True. And they would be dead.
Drop me (not too hard) in most of North America, and I can get by for 3 days. In a month I'll be living fairly comfortably.
No flush toilets, or stuff like that, but the basics, shelter, heat, water, food, clothing.
I like having stuff. I don't require stuff to survive. I have a mindset and the skillsets to survive. Wilderness is harder than urban, considering the concentration of resources.
I don't even require a knife. I can make one.
Can you identify the rocks that will make a suitable cutting edge?
/johnny
Exactly.
What I find ironic in all this is how much time the media and people around NYC/NJ have sniffed and tut-tutted at those of us who are prepared for turd->turbine collisions as “hicks” and “nutjobs.....” and now they don’t understand even WHY they’re going to be without power for at least a week. They can’t even tell you how electrical power is generated or transmitted.
Every time there’s a big storm, we hear calls by uppity liberal arts majors to bury the power lines... and now we have a city with mostly buried power infrastructure that is royally screwed when water (and salt water at that) got into their oh-so-cleverly buried power infrastructure. Let’s leave that oh-so-brilliant dependency on public transportation out of the picture for right now - the subways will likely take a couple months to fully restore (at a great expense, I might add), just getting the power infrastructure back online is going to be a huge feat.
A city of mostly liberal arts majors and welfare dependents in this situation shows what the value of some hard asset skills are.
But they won’t learn. They’ll never bother learning that you can forge a nice knife out of the leaf springs of cars - and that they have lots of cars around them now that aren’t ever going to go anywhere again. Never mind that lots of those cars are filled with at least some fuel that can be decanted off the water in their tanks... never mind that someone could be pulling the alternators out of cars to make makeshift gensets to recharge batteries and such, or that someone could be making makeshift heaters. Nah. Much easier to complain very loudly.
BTW, in my area of Wyoming, I’d be looking for obsidian. Makes tools that are holy-crap sharp. There are recently discovered sites around Wyoming where it is thought that the Indians had “edge factories” - they had nice outcroppings of the rocks/stones that made nice edges and tools and they’d hang out there for weeks at a time, with skilled flintknappers just cranking out one arrow/spear point or knife after another. I’ve spent a little bit of time with a guy who can crank out a very serviceable arrow head in literally five minutes. He thinks that the Indians were at least as skilled as he is and that losing a stone knife for them was a fairly minor annoyance, since it took them only a hike to find the suitable rocks and in no more than 20 minutes after locating said rock(s), they had just about anything they wanted.
“Can you identify the rocks that will make a suitable cutting edge?”
Rocks that have a fracture point.
Yep.