Sodden

As the clock ticked toward noon today, it had been raining hard for a couple of hours. I’d gone out to walk the homestead earlier, before it started, and at that point everything was dry and navigable. The area around the cabin and camper really doesn’t suffer with heavy rain, being gravel and all, but the lower level — site of the leach field, the soft shed and the wood yard — tends to get pretty sloppy, pretty fast.

It did today.

Obviously (or at least it’s obvious to us), we don’t have to worry too much about flooding. Runoff seems to run off, for the most part, around the plot we’ve developed. The driveway and its approaches haven’t shown us that they’re the slightest bit prone to eroding.

The road is a different story.

The terrain down in the bottoms, north of the county road, at the level of Crooked Creek, is a flood plain. Sustained heavy rain, like today’s downpours, will put those pastures and fields under water.

Thinking about that now has me remembering something that Deb and I did when we first started prepping. I researched where the flood plains were around our Ohio home, consolidated them onto a single map and printed it out.

The exercise went much farther than that.

I cataloged assets, liabilities and threats, as many as I could think of, within a 15-mile radius. Here’s a partial list of what I’m talking about:

• Natural threats (historical weather patterns, seismic activity, flooding, wildfire)
• Man-made threats (chemical plants, power plants and substations, utility lines and conduits, water-treatment facilities, fuel and hazmat depots, rail lines, airports and flight paths)
• Law-enforcement stations and substations, jails and prisons
• Fire stations and ambulance services
• High-crime areas
• Drug-rehab facilities and halfway houses
• Homeless encampments and shanty towns
• Voting patterns
• Military bases, installations and armories
• Decommissioned and re-purposed military facilities
• Hospitals, clinics and pharmacies
• Grocers, restaurants and other facilities with food service
• Gas stations
• Gun and ammo retailers
• Water features (springs, streams, ponds, lakes, rivers)
• Significant topographic features (terrain)
• Significant infrastructure (bridges, interchanges, towers, urban areas)
• Potential escape routes and multiple alternate routes
• Potential and historical disaster shelters and refugee camps
• Allies

If that sounds like a lot of work, it was. (And I’m sure I left something out.) Everything on that list was plotted on maps, printed and kept in two large binders, along with satellite imagery and USGS topo maps of the area.

Oh, and there was one more page — it recorded distances from the windows of our home to various points on our property. If I have to explain that further, you’re reading the wrong blog.

I still have those binders, though they’re certainly obsolete now. That was 18 years ago and 700 miles from The Mountain.

So have we gone through the same process for our new Home in Ozarkansas? No, and we probably won’t, at least not formally. Let me tell you why.

The biggest payoff of that exercise long ago wasn’t the binders or the information within — it was the mindset it created. The process laid the foundation for a whole new way of thinking, establishing a radically different way of looking at our surroundings (big picture, not circumstantial situational awareness).

Now, for both Deb and me, it’s second nature. Not only are we naturally aware of what’s around us in this (relatively) fixed location, but the mindset follows us when we travel.

And truly, it never ends. We never stop looking for assets, liabilities and threats. The world around us changes every day, and it’s our responsibility to keep up.

It gives us an advantage that we wouldn’t have if we hadn’t undertaken that original project. Wherever you are, we recommend that you do the same.

You don’t have to make binders, of course, but we encourage you to put it down on paper somehow. The old-school effort will reinforce the mindset.

Besides, this is important. Trust me on that.

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Like a couple of kids who couldn’t wait to go out and splash in the puddles, as soon as Deb got Home from work we put on our rain gear, boarded the buggy and drove down the road. She’d eyeballed it on her way up and reported that nearly three inches of rain tore it up pretty good.

“And we have waterfalls!” she chirped.

What we have, actually, are gurgling cascades in the drainage ditch on our side of the road.

We came back to the camper, fed the dogs and fed ourselves. The sun came out just before 7pm, in time for sunset.

Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.

#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable

#LetsGoBrandon #FJB

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