Life Inside an RV, Preparing for the Worst
After Hurricane Sandy, Lisse knew she needed to drastically change her lifestyle, and that meant forsaking everything
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Do you know where to find water in an emergency if it gets shut off and you can’t buy it from a store? Do you know what to pack in your bug out bag? Tuna packets. Nuts. Mini flashlight. Compact charger. Medical supplies. Change of clothes. Water. Filter. Knife…
Lisse J. (whose name has been changed to protect her anonymity), by her own admission, doesn’t match the stereotype of a prepper. She isn’t White, male, extremist, conspiracy-minded, militant, completely off-grid, a hoarder, a homesteader, gun-crazed, paranoid, nor a believer in apocalyptic millennialism. She does, however, live in an RV (quite comfortably, mind you), sensibly prepared for disaster. “People are surprised to see a Black woman in the lifestyle,” says the 50-year-old Afro-Latina New Yorker. “I’m a unicorn.” She’s been in the van, nicknamed Langston, going on five years.
Previously, Lisse lived in a house in South Beach, on Staten Island’s eastern shore. But in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy slammed the coast with a 16-foot storm surge that crushed homes, killed 24 residents, and destroyed everything Lisse owned in a violent whirl of salt water that rose to the second story of the house, her faith was shaken and her life turned upside down. Her belongings went in a dumpster: books, pictures, clothes, todo. For nearly a month, she went without power, light, or heat. So did everyone else in that flooded community close to the water. Unlike residents in nearby Oakwood Beach — who banded together to take advantage of a state program that paid them the pre-storm value of their homes to relocate so that an uninhabited buffer zone could be made to guard against future storms — Lisse had no home equity to barter for her future. The house she lived in was a rental, and the lease was in her brother’s name. While the landlord knocked out the moldy walls with a sledgehammer and dutifully rebuilt them around her, Lisse started burrowing down internet wormholes, researching how to survive the next catastrophe.
The trauma of Hurricane Sandy was compounded, in Lisse’s case, by a recent breakup with a long-term girlfriend, a period of…
