Contented with the first morning’s discoveries, I came back to camp with goose in hand and fell to work to bring it to an edible state. Being a city boy, this took up a lot of that morning and afternoon. As I plucked and examined that day’s bounty, I knew what lay ahead of us in the coming week. Shelter, agriculture, animal husbandry and work area location, mapping, and layouts, initial fortification planning were sketched out. Trails too. Camouflaging all evidence of our presence from ground and airborne observation was a must.

For the first time, we felt a lessened fear of AppLand machine, two and four legged beast attacks.

As well as we could, we concealed our tracks, cars and tin can shelter and barricaded ourselves therein.

As for food, we had seen seasonal sources of supplies of fowl, fruit and nuts, but sustainable supplies would be left to our own backbreaking labor of planting our seed supplies, harvesting, processing and production as well as hunting by trap and snare and eventually domesticated animal slaughter. This would take time.

As our first week in the Outlands passed, we began considering that we might get a great many things out of these woods that would be useful, particularly for food, shelter, defense and live camouflage.

Besides these things, we were thankful that we had brought enough multi-season clothing, bedding materials like hammocks, and numerous camo tarps.

As we continued to search out our surrounding areas for the multiple locations for this new life’s endeavors, we soon found our original encampment was not fit for long term settlement. It sat on a low spot that was far too open and indefensible an area in these hills, was covered with a rough grass, a bit too far from water sources and other areas that we liked for our new life’s sustainment activities. The distances from a daily water supply for all these needs were the deal breakers.

The search for a safer and convenient spot led us to a tiny little patch on the side of a rising hill, whose rocky upside front facing this little patch was so steep that nothing could come down upon us from the top. On the down side there was a flat hollow place, worn far enough in that our tin can trailer would sit quite easily and unseen.

The flat and mostly level area in front of trailer lot was a dappled, sunlit green, just downhill from the trailer’s hollow place. This plain was smallish — less than 50 yards across and about twice as deep.

Before we set up our new location, we drew a half-circle with small rocks in the upper plain, which took up about 25 yards in radius.

After moving our living stuff and tin can inside, we set up two rows of camouflaged punji stake pits along the semicircle, driving the stakes into the ground till they stood very firm like pikes. Most if not all two and four legged varmints would be dissuaded from approaching us 24/7.

For the up and down hill entrances into this place we made ladders to go up and over the rocky top and across the pits. Thus we were completely fenced in and fortified so we could sleep secure during the night.

Into this fortress layout, we staged all our supplies that were in our vehicles — provisions, ammunition, weapons, clothing, tools and stores, all of which we stored in several camouflage tarp tents beneath which we created french drains, raised rock floors, which to preserve these items from the rains that in spring that could be very violent.

We made two double roofed enclosures with one smaller tarp tent within, and the larger tarp tent above it, since these would house the most precious items like seeds, ammunition and fuel. We did the same over the tin can and vehicles to help make them stealthier from overhead thermal observation. To hide these stores from ground witnesses, we planted fast growing trees, shrubs and vines to create an indigenous plant bowers.

We would later disperse these supplies across several new camouflaged storage sites to minimize the impact of a catastrophic destructive event like the one described below.

And now as we lay in bed for a brief sleep-in on the morning of day 28, we finally started to feel like we were becoming the masters of our tiny ship in the Outlands.

A month later after we had spent ourselves daily on field labor establishing gardens in two areas for food crop cultivation, we were beginning to see the sprouts of our first crops. We were later overjoyed to see those which needed pollination received service from the local insects.

Not having to do that manually allowed us to focus on pest control and watering these new crops. We had planted grains, vegetables, tobacco and a host of herbs and other plants.

We quickly turned at that time to laying out and perfecting our schemes for the setting up animal husbandry areas for fowl and other local fauna and ponds for fish that we would catch, raise and eat. Two days into this what we thought was another of the summer storms we had been seeing of rain falling from thick, dark clouds, quickly turned into something else when a sudden flash of lightning struck nearby rumbling the ground underneath our feet. A great clap of thunder soon followed that made us both a bit deaf.

The rain then picked up and became not a downpour but a deluge. Sheets of water started coming at us making it hard to stay standing and causing us fear that much of what we had done would be washed away.

W then got this expression on her face and then gestured that we needed to move higher up to the stream-fed canal system we had created to move water about our domain.

Quickly gathering her intent, we scrambled up to close down the canal system at its source so that this morning’s brief crop watering didn’t become a catastrophic deluging of our field work.

After staunching the irrigating flow, we both heard a sickening metallic creak coming from the direction where our tin can lodge sat. Oh shit, we screamed, as we sprinted across the muddy water-sloshed trail, expecting an unguided, downward slide of our home towards its destruction below.

Much to our surprise with more close by lightning strikes making us a bit woozy and our path a bit weavy, we arrived at our lodging site to see the tin can had began a powered sliding down the hill in a torrent of mud and water cascading over the lodge’s rock walled protection. The can’s initial descent from its chained location had been aided by what appeared to be lightning strikes near its in ground anchors. We were frozen by the thought which darted into our minds as swift as the lightning itself – oh shit, the bulk of our supplies of extra seed, ammo and medicines were inside. As the trailer slid further down the hill in an ever strengthening mudslide pulses, our hearts sank.

And then the rain stopped, the mudslide abated and the sky cleared. Such an impression did this make on us, that after we gathered ourselves, we put aside all our projects and plantings, and applied ourselves to restoring the trailer to its original location, making its original site impervious to mud slides and rainwater torrents and further dispersed our critical supplies to areas less exposed to mother nature’s tempests.

This took almost two weeks of back breaking labor to accomplish forcing us to work late after sunset to tend and water our crops

Having now fixed our living quarters, we found it necessary to establish multiple sites for crop growing so that one field’s loss might not kill the year’s harvest.

That meant another two plus months of work that would pay off the following year’s harvest.

On the plus side of all of this labor was that prospects of our survival were growing not diminishing. We were not starving castaways but settlers who were settling into the rhythms of their new surroundings.

The tears would run from time to time down our faces when we reflected at the ends of these days were not from desperation, sadness or despair but those of exhaustion, determination, belief that we were finding our way. We were thankful for the life we were establishing.

It occurred to us several times, how much time we had been furnished to plan our escape into and life in the Outlands.

We had the time to plan for shelter, subsistence, security, gather all the necessities for this new life, and study on the plants and places best suited for long-term settling.

We could not have done it without guns, ammo, tools, food, seeds, clothes supplies and most importantly knowledge-based confidence that we could do these things.

On the whole, there was much regarding this new abode to be thankful for.

It was after our second annual harvest that we began to keep a regular journal of each day’s work and what we had learned to date. At the beginning we had been in a justifiable hurry to establish for ourselves a physical location, and not only hurry as to labor, but in the settling of our minds and hearts. The delayed journaling made what we have written less dull, more precise and more meaningful to those who might find these items and place after we perish.

So, this explains why readers will find herein no wringing of hands and no beating of breast, head and face, no weeping about missing modern conveniences and our misery therefrom, and no pissing and moaning.

– typed in 2027

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