My Columbine pilgrimage

In the early months of 2010, I completed the MS of what would eventually become my second published novel, The Columbine Pilgrim. It had been a feverish process, charged with urgency, in which, in spite of being relatively young and in good health, I actually found myself fearing the possibility of dying before I finished telling the story.

Never previously, nor since, has a writing project provoked in me such a passionate need to push through to the bitter end. I’m still not totally sure what lent me that incentive. I just felt that my protagonist Tony Meander’s full saga must be told, regardless of where it took me (and believe me, it wound up taking me places where I was quite loathe to go, but I dutifully “went there” anyway)…

In May, with the MS finally finished, but no publisher yet, I decided to embark upon a pilgrimage of my own. I booked a flight from Savannah, Georgia to Denver, Colorado (the first time I had stepped onto a plane in 14 years), rented a car, and set out to visit the school whose very name-- which just happens to denote a type of flower referenced by the pitifully crazed Ophelia in a latter scene of “Hamlet”— had become synonymous with tragedy and terror. In doing so, I was well aware that I was mirroring the journey taken by Tony Meander in the MS that had so consumed my time and energy for the last few months, a journey which for him had extended both into the past and perhaps also into the uncharted realms of his deeply troubled mind.

My trip turned out to be far less psychologically excruciating than Tony’s, but still quite eventful. On my first night in town, still a bit jet-lagged, I decided to drive to Columbine High School in Littleton, an affluent Denver suburb. I only expected to be able to drive around the infamous campus, but fortune, or providence, it seemed, had chosen to shine on me from the Rocky Mountain peaks which picturesquely surround the area. When I pulled up, I saw that a few students were sitting at a table; it turned out that the school just happened to be hosting its annual Talent Show that very evening. That it was actually open to the public only struck me as strange for a moment: given that Columbine was a public school, why shouldn’t it welcome everyone and anyone who wished to attend a community event like this? Feeling like I was floating on air, feeling much higher than a mile above sea level, I purchased my ticket and entered the school.

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At this point, I must convey my state of mind circa 2010.

The opening line of my MS read “My name is Tony Meander, and I am a Columbine-alolic.” While I was certainly no crazed psychotic like Tony Meander, I held a the time a fascination, bordering on obsession, with the Columbine massacre. But I was far from alone in that regard. In fact, the message board I frequented was full of other people who, each for his or her own reasons, shared an intense interest in this horrific event.

Some of those who were “into” Columbine were no doubt the sorts that today we would call cringe, or worse: namely, the sorts of guys who looked on Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as heroes or idols, or the sorts of girls who crushed on the two mass murderers. But the frequenters of the board tended to be more reasonable and sober-minded. It is, after all, possible to understand what would drive a person to commit an atrocity without sympathizing with, much less advocating for, the atrocity in question.

Certainly, a person who has known what it’s like to be unwanted, rejected, outcasted, or simply to feel profoundly out of step with most people, or with the culture, or the Zeitgeist, also knows the joy of finding something that pierces through his overwhelming intimation of alienation and makes him feel slightly less alone. In fact, it stands to reason that those most out of step will treasure such experiences of connection more, since for him they are like taking deep draughts of cold water in the midst of a parched and barren landscape.

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With this “disclaimer” of sorts in mind, consider how I must have felt entering the actual structure of Columbine High School, the inner sanctum, if you will, of the subject which had fascinated me for years. Though it may seem morbid, or possibly even callous to the human suffering which took place within these walls on April 20, 1999, the truth is that for me, the experience was like stepping out of the pages of a book or pushing aside the images on a screen and actually dwelling, for an hour or so, in a place wherein a story unfolded, a story to which I felt in some way connected.

There was the exact stretch of hallway that Eric Veik videotaped Eric and Dylan walking between classes, during which Eric appeared to get shoulder-bumped by a gaggle of passing, white-hatted jocks… There were the stairs down to the cafeteria, where Veik's camera captured Eric absent-mindedly spinning his cellphone on the table as the boys waited for lunch period to end. And that door looked just like the one in which Eric and Dylan acted out their seemingly goofy and harmless skit “Hitmen for Hire” for a video class, in which both boys ranted threateningly against a bully.

Harris and Klebold in video class project “Hitmen for Hire”

But the steps leading to the library, where the majority of the massacre took place, I noticed, was no longer there, and the former library itself had apparently been completely razed, presumably being altogether too conspicuous a reminder of Harris and Klebold’s murderous rampage.

I was enabled to see all of these things, without seeming like some kind of tacky “atrocity tourist,” and nobody present even favored me with a suspicious scowl. Truly all of my stars had aligned…

As for the talent show itself— held in the theater where Dylan interned as a backstage tech and some speculate he actually met budding actress Rachel Scott, whom Harris and Klebold reportedly targeted for her outspoken Christian beliefs on the day of the massacre— the level of talent amongst the students well exceeded my expectations. I figured that, since Columbine was known as a “high-achieving” institution, the kids would therefore be good singers, dancers, and musicians, but I wasn’t expecting “performing arts school”-esque quality.

The fact that a school like this— the very last place, culturally, demographically, and otherwise, that one would expect to become a site of the most notorious school shooting, to the point where its very name would be inextricably associated with student violence in the popular imagination— had indeed had assumed just such a legacy, seemed faintly surreal.

(to be continued)

Andy Nowicki is the author of several books, most recently The Insurrectionist, Muze, and Love and Hidden Agendas, as well as the just-published The Rule of Wrath. Visit his YouTube channel.