A small town somewhere

I won't name the place, not even the state. If I had to give it up it wouldn't make much difference. There could be a town called Bagley in any number of states but I'm not even sure if there is one in the state I was in. As is often the case I had a private charter from a small regional airport into somewhere near the middle nowhere. For all I knew it was the middle of nowhere. There were a handful of buildings near the runway we landed on but no other aircraft were present. Two cars were parked near the taxiway and a couple of people came to help me with my luggage. The pilot promptly taxied away and took off.

One of two young men introduced himself as Roger and the other as Darrell. The two occupants of the other car had remained in their vehicle. A few miles (ten or so) from my point of arrival we passed through a town of about about 12,000 if the road sign was to be believed. A half dozen traffic lights on the main drag and we were back into the countryside. A sign advised us Bagley was another seven miles ahead.

Bagley just barely is a town - a four way stop is the town center. Several old buildings occupy the four corners and a few newer ones are scattered along the main drag and a few more on the crossroad. There is a gas station but it doesn't have an oil company sign like Exxon or Shell - just three very old gas pumps. There is a diner nearby and what look like some small stores. Except for the newer sheet metal buildings the place could a be century old. Passing through the intersection we go a few more miles before arriving at our destination.

The destination being a small settlement with no close neighbors. The nearest houses - what I guessed were houses - were a good quarter of a mile away. I'm not good at estimating these things but think I'm getting better. The group of buildings was dominated by a large metal structure of the type seen in rural areas and prepper enclaves. Since most preppers are in rural areas... duh. This one was large, two stories and as I was later informed sixty by a hundred and twenty feet. I did some quick calculations and came up with over fourteen thousand square feet. Another smaller building attached to one end was smaller and had six rollup doors of a size suitable for accomodating vehicles. Another ten or so buildings - I tried getting an accurate count but never was quite sure I had it - were scattered around. The surrounding area was all pasture and fields of mostly corn. A large herd of cows was visible in the pasture area - I was advised there were around two hundred head. I was told that the large chicken farm held around three hundred birds.

We were met by the patriarch of the family that owned this particular place. He was a tall stout fellow who appeared to be in his late sixties. The woman with him was his wife and was probably ten to fifteen years younger. I'm not good with guessing ages. Both were attractive and nicely dressed. Like most men I have met in this environment he had a modest beard. Both were dressed in jeans and long-sleeved shirts - this was in mid June - and boots. The patriarch was Kenneth and his wife was Dorothy. Roger and Darrell committed us to their custody and departed.

Neither of my hosts was armed - something that was near universal in the hunting camp but not at the trailer park community. Roger and Darrell had been wearing sidearms. It was close enough to lunch time that they went inside the big house. The interior was comfortable but not fancy. We went into a large living area to wait - the walls were paneled with wood and an enormous rug of some kind of oriental look covered most of the floor. The two eldest offspring - Stacy and Tyler - joined us. They appeared to be in their early twenties, I couldn't guess which was the elder. They fetched a bottle of wine and another of some liquor from a sideboard and brought them to the sitting area and poured drinks. The bottles plain white labels with hand lettering.

"Local production," Kenneth commented with a smile.

The wine was nice - I'm no connossieur - what is usually called a blush, mild and a little sweet. Kenneth and Tyler poured glasses of the liquor which I later learned was a locally-produced brandy. What the legal status was I didn't ask - I wasn't going to push my luck.

Kenneth informed us that in addition to Stacy and Tyler he and Dorothy had ten children, half boys and half girls. They were all there at lunch. After a while a bell rang.

"That will be lunch," Dorothy said. "This way."

In the large wood-paneled dining room some of the remainder of the dozen offspring were present and the other arrived. The youngest seemed to be around five or six. All were healthy-and-happy-looking and well-behaved. The meal was sumptuous for a lunch - a large ham and several rotisseried chickens with delicious vegetables and freshly baked bread. They had a lot more room for agriculture out here and even the hunting camp and trailer park communes told me they produced surplus and sold it locally for extra income. These people lived well indeed.

The small tribe of children was clean and healthy-looking, something I have noticed among enclaves of this type. They are well-behaved and courteous, chatting quietly among themselves and generally seeming quite happy. They largely ignored me after I was introduced. Two appeared to be in their late teens or early twenties - a girl and a boy. The boy, or young man, was huge - Kenneth was over six feet and stoutly built and his son was at least a couple of inches taller and even stouter. He looked like someone any man wouldn't want to pick a fight with.

After lunch Kenneth and Dorothy took me on a tour. Each of them put on a belt with a handgun and a pouch with a couple of spare magazines before we got into big Ford truck with big tires - I had to use the handle behind the door to pull myself up into the cab. I rode in front and Dorothy sat behind me and pointed out items of interest. The area was sparsely populated, sometimes where would be several houses in an area with just a few hundred feet between them, others were a half mile or more away from any other dwelling.

The roads were wide and smooth, surfaced mostly with gravel. Ruts and potholes were almost non-existent and I soon learned why. At a crossroads we stopped as a small tractor passed through the intersection pulling a grader blade. The driver, an older man wearing a straw hat and checkered shirt, waved as he passed. The tractor was old as well and the scene could have been from fifty years ago.

"We keep the roads in good condition," Dorothy said. "A couple of guys do not much else and no more than two or three days go by between grading."

Occasionally we crossed a small stream or creek and a couple of large ones. The bridges were higher than the road on either side so there was always a hump. On the larger ones Kenneth stopped on the bridge so I could look down the creek. It was fairly deep, I estimated twenty feet or so. The water wasn't deep and we saw several people well down the banks fishing.

"A few times a year we get enough big rains the water will be up near the bridge," Kenneth told me. "But most of the time it's like this, water about three to five feet deep. Good fishing."

Not that they needed to fish in streams. There was a large fish farm, rows of rectangular ponds. Kenneth drove among them on the levees, I was a little nervous - the levees were almost as wide as the roads but I've always found such situations unnerving.

"The ponds are only about five feet deep," Dorothy said, noticing my trepidation. "We raise catfish and sell most of what we produce."

I noticed the 'we'. The other enclaves I had visited seemed - in some cases I was told that they were - something like communes. Not completely but a lot of the property was jointly owned by groups.

We had gone a considerable distance, several miles at least when Kenneth stopped.

"Feel like walking a bit?" he asked.

"Sure," I replied. "Is this the end of the roads?"

"Just about," he replied. "Our next attraction is a ways off the road. It's about a quarter mile."

The quarter mile was a trail and smooth enough to drive on but I made a mental note to get in better shape.

"We don't want it to look like a road," Kenneth said. "Our friend values his privacy."

The friend was in front of the cabin as we arrived. The cabin looked like a modern replica of a log cabin and was fairly large. A couple of smaller buildings were behind it. The friend was about Kenneth's age and similarly dressed - jeans and long-sleeve khaki cotton shirt, cowboy boots apparently made for service rather than appearance. He was wearing a sholder holster rig with two large guns and had a large knife in a belt sheath. It reminded me of the one Sylverster Stallone had in the Rambo movies. Without the hardware he would have been unremarkable if I met him on the street.

"Roger, this is Eileen," Kenneth told him. "She's writing about us paranoid prepper types for some newspaper or other."

"Welcome to my hacienda," Roger said. "Come in for a drink?"

"Don't mind if we do," Kenneth replied. We followed him into the house. Inside we were in a large room that seemed to comprise most of the interior, but there were three doors on one end and a large one on the other, apparently leading to other rooms.

Just after we entered one of the doors opened and young woman emerged. She appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties. While Kenneth was dressed like most - indeed almost all - of the people I had met she was wearing a black T-shirt and red parachute pants. She was also wearing indoor slippers - an incongruous sight all things considered. I suppose she might have looked out of place had I thought about it - all the people I had met so far were average caucasian types - the stereotypical survivalist or patriot or whatever one chooses to call them. There had been a handful of mostly Hispanics who all were Americanized - Hispanic names in some cases but no accent. This young woman seemed to have a considerable amount of Asian or Hispanic. I hope someone doesn't find that racist - dusky skin, dark eyes and black silky hair. Actually I don't care, I don't have much time for people who get exercised about such things.

"Alexis," Kenneth said, "this is Kenneth and Dorothy. They have a reporter of some kind with them."

Alexis nodded and smiled shyly. A large cat - a Persian Siamese mix - came in with her.

"I see Chivas is still with you," Dorothy said as the cat came over and rubbed against her legs.

"Yeah," Roger replied. "Alexis wasn't here last time you were up, but Chivas is kind of permanent."

There seemed to be some private joke in there somewhere but I had already learned most of the people I was meeting were somewhat unconventional in some way or other. A sixty-something man and a maybe-thirty-something woman and a cat that would be more in place in a penthouse than a log cabin probaby shouldn't surprise me. The interior of the house was unexpected - a floor of some sort of stone that looked rustic but was smooth as tile from a builder supply store. You can buy that sort of thing - and have it installed - but out here in the middle of nowhere it was as out of place as the cat. An enormous oriental rug covered large part of the big room.

"How about that drink?" Kenneth asked.

"This way," Alexis said. Normal English, not even southern.

We followed her to an informal dining area where Alexis and Dorothy proceeded to pour two glasses of wine while Roger poured something from another bottle into two glasses. It looked like whiskey or brandy. We sat down with our drinks. The cat checked me out and then wantered off.

"You report for newspapers of TV?" Roger asked. "Or the interwebs?"

"I'm a freelance writer," I replied. "I have a column in about a dozen newspapers but that obviously isn't an area of growth. They're all on the Internet anyway so what I write goes there. I've written a couple of books and am planning another."

"About survivalists?"

"That may be a part of it, I'm still doing research. I wanted to meet a few typical examples and see how you live and think about things."

"Who put you onto us?" he asked.

"A friend who is interested in your... prepper movement they usually call it these days. He seems to know quite a bit about it, he's one himself. As much of one as you can be living in Cincinnati."

"That where you live?"

"Yes," I reply.

"Not the worst of the cesspools," he said, "but how do people live in any of them. I know you got your upscale subdivisions and gated communities and all but they must feel like prison after being out here. Named after a great man though, there aren't many like him."

"Cincinnati?" I ask.

"Cincinnatus," said Roger. "Roman fellow, couple thousand years ago. In national emergencies the Roman Senate would sometimes appoint a dictator with absolute power to do whatever needed to be done to save the Republic. The story is he was retired and plowing a field on his farm when the call came. Went to Rome and saved their bacon and in a couple weeks was back on his farm."

The story sounded familiar.

"There aren't too many men like that around these days," he continued. "Any any that are are probably in places like this. You may or may not have figured this out yet but there's a good bit of communication and coordination among some prepper communities. I was expecting you, on account of they told me you'd be coming after you'd been to a couple of others. What do you think so far?"

"They're rather diverse," I replied. "And the usual stereotypes don't seem to apply."

"Most of the people who talk about us don't know jack," Roger said. "Which is fine with us. The less they know about us the better off we are. We're people who would like to be left alone to live as we see fit. Some people see that as a threat. Some of us that are organized - not all preppers are, in fact we're a small part of the big picture - are part of a communications network that covers almost the entire country."

It started with his remarks about Cincinnati and continued as he spoke. Roger was no hick survivalist.

"What you do with what you learn is up to you - we're not worried about what you may say to the government. You know about these three places and they're just three of hundreds. Even if they drug you or torture you there's little you can tell them, and you're free to publish whatever you wish. What we want, and have little hope that it will do any good, is that someone somewhere has the intelligence if not the conscience to prevent what may be about to happen.

"The president recently has made some remarks about the futility of resisting the government. The fact that he said it at all is disturbing, but - and he's an idiot and probably senile so he's just reading what his handlers wrote - that you would need F-16s and nukes to fight the government. Unfortunately that's the way people in the government think. And they have almost no idea of the actual situation.

"The army has just over a million personnel, of which about twenty percent are combat capable - the remainder is support. The Air Force and Navy are useless against a guerilla army of any size. To give you an example - the combined areas of North and South Vietnam is about a hundred and twenty thousand square miles. The Vietnam War was conducted in an area of about a hundred thousand square miles against a third world army and a few thousand guerillas. The then much larger US Army, Air Force and Navy could not prevail and tens of thousands of men died trying.

"The army of today is smaller and even less prepared to deal with such warfare and the potential battleground is three million square miles. The size of the guerilla army they would face is at a minimum ten million and the likely number is twice that or more. In a civil war you can count on a substantial number of army personnel refusing to attack Americans and many would desert.

"I'll give you a copy of an analysis of the overall situation, you can do as you please with it. Essentially what it envisions is an attempt of some sort by the federal government to crush dissent to its plans to impose its vision of a new government. Should that happen a guerilla war is only one of the problems it would face. The populations of the major cities are dependent on a non-stop supply of everything needed to sustain life - food, water, energy, medical supplies - all that stuff moves on the highways and railroads, pipelines and electric transmission lines, all running across the thousands of miles of what they call flyover country.

"Now imagine just a few of those conduits being cut. Millions of people crammed into places that are always on the edge of being out of control, suddenly deprived of food, water, electricity. Controlling those areas would require the entire resources of the army. And it wouldn't be juse a few. Communications towers being wrecked and cables being cut would compromise the communications infrastructure and the government depends on those."

He paused. I had no idea what to say, what I was even thinking. I tried to quickly analyze it but it was a little much.

"You people think there is... something like that coming?" I asked. "That's what you're preparing for?"

"We prepare for a lot of things," Roger replied. "Back in the eighties we thought there might be nuclear war, and there was always - still is - the threat of natural disaster. We prepare to survive - they used to call us survivalists - whatever happens. It looks like, at this point, the most likely scenario is the federal government attempting to impose a regime that is not only unconstitutional but the majority of people, once they begin to experience it, will want to either escape or rebel against. And there's nowhere to escape to."

I admit I haven't thought much about what he was saying. I've seen it discussed, more than most probably as I was researching prepper groups, and was aware that many of them think that the federal government will throw out the Constitution, impose martial law, and similar things. These were very sane and relatively normal people - not wild-eyed fanatics or religious nuts - preparing for it and believing it was likely to happen soon.

"What do you think will happen," I asked.

"The difference between the USA and any other nation of its size," Roger said, "is the armed population. It didn't exist in Russia, China, Germany or anywhere else when they were taken over by authoritarian regimes. Almost all European nations are still in the same boat, even Canada and Mexico are. We can't say with certainty how it will happen but the system will break down. We may break up into two or more pieces, we just don't know. So we prepare for the worst.

"I am authorized to tell you that there are over two hundred organizations like this in an alliance. They are located in more than forty states and have a sophisticated system of communications and transportation that does not rely on the established infrastructure. More importantly there is no central command and control. Most of the members only know a few of the others. There are just a handful of people who know where all of them are. You would have to not only find out who they are but find them and capture them to extract that information. In the gravest extreme - as a wise man once said - we would deploy hundreds of cells all over the country. Transportation, communications, and energy would be interrupted, islolating the large population centers. Ten times the armed forces the government has available would not be able to contain it and nothing would be left to deal with us.

"If necessary we are prepared to assassinate enemy leaders. Not at the federal level - that wouldn't be necessary. The state divisions of federal agencies would be our targets and any agent would subject to either premptive strikes or retaliation. And certainly attacks on our enclaves would be resisted with maximum force. The government might attack this place only to find that one or more other organizations near enough to come to our aid would attack them from behind. Think about Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan - the resistance here would be ten, twenty or more times the size of the guerilla forces there.

"There are a couple of reasons I tell you this. One is that the people in government won't believe it if you tell them. They don't believe there can be anything beyond small groups of poorly organized and equipped resisters. The fact that they have to recruit simple-minded people for their false flag attacks shows that they don't believe anything like this exists. You could write everything down - I don't know what your plans are - and present it to DHS or whoever, distribute it to the 'official' news media, and while there might be some investigations they would be cursory - checking boxes. And since we're hard to find - would you have believed what you've seen existed?"

"Probably not," I replied. "In fact, I wouldn't have. You said you are authorized to tell me all this - by whom?"

"You don't know who I am?" Roger asked with a grin. "Do you?"

"Should I?" I asked.

"There's a reason I'm out here, a closely guarded secret. The regime would like to get their hands on me, really really bad. I told you only a few people know where all of the cells are. My name wasn't always Roger - if you don't remember it check into the Undying Light affair."

I searched my memory. One of those cult things, like the Waco affair. A cult in Colorado, a religious thing. Allegations of drugs and illegal weapons and child abuse. He might have been reading my mind.

"The government sent in a goon squad like at Waco," Roger said. "Killed all of them this time, no survivors like at Waco. Even at Waco the survors weren't believed."

"There were no survivors?" I asked.

"Two," Roger replied. "The other you will never have heard of and you won't hear it from me."

"Pardon my ignorance," I said. "A religious... organization that attracted the attention of law enforcement and something bad happened..."

"You remember the Oklahma City thing?"

"The bombing? Almost before my time but I know the general story."

"You got the official story," said Roger. "You wouldn't believe the truth - and I'm not questioning your integrity - but how would you react to learning that - and there is proof of this - that it was a government operation. I know where the proof is, incontrovertible proof. It isn't here but I'm one of maybe two or three people who know. But it's only one of the reasons they want me and I won't tell you that."