I’ll begin this little foray into the past decade (don’t worry–I don’t plan to cover the whole thing) with a disclaimer: I rarely like or take any interest in year-end retrospectives. But, on the occasion of this decade’s end, I’m indulging.
Ten years ago, I was a high school senior, still living at home, and in a fairly strange situation. In November of 1999, my parents sold their home and moved our family–including two toddlers–into my grandparents’ isolated home in mountains above the Central California city where we’d lived for years.
The reasons for the move were due in part to a desire on my parents’ part to move from the poorly-built (and, we would later learn, toxic) house in which we’d been living, but the overriding factor was a deep conviction on their part that the “Y2K Bug” was going to wreak havoc on all systems logistical, financial and municipal. There was talk of sewers backing up into streets, of food stores being depleted, of potable water and electricity being a thing of the past. In a preparedness-exercise on the scale of a Red Cross effort, my parents amassed a vast store of hard red winter wheat in 10-gallon buckets, and squirreled the containers away beneath my grandparents’ home (the plan was to, in some way that remains incomprehensible to me, till the California hardpan for subsistence). Canned meats (protein treats to sprinkle in among the all-wheat diet) and vegetables took up the remaining space under the house. There was much gun-cleaning between my grandfather and my dad, though it was unclear to me at the time whether the arms were meant to stave off the bands of roving outlaws Cormac McCarthy would later describe in The Road, or for the shooting and subsequent eating of the opossum that roamed the property looking like a half-peeled potato. (more…)
