299 Days: The Preparation Part 6

Right then and there he decided he would start to put the cash from expense checks in an envelope in the car. This is how he would spend money without Lisa knowing.

Grant noticed that, unlike the grocery store, Capitol City had plenty of inventory in the back. It made sense that a gun store wouldn't have just-in-time inventory. If the grocery stores are empty, then people will be flocking to gun stores.

Did I just have that thought? Grant wondered. What is wrong with me? That trip back to Forks had really changed him. Now he saw signs of American society's dependence everywhere he looked.

The whole experience of walking into a gun store was over in about twenty minutes. He filled out the paperwork and got his shotgun.

"Isn't there some kind of waiting period for getting a gun?" he asked the sales clerk.

"Nope," the guy said. "Not in Was.h.i.+ngton. No waiting period on long guns, only handguns."

After calling a phone number where the police checked out that Grant wasn't a felon, the clerk rang up the sale and handed Grant a large rectangular box labeled "Winchester." That was it. Grant was now a gun owner.

Grant thanked the clerk and picked up the rectangular box and put in his car. When he got out to his car and put the box in his trunk, Grant chuckled. That was easier than I thought, he said to himself. Then it hit him: he had changed. A half hour ago he was a helpless and frightened sheeple. Now he was a gun owner. He immediately felt more at ease. The world isn't so scary when you can protect yourself.

As he left the gun store parking lot, Grant started to wonder how he would get the gun into the house. What if Lisa was home? He felt like he was smuggling contraband. He laughed again because many husbands were going to the p.o.r.n store and then smuggling it into the house. He was just trying to have a gun to defend them. What a horrible husband he was.

On the short trip from Capitol City Guns to the Cedars, Grant practiced his line. He hated lying to Lisa but, as the Jack Nicholson's character in the movie "A Few Good Men" said, "You can't handle the truth!" That was it. She couldn't handle the truth and he needed to do this.

Lisa was unloading some groceries- of course, it had been since yesterday that they went to the grocery store- when Grant came home. He walked in with the shotgun box.

"Hey," Grant said, "look what my dad gave me. Mom said he wanted me to have it. Don't worry, it came with a trigger lock." Grant was afraid for her to see the shotgun. It was one thing to see a box, but another thing to see a scary gun.

Lisa glared. But she was thinking. She had secretly been wondering why Grant didn't have a gun in the house. She had heard about a friend of a friend who had a prowler on the front porch and it took several minutes for the police to come. And the trigger lock would take care of the concern about the kids. She saw lots of things in the ER from unlocked guns and kids.

"Let me see the trigger lock," she said. Grant opened the box and the trigger lock was on. She thought about it. This gun actually made sense. She was actually a little proud that her couch potato husband was finally taking responsibility for something around the house like their security. Maybe he wasn't so worthless, after all.

"As long as the trigger lock is always on," Lisa said. "I mean always except if there's a robber. And the bullets are kept separately. And the gun and the bullets are kept up high where the kids can't get them."

Grant couldn't believe how well this was going. "Of course," he said. "That's perfectly reasonable." It was.

Grant was a gun owner, and his wife was OK with it. That felt pretty good.

A few days later, the nagging feelings about dependence came back. The power went out for a few hours and Grant's mind went into a whirlwind thinking about all the things that needed electricity. He realized that when the power was off, the police were hamstrung. Defending his family was up to him. You can't outsource your family's security. You have to man up and get it done.

A few days later, Grant decided to try out the new shotgun. He swung by a sporting goods store to get a second box of sh.e.l.ls; it would be less "embarra.s.sing" going into a sporting goods store than a gun store. He would leave the first box of twenty-five sh.e.l.ls at home for home defense. He had asked the clerk at the sporting goods store where to shoot. They told him about a gravel pit outside town where people shot. Grant headed there with his box of sh.e.l.ls and his new s.h.i.+ny shotgun.

Grant knew how to shoot a shotgun from growing up in Forks, but he ran into something he hadn't experienced before. The new shotgun was jamming. Oh great. It must be broken. He would go return it and get a new one.

A guy shooting at the gravel pit, who looked like a country boy, came up to him.

"That thing jammin'?"the guy asked.

"Yep," Grant said. "I think it's broken."

"Let me see if I can fix it," the guy said. He quickly took the gun apart for cleaning and asked if Grant had ever lubricated the bolt. No, he hadn't.

"You know how to do that?" Grant asked, pointing the bolt in the guy's hand.

The guy looked at Grant like he was an idiot. "Yeah. It's not hard." After a squirt of oil, the gun ran fine.

Grant realized that he was such a sissified and dependent suburbanite that he didn't even know to perform simple maintenance on a shotgun. His immediate thought when something didn't work was to get a new one. Like a sheeple consumer. The idea of fixing it never crossed his mind. That's what highly trained specialists did. Lawyers didn't fix things.

Oh, G.o.d, did he just think that? How stupid was that?

What if he had tried to use that shotgun when someone was trying to kill his family? What if it had jammed because he'd never test fired it?

A few days later, Steve called and said he would be in Olympia for some auto parts business. They got together and started talking about how suburbanites like Grant lived. Steve said something that stuck with Grant for the rest of his life.

"We're living under a false economy," Steve said.

Exactly. That's what had been bugging Grant. This was all fake and couldn't go on. Steve, the auto parts store manager in Forks, knew more about reality than Grant's economics professors at the University of Was.h.i.+ngton. Those idiots told everyone that America could just have a service economy and not build anything, and that whenever there was a downturn the government could just print and spend more money. What could possibly go wrong?

Grant kept asking Steve about how he lived back in Forks. He was fascinated about how much Steve could do: build things, hunt, and fish, can food they grew in their garden, all of that. The nagging feeling about dependence was there again, but Grant knew that he couldn't just start living like Steve did in Forks. It was really bugging him.

Chapter 14.

Survivalist Grant was feeling his oats. He was not afraid to look at guns. h.e.l.l, he'd just bought one and successfully smuggled it into the house. He was invincible.

It was much easier going into a gun store the second time as opposed to the first. Grant went back to Capitol City and looked at all of the cool guns. Wow. He had forgotten how much he loved them.

The expense-check envelope in the car was full, so he bought a .38 revolver; a gently used Smith & Wesson with a three-inch barrel so it wouldn't kick as much as a snub nose. It is hard to go wrong with one of those; simple to operate, and ammo is relatively cheap and plentiful. He went out to the gravel pit. It shot beautifully. He loved it.

He had fallen back in love with guns. They felt so good in his hands. When he handled one, he didn't feel like a dependent suburbanite. Grant remembered how safe he felt with a gun. The ogre couldn't hurt him when he had one. He was safe.

He went back to Capitol City and got a Crimson Trace laser grip for the .38. It put a red dot exactly where the bullet would go. It made aiming almost effortless. It was so easy that Lisa, or any new shooter who didn't practice using guns, could do it in a stressful situation. And a revolver was very simple to operate; no c.o.c.king, no safeties, no magazine or slide that could jam.

At the gun store, Grant saw that guys buying handguns could avoid waiting five days to pick up a handgun if they had a concealed weapons permit. As whacked out as Was.h.i.+ngton State was, at least they had good gun laws. A permit was only $35, so he got one. He now had a concealable revolver and a permit to carry it.

But he didn't carry it; that would be weird. He kept the permit secret from Lisa. She would think he was a gun-crazed nut. He put a trigger lock on the .38 and hid it where Lisa would never find it. He hid the box of .38 ammo; the one box of fifty sh.e.l.ls. That should be enough.

As he was taking baby steps toward being prepared, the nagging thoughts about dependency were getting more intense and frequent. Grant kept thinking he should learn about things. He needed to learn - actually, relearn - how to survive. Not just how to build a fire in the woods. He needed to learn the survival mindset. He had to get in the habit of figuring out a solution on his own instead of depending on someone to supply him food or fix something.

Grant went to the bookstore to find books on "survival." He was looking at the books secretly; he didn't want anyone to know what he was looking at. It felt like the first trip to the gun store. It was like he was looking for a book like "b.e.s.t.i.a.lity Ill.u.s.trated."

Grant meandered over to the "Outdoors" section of the bookstore and waited until no one was looking. Then he pulled a book, the Special Forces Survival Manual, off the shelf and looked at it, s.h.i.+elding it so no one could see the t.i.tle.

That book had things in there about building a fire and making traps to get small game. That wasn't the kind of survival knowledge he needed. Oh, sure, it was good stuff to know and he planned on learning that at some point. But right now, at this early stage of his journey into prepping, he needed to find a book that would tell him how to be an independent man. There were none.

Grant left the bookstore empty handed and disappointed that there wasn't some book he could read that would teach him everything he needed to know. This survival thing might be more difficult than he thought.

When he got home and saw that Lisa wasn't there, Grant got on his computer. He did a Google search for "survival." He erased his browsing history so Lisa wouldn't find out his secret, shameful interest in something so sick and wrong. He started to laugh at himself; it's not p.o.r.n, it's learning how to save your family and live through bad situations. Since when is that a shameful thing?

Grant had an iPod and liked podcasts. So he searched the iTunes Store for "survival," and many bizarre podcasts came up. Some of them were the crazy tinfoil hat kind of "survivalists": the government is going to round you up and put you in camps, the Jews are taking over the world, etc. That image of a survivalist was exactly what Grant was afraid of. "Survivalist" seemed to mean "white supremacist" and "conspiracy theorist."

Great, Grant sarcastically said to himself. He was going insane.

He was worried about society breaking down and only a bunch of weirdoes shared his concern. If the only people who were survivalists were weirdoes, then he wasn't a survivalist.

Grant clicked on one last search result: "The Survival Podcast."

The stats showed that exactly 173 people were subscribing to this podcast. It probably sucked.

He listened for a few minutes. Whoa. The guy doing the podcast wasn't crazy. He was really smart. He was practical. He talked about how to store food, how to learn skills, how to grow a garden, alternate sources of electricity and water. Jack Spirko was his name. He did this podcast while he was driving in his car. Grant was hooked.

Besides the non-nuttiness of the guy and the practical information, the other thing that Grant liked about the Survival Podcast was that Spirko seemed to be just like him. He had grown up in the country and lived a lot like they did in Forks. Spirko got a big job and turned into a suburban guy, but felt like the whole thing was a fake. Just like Grant. Spirko returned to his country boy roots and was telling everyone else who would listen- all 173 of them- about how they, too, could get more independent and survive whatever might be coming. Spirko made it clear that he wasn't a racist or an anti-Semite. He was a libertarian.

Grant hit the b.u.t.ton on iTunes to become a subscriber to the Survival Podcast. He could feel that something bad was coming to America. It was the strongest nagging feeling he'd had up to that point. The economy seemed to be a giant fraud. The a.n.a.lysts on CNBC kept saying that things were fine but Grant didn't believe them. Jack Spirko was telling people to get out of the stock market. That was preposterous; the Dow was at 14,000. Spirko was adamant.

Then it happened. All kinds of banks were failing. There was full-on panic in the U.S. It looked like the financial system would melt down.

Grant kicked his survival preparations- "preps" as Spirko called them- into high gear. He felt bad for reacting so strongly and perhaps panicking, but he felt the need to get food and guns ASAP. When Grant thought about the preps he needed to do, the nagging feeling would stop nagging and start encouraging him.

Chapter 15.

Prepping Grant was really worried about Lisa finding out that he had lost his mind and was a "survivalist." He needed to persuade her why having a little food and security would be a good thing in these troubled times. She was smart and surely would understand that when the Dow drops 40% and the government is taking over banks and whole industries, that something unusual was happening and it required some thinking outside the box.

He was wrong. Grant had allowed Lisa to manage the money long ago. She was smart and did a good job at it. Grant remembered back to a previous summer, when he could feel what was coming, when he sent Lisa a link to a news story about the CEO of a huge European bank. He was not some kook. The banker was predicting a financial meltdown and credit crisis in the U.S. in the upcoming fall. Grant emailed the story to Lisa with the message, "maybe we should diversify at least some out of the stock market." She got a little mad. She told him that she was a very capable money manager and that getting out of the stock market when it was up to 14,000 was crazy because at this pace, it would be at 16,000 by Christmas.

Grant knew Lisa. If she had said they're staying in the stock market, selling now would mean she was wrong. If anything, this meant that if the stock market dropped, she would want to buy more stock because the prices were low. Sometimes when she had a choice of admitting being wrong or doubling down, she would double down.

She wasn't mean; she just thought she was right. And Grant had always sat on his a.s.s while she managed the money, so she was probably justified in not appreciating his last-minute "expertise" on the matter.

Grant would have rather bought some gold, which was at $900 per ounce, and some silver, which was at $17, but he had no choice. More stocks it was. He knew that Lisa would never back down and admit that a "survivalist" got it right. He was now even more worried about her finding out about his secret life. The more prepping he did, the more he was defying her. That's how she would look at it.

Grant felt a wedge coming between him and Lisa. But he couldn't go back to being a dependent suburban sheeple. He had actually thought about what happens when 911 doesn't answer the call and when there is no food at the grocery store. Once you think those thoughts, you can't just go back to not caring. You have to do something.

Be a man, Grant kept hearing the outside thought say.

Be a man.

Well, if Lisa was going to double down, so would he. Grant realized right then and there that he had to prepare for what was coming. There was no choice. He kept thinking how he would feel when his kids were hungry and his family was terrified to leave the house, and he would know that he could have done things to prevent it but he didn't want to make his wife mad. There was no choice. No one was going to do this for him. It was up to him.

Realizing that it was up to him and that he had to do it was a relief. He had been trying to figure out a way to get Lisa on board. It wasn't going to happen. He was going to play the hand he was dealt. Grant had a job to do. He was the man, and protecting his family was his job.

No one said this would be easy, Grant kept repeating to himself. If prepping were easy, all the sheeple idiots would be doing it. Instead, they were going to Applebee's and gorging themselves on food trucked in 1,500 miles and putting it on their credit cards.

He listened to a Survival Podcast episode about storing food and learned that some foods stored better than others and were cheap. Grant focused on oatmeal, pancake mix (Cole's favorite food), beans, rice, and pasta. He specifically wanted food that could be cooked using only water and heat. He didn't want things that had to be baked or required milk or other ingredients. The foods he focused on also had to be easy to store for long periods, and be items that his family would eat. They wouldn't love it at first, but they'd eat it. Especially when there was no food in the stores.

Grant went to the local Cash n' Carry, a discount grocery store that sold in large lots. It wasn't a Costco or Sam's Club. It was different. It was a combination of discount grocery store and restaurant supply store. It sold things in gigantic lots; and very inexpensively.

Grant was afraid to go into Cash n' Carry. It was like the gun store or looking at a "survival" book; only crazy people did that. He expected to see militia people or survival whackos in there. He was doing lots of things lately that he'd never done. Might as well add walking into a Cash n' Carry onto the list.

Grant sat in the parking lot for a few minutes getting his courage up. It was getting easier and easier to do these things now that he'd started doing them.

He watched the people going into the store. They seemed pretty normal. No obvious weirdoes. Grant got out of his car and strolled in like it was no big deal. As he got to the door, he realized it was, indeed, no big deal. He was just going to a Cash n' Carry. It wasn't like he was going to buy heroin.

Grant walked in. He was relieved just being in Cash n' Carry.

Look at all that food. A prepper's dream. It was amazing. The prices were unbelievable. Fifty pounds of pancake mix was $35. That would make 200 breakfasts (using one cup of mix per breakfast). That's less than $0.18 a breakfast! And that's $0.18 now, but that same one cup of pancake mix would be worth $10 if there wasn't any more on the store shelves. But how to store it?

Spirko talked about using a food vacuum sealer. Bacteria needed oxygen so if food wasn't exposed to it, the food would last for years. The vacuum sealer sucked all the air out of the food. Adding some oxygen absorber packets would add even more years to the food. Oxygen absorbers were optional; vacuum sealing alone would do the trick. Grant got a good vacuum sealer, a bunch of sealer bags, and some oxygen absorbers. He was ready to put up several months' of food.

But where? He couldn't store the food at his house; Lisa would find out. Grant had seen a rental storage unit place on the way in to the Cash n' Carry. That's where he would store the food. Then he remembered a storage unit in downtown Olympia, down in "b.u.m town," which was near his office. Grant would use the money from the expense checks to pay for a small storage unit.

Grant looked at all the food in the Cash n' Carry and left without buying anything. He wanted to get the storage unit first and make sure he had a place to keep the food before buying. He went to b.u.m town and got a small storage unit. He felt like a criminal renting a storage unit; they probably wondered if he was going to stash the bodies of his murder victims in there.

It was unusual to pay for a storage unit with cash, but they still took his money. Grant had to use his credit card- which Lisa would know about if a charge ever went through- to guarantee payment so he had to make sure he came in once a month and paid with cash. Oh well. This was better than not having a place to store the food and therefore not getting any.

With the storage s.p.a.ce taken care of and the vacuum sealer, Grant went back to Cash n' Carry. He bought fifty pounds of beans. He got a variety of red beans, black beans, navy beans, kidney beans, and pinto beans in five-pound packages. He bought fifty pounds of rice.

He got ten one-pound packets of gravy. Rice and gravy: that's good eatin'. Lots of carbs, some fat, and some salt.

Grant began thinking about nutrition. He realized there was "normal times" nutrition and "crisis" nutrition. In normal times, when healthy food is everywhere, it made sense to stay away from lots of carbs, fat, and salt. That's how the calories pile up when people are not physically active; no one needs all that salt when they're not sweating.

But in a crisis, when food is scarce, carbs are critical. Same for fat, which is a necessary part of a human diet. It's just that with fast food drive-thrus, people got way too much of it. During a crisis, everyone would be physically working harder, doing lots of things they didn't do before the crisis, like walking places when there's no gasoline available. There probably wouldn't be air conditioning, so people would sweat a lot more and need the salt. Besides, foods with carbs, fat, and salt were cheap and easy to store. Nutrition was one of the many topics where the "normal" rules were backwards in "crisis" times.

Grant also got fifty pounds of pancake mix. Cole would love the rea.s.suring sameness of a morning with pancakes. Pancakes need syrup. The Cash n' Carry was out of gallon jugs of syrup. On a hunch, Grant went to the dollar store. He'd never been to one before; he'd never had to because he could afford the regular grocery store.

Grant found the dollar store to be a prepper's paradise. Everything was truly one dollar; they didn't even have price tags.

Most things were off brand, but who really cared. The food aisles were amazing. He quickly realized that the grocery stores were charging double or sometimes triple what the dollar store was. And the neat thing about the dollar store selling something for a dollar was the unit size. It was smaller than normal. It made for handy small packages that could be stored and used one by one. For example, Grant got sixteen- ounce gla.s.s bottles of syrup for a dollar. He got twenty of them. The smaller bottles would be better than a gallon jug of syrup; easier to pour, less mess, less waste. Smaller bottles could also be given away to needy neighbors. That's harder to do with a gallon jug. Grant looked closely at the sixteen-ounce syrup bottles. They were gla.s.s and had a decent screw-on cap made of metal. They could be washed out and used to store lots of things when the syrup was gone.

Grant got almost $100 of food at the dollar store. That was two shopping carts br.i.m.m.i.n.g to the top. He got boxes of tea bags, big cans of spaghetti sauce, flavored mashed potatoes, and cases of canned vegetables.

He got lots of cheap housewares there, too. He got ten can openers. What good is canned food without a can opener?

Grant started thinking about can openers. A can opener would be worth its weight in gold in a crisis, when fresh food would be hard to get. There would be warehouses of canned food. A can opener was another thing that could be handed out to a needy neighbor. The dollar store had cheap toilet paper, toiletries, over the counter medicines, work gloves, bungee cords, and just about everything else. For a dollar.

After learning what the dollar store had, Grant went back to the Cash n' Carry to finish off some meal ideas. Now that he had two cases of big cans of spaghetti sauce, he got some twenty-pound boxes of spaghetti noodles. They would go great into vacuum seal bags and stay fresh for years. A twenty-pound box of spaghetti noodles was $19. That meant twenty good-sized dinners of a pound of spaghetti and a big can of sauce were about $2 each. And it would store for years.

It cost a lot less to prep than to buy normal groceries. But Lisa and the kids would never eat this stuff in normal times. In a crisis, however, it would be the best tasting spaghetti they had ever had and they'd be thankful they had it when others didn't.

Grant's car was filled up with food. He took the vacuum sealer and an extension cord and went to the storage unit. Since it was in "b.u.m town," Grant knew he needed to be careful. For the first time in his life, he packed a gun. He put his .38 in a little pocket holster and slipped it into the front pocket of his jeans. It fit perfectly. He had the permit; might as well use it. He realized that he needed to pack the gun quite a bit for practice to test out the holster and just the mindset of carrying a gun.

The mindset was a big deal. A person carrying a gun thought differently. They were more aware, and avoided trouble so they wouldn't have to use it.