Calamity in America

by Pete Thorsen

  I was getting by fairly well. Of course things don’t always go well.

  Chapter 6

  Once in a great while I would see another person. Usually off in the distance. I desired no contact and apparently most others did not either. After that trip I had taken into the city I could understand the reluctance people would have in meeting strangers. Most of the bodies that I had seen dead along the highway had died violently.

  I always carried one of my handguns. I had used some of my handgun ammunition to shoot small game and did not have many shells left for some of the handguns. I never used it all though. When I got down just a few shells left I stashed that handgun in one of my scattered RV’s. I made sure I hid these guns very well so they could not be easily found and could then be used against me.

  A few times I did see and talk to strangers that were just passing through the area. Without exception these travelers were always in poor shape and just hanging on by a thread. I had little food that I could share but I always gave these poor souls some jerky at least. Depending on the time of year I sometimes gave out other foods also. I sometimes schooled them a little on what wild plants were edible and what parts of those plants could be eaten.

  It wasn’t all roses for me either. That first two years was very tough. The advantage during that time was that I still had a fair amount of ammunition so I could shoot wild critters (and once in awhile a cow) so I always at least had meat, either fresh or more often as jerky. I had plenty of seeds and I had planted a garden but though I thought I watered it good enough it did not produce very much produce. And even if it would have, I had no way to store fresh veggies. I know that some farmers had in the past canned stuff in jars but I did not have the knowledge, materials, or the equipment to do any canning. But like I said, that first year there was nothing to can from my garden anyway.

  That first fall I had a lot of fruit to eat. Many or maybe even most of the places in my community had some kind of fruit tree in the yard. Some had one and some had more than one. Apples were maybe the most common but there were several other kinds of fruit trees also though where I was it was just a little too high or too far north for citrus trees. I ate a lot of fruit but most of it went to waste. Again it was because I had no way to store it, but it was very good eating while the trees were producing.

  That second winter saw me slimming down. I was eating meat but very little else. Wild plants just like regular garden plants do not produce in the winter. There was always cactus and I did fry up cactus pads fairly often. I had a little of the food that my wife and I had stored (though it was long since mostly gone) but I was saving that in case I got sick or hurt and could no longer forage for food.

  I was very relieved when spring came around again. I planted a garden again in the same spot but before I planted it I incorporated some potting soil and the small amount of fertilizer I found into the soil. I had also done some reading about gardening and planted things a little different this year. I also rigged up a sun shade for the garden so during the hottest months of summer I could shade the garden plants so they would not burn up. I needed that garden to produce big and I did everything I could to make that need come true.

  Way before any of my garden plants even came up, the wild plants were growing and some were blooming. This was the time of plenty for foraging in the wild. This was the first year that I started traveling to one of my RV’s everyday. I would water down my garden really well in the morning and then leave and walk to one of my scattered RV’s where I would spend the night. That way I covered a lot of ground foraging and did not use up all the wild plants in one area.

  The next day I would make my way back to where I had my garden using a slightly different route, foraging all the way. My garden got watered every other day and I hoped that would be enough. I could walk to most of the RV’s very easily in one day and a couple I had to really hoof it to make it in just one day from my main “house.” A few of my RV’s were too far away and I could not walk to them in one day no matter how fast I walked or how early I started from my main camp. Those camps I skipped during the garden growing season. Those camps could be reached in an easy day from other camps so when I did visit them I never had to sleep under the stars on the ground.

  I had trouble a couple times with strangers. Actually, not a year has gone by that I did not have trouble at least once or twice with strangers. I lost track of how many people I had to kill over the years. And no, I am not superman, and I carry many scars to prove it. I’ve been shot with rifles, pistols, and bows, but obviously never a fatal hit. And I have never been hurt so bad that I could not move around, though many times I could move only by enduring some pain. My left arm is now totally healed up but it just does not have quite the strength that it used to have. But at least that arm still works!

  After the first few years, the store-bought antibiotic creams and such that I had accumulated ran out, but by that time I had read up on natural plants that did about the same thing.

  Sometimes I would find someone in one of my RV’s when I went to stay in them. Not very often, but it did happen. When it did, I would (from a distance) tell them that the RV was mine but they could stay for a day or two. But I always told them to leave my stuff there when they left.

  Twice the squatters did not leave on their own and I just set up at a distance and shot them when they came out of the RV in the morning. Once a squatter made a mess in the RV and stole some of my stuff. I tracked him down and shot him from a distance. “Never take a chance if you don’t have too,” is my motto. I see nothing wrong with dry gulching someone who has done me wrong. They do not deserve a “fair fight,” and they do not get one from me.

  When squatters would leave after a couple days of using one of my camps, and they did not take any of my stuff, I always let them go in peace. Each one of these camps had a little food I left there readily available and if they used some of that food while they were staying that was fine. It was neighborly to treat your guests to a meal or two. I did always try to keep some food hidden where it could not be easily found. Usually buried in a sealed container just barely under the dirt nearby.

  It was the second or third summer that I learned how to build my first solar dehydrator. Learning that likely saved my life. With the dehydrator I could now dry and store many different things to eat much later. It turned out to be very simple and easy. And thanks to the bright, hot Arizona sun, the dehydrators (I built several) worked great. And they still do.

  I did have a little trouble with ants in the dehydrators but there are many ways around that problem. I set the legs of the dehydrators in cans of water and that stopped them, but the water had to be replaced daily. When I used oil instead of water it solved the problem permanently (at least until it rained and overflowed the cans).

  The dehydrators worked on some garden produce and some wild edibles but they really shined when I used them to dry fruit. I had so much fruit that went to waste before, but with the dehydrators I could dry it all and never waste any, or at least hardly any. The dried fruit and other items were easy to store and easy to carry when I was walking. And many of the dried items were easy to throw in a pot with a little meat to make a thin stew or soup.

  Through the years I ran out of many of the things we had always taken for granted. Some things I found local, native replacements for, and others I did not. And it was not just food items that I ran out of either. No more Kleenexes. No more paper towels or napkins. Or toilet paper. When my supply of something started running low I would sometimes just save the remaining items for emergencies. I never knew when I might become very sick or incapacitated in some way.

  Some things were easy to do without or to just replace with something else. Kleenexes were easy because I just started using handkerchiefs that could be easily washed. I am still using paper products like newspaper, magazines, catalogs, advertisements, and other paper trash in place of regular toilet paper. I am not really looking forward to the time when those paper items
run out.

  There are so many things that would be so nice to have again that I really miss now that they are gone. The list of items is almost endless, but as each year passes the items get harder and harder to remember. Some things like shampoo I think about almost every time that I wash my hair using the make-shift soap that I have to make for myself out of wild plants.

  Many things now are almost whimsical when I do happen to think about them. Things like going out to a restaurant and sitting down and ordering anything I want from a large menu of different foods. Of course I don’t have lobster or shrimp but in the summer I do catch crawdads that I do cook and eat.

  I don’t have a wide selection of salad dressings to choose from to put on my salad. I often eat salads now but I have no salad dressings. I have tried different things on my salads though. Like when the prickly pear cacti have the ripe fruits on them and I use the squeezed juice on my salads. You just have to make do with what you have. In the old days that was what caused a lot of trouble for people. They just were not happy making do and instead they always wanted the best of everything.

  Chapter 7

  Through the years I ended up with less and less garden plants. That first year that I planted a garden I wasted many of the seeds I had. I did not have a clue what I was doing and the garden that year was very poor. I always tried to save seeds from the plants each year but it just did not always work out. And sometimes I would plant the seeds and nothing would ever come up. I do still grow a few things like watermelons that grow well here and it is easy to harvest the seeds from them. The trouble is while they are a treat to eat when they are ripe I cannot store them at all. I actually have an excess of seeds for watermelons and I plant them near springs here and there in the countryside. I am kinda hoping for them to “go native” and reproduce on their own.

  I miss having potatoes but I do eat tubers from several local plants. Even the roots from thistles can be eaten. And I think it is widely known that cattail roots can be eaten. And yes even here in the desert there are spots that grow cattails. Besides the roots, young leaf shoots can be eaten along with the actual “cat tail” before it gets too old.

  I have learned to eat so many different things. But meat is still and always will be the mainstay of my diet. I use a bow and arrow to harvest most game now. I have even made several bows myself even though I did find a rather nice laminated recurve bow in a house here. I have bows and homemade arrows stashed at or near some of my other camps. Sometimes things happen that are beyond my control and it pays to spread things out and be as prepared for catastrophe as you can be, so I do not keep all my supplies in just one location.

  I guess I should tell you about the one gun that I still have plenty of ammunition for. It is an old antique Colt revolver that my grandfather had and he passed down to my dad. I am not sure if Grandpa bought the gun new or if it was his father’s or how Grandpa came to own it. Anyway, I had that gun and I had hidden it so when the government searched my house it was not there to be found. I had some ammunition stored for this revolver but not very much.

  Then, when I searched all the abandoned and vacant homes here in my community I found a house (actually in the garage) that had no loaded ammunition but a lot of reloading supplies for that caliber. I searched hard but I could not find any guns in that place, so either the government took them or the owner hid them so well that neither I nor the government could find them.

  This guy had participated in something called Cowboy Action Shooting. He had a lot of information about it at his house. Apparently these guys used old guns (or new reproduction guns that looked just like the old ones) and they shot these guns in competitions. Each of the competitions required many shots to be fired so it sounded like it was common for these competitors to reload all their own ammunition. This guy also casted his own bullets for this caliber.

  All of his equipment and supplies were there and intact. The government had apparently taken all of the guns and loaded ammunition but they just left everything else. He had a bunch of cast bullets and a lot of lead to make more. He had used an electric contraption to melt the lead and cast the bullets but I have since cast them using an old pot over a hot wood fire. Just like the real cowboys did over a hundred years ago I bet.

  There were plenty of empty cartridge cases and thousands of primers. Also there was quite a lot of black powder. Reading the material I found at his place (I read everything I find everywhere) I learned that there were basically two kinds of gun powder. Black powder was the old fashioned kind that had been made for hundreds of years, and the newer kind (called “smokeless powder”) that had only been made for about a hundred years. It sounded like at these competitions, or some of them anyway, all the shooters were required to only use and shoot black powder cartridges.

  He had quite a lot of the black powder stockpiled. I think because it was difficult to obtain back then. He also had detailed instructions on how to make your own black powder but I have never done that and I rather hope that I don’t ever have to do so (it sounds dangerous).

  So the only caliber that I now really shoot is this old revolver in .45 Colt. It is a fat cartridge but not all that powerful. I guess it was made to shoot people and it does work for that well enough. I know for a fact. I am good enough with the gun that I have shot rabbits with it and twice I got very close to deer and each time I shot a deer in the head it dropped the deer in their tracks. But mostly I use the bow and arrows now, though I always carry that revolver with me everywhere. I had a holster for this gun and there were three more holsters that fit it where I found all the reloading supplies, along with a couple of belts that had loops to hold extra ammunition.

  Oh, I found out why the newer gun powders are called smokeless after the first time I shot this gun using the black powder. I was used to shooting different guns and there would be no smoke but this stuff is really quite a bit different. The powder is black, but when you shoot it, it produces a big cloud of stinky, white smoke. Plus after using the bow and arrows for awhile I just don’t care for the noise that any gun makes anymore. I like the quietness I now have in my life.

  I lost one of my camps a couple years back to a wildfire. There have been several wildfires around here. It is just natural and there have always been fires I think. In the summer months we often get dry lightning. Storms roll in and produce a lot of lightning but no rain. Obviously, any fire that does start just has to burn itself out on its own. There is no one but me to fight the fires and I am too smart to try that on my own. So fires start and fires die out and that is just the way it is.

  Besides the camps I made in the beginning of all this by dragging or driving RV’s here and there in every direction and parking them, I have also added a few more camps.

  There are many old, long-abandoned mines in this general area and I have made spots in a few of them where I can camp out of the weather. These are certainly not as comfortable as my scattered RV camps but I like to have options. Like my other camps, at each of these I also keep a few supplies and camping gear. I use these mine camps very seldom but I check on them whenever I am in that area. I do have to be careful at these mine camps because many local critters like to use these old mines as their homes also. Rattlesnakes and skunks are common occupants at these and other mines.

  I travel more now than I did the first couple of years or so. I have walked most of the way to the city. I just stayed in empty, vacant houses along the way. I never went into the city though. I am not sure why I stopped and turned around. I was maybe afraid I would find the whole city empty or maybe I was afraid I would find many people there. For whatever reason, I did stop and just turned back again towards home. I did check many of the houses for supplies and I did find things that I could use. I found a wagon at one place and used that to haul many things back home. I made a few trips to bring back everything that I wanted. Some things like books are heavy and rather bulky. The wagon helped a lot in moving stuff. There is not much in the way of water sources in tha
t direction and I have to carry more water when I go there than I usually carry with me.

  I have gone back and searched those houses again because every year I think of different uses for different items. Some things I can never get enough of. I always bring back clothes and shoes that fit me because they wear out. Everything that I use all the time wears out it seems. I have hauled back all the candles that I have ever found. I had found a few old-fashioned oil lamps but very little lamp oil. Then I found that diesel fuel worked fine in the lamps but did produce a smell. I put up with the smell and used the lamps anyway. I also built my own cart using items I found so I have an easier way to haul bigger and heavier loads back to my main camp.

  So many simple things are very useful. Clothes pins I use for the intended purpose but I often find other uses for them. Safety pins I use all the time for so many things. I gathered all of them I ever found and have some stashed at every one of my camps. Pencil sharpeners make great shavings for starting fires. I realized that one day when I was making myself a list and I stopped to sharpen the pencil I was using and then I just looked at the shavings for a moment and realized that they would make a great fire starter.

  In the old days of technology, many times I heard people say “Think outside the box.” Well that is way more important now than it ever was back then.