“Well, what do you think, God?”
I had never heard my father pray before, but this was no prayer. He was talking to me. I was around nine years old.
“I’m not God.”
He pushed back a bit before dropping the matter, and we continued across the parking lot to his pickup. We had just attended a service of the Church of Religious Science in Huntington Beach, California. Reverend Peggy Bassett was the organization’s first female pastor, and became president of the worldwide church a few years later.
Her sermon dealt primarily with the power of affirmation. “We are all God,” she explained, and therefore, we had the power to speak things into reality. The Universe would deliver whatever we desired, so long as we truly believed, were persistent, and were precise with our words.
She told the story of a woman who wanted a new Cadillac. Each day, she did her daily affirmations, repeating her mantra, “There is a brand new Cadillac in my garage. There is a brand new Cadillac in my garage.” Within weeks, The Universe complied; a drunk driver crashed a brand new Cadillac through her garage door.
It seems The Universe is kind of a dick.
In fairness, if I was a universe, that’s exactly the kind of universe I would be.
Reverend Bassett went on to explain that the woman had needed to be more specific. She should have instead said, “I own a brand new Cadillac,” or perhaps she should even have noted the year and model, the condition of the car, and that she owned it debt-free.
On any other Sunday I would have attended a Presbyterian church with my mother and grandparents; this talk of being God and manifesting material wealth gave me a sick feeling in my stomach. And there were the obvious limits of the practice, like what happened when two true believers wanted the same Cadillac.
Even so, one thing Reverend Bassett said resonated with me, as she urged her congregation to embark on their affirmation journeys without procrastination. “I’ve never known anyone who could ‘shoulda.’” The sentence hit me hard as a child; today it haunts me.
I shook hands with the Reverend after the service, and she said she hoped to see me again the next week. I was sure to tell her that I was a Presbyterian and would not be returning.
I’ve never had any difficulty telling people what I think. I had my first argument with an authority figure when I was four; my preschool teacher and I disagreed over whether or not alligators laid eggs. I insisted they did, but she would not concede, so the following day I brought photographic proof.
If my grandparents’ dinner table was a TV show, it was Crossfire, not the Cleavers. Critical thinking and effective communication were valued over compliance; I was well-behaved, but I was not a compliant child.
So in Sunday School that morning in Huntington Beach, I spent much of the time arguing theology with the teacher. I don’t recall the substance of the debate, only that all the kids were given star-shaped purple pencil toppers that smelled like burning tires.
In the adult service, I struggled more in my discomfort. In most ways this was no different from the church I attended every Sunday. There was no cross on the chancel wall, no mention of Jesus Christ, no Communion, but I was struck more by the similarities.
They sang songs and read scriptures. People were warm, and seemed genuine, just like the Presbyterians. They even greeted each other with the same, broad spectrum of awkward handshakes, ranging from the performative Bone Crusher to the mortifying Dead Fish.
What stood out more than any of the specific ritual differences was that these people seemed very happy. It’s not that people at the Presbyterian church were depressed, but these were perhaps the happiest people I’d ever seen, bordering on maniacal.
Their happiness also had an edge to it, a hint of mockery, almost like they were getting away with something. They seemed to be receiving all of the benefits of religion without any of the costs. They were there to worship themselves. They had no need of forgiveness. And they were all about to be very rich.
My father’s apartment was barely furnished. He still had the old waterbed my parents had slept on when they were married, but I used a mattress on the floor. We ate beef stroganoff or ‘beans and weenies,’ the only two things I’ve ever known him to cook.
He was not the archetypal ‘Disneyland Dad,’ only because Disneyland, just up the road, was out of his price range. Each time he picked me up, he’d ask me what I wanted to do, I’d say I didn’t know, and he’d complain that I was indecisive. We’d inevitably end up at the Westminster Mall, where I’d play with the puppies in the pet store, for free.
On birthdays and Christmases he’d give me the free gifts he received for attending time share seminars. I remember a portable black and white TV that never picked up any stations, a knockoff Casio SK-1 keyboard, and a boom box that survived into my high school years, until it met a swift end at the beach one afternoon, after daring to eat my Master of Puppets cassette.
The last time I was in his Huntington Beach apartment, my father had a vision board pinned to his bedroom wall. It was a sheet of white poster board with a photo of himself in the center, and all around it he had glued fans of undersized hundred dollar bills.
I wondered if he was being precise enough.
He later moved to an intentional community and clothing-optional hot springs resort in Central California, somewhere between Ronald Reagan’s Rancho Del Cielo and Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. I visited a few times in my early teens. I recall spending the night under the live oaks, the smell of sulfur in the spring-fed pools, the endless parade of saggy balls.
My older brother also lived at the resort, and he stayed long after my father had moved on. We talked about Guns N’ Roses on my last visit; he thought they were the last of the real rock ’n’ roll bands, that Appetite for Destruction was a perfect hard rock album. It was the last time I saw him before he died.
My father moved to another commune, where the only hard stipulation for residents was that they submit a weekly statement of personal belief. By then he had become more of a religious skeptic, and even that minimal requirement seemed to exasperate him.
I lost track of all his locations and movements and associations. He appeared on a daytime talk show to promote some form of polyamory. He was inducted into an unrecognized Native American tribe, and given the name ‘Singing Bear,’ because, as he later relayed to me, he was always singing. That was news to me.
By my college years he was living in Florida, running a scooter rental business with my uncle. I once heard them talking about keeping their cash receipts off the books to avoid paying taxes. I guess The Universe finally came through.
____
Three distinct explosions, first one, then two more in quick succession, a rhythm permanently lodged in my memory. They don’t sound like the bombs in the movies. There’s a short pop, and then the concussion wave hits.
We run, thousands of us, and then we slow, and turn back. Maybe we can help.
A blood-soaked woman screams as medics try to get her into an ambulance. A female soldier with long, black hair sobs and shakes as her friend tries to comfort her. On the sidewalk, a pigeon lies dead from a single, small wound, amid flyers claiming responsibility for the attack.
September 4, 1997, Ben Yehudah Street, Jerusalem.
It was my fourth day in Israel. Classes hadn’t started yet, and my roommate and I wanted to do some people-watching. Mikey was from Nashville, a Jew by Choice with Christian beliefs. He had a Star of David tattooed on his chest, and a minimalist crucifix ran the length of his back.
By chance, we were the only tattooed, ‘punk-adjacent’ students on our little campus, nestled on Mount Zion, between the Old City and the Hinnom Valley. Herod Agrippa’s two thousand-year-old city wall formed one side of the hallway between our dorm room and the toilets.
On Ben Yehudah Street, we argued about the best vantage point. I liked a shady spot against the wall of a little corner shop, but Mikey wanted to sit in Zion Square. I caved, and we made our way down the street. Minutes later, the corner shop was destroyed.
Three men, members of Hamas, had entered the store, reportedly disguised as women, and detonated explosive devices, killing themselves and five others, and injuring perhaps hundreds. Among the dead, three fourteen-year-old girls.
Friends who had been across town in the Palestinian Quarter when the bombs went off described shopkeepers sobbing as they rolled down and locked their overhead doors. When asked why they were crying, they said it was for the Israelis who had just died, the desperate men who had killed them, and the retribution they knew was coming.
Back on campus, we were told that God had saved us. He had a plan for us. I questioned why an all-powerful god would have allowed three teenage girls to die instead of me, why he wouldn’t have just disarmed the bombs instead, or better yet, brought peace to the region.
The closest thing to counseling I received was talking about the event with the other students who had witnessed it, around twenty of us in all. The faculty and staff had a more detached perspective. “That’s just the way it is here.” “It won’t be the last time.” “Life goes on.”
Indeed the very shop that was blown up on Ben Yehudah Street was repaired and reopened within about a week.
Most days, and nights, Mikey and I wandered, or I wandered alone, between the Old City and the New, down residential streets, past archaeological sites and along fabled pathways.
We walked one night through a newly bulldozed neighborhood, where a Palestinian family huddled in the rubble of their former home, cooking dinner on an open fire. We nodded in acknowledgement as we passed; there was nothing to be said.
Down the hillside, a tent city had formed, where displaced families awaited relief or relocation. It was still early September, but colder nights were coming.
I took a student job as a security guard. With my partner, Eric, I patrolled the campus boundaries, and at night we escorted female students to an auxiliary housing unit in West Jerusalem. Women were cautioned to never walk at night without a male escort.
Our job training consisted of some minimal instructions, and the addendum, “If you have to get physical with someone, use your best judgment. Just know that anything you do will be nothing compared to what the police will do.”
We only called them once, when a sex worker rolled out a blanket under a tree just outside the campus wall and refused to leave. Men had begun to gather, and a few of them were shooting heroin.
Eric and I decided that getting physical was in no one’s interest, especially if it exposed us to dirty needles, though we agonized over whether or not to involve the authorities. We’d heard stories of torture in police custody. Thankfully, when they arrived, they assisted us in merely walking the last stragglers out of the area, and no physical contact was made.
In the Christian Quarter of the Old City, the police would come to “collect taxes.” Mikey and I helped Palestinian shopkeepers lock up their stores before the cops could raid their cashboxes.
Sometimes we’d work in Carlos’s olive wood shop so he could have a break or run errands. Haggling was a favorite pastime, and we became ruthless; we always tried to fleece the tourists worse than any shop owner would have.
In school I studied Hebrew and archaeology, but I was unable to focus. I didn’t sleep well. A slamming door or a backfiring car would jolt me awake, and cause my heart to race. One night the mere clacking together of my own teeth awoke me into a panic.
At field sites, I chased lizards along the remnants of ancient stone walls, as my more conscientious classmates tried to conceal their amusement. I started most of our sessions at the back of the group, half-listening to the professor, half-scanning the terrain for agamas, before drifting away on my own.
In a moment of contrition I decided to make a stronger effort, and I moved to the front of the class, determined to give the professor my full attention. And then I saw it — the foamy saliva collecting in the corners of his mouth as he spoke. Why had no one mentioned this to me? I turned and ran toward the nearest sunbathing lizard.
I was not the only one who was distracted. When our field studies took us into caves, a few of us would split off from the group and look for alternative ways in and out. This invariably led to someone’s head or foot popping through an opening at an inopportune moment. Some of the passageways were barely large enough to squeeze through, but thanks to all of the walking and the school cafeteria’s low-protein diet, I had become quite slender.
I dropped my Egyptology class because I found the way the professor said “Mmmkay” to be emotionally distressing. But as I had already paid for the weeklong trip to Egypt, I got to join the class without having to study. I needed that break.
In temples and tombs, I played a cassette of the Indiana Jones soundtrack in my Walkman as I ran through corridors, hid behind columns, and leapt between massive stones. I didn’t have a bullwhip, but that was probably for the best.
When I sensed another student becoming overwhelmed by our relentless schedule, I’d hand over the Walkman. “Take some alone time. Put these headphones on, and when you’re ready, press play. Come back when you feel better.”
On a short trip to Jordan we visited Petra, an important site in its own right, but one meaningful to me because of its use in the final scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In reality there is no temple hidden inside the iconic Treasury, and the site is crowded with tourists and vendors, but for a child of the eighties, it was a sacred place.
Near the Treasury, two Bedouin men with some horses offered rides to tourists for a few dinars. I invited a couple other students to join me for the lazy walk up the trail to the parking lot. I paid one of the men and I swung into the saddle; then as he turned away to help my friends onto their horses, I took the lead rope and bolted.
For less than a minute I was riding at a full gallop, winding through the Canyon of the Crescent Moon, leaving a cloud of dust behind me. I didn’t even need the soundtrack. The ride was over in seconds, but while it lasted it was the best I’d felt in months.
When I reached the top of the trail I dismounted and walked the horse to cool him down. Minutes later, an out-of-breath Bedouin emerged from the canyon, calling my name between gasps for air. “Steve … (gasp) Steve …” One of the girls must have told him my name after I took off. No one had known I could ride.
“Steve, you were supposed to let me walk you up the trail. Now my horse is too tired to work for the rest of the day.” I knew his horse was fine, but I emptied my pockets, happy to pay for that moment of freedom. We talked about horses for a few minutes until the girls arrived, led along by his partner.
That night in Amman, a tense cab ride put Mikey and me on edge. Our driver stopped to pick up a friend, who had a fresh bandage across his throat, before asking us, “You are American?” We told him we were. He then asked, “What do you think of the Jews?”
Mikey covered his Star of David with his shirt collar.
I answered, “As an American, I try to hate all people equally.”
That seemed to satisfy him, and he shared some of his experience as a refugee, his enmity toward the people who made him into one, and his distaste for Bill Clinton, all peppered with the kind of awkward profanity you might hear from a kid still learning to cuss properly. We were glad the ride was short.
On the bus back to the border the next morning, we passed women in black burqas as they walked along the dusty roadside, where vendors bartered beneath makeshift canopies, and young boys drove their heavy-laden donkeys and multicolored herds of scrawny camels.
I braced for the shift back, wishing I’d had a little more time.
The Hinnom Valley was once the site of child sacrifices to Moloch. In the first century it was used for the isolation and burial of lepers, and the same tombs had served as clandestine burial sites in more recent years. While exploring them, two of my classmates found the skeletal remains of several people.
Called Gehenna in the New Testament, the valley came to represent a place of eternal fire and final judgment, with some later traditions regarding it as Hell itself. For some, the characterization is only reinforced by its large numbers of Egyptian fruit bats.
Across the valley from campus, there was a tiny movie theater, and when I learned they were screening Delicatessen, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s post-apocalyptic masterpiece, I convinced about a dozen of my classmates to join me there.
After the film, as we walked back across the valley, we noticed several young men walking some distance behind us. We began to move faster, but the men matched our speed, and soon they were gaining ground. As the gap between our parties tightened, we saw rifles and a few Uzis.
We sped up again. And so did they.
Soon we were sprinting, the armed men keeping pace. I reached the campus gate first, and fumbled with my keys for a moment before finding the lock, then held the gate open as my friends ran inside and sheltered behind the stone garden wall.
I slipped through and slammed the locked gate behind me, but the moment I was inside, my fear turned to anger. I remember the looks of horror on the women’s faces when instead of taking cover, I turned and faced our pursuers.
When they reached the gate I shouted; my exact words escape me, but it was something akin to “What the fuck!”
They kept their guns lowered, and through heavy breaths, a man with an Uzi asked me, “How do you get to the Wailing Wall?”
“Are you fucking serious? You scared the shit out of us!”
He explained that they were IDF, visiting from Tel Aviv. Young IDF soldiers are married to their guns for the duration of their mandatory service, even when they’re on leave and wearing civilian clothes.
This makes for an interesting dating scene.
As the semester neared its end we took a final field trip to the north. We stayed at a kibbutz by the Sea of Galilee, where a nearby hot spring kept the water pleasantly warm. I floated on my back, alone, late into the night, as shooting stars streaked across the sky, and for the first time since I’d arrived in the Middle East, I felt peace.
The next morning I awoke refreshed. The campus manager had joined us on the trip. “How was your night?” he asked me. I told him about my peaceful swim, and the meteor shower.
“Those weren’t shooting stars,” he said. “Those were rockets from Lebanon, being fired at an Israeli military base.”
____
I walked into the student lounge on the little college campus in Lakewood, Colorado. There wasn’t much to the room, just a few couches and tables, and a small TV — a place for casual hangouts and study groups.
On this day, things were more tense. The TV was on and everyone was watching intently.
“What’s going on?”
“A bunch of kids got shot at a high school. They haven’t caught the shooter yet.”
I turned my attention to the screen as a call came into the news room. A boy had escaped the building, but his twin brother was still inside. He was frantic, trying anything he could think of to reach him. The emergency lines were jammed up by other students and their frantic parents, so he called the news.
I recognized his voice immediately. “That’s one of my youth group kids.”
We watched as the situation developed. Information trickled out at a painfully slow pace. We learned that two shooters were down; some time would pass before we’d be told how many they had killed.
April 20, 1999. Columbine High School.
Details emerged over the following weeks. Two social outcasts, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, had entered the school carrying firearms and murdered thirteen of their fellow students and one teacher before committing suicide. They had also planted homemade explosive devices around the campus in advance of the attack, but none of them had detonated.
The news media and a horrified public scrambled for an explanation, and theories abounded: Harris and Klebold were victims of bullying; they played too many video games; they took too many drugs; they listened to too much Marilyn Manson.
In certain religious circles, there was another theory of the case: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were possessed by demons and set on a mission to kill young Christians.
I attended an evangelical Christian school with a youth ministry department, so it was no surprise that many of my peers had connections to Columbine. Some were close to the victims and their families.
The youth center where I worked was not part of a traditional church; our events were attended by a few Columbine students, but a lot of our kids had dropped out of school. Some lived on the street or in squats; most were drug-abusers. And three days before the Columbine massacre, we held an event that was attended by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
The evening was a bit of a departure for us. We normally put on punk rock shows featuring local Christian bands and the occasional touring act; I’d been handling a lot of the booking for the last year and a half or so. But on occasion we would cater to the goth crowd, and that meant a performance by a Christian industrial goth band called Rackets & Drapes.
I didn’t go to the show that night, for reasons I don’t recall, apart from not being the one who organized it, and the fact that it wouldn’t be attended by the majority of our regulars. If I had been there, I might have seen Harris and Klebold’s car, loaded with improvised explosives, parked outside our little warehouse. It is believed that they planted the bombs around the school shortly after leaving our show.
Pastor Larry was a charismatic preacher, and you probably have to be if you want to get a roomful of punk kids to take a break from the music so you can tell them about Jesus. He didn’t speak at every event, but he reserved the right to take the stage when the Spirit moved him.
All he asked of our kids was that they not be violent, that they leave their drugs outside, and that when he decided to speak, they listen. The vast majority were happy to oblige.
The night of the Rackets & Drapes show, there was little question that Larry would give a sermon. His message was always a variation on the same theme: you are lost, and hurting, but we love you, and God has a better future for you.
On this night, he added something new: “God is telling me that one of you is going to kill somebody.”
And then two of them did.
That thrust Larry and our little youth center into the spotlight. Larry believed that several of Harris and Klebold’s friends had been in on their plan, and that he had convinced them not to participate. He believed that if the Holy Spirit had not given him that message, even more people would have been killed at Columbine.
And so as a mass shooting became the singular focus of all Christian youth ministry in Colorado (I can’t speak to what happened elsewhere) Larry told his story of salvation to any who would listen, and thousands did.
He was not the only one with a story. One of the victims, seventeen-year-old Cassie Bernall, was reportedly asked by Harris if she believed in God. When she said yes, he shot and killed her. About four months after the attack, Plough Publishing released her mother’s bestselling book, She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall.
In the weeks and months after the story was reported, I met several people who confidently told me, “Cassie Bernall was my best friend.” Maybe she was.
In an environment where one’s connection to Columbine was rapidly translating into status, and where that status was becoming increasingly performative, I was careful to make my own distance from the events clear.
I never met Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold.
I don’t know anyone who died at Columbine.
I wasn’t there when Larry gave his sermon.
Numerous services and vigils were held for the fallen. I attended a conference in Colorado Springs with a friend, where I wondered if we’d be welcomed once people found out we worked with the ‘bad kids.’
They turned out to be very receptive to our point of view; above everything else, what people wanted most was for something like this to never happen again. And to that end, they prayed.
Larry was sometimes seen on a hill overlooking Columbine High School, arms outstretched in prayer.
Bumper stickers reading “We are all Columbine” appeared on cars all over Denver.
We weren’t.
A year after the massacre, things were very different at our youth center. Larry was still telling his story about preaching to Harris and Klebold, but fewer kids were showing up to hear it.
I finally told him, “If you don’t stop telling that story and come up with a new message, this place will shut down for good.” He agreed that it was time to move forward. He said he could not imagine doing his ministry without my help. He even called me a prophet.
A week later he spoke to the students at my college, and told the same story again. When I confronted him, he claimed that the Lord had told him to share it. For reasons that I suppose are His alone, God had left me out of the loop.
One of the things that drew me to Larry’s ministry was its simplicity. There were no complicated program schedules, singalongs, skits, or party games. We put on a free punk rock show every Tuesday night. We got to know local kids on their own terms. If they asked for help, we did our best to provide it.
Now Larry was preaching at every show. He formed a core leadership team that looked very different from the kids we worked with. We met for extensive prayer sessions, where people wept as they confessed their sins, while others spoke in tongues.
We were adrift. Our compass had broken, and we could not see the horizon.
For a time it seemed that we had found our way back, and would return to being a community youth center. Larry announced that we would expand. He hired three of us as assistant directors, with modest salaries. He created an internship program. I was about to graduate from college, and now I would move straight into a full-time job.
I’d had a rental house on two and a half acres in Aurora, but my landlord sold it to developers, and I was struggling to find a new place. I lived in my van while I finished my degree. The school administration was either unaware or didn’t mind that I was sleeping in the parking lot. If I didn’t show up for my eight AM class my professor would send another student out to knock on my window.
A steady paycheck right out of school was going to be very helpful to me. The ministry did not have the funds yet, but Larry had faith that if he took the first step and hired the assistant directors, the money would come.
He also had a new direction for the ministry itself. We were about to go to war.
Larry was always open about his pornography problem. It was part of his origin story: he’d been hooked on pornography, but God had saved him from his addiction. He spoke of it frequently, but lately, he’d given it a new spin.
He had discovered that the part of Denver where all the porno shops were had a long history with sexual deviance. There had been saloons and brothels there when Denver was still a mining town, and a succession of similar businesses over nearly 150 years.
For Larry, that could only mean one thing: demons.
He studied area maps and determined that running through the city of Denver were spiritual highways, which were traveled by demons, and along these highways, the sins of the flesh had long flourished.
We would go to these spiritual thoroughfares and fight the demons head-on. We would anoint the bars and porno shops with oil, and pray over them. By the power of Christ we would run them all out of business. We would expel the demons and break their stronghold.
I left the organization.
Larry said I had never been a good fit.
The ministry closed its doors a few months later.
Decades have passed since the Columbine mass shooting, and those searching for answers have still found little relief, but the video game industry and Marilyn Manson are probably in the clear.
We still don’t know why they did it, but the FBI’s conclusion is fairly banal — Eric Harris was a psychopath and Dylan Klebold was depressed. One wanted to kill; one wanted to die, and didn’t mind the killing.
Investigators do not think that Cassie Bernall was ever asked if she believed in God, though it seems clear that she did. Witnesses heard Klebold, not Harris, ask a different student that question, to which she said yes, and he spared her life.
There has never been any evidence that other students were involved in the planning of the attack. We’ll never know if anyone else was dissuaded from committing murder by Larry’s sermon, only that Harris and Klebold were not, and that our prayers didn’t stop it from happening again.
____
I drove up the dirt road, past the little house where the undercover ATF men had lived, and parked near the monument bearing the names of the dead. I took a moment to read them all, noting how many were children.
A small sign said the monument was paid for by an East Texas militia group, and requested a donation to help with its upkeep. I slipped a five dollar bill into the collection box and hoped it would only be spent on cleaning supplies.
This was the site of the New Mount Carmel Center, a church compound about twenty miles outside of Waco, where around thirty years earlier, an ATF raid led to a gunfight, a fifty-one-day siege, and a massive fire. Four agents and eighty-two church members died. Around two dozen of them were children.
America has many sites of great tragedy; when I visit them, I do so in quiet acknowledgment, to sit with the weight of what happened there, but I don’t know if that weight is attached to those places, or if I bring it with me.
I was a high school senior when the Waco Siege took place, making David Koresh and the Branch Davidians household names, and prompting a wide-ranging national debate about guns, religion, and the role of government.
The church had a history of legal battles, gunfights, and even grave-robbing that spanned decades, but when Koresh took power, he caught the federal government’s attention with accusations of polygamy, taking child brides, and stockpiling weapons.
A lengthy and somewhat clumsy surveillance operation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms led to a botched raid and a two-hour firefight that killed four agents and six church members.
Following a ceasefire, the FBI got involved, and the siege began. After nearly two months, agents initiated a tear gas attack in an attempt to force the Branch Davidians from their buildings.
The FBI insists that their gas canisters did not start the fires that destroyed the structures and killed all but nine of the people inside them. They point to evidence that the fires were deliberately set by church members. Others disagree, claiming they were started when the Bureau’s CS gas canisters were struck by gunfire.
The compound was razed a few weeks later, leaving only the concrete foundations of the buildings and the remains of an underground bunker where many of the bodies and weapons were later found.
For many years the property remained vacant, but a small chapel now stands on a portion of the old building site.
I walked the grounds and read the signs explaining what had taken place. A few other visitors milled about, and we had brief, quiet exchanges.
A man and his wife arrived with a group of little girls and a puppy, bringing a burst of life and sound to the otherwise somber scene. The girls ran, squealed, squabbled over who would hold the dog’s leash.
The man was the property’s caretaker, and he was eager to share what he knew with the visitors. He took up a position near the bunker, which had been filled with water and now held schools of goldfish and koi. Having loved koi ponds since I was a kid, I naturally gravitated to the water feature, and listened as the caretaker spoke.
Tossing a handful of fish food into the pool, he noted how the site of a great tragedy had been turned into a thing of beauty. He discussed the church’s new direction, away from the teachings of Koresh and the chaotic history that preceded him.
His wife, literally barefoot and pregnant, took a break from supervising the girls to offer an opinion — the world was sick and in need of healing, and mass media was to blame.
For the caretaker, the tragedy at Mount Carmel had its roots in the spiritual world. He explained that the siege had not been the first significant loss of life to occur there. He spoke of massacres of Native Americans in the 1830s, at the hands of armed troops backed by Charles Alderton, the inventor of Dr. Pepper.
My mind began to wander, and my body soon followed. Around that time the pastor’s wife arrived and asked me if I would like to see the inside of the chapel, and I happily accepted her invitation.
It was not like any church I had seen before. A massive Trump flag was displayed prominently in the front of the little sanctuary. Trump posters and campaign signs were scattered along the walls, amid framed anti-Clinton collages and various accounts of the siege.
“Alex Jones built this chapel. Are you familiar with him?”
I was.
I took my time, viewed every display, and thanked the pastor’s wife for allowing me inside, then made my way back to my car. I took another look around the grounds before settling into the seat.
In 1995, survivors of the siege planted 82 trees on the property, one to commemorate each of the church members who had died. There are now only 81. The current pastor cut down David Koresh’s tree about twenty years ago.
There was no Indian massacre at Mount Carmel in the 1830s, or in any other decade. There was significant fighting between the Waco and Cherokee people during that time, but Dr. Pepper was not involved. Alderton didn’t create his drink until 1885, more than twenty-five years after the Waco were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma.
From Mount Carmel I headed northwest to my next destination — Homestead Heritage, a 500-acre farm operated by Heritage Ministries United. The group relocated first from New York City to Colorado, before moving to Texas in 1980. Today they sell high quality handmade goods and food to the public, and they teach traditional homesteading skills. Courses include such topics as carpentry, blacksmithing, animal husbandry, and soap-making.
Much of the grounds are open to the public, so I walked around the farm and the shops, where I admired the quality of their furniture and other wares. Before long I found myself in the blacksmith shop; one of the instructors came in and spoke with me for awhile.
We talked about farming, and land. I was still searching for a place of my own. We spoke about his courses, and the satisfaction we gained from working with our hands.
The blacksmith felt blessed to be part of a wholesome, insulated community. He was grateful for his healthy lifestyle. In the outside world, he said, all anyone was doing was taking drugs and having sex.
As horny and addicted as we all are, I wonder how we have any time left for doing wars and binging reality TV.
I steered the conversation back to blacksmithing. I’d recently made a few knives from old sawmill blades, and I was interested in developing my skills. He mentioned sex and drugs again. “Don’t forget rock ‘n’ roll,” I thought, but I was a guest in his forge, so I kept it to myself.
I sometimes question who is more obsessed with sex, the people supposedly having so much of it, or the ones calling it a sin. In an intentional community that emphasizes modesty as a defense against lust, sex was being brought up a lot, and not by me.
That aside, much of the Homestead Heritage lifestyle appealed to me, and I felt I could learn a great deal from them, should I ever decide to go back and take a class.
I left the farm and continued my journey around the state, with much more of Texas to explore. I had an interview outside of Austin the next day. I needed a job more than a paycheck, a foothold between one ledge and the next.
____
Most of my land sits atop a thick layer of limestone cement called caliche. In multiple excavations, I have yet to find the bottom of it, though I continue to try. Where it is close to the surface, the trees, unable to penetrate the hardpan, send out long, lateral roots, in search of moisture and nutrients. But eventually, they reach a size that the shallow soil cannot support, and they die.
Near my house, there is a pocket of deeper soil that holds a large huisache, probably the most attractive tree on my property. It is around two feet thick at its base, splitting into multiple trunks, and it stands close to twenty feet tall — an impressive height for a brush country shrub.
But the tree is in danger. As it has spread its branches, suckers have begun to pull nutrients away from its older growth. And in one of its trunks, there is a weak joint, where a crack has formed at the junction of two branches.
Ants are already entering the damaged area, and if left alone, the crack will worsen, leading to rot and termite infiltration. Similar problems await any area where exposed deadwood is allowed to remain on the tree.
I haven’t used my chainsaw in several months, and it won’t start. I suspect the gas has gone bad, so I dump it in my burn barrel and replace it with fresh fuel. It starts right up.
I make my way around the tree, removing all the suckering growth, being careful to cut close to the collar without damaging the main stem. When I reach the weak union, I choose to keep the more vertical branch and remove the other.
I start with a wedge cut just below the lowest extent of the crack, then cut down along the crack itself until I reach the back of my wedge. The branch falls fairly cleanly, and I remove any jagged material with another pass of my saw. The wood looks healthy. There was a little rot, but it was confined to the branch I removed.
The grass is taller under the tree, and the mosquitos are heavy in the shade. I slap my forearm, crushing a juicy one and releasing a droplet of blood — mine, probably.
It’s Sunday morning, but my contractors have come to work on the barn. They’re reinforcing the existing metal frame with oilfield pipe, to thwart the wind. The mosquitos are doing their best to make the men suffer, and they’re wearing as much clothing as the heat will allow.
I drag the branches I removed to a temporary road I cut in a few weeks ago, and pile them up, all facing the same direction. I wrap a heavy chain around one end of the pile, and hook it to my skid steer. Driving backwards, I drag the branches to the pond, where I remove the chain and use the bucket to push them to the edge of the water. This will become habitat for various aquatic residents and visitors to the waterside.
I leave my machine near the barn, so my workers can use it, and walk back toward the house, amid iridescent flashes of green and blue from racerunner lizards, abandoning their hunts to retreat temporarily into the low brush.
The cast iron handle on one of my hydrants broke a few weeks ago during a windstorm. I was able to find a replacement part; I’ll fix it this afternoon.
I need to cut the brush along the fence behind the house before I replace the barbed wire with the high tensile mesh I bought at auction.
There’s a utility pole I’d like to have moved; I’ll try to remember to call the power company in the morning.
I need to dig more caliche for the road.
I return to the huisache, its form is still pleasing to the eye. I’d like to shorten its branches, but it’s best if I don’t remove more foliage this year. Most of the ants have already left the wound, and the smaller cuts I’ve made will heal over quickly. These are short-lived trees; I will likely outlast this one, but its descendants will persist here for a thousand years.
A freight train blows its horn a few miles to the north; sometimes I can hear the iron wheels rolling along the tracks, until the sound fades into an infinity of wind through the brush, of hammers on steel, of insects and birdsong.