“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
- Robert Heinlein
I’m often amazed by folks. I always grew up believing that everyone should logically know how to do a number of activities, or failing that, know exactly who to go to when you need to know. I really do believe that one should be able do roughly do everything in Heinlein’s quote, and more. You don’t have to master a number of skills, just be good enough to get by. Nothing wrong with mastering a skill, of course.
Cooking
Apparently, tons of people don’t know how to cook. They can usually follow the instructions printed on a box that the food came in, which is essentially just how to reheat pre-cooked meals.
There’s a simple way to learn how to cook. Buy a handful of recipe books or visit recipe web sites. Find 20 to 30 recipes that look simple, have a relatively short ingredient lists and sound like they might be tasty. Try each and every recipe. If it’s overly difficult or a pain to do, drop it off the list. Feel free to experiment with the recipes as much or as little as you please. You should weed out roughly half the list.
Once you have 10 to 15 recipes, stick to it. Eventually you’ll be able to do them in your sleep. If you get bored, carefully archive your foolproof recipes and start over again. Or just experiment with preparation or side dishes.
Sewing
Sewing is easy to learn and hard to master. You need very steady hands and good precision to do excellent sewing, but it’s not very difficult to learn the basics. Just buy a complete sewing kit from Walmart, a sewing store or a nearby PX. They should only be a couple bucks. Go to a fabric store and buy whatever cloth is on sale. Practice sewing (by hand) straight lines. Rip out the thread and do it a couple times.
To experiment, go find an old pair of jeans or pants. Cut out the front pockets, leave an inch of material. If you want to go the extra mile, cuff the material that’s left. Bend it back and sew a straight line all the way around. Now go grab some cloth. Cut out two roughly identical squares. Sew a big U through both squares. Put two lines of thread in the U. Once you’re done, cut off all the material around the U. Turn it inside out. Now attach it to the material still attached to the pants.
Also practice attaching buttons to random scraps of cloth.
First aid
You always want to keep a basic first aid kit handy. I don’t mean a handful of band aids. At a minimum, buy a pressure bandage, some gauze (both rolls and squares), an ace bandage, and some medical tape. Practice putting bandages on someone. Have them move around a bit. It shouldn’t be so tight it cuts off blood, but it shouldn’t shake loose either. It’s also worth practicing with tourniquets. You can use belts, rope, etc. I prefer dropping a few dollars and keeping a few real ones around.
I noticed that most first aid kits don’t have anything other than comfort items. Anti-itching gels, band aids, aspirin, etc. It’s nice to have that kind of stuff around, of course. But not much of it is really life saving. With trauma injury, time really does count. The faster you start doing something, the better the overall results. I’ve met tons of wonderful EMT’s, nurses and docs. They’re wonderful people for the most part, and often do an excellent job. But they can’t break the laws of physics. If an ambulance is 30 minutes away, it is 30 minutes away. Nothing can change that factor. The entire point of a good first aid kit is to hopefully keep you or another person alive long enough for that ambulance to arrive.
Making a fire
If you’re a hiker or spend any amount of time out of line of sight of civilization, you need to learn how to make a proper fire. To survive for less than 3 days, you just need heat and water. Food is nice, but not completely essential.
You always need a starter, tinder and kindling. A way to pre-fashion a small fire is to get a cardboard egg carton, fill all of the holes with saw dust, put a wad of laundry lint at the top. Cover the entire thing with a light coat paraffin. Cut out each “egg”. Go buy a Swedish FireSteel and keep it handy. To light, cut the paraffin cover off the laundry lint and land some sparks on it. Partially covering the ‘egg’ with wood shavings and twigs. Add slightly larger sticks.
In a pitch, wood shavings, very dry leaves and twigs will do you fine. If the wood is slightly damp, you can shave off the damp layer and it will dry itself out fairly quickly.
If you need one, go get a fire permit. Practice making fires with the least amount of newspaper, lighter fluid or whatnot possible. Another art is making a fire circle. At a minimum, it’s a safety thing. You obviously don’t want to start a forest fire. Just making a fire won’t necessarily keep you warm. Unless it’s pretty big. You want to make the smallest fire you can manage that does the job. You should arrange rocks to redirect heat towards you and hopefully keeping any smoke away. Some people use a dedicated heat reflector or just put a sheet of tin foil on the opposite side of the fire ring.