by Ron Foster
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LowBuck was having his own problems getting ready for Prepper Stock. Some days it seemed to him that there were just not enough hours in the day to do his regular civilian job, take care of family, plan for the prepper events as well as take care of all the demands of being a popular YouTube personality required of him.
He didn’t begrudge any of it much; he had figured out over the past year that when you decide to stand in the public spotlight you lose the freedom to turn it off on a bad day and had adopted various coping strategies that helped keep the edge off. If it wasn’t the damn internet trolls, it was the a few of the newbie preppers demanding unwarranted personal attention or the manufacturers that broke honor and didn’t deliver on time or pay commissions when they were supposed to.
People just don’t understand that making something out of nothing requires twice the hours and twice the frustration to make it. Just doing a 9-5 or whatever and then coming home and playing on the internet to the prepper community was one thing, being a nicely regarded leader and preparedness subject driver in that community as well as a worker ant in normal mainstream society was a whole another conundrum.
LowBuck if nothing else was, upfront, forthright and most of all - honest. He had hung in broadcasting and forum responding where many other great prepper channels had fell by the wayside over the years and kind of liked the advice to first “be good to himself” that Randal had given him for overcoming adversity. Everything was very slowly coming together now though, he had adopted a motto of “If you can’t please everyone, please yourself’ and took time to just enjoy the community instead of viewing it as always more work which some fool inevitably would have a negative comment on.
The Nay Sayers were not true preppers; real preppers take time to comment positively and are supportive. No these people had some kind of personal problem by getting their kicks attacking other peoples work and do nothing on their own to contribute other than drawing attention to their own destructive negativity.
LowBuck and Randal liked to read the same books and had an ongoing banter and think tank going on about the “what ifs?” that permeated their readings and prepper lifestyles.
The latest one liner up for discussion was “People with guns and no food are finding out that people with food have guns too.” That was one of those weird statements Randal would bring up upon occasion in his reading or writings and fixate upon to see if he could get some more opinions or different insights into how others might consider a similar situation themselves.
I mean preppers were all about tending to their preps but a alter dark prepper ego was stalking them from the video gamers that didn’t have a can of tuna fish but had a can of ammo they thought provided them with a way to sustain themselves. Now everyone was thinking about military tactics between the haves and have not’s and seclusion was not always an option or remedy in avoidance of these nefarious types.
“Just having possession of some sort of a wood burning stove this winter might be the key to survival as we approached solar maximum this year." Randal had said to LowBuck and explained that they were going to be like pots of gold in a grid down situation that might occur if a geomagnetic storm actually took out the nation’s electrical grid. The problem is, like moths to a flame, heat and light will draw some death wishes to a few bug eyed fools that are not invited to sit next to yours possibly in an extended dire long term survival situation.’
Randal had concluded long ago that in a SHTF situation, for him anyway, the less people you know, the better off you were initially for his particular location. He had warned a lot of folks in the prepper community to be aware that friendly hungry people usually are not that friendly if opportunity arose to take your goods, but this advice had fallen on mostly deaf ears or some pacifist or grammar Nazi had taken issue with the way he had said it. The other side of the coin was the people who thought that they could make it with just a survival knife and a few cans of food, those will be the fools finding out sooner than they think the simply can’t, and want yours as desperation sets in.
Add in the factor that houses full of food attract the unwanted envy of hungry people and even you’re so called less than supplied prepper buddies might start eying your stash and not having friendly sharing in mind. It won’t take very long at all until everyone realizes the fact that friends who show up without food and expect to eat are not good friends on a bad day or sometimes even a good day. Those that hadn’t heeded the warnings and invested in doing lots prepping and knowledge acquisition will be kicking themselves for not doing it while coveting yours and convinced that for some reason they are entitled to share with a fellow prepper.
You know the types of people who have all the time in the world to write negative comments on Amazon or abuse someone in a forum, instead of sharing information and helping to build a proactive prepper community they would rather rain on everyone’s parade trying to make others as miserable as themselves. These self-centered prepper types who believed there was only one way of doing something and merely participated to criticize the efforts of others instead of valuing any preppers efforts to become self-reliant, self-sufficient and a resourceful contributing member of the prepper community.
The people Randal could never understand were the ones who demonized someone else for trying to make a buck from the countless long hours and the dedicated work it took to make one’s self available and supportive of the prepper community and their followers. What were these holier than thou types of people thinking? That shit took money and time to do, to do it better requires more time and money and where do they expect that to come from? What prepper takes a vow of poverty like a monk to pursue their individual dreams and prep levels?
People who thought the Government would save them, will find out that it didn’t and many will have decided it was some kind of race or culture issue that they were not first in line for a nonexistent socialism dole they felt entitled too. The Government will always be the one to feed itself first and regulate your rations. The fed realizes that large groups of people with guns make the rules and try to be the biggest and baddest group of guns in the valley controlling the people and commerce.
Bad water & Montezuma’s Revenge diarrhea is predicted to be coming to America so they try to regulate the weakness of anyone who might form a bigger group by regulating the water, the livestock, ammo or anything else they feel they need to do. Hospitals, my Lord now are no longer just a place of healing, but one of many regulated fundamental financial and political control institutions. It’s all about the control.
If food might someday soon possibly be going to be the new currency, then to the prepper’s fresh water is an even hotter commodity to contend with while some states even say now it’s illegal to collect rainwater off your own roof to put on your garden. Will we take a gold coin for this necessity? Coins, well we have already decided that they don’t taste very good. A stagnate city with no resupply trucks moving and water infrastructure failing? Preppers will say first week, damn didn’t prep enough toilet paper, and should have bought more of that stuff while others will be trying to figure out what to do for a toilet. The Ham radio operators, will be all asking who are the nerds now? The rest of society will just be freaking out and unraveling their humanity.
And this dumbass country boy prepper Randal had already been preaching for people to have built up a good store of firewood for a predicted hard winter this year and likely grid down situations.
Burning Green Wood = Smoke / Smoke = Attention / Attention = Bad. You know what is an interesting notion? Randal and his neighbor “Wizard” had been known to say off and on that your 'bug in' home, first and foremost is just a big pile of firewood you gathered for yourself to make life and survival easier in the future. You gather it at your leisure with modern tools while gas, time and good food can sustain your labors.
Later on when you don’t have those luxuries, you will thank yourself a thousand times over for your past efforts that stacked up
all that wood beforehand.
Randal had been wandering aimlessly around his property and house, glancing in his storage sheds and thinking about his preps and life in general. He was leaving for Prepper Stock in the morning and still didn’t feel quite right about it. He couldn’t put his finger on what made him uneasy. But the thought he was forgetting something or the feeling of an empty foreboding dampened his excitement to get going on the road to the gathering.
He had gotten Michael and Michele`s brother to help him load his SUNRNR solar power generator on the deer rack in back of his old GMC 4x4“Jimmy” truck. The thing was heavy but actually not all that bad. It weighed 265 lbs but two men hefting on its sturdy handles could handle it easy enough. That is if the lifting were not too high to get it where you wanted it.
Once on the ground the thing rolled around on its wheels like a dream and anyone could position it without even realizing its weight one handed. That was another reason Randal was going. The manufacturer and he had come to an agreement that Randal could review and help market the item for a small commission. This helped on the bills and helped build up his preps when someone used the special coupon discounts Randal had arranged for the prepper community for anyone who wanted to buy one. At $4500 bucks delivered it wasn’t in most common prepper folk’s budgets to consider so sales were slow but interest was high.
Randal had had better luck selling the amazing system to commercial contractors who were building houses on bare or remote land and wanted its power and reliability to run saws and drills etc. Many of the people who do construction on a daily basis justified its price in their savings on fuel, oil and maintenance on the traditional gas fired generators they were formally used too. The biggest thing they commented on though the very first day they tried one, was just how much they enjoyed its silent running efficiency.
The former way they used to run a job site was listening to the constant drone of a generator running all day long and that becomes bothersome to the ears and nerves. Let alone the difficulties they had of having to monitor the all the support items it required like the gas, the oil, spark plugs and such on a gas generator. You had to leave those dang things on all the time because the work crews couldn’t coordinate the need for power to run all the different hand tools needed for different tasks. Pull starting the gas motors was a pain in the butt enough, but when you had to shut down for oil or gas filling, that is if you were lucky enough to have a battery starter, they seemed to wear out that particular part quickly. The only silence you got all day on a regular job was lunch or when the foreman hollered break and you shut the gas gens constant noise down. What was cool about the SUNRNR was that even in constant use it was fueling itself off the sun’s rays and giving you bonus hours of energy both in use and while idle.
This was an industrial strength or true off grid solution that Randal treasured and was going to demonstrate at Prepper Stock by running the PA system and lights for the event. The SUNRNR company had just come out with a smaller unit called the Phoenix for disaster home use and he hoped that the company would send a representative down or provide them one for he and Lowbuck to demonstrate the difference in a more affordable layman’s solution to disaster preparedness.
You pay for what you get though, 3500 watts continuous or 7000 watts surge was some very serious apocalyptic off-grid capability. Many people would love to have that much power, but they had gauged their budgets and pocket books differently when it came to preps. Randal gauged his differently also based on experience and hard won knowledge of living through many a hurricane. He focused his decisions on capabilities and abilities based on the assets he held in reserve for disasters and as compliments to his self-reliant lifestyle. He had looked at all the options and parameters available to him in a grid down situation and had taken it much further than most and shared the information with the prepper community. Before starting out on this project, he had just like he and LowBuck did everything, he invested his personal time researching as well as his own money evaluating needs, products and circumstances to arrive at his choice of this technologically advanced piece of equipment.
When the special unit first arrived at the loading dock of the freight yard, he had thanked his lucky stars it was designed portable because his installation location was not near as ideal as he had first considered when envisioning its final installation. Randal had previously carefully noted and tried to calculate the amount of sunlight that was available at various times on his prepper cabin. However, there was a significant learning curve here that knowledge could only be obtained by doing it hands on at the actual location.
He also ran various small solar lighting systems from previous reviews and prep purchases from GeoKing, (EEP) Energy Efficient products, SolStar, his own homemade ones etc. and had concluded that you could read every manufacture spec and relative internet theory and not know a damn thing until you tried it out on your own house. He also had the ass with companies that didn’t listen to consumer input and had endured more than his share of badly written Chinese directions that didn’t translate well to English as well as these companies odd shipping practices, lack of spare parts or support ,inferior wiring on some ,as well as a wealth of other unapparent concerns that bit him in the butt at one time or another to think he was prepared, but only to later find out otherwise when the equipment failed as it was put through its paces in actual practice.
That’s why he had decided on a US based company (SUNRNR) to be his guide on or flag bearer to have a reliable and powerful solution. Made in America and with support readily accessible, that was the match that he had chosen for himself. This product was made in Virginia, which was even better Randal had considered. We can talk Southern Randal figured still smiling to himself. Low Buck’s preparedness plans were price oriented but quality adjusted and he didn’t really care where it came from as long as it performed as expected, American made was best and bought first if possible. But he looked at all products regardless of origin based on price and functionality.
Randal sort of agreed with him in this sense and with his import export experience from the past, he had made sure that the US distribution points for products worldwide they evaluated could deliver on their promises of supply and support. LowBuck put the actual items through the YouTube evaluations and torture tests he dreamed up and evaluated them fairly and critically. He leaned towards suggesting to his followers the value priced (EEP) Energy Efficient products as a solution for those on a budget. This company had in coordination with Randal provided some samples to test as lighting and phone charging solutions that had proved an excellent choice for these small scale applications.
Randal’s system was oriented towards his personal long term solution to a worst case scenario. He advised that if you lose electricity you lose the ability to pump and create clean water, treat and pump sewage, to maintain any perishable foods, all perishable medications, and you lose the ability to manufacture new things, like replacement parts for the things that were damaged, he had warned the prepper community. He asked people to consider if the phone and Internet systems are only backed up by a few days’ worth of standby generation with very limited fuel that those systems will go down very quickly.
He knew that once the ability to pump fuel is lost, the ability to produce new fuel is lost. Transportation systems would be severely compromised, if not totally lost. It's something we really don't want to experience and something he was trying to prepare for.
7
RANDAL’S READY
Randal moved around his house room to room taking care of last minute details and reviewing alternatives and possibilities of what to bring or what might need to be hidden or repositioned better in his home once he left for the next week. Most of it he had already thought about a hundred times before and was still second guessing himself if he was making the right decisions about his concerns. There was not really a true wrong or right answer available on this subject, so he just went with his gut instincts on what the dispos
ition of items were and decided to wing it.
First off there was the matter of “Frick and Frack” as he'd named his front door and backdoor handy home defense shotguns. Frick was a pistol handled black 12 gauge Mossberg cruiser model he kept at the backdoor. He had bought it in a pawn shop for three hundred bucks years ago and the original owner had tricked it out with a side saddle shell carrier, forward grip and a heat shield. It was all about wickedness in action for short range adverse encounters with any would be assailants. The forward grip allowed you to cycle through six rounds of ammo quicker than most automatics. Randal had added a barrel mounted flashlight laser combo and a 3 point sling to it so it could perform the duties he had it assigned too which were basically all short range pull the pin on the hand grenade scenarios he envisioned having to deploy it in.
He kept it loaded with No 1 Buckshot as this was his poison of choice for would be aggressors based upon a number of well thought out reasons. This type of ammo wasn’t easy to find in his local area so he just bought it off the internet at one of the discount ammo sellers and put it in his prepper stocks. He had chosen this particular load over 20yrs ago and it had always performed well for him. There was plenty of data on the internet that supported his choice and he chuckled to himself that it was an old Law Enforcement officer that had advised him of it years before the internet and studies had been performed that proved his rational on effectiveness.
Articles stating that #1 buckshot performs overall better than "00" in a self-defense situation are abundant and even expert detractors had a hard time disproving the wisdom of this load over others.