299 Days: The Preparation

Chapter 20 A Busy Ant

It was spring after another Grant’s trip to Joe’s facility. Plants were blooming, but not many people felt a joyous springtime rebirth. Most were gloomy. The economy was horrible. Most were very worried about losing their jobs, some had lost them, and everyone knew someone who had. People were scared.

The country had just elected another big-government President.

People were figuring out that he wasn’t the “moderate” he said he would be. Plenty of people were afraid of what this new President would do. He seemed to be making the bad economy worse.

While some people were panicking about the economy, Grant was not. In fact, he felt much better than he had just a few months earlier. He had about three months of food in the storage unit and an AR-15 and an AK-47 with plenty of ammo, magazines, and even spare parts. He was starting to develop a network of friends who could help in a crisis. Most importantly, he had the survival mindset.

Grant knew that bad times were coming; he had a plan and some supplies, but most of all he knew that “normal” things would be coming to an end. He was mentally prepared for the massive changes — civil unrest, food shortages, personal tragedies — that were likely coming. He did not suffer from normalcy bias, which is when people are confronted with massive change, like the grocery stores not having food. They can’t accept the new reality. They assume everything is like it’s always been; that things will be “normal.” Instead of adjusting to the new situation, they try to shoehorn the old “normal” into the current reality. They might, for example, refuse to believe that the stores don’t have food. They might believe outlandish things like one particular store is out of things now but the other stores have plenty. They are so biased by what “normal” used to be that they can’t operate in the current situation. It’s a combination of denial, wishful thinking, and not knowing how to function in the new situation. Normalcy bias gets people killed. They make terrible decisions when they refuse to believe how bad things are.

Instead of the normalcy bias most people were suffering from, Grant channeled the anxiety of the economy and political climate into action. He added to his food storage. He went to Cash n’ Carry and got more beans, rice, spaghetti, and pancake mix. He got lots of sugared drink mix because he knew people would need the calories of sugared mix and because he knew that water might need to be treated with iodine or bleach to purify it and having some flavoring could make it much more drinkable. He started getting a few items during each trip he made to Costco for the regular things his family ate. He got cases of tuna, canned turkey, cans of refried beans, and packets of instant oatmeal.

He got a lot of oatmeal. Oatmeal met all of his criteria for prepping food; it only required hot water, stored forever, was cheap, and his family would eat it. He got eight boxes with fifty-five packets of flavored oatmeal. That was 440 servings. Each box was $9, so that was about $0.16 a serving. He vacuum sealed the oatmeal envelopes. They would last for years and years now that they were sealed.

Another thing Grant stocked up on was spices and flavorings.

Beans and rice get pretty bland after a while. Eating deer and other game meat required some spices. Hot sauce would make all the difference in the world.

The dollar store came to the rescue again. He got big canisters of flavorings and sauces for $1. Soy sauce, barbeque sauce, hot sauce — all $1. He got about a dozen one-pound canisters of table salt. Salt had a million uses and would be an invaluable seasoning, especially for someone sweating a lot. He also got a lot of coffee and tea. He didn’t drink much of either, but he knew others would. It was cheap, and nothing is more soothing than a cup of coffee or tea.

It took water to make coffee or tea. More importantly, without water, a person was dead in three days. Grant marveled that some preppers would spend thousands on guns and ammo and neglect water. If the grid goes down, water treatment is something that will fail. Waterborne illness is a real danger.

Grant got a Berkey water filter. It used microscopic pore filters to screen out everything that could hurt a person. Raw sewage could be converted into drinkable water. It cost about as much as a case of cheap ammo. What a bargain.

Grant was also stockpiling medicines. He learned on the Survival Podcast forum how to make some great first aid kits. Not the Band Aid kind of kits. These were medium-duty trauma kits. Grant also bought many over-the-counter medicines. He had hay fever so he purchased several thousand non-drowsy allergy pills from Costco for next to nothing. They would last years as they didn’t have an expiration date. Grant also got hundreds of caffeine pills. He and his colleagues might need to be awake a lot.

Grant got tons of vitamins, too. He went to Costco and got a few 500-pill multi-vitamin bottles and vacuum sealed their contents. A multi vitamin a day could keep the doctor away.

Since little cuts could easily kill people when there were no hospitals or pharmacies, Grant realized that he really needed some antibiotics. But he couldn’t get them over the counter, and forging one of Lisa’s prescription pads seemed like an extremely bad idea. What to do?

Grant learned on the Survival Podcast about fish antibiotics. They were the same as human ones, except they said “Not for human use” on them for legal reasons. The antibiotics were used to treat diseased aquarium fish. They were available without a prescription, at a tiny fraction of the price, and could be stored for years in a cool place. Even when they expired, they were still safe, though they might lose some of their potency.

Grant looked this up on the Survival Podcast forum and found out dosing instructions for humans. He discovered several great internet sites for ordering them. For about $60, Grant had enough perfectly good antibiotics to treat a dozen differing infections. He printed out the dosing instructions and vacuum sealed them with the antibiotics. What a life saver.

Now Grant had enough food and medicine for about six months in his storage unit. There was only one hitch; he had to get from his house to the storage unit to get them.

He figured a crisis probably wouldn’t unfold instantly; he would have at least a few hours to get there and load all the stuff. However, loading the stuff might be a problem. There was only one of him and no one else knew about the stash. Lisa, who was a foot shorter than him and very petite, could not lift the big tubs. Oh well, no plan is perfect. Having all those supplies about two miles from his house was much better than not having anything.

Grant started wishing he had a place to put the food, a place far from the city where things would be safer. A “bug out location” or “BOL” as they were called in the prepper community. A BOL would be great, but he didn’t have a fortune lying around.