Amateur Doomsday Prepping 101

Casual conversations turn to topics of survival during cataclysm

Mushroom cloud from Gerhard Vieth's Physikalischer Kinderfreund (1798) as witnessed by Lichtenberg a few years earlier. Anonymous illustrator. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last year, well before the election, before the fires, before Elon Musk became America’s most powerful First Lady since Edith Wilson, there was an earthquake in Los Angeles.

An earthquake is not a rare or special occurrence in Southern California. What was special about this earthquake is that, despite its unremarkable magnitude of 4.1, my house was practically on top of the epicenter. It shook the windows in their frames. I thought the bookshelf in the living room might fall over. It went on for what felt like way too long. Every tremor I’d felt before that day was a bit of a thrill, like a ride at an amusement park. This one was scary like almost getting into a car accident.

After that, I assessed our earthquake kit. You’re supposed to have one when you live near a faultline, but I thought everybody was lying about how serious their kits were, like how everybody tells the dentist that they’re flossing regularly.

Our kit was pathetic. There was a gallon jug of water that my husband had clearly been using as an emergency water supply when he went on runs and didn’t feel like walking all the way to the sink to get some water after he was done. There were several pairs of socks and tee shirts that I had wanted to get rid of but couldn’t for sentimental reasons. A pair of shorts that said “IRISH” across the butt, as was the fashion in the year 2004, but would likely not offer me much protection wading through cataclysmic wreckage.

The rest of the kit had been mostly stripped for parts, as many of the items that one is supposed to include for disaster preparedness also work well when going on a regular-ass vacation with children. (A vacation with children is, functionally, a planned disaster. You’re displaced from your home. You have limited supplies. Everybody is scared and/or stressed out. You think “maybe I’ll read a book” but then you don’t read at all. Scrambled eggs that have been made from a powder. Lots of crying. Flashlights. But I digress.)

At that moment, surveying my sad little earthquake kit and still vibrating from the jolt, I vowed to never be caught with a meager disaster setup again. I spent days researching what items to include in a kit and assembled the whole thing myself. (Buying a premade disaster preparedness kit is cheating!) When it was time to assemble my daughter’s school earthquake kit, I was such a pro that I think I put together the most comprehensive bug-in bag any toddler has ever had. Packed it in an enormous purple duffel bag. Sent it with her on her first day of school. She’d be the envy of the playground when the Big One hit.

My husband returned home with the giant purple duffel bag that very afternoon. The teachers had taken one look at it and said it was too much.

Our power went out a little after 7 pm on the night in January that the Eaton Fire swallowed Altadena. The fire started a little under 10 miles from our house, in a canyon we’d hiked as a family before, but the winds were so strong that our neighbor’s fence– built expertly by the family’s patriarch, a welder– was rattling and slamming. I’d never seen wind like it, and I’d been in New York City for Hurricane Sandy.

We gathered what we needed from the earthquake kit as our three-year-old ran back and forth through the house with a battery-powered lantern. We packed both our cars and drove to a hotel. By the time we got there, the lobby was full of people who were being evacuated, toting their sleepy children, cats in carriers, confused dogs on high alert because the air already smelled like smoke.

The next morning, half of Altadena was gone and the evacuation zone had crept to within two miles of our house. The air inside the hotel was smoky. I delayed recording my podcast until after I was able to drive back to my house to get the cat. She’d been with me for 18 years and goddamn it I was not going to let her think that I was going to let her burn to death. On the car ride down Colorado, the sky was orange and black and ash rained onto the windshield. The fire was six miles away. I’ve never felt a fear quite like the fear of seeing flames reflected in the sky. In our yard, it looked like it was lightly snowing.

I found the cat huddled in a corner of our office. I thought about all of the animals in Altadena and the Palisades and how scared they must be. I had read a post about donkeys in Topanga Canyon running all the way down to Century City and collapsing with exhaustion in somebody’s yard. I’ve never had a positive interaction with a donkey in my life, but fuck that made me cry.

Our electricity didn’t return for a few days, and so we stayed at the hotel before moving to the place of friends who were out of town for the weekend. Even after the lights turned back on, the air was visibly ashy in our neighborhood for several days. The plants on my porch had singe marks on the leaves.

For weeks after the fires, tensions ran high between people who, like me, were attempting to return to semi-normalcy but were wary enough to replace all the air filters in their house and keep the windows closed while keeping Watch Duty open on my phone at all times— and people who believed that returning to normal too soon would lead to dire health consequences full stop.

It seemed like every day I’d get a text or see a post from another mom saying that they had heard from the brother in law of a friend who works for the city that the whole county would be on a boil water notice within 24 hours. Or that the condition of the air in places as far away as Burbank were exactly like the air quality in Lower Manhattan after 9/11. Particles so small they were undetectable to devices that measure air quality were permeating everything that we touched, that our children touched, and that, no matter what government officials said, no matter how many articles by air quality experts debunking the idea that, long after the fires were out and the winds had died down, most of the air was safe to breathe, they were not telling us everything. According to the alarmists, my lungs were filling with poison by the minute. The Air Quality Index was a lie! We were not safe.

I have no idea whether I was correct in dismissing the more alarmist concerns or if I was just operating under the influence of the sort of toxic Pollyannaism that tricks people into believing that things that will definitely not be okay will be okay. The sort of “the arc of history bends toward justice” complacent optimism that just trusts that a happy ending is guaranteed. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I did poison my entire family.

So far, none of the cousin’s friend’s neighbor-generated rumors panned out. Nobody seriously seems to think that we’re all going to die of emphysema because of this– at least they’re not texting me about it anymore or posting ALL CAPS instagram stories urging everybody to panic. I don’t blame people for being scared during a scary time. But I see now how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. amassed a following of Instagram moms. Take a group of people whose concerns are dismissed or downplayed and fill the gaps where they’re not being served with dis- or mis-information or straight up charlatanry, and people who are just trying to do the best for their families and friends will spread rumors like– well, wildfire.

A view of the eastern sky during the Eaton fire, from the San Fernando Valley. Photo by fourbyfourblazer from los angeles, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve been having a lot of conversations with friends who I’d never gotten Bunker Energy from before about what we’re doing “to prepare.”

To prepare for what? We don’t spell it out, exactly. It’s implied.

For the shutdown of the US government. For some kind of civil unrest. For a dismantling of infrastructure that makes the water safe to drink, for food safe to eat. For shortages. For tariffs. For a complete collapse of the American dollar in one of the most brazen crypto pump-and-dump schemes imaginable. (I’m convinced that this is Trump and Elon’s long game. Ruin America, tank the dollar, everybody runs to crypto, thus driving the price up. It’s Scooby-Doo villain-level scheming. Nothing more complicated than that.)

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Friends are talking about moving to Spain. Everybody’s talking about moving to Spain! I don’t think anybody’s done the paperwork yet. In a twist that Montezuma would probably find hilarious, the Spanish people are feeling overwhelmed and oppressed by the number of foreigners who are trying to go to Spain.

Maybe Portugal?

I looked into Canada after the 2016 election and quickly shut that one down when I realized how hard it would be to establish myself as somebody useful to the country of Canada. Who needs podcasters? Who needs writers? Not Canada!

Other people I’ve talked to have bandied about the idea of getting citizenship to countries based on their ancestry. A lot of people want to do this in Italy, but it doesn’t make much sense to flee the fascist flirtings of the homeland for another country that is run by another, different fascist. Plus, that only works patrilineally and the Italians are not famous for being fast at processing paperwork.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Reddit forums about leaving the country. I’m not sure why. I’m not leaving California. I believe that it’s probably too late. The right time to get started on leaving the US was a year ago.

On the forums, a lot of Americans believe that other countries will automatically want them just because they are American. There are commenters who seem to camp out there only to pour cold water on panicking Americans’ dreams of arriving in Norway to a rolled-out red carpet for jobless depressed people who only speak English and are trying to emigrate from the states with their four dogs and two cats. Globally, moving to America is seen as desirable for people in some countries. But having Americans move to these countries is not reciprocally desirable. We are, by and large, pretty annoying. Thank you, forum commenters.

Anyway, what about Paraguay?

I searched Wikimedia Commons for “Book of Revelation” because I was looking for some old Byzantium-looking art, but I found this and had to use this instead. Wonderful. Simply splendid. Distant Shores Media/Sweet Publishing, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

My children are 3 years old and 8 months old. They aren’t fully vaccinated against diseases that once killed thousands of children a year. The elevation of an avowed vaccine skeptic to the highest public health office in the land has aroused concern that those vaccines might not be available at a low cost for very much longer.

Is it possible for me to stock up on vaccines like I would bags of rice?

One friend confessed to me that she’s making sure she has extra pregnancy test strips, emergency contraception, and abortion pills. A layperson might say this seems silly, especially since she lives in New York, but they are gunning for women right now.

Federal lawmakers recently introduced a bill into the US House of Representatives that would require ID that matched a person’s name on their birth certificate in order to vote. I believe that this law is being sold to their dumbshit constituents as a way to fuck with trans people. I also believe that this law was deliberately written to suppress the vote of women who changed their name when they got married.

A bill introduced to the Missouri state house would put pregnant women “at risk of abortion” on a registry that would be shared with potential adoptive parents. The state of Louisiana asked the state of New York to extradite a doctor who prescribed a Louisiana woman abortion pills. New York said no. Who knows what the courts will say?

It’s not that unreasonable to think that whatever flimsy guardrails exist– if they exist at all– could be barrelled through by the runaway truck of our government.

If I were taking antidepressants, I would be stockpiling those right now, too. RFK Jr, who has said in the past that heroin helped him read, think that SSRI’s are not good. (At the very least, I believe that Trump is trying to make “health care costs go down” and get a “win” for himself by making it so that health insurers are required to cover less. Given the fact that 13% of the US population is on some kind of SSRI, excluding that class of medication from coverage requirements would hypothetically bring down costs for health care coverage in the same way that excluding a windshield from a car would bring down the cost of a car.)

I’m having casual conversations about downloading one’s medical records, making sure to have some cash on hand and some money in non-dollar denominations just in case we run into a Wiemar Republic wheelbarrows full of worthless money situation. Where are we bugging out to? Or are we bugging in? Have we discussed a possible interruption of Social Security and Medicare payments with our aging parents? Are we checking in with our local mutual aid groups?

1923 Wiemar Republic “emergency money” in a 10 million mark denomination. Fritz Quant, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I recently started taking the second half of my maternity leave, and so been occupying myself with maternity leave activities– being stared at by a baby who can’t talk yet, doing housework while the baby sleeps, getting into a full-on war with a squirrel who keeps digging around the area of my lawn I seeded with California poppies.

I’ve been filling the long silences with a history podcast about the rise of the Nazis (it’s really good!). My husband pointed out that maybe I should listen to literally anything else during this time of high stress. My reasoning is not that I’m looking for parallels, but ways in which what’s happening now are different from what happened then.

I don’t think that we’re at risk of devolving into that level of horror. Not yet, at least. America is not the Wiemar Republic. Trump is no Hitler– even though he sucks, he’s more of a reality TV producer who gloms onto whatever gets him the most attention than he is a psychopathic visionary.

The other day, I tried to comfort a friend by explaining to her that I don’t believe America has a Hitler. 2025 America has a bunch of guys who if you lumped them all together they’d maybe equal one Hitler. Unfortunately, all those guys are, like, the President’s closest advisers, and they don’t all get along. I thought this would make her feel better, but the horror on her face indicated that it didn’t.

We moved on to less macabre topics, like how we’d felt about buying guns, where the nearest nuclear fallout shelter was located, and what plants that commonly grow in Southern California could be used to poison somebody.