Posted on 08/22/2012 4:49:46 PM PDT by dynachrome
So how do you become a self-taught deadly warrior of the night? You begin in the daytime. Lay out a walking path through your neighborhood “Area of Operations,” a path with plenty of transitions across all types of urban, suburban and rural terrain. Culverts, gullies, overgrown chain link fences, woods, meadows, railroad tracks, bridges, power line right-of-ways, abandoned commercial properties and fallow fields will be your classroom.
To begin, mark your route every twenty or thirty yards. Small torn rags stuck on fences and tree branches look fairly natural, and won’t be noticed. Walk and crawl through thickets, under fences, over walls, through the doors and windows of closed factories or falling-down barns. Travel your path in daylight both ways, several times. If it’s summer where you are located, dress for bugs, thorns and mud, but stay inconspicuous.
Then come back after dark on a moonlit night. Your mind and memory will already know the route very well, but the darkness will swallow up much that was plainly visible by day, while revealing new folds and textures of light and shadow. Your rag markers will help you to stay on course. You can also blaze a temporary trail with a small bag of baking flour, leaving a white pile at intervals.
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Good stuff.
May be of interest to your list.
Only one thing to add. Replace the bag of flour with colored aquarium gravel, (green, brown, blue.) Animals and insects will eat the flour, wind will disperse it or rain will wash it away, but gravel will hang in there and small amounts are not likely to be noticed of you aren’t looking for it.
Ping.
To begin with - move the HE*L out of the city NOW. Then you’ll have a fighting chance of survival.
Play all the tied rags and piles of flour you want - if TSHTF, you are going to cross paths with others trying to get out too = others determined to survive - and that well might mean taking whatever YOU have.
Think of a big freighter going down - picture all the rats scurrying to escape...running over one another.
The city has ALWAYS been the place NOT to get caught in when the hammer comes down. It wont be just others trying to esacape and others looking to rob them, but the cities will go under immediate lock down and there will be curfews. Anyone caught skulking around after curfew is also the target of the law - or what will pass for law.
So if you DO manage to get out of the city - then what? Do you have friends where y ou are going? ARe you especting they should give y ou safe haven - and food? ARe you KNOWN where you are going? Strangers in small towns, villages, farm lands, are going to stick out like sore thumbs.
You will run out of food in 2-3 days. What then?
Better, maybe, to take all your prep time in getting out of the city BEFORE you think you need too - if things go bad in Nov., you may already be too late.
“To begin with - move the HE*L out of the city NOW”
Correct!
One other bit of advice from a guy who lives in the country - you’d be perfectly welcome to play these games on my land, but PLEASE let me know ahead of time! The further out of town you go the more likely you are to run into folks for whom Officer Friendly is a distant fiction and who pretty much have to take care of strangers snooping and pooping in the trees by themselves. The last thing in the world I want to do is ventilate some kid with high-tech viz gear and a paintball rifle who happens to scare hell out of me in the dark.
I’m out of the city, but we still need to know every rock and tree and bend of the stream because we WILL have to fight marauders FROM the city. There are abandoned strip mines and a myriad of caves up here that will prove very handy in such cases.
This is incredibly good advice. Kudos to Travis McGee.
We have been pursuing a little harmless nocturnal archeological project for the past 3 years. Thats fancy talk for digging holes. We know the woods around our neighborhood like the back of our hands. We can now walk it in total darkness. We do carry small green LED lights for the darkest nights but we only use them intermitently.
Walking around in the dark is great for your morale. For one thing you stop being afraid of the dark. Its very empowering. You also develop very good night vision.
Yes you can and will encounter other beings in the woods at night. We have had encounters of the close kind with deer, coyotes, a pesky skunk, a weasel, bobcat and one night a bear. The Bear was a little unerving but we smelled him coming and heard him moving around. He was as anxious to avoid us as we were him. I’ll admit we did high step it back home that night. We do carry pepper spray and a machete. We decided early on a gun was probably a poor idea for that location. We also do not sneak through our neighbor’s yards, well except for Mom. LOL!
Bottom line if we had to we could jump my Mom’s fence (she lives across the street and yes we keep a piece of carpet to facilitate getting over) and disappear down into the 100 year flood plain and be gone.
One of the most interesting challenges is when someone says “global village” is to ask them to walk across their county, North to South then East to West. Counties are HUGE. They are also full of opportunities if following Matt’s advice. A person can get a sense that no one, no outsider, could ever defeat them instead of having the all too common idea that they are so small, the world so big, and they have no chance.
To this I can only add one bit: Get a good PVS-14 and learn how to use it. That includes utilization of both helmet and weapons mounts. Bring spare batteries. Learn how to operate 100% passively. And once in a while switch the thing off in the middle of your training session, adapt, and complete the exercise.
Here in swamp country, I would also advise insect repellent, a good machete and a sidearm in case you run into some of the, er, 'bigger critters', particularly during water crossings.
For later reading.
For later. Thanks for posting and Matt, thanks for writing it.
Yep, just getting past the basic hard-wired fear of the dark is a huge step. Kudos for nocturnal wanderings.
Swamps are great passive, natural land barriers to all but the hardiest and most knowledgeable.
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