Making fire

There are no matches in my house. The garage might have one of those long-barrel butane lighters, the kind used to light candles and start kindling burning for a fireplace fire. There is no fireplace, so lack of a fire starter for a fireplace doesn’t matter.

Why would I need fire? Well, if everything should fall apart and governments and economies collapse, I’ll need fire to boil water for drinking and for cooking the canned and frozen foods and for beans and pasta.

If everything falls apart, electrical plants will stop running when the gas or coal is gone. Without electricity, water treatment plants stop working, which means water does not get pumped to storage towers or into homes. No water for drinking, cooking, bathing or flushing. Waste water treatment stops, too, and sewage backs up and people get sick and die because hospitals can’t function without water and electricity and general cleanliness.

With matches, I could start a fire, if I had wood. There are trees out back, trees now part of the landscaping and protected by homeowner covenants and signs that say the trees are part of wilderness preservation. If everything fell apart, my neighbors would be after the same branches and limbs, those who could start fires and who would not wait for a government to tell them what to do. We might have to arrive at an agreement on who gets what in the way of fire supplies, or maybe he who has the biggest gun and is the most willing to use it.

Also behind the house is a three-acre pond. The water is somewhat brackish, certainly filled with all sorts of microscopic creatures that want to find a home inside human intestines and such, but boiling the water would kill those murderers. The pond has turtles, too, and lots of fish. And an alligator. The alligator would find itself somewhat popular, given its amount of meat and its hide. I have never gone after an alligator, but I do have a number of rifles in calibers of .22, .30, 7.62mm, 7.92mm and .30-30, as well as pistols and revolvers of .22, .32, 9mm, .38, .357 Magnum, .40 and .45 calibers, and shotguns -- .410, 16 gauge and 12 gauge. Several of those are large enough to kill an alligator, all, in fact, with proper bullet placement.

So, with fire, my wife and I could get by for a while. But we have no seed for planting. Weather here is good enough for at least three harvests, growing the right things in the right months.

Like most of our neighbors, we are nearing elderly years. And, most of the people here take one or 12 prescription drugs to maintain mobility or life. Those would stop if everything fell apart.

I would guess a death rate of 80 percent in industrialized countries within a month of everything falling apart. With Walmart looted and trucks not running, people would starve, bodies would not be collected, diseases would spread, no drugs would be available to keep the diseases away.

Just some thoughts.

I am reading Without Warning by John Birmingham. In the book, most of the United States, much of Canada, half of Mexico and about 99.9 percent of Cuba are depopulated.

The world without America. It falls apart. As of Page 175, anyway.