My husband and I became active in Search and Rescue (SAR) while we were in high school. We were so blessed to be able to learn valuable skills early in life, including tracking, map and compass skills, white water rescue, navigation by stars, wilderness survival skills of all kinds, trapping and snaring, field first aid, and more.
On one of our tracking expeditions, we began at the instructors house. It was way out, deep in the Oregon woods. The man who was going to be teaching us was still prepping our outing, so his wife was showing me around her kitchen. I was the only girl on the team and she thought it was GREAT that I was learning all this! She brought me into her pantry and I was stunned. It wasn't fancy at all. It was rather dark, with only one incandescent bulb lighting the whole thing. It was HUGE and it was STUFFED.
Home canned food, purchased food, buckets of dry goods, baskets of potatoes, and on and on and on. I asked her why in the world would she have so much food when it was just her and her husband. She laughed and told me that sometimes they would be snowbound for weeks in the winter. She wasn't going to be caught without a meal to serve!
That introduced me to the idea of "prepping". It's just old fashioned wisdom, not a new fangled mania.
The next part was the Y2K panic. I was a young momma. I had a 4 year old, a 3 year old, an almost 2 year old and a two teen boys and a teen girl who we were fostering. I was not caught up in the panic. I didn't think anything would happen that would affect me. A few days before it was supposed to happen, we got a little cash out of the bank to have at home in case the banks were down for a few days. But I did have one thought that bothered me all night...
I had a very quick daydream of my oldest two looking at me sadly. The baby was crying in the background but was out of sight. I told the girls, "I'm sorry. You'll just have to try to sleep anyway. I haven't any food to give you."
That image turned me into a "prepper". I began to buy a little extra food, so that if I missed a trip to the store, I would still be able to put together a few meals. At the time, I shopped often and didn't cook from scratch very much. We had little extra money (and we didn't eat all that healthy at the time), so the food I put up extra was things like noodle and cheesy packets, rice-a-roni, instant oatmeal, crackers, some canned soups, dry milk, a few gallons of drinking water and lots of cereal. It wasn't much, but it was a start.
Y2K came and went without a bang, but I was never the same. I was beginning to learn to be old fashioned.
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