Lookout Mountain, Columbine High (Part II).

Day four, we practiced van driving. Each team of ten or so had a staff supervisor, and mine was Libby—one of the younger staff members, and pretty sarcastic. This was fine later in the day, but I had been the first to volunteer to drive, and I didn’t really appreciate it at first, ha. Her route for us took us past Columbine High School, and even just going by was eerie. It's odd recognizing a fairly nondescript building you've only seen in pictures before. Like you've been there, but you haven't, and you can't quite remember which.

We drove to Lookout Mountain, and I was disappointed to see that it wasn’t the same Lookout Mountain from American Gods. Lookout Mountain is in Boulder, though, and that’s the city where the good guys are drawn to in The Stand. Lookout Mountain has Buffalo Bill’s grave, mediocre chili, and great fudge. The fog was thick—no more than 100 feet of visibility—and I got some beautiful, haunting pictures. Sparse pines, broken rocks, grey-white mist all throughout. With the fog so dense, you could barely tell we were on a mountain, which is too bad because Libby swore the view was fantastic.



We passed Columbine again on the way back, and Libby asked if we wanted to stop. I absolutely did, and I was glad I wasn’t alone. As if on cue, it started to rain. It was just heavy enough to be visible, and there was no wind but it was freezing nonetheless. The sky was a monotonous grey all around the memorial.

It’s a paved circle—brick laid about. A half-circle outer wall has maybe a dozen plaques on it. Quotes from students, staff, local officials, politicians. The students, the staff—their quotes were far more striking. Honest, not concerned with sounding like good speeches. Real people, sincere thoughts.

The inner circle is two raised half-circles of granite with dead students’ names and tributes from their parents written on them. A lot of them spoke extensively about God, Christ, heaven, dying because of their beliefs. Some were strikingly good, and some were downright awful. One made me coldly angry.

It takes a small-minded, selfish father to use his son’s memorial gravesite as a pulpit for his beliefs on abortion and prayer in school. Your son is dead and you don’t want to talk about his life, what kind of a person he was—you’d rather rant about Roe v. Wade?

Dead silent at that memorial. Hoods up, solemn faces. Grey sweatshirts slowly turning darker, damper, heavier, And absent: any reference to the shooters. No memorials. No apologies. No justifications.

I wore a trenchcoat in high school, and caught a lot of flak for it. These boys were a big reason why, the only reason why. Couldn’t count the number of times some jock asked if I was going to shoot up the school.

It’s not like I was never angry. But I wasn’t that angry. These people I went to high school with—and high school is an emotional cesspool, all these confused kids looking to find their place in life, giving and getting garbage because everyone is a little insecure—they are largely good, or at least decent, passable, acceptable people. Some of them may go on to beat their wives, to run down a kid while drunk driving—some were assholes—but it’s no one’s place to frivolously, single-handedly, devoid of checks and balances, take their lives. A bully in high school is probably a bully for life—but they are lives.

Still, even though they were the kinds of goths I wouldn’t have been able to stand, these kids didn’t deserve what they got, what they’re getting now. They needed help and got stepped on. You can only jab at a wounded animal so many times before it, feeling cornered, feeling threatened, fights back, goes into a frenzy. Some animals just want to flee, and some are feral—these two were feral.

In a sense, I identified. In others, I didn’t. But it’s pathetic when Marilyn Manson is the only person who offers to listen to these kids, suggests something started being wrong long, long ago.

The place had stern intensity, and I think it gave me something far different than it gives most.