How I Learned To Love The End Of The World

Guest Post by John Wilder

“We estimate between two and four megatons.  Everything within a 30 kilometer radius will be completely destroyed, including the three remaining reactors at Chernobyl.” – Chernobyl (HBO®)

Thankfully, everyone is equally hungry under communism.  Bernie’s job is done.

I think I’ve always thought about what’s known today as “prepping” – even at a young age.  When I was young, we lived deep in the mountains.  How deep?  The next closest kid anywhere near my age was ten miles away and probably 2,000’ lower in elevation and was actually a yeti that had moved there from Tibet to get away from the crowds.  The nearest grocery store was twenty miles away.  The nearest movie theater?  Fifty miles.

When you live nearly so far from civilization that tourists try to pay you in beads and pantyhose, you have to think ahead.  Ma Wilder did.  Ma had designed the house with remoteness in mind.  Her pantry was always full, and it was huge.  She built in a pantry that consisted of one entire fifteen foot wall, floor to ceiling, a foot deep.

The pantry was always (and I mean always) stocked from floor to ceiling with canned goods.  Freezer?  Not one freezer.  Two.  And they were always packed to the brim with food.  Well, with the exception of when Pa would let the inventory go down so there would be room to fit half a cow.  Literally.  He’d buy a “side of beef” which was half of a cow.  Minus the hooves, of course.

Ma Wilder had also designed a root cellar that the contractor built.  For those of you not in the know, a root cellar is a small building (8 foot by 8 foot by 8 foot) that is 90% buried to keep vegetables so they will neither sprout nor spoil.  In order to do that, the cellar is dark and cool, like Nancy Pelosi’s heart.  Ma Wilder kept hundreds of pounds of potatoes there.  I should know – I was often the guy taking them down in fall and hauling them up in winter.  And to be clear, we kept the potatoes in the cellar, since Nancy Pelosi’s heart isn’t big enough to hold a French fry.

Exercise?  No, with COVID-19, it’s extra fries.

The house was designed to be heated in winter with firewood.  Since electricity was incredibly expensive up there, Pa Wilder made gathering, cutting, splitting, and stacking firewood his summer hobby.  As it was Pa’s summer hobby, it turned out to be my summer hobby, too.  It was hard work, and paid poorly until it came time to hit the blocking sled for football when it paid off with massive thighs of steel.

There is no jean size for “massive thighs of steel.”

But it wasn’t just the remoteness that drove Ma Wilder to be prepared.  First, I have to explain a little bit about the family.  My parents were older than I was.  Oh, sure, that’s normally the case, except in some places like Hollywood, but in my case my parents were a LOT older.

Why?

It turns out that I was adopted, despite the original story they told me of finding me as an infant in a crashed space capsule in a wolf den near the summit of Mount Olympus.  In reality, Ma Wilder was my biological grandmother and not who hiked around Greece looking for wolf-raised space babies.  Apparently, as a child the only super-power I had consisted of making my biological mother and father both disappear.

I blame the heat ray vision.

I made a website for orphans, but it doesn’t have a home page.

So, I was adopted.  Since my parents were not only older than me, but also much older than even standard issue parents, they had hands-on experience with the Great Depression and World War II while they were young.  Apparently, those were events that may been somewhat memorable.

I do remember sitting down in rocking chair in the kitchen while supper was cooking.  After Pa Wilder had finished his chores for the day, he and Ma would sit down to talk about life, most often with a libation, as Pa Wilder called drinking.  I believe it was mainly bourbon, but I can’t really say since they were quite poor hosts and never offered me any.  Often, Ma and Pa discussed people I didn’t know.  This was so boring it made me want to go to and stick forks in outlets to test breakers.

Especially when they talked about people, I was often admonished that “what we discuss stays within the family” though it was implied that that admonishment probably counted for every topic.  I can see how it might be considered controversial how irritated that they were that the neighbor dog kept peeing in the snow by the back porch and they didn’t want me to tattle to the neighbors.   Or how economic collapse might be a thing.  Or how we might be headed towards nuclear war, and had Pa thought about buying dynamite so he could blow up the road leading to our house so we weren’t the victims of marauding, murdering gangs?

Yup.  That was an actual conversation that Ma and Pa had.  I think they only mentioned that idea once while I was in the room, but when your mother is calmly talking about having your father blow up bridges to save you from hordes of people (the parents of the kids you go to school with) ransacking your home after the Soviets gave America a “just thinking about you” bouquet of 10 megaton fireballs?

You tend to remember that sort of conversation when you’re 12.

I heard that after a nuclear war, there are high radiation levels, then only the politicians will be left.

Ma and Pa were acutely aware that all of their material prosperity could evaporate in an instant.  Ma and Pa had both seen rich men laid low by the Great Depression, and Pa Wilder had fought in World War II.  He had driven all through northern Europe, having been on Omaha at D-Day +3.  I can’t even imagine what he had seen.  Of course I asked him the obvious question, “Did any Germans shoot at ya, Pa?”

“No, son, they never shot at me,” he replied with all the coolness of a Steve McQueen, “but I was with a lot of people they were shooting at.”

I’m ashamed at how long it took me to figure out what he was really saying.

That’s not impressive, though.  One of my friends had a grandpa that brought down 15 German planes during the war.  Worst mechanic the Luftwaffe had.

I’m not sure that they ever mentioned the idea of nuclear Armageddon more than once or twice, but it doesn’t take long to make a kid connect the dots:  “Oh, that’s why we have all the food.  And all the guns.  And the 500 gallons of gasoline.  And the 250 gallons of diesel.  And Ma’s amusing utter failure to raise vegetables in the backyard, repeated year after year.”

My parents were preppers before it even had a name beyond “being prudent.”  It’s probably justifiable, especially on Ma Wilder’s part.  She had seen her family make it through the Great Depression okay, but her family had also raised several children whose parents weren’t well off enough to feed them.  I know that sounds crazy in the year 2020, but in the year 1930, sometimes parents couldn’t even figure out where to get enough money to feed a child.

I think those experiences were a driving force in Ma Wilder’s life.  She saved aluminum TV dinner trays.  She saved old clothes.  She could sew (fairly well), make soap (that was more like a caustic chemical burn in a bar), knit (very well), or ferment wine (she gave me a sip and to 12 year old me it tasted of pepper, hate and despair).  Back when she grew up, prepping wasn’t a hobby.  Prepping was what everyone did.

As I mentioned, one factor that made all the preparation seem even more normal was being so far away from anything.  Also, being so far away from everything meant I was pretty far away from the middle school.  I was the last one on the bus route.  That also meant I was the first one on, and the last one off.  It gave me a lot of time alone on the bus to read – a lot.

All of this might explain why I developed a love of fiction that featured the end of the world when I was growing up.  Lucifer’s Hammer, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Earth Abides, The Stand, On the Beach, The Postman, and I Am Legend were all novels that I read as I rode the green pleather seat on an endless loop back and forth to school.  My classmates might have been looking at the trees and houses or talking to each other, but I was living in a world where everything had changed, all at once and strong men did what they could to rebuild.  And without communists this time.

I think Baltimore jokes are just a riot!

My middle school’s library was filled with books that were older than me – many from the 1950’s with pages already becoming yellow and brittle with age.  There were dozens of science fiction anthologies.  Science fiction in the 1950’s was filled with the paranoia of a country that was just coming to grips with the concept of being able to destroy an entire planet and wrestling with the now obvious fragility of the human species.  One of the short stories I remember was A Pail of Air, by Fritz Leiber.  You can read it for free here (LINK).  It’s worth it.

If you’re not a fan of apocalyptic stories, you might think that the attractive part about reading the end of the world was about death – and you’re wrong.  Reading that literature was, for me, a celebration of life.  In most of those books and stories the human race didn’t die out.  To me, apocalyptic books weren’t about gloom, they were about hope.  No matter what was thrown at humanity, we would find a way through.

I am unabashedly pro-human, and most fiction in the 1950’s was pro-human.  Somewhere after that, we became a bit more self-loathing and reveled in the idea of our destruction.  I can’t help but think that self-loathing started with Doogie Howser, M.D., but I might be wrong.  Much of today’s literature isn’t fun, and isn’t optimistic.  Sure, I see tough times ahead.  But I feel quite strongly that we can make it through them.

Trust me.  We will.

What, you don’t think I developed psychic powers on Mount Olympus?

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