The Wisdom of Planning (Way, Way) Ahead

What a difference a month makes. Last time I sat down to write this “Reflections” column, the thorniest issue I had to report was my chronic failure to raise an orchard of avocado trees. Now, with coronavirus confining us to our homes for the forseeable future, thousands of small businesses closed, and the worst still to come, it seems I should have been concentrating on crops that are quicker to bear fruit. As I write, it’s 12:15 pm on a balmy Thursday in late March. I’m sitting in our little St. Francisville office behind the Magnolia Café. Normally the parking lot would be teeming with locals and tourists and riverboat passengers, all piling in to get a bite to eat and make the most of a gorgeous spring day. Right now the Felicianas are bathed in golden light—the woods a riot of emerald green shot through with cascades of wisteria, and every yard bursting with azaleas and sweet olives. But the parking lot and streets are empty. The air would be silent save for spring birdsong’s oblivious ruckus. It should be beautiful, but instead it’s ominous. For a tourist town—or any town—this is not a good sign.

Circumstances like these call for black humor. Like just about everyone else, we’ve been making plans for a period of confinement, squirrelling away quantities of beans, rice, and tinned tomatoes that would make the most pessimistic doomsday prepper lift his tinfoil hat to scratch his head. My mother-in-law Dorcas, who lives in a cottage on the same property as us, has been doing the same. A farmer’s daughter who has spent all her life out on this remote farm, Dorcas is no stranger to laying in extra supplies ahead of natural disasters, and after living out here for twenty-five years we have learned to do so, too. Anytime a hurricane lines Louisiana up in its sights, we have learned to expect an extended period without electricity because, reasonably, the utility companies prioritize the places where most customers actually live before coming to the rescue of those lurking down dead-end roads twenty miles from anywhere. In the aftermath of hurricanes Andrew, Katrina, Rita, and Gustav, we spent weeks without power or the ability to leave the property—a circumstance that teaches one the value of forward planning, not to mention of investing in a generator. One “disaster” about which we didn’t see eye to eye, though, was the Y2K event at the turn of the millennium. Fearing the worst, Dorcas set herself up with all manner of specialty doomsday supplies, and spent December 31, 1999 hunkered down in front of the TV waiting for the lights to go out while we set out for a New Year’s Eve bash at Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge. As we all know, the lights stayed on as midnight came and went, and the sun rose on a new millennium bright with the promise of a rice-and-bean-based diet for Dorcas. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.

So imagine her surprise a few days ago when, while emptying closets to make room for a new disaster’s worth of vacuum-sealed, freeze-dried food products, Dorcas came across two tightly-sealed fifty-pound drums of whole wheatberries—the starting point for wholegrain flour, which she had purchased from some Y2K prepper supply store twenty years ago and long since forgotten. According to the labels the contents are good for fifty years, so maybe the time has come! God knows there’s been no bread at the grocery store this week, so Dorcas might have been right all along. Talk about planning ahead.

But enough black humor. Obviously this is no hurricane; we know how to prep for those. It seems there’ll be scarcely anyone whose lives aren’t profoundly upended by the almost ungraspable consequences coronavirus will visit on our communities in the weeks and months to come. As the challenges pile up remember what hurricanes have taught us: plan ahead, prepare for the worst, and take care of one another. When you don’t know what the future holds, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Thanks for reading all these years.

(Word to the wise: At least until the stay-at-home order is lifted you might want to hang onto this copy of Country Roads. When America runs out of toilet paper you'll be glad you did.)

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