PAYTON H. STANTIS

Dear Sugar,

Are you prepared for climate disaster? What is in your go bag? What will you leave behind?

Yours,

Prepping

Dear Prepping,

The end of the world is always looming around the corner, isn’t it? There’s a genre of apocalypse that you can talk about at a party: the Y2K, zombie, Mayan calendar, asteroid-hits-the-Earth-mass-extinction-event kind. How many raptures have been a bust now? 

There is a safety in the implausibility. One that allows certain folks to get a hard-on dreaming up scenarios in which they get to blow their neighbor’s faces off and steal their stash of gourds. Then there is climate disaster. There are floods in the mountains and fires fought by the sea. One new record high after another, data centers abound, another community leveled, another ecosystem decimated, another species lost. There is no certainty, no safety as we wait for our turn like frogs in the pot.

The Walking Dead and Annie Jacobsen’s accounts of nuclear apocalypse gave me comfort while living through a plague. Those days spent with my mind fixed on the world flailing around me. Protesters tear-gassed and run over by cars. Wildfire-scorched fur and tender flesh stumbling into a Target parking lot to rest. Death toll tickers on the bottom corners of every screen. I contracted COVID twice, but in the zombie apocalypse I would never get bitten. I’d spend my days hiking around, swimming in serene waterfalls, and foraging with friends. The world nearly empty, save for us and a few pesky brain-eaters. I am conditioned to feel a wave of calmness when I hear the growl of a reanimated corpse. 

The nuclear holocaust scenarios are less dreamy. Potassium Iodide tablets can be at your doorstep in two days thanks to Lord Bezos. 130mg per day for the adults and 65mg for the kids. I know the closet under the stairs would allow for about three square feet of space for food storage (roughly 120 sixteen-ounce mason jars) and 10sqft for my husband, my son, our dogs, and myself. I know to get the 6-mil plastic sheeting and duct tape to seal off the door frame. In these daydream scenarios, I include the dogs. I don’t need to worry about a home for our waste or theirs. Over the two weeks that we find ourselves tucked away from any surviving radioactive chickens or killer dust; I suppose we are coprophagic. Sure, I taught myself to make a fire with no flint and shoot a gun. I can identify local medicinal plants, and I do have a tub full of portable water filters. But honey, let’s face it – if the world is ending, I am ending with it. Are you sticking around?

I have not done the required stockpiling or learned how to spot botulism. I don’t allow myself to invest in the arrival of Armageddon, but my bug-out bag is bursting at the seams.

• A gleam of little teeth as my son giggles at a duck on the side of a pond.
• Wind sweeping my lover’s curls off of his brow as he stares out over a desert lake.
• The tarantula I followed around Balmorhea.
• The love we made in Mexico.
• The scent of sage during a rainstorm in the red hills of Kansas.
• Sweaty skin met with a cool breeze.
• Rocks! Rocks! Rocks! From Big Bend to Big Bear.
• John Denver songs that reduce me to tears.
• The euphoria of salted sourdough with European butter on my taste buds.
• My sister’s fleece blanket riddled with cigarette holes, still steeped in her smell.

I can not say what I would leave behind with a future as unknowable as this. When the end comes, will I even have possessions, or will they be taken by the fires or the rains? I often find myself desperate in my attempts to know what is coming or to have control. After the mental analysis, the predictive astrology, the oracle card readings, the numerology, the Etsy witches, the obsessing – I have come to a place of stillness in the unknown. As I navigate this life making my best attempts to follow the wisdom of the ancients and “be like water” I try to leave the good in my wake. I am hopeful to leave behind a life of service to forests, to rivers, to critters, to humanity, to my family. I spend my days in advocacy of the world I want to create. One based in a knowing that I’m meant to eat fruit in the trees.; not to live against nature. Not meant to cut back my weeds and slaughter the wasps. I am of nature. As are you. If climate disasters destroy the world, then it will destroy us too.

Warmly,

Sugar

This prompt is inspired by Cheryl Strayed’s column, Dear Sugar and gifted to me by the magnificent Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams. I found this exercise to be very expansive and entertaining.

The example we read in class to ground ourself in the tone of the column was fairly graphic. I listened to a classmate read it in my earbuds while my son played five feet away from me and it was quite the juxtaposition.