thread I said that
Keflex was the cure for anthrax and I was
wrong. Keflex will cure many staff infections
but the cure for anthrax is Cipro. So sorry!

I thought about this because of an article
I read recently about the anthrax attack
that occurred in the US when the Patriot Act
was being debated. I was very surprised that
the strain of anthrax that was received by
various legislators was not from Russia,Iran,
Iraq, or any other "hostile nation" it was from
the good old US biological weapons facility in
Maryland. Although it sadly killed 5 Americans
it seemed to kill the freedom of hundreds of
millions of Americans. If you are not aware the
Patriot Act does not cover only terrorism but
all activities that may be considered to be
illegal.

Peace, Raul

[TVCasualty]

the loner living off the land scenario
while romantic
ignores certain basic realities
like the fact that you will die
if you sprain your ankle badly and no one is there to help you.
the whole notion of going into the woods like rambo, with just a knife,
presumes excellent health, a suitable climate,
and damn good luck.

I thought I'd explained that my perspective comes not from romantic notions but personal first-hand experience, but maybe that was on the other survival thread...

Anyhow, as far as spraining an ankle being fatal goes, I wouldn't argue against the fact that shit does indeed happen. However, sprains have happened to humans for a long time, I'd guess, and our species managed to persist up to this point. Wilderness fatalities are almost always due to a series of small, seemingly benign mistakes that quickly escalate beyond any recourse. A slip into icy water leads to hypothermia leads to sluggish thinking leads to stumbling around not building a shelter leads to death. What stops that decline is not allowing oneself to panic and knowing what to do. Even with a sprain, your top priority is shelter, then fire/water, then food. You can make a nice shelter with no tools (and a sprained ankle, just takes longer) that can withstand -20 degree F nights with sticks and debris. I have spent the night in such a shelter with a t-shirt and jeans when the temp got down to about +10 degrees F. Others I know have tested such a shelter to -20 wearing a t-shirt and jeans, too, in Wyoming. It was uncomfortably cold but the goal was survival not comfort. They were wearing thermals until completing the shelter then slept in it with just the shirt/jeans.

"Suitable climate"? The only unsuitable climates are altitudes well above treeline, the extreme arctic and antarctic, and out on open ocean. Everywhere else there are (or were) native inhabitants that thrived. Of course, someone might mention the Maya or Aztecs or other "great" civilizations that suddenly seemingly vanished, but they fell for the same reasons we will: the climate became unsuitable to agrarian, stay-put high density populations. And maybe hantavirus (the Mayans). Agriculture reduces the biodiversity available by focusing only on specific food crops. When the climate becomes unsuitable to agriculture, there are still many other life forms that will persist (and are edible) but by that point most people have forgotten what they are. And our climate is changing fast right now. Just wait until next hurricane season, which will be a lot worse than last year (mark my words). Western Europe is about to revisit the "Little Ice Age" again as the Gulf Stream is weakening. -27 degrees in Moscow last Saturday. When Russians complain about cold, it's cold.

Not everyone is capable of attaining expert-level knowledge of full survival, but not everyone has to. You just need one such person in your group, he/she can tell the rest of you what to do (and you'll learn fast). To me it's a matter of probabilities, and I want information and knowledge that increases my survival probability. You can only get this before you need it.


Someone may drive their whole life without ever wearing a seatbelt and never have a problem. I always wear mine because it increases my probability of survival if the unexpected occurs, and I know I can't put it on after a wreck. Another person might always wear their seatbelt but get killed in a wreck anyway. Events are difficult to predict; it's about stacking probability in your favor.

[Hippie3]

Some questions: When does your Air Conditioner break? Your central heat? When does your computer crash? My guess is, When you need them most.

y'all watch way too much Star Trek, in my opinion.
in the star trek world
technology always fails when you need it most.
the real world is not perverse like that.
thankfully.

[TVCasualty]

The gods of technology must be bestowing great fortune upon you then...

When writing that I was also thinking about rolling or total blackouts, levees, post-storm cellphone outages, FEMA, space capsule parachutes, stuck landing gear, Osama bin Laden detectors, backed up toilets, Netflix, and so on. They don't always fail, and not only when you need them most, but the times they do are sure vivdly stuck in the memory of whoever experienced the failure. Entropy is a law of the universe. So is the fact that a rigid imposition of order results in an escalation of chaos (basic Chaos Theory). The more complex the technology, the more unpredictable the consequences.

[Hippie3]

my everyday reality is pretty convincing,
i know what breaks and how often
even without chaos theory to instruct me.
:lol:
btw
even knives break.
knives, too, are 'technology'.
;)

[Hippie3]

sprains have happened to humans for a long time, I'd guess, and our species managed to persist up to this point.

pretty weak retort-
the survival of the species
is of no comfort to the
individual dying of exposure.
the species will indeed go on
but without the hapless camper.

my perspective comes not from romantic notions but personal first-hand experience

i hear ya talking
but i'm not entirely convinced,
a few weeks spent at survival camps for rich yuppies
does not necessarily equate with a firm grip on reality.
that recent case of the bears eating that environmentalist
offers stark evidence that there is much more to
survival in the wilds long term than knowing how to
build shelter or fire.
i daresay i've met many, many so-called survivalists
who all swore the exact same as you do
but i know they would not last in the real world for long.
and i have the same doubts about you.
i think if you really knew much
you'd be much more humble in your claims.

Everywhere else there are (or were) native inhabitants that thrived.

true
but one must remember such people grew up in their environment,
they knew, from lifetimes of accumulated tribal wisdom,
every plant, what it did, when it grew, where, etc.
they knew when the game animals would return, and where to find
them, how to hunt them, where to find good water, etc.

a few or even several sessions at survival camps
is no substitute for a lifetime spent in the habitat.

of course the survival camp instructors
won't tell you that,
they make money out of convincing folks
that in a few short weeks they can turn
a new york lawyer into a real mountainman.
but where are you going hunting if you live
in manhattan ????

they are getting rich selling that fantasy.
today there is a whole multi-million dollar business empire
devoted to mass-marketing 'survival' to the gullible.
you can buy books, videos, gear
and yes, go off to survival [summer] camp.

i suppose that the people who pursue the interest
are marginally better informed and prepared
than are the totally ignorant
but it's not a huge margin.

real survival is very local, very specific and detail-dependant.
you must know the vegetation of your own area,
not what grows in the next state over.
you must know what lakes are good
and which are poison.
a thousand little details
and ignorance of any one
can kill you.

i'll take my stand with my tribe,
on my land and on my terms.
at least then i'll have
the home field advantage.

[marsofold]

While I'd agree with most of the stuff on the list, if the survival kit is intended to be usable following a limited nuclear war, then the following limitations should be remembered: #1 EMP will destroy all silicon-based electronics not shielded by like...an inch of grounded copper. So store your electronics in a well-grounded thick-walled metal box before doomsday. #2 All modern firearms depend on a supply of ammo/primers. Even if you reload, you still need primers. Unless you use a flintlock rifle or modify a muzzleloader for wheel-lock ignition (my choice). Then you'd only need a bullet mould. Gunpowder is easy to make. #3 A pound of antibiotics is worth its weight in gold. #4 Protein powder, multivitamins, and iodine crystals for water purification will stretch living off the land farther than anything else. And if the government is nazi-like, you're on the run, the kids are starving and all else fails, remember...it isn't cannibalism to eat uniformed pig meat in a pinch! :lol:

[Hippie3]

some iodine supplements would be good in event of a nuke event
protects your thyroid from the fallout.

[Hippie3]

better change that to a $50 soon

[TVCasualty]

pretty weak retort-
the survival of the species
is of no comfort to the
individual dying of exposure.
the species will indeed go on
but without the hapless camper.

I had not originally intended to be in a debate. I was surprised at the oppostition to this kind of knowledge and its validity, and was trying to add my perspective to the discussion, so I'm not putting too much energy into my so-called retorts. And, the survival of the species may very well depend on this kind of knowledge someday. Talk of nuclear anything or pandemics or famine or all of the above certainly raises the possibility.

a few weeks spent at survival camps for rich yuppies
does not necessarily equate with a firm grip on reality.
that recent case of the bears eating that environmentalist
offers stark evidence that there is much more to
survival in the wilds long term than knowing how to
build shelter or fire.
i daresay i've met many, many so-called survivalists
who all swore the exact same as you do
but i know they would not last in the real world for long.
and i have the same doubts about you.
i think if you really knew much
you'd be much more humble in your claims.

I agree, although I have never been to such a camp. Trackerschool is very expensive, but the spoiled brats are gone by Tuesday. Talking to the Navy SEALS that have always been students in classes I've attended about real-life uses of the skills has been very informative, and they aren't known for theoretical bullshit and aren't rich yuppies. Ask a SEAL about Tom Brown jr. They know or at least have heard of him, and use many of the skills he teaches, which includes guerilla and psychological warfare.

The "stark evidence" of the case of the bear-food guy only teaches one thing: Watch out for bears, but we already knew that one, right? He has no connection to the validity of pure wilderness survival whatsoever. I never said pure survival skills would make anyone bear-proof. Yes we can get killed by wild animals; a better death than falling and hitting my head on the toilet, IMHO.

I have met very, very few people who swore the same as me about this stuff; most are not into pure survival, rather some hybrid of indian tricks and manufactured technology (as if their case is relevant to mine; a weak retort?). What I speak of erases the line between flesh and spirit, and is more an excercise for the soul than the body, which will die, eventually. The skills are merely 'body maintenance' while we are alive that allows us time to explore this "life" thing, and the "spirit" thing too. Some of the techniques/skills are entirely of spirit and have worked for me but are impossible to convince a skeptic of, but that's not my goal.

You have doubts about me? Fantastic. I would have been very surprised if you didn't. Anyone with a working brain should doubt any claims made by anyone including themselves. Humility just clutters up quick back-and-forth conversations in this kind of environment, however I don't see myself claiming badass status with this topic, just that I practice and have some experience so I can stand more firmly than someone simply spouting theory. And of course there were plenty of comments implying the poster would just shoot me if we crossed paths in the woods (though I think mostly in the other thread).

a few or even several sessions at survival camps
is no substitute for a lifetime spent in the habitat.

Very, very true. That's why you exchange contact info with classmates, then get together and practice. We have the luxury of years before it gets really wacky. Born Apache would have been great, 200 yrs ago, but these schools are the best I got.

real survival is very local, very specific and detail-dependant.
you must know the vegetation of your own area,
not what grows in the next state over.

False. And True. Shelter is shelter, water is water, fire is fire, food is food. Some plants are very widely distributed, like trees, and the Tracker school also teaches ways to figure out if something is edible that you have not seen before, but that takes a LOT of practice and I am not yet at a point where I would dispense with guidebook verification, but I'm further along than a rote beginner. A luxury we all now have is to explore the various habitats of this continent and learn the plants county-wide, state-wide, and continent-wide. Not all, or even many, but enough edible/medicinal/otherwise useful ones to survive.

a thousand little details
and ignorance of any one
can kill you.

That's a point I've been trying to express the whole time! It's no different for an agrarian/stockpiler survivalist, I might add, it's just that the lethal details might differ. Pure survival offers no guarantees; it's about probability and pure survival makes one aware of many of those little details. Best to explore them now, when the ER is still open, is what I'm advocating.

[Hippie3]

to say
shelter is shelter and food is food
grossly over-simplifies the actuality.
big difference between igloo and lean-to,
big difference between gathering berries and noodling catfish.
and i daresay
humility is not an obstacle to communication,
moreso the reverse.
one wonders why navy SEALS are going to survival school
but hey, why not.
you lost me at flesh/spirit border
but nice reply anyway.
other than the fact that you seem to think
that since this website discusses entheogens
then it's not 'worthy' of your best efforts,
a point you've made at least twice now.
that's a backhanded slap across our face,
but then a guy in tune with the spirit
already knows that, eh ?