299 Days: The Preparation (12 page)

Prepping

Grant was really worried about Lisa finding out that he had lost his mind and was a “survivalist.” He needed to persuade her why having a little food and security would be a good thing in these troubled times. She was smart and surely would understand that when the Dow drops 40% and the government is taking over banks and whole industries, that something unusual was happening and it required some thinking outside the box.

He was wrong. Grant had allowed Lisa to manage the money long ago. She was smart and did a good job at it. Grant remembered back to a previous summer, when he could feel what was coming, when he sent Lisa a link to a news story about the CEO of a huge European bank. He was not some kook. The banker was predicting a financial meltdown and credit crisis in the U.S. in the upcoming fall. Grant emailed the story to Lisa with the message, “maybe we should diversify at least some out of the stock market.” She got a little mad. She told him that she was a very capable money manager and that getting out of the stock market when it was up to 14,000 was crazy because at this pace, it would be at 16,000 by Christmas.

Grant knew Lisa. If she had said they’re staying in the stock market, selling now would mean she was wrong. If anything, this meant that if the stock market dropped, she would want to buy more stock because the prices were low. Sometimes when she had a choice of admitting being wrong or doubling down, she would double down.

She wasn’t mean; she just thought she was right. And Grant had always sat on his ass while she managed the money, so she was probably justified in not appreciating his last-minute “expertise” on the matter.

Grant would have rather bought some gold, which was at $900 per ounce, and some silver, which was at $17, but he had no choice. More stocks it was. He knew that Lisa would never back down and admit that a “survivalist” got it right. He was now even more worried about her finding out about his secret life. The more prepping he did, the more he was defying her. That’s how she would look at it.

Grant felt a wedge coming between him and Lisa. But he couldn’t go back to being a dependent suburban sheeple. He had actually thought about what happens when 911 doesn’t answer the call and when there is no food at the grocery store. Once you think those thoughts, you can’t just go back to not caring. You have to do something.

Be a man
, Grant kept hearing the outside thought say.

Be a man.

Well, if Lisa was going to double down, so would he. Grant realized right then and there that he had to prepare for what was coming. There was no choice. He kept thinking how he would feel when his kids were hungry and his family was terrified to leave the house, and he would know that he could have done things to prevent it but he didn’t want to make his wife mad. There was no choice. No one was going to do this for him. It was up to him.

Realizing that it was up to him and that he had to do it was a relief. He had been trying to figure out a way to get Lisa on board. It wasn’t going to happen. He was going to play the hand he was dealt. Grant had a job to do. He was the man, and protecting his family was his job.

No one said this would be easy, Grant kept repeating to himself. If prepping were easy, all the sheeple idiots would be doing it. Instead, they were going to Applebee’s and gorging themselves on food trucked in 1,500 miles and putting it on their credit cards.

He listened to a Survival Podcast episode about storing food and learned that some foods stored better than others and were cheap. Grant focused on oatmeal, pancake mix (Cole’s favorite food), beans, rice, and pasta. He specifically wanted food that could be cooked using only water and heat. He didn’t want things that had to be baked or required milk or other ingredients. The foods he focused on also had to be easy to store for long periods, and be items that his family would eat. They wouldn’t love it at first, but they’d eat it. Especially when there was no food in the stores.

Grant went to the local Cash n’ Carry, a discount grocery store that sold in large lots. It wasn’t a Costco or Sam’s Club. It was different. It was a combination of discount grocery store and restaurant supply store. It sold things in gigantic lots; and very inexpensively.

Grant was afraid to go into Cash n’ Carry. It was like the gun store or looking at a “survival” book; only crazy people did that. He expected to see militia people or survival whackos in there. He was doing lots of things lately that he’d never done. Might as well add walking into a Cash n’ Carry onto the list.

Grant sat in the parking lot for a few minutes getting his courage up. It was getting easier and easier to do these things now that he’d started doing them.

He watched the people going into the store. They seemed pretty normal. No obvious weirdoes. Grant got out of his car and strolled in like it was no big deal. As he got to the door, he realized it was, indeed, no big deal. He was just going to a Cash n’ Carry. It wasn’t like he was going to buy heroin.

Grant walked in. He was relieved just being in Cash n’ Carry.

Look at all that food. A prepper’s dream. It was amazing. The prices were unbelievable. Fifty pounds of pancake mix was $35. That would make 200 breakfasts (using one cup of mix per breakfast). That’s less than $0.18 a breakfast! And that’s $0.18 now, but that same one cup of pancake mix would be worth $10 if there wasn’t any more on the store shelves. But how to store it?

Spirko talked about using a food vacuum sealer. Bacteria needed oxygen so if food wasn’t exposed to it, the food would last for years. The vacuum sealer sucked all the air out of the food. Adding some oxygen absorber packets would add even more years to the food. Oxygen absorbers were optional; vacuum sealing alone would do the trick. Grant got a good vacuum sealer, a bunch of sealer bags, and some oxygen absorbers. He was ready to put up several months’ of food.

But where? He couldn’t store the food at his house; Lisa would find out. Grant had seen a rental storage unit place on the way in to the Cash n’ Carry. That’s where he would store the food. Then he remembered a storage unit in downtown Olympia, down in “bum town,” which was near his office. Grant would use the money from the expense checks to pay for a small storage unit.

Grant looked at all the food in the Cash n’ Carry and left without buying anything. He wanted to get the storage unit first and make sure he had a place to keep the food before buying. He went to bum town and got a small storage unit. He felt like a criminal renting a storage unit; they probably wondered if he was going to stash the bodies of his murder victims in there.

It was unusual to pay for a storage unit with cash, but they still took his money. Grant had to use his credit card— which Lisa would know about if a charge ever went through— to guarantee payment so he had to make sure he came in once a month and paid with cash. Oh well. This was better than not having a place to store the food and therefore not getting any.

With the storage space taken care of and the vacuum sealer, Grant went back to Cash n’ Carry. He bought fifty pounds of beans. He got a variety of red beans, black beans, navy beans, kidney beans, and pinto beans in five-pound packages. He bought fifty pounds of rice.

He got ten one-pound packets of gravy. Rice and gravy: that’s good eatin’. Lots of carbs, some fat, and some salt.

Grant began thinking about nutrition. He realized there was “normal times” nutrition and “crisis” nutrition. In normal times, when healthy food is everywhere, it made sense to stay away from lots of carbs, fat, and salt. That’s how the calories pile up when people are not physically active; no one needs all that salt when they’re not sweating.

But in a crisis, when food is scarce, carbs are critical. Same for fat, which is a necessary part of a human diet. It’s just that with fast food drive-thrus, people got way too much of it. During a crisis, everyone would be physically working harder, doing lots of things they didn’t do before the crisis, like walking places when there’s no gasoline available. There probably wouldn’t be air conditioning, so people would sweat a lot more and need the salt. Besides, foods with carbs, fat, and salt were cheap and easy to store. Nutrition was one of the many topics where the “normal” rules were backwards in “crisis” times.

Grant also got fifty pounds of pancake mix. Cole would love the reassuring sameness of a morning with pancakes. Pancakes need syrup. The Cash n’ Carry was out of gallon jugs of syrup. On a hunch, Grant went to the dollar store. He’d never been to one before; he’d never had to because he could afford the regular grocery store.

Grant found the dollar store to be a prepper’s paradise. Everything was truly one dollar; they didn’t even have price tags.

Most things were off brand, but who really cared. The food aisles were amazing. He quickly realized that the grocery stores were charging double or sometimes triple what the dollar store was. And the neat thing about the dollar store selling something for a dollar was the unit size. It was smaller than normal. It made for handy small packages that could be stored and used one by one. For example, Grant got sixteen- ounce glass bottles of syrup for a dollar. He got twenty of them. The smaller bottles would be better than a gallon jug of syrup; easier to pour, less mess, less waste. Smaller bottles could also be given away to needy neighbors. That’s harder to do with a gallon jug. Grant looked closely at the sixteen-ounce syrup bottles. They were glass and had a decent screw-on cap made of metal. They could be washed out and used to store lots of things when the syrup was gone.

Grant got almost $100 of food at the dollar store. That was two shopping carts brimming to the top. He got boxes of tea bags, big cans of spaghetti sauce, flavored mashed potatoes, and cases of canned vegetables.

He got lots of cheap housewares there, too. He got ten can openers. What good is canned food without a can opener?

Grant started thinking about can openers. A can opener would be worth its weight in gold in a crisis, when fresh food would be hard to get. There would be warehouses of canned food. A can opener was another thing that could be handed out to a needy neighbor. The dollar store had cheap toilet paper, toiletries, over the counter medicines, work gloves, bungee cords, and just about everything else. For a dollar.

After learning what the dollar store had, Grant went back to the Cash n’ Carry to finish off some meal ideas. Now that he had two cases of big cans of spaghetti sauce, he got some twenty-pound boxes of spaghetti noodles. They would go great into vacuum seal bags and stay fresh for years. A twenty-pound box of spaghetti noodles was $19. That meant twenty good-sized dinners of a pound of spaghetti and a big can of sauce were about $2 each. And it would store for years.

It cost a lot less to prep than to buy normal groceries. But Lisa and the kids would never eat this stuff in normal times. In a crisis, however, it would be the best tasting spaghetti they had ever had and they’d be thankful they had it when others didn’t.

Grant’s car was filled up with food. He took the vacuum sealer and an extension cord and went to the storage unit. Since it was in “bum town,” Grant knew he needed to be careful. For the first time in his life, he packed a gun. He put his .38 in a little pocket holster and slipped it into the front pocket of his jeans. It fit perfectly. He had the permit; might as well use it. He realized that he needed to pack the gun quite a bit for practice to test out the holster and just the mindset of carrying a gun.

The mindset was a big deal. A person carrying a gun thought differently. They were more aware, and avoided trouble so they wouldn’t have to use it.

The front door at the storage unit had a sign that food wasn’t allowed in the units. That was a dilemma. He would be careful not to leave even a crumb in case there were mice or rats (he’d never seen any signs of them there). Luckily, it was late evening on a Sunday so the manager wasn’t around. There was a surveillance camera at the entrance to the units so Grant used a plastic bag to cover the labels on the boxes of food.

It took several hours to seal up all the food. Grant carried all the food up the stairs, sealed it, and put it in organized piles. He realized that he needed big plastic storage tubs like the kind they put the Christmas decorations in. He’d get those later; he didn’t have any room in the car for them with all the food. It was extremely reassuring to be sealing and organizing so much food. He kept thinking about a financial crisis and what an empty grocery store would look like. Then he’d look at the month or two of food he had for his family. He was proud— he was a man doing his job. The nagging thoughts were gone.

This is just the beginning of your work.

There was that outside thought again. Grant listened carefully to it this time.

Chapter 16

Getting in Shape

One of the things Grant realized from hauling all that food up the stairs to the storage unit was how tired he got. Winded, in fact, just carrying a case of canned vegetables up the stairs. Not a little winded; full-on stop and rest with a pounding heart kind of winded. He could never do all the things he needed to do in a crisis if he was this out of shape. He looked at himself. He was fat. For the first time in his life. He had noticed the gut a few years ago, but now he was genuinely fat.

And weak. He never exercised. He worked in an office and sat on thecouch on the weekend. He knew something was up when he started wearing XXL shirts but he never thought it was a big deal.

You will need to be physically strong for what’s coming. Get strong.

The outside thought had been right about everything else.

Grant decided to do what it said.

Lisa had always been in good shape. She stepped it up and got in great shape a few years ago when the kids were in middle school and late elementary school and were much lower maintenance. She did it by joining the gym in town where everyone worked out. A few years ago, she had asked Grant if he wanted a membership and, predictably, he said no. It hadn’t surprised her. Why would Mr. Workaholic and couch potato want to exercise?