At the gun store, Grant saw that guys buying handguns could avoid waiting five days to pick up a handgun if they had a concealed weapons permit. As whacked out as Washington State was, at least they had good gun laws. A permit was only $35, so he got one. He now had a concealable revolver and a permit to carry it.
But he didn’t carry it; that would be weird. He kept the permit secret from Lisa. She would think he was a gun-crazed nut. He put a trigger lock on the .38 and hid it where Lisa would never find it. He hid the box of .38 ammo; the one box of fifty shells. That should be enough.
As he was taking baby steps toward being prepared, the nagging thoughts about dependency were getting more intense and frequent. Grant kept thinking he should learn about things. He needed to learn — actually, relearn — how to survive. Not just how to build a fire in the woods. He needed to learn the survival mindset. He had to get in the habit of figuring out a solution on his own instead of depending on someone to supply him food or fix something.
Grant went to the bookstore to find books on “survival.” He was looking at the books secretly; he didn’t want anyone to know what he was looking at. It felt like the first trip to the gun store. It was like he was looking for a book like “Bestiality Illustrated.”
Grant meandered over to the “Outdoors” section of the bookstore and waited until no one was looking. Then he pulled a book, the Special Forces Survival Manual, off the shelf and looked at it, shielding it so no one could see the title.
That book had things in there about building a fire and making traps to get small game. That wasn’t the kind of survival knowledge he needed. Oh, sure, it was good stuff to know and he planned on learning that at some point. But right now, at this early stage of his journey into prepping, he needed to find a book that would tell him how to be an independent man. There were none.
Grant left the bookstore empty handed and disappointed that there wasn’t some book he could read that would teach him everything he needed to know. This survival thing might be more difficult than he thought.
When he got home and saw that Lisa wasn’t there, Grant got on his computer. He did a Google search for “survival.” He erased his browsing history so Lisa wouldn’t find out his secret, shameful interest in something so sick and wrong. He started to laugh at himself; it’s not porn, it’s learning how to save your family and live through bad situations. Since when is that a shameful thing?
Grant had an iPod and liked podcasts. So he searched the iTunes Store for “survival,” and many bizarre podcasts came up. Some of them were the crazy tinfoil hat kind of “survivalists”: the government is going to round you up and put you in camps, the Jews are taking over the world, etc. That image of a survivalist was exactly what Grant was afraid of. “Survivalist” seemed to mean “white supremacist” and “conspiracy theorist.”
Great, Grant sarcastically said to himself. He was going insane.
He was worried about society breaking down and only a bunch of weirdoes shared his concern. If the only people who were survivalists were weirdoes, then he wasn’t a survivalist.
Grant clicked on one last search result: “The Survival Podcast.”
The stats showed that exactly 173 people were subscribing to this podcast. It probably sucked.
He listened for a few minutes. Whoa. The guy doing the podcast wasn’t crazy. He was really smart. He was practical. He talked about how to store food, how to learn skills, how to grow a garden, alternate sources of electricity and water. Jack Spirko was his name. He did this podcast while he was driving in his car. Grant was hooked.
Besides the non-nuttiness of the guy and the practical information, the other thing that Grant liked about the Survival Podcast was that Spirko seemed to be just like him. He had grown up in the country and lived a lot like they did in Forks. Spirko got a big job and turned into a suburban guy, but felt like the whole thing was a fake. Just like Grant. Spirko returned to his country boy roots and was telling everyone else who would listen— all 173 of them— about how they, too, could get more independent and survive whatever might be coming. Spirko made it clear that he wasn’t a racist or an anti-Semite. He was a libertarian.
Grant hit the button on iTunes to become a subscriber to the Survival Podcast. He could feel that something bad was coming to America. It was the strongest nagging feeling he’d had up to that point. The economy seemed to be a giant fraud. The analysts on CNBC kept saying that things were fine but Grant didn’t believe them. Jack Spirko was telling people to get out of the stock market. That was preposterous; the Dow was at 14,000. Spirko was adamant.
Then it happened. All kinds of banks were failing. There was full-on panic in the U.S. It looked like the financial system would melt down.
Grant kicked his survival preparations— “preps” as Spirko called them— into high gear. He felt bad for reacting so strongly and perhaps panicking, but he felt the need to get food and guns ASAP. When Grant thought about the preps he needed to do, the nagging feeling would stop nagging and start encouraging him.
Chapter 15
Prepping
Grant was really worried about Lisa finding out that he had lost his mind and was a “survivalist.” He needed to persuade her why having a little food and security would be a good thing in these troubled times. She was smart and surely would understand that when the Dow drops 40% and the government is taking over banks and whole industries, that something unusual was happening and it required some thinking outside the box.
He was wrong. Grant had allowed Lisa to manage the money long ago. She was smart and did a good job at it. Grant remembered back to a previous summer, when he could feel what was coming, when he sent Lisa a link to a news story about the CEO of a huge European bank. He was not some kook. The banker was predicting a financial meltdown and credit crisis in the U.S. in the upcoming fall. Grant emailed the story to Lisa with the message, “maybe we should diversify at least some out of the stock market.” She got a little mad. She told him that she was a very capable money manager and that getting out of the stock market when it was up to 14,000 was crazy because at this pace, it would be at 16,000 by Christmas.
Grant knew Lisa. If she had said they’re staying in the stock market, selling now would mean she was wrong. If anything, this meant that if the stock market dropped, she would want to buy more stock because the prices were low. Sometimes when she had a choice of admitting being wrong or doubling down, she would double down.
She wasn’t mean; she just thought she was right. And Grant had always sat on his ass while she managed the money, so she was probably justified in not appreciating his last-minute “expertise” on the matter.
Grant would have rather bought some gold, which was at $900 per ounce, and some silver, which was at $17, but he had no choice. More stocks it was. He knew that Lisa would never back down and admit that a “survivalist” got it right. He was now even more worried about her finding out about his secret life. The more prepping he did, the more he was defying her. That’s how she would look at it.
Grant felt a wedge coming between him and Lisa. But he couldn’t go back to being a dependent suburban sheeple. He had actually thought about what happens when 911 doesn’t answer the call and when there is no food at the grocery store. Once you think those thoughts, you can’t just go back to not caring. You have to do something.
Be a man, Grant kept hearing the outside thought say.