Somewhere
near the beginning of season three I posted a comment on my Facebook page about
scavenging. That is, the rate and
success of scavenging in the Walking Dead, and how our intrepid heroes seem to
be pretty lousy at it. To be fair I
realize that they're hemmed in by hordes of the undead, trapped in small-town
Georgia where there is relatively less material through which to sift. But still.
They're not very good at scavenging.
In some ways the apocalypse is like a giant, never-ending treasure
hunt. It's fun, people,
albeit fun punctuated by moments of extreme terror. Anyway, I mentioned this on Facebook and one
of my favorite former students responded by noting (I'm paraphrasing),
"yeah, and they spent season two doing their laundry when they should have
been doing something more constructive...like building a zombie moat around the
farm...or something."
My
favorite former student's comment got me thinking about the concept of
down-time in the apocalypse, and I came to what I think is a useful (maybe
crucial) conclusion: in the apocalypse, we modern first world types are going
to be extremely bored. It will be like
combat—immense boredom punctuated by the flashes of extreme terror I mentioned
above. Why is this, you ask? The answer is simple: no internet.
I'm
an under-employed academic, so my case may be more extreme than many of you,
dear readers. But the fact is, the
internet has become my only outlet to the outside world. I use it for work. I watch The Walking Dead online. I spend enormous amounts of time reading
about random obscurities when I should be doing something better (For example,
did you know that camels only have teeth on their bottom jaws? The top is only a hard plate. Plus they like apples.). Part of my online time is spent in a desperate
attempt to hawk my books, which informs you of the galley-slave salary that
adjunct professors earn. But still... if
I lost the internet, life as I know it would cease to exist.
People
would go through withdrawal. I know I
would. When I was a kid I was the nerd
who enjoyed going to the library and lugging back dozens of books at a
time. A lot of that behavior I've
carried over to the internet world that we currently inhabit...you can
literally learn about pretty much anything your heart desires with a few
keystrokes. It's brilliant.
But
in the apocalypse, the internet would die.
And we'd have problems. No easy
access to information. Even libraries
would be relatively less useful, because the search mechanisms are all
computerized. Unless you've memorized
the Dewey Decimal for books about agriculture, you're going to be spending a
lot of time searching through the darkened stacks before you get what you
want. But I digress.
In
the apocalypse we'd all have a lot of down-time. So, if the apocalypse does happen, we'd all
be trying to learn new useful hobbies, lest we all die of boredom. Basic blacksmithing, for example, would be an
extremely useful skill to develop.
You're not going to be churning out swords anytime soon, but spear-heads
are relatively easy to make...I recommend models with a long tang, like the
Japanese yari, rather than the socketed types used by pretty much everybody in
Europe and the Mediterranean (the tang offers increased resilience to the spear
shaft). The forge needed to construct
such useful materials is easy to make.
You can look it up online.
The
people in The Walking Dead should all be learning as many interesting/useful
things as they can, rather than doing a bunch of laundry. The same goes for all of us, who are
imagining hypothetical situations where we'd be the people surviving the
apocalypse. And anybody who has useful
knowledge to impart should be liberally handing it out. I would love to have a garden, for instance,
but my thumb is black rather than green.
Every living plant-based organism I've ever tried to grow has withered
into a blackened, decayed husk, not unlike the zombies of Walking Dead
fame. I suck at growing things. And with all the food stores either looted or
filled with bio-hazard levels of trapped bacteria, somebody who can
actually bring the potatoes to full term would be an excellent friend to
have.
This
is one of my pet peeves about one strand of existing zombie fiction—the notion
that after the apocalypse certain types of people (like, say, academics) will
be entirely useless. On the contrary, if
I do say so myself, my background in ancient history would prove to be very
useful in a wide variety of situations.
And most people can say exactly the same, no matter what their skills or
training. Most people are good at
something. My mom's a wicked
gardener. My brother knows everything
there is to know about guns. My dad can
fix most machinery. And therein lies the
lesson to learn...in the apocalypse, the internet is going to be your friends
and companions. Learn from them, and you
won't waste away from a lack of sensory input.
Plus you'll probably discover something cool along the way.
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