42 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2020survival. But it is lonely to lurk on the
internet, a diabolical invention that
isolates people even as it feigns con-
nection. Also, a novelist is already a
professional autodidact; when it
comes to the survival of the human
race, I want to be told the things I
don’t know enough about to seek
them out myself. Hence Prepper
Camp. I was so excited about the tidal
wave of information I would be facing
among my doomsday peers that I
couldn’t sleep for a week beforehand.
All that weekend, my children would
tell my friends in Florida with wild
grins that no, I wasn’t home: Mommy
is at Apocalypse Camp!3.An institution is the lengthened shadow
of one man.W
hen I was still at home,
the classes on the
schedule had seemed a
bizarre blend of two types: hippie
homesteading and paranoid mili-
tarism, without a great deal of inter-
section between the two. I was far
more interested in the hippie classes,
as they might give me useful practi-
cal knowledge and would not involve
discussion of killing my fellow hu-
mans. One of my first classes was
“SHTF (Shit-Hits-the-Fan) Intelli-
gence,” which I believed was going
to be about the extremely rarefied
things one needed to know in a ca-
tastrophe: how to plan escape routes
ahead of time, where to buy lami-
nated maps, how to use a compass,
and how to gauge whether to stay put
or flee depending on what one un-
derstood of the catastrophe at hand.
Instead, the instructor, a former sol-
dier named Samuel Culper who
heads up an organization called For-
ward Observer, described how his
group tracks civil unrest via social
media, police scanners, and on-the-
ground observers.
I couldn’t understand how track-
ing protests against police violence
from a tent somewhere had anything
to do with prepping. But I regained
some sense of my enthusiasm by pro-
ceeding to classes on perma culture,
which I believe in deeply. Industrial
agriculture is poisoning the planetand our bodies; we’re all better off
growing as much of our own food as
possible. Our host, Rick Austin,
sweating through his khaki shirt in
a circle from shoulder to sternum,
gave such a thrilling talk about “Se-
cret Gardens and Greenhouses” that
I bought his book, Secret Garden of
Survival, at the prepper mall after-
ward. Austin had been a commercial
farmer, growing apples in New
Hampshire and oranges in Florida,
when he realized that agriculture’s
traditional rows of plants were not
designed for the plants’ sake, but for
the sake of the machinery that sows
and harvests it; in a post-doomsday
world without heavy machinery, andwith smaller-scale, non industrial agri-
culture, farmers would do better to
plant crops the way crops want to grow.
Austin showed pictures of the evo-
lution of a garden on his mountain-
side homestead, first stripped to the
topsoil, then planted in “guilds” of
fruit or nut trees surrounded by sym-
biotic plantings of berries and vines
and useful nitrogen fixers. The result
within only a few years was a garden
so lush and productive it now doesn’t
look like a garden, doesn’t need
weeding, watering, pesticides, or nu-
trients, and provides many pounds
of food per square foot.
Gladness had taken root in me
again. Next was a talk on “Frugal
Homesteading” by a man who
would end up being my favorite of
all the instructors, John Moody, a
goofy, smart guy who quickly got
the audience on his side by calling
one of the volunteers passing by a
“discount Fabio.” Moody told us he
had once attended seminary; had
cured himself of duodenal ulcers
with food; and had bought a farm
with his family that initially had
less than 0.5 percent viable soil and
was now a functioning homestead.
He was one of the few instructorswho seemed willing to think be-
yond standard prepper lore. One of
his tips was that survivalists often
prioritized the wrong things. They
may spend years prepping for an
electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from
the sun that would in theory take
out communication systems and
thus all of civilization, though, as
Moody said, “Most people in this
room are going to die of diabetes
and heart disease.” At this, the au-
dience gasped in audible dismay.
But to me, it felt a little validating
to hear Moody say this: I had been
astonished at how physically unfit
nearly every attendee at Prepper
Camp appeared to be. Even many of
the younger preppers were obese,
and health problems were visible
and rampant. There were more
canes and hiking sticks than ath-
letic bodies. Moody said that
when he heard an unfit man brag-
ging, “I’m up to seven Glocks,” he
wanted to reply, “Well, sell two
and get a membership to Gold’s
Gym.” Did people think they
could fire a gun into a tornado, a
storm surge, a wildfire? Most attend-
ees very clearly couldn’t run a single
mile to escape disaster, and fitness is
among the most essential tools for
flight. (For that matter, I wondered
why there were no classes on how to
get sick or disabled people to safety.
Were they planning to leave Grand-
ma behind with a semiautomatic and
a fistful of beef jerky and hope she’d
still be there when they crept back a
few weeks later?)
Next up was “Anti- kidnapping
and Hostage Survival,” where two
“barrel- chested freedom fighters,” a
man named Billy Jensen (former
Green Beret and surveillance offi-
cer turned antiterrorism instructor)
and a woman named Check Freed-
man (held hostage and raped at
sixteen, she’d become a federal
agent and “police asset”) taught us
how not to get taken. I looked
around the room at the aged and
the infirm and the unfamous, the
salt of the earth, wondering who,
exactly, the intended audience was
for this talk: Weren’t the people
who got kidnapped usually journal-
ists, or the wealthy, or the children
of the powerful?I COULDN’T SEE WHAT
TRACKING PROTESTS AGAINST
POLICE VIOLENCE HAD TO
DO WITH PREPPING