I. Warning: The Latrines Are Kinda Full

It’s April in the Nevada desert, not even 11 A.M., and the heat is already physical, like something you could lean on. To those not yet accustomed to the republic, like myself, there’s a feeling of unreality to it. Even the view from up here, looking north: blue-green river shading to red-orange mesa shading to gray-red mountain, like a Looney Tunes cartoon.

From under the command tent at what some were calling Camp Tripwire and others Camp Liberty, maybe a mile down the road from the Bundy ranch—family home of Cliven Bundy, the rancher whose mostly successful rebellion against the United States government, eight days ago, has brought all of us here—you can see the whole of the camp: a dusty parking lot lined on either side with tents, boots outside in neat rows, and pickup trucks facing outward, for ease of escape. Before the republic—that’s what I’d been calling it in my head: the Independent Sovereign Republic of Cliven Bundy—this was a disused gravel pit. Now it’s a sandy hospitality suite for the men who’d come to fight. American flags flap noisily above folding tables stacked with rifles, banana clips of ammunition, oranges and Milk Duds, nail clippers and pens, lens-cleaning wipes and tortillas. One guy sits on a folding chair cleaning a .50-caliber anti-vehicle rifle, a gun about as long as I am. Another guy, named Cooper, is telling me about the latrines. They’d had them brought in a week ago, but now Cooper, as one of the guys charged with running Tripwire, has to figure out how to get them emptied.

"I will warn you," Cooper says, when I ask where exactly I might find those latrines, "they’re kind of full."

I wander out to them. The latrines are indeed kind of full. My eyes water with the smell of freedom.

As I come out, half-hallucinating in the flat midday light, I see a man in full fatigues drop on the far side of the lot. His body just lying there, inert. People yelling: Medic! Medic! A guy bolts out of the command tent in a black shirt, gut bouncing. Five or six other men follow him out, rifles in hand. I look around for cover. Everyone here at Tripwire was expecting an assault—but now? I’d readied myself for something like this, maybe, but not nearly so soon.

But it’s just dehydration—weak legs, they announce, dragging the old guy back up on his feet. The thing breaks up as quickly as it began.

"I move pretty well for a fat guy, right?" says the runner, hand outstretched. He introduces himself: Bam Bam.

Words come out of Bam Bam faster than I can write them down. Bam Bam had come out from New Jersey on an Amtrak, until he got food poisoning and had to bail in Elkhart, Indiana. After that, he joined a friend who delivers vehicles and made his way by bread truck and RV. He looks like a portly Kevin Dillon on acid: black pants with cargo pockets, a beaded necklace, a rotten brown incisor, a tattoo of a shark on his left forearm.

Bam Bam says he’s a writer, too, like me. His work is about the Fourteenth Amendment, mostly: the one with the citizenship clause granting equal rights to African-Americans. He’d discovered something hidden in the document. "In the Fourteenth Amendment," Bam Bam says, "they changed two critical words’ definitions, ’persons’ and ’citizens,’ to include the definition ’corporation.’ People don’t really realize the impact of that, but it made us corporations." I can’t really keep up, so I just let it wash over me.

The Civil War, slavery, "Abraham Lincoln, that tyrant-ass son of a bitch"—Bam Bam could go and go. The gist of it was that, like many who’d come, he felt betrayed by America. I watch a white paste develop between his lips. You saw it a lot out here in the desert. All this talking and not enough water. He tells me members of Israel’s Mossad were arrested in New York City on September 11, alludes darkly to conspiracies we don’t yet grasp. "And by the way, I have part Jew in me," he says. "So this isn’t anti-Semitism."

I sort of blink, I guess.

"I’m not saying the Holocaust never happened. Don’t get me, don’t beat me for that. But there’s a lot of exaggerations. It’s become an industry. Norm Finkelstein. Check out his work."

Um, what do you guys think is gonna happen here?

"Honestly?"

Yeah.

"I don’t think many of us are gonna get out of here alive."

II. Range War!

Would you recognize the revolution when it came?

For a few weird weeks in April, history books will show, America was rapt as Cliven Bundy and his misfit army held the United States government at bay. Bundy, as viewers of Fox News soon came to know, was a humble cattle rancher—albeit an unusually telegenic one, with a Marlboro Man face and a preternatural comfort around American flags—engaged in a dispute almost too esoteric to comprehend. At issue were property rights. Whose land was it, out near Bunkerville, Nevada, where Cliven and his family had raised cattle for going on sixty years? Did it belong to him or to the government, to his bovine wards or to the threatened desert tortoise, an animal the government hoped to protect? Cliven Bundy believed one thing, the courts of the United States another, and after twenty years of arguing, the government had shown up to enforce its will. Bundy had stopped paying his grazing fees in 1993, and the government announced it was owed $1 million in fines and unpaid bills. And the Bundy cattle, which had trespassed on federal land for two decades—land specifically set aside for the good of the tortoise and the country—would now be rounded up, moved off the land.