When the grasshoppers say "I am coming to your house"

High winds and blowing snow created white-out conditions and icy roads today.

Mrs ERJ and I stuck close to the hacienda.

So...you don't get prime content. You get a rehash of classics. 

"I am coming to your house when the SHTF"

This is a recurring issue in the preparedness community. You are the ant. You prepare. You forgo exotic vacations to places like Whitehall, Michigan and Angola, Indiana. You invest in infrastructure.

And then your cousin Jacqui-from-the-East-Coast, a grasshopper, informs you "When the Shiitake Mushrooms hit the fan, I am coming to your house."

This topic was explored in detail on James Wesley, Rawles's Survival Blog about twenty years ago. The solution that he and his readers hammered out was to have a "ticket" or a "boarding pass" to ensure a berth on the equivalent of Noah's Ark or the last flight out of Saigon.

It was interesting to watch the evolution of the concept because as the list of "gear" grew it quickly became apparent that nobody was going to be able to show up in the 11th hour with two semi-loads of cargo in-tow.

The list grew something like this:

• One year's worth of food for each person: minimum of 400 pounds per person.
• Four seasons worth of clothing for the climate: 14 pairs of socks, 10 sets of underwear, five pairs of jeans, five shirts, five quilted over-shirts, two work coats, one parka, snow boots, work boots, two sets of running shoes, sandals, hats, five pairs of work gloves, two pairs of cold-weather gloves, one pair of heavy mittens, scarves, three knit caps, two baseball hats.
• One CONEX container for every four people. Gutter to collect rainwater and two IBCs to store water.
• One water pump
• One UTV for mobility.
• 50 gallons of gasoline or diesel
• A 2000 Watt inverter generator 
• Hand-held radios for communication 
• Garden seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, fencing, hoes, shovels, grain mill
• LP stove and five, 20lb LP pigs that are full 
• A 30,000BTU/hr wood-stove and 12 feet of triple-wall stove pipe 
• Two firearms per person and 200 rounds of ammo for each shotgun, 600 rounds of ammo for each high-powered rifle, 2000 for each handgun and 10,000 for each rimfire.
• A year's supply of vitamins and medications and water treatment chemicals.
• and on, and on, and on.... 

Yeah, that and a family of four isn't going to fit into a Toyota RAV4 and drive from Potomac, Maryland to Eaton County, Michigan. Not even in the best of times. Nearly all of that gear was going to have to be pre-positioned before the shiitakes hit the fan.

Suddenly, Jacqui-from-the-East-Coast decided it wasn't as much fun to needle you about your preoccupation for preparing or about showing up 30 seconds before midnight.

Viewed from a different perspective

Cousin Jacqui will be in denial until it is too late. She will dismiss the storm clouds of chaos looming on the horizon until her liquor store runs out of Chardonnay...and Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc, and Tito's Vodka.

Her window-of-opportunity closed about three weeks before she even considered the possibility of imposing on my hospitality. 

And she isn't going to walk 600 miles through the hillbillies of Pennsylvania and the oafs of Ohio to barely "survive" in the Michigan wilderness. Physically, she is holding a hand of twos, threes and a four when she needs eights-and-above to have a reasonable chance of surviving the journey.

The iron law of supply and demand 

Between Mrs ERJ and myself, there are more than 60 people with claims on my charity as good or better than cousin Jacqui-from-the-East-Coast. Most of them don't have her need-for-dominance. Most of them know that sometimes they will draw the dirty end of the stick in terms of tasks.

Even if cousin Jacqui-from-the-East-Coast showed up at the end of my driveway, all of the berths will have already been filled.

She will say "You don't have the balls or the heart to throw me into the street."

That is an easy one. I will turn to the three families who are on the bubble. I will say, "If I let cousin Jacqui-from-the-East-Coast in, then I will have draw straws to see which of your families are tossed out of the life-boat and into the street."

"Unless, of course, you toss Jacqui-from-the-East-Coast into the street and convince her that she does not want to live here. Then it becomes a non-issue for me."

Problem handled by letting the people with the most skin-in-the-game sort things out. I don't think Jacqui-from-the-East-Coast is going to win.