For the last two years, Jeffery-James Halvorson, a 33-year-old used-car salesman, has been preparing his property outside Arlee, Montana, for the end of America as we know it. "Progressive taxation has failed," he says, and when the dollar finally collapses, and the shelves at the Piggly Wiggly sit empty, and the oil companies sell every last drop of sweet American crude to China, people will migrate to the Big Sky en masse—and Halvorson believes his compound, where he lives with his cat, 4 dogs, 9 goats, 18 chickens, and an assault rifle, will be perfectly positioned for a new role as a refugee camp.

Fears of impending societal collapse are nothing new in northwest Montana. But Halvorson's home is noteworthy for what it has become in the interim: the Orange Acres Dharma Station, a safe house, inspired in part by the television series Lost, where travelers passing through—or looking for work, or sightseeing, or just killing time before their Social Security check comes in—can find a soft bed, a warm shower, and some mini-golf, at no cost for three days. Longer, if they're willing to put in a little work.

When I stayed at Orange Acres more than a year ago, at the tail end of a cross-country road trip, the place was bustling, filled with that perfectly blended cocktail of humanity otherwise found only at the DMV. Among the guests: a twentysomething guy from Wisconsin, scouting out real estate in Idaho because Israel just bought a ton of military-grade jet fuel, and, as he put it, "things are about to get hairy"; a family of four from Kalispell, way up north by Glacier, looking for work—and a home—in nearby Missoula; a dreadlocked musician (more on that in a second); and an on-again, off-again gold prospector named Carl, perfectly bald with a beard like a badly singed Brillo pad and just one tooth on top that wiggled like a light switch when he got excited. If we could stick around for a few days until his pension came in, Carl said, maybe he could come...