21st Century Radio News Zoh and Bob Hieronimus' shelter full of supplies is their launch-pod into the future -- come what may.
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Should they have to quickly exit through the bunker's escape tunnel, a shelf of "grab and go" knapsacks,
canteens, propane stoves and sleeping bags are at the ready.
And lest you covet their cache, both Hieronimuses are prepared to defend themselves with licensed firearms.
Doing it for love
They are taking the trouble, not for selfish reasons, but for love, Zoh says. For love of life and her sovereign state. How can you be of assistance to others and your country, if you don't care for yourself first, she asks. It "really keeps going back to service. There's nothing to be afraid of," Zoh says. "The thing to fear is people's ignorance."
The goal, the Hieronimuses stress, is not to survive a holocaust only to live furtively in a post-nuclear underworld. They don't buy the "What's the point of staying alive in such a world?" argument. "The world is wired for survival," Zoh says.
"We have an obligation to children to protect their lives as much as possible."
The third daughter of Baltimore philanthropist Harvey "Bud" Meyerhoff and granddaughter of Joseph Meyerhoff,
Zoh doesn't spend her trust fund globe-trotting or hobnobbing for charity. To her, vacation is a cruise with fans of her daily radio program, the Zoh Show, on http://wcbm.maryland.net - WCBM (AM 680.)
She is a feminist, founder of Ruscombe Mansion Community Health Center, a tireless reader and verbal agitator whose politics occupy the realm where far right meets far left in a frightening morass of world conspiracies, corporate greed and media propaganda.
Bob, her husband of 19 years, is an artist, Beatles scholar and champion of unsung Negro League baseball heroes. His own syndicated radio program, 21st Century Radio, explores the paranormal, the weird, the symbolism of Bullwinkle.
Ever vigilant
Eccentric and appealing, the pair has made vigilance part of their life's work. "Drawing on their inexhaustible energy, they plow a lot of money and time into spreading the word that mankind needs to get its nest in order," writes Alex Heard, who visited the couple's "Earth Changes pod" while researching his 1999 book, "Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America."
They do it with whistle-while-you-work good cheer, not unusual for millennialists like them and "utopian dreamers who pine for a better, brighter future," Heard says. For such folks, "the key to happiness is for redemption to shine forever on the horizon."
The Hieronimuses are used to razzing from cynics. "We can still [have a] decent sense of humor," says Zoh, nursing laryngitis with sips of hot water and a powder-blue scarf wrapped around her neck. She thinks her hoarseness may be due to airborne contaminants.
"We don't mind being laughed at and put down,"
Zoh says. She and Bob speak in a living space appointed with, among other things, an inflatable "Yellow Submarine"-themed easy chair, while a personal assistant and housekeeper tend to chores and daughter Anna does homework upstairs. "Our goals aren't to become famous or amass wealth, but to make this a better planet."
Although Zoh has devoted countless radio broadcasts to Y2K readiness, the notorious computer bug is small potatoes compared to the imminent millennium wallop, she says. Terrorism is her biggest concern.
She and Bob also want to be prepared for Earth Changes, the devastating hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, floods and consequent continental realignments with which the planet will avenge our environmental imprudence. Bob is particularly worried about high winds felling the trees surrounding the sprawling geodesic-dome house they built on a bucolic tract of land. (This is where that escape tunnel will become particularly handy.)
Persuading Zoh's family these threats are real has not been easy. Nevertheless, they are secretly grateful she took
the trouble to build the pod and include them in her plans -- just in case -- she says.
When designing the pod, the Hieronimuses drew from many sources. They say a Church Universal & Triumphant member, familiar with his religious community's state-of-the art fallout shelter system in Montana, helped design the basement. The Red Cross Web site was a godsend; so was Ted Wright's "Complete Disaster Survival Manual: How to Prepare for Earthquakes, Floods, Tornadoes & Other Natural Disasters."
Blueprints for survival
Wright, who spent the London Blitz in a backyard shelter, provides blueprints for quake-resistant survival sheds and food torpedoes (cylindrical containers made from PVC pipe and rubber seals that hold provisions for emergency evacuations), with chipper industry that is part Martha Stewart, part Poor Richard: "Now, sticking to our nit-picky-detail format,
how do we prepare a food torpedo? Let's do it together."
It's unusual for those immersed in end-time preparations to give guided tours of their shelters. But Zoh and Bob are gracious hosts, who want to spread their survival know-how far and wide.
Recently, they also allowed a TV crew to tour their pod for a piece that may run on the Peter Jennings millennium special, "ABC 2000," airing tomorrow through Saturday.
Right now, the bunker doubles as a storage area for old clothes and belongings the Hieronimuses no longer use. They keep meaning to purge, but the days are too short. They also intend to fill and bury the food torpedoes, stashed in the corner, but haven't gotten around to that, either.
The bunker's full kitchen is well stocked: canned fruit cocktail, green beans, Spam and lots of hearty Campbell's
soup varieties. A well feeds the house, but if terrorists melt the grid and the generator fails, some 200 gallons of bottled water will hydrate the pod people.
Also time to play
A hall closet holds basic first-aid inventory -- Kaopectate, cotton swabs, minor pain relief and the like. To sustain spirits and quell boredom, there are candy bars and hundreds of board games, including "Netherworld" and "Big Foot."
Dried fruit, beans and rice are stashed in enough plastic bins to open a Hold Everything store. Wind-up alarm clocks and radios are nearby. A thick steel door on one wall covers the escape hatch from the basement, which is built six feet in the ground and topped by a concrete slab: "That's what you want for security," Zoh says.
Continue through the basement and come upon a long, narrow room chock-a-block with custom-built double bunk beds,
covered with cotton-poly quilts and new pillows still shrouded in plastic.
Imagining having to sleep in this close space is difficult for Zoh, who doesn't want the area photographed. It's also tough on her family, she says. Its dim, claustrophobic aura evokes images of Nazi concentration camps.
If danger should knock at their bunker, Bob and Zoh each own a shotgun and a handgun. "Everybody I know has a gun, and they should," Zoh says. She claims no interest in firearms but wants the choice to protect herself and family against marauders or terrorists.
Upstairs from the bunker, on a windowless level, is the Hieronimuses' broadcast studio, where Bob tapes his show, and where the couple could broadcast as needed during a civil emergency.
Clearly, not everyone can furnish a survival shelter/basement as lavishly Bob and Zoh have. But everyone can turn a club room into a shelter, Zoh says. All you need are supplies for "a couple of weeks, [to give yourself] breathing room to figure out what's next." Realize, she says, the "first 72 hours are the most dangerous of any crisis."
It's about thinking ahead: "Every time you go to the store, take $10 or $20 extra, and put it into this kind of stuff."
Happy preparedness
The necessary procedures and procurements can even be folded into the holiday season as a "preparedness celebration," Zoh says. "I just love the concept."
Preparing for the worst is not all gloom and doom. The Hieronimuses see a silver lining: As citizens become self sufficient, they build stronger communities. A community readying for disaster "resurrects the really beautiful American spirit of individualism, not isolationism," Zoh says. She finds a better word to describe this transformation: "communitarianism."
Such preparations also undermine foreign terrorists infiltrating our civil defense system to launch electronic acts of aggression, Zoh says. "It's absolutely the best thing that could have happened to the nation."
And it makes so much sense, she says. Look at the bomb shelters that saw Londoners through the Blitz, the fallout shelters
built during the Cold War. Everyone in Israel has a gas mask and a shelter of some kind. Throughout America, families and communities are taking similar precautions, be it for Earth Changes or Armageddon.
Who is to say Zoh is wrong? The Earth is warming at an alarming rate. The World Trade Organization wants to control the fate of all nations. Nuclear secrets are being ripped off. Large-scale outages suggest the national electric power grid will take a hit one of these days.
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