by Ted Koppel
In that sense, at least, today’s preppers are direct descendants of one of the Old Testament’s most famous prophets. Indeed, it is not unusual for preppers to cite his example. It may be unfashionable to link catastrophic disaster to God’s judgment, but how interesting it is that Genesis, that bare-bones account of the very earliest days of existence, has no sooner laid the foundation for our journey into history than it diverts into an account of total annihilation. If nothing else, the story of Noah provides evidence that mankind has always been troubled by an undercurrent of worry that what is at present cannot last. Noah is an everlasting reproach to the cynics who mock the ark builders.
Our notions of time may differ from biblical accounts, but Genesis tells us that with only seven days notice of a flood that would cover the earth to the peaks of its highest mountains, Noah built an ark. Genesis is silent on the matter of where Noah acquired the tools, the wood, and the vast quantities of tar with which he sealed the interior and exterior of his enormous ship. Where details are provided, they stagger the imagination. Noah was six hundred years old when God alerted him to the impending cataclysm (although this was, relatively speaking, the prime of life; his grandfather Methuselah died at the age of 969). The ark was to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high—440 feet from bow to stern (significantly longer than a football field), more than seventy feet wide, and well over forty feet high. Even taking into account that he had three strapping sons to help him, construction would have been challenging. It was designed to accommodate not only Noah and his family but a virtually inconceivable menagerie of creatures great and small. Not, as my childhood memory misinformed me, merely two of each, but two each of the ritually unclean and seven pairs of all ritually clean creatures. (Those spares, some commentaries on the Old Testament suggest, were intended for the ritual sacrifices that Noah would perform in gratitude for God’s mercy once the waters receded.)
We are free to speculate on whether some of those spare, ritually clean animals might not have ended up as survival rations. After all, more than a year elapsed between the time the rains began and the day the floods had receded enough for disembarkation, and the Old Testament provides no details on how Noah accomplished the extraordinary task of provisioning his ship for that much time. Rashi, the eleventh-century French rabbi, suggests that the task of building and provisioning the ark actually took 120 years—sufficient time for mankind to mend its wicked ways. That resolves some practical issues while raising others best left to biblical scholars.
I offer the story of Noah simply as evidence that mankind has been struggling with the prospect of impending disaster since the beginning of recorded time and that genuine preparedness is a considerable, perhaps even existential, challenge. But preppers of every era have been outnumbered by the skeptics who tend to view their activities with a combination of fascination and amusement. Unless and until we are actually confronted by disaster, we have a tendency to view it primarily as remote, more applicable to others than to ourselves. Disaster viewed from an appropriate distance can even become entertainment.
Wrapped in the right packaging, doomsday scenarios remain a well-established genre within popular culture: Blade Runner, The Hunger Games, Mad Max. We have a deep-seated fascination with our own annihilation, as long as these postapocalyptic nightmares come with a predetermined running time—a limited experience in a darkened theater from which we can emerge, pulse racing, energized and relieved to be back in a familiar setting.
In October 2013 the National Geographic channel broadcast a docudrama called American Blackout. Its setting is a major city in the wake of what appears to have been a cyberattack on the power grid. The program convincingly evokes the mounting hysteria and a dizzying spiral of inflationary madness that reduces a city and its environs to a barter economy in a matter of days. We meet and follow a family of “super-preppers” who have retreated into an armed, camera-equipped bunker encampment. We watch with mounting horror as a Mad Max scenario unfolds: armed and desperate neighbors preparing to kill members of the small prepper community for their stored food. Eventually the producers of American Blackout resort to the oldest device in theater, the deus ex machina. Without explanation, without further analysis, the script resolves all crises by simply turning the power back on. We have vicariously endured ten horrifying days—and then it’s over. One moment the nation is in darkness, the next it is again awash in electric light. You can do that on a television special.
The National Geographic channel has been successfully marketing catastrophes and their management since the premiere of its ongoing series Doomsday Preppers in 2011. This is popular material. The show’s first program of its second season on the air drew more than a million viewers, making it the highest-rated season premiere in what was then the channel’s eleven-year history. Doomsday Preppers has a catholic appreciation for disaster. Indeed, it is up to the featured preppers on each episode to elaborate on the nature of the crisis they most fear. A National Geographic production crew then “produces” a simulation of the chosen disaster, “inflicting” it on that episode’s voluntary victim(s).
Though the disasters vary from earthquakes to EMP attacks, National Geographic’s two-man team of experts (they are co-owners of Practical Preppers, LLC) render judgment on how well the featured preppers in each segment would be able to withstand the disaster they fear. The same standards are applied in each case: How long will food and water supplies last? Can they easily be replenished? How viable are security and shelter plans? What about those elements the show refers to as the “X-factors,” things like an ability to stay in touch with one another in all circumstances or to administer first aid? Certain conventions remain nonnegotiable: there must be months’ worth, if not years’ worth, of potable water and nonperishable food, or, alternatively, the capacity to grow and hunt food.
One episode featured a couple who raised a variety of herbs and vegetables in a greenhouse, providing themselves and a fertile family of rabbits with food. The rabbits did their bit by doing what rabbits do, providing a cycle of nourishment and rabbit fur. Self-defense is a consistent issue. The ever-changing cast of preppers relies, for the most part, on conventional weapons such as knives and guns for security, although one prepper in Augusta, Maine, uses handmade tomahawks and throwing sticks.
There have been other such programs: Prepper Hillbillies, Doomsday Castle, and Doomsday Bunkers. They are all, first and foremost, entertainment. Their actual survival depends on popularity, not gravitas. Of all the challenges facing their featured subjects, few, I suspect, match the brutal environment of television ratings.
The fact remains, however, that absent any guidance from Congress or the executive branch of government, beyond broad recommendations for weathering the first seventy-two hours or so, individual Americans have been left to select their own approaches to the prospect of a lengthy, widespread loss of electric power. Among those who have taken up the challenge, some are serious and well organized and know what they’re doing. Most don’t.
Making sensible, long-term arrangements for surviving the aftermath of a disaster is not easy. It takes considerable time, effort, and often money. Throughout the following chapters you will meet people who have devoted years, small fortunes, and backbreaking labor to the proposition that disaster, in one form or another, is destined to strike. They consider some kind of systemic breakdown inevitable, and they have little confidence that local, state, or national government will come to their immediate assistance at a time of extreme emergency.
Jay Blevins, author of Survival and Emergency Preparedness Skills and the organizer of several prepper expos, estimates that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of three million preppers around the country. The statistic is difficult to confirm, as anyone who lays in an extra case of water and a six-pack of tuna fish is free to consider him- or herself a prepper. The vast and amorphous whole constitutes a ready and growing market for the makers of guns and knives, water
filtration systems, and dried foods that will be edible unto the next generation.
Considering the gravity of the different potential disasters that drew these people together, it was an amiable crowd inside the social hall of the John H. Enders Fire Company and Rescue Squad. We were in Berryville, Virginia, a bedroom community about an hour outside Washington, D.C., on a warm Sunday afternoon in early August 2014. The town is still more country than suburb. A statue of a Confederate soldier stands atop a granite pedestal outside the nearby Clarke County courthouse. The pedestal is engraved with a cautious tribute to the cause: “Erected to the memory of the sons of Clarke who gave their lives in defense of the rights of the states and of constitutional government.” A nearby plaque makes passing reference to an interim era: “The last public hanging in Clarke County occurred here in 1905.”
Approximately six hundred people paid a $5 admission fee to attend the weekend-long EC PREPCON III. That $3,000 went to the Fire Department. Attendees heard lectures on everything from canning vegetables to stories of heroic survival against overwhelming odds. Blevins, one of the speakers and the organizer of this event, recounted half a dozen such inspirational tales, including one of a rock climber whose arm was pinned under a boulder: he cut off his own arm, rappelled down a sixty-five-foot cliff, and then hiked eight miles before receiving assistance. You have to prepare your mind for chaos, Blevins told the crowd. You must be open to the possibility of catastrophe, and you must have the will to survive. What use is all of your gear, he asked rhetorically, if you don’t know how to use it?
Between lectures the social hall was abuzz with the good-natured chatter of preppers and curious onlookers drifting among the displays of water filters and Navy SEAL killing knives. A “Beginner’s Bug-Out Kit” was tucked between a table with gas masks and a poster advertising “a practical guide to nuclear biological chemical warfare.” A sign politely informed potential buyers, “We have taken the liberty of getting you started on the emergency supplies you have been meaning to put together for an abrupt departure into the unknown.” These gatherings are agnostic as to the circumstances requiring a person’s “abrupt departure into the unknown”; there seems to be a tolerance among preppers that tends to avoid unnecessary acceptance of one catastrophe over another. Nuclear, biological, or chemical attack (referred to knowingly as “NBC”) receives the same respect as a solar flare, economic disaster, or earthquake. When I raised the prospect of a cyberattack on the electric power grid, the possibility was treated respectfully, but I could tell people were just being polite. In any case, whatever cataclysm worries you, this bug-out kit claimed to be able to carry you and one other person safely through the first forty-eight to seventy-two hours—for $499.99:
“Our Two Person Beginner’s Bug-Out Kit Includes:
• One signal whistle
• One Survival Aid 5 in 1 Tool
• One 20″ pocket saw
• One 2 Pack of emergency candles
• One Quick Clot Combat Gauze
• One emergency tinder kit (starts fires without matches)
• Four 2 packs of Warm Pack/Hand Warmers
• Four Glow Sticks
• Two Emergency Blankets
• One Emergency Poncho
• One 12 pack of fire starter sticks
• One emergency drinking water germicidal tablets
• One Gerber Survival Compact Multi-Tool
• Six MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat)
• One folding shovel/pick axe
• One Light Weight emergency tube tent
• One 10′x12′ Reinforced Tarp
• One Set of Two Motorola Talkabout two way radios (Up to 23 mile range)
• One Set of 6 snares with Printed Instructions
• One 45 yd. Roll of Duct Tape”
The list speaks (however unintentionally) to the futility of prepackaged “instant preparedness.” A flashlight would probably be of more assistance than the glow sticks. A crank-powered radio would be of greater use than the two-way Motorolas. Anything my bug-out partner and I have to say to each other, we would simply yell, one emergency blanket to another.
There is something the marketers of this particular bug-out kit are not sharing with us. They don’t expect this emergency to be over in seventy-two hours, and if we need printed instructions with our set of six snares, we’re probably not going to make it on our own anyway, once the MREs run out. Bug-out kits are only intended to transition you from wherever all hell is breaking loose to someplace else where the supermarkets may still be open or where you have an adequate stash of long-term supplies. Not to question anyone’s motives, but these bug-out kits are not cheap. Nothing on display was cheap; disaster preparedness is a flourishing business. Many of the convention attendees, it seemed, were swept up in the reassuring premise of survival itself, unconcerned how or when they might actually put their purchases to use. Serious preppers, I soon discovered, tend to assemble the contents of their bug-out kits themselves.
Two weeks after EC PREPCON III wrapped up in Berryville, Virginia, the Mid-Atlantic Emergency Preparedness and Survival Expo opened for business at the Washington County Education Center in Boonsboro, Maryland. Among the knives, guns, fire starters, and water filters were freeze-dried foods from the Saratoga Trading Company.
Bill Cirmo runs the prepper-catering Bibo Outfitters, Inc. The priciest item in Cirmo’s inventory, at $18,900, is a “bug-out trailer.” This is designed, he explained to research assistant Rachel Baye, for a very long-term, high-impact event. He cited a number of examples: a nuclear explosion, an EMP attack, a chemical attack. A prepper himself, Cirmo is a fan of William Forstchen’s novel One Second After and is convinced that the book’s premise of an EMP attack is a credible threat. Along with full nuclear, biological, and chemical suits and decontamination stations, the trailer carries batteries charged by the trailer’s solar panel and wind-powered generator. Cirmo assured Rachel that, equipped as it is with a water filtration and distillation system and a thirty-day supply of food, one could just hook it up and drive it away.
Rachel raised a moral dilemma: the trailer would equip Cirmo to take care of himself, but how would he respond to someone who hadn’t prepared, who needed help?
“As far as helping my neighbors,” said Cirmo, “there’s a limit to that. When you give away supplies, you’re endangering yourself. I’m sorry that I prepared but you didn’t. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark. The people who said, ‘Why are you building an ark, Noah? There’s no rain.’ ” As noted, among the occasional-prepper crowd, Noah is something of a patron saint. Consider the ark mankind’s earliest bug-out trailer.
Alan Matheny was demonstrating how to use a Taser. “Battery-powered. Replaceable battery. Five-year shelf life. Depends on how many times you take it out and practice with it or dry-fire it.” It is, he explained, a transitional weapon. You can’t carry a gun and you need to get to your car. One step leads to another. Once you reach the car, you’ll have access to the gun(s) in the “get-home” bag—“you know, there I might have a couple rifles, a couple thousand rounds of ammo, you know, whatever you’ve felt comfortable with prepping.”
Matheny looks upon prepping as being a matter of personal responsibility. “That’s what this country’s missing.” He found the prospect of depending on government support in a crisis futile. “I’m just going to sit here on my front step and wait for the government to bring me my food in a disaster? It didn’t work out very well, did it? You know, everybody’s got to take personal responsibility.”
What would happen, Rachel asked, if others requested his help? If friends or neighbors who hadn’t prepared asked, say, to share his food?
“That’s going to get probably ugly at some point,” said Matheny. “It’s like the ants and the grasshoppers, if you’ve ever heard that story, and how they froze to death because they didn’t prepare. At some point you can’t give everything away. We like to help who we can, but at some point you have t
o take care of number one.”
The idea of a prepper’s movement is something of an oxymoron. For the most part, these are people who put a great deal of stock in individual responsibility. They anticipate government failure and are innately suspicious of large organizations. At the same time, in some quarters there is the recognition that long-term survival in the face of a widespread catastrophe requires a variety of skills—the establishment of what would amount to emergency communities. The more fully envisioned of these involve intricate professional hierarchies, with an understandable emphasis on practical skills ranging from nursing to plumbing. In this cosmos, doctors and mechanics are demonstrably more useful than lawyers, journalists, and politicians. In subsequent chapters we’ll spend time with a community that has taken this type of planning to an extraordinary level.
Such arrangements require more thought and planning than most are ready to invest. Greg Johnson, another prepper at the Mid-Atlantic Preparedness and Survival Expo, said that his plan includes bringing a small community of family and friends together, but he conceded that there’s no real organization. There’s a vague understanding that everyone will meet at his house, then head down to West Virginia to stay with a friend who has a farm. It’s not altogether clear that the friend in West Virginia has signed on to the plan.
14
Some Men Are an Island
It’s what God would have done if he’d had the money.
— GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ON VISITING WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST’S ESTATE AT SAN SIMEON, CALIFORNIA
American history reveres personal enterprise and individual initiative. It also has a healthy respect for the power of wealth. Ray Kelly, who has spent a professional lifetime policing New York City, twice as its police commissioner, has learned to assume over the years that the wealthy tend to find their own solutions. If New York City were to lose electricity for an extended period, Kelly told me, “the more affluent communities will try to buy their way out of it.” Cradle of creativity that it is, New York City may be particularly well suited to producing urban legends. The one passed on to me by a middle-aged executive in the financial industry may or may not have the additional virtue of being true but confirms the Kelly theory. It contends that a wealthy Wall Street family has engaged the services of a former Navy SEAL who has secreted a boat along the east bank of the Hudson River. In the event of a major disaster, the SEAL will take the family in that small boat to a larger boat, securely anchored offshore. The larger boat will then set sail for a safe harbor somewhere in the Caribbean.