Apocalypse Any Day Now: Deep Underground With America's Doomsday Preppers by Tea Krulos

Author:Tea Krulos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2019-04-01T23:00:00+00:00

“I want to see everyone’s knives,” Creek said, and soon found himself in the center of a circle of blades pointing at him. He walks around examining them, nodding his head in approval. I was not aware of how critical a knife would be for the weekend, so I somewhat embarrassedly stick out my cheap Wal Mart sporting-department folding knife. I was last place in the Biggest Knife Contest. Everyone else looked like they were ready to out-knife Crocodile Dundee.

The weekend is divided into classes called “pods” that revolve around what Creek calls the Core 4 of survival: fire, water, shelter, and food.

After some safety instruction from Creek, mostly about safe knife wielding (stay out of another person’s “blood bubble,” the arm’s length around them in which they could accidentally cut you), our first pod started. It was on fire making.

Creek showed us a variety of ways to start fires with tinder and igniters like a solar lens, steel and flint, and a ferro stick (a steel rod you scrape rapidly to get sparks). He even showed us how to scrape a guitar pick for tinder to ignite. He showed us some specially made concoctions to help start a fire, like burned material called “char cloth” and fine wood dust he called “punky dust.” We practiced lighting fires with “fat wood” from a pine tree, which we batoned (broke down) with our knives and lit on fire using methods we learned, controlling the fire on garbage can lids.

Our next pod was on water filtration and purification and was led by Jim Conley (and family) from Indiana of Conley Backwoods Skills & Adventures. He practices what he calls “bushcraft”—I hear this term a few times over the weekend—which is another term for survivalism. He showed us several ways to build water filters from nature, and different ways to boil water and purify against threats like E. coli, cryptosporidium, and giardiasis—commonly known as beaver fever. He had us all carve a hook to hang containers from a tripod above a fire, and showed how to make a filter out of cotton, charcoal, sand, pea gravel, and grass.

With our two pods complete (they were each two hours long) we were free for the rest of the day, so Alex and I returned to camp to chat with our neighbors around a bonfire and eat dinner.

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