The Last Refuge
It’s no wonder the brother of the Unabomber suspect came to the desert near Terlingua to disappear; for years renegades and recluses have found their way to this forgotten corner of Texas.
THE CABIN, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN these parts, is out in the middle of nowhere. Getting there requires so many crisscrosses on so many primitive unmapped roads that the visitor’s expectations are scarcely prepared for the meager payoff. Situated on a flat expanse of cactus, greasewood, and curiously colored rocks, the two-room wood cabin resembles a slightly oversized pink outhouse. Aside from the amateurish mural of a coyote and an owl painted on the door, the dwelling is profoundly featureless. The sheer act of building it way out in the desert must have been a labor of love, which is itself odd, since its setting offers no coveted overlook and the mountains of Big Bend National Park are distant black monoliths off to the east. The nearest human neighbor is five miles away; until reporters found out about the cabin in mid-April, its likeliest visitors were coyotes, mule deer, rattlesnakes, and above all, the desert dust and the murderous West Texas heat.
The owner of the cabin, a Schenectady, New York, resident named David Kaczynski, was not the kind to appreciate the breakneck speed with which the national news media discovered his retreat on the Terlingua Ranch. David did not equip his cabin with a telephone or a television; in a sense, he had moved here in the early eighties to hide out from all that. His being here in the desert bespoke an anguished quarrel with the civilized world, which, it now appears, a Kaczynski could resolve one way or quite another. There is no crime in being the kind of loner that David Kaczynski was. He was a loner who could love. He loved nature, so much so that he slept in a hand-dug hole for a couple of years while building his cabin, that he might remain close to the desert. He loved Linda Patrik, the woman whose initials he wrote with his own in the cabin’s concrete foundation—loved her so much, in fact, that in 1990 he moved to Schenectady to be her husband, thereafter returning to the desert only in the winter. And David very much loved his older brother, Ted, who also lived in a remote cabin, some 1,400 miles north of the Terlingua area, near Lincoln, Montana. So much did he love Ted that when he began to suspect that his big brother was the infamous Unabomber—suspected, that is to say, that Ted had spent the past eighteen years sending out letter bombs that had killed 3 people and injured another 23—David agonized for at least four months until his love for humanity prevailed. An intermediary contacted the FBI this past January, and two months later federal agents arrested Ted. A search of the Montana cabin yielded mounds of damning evidence but also a few oddities—among them a stack of letters written to Ted by a laborer at the Terlingua Ranch named Juan Sánchez Arreola, who comes from the border town of Ojinaga, Mexico. Intrepid reporters made haste to Ojinaga and located Sánchez, who explained that he and the suspected Unabomber had been pen pals since 1988 at the suggestion of a man who had befriended Sánchez: David Kaczynski, brother, cabin builder, hole digger, Terlingua desert rat.
David is now gone, but the Chihuahuan desert remains full of kindred spirits. I drove there recently, seeking out those who best understand the call of the wild that beckoned both brothers from the modern world. The hermits I encountered are scattered throughout the desert, dozens of miles in every direction—as far north as the upper boundaries of the Terlingua Ranch (the 200,000-acre rough-and-tumble development south of Alpine populated by some 4,900 landowners) and as far south as Redford. But what holds them together as an unstructured but otherwise meaningful community is the capital of this misfit mecca, the ghost town of Terlingua itself. Once a hotbed of quicksilver mining until carpetbagging profiteers gave up the ghost in 1942, the rubble-strewn village stoops drowsily upon a couple of square miles just to the north of Ranch Road 170, the Big Bend thoroughfare to Mexico. David Kaczynski was no stranger to the town, having spent much of the early eighties house-sitting in the vicinity. More to the point, however, the Terlingua area is where even a bitter recluse like Ted Kaczynski might have had a shot at contentment.
Terlingua is the state’s last outpost for outcasts, for those maligned American loners who fashion their own crude American dream in the anonymity of the desert. As one longtime Terlinguan, Paul Wiggins, puts it, “A lot of who and what we are can’t be explained by American mores. We’re just a neglected corner of America, outside of its infrastructure.” Here in Terlingua Country, less is more: A one-room cabin lacking water and electricity fits right in, and in a region where census takers have discovered people living in cars, caves, and shacks made of hay or automobile tires, no one would think twice about a fellow who sleeps in a hole. The only unwelcome guest is progress, though its trespasses are becoming more noticeable—and when mention is made of this reality, you can hear in the angry rhetoric of the Terlinguans echoes of the resentment that ticked within the Unabomber.
But no one in Terlingua builds bombs or pens 35,000-word polemics decrying the Industrial Revolution. I would have thought differently ten years ago, when I first got a glimpse of the leathery faces, snarled hair, and raggedy clothes of the figures who perched themselves on the porches of the Terlingua Trading Company and the Study Butte Store. They looked incalculable to a yuppie tourist passing through, though the very fact of their existence in the West Texas wasteland seemed om-inous. As my appreciation for the desert’s brutal majesty grew, my fear of its inhabitants diminished, but only so much. The questions kept coming back: Why would people choose to live here? And what would happen to them if they did?
These are the riddles of the brothers Kaczynski. The answers, if they can be found anywhere, lie in the weird communal fabric of Terlingua, where solitude is not solitary and the shared struggle for survival achieves the motley grace of a desert parade.
COLLIE RYAN SITS OUTSIDE HER SCHOOL bus home, carefully painting a scene of the Rio Grande on the face of a hubcap. I apologize for having ignored the No Trespassing sign on the dirt path that leads to her refuge. With a reassuring smile, she says, “People know whether or not that sign applies to them.”
She is sun-scarred but blessed with sharp features and the unmistakable aura of self-possession. Her gray hair and sturdy calves beneath her denim skirt give conflicting signals about her years, but I would no sooner ask a mountain its age. The porch where Collie paints is shaded by a well-constructed overhang consisting of sotol and river cane. It leads to an elegant desert garden of cactus and flagstone, with a plot of soil reserved for cabbage and mint. Behind the rust-painted school bus, a series of paved steps leads fifty yards to a perch over the Rio Grande, where one of the locals, a Vietnam vet and concrete artist named Spider, is fishing for carp.
To the outside world, the ghost town of Terlingua is that scruffy embodiment of Lone Star bravado hailed in Jerry Jeff Walker’s ¡Viva Terlingua! and represented in the town’s annual chili festivals. But no Terlinguan defines the community strictly by its city limits—and Collie Ryan, an indispensable element, is one of the reasons why. When she gave her last $40 to a towing service eight years ago and had her bus hauled a couple of miles from Lajitas, the Terlingua community simply extended itself another twelve miles to include her. When asked exactly what brought her here from Marin County, in Northern California, Collie laughs a little and says, “Well, that’s a loooonnng story.” I get the picture. She’s here now, and no one seems to remember when she wasn’t.
A number of Terlinguans live in buses, and Collie seems astonished when I tell her I’ve never been in such a dwelling. The interior of her bus is surprisingly spacious, no more cramped than a dorm room. Why not live here? There’s plenty of daylight, a kerosene lantern for night reading, a grill on the patio, fresh creek water she hauls from the nearby mule ranch owned by David Sleeper. Collie Ryan’s built-from-scratch desert sanctuary seems like a mirage—“A piece of artwork I can live in,” as she puts it—but it is hard earned and precariously maintained. The riverside heat is of the most savage kind, and “what dust you don’t pave, you eat,” she observes. The men in her life have come and gone. A friend has seen her show up in town “in a lonely blue funk, bitter about America.”
But Collie has her hubcaps—or, as she prefers, “my mandalas,” referring to the Hindu meditative “wheel of life.” They appear on walls all over the Terlingua area, brightly colored and meticulously detailed motifs that express the circular core on which, says Collie, all life is based. “The circle is everywhere—it’s the key to everything,” she says. “If you as a writer understand the mandala of your story, you’ll understand the spring, summer, fall, and winter. We talk with great passion about the mounting complexities, but the facts ain’t changed. If you learn the mandala, you’ll know how to succeed. Someday I’ll run into someone who does mandalas on computers. There is such a person,” she murmurs, “somewhere between California and Arizona. But,” she adds wistfully, “I lost contact with him.”
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