LETTER FROM SALUDA 49have a husband in Florida, and I’d
been parked there since Friday
morning. “She has, we’ve seen her!”
one of the neighbors yelled across
the way. OnStar had tracked my
rental car down and disabled it re-
motely; no matter what, I was stuck
until everything played out. One of
the police officers was Sergeant Jeff
Smith of the Polk County sheriff’s
office, a handsome blond man with
an athletic build who was courteous
and kind. I grew a little crush on
him, but that may have just been
Stockholm syndrome. Jeff and I
chatted between his bouts of calling
here and there, Atlanta, dispatch,
the cop who’d received the original
call. Nearby, tent after tent was dis-
assembled, cars rolled away, men
speed-walked up the hill, fleeing the
proximity of the law. Troy, in the
next campsite over, heard me say
that I was a writer, and his face
darkened; then he and his sons took
off with nary a word to me.
Three hours passed. I missed the
Sunday Christian service in the
field, which would have been lovely;
I’m a fan of collective action of
many kinds. I missed the classes I
had wanted to take that morning:
“Undercover Soccer Mom,” “Nuclear,
Biological, and Chemical Defense,”
“Escape from Restraints.” How ri-
diculous it all was. Here I stood (a
good liberal!) among the few at-
tendees at Prepper Camp glad to
pay hefty taxes for such agents of
the nanny state as police officers,
and yet I was the one who had
somehow found herself squirming
under the nanny state’s attention.
As far as the sergeant could tell, the
mess-up was entirely Hertz’s fault:
likely some functionary had mis-
typed my car’s VIN or license plate
number. OnStar turned my car back
on at last. The policemen drove off.
Later, instead of apologizing, Hertz
put me on a list of people banned
from renting cars in the United
States, for neglecting to report my
car as stolen.
After the cops left, I felt vulner-
able, the object of the intense curi-
osity of the remaining preppers at
camp. I couldn’t bear the weight of
their suspicion, and I was so weary
I knew my shell would break under
The Weekly Archive
Newsletter from
Harper’s Magazine
SUBSCRIBE TO
a curated selection
of excellent writing
that helps put the
week’s events into
greater context,
delivered to
your inbox
- free of charge *
Not sure where
to start with
169 years of
archives?
TO SIGN UP TODAY,
VISIT HARPERS.ORG/
FROMTHEARCHIVE/
questioning. I had a vision of my-
self being hauled before a kangaroo
court presided over by Rick Austin.
Passing under the radar had been
hard. Now that I had inadvertently
brought the pigs to their turf, I did
not feel entirely safe. Before the
police cars’ dust cloud blew away, I
too zoomed off, down the moun-
tain, returning to the glories of
civilization for as long as we still
have it.10.But now we are a mob.I
was terribly sad. I had found my
people, perhaps, but I had not
found my tribe.
It should not have been a sur-
prise to me—though it was—how
rarely actual facts were invoked at
Prepper Camp: instead I had heard
a great deal of fear mitigated by
practical-seeming ideas, lots of
baseless venom spat in the direc-
tion of imagined liberals, but al-
most no science to give weight to
any assertions, no analysis of the
larger state of the world, no evi-
dence of statistical knowledge. Sur-
vivalists had revealed themselves to
be romantics. Prepper Camp was a
castle built on emotion: fear of the
inchoate other was so great that the
survivalists felt justified in being
prepared to kill other humans to
protect their material goods.
But scientists and historians who
study catastrophes for a living have
long known that there is, in fact,
very little antisocial behavior that
takes place after disasters. Rebecca
Solnit’s extraordinary bookA Para-
dise Built in Hell describes in great
detail the collective sense of “im-
mersion in the moment and solidar-
ity with others” that follows large-
scale calamities. The common
person rises to the situation to help
other people, and there can be a
profound experience of well-being,
inventiveness, and flexibility. In
fact, the worst effects in the after-
math of disasters come when insti-
tutions try to impose top-down or-
ganization, as the military might.
The presumption of mass chaos,
looting, murders, rapes—this comes