In the book The Lord of the Flies, Piggy is, from the start, the least likely to survive. He’s chubby, he’s unpopular, and he must have his glasses if he’s going to see anything. He’s a nerd way before nerds get cool.
His eventual death at the hands of the other boys who’ve gone full-on feral, or some imaginary version of it, is sad but predictable. Sadder still is the realization, at least as an adult, that he’s the one who probably should have been put in charge from the start.
The book itself starts out fairly slow and is not the most gripping thing I’ve read. I know it well, as I had to teach it way back when I taught 9th grade English Literature (I taught Brave New World, too!). But its basic premise has been told and retold in lots of fascinating and creepy ways, and I am there for all of them.
In The Yellowjackets, for example — a show about a girls soccer team whose plane goes down in the northern wilderness in the late ‘90s — the Lord of the Flies characters are teen girls, instead. Those who survive the plane crash do not necessarily survive each other, and the ones that do are scarred for life. It’s a fun slow-burn kind of show with split, jumping timelines: one of their time in the wilderness, and the other as survivors that are now, well, my age.
The “Piggy” archetype in Yellowjackets gets a fun twist, in that she’s kind of a psychopath…a well-meaning one, but still. Smart enough to know everyone thinks she’s unbelievably weird (the “trying way too hard” kind) but not smart enough to figure out how to get them to like her, its her cunning “don’t pretend you don’t need me!” attitude that gets her out of there. The rest of the girls are a hodgepodge of personalities like all groups are, though they all wind up doing things they’d have thought unthinkable before.
Think you’re a good person? Well, let’s just see how you act in this situation!
Less Lord of the Flies-esque but still firmly in the “we are forever changed because of this horrible tragedy” genre is another wildly popular show, The Last of Us. We all love a good zombie story, don’t we?
There, I’d argue, there is no Piggy. Piggies don’t make it in that world.
Part of me likes these kinds of shows and movies because if something like that ever came to pass in my own world, I would 100% not be around to see it. That would be merciful, except for the fact that I love a good story more than just about anything.
Not that I want to be a part of a story like that.
I’d drown from exhaustion or a current pulling me down before getting to the island. Even if I didn’t die immediately in the plane crash, I’d have a stroke from the shock, or perish later from being useless to keep myself alive in the midst a migraine. I’d be one of the very first zombies, freezing in place like a delicious zombie steak as a horde (or maybe just one) lumbered toward me.
I remembered this fact about myself over the weekend, when I decided to go to a friend’s doctoral graduation party. It was being held at her adviser’s house, who lived in a tiny community a bit outside of a nearby small-ish town.
I was a little nervous to drive out there on my own, but since I wasn’t sure who all had been invited, I decided to just set out with Google Maps as my guide.
In retrospect, I should have taken a really close look at the route mapped out for me before I began driving. Looking at it later, I realized there was a much, much easier way I could/should have gone, and it made me frustrated that these days all we do is send people “dropped pins” instead of detailed instructions and hand-drawn maps, which is what I would really prefer.
But I put my trust in Google Maps, and by the time I realized the app might actually want me dead, I was already in the middle of nowhere with no phone signal.
It led me down a one-lane gravel road, the grass in the middle of the tire tracks massaging the underbelly of my car, which was a lot more pleasant than jagged rocks massaging its underbelly further down. It didn’t seem a great distance on the map and the road was in okay shape at first, so I stuck to it.
But “not a long way” by car doesn’t mean the same thing when you have to stay in first gear the entire way because of the increasing level of deterioration of the road underneath. Perhaps I should have turned back, but I didn’t know where I was, and the line on the screen in front of me had promised to get me to my destination. I also didn’t have a phone signal out there (my phone is actually terrible for grabbing onto and keeping a signal), and knew that if I exited the current map, I wouldn’t be able to connect to another one anytime soon. And then where would I be?
So I kept going. The road got worse the further I went. A couple of times, the underside of my car got audibly banged up enough that I thought it might just turn off and die. The wheels spun in place in several places as I tried to guide my trusty little Kia Rio — which is not a four-wheel drive — over the rough, abandoned terrain. I passed no other cars, houses, or buildings. I was truly in the middle of nowhere.
It wasn’t nighttime yet, but it was fast approaching. I prayed and sweet-talked my car into getting me to the destination as images from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes flashed in my head. I know it in my bones: lone women do not fare well in these situations.
As I considered trying to call for rescue…in a few spots, messages would get out — I came upon a couple of bike riders. They assured me I was going the right way, so I guided Scarlet (that’s my car’s name) over the even rougher terrain until I finally reached sweet, sweet civilization, and the party, where I was comforted by friends and mezcal.
I remember seeing a meme once that said, “Why does everyone in disaster movies have such a will to survive? If something like that actually happened, I would just pass away.”
That’s kind of how I feel about things; I have no illusions about my physical and mental capacity for true survival-level hardship. If people decide they want to hurt me, they very easily can. I am not a fighter. Actually, I freeze, which is even less useful than “flight.”
Like Piggy (the original, non-psychopathic one), I depend on the kindness and cooperation of others in order to survive. I depend on a fair-ish world, somewhat predictable world, which is definitely not the path we’re on now. Oh, well. I won’t exist once the worst of it comes around, I’m sure.
If I were to survive something disastrous at all, it would almost certainly be because of my partner. He is naturally distrusting of others. He does not panic. He’s not afraid of doing hard things if that’s what needs to be done, and doesn’t need, like me, to have a tantrum about the unfairness of something before initiating Operation Survival.
In the end, there were no murderers waiting in the shadows. Somehow, my car was spared from disintegrating into literal pieces. There were no flat tires, and thank goodness, no rivers to wade across like the goddamned Oregon Trail.
I joined my friends, and civilization. And when we left, a friend rode with me as we traveled in the safety of a caravan.
Just the way I like it.
Scary. I think that Google maps has a practical joke feature that comes up periodically, maybe after you've used the app successfully a half dozen times or so.