Don’t Tread on Me
At ninety minutes, Tread is shorter than its subject, which is a two hour and seventeen minute confrontation by armored bulldozer on the town of Granby, Colorado on June 4, 2004. Marvin Heemeyer, a welder, veteran and muffler shop operator who had lived in the town for twelve years, spent a year and a half putting concrete sheets, cameras, and gunports onto a Komatsu D335A bulldozer in secret. He got in, the crane he had set up closed the bulldozer on top of him, and he destroyed his neighbor’s concrete batch plant, the town hall, the library and a hardware store.
Local police, state police, and the highway patrol responded. Thirteen buildings were levelled and natural gas service to the town was cut off. The rampage made international news. And then on June 5th, 2004, Ronald Reagan died. This is the reason given by Tread for the fact that no one seems to talk much about Heemeyer and his bulldozer. In contemporary true crime culture, with its preoccupations over Ted Bundy and Columbine, he isn’t a favorite. Heemeyer died by suicide when he shot himself in the head inside the bulldozer: there were no other deaths.
On June 4, 2004, Heemeyer turned out of his property onto his neighbor Cody Docheff’s. Docheff confronted him with a wheel tractor-scraper, which he pushed aside. He fired on two police officers who faced him. The reverse 911 system was deployed, first to warn residents to stay in their homes, then to tell them to evacuate. Marvin Heemeyer was the only person to die in the attack.
Law enforcement did not have a plan for this, nor did they have a last-minute solution. They dropped a flash-bang grenade down the bulldozer exhaust pipe. They shot at the bulldozer. They shot at the cameras, behind 3 inch plastic and fans to blow dust away. At one point a police officer got on top of the bulldozer and rode it a little like a bronco, trying to find a place his service weapon could do damage. At another point a little later, he got off. Two ice shovels confronted the bulldozer but were forced out of its path. An anti-tank missile or helicopter strike would almost surely have damaged the town to a much greater extent than the bulldozer.
What combination drives someone to have the steadiness of purpose, the diligence, and the technical ability to spend a year and a half armoring a bulldozer but not to sit through the court system? Where did Heemeyer get this idea?
Generations of children have enjoyed the 1939 book Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. The steam shovel is lipstick red and named Mary Anne and Mike tells everyone that she can dig as much in a single day as a hundred men could dig in a week, but he isn’t really sure. (Stay with me here. I’m going somewhere with this.) Times are tough for Mike and Mary Anne as they travel around America in the late 1930s, looking for work and being passed over for newer equipment. They hear of a town that needs digging for a new town hall — a big job, and “it would take one hundred men a whole week to do it.” Mary Anne and Mike do it in a single day. There is much rejoicing until everybody realizes that there is no ramp to take Mary Anne out of the basement and she is stuck there. When all looks bleak for our heroes, a clever little boy from the town suggests that Mary Anne become a steam furnace to heat the town hall.
Marvin Heemeyer isn’t around to contest the story told by others in the documentary. We hear about his love of snowmobiling, his talent for welding, a little about his life before he moved to Colorado, about the beginning, middle and end of what seemed to be a generally happy romantic relationship, and a little about his muffler shop. The tapes he made, played in Tread, are focused on what was his present and future. His perspective is fatalistic: they were always out to get him, the whole town would never accept him, he never had a chance. It had to be this way.
Listening to Heemeyer’s voice rant and rave against human cruelty and society’s injustices, and watching others in Granby calmly explain their side of the story, the viewer struggles to construct a narrative. Tread is parsimonious: there are no interviews with psychologists, no pieces of press commentary, no neighbors retelling stories from childhood. The explanatory belt and suspenders familiar to viewers of true crime is absent here, but that makes the experience all the more powerful. The reenactments and actual footage create friction in places, rather than always flowing together smoothly, but there is no filler in Tread. It’s a roller coaster ride.
The documentary makes full use of Heemeyer’s audio recordings, a sort of diary and manifesto. He begins with stating his social security number as a proof of identity, which the documentary plays in full. Among the audio verite recordings we are introduced to the small town’s journalists, police officers, and prominent families, members of the snowmobile club Marv Heemeyer participated in, and his former girlfriend.
“He was old-school. An old-school man. And society doesn’t allow that anymore. He was a handshake’s a handshake kind of guy to me.” Heemeyer’s former girlfriend, Tricia McDonald, has nothing but kind words to say about Marv. This is the closest anyone really gets to offering an explanation. What, exactly, did society disallow? Handshake deals? Steak and potatoes? Heemeyer ran a successful business, was respected as a master welder, owned his own property after buying it cheap at a 1991 bankruptcy proceeding, went traveling every so often and snowmobiling with good friends about once a week. On paper, his life sounds pretty good.
Property is the dark heartbeat of Heemeyer’s resentment. In 1998, the town hall of Granby moved to enact spot zoning. This opened the way for Cody Docheff, Heemeyer’s nemesis at the auction, to buy the lot next to Heemeyer’s muffler shop for a concrete batch plant. Marv Heemeyer, a respected welder and business owner, drummed up anti-batch sentiment in Granby, citing dust, noise, and traffic. 1998 also marked six years since Heemeyer had been asked for the sewer line extension to install a working toilet, and an order to stop using the property and pay a $100 a day fine until the water and sewage system was hooked up. In the spot zoning system, the city council withheld the easement necessary to connect the sewer line to the muffler shop around the existing concrete plant.
According to Docheff, he would have been happy to accommodate the sewer line extension through his property to Marv’s. According to Heemeyer, Docheff remained an implacable enemy. In the memo line of a check paying a fine, Heemeyer wrote the word “Cowards.”
Tread presents Marv’s story of buying the property through tasteful reenactment. In Marv’s version, he bought it fair and square at an auction only to be confronted by his deceitful neighbor and a vaguely crooked financier. The neighbor in question calmly disavows any real interest in it and tells of trying to offer Heemeyer a fair price several times. This isn’t about trying to find the truth between the two versions so much as staring into the abyss between them, watching it deepen and widen enough to hide a bulldozer’s worth of resentment.
Is $80,000 a fair price to ask for a sixty-foot extension of plumbing line? It is certainly a fraction of what Heemeyer spent on going to California to purchase the 49 ton bulldozer and the guns, concrete, sheet metal, cameras, fans, and air conditioning. It’s also a poor estimate of the value of his time spent on construction. This is all over a muffler shop adding a bathroom.
What is an individual’s obligation to their community? What obligation does the community have to the individual? Does the fact that that community is a small mountain town change anything? It seems sort of lily-livered and pointless to start a long existential discussion about exactly where the line is, given that we can all agree Heemeyer well and truly crossed it when he went to California, bought a bulldozer, brought it to Colorado, and added a .50 caliber rifle, a .308 semi-automatic rifle, a .22LR rifle, concrete, armor steel, and cameras mounted behind bulletproof lexan. To its credit, Tread doesn’t try.
Marvin Heemeyer’s rampage ended when his bulldozer hit the basement of Gambles department store and was unable to get out. As Tread cuts footage of the bulldozer with documentary interviews, one man comments, “And here you see the bulldozer is losing steam.” It appears to be moving at a pretty good clip still. Unlike Mike Mulligan’s Mary Anne, Heemeyer’s rig did not run on steam. It did, however, end its journey stuck in a basement. The crowd watching from the hilltops and the law enforcement officers trailing behind took some time to realize that it was all over and that Heemeyer was dead. After a full examination of its construction and contents, authorities had the bulldozer dismantled piece by piece and sent to different places for disposal. Where Mike Mulligan harnessed his individual drive for success to the local greater good, Heemeyer was unable to imagine coexisting with his community. There was no little boy with a bright idea around to help a grown man who had backed himself into a corner.
Probably everyone has escaped into the fantasy of dramatically releasing pent-up anger: of shoving their job in their boss’s face, or taking the dog and walking out on their spouse. Sometimes, when the moment comes to quit or tell them it’s not working out, the reality is darker, lonelier, sadder than the anger. The resentments and frustrations seem small and insignificant against the long-planned actions, and others respond with confusion or indifference, not shock and horror. The reality is stumbling over the words, feeling instant regret, watching the object of hatred lose its hard edges and become softer, ambiguous, maybe even a little bit desirable. For all he let out on his recordings, Heemeyer seems to have kept his thoughts and emotions well-hidden from the people in his life. Before the bulldozer got stuck in the hardware store basement: was he thinking about the sewer line?
