The Unabomber, Me and the Poisoned Myth of the American West

On June 10 of last year, Ted Kaczynski, the homegrown terrorist known as the Unabomber, was found dead in his cell in Butner, N.C. Mr. Kaczynski, who had spent 25 years in federal prison for murdering three people and injuring 23 others with mail bombs, had reportedly died by suicide.

The news jarred me. I was writing a novel about Mr. Kaczynski.

One year later, the book is finished and the news has faded, but I’m still untangling the mythologies that surrounded the Unabomber’s life — of the tortured outcast who sought refuge in the American West — from the ones that influenced my own.

I grew up in Missoula, about 80 miles from the Unabomber’s shack in the Montana wilderness and was 11 at the time of his capture. What I remember most from those days is a sense of disturbance. 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 important — and dark. So much so that my home state was suddenly the center of national attention.

Until then I’d felt about as far from the center as a kid could be. Western Montana in the 1990s was not a place that made the national news, save for an occasional environmental disaster and the annual Testicle Festival — a days-long debauch of fried steer genitals that attracted seedier press. To me, home meant the patchy fields behind the hospital where my soccer team practiced in the spring, the green rattletrap chairlift at the three-run ski hill the school bus brought us to every Friday afternoon, the dismal mall my friends and I wandered in endless loops.

At first I was confused about who the Unabomber actually was. Was he an environmental avenger striking back at timber companies, or a madman blowing up computer rental stores? People seemed to think he was smart. He’d gone to Harvard. I knew what that was. Then I saw his shack. Why would a smart person live that way? And why here?

The sudden media attention hinted at the answers. I heard the words “cabin,” “remote” and “wilderness” repeated on the evening news with an increasingly romantic luster. I began to see how people on the coasts viewed my home state: as a wilderness of possibility. A refuge for ruffians, seekers, dropouts, dreamers and the occasional psychopath. Someplace you could go if things didn’t work out. T-shirts and coffee mugs bearing the slogan “The Last Best Place to Hide” popped up in local souvenir stores.