Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life

“You don’t rise to the occasion,” McNeese lectured. “You default to your level of training. When the stress hits, you will only be half as good as your best day of recent training.”

Fact: When lost, individuals generally circle in the direction of their dominant hand. And though they may think they’re traveling in a straight line, they’re usually circling within the same square-mile area.

The way to break free of nationality, according to Schultz’s pamphlet, was to follow the three-flag system. The three flags consist of having a second passport, a safe location for your assets in another country, and a legal address in a tax haven. To these, Hill added a fourth and fifth flag: an additional country as a business base and a number of what he called “playground countries” in which to spend leisure time.

“The way to take over an industry,” Spencer was saying over the music, beginning my first business lesson of the weekend, “is not to fix the current model, but to completely destroy it and replace it with a model you know is better.”

“In a survival situation, you’ve got to know when to let go of your humanness and become an animal. Because if you hold on to thought, there is restriction.”

He said, if you’re ever in a public area and someone starts spraying gunfire, get down on your stomach with your feet pointed toward the attacker, your face positioned away, and your hands covering your head. This way, it’s less likely that the bullets will hit your vital organs.

Later that afternoon, Brown taught us what he called the sacred order: shelter, water, fire, food. Wilderness survival, he explained, required taking care of each of those needs, in that order of importance.

“Who do you think my best friends in the neighborhood are?” Mason was asking. “The plumbers, contractors, and carpenters. I have a Christmas party every year and I always invite those guys. Because when it hits the fan, I’m going to need them.”

I stored ten gallon-sized jugs of water in the garage, taking care not to put them on the concrete floor, which would react with the plastic and contaminate the water. I bought a two-thousand-watt Honda generator, along with a hand-cranked generator. I filled five two-gallon containers with gasoline, then added Sta-Bil to prevent the gas from breaking down. And I tracked down lanterns, kerosene, forty-four-hour candles, hand-crank-powered flashlights, rechargeable batteries, strike-anywhere matches, water purification tablets, and first aid supplies.

We make fun of those we’re most scared of becoming.