38—Emergency Management

With The Big One due and inevitable, I began preparing my emergency earthquake kit with the zeal of a bunker-mentality survivalist. 

If only I hadn’t given away my finely crafted frame backpack that had taken me from the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the heights of Mt. Whitney…if only I hadn’t left my beloved desert…if only development hadn’t sent Vegas rents skyrocketing, I could go…but no, there was no going back. 

So with time ticking, I began searching online for an appropriate emergency supply kit. 
Perfect: a large green ripstop nylon, water-resistant duffle bag with back-packing straps—easily tossed in the back of the pickup for quick getaways or strapped to my back if fleeing on foot.

While waiting for my duffle to arrive, I bought a collection of travel-sized toiletries, eye drops, suntan lotion, mosquito repellant, wipes, sanitizers, and other sundries. I’d saved the camp stove and stainless cook set from my backpacking days, along with some emergency blankets, waterproof matches, and a water filter. At the local sporting goods store, I picked up some fuel, a Leatherman utility tool, emergency flares, a headlamp along with an economy-size pack of batteries for my flashlight, a more extensive Red Cross-approved first-aid kit than the one I had, a rain poncho, cord, a folding shovel, a small ax, pouches of freeze-dried food for me, and kibble which I secured in plastic freezer bags for the cats. I also bought duct tape and a packet of bungy cords. 

For emergency cat evacuation, I bought a sturdy dolly and stacked the carriers on it. Using the bungy cords, I secured three half-gallon bottles of water and my backpacking tent on top of the carriers.

With all my gear laid out on the floor, I pictured myself hunkered down with the cats in the back of the truck or tucked away in my tent. After a busy day of meeting my survival needs, I could catch up on the latest disaster news via my solar-powered radio while waiting for my Thai rice to rehydrate. After dinner, I would kick back in my Polar-tec sleeping bag. Enjoying my cup of evening tea spiked with a touch of Seagrams, I’d pass the time reading aloud to the cats from my palm-sized Emily Dickinson or the Tao Te Ching.  

Joads: americanroadmap.wordpress.org

The moment the duffle arrived, I packed it. Then, to get the feel of the pack before strapping on the compression bag, I slung the duffle over my right shoulder onto my back. The weight of the thing nearly took me to the floor as everything inside slumped rattling and wobbly to the bottom. As I hunched across the floor toward the fireplace, all I could see in the mirror over the mantle was a pathetic reenactment of the Joad family fleeing the Dust Bowl in their rickety old truck. 

I let the pack drop to the floor and stood staring at my exercise in futility. Following the ten minutes of 9.0 quaking that would cause the land beneath me to liquify then sink fifty feet, I’d have fifteen minutes of calm while the hundred-foot tsunami got its act together. I'd be lucky to find my cats in the midst of the devastation, let alone secure them in carriers and run a mile out of the inudation zone through downed trees, live electrical wires, and terrestrial mayhem—with or without my ridiculous pack. 

Security of any kind was an illusion. Other than mortician, no career promised more security than teaching. But even with a file full of exemplary evaluations, I'd been dismissed. I could leave this beautiful coastline and be squished under a bus in downtown Pittsburgh.

On my way into town to return the forty-dollar dolly, the small brave part of me found the whole thing funny. 
On my way home, I stopped at the library, pleased to find the anthology called Existentialism. My copy was packed away in the back of the moving van that had broken down somewhere between here and there. I’d bought the book when I was seventeen and over the years had adopted the practice of opening it at random for guidance through life’s absurdities. 

p. 197: “Existenz only becomes clear through reason; reason only becomes clear through Existenz.” 
Thanks for nothing, Jaspers.

At home, I consulted the ancient Chinese text that never failed me. “I Ching,” I asked with the abstraction of desperation, “what the hell’s wrong with me?” 
I then tossed my coins to divine the answer.
The coins directed me to number four—“Youthful Folly.” I was not, it seems, wanting in talent or discipline. Nor was I suffering from laziness or evil influences. 
The problem: “You are totally inexperienced in your current situation.” No shit, Sherlock. 
The answer: I needed to “find a teacher.”
“Gimme a damned break,” I muttered, having been dissed repeatedly by Heron.
“Don’t argue with your teacher,” the cagey I Ching replied, then added several lines later, “You have a blind spot within your Self.” 

I slammed the Oracle shut and was dragging the emergency duffle, rattling and wobbly, into the hall storage area when, oh right, just what I needed to complete the absurdity—

thonk.