Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

I was skimming through arfcom the other night and found an interesting post. A fella was saying how he had come across about 20 cases of Mountain House canned food that someone had put out in the trash. Still sealed cases, mind you. Naturally, he grabbed as many as he could.

So how does something like that happen? That’s easily a thousand dollars or so worth of food, so why would anyone discard it? The obvious, although possibly not correct, answer in this case is that the previous owner probably died and the family was getting rid of his junk.

So, yes, lets talk about dead survivalists.

We’ve all seen the t-shirt with the expression “If you die, we split your gear!” or similar sentiment. Sometimes someone will post something on the discussion forums about doing something their wife will obviously disapprove of and someone will reply with “Can I have your guns afterwards?” implying the wife would kill the original poster for his insane behavior and then his gear would be up for grabs. And we joke about it. But, it does happen. Plenty of people who stockpile food, ammo, fuel, medicines and gear wind up dying of heart attacks, car accidents, cancer or just plain old age before they ever encounter the big event that they were preparing against.

Mel Tappan, the guy who was the voice of survivalism back in its heyday, died long before he would have gotten the chance to need his guns, food, gold and other gear. (And what a collection of gear it must have been, eh? Esp. with his wife being from the Mack truck family. A little family wealth would buy a lot of AR-15’s….) Tappan died in the early 1980’s, when there was still a USSR, Soviet imperialism, a national hangover from the Carter years and a general ‘malaise’ in the spirit of the American people. Not a time of positive outlook. Tappan’s vision of societal collapse never materialized (not yet anyway) but Im sure he was glad it didn’t happen in his lifetime.

The Four Corners ‘survivalists’ prepared for their own little SHTF and all three died in short order after vanishing into the desert after their crime spree, the last of their skeletal remains only recently being discovered. I would bet that theres caches of supplies they left in the desert that will remain hidden for a very long time to come. They brought their disaster on themselves, thinking they were ready, and died before they could implement their plans for survival.

The folks at CUT (Church Universal and Triumphant) here in Montana built an extremely impressive bomb shelter that is all but abandoned and is occupied by only a couple people who, almost certainly, will not be around to use it under the circumstances for which it was built. Most of the people involved in CUT are still around but have moved on to other things.

Going back a little farther in time, there are plenty of houses in the United States that have bomb shelters in them…leftovers from the height of the Cold War. In many of those cases the original shelter owners have been deceased for quite a while. Their determination to survive, however, continues on after them in the form of concrete shelters under many suburban homes…now called ‘storage rooms’, ‘wince cellars’ or ‘bonus rooms’.

Like fire insurance, health insurance and homeowners insurance we spend resources against a perceived threat and then hope like hell that all our expenses will be for nothing and that we’ll never need the recourse that we’ve been paying on for years and years. It really isn’t throwing money down a rat hole since one thing you do get is peace of mind.

But, preparedness is a funny business. Like old men who collect model trains, the things that we value, seek and collect have marginal interest to those ‘outside the loop’. Take the cases of freezedrieds mentioned earlier… the family getting rid of it probably regarded it as more crap that crazy Uncle Eddie cluttered up the basement with. But the arfcom poster who found it regarded it as a major score.   Its almost like being in a secret club…we recognize fellow members by their gear, not by their names. Not a lot of people walk around with name badges saying “Hi! My name is: Steve And Im A Survivalist”. (Well, maybe at conventions…) But it seems like everyone recognizes the ‘symptoms’. The guy at work who wears 5.11 clothes, a belt that looks suspiciously like a gunbelt, drives a simple four-wheel drive vehicle or pickup truck, has a Leatherman tool on his belt, listens to talk radio, and never seems to get caught unprepared for anything. Maybe in a casual conversation he’ll mention buying some new backpacking gear, home canning some venison he shot, or discussing current events in a manner that shows he’s thinking ‘what if?’. Put all of these things together and you start thining “Yeah, I think he’s probably on the same page as I am…” And some day when he gets divorced and moves to Outer Yakistan and his wife is throwing out his gear, you’ll come across piles of web gear and MRE’s sitting at the curb and you’ll think “Damn, I knew I was right.”

But, as I said, most of the time we’ll all die before The Day arrives. And I am perfectly cool with that. I would much rather have the things I have and not need them than to have a situation arise where I did need them. I doubt many people who have fire insurance on their home would like their homes to burn so they can feel smug that they had insurance, right? Same with me…if I never have to use any of the things I have stockpiled I will be a very pleased individual.

Living out the rest of my life prepared for most disasters but never having to go through one would be a nice triumph.