The EMP

Seventeen years ago this month, I listened to an ordained patriarch tell me about my life. Ever since that day (due to allusions of tumultuous times) I thought I would live through some horrendous last-days episode--you know, the ones you play out in your mind where bombs explode in open fields and you have to travel cross-country to colonize with other survivors, filtering your own drinking water, growing gardens and hunting to remain alive. For some reason, I always imagined myself as a widow, but with some older, protective son and a brood of children, battling through the physical trials and hardships of a telestial world together. In my dream-vision, I felt strong.

The feeling subsided as I began my own family in earnest. Why would I want to believe anything could harm them? I focused on the typical Christian goals: get married, have children, support your husband, nurture your family, serve--yet somewhere in the middle of all this, I lost a portion of my strength. Perhaps I just misplaced it. Then, nearly two years ago, my parents began re-implanting the final days' scenarios through talk of a church series aptly entitled, The Great and Terrible. Though the series delivered somewhere in the middle, only to take a nosedive near the end, one element intrigued us all: the EMP.

EMP stands for electromagnetic pulse, and in Chris Stewart's end-of-days drama, it takes out every kind of electric energy as well as cell phones and car batteries. Set off by a nuclear warhead detonated in the upper atmosphere, the EMP brings man back to the Dark Ages. Chaos rules from Washington D.C. to California. As power-hungry political players make grabs at the government of an already devastated nation, the average American is left to simply survive. Engrossed by the series, I told Duane we needed to bulk up and get tough, to be able to pick up one of our kids (as Johnny Depp once mentioned in an interview) and run for a mile while hauling them. Imagining highways full of abandoned vehicles and city streets taken over by gangs, I started running again--just around the block. I began lifting weights and reinvesting in the mile. At the urging of both parents and family, I stored more food, filling cupboards and the garage with powdered milk, soup and pudding mixes, flour, sugar, dried beans and peanut butter. We ordered dried fruit and dehydrated eggs for Christmas, along with flashlights that required no batteries, hand-operated wheat mills, propane burners, and water purifiers.

What I never realized in all of this planning was that the EMP I so feverishly anticipated was of quite a different caliber than the one described in Stewart's book series, and in some ways, more impacting. The EMP hinted at in my future was already living in my house. I had been sleeping next to it for years. I'd even been adapting my cooking to feed its peculiar appetite. How could I have been so stupid?! It had been giving off little warning signals--a ticking, a soft beeping--for the past seven years, like some type of active bomb... Finally, it exploded.

Now, instead of imagining missiles and tsunamis, I wonder how many of the battles and wars of the last days we will fight in our own neighborhoods and in our own homes. How many of us will lose friends, husbands, sons, daughters, parents, siblings in that struggle? And why do people like I wait for some catastrophic, physical event to occur, although the disintegration of society is well underway all around us? Still, one correlation between intimate EMPs and public--even global--natural disasters that cannot be denied is the inborn compulsion to survive, to heal, and to live again. When disaster strikes, and you raise your head out of the pounding surf, if you find the boon of friendly faces when you look about you, you take hold of those hands, you pull yourself up, and you begin again. If I've learned anything in the past couple months, it is to hold firmly. Hold onto friendly hands; hold to the things you know to be true--those things that remain throughout and even after the storm.

Works Cited

Stewart, Chris. The Second Sun. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2007.