Wolves of Eldorado

"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits." - Jesus

I read the papers every day, scanning for their names. I know I won't see them soon, if at all. Maybe they left early on; maybe they stayed tied to the sect without staying in the compound. From a web search, I know that he's running an internet business near the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado. The telephone directory lists them, so they must still have a presence in the outside world.

Or maybe those are old records.

The FBI and local deputies are at the beginning of the investigation. Four hundred and sixteen children and 139 women have been removed to shelters. Many children will become orphans while their parents either become outlaws or prisoners. There may be months, maybe years, of DNA testing to untangle the genetic mysteries of paternity and maternity. There will be charges, arraignments, convictions and sentencing. There will be appeals and new rulings, as the children and the babies they carry are consigned to the caseload of Child Protective Services.

The news will keep coming and it will trace a twisted path of evil.

In Eldorado, Martha at barely 30 could easily be a grandmother in a couple of years. Her younger sister, Esther, could already have several children. The youngest child, Ezra, could have already been forced out of the compound and left to fend for himself, abandoned by a community in which young males represent too much competition for older men - senior males who believe it is the will of the Lord that they should multiply exponentially with girls barely past the onset of menses.

Girls who should be playing with their hair and taking personality quizzes out of the back of their teen magazines. Girls who should roll their eyes at you when a song comes on in the car and you, the mom so hopelessly out of touch, tentatively ask, "Green Day? American Rejects? Dandy Warhols?" "No, MoTHER...it's Gwen Stefani. I have this on my iPod!"

But the girls in Yearning for Zion know nothing of being teenagers. All they know is that their purpose is to join men many years their senior in a spiritual marriage and bring forth as many offspring as they can bear.

I know people out there. I knew them when, after many years of marriage, they were discouraged at their inability to conceive. I knew them when they were going through fertility counseling, and I knew that they were praying to their god to bless them with children. Finally, there was a daughter. Then there was a long wait, followed ten years later by the miracle of another daughter and a little boy.

And then, they packed up their beautiful children, sold their home, and headed out to join their brethren in west Texas. Eldorado. The fabled City of Gold to the Incas.

It's disturbing when you learn that people you have known most of your life are associated with a sect that perpetuates child abuse. The mind can barely wrap around it, and I hope I am wrong in my assumption. Because I was there when they brought Martha home...I know how beloved and welcome she was. I cannot imagine how they could have sacrificed that precious gift, and I hope that somewhere along the way, they turned aside from the unholy vision of their Prophet.

I met Dean at a community theatre production when I was a high school senior. I had a leading part, he played the sidekick to the bumbling villain; even my mother had a walk-on roll as a neighbor who was a witness to a crime. Dean was a graduate of an ivy league university, and was a recently licensed pharmacist. In his early thirties, he'd moved to town with his wife, Sara, to take a job at a local pharmacy.

Sara, slightly older and already widowed once, was a homemaker. Her first commitment was to her Mormon faith, and our town didn't offer anything in the way of a temple. In a German town with a population of 7,000 there were three Lutheran churches. And I'm not talking about splinter groups or temporary buildings thrown up hastily after a schism in a congregation. Zion, Bethany and Holy Ghost were full size, beautiful sanctuaries with steeples and spires, heavy oak pews, ornate altars, choir lofts, carillon bells, pipe organs, rich vestments for every holy event and stained glass in every window. To say that the town was a Lutheran enclave is an understatement, and the only real spiritual competition it encountered was from a single smallish Catholic church.

The closest Mormon Temple was an hour and half away in San Antonio, and Sara was rarely home, keeping her days and nights filled with genealogy research and other church commitments. Dean stayed behind for work, and at the onset he didn't appear to share his wife's enthusiasm for the Latter Day Saints. He came from a family of scientists, and they were horrified that he had married into, what to them, was a fundamentalist cult.

Dean was an odd little fellow - small, thin, quick and nervous, with the sort of bluish skin that marks a person as undernourished and wanting a little sun. He tended to wear frayed and shabby dark clothing that almost resembled a uniform - navy or black pants with a solid colored shirt, heavy black shoes and thick clothing even in the exhausting heat of a Texas summer. He looked oily, like he needed to shampoo more often, and he was wizened for his years.

Yet, Dean was also affable and quick-witted. My mother believed that he had been abandoned by his wife, and she, uncharacteristically, was moved to invite him over for food and companionship. While the suppers in my house were hardly enticing, we did manage to put together an evening meal, and Dean took to dropping by on a regular basis.

I knew he was different, but we were a simple people and didn't have much new entertainment in my town. Dean was the only person for miles around who owned a Betamax video player and a video camera, and he brought his Pong game along when he visited. I was ensnared at the time in an adolescent utopian vision from reading Robert A. Heinlein, Ayn Rand and the Dune Trilogy, and Dean was the only person I knew who could discuss these writers with me. He gave me a guinea pig once. We got used to having him around.

Over time, I got to know Sara as well. She wasn't what you would call "vibrant" and we weren't what you'd call "close", but, somehow, she extended enough warmth in my direction to keep me returning. She was the ultimate homesteader, and if I knew anything from my teenage apocalyptic required reading list, I knew that I needed to be prepared to survive in a hostile radioactive wasteland after Armageddon.

I turned to Sara to teach me how to grind flour, bake bread, milk goats (not that I ever got the hang of that) and quilt. She was following the letter of her church in regard to stockpiling: canning, drying and preserving food, collecting clothing of all sizes and vintages for all climates, gathering domestic goods and animals. This did not make her an attentive homemaker, per se. She seemed far more interested in the storage capacity of her house than its comfort value or aesthetics. And while I tried not to judge, I couldn't help but notice that their place was in shambles.

The family goat and a psychotic rooster had taken to wandering into the kitchen, and Sara didn't seem to find that troublesome. Her clothing was a jumble of mismatched castoffs with broken zippers and missing buttons that she kept in a line of grocery bags on the floor of her bedroom. Sara's attention was focused on the next life, and her surroundings were meaningless to her from what I could tell. Yet Sara had a certainty about her - an admirable, unflappable calm. She knew how to get things done and she ruled her kingdom.

Together, they seemed to have prohibitions about many things that I had come to regard as normal. They didn't seem to require much in the way of plumbing, for example. They must have made some sort of arrangement, but they had no shower and their tub was used so seldom that when Dean acquired a pet skunk, it made its home there.

And everywhere, there was everything imaginable. When you are waiting for Doomsday and anticipate world shortage, you tend to hoard. Books and dishes and clothing and dried grains and beans in 30 gallon commercial containers; discarded dental and surgical instruments; appliances, machines and gardening equipment of every era; bicycles and mopeds and copiers and gadgets to make things and preserve things; food dryers and water; eggs preserved in enormous jars; scrap metal and lumber; piles and piles of rocks, rock saws and tumblers. Eventually, they boarded up their windows to allow more space for storage shelves. Each room got smaller and darker with every passing season as the storage continued to close in.

I'm not sure, now, how I became so involved with them, but I think I was at an age where I needed a larger adult world. I was done with being in high school; tired of exuding school spirit, bored with adolescent social behavior and the limited world view of my classmates; completely fed up with living with my parents. I had big ideas and no one with whom to share them. Dean and Sara were adults and I enjoyed independence with them. They didn't seem to care when I came or went. I could putter in the kitchen, play with the animals, borrow books, dig around in the garden; start projects and abandon them. Sara was generous with her time, and seemed to regard me neutrally - like a family member who doesn't require any energy or effort, if not an actual friend.

I continued to see them even when I came back home from college. They became like older siblings to me. Weird, older siblings.

Certainly, I learned plenty about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon by osmosis. On at least one occasion, I heard Sara defend the Doctrine of Plural Marriage by explaining to me that after so many years of fleeing hostile communities and homesteading increasingly remote territory, the men folk of the early Latter Day Saints had died in great numbers, leaving wives and children alone and unprotected. Polygamy became a necessary response in a community with a disproportionate ratio of women to men.

While I learned in later years that this explanation was nonsense, and that Smith had received his vision for plural marriage early on and long before Brigham Young settled the flock in Utah, I accepted it as just one of those barbaric practices of less civilized times, like slavery, child labor, and the genocide of Native Americans. I concluded that polygamy was a moot point in any case, since the Mormon Church had, presumably, disavowed it back in the 1890s.

Not that I cared then, (any more than I do now) what sort of coupling arrangements adults enter. I knew from my books that once the world blew apart, the social order would be very different, anyway. And I did note from my copy of Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love" that only the men seemed to be enjoying the advantages of extra spouses. But no mention was made by either Dean, Sara or my books of making young girls, years away from the age of consent, breeders in a perversion of marriage.

While a more worldly parent would have reasonably asked why an older married couple encourages the visits of a teenager and her girlfriends, or why a married man visits the homes of teenage girls with the encouragement of his wife, my parents didn't have the sophistication to warn me off. Dean and Sara, after all, weren't trying to convert me in any overt fashion.

In fact, witnessing only came up on one occasion. It came in the form of two elderly missionaries so innocent and inept, that I'm still telling the story thirty years later. These folks, a husband and wife of senior years, had joined the Church, sold their Missouri farm and headed out on their mission to spread the Word. They were new to preaching and in a solid Protestant town like ours, doors were slammed in their faces at every turn. Even my mother had swatted them back with her broom when they attempted to breach our front porch. Having Mormon friends was one thing; having Mormons try to convert you was quite another. The folks were becoming discouraged, and Dean and Sara asked if I would be willing to let them talk to me as a favor just to give them a little practice. I agreed.

We sat huddled in the living room, occupying the few square feet of dark, dusty space that hadn't yet been converted to storage against the End Days. The missionaries had a film strip projector and an accompanying book as their audio visual aids. As they turned the knob on the projector, they read from the book and showed me the pictures.

Most were illustrations similar to children's picture books. Here we have the Mormon family sitting down to prayer and dinner; here we have the Mormon family together for Bible study in the evening; here is Joseph Smith receiving the golden tablets from the Angel Maroni; here is Jesus appearing in North America after his years preaching in the Holy Land.

I think I nodded, and asked a few questions just to keep it going. I was polite, and had enough presence of mind to know that I was going to remember this for years to come as "The day that the Mormons tried to convert me with a filmstrip." I was actually enjoying myself, knowing as they did not, that there was no part of my intellect or my personality that was amenable to their beliefs. There was no toe-hold. No inclination. No weakness of will. Had I had the phrase in 1977, I would have said, "Whatever." I had gone through two years of catechism and been confirmed a Lutheran, and I wasn't about to start over learning another doctrine. While I didn't notice within myself any particular spiritual fervor, I accepted what I found useful and ignored what I did not. In short, the Lutherans had already given me as much Christian education as I had any interest in acquiring. I was not open to any other variant on the same theme.

So, my mind was drifting as they stumbled on, making their pitch. Until the image on the filmstrip flipped to a color photograph of a very handsome man, and I became curious. The man was tall, slender with streaks of silver in his styled dark hair and short full beard. He was, maybe, in his mid-50s. He was dressed in what would best be described as a disco suit - matching white jacket, flared trousers, vest and a shiny shirt with a long droopy collar open at the neck - the male fashion of the time. He appeared to be standing in some kind of fog, but the background was blue and celestial looking. He reminded me of an older member of the Bee Gees. I sat up.

"Oh," I said, my interest taking a sudden turn. "Is this one of the Elders from your church?" No. They both shook their heads. "No, no," the woman assured me. "This is God."

Until that moment, I had no idea that God was such a stone-cold fox. I had visualized the Heavenly Father as more craggy, stooped and wise-looking...draped in a snowy linen robe...someone who looked more like Mr. Wizard or Father Time than a man who was likely to belt out a version of "Disco Inferno." "You mean, this is a photograph of what you THINK God looks like," I offered, hoping that this would give them a way out.

"No. The photograph was given to our Elders by God." I kept trying to pin them down. "You mean THE God...the alpha, the omega, the Creator of all things seen and unseen. THAT God?" They nodded, pleased at my spark of enthusiasm and no doubt thinking, "Now we're getting somewhere!"

At that point, we turned a corner and I decided encouraging them in this sort of lunacy was just cruel. It seemed wrong to pull kindly elderly farm folk away from their home and demand that they go out and show filmstrips with photos of God to smart-mouth college students. I thanked them and let myself out, still muttering over gods in satin disco wear and vowing I'd never allow anyone to witness to me again (and so far, I've kept my promise).

I still saw Dean and Sara over the next few years. After all, whatever their peculiarities, they had been kind to me and had even extended help to my friends. When a college roommate needed shelter and medical attention, they helped her through a difficult time and paid her doctor bills. When I came down with a brief illness, I went to their house to recover, and not my own. When I needed to make a quick exit from an unpleasant living situation, they came to my immediate rescue. They even took care of my Siamese when I couldn't bring her to my dorm room. Then, they took care of her kittens. No judgment. No impatience. When they had their first baby after years of disappointment, I was at their house to lend a hand and keep the goat confined to the back steps.

I don't remember exactly why I ended the friendship. I think I got older and I began to see Dean in an unfavorable light. He began to seem less benignly eccentric to me and more vaguely creepy in a way I couldn't articulate. Less goofy; manipulative. I, finally, became suspicious.

Over the next 10 years, I avoided the clinic pharmacy, choosing to patronize a competitor instead. My mother occasionally saw Dean in the grocery and would mention that he seemed to have teenage girls living with him that he introduced as "babysitters." I jumped to an immediate conclusion, but then reminded myself that people do, indeed, have help with children and Sara had had her last two babies relatively late in life and close together.

Finally, on one visit home, when I was well into my thirties, I ran into him. He asked me to come to dinner at his house to meet the younger kids, whom I had never seen. Sara was out of town, and I went. By this time, the house was a neglected husk and resembled more of a salvage yard than a home. Stockpiled goods were spilling out of storage sheds and cabinets and closets. The skunk had died (probably in the bathtub, which was now filled with newspapers). The goat was gone.

A growing family had forced Dean to put in a second toilet, but not a second bathroom.

The toilet was conveniently located at the top of the stairs. Not in a room, not in a closet. Just there on the landing, plumbed directly into the wall, where you might normally put a credenza or a potted plant. Martha had grown into a lovely teenager. She was concerned with her weight and worried about her looks. She had just gotten her driver's license. The little kids were curious and funny. And despite the chaotic housekeeping, it all still felt identifiably pleasant.

Martha and Dean talked back and forth with the sort of affection and exasperation that is typical of fathers and daughters. The youngsters were dividing their attention between the cartoons they were watching on cable, and the visiting stranger. They showed me their rooms and their toys. They seemed happy and bouncy. Dean tried to give me an old hospital gurney that was sitting out back.

I only saw Dean once more. I had my own child by then and had stopped into the clinic to visit my dentist. We passed each other in the parking lot and he told me that he and his family were moving out to west Texas the following day to begin a Mormon settlement. Eldorado.

I wished him well and waved to Sara who was waiting for him in a van with the kids.

Not until I read "Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith" by Jon Krakauer (2003) did I finally put it all together. Dean and Sara weren't mainstream Mormons, but members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They were involved in a splinter branch of the Mormon Church that upholds plural marriage as the Word of God through His Prophet, Joseph Smith. The 2000 census documented about 6,000 members of the polygamous sect living in Arizona and Utah. Krakauer profiled another compound in Canada and small aligned patriarchal units scattered around the country and Mexico.

I now believe Dean and Sara had been recruiting wives for plural marriage all along. Perhaps they will read this and write to tell me that when I saw them that last day, they were NOT on their way to consign their daughters to a dark fate. That is was all an awful misunderstanding.

I see the footage of the girls being loaded onto buses. The pregnancies show under the pioneer dresses of girls said to be as young as twelve.

And I think as I keep my nausea and rage at bay, "beware the ravening wolves of Eldorado."

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Ingrid lives on San Juan Island.

While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane." Besides a passion for Tiki Studies, Ingrid is borderline biblio-obsessive. She is an old-school Libran - i.e., she won't be leading the Revolution, but she'll work to make it an attractive affair and hire the musicians and caterers."

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

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