This piece looks at elements of naturalism and nostalgia in the life of Eric Harris (1981-1999). Following years of rootlessness after his home in Oscoda, Michigan, these elements became central to his evolving worldview, intensifying as he approached death.
I. The Awakened Child
Give me a child of seven, and I'll give you the man.
- An old Jesuit motto, on the cover of Kass's 'Columbine'
There is a key passage in police transcripts of the Basement Tapes. Eric Harris is alone in his car, the camera is on the dashboard, and there is rain falling outside:
At the end of this section of the tape Harris says he wishes he could have re-visited Michigan and "old friends". He falls silent...
The place that Eric refers to is Oscoda. The rural town has less than a thousand inhabitants, is mostly white, and is nested in an idyllic region of woods, lakes, trails, and tall mountains. It cradles Lake Huron, is near Huron National Forest, and is close to the trails of the Huron Mountains. Eric was eight years old when his family decided to move there. His father having been in the employ of the US Air Force, he made the decision to live off base, which was decisive for Eric's development and his later identity. This afforded Eric convenient access to endless woods, sprawling and ancient trees, and adjoining meadows. There, Eric played and wandered every day in some of the most vital years of childhood.
The first home I lived in was located in a largely wooded area, so we didn't have many neighbors. Oscoda is a very, very small town. Of the three close neighbors I had, two of them had children my age. Every day we would play in the woods, or at our houses. We would make forts in the woods or make them out of snow, we would ride around on our bikes, or just explore the woods. It was probably the most fun I ever had in my childhood.
In another paper, he starts focusing on the forest that enveloped his family's home:
Living in a rural town in Michigan for three years, I played a lot in a forest.
Within a few lines, Eric focuses on this forest and its centrality to his life as a child:
The woods behind my house were vast, empty, and old. It smelled of a musty tree or maybe of pine trees most of the time in there. Those woods left so many memories in the mind it's amazing. Such as how scary they looked during hard rain storms or how dark they were at night. I was even afraid of going into the woods at nighttime, for fear of the unknown. For the most part, however, my memories are fond ones... countless missions in those woods.
Many years on, his father moved them on base. But Eric still felt a pull to the forest:
My friends and I had a lot of fun there too. We still lived close to a large wooded area so we would travel around in there almost every day.
At the end of one of his papers, he yearns for the forest that encased his childhood:
One of these days, real soon, I will call up Sonia and see if she still remembers me. And see if those woods, our forts, and our hide-outs are still there where I left them over seven years ago.
The forest seems to have awakened something in Eric: A kindling regard for natural agency, not unlike Alexandra from O Pioneers, whom Eric empathized with. From the book:
Alexandra ... stood leaning against the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered so keenly through the frosty autumn air. She always loved to watch them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered march. It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature... the law that lay behind them...
Many years later, Eric would echo this in questions he put to girls that he chatted with:
So, what do you think when you look at the stars?
The girl spewed out a few words, and Eric smelled its insincerity. He asked another girl:
What do you think about when you look at the sky at night, when there are no clouds out and you can see all the stars?
In other places, Eric expresses a regard for animals. In his poem titled, "I Am," he writes: "I cry when I see or hear a dog die." In his journal, years on, he magnifies this thought:
Give the Earth back to the animals, they deserve it infinitely more than we do.
This quote from O Pioneers, which Eric reviewed for a class, holds up a mirror:
But the great fact was the land itself... It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.
The forest wound itself in him and never left, even in mundane interaction. In the same chat above, Eric recalls a recurring daydream of a forest as gateway to the rest of nature:
I am walking through this very deep forest at nighttime... Then I come out onto this beach that reminds me of one of those marine life posters with all the dolphins, whales, stars, oceans and everything. I look up into the stars and they are everywhere, like ten times as many stars as you have ever seen...
Eric had been drawn into the woods and the woods steadily drew something out of him. They followed him everywhere he went, a collusion of branches, roots, and vines in fulgid memories, depths concealed by rainstorms at nighttime that finally passed through him.
II: A Young Man Deracinated
My mind is black, sight is black, everything is black.
- Responding to a school assignment
They are under control, but me, I see all.
- From his 13 June journal entry
Eric had not consented to severing the bonds with forest and friends of his childhood:
In the course of my life, I have moved to different houses or locations about six times. The last three times I have moved, I left behind some of the greatest friends I ever had.
The very first remarks that he makes in the Basement Tapes bleed with rootlessness:
Eric then complains about his father and how his family had to move five times.
It would be too simplistic to suggest that this rootlessness was all he was complaining about. It was not merely that Eric felt uprooted, it was that he already felt rooted in a certain place. He was torn from it by the subsequent aimlessness of his father and family, and this magnified the nostalgia that fed his longing for a place he saw as home. Eric may have even felt that he had been ripped out of Eden. That is nothing else, anyway, than man's religious acclamation of a longing for youth and nature. Beyond the bucolic serenity of his home was noisiness and hollow pluralism. On 10 April 1998, a day after his seventeenth birthday, he started writing in a private journal. In his very first lines, he revealed his disgust with the world:
I hate the fucking world, too much god damn fuckers in it. Too many thoughts and different societies all wrapped up together in this fucking place called AMERICA. Everyone has their own god damn opinions on every god damn thing...
He detested all of this cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism: "too many... different societies all wrapped up together..." In his 21 April 1998 entry, Eric mocked those around him:
Try it sometime if you think you are worthy, which you probably will you little shits, drop all your beliefs and views and ideas that have been burned into your head and try to think about why your here. but I bet most of you fuckers cant even think that deep, so that is why you must die. how dare you think that you and I are part of the same species when we are so different... You aren't human.
In the same entry, a few lines later, he brings his slowly emerging role into focus:
I won't be part of it. I have thought too much, realized too much, found out too much, and I am too self-aware to just stop... But before I leave this worthless place, I will kill who ever I deem unfit for anything at all. Especially life.
On 6 May, 1998, he expands his criticism to popular culture and celebrity worship:
the government having scandals and conspiracies all over the fucking place and lying to everyone all the time and with worthless, pointless, mindless, disgraceful TV shows on and with everyone ob-fucking-sessed with Hollywood and beauty and fame and glamour and politics and anything famous, people just aren't worth saving. Society may not realize what is happening but I have...
In the same entry, he ridicules the effects of this media-induced mass behavior:
Human nature is smothered out by society, job, and work and school. Instincts are deleted by laws. I see people say things that contradict themselves, or people that don't take advantage to the gift of human life.
"The gift of human life"... Repeating these words circumscribes our idiocy. As David Brooks remarks in his 2004 article, "The Columbine Killers," bullying was a media exaggeration: "He was disgusted by the inferior breed of humanity he saw around him."
It has been confirmed, after getting my yearbook and watching people... the human race isn't worth fighting for, only worth killing.
This 9 May, 1998 entry is reinforced by this web site entry, praising natural selection:
Natural selection is the best thing that ever happened to the Earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and weak organisms…
Eric had come to view himself as an agent of ecological reprisal, however belated it was:
Natural selection needs a boost, like me with a shotgun.
In his 12 June, 1998 entry he wrote: "KILL MANKIND"
The final year of Eric's life was focused on its last day. The motives of Eric and Dylan diverged as much as their commitment. However, the world Eric had recalled with nostalgia eclipsed the world he now despised as a young man, and he would punish it for its decline.
III. Darwin Amidst the Remnants
The stars shift and rearrange themselves. Jupiter and Venus clash. Tomorrow, the charts say, children will rule the world.
- Michael Paterniti, "Columbine Never Sleeps"
At about 11:19 AM on 20 April 1999, Richard Castaldo was grazing on lunch with his friend, Rachel Scott. With bovine passivity, he watched as Eric began the assault. In a statement later given to police, Castaldo recounted collapsing and hearing Scott weeping:
He advised he was sitting down and fell backwards and laid on his back... He heard Rachel Scott crying... He was able to observe the front of the suspects and observed what he believed to be both of them firing firearms...
About the same time Castaldo was transmogrified into a malformed paraplegic, student Bree Pasquale was suddenly jolted from her work in the second floor library:
And we heard popping and we didn't know what it was, and then I looked out the window and there was this guy throwing pipe bombs. And they started blowing up and shooting up the cafeteria. You could hear them laughing...
Students leaving the cafeteria mistook it for just a prank. A herd of exiting students then hurled themselves at Eric, thinking it was a game. Eric mowed them down, killing Daniel Rohrbough. Wounded, Lance Kirklin fell. Later, he watched half of his face get blown away from his skull, decorating the nearby Earth with flesh and bone fragments. There, amidst the dead, dying, and wounded, Eric dropped his trench coat. Witnesses and later autopsy reports described his clothes: Black boots, pants, suspenders, a white t-shirt with "Natural Selection" in black letters. Now, bodies, blood, and weeping all around him. He fed on every wound. Darwin, long ago sentenced to a social death by society, rose from the dead to terrify the living.
"I saw and felt evil," computer science teacher, Long, later remarked.
Eric sent Dylan to scope out the cafeteria. Pivoting while shooting, Eric sprayed Anne-Marie Hochhalter with his carbine. Barely surviving, she groped for cover.
Niel Gardner, the school guard, rushed to the parking lot after receiving a dispatch about the shootings and reports of students wounded. He saw two figures at the west entrance of the school, and immediately launched into a firefight with Eric. Art teacher, Patti Nielson, rushed through the school halls to halt what she believed was students noisily making a film. Nielson reached the inside of the west entrance, where she saw a black clad figure outside the double doors, his back to her. It was Eric, trading bullets with Gardner. Dylan hid from the exchange. Eventually, Eric turned to face Nielson. He looked straight at her, smiled, and shot. The blast from his carbine ripped through the glass doors grazing Nielson's shoulder.
Stumbling back, Nielson managed to get back on her feet. Terrified, she ran toward the library. It was now 11:24, and Eric led Dylan into the school. They roamed at will.
Over the next five minutes, Eric and Dylan scoured the halls, bombing, shooting, and laughing. Dave Sanders, a teacher and coach, was shot and gradually bled to death.
During this swath of time, the school's fire alarm constantly intermingled with sounds of pipe bombs exploding, guns firing, and laughter outside of the library. At 11:29, Eric's stoic voice filled the room: "Get up!" He followed with a blast from his shotgun. Kyle Velasquez, a retarded Latino student sitting alone at a desk, is killed, his brains emptied out of the back of his head. Another shot ripped stripped the wood off of the end of a table where Evan Todd was hiding. Passing both of them, Eric and Dylan fired out the window. Eric saw Steven Curnow, and then ended his life. Knocking on a nearby table three times, Eric uttered, "Peek-a-Boo!" A blast from his shotgun tore into Cassie Bernall's skull, killing her instantly.
Over the course of seven minutes, Eric and Dylan carried out seven more executions: Isaiah Schoels, Matthew Kechter, Lauren Townsend, John Tomlin, Kelly Fleming, Daniel Mauser, Corey DePooter. At about 11:36, the killing ends. Blood, brains, and bodies now loitered the library, and they left the room. It was now the "quiet time," scouring halls.
Kacey Ruegesegger later recounted events in an interview:
The things I saw, no teenager should ever see... and they definitely are images that stick forever. I ran to the closest table and I pulled a chair close to me and I just started praying. I knew I would be shot, I knew my turn was coming, I didn’t know if I was going to live or die. There was no mercy from the shooters -- he [Eric Harris] yelled at me after he shot me and I thought he would shoot me again so I closed my eyes and pretended to be dead. He told me to quit my bitching.
CCTV captured Eric and Dylan back at the cafeteria, where Eric visibly attempted igniting his propane bombs. The shots ignited one, creating a brief conflagration that expanded and then enveloped several tables, sending hiding students scuttling out of the school.
The attack was planned as a bombing. Propane bombs that they placed in the cafeteria were set to explode at 11:17. If they worked as planned, it would have consumed hundreds. If other propane bombs, set in cars, had also worked, thousands might have died.
In his most far-reaching vision, Eric saw the "pre-war era" that led up to the attack as igniting a "revolution": A conflagration of youth to end the "doomed" world of their elders, kill off most of humanity, heralding a "new world" of shadows and splendor from childhood.
The last words Eric was heard to utter: "Today is the day the world comes to an end."
IV. The Earth Under Eric Harris
Most will not see the new world.
- In the "Basement Tapes"
Eric is in a large room, like the inside of the hull of a boat. There are old computer screens around him on the walls, except that something is different about them: They are futuristic looking, and yet they are hundreds of years old, covered with dust, mold, and vines. Shadows are creeping all around him. Now, in front of the room, and on the ground, are windows. He can see out the windows and he is looking onto a vast sea. Large hills of water are going up and down, but the only sound is the wind and the movement of the water. The room he is in is moving, like a blimp would, and he is standing there, and staring out into the sea. Only a few people. Nearly everyone is dead and has been for centuries.
