LIFE

Surviving the End

Along with food and water, there’s one other thing we need to keep living.

Photo by Cate Bligh on Unsplash

Jones pulls the green mass of leaves from the dirt and holds them up to his nose, breathing in. The leaves are overripe, he says. They look like weeds, nothing edible. Jones is a farmer and moves over the land like a minesweeper.

I am at his farm as part of an assignment for a mid-city publication. My editor told me to learn how to survive in a post-pandemic or post-apocalyptic world and report it back to our readers. I suspect fresh air is foreign to our audience.

My only experience in farming was as a child helping my grandparents pull up potatoes from their back garden. Sometimes, we planted carrots. Whatever we planted had to be dug from the ground, the dirt burying itself under our nails.

Jones is thirty. He wears a red, flannel shirt. It’s the only shirt he wears while I’m here. Either he only has one shirt, or he has it in multiple versions, dressing in the same outfit like those geniuses who are too bothered with their thoughts to think about what to wear each day.

Jones and his wife, Amelia, and their two kids go without electricity. Everything at night is done by candle or moonlight. Heat comes from a fireplace. Air conditioning from open…