Dale Sullivan, 60, was fishing a rocky creek by himself when he fell and broke his ankle. [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t dwell on survival but I got a response to “More on Preppers,” post of May 4, that I think will interest you. It comes from a friend who did two tours in Vietnam as a Captain in Special Forces, and finished out his time in the Army Reserve. He wrote:

“This post reminds me of the time I worked with a dozen other Reserve officers on a project for FEMA.

“FEMA at the time was little better organized than a Boy Scout troop [maybe less organized, actually] and our project was to inspect all the supplies remaining in the in the basements of the Civil Defense shelters in the Bronx, New York City.
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By Chad Love

For those of us who grew up in the B.D. epoch (before digital), reading was the primary way to stoke our young imaginations. There were few books that fired my pre-adult synapses more thoroughly than Jean Craighead George's "My Side of the Mountain."

This classic adventure/survival/nature tale about a boy named Sam, a falcon and their woodland adventures spurred many a childhood fantasy of mine. There were two people I wanted to be in 1979: Luke Skywalker and Sam Gribley. I knew, even at that tender age, that I'd never be able to make it into the cockpit of an X-wing, but Sam's world was wondrously real, tangible and right outside my back door. Reading "My Side of the Mountain" was a huge factor in sparking my lifelong interest in hunting, fishing and the natural world.
 
So it was sad to read (via Stephen Bodio's always awesome Querencia blog) of George's passing.
 
From Bodio's blog:
Old friends and heroes are dying faster than I can write about them. Jean Craighead George, author of one of my favorite childhood books*, My Side of the Mountain, and sister to the even better- known conservationists and falconers , the twin brothers Frank and John, died last week at 92. NYT here, Wiki here, her own home site here. [ Read Full Post ]

By T. Edward Nickens

A little bit here and a little bit there. You keep your eyes open. That’s how you learn. You pick up a new knot from a new fishing buddy, or try a decoy trick you saw in a magazine. You make mistakes. And if you’re lucky, like I was, there will be a mentor along the way. An unselfish someone who cares enough about you that he wants you to know everything he’s ever learned.

That’s the good thing about hunting and fishing and camping: You can never know it all, and you’re never as good as you could be.

Over the years, I’ve learned from the best—mentors, buddies, guides, story subjects, and some of the most dedicated outdoor-skills competitors this world has ever seen. Put them together, and they’ve got a half dozen different ways to shoot a double or cast a fly rod. Here’s the best of what I’ve learned from them, and on my own, in 35 years of hunting and fishing. And this is what all sportsmen should do with such knowledge: Pass it on.

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By David Draper

As obsessed with (and frankly, terrified of) a nuclear disaster as I was when I was young, the whole doomsday madness going on today has pretty much passed me by. Maybe living within sight of an ICBM bunker, one gets used to having an ever-present harbinger of the End Times in your backyard. That, or I’m just too busy to care. Still, there is one thing Wild Chef readers and doomsday preppers have in common: a perhaps unhealthy obsession with food.

The real problem I have with the preppers is the kinds of food they’re putting up. I’m not sure I want to live in a world where I have to eat white rice and something called textured soy protein every day. And what about working your way through a three-month supply of Rice-a-Roni? That thought alone is enough to make me hope my house takes a direct hit from the first Russian SCARP (which, considering the Minuteman missile buried across the road, is not that unlikely).
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by David E. Petzal

If you’d really like to depress yourself some evening, watch “Doomsday Preppers” on the National Geographic Channel. The show details the plans of normal, well adjusted people to cope with the aftermath of fiscal collapse, nuclear holocaust, the eruption of Yellowstone, solar flares, and so on.

The New York Times noted with outrage that many of these people were accumulating guns and ammunition in order to defend their 1,500 pounds of MREs and dried brown rice, but stockpiling guns is fine with me. My concern is that most of them seem pretty inexpert with guns. One prepper was counting on a Ruger Number One single-shot which, despite its many splendid qualities, is not what you’d pick to blast the mob at your door. Another managed to shoot off several fingers during a practice session. Yet a third, a resident of the Oligarchy of Bloomberg, took lessons in knife fighting because he was unable to get a gun, ignoring the fact that everyone in the Oligarchy of Bloomberg who wants a gun has one, or several, and when the pistol-waving mob comes to this fellow’s apartment I don’t think that he and his knife will last long.

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