Rumination with a Sick Puppy
I am not a doomsday theorist. I’m not someone who would hunker down with enough food to last through a nuclear winter and just wait for the ‘big one’ to hit. But I will admit that a romanticized notion of the apocalypse had something to do with the parturition of my off-grid ideal (my “dream” — how precious — is to live on fifty+ acres in an earthship-type dwelling).
Having played out weird Tank Girl/Cormac McCarthy/Boy and His Dog scenarios in my head over and over, I fixated on the notion that to survive in a postapocalyptic landscape, my best bet would be to have a comprehensive knowledge of fuel sources, an understanding of auto mechanics, and a really big tool belt to wear over a greasy pair of cutoffs.
Eventually, the fact that I was even thinking about this stuff at all started to set off alarms. Why would a person fantasize so fervently about the end of civilization in the first place? I still have frequent dreams, sleeping and waking, about how cool it would be to tromp through an abandoned urban center and grab what supplies I could to produce fuel and eke out an existence in the bleak future of humankind. Is this morbid?
The answer I came to just now, driving home from leaving one of my dogs at Urgent Care because she had her (maybe) first seizure, is that we have been opportunistic, as a race, from at least the moment we harnessed the power of fire. We have spent our time learning how to better use energy resources to make life easier and more comfortable.
Perhaps we have become so dependent on energy infrastructures (grid electricity, plumbing, telephones, etc.) that…that we’ve lost some sort of control. Psychically. Imagine if the grid and all the gasoline pumps failed us for 24 hours…36 hours…42 hours…panic would ensue. Riots maybe. (Again, my extremely dramatic fantasy life takes over and has me running around in those cutoffs saving children and piloting makeshift solar rescue vehicles that only I know how to operate.)
For a long time, I didn’t even question the necessity of paying my power bill, and yet, I wouldn’t have known what to do if the power had suddenly disappeared.
Maybe all those apocalyptic visions were born of a repressed desire to regain control. If all conventional energy-harnessing methods were abolished in a worldwide explosion, the most valuable, the fittest, and the most likely to survive would be those members of the human race who could produce energy and fuel — metaphorically, those who could reach into the fire and pull out a burning branch of their own.
—-Refined gOil
