Epilogue

It’s been four years since I sped across the Bay Bridge, out of San Francisco and into an experience that even now feels viscerally surreal. I can picture the brushfires burning atop a ridge as I drove down I-5 toward the desert, and the indifferent look on the hotel clerk’s face in Primm, Nevada, when I paid for my first night’s room in cash. I remember how life-or-death it felt to be sprinting across Venice beach at dawn to escape a helicopter and how confusing to wake up one morning on a patch of grass next to a bus off a highway in Texas. I can almost feel the sweat dripping off my hand the first time I signed my fake name to a document. I kick myself, thinking how idiotic it was to stop using TOR to mask my IP. And I don’t know why I didn’t just keep riding when I biked up to that Garden District bookstore and saw two men standing outside.

I might have imagined, at the time, that experiences like those would be strange enough to stay with me. But I don’t think I envisioned that I’d be talking about them in 2013 — on average probably once a week. For reasons I can’t really take credit for, “Vanish” hit a seam of rich public fascination that follows me around to this day.

Soon after I got caught I found myself on the equivalent of a media tour, celebrating the art of the disappearance: NPR to CNN, a CBS morning show to AM drive-time radio, not to mention a Swedish talk show filmed in Norway alongside a band called Donkey Boy.

These days, when someone like Edward Snowden goes into hiding, or a diabolical Canadian serial killer ends up on the lam, I’ll get a call from a T.V. producer desperate to fill a slot with anyone resembling an expert — asking me to “tell the viewers what it’s like to vanish,” and “how hard it is to disappear in the digital age.” I’ve met enough people who, after a few minutes of trying to place me, finally declare, “Oh, you’re that Wired guy who tried to disappear!” I’m confident it will be on my gravestone no matter what transpires the rest of my life:

Here lies Evan Ratliff

He once tried to disappear.

Almost made it.

Finally did.

Often people ask me whether attempting to disappear was fun (it was not, mostly) and whether I’ve thought about doing it again (I have, but wouldn’t). The more interesting question, perhaps, is whether life has gotten harder or easier for someone trying to disappear in 2013. It was always relatively easy to disappear. Just travel somewhere far away, stay off the Internet, never contact anyone you know, and never come back. But what we were trying to examine in “Vanish” is how hard it is both logistically and psychologically to drop your life and fall into another one while enjoying the fruits of a world that you know.

Nowadays, more aspects of our lives are tracked and captured digitally, and investigators have grown savvier in using databases to their advantage. The Snowden leaks revealed just how much information our government collects without our knowledge. Meanwhile the tools built to assist a person trying to disappear, whether for noble reasons or illicit ones, have evolved little. TOR remains the best (and probably only) way to conceal your location on the Internet (except, of course, from the NSA, which has been targeting TOR). Services like TrackMeNot offer ways of masking your search trail and Bruce Schneier is still the person to turn to for advice about hanging on to the tattered shreds of your privacy. (Indeed, it was a copy of Schneier’s Secrets and Lies that I once hollowed out and used to store my $3,000 cash before leaving for “Vanish.”)

One of the remarkable aspects of “Vanish” was how much information ordinary people, as untrained investigators, could find about me. Today, none of the digital information that attaches to your identity — whether it’s your favorite books on Facebook, or your Yelp reviews, or the addresses you’ve lived at — can stay hidden from a determined search. There’s not much of a market for privacy protection, and the one based on privacy erosion continues to grow.

And what of the “Vanish” hunters, the thousands of people who spent time trying to track me down? For the most part they dissipated as quickly as they’d come together, a brief community stirred up to solve a problem, returning to their lives when it was done.

Jeff Reifman and I became friends, and occasionally I’ll hear from some of the other more involved hunters reminiscing about the chase or forwarding some “Vanish”-relevant news. Rich Reder, the man behind the “Help Evan Ratliff” Facebook group, gets in touch every year on the anniversary of my disappearance. Jeff Leech and Naked Pizza expanded out of New Orleans not long after the contest ended, and retains the ability to help track down Celiac-inflicted fugitives on both coasts and as far as Dubai and Kenya.

The Hermit Thrushes, meanwhile, are on tour again next month, although as I understand it, the retirement-home shuttle bus didn’t make it.

There was one part of the story I decided to leave out of the original piece, but with four years’ distance it seems fair to tell here. Shortly before I set out, I’d given my parents a rough idea that I was going to disappear for the month, a revelation which caused my mother some concern. How would they be able to reach me in an emergency? So with the tightest security I could concoct I bought two prepaid phones with cash, activated them, and programmed each one’s phone number into the other. I mailed one to my parents, with a hand-written note instructing them to use it and only it to call the number I’d programmed.

On the very first day, however, I woke up in Nevada to a call on my prepaid from my mother’s own cell phone. My grandmother had passed away after a long battle with illness. My mom, in a moment of both grief and urgency, had quite reasonably ignored the security protocol that I’d set out to keep myself hidden. During the call, however, she told me to keep going with the project, as my grandmother, she thought, would have wanted me to. I threw the compromised phone in a parking lot dumpster and kept driving. All of which reveals the inherent loneliness in any real attempt to disappear, the difficulty in doing it without cutting all ties to the people you love, and the reason I would never do it again.

—Evan Ratliff, October 2013