COMMENTARY
Paranoia has trumped innocence
It is a classic story for our modern age, tinged with paranoia and shaded with regret.
The main characters are Judy Nowak, a 65-year-old sewer authority worker from Buffalo, and David Matyjasik, a cousin visiting from Salt Lake City.
David wanted to get some photos of the changing season to take back home. He and Judy headed a week ago Monday for the Southern Tier.
Driving through Eden, they pulled off the road a few times for scenic shots. At one spot, a pickup truck pulled up, stopped for a moment, and sped away. They pressed on minutes later, not thinking much of it.
The next day, around lunchtime, a sedan pulled up at Judy and Henry Nowak’s house. Two men in dark suits got out. They flashed their identification. They were state police, division of antiterrorism.
Judy Nowak nearly fell over.
“They asked if I had been out in Eden, taking pictures,” she said. “They wanted to know what I was doing there. I said, ‘What, we can’t go out and take pictures anymore?’ ”
They wanted her phone number. They asked where she worked. They wanted her supervisor’s name. They were polite but firm.
They said that near the road where she was taking pictures is the Tennessee Pipeline. Thousands of miles long, it carries gas from Mexico to Canada. The man in the truck saw them, got suspicious, wrote down their license number and called police.
Judy Nowak had never heard of the Tennessee Pipeline.
“I mean, we’re just out taking pictures,” she told me. “We did not see any signs to keep away or anything.”
Judy Nowak does not fit anybody’s stereotype of a terrorist. She stands five feet tall, wears glasses and has 17 grand-kids. She is chatty and always has people over at the house. She is so nonthreatening that, when she and cousin David stopped later that day near a rural house in Eden, the lady came out to chat. She asked Judy in for cake and then shared the recipe. The woman’s husband showed David the vintage 1939 car sitting in the garage.
“We bonded right away,” recalled Judy. “There are some really friendly people in Eden.”
It was as if two eras collided in that same afternoon: The post-9/11, 21st century paranoia, side-by-side with the old-fashioned, reflexive trust of a vanishing age of innocence.
Although things were straightened out, the unexpected visit from anti-terrorism officials tilted Judy’s world off its axis. She is having work done on the house. She wondered if the police thought it was suspicious that the front door was off.
“Maybe they thought,” she said, “that we were some kind of crackpots.”
It did not take much checking to check Judy Nowak off of the terrorist list. She and Henry have lived in the house for 43 years. She is far more likely to cook up pierogis than to slap together an IED. Had she and her cousin instead been of Middle Eastern descent, not working and living in an apartment, things might not have gone as smoothly, given the profile of the 9/11 terrorists. But in this case, the system worked.
At first, she was upset. Later, her irritation shaded into understanding.
“They’re doing their job. I guess you can’t be too careful these days,” she said. “But it made me think about how much life has changed. It makes me sad.”
Co-workers at the sewer authority teased her, saying she had better not buy fertilizer—used in bombmaking—for a while. “Looking back, I guess it’s kind of funny,” she said. “But I didn’t think so at the time.”
There is one more thing. She still is not sure what the Tennessee Pipeline is.
“I’m afraid to look it up on the computer,” she said. “If they find out, maybe they will think I’m up to something.”
Welcome to the 21st century.
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