Prepping – Useful Skills

There are a BILLION skills to learn when you’re talking about reenactment or prepping for TEOTWAWKI. I’m going to touch on the top five today, but if there’s a specific skill set you’d like me to write about, drop me a note in the comments below.

Fire

Knowing how to make a fire is probably the single most important skill you can have when in a primitive environment. Fire is how you sterilize first aid instruments, sanitize your water, clean your wounds, clean your body, cook your food, and keep yourself warm. Heck, fire even keeps most animals at bay, which means you’re safer when you have it.

Learning how to start a fire is not easy. If you’re without a lighter, could you do it? Yes, you can keep a couple of hundred packs of Bic lighters on hand for an emergency, but what if they’re all used up? What if they get wet and won’t strike? What if they get stolen, or blown up? What if they’re all duds and you don’t find out until the emergency is in progress? You cannot base the entirety of your fire preps on a single method, because that is the way to die cold and afraid.

There are several fairly simple methods for making fire without the use of a lighter. As in the header picture, you could use a ferro rod or magnesium rod, and start a fire that way. You could go traditional and use flint and steel. You might consider making and using char cloth in your fire starting. Or you can try one of the many methods of starting a friction fire. None of these methods are all that easy, and all require you to put in at least a little effort to learn how they’re done.

Ferro rods are made of ferrocerium, and they can be scraped with a metal object (a knife, a striker, etc) to make sparks. The sparks are caught in char cloth or other flammable material (aka tinder), which is then transferred to kindling, and then built into a fire. Magnesium rods work in a similar way, in that you scrape some of the magnesium into a pile on top of tinder, then spark into it to begin the fire. These two methods are probably the easiest of the “manual” ways to start a fire. It requires you to have tinder on hand, or know how to find it (another skill to learn), and then kindling, and then smaller bits of wood.

If you want to be a bad ass, try making fire with nothing but a flint and steel. Unlike ferro rods and magnesium rods, there’s nothing to scrape. In order to make a spark, you need to strike the flint with a bit of steel. Steel can be anything made of steel, but most often it refers to a C shaped bit of metal carried by many reenactors. The striker is hit against the flint, and hopefully a spark is sent up to fall into a tiny pile of fine tinder. Once the tinder catches, you must nurse the ember until you can get it onto a slightly larger bit of tinder, then add small and then medium kindling until the fire is built up. It takes a lot of skill, and usually you gain a lot of scraped knuckles before  you get the hang of it.

Friction fires are hard to do. I have not successfully made a friction fire yet. I have seen experts have issues when the weather isn’t just right, or their tinder material isn’t quite what was expected. There are different styles: hand drill, bow drill, two man drill, plough drill, and pump drill (definitely not an exhaustive list). The basic premise is that a stick is rubbed against a board until it heats up and begins to smoke. At that point, you work hard to capture the spark that’s smoking, in a tiny bit of tinder, and from there you build your fire. If you want to learn this method, start practicing as soon as you can, because it will take you a while to find what works for you.

First Aid

Go get your basic first aid certification. Thank me later. This is just so basic I shouldn’t even have to explain it. First aid is something every human should just learn to do. It ought to be taught in elementary school. Whether you’re tending to a finger with a splinter in it from chopping wood, or a burn from the fire, or choking on a popcorn kernel, you need to know how to deal with it. In an emergency situation, doctors will be dealing with too much, and going to a hospital or treatment center (such as a FEMA tent) could get you separated from your family. It’s better to rely on yourself. Learn it, and then go out and use it.

Mending

I could say a lot about being able to make your own clothes, but let’s start with a basic: mending your clothes. Know how to darn a sock, sew a seam, fix a button, hem pants, and other basic sewing skills. It’s not brain surgery, and even with bad eyes, I can manage to turn out passable stuff. You need to know how to mend the clothing you’re wearing, because if the world as we know it is ended, you won’t be able to go to Walmart for more.

Gathering Water

I talked about this in my Rule of Threes article, but you need to know where and how to get water. If you’re near a lake, you might just need to figure out how to get (very heavy) water from the lake to your home, but if you’re not near a body of water, that’s a whole other issue. How do you find water?

The Art of Manliness does a better job of explaining it than I do. Go read his article here. Figure out what works in your area of the world (because your area and mine are going to be different, even if we’re living in the same general part of the country!) and then practice it. Practice it a LOT.

Growing a Garden

There are so many things that could have been in my top five, but I have to add in growing a garden. Why is this so important? Because a garden, even a simple one, grows you calories for relatively little output of calories. Hunting often uses up more calories than you get out of it, and you can’t always be lucky enough to have food in trees where you live. I’m in New England, which means I have a four month growing season to grow enough food for 12 months. Sure, there’s hunting and gathering I can do, but having a garden assures that I and my family will eat every day.

Creating a garden that produces is a lot more than sticking seeds in the ground. There’s a massive learning curve, and you need to find out what it’s like in your area. Instructions from New England are going to be of almost no use to someone in New Mexico, for instance, or in Colorado. Learn what grows well in your area, then get seeds and actually do it.

One of the first things you’ll learn is that a lot of your seedlings will die. Sometimes it’ll be because of a known problem. You forgot to water them, maybe, or you let your bunny chew the plants. But sometimes they just die. So you have to plant enough to make up for the ones that you statistically know aren’t going to make it. Another item to keep in mind is that gardens are a great source of food. This means other people, animals, birds, slugs, ants, moths, cicadas, all are going to want your garden. There’s a lot more of “them” than “you” and you have to know how to deal with that before you ever put food in the ground. And then there are weeds. There’s no cure for weeds. Like the common cold, they’re just there. You have to learn how to deal with them before they become a problem.

Check out the Farmer’s Almanac for your area to get some good ideas for gardening in your neighborhood. Oh, and don’t think that living in an apartment means you shouldn’t learn this stuff. You still should. Everyone should know how to garden. Grow things in a window in a plastic bottle, if need be, but grow things. Learn the rhythm of the seasons so that you can grow your food, if you need to.

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There are so many skills that are of use. Foraging, hunting, building cabins and furniture, digging a well, canning, dehydrating, smoking, fishing, boating, raising pigs (and cows and horses and sheep and rabbits and chickens and and and), using a map and compass, lock picking, slingshot and/or ulu use, and more. What skills do you have? What can you do? What holes do you need to fill?