I was a world away from Ike’s suburban bungalow, standing outside a ramshackle old house in northern Idaho.
Seven years earlier I’d stayed here when I’d been making a program about the patriot movement—that fierce and paranoid sect of self-styled freedom fighters who believe that the end times are imminent and that the world is being taken over by a shadowy cabal of evildoers.
Back then it had belonged to Mike Cain and his family. Mike had been one of those dedicated to resisting the onslaught. He’d moved up to Idaho to be part of a patriot community called Almost Heaven, stopped paying his taxes, and awaited the armed showdown with the government that he regarded as inevitable.
But Almost Heaven was little more than a memory now. Mike and his family were gone, and the house was in the hands of Mike’s ex-neighbor John Moore, another Almost Heaven pioneer, though of a less radical stripe.
“We turned it into a gymnasium and a community home,” John said, with a trace of defensiveness, perhaps wary of being seen to capitalize on another man’s misfortune. “It’s called the Woodland Acres Community Center.”
The metal frame of a trampoline I’d once jumped on was rusting in the yard. The plywood porch looked dirty and weather-beaten. Inside the house it was dark. The blinds were down over the windows, and in one corner were a drum kit and some gym equipment. The kitchen was full of stacked boxes. In the old master bedroom mats were laid down for wrestling. It seemed less a community building than a storage area for John and his wife, Michelle, and a clubhouse for their kids. “We replaced that stove,” John said, as if to assert his rights over the place.
I looked in on the bedroom I’d stayed in nearly eight years earlier, when the community was still full of idealism. I felt oddly moved being back. Of all the shows I’d made about weird people, this one had been my favorite. I’d assumed that was partly because it was the first I did, when I was fresh and excited. But coming back, I realized there was more to it than that. There was something deeply romantic about these strange bearded renegades who carried guns and quoted the seventeenth-century English philosophers John Locke and James Harrington, and were willing to lay down their lives for their vision of correct living, even if it came to nothing. “It’s a little sad,” I said. “Thinking this was his dream.”
“It coulda worked out right for them if Mike hadn’t got involved with the wrong people,” John said. “I think he wanted to be the guy who made that stand. I think he wanted to be the guy that did it. I think he wanted to be famous . . . He was supposed to be the guy who died in his house trying to keep his home from the nasty government. That was the philosophy of these people. They really thought this would make a nationwide show of how bad the government was, to take this man’s home.”
I tried to think why I felt sad. The community had been founded by gun nuts and Bible thumpers. When they talked about the slide into immorality, they meant people like me and my friends: drug takers and fornicators, supporters of welfare programs and socialized medicine. George W. Bush, the born-again president, who to me seemed far-right, to them was another socialist, a puppet of the New World Order. But they also spoke for intransigence, idealism, a refusal to take the world on the world’s terms. There was clarity in their simple notions of discipline and justice. In a childish way, I’d like my world to be a story with goodies and baddies. Every time I used to read about a patriot group declaring themselves a sovereign country, as they sometimes did, my heart gladdened. Though undoubtedly weird, it’s also a kind of maverick statement to ask a notary to witness your own personal declaration of independence. A little part of me would have liked to be the sovereign state of Louis.
On a frosty morning eight years earlier, Colonel Bo Gritz unfurled a map and explained his concept for the community. A highly decorated Special Forces commander, supposedly the real-life model for Rambo, he’d run for president in 1992 and found many Christians were paranoid and fearful. They believed America was off-track and needed to return to the core ideals of the Constitution and the Ten Commandments. This was at the end of Clinton’s first term, at the height of paranoia about gun control. “Billary” was hatching plans to take everyone’s firearms away so the government could impose martial law. UN peacekeepers would be in charge; it was all part of the New World Order promoted by the first George Bush and masterminded by a shadowy cabal of bankers and industrialists. Many thought we might be close to the “end of days.”
The same evidence tended to get circulated, often at gun shows and “preparedness expos”: supposed sightings of black helicopters conducting surveillance; signs of concentration camps being built; Soviet tanks on maneuvers; markings on the back of roadside signs that would direct the foreign-born troops during the takeover. One militiaman in Florida spotted government plans in a map on a Trix cereal box. Doubters were directed to consider Waco, the government’s heavy-handed siege of a religious community in Texas that ended in the deaths of about eighty congregants, or Ruby Ridge, another federal standoff that resulted in several fatalities.
Now, Bo’s idea was to go further, found a whole community dedicated to mutual support and safety, a place to sit out Armageddon. Using data from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, he’d figured out that north-central Idaho was the safest place in America. He and a partner had bought up 200 acres there on the mountaintop. They’d subdivided it and called it Almost Heaven. It was as though, having failed in his bid for the presidency, he’d decided to be chief executive of his own little republic, a secessionist state within a state.
Bo had only recently moved up there full-time when I arrived. We spent the day chatting at his house, which was some way from being the frontier redoubt I’d expected, more like a spacious suburban home, sitting on a bluff with a beautiful view over a sheer snowy valley. He drove me down to one of the lots that was available. He was a thick, sturdy man, with snowy hair, and a deep growling voice—warm and friendly enough, though I suspected he was just happy to have an audience and anyone might do.
But even then, there were ominous signs for the community. I got the sense Bo didn’t like it up there. He complained about the cold. He seemed to have misgivings about being the leader, perhaps rattled by the hostile media coverage. After the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by far-right anti-government terrorists, the climate was even less friendly toward people viewed as “militia types.” Where before he’d bragged about the military advantages of his mountaintop position, and written in his memoir, Called to Serve, “It is exciting to be Americans during this time of prophetic reality,” now he downplayed the idea of any confrontation or the imminence of the apocalypse. He sounded offhand when he said Mikhail Gorbachev might be the Antichrist. He was exasperated with some of the more volatile personalities he’d attracted up there, a handful of radical “noodles” who were looking forward to an armed standoff with the government.
Mike Cain was one of the “noodles.” Bo warned me he might try to shoot me if I went and saw him. I went anyway, finding him rolling out insulation with his friend Pat Johnson for a house they were building up on the hill. A tall, thin man, aged fifty or so, a heavy smoker, he’d been a building contractor in Las Vegas. He’d sold everything to be part of Almost Heaven, bringing his family with him. He’d bought an acre and built a house in 1996.
He spoke about wanting to “take America back under the law.” “I’m not opposed to taxes, I’m opposed to forced taxes,” Mike said, as though there were another kind. He objected to paying for services he didn’t use, like upkeep of the cemetery. Like some others up there, he’d signed a “covenant” agreeing to stand firm and protect his neighbors should the government ever try to invade and enslave them.
He told me about Almost Heaven, how they wouldn’t use money, preferring a barter system. “We’re aiming for total selfsufficiency, so we need all skills. We need everybody up here.” I asked whether they might need a TV host.
He invited me back to his ramshackle cement-block homestead, with its free-standing stove, gun rack, and log-cabin extension, and I met his Mexican-born wife, Chacha, and two of their daughters, Vanessa and Tamara. The media had depicted the militia movement as racist, so Mike’s being married to Chacha seemed a good sign. He told me he was an old hippie. I pointed out that hippies put flowers in the ends of guns.
“See that’s when you’re young and dumb. When you get to be my age you learn that it’s better to put bullets in guns.” Over a Mexican dinner cooked by Chacha, I asked him to explain as simply as he could what he was doing up there. “There has been a conspiracy for some years by a group of people that has become known as the New World Order,” he said. “The problem with the New World Order and the one-world government is it requires a benevolent dictator. You show me in history anytime that there’s been a benevolent dictator. Ever. And if you don’t have a benevolent dictator then you have a tyrant.”
I spent two days under his roof. I liked him more than I ever expected. He was friendly, modest, and, only occasionally, when he had a glint in his eye speaking about the government, scary. He told me he no longer paid taxes. He didn’t register his pickup, didn’t carry a driver’s license. “Those are all New World Order items,” he said. It was only a matter of time before the government came looking for him.
On my last afternoon at Almost Heaven, he took time off from his house-building for some target practice. I’d been planning to have a conversation discouraging him from provoking a confrontation. In the event, he brought it up himself, saying, when I asked about earmuffs, “You don’t wear earmuffs in a war.” It was as though he’d been waiting for his moment to declare himself. He got that strange look in his eye and said, “It’s all-out war . . . maybe before the year 2000.”
I told him how sad I’d be if I heard he’d got into a shootout. “Louis, I appreciate what you say, I really do,” he said, hoisting his gun onto his shoulder. “I guarantee, if you hear anything, it won’t be because we started it. My refusal to pay taxes is my right as an American. It’s the out-of-control government that wants to put me in jail for that or take my home or harm my children. It isn’t correct that because I refuse to pay my taxes I am sentenced to die. I should have my day in court . . .
“And it’s not just me saying it. There’s tens of thousands of Americans just like me all across this country. I’m not in any way unique. Perhaps even millions of Americans that are ready for the war. We’re ready. We pray daily that it doesn’t take place. We lift a banner of peace always. But if they would have a war, then let it begin here.”
As I left Mike for the last time, I said, “Don’t do anything silly.”
A year or so after my filming trip, in 1997, I received a letter from Mike. “It’s been a long year for us and very busy. There have been legal battles; some won, some lost, as the NWO continues in its efforts to control us . . . I was arrested and jailed on Nov 8 for the crime of asserting my rights as secured by the Constitution for the united [sic] States of America. My brothers acting under inspiration from our Lord were able to secure my quick release. The dragon is now showing his teeth, and I feel an armed assault against us is imminent. If it takes place, please remember us as a people who feared and loved our God, our country, and our families.”
An officer had pulled him over for driving without plates. Asked for his driver’s license, and not recognizing his authority, Mike said: “I neither admit nor deny but leave you to your proofs.” He was charged with resisting and obstructing justice.
Hearings followed. One of the beliefs of the patriots is that because the flags in U.S. courtrooms have decorative gold fringes on them, it means they are illegal admiralty or martial-law courts. Mike showed up to the hearing with a U.S. flag sewn onto his shirt, with no gold fringe. “This is the flag of my country,” he said. To all the judge’s questions, he replied: “Sir, I do not understand a foreign language.”
Around that time, I spoke to Mike on the phone. It was a little odd. there’s a part of me that half expects contributors to “become normal” after we’ve finished filming. Conversely, Mike seemed to expect me to “become weird.” “We’re not on film now, Louis,” he said. “You know what’s going on. You’re a journalist. You know what the New World Order’s about.” I assured him that I was aware of no satanic globalist conspiracy. I urged him to work through the courts. “I don’t care to be arrested, Louis. I’ve broken no law! . . . I cannot and will not compromise with the Devil. And that’s who we’re dealing with here . . . The compromise is that they should acknowledge the law. And by their own law they’re treasonous.”
In September 2001, I emailed Mike, wondering if the attacks on the World Trade Center might have caused him to realign his priorities. He wrote back: “‘Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.’ James Madison, 1798. Louis, Bin Laden didn’t do it!” He viewed the attacks as a kind of Reichstag fire, to justify a suspension of civil liberties.
Meanwhile, Mike hadn’t been paying his property taxes. The county had sold his house, valued at more than $30,000, for $3,500 at auction. Mike, who didn’t recognize the county’s right to levy “forced” taxes in the first place, also regarded property ownership as absolute: The way he saw it, no government had the authority to take his home, tax bill or not. So he was still living there, but the new owner wished to take possession, and the county authorities were rumored to be poised for a SWAT-style attack.
“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.
One night, down in Kamiah, in the back dining room of the Lolo Cafe, I attended a meeting of a local constitutionalist group, the Watchmen on the Wall. The moderate edge of the extremist fringe, WOTW pride themselves on being law-abiding citizens, whether or not they view those laws as legitimate. They believe in working through the system. There were about thirty-two people present, of whom, I was told, eight or nine were from up on the mountain. Most were in their sixties and seventies. The MC, Tom Simmons, was one of the younger ones. Dressed like a cowboy, with a big white hat and jeans and a big belt buckle, he was, in fact, a web designer who’d moved to Idaho in 1996.
“Welcome global citizens!” he began. “Okay! Let’s get back to doom and gloom here!”
The first item was an initiative to preserve local wildlife habitats by curbing public land grazing. “Environmental extremists,” Tom said.
Next up, a newspaper story about microchipping pets at a local animal shelter. “If they know where the dog is, they know where you are,” one of the matrons commented.
Then federal funding of schools. On this issue, Tom the web designer took a surprising neo-Luddite line. “Why is it that Abraham Lincoln didn’t have a computer and he succeeded?” Tom asked. “Why is it that Albert Einstein didn’t have a computer and he succeeded? Why is it that the man who created most of the computers we have today, Bill Gates, he didn’t have a computer and he succeeded? It’s a string that attaches us to the federal umbilical cord.”
A bald, gnomish old guy in dungarees, with baggy cheeks and wild eyebrows, said that if the sheriff didn’t obey the constitution then he should be “eliminated.”
This was greeted with nervous laughter. “Wait a minute,” Tom Simmons said.
“I’m talking about removed,” the old-timer said, backtracking. “Agreed,” Tom said. “The problem that we have, and you well know this, Dave, is that we are not the majority in this county. I think we have to be prepared to be patient. It’s like the swirling commode. It gets faster and faster. As we get closer to the bottom, more and more people are going to wake up.”
At the end, Jack McLamb, one of the community leaders from Almost Heaven, stood up and said a prayer. “You’ve given us a commandment, Lord, to occupy the institutions of this land until you return. Let us focus on that and remember that’s a commandment from you, o Lord.”
I pieced together a picture of Mike’s last few years. After the run-in over the driver’s license and the missed court date, the judge issued a warrant for Mike’s arrest. After that, Mike rarely left the house. To earn some money, Chacha qualified as a nurse’s assistant, got a social security number, joined the “Antichrist system.”
Mike had become well-known in patriot circles, from the interviews he’d done and for his stand on property taxes. Not paying income tax, sure, who did? But not paying property taxes? That was hardcore. Mike’s house became a gathering place for antigovernment types. One called Dave Roach would drive down most weekends. Another, a “legal expert” named Larry Raugust, moved in with Mike. They put plywood over the windows, with little slits to shoot through in anticipation of the showdown.
“Chacha used to cry at people’s houses,” John Moore said. John was the next-door neighbor, an air-conditioning salesman who’d moved up there in 1997 with his wife, Michelle, and their two sons. “When we cleaned the house up, I found a note from Chacha saying ‘I can’t live like this anymore.’”
Around the time of Mike’s trouble over his driver’s license, he asked people to send in their licenses to Idaho County in a mass protest. John refused. “I said, ‘You’re kidding. I’ve got a job! I’ve got to go to work!’” After that, they fell out.
John became convinced there would be a shoot-out. He built a concrete wall between his house and Mike’s, to protect himself and his family from the crossfire. By early 2002, the local biker who’d bought the house from the county was suing to get possession. Supposedly, he wanted to turn it into a clubhouse for his outlaw biker gang, “The Highwaymen.” In John’s account, the sheriff was only waiting for some bomb sniffer dogs from the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah before making his move: He thought he might need them after the shoot-out if the house was booby-trapped.
In the end, without telling Mike, John stepped in and bought the house on behalf of a “trust.” John seemed a little sheepish talking about the trust. Who was in it wasn’t clear. “We saved it from becoming a biker hangout,” he said. “I just let Mike think it was still going to happen, that the cops were still coming up to get’em.” Mike left in the middle of the night, got a lift down to the bus station and hopped on a bus. He left everything behind—furniture, mementoes, family photos—and went to ground, hiding out from the authorities and from his fellow patriots who felt let down that he hadn’t martyred himself. “So many of his followers were disgusted with him for leaving like that,” John said, “’cause they all had confidence in him.”
Unlike Mike, John was a fan of Bo’s. He used to listen to Bo’s radio show, bought his book, even paid for military-style training for himself and his family.
“I liked being around Bo because he had such a good character. It wasn’t like we were looking for a guru or some kind of cult leader. Here’s a guy who’s been exposed to so many things in his life. I want to say he was wise.”
But even John seemed a little disillusioned with Almost Heaven. Now people were leaving, he said. Property values were going down. His lot lost $2,000 in value the previous year. There was no work. Many of those who left sold their property to people who weren’t patriots. “So now it’s like a regular old community.”
John is a moderate by old Almost Heaven standards. Still, he believes the New World Order and its shock troops, the UN peacekeepers, are on course to take over and annihilate anyone who isn’t cooperative. “America is going down a course right now that’s destined, through immorality and lack of faith in God, that we can’t turn back from . . . I feel we’re going to see Christians treated as terrorists. I don’t think I’d be safe up here but I’d probably be one of the last to die. After they mopped up the cities they might come after these teeny communities.”
John and Michelle walked me to my car. I was struck by something John said: “Mike Cain didn’t participate. He wanted everyone to participate in his thing.” Mike had his cause; John started a “neighborhood watch,” which he coordinated with the sheriff; down in Kamiah there were the meetings of the Watchmen on the Wall. Everyone wanted his own outfit. Everyone was looking for community, but on his own strict terms. A cooperative of rabid individualists, it was oxymoronic in its very conception, like a social club for hermits.
Patriots are ornery and paranoid by their very nature. They don’t mix well. Many of the pilgrims up on the mountain were so mistrustful of government, so resigned to the triumph of evil and the globalist octopus, that the only options were to withdraw totally and wait for Armageddon or to go down in a hail of bullets. Bo’s leaving obviously didn’t help. Nor did the priorities of the original sales pitch, which were to do with safety and defensiveness and immunity from natural disasters, and not civic-mindedness and how to influence local government. Maybe if there had been work in the area they might have muddled through, but there wasn’t even that. As the saying goes, the Devil has the best tunes . . . and the satanic system has the best jobs. This was the ultimate irony, in a way. It’s all very well to crave independence, but what are you going to do for a job? Running out of money’s fine if civilization is about to collapse. But what if the end never comes?
Not long after Mike disappeared, his old patriot brothers-inarms started getting rounded up. Mike’s friend and frequent guest Dave Roach was revealed to be a government informant. Larry Raugust, the live-in legal adviser, was arrested in late 2002. He was charged with manufacturing and possessing “a destructive de-vice”— seven counts. They’d been removed from Mike’s property, as it turned out. (“They were flash-bang things,” Pat said. “You can buy them in Soldier of Fortune magazine.”) At his trial, according to an article in the Lewiston Tribune, he referred to himself as “Larry Eugene of the House of Raugust.” He was sentenced to seventy-seven months in prison.
Another who lived with Mike, James Newmeyer, nicknamed “Snake,” was arrested and charged with eight felony weapons charges.
Thanks to Dave Roach, federal authorities have 600 hours of recordings of meetings of Mike and Larry’s group, “Idaho County Unincorporated Posse.” Pat was at many of those meetings, speaking unguardedly. He has good reason to think he might be the next to be arrested. He said he pays his property taxes now. He’s got a hole in the yard where he sleeps when he wants to be extra low-profile. “Like Saddam Hussein,” I said.
I asked him if he thought they’d come after him.
“Uh-huh. I think they’re coming after me right now. Because I’ve been a thorn in their side. I think they’re going to put me away for a while. But that’s in God’s hands. I’m not going to change my beliefs. I haven’t used a social security number in over ten years, and I’m not going to start now. I won’t be part of that Luciferian system.”
Some weeks later, after a series of phone calls to people who knew people, followed by a letter, and more phone calls, I got a call from Chacha. We met for coffee in Las Vegas, where she was living. Forty-eight now, she looked younger and more glamorous than I remembered, dainty and dark-eyed.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said, unasked. “I don’t know what stuff they planted or anything. They didn’t tell me anything. You know how they felt about women.”
Now the woman who’d once denounced “international banksters” and hosted a cavalcade of guvmint-hating right-wing groupies was hymning the daily miracles of the suburban shopping experience: Starbucks and Borders; the apartment she shared with Mike, its swimming pool and Jacuzzi; her new job caring for Alzheimer’s patients. “And when they get cancer, they don’t die. Because they don’t know they have it. We have one old man, he was supposed to die two years ago, but he didn’t, because he doesn’t know.”
She’d been in Vegas three years, driving through the night from Idaho to get there. Mike had left Almost Heaven seven months after her. In that time, they spoke every day. Now he was working as a truck driver, registered, back on the books of the beast system. “He was off the grid for a while, wasn’t he?” I said. “I don’t want to talk about that,” Chacha replied.
She was upbeat and in tune with her surroundings in a way she never was in Almost Heaven. Her face clouded over when she spoke about it. “The worst mistake we ever made was going up to Idaho,” she said.
They live in a gated community of apartments. Mike was still asleep, so we crept around and whispered. Cream carpet and walls, cute furnishings, flowers, mirrors: as feminine in decor as their house in Almost Heaven had been masculine. Mike was living on Chacha’s terms now. He came out of the bedroom, bleary-eyed, wearing a T-shirt that said “Bum.” He’d been working nights but looked well, still lean and weathered. It was odd seeing him in those circumstances.
We chatted over coffee. I had thought he might have mellowed in his beliefs, but his obsession with the illegitimacy of most laws, his fixation on weird legal niceties (the difference between “Nevada State” and “the State of Nevada” and so on) was as strong as ever. The only difference was Chacha didn’t participate. Now she disapproved. “She’s had her bellyful. She’s saturated. She doesn’t want to hear about any apocalyptic views on end times. She’s done with it.”
I explained how I’d wanted to find out what happened to the patriots, him especially. “A rise and fall kind of thing?” he said, a little sardonically. “I chose to challenge the system, and the system just wears you down. It’s not that it comes after you directly; the delays just go on and on and on.”
“How do you feel about the whole experience?”
Mike paused and said, “Hmm. Chacha and I spoke about it. Sense of loss, I guess. It’s not the property, you can always get that back. I guess my sense of loss is that I’m no longer surprised at the cunning and contrivances of men. And I’m sorry I lost that, because I’d always like to remain a little surprised when I encounter evil . . . Something Goethe said, and it impressed me deeply: ‘At the moment of commitment, the universe conspires to assist you.’ I have great admiration for Goethe, but in this case it didn’t turn out to be true.
“I have good feelings about it because I feel like I’ve become more spiritually in tune than I was before, and I’m terribly, terribly sad that I missed out on so many years of my daughter’s life, years that I can never regain. That’s what I’m saddest about. I couldn’t participate as she was growing up from twelve to eighteen.”
“Has she forgiven you?”
“I asked her about that. She said, ‘I was angry about that for a long time, Daddy, but I’m not anymore.’ But I don’t think that trust can ever be totally rebuilt.” Mike’s eyes were welling up. “It was hard to leave there. It was a lot harder to leave than it was arriving. At this stage of my life, leaving there was the best thing that ever happened to me.” He paused and said, “What did they say about me up there?”
I explained that different people said different things; that people had liked him but they wondered why he’d been so inflexible, puzzled that he would make a stand on the issue of property taxes. I also said they speculated that Mike had ended up feeling it was more important to be with Chacha than to make a stand.
“I lost six years with my daughter. I didn’t want to lose my wife too. Sure, they’re right. I left to be with Chacha. And I’m glad I did.”