Saul Goodman - Get Off the Grid! - Saul Goodman's Guide to Staying Off the Radar

Turn around and head back, using a broom to brush away your returning tracks the rest of the way. Jump in the super-cheap secondary vehicle you purchased under a transitional or even your new assumed name, and drive off to freedom. The desert will tell the rest of the story, and folks will assume you’ve given your body to the wind and the sand. Hate to sadden people who cared like that, but it’s a pretty good way to throw up a smoke screen without actually lighting anything on fire.

Homicide.This might be tough to fake without an accomplice, but it isn’t impossible. The biggest problem is it might involve the homicide of another. Or at minimum, handling a dead body, which isn’t pleasant for anyone but the one-legged groundskeeper at your local cemetery. He always seemed a little too cheerful.

There was this guy, a military dude whom we’ll call Art. In the early 1990s, he was suspected of being incredibly creepy with the daughters of some of his colleagues-in-arms. Guys who are cretins around kids are the lowest of the low, so Art realized he could be in for a heap of trouble.

He settled on what was, despite his creepiness, a clever solution. He decided to die. Sort of. A charred skeleton was found in his burned-out trailer in the Nevada desert and the military wiped its hands and said, “well, that’s that—here are his post-death benefits” to his dependents. The burned bones were interred in a military grave.

Art’s plan unraveled a few years later when his daughters finally complained about him being incredibly creepy with them, too.

He’d used the desert as part of his cover, though, and for a while it worked. All that said, I still wouldn’t recommend this particular solution to whatever problems you’re facing. To put an edge keen enough to draw blood on this point o’ mine: not a big fan of the desert, but it does have its uses. Be wary and careful.

Whatever you do, don’t actually get stuck out there. At night it gets bitterly cold; during the day the sun and the windblown sand will race to burn the skin right off your face. If you’re in a high-desert climate like what New Mexico has, the altitude might make you so dizzy that you forget to hydrate—and it’s between you and your desiccated corpse to figure out what might go wrong if you find yourself dehydrated in the desert.

Moving right along to another climate…

A huge portion of the border between the United States and Canada is a long, straight line. Every few years crews descend from the Great White North and travel up from the American Midwest to mow and prune that strip of land. They cut trees, clear brush, make sure the little pylons buried in the ground that say “International Border” are legible. Then they have celebratory beers and poutine, and go home.

Since 9/11/2001, that border—once the most casual of dividing lines between two friendly and fun-loving countries—has been a lot less porous than it once was. Still, the general affection that persists between Canada and the United States can’t be completely crushed. That 49th parallel has a ton of heavily guarded and gated border crossings, sure, but it also has a number of areas where at first glance, it looks like damn near nothing is going on.

Let’s dig into those parts of the border a little bit. I know I’ve confined a lot of talk about slipping out of an old life and into a new to the lower 48, but this is a good moment to address the possibility of slipping off to join our strapping, trapping friends in the North. If you’re not on American soil as you read this, don’t assume it might apply to some international border relevant to you, by the way. In some nations, every single inch of the borders are under scrutiny—in others, you can still gallivant across as if you own the world. Just keep up on current events, and you should have a good idea which of your neighbors might be most likely to take a siesta when looking in the direction of your home country.

Big buyer beware on this section: your humble host here hasn’t tried this personally, so take this research with a big old grain of Pink Himalayan Salt.

Even people who bust out of their old lives and leave it all behind for perfectly legit reasons like saving themselves from cutthroat psychopaths are still going to lengths others might find kind of objectionable. If those in question have an extended family—moms, dads, siblings—those relatives will probably think the gone girl or guy is deceased. If said family finds out otherwise, they might get pretty pissed at the deception.

My take on what to do in this situation is pretty simple and it builds on things we’ve already talked about.

Remember the bug-out bag?Adopting a new name and lifestyle, even altering your appearance, just doesn’t buy you an ironclad guarantee to a peaceful life from here on out. You shouldn’t expect a “clean slate” so much as a slate that you shit all over and then ran through a broken dishwasher, so it’s still kinda streaky, but you have to eat off it during every meal for the rest of your life and hope that none of the toxic residue of your old life mixes with this evening’s Hamburger Helper.

Let me give you a scenario: say you took on a new identity and exited the grid because your life was in danger from a group of people who think you’re responsible for setting loose all the Thoroughbreds from their stables. It seemed suspicious to you that Old MacDonald happened to own the nearby glue farm, but now a band of farmers have come at you with pitchforks blazing, so you’ve got to find a home far away from the range. With assistance or by yourself, you put together a pretty neat setup, right down to a decent but nondescript job at an ice-cream parlor.

One day at work you see a guy who, based on his demeanor and denim overalls, seems like he might be the kind of dude the people looking for you would send out to do the job. Brawny, serious, tanned only to his T-shirt sleeves. A walking advertisement for FarmersOnly.Com. As he heads your way: your back stiffens, your pulse races, and a vanilla cone slips right through your trembling fingers. Just as the panic threatens to swallow you up—

—he passes right on by, intent on greeting a fellow patron who happened to be looking for a delicious afternoon treat. Still, what if he hadn’t been? When you got off work that night and parked yourself in a spot where you could observe the front of your house for signs of entry—would you have a way out if you did spot someone sketchy?

That song by The Who says “don’t get fooled again,” but Saul says don’t give ’em a chance to fool you the first time. If you smell smoke, don’t bother to search for a fire extinguisher—stop, drop, and grab your prepacked bug-out bag.

Everywhere You Go, There You Are.Go-bags aren’t the only safety protocols that you should have at the ready.

Some things are basic. If you are still in reasonably good physical shape—that is, you’re capable of moving on your own two feet for at least five to ten minutes at a time, invest in some practical clothing ideal for the fugitive man or woman about town who might need to move fast at a moments’ notice. Pack layers. Ditch the skinny jeans for trousers with deep pockets. Have solid, comfortable shoes ready to slip on—shoes you can run in, if need be. There’s a company in Massachusetts making high-performance suits and shoes that you could run a marathon in. Science is on our side, here!

Think about the huge advantage of something like that. Perhaps you’re a guy and you’ve found a job in the upstanding, low-stress field of insurance brokering. You’ve got to look sharp, so you purchase some suit separates that are advertised as being for the active male. Shoes, too. Then, the moment you get a whiff of a “client” who may be looking for something more than a decent premium, you can take off sprinting in the other direction. The average suit is not made for that. You could die of dehydration sweating inside a summer woolen. Even if you can’t track down a space-age activewear suit, it can’t hurt to at least keep a pair of sneakers in your trunk.