A young Perry Farrell at Swezey's first Desolation Center in the desert, Mojave Exodus. Photo by Mariska Leyssius

Maybe you were one of the hundred thousand people watching Drake at Coachella out by Joshua Tree this year, or A$AP Rocky at Lollapalooza in Chicago. Or maybe you've just finished dragging your whole family into the middle of the desert for Burning Man. What you probably don't know is that before Rocky, before Drake, before the original Man burned on a beach in 1986, there was a guy named Stuart Swezey leading bands like Sonic Youth and the Minutemen into the California desert to put on a string of illicit bacchanals called Desolation Center—drug-addled parties for LA punks that would influence today's music festival culture and then disappear as quickly as they came.

I met Stuart Swezey in the spring of 2015 at a trendy coffee shop in Los Angeles's Silverlake neighborhood—an area almost unrecognizable from the Silverlake where he hosted his first punk shows three decades ago. Swezey is now a clean-cut 50-year-old, but back in the late 1970s, he was just another broke LA kid, listening to Rodney on the ROQ, attending underground punk shows, and stuffing LPs for Dangerhouse Records to make a few bucks. Although Swezey wasn't a musician, he ingratiated himself inside the Los Angeles punk scene, making friends while the hardcore scene sprouted up around him.

The punks and the police butted heads from the beginning. "It was just threatening—I think the imagery was threatening, the anarchic nature of it," Swezey says. When punk bands managed to book a club gig, it wasn't rare for the cops to break it up, billy clubs raised.

"They didn't like this radical new movement in their backyard," he continues, "and they were going to use force to suppress it."

In an effort to avoid clashes with the authorities, Swezey came up with the Desolation Center—nomadic DIY shows he hosted in warehouses, lofts, and rehearsal spaces around Silverlake, where the cops wouldn't hassle them. Those first small shows soon transformed into something larger—a looser, more insane Happening that would lead the 20-year-old Swezey and a crew of punk legends out across the California desert, to isolated lake beds, and into the San Pedro Harbor, blazing a trail for the modern festivals we know today.

Stuart Swezey today. Photo courtesy of Stuart Swezey

The idea to take Desolation Center into the Mojave desert came during a road trip through Mexico in 1982. "We were listening to all this experimental punk—people like Wire, Savage Republic, Minutemen," Swezey says. "That's when it just clicked to me: This is where I want to see this kind of music."

When Swezey finished the trip and showed up back in LA, he immediately started setting the plan in motion. He reached out to Savage Republic to see if they would be interested in trekking out to the desert for a show. Guitarist Bruce Licher loved the idea, and even offered a locale: Soggy Dry Lake, a lakebed out by Joshua Tree.

Swezey also asked Mike Watt and D. Boon of the San Pedro punk group the Minutemen if they'd like to join in. Swezey had been a fan of the band's "full-throttle minimalism" since their 1981 album The Punch Line, and did the band's first interview in a zine called Non-Plus.

"I thought it was totally in line with what the movement was doing," Minutemen bassist Mike Watt tells me, over the phone. "The desert would add a whole 'nother dimension to the trip! It was beautiful." With the Minutemen and Savage Republic on board and a location figured out, the first real Desolation Center show was becoming a reality.

Swezey printed 250 handmade, cardboard tickets and, calling the desert pilgrimage the "Mojave Exodus," and scattered the tickets around LA at different record stores. Selling them all for $12.50 a pop, Swezey used the profit to rent three school buses, a PA system, and one small generator. He then reached out to his friend Mariska Leyssius—drummer for the punk band Psi Com—to provide some much-needed organization to the DIY festival.

Kids aboard the bus to the Mojave Exodus in Soggy Dry Lake. Photo by Mariska Leyssius

"I made up this little waiver in case anyone got bitten by a scorpion or a snake, we weren't responsible—whatever that would do," Leyssius remembers, laughing.

When kids piled onto the bus, ready to start the trek out on the Mojave Exodus, Leyssius acted as bus monitor: "Keep your drugs and liquor below the line of the window!"

After a bumpy, sweaty, three-hour drive, the rented school buses finally reached the lakebed. There was no stage—Savage Republic and the Minutemen set up their gear right on the sand and played out to the crowd. It was dusty, hot, but no one cared. They knew they were a part of something special.

D. Boon and the Minutemen performing at the Mojave Exodus. Photo by Mariska Leyssius

"D. Boon once said, 'Punk is whatever we made it to be,'" Watt remembers. "I still go by that."

After the successful first show, Swezey quit his job and spent time traveling through West Berlin. At the time, the city was a haven for artists and musicians, and Swezey loved every minute of it. "You could stay in a squat, go see music, it was just Disneyland for alternative culture," he says.

While he was out there, he ran into Sonic Youth, who had just released their debut album, Confusion Is Sex, and Einstürzende Neubauten—an industrial group famous for playing scrap metal and heavy machinery. He wasn't sure the next time he'd be back in the States, but offered to throw both bands a show in the desert if they were ever in Los Angeles.

A few months later, Swezey found himself home in LA and, soon after, his phone rang. It was Einstürzende Neubauten. The band told him they would be in town the next week and had one day free and asked if he wanted to do that desert show. Even though Swezey had no idea how to pull everything together so quickly, he didn't think twice. Using the German word for Exodus, Swezey would call the second Desolation Center show the "Mojave Auszug."

Fans out at the Mojave Exodus. Photo by Mariska Leyssius

Einstürzende Neubauten brought along experimental performance art group Survival Research Lab (SRL), and Boyd Rice—an edgy musician and artist from the Bay Area punk scene. Rice and SRL's bizarre, avant-garde take on punk paired nicely with Neubauten and the desert setting. The second Desolation Center show would be a must-see event.

The group decided they'd take this new pilgrimage near the town of Mecca, California. Seven buses full of people trekked 150 miles until they reached a closed road off of Highway 10. It was "this really beautiful winding road through these prehistoric rocks; it looked like dinosaurs were going to come out at any point," Swezey remembers.

For the opening act, Rice laid down on a bed of nails with a block of concrete on his chest, surrounded by contact mics. One of the members of Einstürzende Neubauten took swings at the concrete with a huge sledgehammer.

"Boyd [Rice] was totally playing it low-key. He was like, 'Yeah, it's an old carnival trick I'm going to do,'" Swezey says. "But there was no real trick. He was lying on a bed of nails, and he's got a big rock on his chest and someone's breaking it with a sledgehammer. But the cool thing was it was also made into a sound art piece. And it sounded really cool."

Survival Research Lab's Gatling gun. Photo by Matt Heckert

After Rice's performance, SRL took the stage—or patch of sand, since they had no stage. Unable to transport their signature robots from San Francisco, the band created a show that incorporated the surroundings. They filled five old refrigerators, found while camping the night before, with explosives. Then they shot them with a homemade twelve-barrel Gatling gun. Afterwards, SRL rigged a boulder on top of the mountain behind the stage with dynamite, with the hope that the explosives would dislodge it and send it rolling down the hill.

At some point earlier in their performance, a young pre-Jane's Addiction Perry Farrell had wandered up the hill, unaware of the impeding explosion. "We saw him up there and everyone was trying to wave him down and he thought we were just being friendly and waving and he kept waving back," Mariska Leyssius says. "And, well, he didn't get blown up."

The explosion electrified the crowd, many of whom were on acid, but the boulder stayed perched atop the mountain and Perry Farrell stayed in one piece. It was the only hiccup in a shockingly seamless event. There were hundreds of acid-fried kids, watching artists play with power tools and explosives, but it still felt safer than a night at an LA club.

SLR's explosion at Mojave Auszug. Photo by Matt Heckert

The Minutemen's Mike Watt was one of the tripping punks, and for him, the combination of LSD and Einstürzende Neubauten was an otherworldy experience.

"I remember the bass player was playing a one-string bass, and he threw it off and he grabbed this thing you use to level the pavement and he fucking pounded that bass right into the fucking lakebed," he says. "Blew my fucking mind. He also had this gigantic truck string that he was using for a bass string. That was a trippy gig."

Watt never took acid again, after that night—probably because no other trip could top Mojave Auszug.

There were hundreds of acid-fried punks watching artists play with power tools and explosives, but it still felt safer than a night at an LA club.

If the desert performance art, the explosives, the music, and the drugs sound familiar, it's because Mojave Auszug was the spark, or at least some kindling, that helped start another desert-dwelling festival: Burning Man. John Law, co-founder of Burning Man, told me Swezey's work had a big influence on him and many of the early festival collaborators. He explained that those early SLR performances were a huge inspiration for the desert festival—specifically the fire and machine art.

The crowd at Mojave Exodus. Photo by Mariska Leyssius

After Mojave Auszug, Swezey's otherworldly desert shows became mythic among the LA punks. He knew he had to do something next, and that it had to be completely different.

"I was always trying to think at that time, How can we use the LA environment, where I'm from, but in the uncliché way that's not Hollywood or the beach? " Swezey remembers.

Driving home from backyard barbecues at D. Boon's home in San Pedro—a blue-collar town in South Los Angeles—Swezey always loved the way the cranes looked in the water. He decided the next Desolation Center event should be on a boat in the San Pedro Harbor.

Boon and Watt were thrilled. The San Pedro cops hit their punk scene especially hard, and the Minutemen would get shut down after a song or two every time they tried to play a gig. They couldn't believe that their friend from LA was going to plan a show in Pedro. "It was like adding another guy to the band. Bass, drums, guitar, and Stuart—gig inventor," Watt said, laughing.

Swezey decided to call the show "Joy at Sea," as a nod to the Minutemen LP More Joy. The Minutemen called up Arizona cowpunk weirdos the Meat Puppets, and got them to sign onto the show, too.

As for the venue, Swezey managed to charter a whale-watching boat on the cheap, and with help from Mariska Leyssius's band Psi Com, built a makeshift stage out of wooden planks the morning of the show. With the venue complete, the group set sail. But when D. Boon and the Minutemen took the stage, things got a little rocky.

Fans setting sail at Joy at Sea. Photo by Ann Summa

"D. Boon, in his nature, was not there to be still," Watt tells me. "When he played, he wanted to dance. And there was some consequence."

The boat bucked and rocked and threatened to capsize as Boon tossed his body around the stage, but it stayed afloat.

"Like King Ishmael said, 'We lived to tell the tale.'"

As they pulled back into the harbor, a Coast Guard ship hassled the punks because they were flying a Minutemen flag instead of Old Glory. "It was really like this ship of fools going around," Swezey says. I ask him if the Coast Guard thought the spiky-haired, pierced kids were pirates. "Well, technically, we were pirates," he says.

Swezey and Leyssius both laugh looking back: They can't quite explain why they didn't worry more about getting busted by the cops, someone falling from the boat, or the stage collapsing. By taking the movement away from the LAPD and the restrictive clubs, Desolation Center provided punk a place where it could thrive.

"Stuart's a guy who never played in a band, but he liked making it happen," Watt says. "You were going to be all wild-ass about making your band and your haircut and your songs and your style, why not do it with venues? There was something about the aesthetic of that environment that he found—it wasn't the fucking same old, same old."

D. Boon and Mike Watt performing at Joy at Sea. Photo by Ann Summa

Right before Christmas 1984, Swezey received an unexpected phone call from Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. She said she and Thurston Moore would be in LA visiting her family for the holidays and asked if he wanted to do that desert show they'd talked about in Berlin a couple years back.

At the time, no one had seen Sonic Youth on the west coast, so Swezey jumped at the opportunity. The band struck him as a perfect fit for the third Mojave desert show. "There was some kind of dark Americana thing that they were really fascinated with," he says. "The sweeping scope of what they were doing that felt like it could exist in this desert setting and make perfect sense."

With Sonic Youth on the bill, it was easy to talk the Meat Puppets, Psi Com, and Redd Kross—one of the original South Bay Hardcore bands—into playing, too.

Psi Com opened the show back in the Mojave, now fronted by a young Perry Farrell. "Psi Com in its first incarnation was very shoegazer—My Bloody Valentine, kind of—but this was a little more hard rock," Swezey says. "I could see [Farrell] had this charisma and people really seemed to respond to it."

The Meat Puppets went on next and asked for the spotlights to be turned off so they could play just in the light from the full moon. Swezey learned later that someone was handing out psychedelics and everyone in the crowd was tripping.

"I remember there was a guy who just grabbed the microphone, and was shouting, 'We're in the desert! We're in the desert!'" Swezey says. "It was spooky as hell."

Finally, Sonic Youth took the stage. The LA punks didn't know what to make of them. They were doing completely different things from the LA scene, like tuning their guitars with screwdrivers. "I remember somebody at SST saying, 'Why are you booking this Loft Rock? Why are the Meat Puppets opening for this Loft Rock band?'" Swezey says. "After that gig, they were signed to SST."

After Sonic Youth's set, everyone packed into their cars and drove back out all over California. This was Swezey's fourth Desolation Center event in less than two years, and at the time, everyone assumed they'd go on forever.

In December of 1985, D. Boon was killed in a van accident in the Arizona desert.

The weekend of the crash, Swezey threw a Desolation Center benefit show for the Foundation for Art Resources in Downtown LA. Sonic Youth, Swans, and Saccharine Trust all played great sets, but it wasn't the same. "It was the first Swans show on the west coast," Swezey says. "But that was the weekend D. Boon died. I was just done."

In some ways, the magic of the shows is that they never had a chance to become diluted by money or time.

Watt and Swezey both remember Boon as a larger-than-life presence, but also as a loyal friend. Swezey recently showed Watt some old footage from the first desert event. "Seeing D. Boon dance, it seemed like he wanted to jump right out of the fucking screen," Watt tells me about that footage. "It's still hard to believe, after all these years, that something could fucking kill him."

The benefit show was the last of Swezey's Desolation Center events. "I started to feel like things had changed," he says. "For me it didn't have that element of adventure." Instead, he started Amok Books, an underground publishing house, with Leyssius, where he published gonzo journalist John Gilmore's memoir Laid Bare, among hundreds of other titles. He moved on, and the punk scene moved on, too.

Swezey could have made a fortune by making the Desolation Center shows into a yearly festival, but the same spontaneity and disregard for the bottom-line that helped make his shows a countercultural success, were also what kept them from turning into a cash cow. The Desolation Center shows managed to avoid the pivotal moment when festivals for the counterculture shift and become mainstream, inevitably altering their feel and purpose. In some ways, the magic of the shows is that they never had a chance to become diluted by money or time: they were raw, they were real, and, most importantly, they were completely original.

Savage Republic playing at the Mojave Exodus. Photo by Mariska Leyssius

Swezey's influence can still be seen today. Perry Farrell linked up with Dave Navarro in 1985 and made it big in Jane's Addiction. He eventually started Lollapalooza in 1991 and credits the Desolation Center shows as inspiration. Rick Van Santen and Paul Tollett's company Goldenvoice promoted the Minutemen, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Farrell's bands back in the 1980s in LA and, in 1999, they launched a desert music festival of their own: Coachella.

In 2015, Swezey began filming interviews with players from his Desolation Center shows for an upcoming documentary, which he plans to crowd source and release in the fall of 2016. Mike Watt stresses that this documentary will not be "sentimentalism." Instead, he says, it will be "evidence that you can fucking make things happen."

For Watt, the magic of Swezey's vision—taking punk rock to the desert and the sea—encompasses punk's anarchist core. "Part of the scene was, hey, let's blow some minds. Sometimes, it's with bass and guitars, sometimes it's with words, sometimes it's with clothes, and sometimes it's with venues," he says. "Let's turn people onto stuff that proves to them that they're alive."

Follow Joseph Bien-Kahn on Twitter.

Photos by Allyce Andrew

Surrounded by sage smoke and honking geese at the base of Mount Si, we spread our arms out like crosses as Aubrey Rachel Violet Bramble, a witch dressed in an elegant white dress, blesses us. "Let the sage do the work," she says. Her good friend Kat Terran, a shaman, opens up the basket of corn muffins and rose tea prepared for tonight as an offering to the spirits—Mother Moon and Father Sky, the god and goddess, whatever you want to call it. In the world of magic, tradition is important, but ultimately, you create your own paradigm. Do what thou wilt.

An elaborate altar is laid out before us on a blanket surrounded by candles. A crystal ball, an antler, a feather, a shell, each object a stand in for an element or a goddess to be praised at tonight's mixed shamanic/pagan ritual. "Needs more Earth," Bramble mumbles, rearranging the menagerie of ornate objects she and Terran brought with them.

"OK, kids," she says, satisfied with the elemental balance of the display. "I'm going to call the circle now." An incantation begins: Perfect love, perfect trust. The circle is open but never undone. Terran and Bramble, each in their respective traditions, invoke and praise the four cardinal directions, the elements, the Great Mystery. The Earth, the water, the fire, the air: return, return, return. Gratitude prayers are offered, not only to the Earth, but to loved ones, to people in need, to ancestors. May all souls be nourished.

Tonight serves two purposes: It's both a late Imbolc observation (the Pagan holiday honoring the midway between the winter solstice and spring equinox) and a new moon ceremony—great occasions for setting new "intentions." As we later learn from the long list of Seattle-based witches and shamans I'll meet, "intentionality" lies at the root of most modern conceptions of magic.

Photographer Allyce Andrew and I are here at this ceremony in Snoqualmie, not far from where Twin Peaks was filmed, because some time in the middle of last year, we realized every other person we met in the Seattle art scene—poets, musicians, event coordinators—was a professed witch or shaman. I met Bramble and Terran through their music. They're both singers in popular Seattle bands (the gothic Golden Gardens and desert rock outfit Wind Burial, respectively.)

A certain level of nature worship is built into the culture of the Northwest. If you live out here and haven't had your mind blown by the beauty of an ancient old-growth forest, you're kind of missing the point. But in the "spiritual but not religious" Northwest, it seemed like many Seattleites were taking that casual reverence to the next logical level.

I would define magic as the purest form of love and joy and sharing it in a way that is intentional, that thrives. —Lily Kay

We entered into this world through art events that kept cropping up—events that often had mystic or pagan undertones. For instance, on the night of the winter solstice, we had two different Yule events we could choose from—a Cascadian metal festival in Olympia, or an electronic/noise showcase in Seattle in a loft called Teatro de la Psychomagica. In April, a mystically-inclined local composer named Garek Jon Druss performed an ambient synth piece in a church, accompanied by a lecture on alchemy by William Kiesel, owner of esoteric book publisher Ouroboros Press. Events like these happen fairly regularly in Seattle, with varying degrees of authenticity.

"An artist or performer can find some seasoning and burn it in a superficial ritual like manner or even dangle some stones of unknown origin and 90 percent of the audience is so hungry for some sort of spirituality or alternative path that it is accepted as significant," Druss tells me, alluding to the recent surge of popularity in all things witchy. This cultural phenomenon is perhaps best embodied by Urban Outfitters affiliate Free People's widely panned Spirituality Shop, which began offering a $68 "Cosmic Stick" (a large stick with thread wrapped around it) and $75 "Dark Mystic Boxes" (a small box with a fern printed on it, containing some sage and a crystal) late last year.

But Druss also acknowledges the Northwest's unusual bona fides in this area: "Here in our community there are so many strong individuals who are true in their actions and [mystic] study—we all benefit from it."

Kiesel says the strong, mystically-inclined population here is just part of the town's history.

"Beyond the Native American roots in the area, in the early 19th century, Seattle saw a Theosophical Society Lodge open downtown [it has since moved to Capitol Hill]. Not long after, an occult organization called the Light Bearers, founded by Eugene Fersen, became active in town. They had a mansion on Capitol Hill across the street from Volunteer Park. While there has always been some kind of occult or witchcrafting going on here [at least since the turn of the century], we seem to be having another renaissance of sorts," Kiesel says.

In an effort to extend past the glut of trendy "hipster witches" in the area and glean some real understanding of what true, modern, urban witchcraft and shamanic practice in Seattle looks like, we interviewed seven such people about their spiritual practices, how they arrived at them, and why they believe the magical community is so strong in Seattle.

VICE: Why do you think Seattle is experiencing a resurgence of interest in witchcraft and shamanism?
Imani Sims: This ground is so sacred. Seattle is a Pisces city, it's really watery and feely and I really want to dig into the things that don't normally happen—that's Seattle, so it's just a good place for that kind of thing. Another theory is that they just started building the light rail and digging up the city to build this type of transportation, and I think that really woke up the ground. I think it started something huge.

What does ritual mean to you?
I think the three biggest things are consistency, connection with your own spirit guides, whomever they may be, and totems—things of significance for you, whether that be images or stones or plants or people. My spirituality is very Earth-based. I'm into stones and the power that they carry, and how that then fuels my life forward.

How do you define magic?
Kat Terran: Magic, to me, is when we get little glimpses of just how big and astronomical this thing is, this enormous experience we're all a part of. It's almost like we can only handle it for a couple of seconds when we see it, because of how intense and how crazy it feels. Anything that opens just enough so we get kind of zapped by it, is what I'd call magic. It's a medicine tool, it's a healing tool. It's ancient technology.

What did you mean by "ancient technology"?
They are a little different from place to place, but things like rattling or drum work, these are very consistent, and are what I call "ancient technologies," things people from around the world in many different cultures have used to get in touch with spirit and their own ancestors. That's part of what we're experiencing in the Northwest, people are reconnecting with these tools because they connect us with nature, but also ourselves. Gratitude prayers are also one way of doing that. Gratitude prayers constantly. Being connected all the time to how much there is to be thankful for.

AUBREY RACHEL VIOLET BRAMBLE
Singer in local band Golden Gardens, Owner of Swan Children Apothecary, and Witch

How did you get into witchcraft?
Aubrey Bramble: I grew up in Florida and got really into witchcraft in the South when I was in middle school. There are a lot of Wiccan communities in Florida, strangely enough. It's very Southern Baptist, but there are a lot of swamp people who do witchcraft. In the south they were very traditional, by-the-book wiccans or "Oh, we only do voodoo," but here there is a lot more crossover. The program I'm in now is traditional Eastern European witchcraft and Wicca melded with Native American shamanism and things in between.

How do you define magic?
For me, magic is the manifestation of an intent. Say I have an intent, like... I want to carry myself with more grace or kindness. You use your spell, your ritual. Some people will use candles, some will use herbs, some will use meditation and mantras. Personally, I really like to use my crystal ball. I do a ceremony to charge my crystal ball and invoke its energy in the name of a goddess I admire. I turn to my crystal ball after I've set up my altar and candles and gaze on it, meditating on an intent. I can visualize it in the crystal ball. Perhaps I'll chant. When I complete that, I'm able to carry myself with more grace and kindness after the fact because I've really visualized that intent—that ritual manifestation is magic.

You were saying earlier that science was the biggest influence on your spirituality. How do science and magic dovetail in your mind?
Meagan Angus: For me, it begins in a really fundamental way with astrology and geology, and understanding that all of our life comes from the planet. Understanding these basic biological systems illuminates things on a spiritual level too. The depth of how integrated these systems are. When you switch back to a metaphysical level, you can begin to think about things like "Wow, crystals continue to grow even when you cut them from their source. That's crazy." To me, magic was an extension out of humanity developing awareness of ourselves and our own biological processes. There's a reason Pagan holidays are based on seasons—our systems literally wax and wane with the sunlight.

How do you modernize these ancient practices?
Magicians always have their elements around them. There's always Earth, air, water, fire. There's always the four directions, up, down. Can I go out and carve my protection symbol into a piece of granite? No. But I can go get a "Hello My Name Is" sticker like all the other graffiti artists and slap my sigil up on the electrical box outside of my house and it's exactly the same thing. There are a lot of sticker sigils on Capitol Hill because there [are] lots of people actively attempting to control the reality paradigm in the neighborhood to combat all the gentrification happening here. A lot of witches and magicians have been getting together and saying "We're just going to try and make this building invisible for the next several months so nothing happens to it." It's sort of like magical community activism.

How do you define magic?
Lily Kay: Intention. And seeing the love and connection that exists in this world. I would define magic as the purest form of love and joy and sharing it in a way that is intentional, that thrives. Honestly, the most powerful lesson I've learned is just being open and receptive and trying to be better and more intentional about considering things, like, "Oh, I kept dreaming about blue things the other night. I'm going to remember that." Letting those things guide me.

Why do you think Seattle has so many witches?
I think Seattle is small and there are a lot of fucking freaks. It's fucking freak city. And by no means am I saying you have to be a freak to be spiritual or into witchcraft, but also, I think Seattle is so special. I was talking to my friend earlier, who just moved from Seattle to New York. She was saying there was nobody there like her, she'd go to a party and go, "What intention did you set on the new moon?" and people would be like, "What?" She couldn't even ask people what their signs are. So it's also definitely just cultural here, it's not that abnormal to talk about these things or think like that.

How do you define magic?
Bri Luna: Magic is nature. I don't really think it's a supernatural thing, it's just nature, it's the beauty of our planet. I also believe that your intentions strongly affect what you are doing. Again, I don't think it's supernatural. It's learning to work with your mind and how to create things on this material plane with that mind. Any ritual or practice you are doing, it is about the intent behind it. Magic is energy, and so is intent.

Why is there such a strong magical community here?
I think a lot of it has to do with this area originally being native land. Magic is already in the land from the indigenous people who lived here before us. We also have access to so many beautiful places, beautiful mountains, and forests, so you'd have to be crazy to not want to go and dance naked in the forest.

Why do you think the Northwest has become a hotbed for magical communities?
Mykol Radziszewski: Seattle is a wonderful cauldron from which purpose can take form. There's just such intense intentionality here, and the focus of energy is really powerful. If you look at the lay lines here, this place is full of lay lines—hundreds of energetic veins originate and end here. Some of them correspond with water, some with mineral deposits, some with really interesting nothingness.

How do you actively work to experience or create magic in what you call "shamanistic witchcraft?"
How I would define magic is: a trust in the natural, in our own nature, trusting myself to be accountable to that. I know when magic is present because I wake up and feel like an animal. Magic is whatever wakes us up to the profundity and beauty of life. Magic is a ceremony of remembering. It's a daily thing. Magic and shamanism, these aren't religions, they're not something you practice certain days of the week and then move on from. It's something you also do in the in-between times. Magic is when you do yourself the way spirit made you—that's powerful magic. What does it take to remember that? The work of a witch as a healer, and that's perhaps a shamanic approach to witchcraft, is to help people remember themselves.

Follow Kelton on Twitter.

Illustrations by Esther Watson

This short story appears in the September Issue of VICE

One of the hardest stories to write—I think, and other writers I know have agreed—is a love story. It's difficult to render chemistry in writing, and it's particularly difficult to capture one-way obsessions (unrequited love). Thomas Mann nailed it in Death in Venice, Proust in "Swann in Love," and Mary Gaitskill in "The Dentist," but no other examples come to my mind. What marks a good story of one-sided love is the sweetness, the near-gooey awe, of the lover who is never satisfied. Also, of course, the way the world seems to bend to the obsession.

Garth Greenwell's first novel, What Belongs to You, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in January. Set in Bulgaria, it is the story of a young English teacher's one-way love affair with a Bulgarian prostitute whom he meets in a public bathroom. What distinguishes the story—in addition to Greenwell's ability to capture passion and obsession—are the unexpected ways it develops. Although almost the entire affair is in the narrator's mind—he and Mitko spend two nights together, the rest of their encounters only lasting an hour or two at a time—we feel the force of it, and the size, and the way the narrator's passion gives an epic scope to the years that are defined by it. I don't want to give the story away, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to leave that vague. The final things I'll single out for praise are Greenwell's fearlessly, frankly poetic lines and his humor. Shortly after Greenwell's narrator brings Mitko home for the first time, Mitko sees his computer. He is fascinated. He cleans it, and at the first opportunity, he logs on and starts Skyping. He Skypes for hours as the English teacher watches, just out of the frame.

Greenwell writes, "Once or twice Mitko orchestrated an introduction, tilting the screen so that I was captured in the image, and the stranger and I would smile awkwardly and wave, having nothing at all to say to each other. I became increasingly ashamed as the night wore on, as more and more I suspected I was the object of mockery or scorn; and besides this I felt bitter at my exclusion from Mitko's enthusiasm, and jealous of the attention he lavished on these other men. To nourish or stave off this bitterness, I'm not sure which, or maybe just out of boredom, I pulled from my shelf a volume of poems and held it open on my lap. It was a slim volume, Cavafy, which I chose in the hope that I would find in it something to redeem my evening, to gild what felt more and more like the sordidness of it. But I was too exhausted to read and flipped the pages idly, afraid that if I went to bed I would wake to find my apartment robbed, that Mitko would take my computer and my phone, things he coveted and that I neglected and (no doubt he felt) didn't deserve. As I turned these pages, failing to find any solace in them, I noticed that the tenor of Mitko's conversations had changed, that he was no longer speaking fondly but suggestively, and that his priyateli were now older than he, men in their late 30s or 40s. From stray words I caught, it became clear that they were discussing scenarios and prices, that Mitko was arranging his week."

I don't usually like to say these things, but Garth Greenwell is a remarkable new talent.

—Amie Barrodale, fiction editor

That my first encounter with Mitko B. ended in a betrayal, even a minor one, should have given me greater warning at the time, which should in turn have made my desire for him less, if not done away with it completely. But warning, in places like the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture, where we met, is like some element coterminous with the air, ubiquitous and inescapable, so that it becomes part of those who inhabit it, and thus part and parcel of the desire that draws us there. Even as I descended the stairs I heard his voice, which like the rest of him was too large for those subterranean rooms, spilling out of them as if to climb back into the bright afternoon that, though it was mid October, had nothing autumnal about it; the grapes that hung ripe from vines throughout the city burst warm still in one's mouth. I was surprised to hear someone talking so freely in a place where, by unstated code, voices seldom rose above a whisper. At the bottom of the stairs I paid my 50 stotinki to an old woman who looked up at me from her booth, her expression unreadable as she took the coins; with her other hand she clutched a shawl against the chill that was constant here, whatever the season. Only as I neared the end of the corridor did I hear a second voice, not raised like the first but answering in a low murmur. The voices came from the second of the bathroom's three chambers, where they might have belonged to men washing their hands had the sound of water accompanied them. I paused in the outermost room, examining myself in the mirrors that lined its walls as I listened to their conversation, though I couldn't understand a word. There was only one reason for men to be standing there, the bathrooms at NDK (as the Palace is called) are well enough hidden and have such a reputation that they are hardly used for anything else; and yet as I turned into the room this explanation seemed at odds with the demeanor of the man who claimed my attention, which was cordial and brash, entirely public in that place of intense privacies.

He was tall, thin but broad-shouldered, with the close-cropped military cut of hair popular among some young men in Sofia, who affect a hypermasculine style and an air of criminality. I hardly noticed the man he was with, who was shorter, deferential, with bleached blond hair and a denim jacket from the pockets of which he never removed his hands. It was the larger man who turned toward me, with apparently friendly interest, free of predation or fear, and though I was taken aback I found myself smiling in response. He greeted me with an elaborate rush of words, at which I could only shake my head in bemusement as I grasped the large hand he held out, offering as broken apology and defense the few phrases I had practiced to numbness. His smile widened when he realized I was a foreigner, revealing a chipped front tooth, the jagged seam of which (I would learn) he worried obsessively with his index finger in moments of abstraction. Even at arm's length, I could smell the alcohol that emanated not so much from his breath as from his clothes and hair; it explained his freedom in a place that, for all its license, was bound by such inhibition, and explained too the peculiarly innocent quality of his gaze, which was intent but unthreatening. He spoke again, cocking his head to one side, and in a pidgin of Bulgarian, English, and German, we established that I was American, that I had been in his city for a few weeks and would stay at least a year, that I was a teacher at the American College, that my name was more or less unpronounceable in his language.

I could smell the alcohol that emanated not so much from his breath as from his clothes and hair

There was no acknowledgment, throughout our halting conversation, of the strange location of our encounter or of the uses to which it was almost exclusively put, so that speaking to him I felt an anxiety made up of equal parts desire and unease at the mystery of his presence and purpose. There was a third man there as well, who entered and exited the farthest stall several times, looking earnestly at us but never approaching or speaking a word. Finally, after we had reached the end of our introductions and after this third man entered his stall again, closing the door behind him, Mitko (as I knew him now) pointed toward him and gave me a look of great significance, saying iska, he wants, and then making a lewd gesture the meaning of which was clear. Both he and his companion, whom he referred to as brat mi and who hadn't spoken since I arrived, laughed at this, looking at me as if to include me in the joke, though of course I was as much an object of their ridicule as the man listening to them from inside his stall. I was so eager to be one of their party that almost without thinking I smiled and wagged my head from side to side, in the gesture that signifies here both agreement or affirmation and a certain wonder at the vagaries of the world. But I saw in the glance they exchanged that my attempt to associate with them only increased the distance between us. Wanting to regain my footing, and after pausing to arrange the necessary syllables in my head (which seldom, despite these efforts, emerge as they should, even now when I'm told that I speak hubavo and pravilno, when I see surprise at my proficiency in a language that hardly anyone bothers to learn who hasn't learned it already), I asked him what he was doing there, in that chill room with its impression of damp. Above us it felt like summer still, the plaza was full of light and people, some of them, riding skateboards or in-line skates or elaborately tricked-out bicycles, the same age as these men.

Mitko looked at his friend, whom he referred to as his brother although they were not brothers, and then the friend moved toward the outer door and Mitko drew his wallet out of his back pocket. He opened it and took out a small square packet of glossy paper, a page torn from a magazine and folded over many times. He unfolded this page carefully, his hands shaking slightly, balancing it to keep whatever loose material was inside from falling to the dampness and filth on which we stood. I guessed what he would reveal, of course; my only surprise was at how little he had, a mere crumble of leaves. Ten leva, he said, and then added that he and his friend and I, the three of us, might smoke it together. He didn't seem disappointed when I refused this offer; he just folded his page up carefully again and replaced it in his pocket. But he didn't leave, either, as I had feared he might. I wanted him to stay, even though over the course of our conversation, which moved in such fits and starts and which couldn't have lasted more than five or ten minutes, it had become difficult to imagine the desire I increasingly felt for him having any prospect of satisfaction. For all his friendliness, as we spoke he had seemed in some way to withdraw from me; the longer we avoided any erotic proposal, the more finally he seemed unattainable, not so much because he was beautiful, although I found him beautiful, as for some still more forbidding quality, a kind of bodily confidence or ease that suggested freedom from doubts and self-gnawing, from any squeamishness about existence. He had about him a sense simply of accepting his right to a measure of the world's beneficence, even as so clearly it had been withheld him. He looked at his friend, who hadn't moved to rejoin us after Mitko hid away his tiny stash, and after they exchanged another glace the friend turned his back to us, not so much guarding the door anymore, I felt, as offering us a certain privacy. Mitko looked at me again, friendly still but with a new intensity, and then he tilted his head slightly down and moved one hand over his crotch. I couldn't help but look down, of course, as I couldn't restrain the excitement I'm sure he saw when I met his gaze again. He rubbed the first three fingers of his other hand together, making the universal sign for money. There was nothing in his manner of seduction, no show of desire at all; what he offered was a transaction, and again he showed no disappointment when reflexively and without hesitation I said no to him. It was the answer I had always given to such proposals (which are inevitable in the places I frequent), not out of any moral conviction but out of pride, a pride that had weakened in recent years, as I realized I was being shifted by the passage of time from one category of erotic object to another. But as soon as I uttered the word I regretted it, as Mitko shrugged and dropped his hand from his crotch, smiling as if it had all been a joke. And then, since he did finally turn to leave with his friend, nodding in goodbye, I called out Chakai chakai chakai, wait wait wait, repeating the word quickly and in the precise inflection I had heard an old woman use at an intersection one afternoon when a stray dog began to wander into traffic. Mitko turned back at once, as docile as if our transaction had already taken place; maybe in his mind it was already a sure thing, as it was in mine, though I pretended to be skeptical of the goods on offer, trying to assert some mastery over the overwhelming excitement I felt. I looked down at his crotch and then back up, saying Kolko ti e, how big are you, the standard phrase, always the first question in the internet chatrooms I used. Mitko didn't say anything in reply, he smiled and stepped into a stall and unbuttoned his fly, and my pretense of hesitation fell away as I realized I would pay whatever price he wanted. I took a step toward him, reaching out as if to claim those goods right away, I've always been a terrible negotiator or haggler, my desire is immediately legible, but Mitko buttoned himself back up, raising a hand to hold me off. I thought it was payment he wanted, but instead he stepped around me, telling me to wait, and returned to the line of porcelain sinks, all of them cracked and stained. Then, with a bodily candor I ascribed to drunkenness but would learn was an inalienable trait, he pulled the long tube of his cock free from his jeans and leaned over the bowl of the sink to wash it, skinning it back and wincing at water that only comes out cold. It was some time before he was satisfied, the first sign of a fastidiousness that would never cease to surprise me, given his poverty and the tenuous circumstances in which he lived.

I was being shifted by the passage of time from one category of erotic object to another

When he returned I asked his price for the act I wanted, which was ten leva until I unfolded my wallet and found only 20-leva notes, one of which he eagerly claimed. Really, what did it matter, the sums were almost equally meaningless to me; I would have paid twice as much, and twice as much again, which isn't to suggest that I had particularly ample resources, but that his body seemed almost infinitely dear. It was astonishing to me that any number of these soiled bills could make that body available, that after the simplest of exchanges I could reach out for it and find it in my grasp. I placed my hands under the tight shirt he wore, and he gently pushed me back so that he could remove it, undoing each of its buttons and then hanging it carefully on the hook of the stall door behind him. He was thinner than I expected, less defined, and the hair that covered his torso had been shaved to bare stubble, so that for the first time I realized how young he was (I would learn he was 23) as he stood boyish and exposed before me. He motioned me forward again with the exaggerated courtesy some drunk men assume, which can precede, the thought even in my excitement was never far, equally exaggerated outbursts of rage. Mitko surprised me then by leaning forward and laying his mouth on mine, kissing me generously, unrestrainedly, and though I hadn't done anything to invite such contact it was welcome and I sucked eagerly on his tongue, which was antiseptic with alcohol. I knew he was performing a desire he didn't feel, and really I think he was drunk past the possibility of desire. But then there's something theatrical in all our embraces, I think, as we weigh our responses against those we perceive or project; always we desire too much or not enough, and compensate accordingly. I was performing too, pretending to believe that his show of passion was a genuine response to my own desire, about which there was nothing feigned. As if he sensed these thoughts he pressed me more tightly to him, and for the first time I caught, beneath the more powerful and nearly overwhelming smell of alcohol, his own scent, which would be the greatest source of the pleasure I took from him and which I would seek out (at his neck and crotch, beneath his arms) at each of our meetings. It put an end to my thinking, I lifted one of his hands above his head, breaking our kiss to press my face into the pit of his arm (he shaved there too, the skin was rough against my tongue), sucking at his scent as if taking some necessary nourishment at an inadequate source. And then I sank to my knees and took him in my mouth.

A few minutes later, well before he had given me what I was owed, the obligation he took on when he took a soiled 20-leva note from my hand, Mitko made a strange loud sound and tensed himself, placing both of his palms flat against the sides of the stall. It was a poor performance of an orgasm, if that's what it was, not least because for the few minutes I had sucked him he had shown no response at all. Chakai, I said to him in protest as he pulled away, iskam oshte, I want more, but he didn't relent, he smiled at me and motioned me back, still courteous as he put on the shirt he had hung so carefully behind him. I watched him helplessly, still kneeling, as he called out to his friend, whom he called again brat mi and who called back to him from the outer chamber. Maybe he saw that I was angry, and wanted to remind me he wasn't alone. Straightening his clothes, running his hands down his torso to settle them properly on his frame, he smiled without guile, as if maybe he did feel he had given me what he owed. Then he unlatched the door and pulled it shut again behind him. As I knelt there, still tasting the metallic trace of sink water from his skin, I felt my anger lifting as I realized that my pleasure wasn't lessened by his absence, that what was surely a betrayal (we had our contract, though it had never been signed, never set in words at all) had only refined our encounter, allowing him to become more vividly present to me even as I was left alone on my stained knees, and allowing me, with all the freedom of fantasy, to make of him what I would.

Far-right protesters clashing with anti-fascists in Dover

On Saturday, as tens of thousands gathered around the UK to declare that "refugees are welcome here," a couple of hundred neo-Nazis rioted through Dover. They were taking part in a demonstration organized by far-right groups the National Front and the South East Alliance, demanding that Britain closes its borders entirely and forgets about helping people who are fleeing barrel-bombs in Syria. I guess morals and ethics don't play a huge role in personal reasoning when you're a white-supremacist who fantasies about a Holocaust 2.0.

Related: Calling Bullshit on the Anti-Refugee Memes Flooding the Internet

The far-right demonstrators were opposed by a slightly smaller number of anti-fascists, who tried to block their path. Violence broke out as missiles were exchanged between both sides. People chucked bricks, bottles, beer cans, and heavy metal padlocks that had presumably been brought along for the occasion.

I arrived at a large car park where there was a standoff between the Nazis and anti-fascists, with a couple of lines of riot cops acting as a buffer in between.

There had already been some pre-match skirmishes before we'd arrived; anti-fascists had blocked the depressing pub that was supposed to serve as a starting point for the far-right march, and when fascists tried to take it back, it all kicked off.

I spoke to an anti-fascist who had a bandage attached to his bleeding face. "There's not much to tell, really," he said, before telling me that the fascists had been throwing glass bottles. One had hit him in the face and split in half, and before long he realized his scarf was covered in blood.

Things had since calmed down a bit, and there was an edgy standoff between the two groups. On one side, flags fluttered on a continuum that ran from the Union Jack to White Power. On the other, red and black flags and banners reading, "Nobody likes a racist."

The anti-fascists chanted: "Say it loud say it clear, refugees are welcome here," and the chorus of Sham 69's "If the Kids Are United." Meanwhile, the fascists chanted the slightly less catchy, "No more refugees!" and, for some reason, "Pedos, pedos, pedos."

To give you an idea of the makeup of the far-right demo, this guy was holding a flag with an SS Totenkopf on it, venerating Combat 18—a neo-Nazi murder squad.

Then there was the National Front banner using the Mein Kampf-inspired "14 words."

The crowd seemed to range from the kind of ten-a-penny bigots who would have been slurring incoherently about Muslims at EDL demos a few years ago, to people happy to make their nostalgia for the Third Reich alarmingly public.

They weren't to be Blitzkrieg-ing anything quite yet, though. The left-wing activists were at the opposite end of the car park to the racist demo, linking arms to form a solid wall and block the march.

Before long, however, the word got round that the police might let the racist march take a different route towards its goal: the port of Dover. So the anti-fascists, all dressed in black and with masks covering their faces, linked arms once more and formed a human battering ram, breaking through police lines.

They ran along to the next junction, which they thought would now be on the march's route, and made a wall of linked arms, flags and lumps of wood with nails bashed through them.

Soon, the far-right march appeared from around a corner. It slowly surged forward as the police struggled to contain it, with fascists shoving against them. It was a bit like watching a bunch of hornets trying to escape from inside a sandwich bag.

Confusingly, some right wingers wear black bloc gear now, which used to be solely a left-wing thing

Marchers sporadically began to break out of the first line of cops to run forward, wave their flags and give the finger to the waiting left-wingers.

They got ever closer, until the police made them go around the side of the anti-Nazi road block. This did not turn out to be public-order policing best practice, as it bought the two groups into close proximity again. With a thin line of police and some police vans separating them, a hail of half-bricks, the sticks from placards and beer cans started flying towards the anti-fascists, and before long they were being hurled back towards the Nazis. A padlock fell from the sky at one point, as did a particularly noisy banger.

As the fascists circled, the two sides peered through the police vans, jeered at each other, and called each other "scum." Activists and Nazis bounced off police officers like sumo wresters as they tried to get at each other.

With the path now clear, the march was able to continue to its rally, but not before turning around to do some more giving-it-large and chucking shit.

The police then got their dogs out to make sure the two groups were well and truly separated. They brought them forward, shouting, "Get back, this dog will bite you! Get back, this dog will bite you!"

A traumatized child standing near me started repeating, "That dog will bite you! That dog will bite you! That dog will bite you!" looking on in terror.

At the rally, a speaker blamed the crisis—or "invasion," as he called it—on an orchestrated conspiracy by "Zionist Jews." Of course!

WATCH: Hanging with the People Who Ritualistically Suspend Their Bodies from Hooks

The anti-fascists, meanwhile, ambled off to the nearest park, where a local retired man in a suit called Patrick Carey came up to them started thanking them. I asked what he thought about his town being targeted by the far right, as Saturday's was the third fascist demo the town has played host to in the last year.

"I'm very pleased to see these people here. I'm completely hostile to the neo-Nazi movement," he told me. "That's the second week they've been here. Last week I stood alone by a traffic light and shouted at them; there was no one else around. I think it's because of this long connection with refugees. Unfortunately there's been a deliberate focus on Dover to encourage racism and acts of violence against immigrants. I've seen it grow. I've read letters in the local papers. I spoke to a couple of girls today—working-class girls—and they were on the side of the EDL. That's a worry for me."

A spokesperson for the Anti-Fascist Network told VICE: " What happened in Dover on Saturday needs to act as a wakeup call to the left, who have largely underestimated the capacity for street violence the extreme-right have been developing over the past few years. But it should also be reassuring that militant anti-fascists took the far-right's rendezvous point, stood our ground when attacked by fascists and succeeded in delaying their march. Had we had greater numbers there is no doubt we would have prevented them from marching entirely."

Meanwhile, Nazi social media pages have been chalking this one up as a victory.

On VICE News: Breaking Borders

Kent Police were more sanguine in a statement, commenting that they had managed to "facilitate a peaceful protest," which is weird given that "one police officer suffered bruising to his shoulder and some parked cars were damaged in Russell Street after various items were thrown but the protest passed without major incident. There were no arrests. Kent Police would like to thank the community for its co-operation."

In the last couple of weeks, the zeitgeist seems to have swung away from migrant-bashing to getting behind the refugees. But it wasn't so long ago that David Cameron thought it was cool to talk about "swarms" of migrants and headlines asked, "How many more can we take?" rather than demanding something be done. In any case, the thing about zeitgeists is that they're fickle and fleeting and don't take account of what might be bubbling under the surface—those bullshit anti-refugee memes that are swooping around the internet are enough to tell you that.

Unfortunately, one thing definitely bubbling under the surface at the moment is the re-emergence of an increasingly violent neo-Nazi street movement.

Follow Simon and Oscar on Twitter.

This article appears in The Incarceration Issue, a special edition of VICE Australia

Tas Pappas is a classic Australian larrikin, reminiscent of characters like Paul Hogan, Chopper Read, or Bob Hawke, but the skateboard version. It's an impression he may have cultivated a bit, but he is a natural storyteller and charmer. I told him this as we were sitting in his living room talking about his time in prison. "You're not so bad yourself, mate," he said with a wink, not missing a beat. For the uninitiated, Tas is an incredible vert skater from the western suburbs of Melbourne who, along with his younger brother Ben, became an international star in the mid-90s, then sort of fucked it all up and ended up in jail for attempting to traffic a kilogram of cocaine from Argentina to Australia between a pile of longboards. For a more detailed version of Tas's story, check out Eddie Martin's 2014 documentary All This Mayhem. For a few wry observations about being in jail, see below.

"The first stint in American jail was in 2006. I was one of two white guys in a wing full of hardcore LA gangbangers getting shipped back to Mexico and El Salvador and Colombia. That was sketchy as hell, but I felt safer in an American prison than I do in an Australian one.

This article appears in the September Issue of VICE

On a quiet Friday morning this past April, a crowd of concerned citizens gathered for a press conference on the steps of the Josephine County Courthouse, in Grants Pass, Oregon. Grants Pass, a town of 35,000 residents in a rural and notoriously violent corner of the state, was at the moment receiving a great deal of attention, the result of a "security operation" led by a man named Joseph Rice, the coordinator of a local group called the Josephine County Oath Keepers, at a small gold mine called the Sugar Pine in the wooded hills outside town.

The exact nature of the dispute was opaque even to most of the people who had seen fit to take sides, but it centered on an argument by the federal Bureau of Land Management that the two men holding title to the mine were running it without submitting to a federal oversight process they claimed the law exempted them from. Rice and the Oath Keepers had mobilized, and attracted volunteers from across the country, to ward off a possible incursion by the BLM. The security operation had by this point grown to encompass both a defensive encirclement of the mine itself, where dozens of heavily armed men and women were encamped, and a five-acre logistical staging area and basecamp on a very visible piece of real estate just off Interstate 5, where trucks were loaded with supplies, plans were made, and even more volunteers were being processed. The local BLM and Forest Service offices had been closed out of concern for "employee safety." "Please," one of the miners had been reported as saying, "stop calling the BLM and threatening their personnel."

About a dozen locals emerged from the courthouse. They, for the most part, addressed their comments to Rice, a quiet man of middling height with a graying beard, thick arms, and an ever-present Oath Keepers cap. As he stood at the back of the crowd, their message to him was simple: They wanted him and the Oath Keepers to stand down. A former dean of the local community college asked him to "let the legal process, rational discourse, and old-fashioned negotiation determine a nonviolent outcome—for the good of all of us." Some spoke more forcefully. A local sporting-goods dealer named Dave Strahan got up and called the Oath Keepers "nutty, tough-acting, gun-toting thugs."

Then a young activist named Alex Budd invited questions from the press. There were none of substance from the reporters in attendance, but Rice, who is an imposing man even if he wasn't at that moment wearing his customary sidearm, spoke up from the back. "Here's a question," he said. "Have any of you spoken to the miners about this?"

He was referring to Rick Barclay and George Backes, on whose behalf Rice and the Oath Keepers had mobilized. Strahan, no unimposing man himself, turned to Rice and bellowed: "I'm not here to answer your questions, Joseph!"

Rice repeated himself and took several steps toward the speakers. "So if I understand correctly," he said, "you haven't spoken to the miners." It looked like there would have to be a fight with all of the cameras watching. But suddenly the speakers turned, as though by an agreed-upon signal, and fled before Rice into the courthouse.

The breakdown in political communication could not have been more complete. The Oath Keepers had launched their operation out of concern that government agents would move in and burn the miners' equipment and the cabin where they slept before they ever got a chance to launch an appeal. The townspeople involved in the press conference, and the BLM itself, considered this concern to be somewhere between unfounded and ridiculous. The order of noncompliance that had started everything was to come due in 24 hours, and no one seemed to be able to say with confidence how it was all supposed to end.

A view of the Siskiyou Mountains from downtown Grants Pass

Conflicts like the one in Grants Pass have become increasingly common in the American West. Old battles over the way public lands are managed in the region have found a mode of expression through the Patriot movement, a loose agglomeration of groups, some armed, some not, that tend to describe themselves as defenders of the Constitution. They have grown mightily since the election of Barack Obama, from around 150 organizations to more than a thousand by 2014, helping to create a new politics of armed civil disobedience.

Last October, months before the events in Oregon, the Colorado-based journal High Country News ran a series of linked reports on public land conflicts under the imperative headline "Defuse the West." Most Americans, insomuch as they were aware that anything in the West needed defusing, got their introduction by watching the conflict the previous April on the ranch of Cliven Bundy, where hundreds of armed volunteers, many of them Oath Keepers, answered a call for a "range war" with the BLM, and quite nearly got one: In the face of a full media crush, armed volunteers took direct aim at BLM and sheriff's personnel and eventually forced the agency to withdraw. No one involved has faced any serious penalties—a fact that becomes a little hard to process if you think what would happen to a black man who opted to express his views of tyranny by pointing a gun at a peace officer in any major city in this country. The next month, at the well-named Recapture Canyon, outside of Blanding, in rural southeastern Utah, armed protesters led by members of the Bundy family and a sympathetic county commissioner moved into a stretch of trail that the BLM had closed. The county commissioner, Phil Lyman, who by all accounts is not an extremist and contributed to HCN's "Defuse the West" project, reportedly said, "If things don't change, it's not long before shots will be fired."

The documents HCN received from the Forest Service and the BLM show 50 incidents of what they described as "serious confrontations with antigovernment overtones" in just the years between 2010 and 2014. The records they got are certainly very far from comprehensive, and a few seem to be relatively harmless expressions of anti-federal sentiment, like the one of a Colorado man allegedly found riding an ATV in a restricted zone, who told agents, "I will fuck your world up... fuckin' got a hard-on right now, I bet... queer-ass piece of shit... let me touch your wiener," after reportedly punching an agent in the head and attempting to grab his groin.

Many of the others seem to be more clearly politically motivated attempts at assassination: In 2013 a Cochise County, Arizona, man was convicted of two counts of attempted murder, after firing at two BLM agents near his house in Happy Camp Canyon. Just a couple months later, seven rifle shots were fired at a uniformed Forest Service employee driving a truck through the Tahoe National Forest, in the Sierra Nevada. Closer to Grants Pass, someone threw a series of firebombs at BLM campground personnel near Mount Hood in 2013. The quotes mentioned track toward a mean: "You have no right to close roads," a visitor to a Payette National Forest ranger station in Idaho announced. "This is going to go to war, and we'll start shooting if it keeps up."

The Federal Government—mostly through the BLM, the Forest Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service—manages about 20 percent of the American landscape. This land is concentrated in the West, so that between them the Forest Service and BLM manage 81 percent of the land in Nevada, 67 percent in Utah, 62 percent in Idaho, 53 percent in Oregon, and even 48 percent in California—more than a quarter of every Western state. It's not exactly the case that these lands were supposed to be public forever: The BLM is only one in a history of American offices dealing with unclaimed lands, dating back to the very beginning of the Republic, and for most of American history the purpose of federal land management was to facilitate the distribution of public property to private citizens and corporate interests. The lands that remain under Federal control mostly came into the system after Theodore Roosevelt created the Forest Service in 1905, because no one wanted them, or because of an accident of history: The only reason the BLM even manages land in Josephine County, for example, is that a massive conspiracy involving property given away for free by the state to the Oregon and California Railroad, and parceled fraudulently for the purposes of timber profiteering, was exposed in 1904, implicating most of Oregon's congressional delegation. To restore public trust and crush the conspiracy, the federal government seized the land.

There have been periodic attempts to hand Western lands back to the states. These went nowhere because of concerns that the states couldn't bear the financial burden of maintaining them. Instead, in 1946 Congress founded the BLM to manage them, creating an odd legacy in which two agencies both occupy two seemingly contradictory roles: The BLM and the Forest Service are not preservation agencies, like the Parks Service, and they are tasked with facilitating certain levels of ranching, mining, and logging while also securing the environment, protecting archaeological sites, and acting as law enforcement.

Joseph Rice speaking at the site of the Sugar Pine mine

In 1976, Congress repealed the Homestead Act and replaced it with the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which codified the role of the Forest Service and the BLM in preserving "multiple use" access to public lands. The law made it clear for the first time—or for the first time for anyone who hadn't been able to read the signs—that the federal government planned to keep the Western allotments forever.

This set off what's now known as the Sagebrush Rebellion, originally a legislative push in Western states to reclaim federal lands and designate many unsettled areas as roadless wilderness. The movement expressed a disconnect that has never really healed: Ranching, mining, and logging in the West are ways of making a living that have never gone away, and in places where the Forest Service or the BLM manage land, they enforce tens of thousands of rules that are seen by many people as being symbolic of a society that has come to be both hyper-regulated and run by an unaccountable federal government more interested in control than in engagement with citizens.

The result is that the two agencies occupy for many Westerners a role sort of like what New Yorkers would experience if you folded the NYPD, the Department of Environmental Protection, the Landmarks Commission, the Buildings Department, the FDNY, and some portions of the Department of Transportation into one hopelessly underfunded agency. This would be accountable not to a locally elected mayor and legislative body with law-making authority but to one of two federal departments (the Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture, the BLM part of the Department of the Interior) based in Washington and headed by unelected officials who make rules outside a legislative process but functionally with the full force of law—officials who were appointed in the age of Obama, a president whom few of the rural Westerners interacting with these agencies voted for or have a great deal of trust in.

And enforcement by these agencies has often been uneven or capricious, depending on how you look at it. There are credible recent stories of mining cabins being burned in and around Grants Pass without the notification you'd think human decency requires, and many miners view the torching of cabins as a punishment tactic to drive them out of the woods. Looking back to the 1970s, almost everyone in the local mining community knows someone who's had property burned, and a story published in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1990 investigated miners being smoked out in Klamath National Forest, near enough to be neighbors in this part of the world. "We started to burn obviously abandoned fire-hazard-type cabins with the permission of the owner," it quoted one Forest Service official. "Then it seemed to accelerate among the Forest Service guys. Who can burn more cabins? Then it turned into a race." The official went on. "Then we started to plan it. We started to kick people out, so we could burn the cabins. I burned down cabins myself. It felt awful."

The Sagebrush Rebellion has never truly died, and today it has inspired a very similar movement drawing strength from community-level anger and even being used to undermine the legitimacy and enforcement ability of BLM and the Forest Service in Congress. At least two House bills have been introduced in 2015 calling for the transfer of public lands to states where lawmakers and regulators are often quite intimate with large-scale ranching, mining, and oil and gas interests. At the state level, lawyers have repeatedly used anger over regulation to push bills pulled from the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that serves as a sort of mass-production facility for right-wing legislation, backed by companies like Exxon and Koch Industries that are just as bureaucratic and far less accountable than any government agency but that have a great interest in weakening federal environmental protections.

Watch: 'Here Comes the White Power Safety Patrol'

This anger has fueled the growth of groups like the Oath Keepers, founded in 2009 by a Yale Law graduate named Stewart Rhodes and now claiming a probably inflated membership of 30,000, mostly current or former law enforcement and military personnel. The Oath Keepers' anti-regulatory agenda ranges from the dark and insane elements of a deep strand of American thought to something that anyone with worries about civil liberties and the corporate welfare state can find common ground with. Liberal watchdogs call them right-wing extremists; they call themselves defenders of the Constitution. In many cases it has been hard to tell the difference.

In Grants Pass the issue had to do with both a specific regulatory dispute and a long history of distrust between the people who work and live on public lands and the people tasked with managing them. In March, the two miners in Grants Pass had been served with notices from the BLM stating that they were in violation of regulations requiring them to submit a plan of operations at their concession—things like the cutting of trees, disposal of mining waste, and building of structures to live in while they worked. The miners then argued two points: The first was that BLM agents had gone back on the word of its own agents, who, allegedly, had said the mine had a title exempting it from the processes of the 1955 Surface Minerals Act. This claim is currently being argued in front of the Department of Interior's appeals court. Their second point was that, in their view, the BLM and the Forest Service had a history of acting first and justifying later. "That's how all the cops are with miners," Rick Barclay told me. "You're like a second-class citizen. The whole thing is to get people out of the woods." Barclay brought the issue to Rice and the Oath Keepers, who reviewed the documents and felt the case presented a constitutional problem: If the BLM came in and burned the miners' equipment before they got a hearing, they'd violate the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unlawful search and seizure. If the agency acted before the miners had a chance to file an appeal, they'd violate the Fifth Amendment's right to due process. This is when the guns came out. "The only reason my stuff is still standing," Barclay said, "is that there's guys saying we'll shoot you if you fucking burn us down. If you don't want your nose broke, keep it out of my business."

Miner David Everist near the site of a burned cabin

The sign for the BLM/Forest Service interagency office is the first thing you see after you've pulled off Interstate 5 to enter Medford, a typically gray-green Oregon village at the northern end of the Siskiyou range and one of the very few sizable towns that dot the vast, still wild triangle of land between Eugene; Sacramento, California; and Reno, Nevada. The office was the first place I stopped when I arrived in Southern Oregon, a day before the Together for Josephine press conference. On that rainy Thursday afternoon it was closed and surrounded by about a hundred assembled protesters, only some of them armed. Joseph Rice was speaking from the bed of a white pickup. "I took an oath to uphold the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic," he said from his truck-bed podium, "and a domestic enemy is anyone who will abuse someone's rights within that Constitution."

After the speeches, I introduced myself to Rice. He was a former Army helicopter pilot, thickly muscled and walking with just a hint of a limp, and when I shook his hand he was rigorously polite, in the way of many military men who are at pains to be respectful even when they have no plans to say very much to you. I watched him as he dealt with a slightly batty, gray-bearded volunteer whose picture would later appear prominently in the Daily Mail. The man came up saying he'd do "anything at all to help—I just want to get involved."

"Can you cook?" Rice asked him.

The man said he could try. "And you know, if there was any chance for some of that more, you know, tactical training, I would be ready for that," he said. Rice said he'd let him know.

I then introduced myself to Barclay and Backes, the mine owners, and to another miner named David Everist, who told me an impossible-to-follow tale of seeing a cabin lit afire and being arrested for refusing to abandon his placer claim—the type of mining that involves sifting through riverbed sediment, associated in most people's minds with the Gold Rush—in the nearby national forest. He talked so long and in such detail about mining law that I had to invent a meeting to get away. This would become a recurring experience.

The protest ended as the rain picked up. I left and called my contact at the local BLM, a public information officer named Jim Whittington, with whom I'd spoken in New York before I left. He offered to talk with me in person, and I suggested we meet at the interagency office now that the protest was over. I was already in the office parking lot, having told Shawn, the photographer working with me on the story, to meet me there. Whittington paused and said vaguely that meeting there would be "ah... inconvenient." He asked if I knew anywhere else in the area. I'd seen a Starbucks down the road and suggested it as an option, and he said he knew the place: "We can meet you there in fifteen minutes," he said, as though he'd just been driving around waiting for a dispatch call.

Shawn and I drove over. It was still spitting rain, and chilly, but the Starbucks wouldn't let us photograph inside, so we set up under an umbrella at an outside table. Whittington, whom I recognized from photos I'd seen on some rather sinister antigovernment blog posts, approached with a man who surveyed the scene and pronounced it satisfactory. We said we were sorry about the rain and cold, but Whittington waved away the apology: "No, I was going to suggest that we talk out here anyway," he said. "Inside people could hear things that..." He trailed off. It felt very much like a drug deal.

The Oath Keepers' media center

The other man introduced himself as Tom Gorey, a higher-level public affairs official who'd been rushed in by Washington to run point on the events at the mine. This seemed reasonable—Whittington had sounded harried and exhausted both times I'd spoken with him. I had read vilifications of Whittington (representative title of a pro-miner blog post: "IS BLM SPOKESMAN JIM WHITTINGTON A COMPULSIVE LIAR? DOES HE NEED PROFESSIONAL HELP?") and would hear similar assessments of him and Gorey, coloring them as stooges or malign manipulators, depending on who was doing the describing. But they were more or less exactly what you'd expect from public affairs people working on environmental issues for a government agency: Whittington was soft-spoken and wore a dad-who-hikes sort of green fleece vest; Gorey, a squat man who was getting up in his years and had clearly dealt with his share of angry Westerners, was gruffer and slightly more officious, but only slightly. They were friendly and reasonable, but they were also the public representatives of a government facing a genuine challenge to its legitimacy, and they were unable to meet us in the offices of that government housed just half a mile down the road. The situation was beyond absurd.

They were resigned to the madness: "All that happened was that we made a finding of noncompliance," Gorey told me. If Backes and Barclay weren't contesting the surface rights, they would have to file a plan of operations or remove their cabin and equipment. "Since the situation we're in is they're saying, 'Oh, no, we do have surface,' then they can file an appeal." The miners had in fact done so that day, meaning their case was supposed to appear before the Interior Department's Board of Land Appeals. "There was never an issue of due process," he said. "Nothing is going to happen to their structures."

I asked what, then, had brought on the standoff. "Their line that they've been peddling is that the BLM was going to go in there and set fire to the cabin, take the equipment, and all this was going to happen before they went to the IBLA," Gorey said. The Oath Keepers and the miners said they would hold their positions until a judge issued a stay barring enforcement action by the BLM. And they were still preparing for a showdown on April 25, when the notice of noncompliance would come due. This was two days from when we were talking.

I asked Whittington about the burning of structures, which was an issue so raw in the town that the desk clerk at the Motel 6 where we were staying—a 30-ish woman who had never mined a day in her life—had brought it up to us unbidden. "That has happened in the past," he said. "If you look back in the nineteen seventies, you had all these guys who were basically putting up a cabin and saying it was attached to a mine. They were basically homesteading." This doesn't necessarily go against the prevailing theory among miners that land managers want people out of the woods. "There were a lot of old rickety cabins out there, and we did burn cabins. We've maybe burned one in the last fifteen years."

"Their narrative is that the BLM's a bully and federal thugs and strongmen are coming in to trample on their rights," Gorey said. "But it's just a false narrative." He knew that the resentment had come from somewhere, and he had been in the agency long enough to see how far it went: "The desire of many is, 'Hey, you're locking up the lands, and we can't use them the way we did,'" he said. "Wilderness designations and the success of the environmental movement have put restrictions, and there's been this resentment. You combine it with far-fetched constitutional interpretations, things like that country sheriffs are the major players in government—I mean that's what you're running up against." I asked whether the BLM might move in forcefully on April 25. "We're the government," Gorey said. "We're good at sending letters."

I asked Gorey what the future looked like for an agency that risked starting a revolution every time it tried to tell a camper to recycle his beer bottles. "Good luck to the militia movement to disestablish the federal government," he said. "We may have lost the battle of Bundyville, but we will win the war."

Mary Emerick inside the camper that served as her office.

Here's a sign of the times in the West today: We knew the drill before we even got to the staging area, in the tiny town of Merlin, one exit up the highway from Grants Pass. You pull the 4x4 down the side road. Men with guns at the gate signal to you to slow, and they surround the vehicle. You roll down the window and state your business, and they direct you to park away from the entrance. If you're allowed to park inside the perimeter, they mirror-check under your chassis for bombs—someone waits with a mirror strapped to a long fir bough. You exit, and a humorless man with a pistol in a drop holster tells you to stay with him at all times. This is how it was at Bundy, and it's how it is at gatherings like this across the West. Our escort, who was at least in his 60s but tall and agile and lean, said to Shawn: "There will be no taking of photos. Clear?" Three bearded men, wearing full tactical gear and carrying rifles, gave us looks sort of like what you'd give a couple of college boys you found at your daughter's slumber party.

This was partly just an act. We passed the grim guardsmen, and as it began to rain again our escort turned to Shawn. "That thing about the photos," he said, smiling the first smile we'd seen on the base. "Was it intimidating enough for you?" He led us to the beat-up and musty old camper that the Oath Keepers were using as a "media center," marked by a handwritten cardboard sign. We spent nearly an hour and a half inside, during which time the rain never stopped. Our escort never left the door. "Nothing is going to happen," Mary Emerick, the group's public information officer and Rice's right hand, told us when we entered. "But in case something was going to happen, he's there. And you both know he's there. I think it's sweet."

The Oath Keepers are a national organization with a board of prominent constitutionalist activists, one of whom we met at the staging area, and local branches like the Josephine County chapter that operate with a great deal of independence. They have grown quickly since Rhodes founded the group after the election of Barack Obama, and their messaging has been much more effective than that of the 90s-era militia groups they're often associated with. They don't claim to oppose the federal government, for example. They are instead organized around a pledge to maintain the oath to uphold the Constitution sworn by peace officers and members of the military, and they also vow to disobey ten hypothetical orders they believe the federal government might issue. These include the relatively mild "We will not obey orders to conduct warrantless searches" but also vows with hints of the black-helicopters-and-race-war fears of older militia groups, like, "We will not obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps."

Rhodes polices their message aggressively, making sure members avoid racist comments, and he presents the movement as apolitical, though the group has helped to sponsor the mainstream conservative gathering CPAC and armed members have now twice appeared during disturbances on the streets of Ferguson, an action that many observers of the Patriot movement have seen as inflammatory. But the group has worked hard to present itself as community-oriented and responsive to, rather than wishing to provoke, confrontations. President Obama "would like nothing better than to see a race war," Rhodes told an audience recently, exhorting people to prepare themselves for actions like this one. "Picture Katrina," he continued, "but all over the country."

But the staging area was almost unsettlingly calm. There was a big fire pit where everyone hung out, a few camper vans that served as offices, and a chaotic cooking enclosure made from tarps and stakes covering card tables piled with camp stoves and mounds of food that looked to have been bought piece-by-piece: a package of hot dogs, a box of brownie mix, three cans of beans, a single bottle of Vitamin Water. A gnarled little man with a deep tan and a mess of greasy hair emerged from the kitchen and brought Emerick some fried potatoes. It was now the afternoon of April 24, a day before the order of noncompliance was supposed to come due, and the first of two days we spent more or less entirely with the Oath Keepers. Most of the volunteers seemed to be up on the mine itself, waiting.

Emerick looked, like everyone who'd been involved in the standoff, a little frayed. Her insurance agent called, and she wearily told him she'd call back. "I had an accident coming down the hill the other day," she said. "A coyote ran in front of my car, and now all the guys call me Coyote Down." She said that Rice had lost 14 pounds since things kicked off.

Some volunteers spent thousands of dollars on equipment before arriving.

She was perhaps an unlikely antigovernment warrior, but her story is a good illustration of how so many people who are not anything at all close to nutjobs could get involved in the constitutionalist movement. She was from Southern California and had been an elementary-school administrator in a small city called Diamond Bar. She was a grandmother and acted like it toward us almost immediately. She was self-conscious about her age and weight when Shawn took out the camera, and she didn't begrudge us our politics or the fact that a 28-year-old in tattoos and aviators had shown up at the military operation she was helping to run. She came to Josephine County in 1989, following her husband: "Back then you could hear it called 'the Beirut of Oregon,'" she told me. "I said, 'Where are you taking me?'" If this comparison no longer stands it's because Beirut, not Josephine County, grew less violent.

She was in a good position to follow the deteriorating security situation because she worked for Gil Gilbertson, a former county sheriff we'd met that morning. Gilbertson's office—leaving aside his own stated sympathies for the Patriot movement—was a natural place for a budding constitutionalist to begin. The Forest Service or the BLM manages 60 percent of Josephine County. The federal government pays no taxes on this land, and for decades—as is still common in the West—the county received its compensation in the form of royalties from timber sales, which allowed it to avoid raising property taxes. But the BLM and the Forest Service slowed timber harvests over time, and by 2012 the government ended its programs of payment to the county. The sheriff's department nearly collapsed for lack of funds: The jail had largely closed down, reported thefts in Grants Pass increased 80 percent in just a year, and felony suspects arrested with stolen goods were sometimes issued tickets and released. Applications for concealed-carry permits increased by 49 percent, and many citizens took on the job of policing themselves, leading the New York Times to fret in 2013 that "balkanized camps of armed residents could create new tensions" in the county.

There's a way of looking at Josephine County's meltdown and thinking that if there had been local, not federal, control over all that land, then things would have turned out differently. Gilbertson, the former sheriff, even refused to support a ballot measure that would have raised taxes to fund his own department. Emerick supported this position. "It's not about us being antigovernment or anti–law enforcement," she said. "But people were saying, 'Give us these millions of dollars,' and it didn't add up." Gilbertson lost the election, and Emerick dived into her work with the Oath Keepers. Now she was Rice's chief operative and was in regular touch with Stewart Rhodes. "Even before this," she said, "Stewart was probably on the phone with Joseph once a week. He's trying to turn this group into a model nationally."

Rice sauntered in. "What are you talking to these guys for?" he asked, good-naturedly. He agreed, after something that approached begging on my part, to take us to the mine the next afternoon, the day the order would come due. I told him that I'd bought a topographical map and that I'd planned a way up, since they had long since been preventing other reporters from going to the mine. He looked slightly concerned for me. "Trust me," he said. "You wouldn't have made it very far."

They had been dealing with a horde of volunteers. "It's a tactical issue if I give you numbers," Emerick said, when I asked her how many had arrived since the start of the conflict. "But everyone has to fill out paperwork when they come—it's how we try to weed out the crazies. And there are two clipboards, each with big stacks of paperwork."

I asked what sort of thing they did when they weren't running a military operation, and she said they had community meetings, which is how the miners had found them, and did volunteer work, which is how Emerick had found them. "There was this project building a playground for disabled kids," she said. "Twelve of these guys came out, it was a hundred and three degrees, and then a wildfire started, so there was smoke they were breathing, and then it started to rain. And I remembered this one guy, an Army Ranger, he kept working—like, 'Well, at least it'll keep the temperature down.' Pretty much when there's an issue, they're the guys who stand up."

This was our first picture of something that was very hard to square with what you learn about these groups from afar. We spent two afternoons at the staging area, waiting to see what would happen on April 25, and we became friendly with the volunteers, joking around the fire, eating the food, running to the store to buy Clif Bars for the guys and Diet Coke for Emerick. They came from across the West, and as far away as Alaska, and were mostly identifiable—and, at least to me, relatable—as a sort of person in need of a purpose, who'd found it in constitutionalism on the one hand and in the feeling of simply being a part of a group on the other. "We're not toothless rednecks. We don't do the Aryan shit—that's the complete opposite of what we want," a young guy named Matt, from a group based in the Willamette Valley, sought me out to say. "That's not freedom. That's not equality. We've done classes on everything from small-animal butchering to sewing. We're just out to help each other out, help people out."

They were all also very resistant to the idea that they were antigovernment, and in fact we didn't meet a single person in any of the militias who would accept that term. At no point did anyone think to mention the name Barack Obama. A couple of guys from a group called the Idaho III% pulled us over so that one of them, who made sure we knew he was Hispanic, could say to us, "Man, don't you write that we're antigovernment or anti-fed—we believe in government that people have a say in. We have Democrats. We even had a guy in the group who wanted to have, you know, a sex change. And there were some people who weren't OK with it. And we had a meeting and eventually some people had to leave."

I asked who had had to leave. "The people who weren't OK with it!" he said. "We're constitutionalists, and what does the Constitution say about a sex change?"

A minecart outside the Sugar Pine mine

The day the order was to come due, we loaded into Joseph Rice's green Toyota Tacoma and drove to the mine. "I don't believe they will come in here. I don't think that's in their best interest," he said as we left the staging area. "But that being said, today is the deadline. For us it's a security operation, and whatever it takes to maintain the security of the mine is what we're going to do."

Rice was intense to the degree that it was unnerving to share the cab of a pickup with him, but it was easy to see why scores of young military men who'd never met him before they drove in would follow him. He spoke with a firmness that made you think he wasn't used to being questioned back, but there was something earned about his self-assurance—he sometimes paused for half a minute while he searched for words, in the manner of someone who would rather say nothing at all than speak without first satisfying himself to the justice of what he was saying. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley, in Los Angeles County, but moved to Massachusetts as a teenager. He joined the Massachusetts National Guard out of high school and flew both rotary and fixed-wing aircraft before bouncing around the country working in aviation, search-and-rescue, and fire suppression in Hawaii, Florida, Montana, and Alabama. Then he did three rounds as a contractor in Afghanistan, he says. He was injured in combat there and hasn't been able to work as a pilot since. "I broke my ankle in two places and blew out my knee. I got home Christmas Eve, got to the doc, and he said it was pretty well busted. It's been two years, and I'm still trying to get back to flight status."

He was also one of the pilots involved in the search for the Kim family, a story that became a statewide media sensation in Oregon after a family of four, heading to the Oregon coast during Thanksgiving vacation, followed a shortcut down a remote BLM road and became stranded in the snow. Rice flew with a rescue operation for days and was one of the pilots who found the family freezing by their car. He also helped locate the body of James Kim, the father, who had frozen to death after leaving to try to get help. Bear Camp Road, where they'd become lost, is now maybe the most famous stretch of BLM road in the country—it has its own Wikipedia page—and James Kim wasn't the first traveler to die trying to use it to get to the coast. It also happened to be the road we turned down as we left the highway, heading into the woods.

I asked Rice how he'd come to politics. "I was very distressed about what I had seen happen in this country after September eleventh," he said. "And I think that if what has happened to our rights and civil liberties since then had happened overnight, there would have been rioting in the streets.

"I've traveled a lot internationally," he went on, "and I can always tell the American, and it's embarrassing—because they're the only ones who reach down and take off their shoes at the airport. And when the government starts spying on Americans and monitoring phone calls and keeping records on electronic traffic, and when you're keeping records on Americans just because they're Americans, and when you talk about warrantless wiretapping, when you talk about secret FISA courts, when you talk about assassination of American citizens overseas without trial, that's not what I took an oath to defend."

I pointed out that he was talking about issues that long predate the Obama administration. "I'm not political—I look at the world as morally right and morally wrong," he said, which was plain enough from his bearing. "And this situation here with the BLM is not a current administration issue. This was happening under Bush, this was happening under Clinton—this here is a long-term cultural issue." We turned down another dirt road and stopped to open a locked gate, barring the way ahead. He radioed to say we were in the vicinity. "You don't want to wander off now," he said. "You won't see us, but we will see you."

"...if what has happened to our rights and civil liberties since [September 11th] had happened overnight, there would have been rioting in the streets."

The radio came alive. "Break-break-break, all stations fire in the hole," someone said.

"They're blowing shit up," Rice said. He wouldn't say what they were blowing up, but it wasn't BLM trucks. All I could see were trees and forest.

"Gook's going to blow his load!" the voice on the radio said. "Gook," it turned out, was the call sign of the head of security at the mine, a giant, genial, part-Guamanian former Marine named Brandon Rapolla, who had been at the Bundy ranch. We drove on, under madrones and incense cedars. We came to a bend in the road, where three men armed with AR-15s and wearing tactical gear stood next to a bulldozer that had been set up, flanked by at least one foxhole, dug-in and hidden, making the road impassible.

"Hey, it's the boss!" someone called. They started the dozer, moved it off the road, and pulled it back into position when we'd passed.

We came to a huge clearing under pine trees where the cabin belonging to George Backes and Rick Barclay stood, unburned. The entrance to the mine was out of sight, up a steep one-lane track cut in the hillside. There were dozens of guys standing around, most of them armed and kitted out. It looked like they were massing to invade Yosemite. "And you can't even see most of the people who are up here," Rapallo told us.

Backes, a soft-spoken part-Indian man with a long criminal record, walked over. Rice had brought a gigantic card signed by well-wishers from the area, made out to the volunteers at the mine. Backes studied it. "It'll take me a while to read all this, and I'll probably get emotional as hell," he said. "I'd write something in there, but they probably won't be able to read it."

We spent four hours at the mine—which, for all the fuss, was just a four-by-six-foot hole in the ground, dug into a sheer wall at the geologically auspicious meeting point between a greenstone band and a beautiful, dark block of uplifted serpentine intruding into soft saprolite. The tension, the waiting to see if something would happen, cleared as soon as we stepped out of the truck. It was a credit to Rice that the guys in the operation had maintained a sense of discipline at all, because once up there it was impossible to imagine the BLM trying to send so much as a carrier pigeon up Bear Camp Road. The Oath Keepers, whether they were an antigovernment militia or not, had created a zone of militia rule, where no government had writ. I had come expecting to see a showdown. This was like a noontime duel that ended when one party caught the 11 o'clock train out of town.

George Backes reads over a card signed by local well-wishers.

On my last morning I drove to meet Barclay, the other mine owner. He had a thick beard and was a ball of muscle, even at 58, and had, like all the miners we met, fingernails as thick as nickels. We shook hands and took a corner table at the general store—the only place of business of any kind—near his home, in the tiny town of Applegate. "You have a GPS?" he asked when he set the meeting. I said I did. "Good," he said. "You can get lost like all the rest of the tourists." I heard his story of growing up wandering the West while his father followed gas strikes—moving from Kansas to Texas to Utah and back—and how he'd come to Josephine County as a teenager and discovered mining. "We went up, the first time I did hard rock, and hell, there was gold just laying on the rocks," he said.

We talked about the frustrations all the miners in the area seemed to share. In the end it was anger that had brought the guns out, and the degree of political disconnect between everyone involved—the miners, Oath Keepers, and their supporters on the one side and the federal agents, activists, and their local supporters on the other—was sort of hard to believe. They were talking past one another in a way that becomes true in any insurgency, from Northern Ireland to Iraq. "These people are thugs," he said, referring to the BLM and the Forest Service, which was exactly the word used to described the Oath Keepers at the press conference. "It's a cultural arrogance," he said. "'Our administrative rulings trump your rights.'"

A legal scholar might fairly say that the BLM's administrative rulings are an expression of a broader democratic right, to establish enforcement agencies to ensure the collective good. But perhaps liberal watchdogs, acting out of a very fair concern about the political intimidation and possibility of violence that actions like this bring with them, have been too quick to dismiss the anger of people like Barclay. Any insurgent politics is born out of a disconnect between the governing and the governed, the feeling among some organizable section of the populace that it is, for whatever reason, impossible to wield political influence without bringing guns into the discussion.

Something has happened in the West over the past 40 years to create that attitude among certain people, particularly people like Barclay who depend on the land for a living. Groups like the Oath Keepers have been able to reach out and give people a sense of taking back a country so entangled with rules, surveillance, and control—from the NSA to the cardholder agreement for your Amex to the tens of thousands of rules governing what you can do in what seems like an untouched and untamed forest—that you don't have to be a militia member to think that the basic idea of what it means to be a free citizen has been reimagined in this country, without either political party offering much of a voice to those who might find that reimagining troubling.

Rick Barclay near his home in Applegate, Oregon

You might think, as I do, that these people's frustrations have been co-opted by a corporatist ideology that has done as much as any government action to bureaucratize and regulate our lives. You might think, as they do, that my own environmentalism and belief in social welfare serves as an excuse for government regulations that have changed what the nature of having access to public land or being a free American ever meant. But these are points that, at least in this particular case, we were able to discuss like reasonable people. There are a great many people involved, or attempting to be involved, in operations like the one at the Sugar Pine mine who seem to be genuinely dangerous, and it's an inevitability that someone will eventually be killed if these actions go on with the frequency that they have been.

(At the time of this writing, the Oath Keepers are mobilizing for another action at a mine, this time over a dispute in Lincoln, Montana, with the Forest Service.) There is no easy answer, but it couldn't possibly hurt to try to hear these groups out before assuming they're all crazies and fascists. "There's lots of those folks who think that we should erupt into some kind of, I don't know what, guerrilla war," Barclay said. "And that's very counterproductive. But they run people over all the time."

As I finished my interview with Barclay, a beautiful gray-haired woman, wearing elaborate jewelry and a linen dress, came up and introduced herself. He had clearly become a hero in town. "I just wanted to say good luck," she said. "I used to work the mines with my dad. Do you remember the Lost Blue Empress?" referring to a local mine. Barclay said he did. She pressed his hand.

We went out to his truck to look over some documents, and a guy in a flashy jacked-up Chevy pulled up. "Can I have your autograph?" he asked Barclay, joshingly. "No, seriously, you're giving 'em hell, Rick." We all talked a while, leaning on Barclay's beat-up little truck and playing with his brown mutt, named Brown. "Brown's picture was in the Daily Mail of England!" Barclay said in wonder. "Can you believe that shit?"

I asked him again how he felt about setting loose all the craziness. I brought up a video made by one activist who'd shown up after having been at the Bundy ranch, and who'd made a video in which he talked about "heavy hitters" coming in and announced grandly that "we are standing off" with the BLM. It was hard to see it as anything but a call to violence. "We can't let the Chinese or the government have the gold," he went on. "It belongs to the people."

"Well, I don't know about that," Barclay said, and smiled. "The gold doesn't belong to the people. The gold belongs to me."

Image of the drug lab from 'Scenario in the Shade.' Courtesy of Red Bull Studios and Freeman/Lowe/Herrema

In Jorge Luis Borges's fantastical story "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," the narrator reviews a fake book, going so far as to not only describe its pseudo-plot and the background of its fictitious author, but to compare the "reviews" of its first and second editions by other "critics."

The acclaimed artist duo Freeman/Lowe (Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe) have done something not so dissimilar with their latest show, Scenario in the Shade, a multimedia-cum-mindfuck of an exhibition—a collaboration with musician/artist Jennifer Herrema—that opened this past weekend. The trio has converted Red Bull Studios in Manhattan to the point of unrecognizability. Until December 6, the arts space will be a bombed-out labyrinth of sculptural and sonic environments, each room the remnants of fabricated gangs and subcultures that once roamed a made-up megacity called San San International.

"San San is like a metroplex that has grown from San Diego to San Francisco, but SF is now in Alaska," the artists explained to me a few days before the opening. "We're working with these very constant science-fiction and alternate-history models where time is out of joint."

Other images from the installation. Courtesy of Red Bull Studios

To explore Scenario is to be ripped out of reality and plopped into a Warriors-style dystopian urban landscape where chemtrails likely stain the skies (if there were skies to see) and the water is almost certainly spiked with Orange Sunshine LSD. Upon walking through the exhibition entrance on 18th Street, visitors are greeted by a decrepit bodega, an antiquated parlor, and a 70s-style drug den fitted with a couch sunken into the carpeted floor that gallery-goers enter through the back of a wardrobe (because of course there'd be a Narnia motif), as well as a room containing the leftovers of a drug lab, a kinda-continuation of Freeman and Lowe's 2008 installation Hello Meth Lab in the Sun. And that's just the first floor of the 15,000-square-foot space.

The subterranean level, which visitors enter through a porta-potty, includes a fully built-out courtroom; an area surrounded by aquariums, where a ragtag band featuring Herrema and members of Gang Gang Dance and MGMT performed during a private preview; and hacked arcade games like Time Crisis 3 that spout psychedelic visuals. There's even a theater, if all this is too dizzying for you and you need to sit for a minute, where visitors can watch a 30-minute survey of the physical exhibition that is the second part of a trilogy beginning with Freeman/Lowe's 2014 show The Floating Chain.

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Not that overwhelming environments are the only thing on display—the artists also installed speakers in the various rooms which emit a "sprawling sonic collage," including contributions from Kurt Vile, OFF!, Devendra Banhart, Hot Chip, and Bad Brains, together forming seven hours of music that will be released as a record on Drag City. The trio describes just the sound aspect as "its own sort of living organism," suggesting that Scenario, amalgamated, is akin to a living mammal—but probably closer to a fantastical beast sporting ten heads and iridescent teeth.

For more on Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, watch our 2012 video featuring the artists:

"I feel like this is first opportunity where we were allowed to do it all," Herrema told me.

"It's close to the idea of a complete artwork," Lowe added. "We had a chance to make that. There were so many toys to play with here: studios, a video-viewing room, and this weirdo architecture to respond to. You can really make a complete picture."

As I tried to process it all, the three artists explained what inspired the installation itself, prior to even broaching the mad-genius backstory of San San International and the gangs that occupy it.

"It's about a sort of multi-universe and us trying to transcribe from within that matrix," Lowe explained. "You know that feeling when you walk down Canal Street, right? It's about the polyphonic head-fuck that is Canal Street, but a globalized model. We are kind of automating this little bit more to reflect the actual reality of the urban experience."

Zeroing in a bit on this specific iteration of their ever-expanding, precariously tethered oeuvre— Scenario includes Easter eggs from past exhibitions, equally batshit (albeit less expansive) endeavors that sometimes related to San San. The artists divulged that while the space aims to encapsulate said urban, polyphonic head-fuck, they're also trying to tell a story "about people through their objects, and through their environments."

"How can you use material to create a fictional narrative?" Freeman asked rhetorically. "In our studio discussions, we focused in on subcultures and gangs and the way their territories are distributed among a city, and how their style, aesthetic sensibilities, and objects become the identity for certain groups." For example, a sculptural cactus-crystal hybrid appears in the exhibition, representing a fake plant that produces a drug called Marasa that one gang (vaguely inspired by real-life hooligans The Scuttlers) was fond of taking. In turn, there's the drug-lab room, likely alluding to Dr. Arthur Cook, an Albert Hoffman-type psychopharmacologist the artists imagined for their 2010 exhibition Bright White Underground. Dr. Cook is said to have invented Marasa and administered it during group-therapy sessions, which may nod to that vibe-y, carpeted den inside the faux-wardrobe in Red Bull.

From left: Justin Lowe, Jonah Freeman, Jennifer Herrema. Photo by the author

Herrema performing during a press preview. Photo by the author

Gallery visitors exploring the installation. Photo by the author

"There's this connected narrative, but we're not precious or totally directive with any of these spaces," Herrema said. "It's not a Walt Disney ride—it's more like ring-around-the-fucking-rosie."

Lowe added that even if there are noticeable nods to pop culture, be it 60s and 70s drug parties or William Gibson or Philip K. Dick, "the familiarity of the environments is there so people can use those reference points to have an emotional or intellectual responses.

"We're very much bringing in culture and we're bringing in how we experience daily life," Lowe continued. "So there are brands. There is repetition. You do see Nike and Coca-Cola again and again. You do see that same haircut."

Despite finishing what may be their most meticulous, ridiculous, and comprehensive installation to date, the artists have greater ambitions for the future of their dive into hand crafted alternate realities.

"We're still interested in this serial, sort of chapter-based storytelling," the trio agreed. For the third installment of their film trilogy and future exhibitions, they imagine "a long-form narrative feature that tells the stories of Dr. Cook, the gangs, and all the characters involved," using actors and maybe even dialogue.

"San San International is just the mall, the metroplex," said Lowe. "Next time, we're gonna walk you out the front door and bring you to Mercury City."

Even if the hinted macro-metropolis never comes to fruition, it's fun to imagine Borges browsing through Freeman, Lowe, and Herrema's entrancing sculptural worlds, the deceased author taking notes and even feeling a pang of jealousy at the sheer scale and ambition of a project as tripped out as the artists's latest.

Follow Zach on Twitter.

Scenario in the Shade is open at Red Bull Studios through December 6. For more information on the exhibition, visit the art space's website here.

Still from llachlann's 'True Detective' video (see below)

Because it's Monday and you're probably not working properly yet, here are some more distractions to keep you from that spread sheet that's been open on your screen since a minute past nine this morning.

Firstly, look at this lovely new thing, uploaded yesterday by YouTube user llachlann. It's the introduction to the first season of True Detective—you remember, the good one, the one that people liked, the one that people told you about so then you watched it and then you told your pals that it was great and they should watch it, too; only then the second season came out and took an almighty dump on the reputation established by that first season and now you can't look at a photograph of Vince Vaughn without crying (like you could before, come on now, after that Psycho remake)—but made using the Rockstar Editor mode on Grand Theft Auto V.

Back in June, YouTube user Mitch L (who has also made videos in homage to Blade Runner and The Thing) remade the trailer for No Country for Old Men using the Editor, and look, it's completely great. This treatment was always inevitable, too, given the vanilla GTA V features a whopping great Easter egg based on the Cohen brothers' 2007 movie.

Remember the film adaptation of Watchmen? Wasn't quite all that it could have been, was it—but that intro sequence, set to Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changing"? Awesome, wasn't it. Now imagine a sequence documenting one man's life, created using the Rockstar Editor, set to the same song (albeit a cover), cut in a very comparable style, and dedicated to its maker's late granddad, who fought in the Vietnam War. And now, imagine no more...

Reservoir Dogs, that's a film. One you've watched. You probably had a poster, or the soundtrack on CD (or taped off a mate), before you ever watched it. We all did. Here, some bright spark has remade the opening moments of Tarantino's breakthrough movie using the Editor, albeit with a bet-you-didn't-see-it-coming twist. Except, you might well have seen it coming. Because it has "dogs" in its title.

Keeping things on an introductory slant, YouTube user El Serp published this Editor-made opening to Popular Television Show House of Cards back in May. I've never actually seen said programme, though, because it's not on Normal Telly, so you'll have to judge its accuracy for yourself.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day was definitely also a film. A very good one, despite the fact that much of it makes no bloody sense whatsoever. And this remake of its Terminator in a truck chasing a boy on a motorbike who is also being pursued by another Terminator on a bigger bike is really quite good, too – and made prior to the Rockstar Editor even being available. Excellent work, John Chapman.

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Did you know that there are also planes in Grand Theft Auto V? And planes mean only one thing: Editor-made videos of jets and motorbikes based on Top Gun. Here's one example, courtesy of denouille. No geese were harmed in the making of this. Probably.

And to finish, as your boss is definitely about to come over, tap you on the shoulder and say, "Hey, Steve, mate, seriously, I know she left you the other night but pull yourself together, man, accounts can't wait until after three for these figures, and you know I'd lean on them if I could," here's something sad. Jackass was more tragedy than comedy, right?

Thanks for wasting some time with VICE Gaming. More articles – proper ones, about proper games—can be read here, later, when you're not on a deadline. Cheers.

Follow VICE Gaming on Twitter.

Photos by Jake Lewis unless otherwise indicated

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

At 11:30 on Saturday, the Kendall maniacs were not out in force at the Refugees Welcome march. As everyone clustered round a PA blasting 5Live's broadcast from the Labour Leadership Special Conference, it seemed they'd all hit snooze on the alarm clock, that they were having five more minutes in bed with the NHS internal market, dreaming of PFI deals chasing Serco contracts up flights of stairs.

In fact, when Liz's numbers finally came in—a rather disappointing 18,000 votes—not even a tenth of Jez He Did's 256,000—no one could even hear them being read above the cheers for the third candidate, alphabetically.

No, it turned out that the sort of people who made it to refugee protests were the sort of people who love Jeremy Corbyn. Who knew?

As the numbers are read, a sole party popper is let off. Some blokes with T-shirts saying "This Charming Man" beneath a picture of Jez clasp each other's shoulders. A girl is on her boyfriend's shoulders. One walrus-shaped man has to be lead away through the crowd because he's blubbing so hard. It's not quite pandemonium, but it's a good start, subsiding only as Jez's voice comes down the line from the QEII Conference Hall.

His speech is boilerplate, maybe. It's his hundredth of the campaign trail, and by and large it doesn't seem to have been structured as a piece of oratory. More as another efficiently utilitarian lecture in what needs to be done next. You were sick. Now you're well. And there's work to do.

He describes the past three months of the campaign—essentially being piloted off to fucking Mars on a political rocketship—as "a fascinating experience," as though he spent the summer fossil-hunting for ammonites on the Devon coast.

He even cracks a joke. "We've decided to form an ABBA tribute band"—him and the other three leadership contenders. I can definitely imagine Andy Burnham unhappily married to Yvette Cooper. I can even imagine Jez We Can writing "The Winner Takes It All," and then getting Liz Kendall to sing it on their final album as a bittersweet lament to thirteen years of New Labour compromise. He thanks Liz effusively—just as Jesus Christ once wished Pontius Pilate all the very best, no hard feelings. "The late night train rides will never be the same again," he nudges, without explanation. Then he mentions one of his first acts as leader will be turning up at the Refugees Welcome march, and everyone explodes again.

And there he finally is—The Messiah—four hours later, after more than 50,000 people have wended the traditional processional from Hyde Park Corner down via Green Park to Parliament Square.

A great cheer goes up as the crowd realize he is amongst them—people pressed everywhere, Jez merely a spot in the distance, issuing his sermon on a very low-lying Mount.

"He's much shorter in real life," the middle-aged lifelong Labour woman next to me muses. This is exactly the hounding he can expect in the right-wing press in the coming weeks. "Hypocrite Corbyn Dances Round Toadstool While Claiming He Is Seven-Foot Basketball Superstar."

He is also much more inaudible in real life, because the organizers only brought a sound system made of baked bean cans. Halfway back, no one can hear a word. A girl sat on her boyfriend's shoulders is relaying bits to the few people in our corner.

"He's saying that it's a tragedy of global proportions."
"Yes?"
"Driven by economics."
"..."
"...By politics and environmental degradation."
"And what else?"
"He says he's wearing split-crotch trousers." She and her mates collapse into giggles.

There's a crushing sense that the reality of historic moments—from Spike Island to Woodstock—so often doesn't match the fantasies of historians. No doubt the Gettysburg Address was also pretty inaudible, full of people at the back going. "Four score and WHAT?" "What was that bit about fathers again?"

Yet despite this, it remains one of those rare moments where you can feel Tony Blair's famous "hand of history" visiting us. The crowd are hypnotized as he opens by standing there, silent for about 30 seconds, holding an Amnesty International placard saying "Refugees Welcome." It's a piece of protest theater that takes years of training, and Jez has his Equity card in that.

"The real fun starts here," says the middle aged lifelong Labour woman. "He says he's against the third runway. But Labour's already committed itself to honoring whatever the outcome of the Davies Report was. And it was a third runway."

By the time she's said these words, 12 senior Labour MPs have already ruled themselves out of Jez's shadow cabinet. There's a rumor going round that he might not have enough MPs to take all the posts on offer. There's another rumor that Unite has already been phoning up MPs and begging them to take any job going.

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Also obliterating his sound—a helicopter buzzes overhead. Does it contain the marksmen of The Establishment? Are we about to witness the real world version of A Very British Coup?

Chris Mullin's classic airport thriller was about a privilege-foreswearing salt o't'earth Labour leader who wants to get out of Nato and abolish the Lords, but is overthrown by third forces in the aristocracy and military. And while no one can yet see the red laser dot on Jez's forehead, if I were his security detail, I wouldn't let him visit any Hindu temples any time soon.

A man who wants to abolish private schools and the monarchy, who'd probably build a Refugees Welcome center on the playing fields of Eton, is now 50 swing seats and an SNP collapse away from getting to do exactly those things. If you thought there was an almighty stink about tuition fees, wait till you see what it's like when the Duchess of Caernarfonshire is being sent off to live on an estate in Middlesborough.

The folks on the Refugees Welcome demo know full well why banning nukes and talking to Hamas might be a decent idea. The sort of people who launch petitions for Wootton Bassett to become "Royal Wootton Bassett" don't. And for all the vast numbers who've turned out today, there are still far more of these sitting at home clicking through repeats of Noel's HQ.

Jez's speech seems rousing to the few dozen who manage to catch it. Applause ripples outwards. Then Jez and Billy Bragg sing "The Red Flag," which younger readers will recognize as a kind of "Freak Like Me" bootleg version of "Oh Christmas Tree" with all the words changed to reflect international socialism.

This, then, is exactly where we are now. The anthem of Oldest Labour, that Ed Miliband famously didn't know the words to, is reinstalled as a central rite in the New Old Labour that Corbyn seeks to build. Blair is turning in his grave. Liz Kendall lies martyred upon the fields of mass-participative intra-party democracy. The worm has turned. The Militants have won, and in the end their revenge was sweet yet mild.

The afternoon's speaker's list is eternal. After Shami Chakrabarti, after Natalie Bennett, after 85-year-old MP Sir Gerald Kaufman, after Dianne Abbott, it all blurs into one long choir-preach about how cool and awesome refugees are. How they have more vigorous sex than everyone else. Better dental hygiene. Less cellulite. We want a million. No, we want five million. Give us ten and we'll call it square. They can have Wales. Have it, outright. Really.

Photo author's own

Gradually, the crowd starts to slip away into the early evening. A stag-do in morph suits jogs down a Whitehall that an hour earlier thronged with marchers. They lark about having boozy pictures taken with Refugees Welcome banners. The lines between the purity of protest and the grubbiness of the real world are starting to blur again. For the Jez We Cans, those lines are going to finally become ever more apparent in the coming weeks.

Follow Gavin Haynes and Jake Lewis on Twitter.

An 11-week election campaign is definitely its own circle of Hell. I was bored by week three, and at week seven yearn for the cool embrace of death.

Given the mountain of bullshit involved, it's easy to forget that a contest like the 2015 federal election comes along once in a generation. For the first time in history, the NDP is a serious contender to form the government in Ottawa (even if they have to sell their soul to get there). Halfway through the marathon, there's still no clear sense who will come out on top. As far as elections go, unless you were in Alberta last spring, it doesn't get any more dramatic than this.

Of course, because this is a parliamentary election and not a presidential one, the high personal drama between Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair, and Justin Trudeau is largely a red herring. The national campaign matters, but the election will really be fought and won in each of the 338 ridings across the country.

Some of these races will be extremely boring. Some will be tight, bloody battlegrounds that'll be kingmakers on October 19. Others might just be legendary faceoffs—like in Edmonton Centre, where the former head of the city's Chamber of Commerce is facing off against the head of the Alberta Federation of Labour. Front-row tickets to the class struggle: fuck yes.

But the race to watch in 2015 isn't actually all that crucial to the national outcome. It's the race to watch because it's such a fucking gongshow.

The riding of Avalon, on the east coast of Newfoundland, is in the middle of its own generational election. Former Liberal MP Scott "alleged sexual harassment" Andrews is running for re-election as an Independent against his old party. The Conservatives sabotaged their own star candidate before the nomination even closed as part of a nine-year-old war with the island. Union warhorse Jeannie Baldwin is hoping to make a breakthrough for the NDP in the riding against her scattered opponents. And LGBTQ activist Jennifer McCreath is making waves as the first openly trans person to appear on a federal ballot.

It's a clusterfuck. And while there are a lot of moving pieces, there's a good chance Andrews could win this election. In a political system where Independents are rarely able to run the electoral gauntlet, let alone while dogged by allegations of frotteurism, this would be no mean feat.

NEWFOUNDLAND DOGS
Running from the coast of Placentia Bay to Paradise on the edge of greater St. John's, the riding of Avalon is the only political region in the province to straddle the many solitudes of Newfoundland life. Bay and town, Liberal Protestant North and Conservative Catholic South, proud Confederates and Republican holdouts; behold the thrumming heart of the old Newfoundland cosmopolitanism.

The riding itself is young. It was drawn up in 2003, cobbled together out of Bonavista-Trinity-Conception and St. John's East and West. More than many other ridings in the province, Bonavista-Trinity-Conception liked to send strong, fighting Newfoundlanders to Ottawa—including a couple of premiers. Frank Moores did a stint there in the late 1960s before he rode home to slay Joe Smallwood, and it briefly hosted Brian Tobin when he abruptly quit as premier to make a play for Jean Chrétien's job. John Efford, the baymen's champion, held the post when it became Avalon in 2003 and was re-elected handily in 2004. Even when it went Conservative in 2006, part of Fabian Manning's appeal was an aura of fearless independence. He was banished from the provincial Progressive Conservative caucus in 2005 when he stood up for crab fishers in his district against Danny Williams' planned production quotas, and he rode that grassroots support into federal office.

But Manning strayed too far from that reputation in Ottawa and it cost him. Part of what brought him down was a notorious video of Manning applauding the prime minister about the 2007 budget that "shafted" Newfoundland and Labrador. (Although the two Senate appointments he got for losing back-to-back federal elections probably helped ease the pain.)

Regardless of partisan stripe, Avalon loves a pit bull. Not so much a lap dog.

Scott Andrews enjoys Canada Day with local children. Photo via Andrews' campaign website

A CAREER POLITICIAN ON THE RUN AGAIN
Scott Andrews grew up inside the Liberal party. His father was a big time Liberal back in Joey's day, and Andrews has been living and breathing the thick fog of provincial Liberalism as long as he's been alive. He got involved with the Young Liberals after Clyde Wells took over the ailing province in 1989; by the time Tobin came around, he was YL President. He worked in the provincial opposition office for a spell after Williams banished the party to the wilderness in 2003, and before he made the leap to federal politics, he served as the provincial party's Executive Director.

Andrews always had his fingers in Liberal business. There has never been a moment in the last 20 years where he wasn't involved in party affairs. And you don't spend that long working in the party apparatus without learning a thing or two about playing the game.

When Andrews first ran for town council in Conception Bay South, he got more votes than any other councillor in the history of the town. From the outside looking in, Andrews was a model parliamentarian, quietly checking career accomplishments off a list. Before his suspension from caucus, he was the Liberal party's critic for ethics.

Careful to avoid Manning's mistake, he publicly dissented from Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff in 2009, voting against the party's support of another federal budget that cut transfer payments to his province. He's also the only MP from Newfoundland and Labrador ever to get a Private Member's Bill passed into law. Bill C-464, "Zachary's Law," makes it easier for the courts to justify denying bail to people accused of serious crimes in order to protect their children.

Getting tough on criminals to save the children! If you knew nothing about the man (whose personal resemblance to This Hour Has 22 Minutes' Jerry Boyle is uncanny) and only saw his record, you'd think he was the island's Family Values politician.

In an age less sensitive to rape culture, Andrews may have been able to coast along as a Liberal backbencher, steadily greasing reception rooms and the gears of his electoral machine, for as long as he wanted. But he fell afoul of the post-Ghomeshi sea change, and his career ground to a halt last November when Justin Trudeau abruptly suspended him from caucus pending an investigation into sexual harassment allegations from an unnamed NDP MP.

There are no official details, but the Canadian Press reported at the time that Andrews allegedly followed his colleague home, forced his way through her door, pinned her against a wall and ground his crotch against her. She asked him to leave and he did, but he allegedly called her a "cockteaser" (among other things) after the event. We also don't know what findings were contained in the investigation's final report last March. But whatever it was proved enough for Trudeau to boot Andrews from the party. (To be clear though, Andrews has not been charged with any criminal wrongdoing.)

For his part, Andrews accepted Trudeau's decision, neither confirming nor denying the allegations. But he shirked all responsibility for any wrongdoing by chalking up the incident(s) to a woman misinterpreting his "jovial Newfoundland friendliness." Fair enough—let it never be said that Newfoundlanders aren't a friendly bunch. But most of us still manage to avoid accidentally getting accused of being a gross piece of shit.

Despite this rebuke from the party to which he devoted his life, Andrews refused to resign. Then, after a few months of radio silence, he issued a mass mail-out to the riding blasting Trudeau for denying him his "Charter rights, innocent until proven guilty, natural justice or the right to face my accuser." This missive also doubled as a straw poll, asking his constituents whether or not they'd support him in a bid for re-election as an Independent. The response must have been good, because Andrews tossed his figurative fedora into the ring shortly after the writ dropped in August, bringing along his wife Susan as campaign manager.

This is less shocking that it appears at first sight. Say what you will about the man—and there's clearly a lot to say—but Andrews isn't stupid. He's made a living playing the game, and playing it well. He wouldn't be running if he didn't think he had a pretty good shot of going back to Ottawa.

And by looking around the riding at the competition, he's probably right.

Ken McDonald smiles at something. Or maybe he's grimacing? Photo via McDonald's campaign website

THE LIBERALS ARE SEEING RED
Ken McDonald is not worried about Scott Andrews. The Liberal candidate appears positively jolly in his many campaign photos on Twitter, having a laugh while hammering in campaign signs or shooting the shit with people on their porches. He's especially chummy with his provincial counterparts, bumming around the St. John's Regatta or playing through a few rounds of golf at party fundraisers in the capital. And so he should be: the NL Liberals are expected to sweep the House of Assembly in November's election, and McDonald intends to ride that wave as far as possible.

(Nevermind that this local support is less a genuine enthusiasm for the Liberal party than it is a burning disdain for the governing Progressive Conservatives, but the fickle tastes of the provincial electorate is a story for another day.)

Splitting the Liberal vote doesn't bother McDonald. "I am convinced that the party trend will be stronger than it will be for the individual as an Independent," he told CBC back in May (he also apparently said this to Andrews' face). This is a pretty reasonable assumption. His riding has a strong Liberal tradition—before Fabian Manning's two-year interregnum, the last time Avalon/Bonavista-Trinity-Conception elected a Tory was Morrissey Johnson for a single term in 1984. Before that, it was Frank Moores in '68. And the province has never sent an Independent to Ottawa.

But Andrews is no ordinary Independent. He is a lifetime Liberal organizer and, until his recent expulsion, he was a major player in local party politics. In the provincial leadership race in 2013, Andrews helped bring tax-evader Paul Antle to a close finish against eventual winner Dwight Ball. This was after Andrews joined the campaign a few months late; had he been in on the ground floor of the campaign, it's possible that Antle would now be the province's incoming premier.

No one in polite company will admit it, but Andrews was a powerful force in regional Liberal politics. Despite all appearances, the man is like an outport Frank Underwood, a local political chessmaster. As an organizer, Andrews took a direct hand in working and talking with volunteers. He built a lot of personal loyalty with a lot of Liberals in Avalon over the past seven years.

In a Newfoundland campaign, working in the nuts and bolts of the operation alongside ordinary people is a tremendous advantage. This kind of insider knowledge is what makes or breaks a campaign, and Andrews arguably has more inside knowledge of the riding and how to campaign there than the rest of his opponents combined.

The Liberal riding association in Avalon is accordingly filled with Andrews loyalists. This puts McDonald in a bind. If he comes out attacking Andrews too harshly, he risks alienating sympathizers in his ranks and driving them to his opponent. But it's also hard to see how he can win by ignoring one of his biggest competitors, especially given that Andrews is going to be slamming Trudeau and the Liberals every chance he gets.

The real question for both campaigns is whether or not this split among the staffers also holds among the base. But unlike his opponent, Andrews is now free to fraternize with former partisan enemies. He's been spotted glad-handing at more than one provincial Tory event. Free agency in politics can cut both ways.

Ken McDonald is a great candidate on paper. But so was Michael Ignatieff. Counting on the strength of the Liberal brand against all comers has been the grave of more than one aspiring MP.

Danny Williams, former premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, quite possibly saying something rude about Stephen Harper. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

THE TORIES SING THE BLUES
Speaking of graves: the other side of this story is that the Conservative Party in Newfoundland is dead. The governing party have largely written the place off since shortly after their first victory in 2006. You can't really blame them. It's been a pretty rough ride for Stephen Harper.

The story is long, but not complicated. In late 2004, premier Danny Williams threw a temper tantrum over the possibility that the province's sudden oil wealth might mean we'd get less money from our equalization payments, so he tugged at our soft-nationalist heartstrings by pulling the Canadian flag down from every government building in the province. Prime Minister Paul Martin caved like a cheap set of bleachers, and Williams ascended his throne as the Newfoundlandic god-king foretold in ancient prophecy.

After the final collapse of Martin's government triggered the 2006 election, Harper wrote to Williams with a promise to uphold this sweet federal bargain. But Ontario had fallen on hard times of its own and its voters were more than a little miffed about Newfoundland's generous deal. And because Ontario is infinitely more valuable in the calculus of federal politics, Harper wasted no time in breaking his promise to the Rock. Williams was outraged, and ordered his subjects to vote Anything But Conservative in the next election. The provincial PC party went as far as to register "ABC" as a third party with Elections Canada and drop over $80,000 on trashing the federal government.

It didn't make much difference nationally, but it worked at home. Five years after Williams' retirement, the Conservative party is still banished from the banks of Newfoundland. (Labrador elected Peter Penashue in 2011, but he resigned in 2013 over illegitimate campaign donations and lost the subsequent by-election. He's running again this year.)

But despite these rocky conditions, Tories have always found fertile soil in Avalon. Fabian Manning may have been annihilated by Andrews in 2008 thanks to Williams' ABC campaign, but he made a respectable comeback in his 2011 rematch and, had the 2013 boundary changes been in place at the time, he actually would have won by almost 2000 votes. The riding—particularly along the Southern Shore—has deep Tory roots, and it was never out of the question that they could draw another strong showing, especially in 2015. With Andrews disgraced and the Liberal camp divided, a strong candidate could have delivered this seat.

The Tories had that candidate in Ches Crosbie. Son of legendary firebrand John Crosbie and an accomplished lawyer in his own right, Crosbie had the name, profile, and oligarchic blood that could have won the day. But instead, the CPC's greenlight committee inexplicably canned the guy.

No one is really sure what happened. The official story is that Crosbie was disqualified because he briefly appeared as "King Harper" in a mock-Shakespeare play at a fundraiser where he delivered a one-line reference to the Duffy trial. Others speculated that it was because Crosbie's law firm is representing residential school survivors in a class action suit against the federal government, and that the case is still before the courts—although Crosbie himself says this is not the case. For his part, after calling the Conservative party down to the dirt, John Crosbie suggested the whole thing is part ofa conspiracy orchestrated by Senator David Wells in a bid to consolidate his grasp on the province's patronage system. (Wells denies this.)

Most likely, the real reason is that the feds were worried Ches' apple didn't fall far enough from John's tree. The Conservatives would rather lose the seat than deal with a loose cannon like a Crosbie in their caucus, ranting and roaring out of turn. ("For ten years or however long the present prime minister's been there, only one voice carries and that's his, but it wasn't like that when I was a minister," John Crosbie recently reminisced with iPolitics.)

Party leaders in this country don't want MPs who take their craft as parliamentarians too seriously. They just want people who can manage the voters back home and then show up to vote how they're told. This is the only account that can explain Peter Penashue or Piss Cup Guy being greenlighted for the Conservatives while Ches Crosbie was told to fuck off.

Whatever actually happened, not only did the Conservatives torpedo their best shot at winning a seat in Newfoundland and Labrador, but they managed to alienate one of the province's truly great Tory dynasties. Instead, they have drafted Lorraine Barnett from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency to put her name on the ballot, fall on her sword, and give body to the fiction that the party hasn't abandoned the riding.

"The allegations against Mr. Andrews are disturbing and I really don't think he's laid his cards on the table, I don't think he's come clean to people," Barnett told CBC.

She is one of four women running against Andrews in this election.

Barnett is hoping that the divisions in the Liberal party will work in her favour. This is unlikely. Not only is Andrews positioned to capture a large swathe of the Liberal vote, but there is a good chance he can cut into the traditional Tory vote too. There are more than a few conservatives in the riding who are pissed off about what happened to Crosbie and who've warmed to the cut of Andrews' jib now that he's cursing that punk Trudeau. And there's definitely a sizeable chunk of people who believe he really did get a raw deal from the Social Justice Warriors in the Liberal and NDP caucuses who they see as too eager to pervert due process in their sexual harassment witch hunt.

It may be that Andrews is ultimately brought down by the disturbing allegations against him. But that challenge is not going to come from the right.

Bold lighting colour scheme, Jeannie Baldwin. Photo courtesy Baldwin's campaign website

ORANGE YOU GLAD YOU DIDN'T VOTE SCOTT ANDREWS? (NOT SORRY)
The NDP in this race is a wildcard. More than the other two major parties, the NDP stands to gain the most from national polling trends (for now). And as the former Atlantic Regional VP of the Public Service Alliance Canada union, Jeannie Baldwin has the street cred to be a star candidate for the social democrats. But it's hard to say at the outset whether the party has a shot.

Historically, the NDP have never been a contender, either before or since the riding became Avalon. In 2011, as Jack Layton's Orange Wave surged across the country, the NDP in Avalon actually lost votes compared to their showing in 2008. Despite an overwhelmingly working-class character, rural Newfoundland and Labrador has never really warmed up to the federal (or provincial) New Democrats.

But the makeup of the riding has changed a lot since the last election. A fifth of the old St. John's East riding, the sprawling suburbs of Conception Bay South and Paradise, have been shuffled into Avalon. St. John's East elected Jack Harris in 2008 and 2011 by some of the largest margins in the country, and they look poised to do so again in 2015. It goes without saying that Harris will be a shoe-in for cabinet if Mulcair forms the government. Had these areas been part of Avalon in the last election, the NDP would have doubled their vote.

Part of voting (or not voting) NDP in this country seems to boil down to psychology. The party's surge federally is thanks in no small part to Rachel Notley's stunning victory in Alberta last spring. Suddenly a taboo seems to have been lifted and people across Canada feel like it's safe to cast their vote for a Dipper. Given that the new parts of Avalon have voted NDP before and the sky didn't fall, they'd probably be okay with doing it again.

But it's hard to say how many of Harris' votes will carry over in the new riding. After more than 25 years of political service, Harris has become a Newfoundland statesman, larger than any one party or region. The other St. John's NDP MP, anti-Confederate (this means something else in Newfoundland) journalist Ryan Cleary, won by a significantly smaller margin in the last election despite being tailor-made for the St. John's/Mount Pearl champagne socialist demographic.

While they have a beachhead established in Paradise and CBS, the party will have to work hard to maintain it without Harris' name recognition. Baldwin's campaign will have to build up and out from the St. John's suburbs. The provincial party will be little help, since they're busy recovering from self-inflicted burn wounds and struggling to avoid irrelevancy in November's provincial election. If anything, they'll be focusing most of their campaigning in St. John's. Plus, the NL NDP tanked in the last two provincial by-elections held in the riding (Carbonear-Harbour Grace in 2013 and Conception Bay South in 2014), so maybe some distance might do the federal campaign a bit of good.

That's not to count Baldwin out. As a major regional figure in one of the country's more powerful labour unions, she certainly has the professional background to organize the shit out of a political campaign. She outgunned Jenny Wright for the NDP nomination by a large margin, and Wright (the executive director of the St. John's Status of Women Council and organizer of the province's first SlutWalk, whose victory would've been the most emotionally satisfying way to see Scott Andrews eat shit) was no slacker.

Baldwin will have a solid machine behind her, staffed with union battleaxes and, depending on how the Liberal vote splits in the denser parts of CBS, there may be enough of a window for her to squeeze through to victory. But she has a limited profile outside the labour movement, and beyond the St. John's suburbs, the strength of the NDP vote gets pretty questionable.

But there is wisdom in the crowd. If it looks like Tom Mulcair is poised to form government in the runup to election day, the riding might be willing to get in on the ground floor of a brand new day in Ottawa.

They'd be hard pressed to find a better way to stick it to both the Liberals (past and present) and the Tories than that.

Now this is a good campaign photo. Photo via Byrne-Puumala's campaign website

IT'S NOT EASY BEING GREEN
Krista Byrne-Puumala is a great Green candidate. She's young and obviously vibrant. She ran a renewable energy company that installed solar panels in Ontario and interned as the Environmental Coordinator for the city of Mount Pearl for six months. She's active in promoting food sustainability in Newfoundland and Labrador, which is an issue the province desperately needs to tackle.

Unfortunately, no one here will ever vote Green because they're against the seal hunt, and Newfoundlanders love the seal hunt. Sorry.

A TRANS RIGHTS TRAILBLAZER TAKING ON ALL COMERS
If you lived in or around St. John's in the summer of 2009 and don't remember the iconic cover The Scope (RIP) ran about Jennifer McCreath, you're a fucking scrub. The shot of McCreath in a bikini, rising out of the icy waters at Topsail Beach like a boss, is a historic piece of provincial photojournalism. She ran five marathons in 2009 shortly after reassignment surgery, and won gold at the World Outgames in Denmark that July, becoming "the first formally recognized transsexual in world history to run a marathon."

McCreath doesn't fuck around, and this general aura of fearlessness is part of the reason why she's the first openly transgender candidate in Canadian history to appear on a federal ballot. (Second, if you count Québec NDP candidate Micheline Montreuil, but the party dropped her from its roster in 2007 before an election was called.)

Born in Nova Scotia before moving to Toronto as a child, she came to St. John's in 2007 to take a job as a senior policy analyst with the provincial government. She opted to begin her transition in Newfoundland, putting trans issues on the public radar eight years ago through a series of interviews with local broadcaster NTV.

Transitioning isn't easy—especially when you're a public figure in a pretty close-knit place. But McCreath found Newfoundland pleasant and welcoming, telling The Scope in 2009 that:

"In Newfoundland, I would say in general, people are open and accepting of diversity. Even if there's not necessarily a lot of diversity... People here often can understand what it feels like to be different... People can appreciate someone who's a little different who's struggling to gain societal acceptance. They know I'm still a human being."

Since then, she has been a prominent figure in local activism. She was a founding member of St. John's Pride Inc. (she broke with them in 2012 over their handling of trans issues, but reconciled in 2014), founder of the East Coast Trans Alliance, and she even ran for deputy mayor of St. John's in 2013.

Jennifer McCreath, just runnin' a marathon like nobody's business. Photo via Facebook/Jennifer McCreath

Now she's running for Strength in Democracy, the young brainchild of disaffected NDP MP Jean-François Larose and one-time Bloc Québecois leadership hopeful Jean-François Fortin. Strength in Democracy (known as Forces et Democratie in Québec) is basically a metastasized Bloc. Rather than outright separatism, they want a decentralized federalism, empowered and engaged citizenship, and better regional representation in Ottawa. Not unlike Preston Manning's Reform Party, they are a rebellious upstart looking to help Canadians throw off the straitjacket of heavily-scripted, leader-driven party discipline that has come to dominate the House of Commons. Unlike Preston Manning's Reform Party, they're a protest party in search of a base.

But that said, it's not outrageous that a pro-region protest party in the vein of the BQ would strike a chord on the east coast. Take away the overt references to French-Canadian nationalism, and 'sovereignty' as a general political concept has always made intuitive sense to Newfoundlanders. Like Québec, we have a fierce sense of nationalist alienation (and unlike Québec, an independent Newfoundland state is still—just barely—within living memory). We know what it's like to feel like the bastards upalong don't actually give a shit about giving you a raw deal.

Whether these feelings are legitimate or not is beside the point. They exist, and as the Danny Williams saga demonstrates, they drive more of our politics than many people would care to admit. And in this vein, McCreath is the perfect fit. It's hard to argue that anyone is better suited to kick down the doors of the House of Commons and demand they start respecting our distinct society than Newfoundland and Labrador's original trans rights trailblazer.

But calling it an uphill battle is an understatement. Fringe parties often fare worse than Independents in elections, and at the moment there is no ready source of Newfoundland nationalist ressentiment for McCreath's campaign to exploit. And while McCreath has more immediate name recognition than most of the other candidates, she can't hold a candle to Andrews in the riding. The man has spent the better part of seven years insinuating himself into his constituents' lives through a religious devotion to birthday card mailouts and pancake breakfasts.

And there's definitely more than one unenlightened enclave in Avalon that isn't ready to make some Come-From-Away their MP. Being trans is fine, but being a Mainlander? God preserve you, my friend.

Protest parties are a long shot, but they can offer a valuable service—they can give a voice to independent-minded voters while still offering the organization, however fragile, of a political party. This might be especially useful in Avalon, where anyone wanting to flip the bird to the major parties isn't stuck relying on Mr. Alleged Sexual Harassment to be their mouthpiece.

Avalon Peninsula. Photo via Flickr user Yankech gary

THE TIDE ROLLS OUT
Avalon is on track to make history. They're either about to elect their first NDP MP and start breaking the rural ice for the S.S. Social Democracy, or they're about to re-elect a maverick MP with a chip on his shoulder about party (and—allegedly—personal) discipline.

In the grand scheme of things, the stakes are not that high. The outcome of the race in Avalon is unlikely to have any big impact on government in Ottawa. Even if we get a minority government, it's unlikely that its life will rest in the hands of an east coast backbencher.

But just because the Ultimate Fate of Canada doesn't hang in the balance, there are other reasons to care about what happens in this riding. For one, the sheer absurdity of the showdown makes it the most colourful race in Canada right now. It's not every day that a high-profile Canadian sex scandal intersects with a decade-long Conservative family feud, the breakthrough of an NDP government, and the political face of a province's trans community. If the CBC had any money left, they could probably turn this into a killer TV miniseries with one of those Doyles.

It's impossible to say, this far away from voting day, what will actually happen. All things being equal, this should be a contest between the Liberals and the NDP over a place Stephen Harper left for dead nearly a decade ago. But here instead we have a dark horse candidate who has a real shot at upsetting the usual dynamics of Canadian politics in the worst possible way. It may very well be that Scott Andrews has a preternatural gift for electioneering. But if he really is reaffirmed to office on October 19th, someone is going to need to sit down with the riding and have a long, uncomfortable conversation about sexual harassment on Parliament Hill.

There's a lot going on here, and if you love the Rock like I do, it's going to be a nail-biter to see how it all goes down. All I know is that if there's an all-candidates debate between here and the polling booth, I'm making the rules for the drinking game.

And you'd better believe there's going to be a hell of a lot of Screech.

Lead photo via Flickr user Dean. Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.

Look at Anna Haifisch's art and comics at her website and Twitter.

A federal official hands over payment to a confidential informant involved in a 2007 terrorism investigation in the Philippines. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

This story was co-published with the Marshall Project.

Willamette Week, an alternative newspaper in Portland, Oregon, recently published an astounding profile of George Taylor, a man who grew up smoking angel dust; who "has been a criminal since age 13," according to a parole officer; who has "psychopathic traits," according to a state psychiatrist; who has a "Heil Hitler" tattoo encoded in numbers and "White Pride" inked across his shoulders; who, starting at age 18, spent 23 of his next 26 years in prison; who once helped set a man on fire; and who, perhaps not surprisingly, given his history, was hired to help boost cell phones by a Detroit syndicate.

What is surprising is that Taylor simultaneously had a second employer—the Portland Police Bureau, which hired Taylor, with contract and all, as a confidential informant. (Sometimes, when Taylor was working for his Detroit bosses, officers wondered where he had disappeared to.) The bureau used Taylor to build dozens of criminal cases, including at least 20 in which he swore to tell the truth while testifying before grand juries. A bureau spokesman told Willamette Week: "In hindsight, it is arguable that Taylor should never have been used based on his history."

When I read this story by Aaron Mesh, I had a rush of déjà vu. Reporters around the country, myself included, have been writing stories like this for decades, in what almost seems a can-you-top-this challenge to find the most incredible person ever considered credible by police or by prosecutors, who invariably point out the unfairness of expecting them to find informant candidates in the local church choir.

My first entry in this challenge was published in the Chicago Tribune in 1999. Fellow reporter Steve Mills and I wrote about the problematic use of jailhouse informants in capital cases in Illinois. As an example, we profiled one particularly notorious informant whose word was used to put someone on death row. This was our lead:

His criminal record dates to 1978 and includes more than a dozen convictions. He has been in the penitentiary four times and is wanted in four states. His parole officer once called him "a menace to society." A federal prosecutor wrote he was "a pathological liar... not worthy of this court's trust."

Indeed, Tommy Dye lies about almost everything, even his own name. He has a dozen aliases, court and police records show, and he uses them liberally, usually when he is arrested. William Zonka, Thomas O'Neil, Sean P. Kelly, Tommy Welch, Thomas Moriarty—Dye is the man behind each of the names. Selling cocaine, he used the moniker Big Daddy Woo Woo.

Even under oath, Dye lies. He once told a judge he was the valedictorian at St. Michael's High School in Chicago, but he did not even finish high school. He told a federal grand jury that he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. That, too, was a lie. He took some correspondence classes in prison and has worked as a waiter.

I figured Big Daddy Woo Woo would be hard to top. But five years later, while at the Seattle Times, I wrote a story with Florangela Davila and Justin Mayo about a police informant in central Washington. Here's how we introduced him:

James Allen Anderson goes by many names.

Police in Grant County knew him as "The Plate." This was a clever play on words: Anderson has a steel plate concealed in his lower leg, but police used the name to conceal Anderson's identity as a confidential drug informant.

Others in Grant County knew Anderson by other names: "Crazy Jimmy." "Shaky Jimmy." "Jimmy the Weasel." The Anderson they knew couldn't differentiate fact from fantasy.

In an interview with the Seattle Times, Anderson said he solved the Oklahoma City bombing, the JonBenet Ramsey murder and countless other crimes—all before they happened. Asked how, he pointed to his head.

"This," he said. "You think with your mind, you put the cases together, and you put it down on paper."

Anderson said he received assignments directly from Presidents John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, that he had a Marine Corps command at Camp Pendleton and that he's worked as a government secret agent for 44 years.

Anderson is 51 years old.

Big Daddy Woo Woo and Crazy Jimmy belong to a long and ever-growing list of informants featured in media coverage, academic research, television and cinema. Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, created the Snitching Blog. PBS's Frontline dedicated a program to informants in drug cases. Kurt Eichenwald wrote "The Informant," a book about a compromised whistleblower at agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland, which became the movie, The Informant!, starring Matt Damon. Sarah Stillman wrote a heartrending piece for the New Yorker on young informants subjected to risks that sometimes become fatal. David Simon, creator of The Wire, based one of his characters, a police informant named "Bubbles," on a real-life informant, known as "Possum." And newspaper reporters, such as Joseph Neff at the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, have written devastating stories about capital cases built upon sketchy informants.

To get an idea of how frequently informants figure in wrongful convictions, go to this link for The National Registry of Exonerations and, in the search box, type in "snitch" or "jailhouse informant." Then click on the case summaries for details.

But the most incredible story I've ever read about an informant? That was written three years ago, by two of my then-colleagues at the Seattle Times, Steve Miletich and Mike Carter. Here's the top of their story:

By almost anybody's standards, Joshua Allan Jackson is bad news.

A felon with a lengthy history of violence against women, Jackson was sentenced to 10 years in prison April 13 for sexually abusing an 18-year-old woman and holding her against her will for days inside a cheap South Seattle motel last year. The woman told investigators Jackson forced her to audition for a porn film and at one point choked her so hard she almost lost consciousness.

As part of the case, Jackson also admitted to criminal impersonation on various occasions when he told the victim and seven other people that he was a federal agent or a police officer.

During a fight with an alleged drug dealer at another Seattle motel, Jackson told the manager he was a federal agent. The incident would have been almost comical had it not resulted in a citywide "help the officer" call, one of the Police Department's most urgent alerts. Officers from throughout the city rushed to the motel, only to discover the heavily-tattooed Jackson was not a federal agent.

For all of this, the 34-year-old Jackson would be just another habitual criminal except for one startling fact: He was working the entire time as a paid informant for the Seattle office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The agency made Jackson an informant even though he had come out of prison early last year with a documented reputation as a violent, mentally unstable inmate who had been arrested in nearly every state and posed a serious threat to law-enforcement officers.

Now, when I first read this – and saw that line, "arrested in nearly every state"—I admit to wondering how that could possibly be true. But Steve and Mike, later in the story, back this up with what may be the most remarkable sentence in all of these stories about police informants: "A Times review of nearly 800 pages of prison and prosecution documents revealed the Bronx, N.Y., native had been jailed in 43 states."

Jailed in 43 states. How many people have even been in 43 states?

That cinches it. If I'm the awards committee, the title of most incredible informant goes to Joshua Allan Jackson. And for its supporting role, the ATF can join him on stage, as most credulous agency.

We'll call the award the Woo Woo.

This article was originally published by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

The author (right) doing some flirting at a silent speed-dating night. Photo by Lily Rose Thomas

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Flirting doesn't come easy to many. If you're not the kind of girl who's adept at conjuring trouser tents with bend 'n' snap tactics, you probably know what I'm on about: Short of harakiri-ing your self worth by quoting Anchorman at guys you meet in bars, it's tricky to know how to initiate a chirpse.

And sure, rather than making a move, it's much easier to just wait for someone to emerge from the pages of a screwed up Richard Curtis script and send an apple martini and their number your way. But it's also completely unrealistic and a little bit delusional and all your friends and family should be quite worried about you if you truly believe that's ever going to happen.

Instead, you need to stop acting all school disco about dating and start doing some of the chatting up yourself. Here are some handy pointers to help you navigate this strange new world.

DUTCH COURAGE

I'm afraid to say: Bashing out a squinty text in the bogs after five happy-hour sangrias doesn't count as flirting. I'm no literary historian, but I'm pretty sure the best romantic prose was never composed as the author held the toilet lady in a long embrace, murmuring something about "$1 being a bit much for a Tic-Tac," while using one hand to steady herself on the cubicle wall. Sure, sending "r you outt dp tnigght" to every possible shag in your inbox is a quirky move, but it's also 11 PM on a Wednesday, so maybe just use those large, indiscriminate thumbs to order yourself an Uber.

When you get in, eat at least five slices of toast and go immediately to bed. If you insist on disobeying this advice and instead decide this is the opportune time for a saucy bedroom selfie, you are very much mistaken; whoever wakes up to a flurry of unsolicited pictures of you squashing your tits together under your chin is definitely going to feel weird about it. Not sure what response you were hoping for, but it probably wasn't "Um, thanks?" time-stamped at 7:32 AM.

HOUSE PARTIES

House parties were made for flirting; once you've whet a dozen whistles frotting your way across the kitchen floor, there are ample opportunities to light a few conversational candles. Absent-mindedly ashing in his beer is a quick and easy way to get noticed, for instance, as is helping yourself to his Glen's while standing right in front of him.

It is because of this limitless license to chirpse that house parties can be a bit of a mixed blessing. A few warm vodka-Lilts down the line, and you may find yourself sprawled on an IKEA rug slagging off the Tories with a bunch of cocaine socialists. By this time you're probably feeling pretty chatty. How did you get so good at chatting? You probably got it from your mum, who you seem to have a lot to say about tonight. Flecks of white gunk are forming in the corner of your mouth as you tell the object of your monologue about your plans to crack the street food business, before showing him hundreds of pictures of your family dog.

As the sparrows begin to chirrup and the sun gleams through the windows onto your cracking concealer, ask yourself this: When was the last time I heard the voice of this person I'm vibesing with? And how many real-time minutes have I been talking about setting up a Kickstarter for my app idea? If it's longer than two, you have not been flirting; you've been very high, and have probably ruined his night.

Photo by Tom Johnson

DATING APPS

Flirting with virtual strangers on apps is a bit like getting stuck in the office kitchen, stirring a teaspoon of Nescafe round and round a Magic FM mug with your eyes half open while Louise from HR tells you about her "chilled" weekend. If you can't be bothered to wear trousers while flirting, the penalty is a good couple of hours of molar-grinding mediocrity before you meet up to disappoint each other in the flesh. This is how we do things now.

BREAKING THE MOLD

Flirting in daylight—or, god forbid, sober—will give most ladies a throbbing dry throat and a weird metallic taste in their mouth. And that, I'm afraid, is because you were born in the UK. As much as it may pain you to admit it, your national character dictates that you will probably never ask your Tube crush to "grab a cawfee sometime." You might have watched him Tindering over his shoulder, but you're never going to be able to walk four blocks with him, talking earnestly about having hobbies. Inconvenient, but true.

Instead, the only public places it's socially acceptable to try out new flirty material are parks in the summer and pub gardens the rest of the time, and even then you're going to need a conversation starter, like an unruly Cockapoo or an open wound.

Thing is, do you even want to veer into that territory? Remember—if any guy has asked you for your number on a crowded commuter train, he will have been one of the following: a) completely insufferable, or b) someone who might later keep a lock of your hair in a wooden box with a tiny key. Don't stoop to that.

Photo by Jake Lewis

IN THE CLUB

Flirting on a big night out is an ambitious undertaking; you and your friends circling the handbag totem like a bunch of slutty Morris dancers is a visual spectacle, but one that's notoriously hard to penetrate.

Even when you're doing your best come-to-bed eyes from across the room, the reality is that flirting with strangers in the night is going to boil down to proximity. This means you're probably going to end up following the object of your desire around the club like a lost toddler in supermarket. Bar a couple of fancy-seeing-you-here cigarettes and knowing eye-rolls in the cloakroom queue, your best hope of sealing the deal in this situation is to find someone stupid enough invite 20 tenuous mutuals back to theirs for an afterparty.

KNOW YOUR MEDIUM

Messaging is the ideal platform for all literate potential hook-ups, as it allows you plenty of time to quickly google—and feign enthusiasm for—their interests. If the apple of your eye is in the workplace, you've got a job on your hands. Realistically, you're going to spend a lot of your working day trying not to get caught frantically scouring Giphy, because heaven knows a well-timed sloth .GIF in an email thread is a millennial aphrodisiac.

By all means go multi-platform, but more than two at once is overkill. Never do Twitter, though. The only people you'll find flirting there are "gin enthusiasts" and people who wear slogan T-shirts. If you want to go a bit throwback and flirt on the phone, never leave a voicemail; voicemails are for dads, butt dials, and Specsavers appointments. Have you ever heard a successful flirty voicemail? No. And that's because they don't exist.

PRETENDING YOU DON'T KNOW WHEN IT'S HAPPENING

Photo by Dana Boulos

Because we're all absolutely terrible at this stuff, sometimes it's quite hard to tell when a mere vocal exchange has turned into a flirt. Basically, holding a conversation with an available man you've just met for more than three minutes makes you an open target for their advances. Despite the fact that every girl knows this, we often pretend that we don't. This, unfortunately, sometimes lands you in situations you'd rather not be in, like Scott from accounts putting his clammy hand on your knee, or a man on the bus mistaking a question about the next stop for an invitation to aggressively neg you for the next half a mile.

There are ways to quickly evacuate the flirt zone. Dropping the B-bomb early in the game is an easy out. See also: imaginary friends you need to buy drinks for and those fake toilet trips where you end up just rinsing your hands under the tap. Or if you're really desperate, telling a both-ends food-poisoning story will always get the message across nicely.

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OVERTHINKING IT

I don't know which sick Silicon Valley fuck invented the "seen" feature of instant messaging, but they have clearly never been hit square in the face with their own love boomerang. I know you've stared in breathless anticipation as the ellipsis pulsates on your phone, while you ask multiple friends in multiple chat windows if the flamenco emoji was too much. Whatever they tell you will probably be ego-preserving lies; if you're not sure if he's flirting back: He's not.

If you are considering starting a text with the words "me again," or composing a "sorry wrong number" Friday-night message, the game is up. You are galloping into weird town on your crazy horse and you must kill it before it kills you.

You also ought to know that being "good" at flirting is actually a myth. I've overheard enough off-duty fashion bloggers talking about their horoscopes to have learnt that if someone wants to do the funky with you, most of the boring shit that comes out of your mouth will not be a problem. If someone likes the cut of your jib, they just do, even if your jib is flapping in the wind and has "daddy issues" scrawled all over it in lipstick.

Watch our documentary about the changing world of sex and dating, 'The Digital Love Industry':

GO GEDDEM

So you've shaved your legs you've spritzed an ambitious amount of perfume on your inner thighs and your eyebrows are so on fleek it hurts. You didn't pay a woman $50 to rip hot wax from your empowered bumhole for no one to appreciate how silky smooth it is, so get out there and Sheryl Sandberg the hell out of your flirt game.

If you're spending your single life standing flush to the skirting, waiting for Colin Firth to ask you to dance, you: a) urgently need to update your DVD collection, and b) have to remember that, since we stopped wearing bonnets, getting your chirpse on really needn't be that difficult. A bit of light rejection won't turn you to stone, and you can be 99 percent sure no one's going to burn you at the stake for giving it go.

And when he starts talking about a dodgy chicken korma he had last weekend, at least you can say you tried.

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Kyle Kematch drives a boat on the Red River. Stills from Searchers: Drag the Red

Kyle Kematch pulls the brim of his white baseball cap over his eyes to block the camera.

We're sitting at a sheltered picnic table in the midst of a sudden downpour eating homemade chili and bannock at a feast organized by Drag The Red—a Winnipeg-based volunteer group that searches the swirling, murky waters of the Red River for the bodies of Indigenous women and men who have vanished.

Kyle, one of the organizers of Drag The Red, lost his sister five years ago, and my question about her provokes tears.

"Her name is Amber Rose Marie Guiboche," he tells me. Her case is still unsolved.

A year ago, he and Bernadette Smith, who also lost her sister, started trawling the river and scanning its banks after the body of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine was pulled out of the muddy water. Since then, the small team has ballooned into more than 100 volunteers who look for evidence and remains, and hold vigils for lost loved ones.

In the last year, nine bodies have been found in the river, including Fontaine's. Two of them were discovered in July alone. Though Drag The Red hasn't found a body yet, the searchers believe their DIY equipment—a rope that pulls a heavy bar with hooks along the river bed—has helped loosen remains that were stuck at the bottom.

Across Canada, missing and murdered Indigenous women are making headlines and their families are accusing police of not doing enough. Drag The Red has taken it upon themselves to do what could be considered police work. They don't receive any government funding and local law enforcement refuses to help them, insisting the river is too dangerous for dive teams.

Searchers: Drag the Red

Since 1980, more than 1,200 Indigenous women have been murdered or reported missing in Canada. In June, the RCMP released an updated report on the national crisis, announcing they had reduced the number of unsolved cases from 225 to 204. But in the year since their last update, 11 more Indigenous women disappeared and 32 more were killed.

Kyle hopes his sister is alive and well. But he says, "If she is in there, I want to get her back."

He remembers Amber as an outgoing party girl.

"She was only 20, she liked to have fun, she liked to go out and meet new people. She was very nice. Very, very nice girl."

Kyle and Amber bonded after the deaths of both their mother and sister. In 1999, their sister overdosed, and the same year, their mother jumped off one of the bridges that crosses the Red River.

"We went through hard times in '99, that's why we stuck together," he says of Amber.

The two were always talking on the phone and hanging out. But almost five years ago, Amber vanished.

She was last spotted on November 10, 2010 getting into a red pickup truck near the intersection of William Avenue and Isabel Street, which Kyle describes as a rough, low-income neighbourhood.

"Women sell their bodies over there," Kyle says of the area where she was last seen.

Police told his family Amber was a sex worker.

"Even if she was, she's a human being," he says.

Police described her as a Caucasian woman with a slight build. She was wearing a white hoodie, skinny jeans, a black belt, and pink-and-white runners when she disappeared.

A year ago, Winnipeg police released a sketch of someone they think is connected to Amber's case: A 30-year-old white man with short reddish hair, light red or blonde stubble and hairy arms. He was wearing a camo baseball cap at the time the 20-year-old went missing, police said.

But Kyle says police haven't been in touch with his family much about Amber's case. Their last update was that her name was spray-painted on a wall in the Toronto area, but they wouldn't say exactly where.

When I ask him what he thinks happened to her, he replies: "Someone she knows. I had a big speech with her a couple weeks before about how you can't trust nobody. Nobody, don't trust nobody."

Out on the water, Kyle's mind visits dark places.

We're in the middle of the river, dragging hooks along the clay bottom when suddenly there's a tug on the line.

It's not tough to pull up. Kyle inspects the hooks: A plastic bag and a pair of panties—not an unusual find for the draggers.

"Why is there so much underwear in the river?" I ask.

"I don't know," he replies. "Yeah, your mind goes crazy. Is there a female down there? I don't know."

"Where does your mind go when you find a pair of underwear?" I ask.

"Come home if you're there," he answers. "Please let me help you. Let me help you."

The searchers often spot eagles overhead, which they think of as watching over them. Police boats also watch them, but don't help with the search.

"I wish they would actually do it themselves," Kyle told me, the first time I met him on a dock at the edge of the river. "There's lots of evidence in there and that's a fact."

Staff Sgt. Rob Riffle, who is in charge of the Winnipeg Police dive unit and river patrol, told VICE they won't help "because it's not a good allocation of our resources."

"Basically it's like looking for a needle in a haystack when you don't even know there's a needle there," he said.

Pulling up on the rope after feeling something in the water

When a body falls into the river, it fills with water and sinks, Riffle explained. Within a few days in the warmer months, it decomposes and gas bubbles form, which make the body float to the surface. Eventually it will sink to the bottom again, where it breaks down until there is nothing left but bone.

None of the bodies that were found in the last year were found at the bottom of the river, he said: they floated to the surface, where they were pulled out.

Riffle contends that skeletal remains at the bottom of the river are impossible to find with hooks or by divers.

"It's black water diving here, so [the chances] for a hook to find something is so remote, it's not even in the realm of a lottery win to find something."

The waters of the Red River are only about 35 feet deep, but the fast-moving currents stir up the clay river bed, making it impossible to see past the surface.

When the dive team is in the river, visibility is zero, so they search by feel. It's inherently dangerous—there's always a possibility of a diver getting caught on something, or having their umbilical cut, Riffle told VICE. That's why they can't risk diving.

But he says they support the draggers in other ways.

"We support them with safety initiatives. We make sure they're doing their dragging safely. They also walk [along the] riverbanks, so we're supporting them in the sense that we've given them information on where there may be, where collection points are within the river, based on our expertise as the dive unit. And we're in control of making sure that they're doing their searches in a safe manner. That's our support."

When I first met Kyle at a dock on the edge of the river, he emptied a bag of items the draggers had pulled up—mostly clothing, especially women's underwear. They found one pair with blood on them, and another pair covered in maggots.

"Those maggots are feeding off something," Kyle said.

If they find clothing with a distinctive detail or pattern, they post it on Facebook, hoping someone might recognize it.

When they pull up something they believe is significant, they try not to touch it with bare hands, and they dry it out before placing it in a plastic bag. Although, from what I witnessed on the boat, their evidence-gathering techniques are inconsistent.

If they find something significant, they hand it to police—even though officers reject some items.

When a relative goes missing without a trace, an innate urge kicks in to search.

In 2008, when 21-year-old Claudette Osborne went missing, that's what her family did.

Her mother, Brenda Osborne, used a shovel to dig up ditches and search the sides of highways. And in 2014, wondering how many bodies were in the river, Claudette's sister Bernadette Smith co-founded Drag The Red.

She wondered whether police would have found Tina Fontaine had they not been looking for the body of Faron Hall, known as the "Homeless Hero," who had rescued people from drowning in the river.

Hall, who became homeless after his sister and mother died, slept in a tent on the banks of the Red River. Hall went missing after his father died and he attended the funeral. Police found Hall's body in the river on August 17, 2014.

A group of searchers lines up.

"Would they have found her was the question," Bernadette told VICE. "We were like, well, how many others were in that river, you know, and we wanted them to do it, and they didn't. They said they wouldn't. So I put it on Facebook and then a family member, Kyle Kematch said, 'I'm in, let's do it.'"

Claudette was last seen on July 25, 2008.

Her last known location was the Lincoln Motor Hotel in Winnipeg at 6 AM that morning, but in 2010 investigators confirmed her last known location was about four kilometres away, near Selkirk Avenue and King Street, at 6:30 AM.

Claudette called her sister Tina and left a message saying a truck driver was being pushy and she felt unsafe. She wanted her sister to pick her up. But her sister didn't have minutes on her phone and only heard the message after Claudette went missing.

On a Facebook group dedicated to the memory of the mother of four, friends and family remembered her hazel eyes, beautiful smile and quick wit.

Her fiance Matthew Bushby posted that she delivered a baby girl instead of the boy they expected, they had to think of a name. When she couldn't decide, he said, "Patience, Claudette." She then chose the name Patience. "Why? Because I don't have any patience," she told him.

Patience was two weeks old when her mother went missing.

It took 10 days for police to look at Claudette's case after she was reported missing, Bernadette told VICE. She said they only looked at her case because the family pressured them.

Bernadette believes Winnipeg police didn't treat her sister's case the same way they do when a white resident goes missing.

"There was one case last summer where they actually went door to door, knocking on doors. When my sister went missing, that wasn't the same response, you know. There was no police knocking door to door and asking if, you know, they had information, or they had seen anything."

According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, "police have failed to adequately prevent and protect Indigenous women and girls from killings and disappearances, extreme forms of violence, and have failed to diligently and promptly investigate these acts."

"I definitely think there is a double standard when it comes to Indigenous people," Bernadette said. "And I think that's been created through the history of Canada and the government and policies that have been put in place. You know, women are treated less than, and if you are Indigenous, that's even more so. Because you know, we're considered disposable, like no one's gonna miss us, or care about us, when in reality, we all have families that care about us."

Kyle agrees that police don't treat every missing persons case equally. They dedicated more resources to the recent case of missing white woman Thelma Krull, who disappeared July 11, than they have to cases of missing Indigenous people, he said.

"I think they're not doing enough for Aboriginal people," Kyle says of police.

Drag The Red volunteers helped search for Krull. He believes police set the bar high with their search for her.

"They could do more, they could do more, they showed everybody they could do more. They searched for that woman for a long time, and they're still searching for her."

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