Exactly.
What I find ironic in all this is how much time the media and people around NYC/NJ have sniffed and tut-tutted at those of us who are prepared for turd->turbine collisions as “hicks” and “nutjobs.....” and now they don’t understand even WHY they’re going to be without power for at least a week. They can’t even tell you how electrical power is generated or transmitted.
Every time there’s a big storm, we hear calls by uppity liberal arts majors to bury the power lines... and now we have a city with mostly buried power infrastructure that is royally screwed when water (and salt water at that) got into their oh-so-cleverly buried power infrastructure. Let’s leave that oh-so-brilliant dependency on public transportation out of the picture for right now - the subways will likely take a couple months to fully restore (at a great expense, I might add), just getting the power infrastructure back online is going to be a huge feat.
A city of mostly liberal arts majors and welfare dependents in this situation shows what the value of some hard asset skills are.
But they won’t learn. They’ll never bother learning that you can forge a nice knife out of the leaf springs of cars - and that they have lots of cars around them now that aren’t ever going to go anywhere again. Never mind that lots of those cars are filled with at least some fuel that can be decanted off the water in their tanks... never mind that someone could be pulling the alternators out of cars to make makeshift gensets to recharge batteries and such, or that someone could be making makeshift heaters. Nah. Much easier to complain very loudly.
BTW, in my area of Wyoming, I’d be looking for obsidian. Makes tools that are holy-crap sharp. There are recently discovered sites around Wyoming where it is thought that the Indians had “edge factories” - they had nice outcroppings of the rocks/stones that made nice edges and tools and they’d hang out there for weeks at a time, with skilled flintknappers just cranking out one arrow/spear point or knife after another. I’ve spent a little bit of time with a guy who can crank out a very serviceable arrow head in literally five minutes. He thinks that the Indians were at least as skilled as he is and that losing a stone knife for them was a fairly minor annoyance, since it took them only a hike to find the suitable rocks and in no more than 20 minutes after locating said rock(s), they had just about anything they wanted.
I've even used bamboo for a cutting edge/pointy thing, but you gotta be careful. It will bite you in a heartbeat.
I prefer to not try surviving in true wilderness like where you live (without preparation), because it's a heck of a lot harder. Even when I did the mountain man thing, you would run across old bottles, arrowheads, pieces of iron wire, etc...
Just takes a mindset and a game face.
/johnny
One of my favorite classes was Intro to Flintnapping, my friends and family thought it was a waste of time, but can they make tools out of stone?