Glen Tate - 299 Days - The Preparation

Neither did Grant. He knew what he needed. He would get more of the foods that met his criteria of requiring only water to cook or being ready to eat, storing for long periods of time, being cheap, and being liked by his family. More pancake mix, pasta, biscuit mix, mashed potato mix, peanut butter, canned fruit, beans, rice, drink mix, and gravy mix.

People were strangely silent in the checkout line. They weren’t looking at each other’s carts. They just stared ahead, not wanting to pry into other people’s business. They were trying to buy all that food anonymously and assumed everyone else was, too. It was like they were buying something embarrassing like lingerie. Grant chuckled to himself. Buying food before everyone else figured out that they should do the same was something to be embarrassed about?

As the name implied, Cash n’ Carry only accepted cash and didn’t provide help out. That kept costs down. Grant had $320 in the expense-check envelope. He breathed a sigh of relief. Having cash on hand at all times was one of the reasons he kept the cash in the car. Sure, it could get stolen in his car, but it was worth the risk to have a few hundred dollars available when circumstances called for it.

Grant’s bill came to $295. He had about three months of basic food for his family for that amount. Grant paid his cash and loaded his bounty in the car.

He stuffed the trunk and the back seat. He wished he had a pickup truck, but Lisa would have flipped out. Oh well, play the hand you’re dealt. Instead of getting mad about not having a pickup truck, have a plan and execute it; go to Cash n’ Carry when the stock market crashes, load up your food, and take it to your cabin. He was doing far better than a man with a pickup truck who didn’t have a plan.

It was 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday as Grant headed out to the cabin. He thought about what average people were doing right then. They were at their white-collar jobs shuffling paper (actually, trading emails). They would be oblivious to all that was happening. They would eat lunch that came from just-in-time-inventory and had been taken to the store by a semi-truck. They would drive home in cars using gasoline that was also delivered by big trucks.

When they got home, they might turn on the network news that would mention something about some bonds and that FEMA was working hard to help the refugees. They would eat more just-in-time- inventoried food for dinner, probably way more than they needed to eat. They would watch reality shows on TV or surf the internet. They would fall asleep in a safe neighborhood because there was someone to answer any 911 call that might come in.

In a few days, they would hear on the news that “Tea Party” people were upset about some bond rating thing. Quite a few of them would dismiss whatever it was that the “teabaggers” were mad at because they were just ignorant racists. Then they would go about their lives like they always had.

Grant kept driving to the cabin. It was a beautiful drive. The farther away he got from Olympia, the more beautiful it got. The water. The trees. The little farms in Pierce Point. It was a different world than Grasshopperville that he just left. “Grasshooper” referred to the story of the ant and the grasshopper. In the story, the ant works hard all summer gathering food while the grasshopper played; in the winter, the ant is fine, but the grasshopper dies. “Grasshopper” became a term for those who goof off and don’t prepare for the inevitable bad times.

Although he trusted his neighbors, the Colsons and Morrells, Grant looked around to make sure they wouldn’t see him unload all his food into the storage shed. The Colsons did not appear to be home. The Morrells’ truck and car were there, but they weren’t stirring.

Stealth time. Grant quietly and quickly unloaded the food into the shed. He wouldn’t bother vacuum sealing it now; he just had to get it into the shed. He thought he would be using this food in the next few months, weeks, or even days.

Grant didn’t have any rats or other threats to his food in the shed, but he put on his mental list the need to get more thick plastic tubs for the food. He remembered that he had a new, and extremely tough, plastic garbage can in the basement that had never been used. It would be perfect. It stored a tremendous amount of the food; the only thing that didn’t fit was the fifty-pound bags of rice and beans.

Grant was in and out of the cabin in ten minutes. He zoomed back to his office. They might start missing him soon. He had a taping of Rebel Radio in a little while and he might be late.

He actually felt guilty about skipping work for the Cash n’ Carry run — for about one second. That was that damned normalcy bias striking. Even a committed survivalist like Grant suffered from bouts of normalcy bias. He laughed to himself and thought about how utterly stupid it was to worry about taking a couple hours off for this. He went to work to earn money to provide for his family. By going to Cash n’ Carry and getting about three months of food, Grant was providing for his family, which was the ultimate purpose of working.

Normalcy bias was like fear in combat: It was OK to have it, but not OK to be paralyzed by it.

Driving back to Olympia, Grant kept looking for signs that others were preparing like him. He looked for a full parking lot at the grocery store on the way; it wasn’t full. He looked for a full parking lot at the bank because surely people would want to withdraw cash right now; the parking lot looked normal. He was listening to the news station on the car radio. No mention of the bond rating. Lots of talk about the 900 point stock market drop. But, with reassuring comparisons to previous dips in the market. The message from the radio seemed to be: “Nothing to see here. Move along. Go back to work and keep putting your money into the stock market. Lots of good buying opportunities now. Gold? That’s what crazy people buy.”

Grant’s cell phone rang. It was Bill Owens.

“Holy crap, did you hear about the bond rating?” Bill said. “I thought the Mexican refugee thing was big, but this is huge. How are things up there?”

Grant talked for a while about how no one up in Washington State seemed to be fazed by this. He talked about Lisa’s non-reaction. It was time to have “the conversation” with Bill.

“Hey, Bill,” Grant said, “you know that if you ever need to bug out of Texas you can come up here, but can you keep a secret? I mean a not-even-tell-your-wife secret?”

“Sure,” Bill said. “Did you kill a hitchhiker or something?”

They laughed. “Something like that,” Grant said. He went on to describe his cabin and the food and guns there.

Bill sounded relieved at Grant’s revelation. “Not surprised a bit, Grant. I’ve been doing the same thing for a couple of years. Sandy is on board. I can store the food in the garage. She’s cool with the guns.

I was just about to tell you about my preps and invite you down here.” “Preps?” Bill had used a survivalist term. Interesting.

“Bill, did you just say ‘preps’?” Grant asked.

“Yeah, it’s a term for disaster preparations we use down here,” Bill said. “Lots of people in my neighborhood have been stocking up on things for the past year or two. Now we’re glad we did. At first we tried to hide it from each other but now we don’t. We work together here in the neighborhood. When the Mexicans started flooding in, it was obvious to us that we needed to do things to be more self-reliant. We have plans to secure the neighborhood if this shit continues, and it probably will. I feel sorry for those poor Mexicans and I would take in a family, but the government needs to control this. You should see what crime is here. Sandy has stopped going into work. So have I. I was going in for a while and carrying a gun. Now it’s too risky to leave the house.”