I woke up the other morning thinking about an artificial heart. Not just any artificial heart, but a specific one, made of titanium, implanted last year in a 40-year-old Australian man who was in such severe heart failure that most days he could barely make it to the toilet. He was the sixth person in the world to get the new device, and the first to ever be discharged from the hospital with a fully artificial heart and able to live on his own. It kept him alive for a hundred and five days, until he was finally matched with a donor, making him one of 5,000 heart transplant recipients worldwide last year out of more than 50,000 on waiting lists, most of whom died, or will die, with their original, failing hearts. There have been other artificial devices over the past 60 years, all of which have been temporary—a way to keep patients alive long enough to get the real thing. The titanium heart, though, is meant to be forever.

I’m not on anybody’s transplant list—too old; too conflicted--but I could use a new heart. A cardiologist told me this a few of months ago after I had a sudden bout of ventricular tachycardia while out walking our dog. It was a warm, bright day in late January. Luke and I were on the sidewalk at the end of our two-mile hike, just passing in front of the next-door neighbors’ house, when the lower chamber of my heart suddenly, and for no apparent reason, jumped from 75 beats a minute to more than 150, too fast to pump blood to the rest of my body. Everything shut down. I sagged halfway to the ground, what they call pre-syncope, and would have kept falling, helpless to stop what was happening. But then, 13 seconds into the episode, the CRT-D device implanted in my chest fired off a controlled burst of electrical impulses that interrupted the V-tach and put me back into normal rhythm.

CRT-D stands for “Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy with Defibrillator,” a mouthful, I know. It’s a combination pacemaker and implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, or ICD, for people suffering from heart conditions that put them at a high risk of sudden cardiac death.

The moment passed.

I stood up, took a shortcut through the neighbors’ yard, drank a lot of water (thinking, incorrectly, that I must been dehydrated), and then went into our fenced backyard to pick up dog poop. Two days later, after the long weekend, I left a message with my cardiologist to let him know about the incident on the off-chance that it might have been heart related. Three days after that, he returned the call. His office had just gotten around to checking the remote monitor connected to my device, and the data confirmed that I’d experienced an episode of sustained V-tach, something that had never happened to me before, though I’ve been hit with just about every other heart problem there is, starting in the upper chamber and continuing over the past 15 years to the bottom. Given the progressive nature of my deteriorating heart, it was only a matter of time. Fortunately, the defibrillator did its due diligence and corrected the wonky, and life-threatening, ventricular rhythm with what’s known as “overdrive pacing,” which sounds counterintuitive, and sort of is—like revving the engine in a car that’s idling too fast so it slows back down.

The cardiologist called it a “painless therapy,” and explained that if the overdrive pacing hadn’t worked, and if the V-tach had continued for another 15 seconds, then the ICD would have delivered a full-on electric shock to kick me back into proper rhythm. Sometimes it takes multiple shocks—what’s known as a “V-tach storm.” I read about one guy with an ICD who went into tachcardia on an international flight and had a V-tach storm that lasted 10 hours.

I had been tearing it up doing pretty well at cardio rehab—me and a couple of friends I’d made there: Corrinne, a retired Navy procurement specialist, and Sally, an elementary school custodian. Corrinne had a raspy smoker’s voice, popped nitro pills like they were Tic Tac, and gave me a hard time if I got too far ahead of her on the exercise machines. Sally occasionally fudged the treadmill and recumbent cross-trainer settings, once came to rehab in pajamas (it was pajama day at her school), and complained about her freeloading grandkids who she clearly adored. Corrinne had inside dope on a couple of the physical therapists and loved to gossip. Sally had a thing for Monk, the OCD TV detective whose reruns ran on the cardio rehab TVs. Corrinne preferred Little Joe from “Bonanza,” but wasn’t nearly as excited as I was when the classic “Hoss and the Little People” episode aired just before Christmas. Sally, a cancer survivor who in a just world would have already been able to retire, was working a second job in the evenings and on weekends emptying trashcans and doing general clean-up around her apartment complex. She was out sick for a couple of weeks and we worried about her when she didn’t show for rehab.

We were three-afternoons-a-week companions for most of four months in the fall of 2024--checking in on one another, teasing, joking, offering encouragement—until my V-tach. The cardiologist told me to stop working out for awhile and I haven’t gone back since. Corrinne, Sally, and I were all nearing the end of our insurance-allotted sessions anyway, but I still missed them and what Happiness Studies researchers would say was our low-stakes bonding. Only it didn’t feel like low stakes, not entirely, as precarious as things were and are with our bad hearts--even if we didn’t know one another’s last names or a way to keep in touch.

My wife Janet wouldn’t let me out of her sight. We’d been here before with other heart scares and health crises—an embolic stroke I’d had five years earlier that thankfully didn’t do too much damage; a 90 percent blockage of my left anterior descending artery in 2021, repaired with a drug-eluting stent; a couple of massive back-to-back rectal bleeds that nearly took me out three years ago—twice--from a near-catastrophic combination of runaway hemorrhoids, an exposed artery, and the blood-thinner Eliquis.

Eleven hospitalizations altogether over the past five and a half years.

Janet moved her home office downstairs to the dining room to be close to where I spent much of my days, tucked away at my writing desk in a corner of the living room. She went on morning walks with me and Luke, and insisted on holding his leash. She spent a couple of weeks on a mattress next to the guest bedroom downstairs where I’ve been sleeping because of my snoring, even though the noise from my CPAP kept waking her up. (Yeah, that, too.) I suspected that she surreptitiously checked in on me every few hours to make sure I was still alive.

I was already scheduled for a procedure with a cardiac specialist 70 miles away at the University of Virginia to remove and replace a couple of failing leads that had been implanted with my first pacemaker 15 years before, and somehow I got it in my head that new pacing wires would be the answer to everything—including whatever had caused the V-tach. It was magical thinking. The cardiologists all said sorry, but no. The V-tach had been caused by fibrotic scarring in the lower wall of my left ventricle, nothing to do with the wiring. The timing of the two—the V-tach episode and the problem leads—were coincidental.

Janet and I not-so-jokingly say we’re members of the One-Percent Club—that if there’s a one-percent chance of complication in a surgical procedure, as there always is, it will happen to us. And it has:

The Heart Wall Micro-Perf of 1999. (Mine.)

A Nightmare on Riveroxaban. (Hers.)

The Intraoperative Uterine Puncture of 2017. (Hers again.)

The Grapefruit Groin Hematoma of ’21. (Mine again.)

The Rectal Repair Snafu of 2022. (Mine yet again.)

And, a surprise to neither of us, another post-operative bleed after the lead replacement that had the UVA Cardiac Unit nurses chasing down one of my surgeons in the Medical Center parking garage and dragging him back to my hospital room. He didn’t even take off his puffy winter jacket, just went right to work with the nurses, all three of them applying as much pressure as they could on my chest and the closed six-inch incision over my CRT-D device so they could muscle on multiple layers of compression tape in hopes of stopping the bleed without having to do a second surgery. The pain far exceeded the promised relief from Oxy and Fentanyl and kept me awake all through that interminable night, but wasn’t nearly as bad as the next morning when they peeled off the thick, rubbery, Gorilla-glue tape along with a couple of not insignificant strips of my skin. A saintly wound specialist did the best she could to patch me up, enough for us to leave the hospital, but my chest was still too raw for me to wear a seatbelt on the ride home.

We got the news a couple of days later that they may have partially dislodged the new lead when applying all that pressure--another possible complication and one that also might require more surgery, though I’d have to wait a month for a follow-up X-ray to find out for sure. At least the hematoma was under control. Now we just needed to keep an eye out for infection.

Jan and I breathed a small One-Percent Club sigh of relief about the shrinking hematoma, anyway, but the caution light stayed on for the next three months. I was given strict instructions not to lift anything heavy, raise my arm above my shoulder, exercise much besides walking the dog, or sleep on my side. I also had to quit driving for awhile because of the chance of another episode of V-tach. Not that I wanted to go anywhere. My lower left ventricle is a mine field, as it turns out, though in my case there are only a couple of landmines buried there in the form of the small amount of fibrotic scarring in a couple of certain spots in my heart wall—a 2 percent “burden,” to be exact, still capable of tripping up the electrical signal and causing another V-tach episode.

I could walk across that field a hundred thousand more times and never step on another mine, or on the same one a second time. Or it could happen the next time I get up to go to the bathroom.

“There’s no way to know,” the UVA cardiologist said. “Could be five minutes. Could five months. Could be five years.”

With so much uncertainty, and after my small run of trauma, I struggled with depression and anxiety, the successful treatment for which turned out not to be doom scrolling on my computer, or incessantly reading about, and being outraged and disgusted by, the daily contraventions and immoralities of the new American president and his rakehell administration. I mostly avoided my friends—I’m not sure why—though they offered to come over and keep me company. Talking to Janet helped. That and our nightly ritual of sitting together on the sofa to watch Scandinavian police procedurals. I checked in with my brother Wayne in Hawaii a couple of times a week to compare notes on our bum hearts. Misery doesn’t actually love company, but it seems to be OK with miserable company. My daughter Eva sent lots of sweet videos of my goofy grandkids out in Minnesota, and all four of my daughters checked in on me from time to time, which was sweet as well. Still, weeks went by when I didn’t leave the neighborhood, and I hardly left the house. I was between book contracts, so had nothing pressing to distract me. I’d given up religion when I was a teenager, so prayer wasn’t an option. Meditation was difficult, as restless as I’ve always been, and I gave it up after a few tries. A couple of breezy afternoons I sat on the front porch in one of the old rocking chairs that we inherited from Janet’s Aunt Linda, watching and listening to the wind in the trees—two 40-foot Triumph Elms we planted as saplings several years ago, their canopies now nearly as wide as they are tall. That helped some, too. Plus the occasional crumb of Xanax.

Janet eventually moved her office back upstairs and put away the mattress on the floor. She got too busy with work for the morning dog walks. A follow-up X-ray confirmed that my new lead was secure. The hematoma, and the bruising, eventually went away altogether, and my skin grew back, though with a round, red scar on one side of my chest that appears to be permanent--like a drink-glass condensation stain on an old wood coffee table.

Now whenever I take Luke out on my own, which is most days again, I carry my trekking poles, plus a shoulder bag with phone and ID. I also have a medical alert bracelet with our address and Janet’s name and cell phone number. I thought, briefly, and then gave up the thought, about switching my wide-brimmed sunhat for a bike helmet, just in case.

I’ve made a few other adjustments as well. I rarely venture out of Phase One, the web of streets that make up our section of the neighborhood, and I altered my dog-walk route to avoid having to go past the neighbors’ house and the spot on the sidewalk where I went into V-tach. Others I’ve met in a couple of online support groups—one for people with genetic disorders called laminopathies, the other for folks living with ICDs--talk a lot about PTSD. They say you should face your fears, that returning to the scene of the crime won’t automatically make you a repeat victim. But I say why take the risk?

I often think about my mom on these walks--about her first stroke in her early 50s and the health struggles that followed her until the end. We didn’t know anything back then about the causes, or the progressive nature, of the Family Heart. I think about my grandmother and my cousin, too, both of whom died from sudden cardiac arrest--not knowing about the causes either, and not having an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator that could have saved them: my grandmother years before I was born, as she stepped onto a bus on her way home from work in D.C., my cousin Cindy right after she pulled into the parking lot at a school where she worked with special ed kids.

It’s impossible to know what their scarring burdens were, or how many landmines lay hidden there. We only know that without an MRI to see what was in their hearts, and without an ICD for protection, it only took the one. The first sign of trouble in people with hearts like ours is also often the last.

It was my brother Wayne who solved the mystery of the Family Heart. More accurately, it was Wayne’s wife Helen and his daughter Jubilee who insisted he go to the Cleveland Clinic where a team of cardiologists and a weeklong battery of tests in the early fall of 2022 discovered the inherited genetic mutation that caused it. They also figured out the reasons for Wayne’s rapid descent into heart failure and the medications that could lift him out of it. Enough to keep him going, anyway. He’s no longer the energetic children’s music performer he once was--runs out of breath at times, can’t sing as loud or hold a note for as long as he used to, and sometimes has to sit when he plays. But he still gets to be the front man for Uncle Wayne and the Howling Dog Band, and is still a kids’ rock star on the Hawaiian Islands.

What we have—Wayne and I and half the family on our mother’s side, including several of our children and grandchildren—is a rare mutation of the LMNA gene, which carries instructions for making several types of proteins, collectively called lamins. The mutation damages the proteins which in turn weaken the nuclei in certain muscle tissue cells--especially, but not exclusively, the heart muscle. The compromised cells can lead to a number of both rare and not-so-rare laminopathy diseases and conditions:

Dilated Cardiomyopathy, Emery-Dreifus Muscular Dystrophy, Limb-Girdle Muscular Dystrophy, Familial Partial Lipodystrophy, Heart-Hand Syndrome, Hutchison-Gilford Progeria Syndrome. The Lamin mutation can even be a contributing factor for diabetes.

What it’s meant for me is decades-long atrial fibrillation, complete AV node block, arterial occlusion, mitral valve regurgitation, enlarged heart, on-again off-again heart failure, left ventricle scarring, ventricular tachycardia, stroke, pacemaker I, pacemaker II, CRT-D, a pointless cardioversion procedure, multiple heart ablations, blood thinners, anti-arrhythmic drugs, beta-blockers, Watchman implant, panic attacks.

One of the frustrating, even maddening, aspects of laminopathies is that they’re not phenotypical. That is, they manifest differently in different people, and can progress in different ways and at different rates, even within families. Some people get them as children, some as older adults. Most get them in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. There might be a family tendency for which ones you’ll contract, and at what age, and how they’ll progress, but nothing you can take to the bank. The penetrance rate runs north of 90 percent, and if you do inherit the LMNA mutation—it’s autosomal dominant, meaning there’s a 50 percent chance that if one of your parents has the “pathogenic variant,” you will, too—the only thing dead certain is that you’ll develop one or more of the diseases.

Wayne and I are twin cases in point—though he’s 18 months older. In addition to these failing hearts, which we only found out about in our mid 50s, we also appear to have a late-onset form of muscular dystrophy that makes it increasingly difficult to climb stairs, keep up on a walk with anybody except the slowest dog, lift heavy things, carry stuff, raise our arms to our sides or over our heads for any length of time, and, sometimes, particularly for him, breathe.

For a long time, I berated myself about getting weaker, not realizing it was Muscular Dystrophy--convinced that even with my bad heart if I just exercised harder, in the ways I did when I was younger, then I could get back into proper shape. It was an echo of the blame we used to put on our mom—unfairly; whispered among ourselves because we didn’t want to say it out loud and hurt her feelings. Now I suspect that all our gentle encouragement did was make her feel bad for not exercising, or leave her painfully fatigued from the times she pushed herself to try. The likely truth is that for years her body must have been collapsing in on itself from her failing heart, and undiagnosed muscular dystrophy, and chronic cardiac fluid retention. As that happened, and as her heart gave out and other organs failed along with it--things we only found out at the end of her life--she didn’t have the strength or the stamina to keep going.

None of our children and grandchildren who inherited the LMNA mutation have tested positive for any of the laminopathies. Their baseline heart functions are all OK. No signs of MD or premature aging. So far. But that will change. One of our daughters has a follow-up appointment for an electrophysiology study later this summer after a worrisome but inconclusive heart MRI. There always seems to be something. And you always seem to be waiting for the next test to find out what it is.

We join these support groups. Attend online information sessions. Scour the internet for hopeful news. Biotech researchers have recently gotten funding for a new, FDA-approved human drug trial that holds some promise for halting the progression of the diseases—LMNA Dilated Cardiomyopathy in particular. But that study won’t start until 2026, and there’s no certainty about the outcome, or when we’ll know.

Gene-splicing therapy also holds promise for people with the LMNA mutation, though they’ve been touting that as the next big thing for at least ten years and counting--and we’re still waiting. Donor hearts, meanwhile, will always be in short supply, and carry the risks of infection, rejection, stroke, blood clots, heart attack, and medication damage to other organs.

Somebody once asked Denton Cooley, the famous heart doctor who revolutionized heart surgery and performed the world’s first artificial heart transplant (which only worked for a few days), “So, Dr. Cooley, you’re the most prominent cardiac specialist in the world. What can we do to prevent heart failure?”

The story may be apocryphal—probably it is, though I read this version several years ago in The New Yorker. Cooley’s supposed response:

“Change your parents.”

Daniel Timms, the principal designer of the new titanium heart, wishes he could have his parents back. He’s in America now, and has been for years, working obsessively to turn what had once been a literal pipedream into a permanent heart-replacement reality. He misses his mom, who lives half a world away, back home in Australia. He has said this in interviews. And he misses his dad, a plumber, who died several years ago from heart failure—while Timms, a bioengineering graduate student at the time, was in Europe trying to scour up funding for research and development on a new kind of heart that he hoped could save his failing dad. Timms and his dad had worked on Timms’ original idea together, inspired by the “spinning disc” technology of the pond pumps in their own backyard: sitting on the floor of their local hardware store, pulling stuff from the shelves, fiddling with motors and tubes and pipes, seeing if it was possible to reimagine the human heart altogether, and not just make yet another artificial facsimile that like all the others would just be a bridge, a placeholder, until a donor heart became available.

It was a race against time, as these things always are. And time, as it always does, won. But Timms kept going, kept tinkering, kept chasing funding, even relying for a number of years on major investment by a Houston-based retail furniture store owner known from his ubiquitous, fast-talk TV ads as “Mattress Mack.”

It’s a resonant back story, one that I’ve repeated more than once lately, my go-to subject in gatherings with other people when social anxiety gets the better of me. And who knows? It really could end up being the happy denouement of the 60+ year international project to build a better heart, one that’s immune to the ravages of cardiac arrest, coronary artery disease, high blood pressure, heart valve disease, myocarditis, congenital heart defects, arrhythmias—and, for a small number of us, several thousand a year in the U.S., laminopathies caused by mutations of the LMNA gene.

Most artificial hearts in the past had been made of flexible plastic and used a complicated and cumbersome pneumatic air pressure system to force blood out through the artificial ventricles in a “pulsatile” fashion. Like an accordion. Timms went with titanium instead, because it would never need to be replaced. And instead of figuring out a way to pump blood though the body rhythmically, trying like everybody else to imitate the actions of a biological heart, he inserted an electromagnetic motor into his device and designed a small chamber with a spinning metal disk in the center, like a propeller, to force blood out into the lungs and the rest of the body, moving it in a continuous flow. Timms’ heart doesn’t beat, in other words--it whooshes.

Finally, Timms adapted the magnetic-levitation system used in Japan’s high-speed trains to suspend his spinning disk away from the walls of the heart, the “maglev” technology allowing blood to flow more easily around the disk, and eliminating any concerns about wear and tear since none of the parts could ever touch.

The titanium heart almost entirely eliminates the risks of infection, rejection, blood clots, immunosuppressant medication reactions, kidney damage, and a tendency for implanted heart walls to thicken and cause problems the transplants are meant to fix in the first place: heart attack, heart failure, heart arrhythmias, sudden cardiac death.

After several successful implantations of the BiVACOR-TAH (TAH stands for “Total Artificial Heart”), and with U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval, Timms’ company will be implanting 20 more titanium hearts in 2025--and hundreds, and eventually thousands more, after that.

The remaining hurdle to permanent transplant, and it’s a sizeable one, is the external battery, which runs out every three or four hours, making it hard not to think of the BiVACOR-TAH, for all its obvious virtues, as the electric car of artificial hearts in a world without enough charging stations.

What the Timms heart needs, and what we’re all waiting for, is something more like Tony Stark’s self-charging Arc Reactor, so that I—and my children when they need it, and my grandchildren who don’t yet know what they’re facing—can put all this worry behind us, all these complications and all this fretting about the Family Heart, and become an Iron Man, too.

Flood hero Sam Tucker and an unidentified journalist in 1972, 45 years after the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927/Army Corps of Engineers

By Steve Watkins

30,000 Black men and boys were forced to work on the levees during the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, mostly in the Delta states of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana--trying, and ultimately failing, to save them. And once the river broke through, as it did again and again, they had nowhere to go in most cases except the eight-foot-wide crowns of the surviving sections of levee. Either there or the work barges anchored to the river side. Not that the barges were a safe bet either.

When hundreds of Black workers leapt onto one of the barges near Greenville, Mississippi at Mounds Landing to avoid being swept away by the catastrophic crevasse there, the tugboat that was supposed to push them downstream and out of harm’s way was instead sucked back upstream toward the powerful waterfall, dragging the barge along with it.

One of the White foremen standing nearby said they should let it happen, which would have meant certain death for the workers. “Let’s put all [of them] on the barge and cut it loose,” he said, using a racial slur. A retired levee contractor named Charlie Gibson, who had been brought out in his wheelchair during the night to advise the engineers, refused to let it happen. “We ain’t goin’ to cut the barge loose,” he responded. “I’ll shoot you if you try that. If we go, we go together.”

The tug was somehow able to maneuver the barge away from the crevasse and across the three-mile stretch of river to temporary safety on the Arkansas side, though the levees there wouldn’t hold much longer either. Already, crevasses had broken through other sections of levee in the states north of Mounds Landing and across the river. And dozens more would soon erupt to the south as the flood crest continued its marauding journey.

“There was really a domino effect,” said author Richard Mizelle in a radio interview. “Once one levee began to break and the flood waters began to sort of continue to push down toward the Gulf of Mexico—when those levees began to fail, you have a cascading effect of breaks throughout the Mississippi Valley.”

But none were as large, or as devastating, or would claim as many lives, as the one at Mounds Landing, where hundreds of Black workers were killed, and as many as 400 of the survivors, unable to board the barge that eventually escaped across the river, remained trapped near the crevasse. A Black minister would later complain in an unanswered letter to President Calvin Coolidge that White men still stuck on the levee were quickly picked up by rescue boats, but "mules have been taken on board and Negroes left in peril.”

Shortly after the crevasse at Mounds Landing killed hundreds of Black workers—and not long after the near-tragedy that followed with the tug and barge--a levee break on the Arkansas side of the river led to the deaths of more conscripted workers, a horrifying event witnessed by thousands of laborers and refugees and later reported in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. It also led to the most dramatic and heroic moment to come out of the story of the Great Flood.

A much smaller crevasse formed when that Arkansas levee collapsed, but the force of the escaping current was still so strong that it, too, pulled a large boat upstream—in this case a Mississippi River Commission steamboat, The Pelican, with nearly two dozen men on board. Helpless to break free, the desperate captain rammed the bow of The Pelican into a surviving section of the levee in a last-ditch effort to avert the tragedy, but it wasn’t enough. The steamboat capsized and was dragged tumbling over and over through the crevasse with all the men still on board. “It was as if [the steamer] had been carried over Niagara Falls,” the newspaper reported.

One of the observers on the levee, a Black worker named Sam Tucker, shouted to others to help him rescue the men, but no one would join him. So Tucker climbed into a nearby rowboat, pushed off from the levee on his own, and headed for the break and over the waterfall.

“The current lifted his boat and rocketed him through the turbulence,” according to the account published later in the Memphis paper. “Somehow he survived, followed the steamer, and a mile inland picked 2 men out of the water. They were alive; 19 others drowned.”

For years, the Army Corps of Engineers kept an account of Sam Tucker’s heroism on their website to celebrate his heroic act and its importance in the story of the Great Flood of 1927. The account was deleted in 2025, however, when the then-newly-elected U.S. president ordered all government websites to remove “diversity-related” content. The Corps of Engineers somehow managed to keep, or overlooked and left posted, a photograph from 1972 of an elderly Sam Tucker standing next to a couple of willow trees like the ones once used to make the giant woven willow-tree mats that were an important part of the old levees from the time of the flood.

***

Pie & Chai editor Steve Watkins is the author of 15 books, most of them novels and works of nonfiction for young readers. His newest, Wolves at the Door (Scholastic, December 2024), is a historical novel about two sisters in East Prussia, fighting to survive at the end of WWII as the Red Army turns the tide of war–exacting revenge on the first German state they encounter and leaving tens of thousands of children orphaned and abandoned. Another recent historical novel, Stolen by Night, published by Scholastic in November 2023, is about teenagers in the Resistance in Occupied Paris during WWII, and the one Nazi-run concentration camp on what is now French soil. A nonfiction book that Steve researched and wrote for Bloomsbury Press—The Mine Wars: The Bloody Fight for Workers’ Right in the West Virginia Coal Fields—was published in May 2024 and tells the long-buried story of the West Virginia Coal Mine Wars of the 1920s and the labor organizers and union men who made it all happen. The excerpt above is from another nonfiction work in progress.

By Janet Marshall Watkins

[From Issue #2, December 2022]

I was sitting next to my husband at breakfast recently when I saw a headline on Twitter that plunged me down a rabbit hole of fury: “Denver Nuggets mascot makes three times more than WNBA’s Highest Paid Player.”

A mascot. Making three times more than a star athlete. “Can you believe this?” I said. He could. We all can.

The facts are easy to find and tough to digest: Rocky the Mountain Lion, the highest-paid mascot in the NBA, makes $625,000 per year for entertaining fans at Denver Nuggets games. The highest-paid woman in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) makes $228,000. And according to NPR, WNBA players make 44 times less than men in the NBA.

So if you’ve been thinking that Brittney Griner is in a Russian penal colony because of a vape cartridge, think again: She’s in a Russian prison because she’s not Lebron James.

In a conventional news story, this is where I might insert some sentences about why female athletes get paid so little compared to their male counterparts. Revenue, fan base, blah blah blah. But I’m not doing that. There’s no way to justify it, and as basketball legend Sue Bird wrote a couple years back, “I’m kind of done with that. If you’re not on the right side of this fight, and advocating fiercely for equal pay…then I just straight-up feel bad for you.”

The sad true story of women’s sports in America is that we’ve always gotten the short end of the stick, financially and otherwise. But there’s a formula for changing at least some things: 1) Band together. 2) Speak up. 3) Use the law. 4) Win.

The U.S. women’s soccer team did it beautifully—crushing its global competition while filing an equal pay lawsuit that resulted, this year, in a $24 million payout and plan for equal pay going forward. A group of female athletes is now trying to force change in Hawaii, in a lawsuit the New York Times recently described as having the potential to change high school sports across America. And three decades ago, when I was a teenager in a then-rural Northern Virginia community, some teammates and I used that magic formula to change some things, too.

***

It was the spring of 1988 when two of my softball teammates—Anita and Angela—wrote columns for our school paper, one after another, lambasting our high school’s unequal treatment of boys’ and girls’ sports teams.

Angela’s column described in great detail how our softball team practiced on a crappy makeshift field while the baseball team practiced on our campus’ actual game field—complete with lights, bleachers, dugouts and raked dirt. We ventured onto that field only for games, and we had to play our games there: When our school and the rest of the schools in our county were built, nobody invested in softball fields for girls. They just built fields for boys.

On practice days, we took our gloves to a nearby patch of dirt and grass with no bleachers, no dugouts and lots of divots. When it rained, puddles formed around the wooden block we used as home plate, forcing batters to stand further and further away to keep their feet dry. We often abandoned the field altogether and practiced on the blacktop behind the school, plopping down orange plastic bases to create a diamond on the asphalt. I remember diving for a ball there once and realizing, mid-air, that I was going to land on concrete.

Before she wrote her column, Angela had asked the athletic coordinator whether we could alternate practice days with the boys on the game field, since that seemed fair. His answer—“What would we do with baseball?”—infuriated us.

My mom, Angela’s mom, our teammate Julie’s dad and several other parents had already met with the principal by then to make the case that things needed to change—not just for the softball team, but for female athletes as a whole. We’d gotten the worst fields, shabbiest uniforms and most inconvenient game schedules for years. The issue took on heightened urgency after the newspaper columns came out (and the athletic coordinator scolded Angela for hers). My mom recalls encouraging the principal to get on the side of equality. It was 1988 for god’s sakes.

But spring turned to fall, and nothing changed. My soccer teammates and I hung our own nets on game days, while the athletic coordinator meticulously lined the football field. The football team took a chartered bus to an away game, while our softball team had traveled to the same place the previous spring in a mini-bus without enough seats. What message does it send when female athletes squish three-to-a-seat while male athletes spread out in an air-conditioned charter bus? Everyone knows. My mom sure did. I found a letter she wrote to the School Board back then in which she lamented the message “the girls and boys” were being sent by the unequal, unfair treatment.

We’d been talking about the disparities for years—around school, at home, on bus rides. But our principal let us know he was weary of it. At some point, he told us if we kept complaining, he might just get rid of the girls’ soccer team entirely. The message was clear: Know your place. Be grateful. Keep quiet.

But quiet wasn’t in us. And one day, as my mom recalls, Angela’s mom brought up something really interesting: Title IX, the federal law that prohibits gender-based discrimination in publicly-funded activities including sports. The law had been around since 1972, but it was mostly ignored and rarely enforced.

***

Armed with our new knowledge of the law, Angela and I went to a School Board meeting in the fall of 1988 and said our school was violating Title IX. We shared stories—of shoddy fields, itchy old uniforms and playing times that made us feel like the warm-up act for the boys. Supportive teammates filled seats around us as the School Board members and superintendent listened.

We didn’t know what would happen after the meeting; I’m not sure I even really understood what a School Board or superintendent did. My parents hoped the superintendent—relatively new to our area—would take action; surely, he wouldn’t want the legal and PR headache of being accused of a Title IX violation. The School Board requested a review of school athletic programs, and the athletic coordinator was told to take some action steps.

But when spring of 1989 arrived, the only change we noticed was an irritating one: The softball team got booted off campus. The state high school league was enforcing a rule, we were told, that softball teams couldn’t play on fields with mounds. The rule had long been ignored for the obvious reason that high school softball teams rarely had their own fields, and baseball fields all had mounds. But now, we’d have to schlep our gear to a rec-league complex a few miles away. There were mound-less fields there, usually used by middle-aged men playing slow-pitch softball after work.

We adjusted to the new “home” field and got off to a winning start. And then the shit hit the fan. It turned out the new school superintendent had taken our Title IX complaint seriously—and didn’t think our athletic director had taken it seriously enough. So he demoted the guy to a teaching gig for making “insufficient progress” on the steps he’d been ordered to take.

Actions have consequences, as we all learned in bigger-than-expected ways. Suddenly, some people who’d supported Angela and me when we spoke to the School Board about Title IX weren’t so sure we’d done the right thing. Hundreds of students walked out of our high school on the day of a big game to protest the athletic director’s demotion. Sure, we deserved better treatment, but the man was nice. And he’d been there a long time.

The walkout made the local news and The Washington Post. Things got stressful. Some people told us we’d gotten a good man fired and should go to the School Board and take back what we’d said. But we hadn’t gotten him fired, and we didn’t take anything back.

As tension swirled, our speedy, talented team kept winning. We won the district title and the regional title. And then, on a field with a mound—because apparently we could play on a field with a mound—we won the state championship.

The next year, after I graduated, I heard from our softball coach. She’d weathered quite a year helping us navigate the dual pressures of winning games and speaking up. As the next season approached, she was asked an unusual question by a new athletic director: Did the team need anything? New uniforms, maybe?

More surprisingly, the softball team got an actual home field. You could say it was already in the works, but after that state title run, after our Title IX complaint, after everything, it really happened. That crappy old field got smooth new dirt, a scoreboard, fence and bleachers—things the baseball team had had for years. Angela’s mom had gotten things moving by calling up the local National Guard unit (seriously) and asking if they would move a backstop—and they did. Our coach guided a couple more teams to state titles on that field, and she’s now in the state athletic hall of fame. That field is the vibrant legacy of a determined bunch of people who were sick of girls settling for less.

I reflect back on that time with a sense of awe and appreciation for the lessons it taught me. I know it divided my community; nobody expected the athletic director to get stripped of his position. But it was an early lesson for me in spotting inequity, speaking up and not caving to pressure to let things be the way they’ve always been. I can’t recall learning anything better in my whole K-12 life.

***

These days, when I see a headline about Title IX—or about a mascot’s salary, or the U.S. soccer team’s equal pay fight, or Brittney Griner languishing in a prison in Russia—a mix of solidarity and anger bubble up inside me.

I think about how important it is for women to band together—and for men to lend support. I think about the role models—my mom, Angela’s mom, Julie’s dad and many others—who showed us the way. I think about the power of being heard and the discomfort it takes to effect change. And I think about the work left to be done.

In the picture accompanying this column, taken about 14 years ago, I’m helping coach my youngest daughter’s t-ball team, crouching down to give her batting tips. Earlier in that practice, the two of us were playing catch with two boys when I heard one say to the other, in a voice all of us could hear, “How come we have to have the girl coach?”

So many sexist lessons have been taught and continue to be taught. They take work to undo.

I hope things started changing for those boys as they played catch with me and my daughter (and—I’ll say it—tried to match our strength and accuracy). Things changed at my old high school when a group of people banded together to level a Title IX complaint, and the new superintendent took us seriously.

I don’t know what it will take to change the shameful reality that the best players in the WNBA make less than a mascot—and 44 times less than their male counterparts. You can try to justify that kind of pay disparity, but it’s all rooted in discrimination.

For the whole history of American sports, boys and men have benefited from inequitable investments in fields, equipment, marketing, scheduling, TV time, everything. It’s why the NBA got a 50-year head start on the WNBA. It’s why the average NBA player made $10k more 40 years ago than the top-paid WNBA player makes now. And it’s why Abby Wambach—the Peyton Manning of soccer—didn’t end her career financially set for life, but Manning—the Abby Wambach of football—sure did.

Women have been held back for generations by sexist notions of what our bodies are and aren’t meant to do and what we do and don’t deserve. Paying women less, and giving us second-rate facilities (if any at all), shows that our abilities are still devalued.

While much has changed since I was a teenager, much still hasn’t. An October 23, 2022 New York Times story describes female athletes at Hawaii’s largest public high school suing because they lack access to things male athletes have access to—practice facilities, locker rooms, even bathrooms. And it references a threat to cancel the girls’ water polo team—the same threat my high school principal made 30+ years ago to my soccer team.

It can feel pretty dreary sometimes, the slow progress, the insistence on women settling for less. An April 2022 story on National Public Radio about women’s basketball salaries included some outrageous details about WNBA player treatment and pay. But it also cited the ongoing movement “to recognize and fully embrace the money-making potential in women’s sports – and compensate female athletes appropriately.”

I hope that movement continues. I can hear the naysayers, but, like Sue Bird, won’t argue with them. Power. Leverage. Teamwork. The law. I hope it adds up to wins, on and off the field, for more and more women. 50 years after the passage of Title IX, we’ve come a long way. Not far enough.

***

Janet Marshall Watkins is the co-founder of Pie & Chai magazine. She’s also a non-profit director, mom and former journalist. After high school, she co-captained Mary Washington College’s varsity softball team to its first-ever NCAA tournament. The team’s field was a huge upgrade from what she played on in high school, but it was hidden behind the baseball field, on the backside of the athletic complex, in a spot you wouldn’t know existed if you didn’t go looking for it. She hung up her cleats many years ago but still goes to batting cages sometimes; it’s a good stress reliever.

By Steve Watkins

[From Issue #3, January 2023]

The Humans of Brooke Road aren’t all beaver killers. Some are actually quite nice. One family rescues mini pigs. Another runs a conservation research center. Many may not even know they had a hand in the torture-deaths of nearly three dozen beavers two years ago—parents, yearlings, and kits—and the destruction in all or in part of 15 beaver dams tucked into the reeds and hyacinths and groves of dead ash trees in the forested wetlands of Accokeek Creek.

The creek, which runs next to a three-mile section of the frequently-flooded Brooke Road in southern Stafford County, is a small tributary to the Potomac River in Virginia, named for the Accokeek people who lived there since prehistoric times but don’t anymore because the settlers who came in from Europe pretty much wiped out anything and everything indigenous, including the people and also including the beavers.

The 34 beavers killed—impaled and left to bleed out or drown in metal body-gripping traps—may have been the descendants of castor Canadensis reintroduced to the area several decades ago. Trappers and fur-wearers had done all they could in the centuries prior to hunt all the beavers in North America out of existence and came awfully close to succeeding. In the process, they turned what had been a continent-wide wetland, flush with all manner flora and fauna—thanks to the work of beavers, a keystone species—into what is now in many respects a continent-wide parking lot.

In 1600, there were an estimated 400 million beavers in North America. By 1900, there were fewer than 100,000.

Thirty-four is the official number of beavers killed two years ago on Accokeek Creek. That’s according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose trappers are the go-to folks for getting rid of “nuisance” creatures on public land, in this case the 3,000-acre state-owned Crow’s Nest Natural Area Preserve, which includes, and is partly bordered by, Accokeek Creek. Humans on the Facebook chat site “Friends of Brooke Road” put the number much higher, at 80, though it’s not clear where they got their information. Everybody on the Facebook page seems to be an expert on the “beaver problem,” with most concluding that beavers, with all their dam work, are the primary cause of the constant flooding on Brooke Road. And what’s worse, they say, is that the beavers don’t even seem to care.

“We literally saw a 50 lb beaver 10 feet from the S curve milling around just before sunset this evening!!” wrote one Human of Brooke Road in a March 2021 Facebook post. “Hasn’t anyone noticed their dam in plain view from the S curve? Soon enough they will be waving to us laughing as we drive by.”

To which another Human added, “Oh and they will also be holding their sign out to us made from a tree they cut down with the letters scratched on it ‘FU.’”

“We need beavers in the stew pots and new fur coats,” wrote yet another Human in that same exchange. “Would somebody please start using ‘I promise a beaver in every stew pot.’ As their campaign slogan?”

A local politician, Paul Milde, who at the time was running for the Stafford County Board of Supervisors, took him up on it. The photo illustration that accompanies this article is a meme Milde posted on the “Friends of Brooke Road” Facebook page during his campaign, along with a call for government action to clear out the beavers.

“The reason we are seeing water over the road so often over the last three years is completely because the beavers have felled so many trees across the Accokeek that it backs up and pours over the road,” he Facebooked–inaccurately. “In fact the creek has become a swamp. There is no tidal connection. There [sic] road has not sunk several inches. When the Crows Nest became a Nature Preserve, all hunting and trapping stopped and the beaver population exploded.”

Milde actually had a hand in saving Crow’s Nest from development fifteen years ago. But perhaps fearful during the campaign for supervisor that he might be mistaken for an actual environmentalist, Milde put on waders and ventured into the Accokeek wetlands with a videographer buddy, Billy Kelley, hoping to win himself a few anti-beaver votes. Kelley, owner of a local tree care and stump grinding service, filmed the valiant Milde perched on top of several offending dams, taking a heroic stand against the marauders. They posted it on Milde’s web site.

After one particularly wet winter a few years back, when Brooke Road was repeatedly closed due to flooding—sometimes for days at a time—a series of public meetings was held by county officials and engineers at the Virginia Department of Transportation, with Chief VDOT engineer Kyle Bates catching the brunt of the complaints. Fingers were pointed. Voices were raised. Demands were made. Costly hydrology and engineering and mitigation studies were ordered. More costly hydrology, engineering, and mitigation studies were ordered. Rain kept falling. The creek kept flowing. Beavers kept building their dams.

Meanwhile, neighbors at the end of a cul-de-sac in one subdivision off Brooke Road constructed a walking path through the woods connecting with the cul-de-sac in another subdivision. If people weren’t able to drive through when the road flooded, at least they would be able to walk around it.

***

The word “Accokeek” means “At the edge of the hill,” maybe because the Accokeek people lived on the coastal plains east of the Appalachian Mountains. Accokeek Creek sits at the edge of a hill, too—at the bottom of a ridge to the north where the county let developers put in half a dozen ill-advised subdivisions 20 years ago without proper storm water mitigation. Before that, Brooke Road existed so the millionaires at Marlborough Point, a peninsula further east that juts out into the Potomac, could drive to their riverfront mansions.

The Humans of Brooke Road have access streets into their subdivisions that channel runoff straight from their vast monoculture lawns down the hill, where it pours across Brooke Road and into Accokeek Creek. In times of heavy rain, no surprise, the road floods—particularly at the low-lying section locals call the S-Curve, which they pronounce as if it were a curse word. Two years ago, a Mercedes Benz tried to drive through and got swamped there. The owner managed to get his door open and swim to safety, but the Mercedes caught fire and burned to a shell, at least the half of it above the water line. An elderly woman who tried to drive through in a Toyota nearly came to an even worse end as another flood threatened to sweep her downstream until a couple of Good Samaritans came to the rescue.

VDOT keeps a traffic camera aimed at the S-Curve with a constant video feed so the Humans of Brooke Road can check out the road conditions in real time whenever it rains. Those who live east of the flood-prone area, if the water’s too deep for them to get through, will know to park a second car somewhere west of the S-Curve on higher ground in advance of the rain and then walk the path through the woods to get to it.

Which is how absurd the situation has become. There’s the promise of a multi-million-dollar project to raise the level of Brooke Road a whopping five feet—higher than a burning Mercedes—but that’s still several years away. Residents who refused to grant right of way (or who demanded exorbitant amounts to sell it) managed to block construction of a much less expensive bypass VDOT offered to put in where the walking path through the woods connects the two subdivisions above the S-Curve.

Meanwhile, incredibly, developers are still logging and clear-cutting and building more homes on Brooke Road and Marlborough Point, all on the stranded side of the flooding. Log trucks have to jack-knife themselves to get around the sharp turns at the S-Curve, and if there’s been any rain at all, they look more like cargo ships than flat-beds plowing their way through the standing water.

One more good hurricane barreling across the peninsula and who knows what will happen?

***

Crow’s Nest is a strange sort of nature preserve, as I suppose they all are—a kind of outdoor museum where dozens of species of plants and animals, both common and rare, find sanctuary, but also where periodically throughout the year hunters, a particularly virulent invasive species, are allowed to doll themselves up in camouflage and orange vests, load shotguns with non-lead slugs, and kill white-tailed deer and certain unfortunate species of waterfowl. The Malthusian case for shooting the deer is an old one: that otherwise the deer, with no natural predators left in the area, will destroy too much foliage and will suffer and starve. So we’re actually doing them a favor by killing them. Or, to borrow a line from the Vietnam War, we had to destroy the village in order to save it.

White-tailed deer, as Ranjit Singh pointed out in these pages back in November, had to be reintroduced to Virginia some decades ago, along with the beavers, after they’d been hunted almost to extinction. Though I don’t suppose they actually had to be reintroduced. We just wanted them here. So we could enjoy having them around—and, at some point, kill them some more.

The argument for trapping beavers—for killing them, because beaver relocation is against state law—is in part the same as why those deer hunters, chosen by lottery, are allowed to invade Crow’s Nest with their portable tree stands. We brought the beavers back to Virginia to re-create some of the wetlands we’d destroyed and that we discovered we actually needed if we were going to have any sort of biodiversity in Virginia, and as a counter to rampant erosion, and as natural fire breaks. Only now we resent the beavers for creating the wetlands we brought them back to re-create, because sometimes they do it in places we don’t like. Like next to Brooke Road. It’s all very complicated, this managing nature. You might even call it hubris. We like nature OK; we just don’t like it to be too messy.

***

Despite all the meetings and studies and complaints, nothing much was done about the Brooke Road flooding in 2019 and 2020 besides the occasional operating of a pump, the clearing of a culvert, the back-hoeing of a ditch. The one constant was the chorus of voices clamoring for “eradication” of the Accokeek beavers. This went on until finally, perhaps inevitably—with continuing pressure on Stafford County officials from the Humans of Brooke Road and the voluble likes of Milde—the supervisor of Crow’s Nest Natural Area Preserve, Mike Lott, made the politically expedient decision to allow in the USDA trappers. He wanted to be a good neighbor, after all, amenable to the concerns of the Brooke Roaders, plus there were a couple of tracts of land bordering Crow’s Nest that he hoped would be purchased with help from the county to expand the preserve.

The bill from the USDA came to $11,000—$325 for each dead beaver.

In the “Friends of Brooke Road” Facebook chat, one of the Humans said killing the beavers in Accokeek Creek was God’s Will, and assured his fellow Humans that beavers died “instantly” in body traps, though that’s rarely the case. Here’s a video link if you want to see how the traps work, though I don’t recommend watching it.

A single Human, out of the dozens who posted, stated unequivocally that blaming the beavers for the flooding—and killing them as a solution—was wrong. “I’m so done with this conversation,” she wrote. “For months now. Rather than people taking ownership in their part of the problem. All you want to do is kill wildlife. You can live with your own conscience on that one. I can’t do or stop any of it. But a beaver massacre is not going to fix the problem.”

The USDA didn’t want to say what they did with the bodies and pelts of the slain beavers, some of which would have suffered for hours, or even days, before they died, unless they drowned, which would have been its own horrible death for an animal that can hold its breath for up to fifteen minutes.

VDOT officials said taking out the beaver dams in early 2021 appeared to lower the water level in Accokeek Creek—a little, and for a little while. Or at least they thought it did. No hydrologists were brought in to do an actual assessment. The flooding, in any event, continued.

In spring 2022, after 19 official road closures in four years, a desperate VDOT installed a permanent pump next to the warning sign at the S-Curve, plus a drywell for temporarily holding some of the excess water. They also installed a new pipe under the road at the S-Curve and added several inches of extra tarmac on top of it, raising the level just enough so there wasn’t any flooding for the first several months—even, VDOT proudly noted, when the remnants of Hurricane Ian swept through the area back in October.

Nobody expects the new fix to be permanent, of course. The rains of December already shut down the road for a few brief periods right after Christmas. They just hope it will hold for a while. And it hasn’t stopped the Humans of Brooke Road—the Billy Kellys, the Paul Mildes, the God’s Wills—from continuing to clamor for more beaver killing and more dam removal.

But Crow’s Nest supervisor Mike Lott doesn’t see that happening.

“Trapping the beavers alone wasn’t going to solve the flooding,” he said recently. “Brooke Road was built in a flood plain to begin with, and added to that is all the run-off from the housing developments north of Brooke Road and the Creek. Then there’s the die-off of the ash trees from the Emerald Ash Borers, which has been happening nationwide. There are literally hundreds of trees down out there.”

Trees that may be blocking the flow of the creek in some places, but few if any of them felled by the beavers.

In the not-too-distant future, Accokeek Creek won’t be a forested wetland anymore, Lott added. It’s already taking on the characteristics of an emergent marsh, with more herbaceous plants and fewer to no trees. Sea-level rise will also continue to be a factor, and tidal marshes downstream will move further and further upstream. “The salinity is still low enough here at Crow’s Nest for it to remain a freshwater tidal system,” Lott said, “but that could change in the decades ahead.”

Which would likely spell the end to the beavers of Accokeek Creek, who have a limited capacity for tolerating saltwater and would leave to find fresh streams further inland.

The slaughter of the 34 beavers two years ago, and destruction of their dams, may or may not have affected the water level in Accokeek Creek, in however temporary a manner, but what’s indisputable is that it did nothing to help Paul Milde’s political career. Despite amassing and spending nearly $1.15 million in his recent run for supervisor, according to the Virginia Public Access Project, and despite having already served a couple of terms on the Stafford County Board of Supervisors, and despite flogging beaver eradication as a central plank in his campaign platform, Milde lost to a part-time minister, artist, inspirational speaker, former exotic dancer, mother of seven, and first-time politician named Monica Gary, who spent less than $15,000 and pledged to look for other solutions to the Brooke Road flooding. She’s still looking.

Meanwhile, according to everybody—Mike Lott, VDOT, the USDA, Accokeek Creek kayakers—within just a few days of the killings back in the winter months of 2021, more beaver families moved in to the wetlands and immediately got to work rebuilding the dams.

The Humans of Brooke Road were right about one thing: The beavers of Accokeek Creek don’t give a shit about them or about the flooding. They don’t give a shit about all the hand-wringing and complaining in those ill-conceived housing developments north of Crow’s Nest, or about the self-destructive nature of humankind. They don’t give a shit about the lack of appreciation Humans have for the work beavers do with their dams, which—in addition to creating wetlands that attract and sustain hundreds of species, many of them rare and endangered—also filter out pollutants from the acres of manicured lawns that the Humans of Brooke Road and others inflict on the environment and that threaten the health of the Chesapeake Bay and the oceans beyond.

Mike Lott says there are still hundreds of beavers in Crow’s Nest Natural Area Preserve. Of course some of them migrated to Accokeek Creek after the massacre. Beavers hear the sound of moving water, they get right to work damming it up. It’s not in their nature to let a good creek go to waste.

***

Steve Watkins, editor and co-founder of Pie & Chai, is the author of 12 books, a retired professor emeritus of American literature, a recovering yoga teacher, and the father of four remarkable daughters. He is also a tree steward with the urban reforestation organization Tree Fredericksburg and founder of Rappahannock Area Beaver Believers, a wildlife advocacy group, which you’re welcome to join on Facebook. His author website is stevewatkinsbooks.com.

MORE ON BEAVERS

1. Check out Ben Goldfarb’s book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, and Leila Philip’s Beaver Land: How One Weird Rodent Made America. They’ll turn you into a Beaver Believer, member of a loose-knit but deeply passionate coalition throughout North America—throughout the world—advocating for beavers in a variety of ways.

2. Follow my friend Alison Zak and her Human-Beaver Coexistence Fund, which works tirelessly to educate the public about the benefits of coexisting with beavers.

3. Read the article “Can beavers help build a better Chesapeake Bay?” from the Bay Journal, and/or watch the film Water’s Way: Thinking Like a Watershed.

4. Support the Beaver Institute, whose mission, as they say, is “To provide technical and financial assistance to public and private landowners experiencing beaver conflicts, support scientific research, train mitigation professionals, and increase public appreciation of the beaver’s critical role in creating healthy wetland ecosystems.”

5. And, finally, join our local Rappahannock Area Beaver Believers on Facebook.

By Janet Watkins

[From Issue #1, November 2022]

Three years ago, in one of the most worry-filled seasons of my life, I was sitting with my husband in his cardiologist’s office when he nearly passed out. His doctor was trying to figure out how dangerous his heart rhythm had become, and it turned out the answer was “Very.” He was admitted to the hospital for emergency surgery, and as I sat in a hospital chair later, getting ready to call our kids to assure them everything would be fine—though I wasn’t really sure—my phone rang. It was my dad’s oxygen supply company, calling with a question that needed a timely answer because my dad was dying of cancer.

It might’ve been smart in that moment to accept my lack of control and maybe even laugh at the insanity of the dual crises. But what I did instead was what people often do: I tried to manage things—my worries, our children’s worries, my dad’s care. In the dreary months that followed, as my dad died, my husband’s health issues worsened, and COVID set in, I power-walked miles and miles each day, trying to contain my anxiety and keep myself strong. I wanted things to be fine for all of us, especially the kids.

Then one day I was chatting on the phone with a friend who often helps me find perspective when I’ve lost sight of it. I’m sure I sounded overwhelmed, and I’m sure she was empathetic, but what I remember her saying is this: “You know, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow.” Wouldn’t that be hilarious? It could be ME on the verge of catastrophe. And what good would my worry do then?

We live in anxiety-producing times. COVID, gun violence, 24/7 access to bad news, personal challenges, and systemic inequities—it’s no wonder 60 percent of Americans reported experiencing daily stress and worry in a 2020 Gallup poll. More recently, a third of Americans reported signs of anxiety or depression in a CDC study. We live in a world of overbooked therapists, anti-anxiety meds, meditation apps, and lots and lots of substance abuse. In good ways and bad, people are trying to soothe and rewire their worried minds.

My yoga teacher says we can’t avoid stress—hard things will always happen—but we can try to manage our reactions. And that’s in sync with some of the best research I’ve read on how to get through hard times. Dr. Lucy Hone of the New Zealand Institute of Well-Being and Resilience discussed the research in a fascinating Ted Talk I watched as part of a Florida State University class on trauma and resilience. Hone shared how she had had to apply everything she knew about resilience to herself after the stuff of worst nightmares happened: Her 12-year-old daughter was killed in a car accident.

There’s no simple recipe for navigating painful times or containing our deepest fears. But Hone says three things have helped her—and could help all of us, even with smaller concerns. First: Know that bad stuff happens. It just does, and it’s not personal. Second: Focus your attention wisely—mostly on gratitude and what you can actually control. Tune in to the good things happening around you. Third: Be guided by this question: Is what I’m doing helping or harming me? When you need a reality check, it’s a powerful thing to ask.

None of Hone’s advice involves worrying, and I tend to think worrying is mostly futile. It’s the price of love, maybe—like grief—but still futile. Yet worry can have some upsides. A reasonable amount can prompt you to do protective things, like wear a mask and make sure you have a designated driver. It can drive action that keeps you and your loved ones well. But keeping a rational lid on it—that’s the tricky part.

***

Years ago, when I was a working journalist, I interviewed a woman who had developed a terrible fear of flying. She couldn’t manage a trip without Valium, and neither could her husband. Yet on Valium, they couldn’t stay awake to tend to their kids. It was a conundrum, and it was rooted in what I think is the most primal kind of worry—parental worry. She had never been afraid to fly, she said, until she became a mom. Then, the stakes of something going wrong suddenly seemed so high.

I didn’t grow up being a worrier, but parenting changed me, as I think it changes a lot of people. Suddenly, we have these adorable little people who we love so much and who don’t know not to walk in front of cars or stick their fingers in outlets. And once they figure that out, they start driving and setting up Tinder accounts. How can we not imagine them in a roadside ditch–maybe with a serial killer closing in, if we’re really letting our minds run wild? (A friend actually did have a serial killer on campus her freshman year in college. Several classmates were murdered. I don’t know how her parents survived when all they could really do was call her dorm phone and say “Stick with a buddy” and “Please let us know you’re OK.”)

Because the stakes feel so high, we say things like that over and over, hoping it will make a difference. Make good choices. Fasten your seatbelt. Look both ways! We want our words to wrap our most beloved people in a cloak of invincibility. To protect them from accidents. Bullies. Pain. But there is no cloak of invincibility. And the older I get, and the older my children get, the more I think it’s unfair to thrust my worries on them.

So, not long ago, a friend and I made a list of things we say over and over to our teen and young adult children. Drive safely, be responsible—all the classics. We put a good spin on it, calling it “Dear child, when I say these things, I’m really saying ‘I love you.’” I sent the list to my college kids, telling them it would stand in for the boring old lectures I give when they go somewhere, and my mind—calm in my pre-parenting days—envisions bad things. Now, when I start to say “Be careful out there, 95’s a mess,” I try hard to cut myself off. “You already know,” I say. “Have fun.” And I hope they do.

A friend told me recently that if she could rewind her parenting years and change one thing, she’d worry less. It hadn’t made a difference, she said, except to wear her out and rob her of joy. She sounded so wise. Inspirational, really. Then, a few days later, she said she was tired; she’d been up half the night worrying about one of her kids.

Why not just stop? That’s essentially the question posed in a quote by the poet Hafiz—a quote a friend left on a card at our house years ago. It says: “Now that all your worry has proved such an unlucrative business, why not find a better job?” Hafiz lived in the 1300s, so if the quote seems like an indictment of our modern culture, it’s also proof of the timeless nature of human worry. Everyone I’ve shared the Hafiz quote with has either laughed or nodded—a sign, I think, that none have found a better job.

Control what you can control, let go of the rest, get support when you need it, laugh, exercise, focus on the good, practice non-attachment, don’t catastrophize—the advice for fending off worry seems timeless, too. It’s all good, and ideally, if we follow it, we’ll be freed to lead more joyful lives. We’ve only got this one wild and precious life, after all, as the poet Mary Oliver wrote. And, as someone said to my husband not long ago, “All our life stories have the same ending.”

It’s true. They do. Those endings are printed in the obit section, on a day we can’t predict. (“She died Tuesday after getting hit by a bus. Should’ve looked both ways.”)

***

In the rough season when my dad was dying and my husband was back home recovering from heart surgery, I spent a full day with my mom and dad while my husband stayed with our daughters.

My dad was never much of a worrier, and even as he approached death, he seemed calm. He’d always projected the healthy perspective that things usually worked out for the best, and if they didn’t, you’d adjust. I inherited some of that mindset, and I’m grateful. When I’m stressed, I can certainly ask whether what I’m doing is helping or harming me, but I can also ask, What would Dad say?

He didn’t say much that day we spent together, but with some of his last energy, he asked some important questions about my husband: Is he home from the hospital? Yes, he’s home. Doing OK? Yep, he’s OK. Surgery went well? Yes, it went well. A while later, he asked again: Is he home? Doing OK?

I think what he was really doing was asking if I would be OK.

Right up to the end, we want assurance that the people we love will be fine, even when there are no guarantees, and even when we can’t control a thing.

By Steve Watkins

[From Issue #2, December 2022]

Dave and I had visited the sacred Dalai Lama’s house in the Tibetan refugee village of Dharmsala. We’d bathed in numinous hot springs at the confluence of rivers in the Valley of the Gods. We’d travelled to the thundering Aharbal Falls–literally the end of the bus line in Kashmir–then made our way on foot, a two-day pilgrimage, to the boulder-strewn moonscape on the shores of Konsarnog, a glacial lake hidden high in the Pir Pindal mountains. But whatever spiritual bliss that might have come to us after several weeks in India dissipated as soon as we got to Nepal, where we threw ourselves–or were pulled by forces beyond our reckoning–into full hippie tourist mode.

It was October 1976 and I was a 21-year-old refugee from a series of small Southern towns, followed by three colleges in three years, months of cross-country hitchhiking, summers doing hard labor in a central Florida phosphate mine, and now a drop-out once again. Dave had just finished a two-year Peace Corps stint in dusty Rajasthan Province back in India. We both carried extra baggage that should have slowed us down, but didn’t: me a lingering case of dysentery, him a nasty cold. Every time we settled in somewhere in Kathmandu–a cafe, a temple, a street corner to watch the flocks of Nepalese street kids banging on borrowed or stolen or makeshift rhythm instruments and dancing as if there were no motorcycles and tuk tuks and jeeps blazing past, an elbow away–I had to bolt to the nearest shitter. I couldn’t lose Dave in the marketplace even if I tried. His honking and spitting gave him away every time.

We’d been warned to be careful, that Kathmandu was no longer the Shangri-La it had once been. A suspected serial killer, just arrested in New Delhi, had been accused of robbing and murdering two backpackers in Nepal the year before, and then several more in Thailand. The Nepalese government was worried about the rise in crime, and tired of all the hippies flocking to the country and never leaving–and not spending much money. There had been street sweep round-ups of young travelers with expired visas, and forced deportations to India.

We checked into a nondescript hostel, Traveler’s Lodge, where we met a couple of Canadians, John and Mit, who had just come from Thailand, and who we’d run into again and again—trekking in the Himalayas, back in India months later on a houseboat on the Ganges. They offered us our first taste of Nepalese hash, and directed us to a nearby shop where we rented bicycles with no gears and tenuous brakes, and for the next few hours we flew around the city.

I had expected another New Delhi, but Kathmandu had a village feel to it–all the buildings made of wood and brick and stone, few more than two stories tall. There were temples everywhere we turned, and at the center of the city, in Durbar Square, stood Hanuman Dhoka with its giant, freaky Kali bas relief holding his raised sword and an assortment of severed hands and heads, taking up all of one giant wall. We skipped the bloody livestock sacrifices they did there twice a week.

Nearby was the fabled Freak Street with its row of hippie shops. Every one we entered, somebody handed us a little one-hit pipe, a chillum, stoked with Nepalese hash, or a bhang-filled hookah. Pedaling got harder after every stop. We came across a crumbling temple, dead in the middle of one road, where the giant trunk of an ancient tree grew through the brick and mortar, and branched out over the fallen roof–a striking sight, and a metaphor for something. We sat and stared for a while, letting the river of traffic find its way around us.

We visited the Spirit Catching Bookstore, a hidden shop upstairs on Freak Street that John and Mit recommended, where I picked up a copy of D.T. Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen Buddhism, only finding out later that for as much as Suzuki did to share Zen in the West, he was also an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer. The firangi store keeper played guitar and harmonica, while another guy made his own peanut butter with a mortar and pestle and offered us a taste–and a bag for sale. A German woman came in, colorful head scarf pulled low over her matted hair. She rolled a joint of what she said was Afghan bhang, and asked if they had any Tampax. They didn’t, but we helped her smoke the blunt anyway. Peanut-butter guy rolled his own with something he called Buddha Grass, and we helped him with that, too.

From there it was back on the bikes and down New Road and the main drag, dodging more Suzukis and Hondas and honking Toyotas until Dave stuck out his feet on both sides of his brakeless bicycle and skidded himself to a stop as if suddenly, mysteriously summoned. He was still there when I turned around to find him—his gaze fixed on a nondescript shop, one of dozens lining the street, only out of this particular one wafted the scent, or the scents, of cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, steamed milk, freshly-baked pastries, and of course ubiquitous notes of hash and weed. Strains of Santana’s fusion album Caravanserai escaped the open door, like a siren’s call. And there, propped in one of the shop windows, was a hand-lettered sign:

Pie & Chai.

A young Nepalese boy handed us steaming cups of chai when we walked in, and gestured at an array of cakes and pies lined up on the counter. The small tables splayed around the floor were filled with happy eaters. Somebody fired up a chillum. Everybody fired up a chillum. Everybody who could move, anyway. Most of the firangis there—Westerners, like us–were spaced out, stoned-gazing at the walls, glasses of chai, pastry crumbs, table tops, nothing. We dove into lemon meringue and followed that with a huge slice of pumpkin, and, what the hell, how about a piece of chocolate cake? Stuffed, sated, conquerors of our raging munchies, we too sat in silence after that, us and Santana and our fellow burned-out firangis, stoned-gazing at the walls, our glasses of chai, pastry crumbs, table tops, nothing.

I’d told my parents I would call them when I got to Kathmandu to let them know I was still alive. So when I was finally able to rouse myself from my Pie & Chai stupor, I headed for the Telegraph Office where I spent hours waiting my turn before finally giving up, suddenly missing them like crazy. Dave said I must be homesick, plus wasn’t it my birthday? I went back to the Telegraph Office the next day and used up what little patience I had, again waiting hours for my turn and, finally, shelling out forty rupees for a three-minute conversation that was basically me shouting to Mom and Dad that I was in Nepal and everything was fine and I loved them. They said they loved me, too, but if they added a “Happy Birthday,” ocean storms and rough seas interfered too much for me to hear over the Transatlantic trunk line.

Dave and I returned to Pie & Chai again and again in the days that followed—sometimes just me and him, sometimes with John and Mit—as we made our plans for another long bus ride from Katmandu to Pokhara and trekking in the Himalayas on the Jomsom Trail to the Annapurna base camp, or as close as we could get, unprepared as we turned out to be. Everybody at Pie & Chai was warm company, more than happy to swap stories, travel tips, hand-drawn maps, contacts, addresses back home, dog-eared books, hash they’d gotten tired of smoking in exchange for a new strain that might give them a different kind of buzz. We always left excited about another book we wanted to read, another place we wanted to see, another idea that changed how we looked at the world, if only just a little.

A week later, we were high in the Himalayas, showering under waterfalls, hiking up stone stairs carved into the Annapurna massif, stepping off the trail so pony trains could pass with their oversized loads. We ate dal, baht, and saag at stone and slate houses that passed for travelers’ inns, shivered in our sleeping bags on straw mats, marveled at the thundering echo of distant avalanches that kept us awake through the perfect nights.

And when we returned to Kathmandu, exhausted and as happy as either of us had ever been, we met up with the Canadians one last time at Pie & Chai before the next stage in our journey.

In all the years that followed, I never stopped thinking about Pie & Chai, never stopped wanting to open a place like that myself back in the States—a place where people could gather in warm company to plan for the next mountain they wanted to climb, swap stories, travel tips, hand-drawn maps, listen to Santana, or even better, John Prine, eat a slice of pie, wash it down with a good cup of chai, be a part of something, have a sense of community, maybe even gain a little enlightenment. Only without the hash, because, well, Ringo Starr, my third favorite Beatle, said it better than I ever could: “No, no, no, no, I don’t smoke it no more/I’m tired of waking up on the floor/No thank you please, it only makes me sneeze/And then it makes it hard to find the door.”

What Janet and I finally came up with, after talking about it off and on for the first 20 years of our marriage, and briefly wondering if we could manage a brick and mortar cafe, was this magazine. Our baking and barista skills have never amounted to much, and after I opened and ran two yoga studios, I swore I was done with the business side of things. So here we are, and here, again, is what Janet wrote for our first issue to explain what we’re up to and why:

We’re launching Pie & Chai Magazine for a simple reason: to provide good writers with a place to tell good stories, the kind worth sharing. In these stories—under the broad categories of Deep Dives, Being Human, Prescriptions, LOL, Etcetera, and 22401(ish)—we hope to move, enlighten, and amuse you, and draw you in to a creative community.

We aren’t here to make money. We won’t sell subscriptions, we won’t run ads, we won’t pirate your data, and our contributors won’t get paid. Everything here will exist because someone cared enough to create it. For free.

We’re old-school print journalists, so we believe in facts (not alternative ones) and the power of stories to comfort and afflict. We’ll serve up deep reporting, thoughtful analysis, personal essays and poignant humor. You won’t find press releases here, or fiction. No poetry, either, except as it may offer itself up in some of the prose. What you will find is humanity in all its glorious messiness.

In our dreams, Pie & Chai has been a physical place for dishing up warm desserts and bringing people together. But we don’t own a building, and we’d rather write than cook. So, this is our virtual effort to expand minds, forge connections, and sweeten lives.

Namaste.

By Steve Watkins

[From Issue #2, December 2022]

A short while ago I brought up the issue of Confederate street names with my neighbors in the Idlewild subdivision in Fredericksburg. The Virginia General Assembly had finally come to its senses in 2021 and voted to put the kibosh on “Jefferson Davis Highway,” as the transcontinental route had been officially named since 1922 at the request of the Daughters of the Confederacy–not a terrorist organization, but not a very culturally sensitive one, either, then or now.

The original Jefferson Davis Highway—a southern counterpoint to the northern transcontinental Lincoln Highway—started in Arlington at the 14^th Street Bridge and extended south to Georgia, mostly on U.S. Route 1, and then west from there until it reached San Diego. The Daughters lobbied hard for it to run up the length of the West Coast as well, from San Diego to the Canadian border, but that didn’t happen.

The General Assembly killed the moniker after someone got around to pointing out how sketchy it was to have a prominent highway, or any highway for that matter, named for a white-supremacist slave owner from Mississippi who was also the long-dead president of the long-dead (though as-yet-unburied) secessionist Confederate States of America.

Route 1 is now “Emancipation Highway” through Fredericksburg, “Richmond Highway” in northern Virginia, and “Patriot Highway” in Spotsylvania, where they wouldn’t be caught dead using a word like “emancipation” for fear someone might think they were endorsing Critical Race Theory.

It was in the aftermath of the Route 1 name changes that I suggested to my Idlewild neighbors that perhaps it was time for us to reconsider our subdivision street names as well, many of which were named (presumably by the developers, Ryan and Ryland) for Confederate generals, including Posey, Perry, Pickett, Hampton, Wright, Hoke, Walker, and Wilcox.

A number of other streets in the city of Fredericksburg also have Confederate names: Mahone, Hays, Longstreet, Albert Rennolds, Cadmus (Wilcox’s first name), and Jubal Early among them. There’s also a whole neighborhood named Confederate Ridge. And don’t even get me started on the celebrated oceanographer and white supremacist Matthew Fontaine Maury, who after the Civil War went to Mexico to try his hand at setting up a Confederacy 2.0. Curiously, no city streets, as far as I know, with one possible exception, were named for Union officers, including in Idlewild, once a 222-acre working plantation whose original owners, the Downmans, lived in a Gothic Revival mansion they had designed and built by an architect whose name, I kid you not, was Mr. Tongue.

Robert E. Lee used the Downman House, as it was then known, as a temporary headquarters during the Civil War. So did two different Union generals, Patrick and Howe, as the fighting went back and forth. Howe didn’t earn so much as a mention when the developers came in 150 years later, scraped off all the topsoil, and laid the streets for the Idlewild subdivision, though there is a tiny two-block Patrick Street in the development’s Phase Two.

The seven slaves owned by the Downman family were counted in the 1860 census as required by law under the 3/5 Compromise—they ranged in age from 11 to 43—but not their names. The mansion burned to a shell years ago, but the pet cemetery is still there. The Downmans really loved their dogs. Nobody knows what became of the seven people they enslaved. Needless to say, no streets in Idlewild were named for the slaves, though I’m certain that the developers, assiduous historians that they must have been, would have found a way to recognize the people enslaved by the Downmans if only that darn 1860 census had been any help. (I should note that there are streets in the Estates of Idlewild named for the Downmans and their neighbors, the Landrams, slave owners all.)

In the overture to my Idlewild neighbors via our members-only Facebook page, I included a quote from Georgia’s Alexander Stephens, the then-newly-elected vice president of the Confederacy who in 1861 assured a crowd of rabid Southerners that the Confederate government rested on the “great truth” that “the negro is not equal to the white man; that … subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” Stephens also bragged to his fellow secessionists that the Confederate government was “the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Most of my neighbors—two thirds of those who responded–Liked or Loved the post and/or wrote in support of changing the Confederate street names. Why on Earth, they said, would we want to continue honoring those who fought to defend slavery and white supremacy?

Those who disagreed—eight of the 26 respondents–lamented the cost and inconvenience, argued that there were more important issues we needed to address, and/or informed me that I was a woke liberal troublemaker and ought to find better things to do with my time than stir things up around here, and if I didn’t like the street names I could always just leave, and they’d be happy to help me pack and load up the car. I was even accused by one—accurately, as it turned out—of owning a goddamn Subaru.

But even among those eight, as much as they wanted things left the way they were, no one made any sort of positive case for honoring the Confederate generals.

A member of City Council caught wind of the exchange—I wrote something about it for the local newspaper–and told me he would have the Confederate street name issue be added to the Council agenda as New Business, though to my way of thinking it was already Very Old Business. But nothing came of it. Just before the next Council meeting, he got cold feet and said he thought it best for someone else to take the lead. So far, no one has.

There’s an old saying about trees, that the best time to plant them was twenty years ago, and the second best time is now. The same can be said for 86ing these Confederate street names, all of which could be changed if we were so inclined to recognize the contributions of civic leaders, medical heroes, Civil Rights pioneers, nonprofit workers, educators, visionaries, artists. Or, what the heck—Dogs! Cat! Trees! We could avoid altogether the risky practice of naming things after people, though I for one would still love to see a Danny McBride Boulevard somewhere in the city.

This wouldn’t be the first time Fredericksburg has changed street names in response to changing values and priorities. In an April 30, 2015 article in the Free Lance-Star, then-City Planner Erik Nelson noted that in 1933 the city restored the Colonial-period names “that had been suppressed in the heady days following American Independence.” And again, in 1969, according to Erik, the city changed and/or added a number of new street names, in further keeping with the city’s history.

The Southern Poverty Law Center says there are 2,300 roads, schools, and monuments linked to the Confederacy in 23 states, fewer than 400 of which have so far been removed or renamed. But it’s starting to happen more and more. Fairfax City just voted to change 14 streets with Confederate names, and Loudon County says it may follow suit.

Clearly there is precedent for reconsidering who we honor in Fredericksburg and other cities of the South–and how we choose to honor them. Just recently the University of Mary Washington changed the name of Trinkle Hall, which was originally named for a former Virginia governor, an outspoken segregationist and eugenicist who promoted and signed into law the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, the Forced Sterilization Act of 1924, and the Racial Segregation Act of 1926. That building is now named for the Civil Rights pioneer James Farmer, who led the Freedom Rides and taught the history of the Civil Rights Movement for a number of years at the school.

As a retired professor emeritus at UMW–hell, as a human being–I’m proud of the college for taking this action, and for making it clear to students that history isn’t fixed or static, but rather always demanding of our continuing research and reevaluation. One of my books—published in a series of historical novels for young readers I wrote for Scholastic—is titled “Fallen in Fredericksburg,” and tells the story of the first Battle of Fredericksburg through the eyes of an intrepid band of young people trying to solve a lingering mystery from the war.

We need to continue teaching the history of the Civil War, of course–and we need to continue digging deep into that history to ensure a full and honest accounting of race and racism in America and in Virginia and in Fredericksburg. But that doesn’t mean we should hold onto these Confederate street names (and monuments, like those idiots in Mathews County who want to deed the land under their Confederate memorial to the Sons of the Confederacy for, you know, safekeeping). It may be inconvenient, as some of my neighbors complained, and there are certainly other important issues we need to address, as they also argued—rather petulantly, I have to say—but it’s past time we stopped honoring those who so violently dishonored our country.

By Steve Watkins

[From Issue #3, January 2023]

My dad was always asking us “How’s that suit your cosperosty?” whenever he wanted to know what we thought of something, and lately it’s been deviling me, wondering where he came up with the expression. My brother and I were raised hearing it, so it wasn’t particularly weird back then, but for some reason I’ve started saying it myself lately, and my daughters and Janet seem to think I’ve turned daft.

So not long ago, I decided it was time to get some answers and asked several of my learned friends if they’d ever heard the word “cosperosty” when they were growing up. I get together with these guys once a week to shoot the shit and compare ailments, but a fat lot of good they turned out to be. Nobody copped to having heard the word–not that they gave my question the time and attention it deserved. They were too busy debating the etymology of “Cornhole,” which meant one thing when we were kids, but has morphed into something else altogether these days in the form of the popular beanbag game.

So I did my own research, and after hours in some of the dimmer corners of the internet discovered that “cosperosty” wasn’t just some Dad-ism, but rather it was Dad’s bastardization of “copperosity,” which was itself a bastardization of “corporosity,” which was in turn a bastardization of “corporeality,” which means “one’s body,” and hence “one’s health.”

The most famous use, as I discovered, is in James Joyce’s Ulysses–“Your corporosity sagaciating OK?”–a line he lifted and “corrected” from Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories where it was “copperosity” and “segashuate.” According to the internet, Joyce heard someone quoting from The Tar Baby and Other Tales of Uncle Remus, couldn’t get it out of his head, and stuck what he’d heard into a passage of dialogue in the notorious “Oxen of the Sun” episode, notorious because it’s the most ridiculously difficult section in one of the world’s most ridiculously difficult—and, let’s just go ahead and put it out there: unreadable–books (though if you’ve ever tried Finnegans Wake, you’ll know that Joyce was just warming up with Ulysses). Where Joel Chandler Harris got it is anybody’s guess, but the expression appears to date back to what was once a typical Texas greeting, of all things: “How’s your copperosity sagaciatin’ this morning?” Sagaciate, of course, meaning “to get along,” or “to thrive.”

So it turns out “How’s that suit your cosperosty?” has a long and storied history, sort of, as a way of asking somebody how the hell they’re doing, or to inquire about how something suits them, or something along those lines. I may be going daft, as Janet and the girls suspect, but at least once I tell them all this they won’t be able to use “cosperosty” as proof any more

By Steve Watkins

[From Issue #3, January 2023]

I’m the author of a dozen books and a couple of more forthcoming, most of them realist fiction for young readers. They’ve sold around 1.5 million copies and won some national awards. I’ve done countless school visits and readings and book talks over the years. I also have a Ph.D. in American literature, was a tenured college professor, taught high school English, and raised four daughters.

All of which should have helped prepared me, but didn’t, for what happened in Northumberland County, Virginia a few years ago—brought back to mind by the recent censorship and book-burning controversy in nearby Spotsylvania.

It all started when the school librarian in Northumberland—let’s call him Dale—invited me over to do an afternoon talk and book signing at the middle school, where the Common Read that year was one of the books in the popular Ghosts of War series I’d written for Scholastic Press. The school had purchased hundreds of copies and given them out to all the students.

And since I was going to be there anyway, Dale asked if I might come a little early to speak at a high school assembly next door and do a reading from my newest Young Adult novel from Candlewick Press, Great Falls, about a returning Iraq War veteran and his family.

On the appointed day, I drove over to Northumberland and checked in with Dale. “I thought I’d read a passage where the Marine veteran reluctantly agrees to give a pep talk to his younger brother’s high school football team,” I said. “He ends up telling them about crossing the Line of Departure with vastly superior fire power and annihilating a bunch of Iraqi tanks and soldiers. There’s some profanity. Any problem with that?”

“Nah,” said Dale, a veteran himself. “Probably make the students more interested.”

400 high schoolers filed into the auditorium for the assembly. I started by telling them that Great Falls was inspired by a Marine family who had shared their story for a series of newspaper articles I’d written about their struggles with the father’s PTSD after his multiple combat deployments. On an overhead screen, I showed them a picture of the father, Captain Jason Haag, and his myriad tattoos. On one arm, he had the initials of the men with whom he’d served who’d been killed in combat. On the other arm were the initials of the ones who had taken their own lives.

After that I started the reading. Here’s part of the passage. The younger brother, Shane, is the narrator:

Jeremy pushes himself away from the locker and steps to the middle of the room.

“Coach asked me to talk to you gentlemen today,” he says. “About winning.”

You’d never know he was so lost just minutes before that he had to call me for help getting here.

“Well,” he says. “There isn’t any secret to it except one thing.” He pauses and winks at me, as if I’m the only one in the room who’s in on the big secret. Half the guys turn to look at me. Half just look bored.

“Forget what anybody says,” Jeremy continues, “because it isn’t heart, or willpower, or team chemistry, or any of that bullshit they tell you. It’s superior firepower.”

Guys look at one another with quizzical expressions. A couple look at me again. I don’t give them anything back.

“We had the M1-A1 Abrams tank in the invasion,” Jeremy says. “They had these ancient Russian pieces of shit. Had to come to a full stop before they could even fire.”

Coach taps his watch. Jeremy nods, but doesn’t change the pace of his delivery. “We see their muzzle flashes about as soon as we cross over what they call the Line of Departure into the desert. Everybody’s nervous, but then when the little turd bombs bounce off the Abramses, which are about the most heavily armored tanks in the history of modern warfare, we start laughing. And we keep on laughing when our guys unload a bunch of Sabot rounds on the Iraqis before they can throw their tanks into gear and haul ass.”

He pauses, looking casually around the room, pulling rank on everybody just through his eyes. Guys sit up straighter, though most probably don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

“Sabot rounds carry depleted uranium rods,” he says. “They’re armor-piercing shells. So they punch right through those piece-of-shit Russian tanks. Through and through shots. Suck out everything and everybody as they exit—from the kinetic force or whatever. Rip their tank operators apart. Literally. At the molecular level.”

Jeremy sticks his hands back in his jeans pockets and shakes his head, remembering. “That was some sick shit,” he says. Then he nods at Coach again, and leaves.

I was a few pages into the reading when the Northumberland principal, visibly upset, suddenly showed up next to me on the stage. He covered the microphone and whispered, “You can’t read that here.”

It took awhile before the students’ laughter died down, but I eventually finished—editing out any remaining profanity from the dialogue as I went along in order to protect the Northern Neck high schoolers’ delicate sensibilities.

When the assembly was over, the principal called Dale and me down to his office. He was literally wringing his hands. Word had already gotten out about the reading, he said. It was all over the school. Probably all over the county. There were sure to be calls from parents. A member of the school board was in the building during the assembly and may have heard.

“You should have sent home permission slips,” he said to Dale. “And warned everyone about the profanity. There should have been an opt-out.”

Dale stammered an apology. I said something supportive, figuring the principal was surely over-reacting, then scooted off to an English class whose teacher had asked if I would drop by and speak to her students.

Dale was waiting for me in the hall at the end of the period. “Sorry,” he said. “But they want you to leave.”

This caught me by surprise. “What about the afternoon thing with the middle school kids?” I asked. “They all have books I’m supposed to sign.”

“Canceled,” he said. “They’re afraid there might be more profanity.”

“They’re afraid I might drop the F-bomb at an assembly for middle grade students?”

Dale nodded.

I could tell he felt terrible. And now I was worried that he might be in trouble. I’d been told about an assistant principal there the year before who was terminated after he led a community forum at the Northumberland community library on white privilege.

Dale led me to the front door and followed me outside. He kept apologizing. I kept telling him he didn’t have anything to apologize for. He’d just been doing what a good librarian does: Whatever it takes to get kids interested in reading.

And I said what should have been obvious: “The only obscenity here is a country that sends men and women into combat and doesn’t take proper care of them and their families when they come home.”

The middle school kids never did get their books signed. I canceled an evening talk I’d agreed to give at the public library and drove back to Fredericksburg. I’d had enough of Northumberland County for a while. A reporter for Virginia Public Radio, who lived in Heathsville, called me while I was driving. We were supposed to have met for her to record an interview, and she still wanted to do it if I didn’t mind. She’d already heard about what happened at the high school. The focus of her piece, she said, might have changed a little. After we finished, I had another call, this time from the local newspaper. They, too, had heard.

I got a slew of WTF? texts and calls and emails from friends a few days later after the Virginia Public Radio story ran. The Northumberland newspaper ran the censorship story on their front page, so I’m guessing it must have been a slow news week. My librarian friend Dale left for another school at the end of the year. He told me later that he’d ordered multiple copies of Great Falls when he was at Northumberland, and after the controversy they were checked out all the time. Couldn’t keep them on the shelves.

By Janet Marshall Watkins

[From Issue #2, January 2023]

The first time I indulged in bougie self-care at the hospital was when my husband was there a few years ago. Our then 15-year-old daughter had been with us for most of the day, and she couldn’t stomach another lukewarm cafeteria burger. So when a nurse came in to check vital signs, our daughter asked—as if we were at an Asian-fusion joint—“So, how’s the sushi?”

The nurse smiled: “You’d be surprised!”

I’d seen the sushi in the hospital cafeteria many times before, on a shelf in the cooler below the usual array of pre-made sandwiches and yogurts. There was Dannon, there were turkey clubs, and there were trays of suspicious-looking rolls with dabs of wasabi and ginger. I’d picked up those trays quite a few times—picked them up, studied them, then put them back. God knows how long they’d been sitting there, and the last thing I wanted was to eat bad sushi and end up in the hospital myself.

But after the nurse gave the thumbs-up, my daughter and I entered a new level of hospital self-care. I still rely on a lot of granola bars and M&Ms to get me through hospital visits when family members are there. But more often than not, I also excuse myself from the bedside at some point, head down to the cafeteria and grab some sushi. I take it to a table in the sun-lit atrium, exhale for a moment, and enjoy those surprisingly-good rolls.

Twenty years ago, I would’ve thought it selfish to savor a meal if someone I loved was in the hospital. When I was deep in labor with our now-almost 21-year-old, my husband left the birthing room to scarf down a burrito my stepdaughters had brought for him. It was a crappy Taco Bell burrito, and he hadn’t eaten in hours, but when he returned moments later, I chucked a popsicle at him. How could he eat when I was suffering? In hindsight, I get it. In hindsight, Seinfeld deserves some blame for my harsh judgment.

Remember the old episode where Elaine is at a movie theater concession stand and a manager approaches to say her boyfriend’s been in an accident? Elaine starts to dash to the hospital. But then she pauses, turns back to the concession stand and orders her favorite candy: Jujyfruits. Elaine’s boyfriend ditches her when he finds out, and much of America, when that episode aired, seemed to agree that Jujyfruits represented the quintessential act of Seinfeldian selfishness. But Elaine knew what she was doing, and I now know, too: Hunger and hospitals don’t mix, and when things already suck, there’s no point in depriving yourself.

Hospital visits have taught me many things over the years: What a widowmaker artery is. What happens when you’re septic. What ICU delusion looks like. How often complications occur. But also: The virtue of a good hospital salad. Where to get non-dairy milk for your coffee. How much phone chargers cost in the gift shop, and why you need an extra-long cord. Mostly, what I’ve learned is that advance planning can make things easier, and if you don’t take care of yourself, it’s hard to take care of anybody else.

Like many families who have loved ones with chronic health problems, we’ve gone through quite a few hospital stays over the years, sometimes planned, too often for emergencies. As a result, I’ve developed a strange set of skills, ones you may have already picked up, too: How to rush to the ER with a well-packed go-bag, how to understand medical-ese, which people are most helpful in a crisis, what happens if you rush out the door and forget about the dog. Essentially, I’ve learned the many love languages of hospitaling. Here are five of them.

CAFFEINE

Steve and I have many unspoken pacts in our marriage and two spoken ones: The first is if I ever intend to divorce him, I should kill him instead. (This was his idea. We won’t need it, I promise.) And the second: Never let the other go without caffeine while in the hospital.

There are times when anesthesia is coming and the patient can’t eat or drink anything other than maybe an ice chip, and I don’t break the big rules. But otherwise, our Leave No Spouse Uncaffeinated Pact is non-negotiable.

Many years ago, I visited him one morning after he’d undergone a relatively minor procedure, and I was startled to see him looking so rough. I thought something had gone wrong until he told me he’d been put on the cardiac diet, which only allows decaf. The remedy for that crisis was to head straight to the hospital Starbucks. But I now know these crises can be averted by bringing a travel mug of black coffee and leaving it on the bedside tray at night.

If you’ve arrived at the hospital in an emergency, with no time to brew coffee, there are alternatives. That happened recently when Steve had emergency surgery late in the evening. The hospital Starbucks had already closed. So had the cafeteria, which sells Seattle’s Best. So had the Au Bon Pain. I did a quick Google search of nearby coffee shops: All closed by that time of night. I didn’t know when he’d be out of surgery, so didn’t want to drive home to brew anything, but I was also tired and didn’t relish the idea of getting up early the next morning to bring him some.

So, I did the one thing I could think to do: I got a nurse to take pity on me. I asked if there was coffee anywhere on the floor. I said I was SO tired. She said she wasn’t a coffee drinker and wasn’t sure she could make a decent cup, but I assured her I wasn’t picky; if it had caffeine, it’d be great. She made me a big, hot cup.

I wonder if she noticed I never drank it, and that it was sitting by Steve’s bedside in the morning waiting for him when he woke up, the coffee cold and a little old, but good enough to ward off caffeine-withdrawal misery. Crisis averted, marriage saved.

GO-BAGS

Pregnant women pack elaborate go-bags to make their labor and their newborn’s first days as comfortable as possible

The rest of us need go-bags, too, though nobody talks much about it until they get to the hospital and realize what they need and don’t have. Mine is a backpack with two side-cup holders—one for water, one for coffee. The other essentials: Phone and wallet, phone charger, snacks, a jacket or fleece, glasses and sunglasses, and meds. I always think about bringing a neck pillow but never do. I only bring what fits in one bag so I can keep my hands free to carry Steve’s things.

The patient needs a bag, too, with glasses, a change of clothes, whatever book is on the bedside table (if they’re up for reading), and toiletries (unless you just want to rely on the comically cheap stuff the hospital gives you). Don’t forget the patient’s cell phone, of course—and charger with extra-long-cord since patients have limited mobility if they’re attached to an IV pole/blood pressure cuff/heart monitor/urinary catheter/morphine drip. You get the picture.

It’s also a good idea to bring along a copy of the patient’s medical history and a typed list of prescriptions. (The hospital insists on dispensing their own drugs, so no point bringing those from home.) Patients get asked over and over about their prescriptions. Better to hand over a list than have to keep repeating it—or try to remember dosages under trying circumstances.

Steve has a particular outfit he prefers for hospitaling—Minnetonka slippers, soft cotton yoga pants, knit cap, oversized fleece zip-up—and I try to pack accordingly if he hasn’t had time to do it himself. Not much feels good about being in the hospital, and not much fits over or under those open-backed hospital gowns. Nice for your patient to have at least a little something comfortable from home to make it through the ordeal.

SALT

When my aunt was still alive, my mom, aunt and uncle, and all us nieces and nephews took turns at her bedside during repeated and at times extended stays in the hospital and skilled rehab facilities. She had diabetes, and a great many complications from diabetes, and she often seemed to fall and break something. Her only child was an adult with schizophrenia who had his own health issues and who died before she did. So, she relied on us.

Sometimes what she needed was for us to let doctors know she couldn’t handle morphine. What she needed other times was our help breaking a few rules. The hardest of these rules for her, due to doctors’ orders to maintain a strict diet, was that salt was off-limits.

If you’re in the hospital and the doctor puts you on a cardiac or renal diet, you’re going to end up with low-sodium meals—and no salt packets to season them with. Your only flavor options will be pepper, Mrs. Dash’s and maybe Tabasco. My aunt tolerated many indignities during hospital stays, but this was one indignity too far. So, we smuggled in a salt shaker, swiped packets from the cafeteria, or, when we realized she was carrying, fished them out of her purse.

After she died, I went through my aunt’s things and found a whole box full of salt packets. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Enough to stock a McDonald’s. One of my nieces is a nurse, and she recently told us about a recalcitrant patient who kept ordering meals from Door Dash delivered to the hospital because this patient, too, craved certain things. I’d never go that far to get around a doctor’s orders—or burden the overworked nurses, who were asked to go down to the hospital lobby to pick up the illicit meals. But unless it’s a life-or-death matter, I’m a firm believer in the comforting powers of salt and caffeine during uncomfortable times, and I am here to help my beloved travelers on that journey.

DOG CARE

Woe to the person who rushes to the hospital without dealing with the dog.

If yours is untrustworthy like mine, you’ve got to move fast before an ER trip. If an ambulance is coming, it’s helpful to put the dog outside so it doesn’t bolt out the front door when the gurney gets wheeled in, or bark like mad at the EMTs. Just remember to let it back in before you leave.

The moments before I drive to the hospital are like the dog-care Olympics on speed, and I’ve gotten better with practice. I can feed my dog, let him out back, let him back in, drug him (he takes medicine for anxiety!), spread peanut butter on a lick mat (which keeps him from chewing things), and gate off our upstairs in less than the time it takes (last time, anyway) for my husband to be ready to leave. In a bigger rush, the gate, the lick mat and the drugs are my priority. Later, I text our favorite dog walker to feed the dog and let him out.

If you don’t have a dog walker, hopefully your friends/family members have keys to your house—though a keypad lock is a good investment because you can text the code to whoever’s available and ask them to deal with your pet.

None of this may matter if you have a good dog, I guess. But nobody wants to come home from the hospital of all places to chewed shoes or a poopy carpet—or in our case a few Decembers ago, a total wreck of a Christmas tree with shredded branches and shattered ornaments.

SELF CARE

Unless you’re at the hospital for some joyous occasion like a baby being born, so much of being there is stressful. That’s why I love our hospital’s sunlit atrium. It has high ceilings, natural light, a Starbucks kiosk, an Au Bon Pain, plus tables near outlets where you can charge your phone. And did I happen to mention the sushi in the cafeteria one floor below?

I sometimes eat my salmon rolls in the atrium, and sometimes I go to the Au bon Pain and get a Mediterranean salad instead. It always feels indulgent, and I’m mindful of how lucky I am to be able to afford a break from my packed snacks and those cheaper cafeteria burgers. The salads feel like nourishment. Fresh vegetables, a robust vinaigrette, delicious kalamata olives—it’s all worth savoring. I nearly always wash it down with water and a Starbucks coffee, and I’m thankful for the barista who pours in a hefty amount of almond milk.

I linger in that atrium sometimes, and not for selfish reasons. I need the rest. The people I visit need it, too. You can wear out patients if you hover around them nonstop. Everybody needs a break.

When I’m in the atrium, I sometimes text friends, and sometimes I make small talk with other visitors. The Science of Well-Being class I took last year says talking to strangers can boost your mood—and theirs as well. Plus there’s a lot of common ground to be found when you’re in a place that reminds you, constantly, that there are few things more important than good health.

Once when I was there, I chatted briefly with a guy in a clerical collar. I thought maybe he was the hospital chaplain, a line of work I’m curious about since a good friend is heading in that direction. It turned out he was just visiting, but still, I said he must carry a lot of hard emotional weight ministering to people at the hospital.

“That’s why you don’t carry it all,” he said. “God does.”

I don’t know about that, but I do know we’re all carrying things and looking for ways to lighten our loads. Sushi. Jujyfruits. Sunlit spaces. Knowing your dog won’t destroy the house while you’re gone. Smuggling salt to your aunt. Honoring your vow to get your husband his morning coffee.

It’s Hospitaling 101: Whatever gets you through.

By Steve Watkins

[From Issue #4, February 2023]

Call it THE FREE PRESS, all caps. And just in case anybody might not get the message, write out the First Amendment underneath the header in giant letters with nothing else on the front page. Inside, though, there will be plenty:

An article you lift from The Great Speckled Bird, an alternative newspaper out of Atlanta–a gonzo piece about them naming a high school after Walt Whitman, not knowing they’re celebrating the most famous gay person in American history and how cool is that? Not that you know anybody in New Bern who is gay. At least you don’t think you do.

A poem you write that borrows heavily from e.e. cummings and that you sign “steve kma,” your nom de plume, the “kma” standing for “kiss my ass.” Take it as a compliment when a kid reports back to you that a teacher reads it to his class and says there’s no way you could have written it, and you must have plagiarized the poem as well.

An editorial calling for an immediate end to the Vietnam War, and another editorial blasting the policy of teachers smoking at their desks between classes—not because you’re anti-smoking (it IS North Carolina, after all), but because it’s not fair that students have to go outside and herd themselves into the one designated smoking area no matter if it’s pouring or freezing, and there’s never enough time to finish your cigarette, while certain teachers are still blowing smoke rings in their rooms after the tardy bell rings for the next class. Name names.

A passage from The Handbook for Conscientious Objectors you get from some peace activists over in Greenville who have a table set up outside the East Carolina University gym and are handing out anti-war literature to kids lined up for what might be an Allman Brothers concert not long after Duane Allman, just out of rehab, dies from crashing his motorcycle into a flatbed truck back in Macon—three blocks from where Berry Oakley, their bassist, will be killed a year later when he slams his motorcycle into the side of a bus.

Another poem, this one by Steve Pridgen that is so personal and haunting and beautiful it makes you wonder how well you actually know him even though you call yourselves best friends.

Type that first issue on black carbon paper to be printed on a hand-crank mimeograph machine in the backroom office of a United Methodist Church bishop by the bishop’s sympathetic wife, a friend of your mom’s who hates the war as much as you do, which is why she helps, though she swears you to secrecy about her involvement. The bishop will lose his job if anybody finds out, just like the assistant minister at your church who is shit-canned after he preaches a peace sermon one Sunday.

Though she has to keep to the shadows, the bishop’s wife will insist the staff include all your names on the masthead as a condition of using the mimeograph—your full name, too, and none of that “steve kma” business. Do what she says, not knowing what it will end up costing you down the road: the civil-disobedience arrest, conviction, and appeal, the revoked scholarship for your friend Warren, the threats, the assaults and batteries in the school halls, the vandalized car and constant stops and searches by the cops, the bust for planted drugs (or maybe your girlfriend Debbie is just carrying and doesn’t remember when they order her to empty her pockets), the rumor that gets back to your parents that you’re digging a drug tunnel to expedite your supposedly massive dealing operation, the getting beaten up by a sheriff’s deputy, which may or may not have anything to do with The Free Press, but the uncertainty won’t stop you from telling everybody it does anyway, because at the time it all seems to be of a piece.

Sell out your first issue in a day at a nickel a copy, though you hear stories about teachers snatching them out of kids’ hands and throwing them in the trash, clearly a case of illegal censorship, and great publicity besides.

Be prepared for more fallout, like the blood-thirsty school librarian, a retired Marine, who you show the extremely poor judgement of calling a fucking fascist and who subsequently tries to have you expelled, and when that doesn’t happen he tells you that he’ll fight you any time, any where, and he believes in survival of the fittest and he will by-god end you. And the guidance counselor who says she doesn’t need to meet with you for the mandatory senior conference because she’s sure that in a year you’ll be dead or in jail.

As a goodwill gesture, bring coffee and doughnuts to the police station one night at 11 during their shift change. Give it to the cops in their parking lot, but forget one of the doughnut boxes in the backseat of Debbie’s car. When you return with it five minutes later, discover that the cops have poured out all the coffee on the asphalt and tossed the pastries in the trash.

Keep publishing because speaking out is existential. The war is still going on and guys you know are getting drafted and sent to Vietnam to kill and get killed. You’re facing the draft yourself, almost 18 and living in the nexus of the Marine World—20 miles west of Havelock and Cherry Point, the largest Marine air base in the world, and 45 miles north of Jacksonville and Camp Lejeune, where they train your friends to be those killers, and where they play “The Ballad of Lt. Calley” over and over on the Jacksonville radio in celebration of the My Lai murderer William Calley, who is convicted earlier that year (and pardoned by Nixon three days later) for ordering and leading the massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese villagers, all old people, mothers, children, even babies.

Be disgusted. Be furious. Be ready to explode. Use Franz Kafka’s spelling for Amerika.

Join a small protest march around the perimeter of Cherry Point where all that separates you from the young Marine guards with their M16s are a shallow roadside ditch and several feet of concertina wire. Write about that, too, how it’s like looking at an alternate version of yourself in uniform who could kill you both with a squeeze of a trigger.

Write about how everything is in flames—figuratively, and at times literally. Your racist school finally integrated the year before, 16 years after Brown v Board of Education, and there were riots in the halls. Several black kids were charged but no whites. They turned the black kids’ high school into a junior high, white-washed the name, the traditions, the heritage, the identity, all of it. As a “compromise,” they changed the name of the white high school from New Bern High School to New Bern Senior High School, which just pissed off the black kids even more. They also kept the white-school colors–black and red–which seems symbolic. Everybody figures you’ll have more riots, and there are already rumblings, though nobody wants to talk about it. Not openly. Not until one of your black classmates says a white P.E. teachers tried to molest her during Driver’s Ed and half the school walks out of class. Walk out with them just in time to see a truckload of rednecks pull up in front of the school waving a Confederate flag and their hunting rifles. Run ahead of the surging crowd with your friend Woody Manus to yell at them to leave before everything erupts.

Go with Debby and Warren and Tanya—two white kids and two black kids–to the whites-only dance at the Elk’s Club. Insist that they sell you tickets, and tell them you’ll be back next week with more mixed-race couples when they refuse. Catch more shit at school when the Elks announce that they’ll no longer host any more high school dances. Get invited to the black kids’dance the next Saturday night at the community center where your mom is director of the Head Start program during the week.

Remember that they don’t call rednecks “rednecks” here—like the guys in the truck with the Confederate flag. They call them “Grits.” As if that makes any difference. The guys wear all camo just the same, especially during hunting season. Either that or the Grit uniform of starched blue button-downs with the collar buttons never buttoned, high-water khakis, tan leather boat shoes, no socks. The girls’ uniforms are white shirts with Peter Pan collars, pleated mini-skirts, calf socks with garters, and flat-soled Mary Janes. Be pissed, but not surprised, when a teacher orders Debby in her bellbottoms and flannel shirt to stand up in the middle of a class so he can lecture her in front of god and everybody about how she isn’t dressed like a proper girl.

Cover it all—the near riot, the segregated dances, the clothes lecture, the guns, the racism and sexism and militarism and bullying, the violent culture. Call for the legalization of pot. Argue for an end to the death penalty. Demand that John Milton’s Paradise Lost be replaced in the English curriculum with Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death.

Swear there won’t be any conformity in THE FREE PRESS ever–and no euphemisms, either. You’re going to call bullshit wherever you see it, and shout it as long and as loud as your voices will carry.

Read Catch 22 as an instructional manual for how to survive until graduation, then follow Yossarian:

“The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.”

By Uncle Wayne Watkins

[From Issue #4, February 2023]

[Editor’s note: Uncle Wayne—the Pie & Chai editors’ brother and brother-in-law–a children’s music legend on the Hawaiian Islands with his Howling Dog Band, no longer sports a mullet, but on the cover of his classic “Bald-Headed Chicken” album he does. Click HERE to check it out and listen to a rocking rendition of an Uncle Wayne original and the editors’ favorite, “Mouse in My House.” Thousands of children and their parents have sung it thousands of times over the past four decades, including the editors’ daughters and their classmates in preschool, kindergarten, and early elementary school–until the kids decided it was just too embarrassing to have their dad show up in their classroom with his Washburn guitar to lead singalongs and dance-alongs of their uncle’s songs like the onomatopoeia classics “All Around Maui” and “Humpback Whale,” the counting song “Coconut,” the wistful ballad “Woman of the Moon,” and, of course and always, “Mouse in My House” (and, OK, a few Raffis thrown in for good measure; there’s just no denying the gravitational pull of “Bananaphone” and “Down by the Bay,” and “Baby Beluga.”). Now the P&C editors are playing and singing Uncle Wayne songs with their grandsons, Bobby and Reuben. Have a listen, dial up some of Uncle Wayne’s other songs, and you’ll be singing along, and turning your living room into a children’s music mosh pit, too.]

MOUSE IN MY HOUSE

I’ve got a mouse in my house
She will not leave
I cannot make her go
I jump up and down
I yell and I scream:
“GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, MOUSE!”
But she shakes her head
She says No, No, No!
She shakes her head
She says No, No, No!

I bought a big cat
And brought him home
Was gonna chase that mouse away.
But when I went to work
The mouse came out
She got together with the cat to play.

I’ve got a mouse in my house
She will not leave
I cannot make her go
I jump up and down
I yell and I scream:
“GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, MOUSE!”
But she shakes her head
She says No, No, No!
She shakes her head
She says No, No, No!

I put out traps
But they’re no good
She steals that bait with ease.
I try to sweep her up
With my broom
But that just makes her sneeze
AH-CHOO!

I’ve got a mouse in my house
She will not leave
I cannot make her go
I jump up and down
I yell and I scream:
“GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, MOUSE!”
But she shakes her head
She says No, No, No!
She shakes her head
She says No, No, No!

She eats my crackers
She eats my bread
She does just what she please
I opened my refrigerator
Looked right in
She was sitting there eating my cheese.
OH NO!

I’ve got a mouse in my house
She will not leave
I cannot make her go
I jump up and down
I yell and I scream:
“GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, MOUSE!”
But she shakes her head
She says No, No, No!
She shakes her head
She says No, No, No!

I finally decided
I’ll just live with that mouse
It’s really not so bad
She cleans up her mess
Puts away her toys
The best roommate
I ever had.

I’ve got a mouse in my house
She will not leave
I cannot make her go
I jump up and down
I yell and I scream:
“GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, MOUSE!”
But she shakes her head
She says No, No, No!
She shakes her head
She says No, No, No!
She shakes her head
And says No.

***

Uncle Wayne started his music career in 1969 as a volunteer teacher’s aide singing and dancing with the children at his mother’s preschool. After finishing a BA in Early Childhood Education, he worked as a preschool teacher in the swamps of North Florida for 15 years and played music with the children every day. He moved to Maui in 1993 with his wife and daughter where he has continued playing his positive, upbeat, original songs for children and families in preschools, elementary schools, libraries, and festivals throughout the state. His day jobs while being a children’s entertainer have included PATCH (People Attentive to Children) Coordinator for Maui; Early Childhood Education instructor at UH Maui College; and director of the University of Hawaii at Manoa Children’s Center. In 2010 he formed the family folk music group Uncle Wayne and the Howling Dog Band. He has recorded three CDs and has dozens of live performance videos on YouTube. Since leaving the University of Hawaii in 2015, he has been performing full-time with his band or solo wherever he is invited. His music is sold through CD Baby and iTunes and can be heard on all major streaming services.

By Janet Marshall Watkins

[From Issue #4, February 2023]

Last June, a month after the mass murder at Uvalde Elementary School in Texas, I saw a post on our local school system’s Facebook page about a meeting that had taken place to enhance school safety. It showed a group of educators and police officers in a posed photo and noted that they’d “reviewed the School Crisis, Emergency Management and Medical Emergency Response Plan” and had also discussed things like security camera upgrades and police access to buildings.

The focus was clearly on how to respond well in a crisis, and obviously we want police to respond well in a crisis — unlike in Uvalde where the 376 law enforcement officers who responded waited an unconscionable 77 minutes before going in. But something about the Facebook post bothered me:

The talk was all about responding to shootings, but nothing about how to prevent them.

If I knew how to prevent every school shooting, I’d probably be testifying before Congress, not writing for Pie & Chai. But as a mom, former journalist, child safety advocate and founding member of our local Moms Demand Action group, I’ve been deep-diving into gun violence research for years, and there are common-sense strategies that deserve — and frankly have — tremendous support. Congress may not ever do enough to curb gun violence in America, but schools have a unique ability to reach families in ways that can keep kids — and all of us — safer. And while we can’t expect schools to solve every societal ill, they should be proactive about trying to keep guns out of kids’ hands.

Children who bring guns to school almost always get them at home, and millions of kids live in homes with unsecured guns. Those guns aren’t just used in school shootings, but also in suicides and accidental shootings. The sad reality is that firearm-related deaths surpassed car accidents as the leading killer of children and teens in 2020, according to the CDC. What has long been clear to me—and should be clear to everyone—is that parents who choose to have guns need to lock them up and store their ammunition separately to keep kids from accessing them. And parents should understand not just the human consequences of failing to do so, but also the legal consequences. In Virginia, it’s illegal for a loaded gun to be accessible to a child under 14. (It’s only a misdemeanor, and I don’t know why it’s fine for a loaded gun to be accessible to a 15-year-old, but at least Virginia has a law related to gun storage. Not all states do.)

All this came to mind when I saw the school system’s Facebook post about school safety. So at 9 that night, on June 29, 2022–a month after an 18-year-old former student gunned down 21 children and teachers in Uvalde–I emailed Fredericksburg Schools Superintendent Marci Catlett and the School Board.

Dear Dr. Catlett and Members of the Board:

I noticed a post on the city schools’ Facebook page about how school and police officials met recently to discuss school safety. I’m writing to request that you send letters home with each student notifying their parents about the importance of storing guns safely. As you surely know, research shows that most school shooters are students or former students; most (when under 18) get their guns at home or from a friend’s or relatives’ home; and millions of kids live in homes with unsecured, loaded guns.

Urging parents to safely secure their guns would be a tremendous public service, especially in the wake of Uvalde. Your efforts could minimize the risk of school shootings, suicides and accidental shootings.

Parents who need help figuring out how to safely store guns could tap into the RACSB’s Lock and Talk program, which provides free gun locks, or consult besmartforkids.org for other ideas. It’d also be good for parents to know that under Virginia law, it is “unlawful for any person to recklessly leave a loaded, unsecured firearm in such a manner as to endanger the life or limb of any child under the age of fourteen.”

I hope you’ll consider this request, and I appreciate all you do for the city’s children.

Dr. Catlett, a longtime educator, wrote back a little after 8 the next morning.

Good morning Ms. Watkins,

I hope you are doing well. Thank you for your timely email regarding this critical issue surrounding the safety of our schools and gun control. We have made this a priority as we plan for the new school year. We are having our second “Safety Summit” next week. We will certainly share your request with our team. Again, thank you so much for your interest and support of our schools. It matters!

I responded later that same day, thanking Dr. Catlett for her email. I also attached a sample letter to parents that I said could easily be modified to fit the city’s needs; the letter is posted on the Students Demand Action website, and it’s been modified and used by many school systems around the country. Click here to read it.

Dr. Catlett responded with a quick note of thanks that evening. And that ended our email thread–for a while. The school safety committee kept meeting and posting updates online about its efforts, which had a lot to do with emergency response. Staff underwent “critical incident training,” and the schools installed “breach kits” to make sure police have the tools they need to break down doors in a crisis.

What I didn’t see was a letter urging parents to lock up their guns.

Six months later, on January 6, 2023, a 6-year-old in Newport News took his mother’s gun to school and shot his teacher, a young James Madison University grad, in the hand and chest.

Any place in America can be the scene of the next shooting, but this one hit close to home. On the morning of Sunday, January 8, 2023, I emailed Dr. Catlett and the Board again.

I’m writing to see if you’ve sent letters to students’ parents urging them to store their guns safely. This seems particularly urgent in light of the shooting of a teacher by a 6-year-old in Newport News a few days ago. The thread of our previous correspondence about this issue is below, and I’m reattaching a sample letter you could send to parents, in case that’s helpful. My youngest child graduated last year, so I realize it’s possible you’ve already sent letters to parents about the vital importance of storing guns safely; if that’s the case, thank you! If not, I hope you’ll do it soon. I’ve read and heard a lot about how schools/police plan to respond to school shootings, but far less about school-based efforts to keep guns out of kids’ hands in the first place.

Later that same Sunday morning, Dr. Catlett wrote back:

Good morning Ms. Watkins,

I hope you are well. Like everyone, the horrific and unbelievable tragedy that occurred Friday has consumed my thoughts the entire weekend. Thank you for the timely email and for resending the sample letter. I will share the information with the Communications & Safety Team as soon as possible. Again, thank you and we appreciate your unwavering support and concern for our school division and community!

The next day, the School Board met. The deputy superintendent talked about school safety — specifically about the breach kits, but also about how the school system would now be sending letters to parents encouraging them to keep their guns and ammunition locked up.

The letter went out the next day– a modified version of the Students Demand Action sample letter I’d sent Dr. Catlett. The city’s letter, which you can read here, encouraged parents to lock their guns. It said, among other things, that schools have gotten free gun locks from the local Community Services Board, and parents can get one by calling the school.

Fredericksburg City Schools have now joined with dozens of districts around the country in trying to prevent shootings, rather than just respond to them, by notifying parents about the need to safely store guns. Will the letter be read? Will a careless parent become careful? Who knows. But as Dr. Catlett and I agreed in a follow-up email exchange, if even one life is saved, the prevention effort will have been worthwhile.

I’m grateful to city school leaders for embracing a multifaceted approach to safety that includes urging parents to secure their guns. For years, we’ve forced children to prepare for the worst by making then endure school shooter drills. But adults should be shouldering this burden, and that means urging them to lock their guns–and holding them accountable when they don’t. I’m weary of reading headlines about “accidental” shootings involving young children who got their parents’ guns and shot a sibling or friend or parent. Those shootings aren’t accidents; they’re the result of parental negligence.

Meanwhile, in Newport News, the school district has announced that dozens of metal detectors will be installed at area schools, starting with the elementary school where the child, who had brought the gun from home, shot and critically wounded his first-grade teacher.

It’s entirely possible that one of those detectors will spot a gun at some point. It’s also possible that whoever’s manning the detector will disarm the person who brought the gun before anything awful happens. “See? Metal detectors work,” people will likely say. But work at what?

Metal detectors exist because even 6-year-olds can get their hands on guns and fire them. (Disturbingly, children “as young as 3 may be strong enough to pull the trigger of a handgun,” according to Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s webpage on gun safety.)

You can’t blame schools for wanting to do something tangible, something to insulate them from being the scene of the next crisis. But the whole situation reminds me of a TedTalk by trauma expert Dr. Nadine Burke-Harris. In it, Burke-Harris describes the difference between responding to a problem and trying to eradicate it. If a whole bunch of people get sick, Burke-Harris says, and they’re all drinking the same well water, you can prescribe antibiotics all day every day. But if you want people to stop getting sick, you have to fix the well.

Installing metal detectors is like prescribing antibiotics. We have to fix the well.

By Steve Watkins

[From Issue #5, March 2023]

I recently finished work on a historical novel for Scholastic Press titled Stolen by Night which is scheduled for publication in Fall 2023. It’s the story of teenagers in the Resistance in Occupied Paris during World War II, many of whom, after their capture, were “disappeared” in Hitler’s “Night and Fog” program, Nacht und Nebel. Most of the NN prisoners were sent to Konzentrationslager Natzweiler-Struthof, the only Nazi-run concentration camp on what is now French soil, in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace-Lorraine. Tens of thousands were killed there. Few survived.

I read numerous books and articles in my research, most notably Ronald Rosbottom’s When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944; Boris Pahor’s Natzweiler memoir Necropolis; Nikolaus Wachsmann’s KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps; Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After; Jacques Lusseyran’s And There Was Light.

And then there was the document which I’ve posted below, “Investigation Report on the Life in a German Extermination Camp (KZ Natzweiler) and the Atrocities Committed There, 1941-1944,” compiled by a three-man investigative team led by British Army Captain Yuri “Yurka” Galitzine. The military investigators were among the first to enter the camp after it was liberated late in 1944—too late for most of the prisoners, who were either executed on the eve of liberation, or relocated to other concentration camps deep inside Germany. Moving quickly, Galitzine and his men were able to locate a mountain of camp records and dozens of witnesses: a handful of prisoners remaining in the camp, townspeople, contractors, guards, and four of only a small number of prisoners who had managed to escape from Natzweiler. Their investigation produced one of the first on-site reports of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps.

Shaken by the account, and curious about the name of the principal investigator, I spent a considerable amount of time learning what I could about about Galitzine, though nothing about him is included in Stolen By Night. His name, as I soon discovered, was a somewhat Anglicized version of Golitsyn, one of the most prominent noble families in what was once Tzarist Russia. Yuri Galitzine, as it turned out, was actually Prince Yuri Galitzine, and as a boy, like many in the White Russian nobility, he fled from his home during the Russian Revolution, ending up in England where he continued his young life, growing up in a world of wealth and privilege.

He also grew up to be, for a time, an anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer in the years leading up to the Second World War, something we know from records of the notorious Right Club, a secret organization of right-wing extremists that included members of Parliament, military officers, and British royalty, most famous of whom were the Duke of Wellington, the German spy Anna Wolkoff, and William Joyce, who later became the Nazi propagandist known as Lord Haw-Haw.

Many in The Right Club ended up in prison for treasonous activities. Galitzine was one of the few whose story followed a redemptive arc, as his experiences—serving in the military, losing friends in battle, and exposing Nazi atrocities at Natzweiler and other camps—appear to have changed him. After the war, he devoted himself to advocating for the creation of an “International Bureau of Information” to ensure an effective response in the future to the sort of propaganda that fueled Hitler’s rise to power, and without which, he believed, the Third Reich might never have come into existence.

***

It’s impossible not to compare Yuri Galitzine’s story with the life of Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer, who served as kommandant of KL-Natzweiler-Struthof for three years, from April 1941 to May 1943, after which he was appointed kommandant at the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he earned the nickname “The Beast of Belsen.” Among the many atrocities for which Kramer was responsible—documented by Galitzine in his report—were the murders of 87 Jewish prisoners, brought to Natzweiler to be studied, then killed, then included as specimens in the Jewish skeleton collection of Anatomy Professor August Hirt at the Reich University in Strasbourg. At his trial after the war—for Crimes Against Humanity—Kramer confessed to the murders.

One evening, about nine o-clock, I led about fifteen women to the gas chamber. I told them they were going to be “disinfected.” With the help of some of the SS guards, I got them completely undressed and pushed them into the gas chamber. As soon as I locked the door, they started to scream. Once the door was locked, I placed a fixed quantity of the hydrocyanic salts given to me by Professor Hirt in a funnel attached below and to the right of the peep-hole. I illuminated the chamber’s interior by means of a switch located near the funnel…. The women continued to breathe for half a minute and then fell to the floor. I turned on the ventilation, and when I opened the door they were lying dead on the ground. They had lost control of their bowels.

I entrusted two SS guards with placing the corpses in a delivery van, on the next morning at about half past five, in order to have them taken to the Institute of Anatomy as Professor Hirt had asked. A few days later, under the same conditions as described above, I again brought a number of women to the gas chamber, and they were asphyxiated by the same procedure. A few more days after that, some fifty men, perhaps fifty-five, were taken to the gas chamber on my orders, on two or three occasions, and killed there by means of the same salts that Hirt had given me. I do not know what Hirt was going to do with the corpses of these prisoners, assassinated at Struthof on his instructions. I did not think it appropriate to ask him.

I felt no emotion while accomplishing these tasks, because I had received an order to execute the prisoners in the manner that I have described to you. That is simply how I was brought up.

***

I was only able to to find the Natzweiler report online as a PDF of Yuri Galitzine’s original typescript, and I’ve worried about that—worried that because it may be difficult to locate, and difficult to read, it could in some ways become lost or forgotten, the way most things, even terrible things, fade from our collective memory. Which is one of the reasons I’ve reproduced it here, as a resource for other researchers, and for readers–a chronicle of the horrors of Natzweiler written in dispassionate, even bureaucratic language by perhaps the least likely of men. “For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear,” wrote Elie Wiesel in his Holocaust memoir Night. “[H]is duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”

***

INVESTIGATION REPORT ON
THE LIFE IN A GERMAN EXTERMINATION
CAMP (KZ NATZWEILER) AND THE ATROCITIES
COMMITTED THERE. 1941-1944

To: Chief Liberated Areas Section PWD SHAEF (Political Warfare Division/Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force)

From: Capt. Yurka N. Galitzine

NOTE: This report is based on personal investigation and observation made during operations in the area in Dec 1944.

     I. Origins of the camp.

In the spring of 1941 German geologists and mining engineers came to ROTHAU in ALSACE prospecting for red Alsatian granite to face the “Party” buildings in NUREMBURG. They conscripted the local civil engineer, M. Ernst KRENZER to help them in their task and made several excavations in the early spring. At last the stone was located in March 41 on an upper ledge of the mountain behind ROTHAU, very near the Alsatian skiing resort at the Hotel STRUTTHOF.

During the spring of 1941 the local firm of stone-masons and contractors, SADLER & Co of GRENDELBRUCH were conscripted to start working a quarry as a commercial proposition and at the same time to start a road up the mountain.

Suddenly without any warning one day in April several German military trucks brought 150 civilian prisoners up to the Hotel STRUTTHOF (closed some while before) where they were parked under guard and set to work. All the inhabitants of nearby farms and houses on the mountain were turned out and it became a restricted area. The first work done by the prisoners was the completion of the motor road on the mountain while some worked in the quarries. Both working parties were supervised by civilian foremen from STADLER & Co and were guarded by S.S. guards. These first prisoners were mostly German “anti-Nazis” and Russians.

The numbers of the prisoners gradually increased and apparently at the same time the plans of the Germans became greater enlarged in scope. 

2. The building of the camp

The Germans started to build a camp on the summit of the Struthof hill. This camp which they finished at the outset of 1943 consisted of two halves—a wired-off area for the prisoners, and a military barracks for the S.S. guards. 

The prisoners area was built in a clearing on an exposed slope of the mountain with a very beautiful view which was little compensated by the bitter cold climate at that altitude (3000 meters). It consisted of 15 barrack huts built in three rows of five on “terraces”, cut out of the mountain side. The huts were designed to hold 200 persons and were equipped with bunks, stoves, electric light. W.C.s, wash basins, etc. However, as will be explained, it was the regime rather than the surroundings which provided the horror of the place. Also in this compound were a solitary confinement hut, a disinfestation hut and a crematorium. The whole compound was surrounded by a double wire fence with guard posts at intervals and through the wires ran a high voltage current.

The barrack huts of the S.S. men were similar to those of the prisoners, while the camp commandant lived in a comfortable brick house which also served as a camp office just outside the prison enclosure.

3. The quarry.

The quarry is situated on the opposite slope of the hill and is also surrounded by a wire fence with guard posts and joined to the camp by a road fenced on either side with barbed wire.

The quarry was developed through the years 1941-43 by which time enough stone had been extracted. Then the Germans decided to use the ledge formed by the excavations as a factory site, and a repair and recondition works for Junkers aircraft motors was set up. This was enlarged and developed until in 1944, it was decided to try and install the whole factory underground, so gangs of prisoners were set to work digging tunnels in the side of the mountain for this purpose. However this work was interrupted by the arrival of the Allies.

4. Organization of Slave Labour.

As the camp began to fill up the plan of the Nazis unfolded. This camp was to be a distributing and restocking center for slave labour. The records found in the camp show that when sufficient stone had been quarried for NUREMBURG they decided to use the camp as a holding center for the distribution of prisoners to any government enterprise which needed manual labour with the idea of “working the prisoners to death”. When a batch were so exhausted that they could work no more or had succumbed to some disease as “T.B” or typhus, they were sent back to STRUTTHOF to be put out of their misery and a new batch was sent up to replace them. The areas “serviced” by the camp appear to have been ALSACE, BADE, HESSE and occasionally LORAINE.

Although the camp at STRUTTHOF itself never held more than 6000-7,000 prisoners at a time, many thousands passed through its hands. On the work book of the camp in 1944 there were some 31 places listed involving at one moment 24,000 persons.

***

5. Identity of the prisoners.

     a. Nationality

Most of the original 150 who arrived in 1941 were German political prisoners and Russians, some of whom were soldiers and some civilians. As time went by more and more Russians came. Luxemburgers too (including the brother of the husband of the Grand Duchess, the Minister of State and other Luxemburg notables), also Dutch, Belgians, Norwegians and Czechs were amongst the early batches. Later came Greek, Italian and Yugoslav partisans and it was only in early 1942 that the first French prisoners were brought in. The first batch of these were mainly cures and gendarmes. There were never many French in the camp, though among the few there were reported to be seven generals, one of whom, Gen. FRERE the ex-military governor of STRASBOURG died (of “weakness”) in Aug 1944 only three days before an attempt to rescue him was scheduled to be made. The French prisoners were not allowed to mix with the others.

The first Poles to be brought in were a whole village from near LUBLIN who arrived one night in 1942. Many of them were suffering from typhus, a disease which had never touched the camp before.

It is reported that there were two Englishmen in the camp — one officer and one professor.  The latter left some drawings of his fellow prisoners which he managed to smuggle to one of STADLER’S foremen, M. NICOLE. These drawings bear the signature — “B.J. STONEHOUSE.”

*** 

It is also reported that five American airmen captured after a raid on STRASBOURG were interned in this camp. No confirmation of this has been obtained.

Very few women passed through this camp. Of those who did most were killed almost immediately. The total probably did not exceed 150, of these most were Polish, Jewish and French. 

     b. Classification of prisoners.

i. Prisoners were classified under one of eight groups and each group had its distinctive sign and colour, which was worn on the prisoners clothing. Underneath the sign was the prisoners number on a white tape. All articles of clothing had to bear the sign and number. The group signs were as follows: Felon: Green. Criminal: Green. Political (Military): Red. Homosexuals: Blue. Political: Red. Forced-labor dodgers: Black. ‘Bibelforgers’(conscientious objectors and religious): violet. Jews: Yellow.

*** 

ii. Certain prisoners who were considered more dangerous or who had attempted to escape were designated “N.N.” prisoners, the N.N. standing for Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog). These prisoners also wore a yellow patch with three black circles over their heart. They could be shot for the slightest misdemeanor and were not allowed any mail or communication with other persons. There were many Norwegians in this category.

6. Camp Regime.

     a. Administration

The prisoners were divided into ‘blocks’, each one corresponding to a barrack-hut. In these ‘blocks’ prisoners were appointed and made responsible for the general administration and discipline. These senior prisoners (known as “Kapos”) were usually German and chosen from among the common criminals (e.g. murderers) or sexual perverts (e.g. sadists); for some time the chief prisoner was a sexual pervert from HAMBURG. They had full disciplinary authority over the other prisoners in their block, and were allowed to beat or strike fellow prisoners. In fact, in 1943 when things were at their worst, if a Kapo were to kill another prisoner it would have been completely overlooked.

A story of an incident which happened in 1943 well illustrates the attitude of the Kapos. Some prisoners were working in the quarry and a fall of rock caught and crushed the leg of a Russian prisoner. He took the accident very bravely, but was in tremendous pain. The German doctor appeared, applied a tourniquet of dirty rags and sawed off the crushed foot. He then poured a bottle neat iodine onto the raw wound, laughing as the prisoner lost consciousness with the pain. The Russian was carried back to his hut where he lay for several days before he died. But during the time he lay there he used to moan and cry with pain as the leg festered. So every so often the Kapo would walk over and thrash the dying man with a heavy stick telling him to shut up.

Each block had an SS officer over it, but the ordinary other ranks of the guard were kept strictly outside the compound and were not allowed to talk to prisoners. Only the duty officers, NCOs and work details of SS for the crematorium, prison, etc. were allowed in.

Each barrack hut was designed to hold about 200 prisoners; in fact they had over 600 crammed in. There were three in every narrow bunk. Others slept in the W.C.s and the corridors. The prisoners tried to keep warm by each picking enough twigs to light the fires in their huts, as the Germans provided no coal or wood or paper, and they considered it was waste of working time when wood was collected. 

     b. Daily Routine.

0400 hrs Reveille. Breakfast of a bowl of thin watery soup.
0500 hrs March to work.
1200 hrs Break for a meal of soup with a small bit of bread
1300 hrs Back to work.
1800 hrs Finish work. Allowed an hour to go to the dispensary. Every one into compound. 
1900 hrs Dispensary closes. Soup & a bit of bread.
2000 hrs All prisoners confined to their huts.

     c. Food.

The undernournishment was terrible. All the solid food which the prisoners were given was a small crust of bread and they had a bowl of thin “soup” three times a day. All the utensils they were allowed was a wooden spoon.

Occasionally the SS guards would go out into the forest and shoot a deer or a wild boar. Then they sell through the Blockleiters the portions which they themselves did not want (usually the entrails etc.) at 15 to 20 marks a lb. As the ordinary prisoners were only allowed to receive 50 pfennigs a month and the Kapos 1 mk. 50 pfg, it meant that they squeezed the small amount of savings the prisoners had. A canteen was available where cigarettes were sold once a month.

Many prisoners got swollen or distended stomachs from undernournishment, all became very weak and succumbed to dysentery, constipation and many other illnesses. The Russians seemed the worse hit, and pathetic sights are recounted by STADLER employees of Russians eating grass and even dung. Some used to hunt for worms in the mud of a little spring in the quarry. A pathetic description was given to me of a little Lorrainer who died of hunger in the quarry in the summer of 1943. He was left to die and no one was allowed near him.

     d. Health.

One of the barrack-huts was set aside as a dispensary and laboratory, and in the crematorium there was a doctor’s office and a room for autopsies with an examination slab. There was also a hut for the disinfestation of dead bodies and clothes.

The dispensary was only open for prisoners between 1800 hrs and 1900 hrs and naturally there was always a long queue. So that if an unfortunate did not get in on time he had to wait till the next day. Bandages were scarce and those available were made of paper. One prisoner was seen to be working in the quarry with an open wound in his back as big as a man’s fist. It was a festering boil, which he had stuffed with dirty rags. A kind foreman (M. NICOLE)from STADLER’s managed to smuggle enough medicaments to him to cleanse it and heal it.

Typhus was brought in by the first Poles from Lublin, and it soon spread. In the end five barrack-huts were isolated for typhus cases. Many prisoners got stomach or other internal troubles or weak hearts. In winter many prisoners were paralysed with cold as the climate was terrible. A lot died from swollen limbs due to the cold.

Prisoners were not allowed to go to the lavatory during working hours. This also had a terrible effect on their health.

7. The Camp Staff.

The German officers and NCOs were all without exception incredibly brutal. They were all drawn from the ranks of the SS. They were allowed to hit, kill or torture at will during the first years until 1944 when even their right to strike was officially withdrawn though this did not deter from doing so. The Kapos had also been stopped from striking their fellow prisoners. 

The rank and file of the camp guards were usually SS though occasionally Wehrmacht. It should be noted that prisoners claimed that the latter were always more cruel. At the beginning all the guards were equally cruel, but in later years were were many Volksdeutsche impressed into the SS who were much more tolerant. They were usually treated badly by the regular SS men and not trusted. 

No one was allowed to talk about the camp. The German guards themselves never even discussed it amongst themselves and all civilian employees, such as the quarry foremen, signed a paper and swore not to talk.

*** 

8. Deaths and Torture.

     a. Torture.

Little authentic evidence beyond the statement at Annexure C is available. There are
two rooms in the crematorium about which graphic descriptions are given by the present FFI guards at the camp. These men know nothing of the true story as even the four prisoners who escaped from the camp and a captured SS guard could not give much details as very few men tortured ever came out alive. All that could be confirmed were the cries and shouts which could be heard all over the camp coming from these two rooms.

     b. Shooting. 

The majority of the deaths were caused by shooting. Prisoners who were sentenced to death were normally taken up to the sandpit between the camp and the quarry and shot there.

The first death occurred on 24 May 1941 when a party of prisoners were working on the new motor road. Two prisoners broke ranks and tried to gain the cover of the forest nearby. The SS guards opened and hit one in the stomach, leaving him to die while they pursued the other. He lay there from midday when the incident occurred till five o’clock when the other prisoner was finally caught on the other side of the valley. They were Germans presumably anti-Nazis and records that the one was left lying on the ground pitifully crying “Mutter, Mutter.” was called Albert Alfred BERGMAN (born 1896) and the cause of his death is gen as “Weak heart and dysentery”. They were both shot. During the time that the search was going on the other prisoners were made to lie face down in the mud with their arms and legs spread-eagled.

A favored trick of the SS NCOs (especially Fuchs of Kehl) was to throw a stick or cap outside the line of guards where work was going on. If the prisoner crossed the line he was shot for breaking bounds and if he did not go he was shot for disobeying an order. There was a Standing Order offering three days furlough to any SS guard who shot a prisoner. There were many volunteers for this work as a result.

Early in 43 the first Alsatians were brought to the camp. They were 13 young Strasbourg patriots. Eleven of them were taken up to the sand pit and tied together in small groups. Then SS NCO Fuchs with a squad of Croat SS men had target practice on their bodies, shooting them in various limbs before Fuchs himself went to deliver the “coup de grace”. The other two left over were made to carry the bodies of their comrades down to the crematorium where they themselves were shot in the nape of the neck on the steps.

One day three women “spies” were brought up by car to the camp and shot in the sandpit. They are described as being one Englishwoman and two French women, and all were ‘well dr3essed’.

     c. Hangings.

When prisoners attempted to escape or some such breach against the general discipline of the camp, a public example was often made by hanging the unfortunate in front of all the other prisoners. Volunteers were always called on from amongst the latter to take away the stool under the victim’s feet. But they were never forthcoming and it ended by two being detailed.

A pathetic eye-witnesses story is told about a little Pole who was sentenced to be hung. The rope with which he was to be executed was too long and he merely fell to the ground with the halter around his neck crying “Warum. Warum.” So they shortened the rope and tried again.

     d. Gas Chamber.

A special gas chamber for experimenting in lethal was gases was built down at the old STRUTTHOF hotel early 43. There was a little glass panel at the side to enable doctors to watch victims’ reactions and a hole in the door for the insertion of a gas cartridge.

Each prisoner was fed well a week before being gassed. A special card was kept on the intended victim. Sweets and cakes were given on the day of the experiment. Some even got out alive when the gas failed to work, but they always died in some other way later. The doctors tried to ‘revive’ patients by injections as antidotes to the gas.

Most of the victims in the gas chamber were women, some 150 were killed in this way including 50 Polish women who were put in at once no one coming out alive. They were stripped first, raped and then crammed into the small chamber (about 12 ft by 12 ft).

In the crematorium there is another room where prisoners were also killed by carbon dioxide gas from the furnace of the crematorium. In here most Jewish victims were killed. 
     
     e. Crematorium.

In the beginning of the camp when deaths were less frequent a lorry left the camp twice a week for STRASBOURG where the bodies were burnt in the town crematorium. But after a while the town authorities objected as the numbers increased, and a small crematorium, capable of burning 4 bodies a day, was built opposite the STRUTTHOF hotel. This was also too slow and often the coffins could be seen piled high by the side of the road by visitors to the camp. So that at the end of 1942 the camp authorities built a fine crematorium within the prisoners’ compound.

The crematorium is the most interesting and the most horrible building in the camp. There are a flight of steps leading down to a small room where many victims were probably shot as they were forced down the steps. Here in this room the bodies were stacked and fed into a lift which took them up into the furnace room. Here the operator used to put as many as three bodies at a time into the furnace. 

Outside lines a pile of coffins used to carry the dead to the dead sandpit or the distant gas chamber. 

Inside there can be seen the “pin-up pictures’ of the man who tended the furnace, the slab on which the autopsies were performed. It has been rumoured that vivisection was practiced here but no proof is forthcoming. In another room there is a store of little earthenware urns. It was into these that the ashes of burnt prisoners were put, when their families were lucky enough to be able to ask for their remains. They had to pay 75 marks for this privilege. For those who were not ‘bought’ back by their families there was a dump outside the hut into which their ashes were thrown along with all the camp rubbish. This dump was incidentally also the camp sewer. Seepage eventually occurred and polluted the water supply of Rothau down in the valley 9 kms below.

Cremation was known to the local French people as ‘passer par la cheminee’. Here only specially picked squads of SS men and condemned prisoners were allowed to penetrate so little reliable evidence can be obtained what happened inside. 

On the evidence of an SS guard, however, it is known that on 1, 2, and 3 Sept 1944 the last days before the evacuation, 200 Frenchmen and 50 Frenchwomen were brought in and killed. No identity papers of the victims were retained and the floor of the little room below the furnace was said to have been 10 to 15 cms deep in blood according to the evidence of the SS guard who had to clean it out. 

     f. Medical Experiments.

The prisoners were used unhesitatingly as human guinea pigs. They were often given injections to test their reactions to certain new serums, and they sometimes died from these.

There are stories that vivisection was practiced by the camp doctors on the ‘autopsy’ table in the crematorium, but this can not be confirmed.

120 bodies of prisoners have been discovered in the Anatomical Institute of the Strasbourg Hospital. Apparently acting on a telephone call from Prof. JUNG, head of the Institute, the Camp Comdt sent two lorry-loads at 0500 hours next morning of bodies, naked and still warm when they arrived. They appeared to be “still alive” having been injected with serum. Some were women. The bodies found were preserved in alcohol in jars, some being already cut up. The prison numbers of all the bodies are available which will permit identification.

     g. Statistics. 

In the early days the Germans registered the deaths of their victims at the Mairie of NATZWEILER, the nearest village. Here too can be found the signatures of the doctors responsible. Most of the causes of death are given as “weak heart”, “heart failure”, “dysentery”, or “typhus”. Only two cases are noted as executed.

*** 

It is improbable that all deaths were listed during the period. In Feb 43 the new crematorium was finished and all registration of deaths was done at the camp. It is estimated that between 5000 and 6000 were killed here, although French reports (quite unsubstantiated) put the figure as high as 11,000.

8. Escape.

There are only two known attempts at escape from this camp which have succeeded. The first was in 1941 when the son of a Russian general aided by three of his compatriots seized a German staff car standing outside the STRUFFHOF hotel and got away. Three of the escapees were recaptured and shot. But the Russian general’s son is reputed to have got to Switzerland.

During the evacuation of the camp in Sept 44, as the last lorry was leaving the camp, it broke down on the hill outside. With the aid of the local FFI *** four Luxemburgers managed to escape. Their statement is attached at Annexure C. They have since returned to LUXEMBOURG.

The Germans were very strict during attempts at escape. All prisoners were stood to attention until the man was recaptured, or working parties were made to lie flat with their face on the ground, immobile. In fog the SS guards were most afraid and herded the prisoners together and put them back in their huts.

9. Evacuation.

The camp was evacuated on 4 Sept 44 two months before the arrival of Allied troops and all the prisoners except a cleaning up party of about 40 were sent back across the Rhine. The factory was kept in operation by the use of local hired civilian labour.

10. A Prisoner’s Appreciation.

A German Communist who had done ten years in various concentration camps told M. NICOLE, a foreman that “I preferred DACHAU to this. It is larger so that you can get lost easier; it is better organized and the climate is better.”

*** 

[What follows in the report are “Annexure A: German War Criminals in the Struthof affair,” and “Annexure B: Witnesses for Crimes committed at Struthof Camp.” “Annexure C, below, is the statement/report given by the four members of the Luxemburg Resistance Movement who escaped from the camp.]

*** 

     1. Gas Poisonings.

On 2 Aug. 1943, 59 men and 29 Jewish girls were transferred from the Ravensburg [SIC] camp to the KZ Natzweiler. Then on 11 Aug., after 8 days of medical examination, 15 women were led to the gas chamber. Upon their death, they were taken to Strasbourg for post-mortem examination. On 13 Aug. the remaining women were killed in the same manner. The first 30 men were killed in this fashion on 17 Aug., the remainder 2 days later.

One of the girls managed to tear herself loose and jumped over a small wall. She was shot dead on the spot.

*** 

The following morning the undersigned observed blood traces leading from the gas chamber to the loading ramp. To supplement the aforesaid, may it be added that gas experiments were made from time to time with prisoners, to experiment with new gases, in the course of which most of them died.

***

The gas chamber is located outside the camp, in an annex of the Hotel Struthof.

2. Mutiny in the Quarry: (June 43)

100 Russians and Poles were alleged to have had the intention to prepare a mass escape by overpowering the guards, then seize their weapons and make a get-away. The trial began in the evening toward 9 o’clock, when the alleged ring-leaders were brought up for interrogation; since the investigation chamber was separate from the sleeping quarters by only a thin wooden partition, the other prisoners were able to follow the whole interrogation. In order to extract confessions from the prisoners, their hands were chained to their backs, and they were strung to the ceiling by their tied hands. In the course of this, the SS-men participating in the interrogation also whipped them. After half an hour was up every single one (of the prisoners) was willing to confess everything the SS-men wanted to know, just to be relieved from their tortures. A few among them lost their minds through their tortures, and began to sing. About 30 were subjected to this torture. The SS-men conducting the interrogation were given wine and spirits to whip-up their fury still further, and afterwards, knew no restraints. The prisoners in the next room could not sleep during the night because of the continuous cries of pain of those being tortured.

At reveille, the accused were taken away. Most of them had been tortured to such an extent that they could no longer walk, but had to be dragged. There were some among them whose faces were bruised so badly that they were beyond recognition. After four weeks, during which time they continued to have their hands tied to their backs and were exposed to the weather, those concerned were publicly hung, in the presence of all the prisoners. Those chained in this manner had remained chained at all times, and their hands were not free when they had to relieve themselves, or to eat and drink. The chains grew into their flesh, the upper arms were blue from the stopped blood, and had (so to speak) died off.

The ones responsible for this act were:--
       SS-Hauptsturmfuehrer Kramer
       SS-Oberscharfuehrer Buttner
       SS-Hauptscharfuehrer Zeuss
       SS-Oberscharfuehrer Nietsch
       SS-Unterscharfuehrer Ehrmantraut
       SS-Unterscharfuehrer Fuchs
       SS-Rottenfuehrer Ohler

     3. Solitary Confinement:

Before the organization of a cell system, all prisoners to be punished were locked up in one cell, 2 meters long and 1.50 meter wide, furnished with one wooden cot. Their hands were chained behind their backs. Food consisted of water and 350 grams of dried bread, and 1 liter of watery soup every three days.

     4. French Prisoners:

In the summer of 1943 the first shipment of French NN-prisoners arrived and it was intended to exterminate them without exception. On the first Sunday morning of their stay in the camp, they had to fall out in the pouring rain to carry stones from the commandant’s building into the camp, in double time, and in so doing they were beaten with sticks by the Blockfuehrers and chased by the dogs until they broke down, completely exhausted. They were then left to lie on the camp parade grounds until noon. Most of them were bleeding profusely from the dog-bites and the slashes of the sticks.

The fifty men concerned were organized into a special work detail, and had to perform the heaviest types of labor in camp. Some of them were put into an extra detail which the prisoners called the “death detail.” After 14 days, only 30 of the 50 men were still alive. All of them had to work under the worst mistreatment, and were guarded by a chain of sentries. The detail leader permitted himself the sly joke of sending 2 or 3 prisoners through the sentry line with the order to fetch some stones. While doing so, they were shot down by the sentries. 

Detail Leader: SS-Unterscharfuehrer Fuchs.

     5. Treatment of NN-prisoners:

Admission to the infirmary was barred to these prisoners. We have seen their wounds which they bandaged with old rags. Those unable to work were dragged to their place of work and left to lie there in the sun or rain all day. They never received hot meals, because they were incapable of work. Their nourishments consisted only of bread. The treatment of the NN-prisoners was such that after a few weeks they were completely exhausted. The term NN-prisoners is applied to people who are guilty of an infraction committed in “Nacht und Nebel” (night and fog). These people were not allowed to received mail or personal packages.

     6. Executions:

Only the smallest number of executions were performed according to regulations. The prisoners were killed through a shot in the neck by the SS-men. *** The execution premium consisted of 2/10 liter “schnapps”, 300 grams of sausage, and 6 cigarettes. 

In this manner, by hanging and shooting in the neck, 92 women and approximately 300 men were killed during the night of 1st to 2nd Sept. 1944. The corpses were stacked up in a cellar, in which the blood was 20 cm. high. Since these prisoners were not included in the K.Z.N. list, their exact number cannot be stated. They are alleged to be a group of partisans who had been captured in the vicinity.

*** 

During the months of July, August and in the beginning of September, executions by shooting and hanging were carried out almost daily. Only in the rarest cases were executions carried out in front of the prisoners. Then mostly were executions of prisoners who had intended to escape. In such cases they were hanged in the presence of the other prisoners, as an intimidation. 

The punishment of thrashing was often ordered for minor infractions. Prisoners were laid across a block, and then received 20 to 30 blows on the buttocks, executed with full force.

There have been cases where a fugitive was recaptured. Then he received more than 100 slashings with a stick or whip so that his buttocks were so badly bruised that for weeks he could neither sit nor lie down. In the case of a thrashing, the whole camp had to assemble. When it was noticed that someone had escaped, the entire camp had to stand in the open until the fugitive had been caught. 

7. Rations Issued:

Much of the blame for the bad state of health of the prisoners can be ascribed to the fact that the food rations to which they were entitled, were subject to embezzlement. They were entitled to the following ration per day:

350 grams bread
25 grams margarine
15 grams meat scrap
50 grams jam (once a week)
20 grams sausage
50 grams cheese (once a week)

Because of embezzlement by those responsible for the provisions, prisoners did not receive the above ration allowances.

*** 

Most of the time the noon-meal soup consisted of turnips with two to three unpeeled potatoes.

By Steve Watkins

[From Issue #6, April 2023]

“Obituary for the Utah man who fatally shot his five children, mother-in-law and estranged wife: ‘Michael made it a point to spend quality time with each and every one of his children.’”

Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, was one of the first to post on Twitter about the bizarre obituary for mass murderer Michael Haight. “Michael enjoyed making memories with the family,” the obit said. “Michael lived a life of service.”

The full obituary for Haight, who killed himself after murdering his entire Mormon family in early January, had been posted on the Southern Utah Mortuary website in Cedar City, Utah. Shortly after Watts’s tweet, the funeral home blocked online access, but you can still read it on Watts’s Twitter feed, if you have the stomach for it. The obituary also appeared in local newspapers—in one case across the fold from the obit for the family members Haight slaughtered.

“And if that’s not gross enough,” Watts next tweeted, “the wife’s family put out a statement supporting… guns: ‘This is the type of loss that will continue to occur in families, communities and this nation when protective arms are no longer accessible…. It is our desire that the media turn their attention to the great works of God that can render a forgiving heart, how religion can heal and enlarge out capacity for love, and a return to foundational principles of peace within our nation.’”

The family’s statement, published in the East Idaho News, included a smiling photograph of two of the victims—the mother-in-law, Gail Earl, and her daughter Tausha Haight, mother of the five murdered children.

Friends of the family commented on Watts’s Twitter feed that she just didn’t understand the Mormon culture. “Your outside perspective on this one is interesting since I grew up with the family & I’m still connected, through social media,” one woman posted. “We are LDS, the same faith they are. I think the desire to focus on our hopes for a joy filled afterlife are how we make sense of the indefensible.”

To which Watts responded, “As if he deserved a joy filled afterlife.”

Michael Haight, whose wife had filed for divorce after multiple abuse accusations against him, took all the guns from the home before returning to murder his family. His oldest daughter Macie had told police a couple of years earlier that her father was emotionally, verbally, and physically abusive, that he had slammed her head against a wooden couch frame, and that he had once choked her until she was afraid she might die. Michael Haight’s explanation was that Macie had been “mouthy,” and that he’d been having a hard year after his father’s death.

Police concluded that Haight’s actions hadn’t been “assaultive,” just “very close to assaultive.” He was never charged.

You can check out the full obituary for Michael Haight, plus news articles and the family’s statement, HERE on Watts’s Twitter feed, along with a host of bizarre comments and testimonials, such as this one, from a woman who identified herself as one of Haight’s relatives:

“Michael and his family will be greatly missed. He was always quick with a smile and a kind word. He went out of his way to help and serve other people. He loved his family and was proud of them. He took the time to show people that he loved them by serving them…. I’m grateful for his example of Christlike love and service, his life and his friendship.”

None of the obituary comments mentioned the victims.

Watts, meanwhile, had one more WTF post on her Twitter thread about the Haights. “And finally,” she wrote, “the family removed the murderer’s image from their GoFundMe photo and replaced him with… White Jesus.”

That’s the photo you see at the top of this story.

By Steve Watkins

[From Issue #6, April 2023]

Literary Confession #1: A lot of the books I wrote so knowledgeably about on my preliminary exams for my Ph.D. I only knew from Masterplots, those massive tomes they had in the reference section of Strozier Library at Florida State University. I promised myself I would go back and read them for real when I had time, but hardly ever did, even the short ones. It’s OK if they want to revoke my degree. I’m done with it anyway.

Literary Confession #2: I cried and cried at the end of Erich Segal’s Love Story. And I still remember the opening line: “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant? That she loved Mozart and Bach, the Beatles, and me?” Also, I just did an internet search to make sure I remembered that sentence correctly, and I was surprisingly, disturbingly close.

Literary Confession #3: When I first sat down to try my hand at novel-writing, I horribly over-wrote everything, prose so purple it suffered an aneurysm and died on the page. Not the least of my literary sins was calling a crocodile a “volatile leviathan.” Thirty years later I’m still getting grief about it from Certain Individuals.

Literary Confession #4: It’s been years, decades, since I read a Joyce Carol Oates novel all the way through, and at this point I doubt I ever will again. All that victimhood and violence! Can’t anybody catch a break with her every once in a while? Can’t any of her monsters finally get what’s coming to them?

Literary Confession #5: I was clueless when I read Tristram Shandy, and still don’t know what Laurence Sterne meant with the hobbyhorse thing, though I was told it had something to do with masturbation. Or maybe not. Anyway, metafiction, which he basically invented, gives me a headache (except for The Things They Carried, but including Going After Cacciato). Plus, he plagiarized the shit out of Tristram Shandy, but hardly anybody noticed at the time.

Literary Confession #6: Page 27 of The Godfather back when I was in high school. Finally convinced my non-reading brother, Wayne, that reading could be worthwhile. At least that passage. I, of course, had no trouble going there multiple times for deep–you might even say passionate–study, devoted young literary scholar that I was.

Literary Confession #7: I thought Madame Bovary was a dark comedy. That botched club foot operation? That crazy wild sex-carriage ride through the streets of Paris? When I suggested this in a graduate school seminar everybody seemed to think I was an idiot, though I recently re-watched an old episode from the fifth season of The Sopranos, “Sentimental Education,” in which David Straitharn, playing the headmaster at AJ’s school, recommends Madame Bovary to Edie Falco as Carmela Soprano: “It’s almost a perfect novel. Flaubert writes about bourgeois loneliness, emptiness. Emma Bovary destroys herself for some fantasy in her head. It’s great. It’s truly great. Somehow horrifically funny, though tragic. I think you might enjoy it.”

Literary Confession #8: When I was a kid, Chris and Bonnie Woodyard’s dad told us the story of Moby Dick and we were so entranced and also frightened that we started playing the game of Moby Dick, which involved us climbing a giant oak tree and huddling together on a massive branch, pretending that if so much as a pinkie finger dangled over the edge, Moby would breach from the grassy depths of the Woodyards’ yard and get us. It was many years later–quite a while after I’d gotten my Ph.D. in American literature–that I read Moby Dick, as opposed to pretending I’d read it. I would crack open that tome when I crawled into bed each night and struggle to stay awake through yet another chapter. I did finally manage to finish and so escape my secret shame. At the same time, my daughter Maggie, who was then six, got hold of an abridged version of Moby Dick for kids and we read it together and enjoyed it immensely–so much so that whenever we went swimming, Maggie and her sister Eva insisted that we play their version of the Moby Dick game. I was of course Moby, sounding and breaching, while the girls swam madly out of the way–either that or be crushed by the whale. That winter Maggie insisted we buy her a white winter jacket so she could pretend she was Moby Dick until it was summer again and we could get back in the pool.

Literary Confession #9: Though I gave it a mighty try, I didn’t care for Wilson Rawls’ Where the Red Ferns Grow. In fact, I was appalled by it. Oh, sure, they had me in the opening with Billy working to raise enough money to buy Old Dan and Little Ann. And how brave were those little pups–and Billy–when they were in the cave and the mountain lion showed up! But then the book took a dark and troubling turn. The brainless celebration of unbridled raccoonicide was bad enough, but when they chopped down the most magnificent tree in the forest–just to kill yet another poor raccoon–I threw the book across the room. Then I went over and kicked it. Then I picked it up and forced myself to finish. Shouldn’t have bothered. Next time I want to read a good dog book it’ll be Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller.

Literary Confession #10: It took me the longest time to get it that the man and woman in Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” were talking about her having an abortion. And that was only because some teacher insisted. So I did my part and once I became a teacher also insisted to students that the couple was talking about an abortion. I very politely suggested that they–the students, not the couple–would have to be idiots not to see that, when the truth was that the couple could just as well have been talking about doing psilocybin to let a little light in. Or opening a window (literally, not metaphorically). And why did Hemingway title it “Hills Like White Elephants”? I had to read hundreds of stupid student papers analyzing that one, and it was my own fault because I assigned them! There’s a Herman Melville theory that he was inspired to write Moby Dick because he was living in the Berkshires at the time and the rolling, white, snow-covered mountains reminded him of a great white whale. God help me, but I may have repeated that nonsense, too.

Literary Confession #11. When I was a kid I saved up some money to order a copy of Weird Tales or a similar publication I saw advertised in the back of a comic book and eagerly tore into it when it came in the mail. The first thing I read–the only thing I read–was a story about a guy who’s driving down an icy mountain road and has an accident and plunges off the side and gets knocked unconscious. A creepy hermit finds the wreck, drags the guy out, takes him to his creepy lair with creepy underground lab. When the guy comes to, it takes him a while to figure out what’s going on, and what’s going on is that the creepy hermit has cut the guy’s head off but is somehow keeping him–or keeping his head, anyway–alive with a complicated system of tubes and wires. The guy totally freaks out when he realizes what’s happened to him, as of course anybody would, including me, the reader, who got so freaked out by the story that I shoved the Weird Tales behind the couch and didn’t tell anybody about what I’d read, and never mentioned the book’s existence to my parents, and was too afraid to go behind the couch to retrieve it and just throw it away, so I left it there and for all I know it’s still there. I never even sat on that couch again, that’s how scared I was. I’ve never told anybody about this before.

Literary Confession #12: When we were in junior high, Wayne used to go over to a bookstore near our downtown church during the half hour between Sunday School and the church service. I went with him sometimes to check out the comic books. He pretended that was what he was interested in, too, but while I was engrossed in Batman he wandered over to the dirty books section. It took me a while, but I finally realized what he was up to. I must have been afraid of what would happen to his sinful soul, because I ratted him out to Mom and Dad. He got in so much trouble that for all I know he might still be on restrictions.

Literary confession #13: I was thrilled when one of my early books, which didn’t sell particularly well, cracked the top ten thousand in sales on Amazon. Who knows how or why, as secretive and proprietary and weird as Amazon is with its crazy logarithms, but it might have been me ordering half a dozen copies of my own book that put me over the edge.

Literary confession #14: I once wrote a short story from a cat’s point of view. Mercifully, nobody ever read it unless they culled through our curbside trash and fished out the shredded manuscript and pieced it back together. I can’t make the claim/justification that it was a story for children–not that I would have inflicted it on them, either. And I don’t even like cats. But maybe I was too hard on myself. The Washington Post ran a positive review a few years ago of a book in which the narrator was a cat.

Literary Confession #15: In my first published work, “The Glistening Sword”–which I wrote and illustrated when I was ten, and which my dad color-photocopied and had laminated and gave out copies to all our relatives for Christmas presents, prompting them to wonder if we were really that poor, or just cheap–I misspelled “glistening” throughout, the “t” so silent that it disappeared altogether. I also managed to work a typo into the setting, so Death Drop-Off became Death Drop-Of.

Literary confession #16: I loved the library when I was a kid. Still do. Back then, in our small Florida mining town, I was often the only one there besides the librarian, who I remember as being very old and very gray, though it could have just been the dust and bad lighting. It was a round building with concrete stairs on the outside leading up to a flat roof with a crenellated parapet. My own, private castle. And it was green—likely from mold, but still. I spent hours sitting in the stacks, reading all the Hardy Boys, Chip Hiltons, and Andre Nortons they had. (I thought Andre Norton was the name of a series, too.) Mom let me check out as many as I wanted, as long as I could carry them home myself in the basket on my bicycle. One day I discovered a book called The Virginian and asked the librarian if I could check it out. It looked like a grown-up book, so I wasn’t sure how that worked, but it had the same title as a new TV series, a Western, that had just come out that year. She smiled and said yes, and then threw in the mind-blowing information that the TV show was based on the very book I was standing there holding. I tore through it as fast as I could, though it was slow-going in places with a lot of big words and complex sentences. I was confused, too, because in the TV series, The Virginian—who didn’t seem to have an actual name—was pals with the ranch hand Trampas, but in the novel, Trampas was the bad guy and he and The Virginian were mortal enemies. Not only that, but at one point in the book, when they’re playing poker, Trampas calls The Virginian, or almost calls him, something I wasn’t allowed to say at home.

It was now the Virginian’s turn to bet, or leave the game, and he did not speak at once.

Therefore Trampas spoke. “Your bet, you son-of-a–.”

The Virginian’s pistol came out, and his hand lay on the table, holding it unaimed. And with a voice as gentle as ever, the voice that sounded almost like a caress, but drawling a very little more than usual, so that there was almost a space between each word, he issued his orders to the man Trampas: “When you call me that, SMILE.” And he looked at Trampas across the table.

Yes, the voice was gentle. But in my ears it seemed as if somewhere the bell of death was ringing; and silence, like a stroke, fell on the large room.

I couldn’t wait to talk about it with the librarian, who was the only other person alive I knew who had read The Virginian. I felt as if I’d entered a whole new world. Actual cussing in a book! (Even if it was mostly implied.) “I sure wish I could read another one just like it,” I told her, after we’d discussed the myriad differences between the novel and the TV show.

“Well,” she said, “you know you could always see if we have more books by the same author.”

“The same author?” I said, or asked, or just sort of repeated. Because, as ridiculous as it may have been—as ridiculous as it was–I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Yes,” she said, pointing to the cover, where, under the title, were the words—nonsense words as far as I was concerned—“Owen Wister.”

“That’s the name of the author,” she explained. “The man who wrote the book.”

This may not sound possible, or even plausible, but the embarrassing truth was it had never occurred to me that someone might have written the books I’d spent all that time reading. I was eight years old, but I’d always thought that books just were. Now, suddenly, in that moment of revelation, of epiphany, everything changed. But, of course! Somebody wrote these stories.

And they might have written other stories, too. Those weren’t just random extra words on book covers. Those were the names of the writers! And if other people got to do that, even people with strange names like “Wister”—write books, make up stories–then maybe I could do it, too!

By Janet Marshall Watkins

[From Issue #6, April 2023]

A few months after he graduated from college, a friend crashed his bike one evening as he raced down a trail near Charlottesville. He suffered a life-altering spinal cord injury, but as those injuries go, he was fairly lucky: He retained full use of his upper body and partial use of his legs, and despite fears that he’d never ride again, he went on to become an Olympic para-cyclist. He was also fortunate in another way: Before his accident, his dad had bought him a short-term health insurance policy.

In those days, young adults couldn’t stay on their parents’ insurance plans until 26 like they can now, thanks to Obamacare. You had to get insurance through a job, but even if you got a job with insurance, the plan might not cover you for 90 days. So, if you crashed your bike during that 90-day period like my friend did, and needed multiple surgeries to recover, your finances could be wrecked just like your body—unless you had a short-term plan.

Even with the plan, things were rough on my friend. His insurer, happy to pocket his premium payments, initially declined coverage of his medical bills, which quickly soared into the six figures. So, despite his dad thinking ahead, despite thinking he was covered, despite struggling with the trauma of partial paralysis, my friend also got hit with financial stress and the possibility of a future of extreme medical debt. An attorney his mom worked for fought pro bono on his behalf, and eventually—after months and months—coerced the insurance company to do the right thing. Mostly.

The policy didn’t cover everything after the bills came in and were disputed, but it did keep my friend out of crushing financial debt. And it instilled a big lesson in me at a time when he and I were just starting out in what we naively thought would be our carefree, independent, young adult lives: “America’s health care system,” in the still painfully accurate words of the late Walter Cronkite, “is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.”

***

Most everyone I know has a story about insurance. Occasionally those stories involve gratitude: Thank god we have it! But more often they’re about big bills or arguments about care for which an insurance company doesn’t want to pay. Just the other day, I was at my doctor’s office getting a refill on a prescription for a medicine I doubt I’ll ever stop taking. My practitioner wanted to give me a 90-day supply, but for reasons neither of us could fathom, my insurance company said no. That led to a conversation about another patient who my doctor said desperately needs a procedure, but whose insurer doesn’t want to cover it. The insurance company is requiring her to try cheaper measures—not because they’ll fix the problem, something only the procedure will do. But because, well, they’re cheap.

My doctor could only shake her head in frustration. “The insurance company tells me how to do my job,” she said, stating a truth that has become painfully obvious to many of us.

Just recently, the investigative nonprofit ProPublica reported that the insurance giant Cigna uses a system that allows its doctors to reject certain claims on medical grounds—without opening the patient file. “Over a period of two months last year, Cigna doctors denied over 300,000 requests for payments using this method,” ProPublica wrote, “spending an average of 1.2 seconds on each case…” One Cigna doctor denied 60,000 claims in a single month, according to the report, which was based on internal company records. Cigna responded that the ProPublica investigation was “biased and incomplete,” but wouldn’t say how. And Cigna’s not the only one doing it.

You can read more HERE, if you have the stomach for it.

I seem to find myself frequently in conversations like the one I had with my doctor, maybe because everyone who knows me knows I have a bone to pick with the health insurance system, or maybe because I used to be a health writer, or maybe because so many of us are in the same leaky boat, struggling with how to pay for care.

Near the start of this year, a friend whose family has gone through some hard health issues asked me to guess how much money her family spent on care last year. “Just guess,” she said, as if we were playing a fun game. I did some quick math in my head: Estimated monthly premium plus huge out-of-pocket costs for a challenging disease a member of her family had, plus copays, drugs and run-of-the-mill stuff. “$25,000?” I said.

$25,000 will cover an entire year of tuition at my younger daughter’s college. It’ll cover a hefty annual mortgage payment. But it’s not enough to cover my friend’s medical bills. “$32,000,” she said. “Thirty.Two.” That’s about 78 percent of the average annual income for a person living in our area. And it begs the question: Are some people just working to pay for health care?

I sometimes wonder which aspect of our modern lives will appear the dumbest to future generations. Gun violence has to rank high, but our health insurance system deserves strong consideration. Among supposedly civilized countries, we’re alone in not having universally affordable care. We pay different amounts for care depending on where we work, where our spouses work, how much money we make, and whether we’re Medicare age. A drug that costs me $30 might cost you $300. A procedure that costs you nothing might cost me several thousand.

It’s a scheme driven by politics and greed, not patient care, and what puzzles me is how resigned we are to it. We chip into GoFundMe accounts to cover strangers’ medical bills. We give Emmy Awards to Breaking Bad, a show whose main character, a teacher, starts dealing meth to pay for cancer care. And yet some of us, though not me, criticize countries with universal care, looking to poke holes in their approach: “Well, but I’ve heard you have to wait a long time to see a doctor there…”

Maybe it feels better to cling to the myth of American exceptionalism—a mistaken assumption of our nation’s inherent superiority—than to acknowledge how broken our system is.

***

Five years ago, I went through the most expensive health crisis of my life, and the insurance hassles still aren’t over.

I had been limping for days, thinking I’d strained my calf. When my husband saw me crawl up our stairs one too many times, he insisted I seek help because he feared I had a blood clot. My response: “Hold on. Let me see which urgent care our insurance covers.”

I ended up in the ER, and after a long night there, I was diagnosed with a deep-vein thrombosis. I got put on a blood thinner to treat it, and that should have been the end of it, except I hemorrhaged on the blood thinner and needed another hospital stay, a couple of transfusions, and four procedures to deal with the whole mess.

Some months later, we got an Explanation of Benefits form in the mail from our insurance company, alerting us to bills totaling $58,680.40 and warning that $33,208.20 were “in need of review.” “You may or may not have to pay this,” the form said.

I posted about it on Facebook because I found the $33k bill so incredibly outlandish that I couldn’t help but laugh and wanted to share it. A friend responded, “Sounds like a candidate for ‘Bill of the Month.’” The fact that there’s such a thing as a “Bill of the Month” website on the internet tells you everything you need to know about health insurance in America.

“Bill of the Month,” a feature from Kaiser Health News and NPR, examines real medical bills and tries to explain them. One story featured a college student’s $17,850 bill for a urine test. Another involved a $6,589.77 bill for six stitches. Yet another described a baby’s $550,124.76 bill for a NICU stay in a hospital the mother, who works in the insurance industry, “had carefully chosen…because the hospital was close to her house and in her insurance network.” The hospital offered this new mother a $45,843 per month payment plan; she spent a year of her life fighting it. (You can read more here if you want to go down the rabbit hole.)

I think we ended up shelling out about $5,000 of the $33,208.20 we were warned we might have to pay. And then for nearly five years, I got something no one ever seems to get: Free medicine.

The blood thinner I was eventually prescribed for long-term use was covered by my insurance AND came with a manufacturer’s coupon that brought the cost to zero.

I would’ve taken that drug for life, but a few months ago—after my husband retired due to illness, and the COBRA plan we’d hung onto expired—we had to switch insurance plans. My tiny employer doesn’t offer insurance, so we got the best Affordable Care Act plan we could afford. It won’t pay a nickel to cover my tried-and-true blood thinner, and if insurance won’t chip in, the manufacturer’s coupon also won’t work. So, suddenly, my formerly free blood thinner has a $587/month price tag.

I can’t afford that, and I’m not cooking meth like Walter White, so I called my hematology practice. Those busy people, who also treat cancer patients, made time to phone in a prescription for a different blood thinner for me. My insurer will pay part of the cost, and a manufacturer’s coupon is covering most of the rest. So, joy. I’m told the coupon will stop working at some mysterious date, though, and then the drug will cost $350.

This isn’t my first foray into spiking drug costs. Years ago, I found out the asthma inhaler that had been costing me $40 per month would suddenly cost more than $225. I vented to someone I know who works for the federal government, which offers terrific, subsidized plans to its employees. He said: Well, if you want better insurance, get another job.

I wondered if he thought every American should get a job with the federal government. I wondered if he agreed with me that we aren’t really free if we have to abandon jobs we love—or stay in jobs we hate—just to get health care. I wondered if his heart had gone cold. I also thought: This is what happens in a rotten system. Instead of holding those who created and profit from this insanity accountable (i.e., politicians and lobbyists and health insurers), people blame individuals for what we do or don’t have.

Individuals acting alone are never going to solve the problem, try as we might. Not long ago, I read a story in the New York Times about a farmer who secretly gave money to his local pharmacist each month to help pay for medicine that people in his Alabama community couldn’t afford. He was like a one-man insurance system, and the story was a heartwarming tribute to his kindness. But it was also an indictment of our system–because no one should need a generous stranger to make it possible for them to get an EpiPen.

The farmer recently died, and others are now trying to fill his charitable void. Meanwhile, his state has refused to expand Medicaid, making it harder for people to afford treatment.

***

As I write this, I have a notepad nearby with scrawls from my recent effort to deal with a bill from my 20-year-old’s cardiologist. The bill is for double what it should be. Everyone knows it—the cardiologist, the insurance company, and me. But I’m getting ping-ponged between them because each thinks the other should fix the error that caused the expensive bill.

After many calls and many wasted hours, it’s still unresolved, and I realize I’ve turned into my mother. In my mind is an image of her standing in our kitchen 35 years ago, rotary phone in hand, Explanation of Benefits forms by her side, giving an earful to the Blue Cross/Blue Shield representative on the other end of the line. And here I am decades later, Explanation of Benefits forms in front of me, giving an earful to the Anthem rep. Same song, millionth verse.

I live in a country with fabulous medical professionals, and the system has improved some—incrementally—over the years. So even if it’s a hassle, I’m aware of my family’s good fortune. We’ve gotten excellent care over the years, even if we have been stuck with stacks of scary Explanation of Benefit forms.

Still. The inequity in the system gnaws at me, maybe especially when I see headlines like this one on a recent Washington Post story: “Why the South has such low credit scores.”

The story explained that places with the lowest credit scores are places with high rates of medical debt, and those are the same places where Republican politicians refused to expand Medicaid. Expansion would have given more people insurance coverage, minimizing the odds of people being saddled with bills they can’t pay. Not paying your debt drops your credit score, and then if you need to borrow for a car or home, you have to pay higher interest rates, which adds to your debt. It’s a vicious cycle, and it’s linked to the cruelty of our inequitable insurance system.

The story made me think of the day many years ago when my husband and I were in the patient registration office at our local hospital, and then-Virginia Speaker of the House Bill Howell was sitting nearby. Howell had recently obstructed efforts to expand Medicaid in Virginia, blocking care for poor Virginians, yet there he was, accessing care himself.

After years of studying up on insurance policies, as a journalist and consumer, I’ve given up hope that politicians will take the steps necessary to make affordable care a universal right anytime soon. I expect that for the rest of my life, Americans will keep facing radically different costs for everything from chemo drugs to colonoscopies—costs that for some will be utterly unaffordable and will create sad ripple effects, from bad credit to toxic stress to poor health outcomes. I think we’re stuck with the system we’re in not just because corporate lobbyists and politicians rule the day, but because at least some people who actually like their insurance are afraid any change in the system might take something away from them. They’re comfortable perpetuating a system of “haves” and “have nots,” and vote accordingly.

While I’m resigned to it, it pains me, because I want us to do better—and because I know it doesn’t have to be like this. For years, I’ve talked with my cousins north of the border about the differences between their health care costs and ours, and I recently sent a draft of this piece to one of those cousins, Janice Henty. Janice is a retired nursing professor who’s co-authored several nursing textbooks, worked for years at Toronto’s Sick Children’s Hospital, and also worked as a nurse for the Toronto Blue Jays. She’s used Canadian health care her whole life and has siblings and cousins on both sides of the border.

“Your essay made me grind my teeth,” she wrote back.

Janice was quick to point out the flaws in Canada’s health insurance system—chiefly, that it hasn’t historically covered outpatient drug costs. Canadians have had to buy private insurance for their prescriptions (she pays $137/month), or pay out of pocket like many of us do, or meet certain criteria, often age-related, for having the government pick up the tab. On the upside, drug costs are federally regulated, so people don’t face extreme cost variability like we do here; an inhaler’s price won’t leap from $40 to $225 depending on where you work. And Canada is preparing to introduce Pharmacare, which will universalize prescription coverage. “It is expected to be passed easily in Parliament,” she said.

Drugs aside, the Canadian healthcare system is quite comprehensive (though Janice noted the Canadian government won’t foot the bill for things like liposuction and massage therapy). A friend’s relative got a double-lung transplant, she told me, at no charge. And when two of Janice’s grandchildren had to be in the NICU, their parents weren’t billed, either. No half-million tab. No $45k per month payment plan. They just brought their babies home, loved them, and didn’t spend a year fighting an insurance company.

Canada’s coverage isn’t free, of course; it’s paid for through taxes. And some Americans like to think that those taxes are brutal. You can scrutinize the tax rates and decide for yourself. We’ve done some analysis in our family, and I know where I land. Just be sure to consider the official tax rates PLUS the unofficial taxes we pay in the U.S. in the form of health care bills. For my friend, that totaled $32,000 last year.

It’s true there are flaws in the Canadian system. Janice said they might wait a while for non-urgent care up north—though we wait here, too, and sometimes for things we urgently need. Six months passed from the time my husband was told he needed a defibrillator until he finally got scheduled for surgery. I envy the Canadians’ freedom to change jobs, move, retire when they’re ready, and not have to wonder how those life changes will affect their ability to get care.

“The philosophy up here and in most developed countries in the world is that health care is a basic human right, not a ‘choice’ that you have to pay for out of pocket,” Janice said. “Some detractors may say, ‘But do you have second rate care? What are your health stats like?’ The answer is that when compared to other developed nations, we are ahead in some stats, middle of the pack in others, close the bottom of others. Our mortality rate is better than the U.S. We tend to live longer than Americans do. Part of the reason is related to preventative care, and the fact that people of lower income do not have to figure out if they have enough money to go to the doctor.”

Janice said she considers the intermingling of health care, employment, and billing “inhumane,” and I don’t disagree. Surely there’s peace of mind in having comprehensive coverage regardless of where you work, and in knowing that if your child ends up in the NICU, you won’t get hit with a Bill of the Month.

***

Not long ago, we learned that a gene variant running through my husband’s side of the family explains their longstanding heart woes. Having the variant means you’re almost 100 percent guaranteed to have heart problems by mid-adulthood. After testing positive for it, one of the first things our 20-year-old said was, “So this means I’m always going to have to have good insurance?”

I couldn’t help but think back to my old cycling friend’s experience 30 years ago. You’d think, three decades later, that more might’ve changed. That a young person could be on the verge of launching an independent life without having to worry that a health problem might hurt them financially just as their adulthood is starting. But the more things change, the more they stay the same.

We’re still functioning in a system in which the affordability of your health care often hinges on where you or your significant other work. We aren’t the land of the free when we’re bound to jobs and people to access a basic human right. But this is our system. The lucky among us are blind to the brokenness of it. The rest of us do our best to navigate it.

For anyone trying to get good insurance, here’s my advice:

Option 1: Work for the federal, state or county government. They tend to provide the most affordable, comprehensive health insurance an American can get. I’ve had government-employee insurance and many other insurances, and government-employee insurance is golden. On our last government plan, our annual deductibles were $500 per person. With our private marketplace plan, our deductibles are $5,000. So far this year, we’ve spent nearly $9,000 on medicines, tests, procedures and premiums, and it’s only April. That should be all I need to say about that.

Option 2. Work for a large private employer. Your employer will likely give you a few insurance options to choose from. You may not like them. You may realize they don’t allow you to keep seeing your favorite doctor or don’t cover a drug you take. This will probably still be your best option, so you’ll have to suck it up and take it. If you think you can do better getting an individual plan through the health insurance marketplace (i.e., Obamacare), go for it. But don’t close the door on your employer’s plan because you may need to come crawling back to it.

Option 3. Get something on the Obamacare marketplace (healthcare.gov). If your income doesn’t exceed certain limits, you might be able to get a reduced-rate plan via Obamacare. A family of four with a household income of roughly $105k or less will qualify. These plans aren’t perfect; the deductibles can be nauseatingly high and kill your dreams of traveling or retiring early. But the reduced-rate monthly premiums can be really tempting. And there are lots of options—for HMOs, PPOs, Anthem, Kaiser, Optima—all the familiar names and acronyms. Here’s a catch, though: If your employer offers you a plan, you probably can’t qualify for a reduced-rate premium, even if your income level would qualify you, because of how the discounts work. So, Obamacare really isn’t for people who get insurance through work. It’s for schmucks who don’t.

Option 4. If you work for a small company or nonprofit that doesn’t offer insurance and you don’t like what you see on the Obamacare market, you can try to create a small-group insurance plan by working with an insurance broker. The broker will try to get insurers to bid on covering you and your gang. You might get some decent bids. You might not. Insurance companies aren’t trying to improve your life; they’re trying to make money. So, while you’re sizing them up to see if they can give you a good plan, they’re sizing you up to see if it’s worth offering you one. You may end up stuck with an Obamacare plan. By “stuck with,” I mean grateful for it because before Obamacare, insurers could deny you coverage if you had any pre-existing conditions—and who doesn’t?

Option 5. Access insurance through one of the three Ms: Military, Medicaid, or Medicare. These will have their own pros and cons. Medicaid is for people with low-incomes or certain disabilities, and Medicare is what you can get once you turn 65. Once you hit Medicare age, you’ll also want to buy a separate supplemental plan because of all the holes in coverage. And while military coverage can be excellent, ask around and you’ll get an earful from either a military family or doctor about the drawbacks of TRICARE. And don’t even get them started on the VA….

Option 6. Marry someone with good insurance, and stay married, and hope they never get laid off or change jobs or get sick enough that they can no longer work. If they stop working or divorce you, good luck. Because of divorce, a friend recently lost the ability to see the specialists who have taken care of her for decades. My family lost our insurance after my husband had a stroke and had to retire. It seems crazy to have your health care tied to your job and/or marriage, but that’s how we roll.

Option 7. Lobby politicians to pass one of the multitude of proposals that have been put forth over the years to give Americans better access to affordable health insurance. I could get into the details of the proposals that have been circulating for decades, but this isn’t that kind of story. This is a rant.

Option 8. Go uninsured. 25-30 million Americans do. You may end up needing charity care, but some people just feel too overwhelmed by the complexity of the system, or too financially strapped, to figure out how to get an affordable policy if their job doesn’t offer it. If you’re uninsured, you can still access some care. With very few exceptions, hospitals can’t turn you away if you need emergency treatment, and in areas like mine, you can also go to a free clinic.

Option 9. Mexico. Thousands of Americans head south each year for cheaper medicine and dental care and elective procedures. But beware. Two Americans, on a recent trip across the border for an affordable abdominoplasty–a tummy tuck–paid with their lives.

Option 10. Oh, Canada.

By Steve Watkins

[From Issue #8, June 2023]

Brent David Alford was watching hockey the night of June 18, 2022. Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals, Colorado Avalanche vs. Tampa Bay Lightning. The Avs were in the process of smoking the Lightning, 7-0, and would go on to win the Cup 4-2. At 9:45 p.m., late in the second period or early in the third, Alford’s wife Anjelica noticed a car had pulled into their long private drive in rural Spotsylvania County, Virginia, and was idling about 30 yards from the house at a dirt turnaround. Alford grabbed his handgun, a Glock 9mm with a 15-round magazine, and went out to confront the driver and whoever else was in the car. Anjelica and a teenage son, their youngest, stayed at the front door. Anjelica would later tell an investigator that there was so much marijuana smoke filling the car that the occupants’ heads bobbed above it as if they were floating on a cloud–an image she insisted she saw despite the distance from the house, the darkness, the floodlight she said was reflecting off the car windows, and the law of thermodynamics.

Behind the wheel was 17-year-old Devin Johnson, who had just graduated from Massaponax High School and been named to the All-Region 5A team in basketball. He would be starting college and playing next-level hoops at the University of Mary Washington in the fall. With him were his 16-year-old brother, a rising senior, and their sister and her best friend, both 15. They had been given the wrong GPS coordinates for a Grace Hill address in the sparsely-populated southeast corner of the county. The end-of-school/graduation party they were looking for was actually a couple of houses away. They had stopped partway down the 500-foot-long drive onto the Alfords’ 12-acre property when they realized there were just a couple of vehicles parked next to the house—clearly no party happening—so something must have been messed up with the GPS. Before they could leave, though, or figure out where they were supposed to be going, an angry Brent Alford appeared, banging on the car window and yelling. Devin, who hadn’t seen the weapon as the man approached, wondered if he should get out to explain that they were just lost. But then the other kids started screaming at him to take off—“He has a gun! He has a gun!”

In the initial account Alford gave about the incident, he portrayed himself as the calm one. He told a sheriff’s deputy he had left the house holding the Glock in his left hand—not his shooting hand—and politely approached to see why the intruders were there and hadn’t stopped at the “Private Road” sign at the top of the drive. The car, an older model Buick sedan, reeked of all that pot smoke, he said, and it was too dark to see how many people were inside—so dark, in fact, as he made a point of telling the first sheriff’s deputy on the scene, that he couldn’t make out the color of the occupants, all of whom were black.

As soon as he bent down to ask if the driver needed any help, Alford said, things went sideways. Someone inside the car started yelling “Get him!” or possibly “Hit him!” He couldn’t be sure. In shifting accounts over the next several days, Alford described a chaotic series of rapid-fire events, the gist of which were that the car ran over his foot, turned around, bumped into his leg, started to drive off, then stopped, with the brake lights coming on as if the car was going to back up and hit him again—prompting the former Marine, security contractor, sheriff’s deputy, and corrections officer to drop into a shooter’s stance, aim at the license plate—or, in another telling, at one of the tires—and fire a round from his 9mm into the back of the car. He couldn’t

miss, he told the first deputy: his red dot site was right on target, plus he was only six feet away.

He still had fourteen more Speer caliber 9mm Luger cartridges in the 15-round magazine if he needed them.

The detective and prosecutors assigned to the case were skeptical about Alford’s account, except for the part about firing the Glock. One of Alford’s bullets did hit the back of the car—not as it was backing up toward him, they later determined, but as the teenagers were fleeing out of the Alfords’ driveway. The bullet struck the taillight and went through the trunk, slowing down just enough when it struck a container of antifreeze that it somehow, miraculously, ended up lodged under the backseat cushion without hitting any of the kids.

Though the case was reported locally and appeared as a news brief in a few media outlets around Virginia, the fact that Devin Johnson and his siblings and their friend weren’t physically harmed that night is why you probably haven’t heard much, if anything, about the incident. Because in America, a near-miss isn’t enough to make the evening news. You have to be shot, like the teenage boy in Kansas City who, like Devin and his siblings, showed up at the wrong house one night in April. He’d gone to pick up his younger siblings, and the elderly man whose front steps he turned up on shot him in the head after he knocked on the door, then shot him again before he staggered away, begging for help, approaching three houses before someone came to his aid and called 911.

That same week, in New York, another group of young people drove down the wrong driveway looking for a party. They’d turned around and were leaving when the armed and pissed-off homeowner fired his rifle at the car, hitting a 20-year-old woman in the head. She died while her friends drove off frantically looking for help. Later, still that same week in April, another teenager, a cheerleader, mistakenly got into a car she thought was hers in a grocery store parking lot in Texas, saw a man sitting in the passenger seat, realized her mistake, got out, tried to leave and apologized, but the man followed with a gun and shot her and her friend at point-blank range.

The carnage continued on May 8—the same day Brent Alford was sentenced in a Spotsylvania courthouse to nine years in prison, seven-and-a-half of it suspended—when a Louisiana man saw shadows moving in his yard and grabbed his gun. A group of kids had been playing hide-and-go-seek and some of them had gone into the man’s yard. He started shooting as they were running away. One of his bullets hit a 14-year-old girl in the back of the head.

There’s a term we’ve begun using in our house for this all-too-familiar phenomenon, so commonplace that we only have time for passing horror each time it happens: Gun Ownership Disorder, or G.O.D. It’s the deep-seated belief that because you own a firearm—as half of all men in America do, and one in five women—you’re entitled to use it, even if you’re safely tucked inside your home with a small arsenal of weapons and the ability to call 911. Even if you have no real reason to feel threatened except that your mind is running wild and you’re gripped with fear because someone you don’t know has set foot on your property or invaded what you consider to be your personal space.

The fear, the entitlement, the paranoia–all of it may explain, though nothing can possibly justify, why gun violence is the leading cause of death for children and teens in the United States.

***

At some point during Brent Alford’s confrontation with the teenagers, Anjelica Alford retreated with their son back into the house, a 3,000 square-foot, $550,000 Colonial perched on a rise in the middle of a grassy field. She called 911 to report the intruders who’d driven onto their property, at first saying a car had tried to run over her husband, but then back-tracking about what she’d seen, or hadn’t seen, when the dispatcher asked for details about how exactly it had happened. The dispatcher asked Anjelica where her husband was at that moment and told her that he, too, needed to come inside and wait for the sheriff’s deputies. Anjelica responded that she couldn’t see Alford or the car outside anymore. Floodlights on the side of the house illuminated the driveway and much of the front yard. The dispatcher asked what kind of gun Alford was carrying. Anjelica said a Glock, which at that point may no longer have been true.

That’s because after the teenagers drove away—“like Evel Knievel,” according to the Alfords—Brent Alford had returned to the house, gone upstairs, pulled on a bullet-proof tactical vest, and grabbed his AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, one of a number of weapons he kept in the home. Anjelica may or may not have known this when she was on the 911 call. She is vague about many of the details. Brent Alford then went back outside and through the woods and a neighbor’s yard, hoping to intercept the kids in their fleeing car, possibly thinking he could catch up to them somewhere near the sharp bend in Grace Hill road where it cuts hard to the right before zigzagging over to Harris Ford Road where the kids might have found their way back to civilization.

Anjelica begged the dispatcher to please tell the responding officers not to shoot her husband.

Alford’s attorney, presumably concerned about the damaging contents of the call for his client, later filed a motion to have the 911 audio declared inadmissible in court as “Hearsay.”

The Johnson kids’ parents—Corey and Audrey Johnson—were in Richmond that evening attending a Method Man and Redman concert on Brown’s Island. Corey Johnson is a systems operations supervisor for Washington Gas, as well as an event promoter and entrepreneur; Audrey Johnson works for the federal government. As soon as they got the full story the next morning from their children, they called the Spotsylvania County Sheriff’s office. Corey Johnson would later testify at the sentencing hearing about how much he struggled as a father with what he wanted to do when he found out someone had tried to harm his children, knowing he had to model the right way to handle things for the kids instead—by cooperating with law enforcement and putting his trust as much as possible in the legal system. That, too, would be a challenge for him when the initial charges were brought against Alford, which the Johnsons thought were woefully insufficient given that their children could have been killed.

And then there was finding out, a few days after the incident, that Alford had also gone after the kids with an AR-15….

***

Body cam videos from the night of June 18 and the early morning of June 19, 2022, show what appear to more than a dozen deputies and numerous sheriff’s cruisers converging on the Alfords’ house and the Grace Hill area—including a K9 unit with a tracking hound that immediately begins working the area of the shooting in the Alfords’ driveway and yard. Officers are sent to check out the Alfords’ motion sensor camera—nothing useable there, an FBI analyst will later determine—and the party house up the road, where the Alfords said a couple of teenagers lived, left to their own devices by absent parents who may have moved out of the area but still owned the home. At one point, deputies stop a Lyft driver who is starting down the Alfords’ driveway—just like Devin Johnson had done earlier—also with the wrong GPS coordinates. They explain to the driver that he has missed his turn and give him directions to the party house where he can safely deliver his passengers.

The deputies scour the area looking for any sign of the teens’ older model Buick sedan that the Alfords have described as burgundy, or maybe tan, or maybe some other color, and shortly after they arrive at the party house to check things out, they spot it—a 2002 goldish-tan Buick Century also just then arriving. Inside are Devin and his siblings and their friend, the same kids who’d been shot at earlier in the evening by Brent Alford.

The deputies check to make sure none of the teenagers are hurt, then take Devin’s license and tell them all to wait in the car. When there’s a shooting, they explain, every case gets handed off to a higher-ranking officer, and there is one on the way, Detective Sharon Williams, who will be taking over the investigation as soon as she gets there.

The teenagers tell the deputies that they had heard the gunshot but didn’t know the bullet had hit their car—not until the deputies show them where it entered, and look through the trunk to follow the trajectory, and find the damaged container of antifreeze, and lift the back seat where they see the spent bullet.

The rest comes out later, after Detective Williams arrives: how the kids were freaked out by the encounter with Alford, and freaked out when they heard the gunshot, but weren’t sure what to do about any of it. How they thought they must have done something terribly wrong for the man to have been so angry—though there was no way Devin had hit Alford with the car, and no way they’d been smoking pot. They said they’d been afraid to go home, afraid to tell anybody what had just happened. And they had no idea that Alford had gone after them with his AR-15—or that he’d almost caught up with them when they stopped at the top of a hill not far from his house shortly after the shooting.

It was Alford himself who told deputies that he’d seen them there, maybe just trying to get their bearings, but also, he surmised, maybe plotting to come after him for putting a round through the back of their car. Alford said he saw the doors of the Buick open and the dome light come on, and heard rap music blasting from inside. But they left, he said, before he could get any closer.

***

Though the details were slippery, and increasingly unconvincing to Detective Williams, Alford stuck to his story—during the investigation and eight months later when the case went to trial: that a carload of violent pot-smoking rap-music intruders had trespassed onto his property and attacked him with their vehicle, and that he’d shot at them in self-defense.

He also didn’t waste any time telling people about it. Five days after the incident, when he posted some old photos on social media, one of his friends commented, “I’m assuming you didn’t shoot at little kids back then did you?” There were a couple of “Likes.”

In the weeks after the shooting, investigators collected the following: a picture of the spent bullet, pictures of the car, the layout of the car, a picture of the back seat where the bullet was found, pictures of the kids, a picture of Alford’s Glock, a picture of the magazine of Alford’s Glock, pictures of the Alfords’ house, driveway, and privacy sign, maps of the Alford’s house and property and the Grace Hill area, recordings of the 911 calls, body cam footage from sheriff’s deputies who responded to the 911 calls, a couple of text messages from the kids to a friend and to their mom about trying to find the party house, a photo of a lemon-size thigh bruise Alford said he sustained from the kids’ car.

Nine days after the incident, to his astonishment, Alford was arrested and charged with Shooting at an Occupied Vehicle with Malice, a Class 4 felony that carries a maximum sentence of 2 to 5 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. He was also hit with a related misdemeanor, Reckless Handling of a Firearm. After a couple of nights in the Rappahannock Regional Jail, where he’d once worked, Alford was released on bail—and soon posting on social media again.

“The ability to defend yourself and then have the law turned against you is mind boggling!!” he wrote on July 8. “If you even touch a weapon these days, you automatically lose your rights. A criminal can use whatever. The justice system could care less. If you do, to defend yourself and/or your family, we’ll [sic] then, you are now a monster and a criminal!”

The Johnson family, meanwhile, started a Facebook page, “Protect our Children—The Spotsylvania, VA 4,” to let friends and others in the community know about the shooting and what they felt were insufficient charges brought against Alford. They asked people to contact the Commonwealth’s Attorney about it, and even organized a small rally outside the courthouse.

“To think that one of our kids (or several) could have been struck and killed by Mr. Alford scares us to death,” they posted. “’Why?’ … This is the prominent thought in our, and everyone’s, mind. This is a question any parent would ask… We believe that the shooter was willful in his actions against our children when he fired his weapon into their car with them in it. Shooting at anyone who is not a threat is nothing less than attempted murder.”

The teens told their parents they didn’t want to watch fireworks on the 4^th because the sound reminded them of gunshots. A month later, the Johnsons wrote that they weren’t posting photos from the younger teens’ first day back at school in August, or Devin’s college orientation, out of ongoing concerns for their safety.

None of kids were doing very well. Devin felt guilty for having put his siblings in harm’s way. In a victim impact statement he read in court months later, he wrote, “Life could have been completely different if the trajectory of that bullet fired into my car wasn’t altered by a single can of coolant. That single night changed life as I know it. My siblings could have died under my guardianship and that haunts me to this day. I was to protect them at all costs and their life was put into my hands. But instead of heading home clear minded knowing I did my job as their older brother I was left thinking that it was my fault that I put them in that situation…. I don’t know what I would have done if any of their lives were taken that night. Life just simply wouldn’t be the same. And I think about it still, to this day.”

The three younger teens started seeing therapists not long after the shooting to help them cope with their anxiety—at first weekly sessions, then every other week, then, as the trial date drew closer, weekly again. They rarely went out, and said they were often fearful when they did. One of the girls had previously been a straight-A student. All of their grades dropped. They discovered they were members of the same church as the Alfords, a nondenominational megachurch called Lifepoint that meets in a cavernous retail center building that at one time had been an ice-skating rink and later an indoor go-cart race track. Now when they saw the Alfords there on Sundays, the Johnsons recognized them from court. They kept their distance.

Alford, seemingly unrepentant, kept up his posts on social media, later in July complaining that the Sheriff’s investigator, Detective Williams, was out to get him—bending the law, he said, to her own purposes and biases. In August, he posted a quote from the movie John Wick: “People will provoke you until they bring out your ugly side, then play victim when you go there.”

The charges against him multiplied in October when a Spotsylvania County grand jury added indictments for four counts of Assault and Battery, four counts of Attempted Abduction by Force, and one count of Use of a Firearm in a Felony to go along with the felony charge of Shooting at an Occupied Vehicle with Malice.

In November, after the indictments, Alford finally stopped posting.

***

Thursday, February 23, 2023 was unseasonably hot, the outside temperature topping 80 by mid-afternoon. The jury trial of Brent David Alford took up most of the day, with testimony from the four teen victims, from Brent and Anjelica Alford and their youngest son, from several character witnesses, and from sheriff’s department investigators. Body cam footage, photographs, maps, and the picture of the lemon-sized bruise on Bent Alford’s thigh were displayed for the jurors on a giant screen that filled most of one wall opposite where they were seated in the cramped courtroom. A combative Alford continued to blame the kids for provoking the shooting, supported by his wife and son in their testimony. He said if the situation happened all over again, he wouldn’t do anything different. He doubled down when confronted with contradictory statements he’d made to investigators, and with discrepancies and elisions in his employment history.

Nine days before the shooting, Alford had applied for a position as a deputy with the Spotsylvania County Sheriff’s Department, leaving out any mention of a rocky tenure he had had as a corrections officer at the Rappahannock Regional Jail. He listed a current sheriff’s deputy, Josh Carnahan, as one of his references, although he probably shouldn’t have. Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Ryan Mehaffey, who had also, like Alford, served in the Marines, would go hard after Alford’s character at the sentencing hearing, telling the judge that Carnahan had described Alford as “a pathological liar.”

Alford’s attorney was Mark Murphy, one of the more successful criminal defense lawyers in the area, not shy about advertising his past appearances on national news programs such as Good Morning America, Court TV, Fox News, and Geraldo. Murphy tried and failed to have the charges dismissed but did succeed in convincing the jury—which only deliberated for an hour–to acquit Alford on five of the nine charges: the four abductions and a single count of use of a firearm in a felony. But the most serious charge against Alford held—sort of—though the jury reduced it from a Class 4 to a Class 6 felony, Shooting at an Occupied Vehicle without Malice, which carries a maximum sentence of 1 to 5 years and a $2,500 fine.

Basically, in following Instruction #14 from the judge, William Glover (there were a lot of jury instructions), the nine empaneled jurors determined that though Alford had clearly violated the law when he shot at the teenagers, he had done so not out of malice, but rather “in the heat of passion,” which, as it was explained to the jurors, “arises from provocation that reasonably produces an emotional state of mind such as hot blood, rage, anger, resentment, terror or fear so as to demonstrate an absence of deliberate design to kill, or to cause one to act on impulse without conscious reflection.”

In other words, because Brent Alford, or his attorney, was able to convince the jury that Alford was enraged, angry, resentful, terrorized, and/or fearful when he pulled the trigger on his Glock 9mm handgun and fired a round into the back of the teenagers’ fleeing car, he caught a break.

The father, grandfather, husband, veteran, Trump supporter, gun-owner, occasional song-writer, Christian men’s group leader, and baseball enthusiast was also convicted on the four assault and battery charges, each of which carried a maximum sentence of a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. Judge Glover rejected a request for bond and remanded Alford to jail until sentencing, which was set for Monday, May 8.

For the next two and a half months, Alford sat alone in an isolation cell on administrative segregation because he was a former jail employee and law enforcement officer. Mark Murphy showed up occasionally to talk over strategy for sentencing—Alford’s only in-person visitor during that time—and Alford was allowed one 45-minute Zoom visit a week with his family.

***

Brent Alford mugshots, June 2022 and February 2023

In Brent Alford’s mugshot and other pictures from the time of the original arrest, he’s a beefy 5’8 and 220 lbs., with a ruddy complexion, close-cropped hair, and trim beard, a man given to wearing wide-brimmed cowboy hats and cowboy boots, or else tight t-shirts and baseball caps with his wife Anjelica’s business logo—Alford Title and Consulting, LLC. By the time of the trial, he seemed to have let himself go: scraggly hair, unkempt beard, tired, gaunt. He had his hair cut short again for sentencing and was clean-shaven when he showed up in court, shackled, wearing an orange prison jumper. He looked smaller, paler, almost as if he’d shrunk.

The Johnson family was there—all the kids, the parents, several friends and family members. Anjelica Alford came with Brent Alford’s parents, some of her children, some of their spouses, several friends, maybe twenty people in all. At one point, Alford’s attorney, Murphy, asked them all to stand in a show of support for his client, which they immediately did in coordinated fashion, as if they’d rehearsed. The two sides sat near one another—the Johnsons and the Alfords—separated by a narrow aisle for most of six hours as Judge Glover worked his way through a full docket, which included a number of other sentencing hearings:

* A young man with infected arms charged with selling fentanyl—and addicted himself—who was rearrested when he returned to dealing as soon as he got out on bail. More than a hundred fentanyl pills were found in the bedroom where he was staying at his parents’ home. His parents were in court, though they weren’t allowed to be with him.

* A woman who drank 12 shots of 100-proof vodka in rapid succession and said she had no memory of driving her car afterwards while black-out drunk, hitting multiple vehicles and nearly injuring or possibly even killing several people before finally being forced to stop by a deputy whose cruiser she nearly rammed several times. She spoke at considerable length and in painful detail about her lifetime of physical, mental, and sexual abuse, hoping for mercy from the court.

* A pedophile caught in a video sting by an online catch-a-predator group that had lured him into thinking he was meeting a 10-year-old girl for sex. Investigators found dozens of child porn pictures and videos on his phone, horrific images and films that a jury and Judge Glover had had to watch during trial on the giant courtroom screen. Before sentencing, the man talked about how much he loved his own young son and how he would never, ever hurt a child.

* A mentally ill 27-year-old man who’d gone off his meds and had been acting out, saying he was going to hurt himself or members of his family. When a sheriff’s deputy responded to what had been called in as a “domestic,” the young man tried to attack him with a sword, threatening and even chasing the deputy until the officer said he was forced to fire his service revolver, hitting the young man in the groin. The deputy, who had applied pressure on the young man’s wound to keep him from bleeding out until paramedics arrived, was asked to testify about the psychological and emotional impact of the shooting on him, and on witnesses, which he said had been significant. The deputy was Josh Carnahan, the same officer Brent Alford had listed as a reference on his unsuccessful job application with the Spotsylvania County Sheriff’s Department.

Sentencing of Brent David Alford was the last case on the docket. Devin Johnson took the stand to read his victim impact statement, which he’d written out by hand on two sheets of white notebook paper. His younger brother read his statement as well, which he’d folded and refolded so many times that it took him a minute to open it back up. At one point, as he was talking about how close he had come to losing his sister and brother, he broke down on the stand. Their father, Corey, when asked to talk about the impact on the family, broke down as well. Audrey Johnson talked about the disruptions in all their lives—the canceled activities, the academic struggles, the therapy sessions, the basketball tournament in California that Devin had been forced to miss to be in court, the lingering fears.

Murphy, Alford’s attorney, spoke at length about how hard this had all been on his client and on the Alford family. He talked about the uncomfortable conditions in Brent Alford’s isolation cell, and about Alford’s military service—how he was struggling with TBI and PTSD, presumably from his time as a contractor in Afghanistan since Alford had never been in combat when he was in the Marines, where he spent most of his four years as a U.S. embassy guard in Europe. Murphy talked about sentencing guidelines and comparative sentences and requested that Alford be released on time served. After two months in jail, Murphy said, with time to think everything over, Alford now realized that he had shown poor judgement when he confronted the teenagers and shot into their car. He was sorry for what he’d done, and sorry for what the kids had suffered.

When it was Alford’s turn to address the court, he said much the same thing, nearly word for word, as Murphy. He said he saw now that he’d been wrong, and he was truly sorry, and his heart went out to the kids.

The assistant Commonwealth’s attorneys made it clear that they weren’t buying it. And neither, it seemed, was Judge Glover, who began his comments by saying he was glad to hear Alford finally take some responsibility, as Alford had spent the entire time in court during the jury trial—and in the eight months leading up to it—blaming the teenagers. Handed a stack of testimonials earlier from Alford’s friends and family, Glover had spent ten minutes silently and carefully reading them, marking passages with sticky notes. He read aloud from some of those passages, which emphasized what a great guy Alford was, a man who had served his country and his community in the military and in law enforcement, a man who knew how to size up a situation and respond appropriately. But the judge didn’t appear to be buying that, either.

“These people know who you told them you are,” he said, but that was not the person Alford had been on the night of June 18, 2022—or since.

His voice growing louder, Judge Glover pointed out the obvious—that more was expected of someone with Alford’s training and experience. A great deal more. And if Brent Alford had picked up the AR-15 as he was heading out the door instead of the Glock, those bullets—as Alford well knew—wouldn’t have been stopped by a jug of antifreeze.

“It was nothing more than luck that you didn’t kill somebody,” the judge finished, before passing sentence. Nine years, seven and a half suspended. Eighteen months in jail. No guns for the length of the sentence. No going inside any house that has guns—his own or anyone else’s—also for the duration of the sentence. Anger management training. No more violations of the law.

***

Fear and guns. But fear of what exactly?

Anjelica Alford says that on the night of the shooting she was convinced that the people in the car—who she swears she didn’t know were just kids—were going to kill her and her family. In an interview a few days after the sentencing, she said she didn’t understand why they didn’t roll down their window and speak to her husband when he went out with his Glock. They should have raised their hands in surrender, she said, which was what she and her brother did years ago when they got lost one night and an armed man confronted them in his driveway. The man racked his shotgun to let them know it was loaded and he meant business. She seemed to think that the burden of preventing a shooting fell on the people at whom a weapon was aimed, not on the person holding the gun. She didn’t mention the unprovoked shootings in Kansas City and New York and Texas and Louisiana that had made headlines in April and May.

The last thing she said in the interview was that she wishes they had gone to bed early on the night of June 18, 2022, instead of staying up to watch hockey—her and Brent Alford and their son. Because then they’d never have even known when somebody showed up in their driveway—not a threat at all as it turned out, just four lost teenagers looking for a party.

One of those teenagers just graduated a year early from high school and will be joining the Air Force in the fall. One is working two summer jobs and looking forward to his second year of college. The other two, who’d been sitting inches from where Brent Alford’s bullet landed, recently turned 16.

Teenagers have gotten lost looking for parties for as long as there have been parties. A 20-year-old in New York didn’t get to live to tell the story of pulling into the wrong driveway on her way to one. The Johnson kids and their friend, thankfully—and by the grace of God, they and their parents believe—did.

By Steve Watkins

[From Issue #9, July 2023]

The only time I ever shot a gun I killed a turtle. We were visiting a family, the Collinses, who used to be our backyard neighbors, but they had moved somewhere else. It looked like a farm only there weren’t any crops or animals. There was a barn and a pond. The grownups went inside to do whatever grownups did back then. Us kids stayed outside. The Collins kids had a .22 rifle and were showing us what great marksmen they were, blasting away at cans and things. My brother and I weren’t allowed to have guns, though we were allowed to pretend we had guns—with sticks—unless it was a Sunday, when even playing with sticks was forbidden. I remember getting a pirate pistol as a present one time, but that was when I had my tonsils taken out, so I don’t think it counted.

The Collins kids were down to their last bullet before they asked if I wanted a turn. Of course I said sure. I checked to make sure Mom and Dad weren’t watching, then I looked around for a proper target. Somebody pointed and said, “How about that turtle?” There was one sunning itself on a log in the middle of the pond. I took aim and squeezed the trigger and the turtle disappeared. It’s possible the bullet just hit the water and scared the turtle away. It’s also possible that I was a regular Deadeye Dick and killed the poor thing. I felt bad about the turtle, but wasn’t above bragging about my shooting prowess for the longest time to anybody who would listen.

***

I told that story to my friend Mary not long ago at a party in the country at a place not unlike the Collinses’ which we never visited again after I shot the turtle—a farm but not a farm. Mary matched my story with one of her own. Hers was about shooting a squirrel the first time she ever fired a gun. She must have winged it, she said, because the squirrel fell out of a tree and into her yard only it wasn’t dead, just suffering. She felt terrible, so steeled herself to put the squirrel out of its misery and shot it again. Only that didn’t kill it, either, and it started dragging itself across the yard with its front paws. Mary said she felt awful for having already shot the squirrel twice, but couldn’t bring herself to shoot it yet again, so she knelt in the grass next to the crawling squirrel and stayed with it until it finally expired.

We hit a quiet space in the conversation after that, which Mary broke to tell me she actually knew quite a lot about guns because she used to work as a home health-care nurse in a large East Coast city when she was younger, and a disturbingly high number of her patients were gunshot victims. She decided it was important to know what kind of weapon caused what kind of damage resulting in the overwhelming amount of wound care she was doing, so she studied up on all the popular models of handguns and long guns and semiautomatics populating the streets.

After the squirrel, though, she didn’t shoot a gun again until recently, when she and her husband, not realizing what they were getting themselves into, took part in a Project Appleseed retreat in a deeply hidden rural corner of Stafford County, Virginia. Project Appleseed is a nationwide gun-and-patriotism propaganda organization that sets up training facilities all over America to teach long-distance shooting and to rekindle a sort of Revolutionary War zeal for protecting our supposedly eroding rights as free Americans. For targets, the Appleseeders often use pictures of British Redcoats. They also use Oreo cookies, one of which Mary proudly told me she’d hit, after just a little coaching and practice, from 25 meters.

***

A distant family member told me a story several years ago about a woman who showed up at a shooting range he used to go to in central Florida. She had her young son with her, but she didn’t have a gun. She rented one, the family member said, and then she shot herself in the head with it, right there in front of her son and everybody at the range.

I was horrified, of course, and said so. We were driving somewhere. He paused for a second, and then said, “Yeah. And you just know the liberals are going to use that story to try to take away our gun rights.”

***

I saw a guy struggling on the side of the road the other day. It was hot out. He had his shirt off and was surrounded by a couple of unwieldy garbage bags full of stuff that he was trying to wrangle into a reasonable pile he could balance on an old clunker bicycle. He was right next to the highway and seemed discombobulated. I thought about stopping to see if he needed help, maybe give him a couple of dollars, but then I realized he had a gun in a holster strapped onto his belt, so I kept driving.

***

Two teenage boys our youngest daughter knew from high school have been shot and killed this year, one in February, one while I was writing this essay. My wife and I were at the hospital when they brought in the first boy. I was back in an examination room with a health scare that turned out to be OK. Janet sat near the anguished family for hours when security guards locked down the ER—police were worried that the unknown shooter might follow the teenage victim to the hospital—and she was still there when a doctor came out of the trauma room to tell the family the young man had died. He’d been shot multiple times. Janet says she’ll never forget the family’s despair. The other boy who died—he’d also been shot multiple times—was pronounced dead shortly after emergency responders found him in the middle of a street at 3:30 a.m. a mile from where we live.

***

In all the cases of people I’ve known who died by gun suicide, it happened suddenly. Suddenly to those of us left behind, anyway. The first was a kid when I was in high school who was in our younger brothers’ club—three or four of us who lived in the shadows of more popular older siblings. The other younger brothers took me to a pool hall in our little North Carolina town to introduce me to something called a Hot Hamburger, which was a grilled beef patty, maybe two of them laid on top of one another, smothered in gravy. There might have been a slice of white bread under there somewhere. And maybe some onions. The kid got in an argument with his parents not long after. He locked himself in his bedroom. There was a loaded shotgun in the closet.

Years later, a student in one of my creative writing classes came by my office one afternoon to talk about maybe going to grad school for an MFA. He had been out of school for a few years but had just returned that semester. One of the stories he’d written had mentioned suicide and we talked about it for awhile. He assured me that he would never hurt himself, that it was just a character in his story and he had too much to live for. His girlfriend came to see me the next day. They’d broken up. He’d been drinking. He had a gun. He called late that night to tell her what he was going to do.

Then there was the mother of one of my daughter’s friends, who offered me half her sandwich when I dropped my daughter off for a play date. I wish I’d accepted and stayed for awhile and visited with her while the kids ran off and played. Later that afternoon when Janet went to pick up our daughter, she chatted with the friend’s mom, but only briefly. Neither of us saw her again after that. The funeral was a week later.

Just a few months ago, one of our nearby neighbors was outside chatting with a couple of our mutual friends on the sidewalk. It was early evening, still light out. Half an hour later, back inside the house, her husband called 911. The homes here are well insulated so nobody else heard the gun.

***

Once a long time ago I found myself stuck for a couple of days in a remote fishing village in southern Thailand. This was shortly after a bloody military coup and the slaughter of hundreds of university students and other democratic activists by right-wing paramilitary forces in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. I had just ventured out of the dump where we were staying, looking for a morning cup of Thai coffee, which is mostly sweetened condensed milk with a few instant coffee crystals thrown in. They say the reason Thai coffee is orange is because of the added food coloring, and that it’s the same dye used in Kraft mac and cheese.

A Thai soldier stopped me in the middle of a dirt street. He pointed his American-made M16 at my chest, his finger on the trigger. He looked pissed off, but I didn’t have any idea why that might be. I knew there was a suppression campaign going on against what were supposed to be communist guerillas, but I’d been told that was further south, along the border with Malaysia.

I froze, too confused to be scared. Then, after what felt like five minutes but was surely only a fraction of that long, he yelled, in English, “Hey you!” and started laughing. He lowered his M16. Several Thai men who’d been standing around burst out laughing, too. “Hey you!” they also shouted—then and every time they saw me in the village after that. “Hey you!”

***

Shortly after we moved into the subdivision where we live, I went with a friend to join several other neighborhood guys sitting in camp chairs in somebody’s driveway with a cooler of beer. It was Halloween day. My friend was from one of those Scandinavian countries where you spend a compulsory year in the army riding bicycles in loose formation and training with wooden guns. The other guys had all served in various branches of the American military, and they were lecturing us about the importance of guns for self-protection. When we pointed out the troubling statistics—that you or a family member are at significantly greater risk of injury or death from a firearm in the home—they scoffed, and laughed at our liberal naiveté. If we only knew what a dangerous world it was out there, they said, we’d be the first in line to buy a gun for ourselves. We were just lucky to have guys like them around who were armed and ready to come to our defense when it turned out we needed them.

That night when we took the kids out Trick or Treating, I was walking next to one of the military guys. He had daughters the same age as my youngest two. DEA agent. Retired Marine. Nice guy. Loving dad. I don’t remember how I found out he was carrying a loaded handgun in an ankle holster. I’d thought the takeaway story for the night was going to be the house where instead of candy they were giving out brochures on osmotic plastic body wrap for weight loss. The sidewalks in our neighborhood were packed with kids in costumes. Parents pulling toddlers in wagons. Babies in strollers. I kept nervously glancing down at my neighbor’s ankle and wondering why the fuck anybody would have a gun on them while out Trick or Treating with their kids.

We reconvened later with the other neighborhood families at my DEA neighbor’s house for a Halloween party. The kids disappeared down into the basement where he had set up a Ninja Warrior course his daughters called The House of Pain. Some of us guys followed him into a back room where he broke out a bottle he’d gotten in East Asia filled with some very nasty alcohol and a coiled and raised cobra with a scorpion in its mouth. The cobra and scorpion were both disintegrating but for the most part still preserved. You only swallowed a little of the detritus when you did a shot. Afterwards, the DEA guy showed us a video from a heroin operation he’d been on in Afghanistan where they came under fire and had to book it through a hostile village to their waiting helicopters. One of the guys he was with got shot in the butt, which was why he was showing it to us. Everybody thought that was pretty funny.

I asked if anybody else was hit, and my DEA neighbor said yeah, an Australian guy, an officer—he got killed. But their door gunner laid down suppression fire, spraying the whole village as the helicopter lifted off, and they got away without anybody else getting dinged. We saw that on the video, too. It was from somebody’s helmet cam.

Still later that night, another one of the gun guys, Adam, asked my Scandinavian friend’s father-in-law if it was true he’d fought in Vietnam. The father-in-law, who was visiting from out of town, said yes. Adam said he bet the father-in-law had some great stories about the war and he should tell us some. The father-in-law said no.

***

One night when my Scandinavian friend had to go out of town on business, his wife was putting their kids to bed when somebody rang the doorbell. She went downstairs to answer it, but nobody was there, so she went back upstairs to the kids’ bedroom to finish up. The doorbell rang again, and again nobody was there. It kept happening—probably just some older kids playing Ding Dong Ditch—but after awhile, she got tired of it and called their neighbor, another one of the ex-military guys from Halloween. Would the neighbor mind keeping an eye out for anything going on?

The neighbor said sure. Then, after he hung up, he unlocked his gun safe, took out one of his guns, and grabbed his night vision goggles. He had his wife and two small children go inside a pre-designated safe room while he slipped out the basement door and hid in the darkness—with a clear line of sight on our friends’ front door. Both families lived at the end of a cul-de-sac two blocks from us, so unless somebody tried to come up out of the woods, there was only one way in—and the neighbor, armed and ready, night vision goggles switched on for maximum visibility, had it covered. Thankfully, the doorbell ringers never returned.

***

Not long before our friends moved away, they invited all the neighborhood kids over for a party and sleepover. It was their daughter’s birthday. Our two youngest daughters were there. The neighborhood parents were also invited for a cookout, and we all hung out until well after dark. Everybody showed up, including Adam, who came with his wife and infant son, plus an old Marine buddy who tagged along. The military guys always drank a lot, but Adam and his pal seemed determined to take it to another level. At one point they started wrestling in the driveway, which was weird but not altogether unexpected. The neighbor with the night vision goggles, who never drank much and who generally looked out for the other military guys, managed to separate the two younger men before they could hurt anybody or themselves.

By ten o’clock all the parents had left, walking, or in some cases stumbling, back to our own houses. Our friends said good night, then led all the children down into the basement for the sleepover, bracing themselves for more hours of junk food and sodas and cake and kid karaoke.

The next morning, before the kids were awake, there was a knock on the door. It was Adam, looking very sheepish and very hungover.

My Scandinavian friend assumed he’d come over to apologize. Adam had been out of control at the party, after all. Instead, Adam had a question: Had they by any chance found his pistol? He’d had it on him at the party, but now he couldn’t find it. He thought he might have lost it somewhere in the yard.

That started a frantic search everywhere on the property: the yard, the deck, every room in the house, the basement where the kids still slept, sprawled all over the floor in their sleeping bags.

No gun.

My friend called me to come down and help him look. Adam was too hungover to be much use. We didn’t know where his buddy was.

At some point, the night vision neighbor came over, too, though his kids had been too little for the sleepover. And that’s when the rest of the story came out. Adam had passed out drunk in his own front yard after the party ended. The neighbor found him there, took Adam’s sidearm away for safekeeping, then carried him inside. Adam’s wife said she didn’t want him throwing up in the bedroom and could the neighbor please just dump him in their unfinished basement? If he vomited down there, he could clean it up himself when he got sober in the morning.

Adam asked for his pistol back and the neighbor gave it to him. My Scandinavian friend and I hung out for awhile after they left, trying to get our heads around what had just happened, and what could have happened. But there was no making sense of it. We cooked breakfast for the kids, and one by one the parents came to take them home. Our friends moved away later that year, and I don’t remember there being any more neighborhood parties after that.

***

When I taught high school for a few years, the Stafford County, Virginia, sheriff invited us teachers to attend an active shooter training session. It was voluntary, and after school hours, so hardly anybody was there. A teacher friend and I sat in the back and made wisecracks while the sheriff spoke authoritatively—and inaccurately—about what motivated school shooters. He showed a bunch of slides—most of them from Columbine, as if there hadn’t been dozens and dozens of mass school shootings since. Then he brought out a wooden Glock and a wooden AR15 and demonstrated what he said was the proper technique for disarming a school shooter.

Step One, barricade the door to your classroom. Step Two, hide next to the wall just inside the door and wait. Step Three, when the shooter breaks through the door and enters the classroom, grab the barrel of the gun and force it down toward the floor. This goes for both the Glock and the AR. If the shooter has already been firing his weapon, the barrel will be hot and will most likely burn your hands. Be ready for this. Grab the barrel anyway. Lives will be at stake. Step Four, have a second person—preferably your biggest and strongest student—standing at the ready right behind you. As soon as you grab the gun, he should tackle the shooter by the legs. It’s very important to get the shooter on the floor. Step Five, once you have the shooter on the floor, do everything you can to wrestle the gun out of his hands—and then sit on him. If he tries to get up or get away, beat the shit out of him with your fists, your feet, a desk, a chair, whatever it takes. Step Six, wait for law enforcement. Don’t go out into the hall because they might think you’re the shooter and shoot you instead.

I rehearsed this with my students. We were in a windowless classroom on the second floor of the high school where I taught, and they’d been worried that if a shooter came we’d be trapped. Now, though, with our self-defense practice, they were heartened by the thought that they might survive.

The central office had issued black-out blinds to go over the tiny windows on all classroom doors so shooters couldn’t see inside to where we were hiding, but I didn’t have the sense that students thought those would be very helpful. I once asked them how many knew other students who carried weapons to school in their backpacks. A third of them—10 out of 30—raised their hands.

***

One Monday, a kid came to school with a loaded gun because a couple of other kids had jumped him after school on the previous Friday. One of my students told me the kid with the gun asked her to hide it for him in her locker for part of the day but she refused. She confided this after they’d caught him and secured the gun. I told her and the class that they had to report it any time they heard anything about anybody with a weapon. I got summoned later to the assistant principal’s office and told I wasn’t supposed to talk about guns in school.

On the anniversary of the Parkland shooting, a bunch of kids planned a protest walkout, something that was happening at schools all over the country. The administration agreed to let them, as long as the students only walked out as far as the gymnasium, because if they went outside there could be hidden shooters waiting to gun them down in the parking lot.

When the student leaders painted a banner that said “Stop Gun Violence in Schools,” the principal ordered them to change it to “Stop Violence in Schools.” He was afraid there might be community backlash otherwise. The kids, who were way too amenable, or perhaps scared, agreed to all the conditions—the gym instead of outdoors for the walkout, the revised banner decrying gun violence but with no mention of guns.

***

Janet took one of our daughters to the March for Our Lives in D.C. organized by Parkland students. Tens of thousands of people crammed the streets in Washington. Students who’d survived the mass murder delivered speeches on a giant stage. One recited the name of dead classmates. One threw up while talking. Janet said it was the second time she’d seen a gun violence survivor do that. The first was when she was working as a reporter for a Florida newspaper and went to speak to a young man who’d seen his mother get shot to death by her boyfriend. The young man met Janet at the house where it happened, stared for a moment at the blood-stained carpet, and vomited.

***

In Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” a robber shoots a mouthy bank customer in the head. It’s the customer’s hubris, his arrogance, and his delusion that do him in. And a bank robber with a gun. The second half of the story takes place in the time it takes for the bullet to travel through the customer’s brain and kill him.

Here’s how Wolff describes the moment: “The bullet smashed Anders’ skull and ploughed through his brain and exited behind his right ear, scattering shards of bone into the cerebral cortex, the corpus callosum, back toward the basal ganglia, and down into the thalamus. But before all this occurred, the first appearance of the bullet in the cerebrum set off a crackling chain of ion transports and neurotransmissions. Because of their peculiar origin, these traced a peculiar pattern, flukishly calling to life a summer afternoon some forty years past, and long since lost to memory. After striking the cranium, the bullet was moving at nine hundred feet per second, a pathetically sluggish, glacial pace compared to the synaptic lightning that flashed around it. Once in the brain, that is, the bullet came under the mediation of brain time, which gave Anders plenty of leisure to contemplate the scene that, in a phrase he would have abhorred, ‘passed before his eyes.’”

Sometimes I think that’s us, America. Our hubris. Our arrogance. Our delusions. With so many guns everywhere, we’ve already pulled the trigger on ourselves. And though we think we’re the ones still in control of the narrative, there’s no longer any stopping what is already happening, and what’s about to happen next.

***

You can read Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” HERE if you’d like. You can also watch a short film based on the story HERE. And you can listen to Tobias Wolff himself read “Bullet in the Brain” HERE.

By Steve Watkins

First the rumors.

No, Henry’s Meats didn’t come around with their knives to carve steaks from the body. Mutt & Jeff’s Grill didn’t serve elephant-burgers.

Nobody sawed off the feet for umbrella stands. Nobody caught any weird African diseases, no elephantiasis. The little girl from Michigan, the one who got trapped in the car, she might have seen a psychiatrist for a while, but if she did it was back up North, so I don’t see how anybody could have known for sure about that story, true or not.

And the elephant’s name wasn’t Stash, like “trash.” It was Stash, like in “lost.”

But people will say anything. I know that now, especially in a little town like ours, and I guess the best thing is not to even listen, though I don’t see how that’s possible unless you go deaf. You could still do everything you wanted if you were deaf. You could even make great music, like Beethoven; you just wouldn’t be able to hear it is all.

I told my mother that after what happened to Stash. She was the only one I talked to for a long time, maybe about a month. But she just hugged me and said, “Oh Charlie, do you know what? That Beethoven story is so sad it always makes me cry.”

We were there when it happened, of course—me and Jun Morse and George Mooney—out by 301 a mile south of town, sitting in the ditch across the road, hidden behind the tall weeds and under the billboard that said CRITTERWORLD, FLORIDA’S FIRST ZOO, which I always thought was kind of a lie, because it made you think first ever when it was just the first you got to when you crossed the state line. Jun and George were doing their Advanced Geometry homework. We were all three in the accelerated class. In fact, we were the accelerated class. They drove us over to high school from eighth grade so we could sit in a room full of eleventh graders who tried to cheat off our tests. I liked it more than Jun and George, though, because I shared my book with this one girl named Sharla who was a cheerleader but still nice. She would scoot her desk right next to mine, and sometimes when we were both hunched over the book, my elbow touched her boob, but she didn’t move and either didn’t know or didn’t mind, and I kept it there until I lost all the feeling in my arm.

Anyway, the other guys were doing geometry, and I was watching Stash when it happened. One minute he was standing there, this hundred-year-old elephant, not moving except for the ends of his big flappy ears, and it might have been a breeze doing that. The next minute he seemed to sort of wobble. He lifted his chained leg, looked at it as if he’d just realized what they’d done to him, even though he’d been chained to that iron ring in front of Critterworld for as long as anybody could remember. He raised his trunk. He swung his head from side to side, made a noise that sounded like all the air rushing from his body, then fell sideways on top of the Volkswagen.

I stood straight up and stepped on George’s homework. All I could think about at first was why did they park their car so close to Stash? The explanation later, the one the father of the little girl gave to the Jacksonville paper, was they didn’t think Stash was alive. Stash was so still, and so dusty from standing there all those years by the highway, that they thought he was a statue of an elephant, like over in Weeki Wachee they have that brontosaurus that’s really a gas station, or like out West my mother told me about a World’s Biggest Prairie Dog.

Since there’s nothing once you get south of town except scrub brush, slash pine, and Critterworld, and since the little girl’s parents were inside the Critterworld snack shop, I was the first to hear her screaming inside the car. And initially I didn’t believe it was somebody screaming, because Stash flattened the car so badly that I couldn’t see how there could be anybody inside. George was yelling at me to get off his geometry homework, too, so that made it hard to hear anything else. George is just anal about his homework anyway—writes everything out on graph paper in this tiny block print that looks like a computer wrote it, which you might say is sort of the case, because when they did the eighth-grade aptitude test it was old George Mooney that not only scored in the 99^th percentile, but answered all the questions and didn’t miss one. They announced it at an assembly. Jun and I and two girls were in the 90^th percentile, but Jun—whose real named used to be John until he decided he needed to change it—told me all the tests measured was your ability to take tests. Somehow to him that meant that being in the 90^th or even the 99^th percentile was, to use his favorite phrase, a meaningless abstraction, but I didn’t see how it was meaningless, since my whole life seemed to be about taking tests, so it was comforting to know I was good at it. When you make all A’s, you just figure they’re grading on the curve, and most of the kids in class aren’t too smart, so your A is a relative thing, to use another one of Jun’s favorite phrases. But when they rank you with the whole state of Florida, you have to figure there are some pretty smart people out there that you’re up against.

Not that I ever felt as smart as Jun or George. Even though everybody lumped us together as the eggheads of junior high and all because of our grades and because we hung out together and because we played chess in homeroom, I always thought I was pulling something over on everybody, working really, really hard to seem like I was as smart as them, when the truth was that I’m not actually all that intelligent. I said that to my mother after the time I got accused of cheating on a science test. A kid had told the teacher I looked on George’s answer sheet, when all I was doing was seeing how far along George was on the test, which of course was a lot further along than me. Nothing happened, though, because Mrs. Crow said she knew I would never cheat, and besides, what was that kid doing looking around during a test anyway? Still, I was pretty upset, and I told my mother I thought I was getting an ulcer from trying to pretend I was as smart as George and Jun.

What she said was, “Of course you’re smart, Charlie. Just maybe not in the same way as your friends. You have an intuitive intelligence.”

The funny thing was that nobody cared if I was smart, or if Jun was, or if George was. I mean, teachers cared, and our parents cared, and George and Jun certainly cared about themselves. George already had a correspondence going with the registrar at M.I.T., and I’m not making that up. But other kids didn’t care, and I only cared in a weird way, because being smart, or pretending to be smart, was about the only thing I was good at. It was all I had. I couldn’t play basketball, even though I worked at it all the time. I wasn’t big enough or fast enough or strong enough. I didn’t know how to talk to girls, except for smart girls about school subjects, and except for that cheerleader, Sharla, who talked to me sometimes about things, like the difference between dancing and dance. Dancing was what she loved to do; dance was what she wanted to study when she got to college. But she had a football-player boyfriend, and whenever she was with him I pretty much ceased to exist.

But there I was, anyway—to get back to the story—standing on George Mooney’s graph paper, staring across the road, shaking my head to figure out if that really was somebody screaming. It was Jun who made the first move. He stood up beside me and said, “Stash! Wow!” and then he said, “Squashed bug!” He grabbed my arm and we both ran across the highway to the car. George was too busy collecting his papers and books to come right away.

We could just see the little girl’s face through what was left of the passenger door window. Stash had pretty much flattened the driver’s side. The girl was flat on the floor of the car, screaming in a way that sounded more like squealing—like Hreeeeee-Hreeeee-Hreeeee—and I think it was as much to get her to stop as anything else that I started pushing like crazy against Stash to get him off the car. That’s how stupid I was.

Jun ran inside Critterworld to get help. He told me later that when he came back out with the parents I was hitting Stash’s head with my fists and yelling at him to get up, but that’s not how I remember it. I just remember pushing and pushing, and dust rising off Stash in little puffs right in my face, and not figuring out he was dead until the girl’s father shoved me out of the way and I stepped back and looked into one of those big elephant eyes that was wide open but already dusted over, too.

A dozen cars stopped, some of them right there in the highway, before the sheriffs finally showed up. The little girl had quit squealing by them—partly because she’d figured out she wasn’t going to die, and partly because Jun got her a bottle of Coke from Critterworld and stuck about ten straws together into one long one to reach her mouth. The father yelled at Jun when he first brought it out, but the mother said, “Let the boy help, Clyde,” and the father got a little nicer after that, and they worked together to thread the straw through a crack in what was left of the window and down to the girl trapped on the floor.

After that, Jun moved off a short way from the crowd. He couldn’t stand crowds. He told me once that he was an ascetic, and that there were two kinds: the ones that choose it, as a means to something, and the ones that are born to it, the ones like him. That was supposed to explain his aversion to crowds. At the time, I didn’t even know what he meant by ascetic, and when I looked it up I had the wrong spelling so I went around for a long time with the wrong definition in my head. I did the same thing with cavalry and Calvary, too, but that was in second grade.

I didn’t want to leave Stash when Jun moved away. Everybody was so mad at him for dying and crushing the VW and trapping the little Michigan girl, I guess I felt like Stash needed somebody on his side, an advocate or something, even though he was dead. Not that I said anything to anybody. I laid my hand on the bottom of his foot, which was crusty because it was so old, but still not hard like you might expect, and I tried to remember everything I had read about elephants. The only line that came to me, though, was this one: “The powerful feet can trample an attacker into the ground, but are so softly cushioned that a whole herd of elephants can troop through a forest without making a sound.”

George Mooney, meanwhile, wasn’t having any problems remembering. He was over in front of the monkey cage where they kept the psycho-monkey that everybody flicked cigarette butts at, and he was lecturing some kids about elephant penises. For such a math-and-science nut, it’s amazing how much George Mooney went in for the dirty stuff. He told those kids that an elephant penis weighs sixty pounds, and it gets four feet long when the elephant gets aroused, and sometimes, if the elephant is chasing a cow, he might even step on it. And he told them about how the penis is shaped sort of like an S, and the muscles at the end work on their own to poke around under the cow’s belly to find the hole, which is way up underneath, not right there between the hind legs.

For some reason, it really bothered me that George was telling them all that. I knew it too, of course—Jun had given both of us the same book to read—but George was just showing off how much he knew and what a dirty mind he had. Those kids, though, they didn’t deserve to know that stuff. They hadn’t earned the right like we had. It didn’t seem appropriate, or fair, or something, that they should get it so cheaply, and for a minute I hated George Mooney, standing there in his high-water pants and nerd glasses with that hair he never washed, trying to be cool with those elementary school kids, trying to be cool like I knew none of us would ever be cool, not him or me or even Jun, who always knew what to say and never had to show it off like George, the M.I. T. nerd.

I saw all of us in that second as these three very brainy but mostly very pathetic guys who didn’t have any friends but one another, and even those friendships as a sort of last resort because nobody else would have us. I looked at Stash’s old yellow tusks, or what was left of them since they’d been sawed off short before I ever knew him, and I looked down between his legs and saw just this shriveled worm of a penis, and I felt like crying, and I felt like everything that had happened was my fault, as dumb as that may sound, but it was how I felt and in some ways how I still feel, no matter what my mother said later to cheer me up and no matter what sometimes I can think of to tell myself.

The girl was still trapped in the car, and the sheriffs, as it turned out, didn’t have a clue for getting her free, and that’s the way things stood for a while, except for one thing I haven’t mentioned yet, which is why Jun and George and I happened to be there in the first place, hiding out in the ditch across the highway from Critterworld. It was because we were studying old Stash and looking for a way to kill him ourselves.

***

Critterworld is the saddest place in Florida, maybe even in America. I only went inside once, and that was on a field trip in elementary school. Stash out front was so familiar to us that we hardly noticed him—all except Jun, who made a point of saying how much Stash disgusted him—and the psycho-monkey in the cage was already mean way back then from picking up lit cigarettes. When people came near he attacked the bars and tried to throw things, but for some reason he couldn’t stop himself from picking up cigarette butts and burning his hands. All us kids crowded around the cage and teased him with monkey noises that day of the field trip, which frustrated him and made him crash wildly around, hurling himself at the bars as if he wanted to kill us or kill himself trying.

Pay a dollar and you could go inside where they had the two-headed turtle collection, and the Siamese piglets disintegrating in a giant jar of formaldehyde. The whole place smelled of formaldehyde, as a matter of fact—that and the vomity smell of very old, very wet straw. There were the snakes, of course, and all the girls cried when they saw the white rat shivering in a corner of the aquarium where they kept the boa constrictor. And there was the bald eagle with the broken wing that hadn’t healed right so it couldn’t fly. And the albino squirrels, and the furry chinchillas, and the Shetland pony. In the petting area, they kept a lamb and a goat and a calf and a live piglet and a goose, but Jun told me Critterworld sold them all for slaughter except the goose once they grew past the cute-baby stage. Nobody liked the goose because he bit kids.

Our first plan—or rather Jun’s first plan—was to get rid of all of Critterworld, maybe burn it down, but we quickly dropped that because it was too ambitious. “And besides,” Jun told us, “the point is not to draw attention to ourselves or to the deed.”

“Then what is the point?” I asked him. This was in homeroom a couple of weeks before everything happened, and Jun and George were playing chess while we debated our course of action.

George put Jun in check just then, and Jun glared at me as if it was my fault, but also as if to say, “We can’t keep going over and over this for you, Charlie.” He was mad at me for bringing it up again, but I was still having a hard time figuring out why it meant so much to Jun to kill something. I mean, I understood the reasons he said, but Jun seemed so obsessive. That was the word my mother used for it later, anyway, and she said she thought it had something to do with Jun’s father, who used to be head of maintenance at the hospital but lost a lot of jobs because of drinking and now ran a service station north of town out by the interstate. That made a lot of sense in a Sigmund Freud kind of way, I guess, but somehow when you’re in the middle of things it all seems a lot more complicated, and with Jun, who could talk me into just about anything if he talked long enough, I’m still not sure.

The point, as he had explained a hundred times, was to kill a thing that had compromised itself so much that it no longer had a self. Something that wasn’t true to its nature. Jun started talking about “essence” like it was something you could put in your book bag or hide in your locker, and he said Stash represented all those things that had lost their essence, and that’s why we had to do away with him. George, who liked the idea from the start—but from a purely scientific perspective, as he kept reminding us—suggested killing the psycho-monkey instead, but Jun got really mad about that and said didn’t we understand anything and said the monkey was the only animal at Critterworld worth living.

Jun had gotten the idea from a story we read in another advanced class on World Literature. It was that Japanese book, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, which I personally hated but which Jun read about ten times and carried with him everywhere like a bible. It was about a bunch of kids who dissected their cat because he didn’t catch mice anymore, and later they dissected a sailor, I think because he was dating their mom. That was when Jun decided he was an ascetic, which he said made plenty of sense because his family was Catholic, and the Catholics had an ascetic tradition of sitting in the desert and fasting and wearing hair shirts, and Jun said he saw a connection between that and the Japanese ascetics, which was what those kids were in the book, and he went on his own fast for purification, which lasted a couple of days until he went to bed one night and slept through all of the next day and the next night, too, and his parents took him to the emergency room thinking it had something to do with his hemophilia.

Jun said he had a visionary dream about knocking off Stash during his two-day sleep, and he convinced George and me to learn everything we could about elephants. He said we had to understand what Stash was supposed to be to experience the tragedy of what he was instead.

At first I went along because Jun was so persuasive and because he said all we had to do was kill Stash, not dissect him. Plus, it was usually easier to do what Jun wanted than to talk him out of it, and besides, he often lost interest in projects before we saw them through to the end. So, we read the elephant book. We discussed elephant lore. We figured out that Stash was an African elephant rather than an Asian elephant—bigger ears—which I was happy about once I learned how they trained elephants to work in India, which was to make a hole in the back of their skull and poke inside the hole with an iron bar.

Studying Stash himself was my idea. We were having a hard time coming up with a way to kill him. George, in an uncharacteristically stupid moment, recommended dynamite; Jun said poison. I suggested gathering firsthand data on the subject while we tried to figure it out. Jun agreed because, as he put it, we needed to become more elephant than the elephant, and of course the idea appealed to the scientist in George, who must have been the most empirical guy in the state.

So that’s what we were doing when Stash died—or what I was doing. Jun just shrugged about it later and said it was a coincidence; he said Stash saved us a lot of trouble by dying when he did, but something in his voice sounded false, and I wondered if maybe he wasn’t more upset than he was letting on. His mother let him paint a St. George and the Dragon mural on his bedroom wall, which seemed to take his mind off ritual slaughter for a while, and then we took up the Russians in that World Literature class and Jun decided to become a humanitarian.

My mother believes in God, which means she has a stock answer for things that can’t be explained, and I go to church with her every week thinking one day it will rub off on me, too. She said God was watching out for us by taking Stash, but I still have my doubts.

***

After two hours trapped in the VW under Stash, the little girl started squealing again and nothing her mother or her father said could get her to stop. The sheriffs were useless, talking on their radios, calling more and more sheriffs to come out. They tried pulling Stash off with a wrecker truck, but that didn’t work, and they were afraid he might shift and crush the car worse if they jerked at him too hard.

Finally, though, Mr. Funderburke, the guy who owned Critterworld, got Steve’s Sod Farm to send over three tractors, and together they were able to drag Stash off the car. The welder burned the girl’s arm with his blowtorch cutting through the metal, but just a little, a spark, and the sheriffs took the whole family to a motel in town, compliments of Critterworld.

Now the problem was what to do with the body. It became like a big joke there in the Critterworld parking lot: people saying, “How do you get rid of a dead elephant?” then cracking up, as if it was the funniest thing in the world, even though there was no punchline. Stash must have weighed a couple of tons.

Woody Riser, the tree-service man, finally showed up with the biggest chainsaw I’ve ever seen. He consulted with the sheriffs and with Funderburke, then he lugged his chainsaw over next to Stash. The sheriffs herded everybody back a ways—there must have been a hundred people by then, and more coming all the time—and they formed a line around the body. Woody Riser mixed gas and oil for his tank, slipped on his safety goggles, then pulled the cord. The third pull it coughed around and caught, and the noise was so loud that the little kids covered their ears. He went for a leg first, aiming carefully just above the knee where the skin was taut, but I guess he should have checked how tough the flesh was because the chainsaw kicked back on him and took a bite out of Woody Riser’s own leg.

Things got a little crazy after that.

A couple of sheriffs put Woody Riser in their car and left for the hospital, and the rest of them gave up on crowd control while they huddled with Mr. Funderburke to figure out what to try next. Right away people started pushing close to Stash. They all wanted to touch him, but some pulled out knives and poked at him with their blades. I saw a guy sawing at Stash’s tail, and a couple of kids tugging on a tusk. Somebody else went for a piece of the ear.

George and Jun stood next to the psycho-monkey cage—the monkey had gotten hold of a cigar, and they were watching him try to smoke it—but I didn’t want to have anything to do with them for a while. I wanted to leave, but I also wanted to stay, and it was about then that I saw Sharla, that cheerleader from my Advanced Geometry class, standing by herself at the edge of the crowd.

I went over to her and stood there for a couple of minutes before she noticed me. “Oh, hi, Charlie,” she said. Her eyes were red from wanting to cry, but she hadn’t cried yet. I tried to think of something to say back to her—something sensitive or clever—but nothing came out except, “How’s your geometry?”

She didn’t have a chance to answer, though, or to laugh in my face and tell me how stupid I was, because a couple of pick-up trucks pulled into the crowd and a bunch of football players from the high school got out with axes. “Elephant patrol!” they shouted. Everybody laughed except for me and Sharla, and the crowd pulled back to give the guys room to operate. Even the sheriffs seemed to think it was funny, and they ignored Mr. Funderburke, who started yelling at them to stay away from Stash. “He can be stuffed!” Mr. Funderburke kept saying. “He can be stuffed!” Nobody listened.

“Isn’t that your boyfriend?” I asked Sharla. I thought I recognized one of the football players.

“Oh, David wouldn’t do that,” Sharla said, obviously worried that David would. “He’s just with them. He wouldn’t.”

One of the football players climbed onto the hood of his truck and shouted: “County High one time!” The crowd roared, and an ax ripped into Stash’s side.

“County High Two times!” Another ax sliced the trunk.

“County High three times!” Two football players—one of them Sharla’s boyfriend—hacked at Stash’s legs.

“County High all the damn time!”

They attacked.

It must have gone on for a long time, guys passing off the axes when they got tired, always somebody new to step in for a few whacks at Stash. A couple of people left, offended, but more came, and the Critterworld parking lot turned black with blood. I didn’t see too much, though, because I followed Sharla across the highway where she sat and cried in the ditch where George and Jun and I had been.

I’d never seen a girl that upset before, and I didn’t exactly know what to do, so I just patted her on the back like my mother used to do to me when I was little. I wanted to tell her that her sorry boyfriend didn’t deserve her anyway, but that didn’t seem quite appropriate even though it was true. She cried harder and harder, but nothing could block out the thwack of axes or the pep rally cheers as they worked over Stash in front of Critterworld. I heard the psycho-monkey screaming, too, and figured he’d gotten to the ash-end of his cigar, and then after a long time, just about when I started thinking I should leave Sharla alone because I was probably just bugging her, sitting there patting on her like I was, she turned her face to my shoulder and she cried onto my t-shirt and I put both of my arms around her as far as they would reach, and we stayed like that for a while longer until it was all over and nearly dark and a couple of her girlfriends came looking for Sharla to give her a ride home.

She wiped her eyes and climbed into the car, and she said something to me through the back window, but they were already pulling away so I didn’t catch it. Maybe it was just “Good-bye” or “See you in class,” or maybe she just said my name.

Pretty soon I was the only one left, sitting there in the ditch, except for Mr. Funderburke, who just stood in the parking lot like the broken man he was. The crowd was gone, the sheriffs, the football players with their axes, even George and Jun. I got up slowly and walked back across the road to get a last look at what was what. But now here’s the really funny part: For all their chopping and their pep rally and everything, Stash was still there. Sure, he was cut to hell and bleeding everywhere, and his trunk and his tail were gone, and the ears were tattered and all like that, but he was still there. They could have swung their axes for another whole day and Stash would still have been there. Even dead he was too much elephant for them, and I wished Jun was there for me to show him, and to tell him that, and to make him understand.

They got those sod farm tractors back the next day and dragged Stash into a field behind Critterworld. They got a bulldozer and dug a big hole and dropped him in on a bed of wood soaked in gasoline. The fire lasted all night, and I got my mother to drive me out to see it. There were cars all up and down the road.

Some people say that Stash haunts that field now, that somebody stole his trunk and he looks for it on full moons, that passing motorists have seen him standing at three a.m. on his old spot in front of Critterworld. All that standard ghost story stuff. They even say that nothing will grow on the spot where Stash was cremated, but I guess you can write that off as rumor, too, because I‘ve been out that way a couple of times since and the grass is as green there as anywhere.

***

“Critterworld,” winner of a Pushcart Prize for best fiction from the small presses, has been featured in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Mississippi Review, Pedestal, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, 100 Percent Pure Florida Fiction, and the story collection My Chaos Theory.