ICON by Richard Adams Carey
1.
The transfiguration of Vickie Bunnell began one night in February, 1997. On her way home from her law office in the little town of Colebrook, New Hampshire, she stopped to knock on the front door of her friends Eric and Lois Stohl. She told Lois she’d like to borrow something from Eric. What was it she needed? Well, she’d like to borrow Eric’s .38 Chief’s Special.
Vickie and the Stohls were neighbors, sort of, on Bungy Loop, a grid of dirt roads and isolated houses that straddled the Colebrook and Columbia town lines on the slopes of Blue Mountain, way up near Canada. Eric was a New Hampshire Fish and Game officer, and he kept the revolver beside his and Lois’ bed in the event that any convicted poachers or other scofflaws with grudges against him should come visiting some night. Recently, however, Eric had decided that Vickie needed the gun more than he did, and he had offered to loan it to her – but she had refused. So something else has happened, Eric guessed as he went to fetch the weapon. Whatever it was, Vickie wouldn’t say.
No matter. They sat around the kitchen table, the three of them, while Eric broke out the Chief’s cylinder, spilled its five blunt bullets clattering across the table. Vickie knew well enough how to handle a deer rifle or a shotgun, but she had no experience with handguns. Even in her small hands the .38 – with its pretty walnut grip and gleaming stainless steel, with that uncanny beauty possessed by miniatures – seemed nearly to disappear.
Eric showed her how to hold the weapon out in front of her with both hands on the grip, approving of how steadily she did so. He showed her how she could fire by either pulling the trigger or cocking the hammer – Lois felt a chill at the crisp metallic snick of the striking hammer. Then Eric watched as carefully Vickie reloaded the weapon. She asked if she might take some extra bullets with her, and Eric said sure, but she wouldn’t need them: “Generally five bullets are enough to take care of the situation. If they’re not, you won’t have time to reload.”
Then Eric offered to take a precautionary look around at Vickie’s house, a far-flung Cape, a rental, about a five-minute drive from the Stohls’ place. Vickie told him no, no need, but Eric pointed to the loaded gun in her purse, rested his case, fetched his service revolver, told her to stay put, drove off into the dark.
Meanwhile Lois served tea. She knew Vickie, 45, was tough and brave, but she still marveled at how this woman, as frail as a bird, could sit here now sipping tea and chatting about the winter, her parents, her day at work, as calmly as if she had come to borrow an egg. The trivialities of the day assumed an awful beauty. The clock in the hallway ticked off the seconds, and Lois had the eerie feeling of watching herself talk to Vickie from some unfathomable distance.
2.
Vickie had grown up in the North Country, but not in New Hampshire. The Bunnells were one of Colebrook’s oldest families, but Vickie’s parents Earl and Irene – once Earl was back from WW II, the Navy, the Pacific – had bought a house in Canaan, Vermont, across the bridge over the Connecticut River from Colebrook. Homes were a little cheaper there.
An academic star and popular school president at Canaan Memorial High School, Vickie went on to the University of Puget Sound’s law school and a job in the Washington State public defender’s office. Why not come home and practice in the North Country? “You mean cow cases, timber overcuts, and bar fights?” she once said to a friend. “No, I don’t want to spend my life doing that stuff.”
But within a few years she did come home. In 1982 Phil Waystack, an attorney new to Colebrook, found himself outnumbered, opposed by a well-oiled team of prosecutors, in his defense of a woman who had confessed to the murder of her husband. Waystack heard about Vickie, gave her a call, said that the husband had been violent, had often beaten his wife. So there was a case to be made for self-defense. Would Vickie be willing to help? She came home only for the duration of the trial, she told friends and family, and in court she and Waystack won an acquittal.
For Vickie, the whole point of law school had been getting out of the North Country and performing on a bigger stage. So why did she stay after the trial? Her father Earl, who had taught her to hunt and fish as a girl, speculated it was because in the Northwest she had missed doing so right out her doorstep. More likely it was because she fell so hard for another outdoorsman.
John Harrigan was five years Vickie’s senior, the son of her parents’ best friends in Colebrook, and the owner and publisher of two weekly newspapers: Colebrook’s News and Sentinel and Lancaster’s Coös County Democrat. He had won modest fame in New England as an outdoors columnist for the New Hampshire Sunday News, had continued to write about the outdoors and North Country life for his own newspapers and other weeklies throughout the state. He was also just emerging from the wreckage of his first marriage and fighting for a share of his children. Vickie slipped into his life like a key into a lock.
These two star performers in the Colebrook gossip revue hiked on Blue Mountain for their first date and later bagged all the mountains up and down the valley. In the spring they’d pause in their fly-fishing to roast sweet sausages on willow switches over a fire built on lakeshore pullouts or Connecticut River sand bars. After grouse hunting together in the fall, Harrigan would clean the birds in Vickie’s kitchen and – with a bread stuffing flavored with slices of wild apples – prepare a repast better than anything (John swore) they could buy in Manhattan. Their many friends debated among themselves as to what sort of canoe they’d all go in on as a wedding present once the marriage took place.
For work Vickie partnered with Waystack, then after a few years went out on her own. Cow cases, timber overcuts, and bar fights? Sure, but she also began carving a niche for herself in cases she found important, and often heartbreaking: sexual abuse, spouse abuse, victims’ rights, child custody, and adoption. Few of her sorts of clients had money, though, and she ended up doing so much pro bono work that she never made money herself. After hours, when not in the woods, she served on committees and boards for the town, the state, sundry philanthropic non-profits. This included two terms as a Columbia selectman. Meanwhile Harrigan finally won time with his children, and throughout the 1980s Vickie became something of a second mother to them.
By the end of that decade, though, she found herself approaching forty and still without a marriage proposal. She had dropped hints, but these had been ignored. Finally, reluctantly, she began to ease her way out of the relationship so she could date other men. Harrigan allowed her to do so, and he remembers her asking once, “If you ever did marry, would it be to someone like me?” Harrigan had persuaded himself, however, that it could not be someone like him, a man too scarred from his first marriage, he thought, to try such an adventure again.
Vickie managed the parting with such grace – and plain regret – that they remained good friends, sharing occasional meals, games of cribbage, and phone calls. When Vickie could no longer manage the rent for her office on Colebrook’s Main Street, Harrigan offered her his father’s old space in the News and Sentinel building at the corner of Bridge Street and Main.
Fred Harrigan, who had died in 1990, had been a lawyer and judge as well as the previous owner/publisher of the News and Sentinel. John still kept the brass plaque advertising Fred’s law practice by the building’s front door, and he installed a similar one for Vickie just beneath it. So he continued to see her in passing every day, and after he himself hit fifty in 1995, he began to wonder if indeed he might have made a mistake in giving up Vickie. He wondered for two more years and then set about trying to win her back.
3.
There is this irony: that during Carl Drega’s 25‑year battle with the Columbia Board of Selectmen, no one tried harder than Vickie, during her two terms, to keep relations between the warring parties smooth, professional, courteous. And yet, from among them all, it was Vickie who was transfigured.
Drega, born in New Haven, Connecticut to Polish immigrant parents in 1935, was a union carpenter and millwright who lived in central New Hampshire. In 1970 he bought a small cabin in Columbia as a vacation spot and ultimately a retirement home for himself and his wife Rita. The next year Drega began constructing a three-story barn on the property, but he did so without filing for a building permit. The town tried to work the problem out with the property owner at a time when his wife was battling cancer. In fact Rita died on a night in 1972 when Drega was scheduled to appear for a hearing about the issue. Kenneth Parkhurst, chair of the selectmen, is of the opinion that Drega blamed the town for hastening his wife’s death. “He was a thorn in our side ever since,” Parkhurst told the Union Leader newspaper.
The battle of the barn led to an escalating series of disputes with the town and state involving property rights and tax assessments. It was Vickie’s fate to become ensnared in these during her tenure as a selectman in the 1990s. Partly it was a matter of personality that made Vickie the board’s point person in dealing with this difficult neighbor – she had the best people skills, the most self-control. And partly it was a matter of gender: Drega was typically better behaved with women, while with another male he could go from rumbling smoke to a full-blown eruption in a matter of seconds.
On one occasion not even Vickie could stave off an eruption; on another she arrived as the eruption was in progress. In 1991 Drega refused to leave the Columbia town hall during a confrontation with Parkhurst. He then broke into the town’s files and records, and was arrested for trespassing. Two years later, Drega impounded on his property the vehicle of a tax assessor. Vickie hiked in with the assessor to reclaim the car, at which point Drega fired a deer rifle over their heads and pointed it at them. He was arrested for criminal threatening, the charge later dismissed at the consent of all parties. In both instances it had been Vickie who called the police.
Perhaps she thought she had seen the last of Carl Drega when she went off the board in 1994. But Drega was the sort who, in all the years since Rita’s death, had kept a catalogue of his various grievances, the many offenses rendered against him as a sovereign citizen – a hand-written document 79 pages long. This became an Ahab’s reckoning of all that “most maddens and torments, all that stirs up the lees of things, all truth with malice in it, all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain.” In particular, it would seem, Drega heaped upon his two arrests at the hands of a small woman “the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down.” Gender was no longer a shield – rather a more exquisite sort of outrage.
In February, 1997, at a Massachusetts gun show, Drega legally purchased a Colt AR‑15 semi-automatic rifle. At that time there was a ban in place against such weapons – the 1994 Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act. A Republican Congress allowed the law to expire in 2004, but in either event the ban was toothless from the start. Any rifle manufactured before 1994 was exempt, and there were no doubt dozens, perhaps hundreds, of such rifles at that Massachusetts show.
Later, during that night in which Vickie and Lois Stohl shared a cup of tea, Eric found no sign of disturbance at Vickie’s house or in the snow of the surrounding woods. In the midst of his inspection, though, Eric had been spooked, had drawn his sidearm, at the arrival of a vehicle in the driveway. But it was only Vickie, who couldn’t stay put. She got out of her Jeep and summoned a grin: “I thought you might be pinned down and needed help.”
Vickie would find herself safe, if not rested, the next morning. Eventually she’d return the Chief’s Special after purchasing her own .38, a Taurus, which she chose to keep at her office in the News and Sentinel building. She never told anyone what had frightened her that day, and she forbade Eric from mentioning the gun loan to any of her friends or family.
But subsequently Drega would be seen on several occasions parking on Bridge Street outside Vickie’s office and staring lengthily at her through its windows. Probably that February afternoon marked his first appearance there. Maybe he brought his new rifle.
4.
In 1995 New Hampshire Governor Steve Merrill appointed Vickie Bunnell an associate judge to the Colebrook District Court. She would recuse herself from any case involving Carl Drega, and she would also sit for an egg tempera portrait, one that still hangs in the Colebrook District Courthouse.
In this she looks like a tomboy duded up for work – in fact she had a reputation for wearing the boots and jeans she liked to hike in beneath her judge’s robe. Her short, brown hair is tousled above a crisp blue blazer. A cranberry Oxford blouse is drawn tight to her neck by a gold brooch like a sealing wax stamp. The background is the same dusky gold as that brooch, a clayish sort of gold, brightened almost like a halo about her face and hair. She looks back at the observer with a sly smirk, with lips that seem about to suggest that we both go climb a tree. But her brown eyes are different, grave and more reflective – as though if we climbed that tree, we might see a house afire, or a car off the road.
For all its naturalism and true-to‑life qualities, for all its insight into who Vickie was, the portrait also recalls the haunting icons of the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches. These Madonnas and saints gaze back at us in gold-leafed solitude from heaven, from a place where the ordinary elements of light and perspective have been subtly altered, and they do so with an unsettling sense of removal, of abstraction – of unfathomable distance, perhaps. Such portraits exhibit none of the soft-focus, saccharine qualities of, say, Roman Catholic prayer cards. Their faces carry the burden, even in heaven, of their mortal sufferings.
5.
Heard on Main Street, Colebrook, New Hampshire, on the Friday of August 15, 1997: “I’ll get you, you cunt!” This was shouted by Carl Drega from the window of his pickup as he drove by Vickie on Main Street’s sidewalk. Later that day she took out a restraining order against him.
Then, on Saturday night, she was John Harrigan’s date for a dance at The Balsams, the luxury resort in Dixville Notch. Vickie confided to a friend that she was happy, rapturously so, to be dancing with John once more, but she still didn’t feel like he was ready for marriage.
That following Tuesday morning, August 19, Harrigan was called away from the News and Sentinel to his other newspaper in Lancaster. That afternoon a young state trooper named Scott Phillips flashed his blue lights at Drega and trailed his pickup into the parking lot of LaPerle’s IGA Supermarket. Phillips’ intention was to have a chat with Drega about Vickie, either to defuse the situation or measure the real extent of the danger, but this conversation never began. Drega counted Phillips – who had once arrested him in 1996 on a warrant for a failure to appear in court – among his avowed enemies, and he climbed out of his truck armed with the Colt AR‑15 he had bought in February. He immediately opened fire.
Drega murdered Phillips, and then Les Lord, the veteran trooper who arrived on the scene during the course of that shooting, raking Lord’s cruiser with .223 bullets that penetrated its steel body like cardboard. Next Drega hijacked Phillips’ cruiser and drove downtown to the News and Sentinel building. There Vickie – through her office window – saw Drega climb out with his assault rifle. She shouted a warning to the newspaper staff, and herded most of them ahead of her in a flight out the building’s back door. The newspaper’s bookkeeper, however, had locked the front door once word of a shooting at the IGA broke on the police scanner. So Drega had already circled around to the back.
Some newspaper staffers fled around or under vehicles in the parking lot. Vickie was among four women sprinting across the lot towards the back door of Ducret’s Sporting Goods. Drega sighted only on Vickie and gunned her down.
One staffer – editor Dennis Joos, a former Franciscan novitiate, AmeriCorps volunteer, and Vietnam War conscientious objector, a man who could not abide in his presence the squashing of a spider or a fly, call him and he’ll conduct it safely outside – tackled Drega while he was still firing at Vickie. Joos lost the struggle for possession of the rifle and was shot himself. Bystanders saw Drega stand over the fallen Joos and pump more bullets into him, saying, “You should have minded your own fucking business.”
The killer drove to Columbia, set fire to his cabin, and fled via Phillips’ cruiser into Vermont, ambushing and wounding along the way a pursuing NH Fish and Game officer. He disappeared down a logging road off Vermont’s Route 102, there preparing another ambush for the officers he knew would eventually find that vehicle. Six more men would certainly have died if not for the warning bark of a Vermont police dog. As it was, three were wounded before they could take cover. Drega was killed at last in the ensuing shootout.
John Harrigan, at his other newspaper in Lancaster, had learned of the murders over the phone from a terrified staffer. By the time he arrived at the scene, Joos had been taken by ambulance to the hospital where he would soon die. Vickie’s body, covered by a camo-pattern tarpaulin from the shelves at Ducret’s, still lay in the rear parking lot.
6.
Did Vickie even think about that Taurus .38 in her filing cabinet when she saw Drega coming for her? If she had challenged him, she would have been absurdly outgunned, as were most of the police that day.
It’s general knowledge now that the AR‑15 is the “civilian” version of the U.S. military’s M16. Both weapons have an effective range of 600 meters, and their light, speedy bullets are designed to fragment into starbursts of shrapnel on contact with bone, cartilage, or other hard tissues. This enables even flesh wounds to be lethal.
In fully automatic mode, the M16 dispenses hellfire at up to 950 rounds per minute, and while the AR‑15 is available only as a semi-automatic, firing bullets no faster than its trigger can be squeezed (typically around 60 rounds per minute), the gun may be augmented to an automatic through the sort of bump-stock device used by Stephen Paddock at a Las Vegas country-and-western concert in October 2017. The bump-stock’s manufacturer, a Texas company named Slide Fire Solutions, sported the sign “Freedom Unleashed” over its display at a 2017 Las Vegas gun show. Such freedom, as it was unleashed by Paddock, killed 58 and wounded 546, a volume of mayhem entirely in keeping with what the M16 was designed to accomplish.
Like a .38 handgun, the M16/AR‑15 is a weapon that exists for the singular purpose of killing or maiming human beings – in other words, exercising veto power over another’s freedom to live. Despite the weapon’s expense, usually retailing for more than a thousand dollars, some five million Americans own AR‑15s, this according to the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legal Action. Among its worth-the-money features: its low weight and gentle recoil; its military glamor; its action-movie/video-game product placement; and furiously aggressive marketing by its now 400 different manufacturers.
But the bottom line? Sam Andrews, the owner of Missouri-based Tier One Weapons Systems, a gun-engineering company, told the New York Times: “The reason it’s so popular is that if you bring a handgun to a fight where there’s an AR‑15, you’re going to lose. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a 240‑pound man like me or a 90‑pound girl.”
7.
One of the cold comforts of the Colebrook shootings was that Carl Drega was so precise about his targets: those who in various ways had crossed him (after killing Vickie, he stopped at the home of Kenneth Parkhurst – who was away – and then at the office of a local contractor, also absent, who had sued him for nonpayment); also anybody in law enforcement; also any hero (see Joos, Dennis) who might try to interfere. Had he been a random killer, dozens of bystanders would have died at the supermarket, outside the newspaper building, and in Bloomfield, Vermont, where the Fish and Game officer was ambushed.
Vickie was hit several times in the back and buttocks, but one bullet struck her neck and sliced the carotid artery. The human body contains up to one-and-a-half gallons of blood, and nearly all of Vickie’s was spilled immediately as she fell face-down to the asphalt. Claire Lynch, a reporter for the News and Sentinel and a good friend of Vickie’s, nearly drove across the blanched corpse when she entered the parking lot only a moment after the murders. Lynch had fled in terror from the IGA supermarket once she had looked into Les Lord’s cruiser and seen the nearly decapitated remains of that good friend.
When John Harrigan arrived, he saw one bare foot, swathed in the pink tights Vickie wore that day, extending from beneath the camouflaged tarp. A leather pump lay nearby, as if discarded for dancing. Harrigan also saw the enormous quantity of blood that lay pooled beyond the width of the tarp. A friend inside the newspaper building reports hearing at that moment a cry from the parking lot that seemed, in its anguish and extremity, more animal than human.
It was a lament inaugurating a subsequent lifetime of anger, regret, recrimination, and grief. Three heroes had died in a vain attempt to protect the princess of the North Country. The would‑be prince was not among them.
8.
More than twenty years and so many deadlier shootings later, it may now be hard to credit the national and international impact of the Colebrook incident. John Harrigan was kneeling by Vickie’s body by 4 PM. It would be another two and half hours before Drega was found, engaged, shot to death. But no sooner had Harrigan arrived in Colebrook than reporters from outside – from wire services, major newspapers, and television networks – began arriving as well.
Harrigan himself became a reporter again once he rose to his feet. Gathering the traumatized survivors of his staff, he found most of them willing and (somehow) able to resume work. Even as they feared the return of a gunman who was still at large and whose purposes and targets were then a mystery, they went back into the newspaper building. When a state cop from out of town demanded that they vacate this crime scene, they refused and backed him down. They tore up the edition they had intended to publish the next morning – its headline story was about the resignation of the town manager – and they worked until late in the night, an hour or so past the removal (finally!) of Vickie’s body at nine PM.
Relying on dispatches from the field by Claire Lynch and others, they produced an astonishingly accurate and dispassionate account of the day’s events. Harrigan added a heart-wrenching, not-at-all-dispassionate editorial, one paying equal tribute to all four victims (you would not guess at the singular pitch of his grief for Vickie).
That edition of the News and Sentinel sold out many times over and earned a 1998 Pulitzer nomination for breaking-news reporting – though the prize was ultimately won by the Los Angeles Times, with its newsroom of 200 reporters, for their coverage of a botched bank robbery and police shootout in North Hollywood.
That night and for several days after, the Colebrook incident dominated national news. Harrigan’s sister Susan, also a journalist and based in Manhattan, was spookily prescient when asked to gauge the impact of these losses four years before 9/11. “Four people out of a town this small?” she said in answer to another reporter’s question. “You can just run the numbers. That’s like – what? – five thousand people dying in Manhattan on one day.”
For several months after the shootings, letters of sympathy, hundreds of them, arrived at the News and Sentinel from all over New England, the United States, the world. “At times like this I am reminded that inside each of us is an enormous unanswered question,” wrote Massachusetts resident Jack Authelet in reference to Dennis Joos. “How would we react in a life-threatening situation for which there was no warning, no preparation, no opportunity to plan a response or to consider the consequences. Would we boldly face the danger or turn away to live a coward’s life? For most of us, that question will remain unanswered. We will not in our lifetimes face the greatest of human challenges.”
Ekeanyanwyn Chukwudi of Owerri, Nigeria, would read about the incident in Time magazine and confess himself “shocked to my marrow.” In Nigeria he had witnessed murder himself, he wrote in his letter, continuing, “You people are fortunate to have a good system which ensured the prompt stopping of the carnage Carl Drega unleashed on the people, unlike over here where lawlessness, poverty, a weak legal system, and general insecurity prevail. I love you all in America, your values, democracy, human rights, and all that the Stars and Stripes stands for. God bless America.”
9.
But that was a long time ago, in another country (“besides, the wench is dead”), and this one of the earliest mass shootings involving an AR‑15. Since then gunmen less fastidious than Carl Drega – like Stephen Paddock or Dylan Roof or Adam Lanza, and so on, and so on – have put Drega’s kill count to shame, many times over. During 2017 the United States averaged nearly one mass shooting per day, and a small multitude of its citizens have faced, during or at the end of their lifetimes, “the greatest of human challenges.” Neither Mr. Chukwudi nor anyone else sends condolences any more.
Instead it has become increasingly apparent to the rest of the world that such mayhem is self-inflicted. “In retrospect, Sandy Hook marked the end of the U.S. gun debate,” British journalist Dan Hodges wrote about the 2012 attack that left 26 dead at a Connecticut elementary school, and the subsequent 2013 failure to reauthorize the assault rifle ban. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”
That debate flared anew with the deaths of seventeen at Florida’s Stoneman Douglas High School in February, 2018. But history suggests this will be bearable as well. The genie is out of the bottle, and is locked and loaded.
10.
In the North Country all four victims have been transfigured. One of the peculiar cruelties of that day is that in Colebrook, Drega’s victims arguably ranked numbers one through four, in any debatable order, by weight of social capital: two immensely popular cops, each admired for his own mix of good nature, laughter, courage, and judgment; the gentle and compassionate opinion leader at the newspaper, a man who had been that year’s graduation speaker at the local high school; and of course the home-grown lawyer affordable to anyone, handling both the little things and the awful with humor, tact, and resolve. None had any need of martyrdom to be valued. Their eulogies bore no trace of courtesy or sentiment.
Today you drive into Colebrook from the south on the Scott Phillips Highway. You continue to the north, to Pittsburg and then Canada, on the Les Lord Highway. The Joos family lived in West Stewartstown, and there you can borrow books from the Dennis Joos Memorial Library. A black granite slab erected on the lawn next to the News and Sentinel, on the spot where Dennis was shot, bears ghostly portraits of all four and is inscribed, “Their Deeds Are Their Memorials.” So are the names dispersed almost equally among North Country scholarship funds and public service grants.
There is real solace in the relatively small number of victims, even if in Colebrook it felt like the death of thousands in Manhattan. They were few enough to retain their identities, unlike the too-many-to‑get-a-handle-on – and therefore anonymous – victims in Aurora, Newtown, Las Vegas, and other massacre sites succeeding this one.
Nonetheless Vickie ascends from the ashes of this incident like a Madonna among the saints. The only female victim. The only one pursued and targeted on a premeditated basis. The only one so entirely defenseless – save for that handgun she bought so reluctantly, and then eschewed.
If in 1997 America seemed to the rest of the world like a standard-bearer for personal safety and the rule of law, The Reverend Peter Dyer – speaking from the pulpit of the Monadnock Congregational Church during Vickie’s funeral service – was clairvoyant in his reading then of St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians 6:12‑13: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.”
To state the obvious – and the armor of God notwithstanding – bloodbaths in America have become ordinary enough to achieve breaking-news banality. Since its unleashing by the Supreme Court in 2010, “freedom” also means that political spending is a form of free speech. In a system where politicians require vast war chests of money to run for office (we’re not talking about the board of selectmen here), the onset in America of Nigerian-style quid pro quo bribery, gerrymandered principalities, and “spiritual wickedness in high places” cannot, alas, be surprising. It matters little that a clear majority of Americans, among them many gun owners, want gun control and cannot bear the murder of children. They don’t live in a democracy anymore.
11.
In 2001, with help from John Harrigan and the Nature Conservancy, a 10.000‑acre parcel of protected wilderness in Columbia and neighboring Stratford was established and christened the Vickie Bunnell Preserve. It contains thirteen peaks over 3,000 feet and includes the former Blue Mountain, now named Bunnell Mountain.
There also exists now another portrait of Vickie, another icon. But this – a mixed media work by New York artist Kristen T. Woodward, who never knew Vickie Bunnell – is an icon entirely of this world, not the next. In its facelessness and bare breasts it can stand in for any female target of gun violence. And in its studied luridness it could be seen as a sort of picture-of‑Dorian-Gray fall from the shadowed calm of Vickie’s courthouse portrait.
In this other portrait she stands, only slightly more than 90 pounds, with a handgun in her right hand, most likely a .38, its snub-nosed muzzle leveled at the observer. Her body, where not a transparent white, is a ghastly palette of grey and yellow, just blushed with purple – the color of the flesh that surrounds a bullet wound. Pulsing orbs, the color of blood oranges, lurk behind the transparencies of her head, her chest, her belly. These would be a marksman’s shooting-range bull’s-eyes – and also reservoirs of blood. The background is neither gold leaf nor earthen clay, rather the mottled reds and blacks and browns of blood drying on asphalt. The two blood-orange orbs that float in this background evoke the eyes of a stalker, a pursuer, a guy in a pickup outside your window. Or else the shrieking points of bullets on their way.
Eric Stohl remembers how small, alone, and burdened Vickie looked in his rearview mirror as he drove away that night in the winter of 1997. Ahead of Vickie lay the greatest of human challenges. Behind her – and beyond Blue Mountain, and above the Stars and Stripes raised on a pole in her parents’ front yard – was the darkness of this world, and all truth with malice with it.
Richard Adams Carey is the author of four books of narrative nonfiction: Raven’s Children: An Alaskan Culture at Twilight (Houghton Mifflin), Against the Tide: The Fate of the New England Fisherman (Houghton Mifflin), The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire (Counterpoint), and In the Evil Day: Violence Comes to One Small Town (University Press of New England).