Subject This guy can write
June 8, 2003
Why We Fed the Bomber
By ALLAN GURGANUS
ILLSBOROUGH, N.C.
Straight down the back of ornery American life, there runs
this mythic skunk stripe: the cantankerous outlaw
protester. "Are you talking to me? . . . " And Eric
Rudolph, 36, my fellow North Carolinian, belongs right
there, curled along our nation's bristling Mohawk cusp.
Though, God knows, I never met the fellow socially, I can
call forth both his blessed landscape and harsh bloodline.
His tale seems a green boomerang hurled forward from the
19th century. James Fenimore Cooper might help place him in
the forest, Twain could take a chain saw to his knotted
family tree.
Iraq may seem incomprehensible to us, being as it is the
size of California. But North Carolina is only the size of
. . . North Carolina. And so it may be useful to see Eric
Rudolph as he is viewed at home, by us. Not by Japanese
reporters and the 200 federal agents so busy swarming the
bushes for him, they couldn't see him in the trees.
When Eric Rudolph got into bad trouble, he did not head
right to Mexico. He did what another local from just over
the mountain said you could not do again: he came straight
home. He survived five Cherokee County winters outdoors,
living in a cliff-top bed of rhododendrons at an altitude
so high these bushes never bloomed, eating home-killed
venison and wild turkey, stray lizards and handout canned
tuna.
His deranged beliefs have already sentenced him to years in
solitary confinement. Their strange clarity set him aside
from other domestic terrorists. Whereas the two snipers'
sole idea seemed to be collecting a $10 million
cease-and-desist fee, Mr. Rudolph phoned in warnings of the
Olympic bomb. No member of his family has sold the rights
to his story. He somehow knew that the land and his
neighbors would accept then favor him.
How could he be sure? North Carolina's state motto is one
of the few that matters: "To be rather than to seem." Often
described as a valley of humility between two mountains of
conceit ? Richmond to the north and Charleston to the south
? North Carolina has always been a state of small yeoman
farmers who in the old days owned so few slaves, ours was
one of the last states to join the Confederacy. Here, to be
called "a common person" still constitutes high praise.
The truest answers are the ones of being, not appearing. To
locals, it didn't matter if a neighbor had been named the
most wanted and dangerous criminal in America (at least of
the blue-collar sort, since no one from Enron has yet made
the list). Everybody knew him. He worked as a freelance
carpenter. This guy enjoyed a sterling reputation,
especially if you were white. He trucked to work wearing
clean clothes, he used the best materials, he stayed until
the job was done. He undercharged. He said "sir" and
"ma'am." Last Monday, when Eric Rudolph appeared, manacled,
before the judge in Asheville, N.C., his only words were,
"Yes, your honor."
You see, manners matter here, even to our bombers. You
could dislike Jesse Helms and still admire his office's
constituent services, best in the Senate. Whatever your
political pieties, if your freshman daughter's passport had
just been stolen in Ecuador, the boy who answered the
senator's phone never tried, "Can we get back to you next
week on this?" Staff members stayed on the line until the
embassy had been informed, until you could give your
sobbing girl precise directions to replacement documents
waiting there in Quito.
"We look after our own" is often heard. We clean up after
our tired, our poor, our privately and publicly insane.
Flannery O'Connor, asked once too often for a defining
trait of the American South, shot back with some pride,
that Southerners write about freaks "because we are still
able to recognize one." I think Miss O'Connor meant, we
know that we ourselves might be that freak with very few
shifts of circumstance. This apparently isn't common
knowledge elsewhere. We can't afford to forget it, what
with Johnny Cash, Tennessee Williams and Elvis topping our
list.
The mountains of North Carolina, famously beautiful, have
attracted Scott and Zelda ? and the whole militia movement.
Our Appalachians have heartened tubercular cases told that
air this thin is good for them. Thousands of dulcimer
makers named Tree and Sunshine thrive here, alongside every
brand of separatist Armageddon cult our great nation can
hide down a dirt road.
When, in the mid-17th century, the state was settled by
Irish, Scottish and Welsh families like mine, the tractable
profit-oriented types stayed where my own did, on flat
fertile land where money could be made. The straightness of
your farm's furrows bespoke your manly worth. The dodgier
sorts, those whose views proved so extreme that each family
constituted a unique political party and church
denomination, kept heading for the hills. From up there, on
a peak spectacular if inhospitable to anything but further
rocks, you could see what was coming at you, 360 degrees.
The folk music brought to that new land from the Old World
often chronicled some curly-headed youth who'd killed by
accident one of "the king's men," quickly retreating to the
dewy dells to live a romantic life of admiring farmers'
daughters and dust-ups with the next wave of soldiers sent
to shoot him. Several years back, Denis Johnson, the
novelist, recorded the tradition's continuing:
He never meant to hurt no one,
He wouldn't harm a fly,
The Lord knows Eric Rudolph
Didn't want that man to die.
But he could not justify
Knowing all the things they done
So to stop that baby-killing factory
He built a home-made bomb.
And you wonder why local people left food out for him? He
might have killed strangers using bombs chockablock with
masonry nails from the local hardware store, but this
community was as proud as poor. It had its own subtle daily
sense of justice. Different from the clanky mechanism of
the F.B.I. descending overnight onto a burg this small.
Guys wearing lumberjack gear probably ordered Fed-Ex from
catalogs. It could spoil your day to see their plastic
ear-wires, not quite hidden under hunting caps so new
they'd probably been stomped rugged in the parking lot out
back.
The feds literally asked locals which cave Eric Rudolph
might like best, as soldiers would later grill amused
Afghan tribesmen. Agents assumed there were ? what? ? four
to 10 caverns and limestone hideouts, not 15,001, many of
them known only to Indians and Eric.
So ? with the F.B.I. swarming your general store, with the
TV crews trying to siphon power from your service stations,
whose owners learned after one staggering month's bill to
check for telltale black cords ? this is how it was when
you saw him, skinnier than ever, cross the far corner of
your own backyard. You felt a jolt. The glimpse was
thrilling as a brush with Bigfoot. And since you knew he'd
been in school with your daughter, and knew where your path
entered the woods and guessed he would come back this way,
you figured you might leave out a few cans of tuna. They'd
do fine in the rain. No note. It was understood.
By offering a clean million as reward, the F.B.I. brought
bounty hunters down on Eric Rudolph and on us. While their
four-wheel drives never got stuck, and the flies on their
hats were hand-tied, these nosy, muscled guys weren't
welcomed either. They spent too much time eavesdropping
while waxing their hook-end moustaches. If the agents ate
at diners in groups, the bounty hunter sat alone on the
stool at the far end, with a view of the door, a glimpse of
the kitchen and the bathroom. It seemed only fair they went
home empty-handed, every one of them.
Eric Rudolph's family might have been crazy, but it was a
local kind of crazy. His mother subscribed to white
supremacist magazines and let the close-knit kids fend for
themselves. Compare Eric's brother to the brother of
America's other recent troubled woodsman ? Theodore
Kaczynski. When the Unabomber's kinsman recognized a
certain clogged prose and obsessive references to the
writer's own brilliance, he phoned the F.B.I. (They took a
while to get back to him.) And Daniel Rudolph? If only
William Faulkner were alive to set it down. In 2001, to
protest his brother's fugitive status, Daniel Rudolph
rigged a camcorder on a tripod in his South Carolina
garage. "This is for the F.B.I. and the media," he said on
the tape he would soon send to federal agents. Then,
dressed in a white shirt and a tie, he turned toward the
spinning radial-arm saw. Making sure to get a good shot,
all alone in his closed garage, he lopped off his entire
left hand. After applying a tourniquet, he (off camera by
now) drove himself to an emergency room. An ambulance soon
returned to fetch the severed hand, which was surgically
reattached. Did he sign the consent form?
After receiving the unsolicited tape, the F.B.I., as if to
defend itself from the sickening mistake of watching it
just once, issued a simple statement, beautifully
reasonable: "Daniel Rudolph's decision to maim himself is
regrettable and totally unexpected."
Regrettable and totally unexpected, all the Rudolph
families in the annals of America. People who, accustomed
to failure, make that their merit. Folks who'll find
reasons, foes, religions, races, to bear the brunt of such
vast generational disappointment. Violence, for them so
personalized and omnipresent, comes to seem their bully
pulpit of achievement. Unto death itself.
During the years Eric Rudolph was hiding from his crimes,
other deeds more dastardly than his have been committed. In
the names of nations and causes even crazier than his,
thousands have died in a day. By now, those two deaths and
more than 100 injuries attributed to Mr. Rudolph look less
shocking than the first brunt of fear we felt then. (Unless
of course, you are related to, among others, the dead
police officer, the woman who was killed while celebrating
her daughter's 14th birthday at an open-air concert at
Centennial Olympic Park, the clinic nurse who was maimed.)
Have five years' terrors numbed us to Eric Rudolph's
demonstrations of his wild faith in the fetus, the family,
the flag?
Sometimes, speeding my station wagon to a next appointment,
with the car phone biting into my neck, I'll chance past
some stand of woods. Late light slants far back into the
forest. Sunset ignites some fine natural amphitheater, an
enclosing shelter made only from the blooming boughs of
redbud, dogwood. My state is still one of the most
forested. As Eric Rudolph knew. As the F.B.I. found out.
That bower yonder seems so planned, so safe, inevitable, I
decide I am going to slam this car into a ditch, and cover
it with evergreens, then walk clear in and just go back
there and live in that, my grove. Who will really miss me
enough to hunt out this far? After six weeks of berries and
grouse, or probably crows, after chopping my firewood, you
know my muscle tone will be just great. My peace of mind
will have returned to some native certainty, a birdsonged
silence stretching between that last thunder and whatever
ancient tree falls next.
I convince myself I could survive here, as my forebears
did. The woods are still right out here as an option. Maybe
in this grove you could rebuild some old Belief. Or, to
manage that, to really see this place, do you have to be in
hiding?
Allan Gurganus is author of the novel ??Oldest Living
Confederate Widow Tells All,?? an adaptation of which will
open on Broadway in the fall.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |
