Be Prepared

Whenever I think of being prepared, two things come to mind: the Sweet Potato Queens and MacGyver. In her book, The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love, Jill Connor Brown devotes an entire chapter to being prepared. (It's a fun book with pearls of Southern wisdom, but I recommend it with caution. If you're easily offended, you probably won't enjoy it. Along with the good stuff and tasty recipes, there is plenty to find offensive. Consider yourself warned.) Then there's MacGyver, and we all know he is the most prepared man in the history of the world, needing only his trusty of Swiss Army knife and a roll of duct tape. After 7 seasons of creative preparedness, you'd think we'd have learned something. Either West Texas has forgotten or missed the message entirely.

If you've been following the weather at all, you know a major cold front has been approaching the South Plains promising sleet, ice, and the heaviest snow in 7 years. We've known about it around here for a few days, but have we been preparing for it? The city road crew might have been, but I'm not so sure about the citizens. In an area where the only thing you can count on is the inconstancy of the weather, you'd think preparedness would be second nature to the folks around here. The truth, though, seems to be that whenever there's the threat of severe winter weather, gas price increase, or Y2K people are stricken with a sudden bout of mania. There was not a generator to be found at the end of 1999 as people prepared for the end of the world. Last night, you could have gone to any grocery store in town and not found a scrap of meat or a single bottle of water; and that was if you could even have gotten into the parking lots. It's like the people of this area have never experienced a heavy snow . . . ever. Granted, it's always good to err on the side of caution, but how much meat do you need to get through a weekend? Do you really need to steal hot dog buns from someone else's shopping cart? I'll admit I picked up some extra water and batteries, and a few toys to occupy the dogs over the next couple of days. As a tribute to "Mac", the father of modern resourcefulness, I have my handy leatherman tool to cut down the trees in the backyard if I end up needing firewood, as I fashion a woodburning stove out of the dumpster in the alley. If things get really bad I can also use it to spear squirrels to sustain me and the dogs while we wait out the famine that apparently is inevitably going to happen. I can even make us lodgings out of the squirrel pelts when the house has been pillaged and burned by looters. There's nothing left in the stores, so you know they'll be hitting residences. I'm also a crack shot with the blowgun that I can make from the PVC pipe in the garage to fend off assailants. Bring it on.

I may be eating crow later when my electricity goes out and my pipes freeze. (You may not be hearing from for a couple of days, so if you live around here come and check on me!) The preparedness question is a legitimate one in my mind as I remember the Great Deluge of 1998 (or '99?). It rained so much that the playa lakes overflowed and a prominent golf course on the south side of town turned into a lake itself. Did anyone see that one coming? If MacGyver had been here, he would have dug another storm drain with his Swiss Army knife and built a damn using duct tape, a paper clip, and piece of chewing gum and saved the back 9th. It may sound far-fetched to you, but that's what I call "prepared".