Stages of survival?

[finallyME]

Are there stages of someone getting into the whole survival/bushcraft/prepper lifestyle? I know some of you are going to jump in and say those are three completely different areas....and you would be right. But beginners don't know that. They think it is all one and eventually find out if they like any or one in particular..


So my question....what are the stages that we either see in others...or ourselves? Rick says he is DONE, has enough food/supplies. Newbies always come on here with the ROTTW mentality. That seems to be the first stage. What are the others?

[Rick]

I don't think I ever had any stages. I never wanted to run of to the wilderness. I never wanted bug out property. I've never believed in dooms day, end of the world or collapse of society. I accept that anything is possible but most of it is not very likely. I've always been more concerned about weather and some man made events (meth lab, train derailment, factory accident kind of stuff). I think there are others on here that feel the same way. So I guess it's an individual thing.

[natertot]

For me, I didn't get into the prepper mentality until almost four years ago after I severely injured myself, but has evolved from my youth.

I grew up camping, hiking, hunting and fishing. This expanded into what many call bushcraft in my teen years. Really, I just wanted to see how much I could "rough it". From that, I have pressed any and all camping gear into service for emergencies and now I acquire more here and there for the family. After I got hurt, I started taking first aid training more serious and started stocking a lot of basic first aid supplies. This has come in handy for the entire family from minor cuts and scraps to getting by for the weekend to make it to the doctor. Even KyRat met up with me last month for a weekend camp where another buddy of mine cut himself. Out came the first aid kit and camp continued! I am also a tinkerer by nature and acquire tools and parts from all that which has come in handy and can be pressed into service if needed. This included plumbing to electrical and carpentry to welding. I also tinker with guns and reloading, although I can't compare to KyRat on that subject! A few years ago, I have started to stockpile food and started learning some food preservation practices.

Long story short, I live life and pick up stuff along the way that would prepare me and my family for emergencies. I focus more on natural disasters, loss of utilities, and small bouts of civil unrest. Those three things tend to be the most common. The only large scale thing that concerns me is war on U.S. soil. I really wouldn't be surprised if one arrived in the next 5-10 years.

[kyratshooter]

There was a time when I was a doomsday prepper, but that was before they called them doomsday preppers. We were survivalists back then, but the media did a real number on that term.

I must say that I left that realm of thought when I realized the long term food supplies I had purchased because the world was surely going to end at any moment went past their 30 year shelf life. The food was out of date and the world was still here, WTH they told me I needed this stuff!!!!

The charlatans that advocate that lifestyle and strip folks of their money are as pitiful as televangelists offering Gods rewards for your contributions. They are still spouting out the panic laden warnings. The same people with the same message. All they did was change the color of the cover of the book they wrote back in 1975.

Same social warnings,
Same financial warnings,
Same government warnings (but that one has been a close run thing).

My concerns gravitated back to what started my path into preparedness, weather disasters, natural disorders and regional collapse of the grid. Those are things I have seen and have lived through, and due to my skills and equipment I was ready to cope with.

I must admit that I have more stored food than the average person, but that has always been something my family did. I have also seen trucker strikes that stripped supermarket shelves for weeks and periods if sudden unemployment. (Unusual for a teacher but they closed my school!)

I no longer have to worry about unemployment, but if someone gets really mad as my conservative rhetoric and shuts down my pension I can eat for a while.

I live on a "homestead" because I have come to love the rural lifestyle and enjoy keeping critters and having access to open land.

The outdoor stuff is recreation. I just enjoy doing it. I enjoy collecting the gizmos and teaching other people how to be comfortable in the woods.

The guns and knives??? Well those are my contribution to posterity. I have to leave the kids something to fight over when I die.

[crashdive123]

I've never gone through the ROTTW or dooms day phases either. My preparations have always been focused on what I have prioritized as most likely, with weather related events being at the top of the list. Over the years as I have expanded my list I have found that most of my previous preps have covered most other scenarios. Sure, there are some additions or deletions for some preps - terrorism being one of them (live in close proximity to three military bases and and NFL stadium) but for the most part things were covered.

[hunter63]

Hard to keep up with the terminology....back in the '70 and '80's....It was Homesteading....Mother Earth News, Back to the Land, doin' for your self, with the goal self sufficiency, along with hunting fishing and camping.....

This is a extension of my folks and GP's living thru a depression and a WWII, in a small town with gardening, food processing, hunting for food..... all the other skills I was brought up with........and of course putting food by...

So it was natural to want my own "Place" in the country, so the Homestead became a BOL....purchase and work began.

Preparing for any possible problems financially.....came about in 1999...Factory closed, both DW and I were laid off.....51 and unemployed......kinda scary.

But by having "Prepped" (new term)....we not only got by, but expanded our horizons....returning to school, changing careers, and pressing on....and so far worked out.

Not gonna head for the hills unless I want to....but "The Place" it's there.

So too old and need too many meds, to RATTW ......gonna just keep, keeping on......

BTW, all this stuff is a great reason to buy toys, tools, and gear........Prepping.....You see.

[Rick]

Oh, yeah. I do appreciate the reasoning behind all of it. How else can you justify so many guns in so many calibers? Zombies, Roaming Hordes, Aliens, Atomic Spiders, Invading Armies. "Yeah, but honey, think of the kids. Atomic Spiders. You want them to be eaten alive?!"

[randyt]

atomic spiders? did somebody say 50 BMG?

[natertot]

Oh, yeah. I do appreciate the reasoning behind all of it. How else can you justify so many guns in so many calibers? Zombies, Roaming Hordes, Aliens, Atomic Spiders, Invading Armies. "Yeah, but honey, think of the kids. Atomic Spiders. You want them to be eaten alive?!"

Mrs. Tot doesn't seem to mind these excuses! Don't forget government robots!

[Rick]

'Zactly. They love us. Or at least pretend to so no matter how lame the excuse they usually let it go. Besides, they know if we spend $500 for a gun that equals $1000 shopping for them. So......Besides, their excuse is always, "It was on sale". How lame is that?

[pete lynch]

My preps, if you even want to call them that, are mostly along the lines seeing it through a natural or man-made disaster.
My survival skills are for going out into the wilderness and being able to get back in one piece.

[TXyakr]

I don't know about stages but my contention or theory has always been that many of the skills a person learns "surviving" or just camping, primitively or whatever in the wilderness can help them live in suburbia if conditions deteriorated for whatever reasons. I have observed over the decades that there is far more small game and even fish in most suburban and even big city neighborhoods than most wilderness areas for many reasons. If necessary I know were several hundred pounds of beaver and nutria can be trapped within Dallas County and also surrounding counties where much more is available including suburban deer that most people have no idea is there because they don't hike and paddle in these urban areas, especially after heavy rains. Also more water and trees (fuel) etc. I sure as heck hope most of the population runs to the wilderness. ;-) I'll stay were the food and water is and use my wilderness skills here. There is a lot of briar and poison ivy infested brush along most of the creeks and rivers near most large and small towns and I know how to stay hidden there for a few days or longer if needed. Occasionally at group campouts people come to visit where I have hung my hammock and curse up and down at all the briars they get suck on, but I know exactly were to step even barefooted. North American forests are super friendly compared to the Amazon river valley. But it is best just to stay in your home and defend it from fire, flood (have over 100 sand bags etc.), and people who may think it is abandoned if no lights are on. My wife and kids have gone to a motel when the AC failed in Texas during mid August but I stay, I have camped in far worse and know how to adapt to it. My mother was telling me just yesterday that she took some summer graduate classes at University of Oklahoma in Norman back after WWII and the old army style dorms did not have AC, the temps often were not under 90F all night, her roommate from Switzerland almost did not make it, she would get up in the middle of the night to take a cold shower. Life without comforts of modern civilized society are more difficult for some people. Better to take a hammock and hang it under some deciduous trees down by the pond where the wind blows, sleep there. ha ha ha

Absolute worst thing about staying in an urban area if things fell apart for a long time is that the water would be badly contaminated so a very good water purification system for chemicals, viruses, and everything else is extremely important! Many plants and fish take up chemicals pollutions that are not as big a problem in organized society, but would be if the controls such as they are were no longer in place. (Sort of like in Haiti, China and other parts of the world.)

[Sarge47]

Like Kyrat we have more food than the normal person. However it's not because we fear TEOTWAWKI! It's because of something that really happened to us years ago. I was between jobs and we literally ran out of food. I don't remember the reason the government employee gave me but we couldn't get food stamps and we ran completely out of food in the house. If not for some caring relatives I don't know what we'd have done. I didn't even have a vehicle to get out and fish or hunt! That ain't ever going to happen again. On the "prepper" side of things we look at what really can happen to us. A short while back I had to do some fast talking to get back to my home through a police barricade. Seems like there'd been a report of a man with a gun in my neighborhood! As I pulled up to the house I saw two police SUVS that were used by K-9 cops. the guard outside my digs was armed with an M-16! They found the guy okay, a returning vet that was still having issues based on what he'd been through over there and they got him talked down. A half a mile away there is a railroad line that allows many trains to go past, some with suspicious cargo. With all of the rain we've been getting there has been a lot of flooding. these problems are probably not going to make the next episode of Doomsday Preppers, but are the more realistic problems that we're prepared for. As for the guns, well, there was this terrible canoe accident...

[finallyME]

So, are people that go through the ROTTW phase just a flash in the pan? I see a lot of people here that seem to be (not you guys specifically). If someone asks about ROTTW, it seems that either they never come back, or they change their mind. My family has been putting food up for years without any other thought towards prepping. They will continue food preps no matter what else they do or don't do. But that is more religious based than anything else. I went through the ROTTW phase, but I did it when I was 12 and 13. By the time I was 16 or 17, I had changed my mind....mostly due to the opposite sex.

[kyratshooter]

really can not find fault with some of the "doomsday perppers", especially the older group. I can well remember the Cuban Missile Crisis and the feeling of impending doom.

We were all going to die. Everyone was just waiting for the Russians to press the button and we were quite sure they would.

No one was prepared for a nuclear war. No one knew how to prepare. No one knew if you could survive a nuclear war.

While the "Crisis" was still going on people started building bomb shelters, stockpiling food, gathering information....

I still remember my own parents attitude, "If its our time its our time, I wouldn't want to live in the rubble anyway."

So, the first exposure to "prepping" some of us ever had was to the full blown doomsday experience which was divided into two camps; those who bent over an kissed their butts goodbye, and those who sealed themselves into a bunker willing to face the ruined earth a month latter. Not much in between ground in that scenario.

And keep in mind that the cold war lasted until 1989. While some of you were not born in 1989 some of us were grown men with families and had grown up, married and raised families under the threat of the mushroom cloud.

And with our latest government deals we will probably get to die under a mushroom cloud.

It ain't over yet.

[hunter63]

So, are people that go through the ROTTW phase just a flash in the pan? I see a lot of people here that seem to be (not you guys specifically). If someone asks about ROTTW, it seems that either they never come back, or they change their mind. My family has been putting food up for years without any other thought towards prepping. They will continue food preps no matter what else they do or don't do. But that is more religious based than anything else. I went through the ROTTW phase, but I did it when I was 12 and 13. By the time I was 16 or 17, I had changed my mind....mostly due to the opposite sex.

I think a lot fo ROTTW that come on here are just looking for attention.

Otherwise why would you use a device, to get on the web, then register to tell a bunch of strangers, that they are fed up with the world of people, and want to ran away and live off the grid....with their big azz knife.

Then argue with anyone that says "Are you really sure you want to do this?"

So, just GO. Already....even the biggest rock thrown in the lake, will only leave ripples for a short time.
Good luck with that.

I worry about and take care of myself, and family....that's a pretty big job all by it self......even with out a Red Dawn or Zombies.

[kyratshooter]

As for stages of survival and the mention of Red Dawn,

How many of us are no longer among the fantasy fighters and have more resemblance to the old granddad of the two girls, passing out .45 Colt reloads and sage advice.

[natertot]

Kyrat, I agree with you a lot. While I am not about the doomsday preppers, war is something that I fear continually lurks around the corner and I agree with you thoughts on "current gubment deals". Funny you mention red dawn and "fantasy fighters". My plan is hunker down, keep the family safe and cared for, and keep in strong contact with family and friends. Outside of that, I would only pull together with others I trust to pull off any crazy stunts that have a fool proof method to get away with it. Other than that, I will only take care of targets of opportunity that will not result in consequence. Those have always been my thoughts to a very narrow degree. Reality will change some thoughts, this is unavoidable.

[MrFixIt]

Interesting discussion.
Like others, I was raised to put food and supplies by for the "hard" times, or if an ice storm knocked out the power for a few days, or if a tornado came through (and one did destroy my parents house in '84).
In 1999, when the end of the world was going to happen, my mom kinda freaked out and started hording canned food, toilet paper, etc.
I myself have had "survival" training in the military, but it was more geared to getting away/out of enemy territory.
I now prep for natural disasters in my area, other than that, I like to go out into the woods to have a good time and unwind.

[Seniorman]

I know what "TEOTWAWKI" and "SHTF" mean, but "ROTTW"???? What does that acronym mean?

S.M.