by Gene Skellig
“Hang on, Casey; I’ve got to talk this over with Katy. I’ll call you back in a few minutes. What’s your number?”
Waiting for Marty’s call, Casey tried to think of someone else he could trust with such a sensitive task. He came up dry.
He knew nobody else who had the artistic, technical and planning skills to pull this off. He was so worked-up waiting for Marty to call back that he couldn’t focus on any of the other “Open Tasks”. So when the phone rang about twenty minutes later, Casey grabbed it before the first ring ended.
“Casey, this is Katy. Marty told me what you want him to do, and I want to go over it again with you myself.”
Casey immediately recognized her distinctive Australian accent. He recalled her face from the last time he saw her, when he flew into Whitehorse with the Twin Otter during the Canada Winter Games. That was the last time they had spoken.
Casey wasn’t sure how Marty and Katy felt about him now, several years later. Casey had put Marty onto the TFG gold mine in Yellowknife, and after that the share price had gone down considerably during the early stages of the economic crisis. Casey was worried that Marty and Katy may have lost money on his advice, and had not hung on long enough to reap the rewards of the gold mine now going into full production.
“Well, Katy, what I want is for Marty to go on a big shopping trip in Vancouver, and ship a variety of goods to an office I have set up here in Qualicum Beach. Once here in Qualicum, he is to set up a small business using the items he sourced in Vancouver, and then run that business for a few months.” As Casey paused, and listened for Katy’s next comment, he actually held his breath. He knew full well that if Katy did not agree, then Marty would never be allowed to come down to the coast. He also knew how shrewd and intelligent Katy was. He knew better than to interrupt her or to push too hard.
“So that’s like when he set up that business for Garth, back in 2007?” Katy asked, referring to when Marty had helped his buddy Garth set up an educational toy store in Richmond.
Marty was not particularly well-schooled in business, but he had a sharp mind and was a great problem solver. He knew how to relate to people and had world class networking skills. Marty generally performed best when doing things to help others. As a result, Casey had always considered Marty to be untapped human potential still looking for some challenge that would be meaningful enough to consume his prodigious energies.
“Yes, Katy, just like ‘Monkey Mart’ only with far fewer items to source and no long-term business plan to worry about. I just need his help buying the initial supplies, establishing a few routines, and training some staff.”
“And what about the film bit? Tell me more about that”.
“It’s like what Marty and I did back at UBC with the Philosophy Association. I want him to put on a film festival.”
“And for this, you are willing to pay all of Marty’s travel expenses, food, lodging, and $15,000 for his time?”
“Yes, that’s my starting position.” Casey replied. With that, he knew he had her. She would capitalize on this opening, and throw the door all the way open.
“OK, Casey, I’ll bite. Not because you gave us a good tip on Trophy Fish Gold. That roller coaster almost cost us our marriage! But we’re broke, and Marty can’t find a job. So here’s our offer. You add another $15,000 for MY services, and we’ll both come down, WITH our kids. You pay ALL our travel costs BOTH WAYS, provide us a minivan with car seats, and you agree that our names will appear prominently on the program!”
Katy paused, catching her breath after shouting the last part. Whatever deeper meaning that had was lost on Casey.
“Well, Katy, that’s more than I had expected to pay. Are you sure you want to bring your children with you?”
“Yes, I’m not going without’em, and Marty is not going without me. Besides, you know Marty and I work well together”.
“OK, but the apartment is a bit tight for the four of you. It’ll be a bit like camping out.”
“Don’t you worry about that, Casey, Marty and I will fix it up to suit our needs,” Katy said, with a bit of energy and excitement that Casey was glad to hear.
“Give me your email address, and I’ll transfer $10,000 right now for the tickets. How soon can you leave?”
“We can leave in two days. There’s a Lufthansa charter flight taking German tourists back to Vancouver, and I’m sure there’s still lots of seats available.”
“Oh, that’s right; you’re working at the terminal, right?”
“Yes, I am. They cut my hours in half! I can’t feed us on that! I’ll enjoy calling in my resignation tomorrow!”
After copying down their e-mail address and reading it back correctly, Casey asked: “Don’t you and Marty want to know the subject matter of the film festival?”
“No need, Marty figured it out already. It’s about surviving a nuclear war, isn’t it?”
“How did Marty figure it out?” Casey was surprised.
“Marty followed your postings on that investor forum, up until you stopped posting on it last spring. We wondered when you were going to call, to brag about how well you did with Trophy Fish. By the way, we sold too early, and missed out on lots of profits, but it really helped anyhow. Marty kept reading your posts and telling me your ideas about how much more dangerous the world was going to become as the economic crisis deepens. He told me you had this crazy idea that a war could escalate into a global nuclear war. I guess you were right, at least if what happened in Tel Aviv last month is any indication”, she said. “So I take it that the business you want us to set up has something to do with survivalism? But what I don’t get, Casey, is what’s your angle?”
“What do you mean, Katy?”
“I mean, Casey Callaghan, we all know you don’t get into things without a reason. You didn’t get into that gold mine, and all those on-line investor forums promoting Trophy Fish just for the fun of it. You did that to make a shit-load of money. So now you’re rich. Well done, really, but what could you possibly hope to make from a little survivalism store?”
After hearing nothing from Casey, she continued. “OK. Putting on a survivalism film festival and getting everybody all worked up about a nuclear war may be good for the business, but how much money do you really expect to make in a sleepy little town like Qualicum Beach?” She asked.
“We can talk about it later,” Casey said, uncomfortably.
“Wait a minute. WAIT JUST A DAMNED MINUTE!” Katy said, with a different tone in her voice. “You’re serious about this! You actually think there really is going to be a war. You’re gonna be living in that area, and you want other people there to be ready to survive a war. It’s not enough to save yourself, your family, your kids; you want to save what, the entire town?”
“You are getting closer. But you’re not on target. How long do you think a family, even well armed and very secretive, could hold out against several thousand starving loggers?”
Silence. Casey waited. Then, Katy replied. “OH. MY. GOD! You’re right. It’s that old debate you and Marty had at the university, about “Community versus Survivalism”. Marty told me about that a dozen times! You argued that the survivalists have it all wrong, in their “Guns, Gold and God” mentality. You argued that the solo survivalist really needs to be engaged in the wider community in order to have any hope of surviving in a disaster,” she recounted. “Marty told me a hundred times that he won the debate, by arguing that human nature is such that the vast majority of people in the community will not have anything put away for a rainy day and will just come and take it from you, so you had better be ready to defend yourself. You can’t save the entire community. So what’s the plan, Casey? Get them prepared to save themselves so that you don’t have to be the only island in the storm?” she asked rhetorically, but then changed her tone yet again.
“Oh, I get it now! If they get themselves better prepared then there will be many small islands in the storm and the community will have a chance to stay civil
ized; you won’t need to hide in a little fortress. But to get that many people to sort themselves out and get prepared, that’s the problem, isn’t it? And Marty and I are the solution?” Katy’s grasp of the issues was impressive. “OK, we’re in,” she decided. “Now tell me what’s on the shopping list.”
14
STOCKING UP - SOFT
21 May: 1 Year Before NEW
Casey was surprised to see that he only had $41,380 Cdn left in the bank. So he placed an order to sell 20,000 shares in TFG, now trading at a whopping $19. The $294,880 after commissions and capital gains taxes would probably last about another month at the rate he was spending money getting the house ready for the move of the family in July. He also planned to spend another $120,000 on food supplies and fuel. Even that would not be the end of his spending plans for the summer; he also planned to buy some new vehicles and small machines.
Casey had started stocking operations soon after the HOTH reached lock-up in November, but those early operations were focused on “Last - Chance” caches with the ultra long-lived stores which could be sealed away and forgotten about for years.
The food was prepared by Marty and Katy in the Squirrel’s Den. After some research and experimenting, they found nitrogen gas was easier than dry-ice for flooding oxygen out of the bulk foods. They had perfected their methods and could process three 55-gallon bulk food bins into forty-two rectangular 4-gallon pails each day. Each of the sturdy little food-grade pails was first lined with a mylar plastic bag then oxygen absorbers were opened and placed in the bottom of the bags to absorb any residual oxygen over time. By holding a burning match over the small opening of the plastic bag, Katy would confirm that there was not enough oxygen coming out of the bucket to support a flame then Marty would remove the nitrogen wand and heat-seal the Mylar bag closed. They would then seal the pail using the integral gasket and affix a dated label.
They had decided to go with various sizes of food-grade rectangular HDPE plastic pails because they were about 40% more efficient than traditional round pails. The snap-closed, gasket-fitted lids are converted to hinge-style flap-up lids when the tear-off strip is removed, so they are perfectly suited for long-term storage and eventual day-to-day use of the bulk foods.
The best size turned out to be two gallon rectangular pails because you could fit six of them into one of the ubiquitous Rubbermaid Roughneck 31 gallon storage bins and still have the top four inches for canned goods and other items. This extra space worked well because you could mix and match a variety of basic food items into the smaller pails and fill the rest of the Roughneck with comfort food items, canned foods, preserves and other supplies until the Roughneck was filled to the top. This way the bins were densely packed and stackable. You could also pack large numbers of serving-sized mylar bags into a rectangular bucket and mix-and-match the rest of the Roughneck to suit.
To get Marty and Katy up to speed on the Squirrel’s Den operation, Casey had them prepare 100 such bins for him. These would never appear on any inventory. For Casey’s first order, Marty and Katy put together a range of different “loads” which were designed for ultra-long-term storage. These focused on basic foods such as sugar, salt, rice, pasta, beans, oats, wheat and a wide variety of long-life canned and other flavorful and nutritious items to accompany the bland foods. Each bin also contained a few small items such as whisky, tobacco, hard candies, candles, matches, vitamins, tea and instant coffee. These were added in the gaps between the two gallon pails until the Roughneck was stuffed full. Each of the Roughneck bins held an estimated 400,000 calories, or 182 person-days at 2,200 Calories per day - enough to sustain a family of six for one month.
Every tenth bin had a large red cross which indicated that it contained First Aid and medical supplies in addition to a reduced quantity of food items. These contained a substantial First Aid kit, some additional gauze and dressing materials, a small box with a range of ointments, disinfectants, burn creams, sunscreen, insect repellants, aspirin and three medium- sized vials each containing 120 doses of low-dose Amoxicillin, Ciprofloxacin and Cefaclor. A small guide accompanied these basic antibiotic medicines, explaining their use along with graphs predicting the expected reduction in efficacy over time. It would be necessary to increase the number of the low-dose pills taken in order to achieve the desired strength due to the loss of potency over time.
After taking delivery of the bins, Casey cemented twenty into each of five “Last Chance” caches in and around the HOTH.
After that, Casey began to stockpile more conventional food supplies, with life-spans in the three to five year range. He had these delivered from a commercial food distributor in Nanaimo to the garage of the HOTH. He had considered an elaborate and secretive staging process, whereby food deliveries would be made to another location to disguise the destination of the food, but he rejected this as overly paranoid. The driver would have little interest in the end use of whatever he delivered. Besides, in the worst case scenario, any delivery records would long since be lost in the destruction of Nanaimo.
The truckload had five thousand pounds of canned goods and twelve 55 gallon plastic-lined cardboard drums of bulk dry goods. It was unloaded in the garage at the nearly finished HOTH on May 21st. It took Casey, Danny and Yuri just six hours to dolly the cases and drums to the small elevator, send them down to the lower level, and transfer them to the main bunker under the garage. Marty, Katy and Casey broke down and processed all twelve barrels of bulk foods into one hundred and ten 6.5 gallon pails on the second day. Things went very fast with the larger pails, particularly since Casey didn’t have to further process them into Roughnecks bins. He simply piled the cases of canned food in the cool storage corner of the bunker and stacked the bulk-food pails into the DFR where they would be remain at a constant minus eight degrees Centigrade.
That Sunday night, Casey was very tired as he inputted the data. Each of the 180 kilogram bulk food drums had cost almost $2,000, which was by far the most cost-effective source of calories and protein even when adding the cost of the mylar bags and rectangular pails and other materials used to break the load into smaller sized units. As for the caned goods, the variety of vegetables, fruits, meat products and other foods were more expensive, but they provided essential vitamins and nutrients.
The delivery cost over $40,000 CDN, which Casey had paid in advance when he originally placed his order.
Much of this first shipment of food, with sufficient calories and nutrition to feed his family of seven for three years, was not intended to be held on a long-term basis. Rather, it was the first practice run of a multi-year plan.
Despite the devastation in the Middle East, Casey did not believe that a large scale nuclear war was imminent, nor was any other disaster on the horizon. It was still possible that the world would find a way out of the financial crisis and use the horrors of the recent Middle East Nuclear Exchange, MENE, War as a motivation for real progress on arms reduction and peace.
Casey was not optimistic that they would, so having a three year supply of food seemed prudent. More importantly, it allowed him to trial the food preparation and loading operations which he would eventually have to do on a much more ambitions scale.
Six months after that first round of stocking up, with the family having settled into their wonderful home, Casey was being lulled into a false sense of security. The family had moved in early in July, after school was out for the summer. The drive across the country from Winnipeg had been a wonderful week-long holiday that reminded them of past road trips. Using their military move entitlement, the family had little to do other than show the movers around the old house, get themselves to Vancouver Island, and show the un-loaders around the new house.
The large rooms looked empty even after their old furniture had been unpacked. Once Tanya realized that Casey wouldn’t complain, she had Yuri and Danny throw most of the junky old furniture into a bonfire pile. After that, the family went on a spending spree in Vancouver and Nanaimo. With new furnit
ure and an obscene amount of storage space, Tanya set about organizing the family’s permanent home while Casey and the children were busy with the 4-H programs and other summer-time activities.
As the months flew by, the HOTH began to feel like a home. One night in January, as Tanya and Casey reflected on how well things had turned out, Casey realized that he had become complacent. He spent the next few evenings tearing through his favorite economics and geopolitical websites, re-caging his gyros.
While the Callaghans had enjoyed their own boom time, the economy was starting to degenerate again. The international community was still arguing about what to do about the Israeli-Iranian problem, as the once eager United Nations Mission of Aid and Iranian Disarmament, or UNMAID, had become bogged down in logistical, security and cultural issues that threatened to tear the international coalition apart. Casey thought that a major international crisis was increasingly likely. It was time to move his preparations into high gear.
More than a year before he had planned to, Casey began his Food-Bank ConPlan. The original concept was to rotate the medium-term food items out and donate them to food banks just before the published expiry dates. The 5,000 pounds of canned goods had been purchased just twelve months ago and had been selected for their three year official expiry dates. That left over two years to nominal expiry. The same items sitting in a store wouldn’t be as fresh, Casey knew, but he decided to rotate them out early, resetting the clock. So in the first weeks of the new year Casey placed the same 5,000 pound order and received the canned goods and barrels of bulk dry goods by the end of January. He repeated the operation with Danny and Yuri helping with the physical task of moving the old cases of cans back up to the garage, and the new ones down to the bunker. However, he did not remove any of the bulk food pails from the DFR. Rather, he accumulated them and added 110 new pails to the DFR. Taken together, in the past 14 months the stockpiles in the DFR had reached about 20% of capacity.