I’ve been reading a book, The 29th Day, by a young man who survived a bear mauling that occurred deep in the northern wilderness. There came a moment when I heard his description and just cringed. “Doh! No, don’t do that!” It wasn’t the moment before he met the bear. It was the moment when he described their beautiful basket of eggs.
My, what a Lovely basket of eggs! What could Possibly go wrong? Image thanks to Rod Waddington from Kergunyah, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The basket of eggs
The survivor (Alex Messenger) and his five companions were on an extensive canoe trip. By this point, they had eaten down about 2/3 of their food supply. One barrel had the ‘real food’. The spices, drink mixes, and similar kibble were in another. The third barrel had been repurposed.
Yes. Six people, hundreds of miles from civilization, whose only connection was a satellite phone that might or might not be able to bring them rescue, put most of their actual food in a single barrel.
The storm took that barrel, of course.
An unkind fate had planned the deed and laughed? Nope. Storms take canoes sometimes. If all the food’s in the same canoe, sometimes that’s the one you lose.
Having more than one basket don’t necessarily reduce losses…
If the guys had some food in each canoe, they still would have lost gear and food to the storm. Life happens.
No matter how good a prepper you are, fires burn down houses. Thieves steal things. Memories lose links to where important things are squirreled away. (Well ok, at least in us old geezers that’s a thing.)
…but more than one basket makes losses less catastrophic.
You can’t stop all losses. But you have a shot at stopping losses from being catastrophies. If those guys had had 1/3 of the food in each canoe, it wouldn’t have been a very dramatic story.
Multiple Basket prepping
Simple concept, right? So why don’t we all do it regularly? Convenience, mostly. It is simpler to arrange good storage one time than three. It’s easier to track one stash than keep track of four. Truth.
In fact, one basket prepping is so easy and natural we probably don’t notice or think about how often we do it. Let’s shake that blanket a bit and see what falls out.
The bug-out basket
Preppers go on about bugging out endlessly. Many preppers invest quite a lot in their bug-out plans. We’ve sure invested a lot of sweat equity in The Place ourselves. Obviously, we think that can be worth it. Other plans wait in reserve, though. For example, we have an Understanding regarding mutual aid with a different household.
The *best* plans deserve company. Small sidekicks, minions maybe. They ride to the rescue if The Hero gets taken out.
The physical preps basket
Salty and I both Really Need our eyeglasses. Being preppers and all, that means we have spares. Since Salty doesn’t need *expensive* glasses, he has *lots* of spares. I came across them the other day. A whole bagful. I enjoyed a “Doh!” moment.
Then I took out several pairs. One went in his grab bag. Another found a home in the glovebox of his car. Another … well, you understand. Distributed storage.
The financial basket
Preppers boast at times about their stores of precious metals, or ammo, or whatever it is they imagine will be the most valuable trade good after The Stuff Hits the Fan. They foresee exactly what will be most desirable … or so they think. I hope they’re right. But I don’t Trust they’re right. In unprecedented times, people may develop unprecedented tastes. Who knew TP would be so valuable (briefly) in 2020?
So be it prepping wealth or just retirement, why not spread your bets? We have some retirement accounts in the stock market. But we did less of that so we could buy a little land. If the market tanks, the land remains.
Extra baskets are worth the trouble
So that’s the message I hope to leave you with today. It’s an imperfect world. Bad things happen. Circumstances spoil good plans. Life surprises us. Having more baskets means any one loss or miscalculation is more sustainable. It’s worth the trouble.