Desert · 6:04am Jan 21st, 2023
We must face the cannons if we want the corn.
~Malatesta, on surveying the empty food stores
In February of 2021, I was trapped on a single block for roughly week. The snow was fun, for a bit. The water was out because it is always out, it feels like and I wasn't prepared at all. My wife and I hadn't prepared much, aside from picking up some water and some soup, in case the water went out, because I cannot stress this enough, it is always going to go out.
The snow lasted two days, if you count the last flurries. The ice lasted much longer. It was so thick that walking down the tiny baby-easy hill we live on was a comical, perilous journey of slipping. My jeep was frozen solid to the ground. We spent thirty minutes trying to free it, but gave up. In Mississippi, rain is a constant companion. Everything is at least a little damp. Mist pools on the sides of the road and lounges lazily over the roads like an old cat. Hurricanes come every year. When it freezes here, its hard to explain just what that means. It really, really freezes. And in Jackson, its worse. You likely, statistically, live in a city or town that has infrastructure that you never think about that keeps your home working in bad weather. Drains and drainage, trash collection, maybe salt or that weird anti-freeze chemical stuff or whatever to keep the roads relatively okay. Snow tires and shovels. But in Jackson there is nothing. The water, when it flows, is often undrinkable. No one pays for water here, not in the houses, because there's no way to tell how much you use and its barely potable and trying to charge people for barely available, poisonous black water would honestly be some las barricadas shit.
So we stayed inside. The water failed and the power failed, and no one left their houses. The roads were slick, the potholes were solid ice (the one thats now been covered after 2 years was at the time two feet deep and 4 feet wide) and when the power came back on day 2 we had eaten all of our saltines and chips and bread and corned beef (hey, I'm diaspora Irish, its good) and switched to ramen. And every day I would try to free my car, which had been unknown to me in the dark the night before the world ended in silence and snow, parked directly above a standing pool of water in the gravel.
Thinking about it, the days run together. I remember singing with Cass on the walkways at dusk. I remember gathering water when we had a bit of rain at one point in pots and pans and keeping them in the bathtub to boil later. We had gotten water earlier before the pipes died in a rush, and somehow the cat must have been drinking out of them cause I swear to Christ one of the pots was weirdly fuzzy and sometimes it got in the tea. Cass reminds me now, I remember--I set out a pot hoping the rain coming would fill it, and the water was brackish and awful. I felt humiliated, and I won't lie, a little powerless. All of the water tasted awful, even the water bottles.
I remember smoking and shivering in my torn green great coat while my wife helped the miserable bitch woman who lives down the walkway chip enough ice off the stairs to make them safe on her side of the complex. I remember running out of cigarettes on day three, and I remember the night when we realized we were out of noodles. On our way back from the gas station, where a congregation of drifters had gathered, I walked by the pub and started thinking about calories. How many could you live on. How many calories are in ramen. If you eat 3-4 packs a day, is that enough? Is 2 a day enough? Would the weird generic-brand spaghetti at the gas station give us more? I hadn't had meat in so long. The gas station was out of soup. I remember dreaming about steak. We walked down the hill what felt like ages in the pitch black towards the mexican restuarant at the end of the road praying its obstinate refusal to close would hold up long enough to get some actual god damn protein. I was feint, and felt stupid, and was stupid. I wasn't prepared.
I remember how when the snow came down we were so enchanted by it. When it snows here there's an early morning buzz as folks go out to see, to grin like children, and then noon comes and its been silent for hours, and it stays quiet, and you realize how much background noise you are used baseline and you swear the smothering snow is eating the noise. The second night, I had cider around the fire pit with the guys from across the complex and we talked about when the water plant would be up again, and told each other it would be a couple of days and how crazy it was, even though we'd lost water or power so many times at the slightest twitch of weather or shock that it wasn't crazy at all. Its like living in a desert. Everything is water, right? You think it would be wet, and its not like its not, but your body is so dry, and the air is so dry. It sucks the water right out of your mouth. You make jokes about Dune and stillsuits but you wonder why it does that and you'll not know and thinking is for people who have skirt steak on a skillet and you have two cans of tomato soup left and no fucking cheese to put between two pieces of bread, because you forgot to save some when you were making sandwiches, and the white desert eats the houses and your singing echoes down the dead side street and wraps around the tilting power lines and dies in the snow.
I also remember the packed pub serving guiness in plastic cups when the snow was gone and the ice finally melted fully. I remember the loud music and a rotation of musicians and the feverish drunken atmosphere of people who didn't talk about what was happening. You'd think you would but you don't, you just drink and laugh and stomp to the beat of the music and you just do normal stuff for three hours.
What I remember most is that the times you lose water get hard to keep apart. Times of crisis kind of just melt into amalgam. I've done the pots full of water thing at least three times while living in Jackson. My wife has gotten good at flushing toilets with pool water. I always prepare poorly for storm and flood times. Every single time is the same, sort of.
This is kind of a tangent, but did you know when you don't have water for like, a month, you start forgetting to do hygiene stuff? It took a week to get used to being able to just take a shower again. Sure, you can travel a county ever and find a shower, in a house that's not yours, naked and awkward in someone else's alien bathroom, knowing you look and smell like a vagabond, shame in your heart and on your face. You do, obviously, but you can't do that forever so you just don't take showers. and then you forget that's a thing you do. You don't entirely forget everything, you get good at using a tea pot to wash plates, for instance. You get used to making stuff on the hot pot. You drink a lot of hot chocolate and you smoke a lot, and then sometimes you run out of money and you stop smoking altogether. You don't go to work or you do and your coworkers who live in the suburbs complain about you or treat you like some kind of war refugee cause you're from The City, the one where nothing works and every is a fucking Fallout NPC. Got any fucking caps, Courier? Explaining Jackson to someone who doesn't live here is like taking fucking crazy pills. I either go into fullblown trauma dump or I end up joking about how I could sell photos of shit here to Todd Howard for Fallout 5 and finally afford to live anywhere else.
Do you think about the things that keep you alive? I do now, all the time. My countrymen have a sickness in them, and think that guns will keep them alive, and guns won't help them for shit unless they plan to shoot up each other and eat the bullet-ridden corpses for jerky to make it. 454 casull don't make the water work again, and if the hot plate's power cord tears out, your tactical knife won't make it work again. Growing takes time, and land, and sun and air and space and water. No one is prepared. None of us. A lot of us think we are, we dream about it like salivating dogs who think every creak in the house is a bell, but we're not ready. I don't even know how ready you can be, where you are. I know after the latest water outage I gave up on this place being sustainable. I'm not even sure if it'll get worse here or not. There are fewer cats, and fewer neighbors, now. And the water works, right now. It's not too cold. It could feel stable. But I know the water and the power are not sure things, and more and more I wonder if they will be sure for others, outside of my own hellhole.
I dream of collapse too but my dreams aren't the same. My dreams are about ramen packets on a crusty hotplate, and singing on the walkway balcony, and snow and how awfully quiet it will be when the eschaton comes cresting the horizon. I dream about a quiet desert.
In fairness to future readers scrutinizing our memories, we did keep power during the Great Freeze. It's the one utility we had that was reliable.
In balance, we never got rainwater that I remember. I just was smart enough to empty the pipes into every pot we owned when we noticed the pressure was failing. And we were almost out by the time we were able to get access to the gas station and buy liter bottles of water to replace it.
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i left it out after the fuzzy water. You don't remember because you didn't do it :P no, the fuzzy water was the faucets when the snow started and we hadn't lost water yet. The rain water ended up being awful so I'm pretty sure I got embarassed and didn't tell you lmao
Also! We did lose power the first day. You don't remember because you spent most of the morning outside with me but I checked my computer that morning and couldn't get stuff to turn on. I'm not sure when it came back, actually. The day is a blur. I know it was back by day 2? I'm like, mostly sure!
This could be the start of something you could publish. At the very least, I feel like it's something that needs to be seen by more readers.
This situation with your water plant is terrible enough but having to endure it in freezing weather just makes it more difficult. At least the power came back on and you could stay warm and cook a bit, though it still seems so dystopian. I’ve been in similar situations but not quite as bad as what you described here.
The city allowing its critical infrastructure systems to deteriorate and negatively impact its citizens is simply irresponsible. I hope you both stay safe and are able to move to a better place in the near future. Blessed be.
I don’t even know what to say; I’m so sorry.
Yeah, in the zombie apocalypse, I'm pretty sure all our brains are on the menu whether or not our Ka-bars are full tang.
Terrible situation all around. Nicely written.
It's mostly the weight of things left unsaid, at this point. And high quality gas station roller grill taquitos. I'm a lot better now than I was once upon a time, but I can't shake the worry that if I lose that rock in my heart I'll float away.
In more material terms, yes I absolutely do. I live in Arizona and we have this cool thing where the Saudis are allowed to up and take as much of our water for wasteful bullshit as they want basically for free.
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God I heard about this and it’s fucking insane. I’m livid for y’all. We have ex-Brexit guys muscling in here, weirdly, and I’m waiting to see what they’re gonna pillage. Just pillage and plunder all over.