One for the Road

(If I ever make a title that lame again, please shoot me.)

How would I fare during the end of civilization?  This is a question I ask myself more often than is healthy, but after reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road for the third time, I found myself considering the question again.  I certainly don’t have the know-how that the man in The Road does.  I don’t know how to salvage usable things from wrecked automobiles or the best material to make foot wrappings out of.  My first reaction to a nuclear explosion most definitely wouldn’t be to fill up the bathtub for drinking water.  My first reaction would probably be more along the lines of “holy shit what are we going to do!!!”  I don’t even know the best way to kill myself with a flake of obsidian, or if I would even know where to get some obsidian in the first place.  I own no firearms and have no arsenal of canned food.  I don’t have much of a plan for holding out in a disaster or an invasion other than finding a place where I can stockpile staples and wait it out until, well I don’t really know, I doubt I would last more than six months.  I’m pretty useless in my manual skills and my physical abilities and my ability to fix things.  My stomach is so weak from growing up on purified water and antibiotic-fed meat that I would probably die of dysentery in the first month.  We’re overdue for a meteor or a plague. (Fortunately, nuclear war seems to be on the back burner at the moment.)  Which brings me to the question: why am I going to school, spending all my time studying and running?  I should probably be digging my bunker, stocking it with canned everything and acquiring a healthy arsenal of rifles, shotguns, and possibly even a flamethrower.

I know that if I were alive in the twilight of humanity, I would try to stick around as long as possible, even if there was no world to stay alive for.  And it would be awesome bragging rights to say that you were the last human alive, if only you had someone to brag to.

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The Road somehow pulled off an impressive feat: being popular, read and discussed in numerous circles, and also being a well written and significant work of literature.  It came out during my junior year of high school, and it felt like most of my friends read it.  I saw people reading it who I didn’t even think could read at all.  I remember a run I went on with my track team that turned into a sort of an impromptu book club, because almost every one of us had read The Road.  When certain people ventured forth some insight, my first reaction was to turn to them, stare in disbelief, and say “you, read a book?”  Looking back on it, I’m surprised I didn’t get punched in the face.

It’s certainly not a feel-good book, unlike most of the books that are popular these days.  It doesn’t tell us that we can control the universe with our minds, it isn’t an uplifting tale of overcoming one’s addiction problems, it isn’t a window into a fantastical world where a humble male protagonist with a heart of gold takes on evil, gets to fly around on a broom and go to high school in a castle, and hooks up with his best friend’s hot redhead sister.  But it’s not what we want to hear, it’s what we need to hear.  The Road was a miracle in a way, because it got people thinking – about mortality, about morality, about what they value.  Instead of an irrationally positive message or an overtly cynical outlook, The Road got people thinking about the hard truths of reality and what it means to persevere even though, yes, life does suck sometimes and you may have to scavenge for whatever nonperishable calories you can find in an earth whose biosphere has been completely destroyed while at the same time preserve your morals and faith in humanity despite the fact that what remains of humanity is actively trying to eat you.  And it doesn’t even matter what it got people thinking about, simply the fact that people were reading and thinking, and actively discussing those things is in and of itself something we need more of.  So thank you, Mr. McCarthy, for giving all of us a great common experience.  In this age, they are as few and far between as undiscovered canned goods on the road.