James Rawles - Liberators

As Joshua slowed and neared the stop sign, someone forward and to the left of his truck shouted, “Out of state!”

Horizontal half-inch steel barricade cables were simultaneously raised to a height of thirty inches ahead of them, to the left, right, and behind them, all within seconds. These cables were jerked up and pulled taut by teenagers spinning hand-cranked windlasses. Men swarmed out of buildings on both sides of the street. Joshua pivoted his head left and right to see that nine men had rifles of various vintages pointed at the cab of the truck.

A young man with a scraggly beard approached closer than the others, with a shouldered SKS rifle. He had it pointed at Joshua’s head. He shouted, “Shut it down!”

Joshua did as he was ordered.

Four more men appeared, three armed with ARs, and one with a Saiga-12 shotgun. A dozen teenagers, some of them armed, soon followed.

A gray-haired pudgy man holding an AR-10 and wearing a camouflage hunting jacket walked out of a nearby café. He ordered, “Hands on the dashboard and the backs of the seats, all of you! Driver, roll down your window.”

Joshua cranked the window down immediately.

They could now hear the man more clearly. “I’m Elder Josiah Wilson, and I’m in charge here. We cannot have hordes of easterners coming into our county.”

Joshua shook his head and said in a calm voice, “We’re not a ‘horde.’ As you can see, there are only five of us—and two are small children. We are God-fearing and law-abiding folks, and we’re just passing through your county on our way to live with a friend of mine up in northern Idaho, up near Moscow.”

“You are vagrants with no visible means of support.”

“I’m no vagrant. I am a traveler , exercising my right of way. Now, if you’ll be so kind as to drop that cable to my left.”

Wilson said, “You’re not going anywhere until after we’ve exacted our road tax and fine for vagrancy.”

The man with the SKS approached and pressed the muzzle of the rifle into Joshua’s temple, and ordered, “Flip that key forward, just one click. If you start that engine, I’ll shoot all of you.”

Joshua did as he was ordered. Then he put his right hand back on the dash.

The man glanced down at the gas gauge and shouted over his shoulder, “They’ve got a quarter tank.”

Joshua said, “I don’t believe this. I’m not—”

Wilson, looking angry, yelled, “No, no! You are going to pay the county a fine and tax consisting of any fuel that you have in cans. You may keep what is in your gas tank. Then you can decide whether you will press on, beyond the confines of Fremont County, or if you want to turn around and head back from whence you came.”

After a pause, Wilson ordered: “Search the vehicle.”

Six men swarmed the back of the truck. There were gleeful shouts when they dropped the tailgate and saw the ten Scepter fuel cans. In just a few minutes, they had removed all of the cans, the spout, and the lid wrench.

Wilson said consolingly, “We haven’t molested any of your other belongings. We’re civilized here.”

The man with the SKS pulled out a blue slip of paper and placed it on the dashboard between Joshua’s hands.

Wilson explained, “That is a pass, good for twenty-four hours. It’ll get you through the roadblocks on either side of Jackson Hole and all the way to the Idaho state line. You may proceed, but don’t stop anywhere in Fremont County. Once you’ve left Fremont County, you may not return, or you will be shot on sight. Have I made myself clear?”

“Perfectly.”

Wilson said snidely, “Have a nice day. You are free to go.”

The cable to the left was dropped, and Joshua started the engine.

After the pickup had cleared the barrier, Joshua asked, “Did you see any badges?”

Megan answered, “No. But what difference would that make in times like this? They’ve got the ultimate revenue scheme.”

Joshua, still livid, asked, “How many of them did you count?”

Megan answered, “There were at least twenty-two of them.”

Joshua shook his head and said, “If I was by myself, I’d sneak back there and wax as many of them as I could.”

“But you’re not traveling by yourself,” Megan chided. “You can’t take on a whole town. We have the boys to look after. We certainly can’t do that if we’re dead.”

When they were ten miles south of Driggs, Idaho, with Megan driving, the engine blew a head gasket and noticeably lost compression. The fuel gauge was pointed near E.

Malorie said dryly, “Do you suppose this is God’s second way of telling us that we need to start walking?”

Megan pressed on, wanting to squeeze another few miles out of their gas tank. With the fuel tank exhausted, the engine hesitated and finally died when they were two miles south of Driggs. Megan turned the wheel and coasted to park the pickup on the shoulder of the highway.

They reorganized their load onto the two deer carts. Malorie checked the tire inflation on the carts and found two tires were a few pounds low, so she topped them off with the hand pump. With the extra canned food that they’d brought from the house, this was by far the most that they had ever loaded on the deer carts. The heavy carts, along with backpacks that were quite full, made for slow going. Even Leo and Jean carried small loads in their rucksacks.

The afternoon was cold, and the dark sky threatened snow. They started walking, singing hymns to raise their sprits.

Driggs was an interesting town. For many years it had been considered the poor man’s version of Jackson Hole. Like Jackson, it had a wonderful view of the Grand Teton peaks—but as seen from the west side, rather than the east. The town was unpretentious and had only the basic amenities. Not surprisingly, most of the businesses were closed.

One of the few open businesses was a Big R farm and ranch supply store. The cavernous store was unheated and now had a pitifully small inventory. It obviously was in the process of becoming a secondhand goods store.

While Malorie watched the boys and guarded the carts, Megan and Joshua went in and struck up a conversation with a sales clerk, who was dressed in heavily insulated mechanic’s coveralls, gloves, and a fluorescent orange pile cap.

Hearing of their plight, the clerk said, “Those bastards in Dubois have been doing that ever since the Crunch. And the deputy sheriff and city council in Jackson are complicit, since they get a percentage of the gasoline. The County Board of Supervisors and the sheriff up in Lander claim that they can’t do anything about the organized highway robbery down in Dubois. The sheriff’s deputies in Dubois and Jackson have officially been fired, but they’re still wearing their uniforms and badges. The police in Jackson haven’t done anything about it, either. They’re also still on the job, and also on the take. It’s a lot like back when the federal government used to hand out free cheese. Nobody speaks up about it when they get a piece of the action.”

Megan noted that the clerk pronounced Dubois “Dew-Boyce,” rather than the French style, and that made her cringe.

The man continued, “You’ve got to understand that Fremont County is about the size of Vermont, but it isn’t unified. Mormons control some of the towns. Here in Driggs, like in the rest of southern Idaho, the majority of us are Latter-day Saints, but we respect other people’s property and the law. I’d say that’s true for the majority of Mormons. But just like with any other group, there are a few bad apples. In Dubois they started out just trying to defend their town from outsiders, but they pretty quickly slipped into their gasoline banditry. It is basically no different from what national governments do, on a grander scale, even in normal times. They systematically rob you, but they call it a tax, and they have the police to back them up.”