Long_Hunter
Sufficient Speed, Acceptable Drag
2A Bourbon Hound 2024
2A Bourbon Hound OG
Charter Life Member
Benefactor
Supporting Member
Found this article over the weekend and thought I would share it...much has changed since then...or has it?
Somewhere, far down the narrow dirt road leading from the highway to the house, a vehicle tripped the battery powered sensor. A buzzer sounded in the living room, conversation ceased and we were outside, running low to the ground. Turk, in the lead, his woman tight in behind him like a halfback on a pulling guard. I in the rear, slipping in my street shoes on the wet rocks.
Turk had the H&K, a nasty looking, flat black .308 caliber battle rifle that could put a bullet through a fair sized tree and kill whoever was behind it.
The woman had an AR-15, somewhat lighter but deadly enough. I had a shotgun thrust on me as we went out the door, though with its pistol grip, folded stock and short slug barrel, it didn't look like any pheasant gun I'd ever seen.
We covered a hundred yards or so through the woods, veered sharply off the trail, climbing steeply, when suddenly Turk was gone, vanishing like smoke through the dense brush and I was scrambling after the woman down a ladder into an underground bunker, where we peered through narrow openings at the road below.
I was scared, sweating heavily, my adrenalin pumping, my stomach clenched like an angry fist, nearly nuts from lack of sleep (hoping maybe I was asleep), while the woman next to me, taking long, controlled, audible breaths, drew a rock-steady bead on the road with her AR and the sound of an engine laboring up the long hill came to us like the cry of an animal in pain.
It was a pickup truck and when the spot came on it, surely blinding the driver for an instant, I could see Turk leap from the bushes and feel the woman tense.
"God help me if I have to fire this gun," I thought, but it was only a couple of friends coming out from town to say hello and Turk, bouncing and feinting in the weird, foggy light, was his jovial self again.
Back at the house, the woman - call her Rita - cooked spaghetti. She was short and dark, a trifle overweight, with an animated, intelligent face. Her husband had been killed several years before in an automobile accident, leaving her with a small daughter, now six, who slept peacefully in the attic through the entire defense operation.
Rita had been with Turk for just over a year. She was 32, originally from the Midwest, where she taught art in high school until the fine-arts program was cut. Then she moved to San Diego, lived with a sister, and tended bar.
"I never fired a gun before I met Turk," she told me. "I was a pacifist. I marched against the war. But times have changed, man. Fat city's over and if you don't take some serious action to protect your ass, its gonna get skinned."
While she cooked, Turk and the two men from the truck checked out a sinister looking crossbow one of them had brought along. "Nice," said Turk. "Lets you put meat on the table and nobody'll know you're out in the woods."
I sat sipping a beer, listening to my heart wind down. This siege mentality would take some getting used to and besides, I was working on a transcontinental flight and a day and a half of picking my way from San Francisco to the backwoods of Oregon.
"How you like survival country?" Turk asked me now. "You greet all your friends that way?" I asked him. "Uh uh," answered Turk. "Got to practice various alternatives. Sometimes we kill the lights and wait in the tree platforms. Sometimes one of us makes the bunker and the other stays.
Sometimes we both just sit here sippin wine till whoever it is comes in the yard.
But I tell you one damn thing, I don't ever go out on that front porch to greet anybody with less than that shotgun you were carrying. You never know when the crunch is gonna hit but when it does, brother, we're gonna be ready."
The crunch. The giant ****storm. The big shutdown. It might come next week, or it might come in a few years, but it was coming, just as sure as sunrise. That was what it was all about for a whole lot of recent arrivals up here in Oregon, and in pockets of North Carolina, Montana (up around Kalispell), Idaho and Washington State; and for others, spread around the country, who weren't yet about to move.
They were survivalists, people who saw the end of a world where systems worked, services were provided, utilities functioned, neighbors smiled on the street and said have a nice day.
Survivalists were aiming to go through this crunch and come out the other side intact; so they bought gold and silver, plenty of storable food, water purifiers and generators, medicines and spare auto parts.
They learned to fix things, grow crops, tend livestock; they acquired trades that would be indispensable when the crunch came--mechanic, plumber, electrician, stone mason, logger, woodworker, carpenter, cook, emergency medical technician--and items they could barter.
And they were armed, extensively so, because come the day of reckoning, the pickup truck in the driveway might be filled with looters, marauders, raiders or just plain desperate, hungry people willing to kill for the supplies someone else had socked away.
The least-committed to the survival movement bought some goods, stayed home, and went about their business with a little hedge; those further along bought a place in the country to run to at the first sign of trouble; but the true believers uprooted themselves, abandoned or altered their careers, left comfortable, accustomed life-styles, picked locations they felt were safe, and retreated.
In another time they would have seemed absurd, hopelessly paranoid, bomb-shelter bonkers, but they were singing the words to a tune that was being hummed with an increasing frequency throughout the land, first in checkout lines, gas stations, mortgage departments, and now nearly everywhere I traveled: a kind of collective uneasiness that had blossomed into national trembling. "What the hell's going to happen?" everyone was asking.
"We know, and it won't be pretty," said the survivalists. In a way their answer drew on things that have always been with us--the guns, the love affair with the rough-and-tumble, do-it-yourself frontier, the circle of wagons. But there was a difference, a new twist. The romance was gone. This was the flip side of the American Dream, contraction instead of expansion, mistrust in the future instead of faith, a turning inward like the closing petals of a flower.
I decided to check them out.
As with all movements, survivalism had its leaders, and after considerable research, wading through popularizers, commune organizers, hard-sell pitchmen, ex-nazis, obvious maniacs, I found one, a survival consultant and author of a book on firearms, named Mel Tappan, who seemed to approach the subject with intuitive clarity and a degree of irony. The majority of his clients were doctors, lawyers, military men, and cops, all of whom, it seemed, would be drawn to thoroughness and a clear articulation of vulnerability, real or imagined.
"Almost every important movement, either to the wisdom or survival of the human race looks peculiar to the masses," he told me on the phone, "because anything effective in the long run is not what's happening at the moment. Sure survivalism is different; it's gotta be different, and that's what attracts some loonies. But remember, if a guy is looking on the darker side of you, he's either gotten carried away and sees things that aren't there, or he knows a good deal more about the subject than you."
By coincidence, an old friend of mine, a professional guide, had become a survivalist and moved to Rogue River, Oregon, the site of Tappan's retreat. "Come on out," he told me. "I'll introduce you to Mel and show you around. Town ain't much, but, you know, that's what you want. Low profile, low profile." But when I arrived, I found my friend had gone off to track a wounded bear in the mountains of northern California and had placed another of Tappan's followers, the man call Turk, at my disposal.
Somewhere, far down the narrow dirt road leading from the highway to the house, a vehicle tripped the battery powered sensor. A buzzer sounded in the living room, conversation ceased and we were outside, running low to the ground. Turk, in the lead, his woman tight in behind him like a halfback on a pulling guard. I in the rear, slipping in my street shoes on the wet rocks.
Turk had the H&K, a nasty looking, flat black .308 caliber battle rifle that could put a bullet through a fair sized tree and kill whoever was behind it.
The woman had an AR-15, somewhat lighter but deadly enough. I had a shotgun thrust on me as we went out the door, though with its pistol grip, folded stock and short slug barrel, it didn't look like any pheasant gun I'd ever seen.
We covered a hundred yards or so through the woods, veered sharply off the trail, climbing steeply, when suddenly Turk was gone, vanishing like smoke through the dense brush and I was scrambling after the woman down a ladder into an underground bunker, where we peered through narrow openings at the road below.
I was scared, sweating heavily, my adrenalin pumping, my stomach clenched like an angry fist, nearly nuts from lack of sleep (hoping maybe I was asleep), while the woman next to me, taking long, controlled, audible breaths, drew a rock-steady bead on the road with her AR and the sound of an engine laboring up the long hill came to us like the cry of an animal in pain.
It was a pickup truck and when the spot came on it, surely blinding the driver for an instant, I could see Turk leap from the bushes and feel the woman tense.
"God help me if I have to fire this gun," I thought, but it was only a couple of friends coming out from town to say hello and Turk, bouncing and feinting in the weird, foggy light, was his jovial self again.
Back at the house, the woman - call her Rita - cooked spaghetti. She was short and dark, a trifle overweight, with an animated, intelligent face. Her husband had been killed several years before in an automobile accident, leaving her with a small daughter, now six, who slept peacefully in the attic through the entire defense operation.
Rita had been with Turk for just over a year. She was 32, originally from the Midwest, where she taught art in high school until the fine-arts program was cut. Then she moved to San Diego, lived with a sister, and tended bar.
"I never fired a gun before I met Turk," she told me. "I was a pacifist. I marched against the war. But times have changed, man. Fat city's over and if you don't take some serious action to protect your ass, its gonna get skinned."
While she cooked, Turk and the two men from the truck checked out a sinister looking crossbow one of them had brought along. "Nice," said Turk. "Lets you put meat on the table and nobody'll know you're out in the woods."
I sat sipping a beer, listening to my heart wind down. This siege mentality would take some getting used to and besides, I was working on a transcontinental flight and a day and a half of picking my way from San Francisco to the backwoods of Oregon.
"How you like survival country?" Turk asked me now. "You greet all your friends that way?" I asked him. "Uh uh," answered Turk. "Got to practice various alternatives. Sometimes we kill the lights and wait in the tree platforms. Sometimes one of us makes the bunker and the other stays.
Sometimes we both just sit here sippin wine till whoever it is comes in the yard.
But I tell you one damn thing, I don't ever go out on that front porch to greet anybody with less than that shotgun you were carrying. You never know when the crunch is gonna hit but when it does, brother, we're gonna be ready."
The crunch. The giant ****storm. The big shutdown. It might come next week, or it might come in a few years, but it was coming, just as sure as sunrise. That was what it was all about for a whole lot of recent arrivals up here in Oregon, and in pockets of North Carolina, Montana (up around Kalispell), Idaho and Washington State; and for others, spread around the country, who weren't yet about to move.
They were survivalists, people who saw the end of a world where systems worked, services were provided, utilities functioned, neighbors smiled on the street and said have a nice day.
Survivalists were aiming to go through this crunch and come out the other side intact; so they bought gold and silver, plenty of storable food, water purifiers and generators, medicines and spare auto parts.
They learned to fix things, grow crops, tend livestock; they acquired trades that would be indispensable when the crunch came--mechanic, plumber, electrician, stone mason, logger, woodworker, carpenter, cook, emergency medical technician--and items they could barter.
And they were armed, extensively so, because come the day of reckoning, the pickup truck in the driveway might be filled with looters, marauders, raiders or just plain desperate, hungry people willing to kill for the supplies someone else had socked away.
The least-committed to the survival movement bought some goods, stayed home, and went about their business with a little hedge; those further along bought a place in the country to run to at the first sign of trouble; but the true believers uprooted themselves, abandoned or altered their careers, left comfortable, accustomed life-styles, picked locations they felt were safe, and retreated.
In another time they would have seemed absurd, hopelessly paranoid, bomb-shelter bonkers, but they were singing the words to a tune that was being hummed with an increasing frequency throughout the land, first in checkout lines, gas stations, mortgage departments, and now nearly everywhere I traveled: a kind of collective uneasiness that had blossomed into national trembling. "What the hell's going to happen?" everyone was asking.
"We know, and it won't be pretty," said the survivalists. In a way their answer drew on things that have always been with us--the guns, the love affair with the rough-and-tumble, do-it-yourself frontier, the circle of wagons. But there was a difference, a new twist. The romance was gone. This was the flip side of the American Dream, contraction instead of expansion, mistrust in the future instead of faith, a turning inward like the closing petals of a flower.
I decided to check them out.
As with all movements, survivalism had its leaders, and after considerable research, wading through popularizers, commune organizers, hard-sell pitchmen, ex-nazis, obvious maniacs, I found one, a survival consultant and author of a book on firearms, named Mel Tappan, who seemed to approach the subject with intuitive clarity and a degree of irony. The majority of his clients were doctors, lawyers, military men, and cops, all of whom, it seemed, would be drawn to thoroughness and a clear articulation of vulnerability, real or imagined.
"Almost every important movement, either to the wisdom or survival of the human race looks peculiar to the masses," he told me on the phone, "because anything effective in the long run is not what's happening at the moment. Sure survivalism is different; it's gotta be different, and that's what attracts some loonies. But remember, if a guy is looking on the darker side of you, he's either gotten carried away and sees things that aren't there, or he knows a good deal more about the subject than you."
By coincidence, an old friend of mine, a professional guide, had become a survivalist and moved to Rogue River, Oregon, the site of Tappan's retreat. "Come on out," he told me. "I'll introduce you to Mel and show you around. Town ain't much, but, you know, that's what you want. Low profile, low profile." But when I arrived, I found my friend had gone off to track a wounded bear in the mountains of northern California and had placed another of Tappan's followers, the man call Turk, at my disposal.