(un)prepared

There was a moment last week when I was sitting on the potty in our private staff bathroom in the office. Suddenly I heard/felt a weird sound. I had no idea what it was (still don't), but it quickly made me wonder where our disaster preparedness kit is at work. I didn't know where those supplies were, but I really hoped I would be somewhere other than sitting on the john if we ever needed them.

I went to the Principal's secretary (who's in charge of those things--supplies, not potties) and asked where our disaster supplies are. (We've had a fire drill this year, but no other emergency drills.) She told me where they're stored and I told her that one of the tasks I thought I might do over Spring Break would be to put together a disaster preparedness kit at home. After all, I lived through the Loma Prieta quake in '89 (I lived and worked in San Francisco then) and we experienced many earthquakes during our five years on St. Thomas and my hometown was devastated by a tidal wave and the local paper recently warned that if the Monticello Dam on Lake Berryessa ever broke, Davis would be under water in a matter of minutes (okay, maybe many minutes, but minutes). We live in California, for god's sake, where earthquakes and mudslides and flooding and broken levees aren't unusual. And I don't want to end up like I did in '89 after the big quake, with only a lime and some tonic water in my fridge.

Of course, thinking about putting together a preparedness kit and actually doing it are completely different matters. We do have some appropriate supplies in our camping gear, so we're not completely unprepared. But the garage door broke last Friday, so we couldn't get to those supplies right now if we wanted to. (The handyman will be here today to fix it.) And even if we could get into the garage, we'd have to push aside the wicker loveseat and the flattened boxes and the golf club supplies and... You get the picture.

So to say that I related to Margee Robinson's column in today's Chronicle is an understatement. We don't know what we'd do in a disaster until one strikes. Margee's decided her freeze-dried camp food might not be her first choice in a disaster: "If I was starving and had already eaten the cat food, I might like it." The night of the Loma Prieta quake, I walked around the corner to my (male) friends' flat, pressed their buzzer, leaned into the intercom and pleaded in a pathetic voice, "Do you have any food?" (I must have had a flashlight or a candle, because the lights were out in the City and I can't imagine I walked by the crack house without some sort of illumination.) Cheese and crackers eaten by candlelight while sitting on their hardwood floor never tasted so good.