by Neil Strauss
But it was no longer possible to be patient: every morning I read the news, I saw more evidence of dark times coming. Everywhere I went, I heard of more billionaires like venture capitalist John Doerr predicting and preparing for an apocalypse. Every time I talked to Spencer and Mad Dog and the regulars on the Survivalist Boards, they found new flaws in my plans, holes in my training, contingencies I’d overlooked.
At times, it seemed there would be no end to the amount of things I needed to do to prepare. Learning to survive evidently meant learning every essential skill mankind had developed on its journey from Homo habilis to civilized humanity.
And I wasn’t opposed to doing that.
My house had completely transformed.
My yard was no longer a place to get a suntan. Instead it was filled with a fire pit, a tracking box, a debris hut, shovels, stacks of wood, piles of debris, and newly planted vegetables and fruit-tree saplings.
My basement was no longer just for storage. With Mad Dog’s Museum of Early American Tools book as my guide, I’d started building a rudimentary workshop.
My closet was no longer for fashion. Cargo pants, wool hunting jackets, ghillie suits, and tactical belts swung from the hangers. The floor was littered with boxes containing flashlights, rechargeable batteries, bullets, gun-cleaning kits, night-vision goggles, and half a dozen folding and fixed-blade knives, along with sharpening rods and stones.
In my garage, there was barely enough room for my car between the Rokon and the boxes of emergency supplies. And the rear seat of my Durango was no longer a place for passengers but a shelf for my bug-out bag, first aid kit, and CERT uniform.
Even the walls of my house were no longer intact. With my early American tools I’d built a hidden panel, behind which I’d stashed my pistol, rifle, shotgun, and metal-detector-proof knives. In the backyard I created a trapdoor with a hidden crawl-space, which was big enough to hide not just supplies but, if necessary, me.
I’d clearly gone off the deep end, and I had no intention of stopping. Not when I was so close to slaying the demon of Just in Case.
Just in case of nuclear attack, I’d bought potassium iodate tablets online to lessen the effects of radiation poisoning.
Just in case of chemical attack, I’d gotten a friend on the Survivalist Boards to send me DuoDote injection pens to stop the symptoms.
Just in case of an armed attack, especially while trying to escape on the Rokon, I used a connection of Mad Dog’s to purchase an Enforcer concealable bulletproof vest from U.S. Armor.
Just in case Katie or I became ill WTSHTF, I’d driven to Mexico to stockpile antibiotics (though some survivalists prefer to get them from feed stores instead).
Just in case I needed to evacuate from L.A. by water, I’d contacted the American Sailing Association to take their Basic Keelboat Sailing 101 class.
Just in case of Just in Case, I’d learned to tie basic knots, grind grain, bake bread, catch fish, sew clothing, smoke meat, make preserves, and can food.
All my life, I’d never had to do anything practical. If something in my house or apartment didn’t work, I called a repairman or landlord. If my car broke down, I called AAA. If I was hungry, I had food delivered. If I needed something affordable, I bought it online. If it wasn’t affordable, I used credit. My tools were the telephone and the Internet, which instantly summoned the services of other people.
But as the world of survivalism opened up, I began to realize that I’d been rendered completely helpless by convenience. Maybe the instructors at Tracker School had a point. Life was more exciting now that I was learning to handle just about anything that came my way without having to depend on anyone else. Two decades after puberty, I was finally becoming a man.
As my obsession with figuring out how to do everything myself intensified, I drove to a self-sufficient community called the Commonweal Garden outside San Francisco that was part of what’s called the permaculture movement. I wanted to learn how to design a completely sustainable life from scratch. On the roof of one of the houses there, for example, there was a rainwater catchment, which fed water into a shower below. The runoff from the shower filled a pond, which supported ducks. The ducks ate bugs off strawberries in the garden, which were served for breakfast. The leftover breakfast scraps were dropped into a bin of worms, which were used to feed fish that maintained the balance in the pond. And the worms’ waste was used to fertilize the strawberries.
It was a perfect, closed, interdependent system, a microcosm of planet Earth. I stuck around for three days, trying to learn all I could from the people who ran it. And I discovered, much to my distress, that if I wanted to be a more long-term-minded survivalist, rather than killing Bettie for meat, I should have learned to breed and milk her.
“It’s bad that you killed a girl goat, because she could have had babies,” Katie had told me at the time. “Guy goats can’t do that. There are guy goats with sperm everywhere.”
So as soon as I returned home, I went to the website goatfinder.com and began researching the possibility of raising a female goat, much to Katie’s delight. Good thing I didn’t kill a whale.
In college, I’d seen a documentary called The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, about a Japanese director trying to find out what happened to two soldiers from his regiment who disappeared while serving in New Guinea during World War II. Eventually he tracks down their commanding officers, and after much badgering they admit that the platoon was trapped without food, and at least one of the missing soldiers was killed and eaten so the higher-ranking officers could stay alive.
Watching the film triggered an old fear I used to have as a child, ever since being forced to watch movies like The Day After in school and learning about historical aberrations like the Donner Party. I wondered: If I were part of a group that was stuck somewhere with no food, would I be the eater or the eaten?
And I was forced to admit every time, sadly, that I would be one of the eaten. As a student, and then as a writer, I possessed no skills that would be useful to a starving group. Unless, of course, they needed a music critic.
But now everything had changed. My training was making me eligible to lead that group. And as leader I would decree that nobody get eaten—because there’s enough lamb’s-quarter and cattail and dandelion out there to keep us all alive. And if there isn’t—because, say, the earth is scorched—well, if there’s a tasty-looking music critic in the group, I can show them exactly how to butcher, skin, and gut him.
What was wrong with me? I was turning into Mad Dog.
I thought of all the postapocalyptic movies I’d seen: The Omega Man, Things to Come, Mad Max, 28 Days Later, Night of the Comet, The Matrix, Twelve Monkeys, Waterworld, The Day After Tomorrow, The Last Man on Earth, Day of the Dead, A Boy and His Dog, I Am Legend, Doomsday, and on and on and on. And what did almost every one of them have in common? They took place primarily in a city. And the few that didn’t were set in a desert wasteland, with only a little shrubbery to gnaw on—or, in one notorious case, in a water wasteland. There wasn’t a lamb’s-quarter or cattail plant in sight, let alone enough debris to make a shelter or sticks to make a hand drill or natural resources to sustain a permaculture community.
I may have thought I was ready to survive World War III, but there was one major flaw in my thinking. People like Tom Brown, the primitivists, the naturalists, and the permaculturists lived by certain rules. One of those rules was that anything that grew in nature was good and anything made by modern man was bad. But that wasn’t reality.
In a real-life SHTF scenario, it will be hard to avoid the detritus of society. A sharpened bicycle spoke will probably make a better weapon than a stick. A length of electrical wire will make stronger cordage than a yucca leaf. And foam padding ripped from the seats of an abandoned truck will provide warmer insulation than debris. Wilderness survival was good for the forest. But what about the urban jungle?
Kelly Alwood didn’t say a word as he handcuffed my hands behind my bac
k, opened the trunk of a rental car, and ordered me to get inside. With his shaven head, which looked like it could break bottles; his glassy green eyes, which revealed no emotion whatsoever; and the .32 caliber pistol hanging from a chain around his neck, he didn’t seem like the kind of person to cross.
As he shut the trunk over my head, the blue sky of Oklahoma City disappeared, replaced by claustrophobic darkness and new-car smell. Instantly, panic set in.
I took a deep breath and tried to remember what I’d learned. I curled my right leg as far up my body as it would go and dipped my cuffed hands down until I could reach my sock. Inside, I’d stashed the straight half of a bobby pin, which I’d modified by making a perpendicular bend a quarter inch from the top. I removed the pin, stuck the bent end into the inner edge of the handcuff keyhole, and twisted the bobby pin down against the lever inside until I felt it give way.
As I twisted my wrist against the metal, I heard a fast series of clicks, the sound of freedom as the two ends of the cuff disengaged. I released my hand, then made a discovery few people who haven’t been stuffed inside a trunk know: most new cars have a release handle on the inside of the boot that, conveniently, glows in the dark. I pulled on the handle and emerged into the light.
“Thirty-nine seconds,” Alwood said as I climbed out of the trunk. “Not bad.”
I couldn’t believe classes like this even existed. In the last forty-eight hours, I’d learned to hot-wire a car, pick locks, conceal my identity, and escape from handcuffs, flexi-cuffs, duct tape, rope, and nearly every other type of restraint.
The course was Urban Escape and Evasion, which offered the type of instruction I’d been looking for to balance my wilderness knowledge. The objective of the class was to learn to survive in a city as a fugitive. Most of the students were soldiers and contractors who’d either been in Iraq or were about to go, and wanted to know how to safely get back to the Green Zone if trapped behind enemy lines.
The class was run by a company called onPoint Tactical. Like most survival schools, its roots led straight to Tom Brown. Its founder, Kevin Reeve, had been the director of Tracker School for seven years before setting off on his own to train navy SEALs, Special Forces units, SWAT teams, parajumpers, marines, snipers, and even SERE instructors. As a bounty hunter, his partner, Alwood, had worked with the FBI and Secret Service to help capture criminals on the Most Wanted list.
For our next exercise, we walked inside to a shooting range behind the classroom where an obstacle course had been set up. Alwood handcuffed me again, adding leg chains to my feet. I then ran as fast as I could through the course, ducking under and climbing over chairs and benches, simulating a prison escape. By shortening my stride and putting extra spring into each step, I found it easy to sprint across the room. I knew those childhood jump-the-bum games would come in handy.
“You look like you’ve done this before,” Reeve joked.
Though I was hopelessly out of my element when it came to wilderness survival, I actually wasn’t too incompetent in this class. Because I’d lived in cities all my life, I had at least some semblance of street smarts.
“We’re nine meals away from chaos in this country,” Reeve lectured afterward, explaining that after just three days without food, people would be rioting in the streets. “With gas and corn prices so high, the events of the last six months have made it much more likely that you’ll be needing urban escape and evasion skills in this lifetime.”
To prove his point, Reeve told us of gangs of armed looters that ransacked neighborhood after neighborhood in New Orleans during Katrina. “One of the police officers there told me they shot on sight three people out past curfew,” he added.
For some reason, I was more disturbed by the idea of killer cops than marauding gangs. Maybe it was because of the recurring nightmares I used to have as a teenager about being mistaken for someone else and taken to jail. In the dreams, I’d be so petrified during the ride to prison that I usually woke up in a cold sweat before I ever made it there. Since then, I’d come to realize it wasn’t actually jail I was scared of in those dreams, but the loss of freedom that it represented.
As the sun set, we drove to an abandoned junkyard, where Reeve let us practice throwing chips of ceramic insulation from spark plugs to shatter car windows, using generic keys known as jigglers to open automobile doors, and starting cars by sticking a screwdriver in the ignition switch and turning it with a wrench.
As I popped open the trunk on a Dodge with my new set of jigglers, I thought, This is the coolest class I’ve ever taken in my life. If I’d had these skills in school, I would have been playing much more fun games than jump-the-bum, like hotwire-the-teacher’s-car or break-out-of-the-juvenile-detention-home.
Over a barbecue dinner later that night, Reeve asked why I’d signed up for the course. “I think things have changed for my generation,” I told him. “We were born with a silver spoon in our mouths, but now it’s being removed. And most of us never learned how to take care of ourselves. So I’ve spent the last two years trying to get the skills and documents I need to prepare for an uncertain future.”
I’d never actually verbalized it before. I’d just been reacting and scrambling as the pressure ratcheted up around me. Reeve looked at Alwood silently as I spoke. For a moment, I worried that I’d been too candid. Then he smiled broadly. “You’re talking to the right people. That’s what we’ve been thinking. Kelly has caches all over the country—and in Europe.”
On the first day of class, Reeve had taught us about caches—hiding places where food, equipment, and other survival supplies can be stored away from home, whether buried in the ground or stashed in a bus-station locker.
“The thing with caches is that you have to be able to survive if one is compromised,” Alwood explained. “So each one has to contain everything you need: gun, ammo, food, water.”
“You’ll need lots of ammo,” Reeve added, “because that will be the currency of the future.”
I pulled out my survival to-do list and added, “Make caches.”
I’d noticed that the way people prepare for TEOTWAWKI has a lot to do with their view of human nature. If you’re a Fliesian like Alwood and Reeve and you think that without the rules of society to restrain them, people will become violent and selfish, then you’ll build a secret retreat, stockpile guns, and start a militia. If you’re a humanist like the permaculturists and believe people are essentially compassionate, then you’ll create a commune, invite everyone, and try to work in harmony together.
Just as I had my triangle of life and Tom Brown had his sacred order, Alwood and Reeve had their own list of essentials: water, food, defense, energy, retreat, medical, and network.
By this point, I already had at least the basics of most items on their list covered—with one glaring exception. I didn’t have a network.
I’d found no groups where I felt like I belonged. The billionaires were out of my league. The PTs were too paranoid about Big Brother. The survivalists were too extreme about guns and politics. The primitivists were too opposed to technology and modern culture. And the growing tide of 2012 doomsdayers seemed more interested in trying to prove it than doing anything about it.
And unless you’re Robert Neville in I Am Legend—and even he died at the end—the best way to survive WTSHTF will be to have a well-organized team with members cross-trained in every necessary skill.
I’d recently read a book called Patriots by an infamous survival blogger named James Wesley Rawles. A how-to book disguised as fiction, Patriots tells of a future in which inflation has made the dollar worthless, leading to social, economic, and government collapse. Fortunately, a group of eight friends has been training and stockpiling supplies for years—Just in Case. So they hole up in a compound in rural Idaho and, thanks to their military organization, survival skills, Christian values, and weapons expertise, successfully fend off looters, gangs, and even the United Nations.
The lengths they go to in order to accomplish
this are not just extreme, they’re inspirational. They build a 900-gallon diesel storage tank; a solar pump and 3,500-gallon water cistern; a 57-foot-high wooden tower for a wind generator; seven camouflaged foxholes to ambush intruders; and bulletproof steel-plated doors and window shutters.
And that’s just a small fraction of their preparations. They even add an extra fuel tank to their vehicles, which inspired me to look into doing the same.
I needed to start putting together a similar, if slightly smaller-scale, network. At the very least, I needed a few allies I could trust. A pack of wolves, after all, is a lot more powerful and dangerous than a lone wolf. Even Kevin Mason, the CERT fireman, had strategically made friends in his neighborhood.
Who did I have? No one.
“Now you do,” Reeve replied when I shared my thoughts. “You can always come to us.”
Although Reeve lived in New Jersey and would be difficult to get to WTSHTF, I appreciated his offer. It made me feel less alone. At least I now had someone with more experience than Spencer whom I could call for advice.
“But you can’t come to us tomorrow,” Alwood said, a cruel smile forming. Tomorrow was our final exam. “Because we’ll be hunting you in the streets.”
It was nine A.M. on Sunday morning and I was in the backseat of a Range Rover, handcuffed again. This time, it was to another student. His name was Michael, and he was preparing to work in Iraq as a truck driver for Halliburton. He was trying to earn money, he said, to open a laundromat.
“Everyone has to wash their clothes,” he explained, the dollar signs practically glinting in his eyes.
Reeve had driven us ten minutes outside downtown Oklahoma City, confiscated our bags, and left us handcuffed in the SUV in a parking lot in a desolate part of town. If we were caught anywhere in the city by Reeve and his cohorts—most of them bounty hunters and military trainers—we’d be put in restraints, thrown in the backseat of their car, and dropped off miles away to start all over again.