A wolverine is eating my leg

by Tim Cahill

  benefit of the gorillas. Integrity is the name of the game." Dian was also having trouble with the Rwandan government. The Office of National Parks and Tourism took the position that it would deal with only one extranational conservation organization. Predictably, they chose to do business through the MGP rather than the Digit Fund and Dian Fossey, who was intimidating and notoriously ''difficult." To get visas for her research staff at Karisoke, Dian was forced to go through Jean Pierre van der Becke, who had been made director of the MGP. The Rwanda government would only grant Dian herself a three-month visa.

  Dian was fifty-one years old and her health was failing. Emphysema kept her out of the field, away from the animals she loved, and it was so difficult for her to breathe at Karisoke's altitude of ten thousand feet that she had a small "oxygen machine" in her cabin. In November 1985, back in Karisoke on one of her visits, Dian wrote a sad letter to her friend Dr. Shirley McGreal. "There is no way I can be optimistic about the species' survival, albeit the poachers don't roam like buffalo anymore, nor are traps easy to find. It is the human presence that is certainly interfering with their privacy and preservation."

  A month later, during the late evening hours of December twenty-sixth, someone hacked through the wall of the cabin at Karisoke with a long knife, and Dian Fossey was brutally murdered.

  Many people have theories about who killed Dian Fossey. When I heard the news I thought immediately of those stories I had heard drinking pombe under the park. Some men have been jailed in Rwanda, but no one really knows who killed Dian, or why. The press reports and obituaries were appropriately respectful, though, slowly, some negative information began creeping into the reports. The Philadelphia Daily News ran an opinion piece titled (incredibly) "Dian Fossey Asked for

  It." Insisting that "arrogance gets conservationists nowhere," the article claimed that Dian had alienated the local people and that she showed "a contempt for their existence."

  Shortly after that article appeared, I received a note from Dr. Shirley McGreal, chairwoman of the International Primate Protection League. "Dian is being murdered twice," she wrote. "First her body, now her reputation."

  McGreal enclosed a copy of an International Primate Protection League Newsletter devoted entirely to the memory of Dian Fossey. Inside was a tribute from the government of Rwanda, a refutation of various attacks, and copies of letters from Dian that showed real affection for her African trackers and patrol workers. There was a funny story—bittersweet now—about Dian's five-month-long quest to get one of her patrol men a decent pair of boots that fit. The man was a Tutsi, six feet seven inches tall with size fourteen feet that Dian called "gunboats."

  Dr. McGreal has emerged as one of Dian's most ardent and eloquent defenders. Yes, she told me, her friend could be arrogant at times. "But you have to understand," she said, "Dian lived up there, all those years, alone. Her friends were being killed." There was emotion in Dr. McGreal's voice. "She was a martyr."

  The graveyard lies beside the cabin at Karisoke. It is sheltered by great gnarled trees. Yellow-green moss hangs from the branches that shade the graves where Dian buried Uncle Bert, and Macho, and Digit. Now Dian is buried there, next to Digit. There has been some talk of turning the cabin into a museum, the graveyard into a memorial. Perhaps, in another century, there will still be gorillas in Rwanda and people who will come to see them. The tourists—the hated tourists—will stand by the grave of Dian Fossey and a guide—speaking in English, or Japanese or Swahili—will tell them of the accomplishments of the woman who is

  buried there. And the tourists will know that they are looking at the final resting place of a great hero. Not a saint. A hero.

  Postscript: The Karisoke Research Center is now funded by the Morris Animal Fund, which also administers the Digit Fund. The center is thriving.

  As are the gorillas. In 1980, a census indicated that there were 254 gorillas in the Virungas. Today, that number is 290. There are, according to scientists in the field, "significant numbers of immatures," indicating "a healthy population." The biggest population increase has occurred in tourist groups. Dian's fears that tourism would disrupt the animals' breeding cycles appear to be unfounded.

  The Mountain Gorilla Project's approach to the problem is being emulated worldwide. It is a hopeful story.

  in which Tony and Susan Alamo live right here on earth.

  We—writer Bill Cardoso and photographer Tim Page and myself—were driving up to Saugus, fifty miles north of the sprawling Los Angeles Basin, to plan an escape. I was going to infiltrate the Foundation to investigate the charges of a loose-knit group of broken-hearted parents organized under the unfortunate acronym of FOC, which stands for Free Our Children. The focus of FOC is a forty-three-year-old black man named Ted Patrick. Formerly a San Diego community relations consultant for California Governor Ronald Reagan and currently unemployed, Patrick is the tough, tireless "deprogrammer" of Jesus Freaks. He has been spectacularly successful in convincing young Christians that they have been duped by their leaders, that they are possessed by demons, that they have been involved in voodoo, not Christianity. He does this by having parents bring their children—sometimes, it is alleged, by force—to one of several designated motel rooms across the country called deprogramming centers, where the devout young are confronted by teams of parents, friends, and former sect members who counter their chanted prayers with reason: high-volume, high-pressure reason under conditions that would be called third degree if practiced in any police station in the country. The prayerful children are not allowed to "run away," though the vast majority of them have been over the legal age of consent. Patrick claims 125 successful deprogrammings.

  Tony and Susan Alamo, and the Christians of their Foundation, pray to Jesus that this Devil coming against the House of God will be stopped. Mike Pancer, a San Diego attorney and an unpaid panel member of the American Civil Liberties Union is, involuntarily, in the Lord's Service in this matter. He is the answer to the Alamos' prayers. Pancer saw in the papers that adults, the Jesus Freaks, in the process of being deprogrammed, were subjected to what looked like kidnap, assault, and false imprisonment. He contacted the Alamos and began an investigation. While eternal Vengeance belongs to the Lord—and isn't long in coming—earthly justice, apparently, was in the hands of the ACLU.

  Patrick was in good spirits Thursday of Holy Week when I visited him in his suburban tract house just south of San Diego.

  "If we bust one of these groups, we've got them all," he said. According to Patrick there was little difference among any of the sixty-one different groups he knows about. They all are guilty, he says, of "psychological kidnapping."

  "All these groups have the technique of hypnotizing a person on the street or anywhere. And they can do this within five or ten minutes. And they can talk about anything. If they know you are a reporter, they can talk about the news. But the key is to get a person to look you straight in the eyes. And if they can look you straight in the eyes for five or ten minutes, you'll find yourself unable to take your eyes off of theirs. You remember Susan Atkins? She said when she first saw Manson and looked into his eyes, she couldn't take her eyes off of his. All of the kids say the same thing. And I've heard them, heard kids give testimony, give testament of these various groups and they say, 'Well, I was on my way home and I met this person on the street and I looked into his eyes and I couldn't take my eyes off of theirs. ... I left everything and went with them.'

  "Of course these kids are programmed to use this technique, but they are not conscious of being able to use it. They are instructed by their leaders always to look a person straight in the eye. And they use certain Bible verses, and then they talk to a person, and after looking them in the eye for so long a time their subject will leave and go with them. And that is what we call psychological kidnapping.

  "The person is taken to a bus, a van—most of these groups operate from a bus—and the first thing they do is give the kids either coffee, tea, or punch; cookies or sandwich
es. And we have reason to believe that they have some type of mind-controlling drugs or herbs in this food or drink."

  Patrick was vague on the types of drugs used, though he mentioned that the police found "speed" in cookies given by a militant Christian organization in Bellevue, Washington. After being drugged and hypnotized, according to Patrick, the recruit goes through "an intensive questioning."

  "They ask them all about their family condition: 'Do you have a car; is it paid for; is it in your name; do you have a bank account; do you own furniture ... do your people have money; do they own a business?' After getting all this information, they sign their whole life away. Everything they own; everything that they ever owned will belong to the leaders of this organization."

  Then, according to Patrick, there are the "brainwashing" sessions, lasting up to thirty hours apiece. "Two people work on [the new subject] at all times without food and maybe a little water and maybe a little rest. Somebody is constantly in there working and telling you we are the Leader, we are God, and all this jazz. And when they get through with them, they are zombies. That's all they are, complete zombies. They destroy their minds. They take their minds completely away. They have no will to think whatsoever. And all the things they are eager to do are what they are programmed by their leaders to do."

  I asked Patrick if he felt he was engaged in a Holy War with the Jesus Freak groups. "I have nothing to do with religion," he said. "These are not religious groups. These are more Satan groups than anything else. And I will stand behind this 100 percent. There is nothing religious about any of these groups. They . . . they're more Satan and they know they are Satan. Because God does not lie and cheat and steal and even kill. . . ."

  "These are strong allegations," I said.

  "You haven't forgotten Manson," Patrick countered sharply.

  "No, I haven't forgotten Manson."

  "These groups are the same. The Family looked on Man-son. They thought he was God. All of these groups are exactly the same as Manson. Tony and Susan and all the rest of them are exactly like the Manson Family. Only thing is: they're worse. They're more dangerous than Manson. He had a small Family. But these groups—Tony and Susan— have five hundred or six hundred people, and they're better organized. They're more dangerous than Manson. These groups would do anything. Believe us. . . ."

  Patrick's charges strained my credulity, and I wasn't about to believe much of what he said without documentation. He said he could prove his allegations, but—and here he gave me a squinty-eyed suspicious look, as if I might be a devious Christian spy—he wasn't going to release the information to me.

  I told him of my plans to infiltrate the Foundation and suggested that we talk at a later date. Patrick agreed but expressed grave concern for my safety. William Rambur, father of Kay "Comfort" Rambur, presently living in parts unknown with the Children of God, a militant Christian organization, told me that I was dealing with perhaps "the most vicious of the California sects."

  "Watch out for your mind," he cautioned, adding that the brainwashing techniques used by the Alamos could be as fearsomely effective as those used against American POWs by the Chinese Communists during the Korean War.

  "We've lost contact with many of the people who have gone up there," he said softly.

  "Are you suggesting murder," I asked.

  "We've lost contact with them. They haven't called us. We can't reach them. All I'm saying is that we've lost contact."

  So, during the Holy Hours of Good Friday, when Christians commemorate the agony and death of Christ on the cross—when the sky darkened above Golgotha and the earth shook—a Volkswagen containing three journalists was moving east out of Saugus, toward the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation. The town itself is not more than a few stores and a classic High Noon railway station. The Foundation is another ten miles up into the rocky hills, past the beer and burger roadhouses, past the tough-looking country music bars, past the auto graveyards.

  It was Grapes of Wrath country, home of the thirties migration that didn't make it to the Promised Land. It is a hot and tired land on the fringes of the Mojave, and it attracts failed cars: Corvairs and Edsels and Falcons haunt these holy roads. People in trailers own their own land, which they share with rattlesnakes and scorpions. Great steel py-

  Ions carrying high-tension wires march two by two across the arid hills.

  I experienced a definite tightening of the sphincters as we neared the Foundation. As the highway rose, the homes and trailers dropped away, leaving only a few widely spaced roadhouses. If there was a fence around the place, I meant to find a weak spot. I assumed that I could escape overland, avoid the snakes, and come out at a designated point somewhere below.

  But there was no fence, and the Foundation looked exactly like what it was, a converted bar and nightclub once called the Wilson Cafe. The large parking lot held several buses, vans, and cars all painted red, white, and blue and clearly marked as belonging to the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation. One sign admonished readers to Repent or Perish. There was a fire station nearby, and we pulled into the parking lot.

  Cardoso and I worked out a telephone code. If I called and said I was feeling "swell" somewhere in the conversation, I was in no danger. If I said I was "enjoying myself," I wanted him up there immediately. If I didn't call within three days, I wanted an all-out assault on the place by local sheriff's deputies.

  We pulled out of the firehouse and coasted slowly by the Foundation. The hills were green this spring after a wet winter, but in a month they would be brown and bare and choking with dust. They were hills, Susan Alamo was to say later, very like the hills of Galilee, upon which Christ walked. And though she didn't say—and surely didn't think it—they were the very hills upon which Charles Manson had walked.

  Four-thirty, Good Friday afternoon. Hollywood Boulevard, two blocks up from Grauman's Chinese Theater. I'm lounging in the entrance to a toy store, unshaven and looking, I hope, profoundly confused. Page is across the street in the VW, camera at the ready. Two brisk but seedy-looking Alamo-ites are coming my way, tracts in hand.

  My witness was an exceedingly short Christian named Chris who stared up at me with a pair of smarmy eyes that rippled and glittered wetly behind a pair of thick glasses. Did I know that Christ was coming again, that the world was about to end, and that vengeance belonged to the Lord, he said all in a rush.

  I considered the question in silence.

  Apparently encouraged, Chris explained that he wasn't exactly sure when Christ would make an appearance here on the boulevard, but that it was the "Season of His Coming."

  "I know that when the trees bloom summer can't be far behind. Right?"

  "Right," I said.

  "Well, the Bible gives us certain signs that indicate when Christ will come again." According to the Bible and Chris, the end would be at hand when the armies of the world were massed around Jerusalem. I nodded. "The waters shall become bitter as wormwood," Chris intoned, then added reasonably, "that's pollution." He paused to let this sink in, then hit me with what I suspect he felt was a boggier. "The Bible tells us that the Second Coming is near when the Jews preach the gospel and . . . the Alamos are Jewish. "

  The evidence, I had to admit, was certainly piling up.

  I saw a pattern developing: fire a series of soul-rockers, then hit them where they live with a Clincher.

  "The Bible says that Christ is at hand when the cities are enclosed in a smoking haze." Chris directed my attention to the whisky brown skies of Los Angeles. From the rapt and

  worshipful attention on his face, I think he half-expected Christ to descend from heaven, then and there, right through the smog in a blaze of glory, to smite the shit out of all the hustlers and the winos and the Godless shoppers of this choking Babylon.

  We talked about the greatest war the earth has known, a war that raged on even as we stood there, in which the Devil battled Christ for the possession of men's souls. I stared into Chris's eyes for fully thirty second
s in an effort to determine if he was trying, consciously or unconsciously, to hypnotize me. I think he felt menaced because he took a backward step and stared at the tracts in his hand for several uncomfortable seconds. Hypnotism was definitely not Chris's forte. He collected his thoughts and came back with a strong verbal blast of fire and brimstone.

  "Ah, come on," I said, "why would a loving God make someone with the express purpose of sending him to hell."

  "You think God is Love," Chris accused. His voice took on a sneering singsong quality. "You believe in a forgiving God. You only see what you want to see." His voice dropped an octave. "Well, He is a God of Wrath. He is not a . . . permissive . . . God." I further learned there was no hope for me, that I was surely hellhound, but that God had taken pity on me because I was talking to Chris, and that I could save my soul by catching the Alamo bus at six.

  "I put before you this day," Chris said, "both a blessing and a curse."

  "Here's the good news and here's the bad news," I said, smiling.

  Chris did not smile. He apparently disapproved of jokes. His face became pinched and severe. The blessing was eternity in heaven praising God for Christ's sake and the curse was a burning eternity of hellfire.

  We had been standing in front of the toy store, talking for nearly twenty minutes. I would have stayed longer but Chris had better things to do.

  "Read the tract," he commanded, "then come get on the

  bus. Remember, the Devil is going to try his best to stop you from getting to the Foundation."

  "I'm going to go drink a beer or two and think it over," I said. Chris folded his face into an ugly mask of contempt. "That's the devil talking," he stated flatly and stalked off down the boulevard to win another soul for Christ.