Nuclear Red Tide in Texas

I squint. I look out into the sky and see two vultures, or death scouts is what I call them. The scouts scour the sky. They look for the dead, but they are not nasty creatures. They are scavengers, like the rest of us, except they can smell dead animals up to a mile away. I wonder how far away the rest are. As I squint, stare towards the sun, and look at them - I wonder how much longer it will take for anyone else to show up here.

The year is 2038 and I am a little bored yet anxious. My dog, Dutch, sees them too and just glances at them and does not react much. I look down at her and then back at the sky to ponder.

I will give you my background. When I was seven years old, I started thinking something would happen around 2020. At seven, I thought 50 was close to death – or, old anyway. I wasn’t concerned about the future because at 7, 50 years old seemed like a long time away.

Then, I got older and started watching the world, the people, and the land and had a strange vision in college in Austin, Texas. The year was 1995. I was driving down Lamar, not on drugs, not drunk, and had a flash. A vision or premonition as you may call it. It was weird! Everything was all dead. All burnt. All red and black. The sky a yellow, sultry, and heavy orange and then it flashed back to normal. I had to take a minute and pull over and calm myself. It was like nothing I had experienced before.

I went about my life, never really considering myself a prepper. I mean the world had to end sometime, right? When you are young you are invincible and just don’t think about it. At least I really didn’t. I was more concerned over boys, smoking pot, and drinking some cold brewskies. Not about what I felt when I was a kid, or what I envisioned driving down the road one day.

I consider myself a problem solver. If I liked anything with preppers, I liked their style. I mean I like the problem solving, the planning, and the back to the basic’s survival ideas. After all, the world is not going to survive on Millennials with tight pants, government dependence, and 24/7 Internet, is it? Seriously? Well, I guess I should say I am not going to put my faith in what has been created for our future.

I am a Gen Xer of the latch-key parenting paradigm who ate pudding out of a can and styled the ‘neck house key’ so mom and dad could work undisturbed with 12-hour in-the-office days. My generation, we saw the Challenger explode and go down in flames while in the classroom and we were escorted out in the school hallways to do “duck and cover” nuclear bomb drills.

My physics teacher in high school, who is no longer with us on this side of the dirt, used to say overpopulation was the problem. I believe him. In the prior years with the COVID pandemic and then going through the freeze in Texas in 2021, people are the problem, or too many people.

Born and raised in Texas, I always thought we had our own power grid and were safe from any outside interference until the freeze in 2021. I can’t brag about that anymore.

The older I got the more nervous I got about the future - about something “big” happening. No more visions. A few nightmares. But, the more I planned, the more contingencies I worked through. The more problem solving I did, the better I felt.

After 2021, I came into a little bit of money. I had been looking at places to do an off-the-grid project. I settled on Cherokee, Texas, a bunch of big ranches, centrally located in Texas, away from the border, away from cities, and away from the 3 nuclear plants in Texas that could be targets. I bought 10 acres in 2025.

As I sit here watching the sky, listening to the birds, wind, and feeling the hot Texas sun on my face in my lawn chair with Dutch by my side - I think about what a dear friend said to me when I lived in Austin, and I was talking about prepping and the end of the world.

This of course was before she completed her captain’s license and sailed around the world in her sailboat. You will probably find her there on one of the oceans now as we wait for the nuclear red tide to roll in. She said “Shay, why would you want to survive a dystopia? You are not married; you don’t have kids - why wouldn’t you just want to die out when it happens?”

Great question, I have yet to be able to answer it. I mean, I was a crazy kid, took a long time to graduate college, had a great career, helped a lot of people along the way, but I am no Einstein and am too old to have kids and further a future generation. I mean really, what is the point? The best I can gather is our never-ending pursuit to survive.

So, I bought the place in 2025. I put in a well, made a U-shaped parameter of sorts with 4 shipping containers and a greenhouse in the middle. And, one shipping container, a fifth, buried and supported with concrete and provisions to endure the initial meltdown. I researched TV shows and YouTube for solar setups, generators, and wind backup systems. I learned how to filter water and air. I stored enough water and food until it was safe to use the well water and restore my garden.

I grabbed the heart shaped locket I wore on my neck that was now getting hot in the sun as I watched it set. I looked at Dutch and scratched her behind the ears. Were my loved ones on the way? Would they make it on the small dirt roads I charted out for them 5 years before - with relief packs buried at markers on the way?

In the end I guess we are all scavengers - flying high above the sky with our ideas, sniffing out the dead, and waiting for this present-day scenario of life to end so that we can continue our own.

As my boat captain friend said, “What difference does it make?” Dutch and I stare down the dirt road waiting for who might be nobody; I grab the heart shaped locket, say a prayer, sip my beer, and watch for the red tide.