Sandstorm Survival Lessons TPS-0009

There has a humbling of my ego basically reducing it, polishing it down to size of a marble. There was an epic multi-hour windstorm, sandstorm here.

I was my first big sustained sandstorm experience of this site. I've been here since March and this was the first one. There's been some thunder, there's been some rain, there's been some little dust devil whirlwinds.

When I get hit by those, as I have a few times it'll rattle my tiny home. There'll be sand and dust around. But usually that would last for seconds before it just passes by.

There's been some heavy winds but this was the most extreme that I've experienced. I didn't know how to reference it. I didn't know if this was normal, if this was heavy or light, if it was one of many to come.

The first one that I experience here happens to be way off the charts. I find out the next day that it was not typical. It recalibrates everything.

I'm following through with the intention to develop a permaculture training demonstration site that can accommodate a permaculture design course.

The design intention and philosophy is a tactical permaculture training site where it's basically the combination of a boot camp and a PDC. It will be an experiment and hopefully a template that can be replicated.

I just finished re-watching the entire PDC with Bill Mollison and Geoff Lawton.

Going through the full PDC with Bill and Geoff, the warrior spirit of permaculture is front and center. There is not a lot of ambiguity when it comes to things like what Geoff Lawton would do with a little bit of that military budget, comparing the difference between what humanitarian aid revenue budgets are relative to the military budgets of the world.

I'm not gonna wait for the governments of the world to proactively allocate funds to permify the military behavior on this planet.

Really rethinking things like burning feces with toxic fuel.

Rethinking things like leaving toxic forever chemicals from the foam they put on all the fires that they make with all the training and all the explosives, poisoning the surrounding watershed for eternity...The absurdity that a lot of this training is about.

It's dehumanizing as basically all of this energy is going into fitness, right into preparedness for selection in different elite units.

Not just basic training, but pipe hitters, I say, let's make that into tree planters and swale diggers. Are you a pipe hitter? Are you a swale digger? Because both of you could be in fitness competitions together, side by side, and you wouldn't know the difference.

There's so much to there's so much synergy to be explored.

I don't wanna give the military the monopoly on the concept of a warrior, but I will say they have the financial monopoly on soldiering and warfare and battle and, perimeters and strategic defense.

While they hold the monopoly of force, it behooves anyone in permaculture who is for peace, lasting peace, and for appropriate human behavior...

It behooves us to look at the military industrial complex and realize that the energy that they are designing with is the warrior energy, and that the indoctrination that is imposed upon that warrior energy is very ecologically negligent, to say the least.

That's not even getting into the legacies of things I talked about previously, where the the karma of warfare, the ecological karma of past war conduct of all warring nations. We're not even talking about that. We're just talking about, okay, if you wanna hold that monopoly on force, rather than opposing and fighting, whether through law or policy or other means less compliant with the law...

Towards a more efficient design, the designer approach to changing the behavior, the ecological behavior of the militaries of the world is to prove the tactical advantage and the cost savings, the overall efficiency, the optimization of the organization, the optimization of the mission. I'm not the only person thinking about these things.

I'm not the only person, by any means, living and exuding these things.

For me personally, if this is what I wanna dedicate some of my life energy to then I gotta start somewhere. So this is me reporting on where I am at. This is not representative of permaculture at large. It's not representative of veterans since I am not a combat veteran of wars conducted by the military.

The combat I've experienced is not recognized. I've been brave. I've risked my life. I have been engaged in training the indigenous, the people who live in war, more so than myself.

When the US military goes in for operations, the soldiers rotate in and out. They have down time. They take breaks. They're not always not embedded permanently in that warzone.

You're either an invading army, or you're supporting an ally, or you're doing some form of one off operation or policing, whatever it is, whatever the scope is, it's clear to the people who are US military service people. The people that there defending or supporting or training or whatnot, those people don't have any way to escape. They live in that. And so as I think about my identity, my ego, my warriorhood, if you will, thinking about the monopoly on warriorship, warriordom that the military...

I've defended the integrity the of nation, as a patriot, by repairing the earth, by being an eco-warrior but I'm demonized and I am considered, basically, I don't wanna say the words of what I'm considered but I'm doing right by the soil of the nation.

That goes back a very long time.

But I do feel like it would be a very interesting world where we examine the sacrifices that people make to defend a nation. In what ways you could give appropriate proportionate respect to the people who are doing ecological repair and thus being warriors and defenders of the forests, of the nation, of the soil and and the water.

You don't have to go AWOL from the military to be disenchanted with it, and to become disillusioned, then put all the remainder of your energy into healing the Earth, and realizing that there's a lot of work to be done in the mother land.

So, anyway, with all that said, that's a little bit philosophical, but coming back to the action of surviving this mega storm...

If that storm happened, and this project much was mature to a point where we were actually doing permaculture design course with people camping and engaged in that PDC, for that storm to happen and for the spirit of the people to be self-selecting warrior spirited people, then that would be basically, you would call it a perfect storm, because you would find out who was brave enough to do what had to be done in the midst of that, who was prepared enough to do what had to be done safely.

You get that initiation by the dance with the forces of nature. That's what makes an eco-warrior, and that's what makes any kind of warrior.

That's what is the most romantic and attractive about the types of military training that are the most intimate with nature. There's a beautiful mystique with that. It's far more romantic to imagine these athletic warriors who are really in tune with the elements versus drone operators who may be lacking that.

I think about how humbled that storm made me.

Just mechanically talking about what it did. I figured it was gonna be far more devastating to my humble little permaculture site camp in development than it was.

But it was actually perfect timing, because it happened right before I made a mission out to go and procure, basically the starter kit for a food forest, meaning trees, shrubs, vines, seedlings, a mountain of compost...the sort of scaffolding, if you will, the prosthesis that I need to get that garden, to get that food forest established and protected from the elements.

If the calibration that I had towards the forces of nature would not been updated by the storm, if I would have gotten all that stuff done, plantings, sited things out, built things...what I thought I needed to protect that, I would have seen it all be blown to bits.

It taught me, you need to double, triple, quadruple over-build everything that you do now knowing that could occur to that scale for that duration and possibly worse at any time.

I had to uplevel my preparedness, readiness and resolve. I had to rethink a lot.

I remember at Quail Springs, I showed up right after an epic flood damaged their food forest and taught them that they have to build on higher ground. I was there helping to replant a food forest. I imagine they'll never let that happen again if they can help it. Since then I do have to think well, you gotta expect that it's possible.

You have to be somewhat psychologically prepared for the idea that you could put in years and years and years, and much money to establish something a food forest, and then have a be washed away, burnt away, covered in sand, like the song about the dust bowl and your farm got covered in feet of sand.

There are obviously ways to be prepared for that contingency, financially and spiritually, for that form devastation.

It's funny to think about almost everything we do with our little stick frame houses and our little stick power lines and the little wires…

Just run of the mill natural disasters or just extreme weather, we seem to not be learning lessons.

We seem to just keep repeating the same mistakes. As Bill Mollison said, we keep falling into holes of our own making.

That's where you get into the pattern literacy of dome shapes and understanding aerodynamics and fluid dynamics, to where you design structures that actually are resilient, literally the forces of nature roll off their back by design.

So what was beautiful for me, having been, like I said, polished down to a marble, I had been thinking I got this dialed in. I'm gonna be catching rainwater, I dug a bunch of swales and ponds, I'm ready for the rains to come down, hopefully the swales are big enough and wide enough and long enough, and the ponds have enough depth...Everything is gonna be such that if there's a major rain event, then all of the system of earthworks...the water will overflow gently and continue to absorb in the landscape as I continue to build more and more fractals of that pattern to capture that the sheet flow and the and the downpours and the floods.

So my thinking was, import water for now and get calibrated to be prepared for rain but expect zero rain, but be prepared for torrential rains and flooding.

But I realized, with that storm, which was so laughably humbling...just how easy it is for us to underestimate the forces of nature. But what was so funny is that I was planning for a flood of water but not planning for a flood of sand.

It was a beautiful lesson.

I had to protect my eyes and protect my lungs with a mask and retreat into my tiny home for the majority of it. Then having to think about, oh, there's stuff out there. Luckily, there's nothing out there, like animals yet that I would need to care for so luckily, that was not a factor.

But then I had to think, is there anything out there that would be tragic if it just blows away and I never see it again?

There was things that I did secure with rocks and whatnot, having experience with just normal kind of gusts and things. But this was like boulders were moving from the sand being pushed away beneath them.

I've never seen so much mass moved by a force of nature ever in my life.

I am this little jellyfish out here with my little bamboo, tiny home, and I have the audacity to think that my lungs are not gonna overflow with silica, fine particle dust as sharp as glass.

It's gonna scar my lungs and limit my breathing capacity and possibly cause pneumonia and be deadly.

What hubris to think that just because it's mostly fine and pleasant, though it gets hot and there can be heavy rains...But, no, you're feeble.

It was so violent, I didn't know if it was nuclear winter. Honestly, I didn't know. Obviously, there are ways to check on that. There wasn't an EMP.

It was like a blizzard, because you couldn't see more than a hundred feet out. It was like a thick fog of sand.

I guess people who have been to Burning Man they're trained and advised to be preparing for that. I've never been to Burning Man, if I had been and I experienced that, I probably would have not be learning this the hard way.

But going back to some of the lessons from it, seeing the swales I just dug be partially filled up with sand, they just got literally half as effective.

Am I gonna be in this game of one step forward, two steps back with sandstorms filling my swales. A permaculture designer should be smarter than that.

We're dealing with chaos here, and we think we can outsmart it, but often times it ruins our plans and we gotta start over.

It was beautiful in that even Bill Mollison your swales, talking about water and flooding, he says, your swales are gonna get blown out. So you make them deeper, you make them wider.

So I better realize that I'm not just designing for flood waters, I'm designing for partial nullification of my earthworks by massive sandstorms that make my little toothpick scratchings in the soil with the shovel...they're just erased by being covered in layers of sand.

I didn't shed any tears because I knew I had it coming to me.

I felt bummed out until I examined closer, walking out and looking at it and going, this is so beautiful. This embossing, this exemplifies the beauty of the pattern literacy that you're taught in the permaculture design course. Geoff Lawton will say things like, he will test the level of a swale by just filling it with water.

Water will do work for you. In my words, and in my experience, if I'm trying to level a swale, you flood it with water and there are various ways that it'll indicate to you whether you've done it correctly.

But since I'm now off-grid with no water, I can't do that.

So what the gift was of that flooding by sand was that it actually showed me the way these are going to look, the way that nature, the forms and curves of nature, which are so beautiful, the way they're going to correct my mistakes.

They're gonna highlight, and exemplify where I have it right and where I have it wrong.

When I was carving the swales and then watching a PDC, if you just do a gross digging a trench with shovels, I wanna go back and exert the energy to round those edges or should I just wait for the rains to round them off the way they're going to and let nature take its course?

It wasn't the rains that did that. It was the sand, it was the wind that did that. But the effect the same nature. There are no straight lines in nature is the mantra. You get to see these beautiful dune scapes being created. The pond, the dam walls, the swale mounds, to see what is left behind when the dust settles from the sky.

It was like a snow drift, a totally beautiful aesthetic site to behold.

The patterns that it revealed, it showed me that my intuition...I was imagining, the finished work of the swales as I was digging them with the gross, sort of blunt shoveling...Just digging a trench and having it be kind of jagged, just a jagged trench that is not structurally sound.

Then think, I'm gonna have to go back and do the finish work to make these structurally sound, for them to sit right and not just collapse and cave in.

Now I think it balances out because I'm gonna have to do some clearing in the swales. But also the sandstorm did the work to blow those sharp edges off it, so I see how it balances out.

Most importantly, it shows me that I can now wait and see the sort of curvature that I intended, that the design in my mind was verified, by the way the sand took shape.

Then, of course, the wind. Having created a cavity concave in the ground, particles, sediment from the air is gonna drop into that, and you're gonna get more in there than you would than you would have otherwise, harvesting mulch from the sky.

Now I have more confidence and more validation that the leveling appears to be right for the flows that I wanted to create.

They they got flowed through by sand and wind, that is exactly how I intend the water to behave when there are massive flooding events.

At one point during the storm, I darted out and grabbed what I knew was about to start flying away which was flying away which was my backup pair of knee pads.

It wasn't end of the world. Surprisingly, most of my just basic camp infrastructure was intact. A lot of that owing to the fact that I'm big on bamboo and I'm big on dome structures and just always trying to be ever more mindful of the disaster of squared off architecture versus the glory of rounded edge architecture.

The storm activated something deep in the warrior mindset of, you never know when you'll have to react.

If that were leveraged, to be a sort of surprise training exercise, then the psychology of it is like, where could you have been more prepared to address that and to be in a more optimal state of readiness?

I created lists upon lists upon lists of things that I can do to secure everything better, and to make sure that if I had to care for a wound of my own, or care for animals or care for other people...the inanimate objects that I could have put more care to secure beforehand, checking off more and more things.

I want to have maximum availability in an emergency situation, to administer care to life to living beings and mitigate damage and care for physical infrastructure as needed as a lower priority.

But the more that physical infrastructure can be secured in advanced the less it becomes a liability or a hazard or a risk of loss or damage due to the inflicted harm of extreme weather events.

This encampment will have to be fortified against that level of force, overbuilding by design. I will have ever more peace of mind moving forward.

I'm really glad that happened right before I went out to go get a bunch of stuff to plant.

Much extra effort will be needed in sheltering the fledgling food forest.

This storm also forced me to rethink my rainwater catchment strategy.

As I've gotten older and have been more of a lone wolf, I have a policy of I don't want to import any objects here that I can't easily lift by myself without causing major damage to my back. So lots of smaller tanks either plumbed together or gravity fed, or gravity plumbed, or whatever you wanna call it, but exploring smaller tanks versus larger tanks so that I can move them advantageously or rotate them as needed, or even relocate them in the future. By truck and not by semi truck or crane.

Also if you have contamination or failure of a larger tank, that's all your eggs in one basket.

This is really about survival and long term prepping. It makes sense to have a more cellular approach to food storage, water storage, etc. considering spoilage and leakage and whatnot.

I'm thinking, okay, with rain, it's either gonna be a little bit of rain coming mostly straight down, or a lot of rain coming mostly straight down. But what I experienced in this blizzard of sand, with some rain.

This would be like trying to put a rain gutter on a semi-truck going 90 miles an hour in a wind and rainstorm. The futility of thinking, I'm gonna put a rain gutter on a semi-truck so that I can capture rainwater.

I had to think, if this is the way that all the rain comes, I'm not gonna get any of it in tanks. It's like a horizontal mesh of moisture and droplets splattering in all which directions, not just coming straight down and going on the path that I signed for it.

So that was humbling and embarrassing to think about.

It's gonna depend on what percentage of the precipitation comes down in that sort of horizontal tsunami. I would always have to put up a vertical wall to capture rainwater because it's going sideways, violent, bizarre angles of rainwater coming at you.

I can't assume that I'm gonna survive off of rainwater or that my crops are gonna survive off of rainwater if I end up being surprised that even though a lot of precipitation happened, and even though it will percolate into the earthworks at scale. My little tiny footprint of roof catchment space will not be effective.

I started experimenting with hanging cones of concave fabric, dropping a small rock in the center so rain water will collect and funnel down to a low point similar to how you would collect condensation in a solar still.

The idea is, if you wanna control where water flows off of a sheet, whether that's fabric or plastic sheeting or whatever, and you make it concave, and you can weigh it down in the middle so then it can funnel and dip where you want it.

I don't wanna do tons of corrugated steel to catch rain water, it can decapitate you if it gets caught in the wind. It's nasty when it corrodes, sometimes it's a necessary evil but I try to minimize my use of it.

I'd like to be capturing rainwater with fabric that's biodegradable and not a lethal object to handle or that I have to worry about it getting loose or getting ripped off.

Another thing that could be done with those actually would be to weight them down on the ground at a lower level.

Bill Mollison did say something to the effect of, it's 30 times more expensive to capture rain water with tankage than it is to install the earthworks, ie, swales and ponds. Of course, that water is gonna go underground and continue to supply your maturing food, forest crops, and return back to you even years and years later in the form of fruits that'll fall from the water that you captured ten years ago with your earthworks.

So you're basically banking on that water underground, moving very slowly through the top soil, then the subsoil, then slowly draining, either recharging aquifers or slowly draining across the slope of the bedrock.

If you can intelligently design your rainwater harvesting strategy so that at least the rain from one year gets you and your crops through to the rain of the next year...if you do that correctly, then it shouldn't matter if it doesn't rain more than one time, if you're set up to stretch it.

Unfortunately I had my latest experimental strategy torn to shreds. The wind made those rock weighted fabric cones into sling shots. I have had to really rethink that and have to think more about nursing this project with more tankage that's filled from the outside for now.

Here, the enemy is the forces of nature. There's no negotiating. There's no psychological operation. There is no surrendering. There's no way, other than to face that head on and to be prepared for it.

I had to think how was I prepared for this psychologically? What kit did I have available to me? Where was it? Was it handy? Was it available? Did I have to search or dig for it, did I forget where certain things were, was anything out of place? Where the first aid kits are, or all those kind of things.

You never drill enough so you find out what the holes in your preps are when real emergencies and disasters occur.

That shook me up. It was a test for me to know what I'm gonna have to be prepared to do moving forward. It put me on the my edge of my toes, now I'm in a more defensive posture. Now I'm a permanent fighting stance with the wind.

The wind could not only destroy everything in minutes or hours, it could also blow away the rain that I'm trying to survive on and hydrate my crops with.

So I gotta be able to go out there and strategically risk expose to the dangers to be certain that what I built to capture the rainwater is functioning. I have to be prepared to go out and monitor things, to see that the swales are running property.

Depending on the time of year, if you get wet you risk hypothermia. Then what are you gonna do to fight hypothermia?

I don't, I don't want to, I don't need to prove to myself or anybody else that once I have hypothermia, that I know how to fight it and defeat it.

Being able to be out there and work in the storm, repairing the earthworks, monitoring the flows, adapting and even building things on the fly, that requires planning and kit.

I'm not gonna just go about my merry way thinking the rains are gonna come straight down and just fill everything up the way I want it to.

That's just wishful thinking.

Everything is now time pressurized to fortify, to ensure that when this happens again, it doesn't destroy everything I built. It doesn't wipe me out, and it doesn't jeopardize the plan of harvesting maximal rainwater. That means I have to push myself into beast mode for more hours with less sleep, and do those bursts of energy…The sprints that you have to be conditioned for and activate without causing major injury and without it being extremely exhaustive to where you're barely able to withstand doing it.

So for me, my weak point, like many people who have done landscaping for years and been in bands, lifting equipment and all that, I throw my back out, so to speak, at at a drop of a hat, no matter how much I bend with the knees.

I haven't had X rays. I haven't gone to a chiropractor. I haven't had any professional evaluation. All I know is I'm not young anymore. Luckily I don't feel any kind of chronic pain. But when that flares when I'm moving or lifting anything over 5 lb, no matter how correctly I do it, I'm at risk of being in extreme agonizing pain, moving anything at all for days.

In a perfect world, in a village, the world that we all came from, which is people care for each other and are in a village...And when they get injured, they support each other to recover properly and take proper time out of exertion to heal.

You don't get that luxury to lick your wounds at all when you're lone wolfing or often in the work-a-day world. Maybe you can afford, or your insurance will pay for drugs to mask the pain of deeper things that you're not addressing. Or that you don't have time to address. You don't have the luxury to be healthy.

The pain is telling you stop moving, and what do we do? Back to work. Back to the grind. Give me the pills to numb the pain. Or if it's a survival situation, or obviously, any form of having to defend property or any emergency situation, you have to sacrifice and risk injury for the safety of others.

Are you gonna grind down and sacrifice some of your own sleep hours, some of your own flesh, some of your own bones, to do the mission of protecting your and your, defending other people, defending the perimeter?

This major storm forces me to rethink a lot of things and puts a major time pressure on me to be ready for the rains.

I'm in that fighting stance, I could be really underestimating what I'm gonna be dealing with.