From eldest son Douglas Carver, a clear-eyed reckoning with the glossy frontier myth his family sold online—and the splinters buried beneath. Raised on the wind-bent plains outside La Junta, Colorado, Douglas grew up in a sunfaded Airstream named Agnes, a Bible that belonged to his grandfather, and a camera that was always on. His father, Gideon, preached self-reliance and purity to the 1.8 million followers of their minimalist homestead feed, Stone & Sparrow, while his mother, June, curated the pretty proofs: jars of pickled beets, hand-lettered chore charts, sunrise shots over Bent's Old Fort. Behind the edits, Douglas learned a harsher curriculum. Gideon kept a jar of gravel by the door for the boys' "Order of Small Corrections"—pebbles in their shoes during chores, kneeling on rice if they "wandered" in thought, silent dinners when they "brought dust" into the house. As the brand exploded, so did his father's certainty. Enter Emery Vale, an alignment coach out of St. George selling a program called "The Narrow Gate Method." With Emery's scripts and Gideon's rules, the line between ritual and cruelty vanished.
The break came in 2022 along US-191, when Douglas's fourteen-year-old brother, Levi, flagged down a Utah state trooper barefoot and shaking. What followed unspooled like a long-held breath: a hidden sleeping cubby behind the pantry's false back, bank transfers labeled "love offerings," and a web of private Telegram chats where dissenters were shamed. Gideon and Emery were arrested in Grand Junction on charges of reckless endangerment and wire fraud. That morning, Douglas posted a photo of Agnes in an impound lot, the dented aluminum catching a merciless noon: his caption, one word—"Enough."
Pebbles in My Shoes is the first full account of how a family's public virtue smothered its private wounds. Douglas names the architecture of control—checklists, jar economies, the way branded goodness can hide bruises—as he maps the small, ordinary mercies that ferried him out: a studio apartment above a laundromat in Missoula, Tuesday nights at a community group called Sage Recovery, a cluttered desk where three smooth stones from Rattlesnake Creek remind him that weight can be chosen, and set down. In sentences as spare and flinty as the country he loves, he exposes the perils of performative homesteading and traces a path from silence to witness, from endurance to freedom.
