Ozarks suit escapees from 2000

JUDD SLIVKA
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

The first warning on U.S. 65 of millennial doom comes after a curve north of Damascus, where a church sign materializes out of the winter mist to tell drivers: "God is coming very soon. Are you ready?"

Turn onto U.S. 62 at Harrison, curving right and left through hills that dampen radio reception, and hear His name coming through the static on the radio, His message broken up by whistles and pops.

"And this is the time all of us should look to God -- bzzzt -- the finest moment for the evangelic church -- bzzzt -- this problem is a sign, a sign that God is displeased with us that he will destroy our civilization, that's what this problem means -- bzzzt."

The "millennium bug" may or may not shut down computer systems all over the planet come Jan. 1. Regardless of whether the predictions come true -- the power grid fails and planes fall out of the sky and hungry hordes riot -- Bob Rutz will be in the hills.

He will not be watching Dick Clark or Headline News. When midnight rolls around to the Central time zone, Rutz will be on his knees, praying. Many of his neighbors will be, too, new additions to Northwest Arkansas, drawn there for this very reason.

From his 700-acre development in the Ozarks, Prayer Lake, Rutz will be praying that the power grid will not go out, that the planes will not fall out of the sky, that riots will not happen. He will be praying for our lives.

Rutz is a member of the group that Madison County real estate agents call "the Y2Kers," people moving to rural areas in the northern part of the state to escape the effects of the millennium bug, or Y2K, short for the Year 2000.

They are drawn by the region's relative isolation, its spring-laced hills, its ponds, its land ideal for family farming.

"I can think of four or five families already who have come up here because of Y2K," says Bill Cotton, a Huntsville real estate agent. Another agent says she gets five calls a week from people wanting to see land. They call from "New Mexico and New York and Florida and Minnesota."

"They all have the same certain criteria," says a third agent, Carol Wittemore. "Ten to 30 acres, or 40 acres at most. Spring or well on the property, preferably a spring. Ponds, preferably stocked. Propane lines. And they do not want to be on the public water supply."

An Illinois man brought his wife and daughter and son-in-law to Madison County. A minister relocated from Chicago to land near Kingston. A family from Miami spent its retirement account on a Boston Mountains retreat. A Dallas preacher moved to Eureka Springs and now spends his days searching for land to which he can relocate his congregation of 300.

Money may be worthless in less than 327 days, the reasoning goes, so spend it all now on a great place to hide from the rampaging hordes.

The millennium bug is a computer snafu brought about by a shortcut early programmers used when computer memory was so precious that even the first two numbers of a date took up too much space. The year 1999, for example, was coded as "99." Consequently, when 2000 arrives, some programs may think that it's the year 1900. If it's 1900, how could there be data from some time in the future? Frazzled, the computer shuts down.

Much of that early programming is written in embedded circuits -- to change the program, the circuitry must be replaced. It is a laborious process, and one that people fear may not be done by Dec. 31.

In the worst-case scenario, this is what happens:

By virtue of its position next to the international date line, Suva, Fiji, goes dark first, and the darkness stretches farther west each hour. Sydney, Tokyo, Baghdad, Paris -- all go black in a matter of hours. News reaches across the ocean quickly -- reports of bank computers zeroing out, air traffic control systems going down, parties cut short by enveloping blackness.

The darkness travels across the Atlantic, hitting a frantic New York, a city with its arteries already clogged by panicky residents trying to escape to ... where?

23 hours after Suva loses power, the last lights go out in the Pacific, in American Samoa.

"We'll be living in a Psalm 91 world," Rutz says, looking sad.

***

Rutz likes the 91st Psalm. It gives the former California resident a sense of mission as he sits in his trailer, experimenting with not having any electricity by turning the thermostat all the way down and wearing layers of lined clothing. He looks like a construction worker in the Yukon.

"He is my refuge and my fortress; my God, in him I will trust" Rutz reads in a gravelly voice that scrapes the vocal range from low tenor to high bass.

He reads from a blue Bible, worn with finger marks, his breath coming out in sheets, surrounded by boxes of ready-to-store AlpineAire -- dehydrated food packed in the company's "Aire-Tite System," which includes a "state-of-the-art oxygen absorber to maintain freshness and shelf life by eliminating oxygen."

Rutz follows the biblical text with his finger, and if he chances to look out the window while he's reading, he will see a long dirt road leading up from the state highway beneath the Prayer Lake development and a spring-fed, 40-acre lake that even on gray days radiates a healthy, vital blue.

The land is beautiful, rugged, isolated, just what he was looking for. He bought 300 acres to develop a Christian retreat from the chaos he believes the millennium bug will bring. He optioned another 400 acres and began marketing them through the brochures and newsletters subscribed to by those who fear the millennium bug.

For the Christian family concerned about 2000, $25,000 gets a 3-acre lot and the right to farm 10,000 square feet of Kings River bottom land. Drill your own well, install your own septic tanks, rig your own propane line.

Rutz started selling land in February 1998, and there are about two dozen lots left, he says.

He's sold five.

Two have huge homes on them, multifamily dwellings built by people expecting to house their entire clan when time runs out. Another has a trailer that Rutz and his wife are occupying before the owner moves in.

"I'm going to open it up for people who can't afford the $25,000," Rutz says. "There are lots of good people who'd like to come here, but live paycheck to paycheck, or don't have a lot of savings. So I'm looking into the idea of having people invest in others. Maybe there's an old couple up here and they need someone to chop wood for them or take care of the wife. So why not invest $20,000 in someone to help you do that for a number of years?"

Across the road are five trailers Rutz has purchased to help accommodate the hungry hordes; though Prayer Lake occupies high ground, Rutz still expects foragers and knows he won't be able to defend against a rampaging force. Figuring it was better to give those who come shelter and work ratherthan a fight, Rutz bought the trailers.

He has grand plans. A 3,300-foot airstrip. A hospital. A buggy-making shop -- gasoline can't be pumped from modern pumps without electricity. Greenhouses. A factory to make tack for the horses.

"I really do think we're going to go back to 1800s society," Rutz says.

"Once society goes down, I don't think they'll ever get it back up again."

He will not stockpile supplies -- the AlpineAire boxes aside.

"I don't think you'd want to accumulate so much stuff that you get a big bull's eye put on you," he says. "That's why I'm focusing on production."

At the time he thought of Prayer Lake, Rutz was working odd jobs in Irvine, Calif., trying to develop a car-rental business and a new kind of currency for the Internet. Though educated as a chemical engineer, Rutz says he has spent much of his life as an entrepreneur.

"Then I thought to myself, 'Why should I be doing this when money will be worthless anyway?' "

That would be because of the worldwide financial crisis Rutz thinks will happen this year, caused by a run on the banks as people try to withdraw their money as the seriousness of the millennium bug dawns on them.

Ask Rutz, and he'll say that the world's next currency is barter currency, chits that trade so many hours of work for so much food or shelter. Specialized work, like medicine, means more on a chit than stump labor.

The panic begins on the stock market, he says. It gets worse as millennium bug compliance tests keep failing and as the pace of corrective programming can't keep up with the number of systems that need to be reset. The country begins to panic.

Rutz won't say if there are any guns in Prayer Lake, though a county government official describes his city on the hill as "a fortress under construction." And Rutz won't say much about the people who want to live there; they are simply "people who love Jesus and love his word and want to tell people about it. And when the time comes, they just want to help."

He held a seminar in Springdale for potential land buyers, expecting 100 people. Fewer than 50 actually showed up, and some of those were people who told Rutz and his potential landowners that they weren't wanted in Madison County.

But he keeps trying, as he spends his days reading the Bible and wearing layers of clothing, training for The End.

"Noah was in the ark days before it started, all the animals, everything," Rutz ruminates from the front steps of the trailer. "Lot, on the other hand, had to be dragged out of Sodom with nothing but the shirt on his back."

***

If this is The End, this is what will happen, according to the static-filled broadcasts of preachers whose millennial interpretation of the book of Revelation is listened to intently in the Ozarks despite the whistles, pops and fade-outs.

The millennium bug will cause modern society to break down. People rioting, people starving. They look for a savior.

He appears, offering peace and salvation. He is the Antichrist, though he won't reveal that for 42 months.

For 31/2 years, things calm down. Then, when the Antichrist reveals himself, millions of people disappear from the earth in a blink. This is the Rapture, when "true Christians" go to heaven. For those that remain, the next 3 1/2 years are filled with awful persecution; this is the period Revelation refers to as the Tribulation.

Then Jesus returns to wrestle with the Antichrist. He wins, but thousands die in the process. The raptured Christians return as priests for 1,000 years of peace -- the millennium.

At the end of 1,000 years, Satan arrives for a final confrontation. He comes in the form of a prince named Gog, leading warriors from a land called Magog, and he and his army fight against Jesus and the saints of the church in Israel's Geddio Valley.

This is Armageddon.

God wins and the dead rise for their day of judgment.

Jerusalem returns, the Temple is rebuilt, God dwells among his people.

This is a lot of weight to place upon the shoulders of the computer programmers who took a shortcut in the 1960s.

***

This is not the first prediction of great, even biblical change. The Seventh-day Adventist Church was born out of the Millerite movement, which believed Jesus would return to earth in 1844. The Branch Davidians and Jim Jones' followers believed the end was near. In 1993, thousands of South Koreans had abortions and sold their property in the belief the world was ending.

What sets the millennium bug apart is that it gets around.

The Southern Poverty Law Center cites a preacher who told a Pennsylvania audience that a race war was coming and that godly whites should "fill our shoes with the blood of our enemies and walk in them."

The John Birch Society suggests the millennium bug could be the spark for President Clinton to exercise martial law. "Could the millennium bug provide an ambitious president with an opportunity to seize dictatorial powers?" its magazine, The New American, asks.

Religious extremists, such as the Christian Identity movement, see opportunity. One of its publications, The Jubilee, reports that "the net result of the year 2000 problem ... will be POSITIVE! Internationalism and capitalism will be dealt severe blows."

Even mainstream evangelists, like Pat Robertson, have gotten into the act. Robertson's Christian Broadcast Network markets a videotape, "Preparing for the millennium: A CBN Special Report." Robertson's book, The End of an Age, describes Armageddon as triggered by a meteor crash.

The millennium bug worries the nation's neo-Luddite movement, too, people who believe we've become too dependent on computers. So if every computer crashes, neo-Luddite belief will be justified. The original Luddite movement took place from 1811-1816, when English textile workers destroyed labor-saving machines that were putting them out of work.

What is one to make of all that?

"One of the most important things that's arisen in the last 30 years is the increase in conspiracy seeking and conspiracy thinking," said David Frankfurter, an apocalypse expert and an associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. "And it's awful to think that our culture has this built-in time bomb. So there's something refreshing or relieving about knowing how and when the world's going to end.

"It seems that there's some solace in knowing exactly how things will unfold after spending the last 20 years getting screwed by the people above you."

***

Phil and Carol don't want their real names used because they don't want to advertise their concern about the millennium bug. They've been looking for a place to escape it for a while.

They came to Arkansas from New Mexico to attend Rutz's Prayer Lake seminar last winter. They didn't buy into the plan. At the time, Phil says, Rutz had "zoning requirements," such as families having to build log cabins.

Later, when Phil had enough vacation time -- he trained workers for Intel, the computer-chip maker -- he and Carol returned and took a month looking around Arkansas for land.

They found what they wanted in Madison County, miles off the main road, a plot of land that needed to be bulldozed out of a hillside. Theirs is the last house at the end of a long dirt road, a quarter-mile from the nearest neighbor.

With the winter rains, water spills down the mountain above the three buildings Phil has put up. Everything is soggy. Phil says he needs to install some drains and throw some road rock down to pave the driveway so the pickup won't sink. But it has to be dry for that.

There is much work to be done, but, despite the mud, it is clear that Phil and Carol have given a lot of thought to what they want out of the property.

A generator and a battery system sit in a garage, ready to be installed. Four propane tanks have been sunk into the ground, and propane-fired appliances fill the trailer. Phone lines have been strung land two well-insulated trailers towed in. A concrete pad has been set near the houses to hold tanks of diesel fuel.

"We feel this is where we need to be going," Phil said. "I was raised in the country. We had no running water or electricity. We lived like that. I've been in the cities and I've worked for Intel pumping out computer chips. I wanted to get back to this."

Carol thinks this is an adventure. She married Phil when he was still in the Navy, and they moved more than 20 times in 25 years. Moving is no problem, she says. But a lifetime without The Lifetime Network is.

"I'll miss having my room," she said. "I had my sewing room and my computer room and my TV room."

"You'll still have that," Phil told her.

"Well, yes, but they'll all be together. And I'll miss TV. I don't miss the soaps or the game shows, but I'll miss seeing the news. If I could get the news and Lifetime, I'd be set," Carol said.

Phil plans to install a satellite dish when the weather gets drier. Given a worst-case scenario of all the satellites above the earth going out, the dish should be a good investment for another 10 months.

Phil said he doesn't think the worst-case scenario will happen, but he does think the country is in for a tough time.

Take banking, for example.

"There are only five countries in the world that are doing something about this in a serious manner," Phil says, matter-of-factly. "Our banking system interacts with every other country's banking system. [Federal Reserve Chairman] Alan Greenspan has said that if they don't get their computers resolved, we'll cut ourselves off from other countries."

So, Phil is preparing. He's stockpiling food, saving plastic soda bottles to hold water, quietly fitting into the community, using all the money from his 401(k) retirement plan to build his retreat. He is selling his home in Albuquerque, getting ready to move his mother in with him.

This is where he wants to be, alone on the side of a mountain, with switches that can take him on and off the local power grid.

"We are praying for the best but preparing for the worst."

***

Gary North, who runs his millennium bug-warning empire from deep in the Boston Mountains, has become a legend of the Y2Kers.

He has written 42 books, many of them about world-ending events. His big break came in 1986, during the Cold War, when he co-authored Fighting Chance: Ten Feet to Survival, a book that dealt with surviving a nuclear attack.

His World Wide Web site:

http://www.garynorth.com

-- offers thousands of links to "proof" of millennium bug, as well as media reports of noncompliance and a $34.95 videotape.

He bought rural land in Washington County two or three years ago, then decided it was not secluded enough, so he sold to a Sacramento, Calif., computer consultant and moved further into the mountains.

His Web site recommends Northwest Arkansas, eastern Kentucky, Bluefield, W.Va., and northern Minnesota as places to go to escape the chaos to come. That he has the ears of many people who are willing and able to relocate is as good a reason as any for Northwest Arkansas' eminence as a retreat.

Many of those who adhere to North's words -- Phil and Rutz count themselves among them -- are regular shoppers at Fayetteville's Ozark Cooperative Warehouse, which sells food in bulk to an 11-state area.

The store's sales are up 30 percent so far this year.

"This started the first business day of the year," says the warehouse's general manager, Nick Masullo. "It's as if some people made New Year's resolutions to start stockpiling food."

Masullo says the "greatest demand has been for beans and grains in buckets. Each bucket holds 45 pounds, and the manufacturer says they're good for 12 years."

Masullo says he has had no problem keeping up with demand, which seems to set him apart from many businesses catering to the millennium bug crowd. A perusal of Web sites and catalogs shows that water filters and other camping supplies are in short supply -- unless someone wants to buy an expensive "Y2K survival kit."

Carolyn Green, a longtime Eureka Springs bed-and-breakfast owner, has been stockpiling food for years. Now she's expanding her garden. She plans to build a cistern.

She also offers private "survival consultations" at $75 for two hours. The consultations mostly deal with the "back to the earth" living that Green has been trying to do since the 1970s. Lots of instruction about gardening, canning and water conservation. If the two hours aren't enough, Green offers packages that include lodging, consultation and a gourmet vegetarian feast, starting at $105 a night.

But Green will not spend New Year's Eve in the woods, hiding from the panicking hordes -- though she has considered it.

"I want to be surrounded by people. I'm probably going to go into downtown for a party. And if the lights go out, well, I think that'd be fun. I'll bring a flashlight."

***

The car radio never stops sputtering north of Marshall on U.S. 65. The mountains are too dense for the radio waves to penetrate. But, passing through Alpena, through Little Arkansaw, through Green Forest on U.S. 62, the message is clear, though the transmission isn't, this time from a ministry station out of Colorado.

"Bzzzt -- and this is the moral -- bzzzt -- decay of America -- bzzzt -- this is God's way, God's way of punishing us for our -- bzzzt -- sins. Just yesterday I was surfing on the Internet, on the Internet -- bzzzt -- and gentlemen, I was reading more about this apoco --bzzzt -- and let me tell what this good godly man says on the Interne -- bzzzt -- His name is Dr. Gary North, and he knows all about why God is going to make the lights go out next -- bzzzt ... "

This article was published on Sunday, February 7, 1999

-- Nabi Davidson (nabi7@yahoo.com), February 07, 1999

Answers

Wow - kind of a long post!

True Christians are expected to believe deeply in all of Jesus' teachings, including that He will return. He was expected to return during the life of the Apostles. He didn't. The faithful still eagerly await His return.

Naturally a potential crisis like Y2K would make "true believers" expect the second-coming. I too expect "all hell to break loose", but I don't see spiritual implications (beyond the ever-present day- to-day presence of "something").

Expecting the "second-coming" is a normal Christian response to "crisis".

-- Anonymous99 (Anonymous99@Anonymous.com), February 07, 1999.

And regardless of what ANYONE may say, Noone may know the hour of His coming!!

Having said that, what did teh author do, go look for all of the "Christian" fringe (read quasi nut cases) he could find to put into one article??

Chuck

-- Chuck, night driver (rienzoo@en.com), February 07, 1999.