Pack Your Lunch
An excerpt from ‘The Disaster Diaries’
Surviving is often nuts and bolts, food and shelter. On any typical camping trip, with the right ten items, it’s fun; without them, you can die. It can be that simple.
What are the immediate dangers you face? What are the probabilities? What’s going to happen when the North Koreans detonate an electromagnetic pulse and turn off all electronic devices forever? The truth is, our modern cities are exquisitely vulnerable, and that without the functioning of “the grid,” (water, power, sanitation) they cannot support our current population levels. That’s a simple fact.
What to do about it?
I decided that one month’s worth of food and water was a start. I made my lists: candles and flashlights, tons of spare batteries, line, string, and so forth. I had all my camping gear, but I bought new water filters, tarps, tents, ponchos for the go bag.
For those of you who don’t know, the go bag (or the bug-out bag, or the ditch bag) is a small bag filled with essentials that you grab on the way out the door. It’s always ready, and so are you. When I worked on boats, we had our passports wrapped in plastic and a water jug in the ditch bag, so if the boat was sinking, you grabbed that on the way to the life raft. This is a survivalist staple. Having a go bag is usually a good idea, something small already in your car, a bigger one in your home. It’s easy to get sucked into wanting a bigger and bigger bag (do I add a tent? water filtration?), but try to keep it reasonable.
The more I planned, the less comfortable I felt. My situation was not a good one for a lengthy disaster. I don’t mean weeks stretching into months. That’s fairly scary. But the real humdinger is when government and society collapse, when a catastrophe of such severity hits that it shatters the man-made world.
Some of the survivalists call it long-term grid-down, or TEOTWAWKI, a desperate acronym for The End of the World as We Know It, what happens after a widespread nuclear war, a massive comet strike, The War of the Worlds. No more sweet US of A. The post-apocalypse, the stuff of so many movies and books, a place where we’ve all spent time: Mad Max, The Road, Resident Evil. There’s usually a lot of fantasy mixed in with theory.
A great friend of mine told me a piece of family history: “My grandfather was a Jew in Berlin, and he waited and waited to get his family out; he got my father and his siblings out two weeks before the Nazis closed the borders.” The Nazis officially closed those borders in 1941. If his grandfather hadn’t finally gotten off his ass, we probably wouldn’t be friends.
Could I give up everything and walk away to follow an instinct, a gut feeling, or even an obvious risk? Could you do it right now, leave everything and go try to look for work and support yourself, maybe in a city where you don’t speak the language? Head for the mountains?
Los Angeles is an immense, fragile, vulnerable city. The vulnerabilities are in plain sight. Fifteen million souls, balanced like a dew- drop on a spiderweb. How fragile are these systems? Have we waited too long? The climate change science is right there, whether you believe it or not. The earthquake warnings are out there. Like the song says, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.
So is it time to go? And if so, where?
A lot of “survivalist” thinking means building a retreat somewhere deep in the woods, off the grid. A hidden bunker. Survivalist books contain endless pages on the different guns, the massive freezers, generators, razor wire—all based on an unspoken dose of self-hating fear (“don’t let your neighbors see your preparations, they’re potential looters”).
The more I read, the more I thought, the more hopeless it all seemed. Even if I could afford a proper panic room in LA, or a retreat in Montana, what if it’s not what I expected? What if the fallout winds blanket Montana with four inches of fresh radioactive powder? What if we’re in New York on a business trip when the bombs start falling? Are you gonna live the rest of your life in the bunker?
When the end does come, it will most likely be from a completely unforeseen cause. A meteor that NASA’s forward scattered radar missed (or even one we know about—how would we stop it? Bruce Willis?) slams into the Earth and the ash blocks out the sun for a hundred years. The NORAD computers decide that all humans, not just the Russians, are the real enemy, and launch the nukes. Human beings are notoriously bad at acknowledging the unforeseen, even personally: check the current divorce rate, something like 40 percent. As much as we game scenarios and plan, the “Black Swan” problem will bite us in the ass.
The Black Swan is more or less the intellectual property of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a stock-market quant who wrote a book with the same name. The concept refers to the societal blindness of pre-seventeenth- century Europeans who, having only seen white swans, would say, “A good man is like a black swan,” implying that no truly good men exist. Of course, there are black swans, in Australia, and when they were discovered, the term gained a new notoriety: now referring to the existence of the unforeseen. Taleb refers to any extreme unexpected event as a Black Swan, and he makes the excellent point that afterward, everyone can retroactively “see it coming”—this event led to that event—but really, there is no way to predict a Black Swan because of the complexity of the system.
Taleb reiterates a point made famous by Bertrand Russell about the life of a domestic turkey. For the turkey, every day gets better, and it comes to see humans as trustworthy food providers. Then Thanksgiving comes. That day is a Black Swan for the turkey. All of its experience and knowledge actually hurt the turkey’s survival chances.
We’re just a bunch of domestic turkeys. Sorry.
Intuition is set up for understanding small, simple systems— things that primitive man might encounter on the plains of Africa. You’re wired for hunting and gathering, for small social interchanges, and to be afraid of predators—not run a nuclear power plant or manage an investment fund. Your intuition, your gut reaction to a single person might be accurate, but your gut won’t help you identify trends in big systems.
So in the real world we are guaranteed to be surprised by the Black Swan cataclysm. We won’t see it coming, at least as a society. But some individuals might do okay—there are always those guys who guessed right, or who were in the right spot to see what was coming down the road.
Maybe, just maybe, I can be that turkey with excellent situational awareness.
I’ve spent nine years writing about mixed martial arts (MMA), a rapidly evolving combat sport, fought in a cage where fighters can punch, kick, and wrestle. Without a doubt, the more well-rounded fighters, with more options—the fighters who can wrestle well and kick-box well—are the ones who have real success. You’ve got to be able to do everything in MMA. It makes sense: you want a strategy, but you also want to be like water, flowing with the fight, seeking out cracks and weakness. Never be a slave to the game plan.
As far as the survival-retreat plan goes: the military strategists love to paraphrase an old German strategist, Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, who was probably poaching his instructors when he came up with the nugget, “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.” Or, as Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
I was surprised by how many people I talked to in LA had the same escape plan: get down to the marina and steal a boat. People in Malibu and Topanga Canyon, miles away, talked to me about having four-wheelers so they could come down the beach, all the way to Marina Del Rey, and steal a yacht out of the harbor.
Now, I’ve sailed around the world, more or less. Some of these people had never been on a boat. With the right wind, I could steal a yacht and sail it right out of the marina without a problem. It’s definitely something I’ve thought about. But it’s by no means a gimme— there are thousands of people who live overlooking the marina, and many of them have boats. They might stop you. And what if the tsunami trashes the marina entirely? Then what?
We know about how fear and stress can affect your mind in the short term. What about days and weeks and months of denial? This can’t be happening.
Without a doubt, the single biggest long-term problem facing you in a true apocalypse is adjusting your reality. Getting through denial, that’s the bitch of the bunch.
The horror of Armageddon is of course, unknowable. We don’t really know what would happen to people in the event of a zombie apocalypse, or if a superflu kills 99 percent of humanity. But we do have accounts of the worst, most unthinkably horrible thing that ever happened in modern history: the Holocaust. In Terrence Des Pres’ wonderful, terrible book The Survivor, he analyzed accounts by and interviews with hundreds or even thousands of both Holocaust and Soviet gulag survivors.
He found newcomers to the camps had the highest death rate. Des Pres lists lack of information and grief as primary killers, but most new prisoners died “from prolonged terror and shock; from radical loss, both of identity and of faith in the capacity of goodness to prevail against the evil surrounding them.” The adjustment period, before you can come to grips with the new reality, is the most dangerous time. For the newcomer to the camp, mortal danger lay in “the horror and irreparable hurt felt by the prisoner when he or she first encounters the spectacle of atrocity. Moral disgust, if it arises too abruptly or becomes too intense, expresses itself in the desire to die, to have done with such a world.”
The shock of being thrown into a concentration camp might be similar to the shock at seeing your town overrun with zombies or aliens. If you witnessed some unbelievable, mind-bending, world- shattering event, this spectacle of atrocity might kill your spirit, and the body would quickly follow.
If you could survive long enough, Des Pres found, you might recover your will to live. From all his interviews, he set the recovery time at anywhere between a week and several months. Criminals did better, because they were used to breaking the rules. In the camps, if you followed all the rules, you were dead in a month. Criminals recognized the face of this camp social order; they could recognize “us against them”—to the death—earlier than law-abiding citizens. They were in less denial about the changes to their reality.
You have to find a way to survive that adjustment period of shock and help others get through it. You have to find a way to limit denial.
The place to start is with the opposite of denial: acceptance. If you have the imagination to accept that aliens are invading or that the dead are walking, then you’ll have the imagination to accept that this earthquake is indeed the Big One. The more you can accept that things have changed, the less time you’ll waste on denial and “milling” (disaster-speak for checking in with other people and doing nothing) and the sooner you will take action. If the shit really hits the fan, I’ll take a semi-decent plan right now over a good plan in ten minutes or a perfect plan later. The faster you can accept that everything has changed, that everything you’ve worked for all your life is now gone, the better off you’ll be during the apocalypse. I’m not talking about actually redefining reality; I’m talking about adopting an attitude— “What’s right in front of me?” It’s about looking at what you see without preconceptions. If you start limiting your emergency plans to only what you think is likely, then you’re screwed.
All my preparations may be for naught, as I will statistically probably be one of the dead rather than one of the living, but that’s a fact I can safely ignore, because it doesn’t do me any good. So let’s assume, for the sake of our sanity, that we survive, at least for a little while. And if my family did have the tremendous good fortune to survive, say, a meteor storm that destroys two-thirds of the world, it would be a goddamn shame to die because I don’t know how to hunt for food.
Be as ready as possible, be ready for anything: climate change, zombies, the undreamed of. Relying on a bunker is a weakness. Worse, it’s a mental crutch: the evidence might be saying get the hell out, but you’ve put so much time into this bunker that you stay when you should have gone. Prepare by readying your mind and body, the things that will always be with you. Sitting in a bunker with a sweaty shot- gun in your hand is paranoia, but learning the skills to be self-reliant is common sense. I had learned some basic stuff that I knew would come in handy—stay fit, be strong. But in the unknown world that loomed on my horizon, there was a lot I didn’t know.
I could fix that.
