Three Beautiful Things 01-05-2025: Debbie Returns to Kellogg, I Prepare for Debbie's Return, I Read More Deeply into *Lone Wolf*

1. Everything worked out this morning. Debbie's flight from Newark to Minneapolis worked. So did her next flight to Spokane. I arrived at the airport right at 12:30 and Debbie was at the curb. No snow or ice was on I-90 so my drive over and our drive back to Kellogg was wet but uneventful. 

Gibbs loves having Debbie back home! 

2. Before I left for the airport, I worked for around an hour getting gunk out of the bathroom sink drain and succeeded in getting it to drain well again. 

I spent the rest of the morning cleaning the bathroom and kitchen, vacuuming the living room, and clearing up any last bit of clutter in the house I hadn't taken care of earlier. 

I'm not a great house cleaner, but I thought things looked pretty decent for Debbie's return. 

3. I spent much of the evening, after roasting a Trader Joe's Spatchcocked Lemon Rosemary Chicken, reading more deeply into Maryanne Vollers' in depth book about Olympic Park, abortion clinic, and gay bar bomber Eric Rudolph. 

Through tireless interviews and research, Vollers could explain and tell the story of how Rudolph managed to escape being caught for five years, even though he spent much of that time not that deep in the Western North Carolina woods and made frequent nighttime forays into nearby towns to find himself food and other supplies in a variety of thieving ways. 

I found myself contrasting Rudolph's survival over those five years in the woods with the failure of Chris McCandless to survive trying to live off the land in Alaska in Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild. 

Broadly speaking, the primary difference between the two was basic: Rudolph had had extensive experience over the years hiking and camping in the woods he hid out in and he positioned himself close enough to towns and people's cabins and other domiciles outside of town that he could plunder dumpsters, gardens, people's homes, and other sources for food and supplies. 

McCandless had no experience in the area of Alaska where he tried to live off the land and also, unlike Rudolph, he didn't devise detailed plans of how he would survive nor did he keep in contact in any way with civilization. Rudolph listened to a radio and brought newspapers back to his camp. He didn't fully isolate himself in the woods. 

He also devised ingenious ways to stay out of the sight of the armies searching for him on land and from the air. 

I knew the whole time I read about Rudolph's five years on the lam that he would eventually be caught. 

The book opens with his capture.

Like classic epic stories, Lone Wolf opens in the middle of the story, turns to events before his capture, retells the capture story, and moves on to Rudolph's incarceration and when I put the book down last night, he was meeting his original defense attorney for the first time. 

Eric Rudolph's trial is coming up soon in the book.