AP photo by Stuart S. White, Great Falls Tribune

Ted Kaczynski's mailbox on Stemple Pass Road near Lincoln, pictured here the day he was arrested, has long since been removed.

Kaczynski craved
solitude, revenge

By Sarah Galbraith

July 23, 1979:  No meat today, but am much enjoying huckleberries. In morning I went to sit on the cliffs not far from camp. I broke a dead juniper stem and much enjoyed its fragrance. Brought some juniper back to camp for firewood to make smoke smell good.

July 24, 1979: The 22nd was very bad for jets - heard many. Yesterday was quite good- heard only 8 jets. Today was good in early morning, but later in morning there was aircraft noise almostwithoutintermission for, I would estimate, about an hour. Then there was a very loud sonic boom. This was the last straw and it reduced me to tears of impotent rage.

Ted Kaczynski’s journal, as transcribed by the FBI

He spent much of his time hiking gulches and mountains, harvesting the wilderness and hunting the forests illegally. He was a hermit. Theodore John Kaczynski lived a solitary life feeding off the land, writing in his journal and destroying lives with his handmade bombs.

His cabin bordered the Helena National Forest only about three miles out of Lincoln, Mont., in the fertile Cannon Gulch.

 “Spartan” was the most striking aspect of Kaczynski’s lifestyle —  “how Spartan it was, says Max Noel, the supervisor on the Unabomber case for the FBI. “It was a very simple lifestyle.” 

The cabin was nestled in the forest near a creek on the 1.4 acres that Kaczynski and his brother had purchased in 1971. The cabin spanned only 10 by 12 feet, about the size of two medium SUVs, not including the cluttered loft. Plywood walls and two small windows were all that separated Kaczynski from the wilderness.

Rural. The cabin was rural by all modern-day standards. Though not far from civilization, Kaczynski did not have the luxuries of running water, electricity, telephone or a bathroom. A small pot-bellied stove provided warmth throughout the chilly and snowy Montana winters. 

Clothes, tools and a modern radio lined the cabin walls.  Kaczynski had no cabinets or drawers; everything hung from the walls or rested on shelves. On the wall, he hung his gray hooded sweatshirt among jeans and other tattered clothing. Shelves lined most of the back wall and held an array of buckets full of paneling nails, razors blades and other scavenged materials that Kaczynski used as shrapnel in his bombs.

Copy photo by Meghan Piercy

FBI agents documented the interior of Ted Kaczynski's cabin after his capture. Max Noel, a retired FBI agent, keeps these photos in a notebook that would have been used if the case had gone to trial.

Kaczynski had no mattress, flannel sheets or down pillows. When he slept in the cabin he rested on an elevated plywood plank that protruded from the wall with a 1-inch foam pad and an old army blanket, according to Noel. Under that bed Noel would later find Kaczynski’s last handmade bomb.

A small garden just to the south of his cabin was Kaczynski’s space to grow vegetables, including his “Wild Yellow Big Carrot.” He fertilized the garden with his own waste. In a 1999 letter to the Missoulian, Kaczynski wrote that he defecated on bark or newspaper, then buried the mess in the garden. However, he did not urinate in the garden “because it seemed to stunt the growth of plants,” he said.

“He would eat everything from porcupines to grass rats,” says Jerry Burns, a retired U.S. Forest Service officer from Lincoln who helped arrest Kaczynski. “He was eating a porcupine once and knocked out one of his new fillings and he got mad at the dentist who had just filled it in.”Snowshoe hares hung from the ceiling. Kaczynski only had a short walk to retrieve aged meat from his root cellar. He built it into the hill just a few yards from his cabin as storage for canned beans, veggies and snowshoe hares. Kaczynski thought the hares tasted better after some aging, recalls Noel. He would hunt year-round, often tracking small animals for miles and meticulously recording the bullets he used, his successes, failures and original recipes. 

Sept. 12, 1972: I put half a cup of lentils, and the mere smigdeon of rice and barley I had left, in the pot with my porcupine meat, also some sagebrush leaves that I got on my hike, a touch of sugar and salt, and boiled up a good soup. By the time the soup was done it was raining, and pretty chilly, so that hot broth really was welcome!

Kaczynski was an explorer — an explorer of McClellan Gulch, of the Helena National Forest, of places already discovered. Summers were his expedition time. A journey seeking silence. For miles and miles, over mountains and in meadows, Kaczynski hiked for weeks, possibly months.

July 24, 1979: Given nothing but silence, solitude, no disturbance from human sources, and a bare minimum of physical necessities, I would have peace, tranquility, and a reasonable modicum of happiness. Given, in addition, lots of wild country to roam over and some kind of work to do for myself, like gathering firewood and picking berries, I would have a generous measure of happiness. But above all I need peace, quiet, and just not beingdisturbed by anyone. I tremendously crave solitude and SILENCE.

Kaczynski wrote in his journals of towering trees and magical meadows. He seemed always impressed with the majestic rugged mountains, beautiful blue lupines and a fulfilling sense of solitude.

July 14, 1979: I slowly climbed to the top of the mountain through this strip of magic meadow. I gathered some mint along the way and felt as if it would bring me luck to drink tea from mint gathered in this enchanted landscape. (I didn’t believe it, of course: it was just a feeling.)

During his journeys Kaczynski was a hunter-gatherer and slept under the Montana skies. He feasted on huckleberries and soapberries. He hunted rabbits, hares, grouse, porcupines and squirrels. When the skies grew dark or in torrents of rain, he would build a fire with foraged wood and huddle close, often in a makeshift lean-to with tree boughs for bedding.

Copy photo by Sara R. Gale

A photocopy of one of Kaczynski's journal entries. This one diagrams where food was stashed.

July 1, 1979: Anyhow, on top of that ridge, I felt pretty tired, and decided to spend the night there, or rather, down on the slope below the ridge, to avoid lightning, on account of all that thunder. So I scraped out a little level nook on the slope to sleep in. But soon the threat of rain began to look serious, so I went up on the ridge to get a lot of fir boughs, and with these I made a kind of shelter over my sleeping-nook. But by the time I finished it, I was soaked with rain and hail, and the wind had become fierce and cold, and my hands were getting stiff with cold…

When Kaczynski returned to his cabin, he would eventually return to Lincoln as well. Regardless of his resentment of civilization, he needed it and its provisions. For transportation, Kaczynski would hop on his old one-speed Schwinn. With a rack on the back of his bike, an old green army surplus bag and an inevitable mud streak up his back, he would head into Lincoln.

Teresa Garland, of Garland’s Town & Country store in Lincoln, says she was more likely to see Ted come into the store on sunny days. “He was really curious to me,” recalls Garland. She would try to strike up a conversation with him. But Ted would only talk if they were alone.

“When we found out he was the Unabomber we all said, ‘Oh not Ted.’ We all called him by his first name because he didn’t need a last name.”

They talked about gardening, trading suggestions and plant tips. She was always impressed that he could get a garden to grow in the high elevation.

Garland was always amused at how Kaczynski paid. He surfed through his pack, pulled out a bag of beans, took the rubber band off the bag and pulled out his checkbook. Afer he paid, he put the checkbook back in the beans, wrapped it back up and put it in his sack.

Kaczynski often bragged about maintaining his hermit lifestyle on $200 a year. Actually, Noel says, he received $600 a year. On his birthday and on Christmas, he would receive $300 from his mother, although  he may have lived off $200 a year for some time. Bomb making and traveling quickly depleted most of his funds, and at his arrest his money was sparse, says Noel.

But no money could buy the silence Kaczynski craved. When he could not get away from noise, Kaczynski struck back. Sometimes it was the sound of dirt bikes in the forest. His remedywas to bind a trip line between two trees across a motorcycle path. On other days it was the sound of construction and logging equipment. He vandalized the equipment — burning it or tearing out parts of the engine.

Kaczynski lived in a world where good days were measured by the number of planes that flew above. The life of the former college professor, once filled with academia and calculations, metamorphosed to a life in which wilderness and solitude reigned supreme. A life where Mother Nature made the calls. A life where calculations were saved for explosive devices. 

October 23, 1979: Before I left on my hike this summer, I put sugar in the gas tank of one of Mason’s snowmobiles. So hopefully he will have some trouble with it this winter. When I went out on my hike this summer I was planning to lie in ambush by some roadside (dirt by-road) a long way from home and shoot some trail-bikers or other mechanized desecrators of the forest, without too much regard for consequences. But once I was out in the woods I started to reconsider, for 2 reasons. One was that once I was out in the woods I felt so good that I started to care about the future again — I wanted to have more years to spend in the woods. The other reason is that I thought of an excellent scheme for revenge on a bigger scale…