 Welcome to the Valley Advocate Podcast, featuring interviews that take us deeper into the people and happenings on the local scene. For more podcasts and a closer look at what's going on in the Valley, visit us at valleyadvocate.com. Hi, this is Dave Eisenstader. I am the editor of the Valley Advocate. This is the Valley Advocate Podcast that we do with Amherst Media. I'm here with Gina Bevers, Arts and Culture Editor. Yes, you are. You're here with Kathy Harrison, who is a local author from Cummington, Massachusetts, and she's the author of Prepping 101. If I have my glasses, I can read that. 40 steps you can take to be prepared for what? For whatever. I was looking at your Valley Advocate and you were talking about the zombie apocalypse. The good news is that if you're prepared for the zombie apocalypse, you're also prepared for your basic power outage. Now if you're prepared for your basic power outage, you're not necessarily prepared for the zombie apocalypse. This is true. We need to figure things out. This is true. I'm sorry. Go ahead. You're not talking about the grand apocalypse of whatever, you're talking about so many things that are happening now, natural disasters, grid failures, things like that. You're talking about the everyday that could happen tomorrow. I am. Even the more personal things, you lose your job. You have a house fire. All of these things are your personal apocalypse. Oh. Okay. Yeah. These are steps you can take to be prepared for that kind of a thing too. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. So this is in your first book? It is not. It's actually my fifth book. Goodness. Yes. I wrote a book on costume design for kids and I think I sold about 20 copies. My mother bought 19 of them. But it's all good. It was fine. And then I wrote two books about foster care and adoption in Massachusetts. And then I wrote Justin Case, which was my first prepping book. How to be prepared for the, how to be self-sufficient when the unexpected happens. It's a good thing to know the title of your own book. And it was a wonderful book and it has sold very well. But this is a little easier for people who like step by step. This gives you more of a step by step. Yeah. Your intro act, and we should just like hold this up for people who can see from the camera. It's a good book. But like it is, you know, you say in your intro that you never met a list you didn't like, right? So this is like a really, a way to be really organized about being prepared. Yes. I like to be organized. And this gave me an opportunity to do something that was sequential, that's always fun. So was there something that happened to you or that put you on this road to preparedness or is it something that just, that is just something that kind of interests? Good question. So I live in the Hilltowns and right away that puts you in the place where when the power goes out, it's our power. Winter storms happened and for many years we lived at the Bryan Homestead, which is way off in the hinterlands of comington. And one year I had a new baby and he got really sick in the middle of a terrible ice storm. And we managed to get through the night, it was clear in the morning that we needed to get to a hospital. And we couldn't get out, the road was blocked. So my husband was out with chainsaws, he was doing the whole Paul Bunyan thing and he got a tractor and he pulled the trees out of the road and we slipped down. And it occurred to me, he had a gastrointestinal thing and spent the next week in PDICU that all I really needed was some rehydration mixture, which is easy. You can get it in a powder at last just about forever. And I didn't have that simple thing. That was ridiculous. I should have had that on hand. I have it on hand now. I can tell you. Shortly after that, why I say shortly, several years, we had gone to a race. My husband is a triathlete and we'd gone to a race in Schenectady, New York and woke up the morning of the race and we were just under a foot and a half of heavy wet, awful snow. So we knew the race was off, packed up, we were with three other couples and packed up our cars, headed home, got to New York through way and we were there for seven hours. Seven hours is not a really long time. People have been stuck on roads for days. That's a long time. But it feels like a long time and we were really lucky. We weren't prepared because we were smart. We were only prepared because we thought we were going to a picnic. So we had blankets and we had wine and we had good food. It was kind of, we had a really good number one. No, no, no. Well, I was, my husband was, but, but we've had events like that and we lived through ice storms where people around us were without power for weeks, where we were handing out water, where we were, had people come to our house because they needed a shower. And in fact, one of my sons, he and his wife had just had a baby and they lived in East Hampton and they couldn't stay in their home and they not had us to come to, they'd have been in a shelter, which is really my whole point of telling people be prepared is you want to avoid shelters. I consider this our civic duty that if you're capable of being prepared for an emergency, you're one less person that emergency services has to look out for and take care of and feed and make sure that you're warm or you have medical care. It's our responsibility as adults. What do you find the people are kind of the least prepared for? Or what do you, what do you find the people is something that's simple that they can do that they would be a lot more prepared for a lot of things? Most people have no idea where their water comes from and what to do if it doesn't come out of the faucet when they turn. Now, if you have a well, you're in big trouble if the power goes out unless you have a hand pump, which is not a horribly expensive thing to do. And Bruce and I have a water filter with a lot of surface water but almost no surface water in this country is potable, almost can't drink and you should just assume if it's on the surface that you cannot drink it. Right, that's right. So water filter, you can make one that is good for filtering out big stuff but if you want to make sure you're not sick, you need a good water filter. To me that seems like a reasonable place to put a couple of hundred dollars. Yeah, water is super important and yeah and something that could potentially as you're pointing out just not be as stable as you think it is. Absolutely. So how would you express that need or that urgency to say like say if I live in coming to and I totally can get what you're saying, if I'm living in the heart of Springfield or the heart of Hartford, how would you impress upon me that it's important to have this kind of thing because it is a source of, everything is a source of convenience in the city. Even if it's not that convenient, it's so much more convenient. You don't have to take it seriously. If you are absolutely positively convinced that nothing awful is ever going to happen that will take down the grid for several weeks or have a supply disruption that is major, if you're convinced that there will always be plenty of energy. But you have to have a real sense of imagination for that in some ways because I'm only saying that because so many people haven't lived through. I remember the energy crisis in the 70s when people sitting in line and stuff like that. Right? Oh, absolutely. Every other day, you could get four gaps. So, but so many people have never experienced that kind of shortage, that kind of, you know, that there's just not enough. We live here. Even I don't understand that there's not enough beyond a certain point. So what you have is something called a normalcy bias because something has been normal for you forever. It is possible for you to look ahead and say, what is normal for me now? It was actually not normal less than a hundred years ago. Right? It is not normal for most of the rest of the world. To most of the rest of the world, we are the one percent, you, me, you. But that normalcy bias puts us in a bind because then when we're slapped with reality, for instance, let me give you a scenario that's very likely the CDC anticipates a pandemic, a global outbreak of disease. They do not say if it happens. They say when it happens and it is unreasonable to look at our world with people just jetting here, there and everywhere back and forth in planes and airports, teeming with people from all of the planet and hacking and coughing to assume that that's never going to happen because it has not happened in our lifetime. If, however, you were alive in 1918 with the Spanish influence, absolutely, then that killed more people than the war or the war, right? Absolutely. So that one thing, suppose it took out and I don't mean kill, suppose it just made 40 percent of the population too sick to go to work. Who do you think fills those grocery shelves? Who do you think checks your groceries out? Who picks the crops? Who cans the food? Those 40 percent and those are the people are not available. And all of a sudden, normal is not there anymore. Be prepared for the abnormal. I think one of the we were talking before and one of the things that you were saying that you won't find in your book is how to stock up on the latest weaponry and guns and fill your bunker with things that will mow down your neighbors as they try to get your stock. Can you talk about kind of your your like you were talking before about kind of a community based future? And maybe you could talk a little bit about that. Absolutely. So I think that what we're probably looking at the best case scenario for the United States is that we look at contraction, which means you just get a little smaller, you get a little more local. Your food comes from a little closer. And I think in the scenario, I actually don't expect the zombies to come. I don't think I have to shoot anybody. You'll be surprised. I guess I will be normal. It's that normal. I think in this scenario, how am I best served? I am best served if my neighbors are my friends, if they are my extended family. I'm not food secure if my neighbors aren't eating. I actually don't want to kill my next door neighbor over a jar of applesauce to that seems like not the life I want to plan. So what I would prefer to do is to say, gee, you know, you're a lot of butts are a lot. We're actually doing this right now. And we have enough space in our land to put in a couple of pigs. So we put in three pigs and we have two other neighbors and they buy food for us. You know, we share the work and we share them and we'll share the pork. I have another neighbor who had a good chicken coop. I didn't have a chicken coop, but I wanted chickens. It makes perfect sense. We have chickens with our neighbor. We buy the food. He does the work. He wants to go away. We can take care of the chickens for a few days. So in this way, we have an interconnectedness that I think is helpful. And if the grid went down, the first thing I would do is call all of my neighbors over and I'd serve a lovely big soup. And I'd say, let's talk about how we're going to address this. What are we going to do to make sure that we're taking care of each other? I belong to the CERT team in comington. It's the community emergency response team. And what we're doing right now is compiling a list of those people in our community who are disabled or very old people who are alone so that we can check on those people if there's an emergency. I don't want to ignore them. This is my extended family. So how, how do we get there? How do we, I mean, how do we get, you know, better acquainted with our neighbors? You have to knock on the door and we are really taught to be to respect people's privacy. You know, you don't want to intrude on people. I think you knock on the door and you bring a loaf of bread or you bring a jar of jelly and then they tell you they're gluten sensitive and you say, oh, I'm so sorry, but at any pace. But you make that, you make that connection. You make an offering, a goodwill offering. And if so, we have a lot of raspberries. I just invite neighbors to come. I have a swimming pool. I will send out a blanket email and say, hey, the pool's open. Come on over. It's 90 degrees. I want people to feel like my home is connected to them and like I'm part of their family too. And looking at the places within a community that you can make other connections. We've let our institutions fall by the wayside. It's very hard to get people to want to join the Lions Club or the Masons or the Order of the Moose or all the animal orders. And it's hard to get people who want to do community service in terms of joining a volunteer fire department or serving on a planning board. I think you have to step up and do those things. That's how you own your community. You know, there was the Occupy movement several years ago. Our community statement is block you pie. We can't occupy Wall Street, but we can occupy the block we live on. Oh, and so we block you pie. We we use our common spaces. We go to the park and we have the picnics and we hold dances down there. It's a way to connect with our neighbors and we all have something to share. We all have something to offer. Even someone who may look like they don't may have knowledge or information or stories. They could be a wealth of information that you actually use and need. I think it's interesting what you're advocating. This you're kind of advocating a pre-social contraction as opposed to what's what theoretically will happen. Yes. But also it's indirect opposition to this globalization on the road to every day where things are dispersed so immensely. But the but then there's that, you know, by local these campaigns that are happening where people are doing this kind of contraction. It's kind of it's it's interesting. So you're advocate you're advocating do it before you have to do it before you have to. And one of the places that we are the most vulnerable, so you're talking about city folks, is to a very fragile just in time delivery system. It is said that we have three days worth of food on the shelf in a grocery store. That's actually only true if there's not a run in the grocery store. If there's a run in the grocery store, you probably have three hours. And the last hour you're not going to get much except, I don't know, a can of hairspray or something. You can see that before every storm. Every single storm, I don't understand that tornado in Springfield. I remember that delivery system is so fragile. You have to have computer system that works. If the computer goes down, you don't get anything. You have to have reliable fuel. Well, if the Sauds or the Iranians decide that they're just not happy with us, they can shut that off. It can be something during Katrina. One of the issues in the Gulf is that that took out all those refineries and price of oil spiked way up. And so we are certainly at risk and vulnerable there. But people who are living more in the fringes, people are really poor, they are really at risk. It's one thing for me to say, yeah, I'm going to suck it up and pay seven dollars a gallon and go to the market. But if you're living on almost no money, that is not an option you have. So having some food put back is a really good idea. It can be just the little thing that gets you over that hump or learning how to grow anything on your plate and you don't need much space. Sure. If you've got a patio, you can have some container plants. A lot of what we eat, we actually landscape with. I make sure that we landscape with edibles. You see that it's beautiful, but it's also very edible. And you had you had said before that you sometimes encountered these bunker folks and you've been called, excuse me, you've been called naive in the past. Hallyana. Yes, all those that was that was so eye opening for me. So I was asked if I do the Nat Geo doomsday prepper after my first book came out. What is that? So I'm into this. OK, so when Justin Case came out, there was a series on the National Geographic show called Doomsday Preppers and they asked if I would would participate. OK, I I said yes. And no, I didn't know. I had never seen it. I didn't know what I was getting into. It was crazy. And what they really wanted was to make people who prepare look look nuts. In fact, afterwards, after the fact, they didn't like me very much because I wouldn't do any of the things they asked me to do. I wasn't going to act like I was nuts. After the fact, several of us who had participated got together and had a little email group and they had set those people up to look right. And we were better prepared for that because I had done a lot of TV with other books. I knew how this worked. And what I knew is that I didn't have to say yes. And so they'd say so we'd like you to do this. My husband's a beekeeper and they wanted us to put on our bee suits and act like bees had gotten into them and that we were hitting ourselves. And I said, well, that would be stupid reason for the suit. That's not bees in the suit. Is so that you don't get bees in the suit. You don't get bees in the suit. And no, I'm not going to do that. That's ridiculous. And he said, well, you know, this is what you signed up for. And I said, oh, I beg your pardon. Show me in the contract where I said I had the lyrex stupid. And if I signed something, I'm your girl, but I didn't. And I didn't. So, in fact, he called a few months later and said, we're doing a reunion show for people who've done it before. We'd like to, you know, take a look at people, see if they're still doing this. And I said, yeah, no, thank you. And I think they probably called five times in the fifth time. I said, you're just not used to people telling you, no, are you? And they really were not used to hearing no. People assume there's a camera here. Oh, I have to do what they tell me. No, you don't. Anyway, the interesting part for me is that there was a Facebook or not a website for the show and people wrote in comments. And fully half of the comments were about how because we didn't have guns, people were going to, you know, come and steal my applesauce. And one gentleman said, I don't even bother storing food. I've got, you know, this, this and this gun. And I said, so that's your survival plan is that you're going to kill people and still your mother must be really proud. Yeah, I don't know what to say to people like this. I just don't get it. The reality is, you know, my husband and I and a bunch of kids, really, are we going to get into a firefight with, you know, Mad Max? No, it's not what that I don't anticipate that happening. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So. Wait, as you were doing kind of research for for this book, were there a lot of surprises along the way about kind of what, you know, products that you tested out or other other things for being prepared? There were there were some surprises. I bought a plastic liner that's supposed to go in your bathtub. You know, the websites will always say, fill your bathtub at the first sign of a storm. I don't know about the rest of you, but I've never had a bathtub that didn't leak ever in my entire life ever. So I got this, you know, I bought this thing to try out and it fills your bathtub, you fill it with water and it's a lot of water. It's a lovely thing, but it's single use plastic. That is just not reasonable to me. It's expensive. There are many, many easier ways to put away that kind of water. Water is cheap. It's heavy and it's awkward. It's bulky, but it's inexpensive. Anybody can put away, you know, a three or four day supply of water with no investment at all without like a bathtub sized piece of plastic that you have to throw away, then throw away. So there was that piece. I'm a little concerned often about recommending more stuff. We're we're a world that's kind of overwhelmed with stuff and there's a lot of stuff here. So I'm really looking for those things, not that you buy once and pack away in a closet and never look at, but I'm looking more at the sorts of things that you do anyway. Everybody should have a first aid kit. That just makes sense, right? Make it a little bigger than you might think. Make it a little juicier. Make sure you've got enough not just for you, but for your next door neighbor. And you don't need to buy a first aid kit. You can create one with a tackle box and a trip to CVS. It's you don't need to be buying so much stuff. But I did try a lot of stuff. And there were a few things that I did find remarkably useful. I have a pocket juice, which is an awesome little gizmo that you keep plugged into your wall and when you take it off, you can charge your cell phone seven times. Wow. Well, that's a really useful thing to live out in the hills the way I do. If I get stuck on the side of the road and, you know, I look and oh, my goodness, my cell phone's not charged. It's all horrible feeling. I can use my pocket juice and charge my cell phone and call my husband and let him know I'm running late. So some things are really good to have. And some things are sort of no-brainers. Duck tape, oh, my goodness, like store a lot of duck tape. It fixes so many things. Here's something a lot of people don't think about. So one of the first things I recommend is that everybody have a preparedness notebook and in my notebook, I keep the originals of all of my important papers, birth certificates, adoption decrees, copies of all of our immunizations. If you've got pets for my cat, I keep the shot record. In the back, I have a flash drive on that flash drive are my pictures. So if per chance my house burned down, I grab first my children, then I grab the notebook, because also in there are copies of things like my insurance agents number and my Social Security card and all of our medical cards, all of our insurance. These things are critical. If you have to rebuild your life, there you go. Yeah. And that doesn't cost you any money. Yeah. In the bureaucratic world that we live in, it's like those are the things that can really put up some don't you want to know what your credit card number is. If the whole house is gone, including your wallet with your credit card in it, having that number makes your life so much easier. Because what's the first thing you hear when you call is and what's your number. Yeah. No idea. Right. So before we went on, the advocate did its own little apocalypse survival guide, which we wanted to. So cool. I love this. So how do we do? How do we know? So we actually did really well with the zombies. Well, I like having the zombies included, because as I said, if you're prepared for zombies, you're prepared for everything. And here's the best thing about it. You have to laugh at some of this. But the whole time you're laughing because it's very well written. You're also thinking, huh, I hadn't hadn't actually thought about that. It's true. And and getting people to not think about this in terms of I'm so scared. You don't need to be scared. You just need to be reasonable. You need to be organized and you need to be thoughtful about what the future might hold. And honestly, sitting here right now in this moment, I don't know what next week holds. This is probably the most unsettled I felt in my entire adult life in terms of what's coming. Climate change. We used to talk about, you know, as though it was something that would happen in the future, the numbers thrown around was 2112. Uh, here now today in this country, we're looking at the reality of climate change. And we don't know what that's going to look like. But we can pretty much guess that it is not going to be pretty right. We don't know what our food supply is going to look like. There is a wheat rust. I believe it's called UG-99 that has the potential to decimate our our wheat crop. We did a few really foolish things historically and one of the most foolish is that we took all the diversity out of what we grow, so there are only a few kinds of rice. And there are there's one main for so you're really vulnerable. If there's a virus, you can lose an entire crop of something critical, oats or wheat or corn. That was probably not the smartest thing we ever did. Historically, there were hundreds of varieties of wheat. And if one was vulnerable to drought, well, gee, this other variety wasn't. People still ate. And the other really foolish thing we did was let our food turn into property of corporations. Thank you, Monsanto. So they own the seed and they own and farmers have to pay for that seed. And so historically, they kept their seed, they saved their seed and they could regrow themselves, they were self-sufficient. And that is just not the case right now. So we're really vulnerable when you're counting on corporations to feed you. If they feed you, they own you. And one of the one of the statements you'll hear a lot in this community is that we are nine meals for manarchy. And that's actually true. Most of us can manage for probably three days. You've probably got enough stuff in your house. But you are nine meals from things not being not being fun. All right, well, where where can people get your book? Yeah, I need to get one. So if you don't if you have a local bookstore that's an independent, please ask them to order for you. That's your best bet. You can get it at Barnes & Noble. You can get it on Amazon, any place that's pretty mainstream. Great. Yeah. Well, I got a lot to think about and water to get and a big burky water filter. We've got a big to-do list. Yeah, big to-do list. Well, thank you so much for coming. You're very welcome. This was fun. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to visit us at ValleyAdvocate.com.