THE WALKERS: What to wear to the zombie apocalypse

By: Kim Philley

08-11-2011

THE WALKERS: What to wear to the zombie apocalypse

Deep autumn—
my neighbor,
how does he live, I wonder?

—Basho
(translated by Robert Hass)

Italian wool jacket: Banana Republic (Thrift store, Boise)
Cashmere turtleneck: Stuttafords (Thrift store)
High-waist jeans: Found Denim (Fancy Pants, Boise)
Wedge boots: Steve Madden (Bloomingdale’s)
Carpetbag: vintage Japanese (Thrift store)

Photos by Ms. Friday

Wool hat: Calvin Klein (Loehmann’s)
Earrings: Amber and silver (Vilnius, Lithuania)

I’m a big fan of AMC’s new zombie series, The Walking Dead. In a nutshell: America convulses in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse; before scientists can find a cure for the mutant virus, the CDC implodes and the few humans who escape the predatory undead fan out into the Georgia countryside. The survivors refer to the shuffling hordes of undead as “walkers.” The irony of Season Two is that the crude has run out, Atlanta’s I-85 is a snaking junkyard of derelict cars, and now everyone must hoof it—both the dead and the living.

Lately, it feels as if all of windswept Wyoming is huffing and puffing its sub-zero jet stream down Idaho’s neck. It’s freezing out there on the streets of Boise, and I’m acutely aware of how many people are still walking and riding their bikes because they have no other means of transportation: homeless men with cardboard appeals; office workers with one DUI too many; gaggles of Congolese refugees with little more than layers of thin, colorful cotton to steel themselves against the blistering wind.

I’m one of the lucky ones. My dad loaned me his car for six weeks, I have money in my carpetbag, and the crude has not run out. Last week I overheard a thirty-something man confess he was dealing with some big time medical bullshit: he has a brain tumor in need of excising, a bum shoulder, and no car. He said he’d been riding his bike everywhere, to the point of exhaustion. I walked over and awkwardly handed him my business card, upon which I had circled my phone number and written in emphatic caps, I HAVE A CAR! He took the card, blinked at me twice like I was a figment of his migrainous double vision, and slipped it into his pocket. I felt sure I would never hear from him again.

But this week he actually dialed me up. As we sat and talked in my idling pickup, the heat humming, I learned a little more about him. He has three kids under the age of ten. He’s an Iraq war veteran. And he has big time posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which, until recently, he’d been self-medicating with alcohol. All of these traumas had snowballed into his new life at the homeless men’s shelter, which is where I picked him up.

On The Walking Dead, the living and the living dead are severely segregated. The scaffolding of global society has collapsed and what’s left is a brutal, morally ambiguous new order. I’d wager, however, that real life is even more complicated than the zombie apocalypse: The walkers live among us. We roam the same streets and sit elbow to elbow, together in coffee houses. Do we band together for our mutual survival or do we scatter? I have a feeling that in 2012 we are about to find out.