Survivalists: Not Out Of The Woods Yet

DOVES OF THE VALLEY, Idaho - This is supposed to be the safest place in America.

It has a good ground-water table, tillable land, lots of protein running wild in the hills, no nearby military installations. And the closest big city - if anybody would call Boise a big city - is 274 miles away.

Want to make it through the dawning of a new millennium, the Y2K bug, the end of the world? Go to the place created by the dynamic duo of survivalism, Bo Gritz and Jack McLamb. Their Idaho mountain redoubt was designed as a fortress against one-world government, urban crime, smog, traffic, zoning laws, the antichrist and errant computers.

But if you feel safer now that all appears well with the arrival of 2000, just wait.

"We got lots more coming at us," Leonard Michael said Saturday morning from his nuclear-proof underground retreat on the outskirts of Doves of the Valley. "What I've said is it's going to be a slow thing - a little thing here, a little thing there. But it's still coming."

"I think it's real interesting the government has spent this much time to build this whole Y2K thing up, and then nothing happens," added Mike Cain, whose own supply cache is considerable. "I think Y2K was just a little incident. It has nothing to do with the whole New World Order scheme. It's still full steam ahead. It's inevitable."

Residents of a refuge in the hills of Floyd County, Va., also say it's too early to say the danger has passed.

"I'll wait three months before I think the coast is clear," said Ken Griffith, who established the Rivendell refuge in case of a Y2K-related breakdown in infrastructure.

Griffith, a 28-year-old Virginia Tech graduate and former computer programmer, said damage from computers unable to recognize 2000, reading it instead as 1900, could come over time.

"Y2K may not be so much acute as it is chronic," said Meril Stanton, who moved to Rivendell with her husband, Doug, and six children from Houston last spring.

Rivendell residents - about 22 families live on the former farm - fear a domino effect in which small, scattered computer glitches compound one another and send destructive ripples through the economy.

The covenant communities of Doves of the Valley and Almost Heaven in the hills above Kamiah, Idaho, have drawn 350 families over the past five years - a few dozen of whom arrived recently in preparation for what they anticipated would be either the beginning of Armageddon or a fine New Year's Day in one heck of a beautiful place.

In recent weeks, Kamiah retailers sold truckloads of five-gallon plastic buckets for food and water storage, along with 300-gallon fuel and propane tanks and assorted generators, kerosene lamps, propane stoves and battery-powered refrigerators.

The local grocery signed up families to buy bulk foods directly from the supplier. A man walked into the post office last week and bought thousands of dollars' worth of money orders with a wad of cash. Another stockpiled a cave in the hills outside Almost Heaven.

Just about everybody here wants to get ready for the end of the world, David Hasz, the town marshal, said late last week as the serious hunkering down was getting under way.

Gritz, the former special-forces officer who claims to be the inspiration for Rambo, worked with McLamb in the mid-1990s to establish their covenant communities, where those wary of what was happening in the world around them could buy land at $3,000 an acre and put in whatever solar panels, generators, gas tanks or arsenals made them feel safe. Crops would be grown and bartered. The "covenant" was simple: They had to agree to defend their neighbors' constitutional rights, however that need might evolve.

McLamb, who heads a national constitutional defense organization for law enforcement and the military, said he and Gritz saw the need for a retreat long before the Y2K issue.

"Look at what's going on: We're losing our freedoms in America. We're going under the antichrist one-world system, without a doubt," McLamb said. "Bo decided that he and a group of officers and soldiers would try to find the safest place in America to live."

There are a few large, expensive frame houses on view lots, but the majority are small, home-built affairs: log cabins, single-wide mobile homes such as the one McLamb lives in, a couple of underground houses and cabins.

Last week, Cain and a roommate, Larry Rauquist, had an array of camouflage gear spread out on the living-room floor. They had, they said vaguely, enough food and stores to last through any eventuality.

"Y2K was an artificially created situation, and now . . . those that created it are going to have to come up with some kind of activity to keep from looking like story-tellers and liars," Rauquist said.

Michael - a former heavy-equipment operator from Las Vegas - has at least two years' worth of food stocked up inside 8 inches of reinforced concrete buried below 6 inches of dirt, all properly vented and equipped with switchable battery, generator and propane power systems. He has, he said, hard evidence that the government is preparing this year to take over most private property ownership in the United States and use it to pay off debts to international bankers.

Michael said: "Have you seen all the things on TV lately about the terrorists and stuff? This is all mind-control. So that when something happens, they can say, `We told you.' "

The Y2K computer bug, he said, wasn't the only scenario under which martial law could be declared. So he's not about to take down his stockpiles of canned spinach and beef stew, Log Cabin syrup, veterinary antibiotics, toilet paper, spare underwear and anthrax antidote.

Converting such supplies back to cash might be a problem for some stockpilers in Southern California.

Fred Morris, manager at Major Surplus & Survival in Gardena, said yesterday that customers cannot return any Y2K-related items, including lanterns, solar radios, flashlights and water purifiers.

"If we had people bringing all the stuff back, stores could go out of business," he said. "We discussed this with our customers before their purchase."

Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.