Sharecropping The Apocalypse: A Prepper is Cast Adrift (46 page)

I always used poison ivy mnemonics to remember what the plant looked like in nature and to teach others like Leaves of three leave them be.”

The Wikipedia article on Poison Ivy ends with a list of traditional mnemonics to help people identify Poison Ivy. I thought it would be fun to re-print a few of them here along with a photo illustrating the saying.

1. Leaves of three; let it be.
    
   

The catch is that there are plenty of plants with three leaves that are safe to touch, such as wild strawberry vines.
Blue Jay Barrens
blogged about safe, three-leaved plants in a post called
Three-Parted Leaves
. But if you have difficulty telling one three-leaved plant from another, it’s probably best to avoid them.

1. Side leaflets like mittens, will itch like the dickens.
   

1. Unfortunately the side leaflets on poison ivy don’t always have these mitten thumbs. If you look at the “leaves of three” photo shown in the previous item, you’ll note that it lacks these mitten thumbs.
   
2. Longer middle stem; stay away from them.
    
   
3. Red leaflets in the spring, it’s a dangerous thing.
   PLUS
   Hairy vine, no friend of mine.
   This was photographed April 23rd. It is unusual to see red leaves in the spring.
   
4. Raggy rope, don’t be a dope!  Another one is Hairy vine no friend of mine!
   This was taken January 13th after all the leaves were gone. The vine is still poisonous.
   
5. Berries white, run in fright!
   This was photographed on December 8th, also after the leaves had dropped.
   

This mnemonic kind of goes with my edible berries one

White and yellow, kill a fellow.
Purple and blue, good for you.
Red … could be good, could be dead.

If [red berries are] growing in little clusters, they're probably not good. If they're growing in little singletons, they probably are good.

People’s brains changed when subject to the stressors of deprivation and disease. They are sometimes liable to try to eat anything. What was unthinkable before became nagging thoughts of “don’t think about that” as weird cannibalistic or aggressive thoughts of theft or violence occurred. Just that little bit of knowledge about edible berries goes a long way.

Avoid ever having to use this method without careful planning.
Some plants can be deadly, and even if you follow these guidelines perfectly, there is always a chance that a plant will make you seriously ill.

• Prepare yourself for wilderness outings by learning about the local flora and fauna, and carry a guidebook or taxonomic key to help you identify plants.
  
• Even if you are unprepared and cannot find food you know to be safe remember that, depending on your activity level, the human body can go for days without food, and you're better off being hungry than being poisoned.
  

Find a plant that is plentiful.
You don't want to go through the rigorous process of testing a plant if there's not a lot of it to eat.

The Universal Edibility Test is a series of tests you can use to determine if a plant is safe to consume. At the site HowStuffWorks they've outlined the prongs of the test and how you can apply it safely in the field. The initial part of the test is to separate the item into its parts like leaves, stems, roots, buds, and flowers—many plants have edible and inedible portions. The first actual experiment is the contact test:

First you need to perform a contact test. If it's not good for your skin, it's not good for your belly. Crush only one of the plant parts and rub it on the inside of your wrist or elbow for 15 minutes. Now wait for eight hours. If you have a reaction at the point of contact, then you don't want to continue with this part of the plant. A burning sensation, redness, welts and bumps are all bad signs. While you wait, you can drink water, but don't eat anything. If there is no topical reaction after eight hours, move along to the next step.

Some plants have edible parts and poisonous parts. In order to test if a plant is edible, you must separate it into the leaf, stem and root and test each part separately for edibility.

• After you have separated the plant into parts, inspect each part you are preparing for parasites. If you encounter worms or small insects inside the plant, discontinue the test with that sample and consider seeking a different sample of the same plant. Evidence of worms, parasites or insects indicates that the plant is rotten, especially if the organism has vacated the plant.
  
• Many parts of plants are only edible during certain seasons (for example, acorns collected after the fall are usually rotten). If you find grubs inside the plant, the plant is rotting, but the grubs are edible and contain high amounts of protein (although they taste sour and are gritty).
  

8

FREEDOM FLOTILLA

Early the next morning found all hands on deck down at the old ferry landing bustling about and making ready to perform a rescue. Loomis and Clem got the turnbuckles off the steel cable holding the pontoon platform anchored close to shore and eventually with a lot of experimentation and work Crick and crew managed to secure the barge to the tractor and bolted the cables together. After a few tentative maneuvers to get the feel for his unwieldy craft Crick signaled that he was ready to push it up river and would meet them at the plantations landing before setting off for the rescue mission.

Preparations for today were minimalist at best, Getting ready to receive 50 or so starving people when there is so little extra food around was problematic. A big hog scalding cauldron was scrubbed out as best they could and Bertha and Rossy Ross were making a thin watery but wholesome stew out of some vegetables, two chickens and a piglet that Clem had donated to the cause. Bertha would thicken it up later with some flour dumplings and a basketful of Egyptian walking onions that Rossy had gathered from the gardens.

Walking onions are a very unusual heirloom onion. They are top-setters, which mean they produce onion seeds from the flowering green tops of the onion. The reason they are called walking onions because the top setters will fall over and re-root themselves literally walking. You can plant a patch once and have a wonderful perennial harvest for years.

Crick had brought 50 lbs. each of beans and rice and 50lbs of wheat from his stores. The preppers’ survival was soon to be now measured in ounces and days at a time unless other resources were found.

Finding living quarters for all those folks was going to be problematic. There were a bunch of tents but many people had shown up with trailers and RVs and they soon would be forced to make arrangements.

One of the old shotgun style houses up by the ruins of the old plantation could be made to serve for some people without much more than a good sweeping out and the addition of a few boards after you chased the snakes and spiders out. The
term "shotgun" is a reference to the idea that if you open all the doors to the house, the pellets fired from a shotgun would fly cleanly from one end to the other.
Other vacant houses faired much worse and they would take considerable work to make them habitable again. There was lots of still good timber and boards around here though. The salvage of the wood and the chore of getting a dry solid roof over everyone’s heads shouldn’t take all that long if people treated the work like a habitat for humanity affair or just a plain good old fashioned cabin raising.

This plantation had been around a long time and had several old log cabins scattered around decaying away here and there around the massive property but the bones of a lot of them were still good and strong. The old homestead places reminded Crick of the blues singer Muddy Waters house he had once seen in Mississippi. Dovetailed oak timbers blued with age still standing strong after a hundred years or more of being exposed to the elements.

Even the worst of the cabins could be made to serve some kind of function eventually. If nothing else you could just throw a tarp over where the roof used to be on the more Skeletonized ones and be well on your way to making yourself a substantial little house.  Hey! How many damn preppers could even hope to flesh something out like this with nothing more than a camp axe making a family home that would serve for many generations? I know one thing, no one is going to take any time to square timbers or find the heart of an oak to make them out of while just needing shelter but the pioneers of old had the skills, the wisdom, the wherewithal and the gumption to build something once and build it right. That’s the problem with society today, instant satisfaction; gratification where I need it now overwhelms what our forefathers knew that they did not want to undertake such a momentous task more than once if they could help it.

An old saying is “A man or a woman is a measure of their work.” The reason that some old cabins stand the test of time and serve many generations from the days of pioneering to modern society is somebody somewhere decided that they would build something that would last for another generation in order that they would not have to spend that time on hard labor and instead have an advantage to build something further.

Some of these cabins that still exist on this plantation have oftentimes had five generations to reside in one from the first man that lived in it. He wasn’t ashamed of his efforts of construction, no he was proud he had talents and was commended on his ability to make the place for himself. The generations that came after this gentleman whine and complain that they have no other finer house to live in and yet give thanks to the man who first constructed it. Hell, they don’t even have a clue how to fix it as age and time makes their poor abode unlivable and yet none of the neighbors, none of the babies introduced in this next world by this one solitary man’s craftsmanship is appreciated or can be reproduced by anyone of his namesakes.

Crick had shown David around the plantation a little bit and David was as excited as he was about the potentials of this place if enough people wanted to stay and work it. It was going to be hot, brutal hard scrabble community living for a while but for those willing to invest their time and effort into it was an ideal bug out location and way of life to get a new start in this dreadful apocalyptic world we were facing.

David said he could see it as a decent lifestyle possibly that was going to be slowly developing on this place that might even suit him. That is, if he just looked at sharecropping like an old hippy commune or a self sufficiency based reality survival show instead. He knew better though in many ways, back to the land living was just plain miserable for any length of time and particularly more so if all you had was a glimmer of what the old pioneers knew or had access to. Utopia it certainly was not. However, the key to survival is community and he was going to study this place more in depth, no telling what the future held for him and Julie. Having other like minded individuals and a larger talent pool to draw from had its advantages. Many hands make light the work as the saying goes.

David wondered how many folks would choose to stay and how many others would decide to take their chances elsewhere because they were better setup if they bugged back home.

David and Julie had pitched a 4 man tent out in front of Clem`s house, he had an extra three man tent he told Will he could borrow to pitch at what was to be the main campground for the preppers using tents. Dang, a apocalyptic tent city, did that beat a homeless tent city? That is a hard question to wrap his head around David decided. On the one hand, opportunity and access to goods if you could afford them are readily available so David guessed homeless tent city, but the emotional and mental drains would be different. There was a lesson in pondering such a question but for now his thoughts moved on to other things.

David decided so far Will wasn’t such a bad character, he was just shell-shocked and a bit strange from his experience of surviving on his own and avoiding others. Clem said he would keep an eye on him but he, like David thought that once he started having regular interaction with people he would snap back.

Loomis told Will that it would be best if he didn’t mention to the other survivors anything about getting caught stealing and everyone on the plantation agreed that this secret would be safe with them. No sense having Will starting out on the wrong foot with anyone and petty jealousies and suspicions were already an endemic fact with the community that would hopefully be resolved now that everyone’s futures looked a bit brighter.

David eyed the plantations landing and rickety dock and discussed with Loomis and Clem a project idea that the new sharecroppers might get around to building someday. Its construction was simple enough and Bertha and Clem could make the fish baskets easy enough using wild muscadine grape vines which seemed to grow freely around the area.