Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  “You’re a founding father,” I say.

  “Very much so,” says Doug. “And we’ll be forgotten to history in time. But not the things we start. Not the things we set up properly. They’ll last a lot longer.”

  This is Doug’s first week in office. He says he was elected on a Christmas mandate. His campaign centered on the proposition that whilst North Pole is very Christmassy, there is room for it to be even more Christmassy. Recently, Doug went on a fact-finding visit to the small Washington town of Leavenworth, where everything is Bavarian-themed. Many shopkeepers there wear lederhosen and sell bratwurst.

  As a result, Doug has had an idea. It is an idea he recognizes will be a hard sell to the people of this freedom-loving wilderness town. But the idea is this: Doug would like every shopkeeper in North Pole to wear an elf costume.

  “Many people move to Alaska because they don’t want to be fenced in,” I say. “So if you say, ‘I’m going to fence you in with elf costumes,’ might that be an issue?”

  “Absolutely,” says Doug. “But let me show you something.”

  We climb into Doug’s pickup truck. He drives me around town.

  “Some people,” Doug says, “think North Pole looks like a truck stop. And that’s unconscionable.”

  We drive past the extremely festive Dalman’s Family Restaurant, but then past the utterly non-Christmassy computer shop–cum–video game arcade, where I see teenagers playing violent shooting games. We stop and enter. Half a dozen teenage boys are shooting the hell out of the SAS (the British army’s Special Forces). British soldiers’ heads are exploding. Blood sprays from their backs as they lie convulsing in the desert dirt.

  Doug walks purposefully past the boys and toward the owner. He produces an elf costume from his bag. Doug doesn’t have to say anything. The owner instinctively knows where this is heading.

  “No,” he says.

  “Will you at least try the hat on?” Doug asks.

  “No,” he says.

  Doug tries to appeal to him entrepreneur to entrepreneur. Apparently North Pole has recently lost a big Alaska Airlines promotion. For the past two years, the airline flew tourists into North Pole and took them dogsledding, Christmas-ornament making, and so on. But this year, Alaska Airlines has decided that North Pole just doesn’t look Christmassy enough.

  “If we want to capture that Christmassy tourist,” Doug says unapologetically, “then, yeah, for at least six weeks out of the year, people ought to wear elf suits.”

  The computer-shop owner says he’ll think about it.

  I drift away and get talking to one of the teenage boys. He’s spraying an SAS officer up the back with a machine gun.

  “Do you ever get an overdose of Christmas, living here?” I ask him.

  “Pretty much all summer,” he says.

  “What do you do to redress the balance?” I ask.

  “I come here and shoot people all day,” he shrugs.

  “Doug,” I say as we leave the computer shop, “do you think that if the town had been more Christmassy back in April, those kids at the middle school wouldn’t have wanted to plot their Columbine-style massacre?”

  “Let’s just say that if the spirit of Christmas were permeating the entire soul of this community, no child would be feeling that despondent,” Doug replies. “What is the spirit of Christmas? Isn’t it peace on earth? Good will to men?”

  • • •

  WEDNESDAY LUNCHTIME. I call Jessie Desmond, my North Pole Myspace friend who hates Christmas.

  “I’m going to the middle school to watch the sixth graders open their first-ever batch of Santa letters,” I say. “Do you remember your first batch of Santa letters?”

  “It was one of my first moments of real disappointment,” she says.

  “Sorry?” I say.

  “You learn really fast that Santa doesn’t exist,” says Jessie.

  “You’re kidding,” I say.

  “Most of the kids say they’re OK with it,” she says, “but you know they’re not. Because there we were, thinking something was up there, but in sixth grade we realize there’s nothing. It’s just us up there.”

  She says the children have no idea that they’ll one day be obliged to become letter-writing elves. So that class can come as a real shock to them. Although it isn’t as bad as it could be. The school has rules: “If someone writes something like ‘Dear Santa, my mom has cancer. Can you make it go away?’ we don’t deal with those. We give them back to the teacher.” Jessie pauses. “I had written letters to Santa with really personal things in them. I told Santa I wanted a baby sister. The idea that some sixth-grade kids had read that. And suddenly you’re in sixth grade, and you have this batch of letters on your desk and you’re writing back: ‘Yes, Santa’s happy with you. Yes, you’re going to get what you asked for.’ It really ruined it for me. I felt like I was doing Santa’s dirty work.”

  “Are you telling me that I’m about to go to middle school to watch a bunch of children be confronted, for the first time in their lives, with the idea that Santa doesn’t exist?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Jessie says. “You’ll probably see it in their faces. They prepare you for a few weeks before, but there’s always that one person who’s, like, ‘Wait. What are we doing?’ And that’s the person you should be looking out for. The person who wasn’t paying attention in class until the letters are right in front of them. And then they’re shattered. It’s a weird experience.”

  • • •

  I DRIVE to the middle school. In the classroom Jeff hands out Christmas hats. He asks the children to think up elf names for themselves. Then he distributes the Santa letters. Of course I’m doing what Jessie told me to. I’m scrutinizing the children’s faces. But they all seem quite excited.

  Jeff instructs his elves not to write “Santa is going to give you everything you asked for.” Instead he tells them to be more vague: “I’m sure you’ll like whatever surprises you find under your tree. From all the elves at North Pole, and from Santa, Merry Christmas, and remember it’s always better to be good than bad.”

  A dark cloud settles over the room only once, when one little boy reads out a letter that says, “Dear Santa, this year I would like to wear a lot of clothes and shoes, but my mom can’t buy us a lot of clothes because she gets paid a little bit and she pays a lot of rent. Santa, that is my wish for Christmas. I know it may seem a lot for you but that is all I want for Christmas. To wear a lot of clothes.”

  • • •

  LATER, after the children go home, I ask Jeff, “Do you ever get a kid saying, ‘Hang on. If we’re opening the letters, what does that say about . . . ?’”

  “Santa?” says Jeff. “Well, at eleven and twelve they’re pretty savvy. They all know that Santa is basically Mom and Dad.”

  I give Jeff a quizzical look. Jeff gives me a look back that says, “Don’t be silly.”

  Still, I can’t help wondering if Jeff has inadvertently made a mistake getting his sixth graders to be letter-opening elves. My week in North Pole has made me suspect that the job can mess you up. There’s poor Twinkle in the Lotto shop, constantly in tears, powerless to help. Then there’s Jessie, realizing that if she was the magic, then the magic was rubbish.

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT, back at the hotel, the telephone rings. It’s a man’s voice. He says his name is Joe.

  “My son was one of the ringleaders,” he says.

  Joe says he’s willing to talk to me, but not at his house. I call Jeff. He says we can use the middle school.

  And so that’s where I meet Joe, on Saturday morning, in the deserted cafeteria in the deserted middle school.

  Joe’s a soldier. “I was in Iraq when I got the word,” he says.

  “Where were you?” I ask.

  “South of Basra,” Joe says. “I’d been there quite a few months.”

  Joe says he was in the habit of chatting with his wife online early each morning, and one morning in April she typed into the cha
t box, “I’ve got to tell you something. We need to talk about Jack.”

  Jack isn’t the boy’s real name. He had just turned thirteen in April.

  “He’s OK,” typed Joe’s wife. “There’s nothing physically wrong.”

  “I thought maybe he skipped a few days of school or something,” says Joe.

  But, instead, Joe’s wife typed the news that Jack had got involved with a group of boys, and they had made a list, and Jack was “highly involved” with this, and their plan was to kill the kids on the list, and to do it in the cafeteria.

  As Joe relays this to me, I look up with a start. This is where we’re sitting: in the school cafeteria.

  “Were they serious?” I ask.

  “I’ve asked my son that point-blank,” Joe replies. “I said, ‘Would you have done this?’ He said, ‘Yes. I would have.’ And he maintains that to this day. He says they would have done it.” Joe pauses. “They were going to fire some warning shots,” he says. “There were other kids that were indirectly involved—they’d been told about the plan: They were to get certain other kids out of the cafeteria when the warning shots were fired. My son was to go to the office with a rifle and disable the communications equipment, and then they were going to start shooting the kids from the list.”

  “How many kids were on the list?” I ask.

  “Fifteen or twenty,” Joe says. “And there was a comment on there: ‘And all the other cool kids.’ Who knows what that means? That’s kind of open-ended, right? That’s kind of subjective.”

  After Joe’s wife told Joe the news of the plot, via the chat box, Joe sought emergency leave. He says it was hard to leave Iraq.

  “I had a sense of responsibility to my comrades,” he says. “You want to come home with your unit.”

  Sometimes, during our interview, Joe sounds like a soldier making a report to his commanding officer. He says things like “My son stated to me . . .” and so on. But there are other occasions when he’s doing all he can to stop himself from breaking down. I think he thinks he can conceal his broken heart better than he actually can.

  Jack was in custody when Joe returned from Iraq. The charge was conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.

  “I really didn’t know how to react,” he says. “Part of me wanted to grab him and shake him and say, ‘What is your problem?’ And the other part wanted to hug him and say, ‘We’ll protect you from this.’”

  “What did you do?” I ask.

  “I gave him a hug,” Joe says. “I said, ‘I love you,’ and then I said, ‘Sit down.’ I could tell he was kind of scared. I asked him, ‘Why would you do this?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’”

  Joe says he doesn’t know, either. It’s not like Jack’s a Goth, he says. Contrary to rumor, he’s no Goth. “He likes to fish,” says Joe. “He likes to go camping. He likes to make up his own jokes. The counselor is trying to figure out why they’d do this. These kids don’t fit the mold. He doesn’t come from a dysfunctional family. I mean, we have our dysfunctions, but he’s not abused. I don’t use drugs. I don’t consider myself an alcoholic. I spend time with him. I coached baseball for him when he was younger.”

  Joe pauses. “We have rules. He doesn’t dress Goth. He’s not allowed to dress Goth. He’s not allowed to have baggy pants that hang down. He’s not allowed to wear his hat cocked to the side and walk around looking like a little punk. We never let him have violent posters on his walls. He’s not allowed to play violent video games. He’s never been to the mall by himself. He doesn’t have any CDs, like rap CDs, with violent themes. That kind of stuff just doesn’t fit in with our lives.”

  As Joe says this, I think about my eight-year-old son, Joel. I always let him wear his baseball cap cocked to one side. He has a Kill Bill poster on his wall. He listens to Eminem.

  “My God,” I think in a panic. “If Jack was going to kill everyone in his school without all those violent influences, what the hell is Joel going to grow up to be? Or maybe it was the absence of all those violent influences that led Jack to want to commit mass murder. Or could it have been the town’s Christmas theme? The elf business?”

  “I guess that theory is as good as any theory.” Joe shrugs. “The doctors and the counselors have no answers. I have no answers. The boy himself has no answers.”

  Then there’s the other possibility: that Joe’s months away fighting in Iraq did something to his son’s psyche.

  Joe sighs.

  “Maybe,” he says.

  North Pole has been hit hard by Iraq. At the end of September, two soldiers in full-dress uniform arrived at the home of one of Joe’s neighbors, Donna Thornton, to tell her that her twenty-four-year-old son, James, had recently died from cardiac arrest in Baghdad.

  James had been at the middle school, a year or two ahead of Jessie.

  And there have been others. Joseph Love-Fowler—who was twenty-two and in the same year as Jessie—was blown up by a roadside bomb in Balad in April. North Pole has a smallish military base, Fort Wainwright, on its borders. Fort Wainwright has so far lost twenty-six soldiers in Iraq.

  Or maybe being thirteen, and being picked on, was reason enough. Everyone behaves irrationally when they reach thirteen. I suppose it is a statistical inevitability that some bullied thirteen-year-olds, somewhere, will be plotting a school shooting. (Although I don’t have much sympathy for the bullying motive. There were six ringleaders, and nine others with knowledge of the plot. That makes fifteen. So they can hardly call themselves bullied outcast loners. Fifteen is more friends than I ever had.)

  Joe often wonders what might have happened had the guns reached the school. This is the only reason why the plot failed: The boy who was supposed to bring the guns didn’t turn up.

  Apparently, Jack behaved perfectly normally over breakfast that Monday morning. He was joking around as usual, even though he believed that within a few hours he was to commit mass murder.

  Joe looks around the cafeteria.

  “His sister goes here,” he says. “I said to him, ‘Did you tell her, so she could get out when the shooting started?’ And he said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘What if your sister heard the shooting, worried about you, ran to see what you were doing, and one of the kids shot her?’ And I could see from the look on his face that those thoughts had never crossed his mind. He said to me, ‘We were just going to shoot the bad kids.’ And I said, ‘Bullets don’t care who they hit or who they kill. They go through people. They tear flesh and they go through. It doesn’t matter who’s on the other side.’ He had not thought about that. It was not in his thought process.”

  Then Joe mentions the ill-thought-out escape plan—how the kids were going to start new lives in Anchorage.

  “To even think they were going to get out of the school without being killed by the police . . .” he says.

  • • •

  IN THE END, Jack got off lightly: two years’ probation, a five-thousand-word essay on the effects of school shootings across America, a hundred hours of community service, some anger-management therapy.

  Joe says he’s pleased and relieved nobody has thrown a brick through their window.

  “I don’t want people taking the law into their own hands,” he says, “because I have an obligation to protect my son and the rest of my family. So if they push, I’m going to have to push back. And if that happens, it’s not going to be pretty.”

  But he’s sending his son back to school next year: “I told him, ‘You have to face this. You have to face the kids on that list.’”

  Joe takes his son out running each morning. Back in April, Jack could barely run half a mile. Now he’s running a mile and a half.

  Joe looks proud when he tells me this.

  There’s a school for excluded children on the edge of North Pole. The kids who—for whatever reason—don’t fit into the middle school end up studying here. It’s quite possible that some of the plotters will join the school next April, when their year’s expulsion from the public school system is u
p. It seems a great place: small, bright, open-plan classrooms and lovely teachers, like Suze, who shows me around. Suze is another rare liberal in a town full of staunch Republicans. I notice that this is one of the very few buildings in town that hasn’t any Christmas decorations whatsoever.

  “We’re a respite from Christmas, I guess,” Suze explains. “Our kids are all Christmassed out.”

  Then I ask Suze a question I’ve been asking everyone this week. “Do you happen to know,” I ask, “where Kris Kringle is?”

  • • •

  BEFORE I ARRIVED IN TOWN, I kept hearing stories of an amazing North Pole resident who looks just like Santa and has changed his name by deed poll to Kris Kringle. I heard he was in permanent residence as the in-house Santa at the local Santa Claus House gift shop. But when I visited the place on Monday, I saw that his chair was empty. Since then, I’ve been asking everyone: Where is Kris Kringle?

  Jeff Jacobson said he thought Kris Kringle had had some recent falling-out with Santa Claus House—“I think he was demanding more hot chocolate and cookies,” he said—and he is now a kind of roving Santa around town, surprising children in diners and so on with cries of “Ho! Ho! Ho!”

  Gaby, who runs the Lotto scratch-card and cigarette shop, said, “He comes in occasionally, so he might surprise us. He could pop in at any time.”

  “Does he gamble?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Gaby.

  James at the Pizza Hut said, “He was up working at the hot springs last time I heard.”

  But the people at the Chena Hot Springs Resort said they hadn’t seen him.

  Charlie Livingston, the taxidermist, told me he got hit by a car but he’s fine now.

  My hunt for Kris Kringle was proving fruitless. People kept telling me they’d just seen him, and he was a wonderful man, but I never saw him. I began to wonder if he even existed. And then I visit the school for excluded children on the edge of town.

  “Do you know where Kris Kringle is?” I ask Suze, the teacher.

  She looks a little awkward and shuffles uneasily on her feet.

  “Have you looked him up on the Internet?” she says.