comrade simba

Just ate a peach… from the first sapling planted when we moved here. That is huge – as significant as it gets. We are here, we have been here, and we will stay here.

Best damn peach I ever ate…

Part of a response I sent a Florida couple who saw my doomer wanted ad in the latoc classifieds…

Glad you wrote back. Even if your side of Florida doesn’t get a dose of goo… whatya gonna do about the other side showing up with… their “needs”?

It’s tough being a full on doomer. No bullshit, no rose colored glasses, no capacity for magical thinking. Knowing in my lifetime, and for sure my boy’s, the horse will be the primary mode of transportation down the state highway out front. Assuming I make it through the six months or so of society’s total breakdown when the entire country will be one big mass of migrating refugees – some more pleasant than others, but all in a state of desperation…

My hope is that the descent down the energy ladder will be as gentle as a series of shocks to different regions – much suffering (and many will die) but absorbable in the end. Some structure left to work with; people living in an agrarian balance within their environment and the rise of human labor with hand tools driving the engine of everyday living – rather than humans as cogs in a big corporate machine for the sake of the “Economy”. I think the gulf coast is the opening act in The Great Contraction and I’m looking closely at how it pans out. It’s no mystery to me why y’all are getting the jitters.

I have been busting my ass for the last 14 months rebuilding our rental house that somebody torched. I stripped it down to the framing lumber and re-did everything by myself while trying to keep the homestead functioning. I long to wrap it up this month and go back to “puttering” in the garden, and will at least have money to buy a tractor with the rest of the insurance money. It’s been too many years of hauling wood up from the ravines with a wheelbarrow and chipping fencepost holes through Missouri rocks with a bar and sledgehammer. The tractor will help with the heavy work around here, but even with that aid it’s still a tough go day after day. “Doomer Wanted” is a call for help with my heavy labor… I can do it by myself but if all my time is on the hard crap and the other guy soaks up all the putter in the garden it’s sorta a raw deal. Same with the wife’s side of things. Is her helper going to weed in the garden, knead bread, launder the clothes in a hand powered washer, keep the cookstove going, can, dry, sort seed, process herbs and feed critters including the humans?

That doesn’t even take into consideration the culture shock of no cell phone service, pizza delivery or dropping back from the 3bdr 2 bath with attached garage to a “cottage” featuring such novelties as the “Thunder Bucket” and quaint omissions of conveniences like a “thermostat”.

We eat well – that’s our claim to fame. The fact that we may eat at all in the future is our justification for this “voluntary agrarian landed peasant” standard of success. Imaging the sense of triumph when pedaling an exercise bicycle attached to a pumpjack and homemade pump for 15 minute sends a hundred gallons of water from the spring up to a water tank by the house. Staying cozy warm and well fed for a two week period when an ice storm kils the power lines and everybody else in the area is miserable.

It’s not a walk in the park, that’s for sure, but neither is it endless toil and hardship. My wife went to look at the progress I have made on the house – it’s trimmed out and ready for paint, cabinets and fixtures, and fell in love with the place. Spent the whole drive home trying to figure out how we could move back there without sacrificing too much. Garden the whole back yard, run a few chickens and rabbits etc, but the bottom line is it is just too satisfying being here where we are with the serenity and security that makes the homestead “home”.

I checked out the link for the homesteading university. clicked on the sample lesson and, well, harrumphed. Hydroponic growing tower. Complete with styrofoam containers. Do people even have a clue as to what we as a species are facing? Maybe solar panels and blueberry bushes are the answer. Me? I’m sticking with turnips and goats.

the comrade