It’s December now, and with the holiday season upon us, it feels like the country’s gotten complacent about disaster again. In the food blogging world we’ve kept it in the forefront with our fundraising campaign for the earthquake in Kashmir, but in the outer world — in this country anyway — the daily hue and cry about the season’s religious trappings or lack thereof has drowned out follow-up reports on the victims of Katrina, and any discussion of the potential threat of bird flu (or of any other disaster for that matter).

So, feeling delinquent (since I’d promised to finish this piece long ago), I pulled out my flu journal notes and stitched together a hypothetical day two. The more I work on this, the more I discover what I don’t know, and so I should say up front: this is not do-as-I-do writing. This is me, exploring a topic, guessing, stumbling, and occasionally hitting upon something that will be quite useful should we ever face a situation like this for real. When I’m done with the full series (or perhaps sooner, if I get to it), I’ll post a Big List of Links that’ll include all the websites and books that have helped me along the way.

Part Two: Water, Water Everywhere

February 6th, 2006

My, but the poochie looks tasty today.

Kidding.

So, we make it through the initial scramble of day one without too many casualties. A few hideous leftovers in the fridge we weren’t going to eat anyway got chucked, as did this week’s bag of spinach. (Department of so-what-else-is-new: we never seem to eat spinach before it goes bad.) I’m still figuring out what to do with the few bags of rapidly unfreezing blueberries in the ice chest, and contemplating homemade fruit leather.

The Northern Straits people were big on fruit leather and dried fruit cakes — they’d spread their berry pulp out on maple or skunk cabbage leaves set within a wooden frame to keep the juice from spilling, and then they’d lay the structure out to dry in the sun, usually near a fire to keep the yellow jackets away. Of course this was during harvest season, when the sun would dry the berries quickly, but now, in the dead of winter, we have to rely on the smoker instead.

For a moment, I think: crap! It’s the wrong season for leaves! And then I remember a most useful item from the dim sum section of our pantry: Dried lotus leaves. Damn, these things are going to be useful! Soak ‘em, cook with ‘em, rinse ‘em off, and reuse ‘em. If we didn’t have a single pan, we could still steam rice over a bed of coals with just a lotus leaf.

Meanwhile, Chopper’s moved on to the fridge contents and his latest food preservation discovery: pickled eggs. He made a couple jars of these babies back in November and they turned out quite good. Chopper tells me the eggs need to sit in a cold, dark environment for three weeks before they’re ready. After that, they can keep for quite a while — so long as the storage stays consistent. No sunlight, and 40F or less. We’ve been checking out the crawl space under the house, and it’s looking like it may make quite a good little root cellar for this time of year. I’ll be hanging a thermometer down there just to be safe (no, I don’t want botulism, thanks much), and the only light these eggs’ll be seeing is from a flashlight.

Still, even with the successes we’ve had — the smoked meats, the pickled eggs, the dried berries — we’re not out of the woods yet. This is still the beginning and there’s a chance that some day soon (if our self-imposed quarantine must continue), we’ll have to make the transition from food salvage to food sustainability. And that, even with our woods and our tiny garden, won’t be easy.

Meanwhile, we’ve more pressing issues to address, like water.

Since the power went out, we’ve been able to access and retrieve enough water to last us a little over a week. We’re figuring on a gallon a day per person, which is what the disaster manuals all say — though in a colder, damper climate like ours, half a gallon is probably sufficient. Even so, it’s best to guess high, just in case. Fortunately, we’ve got a few other liquids kicking around — some bottled juice, some beer, a little wine (alcohol to prompt further dehydration, woohoo!), and a nice supply of cartons of soy and rice milk. At long last, I have a reason to revel in my lactose intolerance: Unopened, soy and rice milk cartons can last for months!

Another useful item in this department: Powdered Gatorade. I’d never been much of a Gatorade fan, even in my college jockette days, but I learned to love it last spring when caring for Dad. His cancer made it excruciatingly hard for him to eat, so we constantly fought dehydration and electrolyte imbalances. I bought jugs of Gatorade and poured him cups on a regular basis and, on days when I needed the boost as well just to keep going in the face of such difficult duty, I added it to my regimen.

And so, in one of my rare moments of planning ahead at the grocery store, I snagged not only a few more jugs of my favorite strawberry lemonade flavored Gatorade (which will forever remind me of Dad), but a can of the powered stuff as well, thinking, if the water ever gets crappy, we’ve got something to help us manage.

And so, back to the water.

Wait. A brief sidetrack first, because well (in case you’ve been wondering), yes, what goes in must come out, and we can’t keep flushing the toilets forever when the electric pump’s out.

Thus, the second project for the second day: Digging an outhouse. Oh joy.

The good news: The ground’s not completely frozen.
The bad news: We still need to dig a pretty decent sized hole, and the soil is rocky.

Okay, so there are alternatives to this, but the ones I know are pretty short-lived. Like a five gallon plastic paint bucket with a toilet seat on top and flushable kitty litter inside (flushable so that you can flush it all down the toilet when the power comes back on). Fine and dandy for three days without power in an apartment, but for us? Nope. We need an outhouse.

I’d like to take this moment to mention that digging a hole in the ground leads to much extra consumption of Gatorade and the need for a hot shower. Uh… damn. (Note to self: next pandemic? Get one of those camping sun-shower thingies and pray for sun.)

Back to the water. They (the ubiquitous, amorphous they) say that we can survive a while without food, but after a few short days without water, we’re toast. So, solving the water problem is crucial.

Now, we’ve got propane for the camp stove, so we can always boil any water we collect, but how long will that effort last? Hell, I don’t even know how long a single propane cylinder lasts before crapping out, and we’ve only got four. (I suppose after that we could boil water over an open fire, but my previous open-fire camping experience tells me that there ain’t no way we can get a fire hot enough to keep a pan of water boiling for the required 10-12 minutes needed to really rid it of nasty microorganisms.

So, on to strategy number two — or rather, Mrs D. gets paranoid about water and comes up with a redundant system to make it as potable as possible.

First, it’s all about getting the sediment out. What’s the point of boiling if the water’s still cloudy, and if we’re collecting either pond or rain water — I’m avoiding ocean water for the moment because I don’t want to muck with the issues of desalination or boat oil — we’re going to need some amount of filtration.

Now, since we’re not prepared survivalist types, we don’t have a handy dandy pre-fab water filter. But what we do have is some activated charcoal (courtesy of the aquarium department of the local pet store) and a box of coffee filters. I’m improvising here, but hey — if it works for fish, then why not for us?

About that charcoal: I read somewhere once that it’s possible to make one’s own activated charcoal because the activation is just oxygen making it super-porous, but then I read somewhere else, that it’s a special process one can’t do at home, and then I read in a third place that you can concoct something close enough with burning coconut shells or peach pits, and well, the short of it is, I gave up trying to figure out what can or can’t be done and just bought some charcoal for the fish tank.

The important point about charcoal? Don’t use the barbecue kind. That would be, well, icky — especially if you buy matchlight charcoal and end up with water that tastes like lighter fluid.

Anyway, I staple two coffee filters together with charcoal between and then jam the whole thing into a funnel and stick the funnel into an empty, sanitized juice bottle.

Step two in Mrs. D’s Redundant Water Purification System involves setting the filled juice bottles up on the roof in the sun. Assuming we have any sun. Hah. In February. In western Washington.

Hey. It’s a thought, anyway.

Thing is, the heat of the sun and the UV rays of the sun are supposed to do a nice job of getting rid of even more little nasties in the water. Just as good as boiling, some people say, though the jury’s still out over whether it’s the heat or the UV rays doing the work. Trick is to use a nice clear bottle that doesn’t block rays (the ones labeled PETE by the recycling logo work best), and to get the thing up to 150F degrees in the sun. One way to check that is with a thermometer, but I ran across this cool alternate method (that of course we can’t do because we don’t have all the supplies for it) that involves a tube inside the bottle that contains a string, a ball of wax, and a weight to hold the tube upright. The wax must have melting point of 150F. When the wax has melted, then we know the water’s gotten hot enough.

Simple, eh? Yeah, for chemists living in the desert. Here with us? Not so much.

But still, it’s something to keep in mind if we need it in the summer, and meanwhile we can toss the bottles on the roof and hope they get hot enough and we can use some of the propane from the camp stove to boil the water just to be sure. (Hey, I said I’d be redundant…)

As Day Two draws to a close, we have a few accomplishments – the outhouse mostly done, the yummy pickled eggs, dried blueberries, water in process of purification — but it’s hard not to play a game of woulda shoulda coulda with so many things. Shoulda planted more of a winter garden. Shoulda stocked up on more water.

(And oh lordy shoulda gotten me one of those sun shower things to fill with warmed camp stove water, cuz I steeenk!)

I head to the upper deck to check the bottles. They’re warm against our metal roof, but there’s no way of knowing if they’ve gotten quite warm enough. I take them down, and as I do so, I notice smoke from a house nearby. Someone’s got a barbecue going, and I wonder about their food supply. I’d promised myself a walk today to check on the neighbors, but we never quite found the time. There’s just so much to do.

But, we can’t retreat, can we; be the ones who shut the blinds and hope the world just goes away? Where’s the sustainability in that?

–end of Part Two–

(Inspired by Carolyn Smith-Kizer’s “Cooking the Old-Fashioned Way” blogging event at 18th Century Cuisine [for which I am woefully late], I dove into research on the subject and soon found myself imagining a scenario where we’d lost power and were struggling to get by. I’ll write up what I’ve learned, I thought, and then determined, no, I’ll write what I imagine. What follows here is a fictional account of our first day without power. It’s early February of next year, and in this fictional world, we’re in the midst of a pandemic and we shouldn’t expect the cavalry. This is just a small beginning. I hope to follow soon with later days in our scenario, and with more failures, more lessons learned, and a deeper search into life off the grid.)

Prologue

Murmurs and preparations

“Many days you have lingered
outside my cabin door,
Oh, hard times, come again no more.”
–Stephen Foster

The world, or at least most of the world, sat up and took notice last October. Well, not exactly true. A good chunk of the world took notice a heck of a lot earlier; but in October, the U.S. uttered a collective “whaaa?” and then started paying a little more attention. (The politics of this whaa are a subject for a whole separate discussion, and really, the only thing that matters now is that we got hit and we weren’t even remotely ready.)

In October, it was all about small clusters of cases in Southeast Asia, and flocks of dead birds in Greece, and then Turkey, and then Romania. We watched as this thing crept into Europe and then Africa and asked, tentatively, you don’t think it’ll mutate will it? There’s not that big of a chance it’ll mutate, right?

Well, it did. Christmas season. The clusters were now large enough that the formerly unthinkable had become undeniable. H5N1 leapt from person to person with the greatest of ease.

By mid-January, clusters appeared deep into Western Europe, and just two short weeks later, the once green “No cases reported” map of North America had bloomed an angry red. All this, it seemed, almost at the blink of an eye — much too quickly for effective containment measures, and long before anyone could cheer a functioning vaccine or a ready supply of Tamiflu.

Here, in our tiny corner of the continent, three things happened in quick succession: rumors, more rumors, and then panic. First, rumors of cases as close as Burlington. Then, rumors of a state-wide ferry service shut-down. Next day, an island-wide run on groceries, medicines, sporting goods, and liquor. In three days the shelves, at low capacity during the off-season to begin with, were empty. In three more days: quarantine.

A week after that, we lost power.

Part one: Could be worse. Could be raining.

February 5th, 2006

It was bound to happen sooner or later. They don’t call OPALCO “Occasional Power and Light” for nothing. A few years back, a garbage truck slammed into a transformer on the mainland and the entire archipelago was dark for a week.

But, here’s the thing about being without power: We’re fine if we know it’s for a short chunk of time. A couple of days; maybe a week. I remember ice storms in Portland where we’d throw all the frozen food into a cooler, save what we could, toss the rest if it thawed, light a few candles, eat canned food, and then animate the walls with evil shadow puppet mutations and sulk when the lights came back on all too soon.

Today is different, I can feel it. Mid-morning, power’s been out for an hour maybe, and we’re hunkered around the radio searching for information. The news is vague. Something about grid instability and manpower issues, and no, they’ve no idea when we can turn on our coffee makers, our electric juicers, or our bread machines again.

This is it, kids. We’re in it for the long haul and there’s no making a run to the store for pop tarts.

We immediately launch into, if not panic mode, then at least a state of moderate scramble. First things first: the food in the freezer. (Now, I don’t know if this is the right ‘first things first,’ but it’s what we do, and hey – we’re in scramble mode.)

Chopper’s been buying meat on sale and the last thing we want to do is throw it out, so instead, we implement the emergency Casa Belly Timber Meat Triage system (yeah, I just made that up).

It goes like this:
Black Sharpie – smoke it
Blue Sharpie – cure it
Red Sharpie – eat it now

Salmon — cure, beef — smoke. Pork — smoke — wait no, I wanna make smoked sausage — label that for the meat grinder. Moon fish — we’ve got more moon fish? Um, moon fish jerky? Hey, it could work. Box of Eggos, bags of home made pasta… looks like it’s carb central for the next two days. Mystery meat… I give up. Holy crap, we still have some of that stew? Yeah, baby. That’s dinner.

We get it all sorted into two camping coolers; bags of ice from the chest freezer in each. Of course halfway through the process I realize that all this moving around of food is just going to make things thaw faster, and if we’d really been smart we would have slapped triage flags on all the meat before this shit went down. (Note to self: Next pandemic? Strategize the meat ahead of time.)

Meanwhile, on the side deck, Chopper’s got the smoker going. For this, we’re lucky. We’ve got briquettes, and we’ve even got a bucket of untreated hardwood sawdust from the lumberyard to use in lieu of wood chips. And it’s not raining.

The smoker was a serious score back in October. We’re out on Roche Harbor Road, just south of the Alpaca ranch, and stop by this thrift store. More of a junkyard than a thrift store really; gravel and scrub between herds of half broken-down ranges and refrigerators. Chopper’s plan is to scavenge parts for a smoker and go the Alton Brown/McGyver route with trash can, 3 inch bolts inside to hold a grill in place, door cut in the side with a hacksaw, pie tin for water… Then we find this thing. A whole smoker. Or, almost a whole smoker. It’s missing the bottom charcoal pan, the top pan’s got a hole in it, and one of the legs is wobbly, but for seven bucks, we aren’t complaining. Especially not when we discover that the smoker fits perfectly over our Coleman charcoal grill. It’s as if the two are made for each other.

I have to think for a minute about what we’d do if we didn’t have the smoker or the grill. Dig a steam pit in the garden, I think. We’ve got rocks everywhere, kelp on the beach just a ten minute walk away, fir branches, ferns. The fire has to burn a good long time to make the coals and rocks hot enough. Kelp keeps off the dirt and adds flavor. Dad used to tell me about this — how the Northern Straits people would dig camas bulbs and bury them in steam pits for hours, sometimes even days. I imagine we could do the same with the meat and fish, or maybe thread strips of meat onto spits of ironwood and lean the wood like a prairie fence over a low, steady fire.

Back to our modern jerry-rigged smoker, coals heating up while Chopper and I are digging through supplies for the brine. Salt (and tons of it), check. Black pepper, check. Brown sugar, check. Water —

Um…

Crap, electric pump! Pipes are still full, and there’s the water tank. Yeah, but what if there’s not enough pressure? We can drain the tank, right? With what — the garden hose? Well, does the water tank need a working pump to deliver water through the pipes? No, duh, the pump’s for the well. Jeez, do I look like a plumber? So, we have to save the pipe water, which we’ve already wasted, not to mention, somebody flushed the toilet. I didn’t flush the toilet. Did you flush the toilet? No, did you? Arrgh!

Oh, the joys of imminent lack of water.

Brief pause to assess the water situation (noting that we’ve got meat everywhere, only so much ice, and outdoor temperatures that have an uncanny knack for getting unseasonably warm on short notice).

We have:
Ten gallons in the shed.
Four bags of ice from the freezer, currently keeping food cold.
Hot water tank (44 gal) that may or may not drain out easily.
Water from the downstairs toilet tank. (Yeah, ick, but hey, water’s water.)

Also, a short walk from the house: a rather skanky pond. Also, a slightly longer walk from the house: a rather salty ocean.

Ahah. I announce my plan: Water Triage. (No sharpies this time, and I’ve a feeling “triage” is going to become both my most and my least favorite word over the next while.)

Here’s the order:
1. Drinking
2. Cooking
3. Washing
4. Waste

Not much we can do about #4, I imagine, but the goal is to find ways to move #3 to #2, and #2 to #1, ideally, without making ourselves sick. I’ve got notions involving charcoal, coffee filters and juice bottles, but first, back to the meat.

Chopper needs water for the brine. We go back and forth on this. Technically, it’s cooking water, and we don’t really want to use drinking water, but without a hierarchy of potability in place, all we’ve really got is stuff to drink and stuff to avoid. We are not brining meat in the skanky pond.

“Well, since it’s brine,” I offer, “how about the ocean?”

It’s not a completely silly idea. We can add more salt, boil it first to kill any nasty pathogens, and presto — brining water without losing drinking water.

I contemplate a walk to the beach. It’s afternoon now, getting toward dusk. The day’s been cloudy and dead still. The prayer flags hang limp and I realize for the first time I’ve heard nothing from the neighbors.

If this were summer, we’d walk to the beach past a heavily-laden crabapple tree, inviting a rich harvest and weeks of Dutch oven cobblers and fresh-pressed juice. If it were spring, we’d follow the beach trail past new stands of stinging nettles, best (and carefully) picked when they’re young and tender, then steamed or sautéed. In mid-summer through early fall, first we’d find salmonberries, then thimbleberries, then, finally, those fat, juicy blackberries — so tasty that we just might forgive their vines’ invasiveness.

Now though, it’s winter, and we won’t find much. Just quiet houses full of scared people who may or may not peek out their windows at us as we walk by. We’ll go tomorrow, I think, when I’m feeling brave. I don’t want to be paranoid. Sooner or later, I know we’ll all need to reach out, share resources, barter, care for the sick.

But today — today we just muddle through and hope that we’ve done enough planning to get by. Of course we could wake up to a warm and brightly-lit house in the morning and learn this was all just a glitch. That’s the tricky part: no one knows. We could live a lifetime with our dependence on the grid — on electricity, on municipal water, on food distribution — never tested. Or, it could all go belly-up tomorrow. Or today. Time to light the lamps, dive into the old books and learn all that we should know already.

–end of part one–

Read Part Two here.