The Survival Expo
by Amy Benson
“What you have to realize is, Water is the Enemy of Food.”
We did not take this well.
We thought water was the source of life. People die much faster of dehydration than starvation, so the teachings go.
And it’s necessary for any known source of human food, despite the claims of Airatarians who announced that they could live off of air but were later found to be hoovering up Twinkies, one of the most processed foodstuffs on the planet. The Hostess plants and warehouses in Georgia, Kansas, and Indiana will be hot spots in the end times: Shelves into the sky of Ding Dongs and Swiss Rolls and Snow Balls. Shapes that offer a soft entry to the interior. But water is necessary even for the production of shelf-stable pastries.
The salesperson who broke the news about the Enemy of Food, followed it with: “Picture the produce aisle at your supermarket, all of that rot. That’s what you have to avoid.”
That’s a nontraditional take on the produce aisle, for sure.
We’re taught by nutritionists to “shop the perimeter” of a grocery store, skipping the acres of eat-without-chewing foods in the center. I thought of a line from a book I had read years before: “Eat food that spoils but before it does” (which usually revisits me as I am about to test the bounds of “spoiled”). The author was not writing about the end times, though. She was thinking about how to prevent the end times, in a bougie, slow food, small farms, organic co-ops kind of way. Let’s buy and eat our way to communion with Gaia. Let’s welcome butter and tenderly raised livestock back into the fold, and look for the most transformative, sustainably harvested fleur de sel for so long that our coastal cities succumb and slide us back into that salty sea.
We were looking at the grunt force opposite: 50lb tubs of “Meals,” food only in the most generic sense. Portioned out, vacuum sealed into foil pouches, and again into 50lb drums, squared off, stackable. Minimum space, maximum calories. Also the opposite of my nearly lifelong eating strategy: maximum volume, minimum calories. And by mine, I mean likely every body-dysmorphic eater. I mean American Snackwells culture. I mean American culture. Much for little, quantity over quality, constant consumption. Sweet air, salty air, trickery, the willing, nay, the enthusiastic suspension of disbelief.
There is a good bit of suspension of disbelief at this expo. The primary science fiction it requires is that a human of ordinary means might prepare fully to survive pending disasters. Then that the bridge to a post-disaster future can be found at a booth selling Beef Stroganoff in a pouch; Strawberry Fluff; Cherries Jubilee; Chicken Pot Pie; everything in pouches—no air, no water. [This is an irony to hold onto: the two things we need for survival above all others are also crucial to decay. I think this might be knowledge, delicate and forgettable. I’m bracketing it so that it will survive.] If we are eating food from pouches, though, we’ll require the will to live without. And we will need some sort of memory eraser to exfoliate the traces of how things used to be before we dropped down into our 12x16 backyard shelter, where we keep our Meals. Cheese Tortellini, Meatloaf with Mashed Potatoes and Gravy, Chocolate Dip. These are not the stores of your grandparents’ Great Wars bomb shelter or your parents’ Cold War basement pantry—flour, sugar, tinned meats, canned vegetables, hard tack, all manner of Mason jar preserves.
I should say, my parents. We were what one might call Survivalist Light. We stockpiled. We cut and split enough wood to make it through a Michigan winter. We canned bitter tomato sauce from garden tomatoes; filleted the day’s catch into parcels for dinner, freezing, and smoking; ate the bushels of orchard apples to their wrinkly May end. We did not do readiness drills or pack “ready bags,” or go off the grid (though we did give a composting toilet our best effort). Ours was a backward-looking survivalism, a bent towards self-sufficiency steeped in a deep admiration for Mennonites and an addiction to Little House on the Prairie. It’s like one little vestigial wing on me now. I try to strap it down under a high-tech, sweat-wicking sports bra. It flaps once in a while and fucks up my alignment.
The contemporary environmental conversation, though, has turned almost entirely speculative—what the planet will look like in __ years, what and who will not survive the coming decades. It’s not surprising, then, that preparation for disaster is pitched to the decibel of the alarm. What was surprising at the expo (for my frame of reference, given that I watched my mother learn how to weave and cane chairs) is that many of the products seemed to be aimed at maintaining current levels of convenience. The food that will see you fifty years into the future is soccer parent’s food—full meals with zero preparation. Smooth mouth feel. All of that comfort. The mouth as the comfort pouch. The pouch into which the contents of all the pouches will be spooned. When will it stop being a comfort (underground, uncertain, no end in sight), transferring the strawberry fluff from the 4oz pouch into your lonely interior?
If it was not clear to me before walking into the Survival Expo, it certainly is now: there is no room for depression in this prepper land. No room for questions about the worth of survival. I’m here because that vestigial wing flaps and I wonder if it’s worth the risk to have it surgically removed. If you are here because you want to take steps to control the future, you have to surgically remove the question “why.” “Why” is not operative; everything here is about “How.”
Which brings up the question of trash. Is this what litter at the side of our pock-marked roads will look like in the imperiled future? Empty 50lb polyethylene tubs, Mylar pouches, ripped open and licked clean. (That’s me projecting. I would lick them clean, as I lick my plates now under no mortal threat.)
But then what about the body’s trash? Which is really a way of asking about the sustainability of survival. You hole up somewhere with your pouches, but you take your moods, your ailments with you. Your bodily systems continue (extension of your life is, of course, the entire point) while the social, political, and municipal systems might be grinding slowly or abruptly to a halt. A company would be smart to create an all-inclusive digestive pouch, capable of catching and vacuum re-sealing human waste. Because if you are in your backyard survival cubicle with your children and a six-month supply of vittles, where does it go? These are the other neglected moments at an Expo—what it might be like to stay in the backyard shelter, to venture back out.
We didn’t consider this question in the moment, though, as we browsed the “Meal” booths. Instead, we started to learn the language of a new market, falling rapidly into the trained consumer mode of “this and this, but not that!”
Savvy disaster shoppers look for parlance about shelf life, battery hours, and proximity to the military. We gathered that a premium could be charged if a military or military-adjacent term had been worked onto the packaging: Military Grade, Combat Ready, Marine Performance. The Sparta fantasy is thick on the ground here. Throw your male child out into the woods alone at seven years old. Throw him back out if he finds his way home bleeding and crying. He might die, an acceptable risk. He will be complete only when he is lost to conversation and tenderness and excess and decoration. Reason must serve only defense and conquest, which become impossible to disentangle. So they remain entangled.
In the dedicated survivalist’s scenario, though, “out there” is unacceptably dangerous, full of people who will want what you have, people without your foresight, without your values. The home, maybe the backyard, holds the only safety, the square that might be defended from drought and famine and disease and vulnerable power grids and other people. You don’t send your child away to wither mercy and ruth and the contemplation of abstractions. You don’t even send them to school if you can help it. Home becomes the masculine finishing school. You hold them close, teach them celestial abstractions and the setting of snares.
And, indeed, women did not rule the food here at the Expo. Your underground shelter is not your mother’s kitchen, alright? Even that traditional allowance seems to fall exclusively to men. Sucking the moisture, pleasure, and vulnerability out of food is men’s work. 50lb drums can be hoisted by your average man, one salesman explained, but not your average woman or child. Booth after booth with male attendants and male browsers, sales pitches delivered as if by Army recruiters. Would no one believe a female interface for survival? Would we be eyed as a trap door to lassitude, comfort, or panic?
This is a brilliant inversion of the ancient dichotomies: Man, in readiness for war and the hunt, must harden himself against the pleasures of the hearth. Wine and honeycomb and warm stew. Delilah always in her loose garments. Mary dithering and mollycoddling: Woman, don’t you know I must be about my father’s business? She lacked the long-term vision to bury a steel cage in the backyard and fill it with desiccated strawberry fluff, that’s for sure.
There was one female vendor in the place, as far as we could see, and she had remembered to include a folding table of old toys: lead soldiers, a few fuzzy creatures, and some comic books that might have less gore and apocalypse than the adult versions. This harkened me back to tarrying in antique shops: trying to find the soft spots in a forest of hardwood benches and cast iron tools. Of course, the few children at the Expo were magnetized to her booth. Women and children, women and children, women-and-childrenwomenandchildren.
When I first left the little house in the suburbs, I binged on evolution in college, and I’ve been thinking about species survival and extinction ever since. I began to understand the scope and inevitability of biological change—through species death or transformation over eons—and it thrilled me: we are not something definitive! We and every last atom on earth are becoming and becoming and becoming. It was a beautiful thought—staggeringly so. I could lay down the anxiety I’d been raised on about the second coming—when would it start? was I right with God now? now? Mind checks a hundred times a day—talk about preparedness. I felt great wonder and pride when my child, at three, asked a question it took me almost two decades to tunnel toward: “If humans evolved from apes, what are we evolving into?”
The beauty of evolution might depend on its eons, though, and now we are entering, have entered the Anthropocene—the era in which humans are not only the dominant species but affecting every system which might create a geological record. We are affecting climate, storm severity, earthquakes, fire, and famine. (I keep picturing a human—humanoid?—finger scrolling down exposed strata and stopping at the Anthropocene Era, thick with fossils.) And so millennia-old religious preparedness is running headlong into contemporary disaster preparedness. And most of the items for sale in this collision anticipate cataclysm but aim for life extension instead of rapture. There are those who see climate change as a solvable question for technology, true believers, if you will. In some respects, the Survival Expo is the family-sized version of this: seeing future disasters as something you can research and buy and train yourself over or under or through. And thus offering products of the utmost utility: the combination hatchet/fire starter/friction flashlight; the emergency blanket that might also become a tent, an SOS flag, and a life raft sail. Come up with your own uses and tag us!
These were fascinating, an invitation to imagine future tableaus of ingenuity and the costumes we might wear, the props—not just waterproof but underwater matches, a small tube (say, a quarter of a light saber) capable of lighting a great hall for ___ hours. But we rounded to a table dense with badges and stickers and car plates and T-shirts that articulated deep scorn for contemporary American culture. Its unarmed, communal, environmentalist, atheist weakness, its queer, brown femininity. This was difficult. I felt like I had to turn and take in the information only through my periphery. Because it was a negation of the things I want most to survive. And because I know that we all feel a vast fear, but we don’t identify the same disasters. And that every single culture, human, and perhaps even organism has trouble distinguishing between defense and offense. We may, indeed, have reason to fear one another, and that fear becomes its own attack.
Our uneasiness was, thus, activated by the time we got to the model backyard bunker, and still we stepped inside. These bunkers were good for “tornadoes, hurricanes, home invasions, and more!”
We pointed at the circle extending from the wall about hip height in an otherwise featureless cube and asked the sales rep. “What’s this? A bunker cupholder? Don’t want to drop your beer in a tornado!”
“That?” the man ducked his head into the shelter. He was maintaining his salesman drag and gently suffering fools: “That’s a gun rack.”
Of course it was. So obvious. You would need your gun rack. You would need to exit with some firepower. If you had projectiles capable of great speed and penetration, you might be able to face the destruction of your neighborhood, your home, all the items pinned to your refrigerator.
It’s time to admit that this was a Survival-Expo-slash-Gun-Show. And the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting had happened just a few days before in Parkland, Florida. We had been avoiding that end of the hall and guiltily wondering who would get the $10 admission we had paid to satisfy our curiosity. There may be endless school shootings, but collectively we may remember the names of only three: Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Parkland. How would a school shooting enter into national memory now? We don’t want to think of it, but someone is asking that question. Undoubtedly in terms like: what would I have to do to top the memorable slaughter of first graders?
Here, that person could buy handguns, rifles—assault and otherwise—and maximum damage ammo after sitting at a card table for twenty minutes completing a pen-and-paper background check.
My friend and I could have passed that check easy, easy. We could have picked up the guns as if we were real customers, flipped them from hand to hand and sighted down the barrels. Instead, we walked by the gun tables as if they held uncaged vipers. Tables and tables of guns of every sort: from fit-in-your-boot small to haul-under-your-arm big, black to Army green to pink camo. Almost all of them looked plastic, a surprise to me who still pictures real life guns as a Smith and Wesson or my grandmother’s hunting rifle. Plus, in movies guns look like they carry heft—as if the wielders of the guns need all those muscles just to lift them. When they tossed them to one another, I must have figured: well, they can do that because of those giant arms. I didn’t know I could juggle four or five of them, if I could juggle at all. Almost all of them look like toys. Seem like toys, hold the essence of toy within them. And arming yourself—with guns or other tools—for future scenarios is an act of the imagination.
In the survivalist and gun expo, I try to fuzz my eyesight so I’m only seeing the survivalist tables, like a good hunter, filtering out the noise. In this case, I’m trying to filter out the threat (what feels like the most immediate threat, that is). I walk by the arms dealers like I once walked by the man on our building’s stoop who had plastered it with spread eagle porn mags. I climbed the stairs past him in rage and shame: Don’t let him see your eyes, don’t let him see that you see what he’s doing with his hands. Get in and call the cops. Don’t kick him in the face, don’t die. Walking past the gun booths made me shake, in precisely the same way: fear at being next to something that has felt to me so illicit and physically dangerous right there in the open.
But there’s another memory rattling around back there, too: It was one of my first visits to New York City, in my mid-20s. I was walking behind a police officer in a crush of people on the sidewalk. His handgun was close, closer than I’d ever been to a gun like that. I was blindsided by an urge to reach out and grab it. That impulse was followed closely by the thought: Well, that would be a quick way to die. Which I think was the (only semi-conscious) point at that weird moment in my life, and why I had to aboutface and swim upstream through the flow of bodies. Other- and self-obliteration balancing together on the head of a pin.
The Expo’s coupling of abundant means-to-die with survivalist backpacks and underwater matches and books on foraging seemed profoundly, almost touchingly, confused. And the elements of this ambivalence—am I besieged or laying siege?—are, to me, extremist and frightening, but the ambivalence itself feels human. And familiar. Strive or acquiesce? Fight or yield? Die or don’t die?
When we attended the Expo, I had just stopped wearing scarves every day to hide my bald and then fuzzy head; my eyebrows and lashes were emerging. I was about to be saddled with the moniker, “Survivor.” Yet I was ambivalent about survival. Yes, I was grateful to have (hopefully, who knows?) eradicated a cancer that was very adamant about conquest. And part of me felt ferocious, and had been ferocious, at least relentless, during treatment. For example, I could not stop walking during the five months that a kind chemo nurse would put on a hazmat suit in order to funnel what they call the “red devil” through a port in my chest. My urine, after, would have singed bare skin. I would wake every morning around 5 and go for an hour walk. I mean a walk in which I looked like I was being pursued, clocking it to make sure I didn’t slip above the 12 minute mile range. Even when I felt barely alive and in excruciating pain, I walked. The only time I missed was the week when my feet were so engulfed in blisters that they were mere suggestions of feet and my toes were little floating bones. Otherwise I walked because I wanted to feel alive. Or I wanted to feel as if nothing else was being taken from me. Or I felt I would die if I stopped. What sort of alive was this? Frenzied grasping under a mental whip?
Now, after the plunging weight, the breathtaking bone pain, the Job-ian plagues have passed, I have been putting my head down on the counter a lot and tearing or barely breathing. I am coming back to life, taking up the mantle of adult responsibility once more, but I’m imagining myself dead in small flashes. Vague images of my voluntary obliteration. I think: I have survived, but I don’t know if I want to keep surviving. Again, the problem of the sustainability of survival. This part is not entirely new—feelings of despair and fear of responsibility boiling themselves down to shorthand fantasy: Poof, you don’t exist.
I scare myself, but the concrete threat is nil. What? Leave a motherless child? A partnerless partner? I’m fine. A thought, a flash of an image. Not a plan, not an action.
Still, the term “Survivor” makes me anxious and confused, and I don’t claim it. Have I survived? What have I survived? For how long? With what purpose?
In art, we want an ending. Crash bang boom. A resolution or a gutting or a clear derangement. “This doesn’t feel like an ending,” people say when they don’t get banged upside the head hard enough.
It’s what survivalists and the religious and the religious survivalists want, too. A dramatic event in which they distinguish themselves, in this life or the next.
But this is not what most people seem to want in life. Extend, extend, extend. Draw it out. No climactic endings. We are willing to take survival in any form. A relative is miserable, and in advanced age, yet he takes several fistfuls of vitamins and supplements every day. We’ll accommodate any new medically or technologically enabled state of being. Millions are, in facilities, fed and washed and medicated and in a ceaseless wash of pain and confusion.
There is a high risk that either this cancer will come back within a few years or that I will get a different cancer from all of the cancer treatment. This is the part in the symphony called a suspension, but the suspension may go on for years; it may never resolve. One cancer, then another. Then another ailment, and some more ailments from treating those ailments. The body is unwell, the mind unwell, and we may live some sizeable number of years locked from one another in our despair.
Certainty is essential for the survivalist project. A certain mental resolve. You can’t think, well, maybe the planet would be better off if humans were greatly diminished or even destroyed? You can’t think: well, what are humans anyway? What is an individual human, an “I”? I’ve doubted selfhood for a long time. Living in a dense urban center for years turned these doubts into lenses my eyes now can’t see without. The structures propping up individualism—private property, water rights, extreme wealth inequity—seem especially monstrous given climate change predictions. A couple of dinghies for the ultra rich and the rest gone under.
The word survival itself is built on competition: (mid-15th Century) to outlive, continue in existence after the death of another. But you don’t need etymology to see that the survivalist culture is built on zero-sum tabulations. Your shelter is family-sized, you calculate the number of 50lb drums per person, per anticipated days of survival. Imagine how even one interloper might affect those stockpiles. For a sustainable future, you must hope that most people are not as prepared and you can defend yourself against them.
I can’t say, yeah, I want to—am going to—be one of the survivors. I think I want to go out with the crowd.
In college as a biology major, I took a seminar on Human Population Control. Up to that point, I had attended the sort of religious schools that forced us to tear references to evolution out of our textbooks and X out dinosaur books from the Scholastic book catalogues. Religious school breeds missionaries and fascists, mythologists and poets. Not scientists. I was new to decentering the human animal as a special case, eager to back up far enough from my indoctrination to catch a glimpse. Week after week, the professor presented scientific theories of peak population and colony death, and statistics about human birth rates—the bar graphs bulging for Asia and Africa. And then he offered visions of a miserly future for every human creature should we (by which he meant not those of us in the room, in North America, but the fecund) keep producing human life that didn’t die in infancy. He did this with calm, friendly authority, so I took it as Gospel because I was in College and getting the straight dope after years of religious school fantasia.
It took me a few more years to realize how deeply he scared me about reproduction and resource scarcity, and how messed up he was about race and might-makes-right and history-is-written-by-the-victors. It took me a while to understand, as well, how religions didn’t have exclusive rights to indoctrination. His population statistics were not alarming but alarmist. A clear hatred of brown and black people there in the middle of an Ohio cornfield. Years later I thought: was anybody looking at this guy’s syllabus? Chatting over Bunsen burners with him? How did he get to teach this stuff?
I only wonder now what his basement might have looked like, what was buried in his backyard. He could have fit right in here, professor and preppers implying a similar doctrine: Identify the enemy and take them out. Water is the enemy of food. Weather is the enemy of property. Home invaders are the enemy of home. Government is the enemy of ownership. Drugs are the enemy of clarity and sanity and readiness (but they feel so good). The poor are the enemy of wealth accumulation. Insects and empathy are the enemy of everything. Beating hearts are the enemy of limited food supplies. Beating hearts are the enemy. We can’t all survive.
There were certain booths here, though, that seemed comparatively benign, almost sweet. For example, the man selling the miracle backpack (from what was clearly a pyramid scheme company), with absolutely everything you need to survive your 40 days in the desert (just add food and water). There was real ingenuity and a kind of cartoonish optimism required to create a “Ready Pack” with a water purifier pump, 2 gallon water container, water straw, two-way ham radio, hatchet and skinning knife combo, one-person tent, extractor (?), “elite” first aid kit, sleeping bag, duct tape, folding solar charger, folding shovel, hand chain saw, slingshot with ammo, something called “prep bait,” and 28 other items PLUS a deck of cards with 52 survival tips for “hours of fun and entertainment.” I genuinely was tempted by the dollhouse quality of it—getting to unfold each nook (and then surely failing to fit half the items back in).
A different booth called us back, though, with books, pocket-sized tools, and oatmeal boxes with false bottoms to hide your gold. This is where we spent our souvenir money. We bought a calorie dense nutrition bar, but only nibbled the corners, fearing those dense calories. And “survival tool cards,” the most aesthetically pleasing items in the hall. They are metal, the size and shape of a credit card, with a collection of flat tools elegantly arranged like a jigsaw puzzle. The tiny fishhooks and saw and snare locks and trident head can be snapped from the card as needed. Which conjures a bucolic disaster, streams and meadows stocked with edibles.
Another card I contemplated, the “chaos card,” was meant to save one from a different sort of disaster. Described as a “fully loaded break-away escape kit,” the chaos card has tools that might allow you to escape from handcuffs, for example, or the trunk of a car, and a “stabby thing,” for things that need to be stabbed. If you can reach your pocket, if you have placed the card in a pocket each morning, if your clothes have pockets.
I didn’t buy this card. I couldn’t invite that sort of disaster into my home to meditate upon. I couldn’t sit in my sun-filled garret and imagine which tool I might snap from the card to free me from a locked survival shelter or which I might insert into the eye of the person who locked it. I don’t think there is an ingenuity that will save us from the harm others wish us. Or a tool that will ward off fecundity or neutralize systemic poisoning within the body or without. No tool that will help any of us to understand and remember that water and oxygen are necessary for both life and rot; that life is rot.
I’m not ready and I will not ready myself. But I do have my wilderness survival card, and I will remember where I put it. And in our disaster, I will pull threads from my shirt and tie them to tiny hooks that catch the flesh of my fingers before they catch a mildly contaminated trout. I’ll tear a strip from my pants, find the best stick, and knot the harpoon head to its tip. I’ll pop out a rabbit snare and then…I can’t even pretend to know what one does with a rabbit snare.
I think I’m imagining a movie I loved as a child (as I loved all solo and family survival stories): I’m Natty Gann, cursing and biting my tongue cutely in concentration. Surely we could start a rubbed-stick fire, surely we could roast some hard-caught skinned thing over it? We would call out in the dark to see who would like to share.
We did not take this well.
We thought water was the source of life. People die much faster of dehydration than starvation, so the teachings go.
And it’s necessary for any known source of human food, despite the claims of Airatarians who announced that they could live off of air but were later found to be hoovering up Twinkies, one of the most processed foodstuffs on the planet. The Hostess plants and warehouses in Georgia, Kansas, and Indiana will be hot spots in the end times: Shelves into the sky of Ding Dongs and Swiss Rolls and Snow Balls. Shapes that offer a soft entry to the interior. But water is necessary even for the production of shelf-stable pastries.
The salesperson who broke the news about the Enemy of Food, followed it with: “Picture the produce aisle at your supermarket, all of that rot. That’s what you have to avoid.”
That’s a nontraditional take on the produce aisle, for sure.
We’re taught by nutritionists to “shop the perimeter” of a grocery store, skipping the acres of eat-without-chewing foods in the center. I thought of a line from a book I had read years before: “Eat food that spoils but before it does” (which usually revisits me as I am about to test the bounds of “spoiled”). The author was not writing about the end times, though. She was thinking about how to prevent the end times, in a bougie, slow food, small farms, organic co-ops kind of way. Let’s buy and eat our way to communion with Gaia. Let’s welcome butter and tenderly raised livestock back into the fold, and look for the most transformative, sustainably harvested fleur de sel for so long that our coastal cities succumb and slide us back into that salty sea.
We were looking at the grunt force opposite: 50lb tubs of “Meals,” food only in the most generic sense. Portioned out, vacuum sealed into foil pouches, and again into 50lb drums, squared off, stackable. Minimum space, maximum calories. Also the opposite of my nearly lifelong eating strategy: maximum volume, minimum calories. And by mine, I mean likely every body-dysmorphic eater. I mean American Snackwells culture. I mean American culture. Much for little, quantity over quality, constant consumption. Sweet air, salty air, trickery, the willing, nay, the enthusiastic suspension of disbelief.
There is a good bit of suspension of disbelief at this expo. The primary science fiction it requires is that a human of ordinary means might prepare fully to survive pending disasters. Then that the bridge to a post-disaster future can be found at a booth selling Beef Stroganoff in a pouch; Strawberry Fluff; Cherries Jubilee; Chicken Pot Pie; everything in pouches—no air, no water. [This is an irony to hold onto: the two things we need for survival above all others are also crucial to decay. I think this might be knowledge, delicate and forgettable. I’m bracketing it so that it will survive.] If we are eating food from pouches, though, we’ll require the will to live without. And we will need some sort of memory eraser to exfoliate the traces of how things used to be before we dropped down into our 12x16 backyard shelter, where we keep our Meals. Cheese Tortellini, Meatloaf with Mashed Potatoes and Gravy, Chocolate Dip. These are not the stores of your grandparents’ Great Wars bomb shelter or your parents’ Cold War basement pantry—flour, sugar, tinned meats, canned vegetables, hard tack, all manner of Mason jar preserves.
I should say, my parents. We were what one might call Survivalist Light. We stockpiled. We cut and split enough wood to make it through a Michigan winter. We canned bitter tomato sauce from garden tomatoes; filleted the day’s catch into parcels for dinner, freezing, and smoking; ate the bushels of orchard apples to their wrinkly May end. We did not do readiness drills or pack “ready bags,” or go off the grid (though we did give a composting toilet our best effort). Ours was a backward-looking survivalism, a bent towards self-sufficiency steeped in a deep admiration for Mennonites and an addiction to Little House on the Prairie. It’s like one little vestigial wing on me now. I try to strap it down under a high-tech, sweat-wicking sports bra. It flaps once in a while and fucks up my alignment.
The contemporary environmental conversation, though, has turned almost entirely speculative—what the planet will look like in __ years, what and who will not survive the coming decades. It’s not surprising, then, that preparation for disaster is pitched to the decibel of the alarm. What was surprising at the expo (for my frame of reference, given that I watched my mother learn how to weave and cane chairs) is that many of the products seemed to be aimed at maintaining current levels of convenience. The food that will see you fifty years into the future is soccer parent’s food—full meals with zero preparation. Smooth mouth feel. All of that comfort. The mouth as the comfort pouch. The pouch into which the contents of all the pouches will be spooned. When will it stop being a comfort (underground, uncertain, no end in sight), transferring the strawberry fluff from the 4oz pouch into your lonely interior?
If it was not clear to me before walking into the Survival Expo, it certainly is now: there is no room for depression in this prepper land. No room for questions about the worth of survival. I’m here because that vestigial wing flaps and I wonder if it’s worth the risk to have it surgically removed. If you are here because you want to take steps to control the future, you have to surgically remove the question “why.” “Why” is not operative; everything here is about “How.”
Which brings up the question of trash. Is this what litter at the side of our pock-marked roads will look like in the imperiled future? Empty 50lb polyethylene tubs, Mylar pouches, ripped open and licked clean. (That’s me projecting. I would lick them clean, as I lick my plates now under no mortal threat.)
But then what about the body’s trash? Which is really a way of asking about the sustainability of survival. You hole up somewhere with your pouches, but you take your moods, your ailments with you. Your bodily systems continue (extension of your life is, of course, the entire point) while the social, political, and municipal systems might be grinding slowly or abruptly to a halt. A company would be smart to create an all-inclusive digestive pouch, capable of catching and vacuum re-sealing human waste. Because if you are in your backyard survival cubicle with your children and a six-month supply of vittles, where does it go? These are the other neglected moments at an Expo—what it might be like to stay in the backyard shelter, to venture back out.
We didn’t consider this question in the moment, though, as we browsed the “Meal” booths. Instead, we started to learn the language of a new market, falling rapidly into the trained consumer mode of “this and this, but not that!”
Savvy disaster shoppers look for parlance about shelf life, battery hours, and proximity to the military. We gathered that a premium could be charged if a military or military-adjacent term had been worked onto the packaging: Military Grade, Combat Ready, Marine Performance. The Sparta fantasy is thick on the ground here. Throw your male child out into the woods alone at seven years old. Throw him back out if he finds his way home bleeding and crying. He might die, an acceptable risk. He will be complete only when he is lost to conversation and tenderness and excess and decoration. Reason must serve only defense and conquest, which become impossible to disentangle. So they remain entangled.
In the dedicated survivalist’s scenario, though, “out there” is unacceptably dangerous, full of people who will want what you have, people without your foresight, without your values. The home, maybe the backyard, holds the only safety, the square that might be defended from drought and famine and disease and vulnerable power grids and other people. You don’t send your child away to wither mercy and ruth and the contemplation of abstractions. You don’t even send them to school if you can help it. Home becomes the masculine finishing school. You hold them close, teach them celestial abstractions and the setting of snares.
And, indeed, women did not rule the food here at the Expo. Your underground shelter is not your mother’s kitchen, alright? Even that traditional allowance seems to fall exclusively to men. Sucking the moisture, pleasure, and vulnerability out of food is men’s work. 50lb drums can be hoisted by your average man, one salesman explained, but not your average woman or child. Booth after booth with male attendants and male browsers, sales pitches delivered as if by Army recruiters. Would no one believe a female interface for survival? Would we be eyed as a trap door to lassitude, comfort, or panic?
This is a brilliant inversion of the ancient dichotomies: Man, in readiness for war and the hunt, must harden himself against the pleasures of the hearth. Wine and honeycomb and warm stew. Delilah always in her loose garments. Mary dithering and mollycoddling: Woman, don’t you know I must be about my father’s business? She lacked the long-term vision to bury a steel cage in the backyard and fill it with desiccated strawberry fluff, that’s for sure.
There was one female vendor in the place, as far as we could see, and she had remembered to include a folding table of old toys: lead soldiers, a few fuzzy creatures, and some comic books that might have less gore and apocalypse than the adult versions. This harkened me back to tarrying in antique shops: trying to find the soft spots in a forest of hardwood benches and cast iron tools. Of course, the few children at the Expo were magnetized to her booth. Women and children, women and children, women-and-childrenwomenandchildren.
When I first left the little house in the suburbs, I binged on evolution in college, and I’ve been thinking about species survival and extinction ever since. I began to understand the scope and inevitability of biological change—through species death or transformation over eons—and it thrilled me: we are not something definitive! We and every last atom on earth are becoming and becoming and becoming. It was a beautiful thought—staggeringly so. I could lay down the anxiety I’d been raised on about the second coming—when would it start? was I right with God now? now? Mind checks a hundred times a day—talk about preparedness. I felt great wonder and pride when my child, at three, asked a question it took me almost two decades to tunnel toward: “If humans evolved from apes, what are we evolving into?”
The beauty of evolution might depend on its eons, though, and now we are entering, have entered the Anthropocene—the era in which humans are not only the dominant species but affecting every system which might create a geological record. We are affecting climate, storm severity, earthquakes, fire, and famine. (I keep picturing a human—humanoid?—finger scrolling down exposed strata and stopping at the Anthropocene Era, thick with fossils.) And so millennia-old religious preparedness is running headlong into contemporary disaster preparedness. And most of the items for sale in this collision anticipate cataclysm but aim for life extension instead of rapture. There are those who see climate change as a solvable question for technology, true believers, if you will. In some respects, the Survival Expo is the family-sized version of this: seeing future disasters as something you can research and buy and train yourself over or under or through. And thus offering products of the utmost utility: the combination hatchet/fire starter/friction flashlight; the emergency blanket that might also become a tent, an SOS flag, and a life raft sail. Come up with your own uses and tag us!
These were fascinating, an invitation to imagine future tableaus of ingenuity and the costumes we might wear, the props—not just waterproof but underwater matches, a small tube (say, a quarter of a light saber) capable of lighting a great hall for ___ hours. But we rounded to a table dense with badges and stickers and car plates and T-shirts that articulated deep scorn for contemporary American culture. Its unarmed, communal, environmentalist, atheist weakness, its queer, brown femininity. This was difficult. I felt like I had to turn and take in the information only through my periphery. Because it was a negation of the things I want most to survive. And because I know that we all feel a vast fear, but we don’t identify the same disasters. And that every single culture, human, and perhaps even organism has trouble distinguishing between defense and offense. We may, indeed, have reason to fear one another, and that fear becomes its own attack.
Our uneasiness was, thus, activated by the time we got to the model backyard bunker, and still we stepped inside. These bunkers were good for “tornadoes, hurricanes, home invasions, and more!”
We pointed at the circle extending from the wall about hip height in an otherwise featureless cube and asked the sales rep. “What’s this? A bunker cupholder? Don’t want to drop your beer in a tornado!”
“That?” the man ducked his head into the shelter. He was maintaining his salesman drag and gently suffering fools: “That’s a gun rack.”
Of course it was. So obvious. You would need your gun rack. You would need to exit with some firepower. If you had projectiles capable of great speed and penetration, you might be able to face the destruction of your neighborhood, your home, all the items pinned to your refrigerator.
It’s time to admit that this was a Survival-Expo-slash-Gun-Show. And the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting had happened just a few days before in Parkland, Florida. We had been avoiding that end of the hall and guiltily wondering who would get the $10 admission we had paid to satisfy our curiosity. There may be endless school shootings, but collectively we may remember the names of only three: Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Parkland. How would a school shooting enter into national memory now? We don’t want to think of it, but someone is asking that question. Undoubtedly in terms like: what would I have to do to top the memorable slaughter of first graders?
Here, that person could buy handguns, rifles—assault and otherwise—and maximum damage ammo after sitting at a card table for twenty minutes completing a pen-and-paper background check.
My friend and I could have passed that check easy, easy. We could have picked up the guns as if we were real customers, flipped them from hand to hand and sighted down the barrels. Instead, we walked by the gun tables as if they held uncaged vipers. Tables and tables of guns of every sort: from fit-in-your-boot small to haul-under-your-arm big, black to Army green to pink camo. Almost all of them looked plastic, a surprise to me who still pictures real life guns as a Smith and Wesson or my grandmother’s hunting rifle. Plus, in movies guns look like they carry heft—as if the wielders of the guns need all those muscles just to lift them. When they tossed them to one another, I must have figured: well, they can do that because of those giant arms. I didn’t know I could juggle four or five of them, if I could juggle at all. Almost all of them look like toys. Seem like toys, hold the essence of toy within them. And arming yourself—with guns or other tools—for future scenarios is an act of the imagination.
In the survivalist and gun expo, I try to fuzz my eyesight so I’m only seeing the survivalist tables, like a good hunter, filtering out the noise. In this case, I’m trying to filter out the threat (what feels like the most immediate threat, that is). I walk by the arms dealers like I once walked by the man on our building’s stoop who had plastered it with spread eagle porn mags. I climbed the stairs past him in rage and shame: Don’t let him see your eyes, don’t let him see that you see what he’s doing with his hands. Get in and call the cops. Don’t kick him in the face, don’t die. Walking past the gun booths made me shake, in precisely the same way: fear at being next to something that has felt to me so illicit and physically dangerous right there in the open.
But there’s another memory rattling around back there, too: It was one of my first visits to New York City, in my mid-20s. I was walking behind a police officer in a crush of people on the sidewalk. His handgun was close, closer than I’d ever been to a gun like that. I was blindsided by an urge to reach out and grab it. That impulse was followed closely by the thought: Well, that would be a quick way to die. Which I think was the (only semi-conscious) point at that weird moment in my life, and why I had to aboutface and swim upstream through the flow of bodies. Other- and self-obliteration balancing together on the head of a pin.
The Expo’s coupling of abundant means-to-die with survivalist backpacks and underwater matches and books on foraging seemed profoundly, almost touchingly, confused. And the elements of this ambivalence—am I besieged or laying siege?—are, to me, extremist and frightening, but the ambivalence itself feels human. And familiar. Strive or acquiesce? Fight or yield? Die or don’t die?
When we attended the Expo, I had just stopped wearing scarves every day to hide my bald and then fuzzy head; my eyebrows and lashes were emerging. I was about to be saddled with the moniker, “Survivor.” Yet I was ambivalent about survival. Yes, I was grateful to have (hopefully, who knows?) eradicated a cancer that was very adamant about conquest. And part of me felt ferocious, and had been ferocious, at least relentless, during treatment. For example, I could not stop walking during the five months that a kind chemo nurse would put on a hazmat suit in order to funnel what they call the “red devil” through a port in my chest. My urine, after, would have singed bare skin. I would wake every morning around 5 and go for an hour walk. I mean a walk in which I looked like I was being pursued, clocking it to make sure I didn’t slip above the 12 minute mile range. Even when I felt barely alive and in excruciating pain, I walked. The only time I missed was the week when my feet were so engulfed in blisters that they were mere suggestions of feet and my toes were little floating bones. Otherwise I walked because I wanted to feel alive. Or I wanted to feel as if nothing else was being taken from me. Or I felt I would die if I stopped. What sort of alive was this? Frenzied grasping under a mental whip?
Now, after the plunging weight, the breathtaking bone pain, the Job-ian plagues have passed, I have been putting my head down on the counter a lot and tearing or barely breathing. I am coming back to life, taking up the mantle of adult responsibility once more, but I’m imagining myself dead in small flashes. Vague images of my voluntary obliteration. I think: I have survived, but I don’t know if I want to keep surviving. Again, the problem of the sustainability of survival. This part is not entirely new—feelings of despair and fear of responsibility boiling themselves down to shorthand fantasy: Poof, you don’t exist.
I scare myself, but the concrete threat is nil. What? Leave a motherless child? A partnerless partner? I’m fine. A thought, a flash of an image. Not a plan, not an action.
Still, the term “Survivor” makes me anxious and confused, and I don’t claim it. Have I survived? What have I survived? For how long? With what purpose?
In art, we want an ending. Crash bang boom. A resolution or a gutting or a clear derangement. “This doesn’t feel like an ending,” people say when they don’t get banged upside the head hard enough.
It’s what survivalists and the religious and the religious survivalists want, too. A dramatic event in which they distinguish themselves, in this life or the next.
But this is not what most people seem to want in life. Extend, extend, extend. Draw it out. No climactic endings. We are willing to take survival in any form. A relative is miserable, and in advanced age, yet he takes several fistfuls of vitamins and supplements every day. We’ll accommodate any new medically or technologically enabled state of being. Millions are, in facilities, fed and washed and medicated and in a ceaseless wash of pain and confusion.
There is a high risk that either this cancer will come back within a few years or that I will get a different cancer from all of the cancer treatment. This is the part in the symphony called a suspension, but the suspension may go on for years; it may never resolve. One cancer, then another. Then another ailment, and some more ailments from treating those ailments. The body is unwell, the mind unwell, and we may live some sizeable number of years locked from one another in our despair.
Certainty is essential for the survivalist project. A certain mental resolve. You can’t think, well, maybe the planet would be better off if humans were greatly diminished or even destroyed? You can’t think: well, what are humans anyway? What is an individual human, an “I”? I’ve doubted selfhood for a long time. Living in a dense urban center for years turned these doubts into lenses my eyes now can’t see without. The structures propping up individualism—private property, water rights, extreme wealth inequity—seem especially monstrous given climate change predictions. A couple of dinghies for the ultra rich and the rest gone under.
The word survival itself is built on competition: (mid-15th Century) to outlive, continue in existence after the death of another. But you don’t need etymology to see that the survivalist culture is built on zero-sum tabulations. Your shelter is family-sized, you calculate the number of 50lb drums per person, per anticipated days of survival. Imagine how even one interloper might affect those stockpiles. For a sustainable future, you must hope that most people are not as prepared and you can defend yourself against them.
I can’t say, yeah, I want to—am going to—be one of the survivors. I think I want to go out with the crowd.
In college as a biology major, I took a seminar on Human Population Control. Up to that point, I had attended the sort of religious schools that forced us to tear references to evolution out of our textbooks and X out dinosaur books from the Scholastic book catalogues. Religious school breeds missionaries and fascists, mythologists and poets. Not scientists. I was new to decentering the human animal as a special case, eager to back up far enough from my indoctrination to catch a glimpse. Week after week, the professor presented scientific theories of peak population and colony death, and statistics about human birth rates—the bar graphs bulging for Asia and Africa. And then he offered visions of a miserly future for every human creature should we (by which he meant not those of us in the room, in North America, but the fecund) keep producing human life that didn’t die in infancy. He did this with calm, friendly authority, so I took it as Gospel because I was in College and getting the straight dope after years of religious school fantasia.
It took me a few more years to realize how deeply he scared me about reproduction and resource scarcity, and how messed up he was about race and might-makes-right and history-is-written-by-the-victors. It took me a while to understand, as well, how religions didn’t have exclusive rights to indoctrination. His population statistics were not alarming but alarmist. A clear hatred of brown and black people there in the middle of an Ohio cornfield. Years later I thought: was anybody looking at this guy’s syllabus? Chatting over Bunsen burners with him? How did he get to teach this stuff?
I only wonder now what his basement might have looked like, what was buried in his backyard. He could have fit right in here, professor and preppers implying a similar doctrine: Identify the enemy and take them out. Water is the enemy of food. Weather is the enemy of property. Home invaders are the enemy of home. Government is the enemy of ownership. Drugs are the enemy of clarity and sanity and readiness (but they feel so good). The poor are the enemy of wealth accumulation. Insects and empathy are the enemy of everything. Beating hearts are the enemy of limited food supplies. Beating hearts are the enemy. We can’t all survive.
There were certain booths here, though, that seemed comparatively benign, almost sweet. For example, the man selling the miracle backpack (from what was clearly a pyramid scheme company), with absolutely everything you need to survive your 40 days in the desert (just add food and water). There was real ingenuity and a kind of cartoonish optimism required to create a “Ready Pack” with a water purifier pump, 2 gallon water container, water straw, two-way ham radio, hatchet and skinning knife combo, one-person tent, extractor (?), “elite” first aid kit, sleeping bag, duct tape, folding solar charger, folding shovel, hand chain saw, slingshot with ammo, something called “prep bait,” and 28 other items PLUS a deck of cards with 52 survival tips for “hours of fun and entertainment.” I genuinely was tempted by the dollhouse quality of it—getting to unfold each nook (and then surely failing to fit half the items back in).
A different booth called us back, though, with books, pocket-sized tools, and oatmeal boxes with false bottoms to hide your gold. This is where we spent our souvenir money. We bought a calorie dense nutrition bar, but only nibbled the corners, fearing those dense calories. And “survival tool cards,” the most aesthetically pleasing items in the hall. They are metal, the size and shape of a credit card, with a collection of flat tools elegantly arranged like a jigsaw puzzle. The tiny fishhooks and saw and snare locks and trident head can be snapped from the card as needed. Which conjures a bucolic disaster, streams and meadows stocked with edibles.
Another card I contemplated, the “chaos card,” was meant to save one from a different sort of disaster. Described as a “fully loaded break-away escape kit,” the chaos card has tools that might allow you to escape from handcuffs, for example, or the trunk of a car, and a “stabby thing,” for things that need to be stabbed. If you can reach your pocket, if you have placed the card in a pocket each morning, if your clothes have pockets.
I didn’t buy this card. I couldn’t invite that sort of disaster into my home to meditate upon. I couldn’t sit in my sun-filled garret and imagine which tool I might snap from the card to free me from a locked survival shelter or which I might insert into the eye of the person who locked it. I don’t think there is an ingenuity that will save us from the harm others wish us. Or a tool that will ward off fecundity or neutralize systemic poisoning within the body or without. No tool that will help any of us to understand and remember that water and oxygen are necessary for both life and rot; that life is rot.
I’m not ready and I will not ready myself. But I do have my wilderness survival card, and I will remember where I put it. And in our disaster, I will pull threads from my shirt and tie them to tiny hooks that catch the flesh of my fingers before they catch a mildly contaminated trout. I’ll tear a strip from my pants, find the best stick, and knot the harpoon head to its tip. I’ll pop out a rabbit snare and then…I can’t even pretend to know what one does with a rabbit snare.
I think I’m imagining a movie I loved as a child (as I loved all solo and family survival stories): I’m Natty Gann, cursing and biting my tongue cutely in concentration. Surely we could start a rubbed-stick fire, surely we could roast some hard-caught skinned thing over it? We would call out in the dark to see who would like to share.