Maintained by the Council. Updated quarterly, or whenever someone discovers they can do something useful. Last audit: Day 834.
One of the first things we learned after The Correction is that most of what we knew how to do was useless. Not useless in the abstract — useless in the specific, physical, keeping-yourself-alive sense. A stunning number of adults arrived on this island unable to start a fire, identify a food plant, or tie a knot that held.
What follows is the settlement’s skills inventory. It is both a practical resource (who do you ask when you need something done?) and a quiet record of how much we’ve had to learn, and from whom.
Category A: Critical Skills (Settlement Cannot Function Without)
Fish Processing & Preservation
Lead: Jim Taggart
Apprentices: Greg Huang, Maya Kowalski, Elena Vasquez
Method: Adapted from traditional Tlingit smoking and drying techniques documented at Chuck Lake archaeological site (8,800 years of refinement; we are on Year 2). Cold-smoking in cedar-plank smokehouse. Air-drying on racks when weather permits, which is rarely.
Output: Approximately 70% of the settlement’s preserved protein.
Notes: Jim learned from his grandmother in Craig. He is the single most important person in this settlement in terms of caloric output. We do not tell him this because he is already insufferable about fish.
Medicinal Plant Knowledge
Lead: Dr. Yuki Tanaka (by default — see her field notes for commentary)
Apprentice: Elena Vasquez
Current pharmacopoeia: Devil’s club inner bark (antiseptic, anti-inflammatory), yarrow (wound treatment), Labrador tea (respiratory), spruce pitch (wound sealant), spruce needle tea (vitamin C / scurvy prevention), plantain leaf (insect stings), salmonberry bark (stomach issues).
Status: Actively expanding. Dr. Tanaka is cross-referencing recovered botanical guides with observable plants. She emphasizes that she is “learning in real-time on living patients,” which she finds “professionally horrifying.”
Shelter Construction
Lead: Tom Kowalski
Crew: Dale (reluctantly), Monk, rotating volunteers
Method: Post-and-beam construction using locally harvested cedar and spruce. Roofing with cedar bark and salvaged tarps. Insulation with dried moss and cedar bark mats. Based partly on Coast Salish longhouse principles, partly on trial and horrifying error.
Notes: Tom was a marketing executive. He learned construction by reading a salvaged copy of “The Complete Guide to Building Log Homes” and then immediately discovering that the guide was incomplete. He has since learned more from studying how the original inhabitants built than from any modern source. The longhouse is the settlement’s best structure and it’s the one most closely based on traditional design. This is not a coincidence.
Water Management
Lead: Linda Okamoto
System: Gravity-fed from Chuck Creek, filtered through sand and charcoal, boiled before consumption. Rainwater collection (cedar-lined barrels) as backup — which given the rainfall here means the “backup” system produces more water than the primary.
Notes: Giardia outbreak in Month 3 taught us the importance of this role. Two people were incapacitated for weeks. We do not talk about what that was like. We just boil the water now.
Category B: Important Skills
Power Generation & Communications
Lead: Greg Huang
Systems: Two solar panels (salvaged from Craig), one micro-wind turbine (built from a car alternator and cedar blades — it works about 40% of the time and makes a sound Dale describes as “a goose dying”), battery bank (marine batteries from an abandoned boat).
Communications: Shortwave radio (daily monitoring), settlement mesh network (local only, text-based, powered by three repurposed routers and Greg’s rapidly deteriorating sanity).
Background: Greg was a telecom engineer. He says this experience is “about 15% relevant” to his current role. The other 85% is “figuring out how electricity works when you don’t have electricity.”
Navigation & Cartography
Lead: Linda Okamoto
Assets: Hand-drawn maps of the island (Linda), tide tables (reconstructed from observation over 18 months), star navigation basics (learned from a surviving copy of a celestial navigation manual).
Watercraft: Two functional kayaks (Kayaks One and Two), Dale’s boat (which Dale has declared “private property,” a concept the Council has declined to recognize but also declined to test).
Notes: Jim Haines is currently constructing Kayak Three. Kayaks One and Two were his first and second attempts, respectively. They float, which was not guaranteed.
Food Cultivation
Lead: Bev
Current plots: Three raised garden beds (potato, kale, turnips — the things that survive the rain and the deer). Experimental seaweed cultivation along the south shore.
Challenges: Everything here grows. That’s the problem. The things we want to grow compete with the things the forest wants to grow, and the forest has an 8,000-year head start. Bev has declared war on a particular patch of salal and she is losing.
Notes: Most of our calories still come from wild harvest (fish, game, foraged plants). Cultivation supplements but does not replace knowledge of the land.
Category C: Useful Skills
Education
Lead: Elena Vasquez
Students: 4 children (ages 6–14), plus adult learners on rotation
Curriculum: Reading, math, botany, marine biology (taught by Dr. Tanaka), fish processing (taught by Jim), shelter skills, and “History of This Place” (a course Elena developed using the recovered Archive documents).
Notes: Elena has a Master’s in Education. She says it’s “finally useful” now that she’s teaching children things that will actually keep them alive, instead of preparing them for standardized tests measuring skills that no longer exist.
Record-Keeping
Lead: Marcus Cole
Duties: Council minutes, fish inventory, weather observations, settlement census, field notes collection, archive maintenance, this document.
Notes: Marcus was an accountant. His skills have transferred almost perfectly, except now instead of tracking revenue he tracks salmon, and instead of filing taxes he files complaints about latrine placement. He says the jobs are “structurally identical.”
Morale
Lead: Sarah Peterson
Activities: Weekly communal dinner (Saturdays), storytelling nights, music (Sarah’s guitar, Bev’s singing, Greg’s enthusiastic but terrible drumming on an overturned bucket). Maintains the settlement’s one luxury: a small supply of chocolate traded from Craig, distributed on birthdays and emergencies.
Notes: This is listed under “useful” but the Council has discussed moving it to “critical.” After the Month 9 depression (overcast skies for 34 consecutive days, two near-fights over firewood), Sarah’s Saturday dinners were the thing that held people together. Joy is infrastructure. We didn’t know that before.
Category D: Skills We Used to Have (Now Useless)
For the historical record, the following pre-Correction skills are represented in our settlement population but serve no current function: social media marketing, software engineering (Monk is adapting), corporate law, search engine optimization, management consulting, brand strategy, day trading, and “life coaching.”
The life coach, whose name we are not including per their request, spent their first three months insisting they could “help the settlement optimize its mindset.” The settlement’s mindset optimized itself after the first time we ran out of food.
If you possess a skill not listed here, report it to Marcus or any Council member. We don’t care what it is. The stranger the skill, the more likely we’ll need it eventually. Last month we needed someone who could tan deer hide, and it turned out Dale knew how. Dale. The man who won’t share his boat. He can tan leather. You never know.