Eli McCann: Food storage and 72-hour kits and doomsday sermons, oh my. I’ll be ready for that dreaded day — someday.

For as long as I remember, going back to the pioneer days of the late 1980s, my family had a semiannual tradition wherein we would perform a formal audit of our six backpacks with accompanying labels reading “72-hour kits.” These were, of course, the front line of our emergency preparations, the product of some Sunday school lesson or televised prime-time public service announcement, or perhaps both.

Dad, as patriarch, usually would lead the session, passing out the bags to us four small children and my mother, who sat like the rest of us, cross-legged in a sacred family circle. Mom had a clipboard to keep notes — the taking of minutes was a volunteer activity, and the minutes were never again reviewed or approved, but they did lend a level of authenticity and gravitas to what might otherwise look like an inconsequential gathering of pajamaed Latter-day Saints on a Sunday evening.

We would begin combing through the kits’ supplies, Dad retrieving item after item out of his own and asking us in order whether we could identify the same items in ours.

Matches. Flashlights. A confusing amount of hard candy, which mom explained was for “sustenance,” chosen over healthier options because it could last forever without turning bad.

We would find and unfold ponchos, investigating them for rips. Dried-out tubes of lip balm would be opened and rubbed. There was always at least one item no one could identify. We would never throw it out because what if it was important?

Eventually, Dad would announce we were woefully unprepared for the looming natural disaster the token semiannual General Conference talk had warned us was nigh (without ever getting into specifics). Then we would repack the same stale supplies we had just audited and store the backpacks away near the 50 jars of applesauce that had been optimistically canned over the prior four apple-picking seasons. The 72-hour kits would be forgotten for the next six months.

“We’ll get those updated,” mom would periodically say. Then she would sigh, let out a yawn, and mumble “someday.”

Supplies of salt and ‘prepper’

I don’t know if we used this name for it back then, but gradations of the “prepper” lifestyle seemed to permeate my Utah community in the 1980s and ’90s. For example, neighbors took the charge from Latter-day Saint leaders to maintain a two-year supply of food in their basements to varying degrees of compliance.

While some homes’ basements were converted to bunkerlike environments, stashed with MREs (meals ready to eat), rifles and Bibles, our own was often the musty venue for dehydrated fruit and sleeping bags we never used. Ours was a family who only pretended to go camping.

The schools conducted fire and earthquake drills. The latter were more fun because they were typically infused with theater, our thespian vice principal using her voice and nearby office supplies to perform 60 seconds of chaotic sounds over the intercom while we covered our eyes and hid under our tiny plywood desks that were meant to protect us from a collapsing building and electrocution.

The combination of doomsday warnings received from church and state, both apparently unified on this topic, caused my best friend, Mandy Williams, and me to begin hoarding candy under her bed in preparation for an impending famine that never materialized. Our responsible attempts to prevent the mass extinction of the human race were thwarted when Mandy’s older sister and her friends, fifth graders, discovered our supply and took care of it for us during a tween slumber party.

My propensity for emergency preparation carried into adulthood when I began canning my own applesauce that would never get eaten. So did the fire and earthquake drills, this time organized by my employer, during which an alarm would sound, prompting my begrudged co-workers to descend the stairs in our downtown high-rise to walk across the street and be head-counted by stone-faced Janet from human resources, holding a flag and clipboard and looking like she had waited her entire life for this moment.

By the time I entered my 30s, I began to feel all this preparation was for naught. Decades of emergency kit audits, food preservation efforts and drills had filled my brain and time with seemingly useless fearmongering propaganda and information, never to be deployed onto some disaster.

Then the pandemic and quake hit

Then, suddenly, it was 2020, and a worldwide pandemic shut us in our houses and threatened to upset supply lines. Grocery stores were raided for toilet paper, pasta and yeast. It was like we were living in 1992 Russia.

We couldn’t find bread.

“It’s OK,” I told my husband, Skylar, on day three of this. “That’s why we have our emergency food supply.”

I handed him a can of something I had preserved sometime within the past decade (my Sharpie-scribbled year on the cap was illegible).

“What … is it?” he asked.

“It should be food,” I explained, to the very best of my ability. “And maybe some botulism.”

Three days later we awoke to an earthquake.

Our century-old house swayed from side to side. As we started to comprehend what was happening, Skylar flew out of bed and began sprinting around the house screaming words our mothers don’t think we know. I followed him, both of my arms flailing in the air, shouting all the obscenities he hadn’t already claimed. Our dog ran circles around us, barking.

We didn’t cover our eyes. We didn’t climb under any plywood desks. We didn’t go outside to look for Janet from HR and apologize for not taking her more seriously in the past.

Instead, we darted to the exact center of our home, stood under a heavy chandelier, and cried.

When the ground stopped moving and the rumbling dissolved into silence, Skylar looked at me and said, “What happened to all my training? I’ve participated in earthquake drills since I was 7 and all I did just now was run around screaming.”

I thought of my family’s 72-hour kits full of dead batteries and stale candy.

“We really should do an audit of our emergency preparedness supplies,” I suggested.

“When?” Skylar asked.

I channeled my exhausted working mother, circa 1989, and mumbled an answer in a tone I immediately recognized as defeated.

“Someday.”

Note to readers • Eli McCann is an attorney, writer and podcaster in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his husband, new child and their two naughty (yet worshipped) dogs. You can find Eli on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @EliMcCann or at his personal website, www.itjustgetsstranger.com, where he tries to keep the swearing to a minimum so as not to upset his mother.