Anniversaries and disasters

Comfort for the Apocalypse, September 2023

My husband, Brian, and I celebrate our anniversary on the last Sunday of September, no matter what the actual date is. We met for the first time at 4 PM on the last Sunday of September, and three years later we married at the same time and on the same day in the month. Thus, we celebrate both anniversaries in one, and it’s easy to remember. For our sixteenth/thirteenth anniversary this year, I made a gift for each of us in the form of two well-curated and compactly put-together “grab and go” bags, a project that had been on my to-do list for years. A “go” bag is meant to be the essentials one might need when fleeing the house in a disaster scenario (fire, earthquake, flood). It contains a few personal effects, some basic tools and medical supplies, any medications one can’t live without, as well as personal papers.

To put together a “go” bag is to ask yourself what sorts of disasters are most possible or plausible and in which of those you would be forced to leave your home rather than shelter in place. It is to analyze scenarios in which you might have to flee on foot or end up separated from your partner or pet. As you weigh out those threats, you might feel compelled to take on other household tasks, such as replacing old smoke detectors or cutting dry debris away from the side of the house. It’s an exercise in imaginative dread, is what I’m saying, which is probably why I put it off for so many years. (My last attempt at this chore resulted in a single knapsack partly filled with some granola bars, a whistle, and a pair of shoes, which languished in the back of our closet until I dredged it out recently.)

This time around, I really went at it. I got the list of government-recommended supplies, made some additions to it, and then systematically collected and ordered everything for two well-provisioned bags. Though I’m still missing a few items (gas masks, ibuprofen tablets), the bags are sufficiently complete to be put away for the time being.

What is in our go bags: first aid supplies, water, granola bars, cell phone chargers, work gloves, duct tape, sharpies, writing paper and pens, a week’s worth of meal rations each, nalgene bottles full of water, whistles, emergency blankets, radios, flashlights, batteries, copies of ID, photographs of each other, copies of insurance documents, a change of clothes and an extra pair of shoes each, and some cash. At the advice of our neighborhood security coordinator, I also packed a knitting project to keep my hands busy should we be stuck for hours in an evacuation center. Strapped to the outside of our very sturdy packs is a military-grade wool blanket.

It took so long to put all of that together, and yet when I look at this as a list, it seems naively insufficient. Of everything I packed, the item that upset me the most was the ziplock with sharpie pens, blank paper, tape, and photos of loved ones—collected together for the purpose of making a poster should you be looking for someone who has gone missing or has evacuated from a different location. When packaging those things, I was reminded of the thousands of missing person posters plastered all over New York after 9/11, when body parts were slow to be separated from the rubble and no one knew whether their loved ones had died or were perhaps in a hospital somewhere.

According to our neighbourhood security coordinator, having to use these go bags is much less likely than being required to shelter in place. This is something I am well-prepared for with my well-stocked canning pantry, not to mention all the analog crafts like weaving and spinning that take up the better part of my time outside of paid work. Reading MFK Fisher’s book How to Cook a Wolf recently, I realized that for many years I have lived in the manner of a wartime housewife, putting food by when it is inexpensive, buying extra of certain dry goods when they are on sale, and making sure we have enough clothing and other household items to last should there be shortages. I go through periods of paranoid stocking-up whenever there is a particularly bad fire season or global threat to grain distribution, and because of those times, I now have enough for not only ourselves in a protracted emergency, but for those who might come to our door.

How to Cook a Wolf was published in 1942, at the height of the Second World War. It is a work of both food philosophy and recipes, an attempt to inspire courage in the wartime housewife who faced rationing and shortages. In Fisher’s words, the book is her “streamlined answer to the pressing problem of how to exist the best possible way for the least amount of money,” which speaks deeply to my own goal of living my best possible life despite impossible times. Her prescription for wolfish times runs the gamut from using every last bone and scrap to make broths and juices to the penny-by-penny cost of a life-sustaining sludge to get one through the most impoverished periods (this is in the chapter titled How to be Cheerful When Starving). She tells us that “now of all times in history, we should be using our minds as well as our hearts in order to survive... to live gracefully if we live at all.”

In the chapter How Not to Be an Earthworm, Fisher turns her attention to the blackout requirements, which coincided with dinnertime during a greater part of the year. Here she explores the need to create an "emergency cupboard with shelf-stable foods that don’t require much in the way of cooking in case of fuel shortages. She lambastes government recommendations for tinned soups and soda crackers as both non-nutritious and poor in spirit, suggesting instead that one put by canned goods they would eat anyway (as well as some small luxury foods should they be available). According to Fisher, one does not require a hot meal three times per day, and so it’s a good idea to get used to constructing meals that do not require cooking for times when that isn’t possible. It is a question, she tells us, “of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable surprises.”

Fisher was an American, and so her disagreeable surprises are not nearly what they were for the citizens of Europe, and yet….. Reading her words eighty years later, I am struck by how much the climate crisis of today can be likened to the crisis of war. The fires, the floods, the spectre fleeing one’s home with only what can fit into a backpack. Over the last several months and years, we have seen an increase in the number of “events” that have thrown land and lives into an ever-more precarious place. Communities besieged with the terror of “air raids” with no shelters to flee to, a long emergency coming in from all directions.

Because Fisher had lived through WW1 as a small child, she does write with certainty that this second great calamity will come to an end, something that I’m not sure I can do writing inside of the current crisis. It does occur to me though that to survive this, we must start to think of ourselves as in the middle of a protracted war and operate accordingly, taking our cues from those who came before us to prepare for what could come (while hoping that it never does). The go bags are a nod to this, insufficient as they might be, as well as a chance to reflect on all that is important as we pack up the bits of our lives.

Photo taken of local fibre offerings put together by my local fibre working group for the fall fair a couple of weeks ago.

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And finally….

You will notice that this newsletter is missing the recipe and recommendations it normally has - but fear not! I plan to distribute more writing throughout the month instead of saving it up for a single newsletter at the end. I am both working on a book, and toying with the idea of moving my more blog-ish content from Red Cedar over here, and so I’m experimenting with the format of how I produce (and you receive) my offerings.

I will not be writing at red-cedar.ca for the next little while to see how I feel about publishing more “personal” content here, but you can still find photo updates on my instagram @megan.elizabeth.adam - and you’ll be seeing a little bit more of me in your inbox!

Stay well out there, and stay tuned for more.