Make
mine a wheat smoothie*
By Sheryl-Lee Kerr
* a
favourite column
[slk’s note: Although
this was published after Y2K was supposed to bite, it was written
beforehand, just as I was heading out on holidays - so as I wrote it I had to
guess correctly how the bug scare was going to work out … Thankfully the
Prophecy Goddess must have appreciated all those chocolate offerings over the
years and I got damnably lucky. *grin*]
I read there is a guy in America who, as we speak, is happily buried
in a bus in the middle of nowhere. Actually, a network of buses, to be
precise.
His thinking was that when the Y2K bug bit, it wasn't going to be
biting him, his kin, or 500 of his nearest neighbors (regardless of their
thoughts on the subject).
So he bought a lot of old, clapped-out buses, dug big pits on his
huge property, buried the buses and then linked them all together like train carriages. Then he fully provisioned his underground bus tunnels with
emergency supplies for the chaos he was certain would befall us all this
month.
Now, I know what you're thinking: What sort of emergency supplies
would a guy who buys and buries buses for a hobby possibly take with him to beat Y2K?
Good question.
Not, as you would expect, Tim Tams and Maltesers, which I think most
women would agree qualify as food groups in their own right.
Nor beer and, well, beer, as most men would agree equally qualifies
as an essential of life.
Rather, this man trucked in ... wheat. Tonnes and tonnes of wheat.
Well, if it were up to me, I'd also be including ingredients you
could use to at least whip up into a halfway decent smoothie.
Now I have two questions for this forward-thinking guy: (Three if
you count “What in heck are you thinking, fella?”)
1. If you're underground in a bus, where would you plant the wheat?
2. Why bury the buses?
Actually, what all this reminds me of is one of those old
philosophical debates about which 10 members of society you'd save by
allowing them entry to the community's small emergency bunker.
You know: do you save the pregnant woman (to continue the human
race), the doctor (to keep the survivors healthy) or the politician (to
create new words for “tax”)?
Do you, for example, save the lawyer (for amusement) or tell him you saw a nunnery's roof collapse three streets away under the weight of a poorly maintained mobile phone tower, sponsored by two cigarette companies and a silicon breast implant surgery? (For even more amusement.)
Ah, decisions, decisions.
The answer to this dilemma has always been clear to me: None of
these people will be saved because everyone will still be too busy arguing
about who gets to decide by the time the bomb goes off.
Which is why this bus guy has the right idea: he made it clear from
the outset this was his show. He's the man you see for your wheat smoothie. He's the man you see for your rainwater. He is Mighty Bus God.
Which might explain why, right at this very minute, I presume there
is a man buried 10 feet under in a bus with several tonnes of wheat ...
alone.
© Sheryl-Lee Kerr & The
Advertiser, 04 JAN 2000