LETTER FROM SALUDA 45set myself up between the tiny one-
person tent of a man named Buddy, a
construction worker from New Jersey
who would later show me his femur-
length machete, and the larger tent
of a middle-aged man named Troy
and his three bearded sons. Troy and
Sons had a campsite so elaborate—
with tables and chairs and a gas grill
and fancy outdoor cots and lan-
terns—that I envied them. They
were playing cards and eating filet
mignon under golden lamplight. We
spoke briefly, but all I wanted was to
be alone, to let my pretenses fall
away and read my goddamn poetry
by flashlight. Once inside my own
tent, I began shaking with relief after
the long day of pent-up anxiety—
that of being recognized and called
out for the prepper imposter I had,
this day, become aware that I was.6.All things are dissolved to their center by
their cause, and, in the universal miracle,
petty and particular miracles disappear.T
he campsite was loud, and it
was impossible to sleep given
the inadequate pad beneath
me, the giant ants crawling over my
hands and neck, and my neighbors on
both sides chatting away happily:
What’s the diff between kerosene and
propane? I heard. I got some extra steak
if you want, I heard. My credit has been
froze for three years, I heard. Some-
thing way off in the woods screamed
girlishly and either Troy or a Son of
Troy grunted “Fox” in explanation.
Raise. Call. Fold. They were playing
poker. But the thrill in the blood
from the screaming fox made me
think of emergencies, of Rick and
Jane in their armed 360- degree ea-
gles’ aerie in their overgrown Garden
of Eden, with the chicks and coffee
plants in the hidden greenhouse, and
of what they would do if civilization
really were blown to smithereens. It
went against everything I knew about
the essential altruism of humanity to
imagine one of those people taking a
potshot at some bewildered hiker
who had gone up the wrong road.
How terribly lonely it would be for
Rick and Jane waiting out the apoca-
lypse with their animals.I wondered what exactly could
bring a person to that point where
they were willing to hole up and just
stop caring for their fellow man. One
thing I do know about humans is
that the stories we tell about our-
selves are the people we become.
And the American narrative of ma-
cho self-reliance, which the preppers
had been preaching all day, is an
extremely old story; it is, in fact, one
of the oldest stories of this hemi-
sphere, emerging out of the moral
gymnastics it took for ostensible
Christians to sail across the Atlantic
and commit acts of genocide, rape,
and war against other human beings
in order to allow themselves to en-
slave them and to seize and control
land that was never their own. These
new Americans needed a way to
frame their actions as heroic and
inevitable, and they found it in the
narrative of the noble frontiersman,
the solitary figure pitched against
the exigencies of unpredictable na-
ture. This type existed before Robin-
son Crusoe, notably in real-life sur-
vival tales told by captured, enslaved,
or castaway men and women; but it
was Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel—
about a seventeenth-century slaver
capsized and stranded for twenty-
eight years on an island near the
Orinoco River, in South America—
that solidified the specimen into an
archetype. It’s no accident that the
book is counted among the first En-
glish novels: it is a work of purest
fiction—as fictional as Dinesh
D’Souza’s movie, though both were
packaged as documentaries.
It is easy to be intoxicated by
Robinson Crusoe, the character,
even if one sees, through twenty-
first-century eyes, the book’s bro-
ken moral compass. In his extreme
emotional continence, inventive-
ness, almost impossible industry, he
is the pinnacle of self- reliance. The
reader— wooed by these virtues,
which we have been told repeatedly
are the height of manliness—cares
deeply about Crusoe’s plight. We
read anxiously of his parrot, his
struggles with gunpowder, the way
he slowly builds a miniature En gland
on the island he makes his.
And it is easy in all this wonder to
forget that Crusoe’s predicament began
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