Far From the Madding Crowd...

Get out of the cities. You will read that advice in every survival oriented blog. Get out or die. To an extent that is true. I can hardly imagine what the situation would be like in a city like Toronto or New York or London in the case of a major collapse. It would be hell on earth.

But just how reasonable is that bit of advice? The steps that the survival gurus advise usually go more or less like this:

1. Find a secure rural retreat in an isolated area with good water and soil suitable for raising your own food.

2. Give up your city job, and instead relocate to your retreat where you will somehow find work that will allow you to develop your retreat, complete with fortified dwelling and off grid power.

3. Sight in your weapons and wait for the apocalypse. Defend yourself from the hordes of starving city folks.

4. Emerge in the reconstruction as some sort of neo-feudal lord. This is your right, of course, as you are one of the chosen few that followed steps one through three.

Unfortunately, few of us can afford to find and purchase the land for those perfect retreats, and fewer still can afford the development to the standard often advised. And if we all take that advice, it’s going to make for a far more crowded landscape, and a far more expensive one than before.

I’m also wondering where all those jobs are going to come from. We can’t all support ourselves writing survival blogs and writing books about dirt cheap survival retreats. For many people trying to relocate to rural areas, it will mean a sharp drop in income, which makes developing that hidey-hole in the backwoods a lot tougher.

I’m also amused to see that the survival gurus are sure of surviving the hypothetical ‘golden hordes’ that are supposed to come pouring out of the cities. There is the assumption that they will be better armed, better trained, and better positioned than the starving multitudes. Maybe, but let us remember that any retreat, no matter how well defended or positioned is still a static target.

Attackers of retreats will have a lot of advantages. They’re mobile for one, and retreaters are not. It doesn’t matter how much garden you have if you can’t water it without being sniped. Neither can you assume that they will be worse armed or trained than the average retreater. Likely they will not be in the initial stages, but those that survive to continue raiding will be skilled, aggressive ‘professionals’ that are going to be far more dangerous than anticipated. And likely armed as well or better than are their targets.

This doesn’t mean that the rural retreat philosophy is wrong or doomed. It’s just not perfect solution for large numbers of people. Nor are all cities necessarily doomed. Huge concentrations of populations are likely to fail, but there are thousands of villages and small towns and possibly even smallish cities that are likely to survive and possibly even thrive. A lot will depend on the local government and the local population.

So if you can’t afford that million dollar retreat, find an alternative. Consider the likely problems and look for solutions. There is more than one way to be prepared, and more than the simplistic golden horde scenario to prepare for.

In any kind of calamity, those that seem to fare the best and recover the soonest are those groups that pull together and help one another for the common good. Perhaps we should forego thoughts of retreating in splendid isolation to focus on how to survive as families, groups, and communities.

'Wilderness' retreating

Well, I’ve just returned from my annual retreat in one of Manitoba’s wonderful provincial parks. It was great, once again a time to relax and clear my mind and feed my soul. One night, sitting around the campfire, the discussion turned to the big What If? Once again, someone raised the prospect of retreating to the ‘wilderness’ of a provincial park. Just in case there is someone out there thinking that this might be a good idea, let’s look at why (in my opinion) it is not.

The first ‘pro’ that was raised around the campfire that night was the isolation of the park, a complete fallacy. While in the event of a major crisis, it might be a very good idea to get out of the cities, thinking that tens of thousands of other Manitobans that regularly visit the parks won’t have the same idea is naïve. You’ll be isolated all right, along with hundreds or even thousands of others with the same idea. Which brings me to part two of that idea: Most of the parks in Manitoba aren’t really isolated. There are good roads or even highways to most of them, as well as communities nearby that service the tourist trade. There are some parks that are hard to get to, but they are mostly in the northern reaches of Manitoba, with fewer resources and harsher climates.

The second problem concerns non-natural resources such as medicines, tools, ammunition and so forth. As discussed in my last post, sooner or later you’ll be looking at running out of something, and the likelihood of being able to buy, trade or make what it is you lack is even slimmer in the provincial parks than in many other locations. So assuming you get the isolation you were looking for (unlikely) you aren’t too liable to find too many others to trade with for resources. And if the more likely scenario of having thousands head for the hills occurs, what resources there are will quickly vanish with no way to replenish them. You’re screwed either way.

Yet another problem is the idea of using natural resources. At least one person around the fire that night was convinced that they could live off the land in the unspoiled wilderness. This is perhaps the most enduring fallacy of survivalist thought. The fact is, it’s not that easy even where game is abundant. It takes a lot of time, skill and physical effort to sustain a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and even if I wanted to try it, a provincial park is the last place I’d like to attempt it. Generally, the more southern parks tend to be pretty heavily managed and manicured, mostly bare of larger game, and what little there is would be quickly hunted out. The same goes for the smaller creatures.

Even gathering plants would be iffy. While there are many useful plants in Manitoba, most of them don’t produce an appreciable amount of food energy versus the effort and time it takes to obtain and process them. It’s going to take a whole lot of burdock or cattail root to keep you from starving to death, and even then, they are available only during certain seasons.

I can hear some of you say that you plan to garden when you get set up. Even that can be a difficult proposition as many parks contain unique environments that are just not well suited to growing crops. And what will you be eating as you wait for your garden to grow? What if it fails?

I don’t want to discourage anyone from wilderness retreating, but a dose of reality is needed. Provincial parks are what city folk think of as wilderness. Even rural and farm dwellers really have little idea what wilderness is really like. In reality, the paths are few, the resources hard to obtain and the living far from easy in most unspoiled wildernesses.

If living in the woods were that easy, humanity would not have invented agriculture and the technologies to go with it. We wouldn’t need communities or social groups. We’d all be a bunch of modern day Jeremiah Johnsons living the good life. Truth is, the mountain men were dependent on society for markets for their goods and as a source of supplies. And they died from accident, disease, starvation and conflict at a far higher per capita rate than many others.

Don’t get the idea that I’m discouraging people from finding isolated areas to which to retreat, or from planning on hunting, fishing and gathering as activities to supplement their food stores. I think it’s a good idea. What isn’t a good idea is to think a provincial park is the place to do so, or that they can rely on resources in the countryside to take the place of proper preparations now, especially the stockpiling of food.

If you must have your woodland fantasy of a cabin by a lake in the deep woods, fine. Just make sure that the cabin is stuffed full of your preps.

Originally posted October 15, 2010 @ MPN