There is a sense of unease in the world today, and a wondering of how to prepare ourselves for the hard times which we feel lie ahead. Personally, I have never been one to worry about the future when it comes to hard times… maybe because my dad did so much worrying about it I figured he had us covered. In case it helps you though, I will share with you some thoughts on this and what we encountered in our preparations growing up.
My dad felt that communism was overtaking our country, and that we needed to be ready when they did. Thinking that the city was going to be a bad place in this event, we moved into the wilderness. The year was 1970 and I was about 7 at the time. It was all just a big adventure for me, but it was hard on my parents financially. Dad was a sign painter, and well… bears and deer and the occasional cowboy don’t need signs much, so pretty soon we had no income. This was okay with my dad, because he figured in the hard times ahead, most people would lose their jobs, and have to live off of the land and learn how to be self sufficient anyway. However, we never really did that, because welfare came along about then, and so most of the food we ate, and the supplies we bought, were financed by the folks who paid their taxes. Still, we learned how to do a lot with a little.
We never had cows, as my dad thought they’d be too hard to maintain in hard times, so instead we had goats, chickens and rabbits, which he felt would better adapt. They were quite lean, because we didn’t rely upon the feed stores and grain to feed them, but made them forage on the land and learn how to manage. As a result, the eggs and milk and meat were only plentiful for those few Spring and early Summer days when all was green, before the burning days of summer. Diseases were common amongst them due to the resulting malnutrition, and so I am not so sure if they would have provided us with much food if hard times actually hit and we couldn’t get the medicines we needed for them.
We only had an acre of land, yet were fortunate to have a nearby national forest and the Indian reservation, which provided a lot of free grazing for our goats. My sister and I were Heidi the goat-girls for many years! It was our job to keep away coyotes and logging trucks, and was really a most idyllic time for us. So that we didn’t have to work on Sundays, we would weed our gardens the evening before, collecting cartloads for our goats to eat so we could have the day off. This was hard to do, as we had nearly 100 goats! So another idea was to have moveable pens, which we would put in a grassy area on Sundays. The pen was never big enough though, and they were so hungry come Monday! Winters we still had to buy hay from the ranchers around us, so we weren’t entirely self sufficient and this always left a hole in our strategy. I think dad hoped when times were bad, we could harvest the tall grasses and alfalfa which grew wild, and make hay. We didn’t know enough about how to harvest the alfalfa seed from year to year, to insure we could maintain our own hay supply. We had all of the hand tools for the job though, the sickles and rakes and hand carts.
We learned to garden, and of everything we did to survive off the land, that was the most worthwhile thing. (Unfortunately, our hungry chickens agreed, and so it was a never-ending contest with them. One of my jobs as a child was to fill my pockets with rocks and keep the chickens out of the gardens by pelting them!) The ground was so rocky, we couldn’t grow a thing, so we had to clear the land by harvesting rocks first. We used them to make fences around our gardens and walls to shore up the hillside. Our water came from a mountain spring a quarter mile away, and so we had to make every drop count. All of our gardens were circular with a sprinkler at the center. Most of our one acre was composed of these circles, bordered by rocks, with walking paths between. We grew everything, corn and beans, potatoes and lettuce, raspberries and rhubarb, even Jerusalem artichokes. (The rumor spread that we grew marijuana, but it was just Jerusalem artichokes! We lived 20 miles from the nearest town, but that is a little town for you. My dad took in stray hippies and hitchhikers, so I suppose we seemed very odd compared to the cattle ranchers and farmers.) It was really very beautiful in the summer, the gardens with the Columbia River and mountains in the background, and many people would stop on the highway and admire the view. Sometimes they stopped though because our geese, which multiplied all on their own like the proverbial loaves and fishes, loved to warm themselves on the warm asphalt, and wouldn’t move even for the cars. A flock of 100 geese can be quite a speed-bump! If you want to live off of the land and have critters, then Toulouse geese are your ticket. They take care of themselves except in the dead of winter. You have to feed them something then. Ours thrived on table scraps, but it was supplemented by grain. I’m not sure if they would have made it without the wheat.
We built a 3 story underground shelter, in the event we would have to hole up and hide someday. It was never quite finished, and was a damp and dismal place we used to keep some of our animals in. The molds and lack of light down there always produced disease, and so I can’t imagine how it would have been for people. My husband who has probably seen more real hard times than most of us, having grown up on the “wrong side of the tracks” in addition to being in Vietnam, told me that is has always been his experience, that one does not want to hole up in hard times, but always be able to pack light and move out at a moment’s notice.
We canned a lot of our own food, and stored other foods in the event of no supermarkets, such as powdered milk and beans and rice. We bought lots of extra boots and clothes at the second hand stores too, and put them away for later, which never came, and so most of them rotted or rusted in time, and have been thrown away.
So… that’s a summary of how I grew up, waiting for the end… twenty years of it anyway. Like I said, it was hard for me to look at life in this light, and my dad used to call me “whatmeworry”, and was a bit upset with me for not taking it all more seriously. It was depressing to me, expected to walk around with a gray cloud ever over my head, wondering when the sky was going to fall on it. It always seemed to me we should just trust more that God would take care of us, if we took care of Him, you know? True, we shouldn’t be stupid, and not plan for anything at all, but at the same time, we all know how the best laid plans go astray. No matter how we put away and prepare for hard times, there are going to be those who don’t, and are we going to turn them all away when they ask for our help? Are we going to say “tt tt you should have thought ahead” and close our doors? A lady called and told me she knew she couldn’t do that, and so no matter how much she put away for hard times, she saw it all vanishing in short order. And even if we try to hide our share, I imagine there will be those who loot and vandalize, who will have no qualms in making sure we do.
So, from my experience, it seems if we want to do something now in the event of hard times, it is good to learn how to garden, and to prepare ourselves for doing without, little by little, so we won’t go into caffeine shock by losing it all at once. Be spiritually and mentally prepared, and help your neighbor do the same. I actually see hard times as better times, when we learn to live simply again, and help one another as we should. I’ll be most happy to trade you some stationery for some coffee or a plump chicken.
Growing up the way we did taught me something more valuable than survival though. It taught me gratitude… when you have to work hard to eat, you appreciate that bite of food! That little toy from the secondhand store! Our greatest bit of entertainment, about the only one we could afford, was going to the city dump! Oh my! What joy and what treasure we found there! How we anticipated these treasure hunts. These are amongst my happiest childhood memories, yet it is hard to pass this gratitude on to our own children, who live in plenty, and are often resentful when they can't have the latest gadget or when they must eat foods they don't like, or do chores. I think they see it all as a punishment, knowing you have the means to buy what they like but don't. Sometimes I think gratitude can only stem from genuine hardship…
And there is something about growing up this way, where joys are simple and work is hard, that helps one develop a friendship with God, that is hard to find in plenty. For this reason, whenever my husband and I would travel to third world countries, I felt my soul longing to stay there, because I often saw in their poverty, a richness of spirit which we in America lack.
So please don’t be anxious and dread the future, because I think if hard times do hit, it will hurt, but we will find it to be the labor pains of America returning to God. We saw this happen briefly during 9/11. Even in the terrible events unfolding right now with our abortion laws, I see hope further down the road. Sometimes it takes the slaughter of the Holy Innocents to force us out of our lukewarmness, to break forth into outrage at this and all of our sins, and so give birth to a new era formed in Christ.
Let us pray. AMEN.