Evacuation Kits and Going to the Dogs

To prepare a good evacuation kit, you must consider your destination. In all cases, of course, you want the essentials, the basic supplies of food, water, toiletries, and changes of clothing, but different sanctuaries have different specific additional needs. In the case of my step-uncle’s pool house, my roommate and I considered the following factors:

• A probable loss of electricity for an uncertain amount of time, meaning:

—Limited refrigeration.

—Limited air-conditioning.

• A lack of alcohol outside the categories of Captain Morgan and Coors.

Therefore, when we went to our corner grocery for supplies, we bought, in addition to the staples of batteries and filtered water, several bottles of wine, a bottle of bourbon, and a bottle of vodka.

In considering the needs of the pool house, however, we had not taken into account the facts that:

• The electrical outage would be incredibly widespread and prolonged.
• The lack of electricity meant a lack of water, since the well’s pump was electrically powered.
• The only road out would be blocked by, I shit you not, half a mile of toppled trees.

When you are battered by heat, have limited water, and are uncertain when you will feel relief, the experience of time’s passing becomes disjointed. At points it seems as if you have never lived any other way, as if existence has always been characterized by a weak struggle to endure, broken only by complaints and muddled attempts at problem-solving.

Here’s how our time went.

It’s hot. Okay, this has to be as hot as it can get. I can manage this.

Let’s eat the cheese and the other stuff in the refrigerator first. With those trees, who knows how long it will take to get the power back on, and everything else will last.

Okay, now it’s hotter. But it’s still within the manageable realm, as long as I don’t move around or breathe too hard.

These are the unopened bottles of filtered water. Let’s put them over here. Okay, that’s for drinking. Here are the empties of the water bottles and the wine bottles. We’ll fill them with the water in the tub and put them over on this side. Okay, that’s for washing our face and hands. Is there a bucket? Okay, here’s one from under the sink. We’ll fill it with water from the pool and use it to flush the toilet. All right. That’s all set. Let’s make sure to remember: drinking, washing, flushing.

Oh my God, it’s so hot, I might cry.

It was a taste of living in the eighteenth century, but without the eighteenth-century skills. Truthfully, in those moments, a five-year-old from the eighteenth century would have been our hero. “You can get food and water from the land itself? Are you magic? Will you be our leader?”

We sat in the car with the engine running a couple of times, trying to cool off in the air conditioning, but we wanted to save gas in the event that we could actually drive out of the place.

There was, of course, the pool. However, we had not brought swimming suits. Also, the water in the pool was, to put it delicately, rather unappealing. There was a dubious brown scum around the edges that was probably residue from rotten leaves, but who wants to take the chance? In all frankness, flushing the toilet seemed the pool water's most appropriate use. To come into actual contact with it—well, there would have to be a compelling reason. (I’ll discuss my compelling reason in another post.)

Since we didn’t have a pre-industrial whiz kid to show us the way, I began, like many problem solvers of the past, to look to the animals for solutions.

It was dusk, and I was trying to hypnotize myself: There is no heat, breathe in, breath out, there is no heat, breathe in, breathe out. Then I noticed the dogs. They were lying on their sides against the tile floor, as dogs often do when there is a tile floor. Hey, the dogs are lying on the tile floor…that’s brilliant! I’m taking a page from the book of the dogs.

So I did. I stretched out in my evil-smelling T-shirt and filthy shorts on the floor, getting as much skin as possible into contact with the cool tile.

Don’t you judge me. I would do it again. Because, you know what? It works. As long as I was in contact with the floor, I was cool. I was actually able to sleep for a little while that night. Truth be told, I’m a little ashamed that the dogs had the idea before I did.

My advice is, pack your evacuation kits as full as you can. But understand that you can never pack them well enough, and don’t be proud. You can sit in your sweat and fantasize about ways to MacGyver the air conditioning all you want—without tools and a reliable power source, you’ll still be begging the unseen gods for a good, steady breeze at the end of the day. Or, you can look to the nearest animal, the expert at enduring without frills, and—within reason—do what works.