Straight down the back of ornery American life, there runs this mythic skunk stripe: the cantankerous outlaw protester. “Are you talking to me? . . . ” And Eric Rudolph, 36, my fellow North Carolinian, belongs right there, curled along our nation’s bristling Mohawk cusp. Though, God knows, I never met the fellow socially, I can call forth both his blessed landscape and harsh bloodline. His tale seems a green boomerang hurled forward from the 19th century. James Fenimore Cooper might help place him in the forest, Twain could take a chain saw to his knotted family tree. Iraq may seem incomprehensible to us, being as it is the size of California. But North Carolina is only the size of . . . North Carolina. And so it may be useful to see Eric Rudolph as he is viewed at home, by us. Not by Japanese reporters and the 200 federal agents so busy swarming the bushes for him, they couldn’t see him in the trees. When Eric Rudolph got into bad trouble, he did not head right to Mexico. He did what another local from just over the mountain said you could not do again: he came straight home. He survived five Cherokee County winters outdoors, living in a cliff-top bed of rhododendrons at an altitude so high these bushes never bloomed, eating home-killed venison and wild turkey, stray lizards and handout canned tuna. Full Story
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