299 Days: The Preparation

Chapter 14 Survivalist

Grant was feeling his oats. He was not afraid to look at guns. Hell, he’d just bought one and successfully smuggled it into the house. He was invincible.

It was much easier going into a gun store the second time as opposed to the first. Grant went back to Capitol City and looked at all of the cool guns. Wow. He had forgotten how much he loved them.

The expense-check envelope in the car was full, so he bought a .38 revolver; a gently used Smith & Wesson with a three-inch barrel so it wouldn’t kick as much as a snub nose. It is hard to go wrong with one of those; simple to operate, and ammo is relatively cheap and plentiful. He went out to the gravel pit. It shot beautifully. He loved it.

He had fallen back in love with guns. They felt so good in his hands. When he handled one, he didn’t feel like a dependent suburbanite. Grant remembered how safe he felt with a gun. The ogre couldn’t hurt him when he had one. He was safe.

He went back to Capitol City and got a Crimson Trace laser grip for the .38. It put a red dot exactly where the bullet would go. It made aiming almost effortless. It was so easy that Lisa, or any new shooter who didn’t practice using guns, could do it in a stressful situation. And a revolver was very simple to operate; no cocking, no safeties, no magazine or slide that could jam.

At the gun store, Grant saw that guys buying handguns could avoid waiting five days to pick up a handgun if they had a concealed weapons permit. As whacked out as Washington State was, at least they had good gun laws. A permit was only $35, so he got one. He now had a concealable revolver and a permit to carry it.

But he didn’t carry it; that would be weird. He kept the permit secret from Lisa. She would think he was a gun-crazed nut. He put a trigger lock on the .38 and hid it where Lisa would never find it. He hid the box of .38 ammo; the one box of fifty shells. That should be enough.

As he was taking baby steps toward being prepared, the nagging thoughts about dependency were getting more intense and frequent. Grant kept thinking he should learn about things. He needed to learn — actually, relearn — how to survive. Not just how to build a fire in the woods. He needed to learn the survival mindset. He had to get in the habit of figuring out a solution on his own instead of depending on someone to supply him food or fix something.

Grant went to the bookstore to find books on “survival.” He was looking at the books secretly; he didn’t want anyone to know what he was looking at. It felt like the first trip to the gun store. It was like he was looking for a book like “Bestiality Illustrated.”

Grant meandered over to the “Outdoors” section of the bookstore and waited until no one was looking. Then he pulled a book, the Special Forces Survival Manual, off the shelf and looked at it, shielding it so no one could see the title.

That book had things in there about building a fire and making traps to get small game. That wasn’t the kind of survival knowledge he needed. Oh, sure, it was good stuff to know and he planned on learning that at some point. But right now, at this early stage of his journey into prepping, he needed to find a book that would tell him how to be an independent man. There were none.

Grant left the bookstore empty handed and disappointed that there wasn’t some book he could read that would teach him everything he needed to know. This survival thing might be more difficult than he thought.

When he got home and saw that Lisa wasn’t there, Grant got on his computer. He did a Google search for “survival.” He erased his browsing history so Lisa wouldn’t find out his secret, shameful interest in something so sick and wrong. He started to laugh at himself; it’s not porn, it’s learning how to save your family and live through bad situations. Since when is that a shameful thing?

Grant had an iPod and liked podcasts. So he searched the iTunes Store for “survival,” and many bizarre podcasts came up. Some of them were the crazy tinfoil hat kind of “survivalists”: the government is going to round you up and put you in camps, the Jews are taking over the world, etc. That image of a survivalist was exactly what Grant was afraid of. “Survivalist” seemed to mean “white supremacist” and “conspiracy theorist.”

Great, Grant sarcastically said to himself. He was going insane.

He was worried about society breaking down and only a bunch of weirdoes shared his concern. If the only people who were survivalists were weirdoes, then he wasn’t a survivalist.

Grant clicked on one last search result: “The Survival Podcast.”

The stats showed that exactly 173 people were subscribing to this podcast. It probably sucked.

He listened for a few minutes. Whoa. The guy doing the podcast wasn’t crazy. He was really smart. He was practical. He talked about how to store food, how to learn skills, how to grow a garden, alternate sources of electricity and water. Jack Spirko was his name. He did this podcast while he was driving in his car. Grant was hooked.

Besides the non-nuttiness of the guy and the practical information, the other thing that Grant liked about the Survival Podcast was that Spirko seemed to be just like him. He had grown up in the country and lived a lot like they did in Forks. Spirko got a big job and turned into a suburban guy, but felt like the whole thing was a fake. Just like Grant. Spirko returned to his country boy roots and was telling everyone else who would listen— all 173 of them— about how they, too, could get more independent and survive whatever might be coming. Spirko made it clear that he wasn’t a racist or an anti-Semite. He was a libertarian.

Grant hit the button on iTunes to become a subscriber to the Survival Podcast. He could feel that something bad was coming to America. It was the strongest nagging feeling he’d had up to that point. The economy seemed to be a giant fraud. The analysts on CNBC kept saying that things were fine but Grant didn’t believe them. Jack Spirko was telling people to get out of the stock market. That was preposterous; the Dow was at 14,000. Spirko was adamant.

Then it happened. All kinds of banks were failing. There was full-on panic in the U.S. It looked like the financial system would melt down.

Grant kicked his survival preparations— “preps” as Spirko called them— into high gear. He felt bad for reacting so strongly and perhaps panicking, but he felt the need to get food and guns ASAP. When Grant thought about the preps he needed to do, the nagging feeling would stop nagging and start encouraging him.