Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(79)

I was speaking softly because I was in a museum, not because I was asking about a cult. But I was worried she’d assume the latter or not hear me at all. So I was relieved when she didn’t whisper when she answered, “The Children of God.” Then she stared at me for a moment like she was trying to figure out if I was a lunatic or a cult member, or someone chasing a dose of trauma porn, just stopping by on the way to Waco.

“Not the first, huh?”

She smiled. “First Texan, though. Every couple years. Always ’bout your age.”

I was absurdly happy to be called a Texan. I could still speak the language. This is what I did miss about Texans. My grandma used to say, “Words cost.” Which is a perfectly Texan way of saying, We expect you to pick up the rest in context. If you can’t, well, that’s on you. It had been a problem on the East Coast, where I am expected to not only fill in a full sentence but also add a smiley face to any jokes to avoid confusion.

The docent’s directions made perfect sense in that they made no fucking sense at all. “Two dirt roads, but don’t count the first, or the gravel. Might be gravel now. Go down that. Close up to the ridge. Nothing’s there anymore. You were brought up in that mess, honey?” And there it was, the look I was afraid of: pity.



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   I counted the miles on the odometer. But when I saw the ridge, I knew I was in the right place. It felt like I’d been there before.

There was no historical marker. But something happened here. We all have those places where something happened to make us, or change us. I’m here because of this place, and all the places that came after. But this place was the beginning of me. I swear even now that I could feel it, as real as the mesquite-dotted ridge ahead. Something happened here. My parents were here.

I’d seen so many pictures of the place in black and white and sometimes color, old newsreels and stuttering ’70s home videos. Hippies in shacks and bunkhouses. A few wild-haired toddlers running around in overalls. Lanky men in flared jeans. Women in long dresses. Long hair. Long necklaces with yoke pendants hung next to toothbrushes. Baby-faced and bright-eyed. Smiling from ear to ear. They were doing something, brother. They’d dropped out. Given up their worldly possessions. They were going to change the world. It’s a revolution for Jesus, man. Then they started preparing for the end of the world.

I kept heading toward the ridge, but something was off. It wasn’t that I was expecting hippies. They were long gone. If anything remained of the old buildings, I couldn’t tell from the fence line. But I thought I’d find a real ranch, maybe an oil field. This was Texas. There wasn’t a long list of options. But as I neared the ridge, I slowed to a crawl.

   The fence was all wrong. Ranch fences are barbed wire strung between posts. A farm might not have a fence at all. But this fence was black steel and eight feet tall. I was busy staring at it when a family of ibexes with their twisted antlers bolted out of a mesquite clutch. That’s not a sentence found in nature. Then I looked up. Towering above us all stood a single fucking giraffe, probably wondering why the trees wouldn’t grow tall enough to chew. I rolled to a stop and stared at the poor animal, awkward, lonely, and completely fucking lost. You’re not supposed to identify with a fenced-in giraffe that doesn’t belong in Texas.



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My parents had come to this place because they’d been seeking something more meaningful, a way to do good, to help. My dad didn’t want to kill Vietnamese farmers on the other side of the world to save nothing. By the time they tried to send him, the war was already over. We just hadn’t admitted it yet. My mom was tired of seeing her friends’ names on the lists of the dead. They’d been raised during the most prosperous decades in our history. They came of age when it seemed ready to unravel. All they saw was the misery wrought by greed—the poverty and war, the loneliness and the fucking cruelty of it all. So they joined a commune, a community where people shared what little they had, where people spoke of love and peace, a world without money, a cause. A family. Picked the wrong goddamn commune. But who didn’t.



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   Texas may have more than its share of cults—Branch Davidians, Church of Wells, Yearning for Zion, and Rajneeshpuram are just a few. For a while in the ’70s, joining a cult was as common as signing up for CrossFit a couple years ago. Cults, new religious movements, whatever you call them, they’re not a new phenomenon. Most fizzle out. Some last. Some grow enough to be called religions. People join because they’re longing for a sense of community and a higher purpose. They stay because they usually find that sense of community, with all the ties that bind it, and a higher purpose, unless and until they see through it.

One of the most effective cult strategies is to keep everyone too busy to notice what is happening to them. There’s always a big change, a new crisis, a new mission, a new Gospel. A community has needs—food and housing and, in the Family’s case, hungry kids and babies whose diapers needed to be changed. We struggled constantly just to make rent and pay our tithe to keep the home in good standing with Family leadership. You don’t want to leave. Never mind figuring out what you’ll do on the outside, you don’t want to abandon your community. That trick doesn’t only work in cults.