Gallimaufree

You might want to hold your laughter until the end of this story. It is true. It really happened. If you ever meet me in person, ask to see the scar. I might show you.

When my children were very young (pre-school), we often drove out to the Bird Sanctuary at Lake Overholser (it’s not there anymore – the Sanctuary, that is. The lake is still there.) to play and wander about in the late afternoon. Very few people knew about the Bird Sanctuary so it was rarely crowded. The kids could shout and run and have fun. They didn’t bother the birds, and the birds pretty much left them alone.

This was a weekly trip for us from spring to late fall.

As we were leaving the Bird Sanctuary, I spotted a fox lying on the side of the road. It was moving, but not well at all. My car back then was equipped to clean up roadkill and to handle auto-injured animals, and I had an agreement with a vet for bringing in injured animals. Most of the animals I brought in were dogs, with a few squirrels and an occasional cat. I figured a fox wouldn’t be such a big deal.

So I pulled over and with surprisingly little effort, got the fox into the cage. We drove straight to the vet, and he told me the fox was a vixen who’d recently given birth. If I could find the babies, we could save them all and release them back into the wild when the vixen’s injuries healed. It was getting dark by then, and the vet said the babies would be fine overnight.

Early the next morning, just after sunrise, we went back to the Bird Sanctuary and started looking for a fox den. It wasn’t as hard as it sounded; there weren’t that many decent places for a den. An hour later, we’d found the den and the 3 baby foxes.

None of their eyes were open yet and they obviously still had their milk teeth. I put them into a blanket lined box and had just secured the box in the car when I heard my son scream and little footsteps pounding hard and fast. My daughter was shouting “Run! Run!” and laughing, so it couldn’t be too serious.

They were in sight I’d long ago trained them to stay in sight – in another story, I’ll tell you how and why I used dog training manuals for training my children. Today, as adults, they still sit when I tell them. This is a Good Thing.

I scanned the area for any problems, and spied several ducks chasing my son. He was clutching leaves in both hands. My daughter was sitting on a mound, laughing and encouraging him to run faster. The ducks were gaining on him.

The baby foxes were secure, so I ran out to wave my hands at the ducks to scare them off. My son dashed behind me. The ducks kept coming. One had only one wing, and several looked rather scruffy. I stepped forward onto a dew-drenched mound of grass and slipped – just as the lead duck ran into me.

Now, under normal circumstances and with a healthy duck, this would have been no problem. The duck and I would have bounced apart and run in opposite directions.

This was not ordinary. When I slipped, my skirt rode up and the duck banged into my thigh, low down, near the knee – and stuck there. His beak was jagged, as if it had been shot partly off or someone had smashed part of it off with a hammer – or maybe this was the duck that had flown into Fabio’s face. Unlike Fabio, though, no one had fixed this duck’s schnozz .

It had pierced my thigh and was securely stuck there, caught in my tendon, flapping wings and honking fit to burst eardrums. I’m sure I wasn’t much quieter.

My daughter had the presence of mind to bring me some rope we kept in the car, and I tied that duck’s wings down in the hopes of being able to extricate ourselves from one another.

No such luck. He was in like Flynn. We’d become Siamese Twins. Glue would be jealous if it ever discovered how tightly we were joined.

This was in the days before we even thought of cell phones. It was still early morning. No one was at the Sanctuary but us. The nearest phone just happened to be at the nearest emergency room.

There was nothing for it but to get in the car and drive to the ER myself. The children were far too young to drive.

Did I mention that I drive a stick? Five on the floor, hot to trot, manual transmission station wagon – the ultimate family car.

Imagine this: roped up duck still squawking angrily, children hysterical with laughter, mom struggling to get into the driver’s seat, baby foxes forgotten. Now, imagine the drive itself.

I’d forgotten one crucial thing – tying the duck’s feet.

The duck and I struggled for control of the stick shift all the way to the emergency room. The car lurched and stalled and I had to restart it several times. If only there’d been a patrol car around. I’d risk a ticket to get some help.

When I finally pulled into the ER parking lot, the children tumbled out of the car and ran inside as I struggled to detach the duck from the gear shift and get out of the car.

The people there came dashing out, and when they finally stopped laughing, helped me out of the car and inside the ER.

They called the vet, who told them what to use to sedate the duck. He was prompt in coming out to take care of the duck aspect.

In a surprisingly short time, the duck was extracted, my thigh was stitched up, and everyone was happy.

The duck went on to get a prosthetic bill, living a long and happy life far from insane human beings.

Me, I have a scar in my thigh and another interesting story to tell.

Survival Tips for this:

1. Have someone with you – even a child can help
2. Have rope in your car – you can always use rope
3. Know where the nearest ER is
4. Don’t panic

And for today,

5. Have a charged cell phone with you. This happened i the days before cell phones and it would have been soooo much easier if I could have called for help.

Frozen Rocks

Originally uploaded by nodigio

I teach friends and students and others a variety of observation games because I know that observation is one of the keys to survival. I’ll put the rules to the games we play at the end of this post. Some of the will be familiar to you as children’s games.

I’m not alone in believing that the ability to pay attention to your surroundings is a part of the skill set that will put you in the Survivors Club. This is a fairly exclusive club. Only those who survive serious disasters are part of it. My membership is earned several times over. When I was young, I wrecked a car in the Hartz Mountains of Germany, got lost in the Swiss Alps during a snowstorm, accidentally strayed across the Iron Curtain when it still existed and was captured, and a few other incidents, all the way up to middle age, when I got a duck stuck in my thigh, survived the Murrah Bombing, fell through a ceiling, had a tandem skateboarding accident, and right through to old age, when I was in my first auto accident (not my fault).

What I’ve learned is that we really do control much more of our fate than you might realize. The cosmic coin toss may put you in the path of a crazed duck with a broken beak but you have lots of options about what you will do with that scenario. We may not get to pick our DNA, and we may not always survive the collapse of a bridge or dodge a bullet, but if we survive the initial moments of the event, our chances of survival increase. We are in control of every moment after the crisis part of the event passes.

Consider the pilot on the recent forced landing in the Hudson River. The moment of crisis was when the engines were damaged by the birds. What the pilot did after that moment ensured maximum survival. He kept his wits to plot out what to do, he observed his surroundings for the optimal outcome, and he used his skills to execute a safe landing in as safe a place as he could find. That’s what survivors do.

When I crashed in the Hartz Mountains, I drove off a hairpin turn. I was a novice driver, and it was my first time behind the wheel and I did have an instructor with me. Driving in the mountains was probably not the smartest thing to do, but once the crash was done, we survived by observation and skill – I remembered a house we passed. We bound our wounds and hiked back to the house. They didn’t have a phone, but the next morning, they took us into town, and we salvaged the car and got our injuries properly cared for. Had I not remembered the house – and first aid skills – we might have died on that mountain. Others have. Not far from where we crashed, they found the remains of 2 other wrecks and the people in them. At least 2 of the people did not die immediately.

Every one of my mishaps, accidents, and disasters could have proven fatal. I’m not a particularly brave person, and I’m not particularly tough. There’s a growing field in survival psychology, and their research and studies all seem to indicate that 10% of the people will do what they need to do to survive, 80% will panic, and some of them will luck into surviving, and 10% will do everything wrong and die when they should have easily survived. Within those categories are those who survive, those who never had a chance to survive, and those who could have survived and didn’t. There’s still a lot of debate over whether it’s luck, personality, skill, or some combination of those – or something completely different that contributes to their survival.

Me, I’ll hedge my bets and go with a combination of things. Practicing disaster scenarios helps condition your responses. Practice all kinds of disaster scenarios, not just apocalyptic ones: getting fired, your house burning, being in a car accident, being mugged, choking, all the things you might encounter. But don’t over-practice them, because I think if you rehearse too much, you get stuck in routines and miss obvious opportunities. Build up your knowledge and skills. All knowledge is truly worth having because you never know what bit of trivia may float up and save you. Even if you aren’t skilled, if you’ve only heard about something or read about it, you can most likely use it to save yourself and others. How many times have we read a survivor’s story and the survivor said “I read about X and thought I could do that – and I did and it worked.” Read widely, listen to other survivor stories, pay attention to your surroundings.

That last one is critical. Sometimes, you can survive a disaster simply by being observant and avoiding being involved in the accident. A lot of people have inattentional blindness, they are unaware of things happening around them if they aren’t specifically paying attention to them. If you travel the same route every day, you are less likely to notice minor changes and may not even notice major ones. Your eyes focus clearly on only 2 – 3 degree area around your focal point; the rest is blurred. If you are talking on a cell phone as you drive or walk, you are less aware of your surroundings. A recent study indicated that pedestrians talking on a cell phone were more likely to cross streets when it wasn’t safe to do so. If you are concentrating on one thing, you may block out everything else.

You can train yourself to notice changes around you that could help you survive, to forestall this inattentional blindness, and to widen your visual acuity area.

That’s where these games come in. They are training exercises to increase your memory, your observation skills, and your observational skills.

The first is the old standby children’s game: Memory. If you played this game as a child, you’ll remember that it consists of matched pairs of cards laid randomly face down. You take a turn by turning two cards over. If they match they stay face up. If they don’t match, they both go face down. The point is to remember where each picture is so when you turn over your first card, you can more quickly turn over a second card that matches.

Another is a new game marketed on ThinkGeek.com called Think-ets. This is a small bag of miniature trinkets that have several possible games. One game is to take out a random number of trinkets, scatter them on a small surface, give the players time to see them (start with 45 seconds and reduce the time as you become more skilled), then cover them and have the players write down (or call out) what the items were. An advanced form of this game is to recall not only what the objects were but where they were in relation to one another. One way to play the advanced form is to have the players write or tell where the pieces were. A second way is to scramble the pieces before removing the cover and once they’ve guessed what the pieces were, then have them put the pieces back in their original places. Another is to take a selection of random pieces, scatter them, give people time to see them, then cover the pieces and remove one item. Uncover the pieces and have the players guess what’s missing.

For the hearing, random noises can do the same thing. Collect a variety of everyday noises and some not so obvious ones, then have players guess what the sounds are. Play a random series and have them guess what each sound is and where they may hear those sounds. You can even record the sounds of a regular trip and have the players guess where you are, from where you started to where you ended. Don’t forget the footsteps of people who pass you every day, or the sounds of pets or animals that are around, honking horns, traffic roaring, wind in trees or humming through buildings or sculptures, that sort of thing.

Don’t leave out tactile and scent, either. The same things can be done with the textures of the things you normally touch – from surfaces under your feet to vibration in the air to things you feel on your skin – passing breezes, traffic breezes, regular gusty alleyways, sun orientation, and things you touch with your hands. You can patch together strips of textures, and take walks to feel the differences in walking on cement opposed to tile or dry grass or wet grass or street surfaces. Do this with a trusted friend and a blindfold for both the tactile and scent games.

Consider the smell of the places you go – gasoline, hot tar, fried foods, perfume from the woman who always beats you to the elevator, your co-worker’s aftershave, or the smell of hot paper and ink from the printer. Smells may be a little harder to capture than textures or sounds or sights, but worth the effort. The best way is to simply walk along your routine paths and identify the smells as you go. Do this for each season or weather change so you know how the scent scenery changes.

The more variety and awareness you have about these things, the more likely you are to continue to be aware of them on some level. If you train yourself to recall them in play, being able to recall them in everyday life will be much easier. If you do a check periodically throughout your walk or drive or commute to reaffirm the familiar sights, sounds, scents, and textures, you’ll notice changes and be ready to respond to them. When you see smoke where no smoke should be, you won’t walk heedlessly into the smoke the way so many people did at the King’s Crossing Underground fire back in the 80’s. I remember that and being horrified by the fact that officials kept directing commuters down into the fire and the commuters went, and not one drop of water or one fire extinguisher was used to combat that fire. Thirty some people died, most of them not even aware they were walking to their deaths. They followed their routine in spite of smoke and flames.

Don’t be one of the King’s Crossing Underground railroad victims – be aware of your surroundings and respond to them. And join me in the Survivor’s Club.

One of the signs of an impending depression are the numbers of people who lose their jobs, live on unemployment until they stop qualifying for it and then drop off the rolls without ever getting re-employed, despite having marketable skills. When job markets are so tight we have PhDs slinging burgers, we are in a depression. People don’t look for any job that pays if they can find jobs in their areas of expertise. Working in their chosen field brings them higher pay. Why would a pharmacist sling burgers when he can sit in a cushy pharmacy counting pills and mixing medicinal liquids? Because there are no other jobs available and he has college loans to pay and rent and food, and maybe a family to support and no unemployment benefits.

Unemployment figures only count the numbers of people who qualify for and claim unemployment. It does not count all the people who are unemployed who don’t qualify for or claim unemployment. The (wrong) assumption is that these people either don’t want to work or they are employed. If we truly counted all the unemployed people who would like to be employed and are actively job-hunting, our unemployment figures would be much higher than they are. If we counted all the people who are under-employed because they took whatever job they could get regardless of pay, our employment outlook would also be much grimmer than it is.

Some of these people have already discovered how to barter skills they never thought would be useful into ones that keep them surviving. Some manage to turn those skills into lucrative businesses. Some try to turn their skills into lucrative businesses and slam into zoning regulations, health regulations, and business laws that penalize them for their entrepreneurship. In a depression, we have a lot more people working menial jobs, jobs below their qualifications, and small entrepreneurs. In the past, there’s been more mobility in a depression, too because it was cheaper to move to other cities and places looking for work.

In our looming depression, travel won’t be so easy. We’ve already got restrictions on flying, and flying will be even more curtailed and expensive if fuel becomes expensive or difficult to get. There’s talk of creating national IDs to track where people live and travel, and that will dampen moving to other places easily. The high price or lack if fuel will also make moving less easy. And the amount of stuff people now have will make moving a daunting process. If border patrols are set up at each state border (New Mexico has one at the Texas/New Mexico border), that will restrict moving even more. Migrations of people from the city to the country or to other cities will happen, but at great cost. We may have more people work for large companies, and we’ll have fewer large companies because our laws no longer control monopolies and mega-mergers as well as they once did. People will have contracts owned by large companies, which will have the right to control every aspect of their “employees’” lives, from where they live (in company owned housing) to where they shop (in company owned stores), to how they spend their off-duty hours (in company controlled recreation areas). People can “buy out” their contract if they want to work elsewhere or some other company can buy their contract and they may find themselves working for a company they never wanted to work for. It looks pretty grim.

But if you prepare now – help change laws so small businesses and entrepreneurs are supported and mega-corporations aren’t given unequal tax breaks and incentives, build barterable skills that will allow you to either supplement your income with trade goods and services, or use your skills to keep yourself out of the grip of mega-corporations – you can survive the depression with your dignity, honor, health, and wealth intact.

I was born right after World War II, to parents and grandparents who’d lived through the Great Depression. I grew up with it hammered into me that work was all well and good, but you also needed skills you could trade with other people to get by. Employers came and went, skills lasted a lifetime. We were all taught a variety of useful skills: handwashing laundry, basic carpentry, gardening, foraging, sewing, cooking, ironmongery (what’s called blacksmithing in America), knife sharpening, hunting (I shot my first wild duck in the Black Forest when I was 7 years old), weapons care, roof thatching, knitting, embroidery, crochet, slaughtering and butchering skills, sausage making, baking, canning, salting, pickling, and lockpicking. I still keep my hand in at all of these skills. I was apprenticed to an herbal apothecary, so I know how to craft any kind of herbal medicine. I learned a variety of languages (mostly rusty now, I’m where I can read most languages, but no longer speak or understand spoken words – part of the problem is a hearing injury that prevents me from hearing everything that’s said – still reading other languages is a useful skill). After I came to the States, I learned a variety of outdoor survival skills my family mostly ignored in Germany. Honestly, over there, you can always find some shelter within a half-day’s walk, unlike here where you really might be on your own for days or weeks before you found man-made shelters or other humans. Our survival skills were mostly ones involving working with other people and being useful in groups or communities. In America, a lot of survival skills are geared towards being alone or in a very small group, like your immediate family.

You’ll notice there were some lacking skills in what I was taught – consider it a sign of the times. I wasn’t taught plumbing or electricity work because I didn’t encounter either one until after I came to the States. The village I grew up in was considered wealthy, but only the beauty salon had running water and no one had electricity yet. Cars were things of rare wonder, so we didn’t learn any auto care skills. Ask me to hitch a team of horses, clean out fetlocks and hooves, grease axels on a wagon, fix a broken harness, repair a hitchpin and I’m there for you. I did learn some basic automotive skills after coming to the States, and I’ve recently taught myself basic plumbing and am working on basic wiring skills. I’m also learning how to build with cob, and learning ways of generating energy that don’t involve plugging an appliance into a wall outlet.

I’d recommend learning the basics you need to survive: sewing, cooking with a fireplace or grill or woodburning stove, basic plumbing, electricity, and carpentry, handwashing all your laundry (collect some good hand powered old fashioned laundry appliances: washboard, hand-cranked wringer, clothespins and line, and fire-heated iron; and learn to use them before it becomes essential to know how), basic gardening and foraging skills, and one or two food preservation skills. You could barter with those and take care of yourself, too. Once you’ve got these down, consider adding in a specialty skill or two that you hone for real bargaining power.

If you read histories and biographies of people in the Old West, some of the things they appreciated and were willing to barter for were sometimes quite simple things: someone who could bake good bread or make really good donuts would draw people from miles to barter for them. If you can keep and use a Yeast Beastie, that might be a good trading skill (sourdough culture and baking with it). Knitting (and possibly spinning your own yarn) would be in demand in colder regions of the country. Specialty gardening – herbs, soft fruits like grapes or strawberries or raspberries, or root vegetables like rutabagas and potatoes and sweet carrots, or tree nuts like sweet acorns and pecans – could give you a bartering leverage. The ability to tell stories – not just fictional ones but solid history, too – would be in demand if TV does migrate entirely to the internet and internet access is spotty or pricey.

Consider both what you like doing and what you think might be in demand in your area should the upcoming depression be as bad as the one in the 30’s was and take the time now to learn them and sharpen them. If prices do go through the roof and fuel is rationed or in short supply, then you have something you can use to ease the pain of it and live through the depression with some degree of comfort.

That’s what most of my tips are about – being comfortable, maintaining as closely as possible your current style of living or maybe even improving it. It’s part and parcel of our Bounty Ministry in Numenism – going beyond mere sustainability and subsistence existence and into bounty for all.

Once you have a barterable skill, let others know about it. Start using it as soon as possible. Maybe you’re a dab hand at fixing flat tires and doing oil changes, but you’ve got a faucet that won’t quit dripping and it’s driving you insane (you’re using a bucket to catch the water, right?). Your neighbor has a slow leak in one tire and she’s as dab at basic plumbing as you are with tires, so you barter – she fixes your faucet, you fix her tire. You both are happy. She didn’t have to buy a new tire and you didn’t have to find a plumber. And you’re off and running on your bartering career. You can trade skills, services, or the products of your skills. You love cleaning house and washing dishes, your neighbor loves to cook. He gets a clean house, you get quality home-cooked meals. You’re great at spinning and dying almost any fiber, but you’re all thumbs when it comes to knitting, weaving, crocheting with it. Your best friend can knit or weave anything. You provide him with your yarns and threads, he makes shawls, sweaters, blankets, and fabric. You get as much as of his finished products as you need and he sells or barters the rest – and you get a portion of his bartered goods and services or he gives you extra products you can use to barter for yourself. Life is good.