Them

by Jon Ronson

  “Will they die?” I asked Rick.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Depends how many times they get stung. Anyway. Are you ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be,” I said.

  I took a last big swig, we paid up, walked the hundred yards to the entrance, up past the sign that read ‘NO THROUGH ROAD’, and were immediately approached by a security guard.

  “Hey there,” said Rick.

  “You guys should have driven up here,” smiled the guard.

  “Oh, we wanted to walk,” said Rick. “You know. Enjoy the air.”

  “Hey!” said the guard. “No problem. Have a good time at Care.”

  He gave us a little salute. We walked on.

  “That was easy,” I whispered.

  “Told you,” whispered Rick.

  We walked the length of the car park – there were perhaps 500 cars, Mercedes and BMWs and Range Rovers and Jeeps – and up to a second wooden guardhouse, manned by a bored-looking security officer and some young valet parkers. Nobody seemed to notice us as we walked past.

  And then we were in Bohemian Grove.

  ♦

  The bank of sixteen public telephones offered the first indication that this was no ordinary campground. The piano music drifting down from a nearby hill was another. There were clusters of canvas tents everywhere, some just off the road, others perched in the hills, as if built out of the trees. Each encampment was equipped with a bar, a grand piano, a huge stone fireplace, a stone barbecue and a wooden owl sculpture.

  One had an open-air Jacuzzi. A live band played rock and roll standards in another – “Lucille’ and ‘Shout’ and ‘Go Johnny Go” – to a group of men, most elderly, some middle-aged, dancing and shouting and gulping down cocktails. I did not recognize any of them. But we kept our distance.

  From time to time an open-top tram drove bumpily past us – decorated with a drawing of an owl – carrying khaki-wearing Bohemians from one end of the camp to the other. Again, I recognized nobody, although they all had an unmistakable aura of wealth and power. They all looked like they were someone.

  Rick and I continued to explore. The camps were each marked with wooden signs: ‘Cave Man’ and ‘Wolf’ and ‘Dragons’ and ‘Lost Angels’ and ‘Stowaway’. Red lanterns hung in the trees behind Dragons, like little devil eyes. The Grove’s ambience seemed deliberately spooky, as if a designer had been instructed to utilize the shadows of the giant redwoods – the whole place was in shadow – to give it some kind of chic druid-Satanic milieu.

  Everywhere we walked we discovered the remnants of a recently defunct party. Dozens of empty bottles of Moet et Chandon were scattered around a secluded lawn. The ice had not yet melted in the silver bowl that stood on a wooden table. Three strawberries remained. I ate them.

  “Look at this,” said Rick. He was standing by a notice-board, full of snapshot photographs presumably taken at the previous night’s entertainment. In these photographs, elderly preppy-looking gentlemen stood around, drinking and laughing. Some were dressed in full drag, with fishnet stockings and hideously applied make-up, humorously oversized fake breasts protruding from their nylon blouses. They struck burlesque erotic poses, their legs wide apart, fingering their buttocks, tongues out, etc. Others were dressed as Elvis impersonators, with fake chest wigs. Next to the photographs was a notice advertising the following Tuesday’s concert, MC: George Bush.

  There was a further notice, locked in a glass case. It was the guest list. I quickly scanned the names. Bohemians were wandering past me and I didn’t want to appear too nosy. Under C was the name Cheney, Richard. It would be reported on CNN a week later that George Bush, Sr learnt of his son’s decision to appoint Dick Cheney as his presidential running mate while he was camping on holiday in northern California.

  And there was the list of guest speakers for the following week’s lakeside talks: Henry Kissinger and John Major.

  Black linen drapes hung from a bank of trees near the lagoon. We walked between them. I turned around to find myself face to face with a giant stone owl, nestling between two huge redwoods. It must have been fifty feet high and covered in moss.

  “The shrine,” whispered Rick.

  Bohemian Grove was, all in all, an unusual place. Besides the photographic remnants of the Drag/Elvis costume party, which I had found decidedly unpleasant in a palpably woman-hating way, and the cod-spooky Rocky Horror Show touches, this was a very beautiful spot. The ancient redwoods were vast and breathtaking. The tents looked luxurious and opulent, and I imagined myself sipping cocktails at twilight, discussing preppy issues with like-minded world leaders.

  We wandered along the winding path. We found a private beach at the edge of a tranquil part of the Russian River, the sand perfectly manicured. There was a landing stage and a diving board. A handful of Bohemians were swimming naked in the waters below.

  Rick and I gazed out at the trees and we discussed world events. How did we feel about the break-up of Microsoft? Rick was on balance in favour. I hadn’t made up my mind. How about G8? Rick was on balance against. I hadn’t made up my mind. I realized that my preppy demeanour was not a camouflage. I was genuinely interested in these matters. I didn’t have a care in the world. I had made it to the inner enclave. Dusk was falling and the owl burning was soon to begin, and with Rick as my cover I knew I would not be caught.

  “Hey, look,” said Rick. “There’s your friend Alex.”

  Sure enough, Alex and Mike were heading down the path towards us.

  “Hi, you two!” I said.

  “Don’t go that way!” hissed Alex. “There are cameras in the trees!”

  “There are owls everywhere!” hissed Mike, his eyes wide in terror.

  “Just keep walking!” said Alex. “Just keep walking!”

  And before I could say another word to them, they had gone.

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “They seem to be trapped in some sort of paranoid state,” said Rick, breezily.

  “They certainly do,” I said.

  “Ah,” said Rick. “Can you see the osprey?”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “A lovely seabird.”

  ♦

  Nine p.m. There was no formal announcement. No bell was rung. But the Bohemians instinctively knew that the time had come for them down at the lagoon. The ceremony was about to begin. Rick and I found a prime spot, directly opposite the giant stone owl. We sat on the grass and we rested our backs against a tree. Soon the grassy bank was packed. A thousand men had drifted down, in groups of twenty or thirty, and were crowded together, sitting cross-legged on the grass. Many lit cigars. A few scrutinized me. I was probably the youngest person there.

  I glanced behind me and spotted Alex and Mike. They spotted me. We looked away.

  “First timer?” asked a big man wearing glasses.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You’re going to love the ceremony,” he said. “Fools! Fools! Ha ha!”

  “Sorry?” I said.

  “You’ll see,” he laughed. “Here. Have this.”

  He handed me a colour programme. The cover read, “Cremation of Care. July 15th 2000. 121st Performance. Bohemian Grove.” I thanked him and flicked through it. It was a cast list.

  High Priest – Jay Jacobus.

  Voice of the Owl – John MacAllister.

  Funeral Cortege – The Gentlemen of Lost Angels Camp.

  And so on.

  From across the lagoon, a single violin began to play. A hush descended. A figure appeared before the owl. He wore lederhosen. His lederhosen were covered in leaves. He resembled some kind of elfin Germanic Tarzan. He was, I learnt from my programme, Eden’s Garden Soloist.

  He stretched out his arms and began to sing, with operatic grandeur: “Glorious! Glorious! Oh twigs! Oh boughs! Oh trees…!”

  For the next ten minutes or so, Eden’s Garden Soloist eulogized nature’s splendour, his voice ringing through loudspeakers concealed in the trees. Spotlights picked out individual redwoods. They glo
wed green.

  Then we were plunged suddenly into darkness. The drums thundered. Boom! Boom! At each boom a robed man carrying a flaming torch appeared amid the trees. There were perhaps thirty of them. It was, without question, a berobed torchlight procession. Their hoods were red, their robes black. They resembled posh Klansmen, or the cast of a Broadway musical, should Broadway ever decide to do the Moloch Pagan Cult of Sacrifice story.

  They lit a pyre at the foot of the owl.

  “Hail, Bohemians!” said the High Priest, and it was clear he was the highest of all the priests because his robes were silver and gold and made of silk. The High Priest reprised Eden’s Garden Soloist’s eulogy of the great outdoors. “The ripple of waters, the song of birds, such music as inspires the soul…”

  To summarize, he informed the crowd, these men of wealth and power, that Dull Care, arch-enemy of Beauty, must be slain, right here and right now!

  “Bring fire!” he roared.

  I wondered what Alex and Mike were making of this. I, personally, took Dull Care to mean the burdens and responsibilities of business, but I imagined that Alex was interpreting the scene differently. A naysayer could easily presume that Dull Care meant the world beyond the Grove, the average Joes, and that the High Priest was suggesting the world leaders in the crowd should not give a damn about ordinary people.

  As I pondered this, a startling thundercrack rang out through the trees, followed by a scary, cackly voice. It was the voice of Dull Care.

  “Fools!” he roared. “Fools! Ha ha ha! When will ye learn that me ye cannot slay?”

  Dull Care suggested to the High Priest that he was invincible.

  “When ye turn your feet to the market place,” he mocked cacklingly, “am I not waiting for you as of old? Fools! To dream ye conquer Care.”

  At this, and in a breathtaking display of pyrotechnic wizardry, the spirit of Dull Care spat fire onto the High Priest. From the treetops, a gob of fire rained down upon the High Priest’s hat. This infuriated the High Priest.

  “Nay, thou mocking spirit,” he spluttered. “We know thou waitest for us when this our sylvan holiday shall end. But this too we know: year after year, within this happy Grove, our fellowship has banned thee for a space. So shall we burn thee once again and in the flames that eat thine effigy, we’ll read the sign. Midsummer set us free!”

  And the crowd roared and cheered and yelled the last line back at the priest.

  “Midsummer set us free!”

  At this moment, Death appeared on a gondola on the lagoon, carrying a papier-mache effigy towards the giant owl. Dry ice floated upon the lagoon’s surface. It was a beautiful sight. The effigy was retrieved from the boat by (my programme informed me) the Brazier Bearers, held out to the owl’s midriff, and then thrown – by the Mourning Revelry Dancers – into the fire.

  “Aaaargh,” said Dull Care, his grotesque death rattle filling the forest.

  “Hooray!” said the crowd.

  Then fireworks erupted. Then everybody sang ‘And When The Saints Go Marching In’. Then it was over. We clapped. The Grove descended once again into silence, broken only by the sound of many elderly men murmuring to their neighbours, “Could you possibly help me up? Thank you so much.”

  “Well, well, well,” I said.

  “Pretty spectacular,” said Rick.

  “I guess we should go,” I said.

  We wandered back towards the exit. A ragtime band was playing near a bonfire. All along the path, men unzipped their khakis and urinated up against the trees and straight onto the road. This did not strike me as mere convenience. There were public toilets everywhere. It was a statement. I needed the toilet myself, so I urinated too, my urine joining theirs, forming a little golden stream down the path and into the mud.

  ♦

  At 1 a.m., back at the Occidental Motel, Alex and Mike and Violet knocked on my bedroom door. We nodded to each other. Alex locked the door behind him. He pulled the curtains closed. Violet hooked the hidden camera up to the TV set. She fiddled around with the wires. We sat on the bed.

  “OK,” said Violet. “I think we’ve got it.”

  She switched on the TV to reveal an indistinct blob of green to the right of the screen. We squinted our eyes.

  “I don’t understand what I’m seeing,” said Violet. “The picture is very blurry and crooked, honey.”

  “Nobody has ever lived to get this footage out before,” snapped Mike.

  “I think it might be Eden’s Garden Soloist,” I suggested.

  “Who?” said Mike.

  “The elf in the leaf-covered lederhosen,” I said.

  “Glorious! Glorious! Oh twigs! Oh boughs! Oh trees…!” sang Eden’s Garden Soloist.

  “Look!” said Alex. “Torches! Two torches! Now there’s three torches! See them? More torches! It was some kind of sick torchlight procession.”

  Sure enough, specks of light had appeared at a perplexing 90-degree angle in the corner of the TV screen.

  “Damn,” said Alex. “The camera must have toppled over.”

  “That’s so scary,” said Violet. “I would have been terrified. How terrifying is that?”

  “That’s nothing,” said Alex. “They start worshipping the owl any minute.”

  “Hail, Bohemians!” began the High Priest. “The ripple of waters, the song of birds, such music as inspires the soul…”

  “Were you scared?” Violet asked Mike.

  “I’m not going to lie,” he replied. “I was scared to death in there. The whole place was full of owl statues and Gods. Just owls everywhere.”

  “But surely that’s like going to a Hilton and getting freaked out because they had H’s everywhere,” I reasoned. “The owls were a motif.”

  Mike stared at me as if I was mad.

  ♦

  It was clear that the Texans’ interpretation of the ceremony differed from my own. My lasting impression was of an all-pervading sense of immaturity: the Elvis impersonators, the cod pagan spooky rituals, the heavy drinking. These people might have reached the apex of their professions but emotionally they seemed to be trapped in their college years. I wondered whether the Bohemians shroud themselves in secrecy for reasons no more sinister than that they thought it was cool.

  I remembered something that my Bilderberg deep throat had said to me on the telephone one Sunday evening shortly before I set off for the Grove. He said that far from being fed up with hearing wild conspiracy theories about themselves, many of the Bilderbergers actually thoroughly enjoy it.

  He also said that, in all honesty, neither Bilderberg nor Bohemian Grove attract the calibre that they used to. The current members are getting older and older, and the prospective newcomers – the world leaders of tomorrow – don’t seem all that interested in getting involved.

  “Let’s face it,” my deep throat had said to me, “nobody rules the world any more. The markets rule the world. Maybe that’s why your conspiracy theorists make up all those crazy things. Because the truth is so much more frightening. Nobody rules the world. Nobody controls anything.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “that’s why you Bilderbergers love to hear the conspiracy theories. So you can pretend to yourselves that you do still rule the world.”

  “Maybe so,” he said.

  “Fools!” roared Dull Care on the video in my bedroom.

  “Oh my God!” shrieked Violet, clutching Alex’s arm. “How is that normal? That is so Satanic!”

  Mike washed his face at my sink. He said he wanted to get the hell out of northern California. He said that as long as only one copy of the videotape existed all our lives were in danger.

  “We should make copies,” said Mike, “give one to Jon, post another back home, and keep the third with us at all times.”

  Alex and Mike and Violet plotted the future of their video. Once home, they would stream it on their website. Then they would release the complete version as a mail order VHS.

  “Look,” said Alex, “I’m not into the occult.
I deal with concrete things. Waco. Ruby Ridge. I deal with hard-core things. But this was much worse than I expected. The catcalls and the insane cackling. After it was over I was walking through the crowd and I was hearing little bits of conversation. Old men were going, ‘Yes! That’s the key! We must burn him again! I do want to burn him again.’ These people were in a fever.”

  “Even so,” I said, “it isn’t as if you overheard any of them secretly discussing global control or anything like that.”

  There was a short silence.

  “Yes I did,” said Alex.

  “Did you?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Alex. “I heard old men going around bragging about how they manipulate the world. I heard two guys going, ‘Yes, we’re going to get him elected.’”

  “Did you hear someone say, ‘Yes, we’re going to get him elected’?” I asked.

  “I swear to God,” said Alex. “Mike was right there with me.”

  “Is that word for word?” I said.

  Mike nodded.

  “Another guy said, ‘Our new missile system is really on top form. They’re delivering the reactor next week,’” said Alex.

  “You’re making this up,” I said.

  “No I’m not,” said Alex.

  “These people are sick,” said Mike. “This was sick for America.”

  “You do seem freaked out,” I said.

  “I am very much freaked out,” he said. “I’m so tired of these people telling us that David Koresh ran a cult. That was a cult. I have never seen the Branch Davidians worship an idol.”

  This was a good point. I wrote the line down in my notepad.

  “Write this down,” said Alex. “The government is so good at calling people weirdos and…and…cult members…” Alex paused, stumbling on his words. “I’m so tired,” he said.

  “The government,” prompted Violet, “are saying the Branch Davidians are a cult but here’s a bunch of old guys that run America in their black robes…”

  “I’m exhausted,” said Alex.

  “I’d be exhausted too if I’d been through what you’ve been through,” said Violet. She leant over to hug Alex. But he flinched away.

  “The point I’m trying to make is this,” said Alex. “These people point their fingers every day. If you’re against the government you’re an extremist. You’re crazy. But this was a pagan ceremony worshipping the earth and engaging in human sacrifice.’”