Perhaps the title is a bit dramatic with the word “apocalypse”, but as you’ll see by the end of this essay I chose the title for a reason. A few days ago a very unusual wind storm took much of Southern Colorado by…well…by storm. Perhaps the most unusual thing about this wind storm is that it occurred in the middle of December. Additionally, practically no snow or ice accompanied this storm. Despite these facts there was significant damage and many people went without electrical power or other services (like internet or phone) for as many as 48 hours, possibly more. Our household and several others on our block were some of them.

This wind storm definitely was not as intense as the recent massive tornadoes in Iowa, Kentucky, and other states. Here the impact of the wind storms effected people and property within the same area very differently. Some places had massive damage and power outages and others hardly noticed anything other than noise and other minor inconveniences. I know because I checked with friends and family in my area and drove around the city the day of the storm. The traffic lights were working in most of the city, but there were spots where they were not operational. I saw some damaged fences, trees, and other structures in spots, but not everywhere. Fortunately I didn’t hear of many physical injuries to people or animals, but I don’t doubt there were some.

The main way we were effected at our home was through a power outage. We were scheduled to work outside our home that day, but because we work outdoors with children and the wind was in the forecast the programs were cancelled. As a quick aside, both Angelina and I presently work part time with the Nature & Wildlife Discovery Center in Pueblo or Beulah. We teach school-age children about ecosystems, natural cycles, and more. Unless you count gardening (which is mostly volunteer), we don’t have any other regular jobs outside the home. Despite the unseasonably warm weather we haven’t done much gardening lately. So, we were just taking it easy at home and waiting out the storm that raged outside.

Before I get to the bulk of our experience, I would like to emphasize how blessed we were and are. While we were without electricity for nearly 30 hours, we got along just fine. Many people are entirely without good shelter, and I think about them often during the cold months and inclement weather. However, for a variety of reasons I don’t often interact with people experiencing homelessness. We do at least pray for people without homes. Sometimes we help stock blessing boxes and things like that. It’s not much and some would say prayer is practically nothing, but someday perhaps we can do more for them, or maybe they’ll even be able to help us. That could be a different essay for another time.

Our saga began on the morning of Wednesday, December 15, 2021. We were in no rush to get going in the morning given that we didn’t have to go to work, we don’t have any children (just one adult “fur baby” cat), and we anticipated adverse wind conditions throughout the day. However, we did awaken to the sound of wind and other noises in the morning (including the cat, as usual). I decided to get up and make a quick little morning breakfast snack and some tea. I managed to do so just before our power went out at around 10 AM. Our stove is electric.

Despite the loss of electricity, we were somewhat prepared for it. One of our biggest concerns was heat because while not snowy it was cold and gets much colder at night. It wasn’t so cold during the day that it was urgent that we start a fire ASAP. We are blessed to have an indoor fireplace and a store of firewood. However, we had a small concern about burning a fire considering the dry and windy conditions. What if some lit embers made it out of the chimney? Wildfires are very possible and Wednesday was a “red flag” day (high fire danger). While we live in the city, there have been unintentional fires not far from our home in recent years. In the fall of 2019 a fire roared for a few hours within yards (or meters) of our condos and in fact an ember caught on one of the buildings. Fortunately the damage was not very extensive, but it was significant enough to cause concern and financial burden. It was a scary day. We and many others on our block (certainly everybody in our condo buildings) were instructed to evacuate by emergency personnel. Fortunately, the firefighters got it under control enough that we and our cats (we had two at the time) were able to return home that evening. We are so grateful for their service. I’ll come back to the subject of heat and our fireplace later.

Typically we use filtered or reverse osmosis water from jugs for drinking and cooking. Why? A major reason is that we’re suspicious of what’s in our water despite claims by local authorities that we have some of the best tap water around. Any municipal water source concerns me in part because of pharmaceutical residue in the water. If drugs make it through the treatment of water in treatment facilities, I wonder if filtering the water in other ways makes much of a difference. At the very least it could have a net positive placebo effect. I mention water because I wasn’t sure if we might end up without running water. I did not think we would, but it is always a possibility and it doesn’t hurt to be prepared. Some of our water jugs were empty, so I went to our garage where we have a garden hose spigot with a water filter attached to it. It only took about 10 minutes or so but I got them all filled up just in case things got worse.

It was daytime when I filled up the water jugs, but there was no natural light immediately available in the garage because there are no windows into it. Actually, there is one small window in the back door into the garage which faces outside into the courtyard. We typically keep the window covered and the door faces north so it does not let much light into the garage. I needed to use a flashlight, which fortunately we have enough of.

I’ll pause here for a moment to note something else about the garage. Our main garage door is in need of repair. As long as we have electricity it opens fine with the electric opener, but it won’t automatically close properly. I’ve done some troubleshooting, but because I couldn’t figure it out and fix it I anticipated the possibility of needing to get into the garage through the back door. Our friends and next door neighbors keep a wood pile in their garage. While they have a back door to their garage like we do, the door was blocked from the inside so they couldn’t get in to get to their firewood. We didn’t know about that until after the electricity returned. We could have shared some wood with them because we had enough to share. They went to a grocery store and bought some wood to burn while the electricity was out.

Beyond heat, light, cooking, and possibly water, what else do we need electricity for? Please see a list below (it includes some things I already mentioned):

1. Water — Unless you have a manual pump well or a clean water source nearby; needed for cooking, cleaning (stuff and ourselves), watering pets and plants, and more
2. Refrigeration — Food preservation
3. Heating, Cooling, Ventilation — To keep a comfortable living space, prevent freezing of pipes, keep house plants alive; also ventilation in the bathroom (especially if it doesn’t have a window)
4. Medical — Some people rely on electricity to power oxygen concentrators, CPAP machines, or other medical equipment
5. Lighting — In spaces and at times when natural lighting is not available
6. Cooking — Electric stove, toaster, microwave, etc.
7. Communications — Mobile or smart phones, internet (VOIP) phones, internet, etc.
8. Entertainment — Playing music, TV, movies, videos, social media, etc.
9. Education — A lot is done or can be learned via the internet!
10. Work — Computers, smart phones, power tools, and a variety of other electric or electronic equipment
11. Laundry — Few people in the “modern” (that’s an odd term) or W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) world with homes wash clothes by hand or dry them with unheated air anymore
12. Dishes — Especially if you have a dishwasher (not everybody does) or use a garbage disposal a lot
13. Cleaning — Other than laundry and dishes, often a vacuum cleaner or other electric cleaning tools are handy or needed
14. Indoor Growing and Pets — For anyone with pets like fish (requiring an air pump) or reptiles (requiring extra heat/light) and anyone growing medicine (like cannabis) or food indoors

The list above likely isn’t exhaustive, but it probably comes pretty close. If you can think of anything else that should be on the list, I’d be happy to hear from you and I can add it.

As you can see, the list is pretty long. At first I found myself reaching for light switches when it got dark or wanting to use my computer and the internet. We don’t watch normal TV. Our smart phones were mostly charged when we lost power, but we also had some backup power in the form of my large laptop (fully charged) and a portable battery powered speaker (also fully charged). We could use the USB ports on those devices to charge our phones. We weren’t cut off from the world thanks to our smart phones and the fact that the local mobile phone and data service towers apparently survived the storm. However, we were more cautious than usual about how much we used our phones. We did use them to check on friends and family, including our neighbors. A lot of our entertainment and education (mostly news and independent study) comes through our computers and our phones, not to mention quite a bit of our work also.

I already touched on water and cooking a little. Our water continued to run just fine despite our electrical outlets not having power. Filling up our water jugs wasn’t entirely necessary, but it’s still something we try to do regularly because we never know when they could come in handy. As to cooking, our main cooking appliance is our electric stove. We don’t own a microwave, toaster, coffee maker, or electric kettle. If we heat our food we do it on the electric stove top burners or the oven or our Crock Pot (no pressure cooker or other heat-generating electric appliances). Fortunately we have some backup cooking methods. The one we ended up using was a “Jetboil” style backpacking/camping burner which uses a small canister of pressurized isobutane-propane fuel. We mostly ate some leftover chicken soup Angelina had made a few days earlier. That made things easy because we have good, clean pots and the little gas burner heats up cookware very quickly. Of course we could have eaten all cold food or gotten some takeout, but we prefer to mostly cook and eat at home.

We did have some laundry to be done, but it wasn’t going to happen. Fortunately we had enough clean clothes and towels for what we needed during the outage. If it came to it we could use our bathtub to wash clothes. The more challenging part would have been finding places to hang them to dry.

Washing dishes was perhaps the most minor concern. Water usage could have been a greater concern if we had lost access to tap water. We had washed most of our dishes the day before. We don’t even have an automatic dishwasher, so we’re used to washing everything by hand anyway. The only concern would be clogging up the garbage disposal. We already take care not to dump much down the garbage disposal.

Aside from some house plants we don’t really grow much indoors, so that wasn’t really a concern as long as we kept the temperature above 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

If we had electricity we could have run the vacuum cleaner to do some cleaning, but the broom sufficed for the day.

So that of course leaves the big things (for us at least): refrigeration, lighting, and heat.

We have one average refrigerator with a freezer on the top. We did our best to stay out of it given the fact it wasn’t getting electricity. The more we’d open it up the more cooling it would lose. It’s not a multi-power source unit like many portable/camper (trailer or RVs) refrigerators are. I’d seen those in use before (we know people with an RV or trailer), but I didn’t know how they worked. I did some research on it after we got power back. It’s a fascinating system that gives the owner other options should electricity not be available. I reckon there has not been a lot of demand for them in most populated areas (in the USA anyway) because most of the time electricity is available and they’re more complex to install and operate. In case you don’t know, they are powered either by AC or DC electricity or propane. If you’re going to run them with propane in a house you need special hardware for that. All that said, just in case our outage lasted much more than 24 hours I bought a couple of small bags of ice at a local gas station. I put one bag in the freezer, moved the reusable ice packs that were there into the the normal fridge, and I kept the other bag of ice in a small, portable insulated cooler. Then I moved some of the food out of the refrigerator and into the cooler just in case. All of this probably was unnecessary because our neighbors—the same ones who bought firewood because they couldn’t access the wood in their garage—didn’t buy any ice and their food was fine.

Lighting was only a concern in the garage and at night. It was a pretty bright and unseasonably warm day despite the wind. Our windows and skylights let a lot of light in. Between a few candles—which we use regularly for a variety of reasons—and battery powered lighting we were all set. Angelina has a variety of LED “candles”, our phones have built-in flashlights, and we have a couple of other flashlights also. We don’t as yet have any liquid or gaseous fuel-powered lanterns, but it is something to consider. Once we got the fire going it provided some light in the immediate vicinity near the fireplace.

That brings us to the last item: heating the condo. Pretty much our only sources of heat were the sun during the day and the fire in the fireplace. We don’t have an intentional solar heating system. We just moved aside the curtains in our (two) south-facing windows and kept our doors and windows closed for most of the day and night. We did have to go outside a few times (to fetch wood, water, ice, etc.) or vent the windows or rear sliding door (near the fireplace) a few times, especially when the fire got going. The fireplace isn’t huge, but it’s big enough to heat our whole condo enough to be comfortable. Angelina especially likes heat. I appreciate it also, but I’m getting accustomed to taking cold showers. She’s working on that goal, also. Why? That’s another story, but I suggest doing a web search on Wim Hof if you’ve never heard of him before.

The fire was the most intense part of our short urban adventure without electricity in almost wintertime. Our heater has gone out temporarily before because our buildings are old and need some updates. One of the needs is to the electrical system, particularly on the roof where our heater/cooler is located. There have been times when we’ve used the fireplace just to feel more cozy than normal, but usually it isn’t needed because the heater works fine. When it has gotten extremely cold, ice has rendered the system non-functional and then the fireplace has been really helpful. We do need to be careful not to make the fire too hot for too long, and ventilation is important. Sometimes we need to crack open a door or a window because there is not sufficient airflow (oxygen) to fuel the fire. I suspect also that some of the wood was not well seasoned. Much of the wood was given to us this past year, cut from smaller trees. Moreover, to use it safely the fireplace does require maintenance. We need to have the chimney and flue cleaned every year.

When you depend on fire for your heat you have to tend to the fire or it will go out. That’s especially true with an indoor fire that isn’t well-ventilated. As I often do, I fell asleep first that night. However, I awoke at about 2:30 AM to tend the fire and kept waking up every little while during the night to tend to it. A few times it almost went out, but it did eventually catch fire again for a while and kept going all night and into the next morning. I wanted Angelina to get some good quality rest. She stayed up late to tend to the fire and wasn’t feeling optimally well either. While we do not have children—especially small children—to awaken us in the middle of the night with a need to be fulfilled, we are not strangers to waking up in the middle of the night. Our cat often comes meowing and knocking (figuratively speaking) at the door in the middle of the night. There are other reasons we awaken or get up in the middle of the night, but I won’t go into them now.

Thursday was basically more of the same of what we did on Wednesday during the day. I kept the fire going until the early afternoon. However, the electricity came back by about 3 PM that day. We had to use the laptop and speaker to recharge our phones, but all around it was a pretty simple and easy little adventure. It was kind of like “glamping” (glamorous camping) at home. We still had access to that which we call “civilization”.

If we lost access to relatively clean, potable tap water I had some ideas for what we we could do. We have water filters designed for camping and backpacking we could use to get drinking water. In a worse case scenario perhaps the biggest challenge in the long term would be heating (or keeping warm) and cooking. We don’t have a lot of gas fuel canisters on hand. We could buy more, but what if there was a run on them or they weren’t available? If it got really wet, keeping dry could also have been a problem.

We live about 50 yards from a creek. We had functioning toilets, but if we lost that there’s a big pile of wood chips nearby and we have 5 gallon buckets. We could make a simple composting toilet and dig a big hole far enough from both the residential area and the creek to be safe.

I could go on and on about our experience, blessings, and many potential challenges we could have faced if things had gotten worse. In addition, I could talk about how if we had a generator and/or solar or wind power our lives likely would have been easier. That’s all likely true, but we prefer learning how to live while consuming less energy rather than trying to maintain or increase our energy consumption. In fact, I am presently enrolled in a permaculture design course on my way to being certified in 2022. I realize many reading this probably never heard much or anything about the concept of permaculture before. It is well beyond the scope of this essay. If you’re interested in learning a little about it, a good place to start is the principles of permaculture.

The first brief personal “apocalypse” we went through in the fall of 2019 with the wildfire right next to our condo made us ask the following questions:

• What’s so important that you should keep it ready to take with you at a moment’s notice?
• What can you leave behind?
• Where will you go and who will help you?
• What will you do if things get really bad and you lose “everything”?

When we left our condo at that time we were blessed to be welcomed to my parents’ place. (We couldn’t take the cats into their apartment, though.) We had other friends who probably would have welcomed us also, but my parents were the first ones whom we knew would be there for us in our time of need without question. We had five minutes to gather up a few things of value and leave our home. Fortunately, things worked out and we were able to return within hours. Despite all of that, the questions remain, and we don’t necessarily have complete answers for all of them.

This second recent personal “apocalypse” we experienced lasted longer. While less scary in some ways, it prompted a few more questions:

• How will your needs be met with fewer or potentially zero modern conveniences in a worst case scenario?
• Who is in your circle of trust with whom can you share knowledge, skills, and supplies for mutual benefit and to grow the field of trust and love?
• What can you do now to ensure short-term survival and what can you plan for to thrive in the long term?

As of now we don’t have complete answers for these questions or others like them either. Pardon my language, but some people spend a lot of energy preparing for the possibility of “shit hitting the fan” or SHTF. Many of those people call themselves “preppers” (as in “preparers”). Moreover, a significant number of preppers also focus on self-defense under the assumption that people will come for their supplies and attempt to take it by force. I understand that perspective, but to be honest we don’t have a stock pile of weapons and ammunition. We also do not have a massive stockpile of food, firewood, or other supplies. What we do have is a “stockpile” of seeds (it’s not really much of a stockpile…) and a growing body of knowledge on how to grow and harvest food, hunt and fish, and generally survive and care for ourselves and others. I cannot confidently say with absolute certainty that will be enough, but I’d rather co-create a world of cooperation and friendly competition than one full of fear, suspicion, distrust, and hyper-competition.

Angelina said I “came alive” when the electricity went out. Of course we had given some forethought to the possibility of losing electricity (or more) for an extended period at some point in the near future. As the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

I’ve used the world “apocalypse” a few times in this essay and I’ve quoted it each time. I’ve done so because it has become a loaded word. Many people are afraid of SHTF and are paralyzed by the very thought of it. However, I don’t feel that all that we know and love will be lost in one sudden, unforeseen moment. I feel that the very root of the word “apocalypse” reveals the truth. The word “apocalypse” comes from:

late 14c., “revelation, disclosure,” from Church Latin apocalypsis “revelation,” from Greek apokalyptein “uncover, disclose, reveal,” from apo “off, away from” (see apo-) + kalyptein “to cover, conceal,” from PIE root *kel- (1) “to cover, conceal, save.”

Online Etymology Dictionary

As such I consider this paragraph somewhat meta as an apocalypse of the word apocalypse. Every experience in life can serve to reveal or disclose something important about who we are and something more we can learn. We don’t need to stop learning at any point in our lives. We can learn new things and share our wisdom right up until our last breath. Every minor or major apocalyptic situation we encounter can reveal something we have not addressed and perhaps overlooked or actively avoided. Some of the things we previously did not address were revealed by the questions I listed earlier in this essay. There may be more to be revealed. We’ve been considering and even preparing to move out of the condo for years, and doing so could reveal new things to us. For one, I am hesitant to move somewhere that doesn’t have a fireplace in case we ever lose our heating system at a cold time of year again.

A lot of people get very comfortable with the conveniences of life and when even a minor disaster or inconvenience comes their way they panic, get angry, or react in harmful ways. I’ve heard that some “wealthy” people lost nearly all of their money—they lost “everything”—in the stock market crash that launched the Great Depression and committed suicide soon afterward. I don’t mean to judge them harshly because maybe they had much more going than I know, but I suspect they got stuck in a particular identity and world view that shattered in a moment. The inability to accept and adapt to sudden immense change resulted in intense grief and anguish not only to themselves but also their families and communities. Perhaps that is why part of many preppers’ strategies include collecting a lot of weapons and ammunition. It isn’t necessarily that preppers are inflexible or unable to adapt, but many non-preppers might be. People who lose “everything”—lose the concept of who they are and their relationship to the world—in a moment can either implode or explode. Imploding could result in self-inflicted violence (like suicide) and exploding could result in violence aimed at others.

If we’re going to prepare for survival, shouldn’t we ask the question what it is we want to survive for? Are we surviving just to survive because survival itself is important, or are we surviving with the intention of creating—as my favorite author Charles Eisenstein puts it—a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible? There certainly are elements of ugliness in this world, but there also are plenty of beautiful elements about it also. Which would you rather contribute to? Do you want to merely mitigate the ugliness and survive in spite of it, or do you want to co-create more beauty and thrive as much as possible? What does a more beautiful world look like? For me more beauty includes a world in which humans cooperate with one another and the natural world far more than we compete with each other and the natural world around us. I don’t buy the story that we must constantly fight to survive because constantly fighting gets exhausting pretty fast. Life likely will always include struggle, but we can transcend the struggles by taking on the challenges together with grace and dignity as fellow human beings and citizens of Earth.