“Is that the Unabomber?”

Thirty years of change in Montana

The Montana cabin of Theodore Kaczynski, 30 years ago (courtesy FBI)

I started eating at the Crazy Mountain Inn because Jim Harrison had claimed in Esquire that it served “the best chicken-fried steak with cream gravy in the world, a somewhat narrow category, I admit.”

It was thirty years ago this month. I had a four-hour commute each way to my job: a beautiful drive through the hills and plains of central Montana. I did it just once a week, spending four nights at the jobsite. Ambling home on a Friday, I’d detour to a hamlet called Martinsdale to eat dinner at this cafe.

The rustic building dated to 1901, when a new railroad made Martinsdale a bustling center for sheep ranching. Now the trains were gone and the new highway bypass ran two miles north. Downtown was pretty much the Inn, a bar, an abandoned depot, and some nearby houses—a townscape that was typical of Montana in the 1990s. I felt at home.

I’m not a fan of cream gravy so I favored the pork chop or maybe a burger. There was no TV, so I’d sit at the counter and read the police blotters from Harlowton and White Sulphur Springs, a delightful antidote to the urban foolishness of my software job. Holding a newspaper provided a great way to eavesdrop on the room.

I liked the hippie/farmer vibe of the waitress, a young mother. Her husband was the cook and their daughter, maybe four years old, roamed around providing entertainment. On my first few visits, I was disappointed that they seemed to treat me with formality and deference, as if I wasn’t really part of the community. Then one night, taking my order, the mom decided to share with me a funny story. Her daughter, seeing me enter the front door, had run to the back. “Is that the Unabomber?”

Theodore Kaczynski had just been arrested near Lincoln, 150 miles away, and taken to the nearest city of Helena. The news attracted national headlines in a way that Montana stories rarely did. I’d seen the FBI vehicles and TV news trucks parked outside my Helena hotel room. I didn’t pay them much mind. In the city, everything is compartmentalized: they were doing their TV news jobs and I was doing my software job. The Unabomber, with his weird hermit lifestyle and horrific mail-bombs, belonged to TV news rather than real life.

In the café, I could laugh at how everything got telescoped for a four-year-old. She’d seen a story on the TV news about a strange man now in jail in Helena. And into the café walked a stranger from Helena. I knew of course that I wasn’t the Unabomber. I was younger, better looking, more comfortable with technology, less of a hermit, and most importantly not a sociopathic terrorist.

I felt like the waitress was saying: she did too. She was telling the story as a way to welcome me inside a circle. And that was what was most important to me at the time: to feel like a Montanan, trusted, knowledgeable in the local folkways, interested in the lives of everyday folks at a remote café.

Perhaps feeling the good vibes, the four-year-old girl peered out at us from the kitchen. I waved at her. Life was good.

Over the next 30 years, as I built my career as a freelance writer, I kept thinking about the Unabomber. His arrest was the biggest Montana story of the decade (perhaps paired with the Montana Freemen, arrested just a few weeks previously). I pitched magazines to have me write about the 10^th, 20^th, or 25^th anniversary of the arrest.

I wanted to write about how much had changed: the media, terrorism, law enforcement, and nationwide perceptions of Montana. In 1996, it somehow made sense that the way to catch the guy was for the New York Times and Washington Post to publish hardcopies of his 35,000-word manifesto. And it made sense that the guy they caught lived in a dark, uninsulated 10x14 cabin, bicycled daily to the library, and shot rabbits for food. Montana then was for misfits and weirdos—some bad and many good—in a way that it sadly soon ran out of room for.

I never got a magazine to bite on one of these pitches. In April 2026, for the 30^th anniversary, I don’t have to pitch anyone—I can just publish here on Natural Stories. But when I dove into the task, a couple of funny things happened. First, my notes for the previous anniversary articles struck me as bland, predictable, poorly-written cultural analysis, not worth publishing, not a natural story.

Second, when I went looking for the story with significance today, I felt like it wasn’t so much in the courtrooms or the FBI offices or the words of the manifesto or the march of technology. It wasn’t in Helena, where the TV news crews did their jobs. Instead the story was at that café.

I have no doubt that the Crazy Mountain Inn and many of its patrons were struggling financially. The town’s population kept dwindling, it wasn’t on the highway, the nearby Bair Museum was not yet open, and there weren’t a lot of Esquire subscribers nearby. There were few jobs in pre-Internet Montana, and few tourists outside of hunting season.

But there was community: people who toiled in those difficult circumstances, who respected and even liked each other, and who were every day awed by their sublime natural surroundings. In such a setting, it was easy to feel separate from whatever was happening on the TV news.

We had—all of us but the four-year-old—our own lives, communities, sources of fulfillment. We had connections to landscapes and people and quaint old traditions. We were capable of welcoming newcomers into such communities, once they proved that their values were similar enough to ours.

The biggest story of the last 30 years is the loss of that identity. Is that lifestyle gone? Or, worse, is our desire for it gone?

Now that I no longer drive weekly past Martinsdale, I no longer feel a need to enter its café community. Now that I no longer make a living at soulless software jobsites, I no longer so desperately crave their antidote. Now that the Unabomber is dead, no four-year-old will ever again mistake me for him. Now that the news of the day tries to enter my world from so many avenues in addition to TV, I am ever more tempted to tie my identity to it.

But Martinsdale’s mountains and plains endure. For that matter, so do the newspapers in Harlowton and White Sulphur Springs. The café at the Crazy Mountain Inn has new management and vastly reduced hours compared to 30 years ago, but the next time I’m passing through, I’d like to sit at its counter again. If it’s on a day when the news of the world seems particularly troubling, I hope I’ll be wise enough to appreciate the contrast.

End notes:

• Thanks to my paying subscribers, who make these essays possible.