Prepper Movie? Not Quite…

Extreme weather, long-term power outages, natural disasters…

Living on our acreage here in the Boonies—and as the news gets grimmer with each passing year—my husband John and I often wonder: how would we cope if life as we know it went sideways?

Evacuate? Hunker down and wait out the emergency?

Now, John isn’t at all a doom-and-gloom kind of guy. “I don’t enjoy reading about Armageddon,” he says. He simply prefers the Boy Scout motto, “Be Prepared.” Note: there is actually a website called Beprepared.com!

Still, he still reads a fair amount of prepper and survivalist books and websites—on topics like, “What to pack in your bug-out bag?”

(Although sometimes, he reads the comments as much for entertainment as much as information!)

Now, it could be he and are aren’t serious enough about true preparedness: when we saw a plump game bird in our yard two days in a row this week, we were grabbing our cameras. Not a firearm so we could have a tasty roast bird for our dinner.  

Anyway, when the Gerard Butler film “Greenland” arrived in the mail (yes, we are total dinosaurs without broadband who can’t stream entertainment and get DVDs from Netflix), John queued the DVD up right away.

He and I were all set for a story about surviving in a frozen wilderness. Well, it wasn’t. The film was a “run for your life” thriller.

The plot was rife with coincidences, and I wondered how come cell phone service wasn’t disrupted after a comet started raining down space bombs all over the planet? 

The thing is, people in the movie were dependent upon the "powers-that-be" for survival—National Guard, community aid organizations, etc. 

Not a prepper mindset at all.

Plus the characters didn’t seem at all worried about obtaining food, water, and a place to go to the bathroom. However, I did enjoy watching how rugged a huge Ram dually truck could be, tearing around off-road with fireballs hitting it!

Anyway—given the increasing severity of droughts and weather of all kinds, John and I take preparedness more seriously than I’m implying. And hunkering down is definitely our #1 option.

This time of year, before the garden is producing, we have enough food in the pantry and freezers for a couple of weeks—maybe three. (However, if family members sheltered with us, our food situation would be entirely different.)

We have several days of water stored the pantry as well, and our well is connected to a solar array and battery system. So odds are good we'll have running water for the foreseeable future. We have two generators, but of course they're only useful as long as your fuel holds out.

It seems to me, when it comes to being prepared, common sense is a good way to go. Evacuating? You'd pack water, food, pet food, medications, blankets, first aid kit. Staying in place? The same essentials on hand; plan to grow food, and if you have a place to hunt or forage, tools for that too. 

One excellent point the movie did make: in case your family/your pod get separated, identify a meeting spot in advance.

As the years roll on, John and I plan to continue preparing for a possibly uncertain future. And come what may, I hope to hang on to my sense of wonder—like simply enjoying the rare sight of a neighborhood game bird!