Being prepared

Brian Wilson

This week my daughter took a spring break trip to Los Angeles to visit her high school friend Shawna, who is currently living out there.

I am joined by Shawna’s mother in holding out hope that the whole living in southern California, thing is just a phase and that she will eventually wise up and return to the land where the weather makes your face hurt half the year.

At 22-years-old my daughter is perfectly capable of planning and arranging her own travel. By that point in my own life I had a lot of experience hunting down the cheapest method of travel to get back and forth from college in Chicago to my parents’ home in New Jersey for school and breaks. Some of those travel choices were sketchier than others.

Beth’s itinerary had her flying out of Minneapolis early Saturday morning. To make it through the security rigamarole, we figured she would have to get there about 3:30 a.m. Fortunately she has other friends who live in the Twin Cities one of whom offered to let her crash at their house and even was willing to drive her to the airport so that she didn’t have to pay a fortune in airport parking fees.

Over the years, I have recognized that I am something of a worrier. In some people, like my mother, this manifests as morbidly hunting down and amassing a huge clipping file of truly horrendous things that happen to people who did stupid things. I still recall one childhood incident where my siblings and I were chasing each other around with balloons and scissors. In addition to the admonishment of not to run with scissors we got handed the newspaper clipping reporting a child who suffered permanent harm from falling while running with scissors.

My personal expression of worrying is to overly prepare for potential, if exceedingly unlikely, circumstances. In this case, with weather forecasters predicting a snow event of historic proportions, I wanted to make sure that in her journey to Minneapolis she would have all that she needed in case she became snowbound.

I recognize the unlikelihood of becoming snowbound for days on a modern interstate highway, but in my mind it is better to be prepared than losing the English crown for want of a horse. Butchered Shakespeare references aside, I called on my knowledge of nearly three decades of editing winter car travel readiness press releases to put together a list of things I felt she needed to travel one state over including a complete first aid kit. Once packed, it all fit nicely in a small water-tight plastic tub.

Perhaps my obsession with making sure Beth was not going to freeze or starve to death while making a two-hour car trip, was a little over the top, but it never hurts to be prepared. I mean, could you imagine living in Wisconsin without having a shovel, jumper cables and a bag of kitty litter or extra car mats in your trunk, just in case you got stuck or came across someone stuck in a snowdrift?

As coping mechanisms go, dealing with worrying by making contingency plans and prepping for worst-case scenarios is far more productive than other alternatives, such as installing tracking applications on their phone with it sending out alerts if they leave designated locations. I mean, really, who would do such a thing.

Perhaps in this case, my bigger worry is that Beth will decide she loves being in California and will want to move there, far from us. I won’t be able to run between work and a meeting to deal with her car not starting, again.

You would think that at some point, I would resign myself to the fact that it is unlikely my children will want to stick around central Wisconsin for the rest of their lives, even knowing how great it is here.

Perhaps the best way I can prep for that eventual circumstance is to make sure my kids have the foundation of skills and common sense to survive and thrive even without their mom and me there.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.