NEWSLETTER

PHOTO BY SCHUYLER PISHA

ruce’s biggest worry is that he won’t have enough people in the shelter to do what needs to be done inside and—more importantly—outside, once the fallout is gone. As important as it is to him, Bruce views Ark Two as “just a ship to sail across the sea of radiation.” Reconstruction is what he’s all about. For this reason, he dislikes being called a survivalist. He wants to build a new, utopian society after the survivors emerge from their shelters. I really couldn’t even begin to explain his program for reconstruction in fewer than 5,000 words, but you can read all about it on his website. It depends on having pockets of people around the world, working from the same principles of reconstruction, who will eventually link up together. To this end, he maintains TEAM leaders (that’s Together Everyone Achieves More) in each of the 50 US states and around the world. These people correspond with him, subscribe to his email newsletter, and distribute his free pamphlets and DVDs. Presumably most of them are concerned about nuclear war and some of them have shelters, but he admits ruefully that the whole thing is long on organization and short on action, “all hat and no cows, as they say in Texas.” Through his website, Bruce also offers free consultation on shelter building to anyone who asks, on three conditions: That they want to build a shelter right away, that they already have a place to build it, and that they have a budget, however small. Among the hardcore survivalists, Bruce is a living legend.

He has always encouraged people to come and live in Horning’s Mills. Anyone can have a place in the shelter, as long as they put in a few hours of work here and there. A strange cast of characters have drifted in and out over the years. “Various charismatic leaders have shown up with ‘their people,’ but they’ve got to keep ‘their people’ really under control, and they were afraid ‘their people’ would say, ‘Wait, we don’t need a charismatic leader...’ So they disappeared on me.” At the moment, Bruce has a list of 58 locals, many of them his in-laws, who he’s pretty sure will be on board. Of course, since everyone in the town knows about the shelter, any number of terrified Ontarians may show up when the world starts to go all Mad Max on them.




A massive green steel front door, a ten-foot wire fence, and some rusty ventilation shafts poking out of the ground are the only indicators of the vast underground complex below. From the front door, the entryway to the shelter slopes down, into the hillside. All along the walls are electric conveyor belts that will later be used to load in supplies, and at the bottom of the ramp lies the reception and decontamination area. Here, when re-entering the shelter after a trip out into the blasted radioactive landscape of hell, Ark Two members will shower off particles of fallout. Once through decontamination, you enter the shelter proper: About 30 bus-size rooms that branch off a main hallway that runs the length of the shelter.

Most of the floors are scuffed, dirty linoleum. It makes things a little homey. The lighting is generally bare bulbs in those plastic sconces they use on construction sites. It’s a dull, dirty yellow light, but not dim. And it’s roomier than you would think down there. Probably because of the school buses, it has a run-down institutional vibe, more like the basement of an abandoned elementary school than a scary hole in the ground from which to hide from total nuclear annihilation of all that we hold dear and the collapse of humanity from a civil society into roving packs of flesh-eating mutants on jury-rigged motorcyles.

As you walk to the back of one of the bunk rooms, past the six bunk beds lining each wall, your chest might start to feel a little tight. The sleeping quarters are segregated by sex and age. The signs outside each room are coded with animal names, to make it fun for kids waiting out the end of the world. Adult women are Antelopes, adult men Bulls, young girls Cats/Kittens, teenage girls Deer, teenage boys Elk, young boys Frogs, and very young children Gerbils. And don’t worry: There is a designated, private area for having sex.

At the center of the shelter, next to the generator room, is the command area. Bruce thinks of Ark Two as a landlocked submarine. He’s the captain, and just like on a ship at sea, he has absolute authority. He is aware of the potential for mutiny and will sleep in a windowless little cell adjacent to the command area and the generator room, a sort of bunker within a bunker.

BEN WHITE


TO BE CONTINUED:
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