Nicole Walker is the author of the collections The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet from Rose Metal Press and Sustainability: A Love Story from Mad Creek Books. Her previous nonfiction work includes Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and a book of poems This Noisy Egg. She wishes she'd gone with the original title for her collection of poems, "Comeuppance," so she only had one book with "Egg" in the title, but like eggs or chickens, the poetry collection came first. She is the co-president of NonfictioNOW, the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award, a noted author in several Best American Essays, nonfiction editor at Diagram, and is a founding member of the MFA Program at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. Her books have been honored with a Nautilus Award, Independent Press Award, and Foreword Reviews Best Nonfiction Award. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, she left as quickly as she could at 17 for Reed College in Portland, Oregon. While she loved Portland, when she had the chance to return to Salt Lake for graduate school, she jumped at the chance. Salt Lake had changed, becoming more welcoming. She spent the next eight years studying in and around Utah. It became her home again. She’s lucky she now lives just two hours south of the Utah border.
Works
Salmon of the Apocalypse
Salmon of the Apocalypse
What of the future can you divine from a single detail? It’s like trying to discern a recipe from only one ingredient. Although that one ingredient gives you a bit of a clue of what it is you’re trying to make.
I could see the horses’ ribs. The brown fur stretched across the stomach like bark on a tree. Like it was already practicing to be leather. There was nothing green on the ground for them. Nothing even straw-colored. Barren dirt. Gray fences. A hawk stood on a post. Even its feathers looked thin. Thirsty. I hadn’t seen a patch of water since we’d passed Utah Lake in Provo where not even a drawn-out horse would drink that mercury-filled pretender. I reached for my Nalgene, took a sip. I thought for a minute about asking Erik to stop the car. Erik, whom I had been dating for a year, didn’t like to stop on road trips. He liked to make good time. He liked to keep the radio going. But I thought maybe I could help the horses. I could pour the rest of my water in the trough. Then I thought better of it. They would fight over the droplets. It would just prolong their thirst. What would I drink? Maybe it would rain soon. Maybe the owners would come out. They needed real water, not just drops. We kept driving.
It was as we had predicted. We had left the metropolis of Salt Lake City for the safety of a middle-of-the-desert small town to avoid the crushing traffic jam predicted at the end of this world. But, about the ends of the worlds, this one hadn’t killed the narrators of this version. We’d lived through it. We were the stars of our own apocalypse. We had advance warning. We had preparations. We had a trunk full of beer. An entire salmon. Twenty-four unshucked oysters. A six pack of chicken broth. An end-of-the-world emergency kit of sorts—if your emergency is New Year’s Eve in the desert trying to be New Year’s Eve in Portland, Oregon. Although, when our gas tank ran out, we would be trapped in central Utah. Why had we driven south and east instead of north and west? At least then, we’d be nearer places where we could harvest oysters instead of transporting them first by boat, then by plane, then by car to the middle of the desert where, without supplies, the world would feel like it had reached its end.
Y2K wasn’t supposed to bring about complete collapse. It wasn’t avian flu or a monkey virus mutated or a cure for cancer gone rogue. It wasn’t nuclear. But drought plus technological disaster plus the middle-of-nowhere brought us to this full-stop. I’d been prepared for this happening—of me being the last one standing. When I was eleven, after I had mown the lawn, I stored handfuls of grass for my horse, in this case, my bike, in a shoebox in the garage. I stored cough syrup for my dolls. I kept under my bed a pound of white chocolate. I would eat only a fingernail-scraping full at night. I had to make it last. Who knew when the next chocolate would appear? Who knew when my mom would realize the cough syrup I hid under my bed to administer to my dolls had gone missing and start keeping it under lock and key? I stole tiny jars of jam from fancy hotel restaurants. At the age of three, I had already realized the toilet provided plenty of water in a tea-party-for-grandma crisis.
I blame my grandmother for this hoarding problem. Grandma Mayhew kept a ball of foil growing in her pantry.
She preserved up pickles, peaches, pears, cherries, apricots and jam. She re-used paper towels, drying out wet ones on the loop of the kitchen sink faucet. At Christmas she collected the bows from everyone’s ripped-away wrapping. She was a good Mormon. Grandma kept a sixth month supply instead of the three-month encouraged by her church to sustain her family while they awaited the second coming of Jesus Christ—or a husband prone to losing his job. She staved off end-of-the-world questions like why did my husband run off to leave me to raise 4 daughters by myself by shoving her anger at the injustice into something strong and permanent, like a Mason Jar.
Erik and I are storer-uppers but we stored all the bad things. Neither beer nor cigarettes nor wine would have been on my grandma’s list. Erik and I, although not baptized into the church ourselves, absorbed the admonition to prepare but our three-month supply would not be bishop-approved.
We could hold out, in Torrey, Utah, Erik and I. Between us, maybe we could repopulate the world. Here, we would live. We could pillage the gas station for its can of beans, its can of sardines, its box of peanut butter crackers, its rows of candies: spice drops, red hots, gummy worms—all the preserves in the world ready to preserve us into the future. Rows of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Our children could be grateful to such parents who raised them on Reese’s and Kit Kats, on Doritos and beef jerky. We could take some of the food back to the horses. Horses will eat Reese’s too. Everybody likes peanut butter cups. It didn’t seem fair, now that I had found someone who wanted to go into the future with me, that the future itself looked bleak. At least he was a carpenter. He could rebuild.
Everyone knows that you should gas up before the apocalypse but how do you know exactly when ‘before’ is? We did need gas and the road was a lonely one. No other cars drove by as we pulled into the station. I couldn’t see anyone through the windows of the store. I got out of the car because the tank was on my side. But the lever on the pump wouldn’t pull. Through the car window, I told Erik I couldn’t get the pump to turn on. He got out and came over to my side.
“Operator Error?” Erik asked but then he tried to release the hose. Or he tried to. No Operator Error here. The gauge wouldn’t zero out. We were trapped at zero.
We were more paranoid than your average people about Y2K. Erik’s mom and step-dad worked in IT for the phone company. They were in lockdown for the weekend, awaiting whatever crisis would unveil when the computer clocks allowed for only two digits of date data. When the clock flipped to zero, the fear was we’d be transported back to the 1900’s, possibly figuratively, meaning several computers would break down and possibly literally, like we would have no computers and therefore no infrastructure at all. Transmitters down, electrical grid down, pumps from the water treatment plant could go down. This would make people panic. There would be a run on gas, guns, and, salmon AND oysters.
We knew about climate change. We knew about ocean acidification, about the polar bears, the general potential extinction, the rising seas, the eroding coastlines, the shifting, disappearing habitats. Y2K was about the loss of technology—but that was also kind of a dreamy apocalypse. The “get-back-to-the-land” kind of apocalypse where we could learn from our indigenous neighbors. Without tech, we could undo the deforestation, the overfishing, the mining, the driving, the plastic, the shipping. Y2K made us feel like we had a chance to go back. Repair. Hit the reset button. But, like the car we were driving, like the computers that managed to handle the two-digit to four-digit date change, like the clocks themselves, we hurtled into the future.
I followed Erik toward the station. He pressed on the door. It opened. The lights were off. The place was silent. Not even the freezers buzzed.
There’s a giddiness to imagining you’re the only person left on the planet. All that open forest (assuming it hasn’t burned). All that prime real estate on the oceans (assuming they haven’t turned totally acidic). All that free food (assuming it hasn’t all been irradiated by nuclear bombs). Just you and the animals (assuming the animals bore some resistance to the virus/bomb/flood/drought that knocked everyone else out) roaming the countryside, eating berries, picking flowers. You don’t have to wait in line, assuming, of course, there’s anything left to wait in line for.
After the giddiness, the assumptions become fears—fears of loneliness. You realize that there are no lines to wait in to see the movie because movies aren’t being made and there’s no electricity to project the film. Animals think you’re a tasty treat. Fresh food has rotted. The ocean is a dead, salmon-less sea. You become a little desperate. You start to look around at the ground. You wonder how the Fremont Indians made pots. You’re going to need to learn how to make one to gather water. If you can find any water.
I asked Erik, “Don’t these Kit Kats look dusty?” It had only been two hours since we left Salt Lake. If the world had ended, would dust have had time to accumulate? I looked around the store for what would need to be eaten now and what could be saved for later. String cheese and orange juice from the refrigerated section first. Packs of nuts and Cheetos could be saved, presumably, for eternity. Beer. We would need all the beer for now and for eternity even if it was 3.2 percent beer by volume.
And then the lights came on.
A vision appeared. The vision of an angel wearing Carharts and a button-down shirt. Praise be. Hallelujah. The second coming. Etc.
“We’re closed, you know.”
“The door was open.” Erik, who doesn’t really believe in the end of the world, answered more practically.
“It’s New Year’s Eve,” the vision spoke. As if this was an explanation. It certainly didn’t explain the dust.
“We just needed some gas.”
“Chevron. Half a mile down the road. Their pumps are on.”
When we got to the Chevron. I understood why the other place was so dusty. This place, well-lit, freezer-buzzing, was open all year around. This was the real gas station. The other one was just a place-holder, a sign of disaster and the end of the small town. Morley’s was the sign of people on the move, the places recognizable wherever you were, like you hadn’t even left home: Chevron, Shell, Texaco.
Torrey, Utah, in the middle of Utah, just outside of Capitol Reef National Park, where the rocks are red and a permanent population under a thousand is a good place to hide from disasters of the urban kind where swarms of people will be storming the grocery stores for bottled water and canned tomatoes, crowding the free- ways trying to get out of town, and loading their shotguns. But, in terms of places to stay forever, it lacks a couple of things: a sustainable amount of water the Fremont River is narrow; and a sustainable amount of food. The dirt is red with iron but not rich with many other nutrients. The temperatures are air-conditioner-worthy-hot in the summer and furnace-necessary cold in the winter.
As we drove, the wind blew hard across Highway 24, shaking the car. Winter in the desert means freeze but still also dry. No one comes to Capitol Reef in the winter. In Torrey, no store was open. Not the Chuckwagon, the general store, not the Robber’s Roost Bookstore and Coffee house, not Café Diablo which serves rattlesnake cakes, empanadas, a tower of pork ribs surrounding a haystack of French Fries, mixed grill with tout, tenderloin and rabbit sausage.
Even if nothing else was open, we had the key to the cabin. We met my old friend from middle school, Rebecca, her husband, Erik’s cousin, Emily, and her boyfriend. When we entered, the heat, fed by the propane tank outside, kicked on. Erik turned on the water and flushed the toilets to restore their waste conveying abilities. We carried the cooler full of beer, the meat, cheeses and vegetables, a bag of potatoes and the bottles of wine, and the chicken broth up the long staircase to the main floor. The perishables we put in the refrigerator and hoped that the electrical grid would make it through the night. Admittedly, this amount of food would not sustain us through the end of the world. It probably wouldn’t sustain us through the whole weekend if we ate like I expected us to. I bought a fish poacher just for this occasion. Should the world end, one should be able to poach a fish whole.
When I chopped the head off the fish and tossed it in the garbage, Rebecca, chopping garlic next to me, asked, “Shouldn’t we save that?”
“For what?”
“Fish stock or something. Fume?”
“I didn’t bring any carrots or celery. It’d make kind of a lame stock. Maybe the dogs could eat it.”
“Remember that time the dogs ate all that salmon? They threw up all over the car.”
“What would we do with the fish stock? I don’t think we’ll be making bouillabaisse down here.”
“Maybe if we could freeze the heads.”
I saw where she was coming from. But if the freezer lost electricity that night, the fish heads would go to waste. If the electrical grid did fail and we couldn’t keep them frozen, we’d have to throw out the fish heads which would bring ravens. Ravens and vultures. Then we’d be eating by the campfire, trying to see by campfire light, trying to keep the coals hot until morning to warn the ravens away. I tried to think of ways to preserve the fish heads if the electricity went out. I dug the fish head out of the garbage and put it in the pot with the skins of an onion to make a stock if only to keep me from thinking about an influx of hungry ravens.
The directions said to place the poacher directly in the oven. Rebecca and Kurt, Emily’s boyfriend, wanted to stick with a more familiar method of cooking—sautéing the salmon. Apocalypse threatened: They thought I would overcook the salmon. Everyone agrees that overcooked salmon is the worst kind of salmon. But even temperature equals even cooking, I argued. The salmon would saturate with liquid heat, cooking the inside simultaneously with the outside rather than shocking the outside and leaving the inside to absorb heat like a contagion. Eventually, I convinced them the logic of the oven. Two-hundred and fifty degrees should prevent the leeching out of all fat and the absorption of wine and lemon and herb liquid.
This could be the last salmon of our lives. Or, at least, the last good salmon of the year.
Kurt thought I should add thyme.
“I think thyme always tastes moldy,” Rebecca said.
As we each chewed on a sprig, trying to decide if we should add it, Rebecca asked, “What would our six- teen-year-old selves think of us waiting for the apocalypse? It’s so Mormon.” Rebecca and I had been friends since Junior High. But she was Mormon. She had been baptized.
“If we were Mormon, we’d have four kids by now,” I said. “My mom had six by the time she was 28,” Rebecca said. “We are so old.”
“We always have been.”
Emily, a vegetarian, came in to see if I was going to use chicken stock in the soup. “Sometimes, people put in chicken stock when they say they’re going to use veggie stock. I can taste the difference.”
“You can’t get the same mouth feel from vegetable stock. Plus, chicken stock uses the throw-away parts of the chicken,” Kurt argued for me.
“I don’t eat dead things,” Emily reminded us.
“Don’t put thyme in the stock. Everything will taste like mold,” Rebecca reminded us.
I picked up my car keys. “I’ll go into Loa.” “Why? It’ll take an hour.” Erik asked.
“I forgot veggie stock.”
“I thought that was the point. To make do.”
“But if we can still go to the store, shouldn’t we?”
Going to the store was, of course, in “the before.” Before the time when every trip to the store required some mathematical estimation of the carbon each item emitted in production, how much carbon each item cost to be transported to the store, how to add the cost of one more bit of plastic to wrap the head of lettuce and then subtract the speed of decay when you denied yourself the pleasure of plastic wrapped lettuce. It is a long, arduous process, going to the grocery these days. 1999 might not have been the end of the world, but it may have been antediluvian. The flood of information coupled with the flood of carbon filling the skies was about to deluge us. In 1999, you could still pretend a little ignorance. You could still pretend that the math at the end of the millennium was going to be worse than the math of carbon particulates amassing in the atmosphere.
On New Year’s Eve Day, in 1999, going to the store wasn’t contributing to disaster, it was an attempt to avert it. The list of what you could buy at the Loa FoodTown in 1999, the grocery store twenty miles from the cabin in Torrey included: Tillamook Cheese, tomatillos, red cluster tomatoes for $1.49/lb, Fresh Express spring mix, portobellos, shitakes, a package, though dusty, of dried wild mushroom mix (oyster mushrooms, enoki, shitake), bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, bamboo skewers and live baby chicks.
Things you couldn’t get at the FoodTown in Loa: truffles, fresh porcini, fresh chanterelles, boneless, skinless chicken thighs, organically grown spring mix, Vidalia onions, poblano peppers, kosher salt, organically grown anything, panko breadcrumbs, truffle oil, vegetable broth.
I bought the package of dried shitakes. I would rehydrate those and toss them in with the button mushrooms to bring out the underlying woodsy-ness in the soup. If I were really worthy middle-of-nowhere-living, I would have hunted mushrooms on my own.
As I served the salmon, I could already tell the attempt to avert disaster had failed. It was awful. So overcooked it fell apart on the spatula. By poaching it too long, I had washed all the color out of it, turning the flesh white. Tasting more of wet dirt than red fish, the meat caught on the roof of my mouth. I had to push it off with my tongue. Only the citrus sauce I made with the juice of blood oranges and butter alleviated the tackiness of the flesh, but even that didn’t disguise the pastiness of the salmon. We ate the bites we could and stuck the rest, along with the fish head, in the refrigerator, forgetting about the threat of electronic oblivion and turning instead to chips, salsa, and the cooler of beer.
“It’s OK, Nik. It’s not the end of the world.”
But it was. At least for that minute. All that work, all that preparation, that whole production—a waste. I was sad that whole salmon had died just to be turned to thyme and wood.
I should have made something more Torrey-like. Something with pine nuts and river trout, not ocean salmon. Food that they eat down here, that you can get fresh in Loa. Steak and cheese—ranch food. The reason they keep the horses. When you drive north and west, think pink. When you drive south and east, think brown.
The clocks turned midnight and the lights stayed on. At least our part of the grid stayed safe. We opened a requisite bottle of champagne.
“I guess we won’t have to repopulate the planet,” Todd said as he flicked the lights on and off. “Though we could try.”
“We’re probably all infertile, all this booze,” Rebecca said.
“All these years of not getting pregnant. “A toast to birth control pills.” I raised my glass.
Nobody cheered.
“How about ‘to condoms’?”
That got a half a lift of their glasses.
Emily said that she intended not to get pregnant. “If I decide to have kids, I’ll turn my ovaries on,” Neither she nor Rebecca had ever been pregnant. Not one pregnancy scare for either of them. A prophylactic the equivalent of scare quotes kept sperm away from egg? I stared at each of their stomachs, envious of bodies that will do the brain’s bidding.
Emily just thought control and had it. She was thin with mental discipline and vegetarianism. She had self-control. For me, I cooked. I made spaghetti sauce for pregnancy tests, mashed avocados for cysts, packed up the car for Y2K, cut carrots into French burnoise, strained soup through a chinois, take a pill with the word “control” written into it. Those were the kinds of methods I understood.
“Do you think you’ll have kids?” I asked them.
“Not any time soon,” Kurt said.
“We’re going to be 30.”
“One day.”
“One day pretty soon,” I said. I could feel the wrinkle in my forehead fat as a crack.
I didn’t expect the guys to worry about it. But my friends. They weren’t even thinking kids. They were making me feel kind of Mormon. Like I’d lost whatever suavé Portland had conferred upon me. Maybe they just weren’t planners like me. Or maybe they didn’t believe that worry was its own kind of prophylactic.
There is potential food in the desert to eat but it takes someone who has studied deserts or had knowledge passed down to them to figure out which were the good ones to eat. You don’t just get it by wandering into the red rock and hoping a fruit from a Cholla cactus seduces you.
The Phoenix New Times offers this advice:
You’ve seen prickly pear jam at the supermarket, but did you know many varieties of cholla cac- tus are edible straight from the ground? According to the James Beard Foundation’s Foods of the Southwest Indian Nations, the Tohono O’odham Indians regularly consumed cholla buds—a smart move considering a palm-size dollop contains as much calcium as a glass of milk. All you need to prepare your cholla in the wild is a lighter and a pocket comb. Grasp the comb and rake in a down- ward motion along the shaft of the plant. The fruit should pop right off and be trapped in the teeth of the comb. Skewer your cholla onto a small branch and use the lighter to spark a pile of brush. Cook until the spines char and break off. Once the fruit is clear of spikes, simply peel the skin and roast until warm. Voilà! Cactus appetizers. For a Martha Stewart touch, pluck additional needles and use them as cocktail toothpicks.
But in the apocalypse, there will be very little Internet to guide you and the Tohono O’odham are probably not too jazzed to give a lot of free how to live without electricity advice.
Desert plants cling to survival. They make tight, skinny roots. Still, if you know what you’re looking for, you can find something to eat. Miner’s lettuce, nettles, prickly pear and pine nuts. Some Mormons knew their wild plants. John Hyrum Barton (1868-1944) wrote in his diary, “We considered pigweed greens a dessert.” You need to find someone named Hyrum though help you figure out which weed is a dessert-worthy pig.
As the climate crisis hurtles the fertile valleys of the planet into desertification, learning what plants can grow in sandy soil and arid climates would be smart. Pigweed, nettles, prickly pear. These foods require more processing to eat than some of the foods we are used to. The dessert is full of thorns to keep the foragers away. Perhaps we’ll learn how to transform them from pokey vegetation into smooth, apple-like edibles. We’re good at making hybrids, teaching plants to adapt to us. It keeps us from having to adapt ourselves.
I have yet to grow pigweed but, in constant, pointless preparation, I have figured out which pinecones produce pine nuts but it’s not easy to extract them. Pinyon trees fruit only once every seven years. If you’re lucky enough to find a fully-seeded cone, you have to dig out the nut or wait it for the pine cone to dry in the hot sun. I’m not patient. I end up with bruised fingers and hangnails. When I do get a seed out, I eat it immediately but I suppose one could save them, reserve them to make pesto. In the desert, Fremont Indians would have told the pioneers as part of their three-month stores to keep the pine nuts in their shells. Pine nuts are full of oil. They pack more protein than any other seed or nut. Outside of their shells, the rich white seeds go rancid quickly. They are best preserved in the freezer. In a total power failure situation, or in pioneer times, shelled seeds would rot. To survive in the desert, you have to shell on demand. No preservation. No prophylactic.
Bibliography
- The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet (Spring 2019)
- Sustainability: A Love Story, Ohio State University Press (Fall 2018)
- Where the Tiny Things Are: Feathered Essays, Punctum Press (Fall 2017)
- Egg Bloomsbury Editions (March 2017).
- Quench Your Thirst with Salt., Zone 3 Press, (2013)
- This Noisy Egg., Barrow Street Press (2010).