I was perusing the Costco website for something or other to do with my daughter’s wedding this afternoon, when I noticed they had a link for emergency preparedness supplies. It’s tucked away under “grocery and floral,” which is maybe not the most intuitive location for such things. Hey, don’t blame me, I didn’t design or run usability studies on the site.

Now, I’ve been thinking for a while now (like, roughly 12 years) about the need for our family to have some serious emergency supplies beyond our typically full pantry and a few pathetic bottles of water in the garage. We are seriously under-prepared around here. My mom was here today and told me a story about this crazy lady in her apartment building who told her the other day that Jesus and Mother Mary are here because The Big One is coming, and I thought, The Big One? Holy crap!

While I don’t necessarily put stock in crazy ladies, it did remind me that we live in Seattle, where there are earthquakes, and where there will, almost certainly, one day be A big one, if not THE big one. And so a bit later when I was on the Costco site, I saw that link and I thought, “Ah, emergency supplies, we need some of those!”

Only as it turns out, it’s not cheap to be prepared for The Big One, or even for the zombie apocalypse.

Once I started seriously poking around, I saw that there were all kinds of things I’d never even considered, apocalyptically speaking, other than perhaps briefly when reading uplifting, helpful post-apocalyptic tip books like The Stand and The Road. I mean, sure, I’ve thought about things like, should we buy some land in Montana and build a steel, multi-room, underground bunker? Heh, but everyone’s thought about that, right? Even the CDC has a zombie preparedness guide (left).

And if we did have to live in our bunker, would just having a gun safe suffice, or would we be needing an entire gun closet? Because if there’s a need to be living in your underground bunker, probably there’s a need to be heavily armed too, I’m thinking. I was also thinking that maybe we should keep a couple water guns down there too, and a big rain barrel filled with holy water, because then if there were vampires or demons or what have you mucking about trying to get into our bunker, we could fill up our water guns with holy water, pump them up, and go to town. Because hey, you never know. Since we currently own no firearms on account of being liberal, Socialist Seattle hippies, we’d also need to stock up on some guns and ammo. Maybe some, uh … long guns? And shorter ones for carrying on us, too. Also, knives.

There are still lots of nukes around, and if there’s a zombie apocalypse (or maybe even if The Big One happens somewhere that’s not Seattle), who knows what could happen? Probably someone would hit a button and fire their missiles, and someone else would fire back, and then everything would be all radioactive. I’m not really sure how you’d go about both ventilating your metal bunker and ensuring the safety of the air you were breathing, but probably someone has ideas on that, and I bet they’d be happy to charge me a lot of money to set that right up. You also have to guard against critters or aliens getting in through your vent system, which means solar-powered motion detectors at all potential entrances, because the last thing you want on top of everything else is to wake up with Mother Alien hovering over your bed, jaws dripping acid saliva.

And then there’s the food and the water. Now the water, I figure the best way to deal with that is to dig a well in my metal bunker so we have a water supply, and attach a Super Duper Filtering System to that to filter out as much as possible that might be harmful. But I’d have some back-up 10-gallon jugs of water too, just in case. Ideally, I’d built my bunker where there was a natural hot spring nearby, because it would be hard to get a good shower in an apocalyptic situation, and I hate cold baths. Also, whether we’re dealing with zombies or aliens or nukes or The Big One, any apocalypse is sure to be stressful, and a bath in a nice, warm mineral spring at the end of the day would help restore some semblance of sanity. I think I’d build a protective structure around my hot mineral spring and attach it by tunnel to the rest of my bunker so it would be safe, or else find a spring already inside a small cave and secure that against intruders.

Oh, and also, a toilet! Very important. It could be a simple outhouse-type, only inside the bunker, so more like an in-house. And plenty of Febreze and toilet paper. Or maybe a bidet, hooked up to my well and perhaps also warmed, so you’d never have to worry about running out of toilet paper or freezing your private bits with cold water. And there should definitely be hand sanitizer.

As for the food, your big problems there, besides avoiding starving, are storage and spoilage. Clearly, Costco understands this, because they have all these emergency food kits you can buy. For $3,500, I can get a 1-year supply of a variety of delicious (so they say) freeze-dried and dehydrated foods for four people. We have eight, so we’d need two sets. And come to think of it, there’s always extra people over here — family, the kids’ friends, our friends — so maybe we should have four, just in case. Also, extra first aid supplies, emergency blankets, pillows, and extra clothing, outerwear, boots, and tools and work gloves. Work gloves and tools will be important in the post-apocalypse, what with all the need to rebuild civilization and all. Civilization isn’t going to just build itself, mister.

There should also be gum and breath mints, toothbrushes, toothpaste and dental floss, and deodorant. Because hygiene is important, even in dire situations, and unless you’re married to a dentist, chances are your dental care might go by the wayside while an apocalypse is underway.

Did I mention we have pets? Two dogs, and two kittens. What to do with them? Let them fend for themselves? I don’t think I could do that, so I’d need a whole closet of freeze-dried, dehydrated pet food. And plenty of board games and card games to help with boredom. Books would take up a lot of room, but if I had an iPhone or a Kindle or something with books already downloaded, and a solar-powered generator (or two? Yes, better to have a back-up, two it is …) so that I could charge my Kindle, then I could read. And also, thanks to the generators, we could have some light at night because it gets dark in metal bunkers. With a generator, we could charge the kids’ DS’s too, which would help in keeping them occupied. But I would still limit their screen time and make them do their math, because even in an apocalypse algebra and geometry might come in handy.

Now that I’ve written that all down, I feel like I have a good handle on what we need to do to ensure our family’s survival in many different post-apocalyptic situations. But if you, like me, sometimes like awake with insomnia, pondering such weighty matters, you may have your own survivalist suggestions, or be way ahead of the curve, thinking of things I’ve overlooked. And if you haven’t been thinking of the zombie apocalypse, well, maybe it’s time you took a stroll down Costco’s virtual emergency preparedness aisles, and see for yourself, as I did, just how screwed you are.

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