20
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Meet the American nomad prepping for doomsday by living in a homemade cart pulled by sheep and drinking their milk | World Wide Waste
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- Title
- Meet The Nomad Prepping For Doomsday With Sheep | World Wide Waste | Insider Business
- Authors
- Insider Business
- Duration
- 13:31
- Published
- Aug 9 2023
It reminds me of a extended news story I read several years ago about a hermit living in a forest in Maine.
One day when he was a young man, he got off of work, drove to the edge of the forest, took a walk, and just kept on going.
He became a local legend where many people doubted his existence.
He occasionally stole food from the kitchen of a resort in the forest when it was off season. A local cop got obsessed with him, caught him, arrested him, and brought him out of the woods after he had lived there for over 30 years. The last news story he remembered before becoming a hermit was Three Mile Island.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Thomas_Knight
There was also a really good article in GQ a few years ago about him:
The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit (mirror)
Thank you so much for these links!
I also found this documentary on Vimeo, The Hermit, which you might be interested in. The filmmaker interviews several residents in the area sometime between the arrest and the trial, some from whom Mr. Knight has stolen, as well as the arresting officer and some students at his former high school.
I find it particularly interesting how much people's opinions differ regarding Mr. Knight's character, and I agree with the GQ journalist in that those opinions say as much (or more) about the opinion-holder as they do of Mr. Knight.
Also tagging @BeanBurrito in case you're interested.
Thanks! That was super interesting too. But I think it was more of a documentary on the people in the community being interviewed about Knight, giving us a glimpse into their psyches, than it was about Knight himself. E.g. The old, retired police officer getting visibly upset when talking about how Knight was getting so much media attention, and being unable to understand why people found his story so interesting, because he viewed Knight as nothing more than a "criminally minded individual". It's almost like asking the local residents about Knight was acting as a litmus test to detect people who lack empathy, and subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) revealing everyone's personal biases.
Thank you! I haven't heard anything more about Knight since those two articles years ago.
Oh good!
I was worried someone would ask me for a link and I would have to go web searching.
Those were the two articles I read.
"Interesting" is an understatement.
The Sheep Guy is mentally health**ier* than Knight for sure and isn't staying alive by stealing.
Agreed about "interesting" being an understatement. From an old comment of mine on the article:
What an incredibly interesting man and fascinating read with so much to digest in it.
I found it particularly interesting that the other inmates found his silence so deserving of respect and a bit intimidating. I can sort of intuitively understand why that is, similar to the respect that people who took vows of silence used to get, but wonder what the underlying reason for that is. It is something to do with admiring/fearing the willpower required to sustain it?
That made me incredibly sad but I was glad to see the relationship continued on in person. And I am definitely curious how he is doing now that he has been released. Apparently there was a Supreme Court case on whether or not he had to pay restitution for the removal of his camp, but I can't find anything else regarding him personally or his life now.
Some other interesting/funny parts, too:
Reading all the sections on what he stole (lots of books with him being a fellow military history buff! and handheld video games!) and what he ate/drank (lots of junk food and "girly" mixed liquors) was pretty interesting too. Rather than eating healthy or living off the land I suppose his high fat/high sugar junk-food diet makes total sense when his primary concern was avoiding starvation.
Two things particularly stuck in my mind.
What he did to survive the winter. Fattening himself up, meditating to get his mind off of the cold, and getting up to exercise during the coldest time of the night.
The other thing was his comment about how people expect him to have something to say, what he called "hermit wisdom". He admitted he didn't have anything to say. He was just some guy who lived in the woods for 30 years by his wits and some stealing. He didn't get anything out of it except being alone, which was all he wanted.
There’s a book, too. Highly recommend it - fun read.
I saved this related thread from Twitter a few years ago. It is hilarious.
It is by a man making fun of his survivalist ( "prepper" ) brother who didn't think to save a can opener with his stash and how he dealt with the winter blackout in Texas.
https://twitter.com/torriangray/status/1361778280521605122?lang=en
link for people who don't do the twitters
Lol that's amazing, thanks for the link.
Honestly, a (relatively) cheap pocket knife works really well for this and I think a lot of people don't appreciate how easy it is to cut the metal used in tin cans.
I'm pretty sure I could get a can open with a flat head screw driver really quickly as well..
I admire him for living his life the way he wants, but I wouldn't really call him a prepper. If society collapses, his cart-based lifestyle isn't going to last long.
The same could be said for the vast majority of doomsday preppers though, IMO. Stockpiling canned/freeze-dried food, medicine, and ammo is only going to get them so far if society genuinely collapses... especially for those relying on generators to power their compounds, and ICE vehicles to use as transportation. Since, despite what post-apoc fiction would have you believe, gasoline starts to oxidize to the point of uselessness relatively quickly, and even "shelf-stable" gas under the best storage conditions possible will still become completely useless after about three years. Diesel lasts a bit longer initially under poorer conditions, but actually degrades even faster over the long term, lasting only about 6 months even with ideal storage. And same goes for antibiotics, and a lot of other essential medicines, which lose their potency completely after a few years as well.
At least this guy has a relatively sustainable food source with his sheep, and reliable means of transportation with his donkey. So I would say he actually has a leg up on most of the other "preppers" I have read about.
TBH even preppers live a somewhat wasteful lifestyle. Anything that runs on electricity is going to be very resource intensive, generally speaking, and gas has more problems like you mentioned. Many of them buy canned or dehydrated food but don’t buy seeds which they will need in the long run because their stockpile will not last forever. Prepper lifestyle is really more of a fantasy hobby rather than a useful activity.
IMO a lot of (hobbyist) preppers are people who think it's neat to know how to do certain things by themselves; start a cook fire, grow food, build a shelter etc. etc. and rationalise the End Of The World stuff from there because maybe admitting it's just entertainment would be embarassing. They'd be useless in a real apocalypse scenario because they only learn the fragmentary bits that are interesting to them.
(Just want to be clear I'm talking about hobbyist preppers and not accelerationists/racist militia types who actively hope for societal collapse for political reasons, they are a very different phenomenon)
From this point of view I sympathise a lot with the hobbyist preppers because I find the whole 'Primitive Technology' stuff and making useful objects out of junk or raw natural materials very interesting. I think making things gives you a greater sense of control over your environment that is very good for your mental health, we are natural tool users after all.
Yeah, learning sustainable farming techniques, livestock rearing, traditional leathermaking or textile production, and bow hunting is the most actually realistic "prepper" things I can think of... but most preppers I have seen aren't doing any of that. They just stockpile shit that will eventually go bad, or they will eventually run out of supply of, and somehow think that's enough to make them kings of the post-apocalyptic world.
One thing I think of is how reliant people in pre-industrial households were on a central fire. There's a reason many traditional pantheons had a goddess of "hearth and home." The hearth was the center of the entire household, sometimes quite literally placed at the center of a building. Obviously it was used primarily for heating, but fires were used for much more. Obviously you might cook meat over an open flame, but dutch ovens were used to cook stews and even used as baking vessels to bake bread. Want to dry meats and vegetables? Hang them in the chimney to let the smoke dry them. Want to have radiant heat? Build your fire inside an earthenware enclosure with a ton of thermal mass. Want to remove wrinkles from clothes? Get a traditional clothes iron, something literally made by a blacksmith, designed to be heated directly by a fire. Want to heat a cup of coffee up quickly? Leave a poker in the fire continuously. Whenever you want to heat a cup of liquid quickly, just dip a hot poker into your drink. Etc.
In short, our ancestors used their home fires like we use electricity now. They found all sorts of ways to use this one energy source to get useful things done. And of course, these fires can be fed with wood you grow on your own property. Most of the implements that you can use to take advantage of a fire are ultra durable, made of solid metal, and have no moving parts. That to me seems the way to go if you really are worried about collapse. You should be thinking how to live like someone in the 18th century did.
Watch the Townsends YouTube channel for life in the 18th century. No single man lives by themselves. Trade was very important. The farmer still needed the blacksmith, tinsmith, cobbler, carpenter, etc. They bought cloth and leather to make clothes, they might spin wool into yarn and thread, but it was the weaver that made it into cloth. Candlestick makers, etc. We've been living in groups and relying on trade to live for thousands of years.
If we had a huge societal collapse all the peppers are doing is buying themselves a couple weeks of convenience. Pretty soon they will be in the same boat as everyone else.
Oh, I've seen a lot of Townsends. That's where a lot of what I was referencing comes from. A lot of Townsends channel focuses on the lifestyles of 18th and early 19 century homesteaders, the kind of homesteaders that settled in Indiana and Ohio. And the kind of kit that a homesteader would be using then is really the kind of kit a real modern prepper should be aiming for. Were people then still reliant on blacksmiths, cobblers, etc? Sure. But the type of homesteaders Townsends explores were still mostly self-sufficient. They might set out west with enough iron tools, extra shoes, etc to last them for years. A small blacksmith shop is also the kind of thing a prepper community could operate as well. A farming family or village in that era didn't make absolutely everything they needed locally, but they were self-sufficient enough to need to trade occasionally for things they couldn't make locally.
Also, as you alluded, I think any realistic prepper effort would have to be a community, not an individual. An individual isn't going to be able to duplicate all of the trades that even a small village would have in the 18th century. But that seems the type of thing that a small group could manage. Get a dozen families together and have them buy up some land out in the countryside. Have one person learn how to do traditional blacksmithing, one traditional carpentry, cobbling, etc.
The point is that if you really want to prep for a serious collapse of industrial civilization, you shouldn't be trying to keep 21st century life going. Instead, you should be aiming more for an 18th century lifestyle. It's not realistic to expect to be able to keep modern life going through such an event. The necessary supply chains are too long, and the manufacturing are too complex. But duplicating an 18th century lifestyle might be doable. There would be some luxuries that 18th century people had that you won't be able to duplicate; sugar and spices come to mind. But you could probably create a small village or other community that would be able to grow its own food and make its own essential clothes, tools, etc. You might have to stockpile some raw materials you can't find on site, but that should be doable. Iron for instance is a lot more available now than it was back then. So you might stockpile enough raw iron to last your new village a century or more for relatively modest price today. And if you have a supply in stock, you would only have to have the tools and skills to forge and repair iron tools, rather than having to also build up the skills and equipment to mine and refine it.
Also, aiming for an 18th century kind of prepping would make the whole enterprise sustainable even before any kind of collapse. Etsy and other sites are filled with goods offered by people practicing traditional blacksmithing, carpentry, leatherworking, etc. This means that as you set up your doomsday community, you can make the thing have some revenue. The family learning blacksmithing can sell their works online, etc. You won't make much profit today growing corn the way it was in the 18th century; you're not competing with modern agribusiness. But at least prior to any catastrophic collapse, such a community could earn some money by selling various handmade goods.
Now that I think of it, I wonder if that is part of the unstated backstory behind a channel/store like Townsends. We see videos of them setting up that homestead in the back woods, but it's always billed as just a living history/historical reenactment community. But the paranoid side of me wonders if we're actually watching a group of people create their own doomsday village.
I completely agree, sorry if my comment didn't come across right. None of the preppers I've seen have the requisite skills to last more than a couple weeks. Really, you need a community of folks with diverse backgrounds and skills to make it work. Between Townsends, Way Out West (showing a hobby farm that actually has draft animals), Primitive Technology and others, watching them trying to do various activities we take for granted shows how difficult it would be. A blacksmith needs coal and iron to do anything useful, you could scavenge iron, but coal, that will need digging. Building a blacksmith shop is not small endeavor. You would need to build all that ahead of time because making mortar requires cement which is difficult to make from scratch.
Most of the blacksmiths I've seen online use modern forges with propane or natural gas for energy. An 18th century forge uses coal. Which you can still get today, but it takes a lot of work to use and is a consumable. So the community would need access to make charcoal, which isn't difficult, but a forge takes a lot of it.
Clearly they're just optimistic that society will restart before their supplies run out! 😉🤞
I haven't watched the whole video, but this one is another off the grid man ( no smart phone, no ID ) who lives in the woods near the Amish and lives off of a plant based diet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir3eJ1t13fk
Preppers look more and more rational/reasonable after each year goes by...
I don't think so. If there is a nuclear war they might last a few weeks more until their supplies run out, assuming radiation doesn't kill them.
Well, the idea of prepping vs not prepping at all. Used to be I would think most of them are nuts. There are also other more likely scenarios like economic collapse that they are way more prepped for than most.
In all situations at some point their supplies will run out and they will have to deal with what everyone else has to deal with. Their preparations will not shield them.