I couldn’t understand how tracking protests against police violence from a tent somewhere had anything to do with prepping. But I regained some sense of my enthusiasm by proceeding to classes on permaculture, which I believe in deeply. Industrial agriculture is poisoning the planet and our bodies; we’re all better off growing as much of our own food as possible. Our host, Rick Austin, sweating through his khaki shirt in a circle from shoulder to sternum, gave such a thrilling talk about “Secret Gardens and Greenhouses” that I bought his book, Secret Garden of Survival, at the prepper mall afterward. Austin had been a commercial farmer, growing apples in New Hampshire and oranges in Florida, when he realized that agriculture’s traditional rows of plants were not designed for the plants’ sake, but for the sake of the machinery that sows and harvests it; in a post-doomsday world without heavy machinery, and with smaller-scale, nonindustrial agriculture, farmers would do better to plant crops the way crops want to grow.
Austin showed pictures of the evolution of a garden on his mountainside homestead, first stripped to the topsoil, then planted in “guilds” of fruit or nut trees surrounded by symbiotic plantings of berries and vines and useful nitrogen fixers. The result within only a few years was a garden so lush and productive it now doesn’t look like a garden, doesn’t need weeding, watering, pesticides, or nutrients, and provides many pounds of food per square foot.
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I ate in my tent, and with my hand-crank flashlight, I read Rick Austin’s book. It didn’t take more than twenty minutes; I finished pretty bummed out that I had spent $35 on the thing. Though it contains some good ideas, it suffers the lack of editorial attention typical of self-published works, offering only the vaguest recommendations, with eccentric punctuation and terrible photography, and it included the only instance of overt racism (putting aside the MAGA gear and Confederate flags) that I saw all weekend: a photo of the “zombie hordes” that Rick Austin believes will be swarming the land and stealing his food during the apocalypse, credited to the Associated Press, actually depicts desperate brown people wading with their children to dry land.
He has a website and YouTube channel:
If MAGA hats and Confederate flags were the worst forms of “racism” you encountered, which by your own admission they were NOT, then you had a pretty good experience at the prepper faire. With the possible exception of being ripped off for $35 that is.
Although somewhat more politically congenial, I wouldn’t actually belong at a prepper gathering either. Not veteran, not outdoorsy, used the word outdoorsy as shorthand, no survival skills, probably wouldn’t wear a MAGA hat unless deliberately trying to freak out a Lauren Groff. Would consider that. Have a more traditional attitude to the CSA flag but, OTOH, grew up associating it also with outlaw biker gangs, so kind of wince as well. Also laugh to think of leftists seeing it, so there’s that.
I say all that by way of prelude. I think I could still walk around this group of people with only the same level of curiosity and sense of un-belonging that I do in any unfamiliar group and setting.
I find it interesting the number of people of Groff’s persuasion who write or talk as though they expect to be hog tied and beaten at any moment.
Still, I suppose if I went to a black nationalist camp-out or a woodland gathering of neopagan druids, I might be a little more nervous. I don’t think I’d feel rage when I saw their hats, though.