There was a time in my life that I really wished I could find a way to connect with my father, gain the benefit of his advice on life, or even just spend time in each other’s company without it devolving into some kind of rant or purity test disguised as a conversation. Since I’d become a teenager, it seemed that Dear Old Dad had turned into a constantly angry asshole whose presence I could not stand, and having been told that everyone goes through this with their father once they hit their teen years I resolved to fix whatever I was doing wrong that was weakening our bond.
Getting everything I wanted cured me of those particular delusions.
Welcome to the Bob Marshall Wilderness, everyone.
To begin with, it must be understood that I was only ever put in the Boy Scouts for the sake of Stewart’s image. I was an all-American boy with an all-American martyr hero visionary prophet future president father, and so I had an image to uphold. If there had been any intent for Scouting to actually be for my personal development, I would not have been put into a carefully selected Politically Reliable troop 70 miles and an hour away; limiting my actual contact with the other scouts and imposing even more on my mother’s time while preserving the boost in image made it ideal, and when Stewart would smuggle a gun in a shoulder satchel to campouts and events the other parents and leadership would look the other way.
Needless to say it was assumed that I was somehow going to make Eagle despite starting at 15 and having to make a 2 hour round trip drive to see anyone involved in my troop, which was logistically impossible to begin with and still became a running narrative for Stewart’s grave disappointment in me whenever he wanted to needle my self esteem.
Despite the distance, I managed to get some work in on acting like a normal human being. Stewart couldn’t attend every event and even limiting my interaction with other boys my age to highly supervised and structured activity couldn’t stop me from practicing some badly missing social graces and gaining some experience interacting with humans outside of a martial arts classroom or political conference.
I can still remember the older scouts clustering around the window of a back office when it was my turn to watch the Youth Protection Video, mouthing along through the glass to their favorite lines from memory. Nothing beats middle school children talking about the regular Thursday afternoon beer and drug parties for young boys at Steve's house to test your ability to keep a straight face in what should be a solemn circumstance, especially seeing basically everyone you know clustered in the corner of a frosted window and reciting along like a showing of Rocky Horror. Looking back everyone around me was awkward and had their own fairly typical teen boy issues, but I’m certain that I often lapsed into acting like an alien in a skinsuit whenever the neurotypical mask slipped or the weird top-secret paramilitary lifestyle at home intruded on my behavior.
When Stewart was around, I didn’t even have room for that. Remember that I was raised to be camouflage for and an extension of Stewart, not a person.
This is exemplified in the way that my troop’s 50 mile backpacking trip through the Bob became, for me, just another episode of the ongoing Stewart Rhodes Show.
Stewart began to deform the trip around himself in the planning stage, demanding concessions for his brittle knees and metal-rod-fused spine and getting the trip extended as much as he could so that he could realistically keep up. The main utility of this was providing an excuse for his own catastrophically missed deadlines with Oathkeepers projects, but it played havoc with our trip scheduling regardless.
I packed unreasonably heavy, like always. There’s no point in being a prepper if you’re not carrying all your cool doodads out into the field, even if the store clerks checking out your troop’s gear at Sportsman’s sort almost everything in your giant 80s surplus rucksack, even the radical but heavy Bolo sword, into the ‘nonessential’ pile to save weight. Stewart rectified this by repacking my new lightweight hiking backpack (after spending around $3000 in oathkeepers money between three shopping trips, even with one helped by a ‘Boy scouts shopping here makes us look good’ discount) with so much useless Survivadude shit when we got home that the zippers on several compartments burst open on the first day of the hike.
It ultimately didn’t matter, the weight may have become an issue if I were keeping pace with the rest of the troop, seeing nature, socializing, or even just walking particularly fast. Instead, I was in the back watching Stewart’s lagging Six in case of attacking bears or very confident large birds.
I genuinely don’t remember if I was told to hang back and buddy pair with my father while everyone else drew further and further ahead, or if that just came naturally to me and no one said otherwise. Certainly having anyone be alone in the Bob when they had prior injuries and were not in particularly good shape was a bad idea. I do recall that one evening we were relatively caught up with the others at the end of the day, and Stewart gave me permission to go ahead with the rest of the boys. I hustled to the front with my overloaded pack and threw myself bodily into a conversation about why the Eagles didn’t just carry everyone to Mordor while we made just over twice the pace I’d been walking at all day.
Once.
The rest of the time, Stewart and I composed the grumbling end of what I called the Boy Scout Inchworm: The fastest hikers realizing that they’d drawn a little too far ahead and waiting for the middle group to catch up to eyeball distance, the middle group waiting a long, long time for Stewart and I to catch up and then bounding back ahead. This meant that aside from the Scoutmaster, who spent an inordinate amount of time keeping an eye on us in his roving oversight between groups, I was in the company of Stewart from morning to night. We would lose the group in the morning, get to camp late, and stay almost totally isolated for the bulk of the day.
I don’t think I imagined the annoyed glares we often got when we finally hiked up onto the group waiting for us, allowing them to leave without having to tell people that we were abandoned far in the distance if we died.
It may have helped if Stewart had actually used the special plantar fascia stretching device he’d had my mom drive three hours round trip to get, on one of the only days when she didn’t spend nine hours shuttling the child mob between martial arts classes, but getting the very best of ultralight gear in everything from boots to wool socks and sundry didn’t seem to help very much either.
Most of the time I spent with the other scouts was while Stewart was assembling his military-style poncho shelter just before lights out, during which we all got the benefit of his half-remembered Airborne survival training supplemented by random prepper book quotes. One unfortunate youngster received a full lecture on how things worked in the “World of Men” after Stewart used a rear naked choke to separate the world’s most unserious teen boy fight around the campfire. My days otherwise were nonstop contact with my father’s personality, exceeding even riding along on Oathkeepers trips for lack of radio, audiobooks, and road hypnosis.
I might not have been able to spend much time with the kids that I called my friends, for lack of any real understanding of what that meant (they certainly wouldn’t have seen it that way), but I did get the benefit of an endless fountain of Stewart life advice.
Most of it was how I should go about bagging a woman like my mom.
First and foremost mom was younger and impressionable, which is important, but so is planning your appeal: Stewart, in his own words, was a “bad boy” and therefore interesting, but had been baptized into the LDS while his grandmother took him church-hopping as a child. This let him be edgy, but also familiar and safe and made being grabbed by the head by a woman speaking in tongues and bored to tears in Orthodox ceremony in the rest of the Church tour well worth it. Mormon women, you see, were ideal: There were a lot of advantages to be had in the community’s prepper culture and access to the best dry goods canneries and midwives, but mostly it was about finding traditional women who didn’t have weird complexes about sex. “Lots of Christian women have all this weird shame around sex being dirty, but Mormons are like ‘hey, we’re married?’ Cool...” *Unpleasant Chuckle* “… Partake.”
I know a lot of ex-Mormon women would disagree there, but that’s beside the point. At this time in the day we had been on a downhill and thus caught up more to the other groups, and were not too far behind the watchful Scoutmaster. I can hope that he didn’t have to overhear, but he probably did. I’m sorry about that, Brian.
It wasn’t all about finding Tradwives of course, there had to be a decent chunk of the day devoted to reciting filthy basic training marching songs from the 80s (the only worthwhile part of the whole hike) and complaining about the pace of the march. Stewart would repeat his complaints for years after, that everyone else was utterly goal-oriented and not willing to take the time to “Contemplate the flowers of the motherfucking field.” There were fishing poles in his pack left unused and clearings that could have been explored, all forsaken to put your head down and march through a blurred tunnel of natural beauty to reach the end.
This didn’t really match my perspective until the last day, when we had to effectively sprint the last stretch to make it only somewhat late to the already delayed pickup time at the far end of the trail.
In all of his comparisons to the Bataan death march, Stewart never showed the slightest hint of self awareness when it came to considering that he might have precluded stopping to do nature things by slowing the pace of the entire trip. Certainly the front groups had plenty of time to pick Huckleberries and take pictures of birds while they waited on us to amble up. If he ever did, having done a notable father/son thing to tell other people about in the future would have overridden it. He might have known even then that he would be pulling the “Fifty mile backpacking trip through BOB MARSHALL WILDERNESS” out as proof of being an active father if he ever needed it, and he certainly did not hesitate to hang his hat on it in custody hearings later down the line.
After all, the only reason to do Fatherly activities is for the sake of optics. The optics of taking your children to spend time in the wilderness, the optics of your son getting his own housewife to prove the virility of Stewart’s bloodline and his family’s contribution to fixing America, the optics of dispensing wisdom, the optics of being a father.
Nothing matters but perception, not if your life’s overriding mission is to become the most important man in the history of the country. Anything and everything you do thus becomes an exercise in resume building, and anyone becomes a tool to build your persona.
Maybe he would have had better luck at sentencing if he’d reminisced about the Bob a little, no egomaniacal traitor would take his child on a 50 mile wilderness hike with the Boy Scouts after all.