Still Life with Woodpecker: Finding a Newspaper Clipping in My Kindling Box at the End of 1980

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I found this newspaper clipping after a friend read Still Life with Woodpecker aloud to me during one of our story nights. It had been waiting in the paper box beside the wood stove, destined to become kindling instead of memory. Some stories escape the fire.

All of this happened in the deep past. I only recently found the clipping again, resting on top of one of my old dream journals, as though it had been waiting all these years to be read one more time.

Because I had just heard the novel, I immediately noticed something uncanny. Tom Robbins had filled his fiction with outlaws, fugitives, and people living outside ordinary rules. Then, lying in the kindling box, was a very real newspaper story about another group of people whose names belonged to the same cultural landscape. Fiction and history had somehow ended up sharing the same paper box.

The clipping announced the parole of Karl Armstrong, one of the men involved in the 1970 University of Wisconsin bombing. He stepped out of prison carrying nothing more dramatic than a duffel bag, greeted by cheering friends, his Canadian mother, his father dying of cancer, and a nation already beginning to file the Vietnam era into history. Asked whether he would do it again, he smiled beneath his beard and answered, “No comment.”

The article read like a ledger of unfinished lives. Dwight Armstrong remained imprisoned. David Fine had already been released. Leo Burt had vanished into American folklore. Robert Fassnacht, the young physics researcher killed in the explosion, would never receive parole from history. One clipping held them all together—bombers, prisoner, fugitive, victim, parents, lawyers, protesters, and ghosts.

Perhaps that’s why I couldn’t throw it into the stove.

The paper had survived years beside split firewood, then years more tucked away with old dream journals, waiting for someone to notice that history sometimes hides in the least ceremonial places. A newspaper meant to light a morning fire instead lit another kind of flame. Not one of gasoline or dynamite, but of memory.

Books have a way of opening secret doors. Still Life with Woodpecker is full of improbable connections, and perhaps that is why this forgotten article seemed to appear at exactly the right moment. It quietly asked a question the novel never quite answers: what is the difference between an outlaw and a criminal?

An outlaw lives beyond convention; a criminal crosses a line that leaves real victims behind. Sometimes history blurs those categories. Sometimes literature romanticizes them. Yet the death of Robert Fassnacht remains an immovable fact that neither myth nor memory can erase.

Some artifacts are preserved in museums. Others survive in dusty boxes beside a wood stove—or on top of forgotten dream journals—waiting decades for the right pair of hands. Before the match is struck, before the page curls into ash, history sometimes asks for one last reading.