“We estimate between two and four megatons. Everything within a 30 kilometer radius will be completely destroyed, including the three remaining reactors at Chernobyl.” – Chernobyl (HBO®)
Thankfully, everyone is equally hungry under communism. Bernie’s job is done.
I think I’ve always thought about what’s known today as “prepping” – even at a young age. When I was young, we lived deep in the mountains. How deep? The next closest kid anywhere near my age was ten miles away and probably 2,000’ lower in elevation and was actually a yeti that had moved there from Tibet to get away from the crowds. The nearest grocery store was twenty miles away. The nearest movie theater? Fifty miles.
When you live nearly so far from civilization that tourists try to pay you in beads and pantyhose, you have to think ahead. Ma Wilder did. Ma had designed the house with remoteness in mind. Her pantry was always full, and it was huge. She built in a pantry that consisted of one entire fifteen foot wall, floor to ceiling, a foot deep.
The pantry was always (and I mean always) stocked from floor to ceiling with canned goods. Freezer? Not one freezer. Two. And they were always packed to the brim with food. Well, with the exception of when Pa would let the inventory go down so there would be room to fit half a cow. Literally. He’d buy a “side of beef” which was half of a cow. Minus the hooves, of course.
Ma Wilder had also designed a root cellar that the contractor built. For those of you not in the know, a root cellar is a small building (8 foot by 8 foot by 8 foot) that is 90% buried to keep vegetables so they will neither sprout nor spoil. In order to do that, the cellar is dark and cool, like Nancy Pelosi’s heart. Ma Wilder kept hundreds of pounds of potatoes there. I should know – I was often the guy taking them down in fall and hauling them up in winter. And to be clear, we kept the potatoes in the cellar, since Nancy Pelosi’s heart isn’t big enough to hold a French fry.
Exercise? No, with COVID-19, it’s extra fries.
The house was designed to be heated in winter with firewood. Since electricity was incredibly expensive up there, Pa Wilder made gathering, cutting, splitting, and stacking firewood his summer hobby. As it was Pa’s summer hobby, it turned out to be my summer hobby, too. It was hard work, and paid poorly until it came time to hit the blocking sled for football when it paid off with massive thighs of steel.
There is no jean size for “massive thighs of steel.”
But it wasn’t just the remoteness that drove Ma Wilder to be prepared. First, I have to explain a little bit about the family. My parents were older than I was. Oh, sure, that’s normally the case, except in some places like Hollywood, but in my case my parents were a LOT older.
Why?
It turns out that I was adopted, despite the original story they told me of finding me as an infant in a crashed space capsule in a wolf den near the summit of Mount Olympus. In reality, Ma Wilder was my biological grandmother and not who hiked around Greece looking for wolf-raised space babies. Apparently, as a child the only super-power I had consisted of making my biological mother and father both disappear.
I blame the heat ray vision.
I made a website for orphans, but it doesn’t have a home page.
So, I was adopted. Since my parents were not only older than me, but also much older than even standard issue parents, they had hands-on experience with the Great Depression and World War II while they were young. Apparently, those were events that may been somewhat memorable.
I do remember sitting down in rocking chair in the kitchen while supper was cooking. After Pa Wilder had finished his chores for the day, he and Ma would sit down to talk about life, most often with a libation, as Pa Wilder called drinking. I believe it was mainly bourbon, but I can’t really say since they were quite poor hosts and never offered me any. Often, Ma and Pa discussed people I didn’t know. This was so boring it made me want to go to and stick forks in outlets to test breakers.
Especially when they talked about people, I was often admonished that “what we discuss stays within the family” though it was implied that that admonishment probably counted for every topic. I can see how it might be considered controversial how irritated that they were that the neighbor dog kept peeing in the snow by the back porch and they didn’t want me to tattle to the neighbors. Or how economic collapse might be a thing. Or how we might be headed towards nuclear war, and had Pa thought about buying dynamite so he could blow up the road leading to our house so we weren’t the victims of marauding, murdering gangs?
Yup. That was an actual conversation that Ma and Pa had. I think they only mentioned that idea once while I was in the room, but when your mother is calmly talking about having your father blow up bridges to save you from hordes of people (the parents of the kids you go to school with) ransacking your home after the Soviets gave America a “just thinking about you” bouquet of 10 megaton fireballs?
You tend to remember that sort of conversation when you’re 12.
I heard that after a nuclear war, there are high radiation levels, then only the politicians will be left.
Ma and Pa were acutely aware that all of their material prosperity could evaporate in an instant. Ma and Pa had both seen rich men laid low by the Great Depression, and Pa Wilder had fought in World War II. He had driven all through northern Europe, having been on Omaha at D-Day +3. I can’t even imagine what he had seen. Of course I asked him the obvious question, “Did any Germans shoot at ya, Pa?”
“No, son, they never shot at me,” he replied with all the coolness of a Steve McQueen, “but I was with a lot of people they were shooting at.”
I’m ashamed at how long it took me to figure out what he was really saying.
That’s not impressive, though. One of my friends had a grandpa that brought down 15 German planes during the war. Worst mechanic the Luftwaffe had.
I’m not sure that they ever mentioned the idea of nuclear Armageddon more than once or twice, but it doesn’t take long to make a kid connect the dots: “Oh, that’s why we have all the food. And all the guns. And the 500 gallons of gasoline. And the 250 gallons of diesel. And Ma’s amusing utter failure to raise vegetables in the backyard, repeated year after year.”
My parents were preppers before it even had a name beyond “being prudent.” It’s probably justifiable, especially on Ma Wilder’s part. She had seen her family make it through the Great Depression okay, but her family had also raised several children whose parents weren’t well off enough to feed them. I know that sounds crazy in the year 2020, but in the year 1930, sometimes parents couldn’t even figure out where to get enough money to feed a child.
I think those experiences were a driving force in Ma Wilder’s life. She saved aluminum TV dinner trays. She saved old clothes. She could sew (fairly well), make soap (that was more like a caustic chemical burn in a bar), knit (very well), or ferment wine (she gave me a sip and to 12 year old me it tasted of pepper, hate and despair). Back when she grew up, prepping wasn’t a hobby. Prepping was what everyone did.
As I mentioned, one factor that made all the preparation seem even more normal was being so far away from anything. Also, being so far away from everything meant I was pretty far away from the middle school. I was the last one on the bus route. That also meant I was the first one on, and the last one off. It gave me a lot of time alone on the bus to read – a lot.
All of this might explain why I developed a love of fiction that featured the end of the world when I was growing up. Lucifer’s Hammer, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Earth Abides, The Stand, On the Beach, The Postman, and I Am Legend were all novels that I read as I rode the green pleather seat on an endless loop back and forth to school. My classmates might have been looking at the trees and houses or talking to each other, but I was living in a world where everything had changed, all at once and strong men did what they could to rebuild. And without communists this time.
I think Baltimore jokes are just a riot!
My middle school’s library was filled with books that were older than me – many from the 1950’s with pages already becoming yellow and brittle with age. There were dozens of science fiction anthologies. Science fiction in the 1950’s was filled with the paranoia of a country that was just coming to grips with the concept of being able to destroy an entire planet and wrestling with the now obvious fragility of the human species. One of the short stories I remember was A Pail of Air, by Fritz Leiber. You can read it for free here (LINK). It’s worth it.
If you’re not a fan of apocalyptic stories, you might think that the attractive part about reading the end of the world was about death – and you’re wrong. Reading that literature was, for me, a celebration of life. In most of those books and stories the human race didn’t die out. To me, apocalyptic books weren’t about gloom, they were about hope. No matter what was thrown at humanity, we would find a way through.
I am unabashedly pro-human, and most fiction in the 1950’s was pro-human. Somewhere after that, we became a bit more self-loathing and reveled in the idea of our destruction. I can’t help but think that self-loathing started with Doogie Howser, M.D., but I might be wrong. Much of today’s literature isn’t fun, and isn’t optimistic. Sure, I see tough times ahead. But I feel quite strongly that we can make it through them.
Trust me. We will.
What, you don’t think I developed psychic powers on Mount Olympus?
My list included Alas, Babylon. Which was made more realistic to me as a kid because they make a still from copper tubing salvaged from a Pontiac Bonneville. Just like the one I rode around in every day.
Even more unsettling, my dad went to local Civil Defense training and brought home a book he quickly forgot about that became my off-read, dog eared Oracle of what my future held: SM 3-11-A, Nov 1966, Personal and Family Survival, Civil Defense Adult Education Course Student Manual. I am looking at a copy of it on my desk right now. In is the scariest book I have ever read over the past 50+ years.
https://www.edparton.com/!!cc/alas-babylon.pdf
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED062591.pdf
No pre-teen should have been allowed to read stuff like this during the duck-and-cover years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. It would warp them for life!
Here’s a better link for a PDF of Pat Frank’s Alas Babylon (which could NEVER get published today without major censoring, after skimming the first chapter again for the first time in decades!) along with several other of his forgotten apocalypse novels.
https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20160905
That’s a beautiful part of a book – it captures a moment in time.
I didn’t read that until later. I re-read it in 08 or so. Still hlds up.
We “ducked, and covered”, grew accustomed to the doomsday sirens at noon on Wednesday, and were rewarded with what could be gathered from the garden. Our ignorance kept us from understanding the horror of a nuclear war, and we were oblivious of the fact we lived in the middle of one of the first targets of a foreign adversary.
Polio was a big fear back then. We stood in line for hours to be inoculated, but it was necessary. We never thought about it much, but one of my classmates only had the use of one arm. He was lucky, the virus only destroyed the nerves there, instead of those that controlled his lungs.
We’ll see how this crises works out, but it’s appearing the final victim will be my wallet.
My polio inoculation was a sugar cube with a purple dot on it at Oak Grove Elementary school. I still remember it because that was such an unusual thing – a special trip to school to eat a sugar cube.
Today in the realm of public health we can cure everybody of Hep C if we wanted to, just like we wiped out polio. But it’s mostly drug addicts the majority think are not worth saving, and the meds are priced at $1K each per day for 90 days. Capitalism won the Cold War. Yea, capitalism!
https://www.healthline.com/health/hepatitis-c/treatment-costs#1
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/hepatitis-c-cure-eludes-patients-states-struggle-costs-n870846
Hydrochloroquine (HCQ) is a decades-old generic that costs pennies. Once it’s proven to stop COVID19, just watch it go to $50 per pill….or way beyond!
For reference, 60 200 mg hydroxychloroquine tablets are about $ 25.00 with one of the drug discount programs.
Science Fiction tales do not tell young men that world-ending events exist. Young men already know that world-ending events exist. Science Fiction tales tell young men that world-ending events can be overcome .
With apologies to Mr. Chesterton for the liberties.
Glorious. Love the quote.
Yup. Can’t say we expected it, but golly, it’s interesting.
And we will pull through.
Yep, kids today. How can you get an education in a building that didn’t have “Fallout shelter” signs on the wall? Our elementary school was built to withstand a direct hit from a Commie nuke, the new schools today couldn’t survive a firecracker. We had fire drills and we also did the “duck and cover” drills with windows containing chicken wire to help keep us from being cut up by flying glass in case of a blast. Even as a kid with minimal training in nuclear physics, I kind of wondered how being under my desk would stop a nuclear blast but we also were taught to do as we were told.
Funny that even after the threat of thermonuclear war faded, we still have lots of apocalyptic movies and TV shows, except it is zombies instead of Commies. Wait, what if the zombie apocalypse starts in China? Then we would have commie zombies!
Whew. As long as they’re not nuclear commie zombies!
Thanks for this. Great memes. One of the better pieces with the obvious exception that there were no bikinis in this. If you write another article about the time Before Preppers (BP) and adoptees please incorporate hot women into it.
I second that motion.
Or emotion.
Depending on whether this meeting is under Robert’s Rules of Order, or Motown’s.
And I wasn’t alive then, but I’ve seen pictures.
There were plenty of bikinis in the Cold War years.
And the women in them were built to fill them.
Seems that we had nuked some islands in the 1950s, and suddenly the native fashions thereabouts became a great idea for swimsuits. Named after their picturesque atoll. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.
History buffs already knew that daiquiris were named after a Spanish American War locale in Cuba.
People were cooler about stuff like that back then.
IED is too technical a name.
We should have had cars now like the Chevy Fireball, or the Ford FOOM!
Someone should have fermented figs, and called the drinks resulting from it mosque-atel.
Or something like that.
People nowadays are too PC uptight, and their panties are so bunched up before middle school, it takes heavy drugs and alcohol just to loosen them up enough to laugh without cracking their spines.
This is the Trigglypuff/HotCocoaBoi generation.
Meanwhile, to knock that nonsense off, Heinlein’s Tunnel In the Sky, followed by Starship Troopers, is never amiss.
But we’ve been reading those books for centuries. The first ones I can think of were called Swiss Family Robinson(1812), by Johann David Wyss, and Robinson Crusoe (1719), by Daniel Defoe. (Apparently, if you don’t have “Robinson” in your name, you’re toast.)
And since we’re on the subject, has anybody ever seen Judy Robinson in a bikini?
Let met help John out:
https://imgur.com/HaY6pkr.jpg
If you were Lost In Space with her, why would you ever want to come back to Earth?
Marta’s old now.
But I’ll settle for Anne Hathaway and Taylor Swift.
Sure, they’re both liberal airheads, but I wasn’t planning on discussing political theory with them.
(Truth be told, neither would you be.)
Get them on a spaceship with me, and I’m sure everything would work out fine.
Skintight silver spandex spacesuits optional, but highly recommended.
And they can both sing, so we’d have that going for us when there was nothing else to do.
(“Mein fuhrer, I can walk!“)
I’m done now.
And the impending viral apocalypse got a little brighter, if only for a nostalgic moment or three.
Anne Hathaway is cute, but Taylor Swift is not, though she probably isn’t a transgender dude.
Heinlein – my school had him by the shovelfull. Tunnel In The Sky was the first, I think. Starship Troopers, and then everything else I could find.
Wow, Marta could rock a bikini – but truth be told her silver spacesuit was pretty good for a pre-teen John, though I really had it in for Yeoman Rand.
Yeoman Rand…?
I’ll be in my bunk.
Bikinis added for Monday. I listen, and obey!
Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy helped inspire my lifetime of skepticism about a bright and shiny future. That book, and the civil-defense pamphlets my parents had. Helpful hint: if you have a few hours warning, you can dig a trench, put a solid wood door over it, and pile the dirt on top. That will go a long way toward protecting you from flash, blast, and fallout. (Come to think of it, you’d also need deep topsoil! It would be really disappointing to dig out a foot or two, and hit solid rock.)
In my elementary school in Michigan, we didn’t do “duck and cover” bomb drills, we did “duck and cover” tornado drills. And a tornado actually did rip the roof off of the school one night, when I was a student. There’s more than one way for YOUR world to end.
I remember reading that one during seventh grade, football season.
We didn’t have CD drills, just fire drills. Which, in an all-brick building, was less likely than a nuclear war.
I’ve read nearly all of those books, and I’ve been looking for “A Pail of Air” for years! I couldn’t remember the name or author. Thanks very much!
Glad to help, always a favorite of mine, especially when going through those long, cold winters, it really made going to get firewood seem much more of an adventure.
I’ve read all of the books mentioned, some as a young teen. Earth Abides by George R. Stewart is a book that is relevant to the events of today! https://www.amazon.com/Earth-Abides-George-R-Stewart/dp/0345487133
Yup. I read that one in high school.
What a Blast !!
Yup! But, I didn’t mention my big worry growing up in the mountains . . . bigfoot!
The list of books you mentioned filled me with a sense of shame for some reason, as copies of them have not only been read by the adults in this house, but they are sitting on a shelf not far from where I am typing this. I even have an old anthology that includes A Pail Of Air, one of the creepiest stories ever. Makes me wonder what I have been doing all this time, since first becoming vibrantly aware of our impending DOOOOOM at the tender age of 17 (and at that time the overwhelming threat was nuclear annihilation. Isn’t nice that the menu of potential ends has been added to since then?)
The common theme through all of those books was indeed that we can overcome, provided we can also simultaneously accept certain changes from The Way It Used To Be. Characters incapable of making those adjustments always met some sort of horrible end (usually alone, with sufficient time to understand their basic mistake before the light went out).
And therein lies the rub: the changes we need to internalise are those that are obscured by choice, opinion, disagreement, and agenda. It seems rather difficult to understand what is required of one, when the usual sources of that information can’t agree.
Add to this the spectacle of the people we hire to look after things deliberately trying to screw us in broad daylight (by adding the most ridiculous things to a stimulus bill, for example), and it suddenly becomes very difficult to take anything subsequent very seriously.
Of course we will get through this. Or we might be fighting for our lives in another few months, alone and cut-off, aided only by the faithful computer robot our father left for us before he mysteriously vanished…
We shall see what the future brings us.
“the changes we need to internalise are those that are obscured by choice, opinion, disagreement, and agenda” – that’s pure wisdom. Thank you.
Mr. Wilder, the world needs a meme, and you da man!
Kung Flu: Going viral since 2019!
Oh, yeah! (Insert Macho Man Randy Savage Here)
No.
It’s time for Leeroy Jeeeeeeeeeeenkins!!!!
Okay, that’s a callback!
LOL
Hey Kids wana have fun ? Go to the Nat.ATOMIC TESTING MUSEUM in Vegas and laugh at all the stuff we grew up on….My brother and I almost got kicked out, we were told to keep it down……..My Dad when we talked about Commies he would lite up a cig and do Col.Rippers Rant…….Mandrake! .. Fall out shelters now are computer labs or safe spaces. It was serious, look at all the commies now, ever see em drink water Mandrake ? We never did get rid of them, Vietnam left the doors open at schools to let the commie have a job. I love Plan R ………
Outstanding! Also, National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque. Get your red hot Geiger counters here . . . .
Stocked up at local church pantry the past few years and now that is working out well. Especially the grocery bags of toilet paper. Hell there are even some depends undergarments in the kit just in case. We have huge cabinet space under a bar that is filled to the brim with canned goods. Now is the time to rotate out according to use by and expiration dates.
The wahmen’s and trannie utopia will go up in smoke because reality is undefeated and will win again.
The Law of the Jungle is the oldest law and it is not negotiable.
The controllers can rule over Ozymandias and call it an accomplishment but that doesn’t make it so.
I love it. Reality is undefeated. May have to steal that!!!
You write purty good for a kid stuck on the bus. I lived 1/4 mile from a school system, I was bused 65 minutes each way every day to another that viewed me as revenue. I like to read a bit myself. Killer of worlds by Harlan Ellison, the first NWO dream in a way.
Harlan, when he was writing and not suing people, was pretty good. Repent, Harlequin, Said the Ticktockman was also fun.
Thank you John.
You’re welcome. It was fun writing this one.
No home page. lol
Yup. But every bag of chips is family size.
lol
My granny was born near Atlanta during the Spanish flu epidemic. In 1936, she helped her Dad clean up bodies after the 1936 Gainseville, GA tornado. She was a war widow raising my dad and aunt alone, worked at the Bell bomber plant, and volunteered for Civil defense/USO. Before she dropped dead of a heart attack right in front of my face when I was 10, she passed on very important lessons regarding the true worth of a person, natural remedies, and how to kill anything instantly with a .22LR (From hog to human).
She was my hero.
Thank you for making me laugh my azz off.
My pleasure. Grannies of the world are glorious.
Great article. Found you by way of the Raconteur Report.
Both sets of grandparents went through the Depression. The ones we visited the most often, lived in Idaho and I guess you could say they were preppers before prepping became cool.
They had a large yard, about an acre, with another acre in garden, about 3 acres of pasture and a half acre with an Apricot orchard fenced in. (That half acre was also where the pony for the grandkids resided.) Me and my brothers would climb the Apricot trees and pretty much get sick from eating too many of the small fruits. The pony’s favorite trick for getting a rider off his back was to get against one of the trees and scrub you off his back. Who said horses are dumb?
We would visit most Summers and it usually coincided with time to help get out and weed the garden. There were also early crops to harvest. Snapped…and ate plenty of beans and shelled and ate plenty of peas whilst doing so. During early evenings, we would fish for Bullhead Catfish in some of the larger irrigation canals and also pick wild Asparagus growing along the banks.
We would also split a beef with the grandfolks, as well as get a hog slaughtered and processed up. We would pack all that meat up and bring it back home to SoCal with us, as well as some of the canned bounty from the garden.
They had a root cellar under the house. It was nice and cool down there, with a dirt floor and walls. I reckon it was hand dug way back when. There were shelves along three walls filled with everything from Apricot preserves to home made ketchup and Apple Butter. They also had a longish box built on the floor for Earthworms. We would go out in the evening, usually after a evening thunderstorm, and catch them as they we’re sticking their “heads” out of the ground. (Evidently, in some cultures, they are considered a delicacy, but we used them for bait.)
Late 60’s, early 70’s…good times.
I spent long weekends with Great Grandma McWilder, much the same. Loved the time. Hard work, lots of fun, and got sick eating raw onions from the garden. Still don’t like onions to this day.
Great times.
Welcome.