That’s actually funny. This is the first time I’ve given any thought to what you might call those things. A “bike trailer” I suppose.
Anyway, among some odds and ends like a flashlight, extra batteries, a spare change of clothes, and so on, was a good-sized pile of food (canned food, mostly, but also some freeze-dried rations that I found at an outpost) and several jugs of water. The water was the worst of it. You never think about this when water is plentiful, but it really is the limiting factor in everything you do. I can go for several days without food before I start getting into trouble (I’ve done it). Going just a few days without water is bad news.
Before this all happened, water was the least of anyone’s concerns. You could always get it from somewhere. In fact, all you had to do was lift a magic lever in your kitchen and water just fell out of a pipe and it wouldn’t stop until you pushed the lever down again. I mean… it wouldn’t stop. It would just continue—hundreds of gallons could pass by, unused, until you hit that magic lever. When I think about what we all lost in the fall, I don’t think about all the distractions. I don’t think about the televisions or the cell phones or the ludicrous social media or any of the little gadgets that we thought we needed but really didn’t. I think about a kitchen faucet. I remember water being so plentiful that it was literally the last thing on anyone’s mind.
As we all learned, water is actually the first thing you consider in a truly natural world. It doesn’t matter what task you’re about to embark on; water is always your first consideration. Where can it be found? How are you going to transport it? How will you protect it from evaporating? Does it need to be purified? How will you purify it? Do you have the equipment necessary to purify it? How much of it can you carry? I’ve since learned from reading one of Billy’s old survival books that a full-grown human needs to consume two quarts of water per day to stay healthy. If you’re in deep trouble, you can ration that down to maybe one quart per day but you need to be really careful about how you take it in and limit your level of physical activity, or you’ll run into severe issues.
So, four quarts to a gallon, yes? That means if you’re being good to yourself (and the supply is abundant), you’ll be drinking one gallon every two days or (again, if the situation is dire) one gallon every four days. Now, where this produces a problem is in weight. One gallon of drinkable water weighs a little over eight pounds. This means if you have to make a trip that will take one week you need to haul thirty pounds of water.
It is possible, of course, to get more water on the way and you always keep your eye out. It can be scavenged, certainly. It can also be found out in the wild (the human race did survive for a period without utilities or irrigation, after all) but unless you find a safe, swift-running source, the chances are you need to treat it properly, or you run the risk of becoming deathly ill from bacteria or other contaminants.
Clearly, you could boil the water, given you have a receptacle that will stand up to the heat necessary to boil water for the time needed—about twelve minutes. But then, you need the ability to make fire. You also can’t drink water that has just been boiled, unfortunately, because you’ll burn yourself terribly. You need to sit around and wait for it to be cool enough to consume. This means that if you find yourself having to treat water in this way, roughly half of your usable daylight travel time is eaten up in the process of gathering enough fuel to run a fire long enough to boil the water, not to mention finding water to boil, waiting for it to cool, and so on and so on. Additionally, you don’t know if you’re going to find any water to process on the following day.
Given all of that, you always need to know the total distance you’ll be traveling, you need to know what kind of terrain you’ll be running into so that you can estimate average distance traveled per day, and some means to carry all of that heavy water you’ll need to survive.
I knew none of this when I ran into Billy. The only thing that really saved me was that I’d traveled most of the distance to Primm in a car. The main roads inside and around cities were all completely unmanageable. In the places that weren’t blocked off or barricaded, the streets were clogged with those cars that had survived the Flare or those cars that had been repaired since the Flare occurred.
The sequence of events to which we had been subjected meant that all of the major cities had undergone a double pileup. First, there was the initial traffic jam created by everyone trying to escape the riots that broke out after the Flare hit. When things became bad enough, the military came in to establish some kind of order. They weren’t there to win friendship medals, so the first thing they did was bulldoze all the vehicles off the major arteries for the purposes of securing supply lines and aid distribution networks.
The second pileup came after the Plague began to burn through what was left of us. The military personnel were just as susceptible as the rest of us and, as they started dying off in larger numbers, the unwatched roads began to bind up again.
A lot of people in all of the crowded areas where trying to get away. It’s kind of funny… or maybe ironic is the word. As long as society is intact and everyone understands that there’s some sort of system in place to ensure we all play nice, we’ll all cram together in one place like we can’t get enough of each other. As soon as those support systems start to fall apart, we can’t get away from each other fast enough.
Once you get a ways outside cities or towns and into the big empty of the open highway, it becomes possible to drive if you can find a vehicle. I had found one just outside of Hesperia, only slightly used with the owner still in it. I pulled him out, set him aside, and then went through the car (it was a sedan) to see what it had in it. There wasn’t much gas in the tank; however I couldn’t be too choosy. Any cars behind me were all blocked-in bumper to bumper, and I didn’t have any way to get gas out of them and into this car. There were other cars in sight further up the road, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of time shopping for transportation. This car had gas and, because a driver was still in it, it had keys. I was grateful for that.
Whoever he was, he was less of a survivalist than I was. There was a roadside emergency kit in the trunk that looked as though it had been cannibalized, anything useful having been pillaged with the exception of the jumper cables. I also found a flimsy plastic parka in a clear plastic pouch. I opened the parka and pulled it over the driver’s seat. The previous owner of the vehicle hadn’t started to go all runny yet, but he had still been out there long enough to get rather foul, especially in that hot California sun, and I wasn’t excited about settling into whatever he may have left behind in the seat (visible or otherwise). I threw my rifle in the front seat, my supplies in the back seat, and folded up the bike trailer and tossed it in the trunk. I settled in behind the wheel, turned the key, and the engine started up with no complaints (most cars would still do that in those early days if you could find them in an un-fried state). I pulled the column shifter down to “drive” and proceeded on down the road, rolling all the windows down as I went to try and air out the evidence of the previous owner.
I didn’t realize it at the time but finding that car probably saved my life. I made it all the way to Primm before the engine finally gagged and died from a lack of fuel. This would have been days’ worth of travel on foot, requiring water that I didn’t have with me. Not realizing this, I shrugged, set the brake, and went about the business of removing all of my things from the vehicle. Once all was re-situated, and I had my rifle slung over my shoulder, I gave the front tire a light kick (see yah ’round, partner) and continued on my way. The sun was low in the sky, and it would be evening soon so I wanted to see if I could find somewhere in Primm to settle for the night.