Plan To Reunite If The SHTF

I was training for a long ride, so Salty had dropped me and my bike off with plans to pick us both up a hundred miles down the trail. I was about eighty miles down the trail and the sun was mostly down to the horizon when I came to “Trail closed.” Now what? The trail runs under river bluffs; there’s no cell service in most places. Slow transport and no communication made it clear: Plans to reunite are one of the most important preps.

Salty’s Note: Since she’s writing the story, you might safely assume that we got connected… in our case, we set “rally points” at trailheads, with an “if all else fails, go to this spot and stay there until I get there”… for example, on the central part of the KATY trail, the trial in question, it would be the Rocheport Depot which is open 24/7 with water and a bathroom and, importantly, mosquito screens.

Salty and I were going to be separated by 80 miles with no cell service. The plan to reunite was important.

Why are plans to reunite so important? 

You are likely to need a plan at some point in the next few years. Zombie apocalypses need this prep. Dead cell phone batteries need this prep too. Salty and I have activated our plans to reunite along trails, from distant cities, within giant malls, and from eighty feet under the surface of the ocean.

Lacking a plan brings consequences from ‘pain in the rear’ to catastrophic. It would have been a literal pain in the rear if I’d’ve had to backpedal the whole eighty miles to our starting point to reunite at the end of the interrupted trail ride! On the other end, how many prepper fiction novels feature half the family starting out hundreds of miles away and needing to get home?

In the novels, sometimes the hero struggles through all the obstacles to save his people. That is the Worst Plan Ever. In a novel, the Maiden in Distress is just an object who’ll stay sitting where the hero expects to find her. Real life complicates things.

In fiction, she’s waiting at her dorm room door for Her Hero. In real life? Don’t count on it.

If the plan is not specific, there will be no ‘reunite’

Salty and I almost failed to make connections once because we made different assumptions about which door of a large building would be the connection point. Without means to communicate, small details morph into big obstacles. 

Knowing what building to meet at is great. Don’t forget people at different entrances may not be visible to one another.

Plan your times, too. You plan to meet at the C-store on the corner if you can’t get home; and the fallback rendezvous is Aunt Suzy’s across town. You get to the C-store. She’s not there. Is she blocked from getting there, or just off looking for a restroom? Do you go to Aunt Suzy’s? Do you wait ten minutes? An hour? A day? You took a while to get there; would she have left a message in a particular place before she moved to Plan C?

The plan to unite needs a sequence of contingencies

“We’ll meet at the house.” “If we can’t get to the house, I’ll be in (a spot in town to which we both have a key).” “When we can’t get to (home town), I’ll see you at my work, at that door you drop me off at.” “If everything blows up, we go to The Place and wait for the other to arrive.” <– Salty and Spice’s sequence.

You were supposed to meet at that building up ahead. Now what?

Rendezvous points come in a sequence, with clear rules as to when we’ll progress to the next option. Low-hanging fruits come first: If home is fine, we both go home. One does not charge off hoping to guess where the other will be in the great big world. Imagine how well it would have worked if on Sept 11, 2001, Paranoid Prepper’s only plan to reunite had been for his family to come pick him up if the trains quit running?

Everyone who needs to reunite needs to remember the plan

Bob thinks Sally’s prepping thing is unnecessary; stuff like that doesn’t happen around here. Yeah, she once talked about ‘what if the cell phones don’t work’ but c’mon, it’s 2018. They’ll be back on soon. So that whole ‘rendezvous points’ thing went in one ear and out the other.

We’re human. We misremember things. We fail to communicate effectively. Pop quiz your people; “If X happened, where would we reunite?” I’ll admit, the first time Salty and I did this after making the plan there was some shakiness in the latter parts of the plan. Now it’s solid. Practice perfects.

Being separated from your loved ones during an emergency is pretty awful. The best way to make that time as short as possible is to have well-considered plans to reunite that everyone remembers. Then stick to them.