Do You Know How to Survive without Electricity and Water?
This is a story about a man named Jed, out hunting to keep his family fed
I grew up on a poor working farm in the far northern county of Aroostook County, Maine. We couldn’t rub two nickels together most days. This was back in the 1960s and early ’70s. We always had plenty of food as the weather was good for growing things and the wild game was plentiful.
The downside was that in order to provide all of that bounty, we had to work 12-hour days nearly every day to take care of the gardens and farm animals, and then there was the hunting to provide a little more for the table during the long, cold winters.
We gained a strong work ethic and also how to survive in the wild as we hunted nearly every legal season for something to add to the table. And, once in a while we would sneak a little something extra off of the farmland when the game wardens were distracted elsewhere.
Most folks don’t know how to hunt, much less dress the kills out after bringing the dead carcasses home. That is a messy business having to drain the bodies of blood, clean out the insides and skin them before cutting up the meat for the freezer. Boiling and plucking feathers before getting the birds ready for the freezer.
How many young people are willing to do that now, if all hell breaks loose and our creature comforts such as a weekly trip to the local grocery store are no longer an option?
What happens when the food and water run out and you have to know how to find more from nature in order to survive another day? What and who are you willing to kill to keep living? I am a career soldier so coming from a poor farm where killing animals for food was a regular chore. Much the same as mucking stalls and milking the cow. A survival chore so we could make it through the long, hard winters.
As a soldier, I had no problem with killing enemy soldiers as it was just another chore to be done, much like hunting and butchering animals for food. Not that I ever ate my human kills but the mental attitude was the same. Just another chore.
Surviving the outdoor elements was a skill I learned as a teenager in order for me to help put food on the table. I learned a lot more of those types of skills as a soldier. You learn that a human can survive relatively insane uncomfortable conditions when it comes down to surviving another day. It is either that or you die. Very simple logic.
When, and I do mean when, the apocalypse comes for us all, and if I am still healthy enough to ambulate around, I will resurrect those old skills from my youth and be able to provide for whatever family members are in my care at that point. Or, just myself if that is the case.
Attitude is everything in life. How determined are you to survive another day? How far are you willing to go, mentally, to survive another day and night out in the elements? Do you have any survival skills to help you find food and clean water? Can you make a shelter and some makeshift footgear as needed? Can you scrounge for what you need and fight off any competitors for the same slim resources you may find? These are the existential questions you need to ask yourself.
As for learning survival skills, I recommend finding an old set of books called the Foxfire series. They are an old set of books on basic outdoorsmanship and survival skills. I still have my set on my bookshelf from years ago. I also have some books on herbal medicines and home medical practices.
That is another thing that will disappear once civilization collapses. Medical care. Doctors, what few are left by then, will be scarfed up by the rich elites like Bezos and Musk and others around the world. Nurses will be in the same boat. Do you know how to stitch up a deep cut? Do you know which plants you can pick to make medicines from? Can you set a broken bone? Do you know how to treat water to make it safe to drink?
Combat soldiers are trained for these things but we are only 1% of the population. This includes us, veterans. When the SHTF, we will be in high demand, if we can be found, because of our skill sets. But we can only take care of so many as we try to survive ourselves. That leaves the other 98% of the populace to fend for themselves.
Since 98% of the population will have to learn how to take care of themselves and maybe 25% will be outright criminal scavengers (I may be a little conservative here as I tend to think humans mean well), that leaves 73% of the rest of humanity to figure out how to feed and take care of themselves with little to no skills to do so.
Nature is very unforgiving. She doesn’t coddle people until they figure out how to survive in the wild. It is sink or swim. The question is, are you a swimmer or will you drown? In order to be a swimmer, you have to be willing to get wet and choke a little water at first until you learn how to swim without swallowing and inhaling a bunch of water.
If you are someone who gives up quickly when things get really hard, then you will die, hopefully quickly, because dying of starvation and dehydration is a slow, miserable death.
If you are too stupid to get out of your own way, then you will die quickly. Some other person will kill you or you will have a mishap in nature that will take you out. Maybe a fall off a cliff or break a leg somewhere with no help around. Any number of death scenarios come to mind. None of them clean or quick, other than a quick shot in a vital spot to drop you in your tracks over a crumb of food.
There will be a lot of dead humans eventually once civilization totally collapses. Most will die of hunger, dehydration, and disease, then the lesser percentages to avarice over leftover easy-to-retrieve resources. Humans will almost always seek the easy way out and a lot will die in the pursuit of ease.
Those of us who make it past the initial mass die-offs will have a good chance of surviving the aftermath, much like our ancestors survived the last ice age. The survivors adapt until things get better again. But that will be many generations later after all of the shock and loss of civilization as we know it.
How prepared are you for the end of things as we know it? Are you mentally prepared to do whatever it takes to survive and protect your families? Are you willing to put in the effort now to learn lifesaving survival skills for when you will need them? Someone in your family will need them someday soon. Maybe within the next two generations. For me, that is likely to be my grandchildren.
For you younger folks, maybe yourself and your children or maybe just your children, if you are in your 40s-50s in age.
Start learning now because it is coming. Scientists predict that a near-total collapse of the world’s food and water will come by the end of this century if things keep going the way they are.
That is about three generations from now. My great-grandchildren. As I am in my mid-60s, that means I need to start passing on my knowledge down to my grown children so that my future generations have a chance at surviving what’s coming.
Can you say the same? Are you willing to bet the survival of your future generations on their ability to learn these skills on the fly when the food and water run out? Lots will die but I plan to increase my descendant’s abilities to survive above the fray.
My two oldest sons are from the prior army so they have some skills taken from their service but I will need to teach them some extra skills I learned from the poor farm of my youth and my SERE school lessons.
For the rest of you, start scouring Amazon for copies of the Firefox books. For those with money, invest in one of the many survival schools available nowadays. All of this may save your or your descendants’ lives in the not-so-distant future.
