On June 10th of last year, homegrown terrorist Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, was found dead in his cell in Butner, North Carolina. Kaczynski, who had been serving 25 years in federal prison for killing three people and wounding 23 with a mail bomb, reportedly committed suicide.
The news upset me because I was writing a novel about Mr. Kaczynski.
A year later, the book is finished and the news has faded, but I’m still trying to unravel the myths surrounding the Unabomber’s life — the life of a tormented exile who found refuge in the American West, and the myths that have influenced my own life.
I grew up in Missoula, about 80 miles from the Unabomber’s cabin in the Montana wilderness, and was 11 years old when he was captured. What I remember most about that time is a sense of anxiety. I saw helicopters in the sky and heard the quiet anxiety in my parents’ voices. I didn’t know who the Unabomber was or what he had done, but I knew it was important, and dark. Suddenly, my home state was in the national spotlight.
Up until then, as a kid, I felt like the furthest thing from the center. Western Montana in the 1990s wasn’t a place that made national news except for the occasional environmental disaster and the annual Testicle Festival (a multi-day celebration of fried cow genitals that drew the attention of the salacious press). Home to me meant the dilapidated fields behind the hospital where the football team practiced in the spring, the rickety green lifts of the three-run ski resort I took the school bus to every Friday afternoon, and the dreary shopping mall where I wandered again and again with my friends.
At first, I had no idea who the Unabomber was. Was he an environmentalist fighting back against lumber companies, or a madman blowing up computer rental stores? Everyone seemed to think he was smart. He’d gone to Harvard. I knew what it was. Then I saw his cabin. Why would a smart person live like that? And why here?
The sudden media attention hinted at the answer. On the evening news, I heard the words “cabin,” “remote place,” and “wilderness” repeated with an increasingly romantic sheen.. I began to understand how people along the coast saw my hometown: as a wilderness of possibility. A refuge for outcasts, seekers, dropouts, dreamers, and the occasional psychopath. A place to go when things go wrong. T-shirts and coffee mugs with the slogan “The Last Best Place to Hide” appeared in local souvenir shops.
My life in Montana was not romantic. It was decidedly suburban. I lived two blocks from the local high school. We shopped at Kmart, rented movies at Blockbuster, and ate at an Asian fast-food restaurant called the Mustard Seed. I listened to Nirvana and wore clothes with Michael Jordan on them. I never hunted, and I fished only once. It wasn’t until a newspaper headline told me I lived on the frontier, and I wondered what this meant.
Thinkers like Emerson and Thoreau cultivated the notion of the wilderness as a place to purify the soul and find one’s true self. Our heroes and outlaws, from Lewis and Clark to Billy the Kid, Kerouac and Cassidy, have often played out their destinies there. But the West is a place like any other; we simply use it as a mirror to reflect the darker, wilder side of our national character.
Kaczynski’s career follows this blueprint: He left a successful academic career to test himself in nature, where he became the incarnation of a much older myth, of a monster lurking in the forest and terrorizing a complacent society. His mail bomb was a modern twist.
As I spent time absorbing his stories, I began to wonder if my purpose lay elsewhere: If Montana was a playground for rebels with pioneering dreams, I would leave and become a screenwriter in Los Angeles, redeeming my youth.
Kaczynski’s arrest was my first encounter with the poisonous hole at the heart of the American dream, and I suddenly felt like a stranger in the only place I’d ever known.
We are all homeless here. Our frenzied national ambition makes every horizon a proving ground. To stay in one place and do only one thing is a failure.
Driven by our ambition to reinvent ourselves, we pass each other by, unaware of the fact that we are following patterns as old as our country.
So was Mr. Kaczynski. Homeless, abusive, confused, pedantic and reactionary, he mixed up French philosophers, Luddites and environmentalists and pretended to have new ideas to mask old ambitions. But the truth is, he was just trying to justify what he and so many other boys here wanted: to get away from their parents, to transcend their peers, to remake society in their own image.
The media got him wrong. Reporters tried to romanticize Kaczynski, giving him a Thoreau-like character, a philosopher who found purpose in the dark woods. But his only innovation was a new, uncouth violence. Kaczynski never saw Montana, the wilderness, or the West itself, as it really was. To him, its main characteristic was its lack of people. He was a distorted embodiment of the frontier dream that had poisoned him from the beginning.
Oddly, Kaczynski’s myth seems to have grown even after his death. Young people still spread his manifestos on social media, creating stories of “Uncle Ted” as a fiery anti-technology prophet. Reading their posts, I felt like we should hate ourselves for seeking heroes from the worst in us.
We’ve all been implanted with myths about home – that Montana is the last good place to hide, that New York City is the cultural capital of the world – but these are just stories, and they often rely on exceptional characters like Kaczynski. Our home is much more complex than these myths, but seeing it for what it is, loving it in all its tragic beauty, moves us away from destruction and isolation and towards community and stewardship, a deeper form of purpose.
I spent my late teens and twenties bouncing around, anxious, impulsive, confused. I thought I was looking for a purpose and a home, but I was rebelling against the very idea. Like a good American boy, I was chasing the American dream. Not a house and a two-car garage, but rebellion itself.
Last year, exhausted after years of pandemic loneliness and grief, I returned to Missoula to start a new life. The three ski runs are gone, and the town has sprawled out to fill the valley, but the towering mountains and towering trees are still there, and there are plenty of places to get lost.
Every day I wake up and try to see Montana as it is: the golden grass on its dry hills, the big gray-gray skies, the clearcuts and abandoned mines and drug-ridden towns and sparkling wilderness that brings tears to my eyes. It is more complex and beautiful and ancient than I could ever imagine. I hope that one day, in my bones, I will know this place only as home.
