Posted on 06/08/2003 7:13:32 AM PDT by Archangelsk
Why We Fed the Bomber
By ALLAN GURGANUS
HILLSBOROUGH, 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.
And, damn, the boy can write.
The FBI didn't catch him, some local rookie cop did. But, typical of the FBI, they are only too happy to take credit.
The horse in question is probably the only native Carolinan who wasn't demeaned or insulted by this romantic tripe.
For some further insight into this person check the above website.
The Tarheel
Given that his guy is native to NC I hope that he at least 'drove' into the mountains of NC!
The Tarheel
The Tarheel
This is a hit pievce on the people who live in the mountains of North Carolina who even though I have never been there are from reports of people I trust who have lived there pretty much the same as most other people. They just have a more distinctive accent and from my view a very pleasent sounding one.
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