Self-Sufficient Loner Lived Life Montanans Understood

The winters can be evil: 40 below for days at a time, snow piled up off Baldy Mountain so you can’t get into town, streams frozen over.

Winter and summer, Ted Kaczynski kept to his 10-by-12-foot cabin, emerging whenever the snow cleared enough to bicycle into town. If it didn’t clear, he walked--or he waited.

It was, even by remote Lincoln’s standards, an unbelievably hard path through this life:

Hand chopping wood to burn to keep warm. Carrying water. Growing potatoes and carrots and parsnips in the garden--the only things that would survive during the scant two months the sun shines hard in this high bowl in the Rocky Mountains. There was candlelight by which to read the obscure foreign-language texts Kaczynski persuaded the local library to order from outside.

Off and on, Kaczynski worked at his neighbor’s lumber mill, pocketing enough cash to buy groceries or stand at the pay phone and make a call. There was good hunting in the mountains, a rabbit or two to catch if you went out early in the morning. River trout, moist and tender when cooked over an open fire, lurk in the pools of the Blackfoot.

It was a life Lincoln could respect; a good part of the population has ventured up onto this high saddle of the Continental Divide to be similarly left alone.

“There’s people living out in the woods. It’s just a nature way of living. No electricity, it’s like the old ways. That’s what people like to get back to, the old ways. Basically, they don’t like the new technology. And it’s funny, I guess the bomber didn’t either,” said a Lincoln resident who identified himself only as Harry, talking about the suspected Unabomber’s treatises against modern technology.

“It takes a hardy soul to be that reclusive. You got to work at it just to survive up there. He could get snowed in pretty good,” said a neighbor, Kelly McKillips, who himself lived in a tepee when he first came to Lincoln. “We all live here for our own reasons. We just want to be left alone. I understand wanting to be left alone.

“You can die in a matter of minutes in this country in the winter. But Ted was seasoned, he knew how to take care of himself,” McKillips said.

“My son lives like that,” said Geraldine Andrews, sitting for hours over a cup of coffee at one of the local cafes. “He gets up at the crack of dawn and goes for a walk. If the dogs catch a rabbit, they bring it home and cook it. I couldn’t live like that. And if he’s done it, he’s accomplished something very few people ever have.

“You know,” she said, “I’m content. But I don’t think I can say I’ve ever really been happy. My son says for the first time in his life, he feels closer to God than he’s ever felt. And he was raised a Pennsylvania Lutheran. I think he’s happy.”

According to records at the local newspaper, the Blackfoot Valley Dispatch, Kaczynski bought the cabin with his brother, David, in 1971, and had lived in it for at least the past seven years.

Yet two days of scrutiny by the international press has yet to produce a single Lincoln resident who says they were Kaczynski’s friend, or that they ever heard he had one.

Butch Gehring out at the lumber mill near his cabin got along with him pleasantly; when Kaczynski had extra parsnips from his garden, he’d take them over to Eileen and Dick Lundberg, his neighbors about a mile away. But he didn’t stay for dinner. The family of Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) lives eight miles down the road. Baucus never heard of him.

“We socialize with all of our immediate neighbors, but with Ted, it just never came up,” Eileen Lundberg said.

Lots of people gave him lifts on the road into town, or even down to Helena on occasion. They had to. The sight of the thin, bearded man, usually dressed in black and wearing sunglasses, plodding through the weather, usually gave them pangs of guilt.

“The only thing people would talk about was how that man would ride that bicycle every month of the year, whether it was rain or snow or mud up to your knee. Most people didn’t even know his name was Ted--he was just the guy on the bike,” recalled Beverly Coleman, who used to volunteer at the library when Kaczynski would visit.

At his request, she said, the library always put back copies of all the Montana papers, from Billings, Helena and Missoula. They didn’t get any outside papers, but Kaczynski was always asking them to order books from other libraries, often in foreign languages.

“He likes stuff that’s really off-the-wall and hard to get,” said Coleman, who couldn’t remember any specific subjects. “A lot of stuff he wanted was out of print, and a lot of stuff he wanted was in the original. He didn’t want to read the English translations. If it was music, it would be the classics. God, the man must’ve had a brain on him that’s unreal.”

Occasionally, Kaczynski would stop at the self-service laundry, then wander into Garland’s Town and Country variety store next door to browse while he was waiting for his clothes to dry.

“He’d come in about once a week, and he’d buy stuff like socks and fishing lures,” said Teresa Brown, a clerk. “He always paid with small bills--just to the dollar more, and get some change back.”

Brown said she stopped trying to strike up conversations. “Gossip here is very, very big. But him, no one tried. You got the impression after the second time talking to him that he didn’t want to talk. He’s just someone who, after a while, you just let him go his own way.”