This grungy old green tote bag I schlep all my junk in every Monday came as a gift from The Denver Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security when, about ten years ago, I took a class rather grandiosely titled CITIZEN EMERGENCY RESPONSE TRAINING. It was actually pretty basic, but it did inspire me to a certain basic level of preparedness. No, Betsy and I are not about to go and live in a cave in the wilderness where we have hauled enough supplies for a year, accompanied by enough guns and ammo to fight off the hungry hordes who failed to prepare. But I do believe, especially in these uncertain times, a little planning is worthwhile.
And no, I don’t lose sleep worrying over alien invasions (from this planet or any other) or, where we live, floods. Earthquakes and tornadoes are always possible but not huge threats right here. My main concern is our infamous Grid. I fear The Grid could easily fail us. Natural disasters or computer hackers could equally easily bring it down. And no, I don’t necessarily mean the real Doomsday scenario in which one big sector comes down which in turn overloads the next until the entire country, or the whole continent, is without power. It probably could happen, but it is beyond the scale of any preparations I plan to make for survival.
Remember the panic over The Millennium? Computers were going to crash so nothing would work: no power, no gas, no groceries? That’s very much my vision of life without The Grid. Very little will work. How easily we forget, when we have all those things, our degree of dependence upon The Grid. We’ve all sat through power outages of a couple of hours; maybe even a couple of days. It really is miserable. We cannot get out of the habit of anything and everything being available at the flick of a switch or the turn of a knob, or more likely the tap of a key. And it’s all gone.
My worst-case survival preparation is a month without power. It’s not too hard to envision damage to The Grid severe enough that it takes a month to bring it back up. We have enough bottled water and canned food to stretch, very meagerly, for three or four weeks. We have sleeping bags in the basement, which retains a pretty even temperature so we shouldn’t burn up in a summer emergency or freeze in mid-winter. We have wind-up flashlights and a lantern – irritating because of the continuous cranking required but good enough until we can replace the inevitably dead batteries in the good lights. And we do have a good supply of batteries. We have endless books for entertainment in the daylight hours, along with playing cards and board games. We have a camp stove with a couple of fuel bottles, so we could heat up food or water, if only occasionally. We have cash – very well hidden so don’t even think about it! – because even if any supplies are to be had we clearly will not be able to use credit cards. What we do not have is those guns and ammo the TV survivalists always display, so if we get to the stage of starving marauders breaking and entering I fear we’re doomed. Other than that, I’d say we’ve got a pretty good chance.
When I took that class, it was quite apparent that most of us were Seniors. Who among the young people have time even to think about surviving for a month without power, never mind taking time actually to prepare for such a thing. Good preparation in fact usually saves time in the long run, but most young people find it hard to concentrate on that long run. When we’re young we wing it; fly by the seat of our pants. It takes time to prepare and in youth time is scarce – or at least that’s how it seems.
As I age I find preparation increasingly important, you might say vital. Fortunately, in retirement I have time for it. I schedule my cups of tea very carefully so that, with a little luck, I will not have to scuttle to the bathroom in the middle of Act One. Before our month-long road trip last year we each had a ‘staging area’ to collect everything we needed to take with us. This has to be a large area of floor where things can be spread out, so we can check and recheck what we have already placed there. Things cannot be put in the car or into the suitcase because we can’t remember what we’ve packed and spend days or weeks packing and unpacking and repacking.
I never go the grocery store without a carefully prepared list – even if it only has one item on it. If I go without that piece of paper I shall return home with seventeen things I bought in case we’re out but I can’t remember. The thing I won’t have is the one thing I went for in the first place.
Old age is a full-time job!
Problem is, preparation doesn’t always work. Just last Monday I carefully gathered up all library items which needed to be returned on my way to The Center, remembered to put my library card with them to check out new books, placed everything in a tote bag which I put right in front of the door into the garage so I couldn’t possibly forget it. Come time to leave I picked up the bag and went into the garage. There I remembered my other bag, this old green one I talked about earlier, was still sitting on the table with my story in it. I put down the library bag, went back into the kitchen for the Storytime bag, into the car and I was off! Only as I drove past the library did I remember the bag left sitting on the garage floor.
I fear that our careful emergency prep will fail if ever put to the test. We’ve hidden the cash so carefully that neither of us will remember where it is and no amount of searching will turn it up.
Our arthritic fingers will be too weak to open any of the cans with the old manual opener, ditto any screw-tops. We might be able to manage the water, but it’s stored in carcinogenic plastic bottles so by then will probably kill us.
The fact is that time is running out and no amount of preparation can stop it. I don’t find that depressing; I find it deeply relaxing. It relieves an awful lot of pressure. So I’ll try to get the list right before I go to the store, and I’ll try to return my library books on time. But if I don’t, the world will not tilt on it’s axis or turn to blue cheese. I have finally found how to live in the now.
© January 2018
About the Author
I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.
