Keeping hidden

Whilst you are scraping an existence you need to keep one thing at the back of your mind. OPSEC. You need to be the Grey Man and not be seen. My personal plan is to hide out in my home or near to it, keep my head down and make the place look deserted only coming out at night as necessary. Others plan to move away to a BOL and stay there, doing almost the same thing.

However there are some things that force us out. As all prey animals are forced to.

• To feed
• To drink
• To dispose of waste

We can cover these in some ways but not completely.

• We can cover our food with our stores but we will probably need to supplement them
• We can store some water but probably not all and will probably have to come out for that
• Someone, at least, will have to dispose of the waste

So, despite keeping our head down as much as we can we have to poke our heads out every now and again. We should seek to minimise that exposure as much as we can but we won’t be able to stop it. In addition there will almost certainly be people going around looking for food and water in your area. If they find you the chances are they will want to take it from you. So as well as not exposing yourself you need to be camouflaged in some way to avoid scrutiny. Either a hidden location or somewhere out of the way. Finding signs of people will cause an investigation leading to discovery.

Do not doubt for one minute that someone will not attempt to take your stores by force. Just think what you would do if you needed to feed your kids who are starving and the guy down the street has a well stocked pantry. Even if they fail they will be back with friends and no place is impregnable. No place.

There are various techniques discussed elsewhere on keeping your head down, hiding your stores and making the place look deserted. Use all of them to protect yourselves.

The biggest issue with this whole area is human waste. Someone can come out and colect some dandelions or retrieve food from the cache. They can fill a bottle with water from the rainbarrels and not leave a clue they are there. However when it comes to waste we have an issue. We all have to go and not everyone is as grey as we would wish. Kids are certainly not and it will be hard enough keeping them quiet anyway. My way to handle this is for them to go in a separate room, preferably in a composting toilet but anything will do and then that same someone, me, will dispose of it outside away from the retreat when it is safe.

It isn’t perfect but not knowing what is going to happen and therefor what you need to cover; means you can’t really do much more. As you build your knowledge you will think of different ways to perform tasks which will help protect you.