Clarification—How to Prepare Now for the Complete End of the World (nytimes.com)

 We proceed knowing full well the Times has occasionally gotten the story wrong:

CLARIFICATION: only the story on the left is from the NYT. The story on the right  appeared in the Vancouver Sun, 29th June, 1914.

From the New York Times, March 7, 2020: 

OKANOGAN COUNTY, Wash. — When the end comes, some will not be waiting in a bunker for a savior. They will stride out into the wilderness with confidence, ready to hunt and kill a deer, tan its hide and sleep easily in a hand-built shelter, close by a fire they made from the force of their two palms on a stick. 

Four hours from the Seattle airport, in a valley called Methow, near a town called Twisp, Lynx Vilden was teaching people how to live in the wild, like we imagine Stone Age people did. Not so they could get better at living in cities, or so they could be better competitors in Silicon Valley or Wall Street. 

“I don’t want to be teaching people how to survive and then come back to civilization,” Lynx said. “What if we don’t want to come back to civilization?”

Some people now are considering what it means to live in a world that could be shut down by a pandemic.

But some people are already living like this. Some do it because they just like it. Some do it because they think the end has, in fact, already begun to arrive.

 

A couple of times a year, Lynx — she goes by the name professionally, though it is not her legal name — teaches a 10-day introduction to living in the wilderness. When I arrived for this program, Lynx ran to me, buckskins flying, her hands cupped tightly around something that was smoking. 

She held it toward my face. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. Confused, she moved her smoking handful to someone else, who blew on it lightly. It was an ember in a nest of seed fluff. Lynx was making fire.

Her property looks like a kidnapper’s lair from a movie. But her dream, she told those of us gathered, is a human preserve. Her vision is called the Settlement. It will have a school, where people can come in street clothes and learn to tan hides. But to enter the preserve itself will mean giving oneself over to it.

“You walk into it naked and if you can create from that land what that land has to offer, then you can stay there,” Lynx said. “It’s going be these feral rewilded people. I’m thinking in two to three generations there could be real wild children.” 

We set up our tents around her property. I had a sleeping bag from high school, a Swiss army knife and a stack of external batteries. It scared me that there was no cellphone reception. We communicated over the week in hoots. One hoot means hoot back. Two hoots means “gather.” Three hoots means an emergency, like near-death level.

The class may have been there to go ancient, but they brought very modern food requests. In a group of seven, one student was a strict carnivore — Luke Utah, who likes a morning smoothie of raw milk, liver and egg yolk. Another was a vegan. One student said they were so sensitive to spice that even black pepper was overwhelming. One person was paleo, one was allergic to garlic, and one was gluten-free. 

Louis Pommier, a French chef turned backpacker, was bartering his skill for attendance. He nodded empathetically as he heard these restrictions but would go on to mostly ignore them. The first night he made a chicken curry.

 

Many of the people who were there came feeling useless in their lives. Some had just quit their jobs. Lynx said many of the students who come for the monthslong intensives (another option) are divorced, or on their way to it. Several talked about feeling embarrassed at how soft their hands were, and how dependent they had gotten on watching TV to fall asleep.

 

We woke up the next morning and gathered around the open fire for boiled eggs. Soon we would learn how to chop down a tree. First Lynx greeted the tree. She put her hands on it.

“If you’re willing to be cut down, will you give a yes?” she asked. She tugged the tree. She calls it a muscle test. Apparently the tree said yes. “We have to kill to live,” she said.

Many students had brought elegant knives and axes from rewilding festivals — there’s a booming primitive festival circuit, with names like Rabbitstick Rendezvous, Hollowtop and Saskatoon Circle — but when confronted with an actual tree they didn’t want to use those. There was an old ax they used instead. Its head periodically flung off, each time narrowly missing someone. The tree eventually fell, a foot from my tent.

The vibe was a mix of Burning Man, a Renaissance Fair and an apocalyptic religious fantasy. There was no doomsday prepper gun room — what would happen when bullets run out? Nor was there a sort of kumbaya, gentle-love-of-nature-yoga-class vibe. When Lynx told the story of killing her first deer, she said the deer, wounded, tried to drag herself away.

We shaved off the tree’s bark and got to the cambium, the soft inner layer of bark that we would boil in water. This would be used to tan hides. We learned on supermarket salmon skin. We tore into the plastic bags of sockeye salmon with stone shards, then descaled the skin with dull bones.

Lynx demonstrated how to process a deer hide using a hump bone from a buffalo. She sent us to go look for bones from the kitchen. Our job was to scrape off the muscle and fat. The hide was heavy, wet and beginning to rot.

Sometimes she played a deer leg flute while we worked. 

That night was bitterly cold. I wore every piece of clothing I brought. Lynx coached us in warming big rocks by the fire, rotating them like potatoes, wrapping them in wool blankets. I heaved my two rocks, too hot to touch, covered in ash, into the sleeping bag with me.

“Another thing you can do to make a big cozy bed is just rake a pile of pine needles and just burrow in and put logs on either end so it stays together,” Lynx said.

 

Lynx looks like Peter Pan, only 54 and with bone earrings....

....MUCH MORE

Okay, that's not going to work. Too many people, not enough skills. Subsistence farming is a lot harder than it looks.
To have a chance see: "News You Can Use: "'Collapse OS' Is an Open Source Operating System for the Post-Apocalypse""