I finally climbed out of that canyon at eight in the evening.
What guided me at the end was the sound of my mother and my sister at the top, walking the rim and calling our names. I came up breathless and had to explain to them, and to a fireman named Kurt, what had happened on the hike and what condition my father was in. Kurt went straight down.
That was Christmas 1986, and it’s the thing I think about whenever somebody tells me they’re reasonably well prepared.
What went wrong on an ordinary hike?
Nothing dramatic, and that’s what still sticks with me. We were two people who had hiked before, on a day out, in country we thought we understood. There was no single catastrophic decision. There was a series of small ones, each defensible, that added up to being somewhere difficult with the light going and one of us unable to continue. That’s the shape of most emergencies I’ve seen since, professionally and otherwise. People imagine disasters as sudden events. Mostly they’re ordinary situations that accumulate, and the moment you recognize it as an emergency is well after the moment it became one.
What did twenty years of disaster recovery add?
Confirmation that organizations fail exactly the way that hike did. I was in charge of disaster recovery at Trader Joe’s for twenty years. Part of the job was understanding emergencies in detail: how to prepare, how to respond, how to recover afterward. I took courses. I ran the scenarios. What I found, over and over, was that the failures were almost never technical. Somebody assumed somebody else had it. The contact list was out of date. The plan existed and nobody had read it. The backup worked and no one had tested the restore.
What I found, over and over, was that the failures were almost never technical.Share on X
Those are household failures wearing a corporate suit. The scale changes and the mechanism doesn’t.
Why take a free course twice?
I did the CERT course in Los Angeles, then did it again to squeeze out every last bit of it.
The first pass is too full to hold. You’re learning the vocabulary and the sequence at the same time, and a great deal goes past. The second time you already know the shape, so you can pay attention to the details, and the details are where the useful part is. It was free then and it still is. I finished it so pleased with what I’d learned that I decided to tell everybody, on the reasoning that knowing what to do in a disaster is potentially lifesaving and therefore everybody would want it.
You have to decide all of it in advance, because the moment it becomes relevant is the moment nobody can think clearly.
They didn’t. That was an education of its own, and it’s part of why I ended up writing the book. People don’t resist preparedness because they disagree with it. They resist it because it requires imagining something they’d rather not.
What should a household agree in advance?
Less equipment than people expect and more conversation.
Where you meet if you can’t get home. Where you meet if that place is unreachable. Who’s responsible for collecting whom. What happens if the phones don’t work, the most likely single failure and the one nobody plans around.
None of that costs anything. You have to decide all of it in advance, because the moment it becomes relevant is the moment nobody can think clearly. On that rim at eight in the evening, everything useful happened because my mother and sister were already looking and already calling. Nobody had told them to do that. It could easily have gone the other way.
How do you prepare for something you cannot predict?
By preparing for conditions instead of events. You can’t anticipate whether it’ll be a fire, a storm, an earthquake or an accident on a walk. You can anticipate what all of those produce, a short and consistent list: no power, no communication, no access to somewhere you need to be, and people separated from each other.
Prepare for those four and the cause becomes largely irrelevant. It’s also why I think the equipment question gets far more attention than it deserves. The flashlight matters, and it matters considerably less than everybody knowing where to go.
| Step | What to settle or do |
|---|---|
| First meeting place | Where you meet if you can’t get home |
| Second meeting place | Where you meet if the first place is unreachable |
| Who collects whom | Decide it in advance, because nobody thinks clearly in the moment |
| Plan for phones failing | The most likely single failure and the one nobody plans around |
| Tell someone your plans | Where you’re going and when you expect to be back |
| Prepare for conditions, not events | No power, no communication, no access, people separated |
| Take the free CERT course | A weekend, potentially lifesaving; take it twice if you can |
The book on this: Real World Survival is 240 pages on preparing a household for the bad day, from somebody who ran disaster recovery for twenty years and took the CERT course twice.
My take
Gear matters less than everybody knowing where to go. Sit your household down and agree on two meeting places, who collects whom, and what happens when the phones fail. That last one is the likeliest failure and nobody plans for it. Prepare for conditions, no power, no communication, no access and people separated, and the cause stops mattering. It costs nothing. Do it before the bad day, because nobody thinks clearly during one.
What should you do before hiking alone?
Tell one person where you’re going and when you expect to be back. That single sentence is why my mother and sister were at the top of that canyon.
Assume the phone won’t help, and plan as though you have no signal, no battery and not enough water. I get nervous every time somebody tells me their plan is to call for help if anything goes wrong.
Decide the meeting point before you need one. Out loud, to the people involved.
Take the free course. It’s a weekend and it’s lifesaving. Take it twice if you can.
Notice that it’s becoming a problem earlier than you’d like to. The hardest part is admitting an ordinary day has turned into something else, and everybody is late to it.
My father survived and Kurt is the reason. I’ve spent a lot of years since then working on systems that fail, and I’ve never found one that failed for a more interesting reason than the ones we managed on our own that afternoon.
Real World Survival is about preparing without becoming a prepper. It starts with that Christmas hike in 1986, the day nobody knew where we were.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), Los Angeles Fire Department
- Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), FEMA
