Development and Execution of a Plan

Author Allen Currie

A generic response to FAQ. (Many of you wondered what I was doing)
In Feb. 1987 a short article on the Toronto Globe and Mail jiggled the jigsaw enough that a picture formed for me. No entity, you, me, or us together as a government can dispose of our future by borrowing forever. The US was, I thought at the time, hugely indebted. Little did I know what hugely was.
By Oct. 1987 when the crash came I thought I was positioned well for the end of the world as we know it (TEOTWAWKI) I had a large leveraged position using the tools of the time in gold. Gold rocketed up and back down just as fast when a secret government group intervened in the market. (The Plunge Protection Plan team, now renamed to something like The Presidents Working Group on Capital Markets or something.) Over time I also discovered that a number of my other assumptions were flawed, notably as to how society would react to adversity.
I began to research other financial and empire collapses as far back as the Roman Empire in hopes of finding patterns of what happened to the average Joe during and after such a collapse. Unfortunately many or perhaps most accounts dealt with the political leadership rather than the mundane. As I researched my thinking changed and became more focused.
The first rules are keep it simple and search for win/win results. For instance, it might be beneficial in TEOTWAWKI to have sweeteners available. Bees might be a good choice. But do not RELY on anything you do not have experience with. The books available spend 98% of their words dealing with conditions one will encounter only about 1 or 2 % of the time. Mostly bees are really easy to keep. Just keep enough ‘supers’ on the hive to keep them busy. (Supers are those boxes that hold the wooden frames that holds the wax that the bees use to store honey.) However, if you put supers on too quickly the bees only fill the centre two frames all the way up.
If you don’t add supers quickly enough the bees will feel crowded and start to develop queen cells which grow into queens. As the queens develop the queens fight and at least one queen will take most of the workers and swarm or fly away. If you can find the swarm, which you often can, and can move it into a new hive, which mostly you can’t, neither hive will produce much honey this year. Hardly enough honey to winter them over, providing you know how. Best is to take the swarm back to the original hive and kill the extra queen as she walks back in. It is usually fairly easy top spot her.
Another thing that will make them feel crowded and swarm is if you don’t line up the spaces between the frames. They never get into the next super you have added and feel crowded. Swarm.
Yet, if you can read bee activity you can look into the hive once or twice a month and have completely happy bees. Experiment as much as your available resources and time permit, particularly during these ‘normal’ times but do not rely on what you only theorize about.
Another keep it simple rule is not to expect modern surroundings to survive. I was talking to a like-minded friend recently saying I was buying 50 pound boxes of nails and other fasteners.
“Why?”
“How many small steel mills do you know of? If people don’t have money or the interest in spending it, they won’t buy. Those large companies need a large volume just to break even. If they are losing money they will close. Even if the demand comes back in a couple of years the machinery will be all rusty (that which has not been vandalized) and it will be expensive to get back up running. Not only that but they will have to find an open firebrick manufacturer to make their furnaces work, or an open nickel mine for additives to steel.”
I eventually asked myself what is the absolute minimum I need to survive? (Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.) I studied what the pioneers, who could only transport limited amounts to their new location, found most valuable, and then which modern developments would have made their life more comfortable/easier.
Largely the choices were; sharp edges, particularly of steel.( Axes, saws, knives and tools for working the land.) Things that multiplied their strength, (hoists and leverage) and a varied range of plant seeds (Which many forgot.) Especially important modern developments that would have made their lives easier are modern insulation, sheet plastic, hydraulic heavy lift jacks.
Now that I had an idea what type of things might happen after a collapse (Operation Phoenix mentions many types with a couple of major exceptions. 1) Roving bandits who find delight in enslaving or killing to get what they want. They usually leave when the population is killed or runs out of food or whatever it is they want. 2) Con artists, also usually murderous. An example in the USSR when it went down; Con artist approaches poor elderly who owned their own “condo” apartment and need money for food. “I will buy your condo for cash today and you will have the right to live in it till you die.” Life expectancy was about two minutes after the deal was signed. The con artist even took back his cash. Needless to say corruption was the norm. Lots of suicides where the deceased shot himself in the back of the head. Twice.) I had an idea of what TEOTWAWKI might play out as.
My goal was clear. The less visible and the further away you are from the fan, the better. A tank of gasoline away from a major centre comes to mind. Now that I had parameters I began to research where I wanted to be. I studied soil maps, weather maps and patterns, tectonic plates and their movements, cycles, etc. etc. I eventually settled on two areas as preferable. One was on the west coast where a really positive factor influenced me greatly. Mankind has survived in those valleys for over 10,000 years. I found a remote area with only one small highway leading to the general vicinity and lots of virgin forest. Weather was exceptionally good. I tried to estimate what might happen given our world changing weather patterns. I found the warm Japan current that flows from the hot equator up the west coast and provides this wonderful weather was slowing and in danger of stopping entirely.
Not only would this beautifully warm weather cease, but there was another factor. Mother nature uses the Japan current (and the Gulf stream) to move heat calories from the equator to the poles. Water, per cubic whatever can hold and move many calories. If the Japan current ceases, then mother nature will still try to move those calories using the only tool available to her. But the only medium available is air which won’t hold nearly as many calories so you need to move a much larger volume of air much faster. Huge storms are inevitable daily or continuously. Add the tectonic plate movement danger at this location and……….
The second area did not have such beautiful weather but a warm climate zone from the US did poke its nose up into Canada. As well, research indicated that even during the massive droughts of the ‘30’s the area had adequate rainfall. (probably because of its proximity to those large weather modifiers, the great lakes.) Today it might be termed a temperate rain forest with a stunning variety of native flora and fauna. Admittedly it was on a long dormant fault line. (I had no sooner moved my camp there than there was a 3.4 quake. Not big in terms of Japan or Indonesia, but it was a wakeup call.) I then began a personal, on the spot search for a specific area to settle on. Much of that area is crown land.
Show me a politician who doesn’t have a pet scheme to create jobs and increase the tax revenue and I will show you a fairy tale or a long dead politician. All you have to do is find a good story that will fit his scheme and all sorts of good things are possible. On the other hand the petty rules and paperwork are a royal pain. One scheme that is pretty universal is mineral rights. I will use this as my example although your mileage may vary. In our jurisdiction one needs a prospectors license, ($25 and an acceptable name and address) plus staking tags, ($10-$25 or so max, depending.) Claims are 400X400 meters or about 1,300 feetX1,300 each and you can stake up to one square mile worth of claims. ($28 per claim registration fee. )
Once you have staked your claim(s) you can apply for an occupancy permit (normally one must move ones camp at least 100 meters every 21 days—Fine if it is a tent.) Cost about $50 or less for an indefinite or until the claim is either abandoned or you fail to meet their rules. No taxes or anything else except you have to do a minimum of $400 work per year per claim. Under the current rules that comes to two to four days work per year. Or you can say hire a dozer or whatever. PLUS the paperwork of course. All the government coordinated records on you get kinda messed up because you are not acting like a NORMAL citizen. If they should start looking for you and KNOW you have a claim, these records just help them. On the other hand, it is unlikely that a search through your drivers license is going to turn up a mining claim.
To this point, while I was busily saving/collecting things I thought I might need, I had invested over five years in research, mostly thinking if I had my plans in order, I could react quickly enough to stay ahead of a collapse. In 1992 or 3 I began my novel for two reasons; 1) I wanted to give back” to humanity for having lived in the best time and place mankind has ever known. 2) I wanted to see how my logic looked in cold hard type.
I had established (subject to change) my goals and my future predictions. In theory only I chased a number of wrong thinkings, dead ends, and blind alleys. I will now drop out of the timeline and just comment on a number of points.
I have become a garage sale junky, a frequenter of second hand stores, dumps or garbage sites, and other similar places where I can pick up old, easily workable hand tools, barrels and other stuff I need or think might be useful.  Let me say that I have nothing against modern tech but am limiting ongoing operational tools etc. to what lasts a lifetime or was available in 1850. (in order that I be prepared for the worst.) For instance, I have no problem using a dozer to break land and tear out willows and their roots, because once broken it can easily be worked by hand or using horses or cattle. Breaking land by hand is a massive endeavour.
In running tests such as food shelf life to insure that practically my plans were right, I gradually stumbled to the conclusion that practical experience on site was essential for success. Thank God I did. What I had thought was three months work, mostly because of my mistakes, turned into nearly three years. i.e.. I was on a pension of just over $1,000 per month and was paying well over 50% in rent plus another 10%+ in storage for all the “stuff” I was accumulating. Add in food and fuel and saving was difficult.
I purchased a 40 foot steel ocean going container, intending to convert part of it into a habitation and the rest as a storage unit. Surprise. At a cost greater than the cost of the container I immediately had it hauled up to my campsite. My first big mistake. I knew I had to have it on skids for several reasons. {1) Part of the deal with the government was that it had to be mobile. Empty it still was mobile, but loaded it had to be on skids. 2) If I was wrong in my forecasts of a good spot, *I* wanted it to be mobile, etc.} I had desperately wanted to eliminate the 10% of income cost of storing my “stuff” above. As well, a habitation and ones mental state in winter require light and a fire. That means windows and a stovepipe hole.
If I had had any smarts at all I would have sourced and purchased used overhead crane rails (for skids) before I purchased the container. (Overhead crane rails are a special steel.)  Fabricating and attaching the skids back in civilization would have been easy and relatively inexpensive. Cutting steel walls to insert windows in isolation is well nigh impossible, but one or two hours work at a regular mechanics shop. As it is I now have to find and transport logs that are big enough and straight enough to the 50 foot level to carry a now heavy container.  (Not to mention the need to keep the whole thing level because trees tend to be somewhat larger at the base.)
I moved my “stuff” into the container, but now it was full and in the middle of a forest with lots of flammable stuff around. Cutting windows, etc. involves some very hot sparks both inside and outside the container. Starting a forest fire would not please government, and burning my “stuff” would disappoint me. I had to build my barns to store my “stuff” before I could put windows and insulation in the new false walls of the container. (R14 Roxul, a mineral fibre.) Piling all those cardboard boxes outside in the rain, snow and for the bears to maul don’t work so good. Actually tarps have been a godsend. Go to a lumberyard and beg for some of the plastic wrappings they use to transport plywood, etc.
Building barns had its own problems. I couldn’t even call them barns. (A tool crib and a storage unit/shed.) Say you are all alone as I was. You have a 5/8 X 4X8 foot piece of chip board that you want to attach to the wall tight under the rafters. You don’t want any spaces as an anti bug and pest measure so your measurements must be accurate. (The easiest way to keep your animals warm in winter is to build small, tight, and insulate.) You get your chip board exactly right and remove one hand to hold a nail to tack it down to mark it, and the other to hold the hammer. No matter what the darned thing slips at least a little. Not a good way to get an accurate measurement. What takes two men about 20 minutes can take one man six or seven hours. And you do want things to be secretive. If someone else knows where you are located, the news will get around faster. Some officials will know of course, but you hope your data will get lost in the huge amount of data on file about what you are theoretically doing, and not where most officials will look as a normal place to look. Eg your drivers license.
I had always put a high priority on barns for the few species of animals I expected to purchase. (Bees, rabbits, goats, pigs, chickens, horses, dogs.) Take care of your animals first and they will take care of you. (I still lack the infrastructure to support all these species although most scrounge well. Eg horses are real hay burners and you need lots of hay. If the animals are out rustling for food they are very vulnerable to things like wolves which we have a lot of.
My successes include my garden which is also portable on a sledge constructed of poles nailed onto log skids. Few animals will walk in poles and most who will are meat predators. Chicken wire will keep rabbits off. My dog keeps both the smaller animals and the long necked deer and moose at a distance. I rescued some fridges from a dump, turned them on their backs, punched drain holes in their backs, and filled them with dirt. They ride well on the sledge and are like raised gardens. The metal on the outside makes good sheet steel for which there are many uses. Then I discovered that old bathtubs worked really well and they already had a drain in the bottom. I have also used extra large pots and plastic barrels cut in half. (Also rescued from the dump.)
What you are first interested in during normal times is to get established (not necessarily yet fruiting) plants so variety is possible in your diet later. You won’t have time to can or dry the results anyway in the first year. It is most comforting to have a variety in your diet. A steady diet of only potatoes or turnips isn’t very nutritious or satisfying but if there is nothing else, one will do it. Perennial spices such as mint will go a long way towards making life more comfortable. I have 4 types of mint, rhubarb, lavender (I think Grin) horse radish, hops vine (mankind loves its vices and beer is a great trade good.) 2 types of apple tree (I want more) three types of currants, three types of grape, bamboo (Watch closely. It is very invasive.) one commercial dwarf and one native crab apple, sweet cherries (I need sour.) Walnut, Chestnut (native) oak (native) one smaller pine nuts (Need Korean Pine with much bigger nuts.) Blue berries, Service berries or Saskatoons, black and red raspberries. (Haven’t figured out my strawberries (Which a smallish variety is native) Larger commercial strawberries tend to produce well only during the first two years. Something keeps getting my gooseberries for two years. Don’t have pears or plums yet, a very high priority. Most other fruits except Kiwi suffer and die from the winters, and Kiwi requires special handling.
I have a large variety of cured or set seeds for annuals. (Except potatoes which is a problem, but not major. (Setting seeds usually involves only freezing them for about 9 weeks.) I buy more seed each year, however I can get by with the older seed if necessary. A small percentage of the older seeds will germinate if you are/have been careful. You can force the few that germinate to bolt and set seeds so you can have the species next year. Be especially careful that you have things like potatoes, turnip and cabbage (for sour kraut), major belly fillers.
Preserving food is the next big consideration. On high priority get a large steel on steel pressure cooker. (Rubber seals deteriorate.) If you have the rights to do so before TEOTWAWKI (I don’t) the next priority is a large root cellar. I plan 6 ft X 8 ft X 6+ ft high.) My son made a small crawl in sized one out of cement as a test. Temperature stayed above freezing and below 40 degrees F all year round. Dig a bit of a hole (make sure it is dry and any water will drain away easily.) Make your cement box and insulated entrance and heap lots of dirt on top. At least 18 inches. A family of 4 needs about 700 canning jars for a years supply of canned goods. (Plus lots of extra lids etc.)
Other methods of preserving include drying, smoking, salting, and pickling. Sun drying is new to me as we don’t have the right weather (long hot sunny days after the fruit or whatever is ready.) I have discovered a way to compensate.  Take two windows of similar size (Which I rescued from a dump.) Make a shallow box at least as big as the outside of the windows, paint the inside black. Put one window inside the box. (Better if tilted toward the noon sun.) Place your tray of whatever to be dried on the window. Add some spacers at the corners so the air can flow through and take the moisture out with it. Place the second window on top. I have also purchased a quantity of stainless steel window screen and hardwood strips for frames to make drying trays.
I also have secured some glass patio doors for use as hinged lids on a cold frame. Build 4 walls (no bottom, it is soil) with the back much higher than the front. Use the patio doors as a hinged lid. (They should be as close as practical to being at right angles to the April noon day sun since 90 degree angles make the most heat.) (Preferably the unit should be placed against a south facing wall) Paint the walls black. Make sure you have really good soil in the bottom. You can plant most seeds in the coldest part of the winter. They won’t germinate till the temperature is right. The unit will give your plants a several week head start on the growing season. One extreme danger and a lessor one. Once the seeds have germinated watch the interior temperature closely. If you have built well the interior of the cold frame can get hot enough to cook the tender young plants, even while there is still snow on the ground. The minor danger is also true of the mini green houses which I love. The plant cannot be taken directly from the greenhouse effect to the still chilly outdoors. It has to be hardened, or gotten used to the range of temperatures. Raise the lid a bit to cool.
You can of course dry things in a smoke house. Just don’t make smoke. On the farm in the 30’s we used to have a smokehouse about the size of the little brown shack out back to smoke sides of pigs and beef. There is all sorts of good, adaptable advice on the internet. Smoking is not confined to meat. The nitrates from fire are a preservative.
An old trick. Wrap your smoked meat in butcher paper and bury it in the grain bin. (Barley or wheat is best.) It keeps well all summer and no pests bother it.
Another aside. If you keep rabbits, consider a worm farm. Worms love rabbit poo and make potent fertilizer which is going to be in short supply.
I have already spent more time on this missive than I have readily available. Some short pointers for your own research.
I made up 3 ring binders with several divisions. Food, Shelter, Clothing, Water, Energy, Health, Communications, Defense, Etc. Then I split each into sub divisions like Food; Animals, Plants, etc. Then sub-sub divisions. Food Animals; Goats Pigs, etc. Then I assigned a page in each of the sub-sub divisions; Sources of stock. Required specifications. (eg Horses, hay.) Usual disease problems and solutions. Advantages and disadvantages and overlapping requirements with species. (Donkeys usually hate bears and will often attack them successfully.)  Eg the worm farm in conjunction with rabbits and fertilizer or uses the same food as another species.
Hit the net for several  types of sites.
Survival sites. IMHO they plan to spend more time holed up in their bunkers with their guns than they can afford. They think guns will solve all their problems, just as gold bugs seem to think gold will solve all their problems. Defense and an acceptable medium of exchange are absolutely necessary of course but there are other things too. Nevertheless, both types of site come up with some real nuggets among the preaching.
The backwoods living sites are a gold mine for isolationists such as I.
International aid sites, particularly re the 3rd world. They often discuss cheap and effective subjects such as water filtration, Plumpinuts, etc. Great stuff.
Every one discusses problems and potential solutions that can usually be modified to suit your own needs. Some problems I have thought of, I have found creative answers to. Others I have not. Eg. Where did inland Indians get that necessity of life – SALT? I never did figure that one out, but I did solve my own problem of where to get salt for me.
Google things like RAM pumps (In use since the 1850’s) and horizontal windmills. Eg Word is that a new, 30-40% more efficient fan has been developed. I think steam is a sadly neglected subject, particularly with flash pans. Look for shelf lives of foods. Pasta has a huge shelf life. Most canned goods are long lived if not frozen, particularly true of corned beef, but strangely I have had no problems with canned stews. Watch the lid for bulging, and that hiss when the can opener hits it. Discard either immediately. Taste a bit. The taste may change a bit and be okay. One thing about best before dates. Particularly in the pharma industry the best before dates are a fiction, but also often across all the food groups. There is NO benefit for the pharma industry to get a longer best before date, and if they do note a longer than needed best before, the government makes them prove it at great cost. Lose Lose.
Two very important principles; 1) Build carefully to last indefinitely. At best replacement parts may be hard to come by. Don’t stint on quality. 2) If you take good care of your animals, they will take care of you.
As I mentioned earlier it is necessary to come to your own assets (which include experience) your circumstances, and how you foresee the future. (and none of us will be exactly right about that.) There is no single sound bite solution that fits all circumstances. Imagination will overcome most problems you encounter. A lack of money, the most common excuse, has not stopped me.  Mind you, I have always thought money was easy.

Good luck
Allen

Related posts:

1. Operation Phoenix Chapter 10 part 2
2. Operation Phoenix Chapter 4
3. Operation Phoenix Chapter 8
4. Operation Phoenix Chapter 11
5. Operation Phoenix Chapter 9

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