Pecked to death by ducks (4 page)

Adding iodine solution to water is a good way to purify it, as is boiling it for twenty minutes. Dr. Spika said he would have to look into the filters in water purifiers, but my experience with them has been very good.

Dr. Spika recommends against taking antibiotics on a preventive basis, which "puts a lot of pressure on bacteria to develop resistance." Additionally, some antibiotics can "give rashes that are aggravated by the sun." In rare cases antibiotics can be fatal. As traveler's diarrhea is seldom life-threatening, Spika didn't like the idea of exposing large numbers of people to antibiotics on a "prophylactic" basis.

He did recommend carrying antibiotics for a quick cure, however. Bactrim and Septra are two of the most effective drugs, though both contain sulfa, to which some people are allergic. A doctor can recommend certain tetracycline-based antibiotics for the sulfa-allergic traveler.

So there it is: Purify the water you drink, carry rehydration salts, and take antibiotics at the first rumbling of a problem. The situation should not last for more than twenty-four hours, and Lomotil, if your doctor prescribes it, should control the symptoms during that period.

Do yourself a favor: Take this stuff with you on every camping trip. Take it with you on every trip outside the country. Do it so I will never again have to listen to three weeks of bowel babble. Do it for me. Do it for a pretty little girl named Betty.

Since the names on the list were, in fact, compiled by the church—and because about two hundred local residents were on it—church members were out visiting these people. They meant no harm, they said. They were not praying against people whose names might be inserted in the decrees. They were praying for them.

The Church Universal and Triumphant, called CUT, is thought to have between 75,000 and 150,000 members worldwide. Several years ago, the church bought its first piece of land in Park County. In the summer of 1986, CUT sold its California property, a 215-acre site near Los Angeles, and plans were made to move all its operations to Montana. Ed Francis, vice president of CUT, said that the church would relocate its headquarters, its businesses, and educational operations to Park County. Only about four hundred employees would move to the county and join the several hundred CUT members already in residence. CUT leaders deny that the organization is a cult. If the church has to be characterized at all, members would prefer the term "new religion."

This new religious group has become the second-largest landowner in my county. Aside from the twelve-thousand-acre Royal Teton Ranch that abuts Yellowstone Park, CUT also owns the thirteen-thousand-acre Lazy W Ranch, the thirty-three-hundred-acre O-T-O Ranch and a five-thousand-acre residential subdivision. Some residents have expressed concern that CUT may try to take over the county economically and politically, in the manner of that famous Rolls-Royce collector and Bhagwan, late of Antelope, Oregon. Others worry about CUT's plans for development on the environmentally sensitive land north of the world's first national park.

I had, in fact, been talking with Outside editors earlier in the day about CUT's plans to draw hot water from a 458-foot geo-thermal well near La Duke Hot Springs. Ominously, the La Duke well is just ten miles north of Mammoth Hot Springs, in Yellowstone Park. Mammoth is a series of five multicolored terraces flooded by steaming water released from various springs. The high terraces consist of sedimentary rocks formed as minerals precipitated out of the natural flow from boiling springs. The

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terraces are brilliant with the colors of various minerals and look, in total, like some great dirty rainbow of a cataract frozen in stone. The formation is considered to be one of the park's treasures.

Geologists have stated flatly that CUT's use of geothermal energy could affect the Yellowstone's geysers, and specifically, Mammoth Hot Springs. Dr. Irving Friedman, a research geo-chemist with the U.S. Geological Survey says that "when there has been geothermal development next to features such as geysers, it has severely affected them—dried them up in fact. Once you've disturbed them, there's no way to turn the water back on."

The church, for its part, contends its use of the geothermal energy it owns should have no effect at all on the geothermal features of Yellowstone Park. They insist that La Duke Hot Springs discharges as much as five hundred gallons per minute naturally, the amount of water the church intends to use. Unfortunately, the spring where the water is discharged is located inconveniently, across the Yellowstone River from CUT's proposed greenhouse, swimming pool, and buildings. Hence the need for a 458-foot-deep well to intercept the naturally occurring discharge.

A hydrological report, commissioned by the church, "supports what we've said all along," CUT vice president Ed Francis maintained in a press release. "The well was drilled only to access the La Duke Hot Springs aquifer, and our relatively minor use of the spring water will have no impact on Park resources." To its credit, the church released copies of this report to the media. Prepared by the consulting scientists and engineers of a firm called Hydrometrics out of Helena, Montana, the report stated that since the well is about ten miles from Mammoth and five hundred feet lower in elevation, "it is quite unlikely that hydraulic impacts from pumping could be transmitted to Yellowstone Park"; that the geologic structure makes it "highly improbable" that there is any connection with Mammoth; and that it is "highly unlikely that a discharge point such as the thermal well would have any impact on ground far upgradient . . ."

The terms "highly unlikely," "quite unlikely," "highly improb-

able"—and this from CUT's own commissioned report—were not as convincing to some as they were to the church. Paul Var-ney, Yellowstone Park's chief of research, said, "We would have hoped that they would have been a little more cautious." The Park Service, Varney said, does not have "hard evidence" to support a claim that La Duke and Mammoth Hot Springs are connected. It's all circumstantial. "There appears to be a common chemical signature," Varney said, and this indicates "a common aquifer." Varney wasn't so sure that ten miles of distance and five hundred feet of elevation made it "unlikely" that Mammoth and La Duke might be connected. There is evidence, for instance, that suggests that Mammoth and the Norris Geyser basin are connected by underground faults. Norris is twenty-five miles south of Mammoth and one thousand feet higher. Varney echoed Dr. Friedman's concerns. Experience in other parts of the world, he said, has shown that each time man has tampered with geother-mal areas, the natural geothermal systems that existed before have been permanently destroyed.

In discussing the controversy with Outside'% editors, I said there really wasn't a column in it. "By the time a column would appear," I said, "CUT leaders will have come to their senses. They are not stupid people."

Two hours after I told Outside I didn't want to do a column about the geothermal controversy, a pair of church members arrived at my house to discuss the blue lightning bolts. Tim Connor I knew. A well-dressed young man of yuppie mien, Connor is CUT's business manager, though he sometimes deals with the press. The other man, Edwin, was a rangy fellow dressed like a rancher. I didn't catch his last name.

The CUT emissaries looked apprehensive, but soon enough we were sitting in the living room, talking and laughing. The list, Connor said, was not a hit list, and not a shit list. He delicately spelled out the word "s-h-i-t." The compilation of names was really "an informational fact sheet" distributed to church members. (One section of the original fact sheet was headed "Local Groups and Individuals—Negative attitudes and Malintent Expressed Against US." A malintent of my acquaintance believes he

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"made the list" simply because he told some church members he does not approve of mixing real estate and religion. The version of the informational fact sheet that had been circulating around town, Connor pointed out, had been typed from the original fact sheet by a persistent local critic of the church named Marie Mar. She had probably gotten the original from a dissident ex-member of CUT. It was Marie Mar who had attached the decrees to the list.

The blue-bolts-of-lightning decree had come from a book of church prayers. There were probably two hundred decrees in that book. If I looked very closely, I would see that these prayers, which are chanted so rapidly it is impossible for an outsider to understand the words, do not call for harm to fall on the person named. For instance, the decree titled "For the Electronic Presence of Saint Germain" contains the sentence "Roll it back and mow them down, roll it back and mow them down, roll it back and mow them down now those demons and discarnates." The decrees then, were calling destruction down on discorporal beings whose malintent might have caused people to speak ill of CUT. The decrees were prayers of love.

Connor explained to me that a person could be good and yet occasionally possessed by demons that other well-intentioned folks might want to mow down. "Jesus said, 'Get thee behind me Satan,' " Connor explained, "and yet he was talking to Saint Peter."

Edwin, meanwhile, had noticed the large Buddha on my mantelpiece and mentioned that the lord Buddha was one of CUT's ascended masters. The ascended masters—Buddha, Jesus, Saint Germain and Hercules and others—speak through church leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet, affectionately known in CUT as Ma Guru. Edwin was trying to establish some common theological ground and failing badly. It's true that I am a fan of the Buddha's teaching. I'm also a fan of Larry Bird's, and I can't sink two free throws in a row.

Tim Connor said he was concerned that people might get some wrong ideas from the article in the Livingston (Montana) Enterprise, written by Tom Shands. Connor pointed out a sentence

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that particularly bothered him. "The decree calls for two of CUT's ascended masters to expose those who lie about the church and to 'Roll it back and mow them down.' " Connor said, "See how he puts church critics in the same sentence with 'mow them down?' "

"I'm not a journalist," Connor said, "but I could tell you some things." He shook his head sadly. CUT feels it is often misunderstood by the media, and that reporters rely on information from dissidents who have left the church, like former CUT president Randall King, who told the Los Angeles Herald Examiner that "when I left the Church in 1980, we had a monthly budget of a quarter million dollars and most of it came from donations. We didn't mess around with a 10 per cent tithe. If a guy was worth 150 grand, we figured 100 grand was ours the first year." Former church member Raphael Dominguez, grandson of former Dominican Republic dictator Raphael Trujillo, told Los Angeles TV station KCBS that CUT's ascended masters, speaking through Elizabeth Clare Prophet, kept sending dictations to the effect that the Dominguez family should fork over a cool $750,000 to the church.

In a letter to People magazine, after it published a story the church deemed negative, CUT vice president Ed Francis explained how all this negative publicity comes about. Ex-members of CUT and "other churches have discovered a sure-fire scheme to make big money," he wrote. "The formula is simple: sue for damages claiming mind control and brain washing, then go to the media and generate negative and sensational publicity (a temptation the media can't resist), then either try to collect the money in settlement negotiations or convince a jury to assess damages by putting the unorthodoxy of the religion on trial."

Edwin, Connor, and I talked for a while about journalism and karma. I was given to understand that the law of karma, as interpreted by CUT, meant that people would get what was coming to them in the fullness of time and in the natural course of events. CUT did not take it on itself to punish its detractors or dissident ex-members. In fact, such actions would be against their religion.

I said I rather believed them on this point. Four years ago I

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spoke at a public "cult awareness" meeting. Citing ten years of experience reporting on cults in California, I said I had seen some good ones and some bad ones. On the downside, I had been beaten by cultists, seen culties take over whole towns, seen a friend nearly killed by one group, and walked through Jonestown, through the stench of death in that steaming South American jungle. I suggested back then that CUT open a dialogue with the community "so that mutual paranoia doesn't feed on itself."

I think that talk may have placed me on CUT's informational fact sheet. And yet, in the almost four years since then, I haven't suffered any harassment at all, and church members have always been pleasant to me. Evidence to date suggests CUT is not in the business of meting out physical punishment to its critics. And now, propelled by Tom Shands's article in the Enterprise, CUT members were out opening up a dialogue with the community. I said I thought this was a good and hopeful sign.

"We understand that we don't exist in a vacuum," Tim Connor agreed.

And then, since we had found some common ground, I asked Tim and Edwin about the geothermal well. "I just told Outside that a column on the controversy would be premature," I told Connor. "I figure using that well is such bad public relations that you guys will scrap the idea before May."

Edwin said, "You know, one reason why I joined this church is that we don't do things for public-relations reasons. We do what is right."

Tim Connor cited CUT's hydrology report. I said I found it ambivalent and quoted a geothermal researcher and former senior research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Dr. John Rinehart has written that "Yellowstone National Park is the only area in the world where the natural beauty of geysers has been maintained."

In that context Edwin complained that there were people in the world "who don't want you to step on a blade of grass. How is a man supposed to make a living and feed his family?"