Remember Eric Rudolph, that zany abortion clinic bomber who fled into the western Carolina woods and evaded a massive federal manhunt for five years? Well, I went slumming this morning and tracked down and Outside Online article from 2003 that goes on for more than 4,000 words speculating that he must’ve had help to stay alive on the lam all those years (gee, yuh think?). A diverting read, though my internal editor kept wincing at every depiction of Southern Mountain People as, well, Southern Mountain People.
I live in North Carolina and the majority of my hiking/camping is in the Great Smokies, Pisgah National Forest and other parts of western NC. In fact, I was on a day rafting trip on the Nantahala River on the day that Rudolph was captured. While the article smacks a bit of “hillbilly” I think it is pretty fair in its representation of what residents lived with for those five years — the media attention, FBI presence, disruption of their own lives. I personally believe Rudolph had help, but it was not necessarily an everybody-or-nobody scenario. I think he had a few people to assist him and the rest of the good folks there were just trying to live their lives.