A world after all of this…

A series on how we can plan for a self-sufficient future.

When I first started dating the love of my life, the question of what to do if all went down was a big topic of discussion. How do we get food and water? How do we protect ourselves and help our neighbors? What do we do next?

I was clueless.

We lived in Oakland California. One of us worked a 45 minute drive east through a tunnel, the other a 20 minute train ride under the bay. Our house was more than a 100 year old, built in 1906, the year of the great earthquake. The next big earthquake was expected to happen any time now – in geological time.

As a child, we had full access to a large yard and were allowed to dig, build, plant and explore. I was not afraid of dirt or getting dirty. I preferred literal mud cakes to the dolls the other kids played with. I had grown up camping and backpacking. I knew how to be out in the woods for a few weeks. We were poor, but I didn’t understand that.

I finished high school and college, got my first ‘real’ job and stared to build my life. What I didn’t understand well, was the world outside of my own survival. I was too busy trying to make enough money to eat and pay my – relatively small – bills, to pay attention to what was happening in our world politically. I had always voted republican. That was what the rich people I knew did. I did not research beyond that. Reagan won his second term when I was in high school and I would have voted for him if I wasn’t still a year and a half away from being old enough.

Fast forward 20 years, things would change. The 2008 financial crisis had a big impact on me. I was one of the lucky ones. A house that sold to a flipper four or five years earlier had been sold to a bank and that bank was now unloading it for 1/3 of the price – a price a teacher could almost afford. That beautiful house was in an older neighborhood. I moved in and started to make it a home.

The next year, I finally met the person with whom I wanted to spend my life. And the subjects of the wider world came up. I started to have a lot of questions. I started to notice that the Republicans I was voting for talked a pretty good game, but did not follow through and do what they said they would do – including living the moral lives they claimed. When democrats were in charge, positive changes happened.

I was still early in my teaching career and still working and living month to month – with almost nothing left after bills were paid. The tax cuts the R’s promised never filtered down to me or anyone I knew. The laws they made didn’t do much if anything to help regular people. And I came to realize that the rich people I knew growing up were really only economically middle class. It wasn’t that they were rich. It was that we were so poor.

Dating someone new can have a great impact on the things you think about. I don’t think it changes who you are, but it brings that into clearer focus. And it was the things we had in common that made for the most interesting conversations. We have some of the same books. One of us had actually read them. I was more of a look at the pictures and skim the text type reader, mostly looking for the answer to the question I had. When I did read, I read so closely that it would take hours to finish anything, assuming I finished it at all.

One of the books we shared was about vermicomposting – composting with worms. We both had tried it. I was unsuccessful because I did not stick to it. I did not feed my worms enough scraps or keep their bin sufficiently moist to sustain them. I could attribute some of that to ADHD, but not all of it.

The question of how to get clean water if the systems of our city failed also came up a lot. A solar still seemed to be the answer. How to build one? There were many versions in the books we read, one from an old photocopy saved for years in the manila folder that carried it. I tried to build a solar still – unsuccessfully. My neighbor told me that a pump less than a mile from our house that kept water from the bay out of our basements had not been maintained well. If it were to fail, West Oakland would be the next Katrina. Six to ten feet of brackish water in my basement and my stick built house would not be hovering above its stilts for too long.

The house directly south of us had an extra floor and blocked most of the sunlight from our yard. We had a small beam of sunlight through the backyard in the summertime, but growing much more than a few tomatoes was difficult. We had a healthy mature Lemon tree that claimed half of the space with rosemary, lavender and other shrubs at its base. Blackberry climbed the fence and there was a small patch where we grew a bit of squash and corn. We even planted a grafted fruit tree with four kinds of peaches on it. Three adorable chickens lived in a house we built under the stairs, but it was not where we wanted to live forever.

We talked a lot about where we wanted to be in a few years. Here in the city? As wonderful as Oakland and San Francisco are, we wanted space. I could literally reach my arms out and touch my neighbor’s house and ours at the same time. And despite the community of wonderful people surrounding us, I think, we both felt a bit crowded. No room to plant. No room to grow.

All of those discussions led to us both talking about our dreams of living out in the country on our own land where we could build the home and life we wanted.

But conversations kept coming back to the political world. How could I vote for those guys? I started to look at them more closely. I started to look at both sides of the political spectrum. There was one side that worked to do the things they said they wanted to do – the Democrats – even with their imperfections, were at least trying to help regular people.

I proudly voted for Obama in 2010 and have voted for Dems up and down the ballot since. The knowledge I gained during that time did not prepare me for the disinformation era of the 2016 election.

In early 2015, while still on Facebook, I found an article about Christians supporting the Republican nominee, even with everything then known about him, I questioned it. I was attacked by a man claiming to be a Christian pastor while using more profanity than I heard in a week as a high school teacher. My fb friends came to my rescue and defended my character while he continued to attack. I soon got off of that platform altogether.

By the time that election rolled around, we had found our land and moved to western Oregon. Transferring jobs and finding new ones was the easiest part of it. Our farm was about 30 minutes outside of Portland, where our jobs were. We rented a house in between and spent the next two years commuting and trying to figure out how to build a habitable house on our farm to replace the decrepit one that was there. After back and forths with contractors and shady engineers we had a stroke of luck and were able to buy the house that was literally right next to our farm.

We soon moved into our new home, adjacent to our farm, doubling our commute. All of this while reading in near terror the near daily things the new president was doing to make life worse for regular people. We watched as people we once respected bought the lies or just decided there was nothing they could do so they accepted everything.

During all this we went through a few seasons of gardening. Trying to grow our own food and getting a big awakening about what it took to do that. Each year we grew a better crop of tomatoes or potatoes, but are still nowhere near being able to grow all of the food we need for a year.

So much to learn.

This year we started planning in the early winter. Something always gets in the way and stalls my plan, but we are on a good tack. I hope to try this year to collect data on how much we actually grow and how long it lasts. How much are we able to preserve and when does it run out? For example, last year we dehydrated tomatoes, we used them all winter. We have not run out yet. This year we also pared down the things we are growing to only things we actually eat. We have cooked Vegan for the last year and have improved our skills there. We have a better idea of what we can grow. We are only growing food that we actually like to eat and I have even developed a taste for veggies I didn’t know I liked.

Next winter’s project is to pare down even further the things we have to buy from the grocery store. We have tightened up the foods and other things we buy from the grocery store and wasted significantly less than we used to waste. We have questions to research that will take the whole summer and maybe several summers. How much food can we grow for ourselves? How much to share? How much food can we store? What is the best way to do that – frozen, dehydrated or some other preparation? What are the best foods for us to grow? And how do we get things we can’t grow – like coffee or certain fruits?

Even bigger questions are still looming over us. The political climate in this country is scary and does not feel secure. Watching the rest of the world is tough but seeing things happen in the US that have never happened here breeds great concern for our nation. The biggest concern is for my family. How will we make it through to whatever is next? How do we fight to insure a future? How do we take care of ourselves through it all?

This is what I will explore here.