There are certain people who are constantly prepared. Prepared for the next day. Prepared for the next year. Walt is one of those people.
“Were you in the Boy Scouts?” his friend, Mack, asks him. They are standing in Walt’s print shop. The building is old, but floors gleam with a new, gray epoxy. Walt has finished cleaning the inkjet nozzles on a banner machine. They weren’t clogged, but he does it anyway.
“The Boy Scouts?” he asks, wiping his hands on a rag. “No. Why do you ask?”
“You embody their motto.”
“What’s that?”
“Be Prepared.”
Walt smiles. Well, of course. He keeps his shop spotless. He cleans the old windows, caulks sashes himself. Does his own roof repair with tar and sheets of rubber. Printers and die cutting machines are fixed before they break, not after. Why wouldn’t any of us be prepared, he says.
“Good point,” Mack follows Walt as he pushes a broom across a spotless floor. “Why wasn’t the government prepared for COVID?”
Returning the broom to a wall hanger, Walt turns to Mack. “How could we prepare for that?”
“I don’t know. Have emergency plans in place. Labs and distribution centers ready to go. It’s not like we didn’t know it was coming. They’ve been talking about pandemics for a hundred years. Books have been written, movies made. It’s part of pop culture, for Pete’s sake.
“Really?”
“Every time there’s a perfectly foreseeable crisis, America is left in a panic. There will always be hurricanes, like Katrina. And recessions, like the Great Recession. And pandemics, like polio. And now COVID. It’s not like these never happened before. Why are we so shocked when they do?”
“You’re right.” Walt frowned. He was thinking hard.
“It’s like the big guys can’t figure things out,” Mack continued. “And the rest of us are left bailing the boat.”
“My boat’s in storage until April. I drained the motor. Greased the lower unit.”
Well, of course.
“I gotta go,” Walt said. He threw on a Carhartt jacket. “Winter is just around the corner, and I want to check my snow blower.”
“You haven’t checked it already?”
“Sure. I replaced the spark. Lubricated the shaft. Stabilized the gas. I ran it for twenty minutes last week, just to be safe.”
“Then what’s the rush?”
“You can’t be too careful.” He runs out the door. Mack followed, or he would have been locked inside. He decided to go home and start his own snow blower. Even though he started it last week.
Mack had been a Boy Scout. Growing up, it wasn’t an especially popular thing to do. The Scouts were looked down upon by the in-crowd, the kind of kids who got elected Homecoming King, and Queen.
He turned the key on his old but well-maintained truck. He may not have been popular. But he was prepared.
Richard Donnelly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Classic flyover land. Which makes us feel just a little… superior. He publishes a weekly column of essays on the writing life at richarddonnelly.substack.com