The Call of the Weird (11 page)

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.”

No one was sure where he was.

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.”