The Lost Skills of a Self-Reliant Home

Last March the lights went out at half past six in the evening, just as I was getting a casserole into the oven. The outage lasted eleven minutes. In that time I learned three things about my own kitchen: that I keep the flashlight in a drawer I cannot reach without the electric can opener in the way, that the batteries in that flashlight had been dead since sometime before Christmas, and that I had no idea where the nearest working candle was. Eleven minutes. I taught household readiness for a living for thirty years, and my own house fumbled a blink.

That is why I want to begin this book with an ordinary Tuesday and not with a storm. The trouble with starting from a catastrophe is that a catastrophe is somebody else's weather. It belongs to the news, and it puts a person in the frame of mind of watching rather than looking. But an ordinary Tuesday belongs to you. You already know it by heart. You get up, you put water on for coffee, you take a pill, you feed the cat, you run the tap, you check the weather on the phone, and somewhere in the day you or somebody drives to the store. Nothing about that list feels fragile. That is exactly why it is the right list to examine, because every item on it runs on something, and the something is usually invisible until it stops.

So pick a real Tuesday. Not your best day and not your worst. Yesterday will do, if yesterday was ordinary. Now walk through it slowly, the way you would walk a fence line, and each time you do something, ask what stands behind it. I mean that literally. What stands behind the coffee is electricity, or propane, or the woodstove, and behind the electricity is a line that comes down a particular hollow on particular poles, maintained by people you have never met. Behind the pill is a pharmacy, a prescriber, and a supply that runs out on a schedule. Behind the tap is a well with a pump, or a municipal system with a treatment plant and a crew. Behind the weather check is a phone, a tower, a signal, and a charge in a battery. None of this is alarming on a Tuesday. The point is only to see it.

When I taught the canning classes, I used to ask people where their food came from, and the honest answers were usually short: the IGA, the Foodland, a garden in season. Then I would ask what stood behind the IGA, and the room would go quiet in a thoughtful way, not a fearful one. A grocery store in a small town gets its deliveries by truck over roads that ice up and wash out. It keeps its milk cold with compressors that hum all night. It takes payment through a card reader that needs a signal. That is not an argument against the grocery store. I shop at mine gladly and I know the cashiers by name. It is only an acknowledgment that a familiar routine is not the same thing as a guaranteed one.