It was a very exciting private world back then for me, really, and you just can't find these things in real life.
One of my favorite days was the first night I slept all night in the spacious Capstone Project, Inc. bomb shelter all alone. I can still remember the atmosphere was intense and dark at night. There were no lights yet. But of course, this was just a natural progression of my stay in the cult so it seemed like just another experience for me. I got up that morning and took out four or five mice I had trapped, buried them and then drove back home 30 miles to the proprietor, Enrico D'argenzio's house in Livingston, MT, where I was living. They had built the concrete structure of the shelter hurriedly during the winter of '89/'90, and I got there not long after they had finished that part, and the only major construction I saw was backfilling by a huge Komatsu excavator. Right away, I paid like $4,000 for my spot in the shelter in cash. In 1991, I paid another amount something like that for my wife to get a spot.
Local contractors in that area did a lot of the work too, and many of them probably never got paid, when time ran out to finish or even start the rooms inside the shelter. The only room in it was for the huge generator we had since the noise of it would be too loud, if we had to immediately occupy it, since Elizabeth Clare Prophet had given us a timeline of a "higher risk" for nuclear war with USSR, in their failing hours. Our prayers and decrees could buy us time. The church had called all of its membership to come to the shelters for a drill, and after that, the members stopped volunteering their time to build the rest of it, and I got appointed to be the caretaker and administer of it. I was good friends with one of the members from Lebanon, Nadim Yissa, who had done a lot of the tractor and rebar work. In 1992, I visited him and his American wife, Emma, who were still there living in a mobile home a short distance above the shelter. I had a great time, and I have those pics of him and his three teenage boys, Gabriel, Jophiel, and eldest, Nadim Jr.
I didn't go back into the shelter then and really only talked to Nadim a few times about it, not wanting to impose on him to explain to me all the conditions of it and how it had been maintained.
I had finally gotten my wife to join the cult, and she went alone to the Summer Conference at the Royal Teton Ranch in the summer of '91 or '92. I can't remember all the details and never really get a chance to talk about my experiences in length, like I'm doing now. She got a tour of the shelter with Enrico while she was there. Enrico was a contractor in the Los Angeles area, until he moved to Arizona to family in idk 1998.
There is this one story that is too scary to share with my wife and that I have not told for a long ass time. One day while everyone was working on the shelter in the early spring of 1990, someone asked me to give a ride, in my '84 Honda Accord, to three of the local contractors working on the shelter. This was up on a hill in Paradise Valley, and it was about a 4 mile ride down a moderately sloping road that was still pretty much completely covered in snow and ice. I figured it wasn't a problem, 'cause my Accord had front wheel drive, and for me alone, I don't remember, I drove it without thinking. But now I had three guys with me going down the hill, and I guess I was a little nervous, never having expected doing that, and on a steeper straightaway that made a sharp right turn further down, there was a car unexpectedly parked on the right, where I should have been driving. By the time I realized this was a problem and decided not to stop or try to stop or run into the car, it was too late, and the car had already started sliding on the ice, and for a long distance of at least 100 feet, we slid. I felt someone behind me push on my seat like he wanted to jump out. I stayed with it, and in the last 20 feet before we would have fallen about 50 feet down into a snow bank, I got the wheels to grab and turn us to the right, around the sharp bend. As soon as I got it close to the side, safely in a narrow ditch on the other side of the road, everybody jumped out. It even got me to jump out before I had stopped the car, although I was able to walk it to a stop. We all got a ride from some truck that came along, and I came back the next day with someone to get my car.
That was very different than all the other excitement I talked about in an earlier post, which were the battles I thought we were fighting in big weekly services, where we thought we were the only ones on the planet, who were "really" fighting the forces of evil, fallen angels, etc. Just like Moses was a messenger in ancient times, Elizabeth Clare Prophet was the modern-day prophet chosen to lead those that knew the "truth" in services, and then there were plenty of other sacrifices also that "gave" God the authority to keep things in the world from getting out of hand into anarchy or whatever. Otherwise without at least one earnest activity on earth, there was nothing on earth worth saving to God. I guess this is kind of the subject of this thread and while I had gotten going on this, I thought I'd write this last part and few details I added earlier to make more sense, for the hell of it.
That's why I don't talk about this with people, because it really is a little complicated, and I hope I don't sound like a nut.
I had to spend one long night in the shelter alone. It was pitch black in there, because the lights were not connected. It was a little scary, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
Sleeping alone in the shelter in the forboding dark is just how I love to remember that part, and sorry, I remember now and have a distinct memory that the whole shelter had perfectly good working lights. We had running water from a well directly below the shelter, but the trench for the septic system had not quite been finished, but all the toilets were working fine. We were not supposed to use them, and one time I scolded Anna Maria Dean the leader of the Daly City Study Group I belonged to here in the Bay Area, who had gotten me into this shelter group, for using the toilet. The generator room was near a large wall panel with lots of hardware. The air filtering system could supposedly work, and we had a 2,000 gallon tank full of diesel buried just outside that edge of the shelter.
One of my favorite days was the first night I slept all night in the spacious Capstone Project, Inc. bomb shelter all alone. I can still remember the atmosphere was intense and dark at night. There were no lights yet. But of course, this was just a natural progression of my stay in the cult so it seemed like just another experience for me. I got up that morning and took out four or five mice I had trapped, buried them and then drove back home 30 miles to the proprietor, Enrico D'argenzio's house in Livingston, MT, where I was living. They had built the concrete structure of the shelter hurriedly during the winter of '89/'90, and I got there not long after they had finished that part, and the only major construction I saw was backfilling by a huge Komatsu excavator. Right away, I paid like $4,000 for my spot in the shelter in cash. In 1991, I paid another amount something like that for my wife to get a spot.
Local contractors in that area did a lot of the work too, and many of them probably never got paid, when time ran out to finish or even start the rooms inside the shelter. The only room in it was for the huge generator we had since the noise of it would be too loud, if we had to immediately occupy it, since Elizabeth Clare Prophet had given us a timeline of a "higher risk" for nuclear war with USSR, in their failing hours. Our prayers and decrees could buy us time. The church had called all of its membership to come to the shelters for a drill, and after that, the members stopped volunteering their time to build the rest of it, and I got appointed to be the caretaker and administer of it. I was good friends with one of the members from Lebanon, Nadim Yissa, who had done a lot of the tractor and rebar work. In 1992, I visited him and his American wife, Emma, who were still there living in a mobile home a short distance above the shelter. I had a great time, and I have those pics of him and his three teenage boys, Gabriel, Jophiel, and eldest, Nadim Jr.
I didn't go back into the shelter then and really only talked to Nadim a few times about it, not wanting to impose on him to explain to me all the conditions of it and how it had been maintained.
I had finally gotten my wife to join the cult, and she went alone to the Summer Conference at the Royal Teton Ranch in the summer of '91 or '92. I can't remember all the details and never really get a chance to talk about my experiences in length, like I'm doing now. She got a tour of the shelter with Enrico while she was there. Enrico was a contractor in the Los Angeles area, until he moved to Arizona to family in idk 1998.
There is this one story that is too scary to share with my wife and that I have not told for a long ass time. One day while everyone was working on the shelter in the early spring of 1990, someone asked me to give a ride, in my '84 Honda Accord, to three of the local contractors working on the shelter. This was up on a hill in Paradise Valley, and it was about a 4 mile ride down a moderately sloping road that was still pretty much completely covered in snow and ice. I figured it wasn't a problem, 'cause my Accord had front wheel drive, and for me alone, I don't remember, I drove it without thinking. But now I had three guys with me going down the hill, and I guess I was a little nervous, never having expected doing that, and on a steeper straightaway that made a sharp right turn further down, there was a car unexpectedly parked on the right, where I should have been driving. By the time I realized this was a problem and decided not to stop or try to stop or run into the car, it was too late, and the car had already started sliding on the ice, and for a long distance of at least 100 feet, we slid. I felt someone behind me push on my seat like he wanted to jump out. I stayed with it, and in the last 20 feet before we would have fallen about 50 feet down into a snow bank, I got the wheels to grab and turn us to the right, around the sharp bend. As soon as I got it close to the side, safely in a narrow ditch on the other side of the road, everybody jumped out. It even got me to jump out before I had stopped the car, although I was able to walk it to a stop. We all got a ride from some truck that came along, and I came back the next day with someone to get my car.
That was very different than all the other excitement I talked about in an earlier post, which were the battles I thought we were fighting in big weekly services, where we thought we were the only ones on the planet, who were "really" fighting the forces of evil, fallen angels, etc. Just like Moses was a messenger in ancient times, Elizabeth Clare Prophet was the modern-day prophet chosen to lead those that knew the "truth" in services, and then there were plenty of other sacrifices also that "gave" God the authority to keep things in the world from getting out of hand into anarchy or whatever. Otherwise without at least one earnest activity on earth, there was nothing on earth worth saving to God. I guess this is kind of the subject of this thread and while I had gotten going on this, I thought I'd write this last part and few details I added earlier to make more sense, for the hell of it.
That's why I don't talk about this with people, because it really is a little complicated, and I hope I don't sound like a nut.
I had to spend one long night in the shelter alone. It was pitch black in there, because the lights were not connected. It was a little scary, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
Sleeping alone in the shelter in the forboding dark is just how I love to remember that part, and sorry, I remember now and have a distinct memory that the whole shelter had perfectly good working lights. We had running water from a well directly below the shelter, but the trench for the septic system had not quite been finished, but all the toilets were working fine. We were not supposed to use them, and one time I scolded Anna Maria Dean the leader of the Daly City Study Group I belonged to here in the Bay Area, who had gotten me into this shelter group, for using the toilet. The generator room was near a large wall panel with lots of hardware. The air filtering system could supposedly work, and we had a 2,000 gallon tank full of diesel buried just outside that edge of the shelter.
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