Harper\'s Magazine - 03.2020

LETTER FROM SALUDA 41

rociously guarded that they even have

a name for their secrecy: OPSEC, op-

erational security. Self-published writ-

ers could be trusted because they

worked outside the system; a literary

insider in the preppers’ midst might be

considered a double agent. Which of

course, I had begun to see, I was.

It was already too late to blend in,

though. I hadn’t known before I ar-

rived that at Prepper Camp camo

and olive drab were the markers of

belonging. Even very old ladies who

certainly had never seen active duty

wore camouflage sun hats and plastic

clogs. I watched the people around

me with a creeping sense of dismay.

With a jolt, I saw that I was also be-

ing watched in return. I understood

then that being a woman alone in

this place was already unusual; far

worse, I was wearing East Coast

liberal- arts- college clothes, a Patago-

nia fleece, and a North Face back-

pack. I looked like a good bourgeoise,

the kind of woman who drinks

kombucha and does yoga and reads

Harper’s before bed.

A blond giant with

a militia man’s face

and two sullen-look-

ing girls in their early

twenties with blurry

blue tattoos on their

arms milled nearby.

They were staring me

down hard. “Well,”

said the Viking.

“Guess it takes all

kinds.” The girls

snorted. I blushed

with a shame the in-

tensity of which I

hadn’t felt since I was

a bullied middle schooler, and fled to

the white open-sided tents around the

pond where the classes would be held.

2.

I hope in these days we have heard the

last of conformity and consistency. Let

the words be gazetted and ridiculous

henceforward.

P

erhaps I should have expected

to feel wildly out of place at

Prepper Camp. I am a vegetar-

ian agnostic feminist in a creative field

who sits to the left of most American

socialists: I want immediate and radi-

cal action to halt climate change;

Medicare and free public higher edu-

cation for all; abortion pills offered for

pennies in pharmacies and gas sta-

tions; the eradication of billionaires;

the destruction of capitalism; and the

rocketing of all the planet’s firearms

into the sun.

And yet I am al-

so, in the darkest

corners of my

heart, a doomsday

prepper myself. I

live in Florida,

where hurricane

season runs offi-

cially from June

through November,

and both the Gulf

and the Atlantic

are regularly beset

by calamitous storms. It just makes

sense, living on that vulnerable spit

of land between two roiling, unpre-

dictable bodies of water, to ensure

that one’s house has at least a two-

month supply of food

and at least nine modes

of procuring drinking

water in case society

breaks and city services

are cut off. (My family’s

are: a rain barrel [1];

filtration straws [2]; a

sun oven to pasteurize

water with solar heat

[3]; a Sawyer Squeeze

water- filtration system

[4]; a hundred- gallon

airtight bladder, to be

filled at the first sign of

trouble [5]; a gas grill

for boiling [6] and, in a

pinch, dew collection [7]; iodine tab-

lets [8]; and a tub with a tarp over it

to let evaporation run off into a clean

bowl [9].) We have medical kits in

both of our cars and bug-out bags

prepared for each family member, in

case we have to flee in minutes. This

kind of preparation is all still some-

what in the realm of the normal. Less

so: I have negotiated for my family a

hideout in New En gland with a fully

stocked tiny house that has a wood-

stove and solar heat, with forests

around it for firewood and cleared

land for gardening. There are estab-

lished fruit trees, water sources, and

plenty of wildlife, if necessity forces us

to set aside our moral revulsion and

kill our fellow creatures for suste-

nance. In both Florida and New En-

gland, I have libraries of foraging and

food- storage books; if I don’t always

have direct knowledge, I know where

to find it. I take boxing classes for

self- defense; I have

made my children

learn archery. I

have signed them

up, for years, with

the Boy Scouts so

they will know

how to build fires

and handle knives

safely, even though

its soft- focus,

quasi– Hitler Youth

nationalism makes

me queasy.

It is not that I have horrendous

visions of an electromagnetic

pulse taking out the world’s power

grids, or of oil and gas production

ceasing and leaving seven billion

humans to revert to the pre-indus-

trial era, or even of World War III

being launched on an otherwise

normal day because Trump can’t re-

sist the urge to push the big red but-

ton. But I can see how fragile the

institutions of society are and how

ever-more frayed they are becoming

under the weight of late-stage capi-

talism. I see in vivid near-hallucina-

tions how climate change will exac-

erbate every human-rights issue

until we cannibalize ourselves.

There will be mass displacement,

pandemics, tribalist violence, geno-

cide, food and water scarcity, defor-

estation, desertification, cities under-

water. The warming planet, the mass

extinction that has already begun,

the fact that I need my children to

live at least beyond the span of my

own life: these things murmur in

my ears, give me waking night-

mares. Such profound eschatologi-

cal horror can only be slain by action.

I ready myself for as many possibilities

as I can so that I may keep my raging

anxiety under control.

And so, in the depths of my

climate- grief insomnia, I read my lit-

tle library of books and go online to

prepper blogs and Reddit threads to

find new and more efficient modes of