See? We weren’t hysterical. We were right! The people who rushed from supermarket to supermarket as the storm approached, eliciting titters and jeers from the rest of the country, turn out to have been the smart ones.
It was not that we lacked proper pioneer spirit, as was widely remarked.
Our vigilance was not evidence of the wussification of America. Not at all!
The intense pantry stocking of last Thursday and Friday was, in fact, a magnificent demonstration of the fact that Americans still have that bold pioneer spirit.
Alike our forebears, we know that when we pass beyond the writ of government — or in our case beyond reach of government plows after a huge snowstorm that hits a region unaccustomed to such precipitation — we’re on our own. As with the doughty sodbusters of yore, no one’s going to bring us dinner.
After all, the pioneers didn’t go west with empty wagons. They packed their prairie schooners nice and full with the staples of their time, such as coffee and cornmeal, rather as we in Washington packed our larders full of today’s essentials.
Judging from the most severely depleted shelves at our local Giant last week, those essentials appear to be butter, eggs, shredded processed cheese, and frozen pizza. (The health food aisle was weirdly untouched.)
And if pre-storm pantry prudence sometimes veered into the comical — like the hilarious spectacle of suburbanites tussling over the last spicy tuna sushi at the River Road Whole Foods — well, that’s modernity for you. I’m sure there were fights over the last parcels of pemmican in the olden days.
Still, those of us who were thinking ahead, pioneer-style, had to put up with a certain amount of mockery and incredulity from those who thought our vigilance preposterous.
“What do you mean, I can’t have the ciabatta bread from the freezer? I’m hungry,” said a teenager in our household, the day after the storm hit.
“As you can see out the window,” I said, “The whole world is covered in snow. It may be days before we’re dug out. It may be days before we can get to the supermarket. And when we do, we may find that there’s not much to buy. It depends on whether the trucks can get through. And there are seven people in our household. And you’d be surprised how quickly we go through food. So we need to use up our supplies sparingly, because who knows how long we’ll be stuck here. That’s why I’d rather you ate the bread that is already out, rather than eating up what I’ve got stored in the freezer.”
She looked at me, her face crinkling with amusement. “Sheesh, OK. It’s not like we’re trying to survive the siege of Leningrad or something. I just wanted to toast some ciabatta bread.”
I confess that at that point I did feel a bit silly — defensive of my supplies, but silly nonetheless. It had been less than a day since the storm struck. We weren’t about to join the Donner Party quite yet.
Yet vindication was but a few moments away. We got a call from a neighbor: Their power had been out since the night before and wasn’t expected to go back on again for three days, and could they possibly come stay?
It meant taking in a family of five, plus a dog: That would be 12 people to feed. Was such a thing possible? Of course it was, and why was that? Because Laura Ingalls Gurdon had laid in a vast amount of provisions, that’s why.
Examiner Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursday.
