Stocking Up

Nothing like four or five days of the stock market sinking regularly around 400 points/day to make you think of the Great Depression. One of these days, I guess, we’ll be calling it instead the other Great Depression. That would be the one that I was born in, although close enough to the end of that decade not to have any particular memories of the depression qua depression. Nobody was jumping out any windows that I was aware of; nobody I knew was standing in soup kitchen lines; my dad had a job all through those years, though of modest pay. My grandparents did lose all their money during the 30’s, though; money they’d inherited from my successful copper-miner great grandfather. It’s nice to know that the family line once had money, even if all of it was gone before I was around. A little sparkly family memory.

Nevertheless, I was brought up as a child of the depression, where space was tight, money was scarce, and food was gathered and watched very carefully. Our next door neighbors had a food cellar: a free-standing, underground structure with steep wooden steps and concrete walls and dirt floors. You walked down a few steps and opened the short doors to the cellar and what you saw was darkness and spider webs and more steep wooden stairs, and what you smelled was the damp earth, a smell I always thought of as being like a grave, morbid child that I must have been. It was a kind of scary place to a kid, but both sides of the darkness were lined with shelves between which hung a single light bulb. Turn it on and everything changed: the shelves shone with canned goods in mason jars: canned peaches and cherries and plums (we grew the plums in our yard); canned beans, peas, carrots, and tomatoes; canned pheasant and duck. (This was all, of course, before frozen foods.) The cellar was both frightening and reassuring at the same time: darkness and death before the light was turned on, and plenitude of life after.

My parents shared the cellar with the neighbors. The neighbors had a garden, as did we, and we also had my father’s hunting skills. My mother and the neighbor wife shared the canning work, and maybe we all shared the canned goods, as well. My strongest memory of that cellar is of seeing the duck and pheasant legs and wings in those big glass canning bottles, lined up on the shelves. But my second strongest memory is of the regular trips to the cellar to get something for breakfast or dinner. Food there would be, even though everything else was tight.

So, while thinking about the depression that looks like it will be and the depression that was, it seemed a good enough time for stocking up on food, just to make sure we wouldn’t starve, I guess. I don’t can things, but I do cook and bake and freeze and just eat, so by the end of two days, I had produced four quarts of split pea soup, one date cake, one loaf of cheese bread, one pan of corn bread, a spinach/ham quiche, an apple pie, and two quarts of yogurt. It all seemed a little too focused, a little too frantic, a little too much, but it made me feel a little more in control of my destiny. There are times when fantasy substitutes very nicely for reality.

The Emergency Preparedness Committee of Point Roberts (PREP) wants us to think about what we would do in times of disaster (although I don’t think the committee has a Great Depression in mind; more like a Great Earthquake). But one of the things they recommend is having a 3-week supply of food because, if we were cut off somehow, the assumption/theory is that it would take 3 weeks for anyone to get to the exclave to be helpful. That cellar would certainly have done at least three weeks and perhaps an entire winter, so I can at least imagine the possibility of consciously maintaining a three-week supply of food. It’s the three weeks worth of water that seems a little more problematic. But then, it rains a lot. Maybe multiple rainbarrels to replace the cellar.