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Choose Your Friends Wisely

Associate yourself with skilled doers, not “talkers.” Seek out people who share your outlook and morality. Living in close confines with other families is sure to cause friction, but that will be minimized if you share a common religion and norms of behavior. You can’t learn every skill yourself. Assemble a team that includes members with medical knowledge, tactical skills, electronics experience, and traditional practical skills.

There Is No Substitute for Mass

Mass stops bullets. Mass stops gamma radiation. Mass stops (or at least slows down) bad guys from entering a home and depriving its residents of life and property. Sandbags are cheap, so buy plenty of them. When planning your retreat house, think: medieval castle.

Always Have a Plan B and a Plan C

Regardless of your pet scenario and your personal grand plan of survival, you need to be flexible and adaptable. Situations and circumstances change. Always keep a Get out of Dodge (G.O.O.D.) kit handy, even if you are fortunate enough to live at your retreat year-round.

Be Frugal

I grew up in a family that still remembered both our pioneer history and the more recent lessons of the Great Depression. One of our family mottoes is: “Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without.”

Some Things Are Worth Fighting For

I encourage my readers to avoid trouble, most importantly via relocation to safe areas where trouble is unlikely to visit. But there may come an unavoidable day when you have to make a stand to defend your own family or your neighbors. Furthermore, if you value your liberty, then be prepared to fight for it, both for yourself and for the sake of your progeny.

The Best Defense: Live at Your Retreat Year-Round

An eleventh-hour Get Out of Dodge (G.O.O.D.) is a bad idea. Even if you have 90 percent of your gear pre-positioned at your retreat, there is the prospect of never making it there safely. Or if you arrive days or weeks late, on foot, you may find your retreat occupied by armed squatters who are gleefully eating from your carefully planned deep larder. Being forced to abandon a vehicle and travel on foot is a dicey proposition, at best. I strongly recommend that readers live at their retreats year-round—even if it means giving up a high-paying big-city job.

It is best if you can get away from urban regions fairly quickly and then take secondary or tertiary back roads. For those who are forced by circumstances or family obligations to live a long distance from their intended retreat, I recommend doing some detailed map studies and then some test-drives with a GPS receiver in hand, to establish five or more G.O.O.D. routes—some quite circuitous—to stay away from high-population regions and expected refugee lines of drift. Needless to say, always, always have enough fuel on hand to make the drive from your home to your retreat without buying any.

Depending on the fire code in your town, that might necessitate caching some fuel along your route (ideally with relatives or friends). Along with that comes the further complication of systematically rotating that cached fuel. In this regard, diesel is best, because it is much safer to store and has a much longer storage life than gasoline.

If and when The Day comes, do not hesitate. You need to get out of town well ahead of the Golden Horde, while roads are still passable. It is better to be ultracautious and run the risk of burning up some of your hard-earned vacation hours in the event of a few false alarms than to be complacent and thereby end up stuck in traffic, staring at the taillights of the linear parking lot created by the people who left town ahead of you. (Just ask the folks who tried leaving the Gulf Coast cities immediately before Hurricane Katrina arrived. It was a monumental traffic jam.)

Picking a retreat that is at least three hundred miles from a major metropolitan center and that is away from channelized areas or refugee lines of drift will drastically reduce your chances of ever having