Horror, Sleaze and Trash.

rifle-club:

Violence, in short, was in the air. And Kaczynski was breathing it. He was already acutely sensitive to noise, and had discovered there was plenty in his new neighborhood. The sounds of chain saws, snowmobiles, jet planes, prospectors, and helicopters drove him to new heights of rage. So he, too, took up monkeywrenching—stringing wire across trails in hopes of garroting backcountry bikers, shooting at helicopters, and destroying logging and construction equipment.

“Few years ago,” he wrote in his coded journal, some fuckers built a vacation house just across Stemple Pass Road. Motorcycle and snowmobile fiends. They would buzz up and down road past my cabin on most weekends, summer and winter. Last summer seemed they were worse than usual. Sometimes made it a three day weekend. When they were not buzzing up this road I would hear those cycles growling and growling over by their place, all day long. It was getting absolutely intolerable. My heart is going bad. Takes exercise OK, but any emotional stress, anger above all, makes it beat irregularly.

So he decided to take action.

Risky to commit crime so close to home. But I figured if I did not get those guys, the anger would literally kill me. Anyway, so one night in fall I sneaked over there, though they were home, and stole their chainsaw, buried it in a swamp. That was not enough, so couple weeks later when they had left the place, I chopped my way into their house, smashed up interior pretty thoroughly. It was a real luxury place. They also had a mobile home there. I broke into that too, found silver painted motorcycle inside, smashed it up with their own axe. They had four snowmobiles sitting outside. I thoroughly smashed engines of those with the axe.

Nor was Kaczynski content merely with property damage. By the summer of 1977 he would write:

I set a booby-trap intended to kill someone, but I won’t say what kind or where because if this paper is ever found the trap might be harmlessly removed.

Excerpt from Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist by Alston Chase.