Stability of society this card says at the bottom. Man, I feel like no matter where you land politically there is a tremendous instability in our society. On the heels of national security, the inclination is to see this as a very broad, national conversation. Maybe a global conversation about police and guns and the National Guard moving between communities. But I’m going to think small. Real small. I am water insecure. Which is an insane thing for me to say out loud because it’s currently raining buckets outside. Just dumping. I moved onto this land a couple of years ago. We have two sources of water on this property, which makes my statement about insecurity sound even sillier. But I’ll lay it all out for you. There’s a well. I was told by a neighbor that “the wells around here are brackish”. I didn’t know what that meant, so I did what any country boy like me would do, I went out to the barn and had a long drink from the hose. It tasted fine to me. But to be honest I have a high tolerance for weird water–that’s another story. I bought one of these water testing kits on the internet. They send you some little bottles and some instructions and you follow them just so, and fill the bottles and send it all in to a lab. And then they email you a report. I got mine and there were a bunch of green line items on there, and a few yellows and a couple of reds. “That doesn’t seem great” thought I, but my life is pretty wild and free wheeling, and I moved on. I figured I’d have to pay that piper at some point, but we have another source of water for our home, so I didn’t pay it much heed. Well, I should have paid heed, friends. My plants did poorly. I watered a little patch of grass all summer and it didn’t do very well at all. And my chickens—their stool was loose and watery. Watery stool! With some trepidation, I fed my water report into AI, and it basically threw a bunch of red flags that explained all of my symptoms. I switched our chickens to our other water source and—good news folks! Firm, solid stools! I know you were worried. So basically, without giving you more detail than is necessary for this, I’m looking at a very expensive reverse osmosis system if I ever wanted to do much of anything with the water from the well. Not much else to to with it. Rats. The other source of water is municipal water from a nearby larger city. We have a meter on a small water utility. I had lived here about six months when my neighbor roped me onto the board of our small utility and so now I have access to and am privy to information that is openly and readily available to all, but which I may not have paid attention to if not for being a member of the board. Our water comes to us in a single 4 inch PVC line running nearly ten miles from its point of distribution. That line, until recently, had no isolation valves making leak identification complex. We had two separate water outages in 2025, one lasting a week, (and we got lucky—it could have been longer). The system was installed in the early 1980s, the same time I was installed into society. And it’s just in disrepair. We’re doing our best with the resources we have, but honestly, we live in a fairly rural area, there’s not a lot of money sloshing around here, and federal grants for this kind of thing are harder to come by than they once were. It is entirely plausible that the cost to maintain this system will, in the future, outstrip public ability or willingness to do so. And this, so far, has been all about me. About My family. About my property and my specific scenario. The reality is that our little water utility serves only about 85 households in my area, and there have to be 300 households more who would benefit from this clean drinking water. Because remember my neighbor, who told me the wells ‘round these parts were brackish—he knew what he was talking about. They’re pretty much all brackish. The salts come from a time many years ago when my piece of the world was covered in the sea. Salts settled and were sealed in by the thick, sticky grey clay that is so prevalent where I live. And there the sodium sat for thousands of years, untouched, until someone disturbed the aquifer. And now our wells are salty. So that’s the situation at my home. And it makes me feel insecure. Not for tomorrow or the next day or even next year. But in the broad, uncertain future. And that makes me feel uneasy. Because I remember a time before the internet; I could go back. I remember a time before the ubiquity of handheld screens; I could go back. I can imagine a time, (though I don’t remember one) without electricity or speedy, efficient travel between towns and cities and counties and states. But I understand that I could go back. My family and I are adapters. We could do without a lot of things. Yours could too. But we can’t do without water. We cannot do without basic foods and clean drinking water. So what do I do if, in ten or twenty years’ time my source of water dries up? What do we do if we are faced with an impossible situation? A man once told me, right to my face, that if it came down to it, some terrible, nightmare scenario, if society had collapsed to the point that a loaf of bread could buy a bag of gold, that he’d shoot me and my family dead before he shared. He wasn’t even being threatening. He wasn’t an enemy of mine or in my estimation a particularly hateful person. He was just a guy. With a plan. And an iron jaw, set against the world. I worry about the order of our societies. I worry about not having enough. I worry about what I might do then. And I think there’s a certain healthy wisdom in thinking about these things. Not obsessing, not making them the central focus of your life. But sitting, as I do, in my morning chair, coffee in hand, (what a luxury), and staring into the middle distance. Letting ideas and thoughts wash over the various bits of my brain and allowing them to tumble about, picking up context from my life and, yes, from the values I’ve chosen along the way. I’ll tell you what I want to do. I want to build a big-assed cistern. Really big. My friend, the beautiful musician—I’ve mentioned him before—lives far away on a tropical island. He was born there, moved here, and has moved back. We made fast friends in an instant one day and have just stayed that way. I have been to his home to visit, it is utterly lovely in almost every way. One challenging thing about his island paradise is that there is no fresh water. Zero. Zilch. One well on the whole of the island and it’s brackish like mine. My salt is from the Eocene era, 40 million years ago. His saltiness is because the well is like a hundred feet from the ocean. There is a single, diesel powered desalination plant on the island which serves the main downtown core of the small main town with piped water, and water is also available for sale via tanker truck or barrels in the back of your rig. Other than that, (and there’s a lot going on other than that), all of the fresh water on the island is collected rainwater. It is ingenious. It is a kind of elegant beauty. And it is an inspiration to me in my beloved western Oregon, where we routinely receive a full four feet of rainfall every year. A tremendous amount of fresh water falling out of the sky. My plan is, as I mentioned, (when I can put funds together), to build a huge cistern, and collect the rainwater from the roofs of my buildings. I have built on my piece of land a garage with modest living quarters for my parents-in-law. The structure totals about 2000 square feet. If I were able to collect four feet of rain from 2000 square feet of roof, that would total 8000 cubic feet of water. Now, a quick burst of mental arithmetic, (or a quick trip to Google) will tell you that’s very nearly 60,000 gallons of fresh, clean drinking water with only minimal need for further processing. That’s a lot of water, friends. With some specific lifestyle choices, (that who are we kidding–I’m excited to make anyway), like a grey water system installed and mindful showering, that could be more than enough for my family to live on for the year. Plus, the hope is to add a little more roof in the future. I’ll spare you the details. Plus, I have a barn! A huge piece of roof. More like 5000 square feet. That’s enough water to feed critters. It’s enough water to drip irrigate crops for food. It’s enough water. If I can store it… From there my mind wanders to the wanderer. What will I do when there are people around me with no water? How can I make choices now that put me in a better position to share later? Look, maybe none of this will come to pass. Hopefully! Hopefully our little water utility will find the funds and the community support it needs to upgrade and provide that water for all. Hopefully society never collapses this way and a loaf of bread will remain simply a thing to be shared. And as an aside, hopefully, as a culture, we’ll stop being so obsessed with gold anyway. This whole “end of the world” scenario I play out is mostly just a mental exercise in kindness. How can I prepare for kindness to my family, to my loved ones, to my neighbors. Because I’ll tell you right now, in the end, when a loaf of bread will buy a bag of gold, you will have a place at my table. We will drink water together until the end. Maybe the end comes quicker that way? But we’ll be together. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickfromoregon.substack.com
