When the Forest Seemed Most Alive

i.
My favorite kinds of dreams are the ones that seem to start the second my head hits the pillow and last the whole night. Dreams that are one long, continuous narrative. Where, if recalled linearly, it might be jarring or disjointed, within the logic of that dream, its flow still makes perfect sense.

I had a recent dream, for example, where I walked out the front door of my quiet, North Loop apartment directly onto the third floor of the Mall of America. I remember another dream, one I had when I was a teenager, where I met a girl and we immediately went on our first date — a picnic lunch on an airport runway. I can still recall the intense disappointment I felt upon waking up from that dream: that ache in my stomach, the lump on the back of my throat.

Most of these dreams came to me after taking melatonin. There was a period in my life where no matter what I did, when I laid down in bed to sleep, I’d remain awake for hours, finding faces and constellations in the ceiling spackle. I wouldn’t fall asleep until four in the morning, yet I would wake in time to shower, dress, and arrive at Five Watt before the 6:00 a.m. rush. Loaded up on caffeine, I’d drag myself through the day always exhausted, never quite awake. Every night I’d push off bedtime by half an hour, and then another, under the double-edged rationale that if I went to bed a little bit later and therefore more tired, I’d definitely fall asleep. Without fail, I’d snap to full alertness the instant the lights went out.

I started a nightly regimen in search of a remedy: at precisely 9:00 p.m., melatonin, 10 mg; Advil PM, active ingredient diphenhydramine, 38 mg.

I started to sleep. And I started to dream.

If you’ve never experienced melatonin dreams before, I suggest you try them for a week. The dreams I had were so realistic and intense I would forget I was asleep and be surprised to wake up, often short of breath and with my heart pounding. For the first few days, melatonin dreams scared me. I didn’t understand that it was melatonin that was causing those vivid dreams. Like most psychoactive processes, your experiences on melatonin are deeply dependent on your mindset. Since I didn’t yet understand that link — rather, since I wasn’t yet even aware there was a link to begin with — I became deeply alarmed by my unconscious mind. A glass can only spill what it contains.

It freaked me out that my subconscious was suddenly spending eight hours a night going on crime sprees across the Twin Cities before facing an armed standoff with the National Guard. Distressed from a string of dreams that I can only describe as Act Three of Groundhog Day, I confided to a doctor friend that I was becoming disturbed by my dreams. “What does this say about me as a person, what does it say about the state of my soul, that I keep having these kinds of dreams?” I asked him.

“You’re on melatonin, aren’t you?” he asked, chuckling.

I was shocked. “How did you know?”

“Melatonin acts on the same parts of your brain as LSD. Most people on melatonin have vivid dreams.” He smiled. “It says nothing about your soul.”

Your experience on psychoactives is dependent on your mindset. Without the specter of some moral reckoning hanging over me, I began to have the best dreams of my life. Every night became a new adventure, one that felt more real than reality, and at the end I’d wake up rested.

This is how I was able to sleep restfully again. It also made me wonder what it would be like to try LSD.

iii.
In August of 2017, my mom asked if I would consider moving back in with her. She was living alone ever since her husband went to prison – long story, that – and beginning to realize that there was a lot she could no longer do by herself. She obviously couldn’t know at that time that a month later she would be diagnosed with bone cancer — a metastasis of the breast cancer she had been fighting for years — the cancer that would eventually spread to her lungs and brain and end her life. That August, however, her primary complaint was that she just didn’t have the time, strength or energy to get all of her house- and yard work done.

I moved home. Biographically, it was an uneventful period in my life. For the first time since I left for college, I found myself living away from friends and peers. I felt like a horseshoe crab without its shell. (I’ve heard it said, if you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.) There were precious few local activities to keep my attention, so I found a cozy chair at the local library and got to know the staff at the closest Caribou. I tried to put a dent in my reading backlist and curated a Hitchcock retrospective. I took as many bubble baths as our low-volume, high-efficiency boiler would allow. After her September scare was successfully treated with radiation, my mom’s health stabilized and she resumed living life as normal. Eventually, I found a job in Minnetonka, a forty-minute drive from White Bear Lake. My three-month trial period was uneasy: not a day went by during those first 90 days that I didn’t think I was on the verge of getting fired. But, ultimately, I was hired on as a permanent employee. I celebrated by buying a car, a racer red Ford Focus.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to break in a new car by going on a road trip, and within a week I was making plans for a weekend getaway to the North Shore. At the same time, although it wasn’t clear in that moment, maybe the call north was rooted in something more existential, what Camus once described as “the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom out of the implacable ritual.” Maybe we look to reinforce our upward swings with wild lunges to cement the idea that there is hope in life after all. Or, at least, maybe that’s what I do.

Just after I got back from my own leap to freedom, my mom left for her own: a two-week road trip from Minnesota to Oregon with two friends, three dogs, and an RV. Perhaps it was the strain of the road or perhaps it was just a coincidence, but that trip marked the end of my mom’s stable period. She returned exhausted from the trip, and her cancer returned furious from its remission. Her oncologist laid out two options: palliative care, or a Hail Mary course of chemotherapy as likely to cause heart failure as it was to treat her tumors. She chose the latter route. Three months later, when the PET scan showed there was no improvement, she discontinued her treatment. It was though the great rush of Cytoxan had washed her clean and emptied her of hope. Two weeks after that, she died.

iv.
Friday, July 27, 2018

12:00 p.m. — Leave Minnetonka for Duluth

4:00 p.m. — Check into my AirBnB

5:00 p.m. — Explore downtown Duluth/Canal Park

6:00 p.m. — Vikre

7:00 p.m. — Dinner at Lake Avenue

8:00 p.m. — TBD

Saturday, July 28, 2018

5:30 a.m. — Wake up, shower, and venture north

7:00 a.m. — Egg breakfast at Betty’s with blueberry rhubarb pie for dessert

8:00 a.m. – Get supplies at Zup’s

8:30 a.m. – Hike Tettegouche ‘til you get bored, tired, or just want to head home

That Friday night gap after dinner is how I met Amber.

v.
One could argue that the term “dive bar” is contextual, that the use of the adjective presupposes the existence of something classier nearby. By this measure, there are no dive bars in Superior, Wisconsin. I’m not sure how I ended up at Jake’s, exactly, or if it was even called Jake’s, but by the time I arrived the locals had already started calling it a night. I sat at the bar and ordered two Grain Belt Premiums and patted myself on the back for the subversive act. The bartender asked if I wanted to pay up or open a tab. The bill was $3.00.

Just as I have no clear memory of getting to Jake’s, I have no clear memory of how I started talking to Amber. One moment I was aware of her presence, the next thing I knew we were ensnared in conversation. She was maybe twenty-five, her curly hair pulled up in a loose bun. She was wearing too much eyeliner and — using my own as a measuring stick — I estimated her bar tab to be at least twenty bucks.

“Where are you from?” She asked. Small talk. Another implacable ritual.

“I live in the Twin Cities, how about you?”

“I’m from here.” She mentioned the name of a town I’d never heard of.

“What brings you up here this weekend?”

“I’m hiking Tettegouche tomorrow. I needed a getaway”

“That’s fun.”

“It is! So what are you up to, what brings you out tonight?”

“I’ve been having a hard time sleeping lately.”

I asked her why. Her answer was a mad dash away from despair. “Did… Did you know that one in three women have been raped?” I said I’d heard that before. Amber shared with me the details of her sexual assault, the maddening experience of trying to turn her assailant in to the police, the dehumanizing frustration of hearing her account contradicted and dismissed, and the abject horror of watching her friends litigate her case in the court of social media. Her trauma led to nightmares. Her nightmares led to insomnia.

Her phone beeped. “My Uber’s here,” she said with a sigh.

“Wait,” I pleaded, trying to think of something meaningful to say, something my friends would tell you is not a strength of mine. “Before you go, let me say this. You are beautiful. You are worthy of dignity and justice. These nightmares will be behind you soon.”

She started sobbing and hugged me like an old friend.

I can never know the rest of her story, how this chapter ended, whether she found relief in melatonin or therapy or whether she’s haunted to this day. It’s taken a lot of self-restraint to not write an epilogue for her in my mind, but her story is hers to own. Although I’ve prayed for her many times since we met, I can’t say for certain if I could pick her out from a crowd, much less whether she remembers me at all.

Part of me wants to know why she chose to confide in me. Was I safe because she knew she’d never see me again, that as the stranger my confidence was certain? There’s some research that shows we are more willing to share big secrets with strangers than with loved ones. Maybe she saw my second Tall Boy and thought I’d let her take one for the road. I don’t know. But I think when we’re frantically looking for peace, somewhere along the way we’ll take a wild lunge at hope.

vi.
At 8:30 a.m. precisely, I pulled up to the visitor’s center of Tettegouche State Park. I checked my backpack for my essentials: a bag of smoked almonds, summer sausage, two bottles of SmartWater, my Hoffman-Richter survival knife, and a flask filled with Redemption bourbon.

That Saturday, the temperature on the North Shore was 71 degrees. The skies were clear, sporadic tufts of cloud notwithstanding, and a gentle breeze blew off of Lake Superior. During my hike through the woods of Tettegouche, I counted a single mosquito — just one. In short, the weather was perfect.

In spite of these facts, I could not get anyone to agree with me that it was a beautiful day.

I brought it up with everyone who made small talk with me. A young couple with a lawn blanket and a picnic basket (“Yeah, it’s okay….”), a family of four asking me if I saw the rest of their party march down towards Two Step Falls (“Eh, not bad,” said the husband while the wife furled her brow), the twenty-something giving her corgi a much-needed walk (“I guess”) or the mother skipping across the suspension bridge above the Baptism River with her school-aged daughter (“Yeah, ya know, it’s pretty good….”).
Pretty good?

If there’s an official record of how the Baptism River got its name, I’ve not been able to find it. Perhaps it has a similar backstory as Ponte de Bapteme, where – presumably due to the danger beyond – early voyageurs dictated that any compatriots must be baptized before crossing. I’d like to think, however, that the name was derived from the palpable spiritual aura hanging like berries from the canopy, that some part of my experience was shared with the people who wandered there in the decades and centuries before me. That others walked away feeling, as I did, beloved by God. Then again, maybe not. Maybe those fur traders passed through thinking it all just “pretty good.”

“Sa passable, monsieurs.”

I suppose it is as I’ve learned, that your mindset determines your experience.

I perched at the top of High Falls, and dangled my feet above 70 feet of sheer grayish brown rock, water rushing by either side of me like I was on the median of some liquid superhighway. You could not have convinced me there were as many as five days more beautiful in the entire history of the universe. I sat there for what must have been an hour, eating my snack of summer sausage and smoked almonds, a ploughman’s lunch on the throne of a titan.

I was aware, but not self-conscious, of the dozens of people pointing at me from the shores below. Some of them waved, many gawked, but most moved on to the business of being weekend hikers: posing on boulders for Instagram photos or wading cautiously in the slow part of the current while dodging angry crawfish. Mostly they stayed on the shore, holding a lone hand in the air as though raising a Zippo for a power ballad, praying for phone signals. Or they sipped from canteens and skipped stones across the river.

A couple of women, both in their forties, donned two-pieces and swam in the basin below the waterfall. Some combination of the sunlight, water, and the rock faces made them appear to be enrobed in liquid gold, as the tips of waves sparkled like flash bulbs around them. As I made my way down the trail, the two of them spotted me and asked, “How was the view up there?”

“Unbelievable,” I said as I walked past.

Not visible: a half-eaten Summer Sausage

A view of the throne

vii.
On September 29, 2018, two months after my solo trip at Tettegouche, I returned to the park with a travel buddy in tow. The weather was much colder that day, only hitting mid-fifties by noon.

There wasn’t enough room at the top of the waterfall for two people — not that my friend had any interest in risking her life despite the promise of a prominent view — so we found a perch at the top of the lookout, a small ledge with a sheer drop, and sat and took in the skyline. The wind blowing through the pines and autumn leaves made the whole landscape appear as if it were inhaling and exhaling in rhythm, swaying back and forth with each breath. Paradoxically, it was that moment, when the forest seemed most alive that I recognized for the first time that my mom was going to die.

I took out my phone and, through tears, texted her. “I love you, mom. I’m sorry it turned out this way.” With that, I let go, I gazed at the dark treeline spangled with sunlight, and for the first time in my life, laid my heart open to the utter indifference of cancer. I let myself feel, really feel, the lump in my throat and the ache in my stomach, and for a moment, the fleeting charms of earth were gone, her springs of joy ran dry. But we kept gazing out at the horizon, watching the balsam fir dance her aria with the tamarack and the jack pine, mesmerized beyond words by the arboreal ballet.

Soon, everything would change, my life would become unrecognizable to what came before it. Those changes would be jarring and disjointed, but never without their own internal logic. Everything familiar began to wash away. By and large, those changes were for the better. I fell in love with my girlfriend and asked her to marry me. We bought a house together on the west side of town and have twins on the way.

My friend and I spent the rest of that day at Black Beach, climbing the sea stack and sharing a thermos of Swiss Miss that tasted as rich as gently melted chocolate. We called dibs on distant islands and named them like Conquistadors. Then we drove home to the Cities, the stereo blaring at least two notches too loud, listening to “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” letting the Bard have the last word. With our euphoria wearing off and reality setting in, the night was no less beautiful for the transition. I think we were both surprised to find ourselves wide awake.

Rivers til I reach you

A Grief Revisited

i.
“That doesn’t look right,” she said behind me as I stared up at the ceiling, the treble in her voice deadened by her dental mask. “It could be an occlusion or maybe even a cavity. But the whole root of your tooth is dark on the x-ray.”

When I woke up Saturday morning, an emergency dental visit did not seem to be in the realm of possibility. But when I got out of bed and brushed my teeth, I felt an unmistakable grit on my brush. I spit into my hand and put it under a gentle tap and let the water pass through my shaking fingers like a prospector panning for gold. Soon enough, I found my treasure: sharp flecks of mother of pearl. I ran my tongue around my teeth and found an unfamiliar texture, like a corn kernel made of shale, on my lower lateral incisor.

Shit. I’m going to lose a front tooth.

A quick Google search revealed three dentists within a mile of my house. Fortunately, the one open Saturdays – Bucca Dental – was also in my insurance network. A follow-up Google search told me that “Bucca” is a storm spirit of British yore, a wraith believed to haunt the abandoned mines of coastal regions. That sounded to me like a sturdy, romantic name for a dental office, so I got dressed and walked over.

It has been my experience that all dental hygienists are gorgeous young women, and Bucca’s was no exception. She had orangish-red hair and the slender body of a middle-distance runner, the sort of combination that made me think of a defiant maple still gleaming despite a waning autumn. I also couldn’t help but wonder whether my dental visits growing up have had an impact on my dating life. Meet a beautiful woman. Fall in love a little. Endure a span of pain, and criticism, and judgment. Try again in six months.

At any rate, by this point she had summoned the dentist, a regal and handsome Hispanic man named Edgar Mantilla. He looked like a Mexican version of the actor Ray Wise. “Let’s have a look,” he said, gesturing for me to open my mouth. The exam last less than ten seconds. “This is nothing. It’s a calculus.”

What does this have to do with derivatives? I wondered to myself. Confusion must have registered on my face.

“It’s calcium buildup. We’ll scrape it off and you can go.”

The voice behind me chimed back in. “There’s still the matter of this occlusion, Doctor.” I glanced back to see green eyes shining like traffic lights against her cerulean facemask. I couldn’t help but wonder if occlusions were dealbreakers.

“Ah yes,” he replied in a cadence close enough to Emperor Palpatine’s to be unsettling. He explained that a spiral cavity had cut off the blood flow to my tooth, and it was likely dead. He proposed an experiment to illustrate his point, and disappeared momentarily to retrieve a shard of dry ice the size of a pebble. Instructing me to tell him when it started hurting, he pressed the dry ice against my poor occluded tooth. I felt nothing, and so I shrugged slightly. Then he moved the it to the adjacent tooth and I felt a burst of intense pain. He did it again to drive the point home. Nothing. Nothing. Intense pain. “See? You’ll need a root canal.”

I thought to ask when I’d be able to eat hard cheeses again, but I didn’t think he’d get the reference.

ii.

Should I tear my eyes out now?
Everything I see returns to you somehow
Should I tear my heart out now?
Everything I feel returns to you somehow
I want to save you from your sorrow
– Sufjan Stevens, “The Only Thing”

It may seem strange, but it is instructive to think of depression as being like a friend. “Dee,” let’s say, is like an old college buddy who’s a great dude but has rather poor hygiene, so you’re reluctant to admit you’ve been hanging out with him. Dee’s the guy who will say, “Hey, man, let’s focus on you tonight. I’ll bring beer and pizza rolls,” and then just sits quietly and stinks up the place while you watch Netflix. Whenever he comes around, he’s making a timely, almost heroic, entrance: everything’s falling apart around you, but here’s Dee, a friend indeed. He’s blunt and brutally honest – he tells it like it is – but he really, really wants you to understand that even though he likes you as a person, he doesn’t think you have what it takes. So you stare at your feet as you say, “Yeah, you’re probably right. Let me get some of those pizza rolls.”

There’s something poetic to the fact that soil erodes most quickly when there’s nothing planted in it. Common sense then dictates that your heart should be a well-tended garden, with healthy diversity like zucchini and a raspberry patch to go along with a row of lilies and sunflowers and three different types of mint. A lucky few have plots that edge up against some old-growth, with some beech or cedar just barely on the other side of the forest edge. When my grandma died seven years ago, I felt the ground shake as that blessed oak was pulled out, roots and all. Now that my grandpa and his brother Elmer have followed, the whole landscape has changed. My secluded garden is now strip-mall adjacent, a little more of that nitrogen-rich soil flowing down the storm drain with each rainfall.

Reflecting on the loss of his mother, Sufjan Stevens was struck by how the trajectory of his grief seemed so unconventional. “It felt really sporadic and convoluted,” he told Pitchfork. “I would have a period of rigorous, emotionless work, and then I would be struck by deep sadness triggered by something really mundane, like a dead pigeon on the subway track. Or my niece would point out polka-dotted tights at the playground, and I would suffer some kind of cosmic anguish in public.”

Nothing. Nothing. Intense pain. My phone buzzes. Dee wants to know if I’ve ever tried Fireball.

“You are an individual in full possession of your life,” says Stevens. “You don’t have to be incarcerated by suffering.”

It’s jarring to realize that it’s as likely as not that I will someday consider suicide again. Dee reminds me that my retirement savings are meager anyway.

“The Only Thing” refers to what kept Sufjan alive as he was contemplating suicide: “The only thing that keeps me from driving this car half-light, jackknife into the canyon at night….” Signs and wonders. The Northern constellation of Perseus cradling the head of Medusa. A random pattern of moisture on a bathroom wall, conjuring an image of the biblical Daniel. The sea lion caves of the Oregon coast giving sight to a blind faith. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing else but intense awe.

To Him alone who does great wonders
For His steadfast love endures forever
To Him who made the great lights
For His steadfast love endures forever
To Him who struck down great Kings
For His steadfast love endures forever
– Psalm 136

iii.

We both knew this. I had my miseries, not hers;
she had hers, not mine. The end of hers would be
the coming-of-age of mine.
– C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I’ve read that when Grant Achatz, the famous modernist chef, came down with cancer of the tongue, his ability to taste salt was the last to go. I am working from memory, but I believe sweetness faded first, followed by the sour, and then bitter flavors. Saltiness lingered a while, rendering each morsel a monotonous chore, but before long it was all just texture, varied gradients of sand brushing up against his tender tongue. I’ve wondered if that sequence would be the same for everyone, or even the same for every chef. Perhaps sugar would linger for the pastry chefs and bakers. Maybe the garde mangers would cling to bitterness.

It’s worth asking if Achatz felt “less” as his ability to taste eroded away. While his mind and experience and unrelenting creative capacity let him continue to develop celebrated dishes and flavor pairings (the year following Achatz’s cancer diagnosis was widely considered Alinea’s zenith to that point), the inability to taste for himself must have induced some fear or uncertainty. C.S. Lewis wrote, “Fate (or whatever it is) delights to produce a great capacity and then frustrate it. Beethoven went deaf. By our standards a mean joke; the monkey trick of a spiteful imbecile.” But would we elevate Beethoven so high had he never been deaf? The great Swiss mathematician Euler reached the peak of his productivity after he went blind. Frustrated, yes, but not stopped. Taking on water but not yet sunk.

And so I go back to tending my heart’s garden, praying a soft prayer that when this rhubarb ripens I’ll be able to dip a stalk in caster’s sugar and eat it raw, that the magical sweet and sour taste will transport me to some summer morning ages ago when everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
– James Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

iv.

It’s already difficult to picture, standing near its shore, where Lake Superior could possibly end, but when the sky’s a dripping, drizzling gray it becomes practically impossible. The horizon seems to extend above the tree line, as though the lake is curling up over itself and dumping the excess back into its basin. I can’t help but wonder at the first people to encounter it, whether they thought they could find something on the other side or if they believed it to be the edge of the world. Was there an intrepid skeptic who dared put it to the test, walking north only to return from the south several months later?

These were the questions on my mind as I sat at the bar at Castle Danger, sipping a George Hunter Stout – “an American version of the style with aromas of molasses, licorice, maple, coffee and cream that are also echoed in the flavor.” I also wondered if there were more beers on tap than daydrinkers sporting identical trucker-hat-and-camo ensembles.  The tap list boasted eight beers. “Did I already charge you?” asked the bartender, a squat middle-aged woman with silver-gold hair and a ready smile, as I tipped back the last dregs. “I can never remember when someone’s paid or if I’ve just given away beer for free. It’s a nightmare.”

“Your nightmare is someone else’s dream,” I replied as I pulled out my wallet.

“Don’t you want another one? The cream ale is really nice after the stout.”

I declined. “It’d be bad manners to show up to a wedding drunk. Besides, I have to drive back to Duluth for it.”

When she asked if I was excited to go, I smiled and said, “Sure, who doesn’t like an open bar?” But in truth I was dreading it. I tried dodging the invitation once it became clear it was coming, but the bride tracked me down like a blood hound. Didn’t she know you’re not supposed to bring prior romantic baggage to your wedding?

It would have been easy enough to simply decline the invitation. The wedding was in Duluth, after all, and that’s a difficult trip without a car. Scheduling it for 5 p.m. on a Friday meant I’d have to take time off work, another reasonable excuse. And even though there’s no lingering attachment, a betting man would think it’d be, at the very least, an uncomfortable experience. But in the end, I couldn’t convince myself that I wasn’t just trying to hurt her in the most passive way possible. Could I say with total, unshakeable confidence that there wasn’t any part of me that wanted her to notice my absence, that wanted that absence to sting and linger, no part of me that wanted that slight to fester and damage? What would it say about me as a person if I hid behind a reasonable excuse in even the most miniscule attempt to inflict pain on someone I have claimed to love?

It was convenient, to say the least, that my ability to feel, to commune with my emotional self, has been so eroded these last couple months. I don’t like to think of it as a numbness; rather, it’s as though that emotional self is unconscious, passed out in a drunken stupor. He’ll come to just long enough to yell something angry – and probably offensive – before slipping again into restless slumber. It hardly matters which emotions have come for a visit when he’s snoring loudly and mumbling about Vietnam. They’ll have to come back later if they want an audience.

This enabled me, at first, to watch the ceremony with a detached fascination. There were fewer groomsmen than bridesmaids. The pastor had brought a football as a prop, despite the fact that neither bride nor groom cared for the sport. (I’m still not totally clear about the point of that. Something to do with Chris Berman’s “He. Could. Go. All. The. Way.” catchphrase?) But when I saw her eyes well up with tears of joy, and I watched his gentle thumb dry her cheek, I became self-conscious of tears in my own eyes. Was I feeling something, or were my mirror neurons just firing blindly like a caricature of an old prospector? Moving my hands towards my face felt too conspicuous. I let the dampness linger.

It’s fair to ask whether some achievements are worth the effort. In her journal, Sylvia Plath wrote, “The danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.” For the fur traders of the North West Company, it was essential to know how far the lake would stretch. For those early few who were driven only by curiosity, one has to think the satisfaction of attaining that knowledge would be tempered by the realization that they’d only ended up back where they started, but with salt water running down their faces.

v.

The earliest memory I have is of my older brother’s third birthday party, when he got a battery-powered police car that would drive itself in a circle while its siren wailed. I wanted that car so badly I burst into tears on the steps from the kitchen to the porch, hurling myself on the faded flower-patterned tile. Someone – my mother, most likely – retrieved a small wooden recorder and thrust it in my hands, a substitute satisfying enough for a toddler. Apparently all I really wanted was to contribute to the piercing cacophony.

The next coherent memory I can recall is of a dream I had when I was maybe four years old. Everyone I knew – which, considering I was four,  consisted of my grandparents, my mom, my brother and my two sisters – had gathered in the sunny living room of my grandparents’ white one-story postwar rambler, seating me in the middle of the pale yellow davenport. The angled ash tree in the front yard loomed large behind my grandfather, though the sunflowers and petunias of my grandma’s front garden had also crept into view. The room felt warm with love.

I don’t remember who spoke, but I remember the message: we are all from a different place, a world inside a painting in fact, and we all have to go home. And you, Steve, cannot come with. Then I watched in horror as everyone I knew in the world walked to the wall and were swallowed whole by canvas, smudging the watercolors as they passed through. And then I was alone in a suddenly darkened room.

I feel lucky to recall waking up, to remember the relief I felt hearing the sound of bacon crackling in a skillet. Maple syrup still smells like comfort to me.

~

At a movie night not long ago, for some reason my friends and I started talking about gifts. This was a group of friends in which I feel comfortable enough to admit the more awkward aspects of my personality, so I told them that I keep lists about them. “Sooner or later, everyone will tell you what they want,” I said. One of them, for example, had mentioned a handful of records he’d hoped to find on vinyl. Another had, once upon a time, expressed a desire for a particular graphic tee. Shortly after the next movie started, one guest, who’d come after the gifts conversation, blurted out in excitement, “I want that jacket!”

“Exhibit A!” I said in triumph, but everybody else had already moved on from that idea so my self-satisfaction was met with confusion.

Gifts are the most tangible form of love, at least if we categorize our affections by the love languages philosophy. If one were so inclined, it would make sense to ask why I keep notes about ways to match giving to a person but don’t, say, try to keep track of the ways those same friends could be served well, or what forms of verbal affirmation make them feel especially honored, or what kinds of touch are especially comforting to them – or if they are comfortable with any touch at all. Perhaps that’s an area where mental notes are best.

One time I told a friend that my love language, or at least the tongue that speaks loudest and most clearly, is quality time. Just enjoying someone’s company, knowing that they are enjoying mine, no matter what we are doing, swells me up like a balloon. (The next time I saw her, she told me she thought we should spend less time together. I don’t know that I’ve ever been more hurt by such a simple sentence.) Is it any surprise? I’ve had dreams of abandonment since I was four years old.

In A Grief Observed, CS Lewis’ panicked, scribbling attempt to navigate himself through the death of his wife, Lewis noticed that his need to feel comforted by God was preventing him from feeling any comfort at all.

You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can’t, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can’t get the best out of it. ‘Now! Let’s have a real good talk’ reduces everyone to silence. ‘I must get a good sleep tonight’ ushers in hours of wakefulness. Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst…. And so, perhaps, with God. I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.

My pleading mantra, uttered in rhythm to every heartbeat – even before I could understand the concept – has been, “Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t go.” What a fool I’ve been. I’ve had a clutching vice grip around nothingness and all the while the Eternal One has been waiting patiently to sweep me into His loving arms.

In Remembrance of My Mom

In the last conversation I had with my mom – this was about ten days before she died – I asked her what she still wanted to accomplish, what was on her bucket list? I sat at the foot of her bed in the darkness of the early evening, the mood set by the ambient glow from the hall light and the white-noise purr of a sleeping cat, and we mused about how she would like to spend her last days, a period once so distant and abstract, but now on her doorstep. She told me there were two things she intended to prioritize above everything else: to finish some aprons, and to spend as much time as possible with the people most important to her.

It wasn’t until later that struck me as odd. It wasn’t that she wanted to see Paris or live to her next birthday or something understandably self-indulgent. It wasn’t as though she felt her life was incomplete unless she sang echoes off the acoustic rocks of the Grand Canyon or stared awestruck at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Nor did she appraise her life as meaningless unless she saw Hamilton on Broadway or James Taylor at Carnegie Hall. Rather, she wanted to use her remaining precious and finite time to carefully and intentionally wrap her friends and family in the fabric of her love.

Indeed, if there was anything my mom had in abundance – apart from romance novels, or multi-thousand-piece puzzles, or wall art with the word “joy” – it was friends. She had more devoted friends than any one person could possibly hope for. These last few months I saw countless people dedicate their time and energies into comforting and encouraging her. Even as her autonomy was stripped away, as she was brought low by the anchor of her cancer, she was hoisted high by your love; as her body sank into the grave of her illness, her spirit soared under the winds of your affection. I watched in awe as some of you tenderly rubbed lotion on her ailing feet, or scrubbed the bathroom sink she no longer had the strength to clean herself, or even just popped in to offer a word of friendly encouragement. Your contributions were noticed, and they were cherished.

She said towards the very end that there were many people to whom she still had things to say, but in the haze of her illness she couldn’t quite clutch their names from the fog or recall what she had intended to tell them. But I feel confident I can summarize what she wanted to say to each of you: that she loved you deeply, and she was infinitely grateful that you were in her life.

True to form, in that last conversation, my mom wasn’t especially interested in dwelling on the minutia of her plans for her final days. She was far more interested in knowing what plans I was making for myself, what roadmaps I was drawing for my future. She asked, perhaps as a provocation, if I was making plans to marry my girlfriend (though what sort of mother would she be if she didn’t?).

I told her – and Gracia, I hope this doesn’t catch you off guard – that I didn’t know yet, but I was giving it serious thought. I shifted a little closer on the bed and took her hand in mine – a moment that echoed with both devastation and joy in the hours shortly before her death as she clutched that same hand tightly and persistently as though it were all that was keeping her alive.

She asked me what I’d want my wedding to be like, if I were to get married, and I told her how I’d want it to be: ankle deep in the cool waters of the Baptism River, surrounded by the surreal colors and the brisk beauty of a North Shore autumn, wearing Red Wing boots and Pendleton flannel, circled by my closest friends perched on rocks above us like cherubs.

“That sounds like exactly the sort of thing that you would want,” she said to me. I think she meant it as a compliment. “I just wish I could be there for it.”

I squeezed her hand and kissed her forehead. “I do too,” I whispered. It was clear she was getting tired, so I left her room to let her sleep. Looking back, I wish I’d stayed until she dozed off, until her snores chased the startled cat from the room.

In a heartbreaking essay about the stillbirth of his first son, the art historian Matthew Milliner tells what could be described as the miraculous origin story of St. Clement, the Bishop of Rome:

The Emperor Trajan had Clement thrown into the sea with an anchor around his neck. When Clement’s companions prayed to see the martyr’s body, the “sea drew back three miles, and all walked out dry-shod and found a small building prepared by God in the shape of a temple, and within, in an ark, the body of St. Clement and the anchor beside him.”

The story then grows even more odd. Each year, at the anniversary of Clement’s death, the sea drew back for visitors. One year, a woman went out to the shrine with her little son, and the child fell asleep. When the ceremony was finished and the sound of the inrushing tide was heard, the woman was terrified and forgot her son in her hurry to get ashore with the rest of the crowd. It was there she remembered, and loud were the cries and lamentations she addressed to heaven, wailing and running up and down the beach, hoping she might see the child’s body cast up by the waves. When all hope was gone, she went home and mourned and wept for a whole year.

At the next anniversary of Clement’s death, when the sea dutifully drew back, the grieving woman was the first to the tomb. She prayed at the shrine, and when she arose, the child—as if nothing had happened—was fast asleep where he had been left. “Thinking that he must be dead she moved closer, ready to gather up the lifeless body; but, when she saw that he was sleeping, she quickly awakened him and, in full sight of the crowd, lifted him in her arms.”

I know what our modern sensibilities would make of such stories, but for my part it rings true. In the perplexing mercy of death, God set aside the anchor of cancer that was tied to her neck and now cradles her in the ark of his arms. While my mother may not have been a saint, or conjured miracles, her love was as bountiful as her books. Although for now she sleeps, when the tide of this world recedes, I will hold her hand again.

 

Audio of this eulogy, delivered 2/9/19 at Rockpoint Church, can be found here.

Art by Emily Dikken

A Eulogy For Myself, In Anticipation of Dying Young

ed. note: About a week ago, in the wee small hours, I was almost hit by a car. The experience got me thinking about the practical details of dying unexpectedly, whether everyone involved would know my burial preferences or what songs I’d like played at the service (is Iron & Wine’s “Naked As We Came” too obvious?). It also made me think of what I’d want to say to the people who love me enough to come to my funeral. This is what I came up with.

i.
I would hope that by the time these words are read aloud in front of a captive audience – you all look wonderful in your classic black suits and ornate veils, by the way – my life will barely resemble the one I lead now. If all goes according to plan I will have died a peaceful death at home on my dairy farm, my gentle heifers Cownie Chung and Mary Tyler Moo-er grazing in a nearby pasture, the hypermodernist farmhouse I designed and built an enduring metaphor for my simultaneously forward-thinking and self-indulgent nature. I will be survived by my wife Helga, our three sons Sufjan, Maxwell, and Maximillian, and a princely Australian Shepherd named Sir Francis Barkin that I love more than the four of them combined.

Of course, life has a way of laughing at our plans. I can say with some confidence that I would never have met most of the people in this room had I received the future I laid out for myself. What a miracle that turned out to be! No less a modern prophet than Garth Brooks once observed, “Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.” The beautiful faces in this room are living testimony to the truth of that sentiment.

Some people preoccupy themselves with uncertainties about life after death. I have no such questions: I know that I will keep living. I don’t mean that in the strictly spiritual sense (although I certainly believe that to be the case as well). Perhaps you remember that essay I wrote about those aspects of other people’s personalities that have rubbed off on me, that have become integrated into my identity, inseparable from my soul. As you have been grafted into me, I have been grafted into you. I live on through you.

I live on when you garnish your butternut squash soup with toasted pistachios and some shards of Parmesan. I live on when you step around to execute a perfect inside-out counterloop, preferably around the net and for the win. I live on when you go top shelf on some sticky summer day, floating above the defender as though carried by cherubs. I live on when you complain that Tarantino’s character work got particularly shoddy after Jackie Brown. When you cry readily at a film, when you order the plainest thing on a menu to accurately gauge its quality, when you sit quietly and just absorb the unceasing human drama playing out in the lives of those around you, I get to live in you.

You found me malleable and seized that opportunity, molding me like sculptor’s clay. No doubt your fingerprints have been baked into my spirit by some cosmic kiln. (Hopefully I wasn’t murdered, or this metaphor just got very awkward from an evidentiary perspective.) Maybe ee cummings had something like this in mind when he wrote,

losing through you what seemed myself;i find
selves unimaginably mine;beyond
sorrow’s own joys and hoping’s very fears

yours is the light by which my spirit’s born:
yours is the darkness of my soul’s return
–you are my sun,my moon,and all my stars

And even if he didn’t, we get to misappropriate his words and intent to our hearts’ content. That is, after all, one of the beauties of art.

That is also one of the beauties of life. It is up to us to interpret and reinterpret our stories, and we can give value and meaning to their details. Superficial tidbits can be imbued with depths unfathomable in the moment. We own our biographies – as Chef John might have said, you are the John Dory of your life’s story – and it is up to us to decide when fidelity to a greater truth trumps fidelity to objective historical accuracy.

And so it is with how I’d like to be remembered. My closest friends no doubt remember our running gag about how the manager at Famous Daves once gifted us with a $7 trillion-dollar meal platter, a not-so-subtle joke about how easily we’ll exaggerate things in retelling, but also a nod to how prestigious, how august that gesture made us feel. When we were still poor college students, savoring the irony of buying kid’s meals for our weekly man nights, this wonderful woman gave us a meal that made us feel like warrior kings. The absolute cost of it is meaningless minutia compared to the emotional value of that gift.

Just a couple nights ago, I was trying to describe to a friend the feeling of being stranded at home with a broken-down car. I crafted an image of a frontiersman in a lonesome log cabin, deep in the wilderness, coughing up white smoke from the pine log that he’d not properly dried before adding to the fire, longing for human contact from anyone who wasn’t his softly-snoring beardly brother. But he dares not venture outside. “He’d die,” I said. “There are bears in these woods.”

In my mind, then, when you retell my stories, the best way to honor me is to identify the kernel of truth each of those stories was told to convey, and to use your best judgment about how to capture that truth in the retelling. Maybe that means that car we found just outside of Montevideo was shrouded in fog when it was, in fact, probably a clear winter night, and maybe the man we found stiff and rigid at the steering wheel was already turning blue. Maybe that means that balcony I pulled you from was on the fifteenth floor rather than the third. Maybe you lost three thousand dollars instead of seventy-five that time we got sushi and I told you that I loved you.

If it’s the feeling that matters, if it’s the emotional experience that is in some way the real truth, the image we use to craft that feeling or evoke that emotion is as real as what we otherwise call reality. Perhaps reality itself is itself a handcrafted image, its sole purpose to reveal these feelings to us. Perhaps these shadow plays are the only way by which such truths can be revealed: “Now I see in a mirror, dimly.”

“But when the perfect comes, the incomplete will pass away.”

I don’t know how I’ll be remembered. Hopefully my award-winning cheese hybrids (like a cross between Gorgonzola and Gouda called, you guessed it, “Blouda”) will merit mention, as will my bestselling self-help extraordinaire “The Macks Effect: Making Life Your Bitch Through Reverse Psychology.” Others will focus instead on my unlikely scientific breakthrough, the discovery of the heaviest element known to man (your mom). But if I had to choose, I hope the stories you tell are about how together we became more than ourselves. I hope you’d remember first those times it felt like our hearts had left our bodies and were dancing together on a stage only we could see. I hope you take comfort recalling those times we looked at each other with tears in our eyes, unsure if the pains we endured were woven from my wounds or yours, or if the joy we felt was your victory or mine. Were you the harmony to my melody, or was it the other way around? It couldn’t matter less. Together we sang a beautiful song.

 

Photo credit: Daniel Mick

The Peculiar Quality of Friendship

One question I like to ask people after I’ve known them a while is, “In your opinion, what is the exact moment that we started to become friends?” I’d have to concede that in many cases the trust and intimacy required for friendship came along so slowly that no one could identify an exact moment with any confidence, like pinpointing the precise place a creek becomes a river. On the other hand, many of my friends choose the same memory that I do. One friendship started the time we stayed up half the night talking about how I felt my life was crumbling in front of me. Another began when I happened to be the only person in earshot when the cumulative pressures of college and family had become overbearing. Yet another sprouted from a chance encounter in a piano practice room, where she was on the brink of tears and I managed the rare (for me) feat of saying something meaningful and encouraging.

I once described friendship as having five essential pillars – trust, comfort, affection, quality time, and open communication – but I’ve come to realize this model is at once too complicated yet not sophisticated enough. “Too complicated” because quality time and open communication aren’t so much components of friendship as they are the fuel it runs on. (Is gas really a part of a car? A question for the philosophers.) “Not sophisticated enough” because identifying those core components says nothing about the way they interact. Does open communication lead to comfort, or does comfort produce open communication? I’m self-aware enough to notice that it’s often when I start talking that people become uncomfortable.

Setting aside for a paragraph my instincts as a writer, I think friendship can be helpfully conceptualized as a tree, with roots of trust, a trunk and branches made from intimacy, love as its fruit, and communication and quality time the sunshine and rainwater that keeps it fed and makes it grow. Perhaps this is why those friendships with discrete beginnings – the ones we can trace from seed to sequoia – almost invariably involve some moment of profound vulnerability, a basic bid for support, a plea for understanding or compassion that is unequivocally answered.

But rain falls on concrete as well as trees. This obvious fact (and the brusque, blunt person who feels the need to pedantically point it out) has created a lot of conflict in my life. If the word “friend” is to be a useful term, it must refer to something stronger than just someone I talk to or spend time with: it must describe the essential nature of a particular kind of relationship. Nobody, except those who just moments prior had an explicit claim to the contrary, would take offense to the statement, “You’re not my employee” or “You’re not my spouse.” But to say, “You’re not my friend” is an egregious faux pas. Why should this be?

Of course, the first obvious answer to this question is that most people mean something altogether different than I do when they use the word, that their category for the term is much more expansive than my own. Perhaps they would likewise describe shrubs and cornstalks as “Basically just trees.” I hope you can at least understand why I find that lack of distinction unsatisfying.

C.S. Lewis noticed this too. “To the Ancients,” he wrote, “Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it. We admit of course that besides a wife and family a man needs a few ‘friends.’ But the very tone of the admission, and the sort of acquaintanceships which those who make it would describe as ‘friendships,’ show clearly that what they are talking about has very little to do with that Philia which Aristotle classified among the virtues or that Amicitia on which Cicero wrote a book. It is something quite marginal; not a main course in life’s banquet; a diversion; something that fills up the chunks of one’s time.”

The second – and infinitely more important – answer is that friendship is by its very nature selective and exclusive. Any conscious act of exclusion necessarily begs questions about value or worth. But we will continue to be selective, even as we are offended when we are not selected. We will continue to be exclusive even as we are excluded. Percipience is an essential quality of friendship, and our unease will not change that.

Even then, the inherent selectivity at play between friends can create jealousies and rivalries among those who have an equal or even greater claim to such a title. Who has not experienced the feeling of being unable to relate to a close friend when they are in deep rapport with someone else, or the feeling that this person you know intimately has transformed into someone unrecognizable while they are in the company of another friend? White chocolate brings out unexpected flavors in both caviar and coffee, yet few would dream of combining the latter two. If coffee could talk, would it express its insecurities that white chocolate sometimes hangs out with a much fancier friend? Would caviar envy coffee’s much wider social circle and wonder why he needed to hog white chocolate’s attention? Has this metaphor gone off the rails yet?

I like to think of friends as fellow-travelers on the same secret road, people with whom I share a (sometimes intuitive and sometimes explicit) sense of understanding, whether about a shared experience or passion or even something entirely ineffable. “I know how you feel. Let’s walk a while together.” Or, as Lewis wrote, “The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’” Perhaps this peculiar quality of friendship is one of the many that gives it so much value. Regardless, I want trees to climb, even while I see the value of cornstalks. I want friendship, not something like it.

Donald Trump, Charles Manson, and the Importance of Basic Fairness

Following the belated death of Charles Manson, Newsweek published an article comparing the rhetorical style of the late cult leader and murderer to that of the current American president. Based primarily on the opinion of psychoanalyst Mark Smaller, the Newsweek piece notes similarities in how both Manson and Trump were “able to speak in a way that engaged those who felt marginalized or alienated.” Per Smaller, “Our current president speaks in an emotional or affective way to large numbers of people in our country who feel a kind of alienation or disconnection from the government.” Meanwhile, “cult followers … are so seduced by feelings of acceptance and understanding that they accept their leaders’ ideologies regardless of how destructive or dangerous they may be.”

Evaluations of Trump’s communication style are nothing new. Evan Puschak, more commonly known as the Nerdwriter, has done at least two video essays on the topic. One focuses on how Trump answers questions, using an example from an interview with Jimmy Kimmel in the wake of the San Bernardino shooting, while the other takes a look at how he composes tweets. Studies have shown that Trump communicates on a fourth-grade level, using disproportionately simple, monosyllabic language, a “volley of jabs” as Puschak puts it, and ending his sentences with strong, punchy words. Likewise, Trump charges his tweets with emotion by taking advantage of the fact that we perceive Tweets (and texts and other screen-oriented communication) to be more akin to speech than to writing. “Where his opponents and other politicians write through Twitter, Trump speaks through it,” says Puschak. “Instead of asking us to read, he forces us to hear.”

While one might draw similar ideas from the Newsweek piece and the Nerdwriter videos, one is left with the feeling that putting Manson and Trump side by side was a little bit fanciful. While Newsweek does take pains to note that they are not trying to draw a direct comparison between Trump and Manson — “Smaller is clear that he does not believe President Donald Trump is similar to the convicted killer, or that their followers have any shared beliefs or characteristics” — it’s reasonable to wonder if such bases covering is a little bit disingenuous. It’s perfectly valid, I think, to draw comparisons to the way different leaders might use language to apprehend the devotion of impressionable minds; it’s also perfectly valid to point out that such comparisons could be made without such objectionable insinuations. Newsweek might not have been trying to say that Charles Manson and Donald Trump are similar in other ways, but they certainly didn’t seem to mind if we came away with that idea on our own.

These comparisons may be true while not being fair. If this example doesn’t strike you as particularly egregious, ask yourself what your reaction would be if Fox News compared Obama to Hitler because they both love dogs or if Breitbart likened Hilary Clinton to the serial killer Ted Bundy because they were both in favor of suicide prevention.

In the age of Internet memes, political talk shows, and political propaganda television dressed up as educational comedy, fairness is a dying virtue. We increasingly prefer to anger ourselves over things other people don’t actually think than to actively engage with what they do. In “The Reason for God,” Tim Keller notes that if you can’t formulate your opponent’s argument in a way that he or she would agree with, you can’t actually claim that you disagree with them. At this point, few of us seem at all tainted by exposure to our opponents, much less the strongest form of their ideas. Those witches might have had us in mind when they chimed, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. I’ve previously argued that most popular political positions can be framed as a positive (i.e., “Because I care about….”). In another of Evan Puschak’s video essays, he examines the pernicious effects of combining schadenfreude, the process taking delight in someone else’s misfortune, with politics, and how it’s helped create a more toxic political atmosphere. While it used to be that, “on some level, we believe our opponent group is genuinely trying to help, just going about it the wrong way,” we’ve slowly come to see each other as evil incarnate, and deserving of whatever bad things that come each other’s way. This truth is sad and demoralizing, but also self-apparent… and possible to stop. I think it’s on each of us to help create the world we want to live in.

If that’s not enough reason to give fairness another shot, think of the way that ignoring basic fairness distracts us from more important issues. The more time we spend discussing the nonexistent similarities between Donald Trump and Charles Manson, the less attention we can give to Trump’s record as president, or to the still lingering, unanswered accusations of sexual assault that have been leveled against him.

Roy Moore and Overcoming Perceptions

One of the great contemporary American heroes, in my opinion, is an Afghani immigrant named Mohammad Rahimi. In Afghanistan, Rahimi was an anti-Soviet mujahid, one critical of the Taliban. In the late 80s, Rahimi fled the Middle East and settled in Elizabeth, a New Jersey city about fifteen miles from New York City, where he opened a fried chicken shack which, thanks to Rahimi’s children, became a spot where local artists like Flee Jones would have rap battles.

In the summer of 2011, Rahimi’s son Ahmad disappeared for three months. When he returned, Ahmad was no longer the genial, generous kid he’d purportedly been growing up. He exchanged his graphic tees and hip-hop persona for traditional Muslim garb and beard. He started praying in the back of the chicken shack, posting concerning messages on jihadi websites, and wrote about his desire to become a martyr. Mohammad caught him watching Al Qaeda and ISIS training videos. After Ahmad refused to stop, Mohammad reported his son to the FBI, who in turn cleared him as a potential terrorist and turned their attention to other, more acute, threats.

Two years later, Ahmad detonated three bombs in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York. Thirty-one people were injured, though incredibly no one was killed.

Putting it in print is easy enough, but it’s hard to overstate just how rare a thing it is for a father to turn his son into the authorities on only the suspicion that he’s a terrorist-in-training, much less an Afghani mujahid in post-9/11 New York. In fact, in the history of crime, we are far more likely to find the opposite tendency: people overlooking the obvious culprit within their community in order to persecute an outsider.

In 2014, I wrote about the murder of a Texas police officer named Robert Wood. Wood had pulled over someone driving with their headlights out, and as he approached the stopped vehicle, the driver opened fire. Wood died at the scene. A month passed before police got a lead in the case: a sixteen-year old kid named David Harris had been bragging to his friends that he killed a cop. After interviewing Harris, the police found 1) the vehicle driven by the suspect had been stolen from Harris’ neighbor; 2) ballistics from the gun used to kill Officer Wood matched the gun Harris had stolen from his father, a .22 revolver; 3) this gun was still in Harris’ possession; 4) Harris matched the description provided by Wood’s partner; and, 5) between the murder and the interview, Harris had been arrested for holding up a convenience store. Inexplicably, the Dallas police department and a jury of twelve Americans were convinced that an Ohio hitchhiker named Randall Adams had murdered Officer Wood. Adams served twelve years in prison before he was able to get the conviction overturned. Harris was never officially charged with the crime.

Harris had prior contact with the Dallas Police Department, and it was those incidents that helped him escape what should have been a very straightforward murder conviction. Harris was, by all accounts, a charming and gregarious teenager, a troublemaker with a difficult home life who everyone expected would mature into a decent person. It was almost certainly the fact that the officers working the case already knew and liked Harris that they couldn’t accept the obvious fact that he murdered their friend.

Two more cases that follow this pattern are the murders of Mary Phagan and Meredith Kercher which, although separated in time and place by almost a hundred years and five thousand miles, have astonishing similarities. Both girls were killed by men who were the last known people to see them alive. Both assailants had criminal histories. Both assailants defecated at the scene. Both murderers were well-known within the local communities. Both murderers pointed police towards scapegoats that were outsiders to the community: in Phagan’s case, a northern Jew named Leo Frank, and in Kercher’s, an American student named Amanda Knox. After three trials and several years, Knox was exonerated and returned to America. An impatient mob kidnapped Frank from his jail cell and lynched him in the public square of Marietta, Georgia.

I’m not sure what artifact of human psychology drives us to divert our suspicions from clearly suspect people in our in-group and onto clearly innocent people in our outgroup. It’s easy to hypothesize that after millennia of living in small, tight-knit communities, a tendency towards xenophobia and its related pathologies has been bred into our survival instinct. Perhaps it’s related to the psychology of perceptions, that it’s harder to change a formed perception than it is to create a new one. Perhaps it’s something more complex than that. The point, though, is that the urge to “protect our own” is common, whereas the tendency to see someone we know or someone we love as a murderer, as an agent of evil, is so rare that is basically a miracle when it does happen.

This is a roundabout prologue to talking about senate candidate Roy Moore, but my point about him is succinct but the context to understand it is lengthy. When allegations emerged last week that Moore had sexual contact with a 14-year old girl when he was 32, some people were surprised that some Moore supporters didn’t immediately abandon him. But this does not surprise me, nor do I find it inherently wicked. In a perfect world, they’d ask him to step down and drop out of the race. But as someone who’s framed himself as anti-establishment, who portrays his opposition as willing to slander him, it strikes me as exactly what we should expect to see.

Listen, if it’s an act of heroism when a man can turn his own son into the authorities (and I think it is) then that’s only because of how difficult a thing like that is to do. It should not surprise us that their constituents stuck by Bill Clinton or Ted Kennedy, even as it became more and more apparent that each had committed horrible crimes. And it shouldn’t surprise us that his supporters don’t yet want to abandon Moore. That they can’t yet identify him as a creepy old man who has no business in politics isn’t evidence of their wickedness but their humanity. I hope Roy Moore drops out of the race, or barring that gets trounced in the election. But I refuse to see his base as anything other than what they are: the most recent example of a group of people held hostage by the idiosyncrasies of human psychology.

A Note on Race and Mass Shootings

Imagine I have a jar of marbles, 70% of which are yellow. If I pull out ten marbles at random, would you think it odd if seven of them were yellow? What if it was thirteen out of twenty, or …

Is the Media Racist?

1. Last week, writing in The Intercept, civil rights activist Shaun King wrote a story about Michael Christopher Estes, a North Carolina man who planted a bomb at Asheville Regional Airport. The bomb failed to go off. Estes was eventually …

Police Shootings Revisited

This time last year, I published a blogpost that examined police shootings in America. In it, I tried to determine whether police shootings of black people outpaced their expected value in terms of their population share from state to state. I found that the majority of states were within the expected distribution, i.e., in 33 states there was insufficient evidence to suggest that the police were more likely to fatally shoot black people than anyone else. However, the remaining 17 states (my home state of Minnesota among them) showed evidence of racial bias. That is to say, far more black people were shot than could be explained by randomness alone. Additionally, in the most concerning case — when the victim was unarmed, not resisting, and not fleeing the scene — black victims constituted a plurality of the cases. They not only outpaced their population share but were the most common victims of police shootings under those conditions.

Since it’s been a year† I thought it would be a good time to revisit the question and see how we’ve progressed in this area. Despite the best efforts of Colin Kaepernick and his like-minded cohort, it has been my impression that this issue has gotten significantly less press attention in the last year than in the year that preceded it. Is this a reflection of real, quantifiable improvement in this problem? Or have we simply turned our attention to other things?

The results, as one might expect, are something of a mixed bag. Nationwide, the shooting of black people is down roughly 8.5%, while every other category is up slightly. In total, this amounts to an extra three fatal shootings per month, or about a 4.2% rise from the preceding period.

It’s not immediately clear what’s driving the increase in police shootings. I compared state per capita police shootings to per capita violent crime and there is a loose correlation between the two; however, one would expect states that have seen an increase in violent crime to also show an increase in police shootings, but that does not appear to be the case:

Perhaps these results would be more meaningful if examined on the city level. I am unaware of a city level violent crime rate data set.

When segmented by state, the picture looks quite similar to last year. Every state that showed evidence of racial bias last year continued to show it once the next year of data was incorporated. Moreover, three states and the District of Columbia moved from within the expected distribution to borderline status.

Iowa (n=13, p=.027, k=4), for example, is just barely off the expected distribution, though its small sample size doesn’t inspire compelling conclusions be drawn from its example:

Washington D.C. (n=11, p=.490, k=10) is similar to Iowa in this respect. D.C. only had three fatal police shootings in 2017, but all of the victims were black men.

North Carolina (n=75, p=.216, k=28) has a sample size that justifies its placement among the problematic states. Twelve of North Carolina’s twenty-five victims of fatal police shootings in 2017 were black.

Washington state (n=70, p=.037, k=11) had a surprising number of total shootings. Based on national averages, one would expect to see about 30% fewer such shootings, or about 20 (!) fewer fatal shootings since January 2015. Though black victims made up a somewhat smaller proportion of the total shootings in Washington, they well outpaced the population share.

California (n=457, p=.067, k=72) continues to be the worst offender in the country, killing the most of every race and significantly outpacing its population share. In fact, if California’s total shootings were simply the difference between its actual shootings and its expected shootings by population size, it would still rank second in the nation.

It should be noted, of course, that police shootings are not randomly distributed by state, nor are they consistently proportionate to population size. California, Texas, Florida, and New York are the four most populous states in the country and they rank 1st, 25th, 34th, and 51st respectively the rate of police shootings. An important aspect of this conversation is to determine how, exactly, to make California, Arizona, and Oklahoma more like New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. (To the best of my knowledge, no one has studied variance in police shootings by state.)  Racial parity here is a laudable goal, but it will be incomplete — and of small comfort to grieving families — if it is not also accompanied by a rapid decline in overall police shootings.

It’s not all bad news. While states such as Washington, Ohio, Florida, and Missouri are killing more people overall, states like Texas, New Mexico, Nebraska, and Colorado are killing fewer. Texas, for instance, averaged reduced their rate of fatal shootings by more than one per month over the course of 2017. This, unfortunately, was not enough to offset the gains in states like Washington, Ohio, and Missouri. Perhaps closer examination of either extreme — with a contrast with the states that saw little or no change — would provide some insights.

Furthermore, states like Nevada, Alabama, and Kentucky were among eleven in total that significantly improved their performance with respect to racial bias. Nevada, for example, didn’t kill a single black person in 2017, despite the black population of Nevada hovering around 5%.

Lastly, the category I referred to last year as the “most insidious form of police shootings” — when the victim was unarmed, not resisting, and not fleeing the scene — has inched closer to the expected distribution. Black people are no longer the plurality of victims of this category. This superficially positive change masks the devastating fact that the number of this type of shooting has skyrocketed: 35% more in the last twelve months than in the twenty one months that preceded it.

On the whole, I would argue that there is reason for optimism. While it’s unclear what is driving the changes that are reflected in the data, the overall picture is one that increasingly matches the population demographics of our country. (It should be pointed out that this facet is understated in this analysis as the country has gotten less white since the last census, meaning the population demographics used here would make us more likely to find evidence of bias than if more recent figures were available.) Whether this change has been driven by new policies, by increased media attention and protesting, or is just an artifact of having a more robust data set, that aspect of the trend seems to be positive. No state is perfect, and there is a lot of work yet to be done, but the data suggest that, with respect to racial bias, we have taken a step in the right direction. Police are killing more white people, however. Perhaps this is tied to the recent spike in the crime rate, but the data are unclear on this point.

 

† Every time “2017” is used in this post, I am referring to the span from October 10th, 2016 to October 11th, 2017, and “2015-2016” refers to January 1st, 2015 to October 9th 2016. Apologies for the confusion: this choice was made to avoid making the date references more cumbersome than need be.