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Thursday, July 22, 2010
Bugout bags
Is a bugout bag ever done? Well, there will come a day when it is, perforce, but until then they're a work in progress. When Remus says bugout bag, he doesn't mean those bags (plural) you throw into your vehicle when the Big Evil happens, stuff that will sustain you and yours for an extended stay away from home. Those are provisions for an involuntary camping trip in a moderately sketchy environment. It has scented wet wipes for mi'lady, compact little games for the kids and zero degree sleeping bags all 'round. Provisions are carefully chosen for variety and eye appeal, the first aid kit is heavy on bug bite lotions and the tent gets rave reviews for comfort and style.
Then there is the more interesting bugout bag. The real bugout bag. The one you have for bugging out the back door when one Mau Mau or another are crashing through the front door. This bugout bag exists within a universe of stories familiar to all who nurse an internal doomsday dialogue, you know, the one with the I told you so motif wrapped around a Robinson Crusoe adventure, except with deciduous trees and centerfire cartridges. The story where Rule One applies: this game is no game. Background music by Wagner and special effects by FEMA.
This is the bag we lavish our attention on. It's a guy thing, a behind enemy lines thing, a new moon and Marine crawl thing. Everything's camouflaged or stainless steel or mindful of infrared. The FFI would have killed for our kit, the CIA would rewrite their manuals if they only knew. That's the bugout bag we're talking about here. Even the straps have straps. The carabiners are in matte no-glare, maybe even Woodland. Somewhere we have a picture of it with the contents laid out, inventory style. The picture is a month old and mostly out of date. Late at night we wonder if there's room for a thermos-size cold fusion generator. If we had a thermos-size cold fusion generator. That bag.
The ideal bugout bag would weigh exactly nothing, less if it could be managed. Therefore, actual bugout bags are a compromise, but a quantifiable compromise. They should weigh about one tenth your body weight, half again that if you're really fit. Y'gotta be honest with yourself. And so it is we favor vacuum-packed freeze-dried food in mylar packaging that serves as its own rehydration container. In fact, combination everythings are favored. For instance, a machete with a sawback serves as knife, ax and wood saw, the downside being that it's an unhandy knife, a third-rate ax and a barely adequate woodsaw. Sort of like the flying cars thing. Yet we imagine our acute embarrassment at being caught without, say, just the right tool for those quirky vending machine fasteners—people might think we didn't know.
We agonize over each item. How to start a fire, for instance. It had better work in the rain natch, but can we use it with one benumbed hand if we've just pulled ourself out from under the ice, does it have a shelf-life, and on and on. How much is another thing. Is thirty feet of paracord enough? A hundred? How about if we wrap every handle with paracord and use braided paracord as keepers? Each cubic inch of one thing is that much less for something else. Then there's first aid. Do we put up a kit suitable for routine cuts and punctures, maybe also a square of moleskin and some naproxin sodium, or do we outfit ourselves with a mini-EMT kit and teach ourselves heart bypass surgery.
Then there's the bag itself. One marketing maxim says you'll never go broke selling Americans things to get organized. It's as if we were constantly training for submarine duty. Nowhere else in the world will you find customers for shoe compartments that slip under the bed. So we see bags with a maze of internal dividers and zippered pockets, but those weigh up all by themselves, especially if (inexplicably) lined for waterproofing. And worse, compartments pre-allocate the space available for individual components. If they were offered on a bespoke basis this would make sense, otherwise no.
Premium bags marketed to serious hikers are, unfortunately, offered in color schemes that make circus advertising look restrained, as if they should be topped off with a rotating light and a kazoo. And they assume the user will install personal hydration plumbing just short of intravenous, so valuable real estate is devoted to that, um, need. For the record, Remus favors rollups and ziplocks in a bag finished with one of the mossy oak patterns. He adores simplicity so his hydration system is a canteen. That's it. No schematic required, no bite-valves included. Just fill and take a gravity-assisted pull as needed. Tested and approved by generations of Boy Scouts and GIs.
Bugout bags can't help but express the druthers of their owners, their assumptions about the prevailing environment, their expected obstacles and threats. Some will emphasize shelter, others arms or food or tools. Some will have considerable communications gear, others won't have so much as a transister radio. It's a form of poverty, of studied minimalism, of knowing where to be more self-reliant than elsewhere, of providing means and equipment at the expense of deep resources, a balance of durables and consumables based on anticipated prospects for resupply, and of our weaknesses and our strengths and our fears.
A bugout bag infers its purpose, namely: to safely make it to a better location, perhaps to pre-positioned supplies, maybe somewhere that also offers resources for long term habitability, or perhaps to an established enclave or a prearranged meeting place. Bugout bags are for the interim, that debatable space and time between where you are and where you're going. In anticipation it's the stuff of adventure, man on the run, outsmarting or evading danger where it can't be overcome. In fact it would probably be a rerun of the refugee experience throughout time, one of deprivation and anxiety and insecurity, easily becoming one of terror and desperation and agony. So it is we calculate our real bugout bag with care and cheerful optimism. It's our edge, our ace in the hole, our hand up to ourselves.
(This is a condensed version of an article posted at Woodpile Report)
Comments
And a wonderful post it was too! I put up a link to it over at my place.
(we used to call them “crash bags” and mine was always minimalist--passport, cash and Browning Hi-Power)Posted by KG on 07/22/2010 at 04:30 PMOne might almost call it a Pioneer Kit, except that leans more heavily towards the first kind initially discussed.
Posted by on 07/22/2010 at 05:05 PM
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