FROG LEVEL, Ark.—Ray Swanke ducks into a bunker-like outbuilding on his property near Horatio, Ark. and scoops up one several cardboard-sheathed squares of marble from a pallet on the floor.
His wizened frame, swallowed by a billowing white robe, belies his strength. He carries the 80-pound slab of stone with ease to a flatbed trailer waiting on the other side of a gate topped with barbed wire.
He piles tarps, bungee cords, tools and other provisions alongside the marble, then fetches a few large mason jars filled with popcorn kernels, which he wedges securely in a plastic barrel.
“Vern loves organic popcorn,” he explains.
Vern Swanke, Ray’s brother, shuffles from a nearby door, leaning on a cane. He nods in greeting.
Like his brother, Vern wears a whitish, full-length robe and sports a snowy, chest-length beard and hiking sandals over dark, patterned socks. Unlike his brother, whose head is topped by a white fedora, Vern wears a cowboy hat.
Even if they don’t know the Swankes by name, people in and around Horatio know them by sight.
For 30 years, the brothers have become a fixture around Horatio, and people long ago stopped being surprised to see two aging men in robes putting gas in a late-model Dodge pickup or pushing a shopping cart through Walmart.
“Had they not been dressed like that, other than being from away from here, people wouldn’t have thought anything about ‘em,” said Horatio Mayor Borden Neel, who first met the Swankes decades ago while serving as a rural mail carrier.
Locals have gleaned bits and pieces about the Swankes through gossip or observation—about Ray’s quasi-religious teaching, their rock house, the wife and kids that used to live with them—but they eventually became a part of the local landscape.
“They were always really nice, polite people, and that kind of overshadowed the oddness,” Neel said.
As of October, however, the brothers are a local curiosity no longer.
When the Gazette first contacted the Swankes via email a year before, Ray wrote that they were 3,000 miles away and to check back in several months.
In response to an email in early May, Ray wrote that he and Vern had just spent a few days in Horatio but were already on the “Highway back to the Blest Land of Eternal Spring.”
Reached at home on a brisk morning in late October, Ray was packing the trailer for good.
In the next day or two, they would set off for Mexico, where they had spent much of the last year and had purchased some land.
They did not plan to return, and Ray chided Vern for not packing his collection of rocks, which was still on display in one corner of his bedroom.
During the visit, Ray declined to have his or his brother’s photo taken and was initially wary of being featured in a newspaper article.
As he secured the last few things in the trailer, he paused, reconsidering.
“You can tell people we’re leaving the Divided States of United Lies,” he said.
• • • •
In 1978, Vern Swanke closed his horse-shoeing business in Montana, piled his wife and six children in an old school bus and headed south to live off the land.
Their needs were simple. Vern wanted only a modest parcel of land with good soil and a long growing season that was out of earshot of railroad tracks. They drove the bus from town to town and made inquiries at local real estate offices until finding 40 acres in Frog Level.
For the next year, the family lived on their new property in the school bus, warming themselves during winter with a paltry wood-burning stove. They then moved into a rough shack Vern built from tarpaper and scraps of lumber.
There was no electricity or plumbing, and they fetched water from a creek a half mile away.
It was a miserable existence, said Jo Ann, Vern’s former wife. She has since remarried and asked that her last name not be used to protect her privacy.
The couple had met as teenagers at the local fair and married in 1960. They had children and lived simply but happily for the next seven years, Jo Ann said.
Then, Ray returned home after serving in the Army.
“He was always kind of a different sort, but when he got out, he brought all this ‘knowledge’ with him,” Jo Ann said.
The knowledge, Ray told people, came directly from God, and he was not shy about preaching it. Most of his family dismissed him as crazy, but Vern did not.
He believed his brother, and Ray spent more and more time at the couple’s house, eventually coming to dominate their lives, Jo Ann said.
It went on that way until some of Ray’s family members stepped in on Jo Ann’s behalf and told him to leave their family alone.
Vern remained dedicated to his brother’s tenets—it was why he chose to move south to grow his own food, which he said was done in biblical times—but agreed to cut ties with Ray.
The couple’s relationship improved for a time despite the hardship of the move to Arkansas. They eventually purchased a small white house adjacent to their property, which gave them electricity and a well, and they sold some of their produce in Horatio.
Then, Ray showed up once again, this time wearing a robe.
• • • •
After leaving Vern and Jo Ann in Montana, Ray settled in Angel Ridge, a tiny community in central Kentucky.
As Ray tells it, he had gone blind after leaving the Army, a delayed effect of exposure to carbon monoxide, which, because of a design flaw, leaked into the cab of the vehicle he drove.
In Kentucky, Ray led a spartan existence, living in an isolated shack and fasting for weeks in an attempt to purify himself.
Ray said that during the fast, while perched atop a ridge under cover of dark clouds, a circle of perfect blue appeared, revealing the visage of Jesus Christ and a company of angels.
Jesus frowned at Swanke, his eyes radiating disapproval.
Quick as a thunderclap, Ray was pinned down and Jesus rolled a seal across his right hand and forehead.
He was thrown to the ground as Ray Swanke; he arose as the Colorful Peacock of Angel Ridge.
The next morning, he hitchhiked to Danville, about 30 miles away, and purchased a typewriter with a $100 money order that had appeared, without apparent source, in his mailbox, Ray said.
He began work on the first of scores of wide-ranging books and pamphlets touching on everything from theology (“magnified” versions of the Bible and Book of Mormon and “Is God Gay??”); politics (“A Reasonable Solution for the SOCIAL SECURITY PROBLEM!”); cautionary tales (“Can News Reporters be Trusted?”); and practical advice (“A Sure and Free Cure for PIMPLES!”).
The books, all self-published and written in the same pedagogical style, are his end of a covenant with God. In return, Ray said God has provided in abundance.
“How many people do you know with onyx floors?” he said.
• • • •
Ray moves and speaks with the certainty of a prophet.
He strides rather than walks, and his conversation is larded with well-worn phrases coined in his books and punctuated frequently by hard, silent glares.
He had behaved that way since leaving the Army, Jo Ann said, but, after arriving in Frog Level from Kentucky, his religious selfcertainty had redoubled.
Ray volunteers little about his early years in Frog Level. He said he moved to Arkansas at the request of his brother to help build a house for his wife.
If that were the case, Jo Ann said, his help wasn’t welcome. She says that after he arrived, her life became a living hell.
She and the children worked grueling hours on the farm and were required to follow Ray’s dietary whims.
“One week, all you could eat was apples,” Jo Ann said. “One week it would be bananas.”
Often, they had to fast.
The children were home-schooled, mostly from the Bible and Ray’s teachings, and were required to write in the phonetic system that Ray invented as a more logical alternative to standard English.
There was no telephone at the house, and incoming and outgoing letters were screened by Ray.
Occasionally, would-be disciples would show up, stay for a few days, then disappear. Aside from cursory interactions with neighbors and people in town, that was the extent of Jo Ann’s contact with the outside world.
Jo Ann said she had promised herself to endure until her youngest daughter turned 18. When that happened, the two of them waited until Vern and Ray had gone to town and fled. They made it to Texarkana and caught the first bus out of town.
She heard later that, after finding the women gone, the brothers had set out to track them down but the engine fell out of their truck.
It’s been more than 20 years, but Jo Ann still can’t understand how Vern could follow his brother at the expense of everything else.
“That’s the $1 million question.”
• • • •
Not long after Jo Ann left, the Swankes began building their fortress, which, with the possible exception of the beards and robes, is what locals most closely associate with the brothers.
The house is a squat piling of a few thousand tons of rock and concrete tucked into a small hillock. Its facade is inlaid with bulging hunks of quartz-like minerals and faces a small courtyard shaded by a lattice of leafy branches.
“From the outside, it looks like a crappy storm cellar basically, but when you get inside, it’s a whole different ball game,” Neel, the Horatio mayor, said.
Three solid oak doors lead to separate apartments, Ray and Vern each occupying one with the third vacant.
Ray steps inside his living room, which is covered from floor to ceiling with squares of marble imported from Italy, China and elsewhere. He swings the door behind him, and it shuts with the distinct click of a latch and a thud of disconcerting finality.
“Now, try to open it,” he says.
After a few moments of clumsy fiddling, the deadbolt slides left and the door handle, carved from the tusk of a water buffalo, turns.
The locking mechanism is of his own design, Ray explains proudly. It takes most people a while to figure it out.
He nods to a photo of Carlsbad Caverns, which he has visited 20 or more times, and mutters about the mess.
He had lent the space to a young Hispanic man during the recent trip to Mexico, and things were in disarray. There were crumpled bed sheets on the floor and a scattering of litter and cigarette butts on the porch. Ray’s water bed had been unceremoniously stuffed into the corner.
He picks up an open spiral notebook from the desk and squints at it. Several lines are covered in neat handwriting, what appears to be a love song written in Spanish.
The house is arranged shotgun-style, and Ray moves rearward into the bathroom, also encrusted in marble.
He identifies a particular square and points to a pair of flaws. One, he says, resembles a crew-cut man in profile. The other is a monkey’s skeleton.
Had the marble been cut at a slightly different angle, those images would never have surfaced. The odds that they did are less than one in a billion, he said, leveling his eyes in an emphasizing glare.
The bathroom has a sink and toilet with running water and a wide, luxurious shower stall that, in place of a shower head, has an open-topped wooden bucket with a hose nozzle at the bottom. It holds just enough hot water for a thorough soap and rinse, Vern said.
The rearmost room is the pantry, which is unmarbled and lined with broad, wooden shelves. The shelves are fully stocked with mason jars of survival food (Ray’s favorite is black beans and peanuts) that the brothers spent months cooking and canning.
Building the home of rock was Ray’s idea. He disdains what he calls, repeatedly, the “average American firetrap, mouseinfested cockroach den.” By contrast, rock houses are “fireproof, insuranceproof, windproof, water damage-proof, hail-proof, mouse-proof, paint-proof and self-air conditioning.”
One of Ray’s books is a treatise on the wisdom of building city-states entirely from stone. It took seven years to complete.
Vern helped with construction but initially refused to live there because he feared it would lack sufficient ventilation and become too humid. It turned out to be quite pleasant, as did the actual construction.
Vern remembers waking early each morning with gleeful anticipation during the several weeks it took to tile his apartment in marble.
Unlike his brother, who used foot-long squares, Vern opted for the more laborintensive brick-sized tiles. He arranged these side-by-side in pairs, their patterns forming rough mirror images, and aligned them using the orphaned glass tube from a carpenter’s level that had been disgorged from the soil one day while plowing.
His brother’s apartment is nice, Vern whispers conspiratorially, but if you look closely, some of the tiles are slightly askew.
• • • •
In October, as he was loading the trailer to leave, Ray spoke with bitterness about his neighbors.
He nodded to the north, where one neighbor had put in a hog house, and to the south, where there were new chicken houses.
The stench is often unbearable, Ray said—the evils of capitalism made manifest.
He complained about the young man who was invited to his home as a guest and left it in shambles and the people who stay in the white house Vern and Jo Ann purchased decades ago.
Their garbage cans are topped with a mountain of empty cans of Coca-Cola and Keystone Light, and their dogs—pit bull mixes that appear from nowhere, sniff laconically at visitors then recede through a flap covering the window of a teal Chevrolet coupe—have chewed through a couch the Swankes kept in a nearby shed.
Mexico will be different, Ray said. The brothers did not specify their exact location, saying only that it was inland and 3,000 miles away. Ray listed some of its advantages in a November email: a mild climate; fresh and inexpensive fruits and vegetables; the relative absence of chiggers, fire ants, bed bugs and mosquitoes; a lack of tornadoes and hailstorms; and no neighbors who threaten murder.
“But the main reason was to get away from such an anti-Christ false federal lying government, which is likely to suffer with a great atomic nightmare for its wickedness and Just reward,” Ray wrote.
Vern’s feelings are more nuanced.
A large portrait of his four daughters is propped against the wall behind his sink. Their hair and baggy sweatshirts date the picture to the early 1990s.
Vern gazes at it, almost wistfully. He hasn’t seen any of his children in years, but he hears they are doing well. One son owns a successful construction company. Some of his homes cost more than $1 million, Vern said proudly.
The move to Mexico will put even greater distance between Vern and his children. It will also cut him off from the home into which he and his brother poured so much time and effort.
Vern especially regrets the latter, but he is consoled by the idea that he and Ray will build a new house in Mexico that, with one rock house under their belts, will surely be an improvement.
It’s hard to imagine that Vern, who is stooped and frail-looking and had an open Medicare booklet by his bed, can sustain much hard labor.
None of that matters, he said. Better things are coming.
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