by Neil Strauss
To actually survive on my own, I’ll need emergency supplies. Plenty of them. Because if the power keeps going out on a regular day, I can’t even imagine what would happen during an actual disaster.
I’ll need guns too. To protect myself. From marauders who want my emergency supplies and my surfboard and my PlayStation.
And, more than anything, I’ll need skills. I’ll need to learn to live on my own without electricity, running water, gas. I’ll need to learn to truly be sovereign.
The lesson of Katrina wasn’t that the United States can’t protect its own. It was that no country can protect its own.
No place is safe and no government can guarantee the well-being of its citizens.
There’s only one place to find true safety: from within.
PART FOUR
I must find the home of the Faraway.
He is a human being just as I am.
Yet he has found everlasting life…
Surely he can teach me how to live for days without end.
—Gilgamesh, Tablet IX, 2100 B.C.
I like the way you’re thinking,” Spencer said. I was telling him about my epiphany during the blackout in St. Kitts. “You have to make a thorough plan, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you have guns yet?”
“No.”
“Can you fly a plane?”
“No.”
“Well, if the system breaks down, you won’t only have to worry about surviving in St. Kitts. You also have to worry about how you’re going to get there.” I could hear the ring of satisfaction in his voice. He could tell my attitude had changed. “There won’t be major airline flights or cell phone reception or probably even working gas pumps.”
“Good point. I’ll try to get out ahead of time then.”
“But what if there’s no warning?”
The so-called system is something we take for granted. We depend on it to give us an inexhaustible supply of electricity, water, food, gas, Internet, phone service, garbage removal, long-distance transportation, civil order, twenty-four-hour convenience stores, and Seinfeld reruns. But what would happen if it stopped working—and, suddenly, there was nothing to depend on?
“My feeling is that instead of evolving constantly toward a more advanced civilization, human history is cyclical,” Spencer was saying. He had me in the palm of his hand now. His anxieties were my anxieties. “And, just like Rome and Egypt and other advanced civilizations before us, we’re past our zenith. We’re growing weak, while the tribes that want to destroy modernity are growing stronger and more committed.”
To Fliesians, civilizations don’t keep evolving. They progress until some reactionary element hits the reset button, and they have to start all over again.
“Someday,” he concluded, “a future civilization is going to find our computers and hard drives and have no idea they contain the entire history of our society. They’ll just think they’re funny-looking rocks and use them as tools.”
After talking to Spencer, I walked to my bookshelf and pulled out the two Bruce Clayton books I’d ordered after dinner with my parents—Life after Doomsday and Life after Terrorism.
As I leafed through them, I began to feel stupid for having thought that being independent of America meant just having a nationality and a bank account somewhere else. I needed to become independent of everything. All my life, I had thought that freedom was something that, as Americans, we were privileged to have, thanks to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But those documents didn’t create freedom. They created a system. And systems create dependencies. Real freedom, I realized, meant knowing not just where to go, but how to take care of myself if the system ever broke down.
And since returning from St. Kitts, I didn’t have just myself to look after anymore. I’d started dating someone. Her name was Katie. She was a quick-witted, high-spirited Russian–American heartbreaker with two-tone black-and-blond hair and a penchant for midriff tops, tight blue jeans, and push-up bras. One night I saw her sing Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” while her sister, Grace, accompanied her on guitar. From that day forward, I was smitten.
In my survivalist fantasies, I’d imagined dating a rugged GI Jane type of girl who’d grown up on a farm and would teach me how to milk cows and raise chickens. Instead, I’d found someone with even less outdoor experience and more irrational fears than myself.
Katie was scared not just of driving a car and flying in a plane, but of literally everything—from guitars (she was afraid a string would break and lash her in the face) to hotel towels (she’d seen a documentary on microscopic bugs that live in linens) to horses (she was afraid they’d think her nose was a carrot and bite it off). Oh, and also ponds (“They’re like toilets for birds that never get flushed”).
Unlike me, Katie had been popular in high school and, consequently, learning to be self-sufficient had never crossed her mind. If she was too scared to do something, there were always fifty guys around who would gladly do it for her. So she had trouble understanding the growing pile of survivalist books on my table.
“My boyfriend’s going a bit nutty,” she wrote in her journal right after we started dating. “Something must really be going wrong if he’s stocking up on all those books. I hope my hair straightener still works if it does.”
At one point in history, almost everyone was a survivalist. They knew how to hunt, farm, fight, and keep themselves and their families alive without the infrastructure and conveniences we have now.
The modern survivalist movement began as a nostalgic yearning for that way of life. Its grandfather was Harry Browne, one of the libertarian authors Greg had recommended at the Sovereign Society conference. Concerned about inflation, the devaluation of the dollar, and nuclear war with Russia, Browne began leading seminars in the late sixties on how to survive an economic collapse in America. He was soon joined by Don Stephens, an architect who gave the movement’s followers the name retreaters. Worried that cities would erupt into violence in the face of a food, water, power, or other shortage, retreaters advocated building self-sufficient homes and communities in rural areas to flee to.
Then, in the seventies, a man named Kurt Saxon came along. Saxon, an ultra-right-winger who’d grown up during the Great Depression, didn’t have much use for people like Browne. At various points, he was a member of the neo-Nazi party, the John Birch Society, and the Minutemen. In 1970, he appeared before a Senate investigation subcommittee after suggesting liberals be bombed. Considering the word retreater wimpy, he began popularizing the term survivalist in his newsletter, The Survivor.
Around the same time, the other fathers of the movement emerged from the right wing. Among them were Howard Ruff, a financial adviser who wrote Famine and Survival in America in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, and Mel Tappan, who published his most famous book, Survival Guns, and started a newsletter, Personal Survival Letter, in 1977, the year blackouts in New York led to widespread looting and arson.
“If a social breakdown comes, you may be faced with living under primitive conditions for a year, a decade or even the rest of your life,” Tappan wrote in one of many essays on his favorite subject, “and your basic life support problems will almost certainly be complicated by encounters with desperate, dangerous mobs of people who have made no crisis preparations of their own and who are anxious to avail themselves of yours by force. Instead of compromise or improvisation, such circumstances call for the most specialized and efficient arms available.”
It was these men who both gave birth to survivalism and gave the term its fearsome reputation.
And so I did what any aspiring survivalist would do: I called them to ask where to begin.
I had very little time to learn as much as I could about survivalism while waiting for the results of my St. Kitts citizenship application. So I decided to start with the man who supposedly coined the word: Kurt Saxon, who was now seventy-six years old. Though he hadn’t returned my inquiries when
I was a journalist reporting on Y2K, I hoped he’d be more receptive to me as a fellow survivalist.
After tracking down his number, I called and was surprised to hear him pick up on the first ring. Somewhat nervously, I told him I was interested in learning the skills necessary for survival and self-sufficiency. I was sure that after three decades of being the figurehead of the movement, he’d be sick of such requests. Since he’d been a member of so many hate groups, I also assumed he’d be somewhat aggressive, cantankerous, and paranoid.
His response, however, was not one I would ever have predicted.
“Do you feel threatened?” he asked in what may have been the friendliest voice this side of Mr. Rogers.
“I do,” I replied.
“You shouldn’t.” His tone was warm and accommodating, like he was telling a child not to be afraid of the sound of thunder.
“Why is that?”
“Because paranoia doesn’t pay.”
“I’m surprised to hear you say that. So you’re optimistic about the future of America?”
“Everything is going to hell,” he replied matter-of-factly. “I’m a historian. I know what’s happening now. I can predict that within five years, four-fifths of humanity will have starved to death.”
“If that’s true, then why are you saying I shouldn’t feel threatened?”
“Well, I don’t feel threatened.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I live in Arkansas.”
This had to be one of the most circular conversations I’d ever had. He was like the Cheshire Cat of survivalism. “I guess that’s safer than a metropolis like Los Angeles or New York,” I replied, struggling to keep pace.
“Well, you ought to move. I think you’d like it here. For instance, I haven’t seen a black person in over a year.” I was aghast to hear these words come out of his mouth, despite his background. Perhaps he sensed it in my silence, because he backpedaled somewhat. “This is northern Arkansas. There are blacks in southern Arkansas, but they’re nice.”
I didn’t really know how to respond. I wasn’t going to agree, but after years of interviewing musicians, I’d learned that if someone feels you’re judging them, they’ll never open up to you. So instead of being critical or insisting your views are more correct, you give them what every human being really wants, deep down: acceptance, approval, and understanding. “I’ll consider changing my location,” I replied, haplessly adding in a struggle to change the topic, “I bet the food is great down there.”
“You can’t understand how stupid people can be till you move to Arkansas. Anyone who can read without moving his lips here is considered an intellectual. I’m more of an objectivist. Have you read Ayn Rand? Atlas Shrugged is one of my best books. I’m kind of a Howard Roark.”
I’d started the book three times but never finished it. Yet everyone I talked to, whether PTs or survivalists, seemed to swear by it. It was time to pick it up again. (And when I did, I would learn that Roark was the protagonist not of Atlas Shrugged but of Rand’s earlier book The Fountainhead.)
“I’m neither left-wing nor right-wing,” Saxon continued. “Forty years ago, I had a habit of joining nut groups. And you can’t find any nuttier group than the Nazis. They were fun. When we disbanded, we formed the Iron Cross Motorcycle Club. And we were the toughest storm troopers out there. We were terrorists. We used terror.”
If there is, as paranoid people suspect, an FBI phone-monitoring system that begins recording every time certain words are used in a conversation, Saxon had definitely tripped it by now.
“Occasionally the police would call and tell us there was going to be a hippie bash protesting the war, and we’d go in,” Saxon continued. “The police loved to watch because they hated hippies. Still, some of our guys wanted to quit and join the left, because they had better booze, dope, and girls.”
In the same patient, grandfatherly voice, Saxon talked to me for another hour, then promised to send a package with back copies of The Survivalist; an eighteenth-century compendium of recipes for food and medicine called The Compleat Housewife; and all four volumes of his do-it-yourself bomb-making, booby-trap-setting, chemical-weapon-manufacturing, street-fighting manual The Poor Man’s James Bond. “My main thing is to save the best of our species,” he explained. “And to collect and preserve useful knowledge.”
I felt conflicted talking to him. Anyone who joins the Nazi Party for any reason is thoroughly despicable. Yet Saxon seemed so guileless and giving. Then again, if you asked Charles Lindbergh what he thought after meeting Hermann Göring in the 1930s, he would have told you the Nazi commander was a swell guy.
“Are we best friends?” Saxon asked before I hung up.
“Um, I guess so.” I didn’t know how to reply. Usually it takes a few ball games and nights on the town to become best friends. But not for Saxon.
“Oh, yes,” he concluded. “We are!”
And, true to his word, he called me at least once a week after that conversation.
Though it was nice to have the father of survivalism as a friend, it wasn’t getting me any closer to learning how to save myself in an emergency. Even his books, when they arrived, were just compendiums of information, invaluable for reference but useless for beginners like myself.
Most survivalists had an advantage over me. Maybe they were born on a farm and knew about crops and livestock. Perhaps their fathers had taken them camping or hunting or fishing. Maybe they’d even had experience at an early age with woodworking, engine repair, or electrical wiring.
But I was raised in urban apartments. Up on the forty-second floor of our seventy-two-story building, we not only had no backyard and no pets, but no fresh air: we were so high up that our windows wouldn’t open more than a crack. Repairing things meant calling building maintenance. And dining at home meant that Dad picked up takeout food on the way back from work.
The only useful survival skill I had, thanks to researching a form of persuasion known as neuro-linguistic programming for The Game, was the ability to try to talk people with practical knowledge into helping me out. And now I also had a stack of books from Saxon filled with cool plans and diagrams, but no skills or tools to actually use them.
I asked Katie one morning whether she’d learned any survival skills while growing up. “I don’t know how to make food,” she began. “I can’t sew. I can’t drive. I can probably talk someone out of killing me. That’s the only thing I can do, baby.”
Between the two of us, then, conversation was our only survival skill. Perhaps we were a perfect match.
I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote “Survival To-Do List” across the top. Then, since Saxon hadn’t been much help getting started, I tracked down Bruce Clayton—or Shihan Clayton, as his website said he was now known since achieving his sixth-degree black belt in Shotokan karate.
Oddly, like Saxon, Shihan Clayton started the phone call by telling me there was nothing to be afraid of. Perhaps it was a reflex from years of being pilloried in the media. “I’m not particularly frightened by the terrorist thing,” said the author of Life after Terrorism. “They’re an out-of-control street gang with grandiose ideas. There are bigger and tougher organizations cruising the streets of Los Angeles.”
When he realized I wasn’t calling to challenge him but to learn from him, Clayton began to open up. “There are a number of directions problems can come from,” he said, finally. “One is, what nasty surprises can al Qaeda come up with in the United States? The second direction is that Iran will get nuclear bombs, though they’ll be sorely divided on whether to drop the first one on Tel Aviv or Paris. The third danger is that China and Korea are getting better at building bombs. They can reach the West Coast now, and soon they’ll be able to reach all of the United States. So we’re looking at another Cold War there. And with rising gasoline prices and ethanol affecting the price of corn, we may be looking at an economically difficult time in the United States.”
The fears of Americans cha
nge over time. In late 1999, we feared the collapse of our computer system. Then it was terrorist attacks. Then it was our own government. Then it was global warming. Today it’s economic collapse. Fear, it seems, is like fashion: it changes every season. And even though threats like terrorism persist to this day, we eventually grow bored of worrying about them and turn to something new. Ultimately, though, every fear has the same root: anxiety about things we take for granted going away.
“The truth is,” Clayton continued, “in terms of riots or terrorist incidents, the threat zone is going to be pretty limited. You can walk out of a threat zone, typically. So all you need for the basics are nice shoes and an urban survival kit.”
“What’s an urban survival kit?”
“Three things: a cell phone, an ATM card, and a pistol.”
“I have two out of three. But I’ve never fired a pistol in my life.”
I’d only had firearms in my house once. When I wrote a book with Dave Navarro, documenting the rock guitarist’s addiction to heroin and cocaine, I’d removed a handgun and a shotgun from his house because I was worried he’d kill himself. But I had trouble sleeping at night knowing such dangerous weapons were sitting in my closet. Any thief who broke in would know how to use them better than I did. So rather than return them to Navarro—and be responsible if anything happened to him—I gave them away to a friend named, appropriately, Justin Gunn.
“The first requirement in using a gun correctly is not shooting yourself with it,” Clayton was telling me. “It’s a martial art, and you have to take it seriously. It’s not like learning to change a tire. I went out to the Gunsite ranch in Arizona. In a week, they can teach you to be damn dangerous with a gun.” He paused and reconsidered. “Actually, the guy who buys the gun and puts it in his pocket, he’s dangerous. Gunsite graduates aren’t dangerous—they’re deadly.”
