I’d like to make
a Withdrawal
By Pete Thorsen
Chapter 1
People might call me many things if they knew me better — things like doomer, prepper, survivalist, or just plain crazy. But people don’t know me very well and I hide my prepper tendencies, so everyone just thinks I am a regular guy. Obviously my wife knows and though she doesn’t share my feelings of doom, she lets me do most everything I want as long as it isn’t too much off-the-wall. So my wife helps tremendously just by keeping me grounded in reality.
She is fine with me storing a lot of food because she knows that we will eat it up at some point anyway. And with food going up in price it makes economic sense to buy extra, especially if we can buy items on sale that we like to eat. So that part is fine.
And when I said I wanted to withdraw a bunch of money as cash just to have at home in case of emergencies (or bank closures) she really did not see the need but she also saw little harm in doing so because we basically earned zero interest on the savings anyway, so she went along with it.
When I bought a generator in case of power outages, she was all for it. We live well out in the country and loss of power happens here sometimes. And she said it would certainly be nice to have a generator. Plus all the neighbors have them too.
She questioned me when I bought a metal fifty-five-gallon drum at a yard sale but I told her that the generator would do little good if we had no fuel for it when we needed it. She understood that right away and the only question was where I was going to put the thing so it would not make the place look trashy with more junk around. I told her I had a plan so no one would see it.
After I got the drum home, I rinsed the drum out with just a small amount of gas so the fuel I would put in would not get contaminated. I bought some black roofing tar and coated the outside of the drum with it while also making a mess of the old clothes I was wearing at the time. Next, I dug a hole in the ground to set the drum in so it only sat about three or four inches above ground. High enough so rainwater would not pool on top but not high enough to be noticeable above the grass.
Once buried I filled the drum with gas and added some fuel stabilizer to it. Between the stabilizer and having the drum in the ground to stop wild temperature swings, the gas should have a long life. I added a simple hand pump to the drum and made a somewhat decorative pile of rocks around it to mostly hide the pump and that project was done (it was behind the shed anyway). When completed it was wife approved so I was totally in the clear and I now had fifty-five gallons of spare fuel on hand, plus whatever I happened to have in gas cans which got used for all the gas machines we owned, like the lawn mower.
The main reason I wanted the generator and extra fuel was so we would have the ability to run our well pump for clean water if the power ever went out for a longer length of time. I never mentioned that to my wife. I guess I just forgot.
So we now had both food and water mostly taken care of in case of serious problems. And with the cash on hand, we had the means to buy items if stores were ever open but the banks were not. Even before we were married, I was something of a gun collector and a hunter and my wife thought nothing about how many or what guns I owned. She even spent some afternoons shooting with me on occasion which she seemed to enjoy. So I also had the means for defense covered if it ever came down to that, plus I could hunt from home to add to our food supply if ever required.
It gets fairly cold here in the winters, cold enough so you would certainly want heat in your house. We heated with a propane furnace, which required electric to run but we did have two small non-electric gas heaters and also a wood stove in the main room. The wood stove came with the house and we very seldom used it. My wife did not like the mess involved with burning wood. But that wood stove would still work just fine if we ever needed it. Off and on in the winter, I would start a fire in it just for fun. It had glass doors so you could watch the fire inside and my wife liked to use it occasionally.
I also had a plain wood stove in my shop, so that explained the huge pile of firewood I had built up. My wife never said much about the large woodpile. I kept it neat and inside the open front lean-to, I had built on one side of my shop/garage building. So I had heat covered in case things ever went bad too. Plus the house wood stove had a flat top that could be used for cooking though we did have a gas kitchen range and we had two fair sized propane tanks that I made sure were always full or close to it. One tank came with the place and I had bought another that I found online from a local person.
Yes, I was happy because emergency wise we were sitting pretty well prepared. My wife liked to garden and grew a lot of vegetables every year. She did this just because she liked doing it and never thought about what a great preparedness item that big garden really was for us. I made sure she had plenty of jars and lids for canning the stuff from her garden.
I had often thought about installing solar power but financially it just made no sense at all for us. Solar’s only appeal was strictly for its preparedness value and it would be a huge expense that I could not justify, even to myself let alone my wife. I did have the solar setup on the roof of our RV and that was big enough to run the standard 120 volt small refrigerator in there. I could install that compact refrigerator in our house and use the solar panels to run it if times ever required it.
So I was quite happy with how well we were prepared for troubled times if they ever did happen here. I did not really think we would ever need everything I had done because we lived in the middle of nowhere with no large cities even remotely close to us and obviously nothing ever did happen like what I had prepared for anyway.
Story: I'd like to make a Withdrawal
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