Be Prepared 2: Alternatives to "The 10 C’s"

Checklists and Mnemonics

Jan 17, 2023

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Dave Canterbury is a survival expert. (I, as I have mentioned, do not claim to be an expert on anything). He came up with a list of 5 essentials and later, a second tier of 5 items that make a big difference in the proverbial “survival situation”; things that are hard to improvise and which make a big difference. They are

Cutting device (knife)
Combustion device
Cordage
Container (for boiling and carrying water)
Cover (like a tarpauline)

Compass
Cotton (kerchief or shemagh)
Cargo tape (duct tape really)
Canvas needle (a strong needle)
Candle (or other item for light at night)

Now, for survival, I think these are all good things to have. I have a high opinion of Dave Canterbury … and his 10 C’s. If you know these and are familiar with them – that’s great. I agree with his priorities for a wide variety of situations.

I do have two caveats though.

This short article is about something very simple: remembering stuff. Having all the same initial letter makes a memorable (and now perhaps iconic) unified idea, but doesn’t give much help in remembering the individual items! If you are familiar enough with all of them, then that is not a problem. But perhaps you’d like to consider some other mnemonics (memory devices).
But first, my other caveat is this, as I explained in “Be Prepared 1”. We are talking about a surprise unscheduled journey, probably on foot. I’m not thinking in terms of an unplanned “survival situation”, but more in terms of a planned (if unscheduled) expedition (e.g. getting home from an incident, or disappearing from home for a while). If I were planning for an event which involved an unscheduled stay out of doors I would be planning to do better than just survive. I’m aiming to thrive; particularly to sleep well; to be as unstressed as possible; and being discrete is quite a likely requirement. For sure I’ll want the ability to make a fire – it can keep you warm, purify water, and signal – but for preference I’ll purify water with a filter, and have adequate insulation and wind protection. Fires are very conspicuous in terms of smell, smoke, flames, and a big heat signature on thermal imaging. They are often illegal in dry conditions (for a good reason). Keeping warm with a fire will cost a lot of sleep, and fuel, and your own energy.

“An Unexpected Journey”

These “Unexpected Journeys” are not just fictional or hypothetical. My own preparation was put to the test recently. People often think in terms of a bag ready for an unexpected 48 hour or 72 hour adventure; but (due to covid and other exigencies) I was recently - at no notice - unable to go home for nearly 6 months! and had to live out of my lightweight backpack. I did have some sterling support from friends and family who went well beyond the call of duty, for which I am eternally grateful, but still – there is a limit to how long you can outstay your welcome. Guests and fish go off after three days, it is said. So, being too poor or stingy to stay in B&B for months at a time I went hiking and camping in some lovely parts of Devon and other places. I wasn’t homeless in the sense of being destitute and without income – that is completely different – but I certainly got plenty of practice and experience in using and exploring my kit. And I was certainly very glad, during those months, that I had a little more than “the 10 C’s” with me!

Evening: hammock and poncho on steep ground by a river (3 feet behind me). You can see the hammock’s bug net, boots airing, and the day’s shirt and underpants drying after being washed.

You can’t lose a list that’s in your head, if you remember it well enough. Before the advent of printing, there were several memory techniques that were well known.

1 A Mnemonic Phrase

Here’s Jack from “Black Scout Survival Foundation” (YouTube channel) with a similar list and mindset to Dave Canterbury’s, but this sort of mnemonic makes it easier to remember the different items. You will see that the initial letters make up an appropriate phrase for a Get Home Bag - “BACK HOME”.

Blaze and burn

All weather blanket

Cordage

Knife

Headlamp

Orienteering tools

Metal Canteen

Emergency signal

Jack covers this in his video

Even this requires some practice though. It’s a couple of years since I came across his video. I remembered the phrase, but wasn’t able to use it to identify more than four of the eight items. The connection between the letter “A” and “all-weather blanket” for example, is rather tenuous. With use though, I suspect it would perform somewhat better than the “10 C’s”.

If we compare his list to Dave Canterbury’s we see he omits three of the 10 C’s – needle, tape and cotton, and inserts one – emergency signalling. If you come up with your own phrase for your own list, then you will remember it better.

2 A Narrative

Another memory device is a narrative, a story which reminds you of things to take. You may know a movie about a Vietnam veteran who returns home, gets in trouble with the police, then escapes, grabbing his knife as he runs out. He cuts some canvas and a clothes line to cover himself, and later sews up a bad gash in his skin with needle and thread … and so on. These images might be familiar and vivid to you, if you’ve seen the movie. Or make your own narrative up.

3 Memory Palaces

Personally, I don’t use either of these. Like Josh (the Grey-bearded Green Beret) whom I mentioned in “Be Prepared 1”, I think more in terms of kits – a sleep kit; a food and water kit e.g.

One memory device is called the “memory palace”. (You can see Hannibal Lecter refer to it in one of those films: he occupies his mind in prison exploring his “memory palace”).

So in this case you could imagine your own dwelling, which has the advantage of being well known to you, with your sleep kit set out in the bedroom, your eating and drinking kit set out in the kitchen, tools in a toolshed, washing stuff in the bathroom or utility room and so on. This divides the list into shorter sub-lists and uses visual memory. When you come to check that you’ve got everything you need, you simply take an imaginary walk around and look into each room. A slightly different approach, which makes things more memorable, is to make them more extraordinary than your usual abode. So perhaps you could conjure up an ideal dwelling; and visualise things so as to make them conspicuous. So you might open the study door, and start to walk in, only to bump your face on the map and compass which are dangling in the transparent map case from the top of the door frame; then you see that your wife has helpfully fixed some broad yellow ribbons to the ceiling and walls, which all converge on the drawer which contains your passport (for an entirely hypothetical someone who had forgotten their passport on more than one occasion …). The more vivid and extraordinary you can make images, the more memorable they are. Mentally, you walk in, pick up your passport, and find that there’s a foot of string attached to it with your wallet on the end, and below that another length from which dangles your phone. (Make sure you “feel” in your mind the chaotic swing of the phone and wallet as you hold the passport ). You are then aware that your ferry ticket has stuck to the sole of your shoe with chewing gum, for example. Make the memory colourful, freaky, rude, noisy … in short, memorable.

What I do myself might be thought of as a kind of memory palace, I suppose. I look at my hand, and associate different parts of it with different kits. Even if you have been careless or unfortunate enough to lose a hand, you will be familiar with what they look like. So the first thing is I see the

cuff of my shirt, so I consider the clothes I am wearing (or will need to wear) from the outside in, and from head to foot. Then
the palm of my hand, and I consider what container I am going to carry stuff in. Is it just the clothes I have on, or add my handbag, &/or my lightweight go bag (if I’m going to be literally running) &/or my lightweight rucksack, or heavy duty rucksack, or bicycle, motorbike or car? The carrier you are able to take could have a big influence on what you carry.
My little finger reminds me how weak we are compared to other animals with claws, eyes like a hawk or an owl. Humans have the ingenuity to compensate with tools. Instead of claws I need a knife (and perhaps other cutting tools) a headtorch to see at night; maybe binoculars. And the one tool no other animal uses – fire lighting ability. So I look at the three bones of my little finger, my toolkit finger, and think “knife, light, lighter”.
My ring finger reminds me we have a hole running through us, into which we need to put food and water. So I look at the three bones of my ring finger and think “food, water, and something to heat it in. (The extent of the water kit carried, for example, will depend not just on how it is going to be carried, and how much it’s going to be carried, but the availability and likely quality of the water).
My middle finger, the longest, reminds me of the upright I’m going to need for my shelter: trees for a hammock; or one tree to support a corner of a tarp, or a walking staff or stick … i.e. my sleep kit. I look at the three bones of my middle finger and think “what’s under me, around me, and over me” (which will include cordage to hold it up).
My index finger reminds me of doing dextrous sewing – like Silvester Stallone sewing up the gash in his skin. I look at the three bones of my index finger and think “maintenance and repair – times two”, meaning maintenance and repair of both myself and my kit. So maintenance of myself includes washing, sun-screen, bug-repellant etc.; repair of oneself is normally called First Aid; kit maintenance might include a battery charger, petroleum jelly for leather shoes, beeswax for waterproofing things, a knife sharpener; whilst repair might signify a sewing kit, duct tape for tears in a tarp etc.
The thumb is used for signalling that you want a lift somewhere, and so reminds me primarily of communication and navigation (the two bones of the thumb). Map and compass - phone and radios come to mind first. What they have in common is that they are about information. The thumb is all information, which can include timetables, money, phone numbers, plane tickets.
Finally I make a fist, and think defense and concealment. I grew up in the UK, where nobody carries a gun, and currently live in a country where owning a weapon puts you on a list which corruption might mean you end up the target of a criminal who’s after your gun. So I have never owned a gun, am absolutely no expert on weapons, and won’t have any views to offer on that front. Literally the only time I have ever used a weapon in earnest in sixty-odd years was once using a walking staff and pepper spray to protect myself from a couple of aggressive dogs. (But those simple devices did make a vital difference).

Of course, when it comes to lists, there’s also a lot to be said for the mark I Pencil and Paper®!

If you look on YouTube there are a thousand-and-one videos with people showing you what is in their bag. There is no shortage of advice on what to carry. I shall in future do articles about each of these six kits, and on “layering” the basics (falling back on even easier-to-carry things when you can’t take everything you want); but I shall try and restrict myself to fairly original observations.

Incidentally, I’m glad I went when I did: at the time, the law in the UK had recently been changed, so that as far as I could find out, Dartmoor was the only place left in the country where you were still allowed to wild camp. Now (January 2023) I hear that even that exception has been eliminated.

If, for some reason, you didn’t read the minutes or conclusion of the Earth Summit (the UN Conference on Environment and Development) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992 … (and I’m guessing there might be one or two of you) … then you might not have known that this was coming. But they consider you warned. Rosa Koire and others have been trying to bring this to your attention for years.

“Rosa Koire is a forensic commercial real estate appraiser specializing in eminent domain valuation. Her twenty-eight year career as an expert witness on land use has culminated in exposing the impacts of Sustainable Development on private property rights and individual liberty.”1

Everybody is in favour of sustainable development (we know what that means); but Sustainable Development is a very different animal. If you don’t know what it involves, look up some videos by Rosa Koire. If they have been removed from YouTube, then try other video sites, like Rumble, Bitchute and so on. Incidentally, Rosa died very recently, which I’m sure will not bring tears to the eyes of the “Sustainable Development” crowd (but I digress …)

Varying circumstances can dictate how much you need to carry, and can carry. There is no great mystery about this: you are simply packing to travel. That may be a somewhat less appealing, dramatic or romantic slant than all the military-flavour bug-out bags that you see on YouTube, but it is accurate.

I think I should be able to give you some useful ideas. I’ll start next with what I think is the most important item that is almost universally omitted from such bags. I’ve use it “in the field” for about 45 years. It costs about half a dollar or pound, and weighs about 12g - less than half an ounce. For me it would definitely be up there in the second tier of 5 C’s.

What Do I No?