The Call of the Weird (10 page)

“If they want to come up here and make war I guess that’s what they’ll have to decide to do,” he was quoted as saying in a newspaper article. “But I’m not leaving. Not unless I’m in a body bag.”

After that, I heard nothing. I sent letters and emails to the addresses I had. Nothing came back.

When I arrived back in America in 2004, at a loss as to how to reach Mike, I paid another visit to Colonel Bo Gritz.

He’d had his own troubles since I last saw him. In 1998, distraught over his wife leaving him, he’d shot himself in the chest. Strangely, he survived with only minor wounds. Cynics maintained that a highly decorated green beret would know how to kill himself if he was serious about it. They concluded it had been either a plea for sympathy or a publicity stunt. Since then, he’d moved back to his old house in Sandy Valley, Nevada, an hour outside Vegas in the middle of the desert.

The failure of the apocalypse to take place as planned seemed to have taken some of the wind out of the patriot movement. The preparedness expos were no more. On the Internet, the only event that featured Bo as a speaker was the Esoteric World News Convention.

Here the real-life Rambo was listed between Catheann Fronda, “astrologer and Reiki healer,” and Michelle “Shelly” Hanson, “a seashell reader.” From a high of 858 in 1996, patriot and militia groups had dwindled to 194 in 2000. Some militia sympathizers rallied to the government after 9/11, seeing the federal government as a lesser evil than Arab terrorism. Some were imprisoned on firearms charges. Stricter laws were passed against the time-wasting legal actions favored by many patriots.

I drove down to see Bo one hot spring day. Sandy Valley isn’t on the way to anywhere: On the map it lies at the end of two different roads, not far from the California border. Like many named places in Nevada, it’s not so much a town as a grouping of mobile homes and beached RVs, served by a grid of bright sandy streets. Bo’s house was a triple-wide trailer, prettified into a big suburban-style ranch house. To one side, where you might expect a garage, was an airplane hangar with a small prop plane inside. I’d had difficulty with Bo’s directions and I was about twenty minutes late. Possibly because of this, he did not shake my hand. His two Alsatians were padding around with Stars and Stripes neckerchiefs. The dogs were called Hartzall and Shmily. “Shmily. That’s See How Much I Love You,” Bo said. I didn’t catch his meaning. I asked him how to spell the name. “See How Much I Love You,” he said sharply.

The house was cool and shady and full of military and patriotic kitsch: paintings of wounded Confederate soldiers, dolls in bridal gowns, teddies in Confederate uniforms. Bo was wearing cowboy boots and a Special Forces T-shirt. We sat in his office, where he was due to broadcast his shortwave radio show after lunch. I was there to talk about Mike Cain, but Bo was preoccupied with matters of the heart. His new wife, Judy, had gone into Vegas for the day. He still pined for Claudia, his ex. He’d married her when she was sixteen and he was thirty-five. “I can’t help that I think about her every day,” he said. “Twenty-four years wasn’t long enough . . . but I’m married to Judy, and I would like to fall in love with her, but it’s awful hard.”

Claudia had run off with a handyman. I asked the handyman’s name. Bo paused. “Why would I even want to remember? I was going to kill him just for the principle, because the bastard stole my wife . . . And he needed to be killed’cause he’s a no-good son of a bitch. And if I was a normal person I would have killed him,’cause that’s what I do best.”

When he told me the name, I asked for the spelling. This was pushing it. Bo’s tone changed. “I don’t know, I don’t give a damn, and, you know, God knows my limitations. Prayerfully, I’ll never be in his presence, because I am a weak man, and I am a six-degree martial-art black belt and I’ve learned to control myself,’cause I’ve wanted to take the throat out of a couple of media people, but usually they can tell that so I’ve been lucky. I haven’t killed anybody that wasn’t a communist so far.”

I took this as a veiled warning and changed the subject to Mike Cain.

He remembered Mike as one of a small group of paranoid “knots.” “You ever been fishing? Or you ever got up a line to try to tie something in the back of your car or whatever? And you’re pulling out nice smooth line and there’s always a knot somewhere that you gotta go back and fish out.There were about five or six of those guys that thought that Almost Heaven was gonna be Armageddon. But the reason you go to Almost Heaven is so that nothing happens. You got to make something happen. You got to entertain yourself by watching the elk or driving along the Clearwater River, because there’s no crime up there . . .

“I built that community up there so that people wouldn’t have to be paranoid,” he went on. “They don’t have to worry about house invasions or crime. They don’t have to worry about the FBI getting the wrong address and breaking in their doors. The children would go to home school where they don’t have to be taught alternative lifestyles and sexual education in an explicit way. So it gave them a choice and two hundred and twenty-five families are now living up there . . . ”

He wasn’t sure where Mike was now. He spoke vaguely of the house being taken over by a motorcycle gang, some problems Mike had had with the law. From the way he talked, Almost Heaven was still thriving. I hadn’t really thought through the implications of Bo’s not being there: That for many in the community his presence had been the big draw, and how upset they’d be, having dragged their families up there and invested in his idea, when he upped and left. No wonder there was discord. But at this stage, I didn’t know.

A few weeks later, in July, with a few phone numbers Bo had given me, I drove up to Idaho, hoping to find out what had happened to Mike.

Kamiah is a small farming and logging town. It sits on the bank of the Clearwater River, green mountains on all sides. With the town’s population at around a thousand you can do all your research just going from shop to shop on Main Street, the sheriff’s office (never open), the tiny town hall. The local weekly newspaper, the
Clearwater Progress,
“Serving the upper Clearwater Valley since 1905,” looks like it hasn’t been redesigned since it was first published. The week I was there the features included “Tips For Keeping Black Bears Away” and “Cellphones Are As Entertaining As They Are Practical.”

I checked into a motel in town and spent several days on the mountain chatting to the patriots still up there. Driving to Almost Heaven from Kamiah, you cross the Clearwater River, take a hard left, then weave up the side of a mountain for half an hour, enjoying a view clear across a broad fertile flatland, the Camas Prairie.

News travels fast on the hill. Visitors stand out. As I drove up in the morning and down in the afternoon, the driver of each passing pickup would lift his fingers from the steering wheel in a wave, wondering, presumably, who that was in the town car with Nevada plates. I had the same sense I’d had before of people buzzing and excited. Everyone helpful, going out of their way to set up interviews. Maybe because of their exaggerated sense of the conspiracy at work in the world and the dark intelligences machinating against them, they have a commensurate gratitude and naive faith in what a well-disposed journalist can achieve.

One of those I saw was Mike’s old friend Pat Johnson, whom I’d met that first day eight years before, when they were laying out insulation for the house they were building. Unusual for Almost Heaven, Pat’s property had a fence round it.There were two No Trespassing signs, another one saying: “UN Free Zone.” Though I’d set up the appointment by phone, I approached cautiously.

“We’re still morally bankrupt! Even worse than before!” Pat said, by way of a hello. A slight man, bearded, with a deep smoker’s voice, he was sixty-two. He wore round glasses, a workmen’s shirt and boots. He looked a little shrunken, but still had a warm manner, a friendly face, and a ready laugh.

We sat in his modest mobile home, the Ten Commandments on the wall, a Confederate flag over his bookcase, and on the door a quotation from John Locke about a person’s right to defend himself by killing if necessary. He had a TV in one corner, a free-standing stove in another, and on one bookshelf
Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance
of the Bible, Webster’s Dictionary, Black’s Law Dictionary,
automotive books and books on car paint—his trade. I sipped water from a jam jar.

He’d been talking about Bo’s divorce. “He was fooling around, too. He got into fornicating. I’m not poking the finger. I’m single now . . . It’s hard for the ladyfolk living up here. Lots of stress. We’ve got a lot of bachelors.”

“Why is it stressful for the women?” I asked. “I know what mine would say to me. She’d say, ‘I never know if you’re coming back alive!’”

“Coming back from where?”

“We would police the police. If there was trouble, we’d go where the trouble was, for righteousness’ sake . . . That’s what happened to Cain. Chacha left first. Then he pulled out and joined her, I guess. Been a lot of that. Families breaking up. Divorces . . . I’ve changed from where I was when you were here. I thought I could do it with a gun. I believed a good man armed could make a difference. Now I don’t see that and I haven’t for a while. The system is so far gone, we’ve gone so far into unrighteousness, there’s nothing we can do. We’ve got the aborticide of fifty million children since 1970. The marrying of sodomites, allowing that. And it goes on and on.There is a curse on us. God has put a curse on us, I believe.”

Pat had been among those who thought a concentration camp was being built nearby. “There was a light patch in the sky over there at night, but no town, no stadium. So we thought the UN might be setting up a facility.” He said he’d like to see a return to the biblical law outlined in Isaiah and Jeremiah.

“Stonings? Things like that?” I asked.

“You bet! There would be no more adultery. It would put our people back in God’s order . . . ”

“You’d agree that I have the liberty to do what I like as long as it doesn’t impinge on someone else’s liberty?” I asked. “We can all go to Hell in our own fashion?”

“Oh, sure,” Pat said. “Unless your conduct hurts me. As a nation, when people become morally bankrupt, it hurts me. Your conduct damages me.”

He talked wistfully of a time when some state constitutions called for blasphemers to be branded with a “B” on their forehead. “And I bet there was very little of it done. Can you imagine walking around with a ‘B’ branded on your forehead?”

“Seems a little extreme,” I said.

Pat reminisced about the good old days, when he and twenty or so others went down to the courthouse to spring Mike Cain out of jail after his traffic infraction, all carrying guns (“running heavy” he called it). Now most of those patriots were gone. Some in prison, some fled to Costa Rica or lying low in other states. “When you see your friends leave and go back into Babylon, it’s disheartening. I’ve seen a lot of them come and go, and they profess and believe the same things I believe.” He seemed a little lonely; but his strict adherence to scripture meant he couldn’t think about getting divorced or taking a girlfriend.

Like Mike, Pat stopped paying his property taxes and had his house sold from under him. But Pat bought back his house at auction, at the bargain price of $110. After that a distance came between him and Mike. “Because mine went away and he was still in a standoff. He said, ‘Patrick, don’t you see? If we can get enough people in the same situation’. . . I sensed he was angry with me because it turned out that way.”

One afternoon, Pat took me down to the Clearwater River for some target practice. We loaded the gun rack in the back of Pat’s battered Ram Charger. “This is a forty caliber semi-automatic Smith & Wesson. This is a Ruger 10-22 semi-automatic. Just a fun little gun. It’s a good starter gun.” Then we crept down the hairpin bends of a long winding gravel road, to the bottom of the
canyon. We chatted about conspiracies. Naturally, Pat thought 9/11 was the work of the New World Order. He didn’t think we’d been to the moon and had serious doubts whether we’d been to outer space.

“I did not have sex with that woman,” Pat said, quoting Clinton. “What kind of world is it where our president lies—under oath! You asked about stoning. I’d stone him!”

“Wouldn’t that be ‘cruel and unusual punishment’?”

“Nope. Short and quick. One big boulder. Squash him.”

“What about Bush?”

“He’s the same. Clinton did us a lot of favors. He was so blatant with his Monica Lewinsky. They’ve been a lot more able to keep stuff hidden with Bush. So a lot more people are deceived.”

We took turns pinging a can, shooting uphill toward the sheer sides of the valley. Yellow and purple wildflowers were in bloom, the river idled at our backs. It was a beautiful clear day. We picked some yellow cherry plums and blackberries. If civilization collapsed at this time of year, if the beast system took over, I’d be okay for a few days, I reflected, as long as I could find my way back to this plum tree. “It’s like Paradise,” I said. “It really is almost Heaven.”

Maybe a little naively, I’d thought the election of Bush Jr. might placate the patriots at Almost Heaven. But they hated the Patriot Act with a passion and they opposed the invasion of Iraq, not on humanitarian grounds so much as an example of the federal government overreaching its lawful powers. If anything, the patriots were more pessimistic now. During the Clinton years, they’d managed to cross over and win converts among mainstream right-wingers. But those mainstream right-wingers liked Bush. The so
called war on terror, which was proving so effective in intimidating the majority of the public, was regarded by patriots as a ruse, a pretext for the suspension of more liberties.