Bug Out Bags

This is my fiftieth weekly blog post. I never thought I’d last this long, and now I’m hooked on writing the posts. Thanks for hanging in there with me for nearly a year, regardless when you started reading the posts.

So, you say, what’s a “Bug-Out Bag?” It’s the backpack, bag, or small suitcase that you keep fully loaded by the front door or under your bed or in the corner so that you can pick it up on your way out of your house fleeing in an emergency. What goes in a Bug-Out Bag?  I suppose that depends on what sort of emergency you are anticipating or are most afraid of occurring.

I confess that Nita and I do not have Bug-Out Bags. And I’m an old Boy Scout, Be Prepared, and such. Yet, if we had five minutes to get out of the house, we’d be running into each other trying to grab this (old family photo albums) and that (our wallets) and likely would forget our pocket handkerchiefs just like Bilbo Baggins did.  If we had no minutes to get out of the house in the middle of the night, with water quickly rising around our legs, like tragically happened to some folks in Central Texas during the Memorial Day Flood a couple of weeks ago, we’d run outside barehanded in our PJ’s.

A photographer by the name of Allison Stewart is creating a gallery of a collection of photos of the innards of people’s Bug-Out Bags. Allison lives in California where some people are waiting for THE earthquake or tsunami, or comet strike, or violent revolution of angry ghetto dwellers, or stoned old hippies, or whatever. To see some of the images of Bug-out Bags she’s already photographed, check out her website here:   http://allison-stewart.com/bug-out-bag/

I’m fascinated by the variety of what people put in their Bug-Out Bags. What different people consider their essential survival basics runs the spectrum: Food is a commonality, but that’s about it. Even water containers seem to be hit and miss. Some bags have little bottles of wine and batteries for electronic “essentials.” Some have guns. Some have outdoor camping stuff like a folding shovel and little lamps on a head strap.

Some have books. If I took a book it would be the old Boy Scout Field Book from the 1940’s, an amazing manual for living with nothing in the woods, published back when urban Scouting took a back seat to rural Scouting. Back to the modern Bug-Out Bags, I couldn’t tell how many of the photographed bags had kitchen matches or maps or even pocket knives.

Allison’s dad owns the gym where I lift weights to stay slim. Just kidding about staying slim. I go to Mike’s gym to “Live Strong and Die Old,” my girth notwithstanding. Mike doubts my plan will work. Regardless, during Allison’s visit to Lockhart last week, I volunteered to put together and bring a Civil War vintage Bug-Out Bag for her to photograph. That’s Allison on the ladder photographing my old reenacting stuff laid out on the white cloth.

I suspect my Civil War Bug-Out Bag stuffed with goodies from the 1860’s is the only one in her collection that will include hardtack crackers guaranteed to never spoil but will break teeth, a wrinkled apple, a little pressed steel frying pan and a lidded tin boiler, a wood canteen (in modern real life, I’d also take a bottle of iodine pills to purify nasty water).

My Civil War bag includes a brass powder horn and a handful of round lead balls for the black powder revolver I’d have stuck in the waist of my trousers, a big-ass Bowie knife (a hatchet would be better, but I don’t have one), a Barlow pocket knife, a candle and a little box of Lucifers, a canvas sheet coated on one side with Mr. Goodyear’s amazing new rubberized black paint, and a handsome cotton-wool blend knitted bed coverlet in a design popular in the 1860’s. All essentials needed to survive cold and wet weather, eat, drink, and shoot bad people.

The connection of my Civil War Bug-Out Bag and Allison’s photography project to my Civil War novels lies in a two sentences from the memoir of Private John C West of Waco. Describing the battle of Chickamauga, Georgia in September of 1863, West wrote of seeing a woman refugee crossing the battlefield, her home likely caught in the crossfire of the opposing artillery batteries:

“One poor woman was overloaded with coverlets, tin pans and other utensils, with a child on each side and two or three bawling behind. She fell down two or three times but scrambled on for life, while muskets sputtered in the surrounding hills.”

My heart goes out to that young woman 152 after the event. She probably had to bug-out in a hurry, her husband likely gone for a soldier, and the memoir doesn’t read like she had a Bug-out Bag waiting by the door. West didn’t write any further about the fate of the woman and her four or five children, and mega battles seem to be as tough on the local population as they are on the soldiers.

Artillery was pretty indiscriminate in the 1860’s, an all-inclusive facet of the war, if you will. Looking way back to the medieval times, black powder and then artillery started changing everything about war, for the worse, if you ask me.

Still, I like to think that young woman’s perseverance paid off and she reached safety with her brood. Lord only knows what happened to all of them in the days and weeks after the great battle. Maybe some Christian family took in the lady and the kids.

I borrowed West’s short aside about the woman and included her appearance in front of the advancing Texans in my current novel, Redeeming Honor. And, yes, I’m a softy and created at least a temporary sanctuary for the anonymous fleeing woman and her bawling children. After all, I have grandchildren now.