Where did it start... I'm not even sure.<br><br>As a kid I remember the “duck and cover” drills, and lining up in the halls and covering our heads, in preparation for air raids.. but I don’t think that was ever real to me. I remember the tension during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and someone tried to explain to me that we might all die at any time, but I don’t think I really understood.<br><br>At some young age, in reading Heinlein’s novels (I think I read the first at about seven) I came across “Tunnel in the Sky”, and I’ve always owned at least one copy since, and given some away- it’s still one of my all-time favorite books. That was still fiction, and not day to day reality, but it did get me thinking. Much later I read his “Farnham’s Freehold”, and “Time Enough for Love”, both also containing great survival advice, along with all of his other books. He probably had somewhat more influence on me than my parents. I don't think you can be a Heinlein fan and not be survival-oriented, they're almost the same thing.<br><br>I think the first inkling I had that real life could really be unpredictable was the NYC area blackout in 1965. It was relatively event free, in retrospect. Where we were, even the phones still worked. Still, all the authorities were so obviously helpless to either predict it or do anything about it, it had to get you thinking. My thoughts ran more or less along the same lines as James Burke’s, much later, in the first chapter of “Connections”, which starts out with this incident. <br><br>I remember clearly the first magazine article I read about Outward Bound. We didn’t have the web then, and I kept the article with me for weeks and re-read it several times. Couldn’t get my parents to consider it for me.<br><br>I was in the DC area during the riots in ’68, and saw the armed troops, the tanks rolling down the streets of the nation's capital.<br><br>Sometime about then I found the original edition of “The Complete Walker”, by Colin Fletcher. Up until then I’d only been camping a few times, and had no idea such adventures were even possible. That book certainly changed my life, and opened up the possibilities of getting by on my own, with very little. I became a backpacker for many years.<br><br>I was still in the DC area when it was hit by hurricane Agnes a few years later. I was actually trying to get home in a car- sense won out eventually, and I crashed at a friend’s. The next morning I walked through park areas and saw cars up in the trees from the flooding the night before, the pavement itself ripped up and scattered downstream.<br><br>Not too many years later, my parents were caught without power for a week in sub-feezing temperatures in the famous ice storm in Connecticut. They were the only family in the neighborhood not to abandon their house. With no generator, the oil stove was out, so my father drained all the pipes in the house so they wouldn’t freeze and burst, and the family moved into one room. The water was from an artesian well, so there was pressure enough to fill buckets in the basement, for drinking, cooking, sponge baths and flushing the toilet. They cooked in the fireplace that also supplied heat. My father had wood already cut to length but not split when it started- he said it took 12 hours of splitting wood to fuel that fireplace for 24, with a margin of safety. Many other houses didn’t come out so well.<br><br>Then there have been blizzards, ice storms where I’ve been stranded downtown, the Y2k thing, etc. etc. I was in San Francisco during both the Oakland fire and the Rodney King riots there, the latter of which I was a little too close to. Could have been a lot worse.<br><br>So for me, it was a gradual thing, not sudden, lots of incidents over many years, but lots of reinforcement, too.<br><br>Now we’re at war with terrorists and have anthrax casualties, and I can hear the military jets circling over the area all night, every night. It’s been a lot of years, but I don’t regret any of the thought or learning.<br>