A Patriotic Nightmare. Don E. Post

Christian Soldiers. Marching as to war,

       With the cross of Jesus going on before!

       Christ, the royal Master, Leads against the foe; forward into

       battle, See His banner go!

      The hymn faintly echoed from the little pre-fab church nestled against the mountainside, thirty or so yards off a narrow, rocky road in the Davis Mountains of West Texas. At 7:00 a.m. on this cold still dark Sunday morning in February, events transpiring in Odessa and Washington D.C. were light years away. Snow fell softly, adding to the four to five inches that had fallen during the night. The faint singing broke the quiet of the mountains. The little Davis Mountain church had a simple, glossy black cross nailed over the entrance. If not for that cross the church would have been lost among the jumble of other khaki colored prefab structures scattered indiscriminately over some twenty acres. Each had been etched into the Davis Mountains at six thousand feet. Some housed the fifty families comprising John Chudders’ little band. Others served as meeting halls or work areas.

      The little community nestled precariously into the sides of two large V-shaped canyons. Visitors feared to stay overnight in case a small earthquake or strong wind would send the whole community to the bottom of the canyon. The sides of each canyon had been terraced for five or six hundred feet in order to make room for the various buildings. Rock-layered paths and well-engineered gravel-covered roads provided access to the buildings. Revetments prevented landslides by buttressing the embankments along each terrace. Four ponds maintained a water supply for the compound.

      A complex of rooms, chiseled into the mountains over the last twenty-five years, provided the most notable, but disguised, feature of the compound. This included living accommodations for all families, well-stocked medical and dining facilities, and workrooms and storage facilities sufficient to maintain the community in case of an emergency. The new five-thousand-square-foot weapons storage facility, located several hundred yards west of the caverns main entrance, currently stored about $3.2 million in weapons. Only family members were aware of its presence.

      Reverend Chudders, a self-styled minister of an off-shoot variety brought his little band from Michigan to Fort Davis County, Texas, twenty-five years ago. He called his hideaway Yahweh City, or City of God.

      In addition, Chudders’ group housed ten to fifteen illegal Mexican workers a mile down the canyon. Chudders paid the workers an adequate wage and had even converted some to his fundamentalist Christian views over the years. The laborers worked a month or more and then returned to Mexico to be replaced by close friends or family members. They had early learned to keep the mountain compound a secret. The U.S. Border Patrol knew of the illegal immigrant workers, but they had their hands full. The illegal aliens working for Chudders were effectively out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Rumors did abound among West Texas law enforcement officers that Chudders had spawned a revolutionary group in Mexico, but no one could prove it. The state’s attorney general laid recent conflicts in the southern Mexican State of Chiapas at Chudders’ feet on several public occasions, but he couldn’t prove it either.

      Only about five miles of FM Road 17 between Yahweh City and the nearby town of Toyahvale had a hard-topped surface. Toyahvale lies within the southern boundary of Reeves County on West Texas’s high desert plateau at approximately 3,000 feet above sea level.

      The whole region is lucky to see eighteen inches of rain during any given year. The county seat is Pecos, located forty miles north of Toyahvale.

      The mayor of Toyahvale claimed Yahweh City as part of the DeLaney Ranch, while other town people insisted Chudders squatted on government land. A few miles south of Toyahvale, on FM Road 17, one turned right onto a gravel road numbered 1832. It ended in eleven miles. Six strands of barbed wire protected the land on either side. Locked gates guarded the numerous roads leading off into the vast prairie. An unmarked gate on the right, located one hundred yards beyond the Stevenson Ranch gate led to Yahweh City. The road’s sign kept disappearing, making the gate difficult to find. People in Toyahvale believed Chudders group kept taking it off so outsiders couldn’t find them. It was true.

      If one managed to find the road to Yahweh City there followed a rugged, tortuous and mountainous drive, which took almost two hours to drive in good weather. Only 4-wheeled vehicles could make it on rainy or snowy days so all Yahweh City families had 4-wheelers.

      Toyahvale claimed a population of sixty. It was supported by one gas pump at a new mini mart out on U.S. 290 east, one IGA grocery, a post office, one mechanic and a dozen or so abandoned old buildings, all reminiscent of more prosperous days. One ancient amber blinking light hung as a lone vigil at the intersection of FM Road 17 and U.S. 290, which in turn looped down from Interstate 10. In addition to the ranching economy, the town drew some sportsmen and sportswomen who came to fish and boat on Lake Balmorhea, five miles northeast of town.

      People of Toyahvale toiled hard to wrest a living from the West Texas environment. They talked little and were suspicious of strangers asking questions about “those folks up in the mountains.” When asked about the Chudders group, people generally begged off by insisting “we don’t want no trouble ‘round here.”

      The First National Bank stood forlornly at the southwest corner of Main Street. The bank’s old sign hung at an angle so traffic coming from the south and traffic going east and west on Main Street could see it. Martinez’s IGA store abutted the bank’s west side and faced Main Street.

      The IGA store lacked air-conditioning, so two heavy glass-paned double doors always stood open, and people came and went through beat-up screen doors. The metal plates on the screen doors had originally advertised Rainbow bread, but now shone brightly from the touch of thousands of hands over the decades.

      The green, wooden-slated bench to the left of the worn screen doors stretched twelve feet to the edge of the bank building. The town’s old timers had hung out on this bench for as long as anyone could remember. One or two could be found there drinking coffee at the break of day, coffee freely provided by the store. And someone would be keeping watch on the bench late into the night—weather permitting. Some said Grandpa Martinez had the bench built right after World War I so returning vets would have a place to gather. He instituted the “free coffee to old timers” policy.

      In the late nineteen forties the old timers’ bench was bolted to the cement so pranksters couldn’t move it. Some of the young men had hauled it to the top of the water tower on one occasion. It still received a new coat of paint each spring, but if you looked closely you could still see old timers’ initials carved into the slats.

      In recent times, J.D. Boerne, Bob Smith and Delbert Robbins manned the bench by mid-morning. They admitted to swapping lies and watching traffic zoom through town. They seemed to be the only people willing to talk to strangers about John Chudders’ group. But they did that cautiously. “You better not mess with them folks, and git out’a here whil’ ya can,” J.D. warned.

      When asked if they ever saw John Chudders, J.D. looked cautiously around to see who might be eves-dropping, then said, head shaking for emphasis, “Yeah, but he pretty much stays holed up out thar with his folks and as far as we know, he and his folks don’t bother nobody ‘roun here.”

      If pressured to give directions, they would do so reluctantly with a further warning. “You jest head off down highway seventeen here til you come to a gravel road ‘bout four or five miles out and take a right. That’s eighteen thirty-two. Ya go on down there ‘til ya get to the Stevenson’s place,” Robbins said, in a tone of voice that suggested that he didn’t think you could find it.

      Bob Smith, pointing in the direction of the mountains as he raised his right foot to rest it on the bench, said, “The road that goes up to them folks place is about a hundred yards beyond the Stevensons, but sometimes the sign’s tore down. That’s what we hear anyway.” His gaze turned to watch a cockroach scavenging for food on the curb.

      Robbins, elbows on his legs as he leaned forward, walking cane in hand that he used to nervously tap the sidewalk, would chime in, “That’s true. And if ya find it, ya probably won’t make it on that road less ya’ got one a them four-wheel jobbies.