REASON GONE MAD: Ten unusual things for your survival kit - The Berkshire Edge

2022-06-18 22:37:25 By : Ms. Anny Yu

When you-know-what-hits the fan, you should consider having each of these items for your survival kit to make it through the new-and-improved modern apocolypse.

When deciding what to put in your survival go-bag for [INSERT DESCRIPTION OF COMING DISASTER], no doubt it’s wise to rely on the expertise of the good folks at Field & Stream magazine. But if you want to look further afield (ahem) for 10 unusual things that could make all the difference when the you-know-what hits the fan—a phrase and disconcerting mental image that makes absolutely no sense—you’ve come to the right place.

1. Caulk Gun and Caulk — Anyone who’s ever taken on a DIY project like painting a room knows the immeasurable value of latex and silicone caulk. It fills cracks, smooths edges, and hides imperfections so well it’s surprising that popular caulk brand DAP hasn’t launched a line of skin-care products. That’s why if we find ourselves in a break-the-glass-in-case-of-emergency moment and need to survive in a world gone wrong (even wrong-er than our current world, if that’s possible), you’re going to want to have a caulk gun and supply of caulk. Without it, rebuilding a new world from the burned-out shell of the old will be more difficult. Cracks and imperfections will be everywhere, leading the next generation to look around in frustration and ask, “Why didn’t they just put a caulk gun and caulk in their survival kits? Selfish idiots.”

2. Universal Remote Control — It’s painful to imagine, but what if we end up in a situation where some kind of GatesFauciBiden™ nanobot (Kidding! Just razzing the conspiracy crowd!) escapes from a Samsung product lab and destroys all of humanity’s single-purpose remote controls for televisions, home-entertainment systems, air conditioners, garage doors, and so on? But something about the programming inside of universal remotes gives them immunity. In this scenario, those who have a universal remote on their person as the nanobot spreads will be instantly wealthy, sought-after, and desired by people of all genders and sexual preferences for “Netflix and chill” evenings on the couch. Not that there’d be any Netflix, or couches, or, thanks to climate change, any literal “chilling” to be done, but surely something will replace all of those and hopefully require your worth-its-weight-in-gold universal remote.

3. Fortified Compound in New Zealand — Technically this doesn’t go inside your survival kit but does appear to be the item-of-choice among today’s techno-utopian billionaires, trillionaires, and definitely the gazillionaires. (Repeat that sentence aloud with a Bernie Sanders accent for maximum effect.) They’re building private airstrips on their recently acquired vast acreages in New Zealand where they’ll presumably take their families to live out the remainder of their lives at their fortified and/or underground compounds, cut off from whatever disaster has befallen humankind—and which, most likely, was heavily influenced or caused by their techno-utopianism. Irony! PRO TIP: Also pack decades of food and supplies.

4. Peanut Butter and Chocolate — Let’s say you’re on a flight to Patagonia (the one that spans southern Chile and Argentina, not the outdoor-clothing chain store) and the engines fail and the plane crash-lands deep in an unknown forest. Everyone survives, thank goodness, but it’s likely to be weeks or months before you’re found. Fortunately, the forest is a magical one, filled with fairies and elves who provide an elaborate feast each night and myriad entertainments all day. It’s so wonderful in every regard that you lose track of time and place and even forget how you got there. In fact, life turns out to be so much better in the magical forest that when rescuers finally arrive, you politely turn down a ride back to civilization and proceed to live out the rest of your life in the forest. Which, thanks to the magical, health-giving properties of the aforementioned elven feasts, goes on for thousands of years. So it turns out you really don’t need peanut butter and chocolate as an unusual item in your survival kit because the fairies and elves can manifest both out of thin air! But bring some anyway, so that before they magically appear you can entertain fellow survivors around the campfire by acting out hilarious 1980s Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup TV ads.

5. Photograph of What Downtown Great Barrington Used to Look Like — After the coming asteroid strike on Main Street—given our age of insurrections, pandemics, wildfires, floods, and more, this seems like a wholly reasonable prediction—we’ll need to pull together with never-before-matched unity to reconstruct downtown Great Barrington. There will be #GreatBarringtonSTRONG calls to “rebuild it just as it was,” and while that’s a powerful rallying cry, let’s make sure “just as it was” is more like the version before 2015’s downtown “redevelopment” turned a quaint New England downtown into what Architectural Digest has called “something resembling an interstate highway bounded on either side by a few shops and outfitted with dangerous, often-ignored, wholly-insufficient-and-litigation-ensuring ‘STATE LAW: Yield to Pedestrians Within Crosswalk’ signs that do nothing.” (Fact check: Architectural Digest did not actually say that.)

6. An Innocent, Fluffy Kitten — What situation, post-apocalyptic or not, isn’t made better by an innocent, fluffy kitten? I rest my case, your honor.

7. Berkshires Resident $100 Tanglewood Summer Pass – This is a must-have for survival in the Berkshires, full stop. As a longtime Tanglewood-goer, first visiting in 1767 to perform my unique mix of throat singing and “STOMP!“-like drumming at the first-ever Lenox Town Meeting, it’s amazing that more aren’t aware of the Berkshire Resident Summer Pass. For $100, you can sit on the Tanglewood lawn for most concerts, excluding shows by “popular artists,” which includes some up-and-comer named Jimmy Taylor(?) whose signature song, it seems, starts out talking about a “young cowboy” who lives “on the range” alone with “his horse and his cattle” and “sleeps in the canyons” but who, moments later, inexplicably ends up with his horse and cattle on the Massachusetts Turnpike “from Stockbridge to Boston,” an obvious failure of internal logic that nonetheless, I’m told, sends his Tanglewood audiences into long minutes of ecstatic shrieking. Guess I just don’t understand what the kidz are listening to these days! Anyway, the lawn pass also includes the chance to attend morning orchestra rehearsals, which are always a treat. I’ll always treasure that summer morning when I saw a frustrated Yo Yo Ma flub the variation in the early note groupings of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, Prelude, stop playing, curse like a sailor, throw his chair at the conductor, smash his (priceless?) instrument to shards on the edge of the Koussevitzky Shed stage, and then run full speed to the Lion’s Gate exit yelling, “It’s not as easy as it looks, jerks!” Well worth $100! (Fact check: C’mon, if you need a fact check here, I can’t really help you.)

8. Bitter-Apple Spray — If civilization collapses and I’m forced to build a shanty in the forest made only of tree limbs and mud and fill it with furniture made from sticks lashed together with twine hand-woven from dried grass, the last thing I’ll want is for my dog to chew it all up. So some bitter-apple spray will be essential to keep his chompers at bay. This will be shocking and confusing to him: After years of “Where’s your stick? Go get your stick! Who’s got your stick? Good boy!,” he’ll find himself in a dream home made from, and entirely filled with, sticks, but they will all be foul-tasting thanks to the bitter-apple spray. Such will be the tragedy of life for our dogs after civilizational collapse; yet another reason for us to get our act together.

9. A Second Innocent, Fluffy Kitten — While you and your dog are out all day gathering nuts and berries from bramble-filled forests and hunting in dark and scary ravines, your innocent, fluffy kitten from #6 might get lonely. So best to have two of them. (NOTE: You will have to somehow maintain a steady flow of new kittens into your survival go-bag until the day disaster finally strikes. Logistically, I’m not sure how you’ll manage this pre-disaster inflow of kittens and outflow of cats. Sorry.)

10. Yes, a Time Machine — Sure, this one is a bit of a cop-out, as any true-blue survivalist isn’t going to rely on the old “just-go-back-in-time-before-the-disaster-happened” trick to get out of a sticky or life-threatening situation. But in the end, carrying some kind of pocket time machine as a last resort is probably wise. And it comes with additional benefits, like the well-established “knowing who wins various sporting events when you return to the past.” You can then, of course, use that knowledge to place winning bets on sporting events and become a gazillionaire, and then immediately use a gazillion or two for a fortified compound in lovely New Zealand. See you there!

Bill Shein writes a weekly column for the Edge.

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