Illegitimate Sun

Archive for the ‘Shack’ Category

Went to Eckert’s this past weekend with the Amy.

There we picked apples. There were rows and rows of trees overflowing with apples. We literally had our pick of the bunch and in five minutes picked close to twenty pounds of apples.

Such ease of harvest is one of the key features necessary for a shack foodstuff.

The other feature is ease of storage combined with multiple types of usage.

Apples meet this standard too.

Apples can be stored whole, dried, jellied, canned, juiced and fermented.

Even the trees as useful as blossoming trees provide lots of pollen for the beehives I plan to stock. Bees pollinating the flowers would lead to more apples.

This is the lazy kind of survivalism to which I look forward.

There are a couple of assumptions that are already going into the planning of the shack.

1) The shack will probably be in British Columbia, Canada.

Blame Amy for this one. Her desire to resettle in Vancouver means I’ll be settling there too. As a survivalist location, BC is not the worst place to settle.

BC has temperate climate, ready access to renewable food supplies (fishing), access to a source of salt (ocean), fuel & building supplies (wood & wood).

Farming will be hard in the rocky soil that predominates most areas. Lack of sunlight and excessive rain will be hard on certain crops and solar power sources. Land prices will be high in the most desirable locations.
Still, it could be worse.

2) Shack construction will have to be done on the cheap

Blame me on this one. I still am appalled by the skyrocketing price of housing. What am I, Rockefeller? I can’t afford a mansion out in the woods. Instead, I need to settle with a cabin, principally handbuilt, with the basics covered.

Ways to reduce costs, like hand building, not excavating a full basement, and utilizing alternative materials will make all the difference on my poor budget.

3) The shack will need to hold more than one family

I’m a softy. If my friends and family make their way to the Shack, I can’t turn them away. The Shack needs to be able to hold multiple occupents and be able to scale up in the surrounding area as time progresses and more people join us. The Shack itself needs room for a variety of people to stay and there needs to be room for more housing and the supplies to build it need to be accessible.

(Of course, I plan to be voted Mayor & Spirtual Leader for Life. That’s a small price for people to pay to sleep on my couch.)

A little known fact is that I can be alarmist.

(Okay, it may be a well-known fact.)

One of the things I worry about is Peak Oil. For those who don’t follow handy links, Peak Oil is the idea that there is:

1) a limited amount of oil in the world, and

2) at some point we will hit the peak of oil production and after that oil will start running out

Everything after that will be based on sky rocketing prices for energy and all the wonderful cheap things it provides. Communication, food shipping, fresh water, sanity will all be in short supply as our means of powering cell phones, cars, water pumps, and talk shows just disappear.

Several years ago, when I jumped on the Peak Oil bandwagon, it was considered a crackpot theory to all but paranoids like me, geologists, and oil company executives.

Now, with $60 a barrel prices, China and India becoming demanding gasaholics like the US, and brownouts being a household word, I feel a little more vindicated.

Equal parts paranoia and intellectual exercise, the Survival Shack was born. Talking to interested friends, I started to catalog means of living comfortably in the event of a total breakdown of society.

Like Thoreau, I would have a cabin in the woods. A place I could retreat to and avoid looting hordes, road warrior wannabes, and doomsday scientology cults that would inevitably spring up when the lights stop working.The Survival Shack has several prerequisites attached to it.

1. No survival camp compounds.

First and foremost, the Survival Shack must be able to exist innocuously in society before the world ends. To this end, the Shack would exist as a vacation home until its true purpose was required. This makes me seem less crazy and makes it an easier sell to the girlfriend.

No one wants to date a nutjob that builds a bunker in the woods

So, the Shack should look like a real home, pleasing to the senses.

2. Comfort is an essential goal with an eye to the long term.

What may be comfortable now when I’m in my prime may not be comfortable twenty years after the collapse of society. Decrepit old Joshua is sure not schlepping up and down stairs and harvesting wheat by hand.

Life after the fall will be hard, but it shouldn’t be unbearable.

So, plan for the long term. Make sure all features will stand the test of time.

3. Self-sufficiency is a necessity.

I am planning for the end of society. That means running to the local grocery store for french bread is not going to be an option.

The Shack will have to be built with construction, power, storage, and other necessities already accounted for.

In terms of a weekend / vacation home, this is a great premise. Having water and power when you visit is great. Again, looking to the long term, more will be required. Where will you store vegetables and cured meats during the winter? Is the roof repairable with local materials?

You can see have this can get tedious.It’s also a lot of fun to talk about with friends after lots of drinks.

In the Shack section, I plan to catalog plans and concerns that have come up over the course of years of debate. Admittedly, we’re not experts on survivalist construction, farming, homesteading.

Still, we’ve come up with workable ideas for Location Requirements, Construction Designs, Foodstuffs, Power Sources, and Crucial Supplies. Lots of these overlap, but again the overall effect is to create a vacation house that can transform itself into my Survival Shack when the unthinkable happens.

(PS I can see the inherent absurdity of a survivalist blog, but bear with me. It’ll be fun.)