Y(awn)2K? After Early Onset, Town’s Millennium Fever Cools

By this time last year, when most of America was barely waking up to the Y2K bug, this southern Oregon city had been feeling millennial jitters for months.

Hundreds of people attended public meetings on the Y2K computer problem. The mayor’s wife conducted a 12-part seminar in her living room on how to survive societal collapse. Business was booming at stores selling wood stoves, dried food and solar collectors.

“Millennium breeds a new survivalism,” proclaimed a headline kicking off a three-part series in the Grants Pass Daily Courier. It was Sept. 10, 1998, a full four months before Time magazine caught up to the trend with its own “Millennium Madness” cover story.

What a difference a year makes.

Early to grow alarmed, the 50,000 residents of the Grants Pass area remain ahead of the curve, this time in regaining a sense of calm. With less than three months remaining until 2000, sales have slumped at stores catering to the survival-minded. Emergency-preparedness meetings are sparsely attended, when they are held at all.

People seem to have made up their minds about how worked up they’re going to get about Y2K. A few are holed up at the end of dirt roads with a year’s supply of food and ammo. Others have found equanimity by padding their pantries with extra canned food. But most people around here have done little or nothing to prepare--and they feel fine about it.

“In the next three months, I think there’s going to be some pretty massive yawning,” says Mayor Gordon Anderson. He’s a vocal advocate of Y2K readiness but has grown weary of haranguing the what-me-worry? crowd.

“It’s been a pretty tough battle to get people concerned,” he says. “We’re reaching 5% of the people, at best.”

Why the complacency, in this supposed hotbed of preparedness for the worst?

The message from Grants Pass--gleaned from conversations in downtown shops, suburban homes and back-road retreats--is that fixing computer glitches alone won’t make the difference between peace and paranoia in the face of uncertainty.

What Y2K will bring, here or elsewhere, depends greatly on what a person brings to Y2K.

The Mayor’s Wife Takes Charge

“In any community, there’s a bell curve. There’s credibility in the middle and strangeness on the ends,” says Marilyn Anderson, the mayor’s wife.

It’s hard to picture anyone more solidly in the middle. At 56, Marilyn Anderson favors denim jumpers, keeps her white hair cut short and describes herself as a “stay-at-home mom” even though her two grown children left the nest years ago. She is quiet but forthright, a woman who’s apt to run with an idea once it gets into her head.

Such was the case in May 1998, when she watched a video warning that computers’ inability to distinguish between years ending in double zero--1900 and 2000--could wreak worldwide havoc. Jetliners could crash. Power plants could fail.

Marilyn Anderson was alarmed but didn’t know if the video was “real, a hoax, or an infomercial.” So she started surfing the Internet and soon filled a whole laundry basket with printouts about the Y2K bug.

Soon afterward she sponsored a video presentation at her church, and 350 people showed up. While her husband exercised his mayoral prerogative to grill city officials on their efforts to find computer glitches in city equipment, Marilyn Anderson directed her attention to the home front. What could she do, she wondered, to weather an extended emergency?

She convened a readiness discussion group. Every other week for three months, the group of about 18 friends and relatives met in her living room to discuss survival topics--how to purify water, how to cope without electricity.

She tapped into a wealth of knowledge around Grants Pass, long a place favored by the self-sufficient, from Dust Bowl Okies to sandal-clad hippies to gun-toting militia types. During the Cold War, people who worried about nuclear holocaust sought refuge here, declaring it to be among the safest spots from fallout because of winds off the Pacific.

“There are hard-core survivalists around here,” Marilyn Anderson says. “I’ve picked their brains, but I’m not one of them.”

By this time last year, she was in high gear, building up a three-month stockpile of food. By last December, she was nearly done. All that’s left now in her disaster plan is “a little tweaking,” she says.

For her, the process of getting ready was as useful as the supplies themselves.

“Once I researched things and got a plan, I felt better. Any plan helps reduce anxiety,” she says. “Once I had a certain level of preparedness, it all let go. I got to a point and decided that’s my boundary. I’m not going to prepare beyond that, and I’ll let the chips fall where they may.

“This can take on a life of its own,” she says. “I’ve seen people, this becomes their religion, their life. They go nuts.”

The Doomsayer Remains Convinced

Richard Busk, 59, is used to hearing people say he’s “out there.” If so, he retorts, it’s only because he’s privy to information “out there” that isn’t known to the public.

It’s his personal mission to let people in on what they’ve been missing.

The Y2K bug is just part of a much bigger and more ominous picture, he says, one that somehow involves global warming, the ozone layer, Chinese troops massing at the Panama Canal and a top-secret aircraft at Area 51 that can fly at 30,000 mph, powered by the rare-earth element thulium.

“It’s part of a vast program,” Busk says, lowering his voice. “I won’t even take you above that level, but maybe someday, privately, if you want to talk, I can tell you things that will curl your hair.”

For now, he talks about Y2K. Starting in the summer of 1998, he ran “Computer Crisis” discussion groups each Thursday night in the banquet room of the Black Forest restaurant.

“This event could be the worst thing that ever happens to the world,” he told his wide-eyed listeners, who numbered up to 40 a week.

By January, weekly attendance had dropped to a half-dozen or so, and Busk canceled the sessions. Now, if people want his advice, they have to drop by his Basic Survival Store, a 10-by-20-foot room crammed with secondhand wood stoves and rusty flea-market tools.

Not many drop by.

“The number of people who are in preparation here is more than in other places,” Busk says. “But it’s still not that many. We have many who are in denial.”

The View From Main Street

Tracy Samuelson, an assistant at the Budget rental-car office downtown, cheerfully explains what she is doing to prepare for potential disruptions:

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I’m 28 years old. I’m on the high end of being a free-living teenager. I don’t think there’s going to be any difference in my life because of Y2K. It won’t have any effect. I think people getting all that stuff really is crazy. It’s insanity at its finest.”

Her office colleague isn’t as cavalier.

“I don’t know,” says Leesa Baker, 30. “My friend Patty, she’s been storing up. I think people should be cautious.”

Most merchants in Grants Pass appear to line up behind Baker, not Samuelson. To them, Y2K is just another hassle, like a bounced check or an unhappy customer. Few expect major disruptions.

At Van Olpton’s Boutique, a long, narrow store draped with dresses and smelling of lady’s shoes, a Siamese cat lolls on the counter as Christie Potter rings up a sale. They have no computer, she says, and at this point they’ll hold off until after the new year--just to see what happens.

A few doors down at Chuck King Designer Jewelry, sales are transacted on an antique cash register and repairs are done by hand. An ancient computer with a defective hard drive sits on Stephanie Nugent’s desk. Recently she started copying all customer records from the computer onto 3-by-5 index cards--a giant leap backward into the new millennium.

“I’m not real computer-literate,” Nugent confesses. “You do what you can do.”

At the Toyota dealership, used-car manager Cliff Wheeler reaches into a drawer and pulls out a thick binder that the central office sent him. “Toyota Mission 2000,” it reads, with detailed instructions to make sure every dealership is Y2K-compliant.

Wheeler has run diagnostics on all the software and hardware in the office. He has documents from suppliers testifying that the phones, fax machines and thermostats won’t quit working Jan. 1.

“We’ve been working on it for two years,” he says. “We think we’re there. Now all we have to do is wait.”

Y2K-related businesses are hoping that a last-minute angst attack will revive their sagging sales.

“Last winter we shipped all over the country. We were so busy,” says Sherry Dowell. She sells survival-preparedness supplies at Sherry’s Storehouse, just north of town. “This summer it went down to almost nothing. In the last few weeks we’ve noticed a pickup, but nowhere close to last winter.”

At City Hall, city attorney Ulys Stapleton says workers have tested all the personal computers for Y2K compliance. In case of a power outage around New Year’s Day, the sewage treatment plant has a backup generator with fuel for three days, and the city’s reservoirs will be pumped up with a three-day supply of drinking water.

“I think everything’s all in order,” Stapleton says. “I think the biggest problem is worrying about people worrying. It’s the fear of the unknown.”