Toilet Paper Alternative

Survivalism is not camping, if you forget something you cannot just tough it out until you return to civilization. For instance, a fist full of leaves may be tolerable for a week of squatting in the woods but do you really want to exist like this for the eternity. A survivalist must plan for the loss of readily available items not the temporary absence of them.

As I sat on my composting stool pondering my daily schedule I noticed that the toilet paper was getting awfully low. I made a mental note to pick some up if I ran to town, then I stopped. This was a test run for living a minimalist lifestyle, environmentally friendly and free of consumer trappings. In preparing for an off grid move it is important to remember that the devils in the details. The life critical items of food, water, power and heat had been addressed, they are obvious. It is the little everyday necessities that will trip you up during your transition to a simpler life.

Rectal cleanliness is one example of everyday necessities that people tend to overlook when planning an off grid existence. One option is to stock pile enough toilet paper for your family to last several years. Unfortunately this takes valuable storage space and still does not address what happens after the TP runs out.

The average American uses fifty four rolls of toilet paper every year. The United States consumes roughly 36.5 billion rolls annually. Apparently this is a necessary resource whose usage needs addressing. It seems logical that an alternative method of cleansing such as water cleaning, hand cleaning, organic items or alternative paper products should be explored.

Water

A bidet seems like the ultimate solution. It is like power washing your crack. Unfortunately the composting toilet and limited water supply made this unfeasible.

Next down on the list would appear to be the squat and pour method utilized in most eastern cultures. This requires you to enter a water closet, remove your cloths, squat over a hole, deposit, pour water down your anal cleft to clean, then dry and dress. Comfort aside, this is why eastern cultures wear loose fitting clothing with sandals.

I like this method with its low water consumption and fresh feeling, but…I tried it. I simply do not possess the acrobatical prowess necessary to guarantee proper cleanliness. As a typical American I have neither the balance nor flexibility to squat naked over a hole attempting to ladle a cup of water down my crack.

Hand

No, I have a tendency to bite my nails under stress.

Organic

This would include leaves, corncobs etc. Organic by-products are readily available in most parts of the country. Additionally the organic material would compliment the composting process. In the high desert, or low desert for that matter, these substitutes are not easy to come by.

The only option might be green sage brush. It has an oily quality much like Charmin Care Plus and is abundantly available. If stored in a sealed container the sage becomes soft and moist allowing a relatively smooth wiping and the sage smell helps with the unpleasant odors. A plus is that sage is a natural insect repellent. I have not tried this but will on my next trip.

The down side is storage. The sage must be kept green and moist. In the winter sage brush will keep its color but dry out to the point of wiping unpleasantness.

Paper

Glossy is bad and newspaper isn’t much better, it leaves black smears.

I found that a large yellow pages is easy to store, has thousands of pages and properly crumpled up is relative easy on the delicate areas. The yellow paper uses a short fiber that is only recyclable into new yellow page books but it is compostable. So this is the ideal low impact toilet paper substitute.

When you sit down tear a page out of the book and start crumpling. By the time you are finished the page should be soft, pliable and absorbent. My yellow pages has roughly 1300 pages so four of five books will keep me for a number of years.

The down side is that the paper has a tendency to fall apart if vigorously used. The short fibers don’t hold together real well so care must be taken in the wipe. But other than that no complaints.

This little experiment really made me envious of my dogs. Think about how wonderful it would be if we could simply drag our butt across the lawn.

Simple Life – Analysis

Recently I spent a week at Bear Ridge surviving only on the supplies stored on site. After analyzing my notes I have come up with this list of items that need work.

Dried Fruit – Somehow I completely miss this. Dried fruit will not keep nearly as long as dried grains but it would be nice to have until a stable fresh supply can be established.

More Meat - Possibly those half cans of spam or bulk cans purchased from an online survival supply company. I will need to do a little more research on this. Meat is very expensive compared to dried grains. Most protein will be supplied through bean products but I like meat. This meat will eventually be provided through fishing and small game hunting.

Prescriptions – If the prescription is necessary for your comfort or life keep a supply on-hand. Prescriptions can be refilled online or at your local pharmacy during a supply run. Special trips to acquire medicines are wasteful and greatly cut into your monthly budget.

Fuel Efficient Vehicle – Traveling to work or simply to fetch supplies becomes very costly with a gas guzzling truck or SUV. Two trips and your monthly budget is shot. I will be looking for a very small fuel efficient compact vehicle to use for monthly trips for supplies and emergencies. An older model Ford Festiva or Geo Metro would work nicely. The big truck will still be necessary to haul water, gather fire wood from the local saw mills or haul lumber.

Hot Water – I need a method of warming water that does not require additional fuel. If you are utilizing dried goods for meals it is necessary to have hot water on hand. A great deal of time and fuel was spent heating water for meals and personal hygiene. In the winter a large water tank sitting on the wood stove would work. In the summer possibly a copper tube solar water heater or maybe a 30 gallon tank painted blank and mounted on the roof. Even with a propane hot water heater if would be prudent to have a free method of preheating the water thus reducing your overall fuel consumption.

Critical System Redundancy – I have a backup charge controller for my solar array. This is not a common item and must be ordered so I classified it as critical and have a backup available. On the other hand, I can pick up an inverter at Wal-Mart so this item was not viewed as critical, no spare was stockpiled. But when the store is almost forty miles away the distance creates an expensive barrier to acquiring the critical part especially if you are on a restricted budget. If the part is necessary for your survival and you can afford it, keep a backup on-hand. The extra can always be used as a trade item.

Living on Survival Food

On January 1st 2008 I started living off my stored survival supplies. I needed to make sure that I could actually exist for an extended period of time eating just survival food stores. Plus, I wanted to make adjustments and expand on what foods I am stockpiling before greatly increasing the bulk volume.

This first month included primarily pinto beans, white rice and bread. I made several loafs of bread over the month to gain experience baking it but most was store bought; I just did not see a need to go through the flour stocks. The pinto beans were cooked in a crook pot to simulate cooking on a wood stove and the rice was prepared on the stove.

Daily food consumption consisted of 4 slices of bread, 1 cup dried beans and one cup rice. Prepared they yield 2.5 cups of bean and 3 cups of rice. Total caloric value is between 1700 and 1800 calories. This is plenty of calories if you are locked down someplace but if you are working, cutting firewood and what-not, increase your consumption. Increasing food intake will of course impact the longevity of your stores but this beats working at half capacity.

The up side is that this you can live quite well on this survival diet. As a matter of fact I lost 12 pounds this months, which is good for me but someone not as burley as myself will need to up the the calories. I feel great and am going to continue this nutritional regime. You also gain valuable experience preparing the food and save a ton of money over eating out or daily trips to the store.

The down side is the absolute boredom. The first week was ok but then I realized that spices and various condiments were going to be a necessity. You can live on pinto beans and white rice but it is not fun.

One of the reasons I wanted to do this was the discovery process I know a lot of this looks like common sense stuff but if I am going to stake my life on these food stores I need to be sure they will keep me alive.

Because of this exercise over the next month I will be purchasing and storing a much larger variety of beans, rice and dry pasta as well as spices, powered cheese and eggs. In a previous post I recommend an emergency store based on the three staples of pinto beans, white rice and bread this will keep you alive but it just might drive you crazy.

Acupuncture and Herbology

As medicines become to expensive and traditional western doctors are exclusively retained by the elite the common people will once again turn to the ancient arts of Acupuncture and Herbology.

I was talking to this kid a few weeks back about his majoring in information technology at college. He was interested in my twenty plus years of experience in the field and wanted to know what I thought of his career choice. My response was simply that information technology is a dead industry and that he should go into nursing.

In retrospect I should have pointed him to either acupuncture or herbology. These two proven areas of health care have been around for thousands of years and are only discounted by corporate medicine because they cut into profit margins. It is not good business sense to tell a depressed person to go eat a fifty cent raw potato when they are feeling down when you can hook them on antidepressants at forty dollars a week for the rest of their life. Would you go to Walgreen's and buy an eight dollar tube of burn ointment if you could break off a piece of aloe vera plant growing in your back yard and sooth the burn for nothing. Where would the drug industry be today if you could replace most of their products with plants grown in your home garden?

I have two small dachshunds that I love very much so when a friend of mine told me her small wiener dog Joey hurt his back and could not walk it put me in a slight panic. She took Joey to the vet and was told it would run about twenty five hundred dollars for surgery which, she was informed, might not work. The vet suggested putting the dog to sleep. My friend then took Joey to a pet acupuncturist to see if anything could be done.

Now I admit that when she told me this I dismissed it as grief. A month later after four visits and four hundred dollars Joey was running and playing like nothing happened. He was cured without invasive surgery or extensive drug therapy at a fraction of the cost. Think about that.

The next time my back goes out rather than spending a week laid up on muscle relaxers and pain drugs I will be going straight to the acupuncturist. My partner had a recent health expo at his office. They had an acupuncturist there who stuck some needles in his ear for "general health". Now at first I thought this voodoo but he did not catch this flu bug I am just now getting over. I am becoming a convert.

My point is that Acupuncture and Herbology are two areas that will thrive in the coming years and if one could master these skills they would become indispensable to any society.

By the way that potato thing really works. Just get a raw baked potato, wash it and start eating. Something in the vegetable puts you in a much better state of mind.

Sickness and Medicines

I have been sick a lot this fall and just got over the flu or something. My recent illness made me think about how I would deal with health issues living at the cabin. Not that I am worried about getting to the hospital or anything like that, I have great neighbors, but what about healing and for that matter getting sick in the first place.

Would that fresh cool air of the San Luis Valley help with getting over the bug? Would a healthy diet lacking fast food and 7-11 snacks aid in the recovery? The cabin has a little box full of the basic health care needs; Imodium, Tylenol, ibuprofen, Benadril, couple of different cough syrups and a big bottle of multi vitamins. Occasionally a pharmacist is necessary for proper drugs, what is a good general antibiotic that's easily stocked? How do you get prescription medicines with out proper prescriptions?

Personally I feel that a shot of whiskey, a cup of chicken soup and a few hours laying in the sun is the best remedy for anything that afflicts you. If not cured then at least you are in a much better mood. Sometimes I take a handful of vitamins if it seems to be real bad.

I work in a very unhealthy environment. My office is in an old raised floor server room located in a windowless basement that I share with about eight other people. The office is cold, dark and has its own air handling unit designed for server rooms, it cools without adding fresh air from outside. The job is tedious, depressing and if one of my co-workers gets sick invariably we all get sick. On the upside the work does not require a huge emotional investment and pays really well until I can move to the cabin full time.

The holiday season also forces us into revoltingly social situations surrounded by people coughing, sneezing and oozing various mucal substances. They all want to touch you and being somewhat introverted this can be quite stressful. Don't get me wrong I am not an isolationist I just want to be more selective with my company.

So, will being removed from this squalid mass of disease reduce the frequency of illness? Will living in the relative stress free alpine freshness of the San Luis Valley benefit my health? I am planning to move to the cabin in late May of 2008 let's hope I make it till then.