Not a Popular Survival Study

Discussion in 'General Survival and Preparedness' started by Seacowboys, Nov 21, 2008.


  1. Seacowboys

    Seacowboys Senior Member Founding Member

    It occurs to me that if you want a realistic idea of survival during a total collapse, then look at those that have been actually surviving it for a while; the homeless and unemployed. They have been living outside the grid for varying periods of time and probably have the only true view on how it is done.
    When I was in Central America, a small child of around 10 came to my ship asking for work; this was a genuine new approach to the "Will work for food" folks at interstate exchanges. I was quite busy with Customs and immigration and setting up the project I was on so rather than totally dismiss him, I told him to come back in a few days and maybe I would find something for him. Each day, I would see him watching from shore until three days later, he came up to me and reminded me that I had said to check back for work in a few days. I gave him a job cleaning the main deck and washing down the boat, paid him several hundred Limpera (a few dollars). He came back the next day to see if there was more work; my wife was cook aboard the Lana. She asked if he could help her out with her chores. Later, she came to me and told me that the boy live in San Pedro Esulu, about 80 miles away and had walked to La Ceiba to find work. He was staying in a small shelter of packing crates that he had gathered in a ditch just outside the port. She asked if he could stay aboard the boat with the rest of the crew?
    We bought him a toiletry kit and some clothes and let him stay aboard while we were there and always managed to find enough chores to keep him busy.
    I did not know my daughter until she was a grown woman with a child of her own. When she was a baby, her mother and I separated and I began working all over the world and just lost them. My ex-wife remarried and I held too much bitterness to even want to see them; It was a total a-hole cop-out and I'll go to hell for it but that doesn't change it. I met my grandson on the same day that I met my daughter. They came to a salvage job that I was on and stayed with us for several days. As it turns out, the acorn doesn't fall too far from the tree. My daughter was a true survivalist. She had ran away from home when she was 13 and had lived by her own devise since.She lived under the pier in Santa Monica, surviving by her wits and the kindness or gullibility of strangers. Fifteen years later, our relationship is still understandably somewhat out of the ordinary but to place judgment on her, I have to first condemn myself.
    (to be continued)
     
  2. Seacowboys

    Seacowboys Senior Member Founding Member

    Survival Issues always have common denominators: the simple equation is reduced to food, clothing, and shelter. Most of us have spent our lives acquiring these elementary items by some form of exchange, usually money but often other considerations, such as barter for physical goods or skills. When currency becomes less available either through economic upheaval, catastrophe, or unemployment, other forms of exchange become more apparent. During the last great depression, thousands of migrant workers (read:hobos) traveled the rails and roads looking for any form of work they could find. Most of them became scavengers extraordinaire. Scavenging discards, junk piles, alleys, dumpsters, unlocked automobiles, untended clothes-lines...where-ever they saw an opportunity. Those that were able to maintain their roots in a community often ran the hobos out of town because they had little to share and did not want to await the eventual increase in petty-thievery.
    Many people resorted to black-market goods, running illegal whiskey or heroin into a means of support. Others sold what skills they had, carpentry, painting, sewing, what-ever but many had no real marketable trades and had to sell what they could. Many resorted to grunt-labor, some resorted to begging or stealing, many resorted to prostitution in one means or another.
    Look at today's options to see what your choices in a desperate situation might include. Where would you seek shelter if conventional housing was not on the cards? Look in any vacant over-grown patch of palmetto in Florida and you'll find cardboard shelters. Some lots support entire micro-communities. I once knew a family that lived a broken-down automobile until the city came by and hauled it off. Libraries and bus stations have a transient community where many live off the grid. You can almost always count on an offer of "services" from some destitute traveler. We tend to look down on those less fortunate so it is easy to dehumanize these desperate people and assure ourselves that we will never be in a similar circumstance and if by some great misfortune, we are, that our standards will somehow survive along with our pride. Survival and pride do not coexist. Turn the TV on and watch Bear Grils eat worms and drink urine from a snake-skin and recognize that survival is a daily event and not some televised paid vacation in the out-back to show people how to do it.
    If you can eat raw sea-cucumbers to survive and sell plasma, what else would you do to survive? Everything is a matter of choices, do you choose to live or to die? I'll tell you without hesitation, that I will do what-ever it takes.
     
  3. RouteClearance

    RouteClearance Monkey+++

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