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or me, being prepared for 2012 is a stress-reliever. I spendan average of $200 to $300 per month on my supplies.Ive been training myself in what I call frontier livingdehydrating, canning, preserving, cooking without modernappliances. Last weekend I started decorating our attic(almost 3,000 square feet) to store my reserve becausepeople I know are getting suspicious of the amount ofhurricane supplies I keep. Ill never be Martha Stewart,but I feel very good about the variety and quantity I have

amassed. I believe in the three Gs of preparedness: God, guns andgroceries.Susan Skains, Texas Gulf Coast

Dressed in blue jeans and a red short-sleeve shirt, Steve Pacestands guard atop a bucolic hill on the outskirts of Poplar Bluff in theMissouri bootheel. The scene is as rural as it gets; theres nothing outhere but rolling hills and big sky. A lonely sentinel with a shiny silverrevolver strapped to his waist, the retired U.S. Army sergeant scansthe wooded horizon with a pair of binoculars for signs of the comingcataclysm. He sees things others dontthe apocalyptic omens that,he says, are everywhere if you know how to connect the dots.

Pace is a lean and leathery 55-year-old who looks a bit like SeanConnery but speaks in a thick, crusty rural accent. He gives me a tourof his solidly constructed 1950s bungalow on a quiet tree-lined cul-

ACCORDING TO ANCIENT MAYAN

PROPHECIES, THE WORLD WILL END THREE

SHORT YEARS FROM NOW. EARTHQUAKES,

PESTILENCE AND REVOLUTION WILL BRING

HUMANITY TO ITS KNEES. ACROSS THE

GLOBE, THOUSANDS HAVE ALREADY BEGUNTO PREPARE

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARK KATZMAN/FK PHOTO

BY FRANK OWEN

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will starve.) But what Pace fears most is a terrorist nukethat could destroy Americas electrical grid: If they reallywanted to disrupt America, an airburst nuke would providean electromagnetic pulse 300 miles wide that would prob-ably cascade the rest of the system. Without electricityweve really got a problem.

Whatever happens, Pace intends to be ready. In my opin-ion 2012 is the year of collapse, he says. The perfect storm

approaching is a conglomeration of crescendos. The financialcollapse, political corruption, natural disaster, terrorism andresource scarcity will culminate in wars and revolution.

Pace is not alone. In the past few years a growing numberof citizens across the globesurvivalists, conspiracy theo-

rists, alternative religion seekers, former military officers,UFO buffs, hard-core Bible-thumpers, ordinary housewiveswho, post-Katrina, dont trust the government to save theirloved ones if a disaster occurshave become fixated on

December 21, 2012 as EOTWAWKI (end of the world as weknow it). The Mayan long-count calendar supposedly pre-dicts 2012 as the year in which a 5,000-year cycle of civi-lization will come to an abrupt halt. The Mayan civilization,a sophisticated culture of temples and cities that flourishedin what is now Mexico, mysteriously collapsed around theninth century. The Mayans have been a source of fascinationfor spiritual Western tourists since the Beats, particularlyWilliam Burroughs, who peppered his novels with referencesto Mayan timekeeping. The idea that Mayans predicted theworld would end in 2012 has been around since at least the1980s, when writer and 2012 guru Jos Argelles popular-ized the concept with his book The Mayan Factor.

For any number of reasons the 2012 meme has caughton. The media, in documentaries such as Disinfo.coms2012: Science or Superstition

de-sac, where he lives with his ailing mom and his third wife,Martha, who works as a secretary at the local high school.Three years ago Pace moved here to Campbella town offewer than 2,000 people thats known as the peach capitalof Missourifrom Fayetteville, Arkansas (population 70,000)because he thought it wasgetting too crowded. Ihave this fear of becom-ing just a number, losingmy identity, becomingjust another face in thecrowd, he says.

Displayed on Pacesdining room table is acollection of weapons:an assault rifle, a shot-gun, numerous hand-guns, hunting knives andenough ammo to start asmall war. Alongside the

arms are gas masks, antiradiation pills and about $10,000worth of gold and silver. The gold and silver will come inhandy when paper money becomes worthless, which italready has, according to Pace. Its just that people dontknow it yet. Dont call him a survivalist, though: To me asurvivalist is some white supremacist living up in the moun-tains somewhere. Im not a survivalist. Im a preparer.

And theres a lot to prepare for, according to Pace, whoanticipates a world in the not too distant future whereyoull need a wheelbarrow full of dollars to buy a loaf ofbread, just like in Zimbabwe. Catastrophic climate changewill have swamped the coastal cities. (Youll want to beat least 300 feet above sea level.) Law and order willhave broken down. (Youll want to stay away from thepopulation centers to avoid the mobs.) And food will bescarce. (If we have a major crop failure, millions of people

A GROWING NUMBER OF CITIZENS HAVE

FIXATED ON DECEMBER 21, 2012 AS

EOTWAWKIEND OF THE WORLD AS

WE KNOW IT.

Retired Army ser-geant Steve Pace

has stockpi ledcanned food, goldand silver, a water-filtration system,

a radiation suitand a whole lot ofguns and ammo.

Potassium iodide pills, popular

among 2012ers preparing forthe apocalypse, help the bodyward off the effects of radia-

(continued on page 000)

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and books such as Daniel Pinchbecks2012:The Return of Quetzalcoatl, have endlesslychronicled the movement and what toexpect. Pinchbeck, perhaps more than any-one else, has become the greatand mostcontroversialadvocate for a transforma-tional 2012. Apocalypse fever is set to hitmultiplexes with the November release ofRoland Emmerichs big-budget Hollywooddystopian disaster movie 2012, starringJohn Cusack and Amanda Peet.

A cottage industry of small companiesthat supply products to 2012ers is nowthriving, offering everything from bulletsto backup generators to full-size bunkers(such as a $36,000 six-person bargain- basement underground bomb shelter,complete with a nuclear, biological andchemical filtering system, which a VirginiaBeach company called Hardened Struc-tures offers to deliver and install anywherein the U.S.). In May the Associated Pressreported that suppliers of survivalist gearand military surplus stores nationwide hadseen as much as a 50 percent rise in busi-ness in recent months as more Americans,spurred by the bad economy and otherfears, rushed to stock up on gear. One sur-vivalist told the AP that the website of hisconsulting businesswhich teaches new-comers emergency preparednesshadseen a threefold increase in traffic in thepast 14 months.

Never mind that reputable scholars insistthe Mayans attached no particular apoca-

lyptic meaning to 2012. It was merely theend of their calendar. And never mind theabsurdity of the idea that some mysteriousMayan priest could accurately predict whatwould happen 2,000 years in the future.

Its not just the Mayans, says Pace.One of the great prophecies of the HopiIndians was that the world would end whena huge spiderweb covers the entire globe.For hundreds of years we didnt know whatthey were talking about. Now we have theWorld Wide Web. Whether you believe inHopi prophecy, Mayan prophecy, the Bookof Revelations, Nostradamus, the Web BotProject or the Bible Code, the commondenominator is that they are all pointingin the same direction. As Proverbs 27:12says, A prudent man foreseeth the evil andhideth himself, but the simple pass on andare punished.

We are located in the middle of the continent,up high and away from significant populationcenters, nuclear power plants, active volcanoesand major fault lines and at a sufficient alti-tude to limit flooding. We may have to moveand move quicklyso we have bug-out bagspacked with food, water, medical and othersupplies that can be transported in the eventwe have to abandon our primary site. I havea network of friendly sites I can make my way toward and improve my chances of survivalsignificantly.Ace McQuade, Chuck Norrisfan, somewhere in the middle of Canada

The 2012 movement would be easy todismiss as pseudo-mystical mumbo jumboif it werent for the disturbing real-worldtrends that inform the less fanciful pre-


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dictions of bad times ahead: catastrophicclimate change, terrorism, nuclear prolif-eration, financial collapse, swine flu, peakoil, peak food. This is the everyday fodderof CNN andNewsweek, not science fictionor religious fantasy. Home prices havedeclined on average almost 33 percentsince their peak in 2006, and the unem-ployment rate in America is the worst it hasbeen since 1983. When you add the spec-ter of nuclear-armed religious fanatics, whowouldnt be a bit anxious about whats com-ing down the cosmic sewer pipe?

Even before the current economic crisis,Hurricane Katrina in 2005 made clear tomany Americans that civilization can some-times hang by the barest of threads. Thosedoomsday cultists stocking up on guns andgroceries in preparation for end-times dontseem quite so silly after what happened inNew Orleans. As we watched bloated bodiesfloat down the streets of a major Americancity and witnessed the complete paralysisof all layers of government, who among usdidnt think, What would I do in such asituation? Would I have the skills and forti-tude to survive?

The 2012ers generally fall into oneof two categories: (1) the sane but para-noid who are preparing for a new kind ofagrarian civilization based on lawlessnessand an absence of governmentessen-tially New Orleans after the storm but ona mass scale, or (2) folks a little more outthere who believe that on December 21,

2012 a new spiritual enlightenment willarrive. Some New Agers are expectingthe dawning of the Age of Aquarius, whichwas supposed to happen in 1987 with theplanetary alignment known as the har-monic convergenceremember that?but this time for real. A more popular anddramatic telling of the story, the one withobvious box-office appeal, is shared by thehard-core 2012ers: A cascading series ofinterconnected disasters, up to and includ-ing cosmic catastrophe, will occur as themysterious Planet X (some call it Nibiru)crashes through our solar system accom-panied by a giant ass-kicking flying snakegod called Quetzalcoatl, which is sched-uled to come screaming out of the sky.Another theory in play is known as polereversal. Its a notion promoted by 2012leader and author Patrick Geryl (How toSurvive 2012), who believes Earths mag-

netic poles will change places, which willlead to earthquakes, volcanic eruptionsand giant tidal waves that will make mostof the planets surface uninhabitableessentially Godzilla meets When Worlds Col-lide. Last are the Christians who believe inwhat the Bible tells themthe prophecylaid out in Revelations.

Australian Robert Bast isnt much intoorganized religion, though he does havean interest in alternative spirituality. Thatswhy three years ago he began 2012forum.com (Steve Pace is an elder) as a quiet placewhere what he calls the pink and fluffypeoplethe fringe flotsam and jetsamof the New Age movementcan discussesoteric points of Mayan cosmology. Many2012ers gather in dozens of other suchforums, including 2012-comet.com anddecember212012.com, but Basts site seems


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to be the most popular. Bast is not what youwould call a true believer; hes too skepti-cal for that. He does, however, think theancients had something important to tellus. So he was more than a little surprisedwhen all those Bible-thumpers started turn-ing up on the forum. Arent these peoplesupposed to be hostile to pagan mythology?Not at all, it turned out.

Most of our members are Americans,and most of them seem to be Christians ofone degree or another, says Bast. We getpeople on our site from all over the world,but in terms of the area most represented,that would be the Bible Belt, USA, easily.

It shouldnt be that surprising. Just asnearly every religion has a genesis myth,most religions have a how-the-world-will-end myth. In Missouri, as elsewhere in theBible Belt, belief in end-times is common:the prediction that Jesus Christ is comingback to earth sometime soon, whereupona battle will commence, a final strugglebetween good and evil, a bloody Armaged-don, after which the faithful will be rap-tured up into heaven while the rest of usheathens are cast into the flaming pit. Thedeath of millions of people and the totaldestruction of civilization as we know itis welcomed as the fulfillment of ancientbiblical prophecy, just as it is for 2012ers.(Interestingly, some Mormons believe theMayan snake god Quetzalcoatl is JesusChrist visiting the New World after his res-urrection. Mormons also believe Missouri

was the original home of the Garden ofEden, so make of that what you will.)There are further connections between

Christianity and the 2012 movement. Justas Christians have their own online Rap-ture Index (raptureready.com)the DowJones Industrial Average of end-timeactivityso do the 2012ers have some-thing called the Web Bot Project, whichis said to be a secret computer searchengine that began as a way to pick stocksbut evolved into a cross between Googleand the Oracle of Delphi. Devotees saythe Web Bot Project predicted not only9/11 but last autumns financial meltdown.Among the Web Bots other predictions:Famous people will start disappearingwithout explanation later this year, spacealiens will make contact in 2011 and mil-lions will die the following year throughsome combination of natural disasters,

economic collapse and those aforemen-tioned space aliens, who one suspects willprobably have something to do with theunsolved kidnapping of Lindsay Lohanin the coming months.

Since 2012 is a short three years away,you would think posts on Basts websitewould show a sense of urgency. In facttheres a great deal of philosophical talkbut not a lot of practical preparation. Mostof the people on the forum dont have theskills or means to prepare adequately,admits Bast. Many people think they stillhave a couple of years before they need toact, but in reality most people who say theyare going to make an effort never will. Thegeneral preference is for someone else tobuild the community and then just turn upa few days prior to December 21, 2012. Ithink many people expect this option will


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be available to them. It wont.

For now we are buying a 40-foot Conex shipping container just to store things inatractor, fuel tanks, large tools, etc. As soon aswe get our property (were looking at parcelsbetween 25 and 75 acres), we will take the storage container up there and most likelybury it and fortify it as a shelter, with ventila-tion pipes and a concrete surround.SusanSkains, Texas Gulf Coast

Its a lifestyle thing, Steve Pace says.Its a little voice in the back of your headthat says every time you go shopping, Getone of those for later. And pretty soon youhave a decent stockpile.

Opening the doors to his kitchen pantry,Pace shows me a cupboard full of cannedgoods: tuna, mandarin oranges, chili concarne, macaroni and cheese, condensedmilk. Nothing fancy but enough food tolast six months, he estimates. Out in theback, planks of lumber lie waiting on theground. Pace is building a storm shelter.I dont see any need for a bunker, hesays. Its a metal coffin. The ability tomove around is a better defense. If youknow theres a bad crowd coming, get outof the way, let them pass and then comeback. With a bunker, youre in a fixedposition. They can circle you. They cansmoke you out. They can pour ammo-nia down the ventilation pipes. A bunker

makes no sense to me unless theres anall-out nuclear war.In the woods adjoining the back of Paces

property you can see the damage from abig ice storm last winter that knocked outelectricity for 10 days. Treetops are shornoff as if someone had taken a giant hedgetrimmer to them. The ground remainslittered with broken branches. When thestorm came, Paceno surprisewas pre-pared. I fed the whole neighborhood dur-ing the ice storm and still hadnt openedany canned food by the time we got thepower back, he says. They put me in thelocal newspaper for that.

Pace jumps into his truckthe one withthe TERRORISTHUNTINGPERMIT: NOBAGLIMITsticker on the bumperand drives a cou-ple of blocks to a storage locker where hekeeps additional supplies. Unlocking themetal gate he reveals an Ali Babas cave of

survivalist equipment: sleeping bags, MRErations, ammo belts, compasses, fishinghooks, survival manuals, decontaminationkits, water-filtration equipment (You canpump your own piss through this, he sayswith a smile). There are no power toolsbecause there probably wont be any power,he says, just hammers, saws and drills. Ahalf dozen white plastic tubs are filled tothe brim with corn, wheat and rice.

Pace proudly pulls out a heavy-lookingcharcoal-lined contamination suit from anoversize backpack. In case of a nuclear,chemical or biological attack, he recom-mends you stay in your house, seal thedoors and windows as best you can anddon gas masks. But if you have to go intothe open, a contamination suit will proveto be a necessity.


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I pull on one of the gas masks and grabPaces assault rifle to get a feel for whatsuch conditions are like. The rifle, morelike a machine gun, is surprisingly heavy.The smell of the rubber mask makes megag. I suck in as much air as I can throughthe filter, but it is as though Im breathingthrough a straw. Claustrophobia makes myheart race. I start hyperventilating in theMissouri sun, and the plastic eyeholes ofthe mask begin to fog up. I cant even seelet alone breathe, so I frantically peel thething off my head. I dont even bother try-ing on the contamination suit.

All this stuff gives you peace of mind,Pace says, waving his hand grandly acrosshis array of provisions. Its like having lifeinsurance.

But its not all doom and gloom. Absenta disaster of cosmological proportions,post2012 life will go on for the favoredfew, says Pace. I believe in some way it willbe a better existence, getting back to earth,getting back to nature, less materialistic,he says. There will be disasters, wars andplagues, but its not going to be the endof the world. Its not even going to be theend of human nature as we know it. Wemay kill off a bunch of people, but yourestill going to have commerce. Carpentersare going to build, farmers are going tofarm, and criminals are still going to haveto be shot. Its just going to be a change inthe way we do things.

And what if nothing happens in 2012?

We just keep on trucking. Just likeY2K, he laughs. He pauses before saying,Its almost as if humans have this constantneed to envision the end.

The good news is that eschatological pre-dictions always turn out to be bunk. Thusfar, at least. Remember the hordes of yup-pies who bought up half of Whole Foods inpreparation for Y2K, another mass panicsparked by nothing more dangerous than adate in time, a turn of the calendar? Everydecade has its own vision of the end of theworld. And thats the beauty of the dooms-day business.

Theres always another tomorrow.

My name is Daniel, and I am the leader of agovernment research team currently stuck in thespace-time continuum. Our technology has beensabotaged by an unknown terrorist. We have

destroyed time and are stuck in a loophole. Donot believe the particle accelerator being built inthe Alps. It is the time machine that PresidentBarack Obama told my research team to buildand test on December 21, 2012.Daniel, stucksomewhere in the space-time continuum

After leaving rural Missouri, I returnhome to a bustling Miami Beach to findmy neighborhood under a couple ofinches of water. A major thunderstormbarreled through, leaving in its wakedowned trees and drowned automobiles.Luckily I live on the second floor, butother residents had flooded apartmentsand no electricity, which means no air-conditioningnot a minor inconveniencein the south Florida heat. The roof of therecently refurbished Fontainebleau, one


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of the regions swankiest hotels, collapsedunder the weight of the rain, sending awall of water into the lobby. A hundredlightning strikes in the span of an hourand golf-ball-size hailstones drove pedes-trians to seek cover.

I open my fridge, which is empty exceptfor half a pineapple and a bottle of vodka.Okay, it isnt the end of the world, but itgets me thinking about how unprepared Iwill be in the event of, say, a major hur-ricane. I sit at my desk, pour myself a glassof vodka and write a list: Learn how tofire a gun, take driving lessons, stock upon bottled water and canned goods, buy aflashlight and lots of batteries of all sizes,inquire about time-share bunkers.

Hey, you never know.

b


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