Beans, bullets, and Band-Aids

Most every Saturday morning, Bob Snow slips on a short sleeve fishing shirt and khakis and ­putters out to his garage, a former airplane hangar within sight of the historic Rivanna River.

“Thomas Jefferson used to cross right over there,” the Troy, Va., resident says, pointing across a wide field to a distant bank.

Snow is 83. His white hair is close-cropped, and his smile is constant. He hums a lot. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more unlikely hardcore prepper anywhere in America.

But inside the hangar, which serves as the warehouse for an organization called East Coast Preppers, Snow’s obsession becomes clear. Sturdy metal shelves fill its 7,000 square feet. They’re stocked floor to ceiling with backpacks, skillets, latex gloves, and binoculars. Freeze-dried celery, blueberries, oranges, and mango. Powdered eggs, powdered peanut butter. Portable showers and commodes.

And everything is for sale.

An anomaly? Hardly. Harsh pandemic realities brought doomsday into the daylight and put a sudden stamp of social approval on prepping. Today, it’s believed some 23 million adults in the United States are stockpiling their pantries and upping their survival skills. It’s big business, too, with billions spent annually on portable generators, gas masks, and windup radios.

Some preppers are motivated by pragmatism and common sense, but others do a 180 into apocalyptic fear, fueled by a consuming zeal to protect themselves and their families. Christians are not immune from the hype. Depending on their eschatology, some foresee a coming calamity. Others question the desire to preserve what we have on earth when something much better awaits.

By 10 o’clock at Snow’s place, more than 20 customers arrive with emptied car trunks ready for bulk buys. They’ve signed up for a class, too. This morning, it’s “Advanced Prepping.” Men and women, mostly over age 60, plop down in plastic lawn chairs set up in a room where three large dehydrator machines stand against one wall. As the crowd samples a salad made with freeze-dried chicken, a photo of then-President Joe Biden grins from a nearby dartboard. A sign on the wall says, “We now accept cash, gold, and silver.”

Snow, standing at the front, starts the class by holding up a copy of One Second After, a popular novel about an unexpected electromagnetic pulse attack, or EMP. In the book, every modern electrical device is disabled, and the United States is effectively returned to the 19th century.

Some in the crowd have read it. Others want to. They run the gamut, these preppers, from a grandma on her way to a soccer game, to a country singer hopeful on his way to Nashville. But they all seem to see eye to eye about one thing—­disaster is coming, and it’s high time to prepare.

One woman, who only gives me her first name, Joyce, confides that she has a “room of doom” at her house. She keeps it supplied with canned goods, candles, whatever it would take to get through a long-term emergency. “I’ve been doing this for decades,” she admits sheepishly, going on to extol the virtues of rain barrels.

In the back row, Jack, another cautious type who won’t give out his last name, says he’s unhappy with the country’s direction. That’s why he never misses one of these free weekend classes. He’s even taught his 10-year-old son how to sanitize water. But that’s nothing compared with a lady to his left. She quips that she recently cashed in her 401(k) and put it in precious metals. The surprising thing? No one within earshot even bats an eye.

Bob Snow (right) and Gary Woodson take stock of the inventory at the East Coast Preppers warehouse. Photo by Kim Henderson

TODAY’S PREPPER MOVEMENT traces its heritage to the Cold War of the 1950s, when the threat of atomic attack had schools conducting “duck and cover” drills, and families built bomb shelters in their backyards. During the Eisenhower administration, authorities even urged families to maintain a seven-day supply of food and water. They named the initiative “Grandma’s Pantry,” stressing that grandmas are always ready for emergencies.

In the early ’60s, President John F. Kennedy upped the ante by calling for more than $200 million to construct public fallout shelters. The Department of Agriculture got busy, too. The result was a contribution to the doomsday diet—a bulgur wheat biscuit dubbed the “All-Purpose Survival Cracker.”

Over the next decades, terms like retreater and survivalist entered the vocabulary. A survivalist honed pioneer skills and anticipated a combative style of preparedness. A retreater, in contrast, tried to avoid conflict and become invisible. As interest in survivalism grew during the 1980s, books and expos for its adherents became a multibillion-­dollar industry.

Prepping took a hit when the scare over Y2K turned out to be false, but it wasn’t long before the terrorist attacks of 9/11 prompted authorities to instruct citizens to stockpile duct tape and have an evacuation plan. Hurricane Katrina, which left thousands of people without access to resources and supplies, furthered the cause. That was 2005. Five years later, polls showed half of all Americans had preparedness on the brain—a nearly 20% increase from pre-Katrina years.

During that time period, Bob Snow was newly retired and spending time in Utah. As a Mormon, he was already steeped in preparedness. It’s part of a religious ideology that exalts being “anxiously engaged in a positive program of preparation.”

In Utah, Snow saw the Mormon network of home storage centers and canneries. He visited prepper stores with their heirloom seed and water filtration systems. He determined his community back home in Virginia needed something similar. With his wife’s blessing, Snow cashed in a $30,000 life insurance policy and hauled two tractor trailers filled with survival goods across the country. East Coast Preppers was born.

Shoppers in the warehouse today probably don’t know that history. No clues of a Latter-day Saints connection mark the aisles they’re cruising. Class is over, and some participants are looking for the new MadiDrop that Snow promoted. It’s a ceramic tablet that can treat up to 20 liters of water a day for 12 months, a utility he described as “revolutionary.”

Snow is seated behind a table where his laptop is open and acting as a cash register. Business is steady. A regular he knows by name rolls up with three full shopping carts. In a matter of minutes, she shells out more than $1,000 for “supplies.”

Prepping isn’t cheap. Americans spent an estimated $11 billion on emergency preparedness in 2022, and not just on the basics. They bought things like steel shelters, too. Texas builder Rising S Bunkers, which incorporates three crosses into its logo, is one of the best known in the business. Its 8-by-12 bunker starts at $50,900. A decontamination room costs $29,000 extra.

Now that prepping is no longer shorthand for paranoia, big names like Walmart, Amazon, and Costco are jockeying for a share of the market, too. Costco’s one-month emergency food supply buckets are available by the pallet for $6,000, but you can’t accuse them of price gouging. That’s almost 14,000 just-add-water meals for less than 50 cents each.

Pastor Tim Kinnard on his homestead in Sherwood, Ark., with a wood supply for the winter. Photo courtesy of Tim Kinnard

IN EARLIER TIMES, preparedness was a necessity, but prepping today is as much personal philosophy as emergency management. That personal philosophy usually includes strong views about self-sustainability, the kind that are in line with environmentalists on matters like rainwater harvesting and alternative energy. Preppers are also into gardening and canning, pursuits popular with millennials.

But the prepper movement rarely gets linked to either of those groups. Instead, stereotypical preppers are considered too right wing and conservative, and they feel strongly about gun ownership.

Or at least we think they do. There’s a secretive element that makes preppers hard to categorize and even harder to count. But since the pandemic, traffic to prepper websites and online communities has exploded, with some YouTube prepper channels boasting more than a million subscribers. Of course, the more sensational the episode titles—“You Have Been Warned,” “Get Your Money Out Now,” “We Won’t Survive This”—the more monetized the content creator. That’s where fear-mongering festers, and prepping becomes an identity instead of an activity.

Although some Christian preppers embrace that apocalyptic vision, others forgo the fear. They just want to be prepared to help themselves—and others—when tough times come.

Pastor Tim Kinnard lives just north of Little Rock, Ark., a state where the climate and cost of living, as well as less government regulation, have attracted an influx of preppers. One day a stranger knocked on his door.

“He said they were moving from a more liberal context, a trend I’ve heard called the ‘Blue State Exodus,’” Kinnard recalls. “He wanted my advice on a good place to settle.”

The man knew Kinnard from his online lectures and podcasts related to homesteading. That label—homesteader—is one Kinnard is more comfortable wearing than prepper, though his family is more prepared than most. His wife grows medicinal herbs, and his five children help raise pigs. Snap beans are ready in the garden. Their home, a Dutch Colonial, is extra-insulated and designed for good ventilation. Kinnard says their lifestyle is more about self-­reliance than stockpiling. A collected, rather than calamitous, approach.

“Common, everyday preparedness is a wise thing, but what we know as ‘doomsday prepping’ isn’t Biblical unless what we mean by that is we’re preparing to meet the Lord Himself, and we are preparing others to be ready to meet the Lord, too,” Kinnard reasons. “That’s my pushback to the stockpiling-to-survive-the-end-of-the-world flavor of prepping, which many Christians are into.”

And while Kinnard expresses dismay at preppers profiting from Armageddon announcements, he says he doesn’t trust the mainstream media to tell him everything that’s happening either. Instead, he tunes in on his ham radio and subscribes to specific podcasts and YouTube channels to hear reports from everyday people.

“Whatever narrative you hear on the news isn’t necessarily what’s really going on,” Kinnard says. “So having free agents out there doing the same thing, telling us what’s really going on, we need that. But the motivation needs to be the facts, not ‘here’s a spin of those facts so I can get a couple extra dollars.’”

Mark and Krista Lawley are part of the prepping set Kinnard considers non-alarmist. Since 2020, they’ve aired more than 470 episodes of their “Practical Prepping” podcast, all produced inside their North Alabama home recording studio. Some of their most popular include: “Items Preppers Should Carry Every Day,” “Eight Uses for Hydrogen Peroxide,” and “What Moms Need To Know About Home Invasions.”

The Lawleys started their podcast after a trip to the grocery store during COVID-19. For the first time in her life, 62-year-old Krista was standing in front of empty store shelves. “I thought to myself, ‘This is Russia. We’ve got the money to spend and nothing to buy with it,’” she remembers.

Both she and Mark have long believed in keeping their pantry full and their tools handy. His understanding grew while he was involved with the Birmingham Metro Baptist Association’s disaster relief team. During some of its missions, he saw tornado victims desperate for food. Many had only a few days’ worth on hand.

“And the younger they are, the less they prepare,” Krista interjects, shaking her head. She says dependence on DoorDash and Instacart has trained a generation to think only of today. “These people don’t even have a can of soda in their refrigerator.”

Each episode of the Lawleys’ podcast begins with a promise: no bunkers, no zombies, no alien invasions. They point out that a lot of people are prepping for postapocalyptic, total-grid-down societal collapse. Not them.

“We don’t want to survive that,” Mark clarifies, a hint of a smile hiding behind his mustache.

He adds that much depends on your eschatology. “Some Christian preppers think that the Church is going to go through the tribulation, but I believe the rapture is going to occur before the tribulation. What we prepare for are the practical things that happen to everyday people.”

Pastor Tim Kinnard with herbs from the family garden. Photo courtesy of Tim Kinnard

IN ESSENCE, the Lawleys preach planning, and their message resonates with thousands of podcast listeners who, after COVID’s unrest and mandates, no longer trust in the government’s institutions to deliver in a crisis.

Mark and Krista are members of a local faith-based prepping group born of a Sunday school class discussion. Members meet monthly and share their skills. Medical practitioners, lawyers, farmers, weapons experts, cattlemen. Some property owners simply offer space.

“If disaster strikes and you need to get out of your urban setting, because it’s probably the most dangerous place you could be, they are offering a safe haven,” Krista explains.

In contrast, she admits some preppers strive to lie low. They fear the world will beat a path to their door after a disaster and take what they’ve painstakingly stored. Krista is not for that attitude. “I think the Christian perspective is, we’re here for others.”

When the Lawleys launched a private “Practical Prepping” Facebook group in January, it attracted nearly 25,000 members in just a few months. Although they enlisted help to moderate posts, they still spend about an hour each day responding to questions from fellow preppers around the world.

Some countries have government-backed preparedness initiatives. In Sweden, prepping is viewed as a form of social responsibility, rather than an eccentric hobby. Students are taught essential survival skills and the importance of self-sufficiency.

That’s been Bob Snow’s mission with East Coast Preppers for nearly two decades. At his age, though, tall shelves are hard to stock, and heavy equipment is a pain to unload. In May, he announced his retirement. His email to the East Coast Preppers community was short and to the point: He’s tired. But a paragraph near the end provided an additional tidbit. Until their warehouse doors close for good, weekly sales will continue to soar.

Meanwhile, there’s an urgency in Snow’s voice as he tells his Saturday crowd that something significant happened the day before. The price of gold rose $60 an ounce. Then, almost as quickly, it went back down.

He’s right. It was a record high at the time. But for a hundred years gold prices have fluctuated for all sorts of reasons—inflation, rising geopolitical tension, the amount of reserves, the cost of mining—with large swings in both directions. Still, Snow sees the recent spike as a sign of something worse coming. He definitely has the crowd’s attention, and he’s very convincing.

“That just doesn’t happen,” he declares in an understated way, his eyes widening at the thought. “It was a red flag to me.”