Got powdered milk?

I’M FROM NEW YORK.

For almost a year after Sept. 11, I did little to calm my nerves except run long distances in Riverside Park and consult with my doctor on a monthly basis about my constantly dwindling supply of anti-anxiety medications.

I did buy what must have been half a year’s supply of powdered milk (as advised on all emergency lists for families after 9/11), a big box of power bars, dozens of cans of tuna fish and some unwieldy plastic bottles of water -- but having these in my kitchen closet did little to allay my fears.

I also stockpiled the family mail for a while in case it had been contaminated by anthrax, but the pile grew too high and threatened to topple.

As far as I was concerned, I was pretty laid back. Much calmer, say, than my friend who actually put a huge barrel of water in his children’s room, acquired water purification tablets and gas masks for the whole family and began practicing yoga at dawn on the roof of his skyscraping apartment building.

But late one night in August 2002, sitting at my computer in the dark, I decided to ramp up my emergency response. I was in the country in a house amid the trees, far from Manhattan, listening to the sounds of the skunks and groundhogs and raccoons outside in the meadow, snuffling and prowling. In a few days I’d be returning to New York -- how could I cope again with living in Target-town, a crowded island with only a very few escape routes?

So I ordered an inflatable boat. Out in the country in the middle of the night, I surfed the Web and found a nice chubby one, and I put it in my shopping cart and clicked “continue.” I added a pump and an outboard motor. At the time, all this made sense to me. With my inflatable boat in Apartment 12B on Riverside Drive, I could go on living in Manhattan, knowing that, if necessary, I could haul it out of my building and drag it to the Hudson and putt-putt-putt my way to safety.

But when the boat arrived, I stuck it under the bed. I returned the outboard motor to its maker because, well, it was just too improbable and heavy, and too big to store without people knowing it was there. I wasn’t so happy with my impulse purchase. In retrospect it seemed unlikely that, with Manhattan incinerated by a nuclear bomb or two, and millions trying to flee, I’d be able to lug the boat down to the Hudson, much less inflate it, without having it taken from me by some fear-maddened, knife-wielding fellow citizen.

Somehow my “Washington Crossing the Delaware” vision -- me at the prow, hair windblown, husband rowing heroically, sons huddled in the Hudson’s proud spray, Manhattan a fiery background, vanishing behind us -- now seemed an insane fantasy.

Plus, what would I do with the dog? He just wouldn’t fit. So I moved to California. As if that would help.

Of course my new state is -- not surprisingly -- No. 3 on the list of future U.S. disasters, with No. 1 (terrorist attack on New York) and No. 2 (catastrophic hurricane in New Orleans) already having happened. My inflatable boat is in my L.A. garage, in a blue utility bucket. In the land of wildfires and earthquakes, my little dinghy is quaintly outmoded, though the rains and flooding of last year brought it right up to the edge of usefulness again.

After 9/11 and the flooding of New Orleans, it’s hard to know what line to walk between compulsive over-preparedness and irresponsible unreadiness. As a friend of mine points out, if California is going to tumble into the sea, is what we really need eight new D batteries, two boxes of Carnation powdered milk and some bedside slippers?

Until two weeks ago, even though their city was No. 2 on the national disaster list, I never heard my friends from New Orleans talk about preparing for the worst, except perhaps to speak feelingly about the number of “go cups” it would take to get them through a crisis.

Preparing is all about belief in a future beyond whatever disaster you’re imagining, and belief in your own ability to predict and cope. And yet not everyone who went through the Northridge earthquake in 1994 can afford, as a friend of mine did, to buy a motorcycle so he can careen through the evacuation traffic on the 5 Freeway after the next big temblor.

Not everyone in Jerusalem or London can afford to take taxis to avoid suicide bombs on mass transit.

To some degree, it is self-delusion that allows us to think that by behaving responsibly and with foresight, we can stave off our fate. It’s the same type of thinking that greases the insurance business. Peace of mind, a modicum of it, is achieved by knowing you’ve done what you can within the very limited parameters of human imagination and ability.

Preparedness is the flip side of denial, two human ways of attacking situations too massive and destructive to control. After 9/11, one person will buy an inflatable boat; another will happily go to work every day in the Empire State Building. Will those two behaviors really affect the outcome for those two people in the next catastrophe?

In the end, as I prepare for Armageddon, I return to folk wisdom, or magical thinking: If you carry an umbrella, it will not rain.

But my problem is this: What is the equivalent of an umbrella when you are face to face with the Big One? What is the tool you can carry to stave off nuclear annihilation?

Over time, I have become convinced that, more than anything else, the one absolute necessity is ... powdered milk. Use it like a charm to ward off bad luck. Put a cheerful red-and-white box of it on your pantry shelf, and let disaster do its worst.