Shelter In Place: An Excerpt

Executive Summary 

The Electro-Magnetic Pulse generated by a high-altitude nuclear explosion is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences. Virtually every aspect of American society is dependent on electronics. Electronics are used to control, communicate, compute, store, manage, and implement nearly every sector of United States (U.S.) civilian systems. When a nuclear explosion occurs at high altitude, the EMP signal it produces will result in long-term disruption of energy and power distribution, communications, shipping, and the flow of consumer goods. Air, rail, and travel by personal vehicle will be nearly impossible. The infrastructure necessary to address these problems will also be destroyed. The larger the affected region, the longer it will take to mitigate the damage. Power infrastructures may be lost for a year or more. 

Part I 

October 15 

My name is Aurora McKenzie Scott, and I have left two homes in six months, one by choice and the second under duress. Luckily, I was somewhat prepared for both situations, unlike most people, who were taken by surprise and are marooned in dwellings that provide nothing more than a roof. The first home I abandoned was the townhouse in Arlington, which I bought with my late husband, about five years before the cancer took him. The second was an offgrid cabin on the edge of the George Washington National Forest in western Virginia. But that home, too, became unsafe. My present home is a tiny, octagonal hut with a slanted roof, hidden by thick undergrowth a few miles back in the woods. Peter and I designed it as our second layer of “bug out,” a place to go if we had to give up the cabin he had so meticulously prepared. That was the plan before his death, just over a year ago. I have been in the woods for three months, since mid-July, when the strangers came, and I had to flee once more. 

You might wonder why I have only now decided to tell my story. It does seem presumptuous to think that the person who eventually finds these words, perhaps long after my demise, will be interested in my story the way people have eavesdropped on others through the ages. If this nightmare ever ends, everyone left will have a story of equal hardship or worse. But perhaps I have grown too cynical. Perhaps the forces that started us down this path will ultimately lose, and there will be a way to restart America from the ground up. But it is hard to think that way anymore, and I find myself caring less and less. 

So why? I can’t say I really know. Just that my existence here has become overwhelmingly tiresome, and I know that something must change. I am becoming forgetful and wasting more and more time in a sort of peaceful listlessness. Sometimes when I wake up, I don’t know where I am. I wonder why I don’t hear the students starting breakfast, and I lie in my sleeping bag straining my ears for familiar camp noises. I have taken the pistol from under the pillow and placed it where I see it immediately upon waking. Firearms weren’t allowed at the wilderness school where I worked. One look at the 9millimeter, semi-automatic, and I remember quickly why I am here. Though I can remember most of what Peter taught me, my memories of him are also fading. But maybe by looking back, I can make some sense of what has happened and regain some sense of focus. Oddly, if he hadn’t done so well preparing me, I wouldn’t have the luxury of thinking about more than where to find my next meal. But mere survival isn’t enough to keep me going anymore. So, I must look for another goal, another focus, an actual reason for living. 

October 20 

Chores have kept me too tired to write these last days, though I know that I should do better. But the snare I set on the west side of the mountain caught a young wild pig, and I have spent hours gutting, skinning, and cutting chunks of meat off the carcass. In early September, when I got my second deer, I set up a smoking area in a small cave a few miles from the hut. I don’t have much in the way of spices, but I sprinkled the meat with some salt and hung it in strips along a rope I strung across the width of the interior. Late in the afternoon, I started a fire in the back of the cave, hoping that dusk would help cover the smoke. I blocked off the front of the cave by dragging brush across the entrance and spent most of the night and next day feeding semi-dry sticks onto the coals. Short on storage, I wrapped most of the meat in pieces of nylon tarp and buried it in the woods. So now I have been repeating the process with the pig. I have wasted a lot by hacking off just as many big hunks of meat as I could in a short time, worried that a bear or other pigs would come to challenge me for the food. With the deer, I have a decent store, though it wouldn’t hurt to have more. Turkeys, squirrels, and other small animals I eat immediately, in order to postpone dipping into my winter supply for as long as possible. 

At night, I worry. I have made a map of all my hiding places, but suppose I lose it or ruin it somehow? What if I dig up the meat only to find that insects and worms have gotten to it, or it has just rotted away? This is the gamble I am taking. Some days, I go by all the sites to see if they have been disturbed. As fall has come, I’m amazed at how different the woods look. With each visit, I reinforce my memory of each location. If I am not worrying about the food, I torture myself with the question of whether I should go back to the cabin. I tell myself that I should at least find out whether the strangers stayed. Perhaps they just took what they could find and left. I know this is what I should do. I think of all the hiding places where we stashed provisions. Surely, they couldn’t have found them all. I know I should try, but the thought of seeing other people, and, worse, of being seen, is paralyzing. No one saw me leave that day, so no one knows there is anyone to look for back in these hills. My entire sense of security has come to depend on that. 

October 23 

Yesterday afternoon, the wind started to pick up. The skies had been overcast from the start, the morning air humid and close. Then the winds came careening through the tree branches, and by dusk rain was coming down in sheets. I lay in my sleeping bag listening and remembering backpack trips with Peter, before the cabin consumed our attention. I always felt safe with him, knowing that he had anchored the tent with the same methodical care with which he worked on the car or brushed his teeth. But for all his deliberation, he was far from predictable. On every trip, he would do something to surprise me, like hiding frozen steaks and beer in his pack when I was expecting freezedried camping meals or rigging up a hand line and catching a couple trout while I was off exploring. Without him, the roar of the wind took on a menacing tone, and I was struck again by the uncertainties of being totally cut off from the outside world. Was this a passing storm or the edge of a hurricane? I had no weather forecast to ease my mind. This morning the wind abated a bit, but the rain did not, so I’m prepared for a day inside, digging into my stores of instant coffee, reading from our store of books, and adding to this record. 

Where to begin? Five years ago, Peter and I were a somewhat atypical couple living in a townhouse in Arlington. I say “atypical” not because there was anything particularly strange about us, but because of our jobs—his at the NSA doing I’m not entirely sure what, and mine as a counselor for at-risk teens at a wilderness school in the Appalachian Mountains near Charlottesville, Virginia. His job occasionally took him away for short stints of time, while mine required me to be away for periods of four to six weeks, with breaks of two to three weeks in between. We’d been married for about three years when Peter began to talk about buying or building a cabin. I was a bit surprised at first. Peter was a planner and somewhat frugal. Though we made enough money between us for a comfortable life, he had always emphasized saving over spending. So, for him to suggest laying out the cash to buy and maintain a second dwelling seemed out of character. But I was an easy sell, as I too frequently complained about the culture shock of coming home to the congestion of Arlington after several weeks in the woods. It would be a place where we could go to recharge, he said. 

At first, spending weekends on road trips exploring leads we got online seemed a lark. Often, we’d camp in state parks or stay at rustic motels, and our outings felt like adventures. But, as time went on, Peter became more and more specific about the land we looked at—the sun had to be just so, there had to be a creek on the site, or better yet, a spring. The nearest town must be several miles away, and the land had to be nearly surrounded by woods. Then he began using words like “off-grid” and “self-sufficient.” 

Over lunch that day in some West Virginia diner, I asked him why it was suddenly so important that we be off-grid and said that it seemed like a lot of trouble to go through for the occasional power outage. “I camp pretty off-grid all the time,” I reminded him. “I don’t mind having some amenities when I’m not working. Are you thinking we won’t be able to afford a little electricity?” 

I threw in the last question as a joke, but as he slowly stirred his chili, I knew he had something serious on his mind. 

“But it could be more than a little power outage,” he began. Our eyes met across the table. “It could be something much more drastic, and it could last a long time. Like months, maybe even years.” 

I glanced out the window beside the booth. It was early spring, and daffodils were nodding along the fence line at the edge of the parking lot. 

“Do you know something?” 

“Know? Nobody knows…But there are possibilities and capabilities that people have…we call them ‘unstable actors.’ Remember that cyberattack on Lehman Brothers? That’s nothing compared to what could happen.” 

“Is this classified stuff you’re telling me?” 

“No, no. Not at this level of detail.” 

His eyes were down in his chili again, but his mind seemed to be far away. 

“It just wouldn’t hurt to be prepared—shelter, food, water. A way to get more if it lasted very long.” 

“Hmm…so you want us to become preppers, like those crazy militia people.” 

“More like the Mormons…just some common sense readiness…and, if nothing major happens, we’ll still have a nice little getaway.” 

Not long after that, we found the place, a stalwart-looking, craftsmen-style cabin with deep front and back porches and wide dormers above each porch. The land was a thirty-acre plot surrounded by national forest with a driveway that was just an overgrown dirt track. Beyond our driveway, the forest service road climbed for a while and then dead-ended a couple more miles up the hollow. Built in the 1950s, the cabin had most recently been the retirement home of a couple from Martinsburg, West Virginia, but by the time they’d passed, their children were scattered too far to want to make use of it. 

“Just make an offer,” the real estate agent said. “The heirs have been squabbling for years over the property taxes, low as they are.” 

A couple months later, we arrived for a long weekend with cleaning supplies, an air mattress, and a few coolers of food. Peter had taken care of the nitty-gritty details of the house purchase while I was at work, and we’d just closed the day before. My school term had been complicated by a new student who came with more than the usual emotional baggage and who spent the first two weeks pitting the other girls against each other. Adding to everyone’s misery, the weather stayed cool and rainy for weeks. It took most of the threehour ride from Arlington to decompress, but by the time we drew close to the last turnoff, I was ready for our first weekend at the new retreat. I couldn’t wait to get rid of the old-person-shut-up-house smells, and Peter was anxious to see what needed to be done, first to make the place livable, and then to repurpose it for off-grid survival. 

We’d agreed to have the electricity turned on until the solar was up and running, but we hadn’t done it yet, so that first weekend was like indoor camping. The weather had finally turned warm, and I was happy to run around opening windows and peeking in closets. 

The cabin was laid out so that from the center of the front porch, you walked into the left end of the living room and opposite the doorway to the kitchen. A few feet from the doorway was a woodstove and brick chimney. Directly behind the wall, in the kitchen, was another wood-burning cook stove, a white and green porcelain model from back in the 1920s. There was a propane gas stove, too, but the wood stoves would be more than sufficient for heat. With a little cleaning up, they would both be in good working condition. The eat-in kitchen was the same size as the living room, with its own door to the back porch. To the left of the kitchen doorway, a hallway ran down the center of the house with a bath and small bedroom on the right, and a larger bedroom and the stairs on the left. Peter had pulled the car around back and was lugging in a cooler when I opened a door between the kitchen and bathroom. 

“Ah…a cellar,” I called. “Have you been down there? I thought it was a closet.” 

“Yeah, when I came for the inspection. It seemed pretty dry, no mold or anything.” He walked down the hall to look over my shoulder. “I think we should put a floor in here, though.” 

My blank look conveyed that I was not following him. 

“You see…if we make it into a closet and put in a trapdoor, we can cover the door with a rug or some old linoleum, and no one will know it’s a cellar. We can block off the cellar windows so that from the outside, it’ll just look like a crawl space. That way, if someone breaks in, they won’t take whatever we have down there. And, we can use the closet as more pantry space. Let me show you something else.” 

I couldn’t help smiling at his excitement as he led me through the kitchen and out the back door, grabbing two headlamps off the counter as he passed. One of the plusses of the house had been the weathered barn that was situated just a couple hundred feet to the back right of the yard. Peter headed straight for it. 

“Remember the root cellar under the barn?” 

He led me to a set of stone steps that was situated about halfway down the right wall. From a distance, the weeds hid them from view. 

“This entrance is pretty obvious, but if we filled it in, it wouldn’t take long for the weeds to take over and no one would know it was ever here. Then we could cut a trapdoor in the floor of the barn and park that old tractor on top of it. Presto! Hidden root cellar.” 

“Wow,” I said, “You’ve been giving this a lot of thought.” 

“Well, I had some time to spend after the inspection.” 

“And you really think that all this secrecy is necessary?” 

“Ay,” he said, using his pet name for me, “If we lose electricity for a long time, there will be no food shipments, and people will be desperate for their next meal. Even out here in the country.” 

He led me down the steps and pushed open the heavy, wooden door at the bottom. We pulled on our headlamps, and he picked up a broom he’d left by the door. Batting at cobwebs as we went, he showed me three separate rooms: a large outer room with waist-high bins that we figured were probably used for potatoes and other root crops, a smaller room to the right with a sand floor— maybe for crops that needed a drier environment—and a last room to the back left that was lined with deep shelves. I tried to imagine all that space filled with food. It would be enough to last a very long time. 

“We’ll need to buy a couple of thermometers and something to measure the humidity. Then we’ll know what we can store down here the best,” Peter said, peering into a corner. “I haven’t seen any mice droppings, so it must be sealed pretty well.” 

“Hmmm…So, now we need to become food storage experts,” I said, as we emerged into the warm sunshine. 

It was a relief to be out in the fresh air. While Peter fiddled around in the barn, I headed back into the house and started hauling our duffels, sleeping bags, and air mattress up the stairs. The second floor was more like an attic, a huge room that ran the length of the house, divided in the middle by just the chimney. I laid out the air mattress against the chimney on the front side, so we’d be able to see out the front dormer, and attached the air pump. While the pump whined behind me, I gazed out the window. Looking south, I could barely discern the break in the canopy made by the forest road. The town of Wagner was out of sight, far to the west. I imagined the woods and road crawling with desperate people looking for food. It was then that I realized that I’d been focusing much more on the idea of the cabin as a getaway, something I really needed, than as a survival home, something Peter seemed more and more convinced was necessary. 

That night, as we lay on the air mattress and basked in the moonlight falling through the window, I broached the subject. 

“You know, we talked about having this place as a retreat and a haven from catastrophe. But I’m not sure that it will ever be a place where I can relax if all we ever do while we’re here is prepare for some kind of Armageddon. Are you sure you’re not just being paranoid?” 

Snuggling up to my side, Peter reached an arm across my chest and pulled me closer. “Ay, if you knew what I knew…” he said. “I can’t tell you specifics, but there are countries that want to bring us down, even at unimaginable costs to their own people. But I promise, we’ll make this a place we can both enjoy, and I can do most of the work while you’re on your teaching stints. It’ll be a lot more fun than hanging around the townhouse by myself on the weekends. And if you want me to ease off on the project when you’re here, I can do that, too. You don’t have to do anything you don’t feel like doing.” 

“Well, when you put it that way, it sounds better, even though it makes me look kind of lazy.” 

“Ay, you are anything but lazy, and you know it. Hey, let’s take a picnic lunch and explore up the creek tomorrow,” he suggested. 

And that’s what we did, and we had a great time, finding several waterfalls, a few frogs, and even a little snake that came swimming across a little pool toward us. And, of course, I didn’t even notice that while we were goofing off, Peter was probably thinking about where he would put this little hut. 

October 24 

After writing yesterday until my hand was too sore to go on, I reheated some oatmeal with dried apples that I gathered last month. Luckily, just about all of these hills were at some time farm land, so it’s not unusual to find overgrown orchards in seemingly unlikely places. Pigs and apples are the legacy of generations of hardy, Appalachian mountain farmers, and I’m thankful for all they’ve left me. Unfortunately, the wild blueberries and huckleberries that I gathered in July are sitting in tins in the root cellar back at the cabin. I usually gathered the apples at mid-day, hoping that the bears would be napping, and used my largest backpack to haul them back. I often saw deer scavenging the windfalls, and piles of bear scat everywhere, though I never actually saw one. Near the smoking cave are some large stone slabs where I spread the apple slices on tarps to dry. This was a tedious process, and sometimes the weather turned rainy or humid, and I had trouble getting them to dry. 

Peter built this hut from a gazebo kit that he modified to suit our needs. It has a double floor with the bottom platform sealed to keep out moisture, insects, and rodents. Between the two floors, eight inches of storage space hold the majority of my food in airtight tins. Rice, beans, biscuit mix, instant milk, instant potatoes, Tang, sugar, coffee, honey, spices, tea bags, dried eggs, nuts, raisins, canned chicken and tuna, and some real luxuries—freeze dried meals that Peter made himself by cooking extra stews and crock pot meals and then drying them in a dehydrator. 

For the inside framing, Peter used two-by-eights, which left about four inches of exposed stud after he finished the interior walls. Between the studs, shelves at various levels provide more storage area. At eye level, an eight-inch window runs around most of the interior except for the few feet directly behind the woodstove. The window is coated with a non-reflective substance to make it harder to see from outside during the day, but I still feel like I’m in a fish bowl at night, so I close the blackout curtains and use as little light as possible. This hasn’t been a problem during the long days of summer, but I wonder if I will go a little stir crazy when the cold weather and short days set in. Two vents near the ceiling and two near the floor provide for cross ventilation and can be closed off in the winter. The bed platform is about two feet off the floor and stands against the wall opposite the woodstove with the area underneath providing yet more space for storage. 

You may be wondering how Peter got all this stuff up here. I helped him sometimes, but he often invited a friend or two when there was a lot of heavy lifting. The hut is about four miles from the cabin, behind the crests of two more hills, and maybe nine hundred feet higher in elevation. The forest road goes about halfway up, but then the route turns left up a hollow, over the ridge to the northeast, across the next hollow and halfway up another hill to a small knob. Peter hid the hut in a dense rhododendron thicket just over the crest of the hill. A spring-fed creek flows down the crease below the knob, about a five-minute walk downhill. Renovations around the cabin took about a year, but as we started our second summer there, Peter was already hauling up the building supplies for the hut. Though he camped here many times during the building process, by early fall it was enclosed and ready for our first night here together. 

Since Peter put the windows so high, I must stand to see out. Yesterday, as I was swallowing down my lukewarm oatmeal, the rain seemed to pick up and pounded against the walls with new ferocity. It came in waves from the southeast, unusual for this area where most of the weather comes from the southwest. When I rose to look out, the window was plastered with bits of leaf, twigs, and other debris that made it almost impossible to see through. Even on a good day, the thicket limits the view. Yesterday all I could see were the leathery leaves of the rhododendron, slapping against the glass. 

Curious beyond my better judgement, I pulled on my raincoat and pushed open the door. Heavy as it is, made of two by sixes, the wind nearly pulled the knob from my hand. I pushed myself out and closed the door behind me, holding onto the knob for support. With my other hand clamped to my head to secure my hood, I looked toward the top of the ridge, where an assortment of oaks, maples, hickories, and pines stuck out above the brush, waving wildly. They seemed to me like sentinels of the forest, warning of danger and calling, “Go back! Go back!” I stood, transfixed, rain pouring down my pants and into my boots, when a loud “CRACK!” sounded from behind me to the right, and I turned to see the upper third of an oak break and topple toward me. Its branches made a sound like bright static as they crashed into other trees on the way down. Damn! I thought, though I quickly realized that the crown of the tree would fall a good thirty feet short of me and the hut. As the tree came to rest, I looked around at the other trees in that direction. Though they continued to dance and gyrate, I didn’t think more than a couple of them were close enough to pose a threat. Glancing at the downed tree once more in disbelief, I pushed open the door and thrust myself back into the precarious safety of the hut. 

The wind and rain began to die down in the early evening, and I woke this morning to a light cloud cover that has been coursing over the mountains as though in slow motion. I emerged from the hut after breakfast to a world of downed branches and debris with a half-full chamber pot in hand, really a onegallon plastic paint can with a close-fitting lid. Periodically, I dig a trench near a fallen tree about a foot deep and a few feet long. The soil is soft, so it is more a matter of scraping than digging. This becomes my toilet until it is half full. Every time I add to it, I sprinkle on some of the leaf meal I’ve scraped away to cover the smell and help the excrement decay. After a week or so, I refill the hole and dig a new one. I rinse my bucket with plain urine or used water from my dish washing, but I’ve found that the lid is tight enough to keep in the stench, so I don’t attempt to sanitize it. 

After toilet duty, I took the water bladder to the creek for drinking water. The rain filled the rain bucket with a couple of gallons that I will use for cooking, but I prefer creek water for drinking. I’ve given up on purifying it since the source is so close, and it hasn’t made me sick yet, though sometimes on a sunny day I leave the bladder in the sun for a few hours to catch some ultraviolet rays. The container is as clear as any jar I have, so I’m confident that the sun can do its work. Filled to the brim, it weighs about twenty-four pounds, but I can fit it into my backpack and it still weighs less than the usual thirty-plus pounds I carry on backpacking trips. 

These daily chores are probably the reason that I have kept my sanity, such as it is. Though chaos may reign elsewhere, life in these woods is reduced to its simplest directives—get water, get food, maintain shelter. There is no thinking about when to repaint the townhouse, how much to put in the savings account, or whether it’s time to put new tires on the car. Procrastination affects my life immediately, so I do what needs to be done. No firewood—no cooking; no water—no beverages, cooking, or washing (though I do still put off the laundry sometimes). I basically have three changes of clothes, plus fleeces, a down jacket, a warm base layer, a rain suit, and a few extra pairs of panties. Just downstream from where I take my water is a little pool where I wash my clothes in a small, plastic tub, using just a few drops of biodegradable soap. I try to change my undies at least every other day, but I admit, it’s not much of a priority. Most of the time, I just string the wet clothes around the inside of the cabin; they seldom dry outside in one afternoon, and then I’d have to bring them in at dusk, anyway. 

My toilet and water chores were done by mid-morning, so I moved on to cooking, which has been my biggest challenge. During these hot months, starting a fire in the woodstove is pure torture, so I’ve made myself a little cooking area in a small clearing north of the hut. Although I know that someone could see the smoke, I tell myself that I have no choice. Though the air had dried out since the storm, the temperature was still mild for late October, so I hauled my Dutch oven full of soaked pinto beans to my cooking site and got a fire started under the grill, which we took off the Weber kettle grill we had on our porch in Arlington. I keep a little camp chair hidden under a tarp in the brush nearby, along with a small pot for heating water. Cooking beans is a long-term project, and I can’t walk off and leave them for more than a few minutes for fear that the fire will get out of control, so I brought my notebook, pen and sketch pad. By late afternoon, the beans were getting tender, and I added more water, some rice, and a few dehydrated carrots and peas. The final result wouldn’t win any awards, but it was tasty enough and would last through several reheatings. I finally dug in at around six, leaving myself just enough daylight to haul everything back to the hut. 

October 26 

Yesterday was a lost day. That is what I call the days when I let myself get caught up in a bout of malaise and melancholy. There must be an inner clock that regulates these moods because they usually come when I have nothing pressing to do, so they haven’t impinged upon my survival thus far. I worry that this may change, though, and that one day I’ll find myself unable to crawl out of my sleeping bag to do more than pee. I did manage to get up, though, and spent the day wandering in the woods, finally arriving at a certain rock a few miles along the ridge where I have gone before. I am amazed by how long I can just sit there and allow thoughts and feelings to wash over me. Most of the feelings center around Peter, images that come and go—his posture as he stood in front of the mirror to shave, the way he patted his pockets before going out the door, his smell when he kissed my neck. Inevitably, these images lead to more disturbing memories—IV lines sticking out of his arm, hospital gowns open in the back revealing an unfamiliar, emaciated body, a pale face against a pale pillow. But his eyes never changed, and I hold onto the memory of his gaze. I’ve learned that there is no point in trying to fight these moods. The most I can do is call a kind of truce, acknowledge them, and wait. Eventually, they recede enough for everyday life to break in, sometimes in the form of some necessary bodily function—hunger, thirst, exhaustion. After such an interlude, I’m likely to feel drained for as much as a day before I regain some energy. 

So, I am not feeling totally back to myself as I sit on the sleep platform against the wall and take up my pen. When I think about what to write next, I am overwhelmed by what I’ve yet to convey, little details and the big story of what it was like on the day everything ground to a halt. It’s odd how removed I feel from that person who suddenly realized that the big disaster was imminent. Looking back, she seems at the same time confident and naïve. Of course, we were all naïve to varying extents. But, at any rate, this is how I remember it. 

On the morning of April 1st, I had just stepped out of the shower in Arlington when the NPR news broadcast on the bedroom radio caught my attention. A cascade of computer glitches and irregularities had struck Wall Street just after the opening bell. Data simply disappeared from the computer systems of the major traders, and their operating systems were behaving erratically. At first, the industry suspected some sort of elaborate April Fools’ hoax, but efforts to identify and fix the problem had gone nowhere. Trading was suspended for the day, and trading houses were desperately trying to figure out what had happened. An anonymous spokesperson for one of the brokerage houses reported, “It’s as though someone took a magic eraser and wiped out all of our files.” Commerce Secretary Abraham was urging the public to remain calm. At the moment, everyday banking systems did not appear to be impacted; however, many banks were choosing to shut down their computer systems out of an “abundance of caution.” 

As I stood towel-drying my hair, I tried to digest the news and wondered what was going through the minds of millions of Americans. Would they panic? Start a run on the banks? If the bankers were smart, I thought, they’d all close their doors immediately. I pictured fist fights at ATMs and streets snarled with traffic. Perhaps people would just sit still and wait. Wall Street’s problems might seem far enough removed that middle America wouldn’t understand the possible ramifications of the announcement. Or they’d have blind faith that the problems could be easily fixed. 

You might think I’d have remained glued to the news, but speculation was the last thing I wanted to hear, so I switched over to the classical music station, knowing they would interrupt the program if there was an important update. To tell the truth, I felt a little detached, part of me just wanting to ignore what I was hearing and its possible implications. But in the back of my mind, I knew that this could be the start of something big, the big “it” that Peter and I had been preparing for since we’d bought the cabin. Without thinking, I started throwing clothes into a duffel—my favorite jeans, hiking boots and the fleeces that I kept with me most of the time. I was halfway through a two-week break, so I could afford to disappear for a few days. My electronics and chargers…What else? I’d been meaning to make a bug out list, but I’d gotten lazy since Peter’s death. 

Back in the bathroom, I was pulling all of the over-the-counter medications from the shelves and dumping them into my toiletry bag when I saw Peter’s aftershave. In the months since his death, I had left the little blue bottle right where he had left it, occasionally sprinkling some on my nightshirt. I dropped it in with the medicines and went back to the bedroom for the gun. 

In the kitchen I packed the bread and some food from the pantry into reusable bags and took them out to the pick-up. I brought in a cooler, dropped in some ice packs and all the ice from the ice maker. The milk, butter, cheese, some vegetables, a few condiments, and several packages of meat from the freezer came next. I looked around the refrigerator shelves at the containers of leftovers. I couldn’t take it all, but it would surely rot if the electricity went off. And if it went off for a long time, that would be the least of anyone’s problems, I thought. But, in spite of myself, I pulled them out, dumped them down the garbage disposal and tossed the containers into the dishwasher. I’d turned the downstairs radio to the same NPR station, and I could feel my own panic rising as the music lilted on. Then the music was interrupted by that high-pitched tone they use for testing the emergency broadcast system. 

“This is not a test,” a male voice began. In addition to the breakdown of the computer systems at Wall Street and several major financial institutions, there were reports of a major power outage on the west coast, affecting the grid from just north of San Francisco south to the Mexican border. The president had been briefed and was expected to make a statement within the hour. In the meantime, people were encouraged to remain calm, and if it was feasible, to return home. Metropolitan areas were being encouraged to follow storm evacuation procedures as though a winter storm or other natural disaster were imminent. The goal was to get workers and students home in as orderly a manner as possible. The term “abundance of caution” was repeated several times, but no details were provided about what the threat might be. 

Just go, I thought, as I turned the radio off and the dishwasher on. But what was I forgetting? Keys. Which to leave and which to take? I pulled both sets of truck keys from the kitchen drawer and dropped them in my purse. If you’ve ever tried to get new keys for an antique pick-up truck, a 1966 Ford F-250, to be exact, you can appreciate how carefully we kept track of those keys. I left the second set of my car keys in the drawer. My neighbor, Linda, already had a key to the house. In the garage I took three cases of powdered milk and set them in the back of the truck. Also, three empty gas cans, in the hope I could fill them on the way. I looked around. There was nothing left to take that we didn’t have at the cabin. I pulled the truck out of the garage and stopped it in the driveway. Up and down the street of townhouses, everything seemed quiet.