boati

overnight means nothing. you dont even need water, much less food. unless it's sub freezing, you dont need fire. If it's not raining, all you need for "shelter' is 5 of the larg garbage bags from the $ tree. Fill a 3 of the bags with dry debris. If the woods debris is wet, take some corrugated boxes out of the bales of same behind wally's. wrap the 3 bags with strips of the bags, cut off of their mouths, so that they cant spread apart when you lay no them. Fill the other 2 bags from the $1 package mostly full of debris. Get your legs into one, pull the other one over you, tying them into place. with strips cut off their mouths.

Poke a breathng hole in front of your face, in the 2 bag enclosure, and lay down on the other 3 bags. If it's raining or if you'll be staying more than one night (ie, rain likely in the future) you'll need either a package of sheet plastic painter's "drop cloth", or you'll have to cut open some more bags, and tape them together.to form your A-frame shelter, Tie the shelter off to wooden stakes with strips cut off of the drop cloth or the sheeting, if you can't afford a $'s worth of twine. Ditto for making the ridge-line, natch.

A church or goodwill will give you lots of heavy winter coats if you ask and you're homeless. If you wear two of them and have two more tied around your legs. this "hobo shelter" suffices down to 20F, without a fire or any more gear/clothing. A discrete Dakota fire pit will heat rocks, chunks of concrete, or a bucket of water at night, without showing a light. The heated items will warm your shelter for 4 hours or more. It only takes an hour or so to make a raised wooden bed. Bury the hot items under the bed in some loose earth, and you'll be ok at 0F. This is with the 4 coats and the garbage bags full of debris, and the tape-sealed plastic shelter.

You'll need a double layer of the plastic at such temps, and debris stuffed between the layers of plastic. and you'll need the 2x2x4 ft cold air "sink-hole". The only people who can't get into shelters are the crazy or dopers. and anyone with any hustle to them gets on a bus for warm areas before sub-freezing weather hits.

boati

I once did day labor for 2 months with a guy who lived exactly like the above. I asked him why he didn't save up enough to get an old vehicle to live in. We were clearing $50 a day at the time, and getting 20 hours of overtime per week, so a week's effort would have got him such a car, in 2011. He said, "well, John, between the bottle of wine, the two packs of cigs and the party girl, I never have any money". Some skank would come "party" with him for an hour or so every evening and take every dime that he had left after the booze and cigs were bought.

BigBassMan

Why not just use decent winter clothing?

BigBassMan

There are a lot better ways to live.

John in AR

Please read that out loud to yourself and see if you recognize the logic disconnect there.

Hint – I’m in Arkansas, walmart’s ‘home court’. In our town, even though we don’t have a kroger or even a walgreens or CVS pharmacy, we have a walmart. They’re seemingly everywhere here. But as many walmarts as we have here, you’re still not going to encounter one when you’ve bugged out into the woods to avoid human population. They put walmart stores where people actually are; not where people aren’t.

Seriously; I was in the woods this weekend – no walmart there.

‘If you’re soaking wet in the woods, just grab some dry cardboard from behind walmart.’ Wow.

Garand

Wow, now that's money........... I remember back after I retired from the Army, my first job was as a Team Leader doing UXO duties on a range that the government wanted to turn back to the local natives. They paid me $7,500 a month and I cleared $4,000 of that.

Dorobuta

have you actually done this, yourself, or is it more mental gymnastics?

Dorobuta

The other disconnect here, is they all have these very large compactors that cardboard boxes go into. They are crushed and compressed. then they are bailed tightly with wires and set aside to be picked up and recycled.

BigBassMan

Most likely never looked behind a Walmart in the last 40 years.

Now goes to dollar store, WalMart too high class for him.

John in AR

I'm still stuck on the "grab cardboard from walmart, while you're hiding in the soaking-wet woods".

BigEd

A title for Melvin's new book "Dumpster Diver Survival: How to scrounge your way through the Suburban Wilderness Apocalypse"