Howard and his wife ‘live the life’ and his words of wisdom are worth their weight in gold.

Over to Howard:

This is a comment on could you survive a long-term grid down and life in the boonies.

Where we live there is a country store five miles away which has hardware , animal feed and mostly basic groceries. If you forgot to thaw meat for supper you can get frozen pizza and a couple kinds of canned dinners. They’re supplied from Anchorage with their own truck so if the grid goes down they will be empty in a few days. The nearest full service grocery store is forty miles one way so you don’t run to the store for hamburger. This is in normal times so we stock up and plan meals.

It was 5F here this morning (-15C). They don’t even cancel school until -50F. (-40F equals -40C). Yeah! It gets quiet as most people don’t travel when it is that cold.

We personally are off grid so the only way we would know about a massive grid down is if the internet stopped working. The local grid is not interconnected with anything else so it might not even go down.

I’m getting a bit too old to raise everything I would like and am looking for some one to partner on the garden to keep the land clear and productive. I expect that in a SHTF situation at least some of my town children, grand children and great grand children would show up and increase the labor force.

Living in the boonies still can allow for neighbors. You need to cultivate community. If you buy a remote property and don’t live there all the time it may not work in a time of crisis. For one thing a garden needs to be worked every year and I can tell you from experience that the weeds can get ahead of you even if you can be there two days most weeks.

We have solar panels but they don’t produce much in winter but most of our power use is internet and my grandson’s gaming computer so we could cut generator run time a lot (we usually burn about 5 gallons of gas a month in winter).

Our primary lighting is hard plumbed propane lights but we could cut back on the number of lights burning to conserve propane. We also have backup oil lamps and fuel. Our primary heat and cooking is the kitchen wood fired range (large airtight fire box). We have almost two years wood stacked and would ration gas to make sure we could keep the chain saws running.

The basic strategy is to keep your supplies stocked up and then go on tight rationing as soon as something serious goes down.

You can count on the fact that the boonies are at the end of the supply chain and if the world normalizes you will be the last to have a chance to resupply.

If life doesn’t ever return to normal you have time to work out how to go on as no one can know all the possible situations that could occur so there is no reason to waste energy and worry to try and plan for all the possible permutations of disaster.

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Now that ladies and gentlemen is from someone who lives the life we all may be facing one day. Howard thank you so much for taking the time to read the articles and for the comments you make.

Take care

Liz