Why more Americans are learning to pick locks, bust out of handcuffs, and avoid surveillance.

Online activity has done anything but buck the trend. Doug Ritter, founder of Equipped To Survive, which publishes consumer reports on survival gear, says traffic has grown by the double digits, starting when "things really got depressed economically." Since the site's launch in 1996, it has seen a steady 5 percent growth with 50 percent leaps after major disasters.

"We first noticed a lot of new people showing up on the forum last fall, when people started to recognize that we really are in a recession. And then the unemployment rate started to skyrocket and people started to worry about whether they were going to lose their home," Ritter says. "They're trying to get prepared for more troubled times." The site now receives about 260,000 unique visitors a month.

Traffic at Post Peak Living, an e-commerce site that sells survival kits, has also swelled, particularly as the price of oil rises, says co-founder Andre Angelantoni. Seizing the business opportunity, he has begun to offer online courses in subjects ranging from how to raise chickens to how to start your own garden to the $199 flagship "Uncrash" course, which helps registrants evaluate how each facet of their lives will be affected by the inevitable fall. Angelantoni and his business partner, Craig Wichner, believe the world has reached its peak in oil production and society will regress to the way it operated in the Colonial era.

People have always anticipated the end of days. And in truth, while having survival skills—whether they are tactical or horticultural—could save your life, in reality they will likely do little more than what stockpiling canned beans and toilet paper did in preparation for Y2K: that is, lend a sense of security.

At the end of the final day, after my cohorts and I had successfully evaded Reeve's trackers, we convened at a Chili's Bar & Grill and swapped stories with the other students. None of them had been "caught," either, but many of them had been spotted by Reeve and his trackers and had run for it. Some went deep into disguise; the most shocking of all was Kyle cutting off at least 24 inches of dreads for the exercise. The mood was light-hearted; we were all drinking beer. Maybe it was because, with our knowledge, we all felt a little safer—or at least better prepared next time we got locked out of our homes.