Earl gives me a look as if to say, “There’s nothing wrong with gun ownership.”
Then he tells me that—as a result of the shooting plot—his daughter has pulled her kids out of the middle school. The Dalman kids are being homeschooled instead now.
“It shook everyone up,” says Earl.
I have a few hours to kill before I get to go inside the middle school and meet Jeff Jacobson, and so I visit a sweet, twinkly-eyed lady called Jan Thacker, local columnist and author of the book 365 Days of Christmas: The Story of North Pole, Alaska, the Little Town That Carved Itself Out of the Alaska Wilderness and Became Known, Worldwide, as the Home of Santa Claus.
Her book begins, “So does he? Does Santa really live in North Pole? . . . The police chief believes it, and who is more honest than the chief of police?”
Jan and I chat for a while, and then she takes me into her back room, which is full of guns—a glinting rack of them—and a number of stuffed wolves she’s killed.
The stuffed wolves have ferocious facial expressions. They’re snarling, their teeth bared, their eyes aflame with hatred, ready to pounce.
I tell Jan she must have been very brave to shoot those terrifying wolves.
“Were they pouncing like that when you shot them?” I ask.
“No,” Jan says.
Then she explains: The local taxidermist, Charlie Livingston, tends to give the wolves ferocious expressions however they were behaving at the moment of their death—even if they were just wandering around all doe-eyed, looking for a pat and a play.
It’s surprising to see such a twinkly-eyed old lady so heavily armed, but this is normal for North Pole. It solves the mystery of where the plotters would have got the guns. There are guns everywhere.
This is mainly because of all the bears. There are bears everywhere, and moose. I suspect this is why the town is so Republican. There are virtually no liberals. When you’ve got that many bears, you’re not going to be liberal. You know what liberals are like with bears. We just scream. We let out a high-pitched scream and run away, our arms in the air.
It is all the more surprising, then, that Jeff Jacobson is a gentle-hearted liberal, a card-carrying Democrat. I’ve been told that sometimes, at night, Jeff can be seen driving around North Pole, quietly putting up decorations in underprivileged parts of town. Now it is lunchtime, and Jeff is putting up decorations in his math classroom. He’s wearing a Santa hat and a tie covered in snowmen. We talk a little about how much he misses being mayor.
I don’t think Jeff gets on with the new mayor, Doug Isaacson, who’s apparently a steely-eyed, shaven-headed staunch Bush Republican. Doug Isaacson’s big idea is apparently to get all the shopkeepers in town to wear elf costumes as a means of generating increased tourist revenue. Jeff feels this is just window dressing, and what’s on the inside is what counts, Christmas-wise.
Jeff tells me this is a good week for me to be in North Pole. Tomorrow his sixth graders will get their first-ever batch of Santa letters to answer. They’ll give themselves elf names and write back on Santa’s behalf.
“We live in a world of text messaging and video games,” Jeff says. “Being a Santa’s elf connects us with real people all around the world.”
“Can I come along and watch them do it?” I ask.
“Of course,” Jeff says.
“Jeff,” I say. “I hear some of last year’s elves were caught plotting a mass murder.”
For a second Jeff freezes, Christmas decorations in hand. Then he recovers and carries on pinning them up.
“It was going to be on a Monday,” he says.
“How was it thwarted?” I ask.
“One of the kids—the one who was going to be bringing the weapons in—didn’t show up that day,” Jeff says, “and so they postponed the plan. And while they were discussing the postponement, the plan was overheard, and the police intervened.”
“And what was the plan?” I ask.
“They were going to bring some knives and guns in,” he says, “and they were going to kill students and teachers. They were going to disrupt the telephone system. They knew where the telephone controls were. And they were also going to disable the electricity. Turn off the lights. And carry out their plans. And these were well-thought-out plans. They had diagrams. They had a list. . . .”
“How many people were on the list?” I ask.
“Dozens,” says Jeff. “And each kid was assigned who was going to do who. With what.”
“Oh my God,” I say.
Jeff shrugs. Then he smiles. “These boys had just turned thirteen years old,” he says. “They were going to disable the telephone system. That sounds terrifying, right? Well . . .”
Jeff rummages around in his pocket and pulls out his mobile phone. He gives me a look as if to say, “Well, duh!”
“So maybe they once saw someone in a James Bond movie disable a building’s communications system,” he says.
The more Jeff tells me about the ins and outs of the plot, the more it strikes me as a mix of very chilling and very stupid. After the shooting, the boys were going to run to the station and catch a train to Anchorage, where they’d create new lives for themselves using aliases. One boy’s alias was going to be John Wayne.
The thing is, they hadn’t checked the train timetables. The shootings were going to occur at lunchtime in the cafeteria. Even if they gave themselves an hour to kill their enemies and get to the station, they would still have had a five-hour wait on the platform for the Anchorage train.
Lunchtime is over, and Jeff’s sixth graders run into class. They are only twelve, just a few months younger than the plotters.
“To see those little boys in handcuffs . . .” Jeff says. “I taught five of them. It broke my heart. As teachers we had to carry on like it was a normal day. But we were being ravaged inside with our emotions. Some teachers were having anxiety attacks. One is still suffering badly with stress. . . .”
I’m not allowed by law to meet the kids, but I’m determined to meet at least one of their parents this week. I ask Jeff if he’ll try and arrange this. He promises he will. I tell him I’ll see him tomorrow afternoon for the class where the kids get to open the letters to Santa for the first time.
• • •
WEDNESDAY MORNING. Doug Isaacson—the new mayor of North Pole—stands atop a snowy nature trail and surveys his town below.
“Imagine being in England two thousand years ago when your towns were just getting started,” Doug says. “How would you set them up for future generations? That’s where we are! We can do that here! That’s awesome.”
“How old is North Pole?” I ask.
“Fifty years old,” says Doug.
“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.”