Howdy folks!
This week has been spent at the "city house" earning some money, hence why there's no fun progress pictures from the homestead, but we're headed back out today after work...
...Which got me thinking about an exchange I had a while back with a colleague. I work with plenty of backpackers and avid campers, and my colleague (who is a huge backpacker) was shocked and appalled at my "kit". He picked up my daybag once, and looked at me with these great big bug eyes like "you seriously carry this much weight?"
So that's something I want to talk about real quickly, because I'm not a prepper, I'm not a camper, and I'm not a backpacker. Those are all very different things. Me? I'm a homesteader.
Case in point, here's what it looks like when we're preparing to leave the "city house" to head back out to the wild:
And that doesn't even include the pile of stuff we already keep in the truck normally, like our medkit and tools, or the literal thousands of pounds of equipment and supplies we have out at the cabin waiting for us. Nor does it include the shelves and shelves of reserve supplies we have at the "city house" so that we can up and leave any time our bills are paid up and we can disappear for a while.
See, we're not packing light. We're packing long-term.
This is Mrs. Shackleford with a "light" load:
So what's the point of all this? I don't know, maybe I felt like rambling on a Friday and it's fun to pretend I have an audience.
But seriously, if you're considering doing something like this yourself, here's some advice: ignore backpackers and campers. Any review you're reading that complains about something being too heavy or bulky, ignore it. Any video you watch where somebody uses the phrase "ounces make pounds", unsubscribe.
A camper wakes up at dawn and fixes eggs and bacon, then plays in the lake or the woods with their kids until making hotdogs for lunch, and settling in with some beer and s'mores in the evening.
A backpacker wakes up and puts the whole of their worldly possessions in their backpack and hikes off into the wild blue yonder (usually following a proscribed path somebody else more intrepid already made for them).
If you want to do like we are, your day starts at dawn and you spend the first couple hours making breakfast and coffee, getting dressed, and getting all your shit together for the day. Then, you're going to work your balls off until about 3pm on whatever you're currently building, repairing, or upgrading. Why 3pm? Because when 3pm rolls around you have no more than four hours of daylight left, which means you've got evening chore-ing to do: better make sure you have wood for the night, supper plans that you can finish before sunset, water for the bath, clean water in the filter bucket for drinking, entertainment plans for the evening. You can't just go to bed at sunset and wake up at sunrise--hell, half the year, you've got more darkness than daylight. You need to have shit to do, son. Check batteries, clean dishes, make sure there's no food left out that's going to attract animals. Make sure there's alcohol left so you're not just sitting around dead-sober waiting for sunup (this last part's optional, but I'm no teetotaler and don't expect you to be--as my mom said once, "I'm not going into the apocalypse sober, dammit"). Yeah, the evenings are the best part, because that's when you kick back and relax, but relaxing on the homestead isn't like relaxing on your couch at home--you're still working until well into the evening.
Campers and backpackers are there for recreation. Backpackers especially are in it for sightseeing. Also, there's nothing wrong with that! Hell, if you haven't done it, you totally should! We have some of the best sights in the world to see, so go out there and see them before they burn down or flood or get paved. Seriously.
But if you want to build... If you're not sightseeing, but building a home, you need to remember Peter Zeihan's #1 principle of economics and logistics: moving stuff is hard. Focus on getting a way to move things, and not just on your back. Into horses? Awesome. Get a horse. Are you like me, and don't have a place to put a horse when you're not using it? Get a steel horse. They eat dinosaurs and shit pollution, but they can haul a hell of a lot more than you can. If you're reading this five or ten years from now, and we have all-electric ATVs, change that to "they need solar panels that are made from toxic chemicals, and they support lithium mines in some of the worst corners of the world, but they can haul a hell of a lot more than you can" for the same dramatic effect.
Once you've gotten over the moving stuff is hard hurdle, don't worry about all those YouTubers and dingbats online who say "you've gotta cut weight, brah." Focus on getting the most durable version of something you can afford. You're not hiking--nine times out of ten, you're gonna drag that sumbitch out to the woods once, and then after that, it never comes back out. So who cares if the first time you drag it out there, it weighs a ton and you work up a cussing sweat? If you don't have to replace it for 20 years, you're good.
Remember--this is fun as hell, but it's also a ton of work, so don't be shy about having what you want. And don't try to go all minimalist. Bring stuff purely because it's fun. Bring a boombox, bring a chessboard, hell, bring your drumset if that's what makes you happy. Just solve transportation first, and then any time you see somebody flexing nuts about how lightweight their pack is, remember that while they're sleeping on the ground and eating dehydrated stroganoff out of the same cup they use to make their instant coffee, you're sleeping on memory foam and drinking a Malbec out of real glassware.
You're a homesteader. You're building a home, not sightseeing. Be good to yourself--you worked hard, and earned it.
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