Reflections on Preparedness

A small cemetery

            


    I was looking forward to a normal day today following a labor intensive weekend.  One of the errands I needed to run today was out to a hardware store.  This farm has a small family cemetery complete with headstones.  The gentleman who owned this farm prior to us, has aunts and uncles buried there, and he visits periodically.  He was a dear friend even prior to selling this part of it to us.   I promised, when we bought the farm, to make sure this area received reasonable care.   Periodically, the small area needs weed eating, some flowers trimmed or planted, a tree branch removed, or the leaves raked from the area of the graves and the stones. Our eldest son does most of the really tough work there, and the area looks very good.  We have been meaning to enclose the area with fencing, and place a heavy bench facing the headstones.   Finding the right heavy bench took some time, but we finally found the right one.  When the purchase was complete, we continued talking to the gentleman working in the hardware store.   He was talking about his own farm which is in a county neighboring our own.  He was very quick to volunteer that he and his friends have set up a survival camp for about forty people, because he fully expects a US financial collapse.  He and is friends are stocking supplies as if such a collapse is an absolute certainty.  He said that they were stocking American made tools, and lots of food.  He said they had some guns for hunting. Their focus has been several hand pumps so that they can get water easily.   We told him only that we were doing our best to put a little food away, but that we hoped that our government would make the necessary changes to prevent a collapse.  There is no point in telling someone you don't know, what and generally where, your supplies are.  It made me wonder if we should look into additional wells here.

Many places can have a hand pumped well.  Not every well can have a hand pump attached because a hand pump cannot pump water below a certain depth, so it depends upon the location of your water table.

 

A handpump well, operable without electricity.

 



            As we left and loaded our purchases in the sticky humidity into my sons truck, I thought about how much life has changed since 2008.  In 2008, my father passed expectedly, and a month later, our youngest son, passed unexpectedly. Nothing has been quite the same since.  Barack Hussein Obama was elected and one executive order after another took out nation farther from where I believe it should be.  Congress, with a very few exceptions, has been surprizingly non-courageous in setting limits.  It's almost as if we have been living a bad episode of Sliders, the X-Files, or Fringe, or a combination of all three programs since that time. There is the strange feeling that anything can happen now, and this can be unsettling. Despite the fact that the government says we have no inflation, the fuel, animal feed, and general food costs have risen sharply.  Our insurance costs to the farm are up 70% since 2008, because they say they have paid out more claims since then, than in any other period. My quest to find a new insurer did not find anyone who would insure a farm of this size for any less.  We used to be able to prepare for emergencies in a bubble. It did not leak into our errands, or time with friends.  Now, each day, someone talks to us about a collapse of some kind in the United States.  Somewhere along the road since 2008, prepping became mainstream.