by Waits, Chris
I promptly removed the wire from across the path, twisting it together and wrapping it around one of the trees. Still amazed, I cut my hike short and headed back, shaking my head at yet one more mystery in the woods. What would happen next.'^
The next strange event unfolded in the spring of 1977 or '78 about two miles up McClellan, where there was a small piece of property that was one of the last private holdings in the gulch I hadn't been able to buy. Since I owned the rest of the land, I kept the gulch blocked off to prevent theft or vandalism to some of the old structures left from the early mining days.
One afternoon, when I returned from town, I saw that my cable across the road had been removed and fresh vehicle tracks led up through the timber. I followed them and found a man who had hauled a small crawler tractor with a dozer to excavate and mine along the streambed.
He said he was working with a Missoula man who had purchased the property, which puzzled me because the owner was from Helena and I had been trying for several years to work out a purchase agreement with him.
I didn't argue, deciding to let him stay while I found out what was happening.
Soon he erected a small, twelve-foot-square tin-covered cabin, and started to build a road above and beyond a historic section of the gulch. I visited the site one day while he was gone and felt sick about the damage I saw. Trees were pushed over with root balls sticking into the air, and the logs were covered with dirt. No drainage dips were
constructed in the road so the runoff was cutting a channel into the road bed causing severe erosion and siltation of the stream. I felt especially had because I had tried to be friendly and the man had promised he would treat the fragile mountain terrain with due respect. I had e en ridden up earlier with him to help imload a small chest freezer to use as a cooler for his food.
I called the Helena man who owned the property. He was furious, and the whole property dispute headed for court.
Several days later the miner arrived, went up the gulch where he had been working, and promptly returned.
He was angry. Someone had trashed his cabin, vandalized his small bulldozer and stolen its magneto so the dozer wouldn't run. He wanted to know why I would let people go through my locked gate and up the gulch.
I assured him I hadn't and I was unaware of the vandalism. I went on to say that w hoever damaged his cabin and dozer must have hiked in over the ridge from the south.
He reported the incident to the Lincoln deputy sheriff and I promised I would keep a closer watch and would check his things from time to time when he was away. I didn't want any of my things vandalized either, and hoped the culprit would be caught.
It was a real mystery. But the mining activity and the man's careless damage to the environment were obviously bothering someone other than me.
The property dispute was settled quickly in court. The original owner, the Helena man I knew; prevailed. Soon after the court decision the miner obtained a replacement magneto, repaired his tractor and hauled it home.
He w^as gone, but his mess remained. A few years later I was able to buy the piece of property, but the mystery still was unsolved.
After that incident had come more and more acts of vandalism and theft. These weren't the acts of teen pranksters in the w^oods for a weekend kegger. For example, an area rancher found one of his cows shot dead, but neither hide nor flesh taken. A feW' years after that, area electric power went off one late summer day. That in itself isn't unusual in the Lincoln area, but a few days later I happened to have coffee with a Montana Power Company employee. He mentioned
that someone had chopped down a power pole, as if felHng a tree, and that caused the outage.
The only common denominator: everything was happening in the Stemple Pass area. The only lull in the activity lasted from summer 1978 into 1979, which at the time I didn't relate to Ted's absence from the area.
One late summer afternoon around 1979 the local deputy pulled up into my yard, got out of his pickup, and began to question me about who might have been involved in an incident he was investigating.
Somebody had demolished an almost new and very nice cabin less than a half mile from Ted's home place.
The deputy, whom I knew well, mentioned a couple of possible suspects. Then he brought up Ted Kaczynski's name.
"I don't know who would have done this, but I know it wouldn't be Ted," was my immediate response.
At that time I really believed that statement. I hadn't yet seen the side of Ted that was capable of such a crime.
We discussed other possibilities. Then I asked him, "Why would Ted be considered a suspect anyway.^"
The cabin owner said he and his kids had ridden their snowmobiles up around Ted's cabin and it had made him extremely upset, the deputy replied. I explained the family had done the same thing to me and I was upset at the time. I caught them and told them to leave.
I argued that if I had the same motive and didn't do it, that fact alone wasn't enough to pin it on Ted. The deputy agreed.
We then talked about the cabin and the destruction. I was shocked. The person responsible had devastated the cabin and machines parked there and most everything was beyond salvaging. An ax had been used to hack a hole in the cabin to gain access. After entering, he then had chopped up the kitchen cabinets and emptied the contents of the refrigerator and thrown them across the floor. Mustard, glue, bleach, and other substances were squirted and poured all over the carpet, furnishings, and bedding. Even the phones were smashed and phone lines were pulled out of the walls.
Virtually no spot inside the cabin was left unscathed. All this anger was then directed outside where, after growing tired of unscrewing
fasteners around the window of the small mobile home used as a eamper, he fmally smashed the glass to get inside, and ravaged the camper.
The snowmobiles and motorcycles were next. After chopping and slashing the machines, he pounded and broke their engines with an ax. Some things, like a chain saw, just disappeared without a trace.
It was a scene of destruction. Whoever was responsible was a very angry and vengeful person. At the time, I heard the damage w^as estimated to be from $20,000 to $25,000.
I couldn't believe it. Who could have committed this terrible act.^ I had successfully helped get Ted off the hook, and even if there was a question of his guilt or innocence at the time, nothing could be proven. Whoever w^as responsible w^ould get away with the crime for the time being.
Everv' area around my home was hit. It seemed as though nobody w^as safe.
During the late summer of 1980, a family moved onto some property that had just been logged. They set up a camp and had a couple of motorcycles for mountain transportation. The family left for several days. When they returned they found the motorcycles a sorry sight. All the tires were slashed, the bikes were smashed up and sugar had been poured into the gas tanks. The motorcycles were nearly destroyed.
Earlier that same summer a potentially deadly episode occurred in my gulch. I had just moved a 16-by-26-foot cabin to a spot near the trailer where I w as living.
I had started a low-scale logging operation, selectively removing some large Douglas-firs that w^ere beginning to die or fall over undercut banks heavily eroded by a recent spring flood. I skidded the logs down to a landing near the Stemple Road w^here I decked and prepared them for hauling to the Champion International peeler mill west at Bonner, Montana.
I left for the weekend on a welding job near Toston, some ninety miles to the southeast. I had hooked up power to the new^ cabin since I planned to fix it up and build an addition at some point. I accidentally left a light on when I left, and I never locked the doors since
the building was tucked away in brush and trees, and was barely visible from the main road.
When I returned I was alarmed to find a bullet hole through the wall just below a window near the light that had been left on. The bullet had ripped through the wall at an angle about chest high and then hit a protruding corner next to a mir
ror. If it had pierced the corner it would have shattered the mirror.
I followed the path of the bullet by line of sight and determined this was no accident. The trajectory led to a cluster of trees and brush on the hill behind the cabin far from the road where someone could have discharged a gun.
Ted was the last one I ever would have suspected. Looking back I now realize how easy it would have been for him to think it was a person other than me in the new cabin. I never had explained to anyone what I was doing. Logs piled along the road, a new cabin moved in, the circumstances could be interpreted as signs that some loggers had moved into the gulch and were beginning operations. Ted knew the cabin and tractor I later found out he vandalized a couple of years earlier didn't belong to me so it would be easy for him to think this situation was similar.
What topped everything else about the shooting was that whoever fired the gun then entered the cabin to see if he'd hit anyone. When he found the building empty he dug the slug out of the wall, removing any possibility of identifying it. Later I explained to Ted about the logging activity and that I was trying to save the timber before it toppled into the stream, and told him about my new cabin. He looked surprised and concerned. Although I said I was finished logging here and never wanted to take more trees out of McClellan Gulch other than ones I was losing, I never mentioned anything to him about the bullet hole in the wall.
After a short lull, a period of relative calm, Lincoln area residents were surprised to learn of a cowardly shooting.
Two men had started a small placer mining operation in a streambed that flowed into a drainage some fifteen miles southeast of where we live on Stemple. After clearing the timber and brush from the site they set up a gold washing plant and equipment used for excavation and moving placer material.
Things went smoothly tor a while. Then one afternoon one of the men was perched atop the washing plant. He bent over to inspect the machine while it was operating.
A shot rang out. The man fell over, hit in the back. Miraculously he survived, but after a long, slow, and painful recover^', he remains partially crippled to this day.
The gun used in the shooting was a 30-30, determined by ballistic tests on the slug that was recoered. Once again, there was plenty of speculation, but nobody was ever charged; the shooter remained at large. Now the stakes were even higher; a man's life and health entered into the equation.
From the early 1980s on, rumors surfaced from time to time that someone was shooting at aircraft: helicopters, planes, even passenger jets far overhead. Nobody knew where the shots were coming from. At the time I questioned the validity of the reports because I didn't believe anyone around Lincoln could do such a thing. There was much I hadnt learned yet.
With the summer of 1981 came another bid for a logging job. During the 1970s and 1980s, logging and road construction contracts on National Forest land were on the upswing. The emphasis on increased timber production directed from the federal officials in Washington, D.C., trickled all the way down to the Lincoln District. It was a period of high productivity, with local foresters' jobs graded critically by the board foot—the amount of lumber the public forests were yielding.
This dictum ended in 1990, when the Forest Service philosophy swung in favor of multiple use and the recreational value of public land.
During the period of high timber productivity many millions of board feet were logged around Lincoln, and dozens of forest roads built, with one new local road system alone stretching into twenty miles of otherwise inaccessible mountain terrain.
One of the logging jobs contracted during the summer of 1981 was located east of Dalton Mountain Road, less than ten miles by road and five by air from where Ted and I lived. Rubber-tired skidders were being used on the job. There also was new road construction
into a mountain area some wanted to remain roadless. The contractor had crawler tractors for building roads, a log loader and other equipment at the site. The job had run smoothly for a year, until the late summer of 1982.
Leaving the site one day after work, the crew felt all the equipment was secure behind a locked Forest Service gate, ready to go when they returned.
Since it was the end of August, fire season was in full swing, with fire lookouts constantly scanning the forests for any early sign of trouble.
When a call came in that smoke was sighted near the timber sale area, a fire crew was immediately dispatched. A short time later they pulled their fire trucks into the area and found the log loader had been set on fire, and that flames then spread to one of the rubber-tired skid-ders, leaving charred smoking hulks of steel. Flames also had spread to nearby trees and several acres were burned. Fire fighters were able to extinguish the blaze quickly before it built into a dangerous forest fire.
Investigators determined damage to the machinery alone was $75,000. The stakes were escalating. Whoever was responsible had turned from vandalism to total destruction of local cabins and expensive equipment.
How could this criminal be caught with no one knowing where or when he would strike next.^ He was clever; no clues were left behind.
In late May 1985, a little thing happened that meant nothing at the time but would take on great significance a dozen years later, when I learned of Ted's travels as the Unabomber. I drove my 1975 light blue Blazer out of my shop after overhauling its automatic transmission. The vehicle was new to me. I had purchased it in Butte, making a good deal because of the transmission problems. It would be a fine vehicle for my wife to drive during the winter, since she was still working at the time and usually left home before the snowplows got out to clear the road.
After locking my shop doors, I headed for home, eager to let Betty try out the vehicle. I crossed the Stemple Bridge over the Blackfoot River, passed the square concrete-block sheriff's office just outside of Lincoln, and headed south along the gravel road. About a quarter of
Top: Incinerated rubber-tired log sl
Center: In addition to destroying logging equipment, the vandal nearly caused a major forest fire.
Bottom: The log loader was a total loss.
a mile ahead I spotted someone holding his thumb out, walking backward and trying to hitchhike. As I got closer it looked like Ted. I was taken aback as I had never seen him hitchhike, before or since.
He had no way of knowing I was driving the Blazer, since neither he nor anyone else in Lincoln had yet seen it. I pulled up alongside and he promptly hopped in, appearing relieved it was me and not some stranger.
I knew he had just arrived in Lincoln from town, probably Missoula, because of his dress and the time of day. He was wearing his "going to town clothes," a little nicer than his everyday garb, and he carried his small nylon travel pack, not the larger green canvas army pack he always carried while hiking around Lincoln. Also, it was just a few minutes after the bus arrives daily from Missoula, a little after 3:15 P.M.
Ted barely acknowledged what I was saying, even with me talking non-stop about my new vehicle. He seemed even deeper in thought than usual, anxious and nervous, and he was in a hurry. As I pulled up to his mailbox where I often dropped him off, he barely uttered his usual thanks or good-bye as he promptly got out, and immediately headed toward his cabin. Even though it puzzled me at the time, I passed it off, eager to get to home to present the Blazer to Betty.
In the fall of 1986 I started to spend all my spare time cutting lumber at my sawmill so I could expand our home. I was building an atrium where I could install a large spa, raise exotic birds and grow tropical plants. One day after milling lumber all morning I walked toward the house to get something for lunch, leaving my pickup over by the sawmill, where it was invisible from Stemple Road.
As I approached the door I heard Ted coming up the road, his bike chain squeaking as usual, the pace quickening as he neared my driveway. Betty was at work and with my pickup out of sight, it appeared nobody was home.
All at once our dogs, which were loose and lying on the lawn, ran out toward Ted bark
ing wildly. The sight, sound or smell of him still drove the dogs mad. What happened next stunned me.
Ted let fly with a string of extreme profanities that floored me. I had never even heard him cuss before.
Was Ted so controlled he could display total calm on the outside while he was seething with anger inside.^ I was learning new things
about my friend. Looking; back, ccn \ hen considering such odd behavior, there was nothing concrete so I remained in a state of denial, refusing to consider him guilty of anything.
After that incident, though, I knew Ted had a great deal of hidden anger. What I didn't know was how he had handled it and would in the future. How well did I really know Ted.'^ I talked to Betty about the incident and I was surprised to fmd out she had heard the same vicious profanities several times.
When I asked why she hadn't told me, she replied, "Why.^ I don't know Ted and whether it's out of character for him or not." I saw her point. Ted never waved to her or took a ride with me when she was present, so why would she recognize his "usual" behavior.-'
Early in the fall of 1986, my wife came home from her job permanently. She was having great difficult^^ with her back, lifting sixrv-pound tubs of meat all day long on a cement floor at the High Countrv' Beef Jerky plant, where she had been employed for more than seven years.
Her constant presence at home would change things in the gulch for Ted, giving him less privacy around the access area near Stemple Road. I continued to use every spare moment away from my logging activities to work on my new building addition, finishing the roof, and buttoning things up for winter.
The first heavy winter storms came relatively late even though there were periods of-30° temperatures and some light snowfall during Januarsr'.
