Jonathan Raban - Bad Land - An American Romance

It was woodsy, but it was not “the woods.” When the spirit of Emersonian self-reliance failed him, Kaczynski could ride his bike to the Blackfoot Market and pick up the Del Monte canned food, whose containers, meticulously labeled, figured prominently in the FBI inventory. But this proximity to town must have had its disadvantages. Snowmobiling was Lincoln’s economic mainstay in the winter months, and when Kaczynski was laboring on his life story (Item MB28 in the inventory was a “brown clasp envelope marked ‘Autobiography’ ”), he must have been plagued by the din of rainbow-striped machines whizzing past the cabin, for the logging road, which took a zigzag path through a shallow canyon, was a perfect snowmobilers’ racetrack. FC was similarly troubled: his thesis complains of “noise-making devices” intruding on his “autonomy.”

For industrial society, its lawn mowers, TVs and radios, lay right on Kaczynski’s doorstep. If he was FC, and trying to live like the solitary “frontiersmen” hymned in the Unabomber thesis, he must have felt himself constantly mocked by the late-twentieth-century tourists who piled into Lincoln, at every season, to enjoy the active outdoor pursuits for which the place was famous — the anglers, cross-country skiers, hunters, hikers, off-road 4WD enthusiasts. His cabin was most certainly not a haven of solitude in what the Unabomber called “ WILD Nature.”

Yet here were deer, elk, black bears, rabbits and fish that would leap to a baited hook. Kaczynski gardened — grew his own carrots and potatoes. The FBI inventory, with its bags of fishhooks, bows and arrows, guns (one of them homemade), together with the chemistry set, the peanut-butter jars, the Hershey’s cocoa cans, the soft-drink bottles (“Raspberry Super Sip”), suggested the life, not of a man, but of a dangerous boy. The most grown-up thing on the list was the supply of Trazadone antidepressant.

Item L9 interested me. “A Plastic Bottle Labeled ‘Strychnine Oats.’ ” I mentioned it to Diana Holliday. “You feed oats to the deer, don’t you?”

“Oh,” she said: “that makes me really angry at him. He hated the deer. They used to eat his garden …”

The positive ideal that we propose is Nature.

Lambkins Lounge at the center of town was like an English pub at Saturday lunchtime, loud with talk, and welcoming.

“You’re from Seattle?” the bartender said. “That’s where all the serial murderers come from. You’ve got Ted Bundy … you’ve got the Green River Killer … You’ve got the whole bunch out there. This guy is our first and only. We’re kind of inexperienced.”

She was down to her last six “Lincoln, Home of the Unabomber — The Last Best Place to Hide” T-shirts, with the composite drawing of the hooded, mustached man in aviator shades blazoned on the front. The first edition, of 400, had arrived at 9 p.m. the previous evening; fifteen hours later, I bought the last T-shirt but one. A rush reorder had been sent out to the factory, and the second printing was due to arrive first thing on Monday morning.

Profits were going to the volunteer fire department, which had set its sights on a defibrillator. By Saturday morning, the defibrillator was in the bag, and the volunteers were looking at the next item on their shopping list — a compressor for filling air cylinders. After that, they wanted new jackets.

“It’s split this town right down the middle,” said Jay Verdi, the fire department’s bearded PR man, who had dreamed up the idea of turning America’s Most Wanted man into a windfall for Lincoln. “A lot of folks are mad as hell at us for doing it.”

“Well, if you hadn’t got there first, some private entrepreneur would have cashed in on it,” I said. “But why so few shirts? You could have printed five thousand—”

“We were being a bit cautious. We were afraid this whole thing could blow over in a few days. We didn’t want to get landed with a pile of stuff we couldn’t sell.”

I thought of the cavernous fire hall in Ismay, stacked floor-to-ceiling with Joe, Montana, stuff. Lincoln’s sudden blaze of notoriety and fortune seemed more securely rooted.

With each T-shirt came a card, printed in curly black script, like a funeral invitation:

This Is A Sad Event In The

Nations History But Some

Good, Will Come From It, In

The Way Of Lincoln

Receiving A Defibrillator To

Save Lives

Our Sympathy Goes Out To

The Families Of All The

Victims

The Lincoln Volunteers!

“Did you pay any attention to Kaczynski before he became world-famous?” I asked Verdi.

“I rode with him to Helena once. In 1978. I was buying a new Blazer. Sat with Ted on the stage.”

“What did you talk about?”

“He said ‘Hello.’ ”

“Anything else?”

“At the end, he said, ‘I probably won’t be riding back with you.’ That was a lot of words for Ted. Nobody had a conversation with him. You’d say ‘Howdy.’ Ted’d grunt. That was as far as it ever went.”

As I was leaving, Verdi said, “The two guys who made the arrest … one of them’s a friend of mine. When they grabbed him, Ted didn’t struggle, like they said in the media. There wasn’t anything like that. My friend said the wind just went right out of him. Total relief.”

Past the Idaho state line, Sandpoint was lodged in the top of the ear of Lake Pend Oreille. A number of people from around Ismay had come here, most of them in 1934. As in Thompson Falls, there were jobs to be had at the mills and on the logging outfits. There were also “stump farms,” going for next to nothing, where the timber companies had left swaths of clean-cut ground; battlefield acreages of stumps and slash. Some of the exiles were incurable farmers. They took on these desperate bits of land, blew the stumps out, and started over again.

I saw little tilled soil near Sandpoint, though there were many horse farms, and some dairy herds. The town, motley in its architecture and thick with traffic, was in need of a bypass operation. Stuck in a jam, I read the messages of disaffection on bumper stickers, GUN CONTROL MEANS USING BOTH HANDS, RUSH IS RIGHT. BO GRITZ FOR PREZ. DON’T STEAL — THE GOVERNMENT HATES COMPETITION. A lull followed, with a sticker advertising the local public radio station, and I’D RATHER BE QUILTING. Then IMPEACH CLINTON AND HER HUSBAND was countered by a liberal crack, RUSH IS REICH, on an elderly, mud-spattered pickup. PREACHER RAN OFF WITH MY WIFE AND MY DOG — I SURE MISS THAT DOG.

Sandpoint cannot have enjoyed the fame that had lately fallen on it. A couple of weeks before I drove through, Mark Fuhrman, the disgraced detective in the O. J. Simpson case, had found the town sufficiently white for his retirement needs. Louis Beam, ex of the Ku Klux Klan, and now an advocate of armed citizen resistance, had also just moved in. The Aryan Nations lived close by, and, twenty-five miles north of Sandpoint, on Forest Road 632, lay the cabin on Ruby Ridge where a federal marshal and Randy Weaver’s wife and son were killed in a shoot-out with the FBI.

Thirty miles on, at Newport, I crossed the line into my home state of Washington, and switched on the radio. A phone-in-program, with callers baying for liberal blood, broke for commercials. First up was an ad for Initiative 48, the property rights measure, due to be voted on on Thursday.

It told the tale of a retired couple, whose little farm had been declared a protected wetland by the EPA, because the old man had dug a ditch on it. The narrator was a woman, whose indignant tone matched that of the telephone callers a minute before. “Vote yes on 48! Our only opponents are out-of-state environmentalists and Seattle extremists.”