His smallest unit, he says, is “about the size of a small bath-


room, eight by 12 feet, for two people. It’s an air-tight walk-in shelter with an air system, a single bed and a water barrel. “It used to be,” Scott says in his thick Texan drawl, “I’d go six or


seven weeks without selling a single unit. But now, I’m selling shelters every single day. Not usually the million-dollar ones but the US$60,000 and US$70,000 ones. It’s like a modern-day gold rush for shelters right now. But this is the new normal,” he says. “If you see some of my pictures, these shelters look like houses.


They become man caves; you put a leather couch down there with a 42-inch big-screen TV. It doesn’t feel like a bunker — it feels like a house. They can be wine cellars or gun rooms.” Scott even hinted at one customer who uses one as a swingers’ palace. “So far as I know, it ain’t even got water in it; it’s got Jack Daniels.” Preppers also spend on vehicles. Michael V. is based in the US Midwest. “They used to


call us farmers,” he told me when I met him at the 2016 Burning Man arts festival in Nevada, a clothing- optional week-long party that’s an alleged hotspot for preppers and other independent-minded types. “I prefer the word ‘agriculturalist,’” he says. “My most impor-


tant implement? This Mac computer.” He runs operations in several states and in response to the question, “How much land do you own?” he replies, “Asking an agriculturalist how much land he owns is like asking a stockbroker how much he’s got in his portfolio.” One of the philosophies supposedly espoused by Burning Man


attendees is “radical self-reliance,” which translates to “we can work together to survive but if necessary, I don’t need anybody’s help.” That also translates handily to the prepper set. Michael is not his real name. As he and many other preppers


admit, they don’t want to be known as crackpot preppers. He would rather be seen as a practical businessman who has done his homework. One of the reasons he embraced prepping was that a decade ago, Michael says, he read some Pentagon reports on the likelihood of foreign governments attacking the US energy system. “It made sense to me that our grid is pretty fragile; between EMPs [electromagnetic pulses] and a fragile grid and more demands on the grid, I decided I’d be ready for the electricity to go out.” So he opted for a more understated approach. His home shows


no outward sign that here lives a prepper, but, he says, “all the ground-level windows are impact-resistant. The ground-level doors are steel-framed and steel-reinforced so you can’t kick them in.” “And when I leave town, the only vehicle I drive is this 12-valve


Dodge diesel truck. I picked that truck because it has no computer on it and I picked diesel because it’s so versatile. The truck has a 140-gallon tank so I can literally be anywhere in the country and drive home without stopping. I had a special front bumper made. I put a Faraday cage in there to put my phone in. It’s grounded so the electronics inside are protected. I got a lot of tricky features in my truck but going down the road, it doesn’t look any diff erent than any other truck. “Outwardly, I hope nobody really sees that I’m a prepper. But I’ll tell you, I’m a bit surprised at the corporate levels of people involved


in this. I met a bank branch president who was getting work done to his Dodge truck to have the same aſt ermarket features as mine.” Meanwhile, back at the Ark. If you type Camp Century into Wikipedia, you’ll see a bird’s-eye


view of the layout, complete with labelled rooms and connecting passages. If you ask Beach to show you a schematic of Ark Two, you get a drawing that looks a lot like a Camp Century overlay. When you arrive at the gate of Ark Two, the only outward sign


that it even exists is a concrete-encased metal door on the face of a small grassy hill. Behind that door and under the grass, Ark Two con-


sists of 42 full-length school buses with their engines and chassis removed, fused together, reinforced with steel and cement, buried under southern Ontario farmland. Like with Camp Century, each bus or dividing room


has its purpose. One is a communications room; another is the dentist’s office. There are men’s and ladies’ washrooms and a kitchen with a soup pot so big,


Beach says, you could cook enough for 3,000 people a day. There’s a library. A command post. Power is provided by generators, water is pumped from a well and air is piped in from above ground. Down one dark hall is a kids’ playroom and adjacent to that,


row aſt er row of child-sized bunks — enough for 96 kids sleeping toe to toe. “It’ll probably be an orphanage mostly, an underground


nursery,” Beach says. “There’ll be lots of little’uns down here with no parents.” And after the nuclear holocaust happens, Beach wants the


inhabitants of Ark Two to begin the rebuild. “This is a lifeboat; this is not a luxury liner like the Queen Mary,”


Beach says in his Kansas twang. “Nobody’s going to be down here for more than a couple of weeks.” “We are what I call ‘reconstructionists.’ We’ll be preparing to


rebuild civilization aſt er the radiation danger recedes.” (If you’d like to be put on Beach’s list for when the time comes, contact him and off er him some sweat equity. A place like Ark Two requires considerable upkeep, and fi rst choice will be given to those who help the most.) Jason Kom-Tong got his first look at Beach’s installation the


same time as I did. Kom-Tong had read about Beach and because he, like Michael, is an understated but dedicated prepper, he wanted to see what Ark Two off ered the post-apocalyptic world. Kom-Tong describes himself as a “prepper lite” and says he has concerns about the electrical grid grinding to a halt, so he keeps several months’ worth of food and water in storage. “I’m not like one of those guys who’s going to build a fence around the property and haul out my gun,” he says. But still. “Don’t you think that aſt er spending all this money on prepping


that guys might actually want to see something happen?” I asked him. “You know, like testing the airbags in a new vehicle.” He laughed and then, showing me photos of his beautiful young son and daughter, said, “I sure don’t.”


PETER CARTER is a Toronto-based freelance writer NOVEMBER 2017 | CPA MAGAZINE | 43


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