Business is good for Steve Rene. Though that isn’t a fact he is gloating about. Interest is “up ten-fold”, he tells me, allowing not even the slightest of smiles at this silver lining to the age of Covid-19. As the operations officer of Fortitude Ranch in West Virginia, Rene makes his living worrying full-time about exactly what the arrival of a pandemic has forced millions of us to contemplate: the worst-case scenario. A virus like Covid-19 is just one of a long list of worst-case scenarios that keep Rene busy during the day, if not awake at night.
Whether it is a pandemic, an atomic bomb, an EMP attack, chemical warfare, a catastrophic weather event or some other disaster, manmade or natural, Rene and his colleagues have a plan, offering their clients a refuge not just from the primary crisis, but what they see as their potentially more serious secondary effect of “the long-term loss of law and order”.
That refuge is 100 acres of heavily wooded hillside a few hours’ drive from Washington, DC, where most of the ranch’s members live. To the west is the sparsely settled West Virginia countryside, to the immediate east the million-acre George Washington National Forest.
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