“It’s the end of the world every day, for someone. Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.”
—Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, 20001
I remained in touch with Jim O’Connor, the CEO of Trident Lakes near Dallas, over the course of a few years, but there didn’t seem to be much forward momentum with the project. O’Connor asked me not to return to the site, explaining that they were redrafting the plans. Eventually, my curiosity got the best of me and I went out there anyway.
When I pulled up to the site, it was clear that no one had been there for a long time. An emaciated steer grazed lazily in front of the fifty-foot fountain, which was filled with stagnant puddles covered by thick lime-green tendrils of algae. Vandals had chipped the lion head plaques from the fountain and made off with them. Stretchy plastic, once wrapped around such ornamental details to keep them clean, now sagged into the stinking water, which had become a breeding ground for mosquitos.
The only new addition I could see as I walked the main drag into the compound were two rows of life-sized marble Roman statues flanking the road in wooden crates. The statues wore rose crowns and victory laurels. Some disconcertingly appeared to be reaching toward the sun. I had the urge to break the crates and free them.
When I got to the main house, where O’Connor had shown me the site plans during the snowstorm years earlier, I climbed up on an air-conditioning unit and peeked inside. Someone had left the TV on to lend the illusion of occupancy. There were folders and papers everywhere, some haphazardly piled, some strewn across the floor. Wandering behind the building, I came to a garage containing a couple of stripped-down vehicles, wonky filing cabinets, and broken light fixtures. A pair of dusty suits of armor with pikes in hand guarded a John Deere riding mower with a mouse-eaten seat. The suits of armor faced off with another set of stone statues lined up against the opposite wall, including one of Julius Caesar. As a monument to the folly, greed, and vanity of bunker projects, Trident Lakes seemed complete.
The final time I spoke to Jim O’Connor, he’d advised me that John Eckerd, Paul Salfen, and Rob Kaneiss, whom I’d met on my last visit, were no longer involved with the project, that it was down to him alone. He assured me this wouldn’t affect the plans going forward.
It would be a few months before I’d get the full story of what had happened, but when I did, it verified what I’d always suspected about Trident Lakes: it was a scam. The founder, John Eckerd, and a “co-conspirator” named Anthony Romano had been arrested by federal agents after accepting a $200,000 wire transfer that they thought was coming from a Colombian drug cartel. The charges against them suggested that Eckerd had intended to launder the money through Trident Lakes.2
According to the criminal complaint, Eckerd faced two counts of money laundering and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.3 He was also being sued privately by a man in Dallas who’d invested $13 million in an Australian tire-hauling business and claimed his investment had been funneled into Trident Lakes instead.4 Eckerd was eventually sentenced to fifteen months in federal prison. He also filed for bankruptcy. It seemed a fitting end for someone who’d sought to build a fortress to keep the world outside—now he had one, without ever having broken ground. These revelations triggered further research into the places I’d visited.
I began with the most obvious, or at least the issue at the fore of my mind—the “contagious” lawsuit against Vivos that Blake had mentioned was brewing when I was in Indiana. I could find no record of it online, so I emailed Vicino directly. He said that there was no lawsuit pending but did write back with another story.
“We had one woman back in 2012 that attempted to take over the Indiana shelter. Huge ego!” he wrote, in his usual overwrought manner. “That suit was dismissed, and she ended up settling a countersuit from Vivos for libel and slander. She may have bought into Larry Hall’s shelter. I wish him luck with her!” He accepted that Indiana was not as luxurious as Larry Hall’s silo conversion but made the point that the fees were a fraction of what residents of Survival Condo were paying. And as I knew, for that price it was still, in Blake’s words, “a serious motherfucking bunker.”
I tried to follow up with Blake but never heard back from him. Vicino finally let me in on the fact that Blake was “up for foreclosure by the association”—meaning he was being voted off the island. Vicino also suggested that Blake had been dealing with some mental health issues. I obviously couldn’t verify this, but I recalled Blake’s anxiety about the “tiny cyborgs”—which, at the time, I’d found quirky and interesting—with a heavy heart.
Next, I paid for access to court documents filed with the state of Kansas that documented how a Survival Condo resident named Peter Ziegler had made a $3 million loan in February 2013 to LAH Cubed LLC, a company run by Hall.5 Ziegler had died in a tragic accident in 2017, leaving it to his heirs to collect on the loan. When relatives sent a letter demanding payment, the suit alleged that Hall began transferring assets into a newly created entity called Raven Ten Development. In his response filed with the court, Hall suggested this was all a misunderstanding. A settlement for an undisclosed amount was reached before the case went to trial.
I also managed to dig up details of a class-action lawsuit that had been filed against Wise Company for “unlawful, unfair, and deceptive advertising and business practices,” alleging that on its website and packaging, apparently, Wise Co. had made misrepresentations and omitted material information concerning how long its food would last and how many people it would feed.6 The company settled the lawsuit in a distribution of cash payments.
Like so many other things, these issues became trivial when the COVID-19 pandemic roiled through the United States, and I watched Robert Vicino, Drew Miller, and Larry Hall pull residents into their respective fortresses with relative confidence. As the media spun out stories of Saudi royals and Silicon Valley elites taking to their yachts and private jets—some en route to New Zealand—Amanda and I were holed up in South Los Angeles with my mom, a good stockpile of food, and bug-out bags at the ready. We had a bunker waiting for us in South Dakota, but no willingness to go because we couldn’t take our families with us. I imagined Auggie at Sanctum shaking his head at this lack of foresight, until I emailed him to ask his advice and learned that he was trapped on a ship off the coast of Burma where he’d been working, unable to get home to his wife and daughter after the Thai government curtailed international travel in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus in the country.
Hunkered down in self-isolation for months as I read through these cases, I began to feel the now familiar prickle of sinister portents. I recalled my looming dread, years ago, in the B-207 bunker at Vicino’s xPoint in South Dakota as I meditated on the brittleness of global trade networks and the resources required to keep them afloat. I thought about how uncomfortable I felt at Moorish Blue in Sydney when the twitchy bodyguard Manny Ray took the gym bag to his car under the eye of the hookah-smoking restaurant owners. I remembered Drew Miller’s body-burning pit in West Virginia and the shooter-proof children’s backpacks at PrepperCon in Utah. I remembered my psychic dissociation in the Survival Condo.
I was apprehensive about being hounded by these wealthy dread merchants if they became unhappy with my account. But I also worried I’d gotten too cozy with them. I kept imagining FBI agents listening to tapes of me telling John Eckerd I would “pen the story of Trident Lakes for posterity”; surely, his house had been bugged. These bunkers I’d scoured the underworld to locate were supposed to be sanctuaries from the world’s noise, but the more I learned about them, the more I saw that they were just as full of hokum, hustle, and avarice as any other business.
Despite the dubious claims Rising S had made about delivering bunkers to New Zealand, they continued to do steady business as we ticked over into the second decade of the century, and then sales increased exponentially during the pandemic. Ron Hubbard from Atlas Survival Shelters, clearly viewing Rising S as his primary competitor, launched a campaign against them on his YouTube channel.7 In one video, Hubbard alleges that Rising S reported a client’s illegal weapons cache to the FBI, sending the client to prison for thirty-three months. In a different video, Hubbard tours what he suggests is a $200,000 Rising S bunker that buckled under the weight of topsoil and was flooded with water, destroying everything inside. In yet another upload, a woman in Minnesota took Hubbard on a tour of what looked very much like a Rising S bunker installed on her property. The video claimed that the bunker was put in the ground only eight months previous, but it already looked dilapidated.
Each of these videos had garnered tens of thousands of views and provided the viewer with a link to the official Atlas Survival Shelters YouTube merchandise store, where you could purchase Atlas-branded coffee mugs and iPhone cases. So just another tendril of doomsday capitalism.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau (BBB), a nonprofit established more than a hundred years ago to enhance consumer trust, requested that Atlas Survival Shelters “substantiate, modify, or discontinue claims on the company’s website” that authorities found to be breaching the BBB’s codes of advertising, including assertions that it “was a dominate [sic] supplier [of bunkers] during the Cold War Era,” that they operate “the largest fallout shelter factory in the world,” and that they’ve provided “37 years of award-winning service.” The bureau notes in the alert that Atlas Survival Shelters failed to respond to their request as of December 2019, suggesting to would-be bunker buyers that Ron Hubbard was unable to verify those claims. The web page was also littered with customer complaints, some of which an Atlas representative suggested were posted by Rising S.
Heidi, Sonya, and Carey from Tennessee Readiness kept in touch to let me know the store was still ticking along, and that they were all very worried about the rollout of 5G mobile phone towers in the area, which they thought were going to cause cancer, infertility, and even autism. If I wanted to get the “real news” on this, Heidi suggested I watch a film on YouTube called 5G Apocalypse—the Extinction Event. I had a look, briefly, and then probed the film’s provenance instead.
The director of the video is a Californian named Sacha Stone. On his website, a pixelated image of him with wooden beads in his hair and aviator sunglasses floats over a rambling “About” page filled with new-age conspiracy theories. In other words—in fact, in Heidi’s own words from the time I met with her—Sacha didn’t “pass the sniff test.” I later discovered that RT News, which is funded by the Kremlin, had aired more than a dozen segments warning that dire health risks would result from people being near 5G towers, including cancer. Like the Yellowstone evacuation “broadcast” Carey had played for me on her phone, this hysteria was a result of a misinformation campaign probably propagated by a hostile goverment to stoke confusion. After the outbreak of COVID-19, internet sources began suggesting that the newly installed 5G towers were spreading the virus. In the UK, this led to towers being lit on fire, which looked to me like pagan rituals to banish the plague.
As the years passed, xPoint actually seemed to be succeeding as an intentional community. Since I’d last been there, National Geographic, HBO, Vice, the BBC in the UK, and ARD from Germany had all made shows or segments about xPoint, publicity that had helped add a few souls to the steadily growing bunker city. This included people who saw buying a bunker as an investment in their own celebrity.
Vicino had equipped a “show bunker” specifically for media tours, and the last time I visited the community I slept there. Inside, the bunker was reminiscent of the one I’d seen in Indiana: veneer paneling, modern kitchen appliances, and cozy interior touches including a piece of art by Vicino’s son Dante. The living room was draped with warm-temperature bare lightbulbs, like a hipster brewery. Many of the camera crews who traveled to xPoint were incredulous regarding the bunkers’ livability, which of course Vicino took in stride.
“You know,” Vicino told me, “I had a reporter here the other day and I took him into the show bunker, and I asked him if he thought it was nice. He says yes. Then I asked him, ‘Is it nicer than your house?’ He says yes. Then I ask him if his wife would be happy there and he tells me no. So then, I asked him whether his wife would be happier in the bunker with me instead of him.” As usual, Vicino laughed heartily at his own joke.
Vicino’s childhood friend Jerry was equally undaunted. “These reporters come here and they think it all looks so grim,” he said, “and I tell them when shit goes wrong this is going to look like the goddamn Hilton.”
Milton, who’d rebranded himself “South Dakota Milton”—even making his own hats and T-shirts—continued to be the only person living full-time at xPoint. Over time his hair and beard grew wild, and he started to look like an old-school Luddite wilderness survivalist. Except he wasn’t, at all. He spent a lot of his time stoned and locked in his bunker roaming around inside a PC-based virtual reality simulator that he ran off the diesel generator. It made sense to game inside the bunker, he said, “because when you’ve got the goggles on, you’re super vulnerable.”
In mid-2019, a delegation of Milton’s friends arrived from his hometown in Chicago. They seemed keen to help him with homemaking projects, but Milton insisted they were trying to convince him to return to his job at the Department of Veterans Affairs. “They say they’re here to help me but they’re really staging an intervention,” he told a camera crew from the German broadcaster ARD. “Everyone wants to tell me I’m crazy, but they’re just jealous because I’m free.”
In the spring of 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Vicino sent a letter to the entire xPoint community stating that Milton hadn’t made his rent payments and that he was “slandering” xPoint, Vivos, and Vicino himself. Milton angrily locked up his bunker and left, just as everyone else was arriving at the pandemic’s peak to button up the blast doors and wait it out. When I contacted Vicino to ask if he’d kicked Milton out of the community, Vicino wrote back to assure me that it wasn’t an executive decision, that “Milton has pissed a lot of members off for his never-ending reach for internet stardom.”
The friction could have been due to the fact that a handful of more low-key residents had moved into xPoint, including Brett, an Alaskan knife manufacturer, and “Bunker Bob,” a Californian in the Coast Guard. Bob’s bunker was fantastic: it had a bar splitting the kitchen from the living room and a delicate etched entryway cresting a hall that stretched back through the bedrooms to the mechanical room for the diesel generator. Stained pine stairs with a bannister led to a loft where Bob planned to stash a couple years’ supply of food. I had fond memories of Bob’s very drunk girlfriend excitedly demonstrating their freshly installed dimmer switches for the interior lighting just before she blacked out and had to be carried upstairs over Bob’s shoulder.
Sadly, Bunker Bob was never able to test out his creation; within a year of buying the bunker, he perished in a fire in Deadwood, South Dakota, where he was staging construction materials. I can’t imagine the frustration he must have felt in his final moments, having prepared for so many potential disasters, only to die of something so commonplace as an electrical short.
Tom and Mark, egged on by their respective wives, Mary and Susan, continued to work diligently on their concrete “Igloos” until they eventually put them to use in 2020, just as planned. Other bunkers along the block were in less advanced states of construction, useless during the crisis. Piles of concrete blocks, wood, and bags of cement were piled outside the blast doors. Some had been fenced off with barbed wire to keep the cows out. Others began to be buried in cow shit again. But the point is: F-Block was sold out, there were water mains, and—as Vicino had promised years earlier—xPoint was indeed blooming.
In the final months of the 2010s, nuclear anxieties continued to escalate around the spin-up of Iran’s nuclear program and development of military equipment used in launching long-range missiles in North Korea. Elon Musk’s SpaceX began launching strings of internet satellites into space as part of Starlink, its space-based internet communication system that would allow for almost limitless surveillance of the Earth’s surface, while the Chinese state ramped up production of techno-authoritarian tracking systems like facial recognition cameras run by artificial intelligence, emboldened by the pandemic. I left Sydney as it burned, only to land back home in Los Angeles into a haze of smoke. By the time I arrived, statistics were released by the Gun Violence Archive that there had been 419 mass shootings in the United States in 2019, a new record.
News of catastrophic floods came from all corners of the globe, but it was often overlooked because of the outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus. In the background to all of this, misinformation was being taken at face value while actual news continued to be labeled as “fake.” As the calendar ticked over to 2020, the things people were prepping for in 2017 that had seemed distant and speculative had suddenly become everyday life. Even acknowledging that the calamity howling of dread merchants is, for the most part, a sales strategy, the desire to burrow grew with each passing day. I have always been, and will remain, a militant atheist, but there was no doubting the feeling that we were living through end times.
Subterranean space is an ancient sanctuary; the underground has been our place of protection for thousands of years. Never before in recorded history has humankind faced such grave, and myriad, existential threats. We’ve also never had such a clear window into those threats, or so much personal capacity to take shelter against them. Retreating into our bunkers, even just as a metaphor for confronting our dread of the unknown, will be necessary to escape the traps we’ve laid for ourselves. The survivors of the next catastrophe might very well end up being a peculiar mix of government officials, Mormons, self-sufficient indigenous communities, off-gridders, doomsday preppers, and people who happened to be at sea or in space.
The human story to date is that we’re smart enough to dominate our habitat and then engineer our own destruction. The next chapter of that story will be about whether we’re smart enough to engineer our survival. Looking past the dread wrought by dangers like atomic weapons, runaway technological advancement, and climate change is our greatest challenge. But there’s hope to hang on to. Human beings, collectively, are living longer than at any time in history, and high-casualty global wars haven’t been fought in decades.8 Many diseases—including other coronavirus strains like SARS (2003) and MERS (2012)—that could have been catastrophic have been caught early and quarantined or quelled because of international cooperation. For the first time in history food is abundant, even if it is, like wealth, unevenly distributed owing to a lack of political will. The connectivity and speed of the modern age is still paying dividends in terms of quality of life, even if an aging, technologically dependent, and largely urban population is a double-edged sword for the planet and our psyche.
As an ethnographer—a culture writer—I can’t help but feel that as adaptation overtakes mitigation in the debate over future crises, preppers may play an important role in understanding how people will respond to rising frustration and despair.
In my own search for answers to this sluggish apocalypse, I’ve been forced to be realistic in confronting notions of perishing, finitude, and fragility. This process has filled me with at least as much wonder as dread, and more political energy than resignation. And it’s forced me to realize that prepping is practical, communities are crucial, and disasters aren’t ends but irreversible transitions. Significant events are sometimes catastrophic, sometimes tragic and cruel, and sometimes generative. However, they’re always something less than an extinction. Catastrophe, by its very nature, falls short of finality. It’s the end of something but never the end.
As Robert Vicino once told me, “This is not a story about concrete or steel or a giant fountain, it’s a story about survival and rebirth.” It’s also a story that has played out repeatedly over human history. Though the threats we face may have changed, hunkering down to chart a course through turbulent times remains a vital practice for survival, a lesson I learned in my journeys with preppers. The most valuable lesson they taught me, however, was about the futility of succumbing to despair. Their preparations may have appeared irrational only a short time ago, and we may still query their motivations, but we no longer have the luxury of being dismissive of their concerns. The time to hunker down and outthink extinction is upon us. Again.