Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

by Max Brooks

Again, you can’t just blame Tony, or even the whole tech industry, for not being prepared. They all should have had emergency supplies on hand, but, really, who does? How many people in L.A. have earthquake kits? How many midwesterners are ready for tornadoes or northeasterners for blizzards? How many Gulf Coast residents stock up for hurricane season? I remember partying in New Orleans before Katrina and people talking about “when” the levees fail. Not “if,” “when!” And that’s just the dramatic stuff. How many have a fire extinguisher in their kitchen or emergency flares in their car? How many of us have opened the medicine cabinet in the middle of the night to find that one pill bottle we so desperately need has a long-expired label? And when it comes to supplying everyday life, being caught unprepared wasn’t unique to Greenloop. Neither was the one-click, online delivery system they depended on. The whole country depends on that now. No one remembers that Christmas in the late ’90s, before the dot-com bubble burst, when everyone thought they could click their way through Santa’s list. They didn’t understand that the gifts they were ordering still had to be transported, in most cases, from overseas, on very big, very slow ships. The result was that a lot of my friends didn’t get their e-toys on Christmas morning, while their parents spent the night before rushing from one sold-out Toys “R” Us to the next. And that was when we still had Toys “R” Us.

This feels like the cornerstone of most of this book. Like many of Brooks' other books this is not about sasquatch or even about Mt Rainier, it's about how thin the logistics of out lives are and that we humans have the potential for both violence and ingenuity when our backs are against the wall.