This “what if” scenario video on CNN is a reasonable portrayal of what may lay ahead for the United States if swine flu takes off. This could become a very serious pandemic, and if you haven’t gotten your prescription for Tamiflu, I’d get it now before pharmacies run out. My local pharmacy has already run out of Tamiflu.

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I assume you are all as alarmed as I am about the onset of this swine flu virus. BHM has written fairly extensively about the possibility of a pandemic involving a 1918-flu-like virus, and have even published a book about how to prepare yourself against this and other society-wide threats. But I always hoped we would never actually have to face such a threat. This swine flu, unfortunately, may be the real thing.

My daughter, Annie, the managing editor of BHM, told me this morning, “Dad, this is like the Perfect Storm. We have the possibility of a disease pandemic, the country is in a severe recession, and there is widespread political dissatisfaction on the right with the Obama administration. I hope we don’t get a cataclysmic weather event on top of this.”

We are battening down the hatches here, preparing to isolate our family against the outside world, and making plans to produce the next issue of BHM with a staff that can isolate themselves in their own homes. I hope it won’t be necessary, but isolation is the only real protection against a virus from which humans have no immunity. We are also buying Tamiflu and Relenza, which will help fight off flu.

We have plenty of food, fuel, and guns and ammo in our home, and we live way out in the woods. Today we’ll buy as much meat as we can, and jerky and freeze it. If this swine flu develops into a pandemic, the supermarket shelves will empty quickly. I advise anyone reading this to take this pandemic threat seriously.

. . . . . .

A comment on this post from www.realselfreliance.com has a link to an excellent video on swine flu from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control): Click here to read it.

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Pistol River at the mouth

I live near Pistol River, which is normally pretty quiet. Here it is after two days of big rain. The mouth at the ocean broadened from fifty yards to a quarter mile. This will “wash out” the river and trigger something in the steelhead waiting offshore. When the river begins to drop, the steelhead will start swimming upstream. I’m not sure how many steelhead are in the ocean off of Pistol River, but there are lots in the ocean off the Chetco River 8 miles to the south in Brookings. All the locals are getting ready to do some serious fishing.

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We’re playing with the grandkids in North Carolina for a week prior to going to the energy show. Hot and humid here but bearable. We’ll see Erik for only a few days as he is doing a lot of training “in the field.”

Annie and the two grandkids plan to move back to Oregon and live with us during Erik’s upcoming (Autumn) deployment to Iraq. She’ll work at the magazine. They hope to settle back in the Gold Beach, Oregon area when he separates from the Marine Corps in two years.

We’re still tired and I’m allergic to whatever is blooming down here, but it sure is fun playing with the grandkids. Thursday Annie and I will fly to Custer, Wisconsin and do the three-day MREA Energy Fair.

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Here’s a timely email I received yesterday about the magazine’s preparedness guide:

I am a recent subscriber to your Backwoods Home Magazine and I thoroughly enjoy it. It is the only magazine that I subscribe to that I read from cover to cover. I want to thank you for putting together the wonderful Emergency Preparedness and Survival Book which I received with my subscription. This book is priceless. I’m so impressed with this book that I ordered more for family. My husband and I aren’t hard core homesteaders, just ranchers living quite a ways from the nearest town but we’ve always had at least a 6 month supply of supplies on hand. With the world situation being so unstable, we decided that we needed to expand our supply and this book has been so very helpful. Thank you again.

Sincerely,
Camille Habermacher
Utopia, Texas

Just the other day the office staff and I were discussing how soon we had to send this book back to the printer for its fourth printing. Stocks are getting low so we’ll no doubt reprint in a month or two. The Emergency Preparedness and Survival Guide is a valuable book, full of information you will need if you are to survive an emergency in relative comfort. With more and more economic forecasters predicting a severe downturn in the economy later this year, this book may become very handy in the near future. It contains 296 pages and sells for $21.95. Inexpensive for what it contains. A lot of people order it in bulk — 10 copies at a time — at the big discount we give, and give them to their family and friends. If other readers would like to check it out, click here . If you’d like to read a couple of sample articles from the book, click here and here.

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I’ve just about finished establishing my new overflow firewood storage area. It’ll hold a little more wood than I thought — at least 6 cord. Since I can already store about 4 cord under cover, and my average winter use is about 2 cord, that will give me about 5 years worth of firewood storage, 2 years of which will be under a wood roof and the rest under a tarp. Not bad!

I gave up using my chainsaw to get out the stumps and roots in the middle of the spot I had chosen for the overflow area. There were too many rocks and dirt embedded in the roots. A running chain just needs to touch dirt and it’s dull. So I hired a neighbor, Shawn Crouse, to bring up his stump grinder and take the whole mess out.

A stump grinder is one of those super nifty machines that have an ingenious, but simple, design. Made by Carlton, it weighs 1600 pounds and its 27-horsepower motor turns a grinding wheel that contains 20 carbide teeth. The set of teeth cost a hundred dollars to replace but Shawn said he can get through about 10 big stumps with one set. Rocks tend to dull the teeth. He operated it with a remote control attached to a long cord so he could guide the action of the grinding wheel up close. One carbide bit worked its way loose during the grind so he had to stop and replace it.

  Once he was done, my sons and I laid out the rest of the skids on the ground and over the steel fence posts I put up on either side. This will keep the wood contained and off the ground. It’s nice to have a good use for the stacks of skids I have around here. Every time BHM gets in a shipment of magazines or anthologies, they are on skids (pallets), for which the magazine is charged $17 each. Highway robbery? I agree. I’ve given lots of skids away, burned some, and my kids have used them to build a clubhouse. This project used up 22 skids.

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Ever notice that there are a lot of people in society who do not act in their own behalf, even when confronted with evidence that it is imperative they do so?

We all sort of understand the alcoholic or drug addict who has an underlying character or mental defect that makes them need a crutch to get through life. I’ve known alcoholics and addicts who gave up substance abuse only to delve headlong into fervent religious beliefs and the sudden need to convert others to what they have “discovered.” Seems obvious to me they’ve traded in one crutch for another, albeit a less destructive one.

The abused housewife is a tougher one to understand. Why don’t they just get out of their situation? And if they do get away from one abuser, why do some of them seek out another abusing man? Some women seem to have a homing device for abusive men. Low self esteem? Victim of childhood abuse that makes them seek out another abuser? Or just scrambled eggs for brains?

Harder still to understand are those people who are at serious risk of illness or death from the way they eat but won’t change what they eat? I’ve come upon many of these people. Heck, America is full of them, judging from what the news media has labeled America’s obesity epidemic.

A couple of years ago I was enrolled in a supervised exercise program following heart surgery. Many people in the program had undergone bypass surgery like me, but few had bothered to read anything about the eating habits that may have led to their clogged arteries. Many were way overweight but weren’t particularly interested in dieting or exercising. How come?

Most people seem willing to give up smoking once they understand its hazards. Why not unhealthy foods? Is it because there’s a social stigma attached to smoking, namely, smoking implies you must be really stupid to go in the face of such overwhelming evidence that it will some day kill you. Is that it? Smokers quit because there’s a social stigma attached to it, not because it might kill them?

I like to act on newfound knowledge. It makes me feel pretty smart. I used to smoke, but read the evidence it would cause cancer so gave it up. I like to drink but limited my intake based on the evidence that too much led to serious social and health problems. I like to eat, but adapted my intake and tastes to healthy foods once I learned that overeating and certain foods could shorten my life.

Heck, I even moved to the country when I realized the city was hazardous to my life.

Who knows! Maybe I just don’t understand certain types of people.

I made kale soup today, chopped wood, and built the first wood stove fire of the season. Great fun! Maybe next post I’ll talk about chopping wood. Thoreau was correct, as far as he went. But chopping wood has more benefits than warming you twice. Maybe I’ll even post John’s kale soup recipe.

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The rainy season may have begun in southern Oregon, and I have still not fixed a leaking part of my roof, which covers a room of my house we call the sun room because of its exposure to the setting sun. I’ve known this particular flattish section of roof (it’s a converted porch) had a problem for at least three years. But I ignored it because it never actually leaked — until last winter.

The warning signs were in the popping nails on the rolled roofing, plus the rolled roofing was very old. It’s a job I needed to farm out to a company who could strip off the old roofing and hot mop on some new rolled roofing. But even though it finally leaked over the winter, I ignored making the simple phone call to a local roofing company that could take care of this problem in an afternoon. Finally I called them a month ago, only to have to wait until they came out, inspected it, mailed me a bid, had me accept it and give them a down payment, then put me on their schedule. I’ve got two more weeks to wait until they get around to my roof.

The rains of the last two days have been heavy enough to start the leak flowing. Oh shame! No excuse for my procrastination. I’ve already allowed the leak to damage the drywall of the ceiling and one wall, so I’ll have to go in and repair them after the new rolled roofing is put on.

A good lesson for me I guess. I usually don’t procrastinate, but hop right on a project. But the expense of hiring someone else to fix the roof made me hesitate. Now I’ll have to pay the roofing company, plus have a bunch of inside repair work to do myself.

The rain of the last two days brought a lot of cold air with it. It has hovered around 48 degrees, not quite enough to light the first woodstove fires of the season, but pretty close. I loaded both our stoves, but I’ll leave it up to Lenie to give the go-ahead to fire them.

Can America Be Saved from Stupid People

My book of columns, Can America Be Saved from Stupid People, has become BHM’s all time fastest seller. It is the 14th anthology we’ve produced, and where most of our anthologies take a little more than a year to recoup the money we spend to print them, this one took only six months. And it’s still selling well. I think the fast sales owe a lot to its very catchy title. Overall sales, however, have yet to surpass any of our 11 big anthologies. If you’d like to order it, click HERE.

Preorder the Thirteenth Year Anthology for $15

Speaking of the big anthologies, the Thirteenth Year Anthology is our newest big anthology going to print, and the November/December issue will have an ad for it for people who want to preorder it for $15 per copy. Readers of this blog can also order the book for $15 and be among the first to receive it — if you buy it NOW!

We expect the new anthology to retail for $22.50. In fact, all the anthologies will go up to that price, reflecting our increasing printing and postage costs, so if you need any anthologies to round out your compilation, get them now before the price goes up. Just CLICK HERE to order the Thirteenth Year Anthology.

We’ll mail the new anthology to you by the beginning of December, which will be just in time to make a nice Christmas present for someone.

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Two of my sons are cross-country runners, one at the local grammar school and one at the local high school. I began training with Jake, the high schooler, but I ride my bicycle while he runs. Lenie has now joined us, alternately walking and jogging. Yesterday, as Jake ran off down the lower logging road, Lenie and I walked the upper one, which has turned into a beautiful young cedar forest with trees between 8 and 12 feet tall. Just about five years previous, I had walked up the same logging road with a friend who was a committed environmentalist as well as a writer for the magazine. The forest had just been felled and my friend could not hide his disgust at what he perceived as widespread environmental destruction by a logging company. I tried to explain to him that the logging represented a good use of forest land, and that I was familiar with the practices of the local timber company, Southcoast Lumber, and they did things correctly, namely, they logged, then burned, then replanted according to a very long-term logging schedule. “They have an economic stake in taking care of this land,” I said. “Thousands of homes will be built from the timber, then in another 20 or 30 years, they’ll log again and repeat the process.” I tried to explain to him that even the burning they do after logging is good for the land. “Fire is a natural part of the ecosystem of these forests. What could be more environmentally responsible than that?” He dismissed my explanation, as I knew he would. He was one of those environmentalists who seem to treat their beliefs as a religion. He blocked out explanations that showed timber companies doing any kind of enlightened logging. He simply looked at the denuded land and saw its ugliness. He couldn’t see the productive beauty that was eager to spring up as new trees. For him, logging was simply bad! Now here my wife and I were walking through this beautiful new forest. The logged timber has long ago become new homes. The land sloped away from us to the Pacific Ocean, and we could survey miles of new trees leading to the ocean. But I could see this in my imagination five years ago, amid the heaps of stumps and slash. Why couldn’t my environmental friend see that this was a responsible use of land, not a rape of a forest. Would he acknowledge it even now? I’ve lost track of him so I can’t ask him. I’ve met a lot of people like this. They are committed to a line of thought, and no amount of reasoning will sway them from their beliefs. And their thoughts DO become beliefs, as far as I can tell. Thought and reasoning implies listening to alternative views as you search for knowledge. Beliefs imply that you have reached your decision. There is no more room for talk. Too many environmentalists have become “true believers,” rather than pragmatists looking for sensible solutions to environmental problems. They have become part of the problem, not part of the solution. Companies like Southcoast Lumber are part of the solution. They are making money by caring for their forests. We’ll cut our Christmas tree out of this new growth of forest when there’s snow on the ground. We take care to cut out a crowded tree to help the timber company improve the new forest. Reminds me of a Robert Frost poem: Whose woods these are I think I know, His house is in the village though, He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. … I’ll skip to the end: The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

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I think hard work is the key to success in all endeavors in life. Since we arrived home late Friday night, we’ve been doing house and yard chores: vacuuming, sweeping, and washing clothes inside, and mowing, weedwacking, gardening, and watering trees outside. My family likes a tidy place, inside and out, so we do this sort of family work project every time we come back from a trip. It took the five of us most of the day today. The boys each have a machine they like to operate: Jake the weed eater, Robby the power mower, and Sam the blower. Lenie likes to work in the garden, of course, and I like riding my big mower. As we were finishing up our many chores today, you could feel the family’s group satisfaction in a job well done. It occurred to me that these work projects, and the gratification my three boys, Jake, Rob, and Sam, get from them are probably the most valuable lessons Lenie and I could be giving them. They have seen us work very hard all their lives, and we have made comfortable lives and a good business with our hard work. Now we are showing them how to do the same. They recognize hard work as an essential ingredient of a successful life. I got my work ethic from my parents, as did Lenie. My parents were of Irish immigrant stock, but their hard work enabled them to meld into American society well. They never got rich, but their five kids never wanted for anything either. Their children–me and my siblings–applied the work ethic learned at home to their own lives, and now Lenie and I are passing on the same teaching to our children. I think it becomes a personal thing: I want my property and my business to reflect the view I have of myself as a hard working person, just like my father and mother did, and just as I hope my children will. What could be simpler. Hard work underlies success!

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