I came into the mountains last June at the so-​called golden hour, through cliffs the color of sand and grace. Wildfire smoke made the whole Western Slope seem becalmed, as if through the particles the sun breathed soft light. Time layered in stone, olive, rust, and dusky violet. I was listening to Christian radio. A preacher from Wisconsin. An amiable voice, beneath its surface a sense of fracture. Ochre, if I had to give the preacher’s voice a color.

“Quite a few years ago,” the preacher mused, “we went to the coast. I was studying on the beach while my three teenage boys were out in the ocean.” His three boys frolicked in the waves; the preacher considered God’s word. Sound sifted away—​until the preacher heard his wife screaming. “She said, ‘Honey.’ ” He had shorn the memory of alarm. “‘Do you hear the boys hollering for help?’” In his telling she asks as if she is simply curious. Do you hear our children drowning? “I looked up. And listened. I said, ‘Well, it kind of seems like they are.’ ” He dropped his Bible in the sand, he sprinted to the water. “Only problem, I was wearing blue jeans. Have you ever tried to swim in blue jeans?” His legs were heavy. The water carried his boys away. “The undercurrent,” said the preacher. The undertow. “I was drowning myself,” he observed.

And then—​I don’t know. The radio signal stayed strong, the preacher kept talking, his voice carrying me up into darker canyons too steep for the setting sun. Evidently, he survived. His three boys? He never did mention. The story, which we may imagine as beginning in fact, had been made into parable, the meaning of real things smoothed like sea glass. Myth carries people away. The preacher spoke more about the weight of his jeans. “The weight of our lives.” The weight, he said, is anything that distracts us from God. His sovereignty. His authority. That was all that mattered, even more than his three boys. The “weight” that drags you down could be anything. “It may be a love.” Even for your children. “Lay it aside,” he rumbled. There is no saving this world.

When I first came west at nineteen, I had my own religion. I thought that the mountains were the Earth’s secrets rising to be seen, by me, as if geology were revelation. This is a widespread misperception. Over the years, I came to think of them instead as indifferent, not made for me or anybody, not made at all. There is no intention.

But now, driving, I saw them as tender. Maybe it was the haze. These mountains still grow but as they do their peaks soften and drift down to the plains. They rise, they subside. I thought of Andrew, my friend, who would be soon riding his bicycle up this spine across which I drove. His mind would be clear. “I don’t really do the past.” Neither do the mountains. I imagined them sleeping. But they were never awake. Or always awake, always sleeping, rising, sinking. How does a body come apart? How does democracy dissolve? It subsides.

I drove down a riverine valley into the town of Rifle. Riparian green punctured by factories and grain elevators, the spike of a steeple at the edge of town. Shredded tire on the road and two men by a broken blue pickup, hood raised, drinking beer and watching the sun’s last smoke-​filtered light, purple and violent, shot through with the palest of pink hues. Dead deer down by the water, its body half-​open.

I was hoping to eat dinner at a restaurant I’d heard about called Shooters. Like Hooters, but with guns. Waitresses in cutoffs, each of them armed. It was the creation of a congresswoman named Lauren Boebert, and she carried too. “I am the militia,” she’d declared. There’s a photograph of her flanked by two servers in their Daisy Dukes and cowboy boots, armed with eight guns between the three of them. Boebert looks back over her shoulder, not at the viewer, but down at the assault rifle the buttstock of which she is framing—​no other way to put this, one must respect self-​presentation—​with her ass.

“Buttstock,” though, is only the correct term if it’s a rifle. This gun may actually be a very elaborate pistol. “For an AR-​15 to be that short and still have a buttstock,” a gun enthusiast friend told me, “it would need to be registered with ATF as a ‘short-​barrel rifle’”—subject to much greater regulation. “The ‘pistol brace’ she has in place of a stock is meant to be clamped around your forearm to stabilize the weapon if you fire it like a pistol.” My friend called it a “photo-​op gun”—​lacking a sight, he said, “you could point it at something and maybe hit it, but definitely couldn’t hit anything at a distance that would require adjusting aim for vertical drop or wind.”

Perhaps accuracy was not Boebert’s chief concern. Responses to another viral image of Boebert, Zooming into a congressional committee hearing, made much of the crossed AR-​15s she chose as her background but took no note of her short bookshelf, which featured multiple copies of a volume called Dressed to Kill. I bought a copy. Above the title are the words “You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore Because You Are . . .” The subtitle is: A Biblical Approach to Spiritual Warfare and Armor. The gun, the book, Boebert in her cutoffs. Boebert’s Twitter banner brings it all together: a blue-​jean crotch shot of a Glock on her hip, crossed hands holding a virginally white “45” cap in front of her fly, a kind of Morse-​code militant eroticism.

On January 6, Boebert tweeted, “Today is 1776.” As the mob grew, she shouted on the House floor, “Madame Speaker! I have constituents outside this building right now!” A viral rumor claimed she shared House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s location. This was not true. She just tweeted that the Speaker had left the chamber. In case anyone was interested. “Naaaaancy!” the insurrectionists called as they filled the corridors. “Where are yoooo, Nancy?”

But I hadn’t come to Shooters the month before it shuttered to meet Boebert. Her story was a stunted one: long gun, short bookshelf. I was here for the atmosphere. Dinner was a bust. They were winding down when I arrived after eight, and the only waitress remaining was an older Latinx woman who spoke limited English, which was surprising, since Boebert’s views on immigration and English were exactly what you’d imagine. She didn’t even carry a gun. But when I returned the next day for lunch, the place was packed with thick-​boned ranchers and their children, some carrying—​the ranchers, not the children, though that would come in due time—​and builders, construction workers on break. There were three tall white crosses at the entrance, and a life-​size cardboard Trump, and an image of Trump cut into an American flag made of steel, and a map of America on which was tacked play money—​what looked like a $20, featuring Trump; a $1,000 bill, featuring Trump—​and a picture of John Wayne. There was a woodcut of “We the People” above an AR-​15. A woodcut of a Blue Lives Matter flag bracketed by AR-​15s. A wooden sign that listed “Top Ten Reasons Why Men Prefer Guns Over Women.” (Number 1: “You can buy a silencer for a gun!”) The waitresses by day were young and looked White. The guns riding their hips were huge. I spied an empty seat between two men at the counter. Both wore black T-​shirts with a monochrome American flag on the sleeve. Maybe they were together. It’s the practice of such men to leave space between them. I sat in it. Neither nodded. I tried the man on my right. His shirt advertised Shooters, his red hat MAGA, the gun on his hip a certain sense of the American threat level. He looked like he’d been left a long time in the deep fryer. He had a notebook; he seemed to be doing figures.

“Manager?” I asked. He agreed that he was. “I’m a reporter.” I tapped my own blank page. He allowed that I might be. “Could I talk with you about Shooters?” That he could not permit. The boss lady wouldn’t like that. He gave me a manager smile. It didn’t feel friendly. I studied the menu.

“I recommend the Guac Nine,” said the man to my left. He did look friendly, or maybe lonely, which sometimes amounts to the same. His name, he said, was David, initial “G,” and he was just shy of thirty, unarmed. His gun, he explained, was “outside.” I pictured a bike rack of assault rifles, but I realized he meant something smaller, tucked into a glove compartment, one of the 393 million firearms privately held in America. David G didn’t need his at Shooters. He nodded at a pistol passing by, holstered to a young woman balancing two platters. “Bacon and cheese,” said David G of the burger he thought I should order. Or there was what the menu called “Glock-​a-​Mole.”

I explained my notebook. David G glanced past me at the manager, as if to make sure he wasn’t listening. He didn’t look like a nervous man. Thick, square shoulders packed into his black Shooters tee, big neck, square jaw scrimmed by an earth-​red beard. Square glasses, tinted red. This, combined with arched eyebrows and an underbite that set his thin lips in a permanent half-​smile, gave him the appearance of a boy in band class who has come to accept that not many care about all he knows of twenty-​sided dice. 

“Things,” said David G, “are going down the hole. Fast.”

The things that hold us together.

“Civil war?” I’d learned that with patriots the question needed no framing.

“That’s right. We’re going down fast.” We were the things that were going down. I told him about Sacramento, and Antifa versus the Saviors. He nodded, chewing. He wasn’t surprised. I told him about Ashli, how I thought some people had made her a martyr—

He interrupted. “Yeah, I know her.” Present tense? He didn’t explain. He just folded her into the things that were going down. The shit that was coming. That’s why, he said, he was in Rifle. Refugee, from Denver. Just like Lauren. Boebert, he meant, who’d moved inward, up from the city.

“What happened in Denver?”

“I got into trouble.” He did not care to say what kind. He stared at the television over the counter. Fox News. “MURDERS,” it read in big white letters. “VS 2020: +17%.” In a deepening red square of alarm: “VS 2019: +133%.” “The guns,” he said, still staring, “are the most important thing.”

The manager, I noticed, wasn’t happy about our conversation. Maybe because the boss lady wouldn’t be. But I was. I’d made a friend. David G and I were the lonely men, the ones who want to talk, the ones who don’t have anyone else to talk to. He seemed the least threatening presence in the room, including the children. He told me he kept his serious firepower ready—​at his grandma’s. Hidden. Where he lived, he had only BB guns. “Decoys.”

Who did he mean to fool?

“I have two green cards acting as roommates.”

I pictured two bureaucratic rectangles, printed on green card stock, with arms and legs, doing a little roommate dance.

“They barely speak a lick of English. And you can’t trust someone you don’t understand.”

True enough. But wasn’t it him who was trying to deceive, with his decoys?

“We are in a tinderbox situation.” I thought of the smoke in the air. Something I’d heard on the radio. A fire warning, issued for the first time in ten years. “Critical extreme.”

“What is it that will put us over the brink?” I asked.

Had he not told me about the guns at his grandma’s? He thought that the fact that he had to hide his guns meant it might well soon be time to use them. “Veterans, myself included, will rise up when the moment comes.” He’d had six months in the Army. What had he learned? “I was almost blown up.” I didn’t follow the lesson. It happened twice, in training. Mortars landed next to him. His mistake or the artillerist’s? Not the point. Here he perched, polishing off another fat plate from Shooters. The point was that he’d been in the shit, even if the shit was self-​inflicted. The point was, he was prepared. “I’m indestructible,” he said. What ended his Army career? “Something like asthma.” Now he was a UPS driver. “Not a single army in the world can stop us.” The UPS drivers? The veterans. The men with hidden guns. The world pushes them, he said. It does. It pushes, this world. It takes. “Little bits at a time, taking little bits from us.” Like erosion, like the wind. You don’t notice. You think you’re standing your ground, but the ground crumbles. You step back. You eyeball the green cards. Possibly, you tweet. Maybe you march. Up Constitution Avenue. January 6. Now the course of things is reversing: You take. You take ground. Press forward—

“Ashli Babbitt?” I said.

David G nodded slowly, looking at me through his red-​tinted glasses. “I met her. I met Ashli Babbitt. It was a truck stop. Ashli Babbitt.” This was before Ashli Babbitt became “Ashli Babbitt.” How had he wound up talking to her? “Just like you and me, talking now.” Nothing flirty. Just two people at a counter. Only later would he know her, would he himself understand his close contact with the spirit of history. “I never forget a face,” he explained. He hadn’t watched the video. He’d never seen her die. “It popped up on the Facebook.” Her face. Such was his “feed,” filled with the face of a woman he believed he had met, to whom he had been nice, who in return had been nice to him, as not many were, and now she was gone and everywhere at the same time. He dreamed he saw her. He wondered if it could have been him, in the broken window, leading the charge. He thought of the mortars. Maybe it almost had. “The way they killed her,” he said, “made me feel like I don’t like people anymore.” Correction: He’d never really liked them. Individuals, yes, but not “people.” “People” bullied him as a child. People do that sort of thing. He’d learned to fight. That’s why he didn’t carry. “I start with my fists.” Where does it end?

I noticed on his shirtsleeve a Scripture citation running down the side of a monochrome American flag, Joshua 1:9. Same as on the patriot pastor’s shirt at the Ashli rally, same as on Pastor Dave’s AR-​15 at Glad Tidings. The battle verse, rak chazak amats. It was on a lot of Shooters merch. The front of the shirt featured the fragmented snake of the Revolutionary-​era “Join, or Die” flag, only, it read “Liberty or Death.”

“Are you a man of faith?”

“Absolutely.” He felt guided by Joshua 1:9. He wanted to say it from memory. “‘Have I not’”—his voice deepened and stumbled as if entering a dark cave. He closed his eyes. “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and—​Be strong and—” He couldn’t remember. It’s all right, he said. Joshua 1:9 was the weapon he always carried. He pulled out his phone. Tapped and it was there.

“How will I know when things are going down the hole?” I asked.

“You get into the city areas, you will see the people.” Which people? The “instigators.” I’d see them fighting in the streets. “When I say it’s going down the hole fast, I’m talking about that. I’m talking about those of us who have less tolerance for the instigators.” The instigators. “So some will resort to, let’s just say, other methods.” Militia? He smiled. “I’m not saying I’m not militia.” He would say he was a man of peace. The militia movement, he said, stands for “any reasonable method to promote peace.” Like guns. He offered his favorite quotation: “‘People who know violence and are capable of violence are always the persons to pick peace.’” He didn’t know who said this.

David G finished his meal, and I moved on to a table of five men. One grumbled for all: “You don’t want to hear my point of view.” The manager approached. I was small, he was smaller, but his chest appeared to have inflated. Did his hand hover near his sidearm? Impossible. It wasn’t that kind of situation. Was it? He stood there. I stood there, too, eyeing my uneaten Guac Nine. It was time to leave. Not that I thought he was going to draw his gun. It wasn’t like that. That would defeat the point of the gun. He didn’t need to. The point of the gun was the promotion of peace.

Excerpted from The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet. Copyright © 2023 by Jeff Sharlet. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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