The apocalypse was trending. The memes were dank with foreboding, and the presiding mood was one of half-ironic Cold War nostalgia mixed with sincere eschatological unease. It seemed as good a time as any to visit a place for sitting out the end times. My obsessive consumption of prepper videos had opened out onto a broader vista of apocalyptic preparedness, and to a lucrative niche of the real estate sector catering to individuals of means who wanted a place to retreat to when the shit truly hit the fan.
I’d made arrangements to meet with one Robert Vicino, a real estate impresario from San Diego who had lately acquired a vast tract of South Dakota ranch land. The property had once been an army munitions and maintenance facility, built during the Second World War for the storage and testing of bombs, and it contained 575 decommissioned weapons storage facilities, gigantic concrete and steel structures designed to withstand explosions of up to half a megaton. These Vicino intended to sell for twenty-five grand a pop to those Americans who cared to protect themselves and their families from a variety of possible end-time events—from nuclear war, certainly, but also from electromagnetic pulse attacks and gigantic solar flares and asteroid collisions and devastating outbreaks of viral contagion, and so on. He had set up shop in the Black Hills in the hope of drawing some customers from the multitude of bikers who had descended on South Dakota that week for the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.
Vicino was among the most prominent and successful figures in the doomsday preparedness space, a real estate magnate for the end of days. His company specialized in the construction of massive underground shelters where high-net-worth individuals could weather the end of the world in the style and comfort to which they had become accustomed. The company was named Vivos, which is the Spanish word for living. (As in los vivos—as distinct, crucially, from los muertos.) Vivos claimed to operate several facilities across the United States, all in remote and undisclosed locations, far from likely nuclear targets, seismic fault lines, and large urban areas where outbreaks of contagion would be at their most catastrophically intense. They were advertising an “elite shelter” in Germany, too, a vast Soviet-era munitions bunker built into the bedrock beneath a mountain in Thuringia. Vivos’s flagship location was beneath the cornfields of Indiana. It had been a government shelter during the Cold War and supposedly featured a luxuriously appointed dining area, a home entertainment theater, a medical center equipped for surgery and defibrillation, a pet kennel, and a hydroponic miniature farm for growing fresh fruit and vegetables. The development also apparently boasted the world’s only private DNA vault—described by Vicino as “the next ark of humanity”—in which members could store their own genetic code, “for the preservation and potential restoration of the human race itself.”
Vivos’s new South Dakota location went by the name xPoint. Each of the bunkers, evenly spaced across eighteen square miles of prairie land, had an area of 2,200 square feet—significantly larger than my own (admittedly not very large) house. The place would, it was claimed, be home to somewhere between six thousand and ten thousand people and would become “the largest survival community on earth.” It was pitched at a demographic somewhere between the super-wealthy clients for Vivos’s luxury underground shelters and the doomsday preppers who planned to survive the apocalypse through manly grit and YouTube know-how. It was the future domain, in other words, of the postapocalyptic petit bourgeoisie.
The place was, I read on the company’s website, “strategically and centrally located in one of the safest areas of North America,” at an altitude of about 3,800 feet and some one hundred miles from the nearest known military nuclear targets. “Vivos security team can spot anyone approaching the property from 3 miles away. Massive. Safe. Secure. Isolated. Private. Defensible. Off-Grid. Centrally located.” (It was not intuitively clear to me how a place could be both isolated and centrally located, but then such claims were no more lavishly contradictory than the sort of thing you’d come across in even the most mundanely pre-apocalyptic of property listings. At any rate, if pretty much the entire rest of the world had perished—nuclear attacks, cannibalism, paroxysms of miscellaneous savagery—any settlement of living humans would have legitimate grounds to proclaim itself centrally located.)
Vivos was offering more than just the provision of ready-made bunkers, turnkey apocalypse solutions. It was offering a vision of a post-state future. When you bought into such a scheme, you tapped into a fever dream from the depths of the libertarian lizard-brain: a group of well-off and ideologically like-minded individuals sharing an autonomous space, heavily fortified against outsiders—the poor, the hungry, the desperate, the unprepared—and awaiting its moment to rebuild civilization from the ground up. What was being offered, as such, was a state stripped down to its bear right-wing essentials: a militarized security apparatus, engaged through contractual arrangement, for the protection of private wealth.
End-time real estate was an increasingly competitive racket. In Texas alone, you had two major purveyors of luxury apocalypse solutions: Rising S, a manufacturer of high-end customized shelters and bunkers, and Trident Lakes, a planned community north of Dallas featuring a range of variously lavish condominiums priced between half a million and two million dollars. On the Trident Lakes website, I read that in the event of a nuclear, chemical, or biological emergency, the properties would be sealed by automatic airlocks and blast doors, and that each would be connected via a network of tunnels to an underground community center featuring dry food storage, DNA vaults, fully equipped exercise rooms, a greenhouse, and meeting areas. The promotional blurb also promised such features as a retail district, an equestrian center and polo field, an eighteen-hole golf course, and a driving range.
This was a new entry into the apocalyptic imaginary: bankers and hedge-fund managers, tanned and relaxed, taking the collapse of civilization as an opportunity to spend some time on the links, while a heavily armed private police force roamed the perimeters in search of intruders. All of this was a logical extension of the gated community. It was a logical extension of capitalism itself.
And it brought to mind an image that had gone viral around that time: a photograph of three men obliviously golfing against the backdrop of an Oregon wildfire, a sheer wall of incandescently burning pine forest rising like a vision of the inferno itself above the impeccably maintained greens. It was like a Magritte painting in its surreal juxtaposition of irreconcilable realities. The first time I saw it on my Twitter feed, my reaction was one of almost vertiginous moral horror. It was almost too terrible, too bizarre, to assimilate. And then I kept seeing it, over and over, until my reaction became: this again?
My point is that it did not take long for me to become, in my own way, one of the golfers.
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Waiting for a call from Vicino to arrange our meeting, I had nothing better to do than mooch around Hot Springs. It was Sunday, and the town was largely deserted, save for a steady procession of grizzled and leather-vested bikers passing at a respectful clip through Main Street en route to Sturgis, many of whom had hoisted Old Glories like ensigns from the sterns of their Harleys, flags so incommensurately massive as to provoke faint anxieties about wind-drag and possible capsizing. In the town itself, I noted the omnipresence of the same flag—on car bumpers, in store windows, on sundry items of clothing, billowing superb and regnant from otherwise unremarkable buildings—and was impressed by the melancholy strangeness of this insistent motif, which seemed to me a kind of obsessional warding off of its own meaninglessness.