But then we had a child and after her first birthday we enrolled her in daycare. As I flipped through the parent’s handbook and perused the guidelines on nut-free snacks and religious holidays, my eye stopped at page 19: Emergency Supplies. The instructions told me to pack drinks in boxes, diapers, an emergency blanket, a jar of high-protein foods, and a plastic poncho, all of which the school would keep in a watertight container. The last item was a photo of our family. “Add an encouraging comment!” the manual suggested.
I found a blank card in my filing cabinet, printed a photo, and started writing. “Hello Darling!” I started and then stopped. What do you say to your toddler in the aftermath of a disaster? My daughter’s teachers would give her a photo and a juice box in the middle of a destroyed city and tell her everything would be okay? Yes No. I’d blow up a dinghy with my own lungs, I’d paddle through flames, I’d cross miles of smoking rubble to get to her.
Slowly I started to make a plan. First my husband and I had another baby, a son. We have moved to a new house within walking distance of our children’s school. I bought a 50 liter water barrel. I pinged our neighborhood group chat to keep track of who had an emergency generator and vegetable garden. Then my husband—a bit of a catastrophist himself—started to worry that I wasn’t fast enough on my human-powered bike and trailer to get our two toddlers out of the way. So I bought an electric cargo bike, a cheerful yellow Tern GSD S00 that my daughter, then 5, called Popsicle.
I heard about the disaster relief processes from a friend earlier this year. The race is designed to recreate four days of chaos after a catastrophe strikes. It’s the size of an alleycat, a kind of unauthorized street race that bike couriers ride in, with checkpoints all over the city and a laminated map where race volunteers demarcate tasks after they’ve been completed. In the DRT, each of the tasks takes the form of obstacles that people volunteering to help in a disaster may encounter: rough terrain to traverse, debris to clear up, messages to deliver, water to carry. Just like in a real disaster, we don’t know what the route is or what to do until an hour before the start when we get our hands on our cards.
After the Big One, bridges will collapse. Debris, damaged roads and a lack of fuel make it impossible for emergency vehicles to pass. However, a bicycle can get almost anywhere. In the decade since its inception, the DRT has evolved from an event run primarily by pedalpunks to a training exercise for the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management. Neighborhood relief teams are working on the race to fill their volunteer hours. When I read the website, I realized that I had been preparing for this for years. I had a bicycle; I was ready. I am registered. It wasn’t until half a dozen people pointed out that I would be carrying my own body weight in gear that I started to wonder if I could really be the hero I thought I was.
Photos: GRITCHELLE FALLESGON
Mike Cobb, the founder of the Disaster Relief Trials, is a former bicycle repairman. He got the idea for the race after watching footage of the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010. Cycling, he thought, could help solve a major transportation problem. After signing up, I emailed Cobb with the candid admission that I had no idea how to load clunky gear onto my bike. He said I would meet him the following Tuesday at Cully Park, where the race starts and ends, on what he calls his weekly coffee chat.
When I appeared on Popsicle, Cobb and some former participants were standing around the picnic tables. He offered me a hot coffee and an assortment of about 12 alternative milks. Cobb has unruly dark hair, a gray beard and is skinny in a wiry, rubbery motorcycle way. His sense of humor, I soon learn, is bone dry. He refers to me, his face straightened out, as “the embedded reporter.”
