The Comfortable Survivalist

2011-06-17T00:55:00.004-05:00

Two years into this homestead we no longer buy the following items from the supermarket:
milk (we bought two registered La Mancha dairy goats, and their RAW milk is delicious superfood)
bread (Lynette ordered whole grains and grinds them and bakes our bread, delicious!)
beef (uh, we live on a cattle ranch)
yogurt (home-made, fresh from goat's milk)
cream cheese
refreshing beverages (home bottling kombucha, etc)
hummus (Lynette buys some sesame seed peanut butter and chickpeas and blends it herself).

In addition, Lynette's been making fermented products that pique the palate and are either 1. really refreshing (KOMBUCHA) or 2. powerfoods (BEAT KVASS and KEFIR).

My fav is the kombucha. Mmmmm... fermented black tea and sugar with fizzy zing!

So it's a start. We buy all our veg from the farmer's market now, and just harvested the 500 onions, with okra growing vigorously despite the drought. Brought in a terrific crop of tomatoes, both celebrity heat-setting and Roma. Also had bell peppers, which seem to have stopped fruiting with the tomatoes because of extreme heat, dryness and wind. We water, but the stress is high.

Producing food is 10 times more rewarding than the savings alone. I've been keeping track, and with organic milk at $6 a gallon, we're still saving money feeding our six children goat milk even feeding the goats premium feeds and pampering them.

So far so good on the two-and-a-half acre homestead.

Hooray, too, that the US Senate voted to do away with ethanol subsidies! Yay! Now down with GMO!!!

2009-11-08T21:42:00.005-06:00

Time to Put Wild Game in the Freezer

Pictured above is a feeding frenzy my sons and I encountered last weekend at Port Mansfield. Mainly Spanish Mackerel, but I fished from my kayak (if you look closely at the photo you can see me) and saw numerous sharks and jack crevalle. A jack ripped my lure, a Rattlin' Rapala as soon as it hit the water and towed me a mile out to sea, literally, in a Texas Gulf Coast-style "Nantucket Sleigh Ride."

As soon as Hurricane Ida is done and the Gulf waters have calmed, we'll head up for the flounder run, throwing Berkley Gulp, or live finger mullet free-lined on a number one offset circle hook.

The chest freezer is bare. Except for snapper and tuna, we never freeze fish, so it gets eaten quickly and not put into the "food supply pipeline," i.e. the freezer. The only way to prepare fresh fish, in my opinion, is to poach it whole on the grill after gutting. No meat gets wasted this way, at all. Frozen fish like snapper can be beer battered and deep fried for excellent results.

Fish, however, is a luxury, and is very seasonal. The meat that gets us through as a family is gathered in the chaparral or out on the coastal prairie: wild pig, venison-or even better-a nice nilgai antelope.

I love to still hunt rather than sit in a blind, but this year I vow to sit still longer in some of the likelier looking areas for deer. After extensive scouting and an early-season hunt, I have a fair idea of where to find a nilgai.

The boys and I have also been baiting for pigs, but so far all we have lured are javelina, which we do not care to eat but are delightful to watch.

It's also time for fall season planting here, and we'll have updates on that.

Living life like our great-grandparents lived it is more rewarding than it sounds!

Be good to the land and it will be good to you!

2009-10-20T19:58:00.004-05:00

Green Building Part II, Notes on Passive Thermal Design and Home Layout

First of all, whether urban or country, get a good quality satellite image of your home. I've always relied on so-called "aerial topo-photo maps" for hunting and fishing, and they can be used with great effect for proper home layout in relation to the sun.

So-called "passive solar design" is a fancy way of saying, "line your home up correctly with the sun's path, along with considerations made for cold winter winds and cool spring breezes." To do this, you have to be able to see it. Google Earth will do, but I like to have a nice glossy map like the topo-photo I got from mytopo for being a member of Outdoor Writers Association of America.

Fierce afternoon sun is a killer on central air-conditioning during summer months, but that same western orientation of your home's walls during the winter can save considerably on heating costs during the winter. Except that the sun will be farther south in the northern hemisphere (off one's left looking west) during the winter. This movement of the sun to the south during the winter makes for good southern exposed warming during the winter. During the summer months, this doesn't come so much into play because the sun is more directly overhead, particularly true the farther south one goes.

A windbreak to the north and shade directly west of the house are both advised in green building circles. Natural vegetation is a lifesaver here in hurricane-prone South Texas, because those scrubby little mesquites and thornshrubs of the chaparral create enormous amounts of friction from the ground to about 10 feet off the ground.

During winter months, fierce cold fronts whip in from the north with extreme ferocity, and an icy wind saps the heat out of your home. This can be profoundly reduced by having a windbreak to the north of the home.

Make sure that you have closet space on whatever west-facing walls you do have if you live in a hot climate. With closet doors closed, you can feel for yourself the insulating difference a closet will make in a room on a summer afternoon. My water-heater closet is downstairs on the west and the upstairs has mostly closet space on the west, with the air handler and a clothing closet blocking off the afternoon heat from the main envelope.

A comfortable home is an energy-efficient home.

2009-10-20T19:07:00.002-05:00

The Ranch House I Built, taken at Night

2009-10-14T20:15:00.004-05:00

Green Building, PART I

When I renovated the ranch house where we live now, I was well-versed in two areas I do not regret having stayed up many nights boning up on: Miami-Dade Hurricane Code and the Greenbuilding Guidelines of the Texas Veterans Land Board.

I won’t go into Miami-Dade Hurricane Code here, but I will talk about practical green-building areas homeowners will want to implement in new construction and consider in renovations.

Here are some guidelines from the Texas Veterans Land Board Green Building Website:

“Use of passive solar layout which is positioning the house such that solar heat gain is maximized in cool weather and minimized in hot weather (in winter the sun comes through windows to warm the interior of the house, but in the summer the same windows do not receive direct sunlight) natural breezes maximize ventilation during hot weather (southerly breezes cool the house in the summer, while walls protect from northerly winds in the winter time natural day lighting illuminates without heating (Plant shade trees)

Orient towards the south north side shields interior heat during winter south side exploits cooling during summer

Optimize material use, thus minimizing waste

Materials

Use low-maintenance building material

Choose products that incorporate low energy in production and transportation, are locally produced, and salvaged, or made from recycled materials

Use non-toxic material

Use high levels of insulation, high performance windows and frames, cool shell and attic

Land Use and Site Issues

Create transit friendly, walkable and bikeable communities to reduce vehicle dependence

Renovate older buildings

Encourage in-fill and mixed use commercial and community development

Value site resources and minimize impact on site

Design water-efficient, native, low maintenance landscaping

Equipment

Install high efficiency heating & cooling

Install high efficiency lights and appliances

Install water efficient equipment

Install mechanical ventilation equipment

Install rainwater collection”

I will discuss EnergyStar™ guidelines at some point in the future, and I did wind up with a rather energy-efficient home that busts summer heat with central air for less than $300 a month.

But I want to touch on those aspects of “green building” that are good for your family and for the land:

Paint with low VOC paint.

Volatile Organic Compounds are the nasty poisons in paint, and Sherwin Williams sells an excellent low-VOC paint. A little pricey, but undoubtedly worth it. My sweet wife was 8 months pregnant with Rosaleigh when the nesting hit her hard at the end of construction on the home, so she painted most of the interior. I would have disallowed it had the paint not been low VOC.

One thing not on this list is to KEEP NATIVE LANDSCAPING. Now I know a lot of new homes are built right over farm fields (more on this later), but if you get a lot with a bunch of mesquite trees, fiddlewood, granjeno and the lot, KEEP THEM UP! Don’t wipe everything out when you grade and clear the spot for the house, or you throw the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. I am still proud of the beautiful, mature, xeriscapic plants around my home, like the huisache trees, the large lotebush, the wild Turk’s cap, and a gorgeous ebony tree.

Regarding low-maintenance building material, we used James Hardie Hardi-Plank siding, because the ranch house was wood-frame construction, the core of which dated from the 1940s. This also means galvalume metal roofing, which we had installed after the hurricane ruined all our sheetrock.

I would love to have foregone the sheetrock, but had no alternative that I could afford, and that was as sustainable. After all, sheetrock is gypsum, and if you know anything about gypsum, you know it’ll never run out, and if it does, so what? Definitely not low-maintenance once it’s hit with water, unless you use the blue or green waterproof sheetrock throughout, which we did not…

Look for Part II of the Green Building Installment, where I discuss energy efficiency, an investment I pursued aggressively during the renovation, and which has paid for itself already! (Can’t skimp there!!!)

2009-10-06T23:17:00.003-05:00

THIS JUST IN:

Our son Daniel saved his money and ordered 25 sexed Rhode Island Red pullets. To the layperson, this means that some knowledgeable poultry person tested the sex of the 25 chicks in the photo and guaranteed they are females.

A pullet is a young female before she begins laying and becomes a hen.

Daniel plans to raise the chicks up and sell the eggs produced by free-ranging, happy hens. The pullets that make it should be ready to lay by next summer, God willing.

Unfortunately, one already got out, wandered under my toolshed, and hasn't been seen since. If helpless chicks don't illustrate the frailty of life and the reliance young have upon adults, then nothing does.

2009-09-19T21:16:00.002-05:00

Here is a promised photo of the Glinting Green Beast.

Part II of my travels brought me through Arkansas, all the way to Little Rock, and I was eating a quarter-pounder at McDonald's when I saw "Texas Flooding" headline on CNN.

Damn. Just where I wanted to drive, too, out on State HWY 45 to Tyler and Palestine, where I could cut straight down to College Station to Lynette's Uncle Larry's place.

Not to be. As I pulled out of Jefferson, I called my brother Eric, who directed me like air traffic control through some of the weather.

"You'll thread the needle's eye of two very bad thunderstorms if you stay on 59 South through Nacogdoches," he said. "Like Moses parting the Red Sea, but you have to hurry."

I hurried. I got through Nacogdoches with just a few sprinkles, and then in Lufkin, where the road got confusing, it was raining good. It tapered off as I approached Livingston, just north of Houston, and my westward jaunt toward College Station. There was crazy lightning in the way, though. Things weren't looking so good.

I got to over Lake Livingston which looked like darkwater East Texas hell in the darkness with the lightning and narrow causeway death route cruising. In Huntsville, the water starting to pour down, and as I cruised through a tapering-off spot and got back up to 60 mph just west of town, I spotted water over the roadway too late.

BOOOOM! SHHHH! I hit the overflowing San Jacinto River like a ride at Sea World, but the Suburban went through it. I was shaken, and I now know where that term comes from. I think it's East Texan, like "Boy, I was shaken like a leaf." Or something.

I called Larry in College Station with the last little bit of cell phone battery I had, and he told me the roadway should be fine. As the rain tapered off, with lightning playing in the sky, I hauled ass for College Station the last 30 miles, doing on average 75 mph in that tree-lined two-way East Texas highway.

In College Station, Larry waited up, I got another shower and brushed teeth and dozed off, and he treated me to a great breakfast in the morning. I called in sick to work because they don't give me an option for calling in for a transnational vehicle pick-up.

Got home that Monday and Lynette heartily agreed she had found a winner, and thanked me sufficiently for bringing it down unscathed.

So began my diesel "survival wagon" adventures, more of which I can feel to come.

2009-09-18T21:11:00.004-05:00

See the USA in a Chevrolet. Suburban. That your wife found on E-bay.

Just a little south of Milwaukee.

Indeed I Facebooked it at 3:00 am Saturday morning one week ago on my status update.

"Flying to Milwaukee to pick up the Suburban I bought."

It's just like the one pictured above, except with the GM Teal Green metal flake paint. Fancy vehicle.

Four-wheel drive with the same 6.5-liter turbodiesel that powers all those Humvees in the American military. An engine with which I am very familiar. And a 2500 to boot.

So here's how I did it. Financing through USAA for $5,750 because I put the $500 deposit in PayPal upon purchase, I packed the cashier's check, hopped Delta Airlines flights from Brownsville (5:30 AM) to Houston, Houston to Atlanta, Atlanta to Milwaukee (2:45 PM).

Duke van Welden, the northern Illinois wildman who sold it to me, picked me up in the airport, in the Glinting Green Beast. I was thrilled that it looked so good.

"Duke!" I yelled, clutching my carry-on. "Ben!" he called back. It was love. He was into me for my money, and I was into him for his car.

We were back in Grays Lake IL in short order, having dispossessed each other of those respective items, and after Duke and his wife Nancy led me out onto IL-59 South, off I went. I departed northwest suburbs of Chicago at 5:15 PM, bound for my sister Julia's house in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, 8 hours to the south.

After blasting down the highway at 65 comfy mph, and a quick bite at the Cracker Barrel in Bloomington, IL, I found myself driving through downtown St. Louis. Unexpectedly beautiful, with that arch all lit up and the Mississippi River casting back the city's lights in the 10 PM darkness.

I fueled up south of the city with 500 miles on the thing and another 300 to go on that tank, just to be safe, and zoomed away into the Missouri hinterlands.

Just north of Cape, just after midnight, I began hallucinating like a nutjob because I was so tired. The car in front of me became a rocket spewing blood, blasting blood all over the road and surrounding landscape. What a mess, I thought.

I'm hallucinating, I thought. Damn I'm tired. Damn I have weird hallucinations.

At that point I decided to compose poetry, because the horned moon was coming up crescent above the Mississippi on my left, so there was some thought about Baal, then the Ishmaelites' crescent and Gideon and the night camel. No, never did do any drugs. At all. Sorry. Can't explain the wacked out musings.

Got directly to Julie's house because of the GPS my brother Carl had lent me, and woke her up, showered, brushed my teeth and was asleep in their posh basement by 2:00 AM

My three adorable nieces woke me up at 7 AM sharp, and with five good hours of sleep I rose and was treated to an excellent breakfast.

Went on down the road at 9:30, with a lot of Missouri yet to beat and all of Arkansas. My plan was to stop at wife's uncle's house in College Station, Texas, home of the Aggies.

Flooding, unbeknownst to me, awaited me in Texas. More tomorry.

2009-08-30T16:34:00.005-05:00

Great new website I found while looking up plans for a two-car garage I'd like to build. This one's from the University of Tennessee extension office, and has everything from plans for a backyard barbecue pit to six-way cattle trap and loading chute. check it out at:

http://bioengr.ag.utk.edu/extension/extpubs/planlist97.htm

Till then, we got some rain and we remain, living the dream...

2009-08-01T08:46:00.003-05:00

We're off selling cattle this morning.

Caught up 4 young bulls. Teach in the fall winter and spring and sell cattle in the summer.

I also like to butcher out our own table beef in the winter when it's as cold as it can get here in South Texas. But for now, we take our young males to the auction in Edinburg to offer any willing takers.

At the auction, there's no way to establish that these bulls are native-pasture, grass-fed and organically raised. No matter. Whoever buys them gets hardy, all-natural cattle.

American Brahman, anyone?

2009-07-30T04:17:00.004-05:00

OK, so we get some big rattlesnakes around here.

The video clip that I've stuck on this blog is of the 6-foot, 4-inch rattler I killed a few evenings ago as I was walking back down the lane to my house from my dad's barn. I ran back to the parents' house and dad was gracious enough to get me his short-barreled .12-gauge shotgun.

I put a load of number 8 shot into the side of the snake's head. It seems this summer has involved an awful lot of eradicating critters, and I might have apologized for eradicating yet another, mentioning how I do not enjoy it and so on, but you know, I really do enjoy it.

Being good to the land is my credo. However, if you are too good to Mother Nature out here in the chaparral, it simply takes over. If you trap rats, snakes, etc and turn them loose somewhere else, you don't stand a chance.

There is a certain amount of pushing back that comes with a country home, as people who've lived in the country know. Killing snakes under the trampoline, racoons in the attic, possums under the swing set, digging native flora up by the roots -- it's all part of just existing in a niche that we are entitled to cut out of the habitat.

Studies show that varied land use benefits wildlife tremendously. Living organically by not spraying chemical fertilizers and insecticides does too. So I hope God forgives me for taking shotgun, shovel and torch to his creation now and again (referencing Aldo Leopold).

Till next time, stay away from them rattlers, and I'll try and do likewise!

2009-07-23T11:55:00.004-05:00

If you rifle hunt, but have not gotten around to bowhunting, go buy a good crossbow RIGHT NOW.

New news straight from Steve Lightfoot at Texas Parks & Wildlife confirm what I saw coming: Texas has approved of crossbows for general archery use in the state.

I shot my first crossbow in my best friend's backyard as a teenager, and was impressed that the bolt penetrated 1.75-inch-thick lumber.

Previously, and I may add, arbitrarily, crossbows had been limited to hunters with various physical limitations, and were intended to be a way I guess for handicapped people to "bowhunt."

But crossbows are not voodoo, and they don't give their operators any major advantages over compound-bow shooters. Both crossbows and modern compound bows have the same effective range: about 40 yards.

My info on crossbows comes straight from the expert's mouth, ie. W. Hovey Smith, who literally wrote the book on crossbow hunting.

Smith, whom I met at the OWAA conference, enlightened me on crossbows, and I can tell everybody that I am getting one for use in the early archery-only season. They are a breeze to cock with modern mechanisms, and you will have to practice plenty, but with a good red-dot scope mounted on the thing, you should be able to zero in your new crossbow for the early archery-only season hunt in Texas.

Then, put on your ghillie suit, set up your ground blind and hunt like a bow-hunter. You will need to use the same discipline and skill as bowhunters, but your major advantage is the notable lack of deer-spooking motion that bowhunters encounter when drawing back to shoot.

To be legal for crossbow hunting in the Lone Star state, you must have a valid Texas hunting license, hunt during the prescribed season, and buy an archery tag.

Just another means of getting food for the table, with a new, challenging twist. Get your crossbow and get practicing for September!

2009-07-18T21:49:00.003-05:00

So this is what we do with rattlesnakes that startle us at nearly midnight 'round these parts.

I hate waste, and I think it is something of a waste when a venomous snake like this one cannot go around eating huge, destructive wood rats, but I have stated before and continue to emphasize my position: where you see a rattlesnake is where its territory is, and that's fine, as long as it's not my territory also.

So under my trampoline, and by the front gate, these are places that are no good to share with snakes.

Therefore I feel obligated also to dispatch the snake quickly and take its skin and, if possible, the meat also. My 13-year-old son Peter discovered how to carve long, beautiful boneless fillets off rattlesnakes. He did that for the snake I killed two months ago under my trampoline and got a Zip-Loc baggie full of beautiful white meat.

So we are rattlesnake skinning, snake-chili eatin' comfortable survivalists around here.

I spent all day with my brother prepping the two corrals for cattle catching. Soon I'll have photos of South Texas cattle punching on the blog. My goal with the next big round-up is to brand everything we don't sell, and to bring some of the better looking heifers and cows nearer to the house where I can gentle 'em up and raise some beef cattle for table.

Till then, be sure and support your local food growers, and take care of your body by eating the good things God gave us, and very little of the rest...

2009-07-09T00:05:00.002-05:00

OK new country wisdom: carry a bolt-action .22 rifle with you wherever you go in the country, with CB shorts in your pocket.

I don't know what it is about .22 "shorts," as they're called, but they are terribly effective on nasty rattlesnakes. I shot a .44-caliber flintlock rifle not too long ago, and I can't help but feel that a .22 rifle firing shorts is like a scaled-down version. That bullet with that little pop of powder sure drops dramatically, but what it hits it hits with distinct finality. Deal sealed.

It's the stroke of midnight just now, and I can report that I just killed a very large rattlesnake at the ranch gate about a half-hour ago with .22 shorts. Two shots. Very glad I had the rifle. If I can dig the thing out of the brush tomorrow morning, I'll skin it, but before I do, I'll take a photo to include here.

And yes, they still sell CB shorts. Go pick some up. If you live in town and have pesky possums to deal with, that's just the thing. No one will ever hear you shooting your .22 rifle, and the possum will be dead meat. You can even do your practice shooting in your backyard under the un-American noses of your homeowners' association nazis.

Cheerio!
Ben

2009-07-03T05:52:00.004-05:00

After a life of consuming, end-use consumption, burn-through, throw-away is programmed into most of us. I'm as bad as anyone else.

Time to de-program and learn how to be resourceful! I was at least prescient to see that when I built my ranch house that I could use that 5-10% "waste" that contractors figure into their budgeting later on down the road. So it sat for a year: scrap plywood, inch-thick lumber of all widths and lengths (lots of it), spare roofing underlayment, some damaged but not destroyed metal roofing sheets, nails, nails, screws, tacks, hurricane ties and hardi-plank siding.

In the country, you can store such things by stashing out of direct view from the wife (her refrain is that she doesn't want her yard looking "white trash"). This summer, I've put these materials to use by attaching a 12X8-foot workspace to the back of my 12X12 storage shed. It is coming along nicely, even if it is something of Frankenstein's monster of the workshed world.

So be it! What I am doing is I hope more important than the extra workspace. It is resourcefulness training. The two most resourceful men I ever knew were (are) Army Green Beret Master Sergeant Craig Mann, my wilderness survival instructor in college, and David Woolverton, himself a veteran of long-range reconaissance patrols in the Vietnam War (Quang-Tri Province, the A-Shau Valley, etc.).

Whether infantry life or backpack travel, there is some hard learning about reduce-reuse-recycle in asceticism. If you have lived out of a backpack for months at a time, suddenly a piece of wire becomes something other than trash. If you can hoard and save, stash your things somewhere (Woolverton uses a semi-trailer to save his treasure trove of scrap) for future use.

Keeping stuff around without getting cluttered is the key to becoming a more resourceful human being. Don't automatically throw things out. Figure out an application if you can. At least begin to force your way into that thought process!

2009-06-16T20:49:00.006-05:00

OWAA CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS

GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Jim Miller's entirely traditional birchbark canoe.

Dave Graham's flintlock shoot.

Trying out Hobie's Pro Angler kayak. Mirage drive is the new mobility, and will at least quadruple my paddling range!

Shooting the Smith & Wesson .500 Magnum revolver.

The talk on writing for trade magazines.

John Otterbacher's keynote address, about mortality, long-distance sailing and writing.

Meeting Field & Stream's Flyfishing Blog Writer and Editor-at-Large Kirk Deeter.

Meeting renowned editor and hunting/gun writer Wayne van Zwoll and watching him shoot rifles and photos.

Meeting National Shooting Sports Foundation's Range Report Editor Glenn Sapir.

Telling renowned outdoors writer Jim Zumbo I am a fan of his.

Meeting Georgia writer Hovey Smith, frequent contributor to Gun Digest and a wide-ranging thinker.

Meeting and hanging out with Bugle Magazine's Conservation Editor Paul Queneau, who's my age and laid back.

Meeting and hanging out with Nature Conservancy writer/blogger Matt Miller (I love the Nature Conservancy).

Meeting C.J. Buck, the fourth generation of Buck Knives.

Meeting one of Popular Science's Top 10 Inventors of 2008, Ben Hobbins, who invented an indestructible, environmentally friendly plastic lure.

Free shotgun shells, caps, boots, shirts, socks, first-aid kit, fishing lures, knife, and food. And the hospitality! Man!

Encouragement to write that damn difficult memoir about the Iraq combat deployment, from published authors (Hovey and Tom Huggler).

And finally, being the only guy who looked uncomfortable eating quiche at the breakfast sponsored by the Sierra Club.

Semper Fi, OWAA, you guys rock. Completely and totally rock. Lots more, maybe a part two?

Photos to follow.

2009-06-13T15:38:00.007-05:00

Am at the Outdoor Writers Association of America annual conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Great city, reminds me a lot of Austin, and the Amway Grand Hotel reminds me of San Antonio's Menger, minus Sid who sang and played piano wonderfully in the lobby in San Antonio's grandest hotel.

I'm digging the great folks who are members. Very helpful bunch. I will, God willing, be writing for the magazines once again. My initial foot-in-the-door moment came when Texas Highways Magazine published my cover feature "Port Isabel: Simple Pleasures by the Seashore" in Feb. 2005 while I was in Iraq's al-Anbar Province. That successful break-in for consumer magazine writing was sidetracked by both the war and the sorting out I had to do after returning from Iraq.

I'd say the sorting out is as done as it'll ever be, better or worse (see previous posts on this same blog for archived relics of my old thought processes).

My highlights so far (one day in) are having talked with Field & Stream's Editor-at-Large and the editor for Angling Trade magazine, Kirk Deeter, as well as former Field & Stream Editors Slaton White and Glenn Sapir. Also spoke with Intermedia's Wayne van Zwoll and NFWS's Eddie Magazine Editor, Craig Springer.

Kirk has the great spread about fishing Bolivia with the natives in the July spread of Field & Stream. Frankly, I am starstruck.

OWAA is a fantastic organization, and it is through them that I shall maintain a professional outlet for the passion I bear for writing. Semper Fi.

2009-06-04T22:05:00.002-05:00

That's Rosaleigh. She was born on June 23, 2008 in a Category 2 Hurricane as it plowed into the Rio Grande Valley, Texas. She was also born in the middle of a nasty property lawsuit, so I can always safely say she was "born in a crossfire hurricane," much like Jumpin' Jack Flash.

Bathing our babies in the deep sink of our little cottage's country kitchen has always been a dream for Lynette and I. Now that it's reality, we have it in our power to do our best by our children. In the country, that means raising food. Real food, the way God meant it. I'm stealing from my friend Marco Varlesi here, and the conversation we just had, but "organic" food is not the revolutionary, edgy thing. As Marco said, it's not "organic farming vs. traditional farming." Organic farming IS traditional farming, and traditional farming is organic farming. It's, in Marco's words, "traditional farming vs. chemical farming."

Read up on mass produced dairy, mass produced grains, mass produced beef. Nasty, synthetic, disgusting, and flat out, in my opinion and many experts, the cause for epidemic heart disease, birth defects, obesity, and diabetes. Buy organic, from your rural growers if at all possible, and don't worry about an extra couple of dollars, recession or not. Raw foods, honey, milk, and unprocessed, un-chemically-bleached whole grain flower, extra-virgin, cold-pressed olive oil are all worth paying for.

Lord knows that with five kids we'd love to stretch our money to the utmost, but we won't feed our children chemical trash.

God Bless and Keep.

2009-06-02T22:29:00.004-05:00

When considering buying a place in the country, I advise finding the nastiest-looking, trashed out, abused, scarred run down property you can get your hands on. Really, your only real requisite for land is that the neighbors be no fewer than 330 feet away (the width of a five-acre block). Not that there's anything wrong with having neighbors. HA! Just kidding! At any rate, abused property can be bought as foreclosures, or if not, at least at unheard-of low prices.

Then, have the scrap metal collector come out and haul away all the junk cars, old refrigerators, mattress springs, steel roofing, stoves and so on. After the scrap is gone, bring in a demolition dumpster and get after the acres of old carpet, brittle, UV-damaged plastics of various obsolete electronics, scattered plastic broom bristles (invariably of eye-catching color), vinyl-upholstered loveseats, foam padding, broken glass, broken glass, broken glass, old carpet, macabre-looking baby dolls half-buried in the dirt -- all that good stuff. When you have filled the demolition dumpster thrice or so, and finally gotten down to picking up individual things like bottle caps and cigarette butts, it's time to burn the rotted wood found in profusion around such places. After you have burned it all, use a construction-site magnet nail-picker-upper and your hands to pick up the burned out, rusted nail (after the coals have burned out).

Burn somewhere you're not worried about sterilizing the soil, but don't worry too much. Even if you sterilize the soil, you'll soon discover LAND HEALS! This is the point of buying sorry, worn-out property: you can put it back in balance.

The photo of the Monarch on the native blooms belies the dump that previously was our little homestead. It had been rented to the ranch help, who apparently used the entire property as a trash dump. After that, "friends" of the family left bags of divorce-discarded property, all seriously random, including a non-functioning Jeep pick-up. I do believe that it took me THREE construction dumpsters to get the land somewhere near clean, but the acreage was a gift from my father, so it was the least I could do for the entire family, nuclear and extended. But most of all, I did it for the land. The land gains a place in the family as a symbiotic protector and nurturer. Take care of the land, and it will surely take care of you.

Peace. Out.

2009-06-01T21:54:00.002-05:00

You know, my hat's off to Jack Spirko. He's the guy who has the Modern Survival Philosophy thing nailed. A north Texan, Spirko says you do the things that put you in a better position in life, so that even if nothing goes wrong, your quality of life has improved, not diminished.
Spirko, nor I, are of the black government helicopter crowd. For a little bit I figured I'd yield to Spirko and change the name of this blog again, before I really get up to full bore, both chambers loaded. But I don't know. Survivalism is such a multi-faceted thing, and it's a lot catchier to the uninitiated than "modern homesteading" or something to that effect. Besides, the modern homesteading thing is being done.
Survivalism is preparedness, which I advocate. It is also awareness of global, national, regional and local political issues, like taxation and the whole EVERYTHING MUST BE ILLEGAL movement. It is knowing how to handle a weapon tactically in a gunfight, God forbid, even the wife and older children. It is all that thrown in with homesteading, so I'm keeping the jovial, rather Epicurean title, "The Comfortable Survivalist." That's what I am; those are the values that kept my ancestors around long enough to continue the chain of survival until it yielded me, and I am glad it did.
This evening while Lynette worked her job at the nearby church, I was looking for some rabbits around the garden to pot. I looked back, and the evening was stormy, and there was a rainbow arching down, its terminus was my happy yellow country home, The Bunkhouse. The garden was in the foreground with its cornstalks and squash and newly planted okra, and the native flora was a rich, living green.
Start homesteading and getting back to the land, and you'll find that pot of gold.

2009-05-29T21:59:00.004-05:00

It occurred to me while I was drinking my air-condition condensation after a backyard skateboard session on the old plywood halfpipe: I am a "comfortable survivalist." After all, my home's central air conditioner (photo is of the wood-frame Energy-Star farmhouse I built after the war) only needs to run when the humidity broaches 80 percent and temperatures are over 90 degrees -- ideal distilled/condensed water conditions!
I get 2 gallons a day of distilled water out of cold-air condensation dripping from the half-inch PVC drain pipe under my wrap-around porch, to drink cold with the vegetables from my victory garden and the home-grown beef.
I'm not terribly paranoid, but I am moving more off the grid. In my mind, balance is key, not too much survivalist, but not too namby damn pamby, either. I can shoot, move and communicate, but I do not fear my government. In short, I am a comfy survivalist.
The old "method journalism" thing is behind me. I'm going to go now,and change this blog title to "The Comfortable Survivalist." How does that sound? Accurate... to me. Semper Fi.

2009-04-29T22:39:00.000-05:00

New website is up at www.riograndeoutdoors.com. Web designer & freelance graphic artist Jenny Loken is going to continue working in some fresh content, but the important thing is, the old site's gone. Just wasn't much in the old site -- it was basically a parking space. It was a bro deal from a friend, and he did a nice job, it just needed to be updated.

One of the features of the new site is this very old blog of mine. Started it when I was writing opinion stuff about the Iraq War, back when I was trying to sort out in my mind why it was I had signed on. We've come a long way from there now, and turns out, it was more about youthful idealism and less about the writing, although it was originally supposed to be about the writing.

Well now it's about the writing again, so this idea of mine, which I call "Method Journalism," applies once more. I was hired to write hunting and fishing and outdoors for Valley Freedom Newspapers, as the site says, and so when I'm out the door to chase tarpon or shoot a new rifle, I just tell Lynette I'm "off to work." Indeed. It even works a lot of the time.

Readers have responded positively, and this is more for them than it is for me. I know how much South Texans love their deer and dove hunting, and their bay and bass fishing. So does Valley Freedom Newspapers, because they hired me specifically to fill that niche more than a year ago.

I also dig conservation and eco-friendly sustainable living, like good outdoors enthusiasts like hunters tend to do. So we hunt, we fish, we recycle, we compost, we garden, and we love our families. Peruse some of the old posts on the site. They're relics. Nature heals better than time does. Semper Fi.

2006-05-25T11:49:00.000-05:00

As you can see, my loyalties as an American are questionable, based on a flim-flam Web quiz. You can't put a percentage on patriotism.

So I'm not a pundit, like everyone else is, so this blog will never get off the ground. I don't want to share my opinion with people, I want to share my experiences and observations. And not about Ken Lay or Rep. Murtha or anyone I don't freaking know.

The school year is finished. My seniors have been let loose on the big world.

"Now you are free to either fail, or succeed," I says to them. "If you fail, at least fail spectacularly out there."

Class of 2006! Woo hoo!

2006-05-22T11:21:00.000-05:00

You Are 67% American

Most times you are proud to be an American.
Though sometimes the good ole US of A makes you cringe
Still, you know there's no place better suited to be your home.
You love your freedom and no one's going to take it away from you!

How American Are You?

2006-05-16T14:52:00.000-05:00

I actually had a co-worker make me an "I Went to War" card, like a Subway card, with clip-art of an infantryman's silhouette, a .45 pistol and a camel, numbered 1-10. I am supposed to punch out the numbers with a hole puncher anytime I mentioned Iraq, and after that, I'm not allowed to mention it.

Ha ha. Let me apologize for all the Iraq combat veterans for the times we might have tried to reference any part of our experience in order to frame something in the new context in which we find ourselves living.

Let me apologize for not thinking like the rest of you. I mean, we dress like you, eat and drink like you, push carts at the grocery store, walk with wives and girlfriends, or husbands and boyfriends at the mall and in the park. You probably can't identify us merely by looking at us. We're not perpetually surly like Clint Eastwood characters, and most of us don't generally sport Operation Iraqi Freedom caps or tee shirts, and if we ever had a "1,000-yard stare" it was at the end of a long day on patrol or a memorial service for one of our dead, and besides, it was on the other side of the world.

Let me apologize for the things we've seen and been through, and for the fact that these things seem comic to you. We've seen the heads of suicide bombers laying in ditches, severed feet, severed hands, and headless bodies. We've seen suspected insurgents fall to the ground like a sack of potatoes after being gunned down for, at the very least, being in the wrong place at very much the wrong time, doing the wrong thing. We've seen our closest friends gasp out their last breaths in the dirt, legs shattered to the knees. We've carried dead insurgents by the bare ankles with our bare hands, ankles still warm to the touch. We've sustained mortar barrages, rocket attacks, and had rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms rifle and machine gun fire shot at us. We've gone for months at a time with one shower a month, picked up smoking before having to quit back in the non-smoking Western World, and seen more of 3:00 am than anyone--even night shift employees and college students occasionally get a break.

Not all veterans saw what I saw, and I didn't see many things other of my combat veteran comrades saw. Our experiences are radically varied, but are generally characterized by de-sensitization, an expanded tolerance for suffering, and a radical aversion to frustration and any sort of feelings resembling helplessness.

And I think I can safely say we hate the petty f*#^ing things that the rest of you worry about. Petty co-workers and petty talk, petty bureaucratic rabbit trails. Life carries a new gravity about it that is just too hard to explain.

But by God, we're not allowed any slack. We get laughed down or poo-pood if we say, "Cut me some slack, man, I'm trying to get used to this here society again." Sorry if this seem petty to the rest of you.

I took the "I Went to War" card with an awkward grin and a little chuckle. I guess I should go punch a hole in it now.

2006-05-11T11:23:00.000-05:00

Who needs a writers' support group when you've got friends and co-conspirators like mine?

I got three great e-mails over the last 36 hours. First one was from my platoon commander back in the war, Marine First Lieutenant Patrick McKinley--a great friend. Then came one from Dan Murphy, Cairo Bureau Chief for the Christian Science Monitor, who went on Operation River Blitz with us back in March 2005 in the Anbar city of Hit. The most recent of the three was from my old college professor/mentor, Robert Sledd.

Murphy helped get Jill Carroll free and has spoken on National Public Radio about the matter and is just an excellent writer, and McKinley helped keep his troops alive and in the fight back in Iraq. Sledd critiqued my manuscript and had the best feedback I could ever have hoped to receive, so I am poised to finish my re-write of the book, which should turn a well-written but disjointed account of war into a well-written, cohesive account of war.

My father always said the idea of the "self-made man" pulling himself up by the bootstraps is a crock of shit. He's right--behind anything or anyone that is deemed worthwhile is a whole troop of contributors who support the individual. The encouragement I've gotten, direct or otherwise, from these three men who I hold in the utmost esteem help keep me going forward as a writer.

2006-05-08T08:18:00.000-05:00

"it bothers me that it didn't bother you" --anonymous

First, about anonymous comments. I think the ability to post comments anonymously is the best thing about the whole blogging thing. What I'm after, in the end, is the whole spectrum of humanity, and nothing tells people more of who you are than your anonymous self, like those personal aspects that come out when you surf the web anonymously. Ultimately, people are pornographers, sadists, saints, deathly lonely, vulnerable, the whole spectrum is out there. It's horrifying, fascinating, redeeming, depending on that true, distilled, anonymous self.

But we're also self-righteous, certainly more so than when we have a name and are in company we know. The point of my reportage is to be honest first. I'm going to re-frame the context of my one combat homicide: I thought I was going to die. Enemy 82-mm mortars (bombs that get launched out of a tube and fall from the sky throwing deathly hot, jagged shards of steel about the size of coins) were falling nearby, and they were being "walked" towards my position, meaning the enemy fighters with the tube where the bombs were being launched were adjusting it based on direct observation. So they were landing closer and closer and soon they would be coming down on top of us. That's when I saw the man with the binoculars. After we cut him down, the mortars stopped.

I'm supposed to stay up at night for that? At least I'm not one of those guys who claims that it is a big game. I'm certainly not saying I enjoyed having to kill. I'm just reporting on my feelings about it. Guilt didn't--hasn't--entered the equation. My apologies to people out there who feel I should write some sort of sentimental poem about "the man I killed," and how we'd be drinking beer together had there not been a war or whatever. I'm not Henry James. I'm a mere mortal.

2006-05-03T14:13:00.000-05:00

When I got to Iraq and was fishing for newspapers who would publish my dispatches, a tech editor of some sort from the Corpus Christi Caller-Times--I can't recall his name--asked me if I wanted to keep a blog. That was August of 2004, and I didn't know what the hell a blog was, but I said yes and never got back to him.

I could never have kept a blog in Iraq. We lived at the dirt, spending an average of 20 days away from the Forward Operating Base (FOB), and when I had access to a computer it was only for 30 minutes at a time, often with a two-hour wait. That was enough time to e-mail my wife, father, and Mike Murphy, and that was it. I thank The Brownsville Herald for publishing the dispatches, though they were indeed very few and far between.

Hell, the first six months I counted nine showers, and probably only three times as many brief forays on the internet. Hard to believe I'm back to teaching high school English in a clean, well-lighted classroom. Hemingway has never been so relevant.

2006-04-12T15:42:00.000-05:00

I turned in my first feature story to Texas Highways shortly before I hopped the flight from Riverside, California that eventually put me in al-Asad Airbase, Iraq. I was not writing under the most optimal circumstances, but I sat in the barracks room at Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center with a borrowed laptop, cranked on the British trance music and hammered out 1,200 words.

Surprising thing is, the editors at Texas Highways kept the feature, which ended up the cover story of the February 2005 issue, completely intact. They rock! I expected them to mangle it after all I've heard of editors, but they left it alone. I've wanted badly to write another feature for them, but my ideas have disappointed me, like when I checked out Port Mansfield for a destination piece and found it so rough and inhospitable I wouldn't recommend it in a story, ever.

Mike Murphy, photo editor at Texas Highways, began a lively and lasting correspondence with me when I reached my base in Iraq, and he was a huge source of support, sending beef jerky, hard tack, Frito pie ingredients and other necessities with splendid consistency. I've gotten the chance to "ranch sit" for the Murphys since I got back home, spending two weeks there with my wife and sons in the Summer of '05, and it was the best vacation of my adult life.

Good things come to those who write. Bad things sometimes come to method journalists, though, too.

2006-04-11T12:50:00.000-05:00

"Did you kill anybody?"

Anyone who's been in a combat zone, I imagine, gets asked this question far too frequently. How do we explain that it's not about that, or that operating in a guerilla war transcends the mere act of killing, which, under current rules of engagement, is simply something we do to keep attackers at bay? Killing someone hardly even factors in to the whole scheme of things, unless you're William Manchester capping a Japanese sniper in a small hut with a .45 pistol. That, apparently, freaked him out, otherwise it hardly seems like a big deal when it happens.

But Hollywood has been so patently unfair to infantrymen, with cut-and-dried images showing easy killings of enemy troops in the open--enemy fighters firing for sustained periods of time from the same position, which is rare indeed. Most fighters, especially guerillas, retain as much cover and concealment as possible and fire for a very, very brief time before getting gone. Just getting a shot off under these circumstances is a challenge, because Marines are taught to shoot at a specific target, not to fire indiscriminately.

Anyhow, to answer the infamous question: by my best count, I killed one, and I felt at the time like I was just trying to beat the enemy off of our backs. We were getting mortared and I saw a forward observer, an Arab watching us (standing in the open, bad idea) with binoculars and as I turned to tell Lopez to shoot him, Lopez began firing, then Rodriguez, then myself and Salinas. I got a good line of sight on him, watching Lopez's red tracers zipping in on him, acquired good sight picture in my M-16's iron sight ring, and we cut the guy down.

Yay.

I don't feel one way or the other about it, except I was excited then.

We had tanks with us that day (it was January 20, 2005 or somewhere about there) and they went to do a battle damage assessment on the position we fired on, and they found four dead "insurgents" in the palm groves along the Euphrates. As soon as we blasted the observer, the mortar fire stopped! Fancy that.

Other than that, some of the guys gunned some Arabs down and I held my own fire at different times, and there were times I held my fire and now wish I hadn't.

Killing does not seem to faze Marines, period. We laugh a little too loudly when we recount such incidents, but it just didn't feel wrong, especially when we all have friends who were killed over there. The attitude is, f*@# 'em. Period. The Arabs believe when Allah wills your life to be at its end, it ends. We're just puppets of Allah in this sense, in the Middle Eastern perspective.

None of this sounds terribly enlightened, but I'm afraid I must tell it the way I saw it. I hate the dramatization of things. If something bothers me, I say so; if it doesn't bother me, well, it just doesn't.

2006-04-10T13:26:00.000-05:00

Colby Buzzell, soldier and author of "My War: Killing Time in Iraq (Penguin)" told me everyone came knocking his door in after his blog became a big hit while he was serving with the Stryker Brigade in Iraq.

Very kind of him to e-mail me back; I told him he had my respect, but of course he had it just for serving in Iraq as my brother-in-arms. I was a Marine, sure, but a grunt is a grunt, and everyone else, as they say, ain't s****. OK, so they're all valuable parts of the team, but still, infantry has to put up with so much dirt and so little sleep.

Buzzell, whose blog really does kick ass, inspired me to do likewise, so here.

Like Buzzell, whose book was in the galleys while I was back in the Hit-Haditha corridor of the al-Anbar Province of Western Iraq, I've written a book, "Digging for Fire: An Unembellished Tale of War," and I'm currently doing a re-write because Leigh Ann Eliseo with David Black Literary Agency in NYC said it was worth running a few parts through re-write. The fact that she and another agent from David Black even looked at the manuscript makes me dizzy with (false?) hope. Eliseo also told me I was a "talented writer." We'll see.

The book, straight non-fiction, is a story worth telling, and my angle, as you can see from the blog, is that of what I call "method journalism."

I just always wondered why, with the extremes gone to by embedded reporters, someone didn't just sign the dotted line for Uncle Sam and carry a rifle in order to get the most authentic story available. I was a Marine reservist, a rifleman, before September 11, before the Iraq War, and I was a journalist while I worked my way through college. I looked for embed jobs for newspapers, but in South Texas, there are no newspapers that would send a reporter overseas for anything--that's what the Associated Press is for, I suppose.

So I was out of the reserves, honorably discharged after six years, yadda yadda, and Marine reserve units began getting some serious field time alongside active duty for the first time since Korea. I was teaching English in 2004, surfing the web desperately, getting a resume ready for the AP, and it dawned on me: re-enlist in the Marine reserve and pull a combat tour in Iraq and voila, method journalism. Boots on the ground, the view behind the rifle, the real deal. I swear Michael Herr would have traded his sweet writing job for Esquire in Vietnam for Corporal's chevrons in the Marines as a grunt. I could tell Herr was smitten after I read "Dispatches," and I think he really dug the view from a patrol in column. It was just that the poor guy had never gone through Marine Corps Recruit Training.

So that's what I did, I re-enlisted, got my orders for Iraq, drew my gear from the armory and supply, and went. We had engagements with enemy fighters, we had frustration that comes from guerilla war, and I had material for my book, and I'll publish it and it will sell because war is a devastating business and it is something no one except grunts truly understand, least of all embedded reporters.

Semper Fidelis,
Salaam aleykum,
BC