I skipped church this past Sunday. I feel guilty because instead of going, I told a friend that I would drive to the mountains to see the real salvation he said was stored away in multiple cellars connected by tunnels he’d built under his house. This was an old friend, Job Burke, that I’d known well before I settled down in Charlotte. He was a friend of my family, his father had employed mine so many years ago, and we stayed in touch because I would see him every now and then when I visited my parents in Ladoga and he happened to be in town to see friends or relatives as well. He has a wife and children; he only lived with two of his sons, though, because of all the work they did to the house. He has daughters and he talked very highly of all of his children. They lived with their mother at their grandparent’s house and visited Job and his sons when they could.
I was filling my truck in Ladoga last week when I saw Job and said hello. We filled each other in on our families and when I asked him what brought him back to town that day, he said that he was meeting with some people who would be moving to the mountains close to his home pretty soon. He told me that they were moving because they understood that the world wasn’t what it used to be and would only get worse and if worse came to worse they would be able to survive whatever came next in the relative seclusion of the mountains. I was surprised by his candor; doomsday preppers, as they have come to be known, are usually looked at with suspicion, as though they were mentally unwell and over paranoid. I thought that I’d only known them from TV shows, but I guess the thinking has permeated ‘normal’ society. It’s not completely insane to worry about the future of our country, or the world for that matter, given the current political climate and wars that seem to spring up around the globe everyday. Threats to our society have emerged that we couldn’t even contemplate decades ago, like cyber attacks to the electrical grid, and still others persist that have endured for centuries, namely the second coming of Christ. I attend church fairly often, so I am aware that the world as we know it will end someday with an epic war between good and evil and I pray to God that I don’t live to see it, that I am safely in heaven well before it happens. But I have been hearing warnings about the end of the world for as long as I can remember and by now, I am in my late twenties, I figure it’s futile to try and set a date when we expect it all to come crashing down, it’s best to live your life while you can the way the good Lord intended it.
Talking to Job, though, made me wonder if I could be doing more to ensure the safety of my loved ones if society collapsed before Jesus came back. We decided to have lunch and talk more because I wanted to hear more about his home in the mountains and this safe seclusion his friends were moving in search of.
We went to a nearby Waffle House which I pushed for because I had skipped breakfast and wanted eggs and bacon. As we ate he told me about the house he had purchased in the southern part of Haywood and the additions he’d been making in the years since he acquired it. He’d dug and reinforced a series of tunnels underneath the home that he said were big enough for his entire family to call home if a meteor hit and caused widespread panic. It was filled with shelves of food that could last unrefrigerated for decades and he was still working to buy as much stuff as he could find on the internet, in army supply stores, to make his stock even bigger. He described the gas masks and fallout suits that he was saving up for; “the best I could find, NASA grade stuff,” he said.
It all sounded excessive and I told him so. He said, “Maybe it is, maybe it ain’t, but I know I’d rather be safe than sorry. You got car insurance, right? Health, life, home insurance too I imagine. Why? ‘Cause it’s the smart thing to do. You got insurance if the power goes out for good? And if you did, how would anybody know without computers? We’re too dependent on machines. The minute the terrorists figure out how to cripple our grid, America will crumble because we don’t know how to function without it. Think about everything you use that has a computer in it, and think about what you would do without those things.” Everything I use has a computer in it, even my toaster that I got for Christmas last year at my job; it has a menu display so that you can more accurately set the timer to ensure even toasting depending on the type of bread. It’s true that an attack to the grid would be crippling, but I doubt that I’d miss that toaster very much. Definitely my car, though, my cell phone. And all of the services that operate with a computer system like grocery stores which would likely be looted very quickly after the lights went out. People panic in the dark. It’s hard not to. And even the most cool-headed person will go crazy in that situation because they won’t be left with much choice; if everyone else goes ape-shit over bread then the new normal is that you must go ape-shit in order to have bread.
Job’s message was ringing loud and clear to me and I couldn’t help but wonder how long the food in my apartment would last if doomsday came. My girlfriend and I have a baby boy, so it’s only the three of us; I imagine that we could survive a month or so, if we aren’t robbed by a desperate neighbor of course. If we had to survive on the land, I’m sorry to say, my family would not last a week. I know I can run fast, I can jump and throw, all training I acquired from basketball, but you don’t have to kill things in basketball. I’ve only killed animals with my car and I always felt bad for hours after. Maybe I’d be better than I think, maybe my survival instinct is strong, but it’s never been tested so who’s to say?
I asked Job if I could see his tunnels and he invited me up on Sunday, when he usually did a walk through to make sure everything was in place.
When I told my girlfriend that I was going up to see what Job had built, she laughed at me. “Don’t go getting ideas. I’m not moving to the mountains. I ain’t dealing with that snow in the winter time.” I reassured her that I had no intentions of the sort. I joked that I was weaseling our way onto Job’s good side so that if worse comes to worse we could have a spot in his tunnels, safe from zombies or radioactive fallout. “If the sky falls out of the heavens tomorrow,” she said, “and the world as we know it ends, I pray it lands right on top of this apartment and takes us first.” I asked her if that meant that she would give up and kill herself if we did survive. “I’m not saying that, that’s lazy. I would make something happen. It ain’t like I haven’t gone without eating before. And my grandma taught me what I could eat in the yard, she knew all about that stuff. I learned how to start a fire when I used to go to the Y after school and in the summertime. I don’t know if I can still do it, but I would make something happen if I had to.” She made me feel slightly better about our preparedness. When I asked her to come see the tunnels with me, she laughed and walked away. “Take pictures.”
I invited my friend Carl from work to go with me. Something about driving to the mountains by myself unnerved me. Even though I’m black, I didn’t assume that I’d encounter racists on the short trip, but realistically, I was prepared for it. I think mostly, it was apprehension caused by horror movies I’d watched that started with a car driving on desolate mountain backroads. Carl couldn’t get out of church, though. He was living with his mom and she was a Wednesday, Sunday kind of Christian, who sang in the choir and read announcements every Sunday. Carl had fallen on bad times when he tried to buy a house a couple of years ago. It was more than he could afford and his fiancee at the time was too pregnant to help. She left him, took his son, and he moved back in with his mom who insisted that he abide by her rules while he was under her roof. “It’d be cool if I could get out of church. You think he got guns up there too?” Carl’s idea of doomsday was a zombie apocalypse. “I bet he does. Probably got more bullets than bread.” I said that more bullets was the smart thing. They’d be like currency for the survivors of doomsday, making guns the new banks. “If it is zombies, then is a tunnel even a good idea? Just one zombie in there and it’s all worthless. I’ve thought about this, and the only thing you need once it’s all over is a gun with plenty of bullets. I guess a bike, too, ’cause you don’t need gas for it, but I wouldn’t want to be on a bike with all my supplies. But a gun can get you a working car, gas, food, more guns. It’s the only thing that matters.” It’s hard to disagree with that. But then that got me thinking. Whatever tragedy could possibly befall the earth, the one thing that makes it infinitely worse is other people. When a hurricane hits and people are beleaguered, waiting for emergency response, there’s always an idiot around who’ll take the opportunity to loot and terrorize. This idiot is sure to survive whatever plague will befall us in the future, he is as persistent as a cockroach. If not for that idiot, maybe people would pool their resources together and help each other. Maybe there would be no need for a gun. It feels naive to even think that, though. Of course the idiot will rear his ugly head at the first sign of trouble, and who’s to say that I wouldn’t be that idiot? I realized after talking to Carl that doomsday prep is really all about protecting yourself from the idiot in the event of disaster. “Take pictures of his guns,” Carl said. “I bet he got some good ones.”
I decided to cancel my trip to Haywood and went to the pawnshop instead. Job didn’t mind, heavy rain had exposed leaks in his tunnels that he and his sons would spend the day fixing. I bought three guns on Sunday and hid one in my apartment, one in the trunk of my car, and the other I carry around with me. I’m thankful for Job, if not for him who knows what would have happened to my family when it all comes crashing down. And if it doesn’t crash down in my lifetime, at least I will have something more precious than gold and bread to pass down to my son; a doomsday bank of his own.
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