The Disaster Diaries

"“The Disaster Diaries” is an exuberant sprint through all manner of survival topics. Sheridan bounces all over the place: Performing under extreme stress, disaster preparedness, physical fitness, firearms, emergency medical care, hotwiring cars, primitive wilderness survival, hunting, knife fighting, winter survival. Could you actually survive after reading this book? Hell no. But it’s a fun introduction to a bunch of skills and Sheridan points the way to good resources for learning more.<br/><br/>This passage is pretty representative of the tone and spirit of the entire book:<br/><br/>What little boy, growing up, isn’t obsessed with guns? Squirt guns, laser guns. The nonstop violence of cartoons and comic books gives way to John Woo movies. A few real hippie mothers in my neighborhood hadn’t allowed toy guns in the house, but that just meant those poor kids had to find sticks and break them to look like pistols. Poor bastards.<br/><br/>#####################<br/><br/>Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had written, “Being a man is, precisely, being responsible.” That’s the secret philosophy of real manhood—a man takes responsibility for everything that happens. He never, ever makes excuses. If it’s bad, he should have seen it coming, avoided it. He’s a master of his fate.<br/><br/>You may think I’m a paranoid pessimist, spouting all this doom and gloom. But after considerable thought on the matter, I believe that’s wrong. I’m an optimist. You and me, we’re going to make it, at least those first twenty-four hours after the wave hits, the bomb drops, or those corpses start clawing their way out of the dirt. If you are one of the lucky 1 percent who survive the pandemic, it will be a damn shame if you die because you don’t know how to start a fire. We’re going to make it, and we need to know what we’re doing.<br/><br/>The thing that separates us from animals is the prefrontal cortex, and fear and stress can completely circumvent that part of your brain.<br/><br/>Dave Grossman and Loren W. Christensen wrote in On Combat: “You do not rise to the occasion in combat, you sink to the level of your training. Do not expect the combat fairy to come bonk you with the combat wand and suddenly make you capable of doing things you never rehearsed before.”<br/><br/>There is a simple technique that can help even an untrained person overcome extreme stress in any situation, and it’s sometimes called combat breathing. Basically, the only link between the sympathetic nervous system and the autonomic is breathing. You breathe automatically, but you can also control your breathing with your thoughts, unlike your heart rate or your adrenaline levels.<br/><br/>Strength is agility and stability.<br/><br/>Sean told me a basic level of strength that remains an excellent goal: be able to squat twice your body weight.<br/><br/>eventually, usually within 10–15 km, the animal collapses from hyperthermia (Liebenberg, 2006). The basis for this kind of hunting lies in human endurance capabilities, which exceed those of other mammals, especially in the heat. Reasonable fit humans are unique in being able to run 10–20 km or more in hot conditions at speeds (2.5–6 m/sec) that exceed the trot-gallop transitions of most quadrupeds (Bramble and Lieberman, 2004). Because quadrupeds, including hyenas and dogs, cannot simultaneously gallop and pant (Bramble and Jenkins, 1993), a human hunter armed with nothing more lethal than a club or untipped spear can safely run a large mammal such as a kudu into hyperthermia by chasing the prey above its trot-gallop transition speed.<br/><br/>McDougall mentions Arizona’s annual fifty-mile Man Against Horse Race, where at short distances the horses kick ass, but later on humans start to close the gap. In 2011 the fastest man ran 7:33 and the fastest horse ran 6:45.<br/><br/>Make sure you have enough water. A gallon a day per person, for a month.<br/><br/>For those of you who don’t know, the go bag (or the bug-out bag, or the ditch bag) is a small bag filled with essentials that you grab on the way out the door. It’s always ready, and so are you. When I worked on boats, we had our passports wrapped in plastic and a water jug in the ditch bag, so if the boat was sinking, you grabbed that on the way to the life raft. This is a survivalist staple. Having a go bag is usually a good idea, something small already in your car, a bigger one in your home. It’s easy to get sucked into wanting a bigger and bigger bag (do I add a tent? water filtration?), but try to keep it reasonable.<br/><br/>Some of the survivalists call it long-term grid-down, or TEOTWAWKI, a desperate acronym for The End of the World as We Know It,<br/><br/>If you could survive long enough, Des Pres found, you might recover your will to live. From all his interviews, he set the recovery time at anywhere between a week and several months. Criminals did better, because they were used to breaking the rules. In the camps, if you followed all the rules, you were dead in a month. Criminals recognized the face of this camp social order; they could recognize “us against them”—to the death—earlier than law-abiding citizens. They were in less denial about the changes to their reality.<br/><br/>Prepare by readying your mind and body, the things that will always be with you. Sitting in a bunker with a sweaty shotgun in your hand is paranoia, but learning the skills to be self-reliant is common sense.<br/><br/>another old maxim is “The pistol is what you fight your way back to the rifle with.”<br/><br/>Apocalypse means “unveiling” in ancient Greek.<br/><br/>Armageddon is a contact sport, and somebody’s going to get hurt.<br/><br/>“Cleaning the wound is the most important thing you can do. Wound cleaning is so freaking huge,” Bill said. “There is no medication that replaces the physical removal of dirt and bacteria.” We’re so used to antibiotics and creams that we’ve lost our fear of infection. But it’s absolutely deadly. You have to get in and scrub the wound, deeply, painfully clean it, or else the person is doomed.<br/><br/>“If the world was ending, I would have Leviquin or Cipro, Augmentin, and Bactrim or Septra. Those last two are drugs from the sulfa family, and they are antibiotics that will handle resistant strains. All of these can be had in pill form.” Easier for us laymen than dealing with syringes. Dr. Winters thought for a moment, and then added Doxycycline because it treats atypical bacteria such as Rickettsia, which causes Rocky Mountain spotted fever and typhus. “Typhus,” he said, “which is flea- and tick-borne, was incredibly deadly for refugee camps.” Certainly, typhus is one of the great killers in history, like the plague and dysentery, and typhus epidemics changed history. In a refugee camp, or in a city with no electricity or plumbing, it could strike again. These drugs deteriorate over time—most of them have expiration dates of about a year. Dr. Winters said that you would, of course, still try them if you had nothing else, but you couldn’t expect much. Within five years, most of the stores might be inert. In a long-term grid-down, we’re headed for a time of no antibiotics.<br/><br/>the most common cause of infectious diseases is drinking water that has human or animal fecal matter in it. These diseases are usually diarrheal; our system recognizes the problem and tries to flush the invasive bacteria out of the intestines. Fighting these bacteria is the norm in most places on earth. Heat kills, so bring any water you intend to consume to a rolling boil. If you’re above eighteen thousand feet, you have to boil it for a few minutes, because at high elevation water boils at a lower temperature. Or use chemicals—chlorine or iodine are the common ones. Or filters. There are a lot of neat little filtration devices out there. Water is a big deal. You can last a month or more without food, but without water you’re dead in three days, maybe a little longer.<br/><br/>Messing with the wires is old school, it’s not necessary, nobody does that anymore.” He reached right up under the dashboard and fished out the wires. “You still got it here. Always the white wire with a red stripe is hot. Tie it to the blue, then tap it to the yellow.” He bridged with the screwdriver. “But you don’t need to do that. What I did is flare the ignition switch”—it looked exploded, almost like a bullet spread out—“but with a little three-pound dent puller, it would be effortless.”<br/><br/>The cord on the bow was 550 parachute cord, another ubiquitous survival item (a lot of survivalists replace their shoelaces with 550 paracord, just in case).<br/><br/>Hemp was the source of almost all rope in the Western world until the invention of nylon.<br/><br/>“You can tell if a plant will make decent cordage by breaking a small branch and tearing it—if you get long strips, you can weave those to make string or rope. I don’t teach the various names of plants, because those will change from location to location. I try to teach characteristics, to make it more universal.” Cordage, meaning rope or string, is a highly valuable survival item. You can use it to lash your structure together, to make traps, to make the bow part of the bow drill, or to construct a bow and arrow.<br/><br/>Clothing is an essential survival tool. By wearing the skins of animals, our ancestors survived and flourished. John showed me how it could be done. Basically, the animal skin has to be cleaned of tissue and membranes on the inside and hair on the outside. I asked about that. Wouldn’t leaving the hair on make it much warmer? Yes, but it would also make it ten times harder to tan.<br/><br/>To tan a hide, you coat it with oils, which allows it to dry but stay supple.<br/><br/>John and I scraped the meat, membranes, and hair off a deer hide. Then we soaked it in brain oils (John bought pig brains from the supermarket). You have to really work the oils in, soaking and wringing the hide out dozens of times. Wringing the heavy hide dry like a chamois is laborious work, but the hide needs to soak up the oils completely. Leaving the hair on makes the job harder because then the oils can only penetrate from one side. After you’ve really imbued the hide with brain oils, you need to work it as it dries to keep it from becoming a piece of rigid cardboard. John showed me how to push and pull, stretch and grip the hide as it dried. Slowly, imperceptibly, the hide begins to turn into buckskin, that soft, supple, wonderful stuff that feels like a velvet blanket.<br/><br/>Finally, you take the lovely soft piece of skin and smoke it, locking in the oils, so that afterward, even if it gets wet, it will dry soft.<br/><br/>“There were no dumb cavemen,” said Professor Shea. “The lions and wolves made sure of that. These were a profoundly intelligent and spiritual people.”<br/><br/>For long-term survival, put a steel pot in your go bag.<br/><br/>I have it tattooed on my arm in Latin: Mundis Ex Igne Factus Est. The world is made of fire. Your soul is forged in hardship, in privation. There is nothing worthwhile that comes easy.<br/><br/>What’s the best thing to have in your bug-out bag? A doctor or a mechanic. The numbers to stand watch, to divide up labor, and to fight if necessary.<br/><br/>He lectured like a college professor, a good one—encyclopedic, animated, and exhilarated by the subject. “This is martial arts,” he said. “Martial means war. This isn’t about competition. It’s about winning. I arrange the circumstances, no matter what they might be. Real martial arts, if we’re enemies, I don’t challenge you to a duel with a stick and knife (the classic eskrima pairing of weapons). Real martial arts is me following you, unseen, for days, and then sniping you from a roof across from your house when you come out the front door. That’s martial arts.” Here’s my guy, I thought.<br/><br/>All this may play into what sociologists call elite panic, which, in a disaster, is something you do have to keep an eye out for. The elite, meaning government and law enforcement, sometimes overreact. They have the most to lose from the upending of order. “Elite panic in disaster, as identified by contemporary disaster scholars, is shaped by belief, belief that since human beings at large are ******* and dangerous, the believer must himself or herself act with savagery to ensure that individual safety or the safety of his interests. The elites that panic are, in times of crisis, the minority. . . .” writes Solnit.<br/><br/>When disaster does strike, retaining your humanity is the most important part of survival. There will be moments of chaos and confusion, but they won’t last. Social order will reassert itself. Cooler heads will prevail. Working together with your neighbors will have a much higher success rate than going into paranoid bunker mode.<br/><br/>As the ancients said, **** homini lupus est—man is a wolf to man.<br/><br/>If everyone in the country could become just a little more self-reliant, we could defuse this thing before it happens. If everyone lived with a few months’ worth of food and water in their house or apartment, we could delay that competition for resources, and probably avoid a lot of the problems following something like an EMP attack, a solar flare, or even an economic crisis. Aliens or zombies are still gonna be tough, but that’s a given.<br/><br/>But preparing for the end of the world is like being a parent—at some point, you have to let go. You can’t control everything, you can’t live in the bunker, you can’t refuse to ever let your daughter go on a date. At some point, when you’ve done your best, you have to get on with your life and trust the universe not to **** you. Some of the people I met over the course of this journey seem happy and content; for others, all their preparation seems to have made them more worried, more fearful."