By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Salvation
Leonard Michaels’ 1982 short-story collection “I Would Have Saved Them If I Could” explored how a writer/creator gives birth to characters, then watches almost helplessly as they develop and follow their own free wills towards whatever fates awaits them.
Fellow author James Joyce voiced a similar sentiment: “The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
As a parent, I struggle with that seeming detachment, if not indifference. Children depend on and need us. Each one grows up differently. How do we strike the right balance of nurturing them—and ourselves—before letting go?
At least I don’t have to worry about Bryan Korbel. The Minnesota man, 53, is a “prepper”: When the end of the world comes—via nuclear war, the rapture or some other civil breakdown—he’s all set with a 224-square-foot home he can tow with a 45-year-old pickup (pre-computerized car systems, which would be fried by nuclear blast) and stocked with supplies.
Korbel will haul the structure and his family to land he owns north of Hinckley, Minn., stopping to pick supplies he has cached en route in PVC tubes buried underground. He is ready for anything nature or man might throw at him.
“My brother thinks I’m nuts,” Korbel told the Tribune News Service while modeling gas masks for them. “He’s lazy. I already know he’s going to be knocking on my door.”
Talk about sufficiency. Then there’s the vindication doomsday prophets will feel when skeptics like somehow drag ourselves to that one spot on earth they’ve reserved that escapes Armageddon unscathed: Hinckley, in his case.
“Bryan,” I’ll say, pounding on the fortified doors of his sanctuary. “You were right after all.”
“Whoizzit?” he’ll demand—with reason, as his 224-square-foot asylum stands to be cramped with his family plus months worth of food, toilet paper and, most important, ammunition.
“Your pal, Scott,” I’ll say, brushing fallout from my hair.
“How did you find me?”
“It was hard with my eyeballs melted, lesions and hair falling out. Worse was regret I lost loved ones plus ever doubted you.”
“Wait. I can’t kill you until I unbolt this door. Honey,” he’ll call to his wife. “Where’s the blowtorch?”
As he points his Uzi barrel through the newly-melted hole, I will rue how I would have saved mankind from this dystopia, isotopia or whatever, replacing it with a utopia, if I could.
“You know what ‘utopia’ is?” I asked Flannery, my daughter.
“An ideal, perfect place?”
“Actually, no place. When Thomas Moore coined the term in his 1516 book ‘Utopia,’ he drew on the Greek prefix ‘ou,’ meaning ‘not,’ and ‘topos,’ meaning ‘place.’”
“So?”
“It’s fine to pursue utopian ideals, communities and so on as long as you realize they’re not real. Who conceives of terms like this and ‘perfection’?”
“Humans?”
“The premise is flawed, you see?”
“So?”
“Aim high, expect less and your story will be how you deal with the stress between them.”
“That’s lame,” she said. “Time to let this one go. Do you have Bryan Korbel’s phone number?”
“Why?”
“I want to reserve a space next to his,” she said.
