40 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2020
survive what they call TEOTWAWKI,
or The End of the World as We
Know It. The camp was started in
2014 by a husband- and- wife team,
Rick and “Prepper
Jane” Austin, celeb-
rities in the dooms-
day field. Its sixth
iteration would take
place on a late-
September weekend
with downpours fore-
cast for all three
days—I had bought
waterproof every-
thing—but which would turn out to
be so uncannily hot that it could
have been full-blown summer.
In a still-dark field, a man wearing
an orange shirt that read i’m a parking
cone guided my car into place. The sky
in its slow dawning revealed high
blue shards of clouds, hills rich with
goldenrod, a pond scummy at the
edges. I reclined my seat to rest and
to watch the preppers pass by. They
were mostly male, between their
late fifties and early seventies, with
such an abundance of paunch that
the only possible reaction was to
marvel. These men were straight-up
gravid. They seemed proudly working-
class and most were former military, a
fact made clear by the patches and
medals they wore like over- the- hill
Eagle Scouts. Nearly everyone was
white. Over the weekend, I would
count exactly nine visibly non- white
preppers, three of whom were present-
ers. The camp’s organizers were surely
aware of their target demographic; one
volunteer had made up a little cartoon
character named Pappy Prepper, a
bearded old white man in camouflage
pants, who in a promotional video for
the gathering sang a song to the tune
of “My Favorite Things”:
Ways to store water and defensive
shooting
Grow secret gardens and stop folks
from looting ...As the day came on around me, I
listened to the human parking cone
cheerfully directing traffic. “You handi-
cap?” he shouted toward a giant pickup.
From the truck there was a hem-
ming. At last, one of the men inside
shouted, “He’s too proud to tell you he’s
a wounded veteran.”
“Aren’t we all!” said Parking Cone.
A river of grim and portly old men
flowed by, and I felt shy in my civilian
womanhood and comparative youth. I
waited until I saw a
pair of women in
hiking boots and
flak vests, and gath-
ered my courage to
follow them out in-
to the cluster of
tents optimistically
called the Prepper
Camp Shopping
Mall. Nearly all the
instructors and speakers this weekend
would be unpaid, trading their exper-
tise for the opportunity to sell their
books and other goods and to market
their survivalist services. There were
tents peddling batteries, huge water-storage tanks, medical equipment, ar-
my-navy surplus, and something called
colloidal silver, which purportedly had
antibiotic properties. (When I asked
how it worked, the woman selling it
gestured vaguely and said, “It just
does!”) An angel- faced woman named
Mary in a doeskin skirt advertised a
permaculture
school. An eager
young man from a
company called Ten
Foot Wall sold a
USB drive that can
create virtual, her-
metic computers
within your com-
puter, in order to
block people and
software from track-
ing your online
movements and pur-
chases. There was a
table displaying
weaponry, and
propped at the edge
of the nearby pond, there was a target
in the shape of a human body. Even
early in the morning, the pond was fullof children tooling around in kayaks
and canoes.
Prevalent iconography included ea-
gles, crosses both Celtic and Latin, the
Don’t Tread on Me snake flag (aka the
Gadsden flag), and the Confederate
Stars and Bars. There were MAGA
hats galore, so many that by Sunday I
would lose the thrill of fury at seeing
one. There were T- shirts bearing such
phrases as: we are the virus they
want to destroy; pro-god, pro-gun;
live free or die hard; the calm be-
fore the storm. The right shoulder
sleeves of many shirts featured back-
ward flags, which I took to have sinister
intent until I discovered that this was
a convention of military uniforms,
meant to show the banner flying as
though in a breeze. My favorite tee
depicted Ronald Reagan unbuttoning
his dress shirt to reveal a chest made
out of the American flag.
A sweet-faced woman beaming
over a basket of apples invited me to
take one. come hear a dramatic
reading of the best- selling book
in history! a sign behind her read.
The Bible? I guessed. Her face fell a
little, but then she laughed. She was
pushing her husband’s self-published
disaster- survival fiction series; she’d put
up the sign to lure people in. I said I’d
love a reading. He, one Timothy
A. Van Sickel, was a good sport and
read to me in a sonorous voice from
Genesis, and then from his own work.
He read very nicely, I told him. One day
three years ago, he said, he’d come
home from his con-
tracting job with the
epiphany that his
true mission was fic-
tion—survivalist fic-
tion, in particular.
He’d published five
books since then.
Five books in three
years! I marveled. I
felt for him: he had
the eager, shy des-
peration all authors
feel when they have
to hawk their souls
in public. I wanted
to tell him that boy
howdy I could empa-
thize, but I couldn’t out myself so early.
Preppers are notoriously private, keep-
ing their end-of-the-world plans so fe-PREPPERS ARE NOTORIOUSLY
PRIVATE; A LITERARY INSIDER
IN THEIR MIDST MIGHT BE
CONSIDERED A DOUBLE AGENT