How Long Can You Survive? We're Shooting for 20 Years. Then...

We'll go from there.

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Our drought has officially reached emergency status. Soon, we’ll be seeing mandatory water restrictions. Meanwhile, toxic wildfire smoke from Canada shrouds the horizon. Our air quality index drifts toward “hazardous.”

A birthday party moves indoors. A hiking trip is postponed (let’s be honest, canceled). My social media is an endless stream of fire and ash. All this while the president airs conspiracy theories and openly plots to take over this fall’s elections. And tech companies plan hyperscale data centers in our backyard, with the intention of piping out all of our available drinking water.

Otherwise, it’s been a nice week.

I feel fine.

Needless to say, we spent the last few days finalizing our rain harvesting plan. We installed two barrels. For those of you following my natural disaster plans, we built a filtration rig that uses:

60 Mesh Sediment Pump Prefilter;
Camco TastePure inline filter;
Envig Catalytic Carbon KDF inline filter;
Aqua Crest 5 micron Hose Water filter

From there, we’ll filter the water one last time through an Alexapure rig. We might add several drops of bleach. All of these filters use garden hose thread. We’re using foodsafe hoses from Camco. Finally, we’re using a Milwaukee M18 battery-powered pump to push the water through the filters into a collection bucket (then it goes into the Alexapure). As a backup, we finally found a good manual pump that generates enough forward pressure for the filters: The Bosworth Guzzler GH-0400N-5 with an extended handle. One day, my daughter will use it.

Next week, we’ll send that filtered rainwater off for testing to make sure our system works well enough. Then we’ll be done.

For a while…

We have our N95 masks. We have our half-face respirators with 3M P100 filters (60926) for organic and acid vapors if the air turns hazardous. We’ve been dealing with these threats for years now. This is the way.

Sometimes, people ask:

How long do you plan to survive?

This question comes from the newly initiated. They ask me if there’s any point in going through all this trouble, in doing all this research, in testing all these strategies, in developing all these systems.

Are they actually going to work?

What if they don’t?

The answer has wafted around in the back of my head. Now it’s finally on my tongue and in my fingers. Do I think these plans will protect my family forever? How long am I planning to survive? I have a response:

20 years.

That’s how long our equipment will last. It might last even longer if we take good care of it, but 20 years feels like a nice, solid number. Beyond that, all bets are off. By then, we’ll be living in a different world, one more like the futures that actuaries and dystopian novelists warn us about. That’s when the threats will probably, finally, begin to outpace our ingenuity.

It might happen sooner, but so far we’re keeping up. It’s not easy. Digging the foundation for the rain barrels took days. It took another day to lay the cinder blocks and pavers. It took days to research the filters and pumps we would need. A lot of people either can’t or don’t want to do it. I can’t worry about that, not anymore. All I can do is figure out what works, and try my best.

What happens if someone steals your barrels?

Then we’ll get new ones.

The barrels aren’t the point. The point is knowing how to use them. The point is knowing how to filter the water.

What if a fire burns down your house?

Then we’ll bug out. We’ll take what we can.

We’ll start over.

What if it gets so bad that your neighbors turn on you?

I don’t know.

We’ll figure that part out. I’m not going to worry about that because other people’s actions are beyond my control. I can’t shoot them. If I shoot them, I have to bury them somewhere. Once you start shooting people, I think it’s over. It’s only a matter of time before someone overpowers you. You and I can predict a lot, but we can’t predict what Todd or Heather are going to do when they run out of food and water. I hope they start cooperating with us, and accept our help with grace. All we can do is try to build a community that protects them. We can’t force them to join it. One day, someone might murder me for a bean burrito.

It’s easy to get lost inside the doomscroll. It’s easy to tell yourself it doesn’t matter what you try to do, because life will just get harder and harder until it finally beats you. Once, someone tried to tell me none of this mattered because if you can’t live until your 80s then you might as well die now.

I refuse to accept that.

I’ve got a family. I’ve got a life. Even on the bad days, we still have a good time. It’s worse than ever out there, but there’s still something to live for.

This year has taught me one thing. Even during an historic drought, it still rains. Things still grow. Things still live. For how long?

As long as they can.

Duh.