The Shotgun Wedding star said it all began with a small cabin in the woods that he had no desire to spend much more than a day or two at and has since blossomed into a 54-acre remote compound in North Dakota.
“I’ve become a bit of a doomsday prepper, I guess,” he told Inverse. “So I’m learning how to hunt. I have wells. We have water. We have fuel. I’m building something so if things do go south, I have a place to take my family. And I believe that we could live off the land out there. I’m not very good at it yet, but I’m getting there.”
The former All My Children actor doesn’t claim to know when the end of the world will come, but if and when it happens when he’s alive he’ll be prepared.
“I’m building something so if things do go south, I have a place to take my family,” he said.
Not only has Duhamel, who shares a son with Fergie, taken to growing crops on his 54 acres of land, but he’s even learned how to hunt and fish.
He says he acquired the 54 acres after a cabin next to his “little cabin in the woods” went up for sale.
“I bought it for like nothing; this beautiful little idyllic cabin on the water,” he said. “Suddenly I had 54 acres out there. So I had two cabins, one with no electricity or water. They both have wells and electricity now, but they’re both really small.”
Neither cabin started out with water, but he says now they both have “actual plumbing with actual flushing toilets.” Plus they’re equipped with Starlink internet and televisions.
He came up with the idea of creating his own sanctuary after reading Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse, which he said “freaked me out a little bit.” Then he learned about a community where people were allowed to live as long as they had a specliaty.
“And if you didn’t have something to bring to the group, you were out. I’m not saying I’m that crazy about it, but it is a comforting feeling knowing that I could survive out there.”
Duhamel doesn’t call himself a survivalist, but he’s pretty confident that should he need to go off the grid for some time, he’ll be able to survive.
The only issue he’s found is in the winter when it snows.
“We’re so deep in the woods that, especially in the winter, if you run out of any of these things and you get snowed in, you’re suddenly Jack Nicholson in The Shining.”
Well that’s something I didn’t know about Josh Duhamel! You learn something new every day.