From Tent Camp to Militia Compound to National Forest: The Saga of Harvester South.
A closer look at the complicated history of the area surrounding the southernmost public train stop in the metro area, which became the home for a violent homeless tent camp in the 2010s, then a right-wing militia compound in the 2020s, then finally America’s newest national park in the 2030s
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The Progress storytelling project is supposed to be telling “the first 200 years of history” of this fictitious city; but the actual years themselves are 1845 to 2045, which I deliberately did so I could add a little science-fiction to my project. Of particular interest is right this moment in Progress’s history, because of course I’m basing 2024 events on the actual world all of us live in, but even just a few years later in 2028, it’s suddenly now the fictitious alternative world that Progress exists in (which I call the Progressverse), which means I have a chance to present a fictitious view of how the end of the Trump administration might go. But to tell the whole story of how things went down in the Progressverse, we need to go back to the 2010s, when Progress like every other big city in America suddenly had to deal with an explosive crisis in the number of homeless people (also sometimes called “displaced” and “unhoused,” but I’m just going to stick to one term here in this blog entry, with hopefully readers’ forgiveness). And like a lot of these cities, the middle class of Progress didn’t want to notice the exploding number of homeless in the metro area, nor what it represented, nor the monumental tasks that loomed ahead of the US of how to actually deal with it; so instead, they did everything they could to just make the problem disappear from public view, through cruel practices like installing spikes on public benches so that the homeless could not longer rest on them.
Eventually, some of these people drifted out with their belongings to the very farthest stop of the entire massive metropolitan public transit system, i.e. the “Metro;” this was to a lonely station called Harvester South, a good 25 miles away from the center of the Progress inner city. Harvester itself, of course, is the smallish town that services the widely spread community of farmers in this area (where the vast majority of the crops consumed in Progress city are grown), and there’s a station on the southern line for them specifically, conveniently located across the street from the Progress University Agricultural School (also known as the “South Campus”). Just a few miles further south from here, though, the transit authority decided to build a station just in case any development started up way down here, right next to where the vast Winnemac State Forest begins.
Like all the hundreds of stations in the city-subsidized Metro’s vast web, it costs only one dollar to get from the city’s center out to here in the middle of nowhere, a good 30 miles away from the city proper; so more and more homeless people found themselves grabbing their tent and their meager belongings and heading out to this place where no one else goes, because at least they’ll be away from prying police and hassling citizens, free at least to lay down and sleep when they need to. And this served the middle-class citizens of Progress just fine, because the homeless were now out of sight and therefore out of mind, and who cares what the condition of those people’s lives are as long as they don’t have to see them on their way to Starbucks every day? And thus did an ever-enlarging tent city begin emerging at the edge of Winnemac State Forest throughout the 2010s and into the ‘20s, eventually gaining the ominous name of “Camp Nightmare.”
It was called this because that’s what it was; a place with no infrastructure, no utilities, no trash pickup and no law enforcement, yet a legitimate community where close to a thousand people were living by the early 2020s, the camp was a cesspool of filth and disease, where the strong preyed on the weak under a brutal system of warlord justice, with several competing gangs that were in a constant state of war over the drug trade that flowed through this space. Desperate women became voluntary sex slaves to fund their meth addictions, and you never knew when an unmedicated schizophrenic would fly into a psychotic rage at three in the morning and just start stabbing every random person within reach.
The camp became a notorious eyesore for the city, the elephant in the room that no one was willing to talk about, because the solution for fixing the situation seemed so out of reach as to be unachievable. Eventually these stories reached a man named Evan Wright, who lived in Winnemac’s other large metropolis, the more conservative Zenith over on the state’s far east coast (located in the exact spot where real-life Detroit is in our universe). A rising star in the Trump-embracing alt-right movement of the 2010s, Wright was alarmed by the stories he had heard about the tent camp, so decided to go undercover with a GoPro and shoot a week of footage for his extremely popular YouTube channel. The footage he captured shocked a nation, including a bloody gang war fought with broken bottles, a man who literally offered to sell Wright a sex slave on camera, and a violent schizophrenic who literally stabbed Wright in the leg while the camera was rolling.
Wright began gathering resources to provide humanitarian relief at Camp Nightmare, calling on the vast network of fellow quasi-fascist groups that now existed in the US to do the same, and soon these groups had established actual military-style temporary bunks for people to safely sleep, brought in fresh food and water every day, coordinated volunteer doctors to form a clinic at the space, and provided a rather thuggish form of law enforcement and crime prevention, driving out the gangs (through a suspicious amount of mysterious disappearances of key members) and declaring that no more drug use would be tolerated in what was increasingly started to get called not a “camp” but a “compound.” As one might expect, a grateful camp population was easily swayed to join Wright and his alt-right cohorts, and the entire compound started taking on an eerily coordinated look and feel, a campus that started with old military relief structures but that more and more started looking like an actual militia. On July 4th, 2024, Wright held a large and celebratory Independence Day event at the space, where he officially declared it now to have the new name of “Justice.” Four months later, Donald Trump was elected President.
Of course, we all now know what happened at the end of Trump’s presidency (here in the fictitious Progressverse, I mean), when on November 3rd, 2028, hundreds of small militias just like Wright’s, with the assistance of soldiers within the actual military who were friendly to the cause, launched a serious and coordinated attack on the US government within all 51 states simultaneously, with the aim of taking over power the day before the next Presidential election could declare a new leader for the country, a surprisingly sophisticated attack that had been code-named “Judgement Day.” What not a single person knew, though, neither the coup participants nor the people who opposed them, was that the US military was fully aware of and knew every single detail of the attack that had been planned. In fact, when even rumors had started surfacing months before, a special secret task force had been established within the government, containing such personnel as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the head of the CIA, the head of the FBI, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and more; they were so secret that not even the President knew of their existence.
The entire reason for their existence was to take down the movement with maximum force and minimal time, having decided as a group beforehand that they would officially treat the alt-right militias as a legitimate threat to national security, at which point they were legally allowed to strip such people of their rights as US citizens and instead treat them as enemy combatants. Much philosophical discussion was had behind the scenes about the end of World War Two and the decimation of the Nazis in Germany; it was decided that for the sake of this country’s lasting peace, as many of the Judgement Day participants would be killed during the combat as possible, so that like WW2 there would be very few of these people left afterward to continue causing trouble. Armed with a complete and thorough list of all enlisted US soldiers who were planning on participating, at three in the morning the various branches of the military went about very quietly rounding these people up with no warning and immediately putting them in detention centers, where they were unable to get the word out to their civilian brothers-in-arms. A crucial part of this plan had been for such soldiers to quickly gain access to the nation’s various armories, so that the militias would have resources fully equal to the official Army’s; so by the time these militias all got to their designated rendezvous points with their limited militia-style weaponry and armor and realized the cavalry would not be arriving, it was already too late, and the fully armed (and now furious at this brazen attack on their country) soldiers slaughtered the Judgement Day participants in masse, almost 100,000 of them by the time the 24 hours of battling was over, far and away the worst massacre in US history and almost the world.
It would take the nation almost a year to recover from the events of that day, whether that was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff temporarily claiming martial law and therefore national authority while the military in conjunction with the FBI investigated whether Trump’s administration had been an official part of this attack; the delayed next election now going forward; the return of peaceful power the following January 6th after Trump’s expulsion (technically his third impeachment at that point, but this time Congress had no problems reaching the two-thirds super majority needed to kick him out); the slow repair and rebuilding that came from the violent events happening in the streets of every city in the US that day; and the eventual war-crime tribunals, in which it came out that some of Trump’s staff did indeed know about the coming coup attempt (but in his usual style, Trump himself facing no consequences, in that he had a fatal heart attack a month into the process).
Meanwhile, the city of Progress was given ownership again to the now abandoned space at the edge of Winnemac State Forest that had once been Justice, and Camp Nightmare before that, and Harvester South before that. And after quite a bit of debate and soul searching, the city decided to work with the state and the National Forest Service to get the entire area there declared the United States’ newest official national forest, half a million acres once all was said and done (or about one-quarter the size of the real-life Yellowstone National Park), devoted mostly to the pursuit of hardcore wilderness camping and hiking. As usual, the city named the place after a famous public intellectual, in this case early environmentalist John Muir; and the park’s main visitor center was built right in the middle of what used to be the Justice compound, purposely designed in a retro 1920s lodge style that had become trendily popular again at the start of the 2030s. A sophisticated structure, it contains a five-star “farm to table” restaurant that sources all its produce from the nearby Harvester, and rents family cabins located directly behind it, for those with kids who might want a taste of the outdoors but not want to go all the way out into the wilderness with a tent. In the fifteen years since (remember, in the Progressverse it’s the year 2045), it’s become a beloved part of the metro area, especially since anyone anywhere can continue to travel to the park for the low price of one dollar.