Below The Fold

Marvin Heemeyer could have been a man broken.

He could have wandered away, drifted out of town leaving behind his hopes and dreams—the muffler business he built from nothing that was now subject to fines and unwanted neighboring businesses.

Marvin Heemeyer could have just packed up his pride and his sense of justice and hightailed it out of town.

But Marvin Heemeyer wasn’t just another ordinary small town mom and pop shop owner with two bits in his pockets and a storefront with a zoning problem. Marvin Heemeyer remembered the story of Alma Tom Leask, in another small town in another part of the state.

So Marvin Heemeyer decided to do Tom from Alma one better. Marvin Heemeyer built himself the biggest sonuvabitch bulldozer tank you ever seen. He reinforced it with concrete and steel, made the thing im-fuckin’-penetrable. He mounted a .50 cal and some cameras so he could see where he was going. He filled the cab with water and rations. The whole thing must have taken weeks, maybe even months. With each rivet and pound of concrete, he cursed the former mayor, the town’s newspaper, the county commissioners, the bank, the cement plant, the utility company, even the hardware store.

And then, once he finished, he cut a swath through the sleepy mountain town of Granby, destroying all of the buildings that housed the objects of his hatred, taking on an entire SWAT team, the Colorado State Patrol, Forest Rangers and a legion of deputies, all armed to the teeth with weapons that did little more than occasionally nick the armor that plated the bulldozer.

Marvin Heemeyer wouldn’t be stopped by anything other than the bullet he saved for himself, after moving like a leaden tornado sluggishly up Granby’s main drag, lumbering through the former mayor’s home and half a dozen other buildings before wedging the behemoth in the corner of a warehouse.

Marvin Heemeyer could have tucked his tail between his legs and ran away. But he stood up to everyone who stared him down and leveled the playing field with his backyard tank as he leveled the town.

Marvin Heemeyer was a scoundrel and a vandal and a scofflaw, they all say. Marvin Heemeyer was a stubborn fool who refused to obey the laws of the town in which he lived. Marvin Heemeyer was a libertarian Anti-hero who’d have sooner wallowed in the depths of anarchy than put in the septic tank the city demanded.

Marvin Heemeyer drove his iron chariot into the fiery pits of liberty, and didn’t live to tell the story.

I just wish Marvin Heemeyer hated Wal-Mart, too.