On June 10 of last year, Ted Kaczynski, the homegrown terrorist known as the Unabomber, was found dead in his prison cell in Butner, NC. Mr. Kaczynski, who spent 25 years in federal prison for killing three people and injuring 23 others by letter. bomb, is believed to have died by suicide.
That news shocked me. I’m writing a novel about Mr. Kaczynski.
A year later, the book was finished and the news faded, but I was still debunking the myths surrounding the Unabomber’s life – about tortured outcasts seeking refuge in the American West. – from the myths that influenced me.
I grew up in Missoula, about 80 miles from the Unabomber’s tent in the Montana wilderness, and I was 11 years old. What I remember most about those days is the feeling of turmoil. I saw helicopters in the sky and heard the quiet worry in my parents’ voices. I don’t know who the Unabomber was or what he did, but I can say it was important – and dark. So much so that my hometown suddenly became the center of national attention.
Up until then I had felt as far from the center as I could have as a child. Western Montana in the 1990s didn’t make the national news, except for the occasional environmental disaster and the annual Testicle Festival — a multi-day gathering of fried genitals that attract more press. For me, home means the patchy fields behind the hospital where my soccer team practices in the spring, the green chairlift at the three-lap ski hill the bus takes us to on every Friday afternoon, the gloomy shopping district my friends and I wandered through. endless loop.
At first I was confused as to who the Unabomber really was. Is he an environmental avenger striking back at lumber companies or a madman blowing up computer rental stores? Everyone seems to think he’s smart. He went to Harvard. I know what it is. Then I saw his shack. Why would an intelligent person live like that? And why? This?
The sudden media attention hinted at the answer. I heard the words “cabin,” “remote,” and “wilderness” repeated on the evening news with increasing romanticism.. I began to see how people on the coast saw my home state: as a wasteland of possibility. A refuge for hoodlums, seekers, dropouts, dreamers and the occasional psychopath. Somewhere you can go if things don’t go well. T-shirts and coffee mugs bearing the slogan “The Last Best Refuge” appear in local souvenir shops.
My life in Montana was not romantic. It’s clearly suburban. I live two blocks from the local high school. We shopped at Kmart, rented movies at Blockbuster, and ate at an Asian deli called Mustard Seed. I listen to Nirvana and wear clothes with Michael Jordan on them. I have never hunted and fished exactly once. Newspaper headlines first alerted me that I lived on the border. And I wonder what this means.
Thinkers like Emerson and Thoreau advanced the idea of the aspirational wilderness, as a place to purify the spirit and find one’s true self. Our heroes and outlaws often sealed their fates there, from Lewis and Clark to Billy the Kid to Kerouac and Cassidy. But the West is a place like any other place. We only use it as a mirror to reflect the dark, untamed aspects of our national character.
Mr. Kaczynski’s story follows this plan. He left behind a successful career in academia to challenge himself in nature. Once there, he becomes the avatar of a much older myth – of a monster lurking in the woods, terrorizing a complacent society. His mail-delivered bombs were a warped modern twist.
Following his story over time, I began to wonder if my purpose lay elsewhere. If Montana is a playground for malcontents with avant-garde fantasies, then I’ll go away, become a screenwriter in Los Angeles, wash away my youth..
Mr. Kaczynski’s arrest was my first encounter with the toxic pit at the heart of the American dream. I suddenly felt like a stranger in the only place I truly knew.
Here we are all homeless. Our fervent national ambition turns every horizon into a testing ground. Staying still in one place doing one thing is failure.
Driven by the ambition to remake ourselves, we pass each other by, unaware that we are following a pattern as old as our country.
The same is true of Mr. Kaczynski. Homeless and lashing out, confused, pedantic, reactionary, he pretended to have new ideas to hide his old ambitions, cherry-picking from the French philosophers who followed Luddites and environmentalists. But the truth is, he’s just trying to justify what he and so many other boys here want – to escape his parents, get ahead of his peers, and rebuild society in his image. theirs.
The media misunderstood him. In seeking to romanticize Mr. Kaczynski, reporters gave him Thoreau-like qualities — framing him as a philosopher who found purpose in the woods, even if it was dark. But his only innovation is a new, cowardly kind of violence. Mr. Kaczynski never actually saw Montana, the wilderness or the West itself as it really was. For him, its main attribute is the lack of people. He is the twisted embodiment of a dream of the frontier that was poisoned from its inception.
Oddly, the mythology of Mr. Kaczynski seems to have only grown since his death. Youth Still spreading the messages from his manifesto on social media, creating their own narrative of “Uncle Ted” as a fiery anti-tech prophet. I think we must hate ourselves when we read their posts for how we look for heroes from the worst among us.
We all harbor myths about our homes, whether it’s that Montana is the last refuge or that New York City is the cultural capital of the world. But these are just stories, often relying on exceptions like Mr. Kaczynski. Our homelands are much more complex than these myths, but seeing them as they really are – and loving them in all their tragic beauty – leads us away from destruction and isolation, to community and stewardship, a deeper kind of purpose.
I spent my teens and twenties on the move, anxious, driven, and confused. I thought I was searching for purpose and home, but I was resisting the very idea. Like a good American boy, I’m chasing the American dream: not a house and a two-car garage, but rebellion.
Last year, exhausted from years of loneliness and grief from the pandemic, I moved back to Missoula and started life anew. The three-track ski hill is gone and the town has spread across the valley, but there are still towering mountains, looming trees and plenty of places to get lost.
Every day I wake up and try to see what Montana is like. Yellow grass on dry hills, vast skies that often turn from gray to darker gray, clear and abandoned mines, towns full of meth, and wastelands so sparkling they make me fall tear. It is more complex, beautiful and ancient than I could have imagined. One day, deep in my bones, I just hope to call it home.
