One of the last happy meetings of the Tonya Harding Fan Club took place at Nancy Welfelt’s house, around her dining-room table. The meeting had actually begun at Clackamas Town Center—the mall, in Clackamas County, Oregon, where Tonya skates—on the morning of the day before Tonya’s on-again, off-again ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, began his sixteen hours of interviews with the F.B.I. That was several days before Tonya announced that she knew about the plot to attack Nancy Kerrigan only after it had unfolded, and about a week before Jeff pleaded guilty, but several days after Shawn Eric Eckardt complained to the Portland Oregonian that Tonya had browbeaten him for not getting around to arranging the assault as quickly as she wanted. It was a golden moment. It was probably the last moment when the fan-club members could believe that Tonya had been completely uninvolved.

On the morning of the meeting, January 25th, as on most mornings since all the bad news, some of the club members went to the rink to watch Tonya practice. The ice was empty except for Tonya, who was bent over in the corner, fixing a skate. She was wearing a stretchy black sleeveless catsuit over a stretchy gray tank leotard. Every contour of her body was outlined in black—her meaty back, her strong upper legs, with their blocky muscles. She stood up and started down the length of the rink, her skates cutting feathery grooves in the ice. Her lips were pressed tight, and her chin was thrust forward. Her expression was wan and stubborn. Her ponytail fluttered out behind her. No other part of her seemed to move, but she was crossing the ice with tremendous speed. A snatch of music came over the loudspeaker. At the end of the rink, where a hundred or so people were gathered, she turned sharply, bent her leg, and then spun until the ice beneath her skate began to make a sizzling sound. Suddenly she stopped, skated toward the other end of the rink, spun again, pulled at the waist of her catsuit, then circled the ice once more. For an hour, she practiced pieces of her program—a spin, a leap, a movement of her leg or hand. The pieces were never fused together into something fluid or pretty. They were just explosions of motion between long silent moments, when Tonya would stand alone in the huge, blank rink, kicking at a frosty patch or tightening her skates. She didn’t look happy, but she also didn’t look rattled or embarrassed or shy. At the end of the hour, when she stepped off the ice, the club members told each other that she seemed composed and steady.

The club was meeting that day because the members had a lot of work to do. Since the attack, and since Tonya’s victory at the nationals, the club, four hundred strong, had received hundreds of requests for membership information. Elaine Stamm, the club’s founder and president, had printed up more copies of the flyer describing the memberships—ten dollars for adults, one dollar to join Tots for Tonya—and suggesting additional opportunities to support Tonya, by fund-raising, or by giving her cosmetics, hair care, and nail care, or by making calls about her to sports talk programs, or by mailing her encouraging cards. There were also scores of requests for Tonya buttons and bumper stickers, and for tapes of “It’s Tonya’s Turn,” written and recorded by Linda and Greg Lewis, local songwriters who a few years ago composed a hit song about Desert Storm. Linda and Greg had stopped by that morning to make some last-minute arrangements with Elaine about the song. Linda was saying, “We’re not skating fans so much, but we’re Christians, and we thought this was the right thing to do.”

The mall was a good place for the club to gather and get all this done. There really isn’t a town of Clackamas. There are acres of Douglas-fir forest and grassy idle pastures, and balding hills now sprouting subdivisions, and ranchettes on lawns of chunky red mulch, and squat new apartment complexes with tan siding and shiny driveways, and featherweight trailers perched on rough concrete blocks, and there are tumbledown old farmhouses on weedy tracts waiting to be seized and subdivided, and there are little strip malls and fast-food restaurants and glassy health clubs and tanning salons standing alone in enormous parking lots, and there are bushy fields of huckleberry, blackberry, sumac, and salal, and there are pockets of businesses having to do with toys and mufflers and furniture, but there really isn’t any town to speak of, or even a village to drive through. Unlike an old-fashioned town, which spreads out organically, Clackamas County’s settled areas look as if they had emerged abruptly, hacked out of the tangle of blackberry bushes and firs. Around the mall, new things are cropping up so fast that the place seems kinetic, as if everything had gone up, and could come down, in a day. Even where the county is overbuilt and busy, emptiness is the feeling it conveys.

Portland is half an hour’s drive away from here. It is an old, compact city that was settled by Yankee merchants, who fashioned it after Boston. Portland is the largest city in Oregon, but it is of very little consequence to people like Tonya and Jeff and Shawn, who live in and rarely leave Clackamas and east Multnomah Counties. News reports that say Tonya is from Portland have missed the geographical and sociological point. The world that Clackamas County is part of starts somewhere in the Great Plains, skips over cities like Portland and Seattle, and then jumps up to Alaska—a world where people are plunked down on harsh or austere or overgrown landscapes and might depart from them at any moment, leaving behind only a few houses and some gear. Alaska, desolate and rugged and intractable, feels like an annex of Clackamas County, and Portland seems a million miles away. Alaska, not Portland, is also where many people from Oregon have often gone to get more land, or to make quick money by working for a summer in a fish cannery or on a logging crew. There is a Yukon Tavern in Clackamas County and a Klondike Jewelers, and at the nearby thrift stores you can find old table linens with Alaskan motifs—huskies, oil rigs, Eskimos—and old postcards of Alaskan landscapes and photographs of Juneau cannery crews and of log camps, scribbled with messages to the family back in Clackamas.

The winter weather in this part of Oregon is gray and drizzly, and the light is flat and filtered through a low ceiling of clouds. Occasionally, the clouds bust up, and it will rain in spats—you can be driving around and the rain will pour on your car but not on the car behind you. The most monumental thing in Clackamas County is Mt. Hood, a mostly dormant volcano, which is 11,235 feet high and is snow-covered year round. Mt. Hood has several active, constantly creeping glaciers. Otherwise, the only ice regularly found in the county is the skating rink at the mall.

Clackamas Town Center is a giant mall, the largest collection of retail stores in the state of Oregon; the space it encloses, more than a million square feet, is so much bigger than any other enclosed space nearby that when the mall opened, in 1981, it provoked a little local hysteria. Rumors went around the county that a band of hippies or Satanists was kidnapping children and taking them into the mall rest rooms and either castrating them or cutting off their hair, then painting their faces and letting them go. Psychologists later attributed the rumors to the unease of people who were accustomed to being isolated and outdoors, as they always had been in this part of Oregon, suddenly making regular visits to a place that was crowded and contained.