On June 10 of last year, Ted Kaczynski, the homegrown terrorist known as the Unabomber, was found dead in his cell in Butner, North Carolina. Mr. Kaczynski, who had spent 25 years in federal prison for murdering three people and injuring 23 others with mail. bombs, allegedly committed suicide.
The news shook me. I was writing a novel about Mr. Kaczynski.
A year later, the book is finished and the news has faded, but I’m still unraveling the mythologies that surrounded the life of the Unabomber—the tortured outcast who sought refuge in the American West—from those who influenced mine.
I grew up in Missoula, about 80 miles from the Unabomber’s cabin in the Montana wilderness, and was 11 years old at the time of his capture. What I remember most about that time is a feeling of disruption. I saw helicopters in the sky and heard the hushed anxiety in my parents’ voices. I didn’t know who the Unabomber was or what he had done, but I could tell it was big – and dark. So much so that my home country suddenly became the center of national attention.
Until then, I felt as far from the center as a child could be. In the 1990s, western Montana was not a place that made national news, save for the occasional environmental disaster and the annual Testicle Festival – a multi-day debauchery of ox genitals fried foods which attracted a seedier press. For me, home meant the uneven fields behind the hospital where my soccer team practiced in the spring, the green rattle chairlift on the three-track ski slope where the school bus took us every Friday afternoon, the dingy mall my friends and I used to wander through. endless loops.
At first, I didn’t know who the Unabomber actually was. Was he an environmental avenger who attacked logging companies, or a madman who blew up computer rental stores? People seemed to think he was smart. He had gone to Harvard. I knew what it was. Then I saw his cabin. Why would an intelligent person live this way? And why here?
The sudden media attention suggests the answers. I heard the words “cabin,” “remote,” and “wilderness” repeated on the evening news with an increasingly romantic glow.. I began to understand how coastal people viewed my home state: as a wasteland of opportunity. A haven for thugs, seekers, dropouts, dreamers and the occasional psychopath. A place you could go if things didn’t work out. T-shirts and coffee mugs bearing the slogan “The Last Best Place to Hide” appeared in local souvenir shops.
My life in Montana was not romantic. It was clearly a suburb. I lived two blocks from the local high school. We shopped at Kmart, rented movies from Blockbuster, and ate at a pan-Asian fast food place called Mustard Seed. I listened to Nirvana and wore clothes adorned with Michael Jordan. I had never hunted and I had fished exactly once. Newspaper headlines first alerted me that I was living on the border. I wondered what that meant.
Thinkers like Emerson and Thoreau made the idea of wilderness aspirational, as a place to purify one’s mind and find oneself. Our heroes and outlaws have often played their destiny there, from Lewis and Clark to Billy the Kid via Kerouac and Cassidy. But the West is a place like any other. We simply use it as a mirror to the dark and indomitable aspects of our national character.
Mr. Kaczynski’s story followed this pattern. He left behind a brilliant academic career to test himself in the wild. Once there, he became the avatar of a much older myth: that of the monster lurking in the woods, terrorizing a complacent society. His postal delivery bombs were a twisted, modern touch.
As I absorbed his story over time, I began to wonder if my purpose lay elsewhere. If Montana were a playground for malcontents with pioneering fantasies, I would go out and become a screenwriter in Los Angeles, cleansed of my youth.
Mr. Kaczynski’s capture was my first encounter with the poisonous pit at the center of the American dream. I suddenly felt like a stranger in the only place I had ever truly known.
We are all homeless here. Our maniacal national ambition makes every horizon a testing ground. To stay in one place and do one thing is to fail.
Driven by our ambition to remake ourselves, we cross paths, unaware of the fact that we are following a model as old as our country.
The same was true for Mr. Kaczynski. Homeless and raging, confused, pedantic, reactionary, he pretended to have new ideas to mask his old ambitions, choosing among French philosophers, Luddites and environmentalists. But the truth is, he was just trying to justify what he and so many other boys here want: to get away from their parents, transcend their peers, and remake society in their own image.
The media were wrong. In seeking to romanticize Mr. Kaczynski, journalists gave him Thoreau-like qualities — portraying him as a philosopher who found purpose in the woods, no matter how dark they were. But its only innovation was a new form of cowardly violence. Mr. Kaczynski never really saw Montana, the wilderness, or the West itself, as it really was. For him, its main attribute was the lack of people. He was a twisted embodiment of the frontier dream poisoned from its inception.
Strangely, Mr. Kaczynski’s mythology seems to have only grown since his death. young people I always get the message acrosss of his social media manifesto, creating their own “Uncle Ted” story as a fiery anti-technology prophet. We must hate ourselves, I thought as I read their posts, for the way we look for heroes among the worst among us.
We’re all fed myths about our homes, whether it’s Montana as the last best place to hide or New York as the cultural capital of the world. But these are just stories, often relying on outliers like Mr. Kaczynski. Our hometowns are far more complex than these mythologies, but seeing them as they really are – and loving them in all their tragic beauty – moves us away from destruction and isolation and toward community and life. Stewardship, a deeper form of purpose.
I spent my late teens and twenties on the move, anxious, motivated, and confused. I thought I was looking for purpose and a home, but I rebelled against that very idea. As a good American boy, I was chasing the American dream: not a house and a two-car garage, but rebellion itself.
Last year, tired from the years of loneliness and heartbreak from the pandemic, I returned to Missoula and started my life again. The three-run ski resort is gone and the town has expanded to fill 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 Montana for what it is. Golden grass on dry hills, big skies that usually range from gray to darker gray, clearcuts and abandoned mines and meth-infested towns and glistening wilderness so breathtaking they make me cry . It’s complicated, beautiful and older than I can imagine. One day, in the marrow of my bones, I hope to only know it as home.
