I thought I was ready when the time to be ready arrived. I wasn't. I was more ready than most people, but still not ready for what happened.
To this day, I don't know why it happened and apparently there's nobody left to explain it. It doesn't matter anymore anyway. What was is probably gone for a long, long time, and people like us have to pick up the pieces and get on with trying to live. I'm writing all this down in hopes that if and when things do get back to normal a lot of people will read it and do what all people should have done before.
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I started getting ready as more of a hobby than actually preparing for when "the shit hits the fan", or "SHTF" as the survivalists called it. There were many scenarios that would cause SHTF, none of which I thought would ever happen. The leading scenarios were about the world, or at least the US, going from normal to crisis to lawlessness in a matter of weeks or even days in some cases. You had your "the world economy is going to collapse" people, your "there will be another civil war" people, and your "another country will bomb and then invade the US" people.
I tended to discount these for what, to me at least, were logical reasons.
While the economy had gone belly up at least a couple times, the world didn't descend into chaos. Even though in at least some cases it took years to do so, governments managed to work through the depression and come out healthy.
Another American civil war would just be stupid. Civil wars have never worked out well. The group with the most resources always wins, and they usually aren't very nice to the losers. After most modern civil wars, the leaders on the losing side end up being executed for treason or some other offense. Why would any sane person even think about starting a civil war unless they were absolutely confident they could win?
While I supposed it was possible that some other country could launch nukes at the US, the result would be their own destruction as well. It was also possible some country could load up a million or so soldiers and ship them across the Pacific or the Atlantic with the intention of attacking the big cities on the East or West coast, but it's very probable they wouldn't make it. That many ships or planes would be spotted long before they posed any real danger and the US Air Force and Navy would end the threat before it got started.
Right behind these were "artificial intelligence will take over and eliminate the human race" and a global pandemic that kills most of the human population of the world.
While these made some decent novels and movies, they weren't all that realistic. I mean, artificial intelligence isn't really all that smart. AI can rapidly review data from a multitude of sources, develop conclusions from that data based upon its programmed algorithms, and then take or recommend actions based upon those conclusions and again, its programmed algorithms. It can further examine those actions and determine if they were correct and modify its logical process as needed.
At the time it happened, I was a civilian electro-mechanical engineer working on B1B flight simulators at Ellsworth AFB and my job required a thorough and current knowledge of that sort of thing because I was writing it into my machine control programs. Everything I'd read told me even the best artificial intelligence is really good at adapting its programming to different conditions and reporting any conclusions in appropriate language, but in reality is maybe actually as smart as a five-year old. Though the data set used can be enormous, any autonomous decisions are made just as a five-year old would make them -- by trial and error.
A self-driving car can learn where it is and where it needs to go, but it you want to transfer its "brain" to an aircraft or a robot, that requires a software change and a human has to do that. Artificial Intelligence can read most current languages spoken in the world and can be taught the phonetics to speak them correctly. It can also be taught to generate art, prose and poetry when given appropriate parameters. It can't just one day decide to become a best selling author or poet and start writing, or begin painting scenes that it visualizes on its own. It needs a human to ask it to do something or to tell it what to do. Yes, there can be some unforeseen consequences, but when all else fails, a human can always "pull the plug" and stop the computer.
A global pandemic was possible, but even in the worst pandemics like the plague and Spanish Flu, enough people survived to keep society going. Yes, the disease slowed civilization down, but civilization didn't die.
There were several other causes like natural disasters such as tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, blizzards and forest fires that could likely happen and cause significant stress on society. The more I thought about those causes, the more sense it made to do some preparation. It wouldn't hurt and if something did happen, I'd be prepared.
It was also a way to get back to quasi-reality from my job. Back then, I spent all my work days immersed in tuning the interactions between computer code and hydraulic servo valves and the response time of hydraulic systems, and I needed something a lot less complex to decompress on the weekends.
I started reading about what I would need and decided my best bet was to have a month's supply of food in my apartment and a shotgun for self-defense. The extra food was easily affordable since I wasn't married, lived in a two-room apartment, and worked too many hours to actually spend much of my income on anything else. I still had the single-shot shotgun I got as a kid so I could hunt rabbits, squirrels and pheasants on my dad's farm. I still did that when I had the time.
I stored a month's supply of canned and dried food in my bedroom and bought three boxes of buckshot to go with the box of bird shot I already had. I was all set... until I read some more and watched some videos.
One article I read asked the question, "What will you do if you're away from home when the shit hits the fan?" The answer was something called a "get-home bag" and was a small backpack filled with enough to get me from my office to home if there was trouble in the city or on the road.
I bought a small backpack and stuffed it with protein bars, six bottles of water, and a first-aid kit. Also in that backpack was a coffee can with a candle and a disposable lighter, but I'd always had those in my car. If you're stuck alongside the road in a heavy snow like we sometimes get during the South Dakota winters, it's nice to have a heat source so you don't freeze to death before the wrecker gets there. I was all set...until I read some more and watched more videos.
The opinion of all the experts on the internet was you should prepare to weather a crisis at home. That's where your food supply would be and you'd be familiar with the area, but the next question was, "What if you can't get to your home or if your home isn't there or if it isn't safe to go to your home?" The answer, actually three answers, were a "bug-out bag", a place to "bug-out" to, and to never let my gas tank get lower than three-quarters of a tank so I'd have the gas to "bug-out". I think that was when my hobby became sort of an obsession. Looking back now, I wish it had become an obsession a lot sooner.
Keeping my gas tank filled was something I already did during the winter. It's not unusual in my area of South Dakota to have a heavy snow that will cause traffic to back up for hours. Having a candle in a coffee can will keep you from freezing to death, but a full tank of gas and a car heater will keep you comfortable.
The bug-out bag was easy. It was just a scaled up version of my get-home bag. It was a bigger backpack filled with food for three days and water for a week. Since I might need to make a fire to cook and keep warm, I included a hunting knife, a hatchet, two disposable lighters, and a ferrocerium rod and striker in a metal box full of charred cotton cloth in case the lighters died. If I got wet or just needed some more layers, I had an extra set of clothing, and in case something happened to the clothing, a sewing kit.
According to everything I read, it might be that I'd have to fight my way out of something, and to do that, I bought a bigger first-aid kit in case I got hurt and had to fix myself up. Stuck in a pocket in the flap was an unloaded Sig P365 nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol with a hundred rounds of ammo to keep me from getting hurt. Carrying the pistol required me to get a state carry permit, but that was easy. After three visits to a gun range to practice, I spent one Saturday taking a class and then took my application and check for the fee to the local sheriff's office. A month later, I had my South Dakota carry permit in my wallet.
The place to bug-out to was harder. The articles I read said the place should be pretty isolated because looters would be roaming the countryside looking to take what they didn't have from people like me who did. Since I lived in an apartment, I'd probably at least have my neighbors begging from me. Montana seemed to be the favored location, but Montana was a five-hour drive from Box Elder, South Dakota where I had my apartment. Besides, I didn't have enough money to buy even a small place in Montana.
Dad's farm was closer. The six hundred acres where he'd run some cattle and raised hay wasn't exactly out in the middle of nowhere, but it was a little over twenty miles from the nearest city, that being Rapid City. I figured I'd just build a hideaway cabin to use for hunting and fishing the small river that ran through it. I did both there every year anyway, and with a small cabin, I could stay over a weekend instead of driving back and forth. If I needed it to bug-out, it would be there.
I still call the place Dad's farm, but it's essentially mine. He willed it to my mother when he passed and her will states that it will go to me when she passes. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it when that happened because the inheritance taxes would be huge, but I liked hunting and fishing there, so I was playing "wait and see". The land would never drop in value.
I was paying the taxes on the place because Mom couldn't afford to. I didn't want to continue to pay property taxes on the old house and outbuildings, so I had them torn down. Then I rented the place to a local cattle breeder. His cattle and the small herd of horses he ran there kept the old pastures and fields cropped down and the rent paid the remaining property taxes every year with a little left over to go toward the taxes I'd eventually pay.
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Once I'd decided to build a bug-out place, I started reading and watching videos about what I needed to build. I found people who recommended just a small log cabin, people who built what would have been called a "fall-out shelter" in the 1950's, people who built basically a full sized and equipped house, and everything in between.
