A Safer Place: Planning To Bug Out Permanently

"little house on the prairie"In my last post where I outlined my 2012 preparedness goals, I mentioned my big hopes and dreams of acquiring some land at some point this year. With the state of our finances at the moment, this seems like an extremely remote possibility, and yet I can’t shake the sense of certainty and urgency telling me that we need to make this happen.

I don’t know if that’s just me, or something else driving me (i.e., the Holy spirit); whether this is something God wants for us or if it’s just my own wishful thinking. I do know one thing, which is that if there’s anything life after job loss has taught me, it’s how to rely on God’s provision. So I’m trusting that if we’re truly walking in His will in this pursuit, He’ll make it happen for us. I don’t know how, but He’s done amazing things for us in the past. It basically comes down to trusting that when the SHTF we’ll be right where He planned for us to be. I just hope He plans for us to be on our own homestead out in the country with an ample water supply nearby.

So that’s my dream. My New Year’s and Christmas wish. The homestead, that is. I don’t think it’s really all that impossible, if we can just get some of our debt under control and start making decent income. There is some really inexpensive acreage in the northeast corner of our state, well-situated near a lake, with plenty of land for us to grow some decent crops and have some small livestock.

Of course, we’d have to do it in stages. Stage one would be to save up so we can pay cash for the land. There are no mortgages or additional debt in this plan. Stage two would be using the land as a bug-out/weekend retreat while we save up money for a travel trailer or a tiny house to park on it. We could possibly help finance this stage, and further stages, by renting out part of the land to tiny house enthusiasts, or possibly like-minded preppers in search of a rural lakeside retreat. Meanwhile, we’d work on paring down our belongings and learning how to live more efficiently with only what we truly need.

Stage three would be paying cash for the trailer/RV/tiny house/whichever and moving to our land full-time, and either putting our current house up for sale, or renting it out for enough to cover our monthly mortgage payment if we can’t sell it for enough to pay it off completely. And then we would start building up our homestead and preps: drilling a well, if possible; building a root cellar/storm shelter/hidey-hole for our food stash; getting some chickens and a couple of dairy goats, and planting a big vegetable garden. We would also take full advantage of living out in the country to create our own shooting range so that we could practice and become well acquainted with our weapons. Meanwhile, we’d be saving up for stage four — building a more permanent residence, a small house or a cabin.

I’ve been in love with the idea of getting off the grid and living a more basic and simple life for a while now. I grew up in rural country–it wasn’t on a farm, but it was still a more relaxed way of life. I feel as urgent a need to get away from this impossibly-paced existence of constantly working on a computer and never really accomplishing anything, never having time to breathe or think or just stop, and there’s always so much more that has to get done, as I do the need to prepare for whatever inevitable calamity is going to happen to this nation. I dream of a quiet life in which I actually have time to take care of my home, to spend in prayer and meditation as I work with my hands. I dream of having fiber animals and learning to spin, of sitting on the porch with my spinning wheel with a baby in a playpen in the sunny yard while we wait for my husband to bring home the daily catch from the lake.

Of course, having actually had some exposure to the country life I know it won’t be nearly as romantic as that. But I don’t care. I want to slow down, and I want to be self-sufficient, to not need to work so hard taking care of things for other people for money because we have everything we need and we don’t need a lot of money. Mostly, I want to feel safe, and I don’t feel that here, in the city, on our corner lot that adjoins a major street in a crappy neighborhood that sees a lot of violent crime in the best of times and is sure to be riot-central when things get truly bad. I want to get back to a place where, when we hear gun shots, we want to run outside to see what on earth the neighbors are shooting at and feel perfectly safe doing so, instead of ducking down and wondering if we should call 911.

So that’s what we’re working toward this year. I only pray that there’s still time to make it happen.