on the cover / By Kym Kemp

Survival!

Stocking up for economic catastrophe in the SoHum hills and elsewhere

(Nov. 13, 2008)  “I’m gonna be the last man snackin’,” M. R. Robinson grins as he indicates his storeroom. Sixtyish, short with clipped silver hair and a ramrod back, Robinson looks more like a military man than the artist and master carpenter he currently is. Last year, Robinson foresaw the recent economic downturn and, worried that events might spiral into a survivalist’s nightmare, he began buying food.

One large room in his home is packed with cans, jars and dry goods — over two years’ supply for a large family.

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“I have a half ton of sugar, a quarter ton of salt,” he explains as he pats one of dozens of large blue Tupperware containers lining his walls. Boxes of oats and bags of beans line the room, too. According to him, dry foods are the best long-term bargains because they require little storage space and pack a lot of nutrition into relatively small quantities. “Just add water. It triples the weight.

A former cab driver from Chicago who hitchhiked across America in his youth, Robinson has a confident laugh. “I’ve survived on the street,” he says. “I’ve survived on the roads. I’ve survived here in nature. I can survive. Most people aren’t like that — they aren’t used to having nothing.”

The economic downturn is going to be hard on Americans, Robinson believes — they are too used to having the government take care of them. He thinks most people aren’t independent enough, though he concedes that Humboldt County residents may be better equipped than people elsewhere. Also, our rural setting gives us plenty of opportunities to live off the land.

Robinson, though, isn’t planning on depending exclusively on hunting or gardening. He feels that a large store of food may be necessary to get through the months or even years when society’s transport systems could be disrupted. Many of the disaster sites recommend having a three-day supply of food and water. But he scoffs at the skimpiness of their imagination. “Three days! That’s not surviving! You can hold your breath for three days. You need years.”

To accumulate this large supply, Robinson first began bringing home canned meals like soup, stew and chili. The process of deciding how much to buy was simple. He planned out seven meals (a week’s worth of items to eat) then he bought 50 times that amount, roughly one year’s worth. For instance, he decided one night’s dinner would be chili, one night’s beef stew, another would be chicken noodle, etc., and bought 50 family-sized cans of each. Then he went back and doubled the amount for two years’ worth of supplies.

Then he realized that his wife, who is currently living closer to town, would probably want to cook meals rather than just subsist out of cans and jars and so he began buying large amounts of staples such as sugar and grains.

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