With the formal debriefing over, the newcomers continued their tales over lunch. To everyone’s surprise, it was a hearty spread, with fresh meat, cheese, and vegetables. T.K. asked Todd, “Hey, what’s with wasting all this fresh food? I thought you’d be starting on the storage food by now.”
“Savor it while you can, T.K. We’re just in the process of using up all the food from the refrigerator and freezer. We don’t know how much longer we’ll have power.”
T.K. looked glum. He moaned, “We’ll be eating wheat berries for breakfast tomorrow, I suppose.” They all laughed.
After concerted study, Todd and Mary Gray had chosen the Palouse Hills region of north central Idaho as a place to look for their retreat. It fit all of their criteria. It had a low population density. It was more than six hours’ drive from the nearest major metropolitan area, Seattle. The entire region had deep, rich topsoil and diverse agriculture. Most importantly, it had precipitation through most of the year, eliminating the one weak link in most modern agriculture in America—water. The region did not need electrically pumped irrigation water to grow crops.
A “vacation” trip in the summer of 2001 proved out their hopes about the region. Everyone they met was friendly, there was no traffic, and most of the pickups had gun racks and N.R. A. stickers. Aside from the occasional double-wide mobile home or satellite TV dish, it looked more like the 1960s than the “Aughts.” To Todd and Mary, who had both grown up in the suburbs of Chicago, the price of land and houses seemed absurdly low. The price of a three-bedroom house on twenty acres ranged from $140,000 to $300,000.
After three subsequent trips looking at real estate, they finally found a forty-acre farm that they wanted to buy. It was a mile out of Bovill, a small town thirty miles east of Moscow, Idaho. Bovill was situated at the eastern fringe of the Palouse Hills farming region. The town was a bit colder than much of the surrounding area, but that also meant that the price of land was lower. Further, the economy of the area had a mix of both agriculture and timber to support it. Todd also liked the prospect of being close to the Clearwater National Forest. As he put it, the 1.9 million acre forest would make “a big backyard.”
The brick farmhouse was built in 1930. It needed some work, but it met all of their needs. It had a full basement, three small but adequate bedrooms, a wood cook stove that also looked 1930s vintage, and a metal roof. There was also a garage/shop, a barn, a woodshed, a meat house, a large orchard of fruit and nut trees, and a spring house a hundred yards up the hill behind the house. Unlike most of their neighbors, who were on well water, they had a five-gallon-per-minute spring gravity fed to the house. Because the current owners were retiring and moving to Arizona, a seven-year-old John Deere tractor also went with the house. The owners had asked $178,000 for the place. The Grays offered $125,000. After two counteroffers, they finally settled on $155,500.
They paid cash.
The path that led Todd and Mary Gray to the Palouse Hills began one evening in October, 2006, as Todd and his college roommate Tom “T.K.” Kennedy walked back to their dorm. They had just watched a DVD of the Australian film The Road Warrior at a mutual friend’s apartment. Todd commented, “Pretty good movie, T.K., but not too believable. Personally, I think that in a situation like that, the gasoline would be gone long before the ammunition, not the other way around.”
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing myself,” T.K. said. “Also, the best way to survive something like that wouldn’t be to zoom around from place to place.
That just increases contact with other people. Consequently, that increases the chance of trouble. Mel Gibson’s character should have set up some sort of retreat or stronghold.”After a few moments of silence he asked, “Do you think a scenario like that—total collapse of society—could ever really happen?
“I think all this talk about ‘The Y2K Bug’ is overblown. But given the complexity of society, and the interdependence of systems on other systems, it probably could. In fact, all it might take would be economic trouble of the same magnitude as the Great Depression of the 1930s to set something like that off. That could be all it would take, and the whole house of cards would collapse. Our economy, our transportation system, communications systems—everything, really—is so much more complex and vulnerable than back in the 1930s. And our society is not nearly so well-behaved.”
T.K. suddenly stopped on the sidewalk and cocked his head. He looked Todd in the eyes and proclaimed, “If something like that is truly possible, even on an outside chance, then I think it might be prudent to make some preparations.”
Back at their dorm room, their conversation on the subject went on with great intensity until three a.m. Without knowing it at the time, Todd and T.K. had formed the nucleus of an organization that eventually would have more than twenty members, regular meetings, logistics standards, a set of tactical standard operating procedures (SOPs), and a chain of command. Oddly, despite its formal organization, their survival group was not given a name for many years. It was simply referred to as “the Group.”
When they recruited new members, Todd and T.K. described “the Group” as a “mutual aid” organization. Members could depend on help from each other, both in good times and in bad. If a member had their car break down, or got into a financial bind, for example, the other group members were sworn to give immediate aid to the best of their ability—no excuses, and no questions asked. The group’s major benefit was that in truly hard times it would provide strength in numbers and a solid logistics base, allowing the members a greater chance of pulling through a crisis unscathed.
Within a few months Todd and T.K. had gathered a number of friends into the Group. Most of them were fellow students at the University of Chicago.
Since nearly all of them were short on cash, they didn’t get far beyond a lot of talk until most of the members had graduated from college, and started making decent salaries.
For the first few years following its inception, Todd and his fellow group members talked, argued, and reasoned their way into a formal organization.
Todd held the overall leadership and guiding role. He was simply called either “boss” or jokingly, “head honcho.”
T.K. became the group’s personnel specialist. He counseled group members and ironed out wrinkles in interpersonal relations. In addition, T.K. emerged as the organization’s main recruiter. He carefully sized up each prospective group member, weighed their strengths and weaknesses, and did his best to judge how each would react to a prolonged period of high stress.
CHAPTER 3
Ready and Able
“…it would be appropriate… to have organized groups charged to conserve certain data and certain civilized forms, and to foster a new beginning when the right time for it comes.”
Less than an hour after the second debriefing ended, the TA-1 field telephone at the “Charge of Quarters” (“C.Q.”) desk clacked three times in succession. Mike snatched it up. “Mary says that a pickup truck just stopped at the front gate.”
Mike asked, “Pickup?… but Ken and Terry own a… Bronco!” Anxious looks spread around the table, then in a blur everyone was snatching up their weapons and heading for the windows. If it weren’t serious business, it might have looked comical, with everyone bumping into each other. Todd was shouting, “Hold on! hold on! We can’t all man the front windows! Kevin, watch the back! Dan, west side!” Meanwhile, Mike was still at the C.Q. desk with the field telephone held to his ear. Mike yelled, “Mary says whoever it is, is out of the truck and is waving his arms.”