4 Pipes in the Ground: Burying Secret Spaces
“There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We’ll dream of being blind.”
—Paul Virilio, interview with Louis Wilson, 19941
When I was about twelve years old, I had a friend named Miles whose dad used to put us to work reloading bullet shell casings in his garage in Riverside, California. Periodically, and spontaneously, he loaded the car with guns and supplies, and we all headed for the Mojave Desert. I know now he was bugging out: retreating to a location outside of an anticipated disaster zone. One evening during dinner he saw some kids tagging a fence by their house with spray cans. He grabbed his loaded Uzi submachine gun and went out to confront them. He returned badly beaten, and without the Uzi. My friend’s dad, I realize now, was a prepper, dealing with his anxieties about the state of society by practicing escape and—not always wisely—confrontation.
I grew up in the Inland Empire of Southern California, a dry suburban outpost east of Los Angeles with marmalade sunsets, good spots for skateboarding, and a lot of methamphetamine labs. In the 1990s, gentrification in LA had pushed people inland, and houses for those transplanted rapidly replaced orange groves as the dominant feature from a car window. Some of the new arrivals were from LA gangs. The parties were always good, but my childhood was also scarred by turf wars. I was once jumped by a car full of people simply for looking at them as they passed. A couple of teenagers I knew were murdered, one of whom was bludgeoned to death with wood from a construction site. I had no idea my childhood was abnormal until I moved to England to start my PhD and casually dropped these stories into conversations at the pub. I quickly learned to stop mentioning them.
In hindsight, my drift toward prepper culture in my late thirties wasn’t surprising. In my youth, I felt capable of weathering any hardship, whereas age triggered caution, resignation to casualty, and an acknowledgment of my limits. I was drawn to prepping at the point in my life when my conviction in my own invincibility was faltering, but it also reinforced my expectations of the world as a dangerous, chaotic mess. The more I thought about it, the more I was curious to know if buying a bunker brought people peace of mind. I was keen to see how the backyard shelters of the Cold War had transformed through time, to know if they were effective as a bulwark against today’s threats. Luckily, since the firms building these shelters have public-facing storefronts, they weren’t hard to track down. Two of the largest companies, Atlas Survival Shelters and Rising S, have assembly facilities just outside Dallas.
I headed there from Los Angeles by road and went out of my way to drive through Arizona and New Mexico via the Diné (Navajo) Indian reservation. I pitched my tent in the dark at the edge of a mesa and awoke to a searing sunrise climbing up the red umber sandstone buttes of Monument Valley. A pale dirt road cut across the vista. There were no cars, no traffic of any kind. In the cold morning air, I stared out at the emptiness, sipping coffee. As I did, I recalled from my undergraduate classes in archaeology that the indigenous cosmology of the region is based on dividing the world into four eras. The First World was made by the “creator,” but it was destroyed by fire and the people took refuge underground. In the Second World, people re-emerged from the underworld, but other animals no longer trusted them, and the world was frozen. The Third World was destroyed by floods. The people then emerged into the Fourth World, which is ours. The moral of the creation story is that just as the worlds before it were destroyed, so, too, the Fourth World will be destroyed, whether by cosmic decree or human hubris.2
Late in the evening I arrived in Dallas, where I checked myself into an Airstream trailer I’d booked on Airbnb, in some hipster’s back garden. The Airstream, originally built in the 1960s, was old enough to be retro cool. Strung with Christmas lights, it had a couple of fold-out chairs with a firepit next to it. If you buried it, I thought, it would also make a decent bunker. It was home for the next week.
The next morning, I drove to Atlas Survival Shelters in Sulphur Springs, northeast of the city. It was easy to spot. In the front parking lot, under a giant American flag, a bright yellow truck with a vinyl wraparound sticker of a nuclear explosion on it was parked catawampus, taking up two spaces. The side of the truck had another sticker stretching across, depicting a vertical cross-section of a bunker and a phone number: 1-855-4-BUNKER. The timing of my arrival was fortuitous: workers were loading the company’s signature BombNado shelter onto a flatbed truck with a forklift. They told me it would be driven to Florida and dumped into a hole in somebody’s backyard. The shelter was square, about the size of a walk-in closet, made of thick metal painted matte black, and had a flange on top leading to an emergency escape hatch. It looked like an oversized woodburning stove.
The owner, a man named Ron Hubbard, wasn’t there. He’d taken off to deal with an issue at a second facility he had in California and had probably been flying over me as I drove in the opposite direction. His on-site manager, Pedro, however, said he’d be happy to answer all my questions, and took me into the workshop, where a dozen massive corrugated pipe bunkers were in various stages of completion.
“These are ten-foot-diameter, galvanized corrugated steel conduits welded together that we bury twenty feet underground,” Pedro told me as we walked through the factory. “We make them from thirteen-foot to fifty-one long and you can see all the sizes here,” he said, nodding at the neat row of shelters.
The only shelter prepared for delivery already had the end cap welded onto it, and the ladder wouldn’t be installed until it was in the ground. The only way in was to slide down the ladder chute. Pedro held my camera while I took the plunge. Inside, there was a greenish hue filtering onto the corrugated walls from some sort of weather sealant they’d been painted with. It was sweltering without the air filter running. I could see the filter in the corner: it looked like an electricity meter or built-in vacuum system. Next to it was a deep stainless-steel sink and a brown leather couch. In the adjoining room were two bunk beds. The bunker was austere, reminiscent of the fallout shelters pictured in the September 1961 issue of Life magazine, or a British Anderson Shelter: constructed from fourteen sheets of corrugated iron, Anderson Shelters were ubiquitous during World War II. Though there were 3.5 million of them built, they’re hard to find today—many were pulled apart and had their materials repurposed after the war.3 These bunkers, similarly, wouldn’t have the lasting power of those at xPoint. It was easy to imagine them abandoned, in a state of decay, food buckets floating in a flood caused by someone’s lawn sprinklers.
Pedro explained that he’d just shipped a fifty-one-footer to Canada, with an escape hatch that would be buried under just a thin layer of sod. It could be pushed through the turf with little force if the main entrance got sealed or the bunker was under attack.
“That one was rare, cool to work on,” he said.
My friend Robert Macfarlane suggests that despite our best efforts, the Earth’s “underland” remains resistant to our usual forms of seeing. “It still hides much from us, even in our age of hyper-visibility and ultra-scrutiny. Just a few inches of soil is enough to keep startling secrets.”4 It was bizarre to imagine these living spaces vanishing under people’s lawns, visible only by their breathing tubes to the surface, so easily obscured by some shrubbery.
On my way out, I ducked into the main office. A row of fake guns was lined up next to a five-foot-high safe ostensibly full of real ones. I assumed the fake guns must have been used as props for a photo shoot or something. On the desk were stacks of structural plans and contracts and a couple of books, including Surviving Doomsday and the undoubtedly riveting six-hundred-plus-page Corrugated Steel Pipe Design Manual.
As I walked to the car, I called Robert Vicino to get his opinion on backyard shelters. When I told him where I was, he howled with laughter.
“Those shelters can’t have viable air filtration for twenty thousand or whatever Ron Hubbard is asking,” he told me. “And anyway, some of those things are fifteen feet long—even Japanese people would feel cramped in them!” I waited for Vicino’s laughter to tail off. Then he continued: “The more serious problem with what they’re doing is that those bunkers are made of corrugated pipe; they’re not going to survive, Brad. They’re only making them like that so that they’re shippable. These guys are selling widgets, not serious bunkers.” He promised to email over an academic journal article about how the 6.7-magnitude Northridge earthquake in 1994 collapsed a large-diameter flexible corrugated metal pipe at the Lower San Fernando Dam.
“When people ask me about those shelters,” he said by way of signing off, “I always tell them ‘I wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those.…’ Get it?” Within minutes, the article had dropped into my phone’s inbox.
As I sat in my car reading through it, I thought that comparing the structural integrity of a reinforced concrete bunker to a pipe welded together in a shop didn’t really make sense.5 Architecturally, they were a world apart. But getting a backyard shelter also didn’t require complicated community planning with a property developer at the helm. More to the point, while xPoint appeared to be having trouble attracting a full community through the gates, the Atlas warehouse was packed with bunkers and churning with activity. There was so much business to be had, in fact, that there was enough market share for Rising S Bunker to also be doing steady business across town. I spun back onto the highway to go see.
I drove south through Texas for an hour to Murchison, past prime grazing country and sprawling ranch houses. When I arrived at Rising S, the massive shop floor had teams of people swarming around dozens of angular multiroom quarter-inch-steel-plate bunkers, their stairwell escape shafts reaching up to the ceiling. The whole scene struck me as a bit, well, Freudian.6 Certainly my Oxford colleague Ian Klinke would have seen it that way; he always said the desire to get into a bunker was a subconscious desire to crawl back into the safety of the womb.
While I waited for Gary Lynch, the CEO, to appear, I chatted with Ned, a gangly shelter engineer in an oil-smeared blue jumpsuit and frameless glasses so dirty they were almost opaque. Ned took me through a bunker and showed me the kitchen and the standard NBC filtration setup, but refused to tell me where any of the bunkers were being shipped.
“You got one of these in your backyard?” I asked.
He stopped and looked at me, considering. “If there was going to be a nuclear war, I’d just want to die.” Elaborating, he said he thought people were terrified of death because they didn’t have religion: in his eyes, the bunker was just a stalling mechanism for not making peace with God.
“If these bunkers give people peace, fine, who am I to judge, but what is it in life that people are clinging to so desperately?” he said. “But hey, maybe these are just somebody’s man cave and it’s all the time they get to themselves, fixing it up. It may have nothing to do with the end of the world.”
Gary Lynch emerged from his office in a tidy plaid button-up shirt tucked into a large belt buckle. He smiled at me through a gray goatee, shook my hand firmly, and then gestured sweepingly across the shop floor.
“There you have it; we can’t build these things fast enough,” he said. His phone rang and he held up a finger, then answered it and walked away. Ned shrugged as if to say, “Yeah, good luck with that,” and bustled over to a shower of sparks coming from one of the teams.
“Sorry about that,” Lynch said when he returned. “But this is a perfect example of what’s wrong with society. I’ve got this woman calling me to ask for directions to a property they want to survey that doesn’t come up on Google Maps. How are they going to survey what they can’t find?” Lynch’s accent was lush: he sounded like an actor playing a Texan.
“People aren’t taught to be free thinkers and to use their own common sense,” he said, shaking his head. “When her computer or phone screen doesn’t tell her what to do, she freezes. They’re like sheep looking for a shepherd.”
I asked when business kicked off here. “One word: 9/11,” Lynch responded. “The United States took a major turn during the World Trade Center ordeal.” Lynch put forward a widespread conspiracy theory: that the airplanes that had crashed into the Twin Towers weren’t commercial airliners; that it was a planned act necessary to get the Patriot Act passed, thereby facilitating a massive expansion of US government surveillance over its citizens. He described it as “the biggest single loss of freedom in American history.” Lynch’s phone rang and he walked away again briefly, clearly exasperated to see it was the same number before picking up. As he walked off, I mulled over the conspiracy theory. It wasn’t so surprising to me that people who didn’t trust government and media latched on to such ideas. After all, the 9/11 attacks were used as a justification for expanding government surveillance of citizens. Neither was it so surprising that dread merchants like Lynch would take it a step further. After all, the events of 9/11 had been good for business on two fronts, bringing in customers worried about terrorism and customers who wanted to hide from state surveillance.
“Anyway.” Lynch was back. “Yeah, politics plays a role. Sales increased seven hundred percent from 2015 to 2016. Many of our new clients were liberals buying in because of the uncertainty introduced by Trump’s election.”7 This was a novel demographic for Lynch, different from the post-9/11 crowd. “So,” he said, “I’ll walk you through and you can ask whatever you want.”
I waded in. “I was just thinking: these bunkers are like wombs, and I saw that you have crosses in your logo,” I said. “Is there a religious message here in the idea of being reborn from the bunker?”
“That’s exactly correct. Clyde, the owner of the company, made that sunburst of the three crosses of Calvary for the logo,” Lynch said, inspecting a weld. Clyde Scott was out of town, but Lynch was happy to let me in on the fact that Rising S was short for Rising Son: an allusion to the resurrection. “It’s Clyde’s belief that Jesus Christ died for our sins, and so sure, the bunker is like the cave Jesus came out of. But there are many parallels in life.… The company wasn’t started for that reason. We were already manufacturing, and we had a prepper mentality, and things just happened in society that caused product evolution. When something big happens in the news, which is basically every day now, we get more orders.”
“What’s the difference between the bunkers you build and shelters from the Cold War?”
“Comfort. I mean, if you can afford it why be stuck underground in a cage? Everybody cracks differently. When one of my clients asks me, ‘How long can we stay down there?’ I tell them: if you’ve got food and water and don’t need medical attention, you don’t need to come out.”
“What’s the longest someone has stayed in one that you know of?”
“We did one in Venezuela for this guy that travels between there and Panama. When civil unrest came to a head last year, he went into the bunker. I sent him an email to see if he was all right, and I didn’t hear anything back home for five or six weeks. When he emerged from the bunker, he replied, saying everything was fine and he was headed to Panama. He had to abandon the bunker, but he’s alive and that’s all that matters.”
The bunkers Lynch was leading me through felt like more robust versions of a shipping container. You could piece them together to make larger bunkers, a bit like Lego. This made for easy transportation, since they could be assembled at the other end before they were put in the ground. Lynch said the largest he ever assembled, outside Salt Lake City, could house a hundred people. He also described some of Rising S’s methods of covert excavation and installation, meant to keep the existence of the safe space secret from those who might seek it out in a disaster. It made sense that if you had a bunker you’d want to maintain operations security (OPSEC) during its construction so that you didn’t end up with your neighbors pounding on the blast door begging to get in after an event. (In fact, there’s a famous episode of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, called “The Shelter,” about this very idea.) One client, Lynch said, paid for his neighbors to go on holiday so that they wouldn’t see him digging. When they came back, he told them he’d decided to resod the lawn.
“We made a fake sign for a landscaping company and everything,” Lynch said, laughing.
I recalled that Burlington, the underground city I broke into with the urban explorers in 2010, was supposed to be secret. Its existence wasn’t made public until the inimitable British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell revealed its whereabouts in his book War Plan UK—a reveal that eventually led to the declassification and abandonment of the facility. Secrecy, after all, is paramount to the function of a bunker, whether in the hands of a private individual or a state. Governments around the world continue to protect their underland secrets, and deny their citizens a right to do the same. You might say that building a secret bunker is an act of civil disobedience in an age when almost everything is meant to be seen, known, tracked, and traced by the corporate state.
Lynch took another call, leaving me to wander the shop floor and ponder the trade-off between security and privacy. The Cold War satellites that once took spy photos have given way to newer ones that have provided us with the Global Positioning System (GPS) and can guide nuke-tipped ICBMs, but they also created a volumetric network of control and surveillance.8 This is the same surveillance network being wielded by our governments to spy on us. These networks surround us: they are not just in the air but also in the ground—in the form of fiber-optic cables and data servers—and in our pockets and bags, embedded in our everyday technologies, which are near impossible to opt out of.
One of my early mentors, the American cultural anthropologist Adam Fish, has delved into these issues more than most. He argues that we have entered a new stage of capitalism called technoliberalism, a form of governance in which politicians across the spectrum are willing to erode civil liberties, the environment, and the social safety net in exchange for campaign financing and cozy relationships with the wealthy libertarian technology companies that are turning all our movements, purchases, and relationships into usable (and sellable) data.9 Athens-based artist James Bridle, who uses technology as a medium, suggests that this widespread acceptance of surveillance culture is the catalyst for a “new dark age,” a paranoid feedback loop in which “the failure to comprehend a complex world leads to the demand for more and more information, which only further clouds our understanding.” More information, Bridle writes, doesn’t provide more clarity, but rather more confusion.10
All of this has created a permanent pathology of “autoscopy”—where, in the words of another keen student of our changing cultural habits, Texas-born cultural theorist Ryan Bishop, each of us is seeing ourselves “as a self viewing itself: both viewing subject and viewed object” all the time.11 That’s to say, we will forevermore live without knowing whether we’re being ourselves or a version of ourselves that we know is being watched. Alienation from the self only intensifies dread.
With advancements in imaging and with the advent of drone technology, government surveillance has become increasingly granular. A decade ago, the United States Air Force (USAF) deployed over Afghanistan a technology it calls the Gorgon Stare: a spherical array of nine cameras attached to a drone that can transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.12 The USAF also used a similar system in Iraq: a 192-megapixel twelve-camera array, attached to a small plane, which was capable of tracking every vehicle and person across an area the size of a small city, for several hours at a time.
Within a few years, this technology moved from the battlefield to US city streets. A company with the ominous name Persistent Surveillance Systems, run by tech entrepreneur and Air Force Academy graduate Ross McNutt, worked with Baltimore police to secretly monitor all human movement across the city in 2016, field tests that were conducted for up to ten hours a day with small Cessna airplanes.13 In 2020, despite numerous objections from civil rights groups, Baltimore approved use of the system, citing the need for the technology’s effectiveness in gathering evidence of criminal activity. Having these planes in the air means that anyone living in Baltimore who steps out of their front door may have their every movement traced without their knowledge—and that includes the police. The 2016 field tests recorded images that contradicted officers’ reports of shooting a suspect through his windshield while stopping him for not wearing a seat belt.14 The officers had no idea the incident was being recorded from the air.
“Gorgon Stare” was an apt name for the program that spawned these technologies. “Gorgon” derives from the Greek word for dread: gorgós. In Hesiod’s Theogony, a Greek poem from 700 BCE, three cave-dwelling Gorgons with venomous snakes for hair would literally petrify anyone who looked at them.15 Our idea of the Gorgon, though, comes from Homer. In the Iliad, he wrote of the Gorgon Medusa, who was beheaded by Perseus in her cave after he used his mirrored shield to see her without looking at her. Her head, retaining its power to petrify, was given as a gift to Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, to be placed on her shield, so that the terrible petrifying glare could paralyze mortals with dread during battle.16 According to historian Caroline Alexander, “this conjecture conjures the dread object’s power to petrify—to turn to stone—all who gaze upon it.… The most terrifying conceivable object, the Greeks well knew, was not a snake-haired monster of imagination, but the concrete work of human hands.”17 There is no doubt that surveillance systems are the result of such work. At present, the underground is the last place human beings, free of the Gorgon’s stare, can exist without dread of being traced and tracked.
However, this may not last for long. In 2017, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held a “subterranean challenge,” in which it solicited bids for techniques to enhance “situational awareness” of global underground areas, with a $2 million–prize purse. The challenge was to create machines that could make their way through tunnel systems, urban undergrounds, and natural caves. Robots had to be able to climb, crawl, squeeze, and sense their way through these environments, with an eye toward future deployment in underground environments that human bodies can’t access—like the air intake system of a bunker. Though the competition won’t be complete until 2021, a team from Carnegie Mellon University and Oregon State University took home first prize in the inaugural round. The robots they built may well become autonomous subterranean avatars, capable of seeking, finding, and destroying underground redoubts. Their deployment will mean that there really is nowhere left to hide.
Gary Lynch returned from his phone call with apologies. Having thought about the steps his company took to conceal the location of the bunkers they installed, I had a question ready: “Is it Christian to hide your salvation from your neighbors?”
“No,” Gary acknowledged. “But in the aftermath there will be a new community of people: they just might not know each other at first. The social contract will be rewritten. I’ve buried five or six bunkers within forty miles of here. Eventually, those people would find each other. I’ve got areas in the US where we have a really high concentration of bunkers. Within central Texas I have an area that is probably a ten-square-mile radius with twenty-five bunkers. Vegas is a hot spot, too.”
“What do people in those places tell you they fear?” I asked.
“People worry about four major things: nuclear war, government collapse, financial collapse, and social unrest. Any one triggers the other, but I think the economy goes down first. The country is twenty-something trillion dollars in debt. How do you recover from that? And that’s happened in twenty to twenty-five years.” Gary had a point. On top of the astounding national debt, by 2020, 45 million Americans owed $1.6 trillion in student loans alone. According to the Brookings Institution, a centrist American think tank in Washington, DC, 40 percent of these borrowers are likely to default on those loans by 2023.18 I am one of those 45 million, and like other Millennials I work long hours, pay exorbitant rent, own no property or assets, and have no intention of paying off those loans. Student loans are now second only to mortgage debt in the country, and unless drastic relief is offered—of the sort the US government offered to the banking, airline, and automobile sectors after the 2007–08 financial crisis, or the trillions shoveled into the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic—the situation is bound to implode. What that looks like, no one knows. It’s an unprecedented situation, like so much of what we’ve experienced of late.
“So, if people don’t know what’s coming, are you building for the unknown?”
“That is not correct,” Gary replied in his sprawling Texas register. “There are not more unknowns these days, there’s just a lot more awareness created by media, our phones, technology, communication. When you were a child, I was a child. There weren’t cell phones. There really wasn’t email. Things went a lot slower. There could have been a disaster somewhere, but you might not know about it for a couple days because you had to wait for a newswire with all the information—probably factual information back then—to make it to the Dallas Morning News or the Boston Globe. By the time you got that information, often the situation had been resolved. Information is moving faster, society is going in debt faster, everything’s happening faster.” It was jarring, but not surprising, to hear Lynch talk about factual information and media distortion when he had, just thirty minutes earlier, pitched an unproven conspiracy theory to me.
Gary’s phone rang again, followed by the now familiar ritual: finger held up to halt our conversation, he retreated into one of his nearly complete bunkers. I could see him through the open door: phone pressed to his ear with one hand, running the other lovingly along a freshly installed kitchen countertop. I was left standing in an aisle bordered by a few dozen steel bunkers. One of the other doorways was lit up by flickering blue light: sparks from a welder—the only color in the building other than a yellow crane hanging overhead, used to load the bunkers onto flatbeds.
As much as anything, the second backyard shelter doom boom seemed fueled by an overwhelming desire to hide. Gary’s diagnosis—that everything was now happening faster—was right in line with some of the most significant thinking on our rapidly changing world. Paul Virilio, one of the most influential explorers of our accelerating society, developed a philosophy of speed, which he called dromology: the logic that demonstrates how connectivity is introducing complexity and shrinking room for error.19 Back at xPoint, Milton had told me that his bunker was the only place he felt alone, and I’d experienced much the same sensation for myself. For me, this sense of being constantly watched and monitored, my life reduced to a series of algorithms sitting on some massive corporate-owned server, always feels more overwhelming than the idea of nuclear war or the climate crisis. I feel like a fish in a trawler net, pointlessly flopping around, trying to get back to the ocean.
Lynch emerged from his bunker phone call. “What do you think of the bunker communities people are building?” I asked him. “Is a community a good model for survival?”
“It’s not,” he replied, pinging off a text message. “Places like xPoint, where the location is known—people will converge on those locations. And,” he added, “who are you going to be stuck in there with? It’s like living in a high-rise building. Just because someone can afford to be there doesn’t mean that they’re not a child molester, psychopath, or rapist. Our clients are responsible individuals who see a bunker as an insurance policy. They don’t like to be called preppers. Look at Weaver at Ruby Ridge, David Koresh, they were all survivalists. It took a few big hits like that for the idea of preppers to emerge—no one wanted to be a survivalist anymore. Now with preppers the media have made a lot of them out to be complete lunatics, and those people will be attracted to those communities, you know they’ll attract each other.”
Having spent hours upon hours watching National Geographic’s 2012 series Doomsday Preppers, I knew what Lynch meant. The show used foreboding music and a throaty “voice of God” narration to introduce preppers as paranoid and obsessive antiheroes motivated by extreme ideologies—in other words, the same as the survivalists who preceded them.20
“And just like survivalists,” Lynch continued, “you’re going to have the government there on day one to round those people up and disarm them. The people paying to get into those communities are doing exactly what that woman on the phone was doing, relying on somebody else to take care of your problems. A hundred and fifty years ago, everybody had a garden, they were self-sufficient, now I can’t even fix this thing,” he said, holding up his phone. Technology, he was suggesting, was causing us to lose agency over our lives. “It’s gonna take some kind of traumatic event to hit reset,” he concluded. I had to admit that Lynch made the bunker seem like a totally rational addition to the house, a place of safety from future disaster, yes, but also a hidey-hole from overbearing state and corporate technologies.
On the way out, I saw Ned and went over to press him on where these bunkers were going. He told me that Rising S was in the General Services Administration (GSA) catalogue now, and some of the bunkers were being purchased by the government. “Does that concern you?” I asked. “That the government wants bunkers from private contractors?”
Ned was tight-lipped. “I can’t tell you about it,” he said, shrugging. “Some of them are simple storm shelters. But otherwise I can’t talk about it.” It was obvious that business was good for the backyard bunker builders, but that the US government was clearly one of Rising S’s main customers came as something of a surprise.
Back in the Airstream trailer, I started reading up on my final destination in Texas. North of Dallas, a new community called Trident Lakes was forming that looked like it might rival xPoint in scale and sounded almost sumptuous in comparison. The website for the development described lagoons, a helipad, a spa, and a golf course inside the bunker complex. As I scrolled through the images of the blue lagoons on my phone, warming myself next to the firepit outside the trailer, it started snowing.