![]() The consortium of engineers traded notes and decided that the U.S. converged on CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. embassies and consulates following the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings, Pense says he and other government contractors around the U.S. In the early ’80s on a job for the State Department to reinforce U.S. On one government contract, he witnessed a nuclear warhead knock out power in Hawaii after detonating high above the Pacific. After the war, he was an electronics engineer in the private sector, sometimes on military contracts, learning the frailty of the nation’s power grid firsthand. Lee Ermey recite your high school American studies textbook, but gentler.ĭuring his 45th Infantry Division, Pense taught field wiring, instructing G.I.s on setting poles and stringing wires to rig together a communications network from scratch. Listening to him talk about his life is like having R. He doesn’t say “um,” or “well”-the slow, deliberate syllables that emanate from his jowls feel like historical record, perhaps with a sprinkle of Americana, but not quite jingoism. When he gets up to show me about his cabin, Pense stands with the height and permanence of the dignified trees that encircle the property. Conversations with locals and time spent on survivalism forums reveal a religious cohort who believe the Ozarks are God’s country-sacred ground upon which one can wage a last stand against the sins of a rapidly globalizing world. A Lebanon real estate agent tells me remote acreage is an increasingly hot commodity for city dwellers eager to go native. The region is largely insulated from natural disasters-save the odd tornado or benign rumbling from the Bootheel’s New Madrid Fault Line-and the low population density of like-minded folks means preppers, survivalists and homesteaders get left alone. The Springfield Plateau has a 200-foot-deep aquifer for when rainwater gets scarce. It’s a prepper’s paradise.Īnd what better place to prepare than the Ozarks? Strafford got 47 inches of rain last year the mean temperature was a mild 59 degrees. Buy lead.” Carved in a split log on the mantel is, “A country boy can survive.” The guttered roof deposits 30,000 gallons of Ozarks rainwater into storage tanks outside each year. A sign above the fireplace reads: “Invest in precious metals. He wears a Realtree camouflage jacket, circular wire-framed glasses, gray slacks and black leather shoes. Pense tells me this sitting beside the fireplace that heats the furnace-less cabin, necessary in the damp 40-degree weather. One way in, one way out that’s what sold Pense and his wife on the 21-acre hilltop property in Strafford some 25 years ago. ![]() If the grid goes down the way he thinks it will, you’d need a tank to ascend the eroding gravel path because the 83-year-old Army veteran knows exactly which oak tree he’d fell across the route, lest the marauders come for his cache of, among many other things, 44 raised-bed gardens of food. T he bald snow tires on my ’06 Accord struggled to achieve the grip needed to summit Len Pense’s long, steep driveway. So I picked up my shotgun and went to look for my dog, and I found five men, and they were already skinning him to eat.” So I’m seeing all this stuff happening, and then I look around, and my dog’s gone. And I also have a police riot gun, a 12-gauge, that holds eight magnum shells. He was a dog, and he was with me in this. Buddy was half-Rottweiler, half-German shepherd. And I had a big dog-my dog died of bone cancer of all things two years ago. And they had established, I think, about 1,000 trees in the forest out in Mark Twain to hang people from if they catch them stealing or whatever. “Next thing I see is, they hanged the colored boy, ’cause they caught him stealing. And the white boy is talking, and he says if you steal wood from any of those people, only take one piece, because if you take more than that they’ll miss it. And I saw a colored boy and a white boy, youngsters, and they were talking. Those people were then forming little camps-15, 20 people per camp. "I had a dream not long ago that was sort of like God said, ‘I will show you these things,’ and that we’d lost both grids on the East and West Coasts, and I saw trains coming in, packed, standing-room only, from both coasts, and they were just releasing them into Mark Twain and everywhere.
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