The Women Who Walked Away
March 5, 2024 8:11 PM   Subscribe

When it is warm, or warm enough, the site is gentle, a haven. [...] Your fellow man, the government, Klaus Schwab, the Dobbs ruling — their tentacles of harm and control feel very far away. [New York Magazine]

Why did a mother with no backcountry experience take her sister and 13-year-old son to live off the grid on a 10,000-foot mountain during a Colorado winter? [Outside Magazine]
posted by riruro (27 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- loup



 
Content note: The story includes harm to children.
posted by PresidentOfDinosaurs at 8:42 PM on March 5 [3 favorites]


That kid's diary reads so young, he was still a baby. It's easy to condemn his mom, but she was clearly ill. The aunt, maybe also, or maybe she thought she could help. What a pointless loss.
posted by emjaybee at 8:47 PM on March 5 [6 favorites]


What a terrible end for all of them. Anyone who thinks conspiracy theorists and hard-core preppers aren't hurting anyone needs to read this story. Sure, they did this to themselves, but they are just a couple of who knows how many vulnerable people who take all that nonsense to heart and don't have the support systems or the capacity to see the reality of what they are contemplating.
posted by dg at 9:18 PM on March 5 [13 favorites]


Heartbreaking, a little portrait of Americana, almost a Don DeLillo short story:

The other artifacts on the site included sunflower seeds, Emerald Oak lettuce seeds, Kentucky wonder-pole-bean seeds, long-reach matches, lighters, various colors and gauges of polypropylene cord, hand shears, a headlamp, a flashlight, a small shovel, a handsaw, two water-purification straws, a Solo camp stove, cans filled with burnt twigs, backpacks of extra clothes (hats, gloves, scarves, underwear, outerwear), Band-Aids, a Swiss Army knife, a blue stuffed raccoon, a red FAMILY-FUN ticket stub from Manitou Springs (a resort town outside Colorado Springs), a lightweight green towel, a laundry bag, a fishing pole and fishing tackle, two pairs of light hiking boots, a pair of low-top Adidas sneakers, one Teva sandal, several pairs of soiled women’s underwear (strewn around the camp), Chapstick, Vaseline, and empty water bottles. There was an insulated bag that seemed to be filled with urine; wrappers for Nature Valley Granola Bars, Clif Bars, and Rx Bars; wrappers for instant Thai jasmine noodles, a Souper 6-Pack of Shrimp Maruchan ramen, as well as various other flavors of ramen; empty bottles of Mott’s apple and Simply Orange juice; empty cans of Vienna Sausages, Chunky Soup with Sirloin Burger, and Dinty Moore Stew; a pile of dark, matted eight-inch-long human hair still gathered in a hair tie; a blue blanket with images of yellow fish on it (used as a ground pad); $35 in cash; and keys to a 2006 Hyundai.
posted by chavenet at 1:51 AM on March 6 [5 favorites]


I found myself caught also by the casual brutality of the towing of the car that could have served as an escape, because it was parked for 30 days. In my eyes, the people who did that also have something to answer for.
posted by corb at 3:26 AM on March 6 [23 favorites]


I've been trying to come with something to say. The outside article compares this to Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, a book that for whatever reason has become commonly assigned in high school English classes. I've always felt like Krakauer was attempting to romanticize McCandless's stupid pointless death. I appreciate that these articles featured no romanticization at all, but clear descriptions of diarrhea everywhere and a dead kid's body being left out in the open while his mom and aunt died of starvation and exposure. I hate that these brainwashed fools killed a kid.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:49 AM on March 6 [27 favorites]


This all seems pointless and that is desperately sad.

My instinctive understanding since a kid has been that life demands we craft meaning and purpose and that we find inspiration from the wise in earlier generations and their debates about how best to find and do this. Not a day passes without this. Love is at its heart, engagement with life its consequence and the struggle to best the ego a key means. The alternatives strike me as monstrous; despair or cheerful cynicism, automatism or the endless search for diversion, distraction and escape. I hope these poor souls knew at least for a moment that they had acted, knew agency, and secured some kind of brief victory.
posted by dutchrick at 3:54 AM on March 6 [3 favorites]


That poor kid.

Isolated from normal social interaction. Then torn away from the only friends he had (on Roblox) by his mentally ill mother to suffer a long painful death in the wilderness.

The diary broke me - transcribing the farewell messages from his online friends, and his cheery tone as he described the steps his family took to their doom.

The mom wasn't a victim. She was a sick abuser and her sister was an enabler.
posted by xthlc at 5:38 AM on March 6 [11 favorites]


the casual brutality of the towing of the car

I disagree, that was just a park ranger doing their job. People leave shit in parks all the time. Rangers don't just tow a car out of the blue, they would have left a sticker or some other notice on the car and only towed it when it was still there a month later.

Even then, as the article points out, they could have walked a few miles downhill to the road if they wanted help. At least for Rebecca, this was always going to be a one-way trip. Poor kid.
posted by echo target at 6:01 AM on March 6 [24 favorites]


A sad story. I thought the contrast between the two pieces was very interesting. I found Weil's piece for New York Magazine to be pretty bad. I don't think it's respectful to treat a recent domestic tragedy like a creative fiction exercise. Too much psychologizing, too quick to speak directly from the women's imagined voices, too purple the descriptions of people, too little letting the reader into the journalistic process. I thought Conover's piece for Outside was significantly better.
posted by dusty potato at 6:30 AM on March 6


This was an absolutely harrowing read. Even knowing how it ends, I read it with a pit in my stomach, dreading how it would end.

I have almost zero interest in any of the things Outside covers, in so far as I vastly prefer all of my activities to take place Inside, and yet, Outside's journalism is so consistently excellent that I never regret anything I read from them. It's a bit ironic that this one tracks with my interests a little more than most, because it starts with online conspiracy theories, which are like the most Inside of Inside activities, and that is the thing that lead to the downfall of this family.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:38 AM on March 6 [17 favorites]


That area of Colorado is so, so beautiful during warmer months - it’s near a (tiny) college town that hosts a writing salon each summer. The people that Actually Live There Year Round will tell you that winter is not to be trifled with and they look out for each other. I am so glad that the author was so candid about tough outcomes with other people who had A Little More as well. So many things warping decision making: propaganda, mental health, starvation, low body temperature, and logistics for transporting a teen with giardia It’s likely the smell kept the animals away.

So sad…
posted by childofTethys at 7:00 AM on March 6 [1 favorite]


I found myself caught also by the casual brutality of the towing of the car that could have served as an escape, because it was parked for 30 days.

One of the articles mentioned that they attempted to locate an owner first. Unfortunately, stuff gets abandoned in parks all the time.

If they couldn't even start to walk a few miles because they were so starved and hypothermic, they probably couldn't drive, either.

I'm not surprised the Outside piece was better than the New York one, which seemed caught awkwardly between straight reportage and a more contemplative piece.
posted by praemunire at 7:32 AM on March 6 [2 favorites]


The NY article just drops Talon into the middle of paragraph 6 or whatever without explaining whether he’s a teenager or a pet dog.

I’m not reading this.

My only contribution is to say that in spring 2020 I wears afraid that the food chain would collapse and we wouldn’t have enough to eat, so I gardened intensively. I turned every square inch of my yard into vegetable plots. That summer I went to strangers houses and picked leftover fruit to can. Even buying topsoil, seeds, etc from a nearby store i later calculated that I wouldn’t have been able to supply more than 5% of the calories my family of four needed. I would have been able to keep us from getting scurvy if we ended up on a diet of rice and potatoes but that’s the best I could do.
posted by bq at 8:08 AM on March 6 [9 favorites]


bq, that seems like a misreading? The first time the name Talon is mentioned in that piece, it's as part of the sentence "When the new baby, whom Becky named Talon, was an infant, Becky started dropping him off at the Burden home on her way to work." and the context before that makes clear it's Becky's child that's being referred to.

It's not a *great* article, but it's not that bad.
posted by sagc at 8:18 AM on March 6 [1 favorite]


I appreciated the Outside article providing some context about living remotely, in relatively extreme environments. How having even loose connections is safer than being completely alone. (Not safe, but safer.)

One thing that struck me was how uninterested the women seemed to be in homesteading or wilderness survival or self-sufficiency as skills or practices. As though nature was simply an empty space free from society, and not a place with its own hazards. Going from an apartment to backwoods camping in the winter in Colorado is skipping so many steps, it's horrifying.
posted by mersen at 10:15 AM on March 6 [13 favorites]


I wonder if Christine (or even Rebecca) ever thought about leaving with Talon when it was obvious he was suffering badly, but didn't because they were afraid he'd be taken into care. (Not without reason, but also not without good reason. Whatever was going on with Rebecca, she was obviously not fit to take care of him.)

I also wonder if Rebecca abused Christine emotionally. The self-abuse she casually volunteered to her friend is absolutely something she could have learned to perform from "normal" society, and I know that depression is tenacious, but I doubt she would have treated her comments as so unremarkable (don't even need to explain the acronyms!) if the person she was closest to had fought against her thinking of herself that way.
posted by praemunire at 10:24 AM on March 6


Odd, half the first part of the article is missing for me when I look at the NY May site, but not the archived version.
posted by bq at 10:30 AM on March 6 [1 favorite]


That's just deeply sad. I understand the appeal of conspiracy theory; people need to make sense of a pretty chaotic world in which there may be some evil forces. An old friend, intelligent and thoughtful, with resources, has fallen deep into conspiracy theories, leaving scorched relationships behind. I'll keep the articles bookmarked to share on prepper threads on reddit and fb. They had a little family/ community that supported them and they abandoned it. It shouldn't have taken many nights camping at elevation to realize how unprepared they were. In Colorado, it can be really warm and lovely in the daytime, but it gets cold at night.

Way back, VP Cheney recommended storing water, sheet plastic, duct tape because, terrorism. It made sense to me to store some water, food, basic supplies, and I still do. That was helpful when Covid shut things down. But every prepper site wants you to buy survival food and gear, and having food would have kept them thinking at least a bit more clearly. Maybe giardia and food poisoning really debilitated them.

Community is what you really need. Mark Zuckerberg can build his doomsday compound in Hawaii, but without community, it seems unlikely to be worthwhile.
posted by theora55 at 11:21 AM on March 6 [3 favorites]


The details that stand out to me are the LifeStraw and the lack of sleeping pads. Those scream never-been-camping louder than anything else in the article, and I am sure would have been a giant red flag if they had shared their plans and gear list with anyone who had experience in the wilderness. The paranoia and conspiracy theories makes me wonder if they would have listened to anyone who tried to get them to stop, though.

It makes me wish that survival shows placed more emphasis on current wilderness survival best practices (bring modern gear! plan! tell people your plan! make sure you can bail out to civilization! If you are naked and alone in the deep wilderness with winter coming on, and no tv crew around, you are so, so fucked!).

Sometimes I look at prepared survival kits, and so many of them are, like, a LifeStraw, 30 feet of paracord, a cheap knife, and a shitty compass. It reminds me of how all the boys in the 80s had ninja throwing stars and "Rambo survival knives," probably ordered out of the back of a not-as-good-as-the-Sharper-Image catalog, and only useful as props for a fantasy. The prepper thing has the same smell.
posted by surlyben at 12:48 PM on March 6 [5 favorites]


I am sure would have been a giant red flag if they had shared their plans and gear list with anyone who had experience in the wilderness. The paranoia and conspiracy theories makes me wonder if they would have listened to anyone who tried to get them to stop, though.

It's interesting that the social media mentioned is largely one-to-many, rather any kind of truly interactive groups. I know not everyone on prepper forums are racist morons; there is a genuine need for everybody to do at least some disaster planning, so there is an actual body of survival skills out there. I wonder if anyone "in that world" might have been able to dissuade them, at least until they were better-prepared. (People on forums love to tell you you're doing it wrong!) Or would they just have gone into more of a folie à multi?
posted by praemunire at 1:36 PM on March 6 [6 favorites]


Rereading the article, they did tell the other sister, who made the really quite reasonable suggestion that they stay at the sister and her husband's off-grid property in an RV with a generator. It sounds like either they didn't tell her the full plan, or else they just weren't going to listen to any advice.
posted by surlyben at 2:20 PM on March 6 [2 favorites]


I am sure would have been a giant red flag if they had shared their plans and gear list with anyone who had experience in the wilderness. The paranoia and conspiracy theories makes me wonder if they would have listened to anyone who tried to get them to stop, though.
One of the things the article mentions is that there is a constant refrain on prepper sites of not telling anyone your plans so you don't end up feeding the whole neighbourhood when civilisation collapses. Everything I've seen on these groups suggests that, if you just get ready, it will all fall into place when the time comes. They don't do this explicitly, but it seems they are largely populated by people who have actual experience camping, hunting, fishing etc and it probably doesn't even occur to them (or they don't care) that people with no such experience are following along. When experienced people talk about survival techniques, I guess it sounds simple to the inexperienced, but those techniques are underpinned by not only proper equipment but also years of experience and honing of skills.

A logical thing to do would have been actually going camping for a bit so they had some vague idea of what they were facing. But it's clear they had never camped or had any real idea of what they would face. Reading the article, I felt sad that nobody seemed to care enough to make sure they knew what they were doing, but maybe they'd been so used to the women being independent and close-mouthed their whole lives that they all assumed they knew what they were doing. That seems a pretty charitable reading, though, given those close to them must have known they had no practical experience.
posted by dg at 2:25 PM on March 6 [4 favorites]


I am sure would have been a giant red flag if they had shared their plans and gear list with anyone who had experience in the wilderness

[...]

Rereading the article, they did tell the other sister, who made the really quite reasonable suggestion that they stay at the sister and her husband's off-grid property in an RV with a generator. It sounds like either they didn't tell her the full plan, or else they just weren't going to listen to any advice.

Yeah, there's more info on the sister-in-law's family and interactions in some of the older coverage. Aside from the straight-up offer of an off-grid place to live, it sounds like the sister-in-law's husband is quite experienced with wilderness activities in CO and tried to help them, and even introduced them to someone who had direct experience with what they were planning to do (from the Guardian article I linked: "Tommy introduced the trio to an experienced Native American outdoorsman who had lived off the grid."). This was definitely one of the things that stuck out to me in earlier rounds of coverage of this extremely sad event.
posted by advil at 2:34 PM on March 6 [5 favorites]


The mom wasn't a victim. She was a sick abuser and her sister was an enabler.

I think we're in full agreement on the usage of "sick" when I say the above statement strikes me as emblematic of humanity's sickness.
posted by tigrrrlily at 4:49 PM on March 6


Don't make me cry at my desk!

The one part that stuck out to me was when the author wondered why Rebecca and Christine didn't leave after Talon died. I think she was so attached to her son and sister that she was trying to keep them trapped in time and if it took hauling them up a mountainside to "camp" so be it. I don't think she meant for them to die but better that they starve to death together than find their own way (Talon growing up, Christine finding a partner or even her own place) and leave her alone. I wonder if it would have happened even without COVID, if in some less dramatic fashion.
posted by kingdead at 7:27 AM on March 7


Not the first or the last alt right conspiracy to claim lives, sadly.
posted by signsofrain at 9:30 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]


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