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I Miss it All

(Photo by: Andy Stagg/View Pictures/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Devin Kelly | Longreads | July, 2021 | 17 minutes (4,874 words)

Read Devin Kelly’s previous Longreads essays: “Running Dysmorphic,” “What I Want to Know of Kindness,” “Out There: On Not Finishing,” and “Repetitive Stress.”

I hate the part of me that has become impatient. I notice it more these days. I notice it when I create a plan for myself and a friend’s schedule doesn’t fit that plan. I notice it in how I structure my days, even days supposedly given to leisure. How I’ll give myself an hour to read upon waking, an hour to exercise. How, if I’m going for a walk, I want to be outside by a certain time. How I’ll start to feel anxious if I’m not. I clench my jaw. I check the time. I run my thumb over my index finger and crack my knuckle. I want a drink. I straddle the edge, feel myself losing my cool, an ache in each temple. What uncertainty am I losing by being so structured? How many mysteries have gone unnoticed? Why do I feel, in a world that consistently, without fail, automates and compartmentalizes my time, like I have to do the same for myself? By structuring myself in such a way, do I lose grace?

I’ve spent the last eight months unable to run, rehabbing the damage done to my leg as a result of an osteochondral lesion in my knee. I recently underwent surgery to transplant cadaver cartilage into the small area on my femur where my defect was located. And I feel that same hatred of impatience today, as I nurse my leg post-surgery. I feel beleaguered by injury. Which is another way of saying I feel helpless. My father helped me up the stairs a week ago. My girlfriend brewed me coffee, laid out my pain pills, refilled the ice in the tiny freezer. I kept saying sorry. I kept feeling inconvenient, like I had no value. Worthless. Everything felt like something to be endured rather than loved.

Everything felt like something to be endured rather than loved.

During the eight months of injury prior to surgery, I thought I could strengthen my body back into working like it used to, and I bought a spin bike. Not a Peloton. Good lord, no. A Schwinn. A sturdy, entry-level thing to do my body justice. For nearly every morning since the end of last summer when I got hurt, I have hopped on that spin bike in my apartment and absolutely barraged my legs into oblivion. I made my own workouts at first, then, not knowing if I was pushing myself enough, enlisted the help of this British cycling team, GCN, and their indoor cycling workouts on YouTube. After exhausting myself of all of those videos and their perfect voices, I downloaded the Peloton app.

There is something about an exercise machine that speaks to every part of my personality I try to keep hidden in polite company. Prior to the pandemic, if I needed a day off from running or had to engage in something slightly less stressful to heal a running-related injury, I would go to the gym and walk on the stairmaster. I have a hard time admitting this to anyone. It feels wrong. But I would go, set the machine to scale the height of the used-to-be-named Sears Tower, which appeared as a pixelated Tetris-y block on the screen, and step until my socks dampened all the way into my shoes. There is a way that exercise machines enact the endless, grueling task of being alive in late capitalism. They feel almost Sisyphean, like how Hillary Leichter, in her novel Temporary, writes: “the world is infinite, and the work is, like, endless.” No exercise machine hides itself, or its true nature. You know this. You understand. When you step on a rotating set of stairs, or ride atop a spinning stationary wheel, or jog on a humming conveyor belt, you know that you aren’t going anywhere. And yet still, you go, even if sometimes, as Leichter writes, you feel “silly for expecting anything at all.” We feel mindless and used in our labor, and then we hop on our machines that go nowhere and perform the same kind of dance with our bodies. It’s so pervasive that it has become, in part, a cliché. We laugh about it. We say this is life under capitalism. And yet, sometimes I worry that, regardless of our ironic self-awareness, we lose a little bit of one another each day. I know I’m being sentimental. I’ll be blunt. Each day, we are losing one another. And by one another, I mean: everything. And by everything, I mean: in a world where it sometimes feels we have to jerry rig into our lives both what we love to do and who we love to do it with, where we have to apologize for the excesses of personality that are not the same as the excesses of production, where we have to somehow — I did not know this was possible, tell me if it’s possible — make time, we lose the possibilities of connection that make up so much of the inherent value of a life.


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When you decide that you want to do a Peloton workout, you can filter your wants down to the smallest, most specific extremes. You can ride for 15 minutes, 45, 90. You can spend the whole time going up a hill that doesn’t exist. You can decide if your preferred level of difficulty that day is 7.8 or 6.2. Whatever you want. You can choose your favorite instructor. When you ride, you can turn the leaderboard off. You become the curator of the museum of your experience. You don’t have to talk. You can live in the workout you demand. In doing so, you are no longer beholden to others, to their sweat, or a friend’s need for a bathroom break. You can even pause and then return. What remains, after all of this, are the only things Peloton deems a community good for: encouragement, competition, and independence. If you want to give someone a high-five, you can give them a virtual high-five. I once gave one by mistake and then fretted about it for a day. I had no reason to do it. It was an error, a stray finger. I couldn’t apologize. I couldn’t see the recipient’s face. I felt ashamed. The instructor peppers in encouragement throughout the workout. Birthdays. Milestones. Things that are holistic and uncontroversial. If it’s your hundredth time taking an on-demand spin class, you’ll get your name shouted out. If you want to race, too, you can race your community. Goodbye, friends. But if you want to go at your own pace, you can ignore the leaderboard. Either way, it’s your ride. You choose.

There is a way that exercise machines enact the endless, grueling task of being alive in late capitalism…you know that you aren’t going anywhere.

The illusion of community is at the heart of so much of our contemporary society. In his book This Life, Martin Hägglund puts it best when he writes: “If we are committed to capitalism, we are committed to commodifying more and more aspects of our lives.” One of those recently-commodified aspects is the very idea of community. In the recent documentary, WeWork: Or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, one interviewee discussed how the entire “We” corporation was “helping you live and not just exist.” The emphasis there is mine. Highlighting a difference between living and existing is central to the commodification of everything. It used to be the case that if you did not buy a certain singular product — the newest iPhone, for example — you were simply existing, not living. Now, it’s not just about product. It’s about community. If your experience of community isn’t individualized, fine-tuned to generate success on your terms, are you really living?

We know community is commodified because it is at the heart of an app like Peloton’s appeal. Even the word peloton refers to the main group of bicycle riders in a race, the ones who aren’t in the breakaway lead group or chase pack. But what is at the heart of such a community? A community where, even if you once attended a live class, the lights were dimmed low, and it felt like it was only you, your bike, and the leaderboard? A community where, if you attend from your own home, it is only you, and virtual high-fives, and the aching solitude of a screen? A community where you aren’t annoyed by people’s insecurities, by their detours, by their having-a-bad-day-can-we-take-it-slow-questions, by their endless talking, by their bathroom breaks, by the endless list of what makes a human, well, human? A community where, if you don’t want to, you just don’t have to deal with the other people in the community?

***

The sadness of the past year has been a sadness of isolation. When I got hurt and couldn’t run, I didn’t just miss being outside. I missed the sincere, unfiltered joy of being among the intricacies and inconveniences of people. Each morning, riding alone on my bike to nowhere, I nitpicked my intensity and length of workout down to the minute. I rode in intervals and rested in intervals and measured my heart rate in beats per minute. I filtered my life completely. I wanted to be out there, though, blowing hot breath on my hands as I waited to meet my friend Andrew, the cold sweeping over the Central Park reservoir while so many others ushered themselves past, each and every person part of the endless chatter and dance of things. I wanted to be inconvenienced. To have Andrew be five minutes late, or for me to be five minutes late. I wanted to arrive, and then be asked to go the other way around the park. I wanted to give in to someone else’s wants. I missed my friends. I missed them so much.

If your experience of community isn’t individualized, fine-tuned to generate success on your terms, are you really living?

In all my years of running with my friends, I have been met so many days with the inconvenient and the unexpected. Some days, I have been the cause of that inconvenience. As a walk-on runner on my college team, I often did not feel like I could manage even the pace of our easy runs. Workouts that were supposed to be gentle ended up feeling brutal. But we learned how to translate the difficulty into solidarity. When my college team arrived at Van Cortlandt Park for midseason track workouts, we heard the same refrain from our distance coach. It wasn’t some canned exaggeration about effort. Holding a takeout coffee in one hand and a stopwatch in the other, he said, over and over again: the time in the front is the time in the back. It meant something small, but important. Whether you were leading the workout’s most recent interval or being dragged along in the draft of everyone else, you all clocked in at the same time, even if you lagged a few steps behind. I guess another way of putting it is simpler: if you were faster than the rest, you were still slow. And if you were slower than the rest, you were still fast. There was no inconvenience. There was just each other.

I think about the beauty of being dependent on another’s whims so often these days. I think about missing the beauty that comes with such a long, extended moment. In Ross Gay’s essay “Inefficiency,” he writes about how he loves “just wandering,” before adding the sentence: “Maybe you’re with a friend, and maybe the inefficiency will make you closer.” I worry friendship is the next territory of consumption and commodification, to the point where you can no longer simply wander with a friend, just to see what closeness might occur. When we have been alone in so many ways for so long, I worry that we run the risk of losing the ability to find value in one another organically, in the ways people know best. The small, daily inconveniences of life. The long run cut too short. The short run ventured long.

Those small inconveniences begin with the ordinariness of a friend asking if we can do an extra mile one day. It’s not that such acts end as bigger values, but rather that such acts are of value. So often, our actions are tied to outcomes that are said to be of value, but what if the actions — as ordinary and inconvenient as they sometimes feel — are the things that are of value? When I’m running with my friends, I often think of how incomprehensible it is that we are friends. I’m a teacher who wakes up early to read. One of my friends hasn’t read a book in years. And yet, because of how often we have moved together through inconveniences, how often we have breathed side by side, or how often one of us has paused while the other has tied a shoe or sprinted into a bathroom or stopped for a drink of water, we have learned the value of connection brought on by vulnerability, the love required to go by the same stopwatch while moving, sometimes, at different speeds, each of us with wholly different needs. My friend who doesn’t read still reads everything I write.

Perhaps one central question of our daily politics is what am I open to today? It’s why I love Ross Gay’s assertion in another essay, “Loitering Is Delightful,” that “laughter and loitering are kissing cousins, as both bespeak an interruption of production and consumption.” That interruption of production and consumption is central, I think, to our experience of meaning in life. Lately, my interruptions of production are solely my own. I teach remotely because of my surgery, my leg propped up and braced beneath my laptop. In breaks between classes, I walk with my cane to the bathroom. I come back. I sit down and pick up my cane and pretend it’s a shotgun. When I can’t reach something I blow it away. When I’m frustrated, I shoot a big hole in the wall. I browse various online communities and feel at once enthralled and alone. I read. I say the words aloud. No one responds. I crave a cigarette. I get back to work. In each of those actions, I am alone. I feel helpless alone and scared alone and at work alone. The thing about laughter and loitering is that we engage in such acts among people. And the thing, sadly, about production and consumption is that our culture has fashioned it so that we can engage in such acts alone, even when we are in a room full of people. We browse alone. We buy alone. We are so close to living and dying alone.

***

Prior to being injured, I ran with my friends Nick and Matt across the state of New York. It took a week. We averaged almost 60 miles a day, through towns I don’t remember, each day beginning with these dark, foggy river valley mornings that morphed into sweltering blacktop infernos. Perhaps, reading this, you might think that there’s some greater story there. Maybe you’re thinking he should write an essay about that. The truth is, the product of our run — all those miles — meant little compared to the sidetracks. The hours spent in the crew van with the AC on full blast, eating turkey sandwiches and waiting for the heat to die down. The bear we had to slow down for, letting the big guy cross the road and then worrying for miles about him bursting out of the tree line to devour us. The detour through Pennsylvania after we found out it was illegal to run on a state highway. The morning Nick tweaked his ankle and had to stop every mile, and how we tried everything — wrapping it, kissing it, rubbing it raw with our sweaty thumbs — to make the pain go away. And how the pain didn’t go away. And how Nick had to stop. And how we had to talk, for a long time, about how it wasn’t about the miles and the daily monotonous trot of progress, how it was about us. And how that was hard.

That conversation was hard because we were confronting the decision of whether we valued the sum of our experience — the cumulative miles run, the ability to say we ran across a state — or the dailiness of our experience, the time spent among one another. The truth is, it’s hard to value the latter, because our culture gives us no way to commodify that value. “If I am really / Something ordinary,” the poet Larry Levis writes, “that would be alright.” Our culture doesn’t agree. Saying that it was okay to stop was saying that it was okay to be among one another in a different way, that we valued the dailiness of our lives together more than being able to brag that we achieved some goal. It was hard, though. Because we had to learn how to say that.

A day after Nick stopped, I stopped, and only Matt ran on the final day, from Rochester to Niagara Falls. If I could have fashioned it in my mind, I would not have fashioned it that way. We would have all run together, the entirety of the state, with joy blitzing out the sides of our mouths. But when you are among people, even and especially the people you love, you don’t get to fashion it your way. And that’s okay. The beauty of people is that you become beholden to the fragility and waywardness of others, just as they are beholden to you. I know this because I have inconvenienced many a friend. I forget every birthday. I’ll take a week to respond to a text message. I used to get sad at parties and make people stand outside with me while I smoked. I don’t know how to drive. Everyone drives me everywhere. Being friends with me is like being friends with a tiny king who hasn’t found his kingdom.

The beauty of people is that you become beholden to the fragility and waywardness of others, just as they are beholden to you.

And yet, there are people who love me. Do you know how hard that was to write? So fucking hard. I deleted it the first time I wrote it because I was scared of saying it, as if those people themselves would walk through the walls of this room where I’m sitting and say no, we don’t and then disappear. I deleted it the second time, too. And the third. But there are people who love me. People willing to walk slow with me as I amble with a cane. People willing to try to run with me across a state. People willing to wait when I am late. People who send me things to read. People who read the things I write. People whose time I’ve wasted. People who ask me how I am, even still, even still. People, though, not products or machines. And there are so many people I love.

***

In an archived interview featured in the documentary WeWork: Or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, WeWork’s co-founder Adam Neumann says, “Through helping each other, we can become more successful.” It’s a relatively innocuous thought. And it makes sense. But when considered through the lens of a company that sold the very idea of community as a means of achieving economic value, it makes you, well, question everything. At the heart of the notion of co-working is the idea, quite simply, that if you gather a bunch of smart, hard-working people in the same glass-paneled room, you can commodify every aspect of their interactions. Their leisure time spent at the communal WeWork coffee shop could become a conversation that might lead to the next unicorn startup.

This isn’t dissimilar from an app like Peloton, where you can choose the experience of community that you prefer. In both options, people can be discarded if they don’t fit your own personalized idea of success, if the experience of being with others is not aligned to the best version of yourself, as Peloton’s mission statement puts it. In his letter to potential investors, Peloton CEO John Foley wrote that Peloton “prioritize(s) culture as much as any other business objective.” Prior to that, he wrote: “Peloton sells happiness.” What does happiness mean? Why does it need to be sold? Our society has been in the business of buying and selling such things forever. Why trust corporations to determine the value not just of happiness, but of community? When he left WeWork, Adam Neumann took a 1.7 billion dollar exit package while the company laid off many of its employees. Through helping each other, we can become more successful. Okay. Why not rephrase that? Through helping each other, we, simply, find value in each other.

The thing is, I don’t really care anymore about the best version of myself. That idea changes too much. It feels fickle. And the thing is, it often takes my friends to remind me that who I am is worth something at all. They see the ordinary parts of me that I feel, sometimes, are useless. “Saint friend,” Carl Adamshick writes in the opening poem of his book Saint Friend, “carry me when I am tired and carry yourself.” I have the book in my lap right now. It’s 9:43 PM. My girlfriend is asleep, and I’m listening to an album by Chuck Johnson, a slide guitarist whose reverb-washed instrumentals sound like you’re eavesdropping on the music director of a small hillside monastery as he plays something he thinks only God can hear. I keep the music turned low so it feels intimate, like it might be coming from another room, where someone else is listening to the same song as I am. Hi, imaginary friend.

I keep the music turned low so it feels intimate, like it might be coming from another room, where someone else is listening to the same song as I am. Hi, imaginary friend.

When I think of that phrase, Saint friend, I think of an ordinary weekday two years ago, when I called in sick to work. When I told him this in a passing text, my friend George asked if I had a thermometer. I said I didn’t, and he immediately took two trains to bring one to me. That was it. He came up my stairs, took my temperature, left the thermometer on the table, and went back home. I’ve been friends with George for years. We’ve done so much together, but I remember this the most. This inconvenience I caused him, and how it let him show his love.

When I think of that phrase, Saint friend, I think of my friend Hannah, who, when they heard I had to walk with a cane, brought me a miniature cane that they bought at a store that only sells tiny things. It’s 2 inches long. I have it right here between the fingers of my left hand. What value would such a thing have out there in the world where things are bought and sold? A clumsy mouse would break it. But I cherish it. It reminds me that someone cares. It feels sad that I need that reminder. But I do.

When I think of that phrase, Saint friend, I think of sitting with Nick and Matt, learning together how to say it’s okay to stop. It was a new phrase for each of our mouths. Tonight, sitting here and remembering that moment, it’s still a new phrase. It sits heavy in my mouth. It’s okay to stop. I’m not going anywhere right now. I’m pretty fucking immobile. It’s okay to stop. It’s still hard to say. But I owe it to my friends for helping me learn to say it. Adamshick writes that life is a “destination / different than expected. So many paths. / So many apologies. So much gratitude.” Our gratitude is cultivated in small ways. This tiny fucking cane that cannot help me walk makes me more grateful than the cane that does.

It makes me sad that there is a distinction between living and existing. That people have to place a “co” in front of a verb like working to highlight that it’s done with people. Living does not need to be qualified as time spent producing, time spent buying, time spent playing, or time spent planning. Living can simply mean time spent among. I find value in this. In the time spent among one another. Not just with, or next to, but among. To be among those who love us means to be among the all-ness of those who love us. To be among the dailiness of us. Our minor squabbles, our pettiness, our arguments and frustrations. It means to spend time. The kind of time, these days, that we are told is better spent producing or consuming. The kind of time, these days, that we are told is better spent alone. Maybe with. Maybe next to. Still alone.

If friendship becomes commodified and the experience of community becomes increasingly eliminated of the various intricacies of being among people, we lose the sometimes hard, sometimes surprising, sometimes fucked up, sometimes beautiful paths that are not simply the same path each day. Maybe we lose learning how to apologize. Maybe we lose learning how to say thank you. We lose, almost certainly, many moments of gratitude. We lose friends delivering thermometers. Tiny useless canes that end up meaning the world. We lose our various saint friends. Those people in our lives who carry themselves while they carry us. I don’t know what they’d be replaced by. I do, though. Fake high fives. Co-working spaces with glass-paneled offices. Product-driven social networks. Guided workouts attended by so many people, each in a room by themselves.

***

Prior to my surgery, when I would sit on my spin bike and choose the day’s workout, I considered the time I had to squeeze whatever effort I wanted out of the morning before the rest of the day’s tasks set in. Before I had to commute to the school where I teach. Before whatever commitment I made for the weekend, whatever augmentation of time, whatever penciled-in-thing. I said I am carving out space to be my best self, and then I put my headphones in, tilted my phone sideways to get a bigger screen, and sweated in isolated silence for an hour listening to a gesticulating, smiling person somehow bathed in the perfect amount of sweat offer mantras and congratulations and attempted joy to a few hundred or thousand people I did not see.

And yet, while on the bike going nowhere among people I did not know or hear or smell, I often imagined something else. I imagined being with my friends. Next to my bike, I hung a framed poster for the New York City Marathon, a race I’ve run now countless times, each time with the company of others. There was the time Matt came to New York from a wedding on a 10 PM train and arrived at my apartment at two in the morning, just a few hours before we had to leave for the starting line. We slept in the same bed, woke bleary-eyed and groggy, and stumbled to the train in the dark, and fumbled toward the start line in the just-arriving sun. I miss that moment. I cherish it. My current injury has an uncertain recovery. I don’t know if I’ll ever run a marathon the way I used to, or if I’ll ever run another marathon at all. But on the bike alone, in a digital room of invisible others, I never imagined myself alone. I never imagined myself without the company of my friends. I put them beside me in my mind. I could hear their breathing, the janky, staccato rhythm of a bunch of various footfalls. I could see us together, such strange and perfect companions, and how we felt beautiful.

That is what I miss about running. That is what I miss about my friends. That is what I miss about running with my friends. I miss the surprise of it. I miss the run we saw Hangover Duck, this red-eyed marvel of a bird who, depending on who tells the story, opened its mouth and said something different each time. I miss the run Ben introduced us to the leaf game, which began every fall and ended come December, when we could no longer sprint to catch falling leaves mid-stride. The run when Matt had to stop and really didn’t look okay and then we asked him, we said are you okay, and he said I’m okay, and then he was, he ended up being okay. Unbelievable. I miss what feels unbelievable. And the run Ben almost shat himself. I miss that. The run Julian and I got in a fight. I miss the run when a man washing his car sprayed us all with his hose. I miss each long run on a Sunday morning when no one talked for the first mile. I miss that silence, and what filled it: our bodies, still together. I miss the run before the funeral. There was that, yeah. And the run before the wedding. That, too. I miss the way the running — and all of its detours, its pit stops and unlaced shoes — taught us how to slow down for one another, how to have grace, how to find value in what we once thought had no value.

***

Devin Kelly is the author of In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen (published by Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the co-host of the Dead Rabbits Reading Series. He is the winner of a Best of the Net Prize, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian, LitHub, Catapult, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and more. He lives and teaches high school in New York City.

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Editor: Krista Stevens

Mormonism’s Sci-Fi Swan Song

The Book of Mormon on display by young LDS members attempting to persuade members of the audience at The Hill Cumorah Pageant to become believers and followers of the faith, prior to the dress rehearsal of the pageant in Manchester, NY, July 10, 2019. All photos by Heather Ainsworth.)

Andrew Kay | Longreads | July 2021 | 35 minutes (9,917) words)

This story was published in partnership with The Point Magazine.

 

Friday evening 

On a July evening in upstate New York, in a field long ago nicknamed “the Bowl,” a dozen men of divergent builds and ages line up in a row. They are wearing street clothes, and they stare — some at the ground, others at the sky — with the studied demureness of people who know they are being watched. Some 10 yards away a huddle of people acting in an official-seeming capacity size them up with laserlike intentness, shielding their mouths as they mutter impressions to one another. And all around them a hundred hushed onlookers have gathered, sharing whispered speculations about the outcome of something plainly momentous.

This is the culmination of casting day for the 2019 Hill Cumorah Pageant, a production put on by Mormons each summer and likely the largest outdoor theater event in America. It’s a spectacle that from the vantage of 2021 seems doubly alien: first because it is among the most bonkers, if least-known, of all pieces of Americana; second because it is an immense gathering of bodies, so my mental pictures of it, when I conjure them amid the pandemic’s late stages, appear like negatives of a vanished world.

The pageant is best described as cosmic cosplay: a volunteer cast of 770 Mormons from across the continent — electricians and nurses and adjunct professors, selected from an applicant pool of thousands — acts out key scenes from the Book of Mormon, the faith’s foundational text, before an international audience. (In 2019 that audience will total 43,000.) It has been happening since 1937, but in late 2018 the Mormon prophet, Russell Nelson, decreed that it must end; the last show, pageant organizers decided, would happen in 2020. Because of COVID-19, though, the finale will get postponed to 2021, and in time that too will be canceled — meaning this, the 2019 pageant, is the actual finale. That no one knows this now gives the events of this week a strange retrospective poignancy.

Since morning they have cast all 770 souls — all but one, that is — assigning parts both major and minor for a mythic drama that sprints through the panicked flight, from Jerusalem, of a party of fugitives in 600 BC, repulsed by that city’s godless decadence; their journey by ship to the Americas; their multiplying in time, then fissuring into two rival tribes; the appearance, hundreds of years later, of the just-resurrected Jesus before them — here, in the Americas, where Mormons believe Jesus walked and preached; the killing-off of the more virtuous tribe by the wickeder one, but not before the good tribe has buried a history of its doings through the centuries, inscribed on gold plates, for posterity; and finally, the unearthing of those plates 1400 years later by a young Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founder, at the urging of a being named Moroni, on the very hillside (the Hill Cumorah) where the pageant is performed.

All this they will reenact just six days from now, when the pageant’s directors will elevate this ragtag army to theatrical competence. Then, on opening night, in costumes ranging from 19th century Yankee garb to whatever fugitive Israelites living in the pre-Columbian Americas might have worn, they will dramatize these scenes on a 10-level stage overlooking the Bowl. Striding about, they will trace memorized movements and lip-synch dialogue to a soundtrack from the ‘80s featuring an epic, John Williams-esque score. Many will dance, embodying that double helix of the sacred yet campy that Mormons have mastered. And when the show is over, per tradition, they will go forth to meet the crowd, and the actor playing Joseph Smith, a perennial fan favorite — this year, a cherubic grocery-store consultant with an MBA — will get mobbed as if he were Freddie Mercury or Kesha.

All of that, though, is yet to come. Now they must cast Jesus — or rather, the Jesuses, for though there is only one Jesus in Mormonism, he is played in the pageant by two men. The first role, by far the less prominent, is the Jesus who appears early in the show, in a vision to the prophet Lehi in Jerusalem, foretelling his birth centuries later; he is called “Vision Savior.” The second is the Jesus who, at the pageant’s pinnacle, visits the Americas: “New World Multitude Savior.”

The men in the row mill about now, striking sheepish smiles or mumbling quips. Then they take turns stepping forward and pacing back and forth, waving magnanimously and exclaiming, “Bring me your children!” while the directors assess their resemblance to the Son of God. One is a friendly-faced man with auburn hair and a dad bod, perhaps 42; another, 23 or so, has a thick middle-parted mane and looks like a young Eddie Vedder. Still another, about the same age, looks to be a disciple too of CrossFit — and when it is his turn to stride to and fro he teeters backward in his cross trainers, as if burdened by his own pecs. It is unclear whether Jesus can be jacked, but the answer would appear to be no: he and the Vedder look-alike are politely waved away by the directors.

Evening advances, and the sky turns a providential pink. The directors confer, engaging in an act that they understand, by their own account, in miraculous terms. They cast everyone based on spiritual hunches: as Mormons see it, every human is a kind of telegraph that clicks, at intervals, into clarity and articulacy, alive with vibrations from beyond. (Mormons call these intervals “personal revelation.”) They await this clarity together now — and I have the sense, viewing them and the anxious would-be Jesuses, that I am seeing something I am not supposed to see: that the powers that be in Salt Lake City, who know of my trip to the pageant — who have stipulated that I must be accompanied by an escort at all times and have, I keep imagining, reviewed my criminal record and even my browser history — would not want me witnessing this unchoreographed scene.

At last the pageant’s artistic director, a Brigham Young University theater instructor named Shawnda Moss, hastens alone toward the remaining men, dismissing all but two — one the man with the dad bod, the other a slender kid in his early 20s with blond hair and dark eyebrows. The crowd coos. Moss looks up at both and, on the verge of tears, declares, “I would like to cast the two of you as our saviors.” Then she turns to the younger of the two and says, “I would like to cast you as our New World Multitude Savior”; to the middle-aged man: “I would like you to be our Vision Savior.”

 

Interlude; or, What the Hell Am I Doing Here

 

All that summer I had been sleepwalking. Mornings I woke, and with a glazed-over slowness, a boredom, slouched through my workaday round. Long after work I slouched down streets, familiar streets, which in darkness came to seem projections of my own neural pathways — a circuitry I was sick of. “I feel like I’ve lost the ability to be surprised,” I told a therapist. I tried edibles — chocolates — and when the first did nothing ate a second, then a third, and then all three arrived at once, a stampede that left me rocking back and forth, repentant, ready to moonlight as a D.A.R.E. speaker.

It wasn’t “depression,” exactly; it was spiritual, a staleness that, as an irreligious person, I’d fought with all my life. Except this time was different: I was glimpsing it all around me — in my students especially, college kids to whom I taught writing. The boy with the 142 IQ who went full Brian Wilson and stopped getting out of bed one day. The girl who confessed to me, in chillingly dispassionate tones, that she saw no point in living out the rest of her days. Something was afoot: some gathering despondency, strongest in the young, that had no shortage of worldly causes — planetary, economic — and yet exceeded these. It was a ghostly deficiency. All the Christian faiths in America were hemorrhaging members — and panicking. Fewer than half of millennials now identified as Christian, while Zoomers had just been declared “the Least Religious Generation.” “Nones” outnumbered Catholics and equaled evangelicals.

Meanwhile, a host of weird pseudo-religions like QAnon had sprung up to fill the void, which terrified me. One morning I drove out to the country and, cresting a summit, saw a giant Q mowed into a hillside.

One day I saw a headline that woke me up: the penultimate Hill Cumorah Pageant was approaching. I knew about the pageant because, though I live in Wisconsin, I grew up half an hour from where it takes place. I’d never attended, but knew that once a year a wormhole materialized down the road, something akin to J.K. Rowling’s Platform 9 ¾ that bore you not to Hogwarts but a parallel universe of mature make-believe. The headline kindled my curiosity. I pictured Mormons — a pair of missionaries clacking their way down the street in those white short-sleeved shirts, black pants, and dress shoes, facsimiles of Gallant from Highlights — and it struck me that they were the antithesis of what afflicted me and those I knew. Something in their door-to-door deportment, their earnestness and brio, seemed a soft rebuke to my own disenchantment.

I would go and walk among them, discover what they were plugged into and even absorb something of their radiance. In the process I would return to where I was from — and where, I should explain, I first knew the jolt of something higher.

I would go and walk among them, discover what they were plugged into and even absorb something of their radiance. In the process I would return to where I was from — and where, I should explain, I first knew the jolt of something higher. I’m an older millennial, one of the legions of “nones”; my upbringing was an experiment in godlessness — secular and scientific, shorn of euphemism. My mom was an ex-flower child, my dad an alumnus of the original Woodstock who made kombucha and jogged on our home treadmill in just tighty-whities and blue Pumas. To teach my brothers and me about origins, they read aloud from that candid seventies picture book, Where Did I Come From? In it were illustrations of a plump, ruddy-cheeked couple with thicket-like pubes who, in one image, were in bed together, locked in a coital embrace. “It’s a little like a sneeze,” the caption read, “but much better.”

What happens when you raise a child in a vacuum of religion, untroubled by sin, bereft of any metaphysical framework? I spent Sundays watching MTV and playing outside; I discovered masturbation at around age 8 (privately dubbing orgasm “the super feeling”), then, convinced anything so delightful must be injurious, renounced it. At night I lay awake, brooding on eternity. The worldview of Where Did I Come From, however clear-sighted, reduced human life to biology alone; there were no sequels entitledWhy Am I Here? or Where Am I Going? What dogged me most was the endlessness of death: an electric shock coursed through my body when I tried to grasp the infinitude of it, how all the eons I could think of were, joined together, the briefest prologue to whatever lay beyond the grave. How was everyone I knew just going about their affairs — talking on the phone, dawdling at the mall — when it was obvious they were hurtling toward that blankness? Shouldn’t they be screaming?

At some point, to divert my brain, I took to reading late into the night. The books were science fiction and fantasy — and because I shared a room with my younger brother who fell asleep easily, I read them by the glow of a Nintendo Game Boy accessory called a Light Boy. I sat up reading, at first, Orson Scott Card’s Ender saga, Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet and the requisite Tolkien novels, then weirder stuff: David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

The books drilled a hole through my world of Saved by the Bell reruns, and through that hole I could peer at a widened reality where good and evil lay as clearly demarcated as oil from water. Supernaturalism abounded: people died and rose again, often many times over. It was possible to believe that the sensible world was a fraction of what was — that a numinous realm hovered behind it where other life forms dwelled, watching and invisibly swaying us.

I now know that nearly all these writers — and with them heavyweights like Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe, and C. S. Lewis, plus recent voices like Stephenie Meyer — were, or are, ardent theists. I think I leapt at them because they were smuggling in religion under the guise of science fiction. Or was there a difference? I see myself sitting up in bed like a miner in darkness, equipped with the Light Boy and holding it, lamp-like, over books that together formed a vein of something — some ore of strangeness, of wonder, that I hadn’t known I’d needed but couldn’t now ignore.

 

Tuesday morning

 

It was a luminous July morning. I was being driven about the grounds in a golf cart by Neil Pitts, the pageant president, a man of 68 with the benignant and fatherly air of an elementary-school principal, who was indeed wearing a white short-sleeved button-down and black pants. We drove past the 10-level stage, an enormous Chichen Itza-like structure with a steel frame and façade of gray fiberglass sheeting, built into the lower half of the Hill. Pitts explained that the pageant began in the ‘30s, when Mormon missionaries living on the Joseph Smith Family Farm, down the road, put on impromptu skits from the Book of Mormon to amuse themselves. In 1937 it became standard and they moved it to the Hill Cumorah.

I see myself sitting up in bed like a miner in darkness, equipped with the Light Boy and holding it, lamp-like, over books that together formed a vein of something — some ore of strangeness, of wonder, that I hadn’t known I’d needed but couldn’t now ignore.

We entered Zion’s Camp, crammed with RVs and tents, deserted just now. We passed one tent with a huge banner-like photo draped across the front; pictured was a family of eight, arms around one another — good-looking, Rockwellian people who sparkled. Then we cut back across the Bowl, and Pitts described the seismic power of the sound system, complete with speakers below the stage that rumbled during the show’s most action-packed sequence — a scene called “Destruction,” when earthquakes and flooding rock the Americas as Christ is crucified. Though I knew this from my reading, I turned to Pitts and, with the artless fascination of a child, said, “So the consequences of the Crucifixion were felt here?” He nodded: “Big-time.”

We passed a pavilion called the Study Shelter, where meals and hymns happened, then skirted the cast area, full of tents where youths hung out when not rehearsing. At last we made our way back to the stage, where some 200 cast members had gathered for morning rehearsal. Pitts dished me off to my next chaperone, associate director Shelby Gist, a straight-talking woman in a streaming floral blouse and jorts. Gist stood at the center of a throng of players, telling them with the exasperation of a JV hoops coach when to depart the stage after a scene: “The exact line is, ‘Then he will pour out his spirit abundantly upon you.’ Then you can move!”

The cast dispersed to their stations about the stage. Many were clad in BYU merch, others in a popular T-shirt that read AIR MORMON, featuring a silhouette spread-eagled in space — but instead of Michael Jordan dunking it was an angel blowing into an apocalyptic trumpet. They ran through a “boat scene” depicting the fugitives’ voyage from Jerusalem to the Americas, in which they reared up a mast nested in the stage while spray geysered up. As the brassy space-opera soundtrack blared, I watched an attempted mutiny as Nephi — the Book of Mormon’s extremely sincere protagonist, its Frodo — got ambushed, only to shriek, “Touch me not!” in tones that would’ve made Elijah Wood blush; and, magically, the mutineers flew backward and collapsed.

I started laughing at this, adult live action role-playing that it was, yet found it captivating: it was the strangest cocktail of old and new, ancient yet American. The pageant was conceived as America’s answer to Oberammergau, a passion play performed in Bavaria since 1634 — it continues to this day — in which local people reenact Jesus’s last days. With this in mind I began to see this spectacle for what it was: the last vestige of a centuries-old tradition of outdoor religious theater, the heir to the medieval morality plays in which an “Everyman” faced some great temptation, undergoing a trial in which his soul hung in the balance — the creaky entertainments of the English countryside that Shakespeare watched as a child.

Yet there was something undeniably contemporary about this play and the religion it celebrated. I found it impossible to forget that this story had been written less than two centuries ago: the whole religion was as recent an invention as the lawn mower. And in its modernity it kept reminding me of that genre in which I’d taken refuge as an insomniac kid. It wasn’t just the soundtrack or the apparitions being staged; it was the terms I heard people casually using, like “spirit prison and “Melchizedek Priesthood.” It was the fact that the Jesus statue at the Salt Lake Temple visitors’ center is backed by a huge mural of the Milky Way — an outer-space Jesus.

A scene during the opening night of Hill Cumorah Pageant in Manchester, NY, July 11, 2019.

So when I learned the pageant’s script had been written by Orson Scott Card, the controversial sci-fi novelist I’d read by the glow of the Light Boy, it rather put me over the edge. Card told me, when I tracked him down: “I’m on the record many times over, calling Mormonism a ‘science-fiction religion.’” He meant Mormon cosmology, an interstellar system graced with a lore to rival Dune, which crystallized in the 1820s — the decade that brought Mary Shelley’s best-known novels — and continued to be built out in the decades that followed, which saw luminaries like Jules Verne and, later, H. G. Wells.

What was the point of this sci-fi faith? All around me were clues: the fact that the cast saw themselves as creators of a celestial city on earth, here in this field. They called that city Zion, an ancient name for Jerusalem that Mormons have revived; they believe themselves charged with forging New Jerusalems now, modern microcosms of the ancient one that take shape wherever people gather, commit to the greater good, and thereby grow godlike. Mormonism is filled with such cobwebby concepts — and rites — dredged up from antiquity and given strange new life in contemporary America: they believe the Garden of Eden is in Jackson County, Missouri. The earliest Mormons performed exorcisms in the age of the first fax machines. And this was key, to faith and pageant both. They depended on a furious effort to resuscitate what was buried in a premodern past — ritual energies, characters, symbols — in the midst of modernity: a landscape of decaying interstates and shuttered malls, where these antique constructs sat as awkwardly as mastodons. Keep going, those around me seemed to say, arms outstretched like so many Gatsbys toward a dream of divinely charted existence. It can persist even here.

Morning bled into afternoon. I followed my next handler, an ebullient Filipino-American woman named Cherlyn, toward the outer edge of the Bowl. There, by the road, I watched a group of teens practice a scene called the Harvest Dance. The soundtrack featured a jaunty Disneyish waltz, which the directors played on a boom box while the teens cavorted. Here I noticed something I would go on observing during youth rehearsals: the directors called out, “This actually happened.”

An outsider might have perceived all this as akin to, I don’t know, the Middle Earth Festival, but to the cast, of course, it was tantamount to a Gettysburg reenactment: not fiction but received truth, a kernel of vision they had internalized and that, acorn-like, ramified into all they said and did. They were meant to emerge from this with the pivotal episodes of the Book of Mormon lodged in their muscle memory. (Surely no attendee at the Middle Earth Festival marvels afterward, “I finally get what Gandalf went through at Moria.”) What did it mean to sacralize a science fiction, ramping up its imaginative plot points to the status of historical fact?

An outsider might have perceived all this as akin to, I don’t know, the Middle Earth Festival, but to the cast, of course, it was tantamount to a Gettysburg reenactment: not fiction but received truth, a kernel of vision they had internalized and that, acorn-like, ramified into all they said and did.

Standing at the roadside, I saw a line of 18-wheelers parked beside the Bowl, their cargo spaces open. They held chairs. A coordinated army of cast members approached the trucks, took hold of the chairs, and carried them to the Bowl, wave after wave, trundling them by the thousands and fixing them in rows on the grass. A small city was taking shape here in a matter of days. It was a huge extrusion in the physical world of one guy’s imagination, of a wild saga inscribed in the brains and bodies of his followers. The kingdom, I saw, was here. Whether the vision that had birthed it was fact or fiction, historical record or fever-brained concoction, hardly seemed to matter.

 

Interlude: The Vision

 

Two hundred years ago, in a wood three miles from this field known as the Sacred Grove, a teenager arrived on an early-morning walk. He was shy and apparently unremarkable — poor, uneducated, the fifth of 11 kids. Joe Smith. He’d grown quieter of late, tormented by his sinfulness and the hypocrisy of those around him.

Across the region people were starved for the supernatural, for more than the standard church service could provide. Unlettered hicks spoke in tongues; farmers saw stuff in cornfields, preached the Second Coming of Christ in the flesh — and soon. The Smiths were steeped in that enthusiasm, practitioners of a backwoods occultism that led them to scour the land for buried treasure. He had a divining rod — a forked hazel branch he carried through the countryside, which he believed pointed toward riches in the earth — and with it a seer stone he held to his eye for the same purpose. Ludicrous and Tom Sawyerish, maybe — but then, the Western world was in a cusp-moment, caught between premodern magical thinking and an Enlightenment rationalism whose conquest was far from complete.

So: a teenager awash in magic, on an early-morning walk. He came to a clearing in the woods, knelt down to pray but couldn’t speak. Suddenly he heard footsteps behind him, shot up, and spun around, only to find no one. He stood there unable to shake the thought that he was being stalked, tracked down “by some actual being from the unseen world.” He would die. Just then, a pillar of light tunneled through the trees and staggered him. You’re forgiven, said a voice. All the churches have grown putrid. Go off and live virtuously.

What happened next is either unutterably enchanting or unsuitable for adult discussion. He went up to bed one night and began to pray, and as he did so his room flared with light and a paranormal being in a white robe hovered before him. He stated his name as Moroni; he had come to tell Smith of a new gospel buried in a hillside nearby — he specified where — inscribed on gold plates and bearing “an account of the former inhabitants of this continent and the source from whence they sprang.” Buried with the plates was a pair of seer stones like those he’d used to hunt after gold, which he would need to translate them. Go and find them, the thing urged him, dig them up, and translate them for the world. Then he vanished and the room grew dark.

That was how it started: as a poor boy’s dream of treasure, transmuted into divine longing. Gold gave way to God. He bided his time — got married — then set out one night with his new wife, Emma Hale, toward the hill. He found the appointed spot and began to dig — and while he toiled the being materialized again, watching over him. Hours later Smith descended the hillside with the plates swaddled in his coat like a live thing. Hale never saw them directly, but rather caressed them under cloth, feeling their metallic hardness, the grooves of their inscription.

The characters on the plates, he said, were written in something called reformed Egyptian. They needed translating. So he retired to a room with an assistant and, placing the covered plates on a table and one of the seer stones in a top hat, gazed into the hat and did something oracular. In the darkness of the hat the seer stone glowed, and above it a parchment materialized, upon which the characters appeared, and below them their English translation. Smith spoke what he saw while the assistant, rapt, transcribed. He unspooled a saga of ancient American tribes from Jerusalem — their feudings, visit from Christ, the better tribe’s extinction. The work was finished by June 1829, hitting the shelves at a local bookstore as the Book of Mormon the following year. It was a feat of magic: Smith pulled a world religion out of a hat.

Whether you find the product unreadable (Mark Twain called it “chloroform in print”) or discover in it a mystical document on par with the Bhagavad Gita is a matter of personal temperament. If you are like me, you are apt to see in Smith an early writer of speculative fiction. It’s not just the supernaturalism of his saga; it’s that it has a strong element of the seriality that typifies the genre: whatever Smith’s plates really consisted of — and no one outside his innermost circle ever saw them — he used them as the basis for a sprawling piece of Bible fanfic. The Book of Mormon is a superfan’s paean to the King James Bible: there’s a reworking of Exodus, but instead of Moses there is Lehi, leading his people not to Canaan but to America. An ark of sorts bears them there. There are ancient submarines worthy of Jules Verne. Above all there are Jesus’s dealings in the Americas post-resurrection — The Further Adventures of Jesus Christ.

There’s a term known to lovers of science fiction — namely, retroactive continuity (“retcon” for short). It describes how writers take an existing series and reinterpret its details to make possible the series’ continuance. At its best, retconning can breathe new life into a stagnant franchise; at its worst it’s a cringey affront to the audience’s memory and intelligence, the author scarcely acknowledging some preposterous contradiction with what came before. Think of Star Wars: in The Return of the Jedi Palpatine dies decisively, hurled down a reactor shaft by Darth Vader. But in The Rise of Skywalker, in a WTF-caliber retcon, he’s simply…back. (“Somehow,” a character remarks airily, “Palpatine returned.”) Mormonism constantly retcons the Bible: in John 10:16 Jesus tells his disciples cryptically, “Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring.” Does he mean the Israelites in the next county over? No, Smith revealed; he means he has to go materialize amid chocolate, maize, ocelots, preaching before Native Americans. For that matter, Adam and Eve lived in the Greater Kansas City Metropolitan Area.

Transposed to the religious realm, retroactive continuity becomes a gesture of defiance, a refusal to let the series — the Judeo-Christian franchise, nearly two millennia old — come to an end. The U.S. into which Smith was born was undergoing a spiritual stagnation not unlike our own: in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, religious participation was shockingly low. Just 17 percent of Americans in 1776 belonged to a church. In his “Divinity School Address” a few decades later, Ralph Waldo Emerson bemoaned “the universal decay and now almost death of faith in society.” “Half parishes,” he noted, “are signing off.”

How do you thwart a large-scale decay of faith? It is as a response to this question that Smith and Mormonism speak pressingly to us now. Smith’s answer was to insist that revelation was ongoing, that ancient scripture could be opened up and revised — continued — with new visions that drew on the old but retreaded them for a nascent U.S. “Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead,” Emerson complained. So Smith revived it, retconning the Bible into a new myth, a sequel with America at its center: America was the site of Eden, of a Christ visit; in the end, it would be where humanity gathered to await the Second Coming.

“He waged a resistance movement against disenchantment,” Richard Bushman, Smith’s 90-year-old biographer, born into the church, told me. That was the conceptual engine at the heart of this sci-fi faith and the pageant that celebrated it. They were modern re-enchantment projects, huge sweaty efforts to counteract disbelief with the jumper cables of a resuscitated myth. Here, in the middle of contemporary life — on a hill in upstate New York — God was fully, thrillingly alive.

 

Tuesday late-afternoon

 

The cast Wi-Fi password was “ComeUntoChrist.” It was 4:30 now and hot, and I was tired and irritable. There was no coffee to be had on pageant grounds, I was beyond the reach of my 4G LTE service and, worse, weary of the constant supervision. They were so damned nice, the escorts — but their niceness couldn’t conceal the fact that I was being surveilled. It was odd: there’s a thriving subreddit called r/exmormon, where apostate Mormons vent and defiantly proclaim their indulgence in masturbation, Jim Beam, lattés. Had I been after dirt on the church, did Salt Lake City really think I needed to travel halfway across the country to get it?

But there was a Hill Cumorah Wi-Fi network, and it was cool if I used it (I imagined 90 percent of the internet being blocked) — and I was walking now with a handler named Kristin a stone’s throw from a restroom hut. I decided to stage a mini-rebellion: I would go into the hut and camp out, getting my internet fix and some alone time. What if Kristin gave up and left before I came out?

She walked me to the hut and I went inside, entering a stall where I stayed forever — answering texts, checking all the things. At last I washed up, drew a breath and left the hut, glancing about. The coast was clear. I felt an influx of giddiness that was choked off when, some 25 yards away, I spotted Kristin beaming at me and waving. I plodded my way to her like a guilty spaniel, but when I reached her she showed no sign of annoyance. “Hey!” she cried. I half-expected her to add, “How’d it go?!”

She handed me off to my next chaperone, Scott, the middle-aged ex-CEO of a street hockey league. Scott’s kindness was more than skin-deep, a preternatural goodwill that made me briefly forget my annoyance at being monitored. His affect was fully Fred Rogers, his eye contact unswerving as a Mack Truck. What was my background? he inquired. Former academic, I said. Scott gazed mutely into my eyes and thence my soul for some five seconds. “That’s why you’re so thoughtful,” he said at last.

We headed toward the stage. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the greatest organization in all the world,” Scott said, “because it can pull people together to get great things done like this, in such short periods of time.” He cited the church’s readiness to aid communities stricken by natural disaster: when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, droves of Mormon volunteers rushed to the scene, bringing food and manpower well before the U.S. government had lifted a finger.

He cited the church’s readiness to aid communities stricken by natural disaster: when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, droves of Mormon volunteers rushed to the scene, bringing food and manpower well before the U.S. government had lifted a finger.

When we got to the stage I saw that dress rehearsals were underway. Here I had my first glimpse of the costumed ancient Americans. The latter, I should pause to explain, are the reason the pageant and the Book of Mormon can make for distressing experiences. The book posits that two tribes, the Nephites and Lamanites, lived in the pre-Columbian Americas, and that the Lamanites, having killed off the Nephites, became the peoples now known as Native Americans. What makes this origin story especially painful is its timing: the Book of Mormon was published in March 1830, two months before President Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the U.S. government to force Native peoples off their ancestral lands and relocate them west of the Mississippi. And it was marketed as a history of the Native Americans, who came, it revealed, from Jerusalem. While Indigenous people were being shunted westward in death marches like the Trail of Tears, their history was being quietly overlaid by the visions of a white kid from upstate New York. It was its own Indian Removal.

I should clarify that however gruesome these origins, the LDS church is now a multiethnic phenomenon with more members outside the U.S. than in it — and plenty of these members balance clear-eyed critique with a regard for what they find redemptive in the faith: often, its contention that revelation is continuous and anyone can have it. Still, this much is clear: Mormonism is a modern re-enchantment project that took shape on a continent populated, to begin with, by people who never saw themselves as bereft of wonder. “We as Indigenous people never were kicked out of our Garden of Eden,” Elise Boxer, both a practicing Mormon and an enrolled citizen of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, told me. “That’s where we live.”

Gazing at the stage now, I saw that on either side, two groups of about 20 teens — white as Wonder Bread, clad in skirts rather like Navajo quilts — practiced a battle dance while the soundtrack blared. They brandished spears. One group played the Nephites, the other the Lamanites; it was a call-and-response. At its close the two groups chanted, “Hah!”

A couple take a selfie in the golden, end of day light, just prior to the start of the Hill Cumorah Pageant in Manchester, NY, July 10, 2019.

Closer at hand I saw other players decked out as ancient Americans. Some wore headdresses containing feathers, plus beaded necklaces and shirts decorated with pelts; another wore a kilt studded with turquoise. Still others were clad in a different sort of outfit that looked not Native but vaguely biblical: gem-filled headdresses, purple and emerald robes that undulated in the breeze. These were the fugitives who flee Jerusalem toward the start of the pageant. At one point I saw the (partially costumed) man playing Joseph Smith stroll by in a khaki nineteenth-century tailcoat and wig, plus cargo shorts; he paused to share a joke with a Nephite man in a feathered headdress and kilt. Watching them chortle together I wondered if I might be on whippits.

The redface, though. It was in such cartoonishly bad taste, it was hard to balance with the extreme kindliness, the charity, that the cast radiated. (Later I asked one of the escorts, “Is it okay for a nearly all-white cast to dress up as Native Americans?” She replied, “Please don’t ruin anyone’s day by asking them that.”) I thought of the Boston Tea Party, whose dissidents dressed up as Mohawk Indians. Writing now, I think of the storming of the Capitol — of the Q Shaman, whose aesthetic was less Viking than Native. Why, in precisely those moments when they wanted to trumpet their identity to the world, did Americans play Indian dress-up?

The redface, though. It was in such cartoonishly bad taste, it was hard to balance with the extreme kindliness, the charity, that the cast radiated. (Later I asked one of the escorts, “Is it okay for a nearly all-white cast to dress up as Native Americans?” She replied, “Please don’t ruin anyone’s day by asking them that.”)

Scott turned to me: “How would you like to be in a scene?” Over his shoulder I saw two teens in Native gear, at ease during a lull in rehearsal, doing the “Raise the Roof” dance. “We’re going to do a run-through of the New World Multitude scene. You can be a Nephite.” Processing this, I felt my visage crumple into a constipated expression. This was the climax of the pageant, when the risen Christ appears among the Natives. For an instant I pictured myself — tired, angry, emanating B.O. — unwillingly donning a headdress, then being embraced and kissed by Jesus. That image, in turn, being uploaded to the pageant’s Instagram, then picked up by the Salt Lake Tribune and going low-key viral. My alarmed friends blowing up my phone: “Yo, call me as soon as you get this.”

But it was to be a street-clothes rehearsal (aside from Jesus), which seemed less risky. Soon cast members, hundreds, began congregating at the foot of the stage. They arrived in waves. It was early evening and the atmosphere had grown expectant, alive with the ambient power that can only come from a concentration of bodies outside. And, of course, Jesus was coming.

Together we trekked up the hill, taking our places at stations on either side of the stage. I was a knot of anxiety: Was this okay? The Nephites were a made-up people; wasn’t it impossible to appropriate a culture that hadn’t existed? But then I recalled the faux-Native getup I’d just seen, the chants. I couldn’t possibly go through with it. Also, wasn’t I partaking in a sacred myth I didn’t believe in — and didn’t that mean I was appropriating Mormon culture? I felt mired in layers of wrongdoing; I was losing my shit.

Suddenly they flipped on the soundtrack and the scene started. All around me cast members were looking toward the top of the stage as if entranced, and I followed their gaze and stopped cold. It was him: it was Jesus Christ. Shoulder-length auburn wig with middle part. Synthetic beard. White robe, brown sandals. He looked like the Jesus from the gaudy religious pictures I’d seen in older relatives’ homes — except he was standing atop Chichen Itza.

He had a beam of light trained on him, and stood motionless with arms outspread and palms turned upward, a radiant wisp against the New York sky. He could have been a superhero. “I am the light and the life of the world,” he lip-synched. Joyous choral music ensued; the voice of God sounded through the speakers: “Behold my beloved son, in whom I am well-pleased.” As the carol continued, the hundreds of cast members filtered onto the stage, a massed and carefully patterned congregation. Scott, beside me, nodded: it was our turn.

We found our places and stood still. Jesus, still at the top of the edifice, dropped his hands. There was a central staircase leading down the stage, and he began to descend it, the beam of light staying with him. “Arise, and come forth unto me,” he mouthed. I scarcely recognized him from the casting ceremony. His name was Austin Reid, and he had gone from an early 20-something who ran an online outdoor-gear company to a sort of ghost, lordly and wraithlike and totally self-assured. “Thrust your hand into my side,” he pronounced — and a lone player walked up the steps and did just that. “Now you know that I am the God of Israel,” he said. “The God of the whole earth.”

Players rushed to greet him, in keeping with the script, but it seemed they were hardly acting — just viewing him as the thing he represented, genuinely magnetized. Some he touched, healingly; others he embraced. The chorus swelled to a refrain of “Hallelujah.” Near me a young mom held a toddler who cried, “We have to go! Take me to Jesus!”

I looked out across the landscape to the road below, where an SUV drove by, and imagined the driver sipping a coffee and glancing up at us innocently and then spraying the coffee. The road was Route 21, which I’d lived off of growing up. Then I glanced back at Jesus, encircled by players who, by tomorrow, would be dressed in the Native costumes I’d seen earlier. I felt full-force the scene’s terrible ambiguity. You could have called it, rightly, a disturbing symbolic drama in which a white Jesus literally descended to dispense wisdom and salvation to Indigenous people. In that sense it was the epitome of a colonial mindset that had produced the Indian Removal Act.

At the same time, it was a stunning piece of outdoor religious theater: ordinary people were acting out ultimate things amid gnats, birds, trees — and doing so despite a wider culture that had mostly abandoned outdoor theater and, increasingly, ultimate things. They were ushering in a new reality: the scene’s title meant not just the premodern Americas but life now, made annually novel, alive with ghostly energy, by this hillside ritual. It was a defibrillator to the heart of an old and disenchanted world.

 

Wednesday pre-dawn

 

I woke at 5:00 a.m. the next morning in my Airbnb, a rural guesthouse, peeled back the sheets and found a large white spider beside me. I barked, shot out of bed and, unthinkingly, dressed and set out driving.

It was still dark. It is strange to drive the roads of the region where one is from when one’s family is gone from there; stranger still if the region is western New York. If you are from this place, you can understand how a religion started here. There’s a feral rawness to its woods, and the roads that lead through them are lonely and trance-inducing. The fields are limitless: you ramble through them, and when you get to the end, seemingly, there is only more field, as in a dream or a prefiguration of eternity.

A woman recalls her story of deciding to join the LDS faith (being saved) during ‘Devotional’ at the days end, but just prior to the dress rehearsal performance of The Hill Cumorah Pageant in Manchester, NY, July 10, 2019.

I was thinking about Joe Smith. On a morning like this he’d had his first vision. What got me, though, was what came after: how he spent his life expanding this Bible fanfic into a cosmology that millions lived in. The way he disclosed that cosmology — it reminded me of nothing so much as the pulp science-fiction magazines that, a century later, marked that genre’s golden age: Amazing Stories. Other Worlds. (Scientology, itself a sci-fi faith, began in one of these.) Smith revealed his cosmos one mind-blowing installment at a time. His visions were serialized in a sense, separated by months sometimes; converts awaited each with the bated breath of cult fandoms biding their time till a new issue, volume or episode drops. Only the stakes were everything: their destinies, the nature of the universe, and of their souls.

Here is what he revealed: God was an embodied extraterrestrial who lived near a distant star called Kolob — and if by some marvel we could see him, “if the veil were rent today,” we would find ourselves eerily mirrored. It was the 1840s and telescopes had grown more sophisticated. People peered through them expecting to see God, and when they didn’t, they merely concluded he lay beyond the reach even of these new instruments. Smith’s story was of its time in that sense, but added a crucial wrinkle: God had been one of us but upgraded himself into a superior being. The purpose of our own lives was to replicate his ascent, becoming ourselves gods who would populate our own planets after death, parents of new creation. “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens!” Smith thundered to his followers just before his death. “That is the great secret.”

Smith’s was an extremely American drama — bootstraps individualism given mythic form by a man who’d spent his youth in poverty, hunting treasure. How could you get more upwardly mobile than to become a god? There was a catch, though: no one could attain godhood singly; we got there as units — by marrying and having children — which sounds like a championing of the nuclear family, and is, to an extent. Beneath this, though, lay something more poignant: an insistence that we need each other, that we’re interlocked by spokes of dependency, our souls’ progress conjoined. The Mormon heaven is social: in death we find ourselves surrounded, in thriving celestial hubs, by the people we loved in life. To the extent we perfect our bonds with them here, now, we are already there.

I went on driving, watching woods give way to drumlins, remote roads to residential ones. I made my way by instinct down one such road, scudding by silos and houses just lighting up, and veering at last onto a steep street I climbed and then pulled over. I looked at the silhouette of the house I’d grown up in, warm now with other lives. I’d not seen it in 15 years. In the stillness I heard our voices as they’d sounded when we were gathered in this place: children’s screaming laughter, my dad belting out Grateful Dead songs, my mom in her bathrobe laughingly chiding him. It occurred to me that in the Mormon heaven I would never lose these people. I saw my bedroom and me in it at night, already dogged by the insomnia that would rack me as an adult and driven, for distraction, to books. The reading was a kind of prayer, as all fiction-reading is. Hands close together, I lay summoning what was invisible, miraculous: aliens, unfathomed planets, unseen forces that governed all we did.

The memory of these stories blended in my head now with Mormon myth, and I had the sense that they had sprung from the same impulse. Mormonism and science fiction were modern inventions that responded to a new reality, one increasingly dominated by scientific thinking and the technology it bred. People found themselves in a Copernican universe far vaster and more impersonal than the biblical heavens, and one way to react to this new normal was to discover in space itself — its stars and planets and imagined denizens — the stuff of religious awe. So in science fiction, the wonder and terror long inspired by the Judeo-Christian God, and by angels and devils, gets remapped onto aliens; visitations become visitors. In Mormonism, God is an alien; we are all incipient aliens, bound up in a project of collective deification.

In the stillness I heard our voices as they’d sounded when we were gathered in this place: children’s screaming laughter, my dad belting out Grateful Dead songs, my mom in her bathrobe laughingly chiding him. It occurred to me that in the Mormon heaven I would never lose these people.

Why did it matter, this drive to enchant? I thought again of that spiritual desiccation I had glimpsed in myself and my students. And of what I’d seen on the ground that week: people supercharged by a modern myth that insisted on the sociality of salvation, a retconning finally of redemption itself, which held that we are delivered as collectives or not at all. It was a mythos for the era of disasters. It lay behind the Mormon response to Katrina, and lately COVID-19, which saw bishop’s storehouses, positioned around the globe, bring nearly one hundred million pounds of food to beleaguered populations in 2020.

Was the culture I belonged to — a culture of unbelief that wanted, nonetheless, to confront the catastrophes ahead, which threatened to tilt reality toward science fiction — capable of such feats of social strength? My time here had made me skeptical. Because belief was the crux of it, the impetus behind the directors’ calling out to the young cast: this actually happened. That was what elevated their story from sci-fi to scripture, from Dune to an architecture of revealed truths in whose image they remade the world. What did I or my friends — secular, overeducated, climate-terrified yet basically inert — have to rival that?

In order for people to abandon their self-interest and commit to a grand cause, writes Jane Bennett in The Enchantment of Modern Life, something has to happen to their aesthetic being — that part of them that is sensory and emotional. They have to fall in love. “One must be enamored with existence,” she writes, “to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others.” Put baldly, “You have to love life before you can care about anything.” Enchantment turns out to be the precondition for committed political life together — a way of charming people toward self-transcendence with a vision of existence that pulses with animacy and purpose. Ethical codes are stillborn without such visions; they can’t catch unless people are inflamed by some story of their lives capable of drawing from them, again and again, virtuous performances.

 

Thursday

 

Opening day. Morning.

Across the grounds people bustled. Some drove golf carts. On the Bowl, cast members did last-minute run-throughs while directors, clutching at walkie-talkies, fine-tuned and fretted. The air crackled with promise.

I had arrived late. There had been a dry run of the New World Multitude scene and I had played hooky, having decided against the part. Now I strode with Scott through the cast area, where a mood of serenity had set in. People were finding each other. They sat in clusters outside the tents, playing guitars and singing, touching each other reassuringly and laughing. I had never witnessed a pilgrimage. I saw people divorced from their workaday lives who — bathless, deviceless — had been deprived into clarity.

“Everything else is stripped away,” said a girl named Emily.

“It’s a very similar feeling, I would imagine, to when people converge on disasters, and they’ll sacrifice of their own to give to some cause,” added another kid, Jonathan. “Everyone’s made some sacrifice to be here. And love is at the center of that.”

I went on walking, surveying all I saw with the attention one bestows on something about to vanish. No one knew, of course, that this was the last pageant — that the pandemic would obliterate the planned finale — but there was something valedictory about it all. The show needed revision — the redface had to go — yet it seemed a pity that this huge, weird piece of Americana, which had survived into the age of TikTok, was ending because a 94-year-old man in Salt Lake City had demanded it should. The church’s official line was that it wanted people focusing on their home lives — scripture-reading, prayer — not theater. This sounded like a cover for wanting to save money, issued by an institution that as of 2020 had $100 billion in assets.

Morning blurred into afternoon, afternoon into evening. Somehow, the premiere was close at hand; the cast left to change.

For once unchaperoned, I followed a party of players toward a costume house at the hill’s southwest end. Here, as players disappeared behind curtains, I took in a scene that included an entire wall stocked with boxes containing beards, each labeled. There was NEW WORLD MULTITUDE SAVIOR and, beside it, UNBELIEVER #1. “They’re all made of human hair,” said a voice beside me. It belonged to a spectacled seamstress named Jackie. “A beard can take a year to make.” There were hundreds. She plucked a box off the wall — VISION SAVIOR, the lesser Jesus — and opened it. “Church members donate their hair for these,” she murmured, dangling a reddish pelt before my face. I gaped at what was at once the beard of God’s son and the Norelco trimmings of some ginger guy in Utah, then turned away.

All emerged from the costume house dressed and I followed, watching as they rambled down the hill. There they were joined by the clad players from the other houses, several streams of people made suddenly mythic, who came together in one teeming body aimed, I saw, for the devotional pavilion. Beyond them I glimpsed the Bowl, swarming now with spectators — thousands—staking out chairs. With a giddy solemnity the cast crowded into the pavilion, ranging in rows — characters from a Mesoamerican past brushing shoulders with those from Jacksonian America. A director led them in a last prayer, after which they sang a hymn called “God Speed the Right,” then marched out to meet the crowd.

I walked with them. The premiere was slated for 9:00 p.m., and it was 7:30; this time had been allotted for the players to mingle with the audience. I watched the graying cherub playing Joseph Smith — Willy Wonka-ish in top hat, tailcoat, and breeches — get swiftly engulfed by stans seeking selfies. Vision Savior, who worked in Big Oil and lived year-round in Saudi Arabia, flashed me a beatific smile, then turned to greet a family of eight.

I surveyed the acreage of people before me and, in the gathering darkness, ventured in. It was the most international of crowds. I met a family that had flown in from Honduras that day, and when the show was over would return by red-eye flight. I met a party of women from the Sichuan province of China who’d been born into Buddhism but converted as adults to Mormonism, enticed by the emphasis on family.

At this point I became aware that the weary cynicism that had steered me to this place was being dislodged by something else. A doubt about my doubt? The energy, the immense shared electricity coursing through this outdoor cathedral, unmoored me. A man in the missionary getup — mid-50s, indefatigable as a jackrabbit — pulled me aside, training laserlike gray eyes on mine. “I teach economics and finance at Columbia. These are not individuals lacking in intelligence,” he said, gesturing across the crowd. “They’re brilliant.” He had fused his spiritual and logical intelligence, he needed me to know, into “an incredible technicolor understanding.”

Whatever unsteadiness I was feeling, it seemed a consequence of being inundated by thousands of worshippers. I suppose I would’ve felt the same approaching the Kaaba at Hajj. I met two women from Massachusetts who spoke to me of the afterlife with such passionate certitude, such detail, they could’ve been returning tourists. “The amazing love that exists on the other side of the veil is outstanding,” one said. They spoke of becoming kings and queens in death — of deification — and with gentle firmness stressed how I needed to pray to receive personal revelation. When I asked how — was there a wikiHow? — they laughed: “Just talk to God. Just ask Him.” (Earlier, in private, the pageant president had told me the same, more forcefully: “You have to kneel down and ask!”)

At this point I became aware that the weary cynicism that had steered me to this place was being dislodged by something else. A doubt about my doubt?

All at once the cast vanished, full night came on and the show started. I found a seat. In the dark, a cluster of robed women appeared atop the stage, flourishing apocalyptic trumpets they pretended to play while an epic fanfare sounded through the speakers. The cast marched onstage, an army, some bearing flags — and as they assumed their places in an opening tableau there were whoops and whistles in the crowd.

All went semi-dark. A group of players danced and jumped while the narrator, an omniscient father-figure who sounded like Charlton Heston, set the scene: Jerusalem, 600 BC. Depravity reigns. Lehi, the Mormon Moses, and his son Nephi have visions foretelling Jerusalem’s destruction and Jesus’s coming. They need to flee. The visions took the form of “water curtains,” big cumulus mists plumed up from understage, through which apparitions shone: a manger, a tree, a middle-aged angel high above the stage who for years dangled from a cable but in 2019 stood on a hidden platform. The production quality lay between full-on professional and DIY.

It started raining; babies cried. Someone farted. I watched the fugitives cross the Atlantic in that wooden boat, limousines-long; their arrival in the Americas and campy harvest dance; the fracturing of the party into rival tribes.

The show’s climactic sequence kicked into motion. “Far away, on a hill outside Jerusalem, three crosses rose,” the narrator announced. At the upper-right corner of the stage a trio of crucifixes swung into view, thronged by flames, then vanished. A stage-wide inferno followed — the cataclysm that killing Jesus triggered here. I watched as firebombs burst, geysers shot up, and waterfalls plummeted; I saw the silhouettes of a few hundred cast running about screaming while, below us, the earth convulsed with subterranean sound.

Total darkness and silence ensued. Then the risen Jesus appeared, this little refulgent being clad in white and perched at the pinnacle of the stage. It had always borne the seeds of sci-fi, the Christian story — an otherworldly emissary, the logos incarnate, sent here on an errand to save us — and here Jesus looked like nothing so much as a lone visitor. His person was mediated by streaks of rain. It was so quiet across the Bowl, a deep and babyless silence. Lights slowly came on, and I watched the scene I’d acted in two days before: Jesus descending the staircase, the cast filtering onto the stage, all surrounding and venerating him. Around me, people started crying.

The scene ended and they told of the two tribes going to war afterward, of the Nephites’ dying off — but not before one of them, Moroni, had buried their history in this hill. It’s hard to convey the all-out weirdness of the next, final episode. “Centuries later, in the spring of 1820,” the narrator declared, “the Lord heard the earnest prayer of a young man named Joseph Smith.” There was Smith excavating the hillside while Moroni supervised; there he was sharing the good news with a bunch of New Yorkers in bonnets, corsets, suit jackets. It was impossible to ignore how meta — how postmodern, really — it was: the abrupt fast-forwarding 14 centuries, the found text which is the very text you’re watching, the author inserting himself into the story. It was at once deeply moving and reminiscent of a senior thesis by a screenwriting major.

The show concluded and the Bowl resounded with cheering. Anxious to beat the crush, I got up and hastened away. Rain fell more heavily. When I reached the roadside I turned and took in the scene a last time: the multitudes gathered on the grass like groundlings, as they’d gathered here nearly a century; the cast advancing to meet them; the whole thing an international city, the shadow-image of the ones they hoped to form in death. And the driven rain deluging it, in effect, out of existence.

The character of Jesus Christ rises above horn players at the end of the The Hill Cumorah Pageant in Manchester, NY, July 10, 2019.

I found my car and drove off, making my way back to the guesthouse, where I peeled off my wet clothes and stood a moment savoring the silence. Then, warily, I approached the bed. What I wanted to do I had never once tried, despite being almost 37 — and couldn’t at first. What brought intelligent people, brilliant people, to kneel?

Nevertheless, I lowered myself, placing my knees on the tile and feeling the soreness in my nearly middle-aged body, no longer that of the boy who’d arrived to bed each night seeking communion with the spirit world. To whom or what was I even kneeling? Jesus Christ? The phrase embarrassed me. The embodied God who’d preceded us in space?

A line from Wallace Stevens came to me: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” I couldn’t decide whether this was sublime or Orwellian. Still, I brought my hands together and asked — to be more inspired, surprised, tuned to a godly frequency that as yet I hardly heard — and felt something unfamiliar: a peace that was either grace itself or the relief of giving up control. This I let linger, studying it, till it got really late — till the imprint of the day, of the whole mad pilgrimage, began to weaken, eroded by the sound of rain hitting the guesthouse, great percussive drops that drew me by degrees to sleep.

***

Andrew Kay is a writer, editor, and teacher who lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

***

Editors: Ben Huberman and Jon Baskin (The Point Magazine)
Fact Checker: Julia Aizuss (The Point Magazine)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Black-crowned Night Heron perched against clear blue sky, Long Island, New York (Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Lyle C. May, Samuel Braslow, Lindsey Hilsum, Megan Mayhew Bergman, and Anand Menon.

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1. Qualified Immunity: How ‘Ordinary Police Work’ Tramples Civil Rights

Lyle C. May | Scalawag Magazine | June 23, 2021 | 2,807 words

“There is little to no accountability behind the closed doors of police work.”

2. Boxer Patricio Manuel, a Transgender Pioneer, Is Still Looking for His Next Fight

Samuel Braslow | ESPN | June 22, 2021 | 6,489

“Manuel sees sports as the latest front in a culture war that fought — and lost — previous battles over same-sex marriage and trans bathroom bills.”

3. More Than Accomplices

Lindsey Hilsum | New York Review of Books | June 10, 2021 | 3,864 words

“How do we determine the agency of female participants in genocidal regimes, where male supremacy often goes hand in hand with ethnic chauvinism?”

4. Seeking Home Aboard the Night Heron

Megan Mayhew Bergman | Audubon | April 23, 2021 | 2,071 words

“The pandemic prodded me to fulfill a lifelong dream of living on a boat. I’m learning the ropes surrounded by the birds of my North Carolina childhood.”

5. The Missing Note

Anand Menon | Tortoise Media | June 2, 2021 | 4,500 words

“Losing family is like losing your sense of social gravity…. Losing four of them almost at once was correspondingly more unsettling, more destabilizing, and subverted my notions as to who I was.”

Road Grad

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Jill Talbot | Longreads | June 2021 | 9 minutes (2,508 words)

The showers had been steady for days. Even when the rain broke, the weather app on my phone showed another coming storm. At night, lightning scarred the sky, jagged answers to the crack of thunderous questions. A relentless deluge, like so much else last year.

***

In the spring of 2020, the bottom corner of TV screens broadcasting news channels recorded the rising numbers of deaths and cases, along with Dow numbers shifting, sometimes in seconds, from green to red.

During the spring break of my daughter Indie’s senior year, her school district announced they would close schools the week following the break, with plans to reopen on March 23. On March 19, the governor of Texas temporarily closed schools until April 3, then later extended the order to May 4, and on April 17, he closed all private and public schools for the remainder of the year, while initiating steps to re-open the state for business. Indie would finish her senior year in her bedroom. She would not step back through the front doors of her high school, and she would not place her hands in purple ink and press them to a wall or write her name and 2020 beneath her handprints. There would be no Bronco Walk, when seniors paraded the school halls behind the drum corps in their caps and gowns as teachers and students came out of classrooms to cheer, while parents lined the main lobby boasting signs of celebration and congratulations. I would have cried, I am sure, standing there, holding a sign for Indie.

During those first weeks at home, Indie told me more than once how she wished she had known that the last day she left school was the last time. She grew up with so many goodbyes, so she knows the importance of looking back in those moments before leaving.

Up until that week in March, as Indie left for school each morning, I’d stand beneath the canopy of an oak tree outside to watch her go. She’d always look back as she pulled away, and I’d blow kisses and wave my arms wildly. I mourned those mornings. They ended before I knew they were gone.

I raised Indie on my own.

After her father left, disappearing one July morning when she was 4 months old, I understood the most important thing I would do in my life was raise Indie. When she was 2, I promised myself not to date until she was grown. I worried about men coming and going through her life, but more importantly, I recognized my responsibility, and while I have a history of being irresponsible in my life, I wanted to get this one right. The promise kept.


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Through the years, I went to every parent-teacher conference alone. I taught Indie how to ride her bike. How to drive a car. How to dive into a pool. I watched her write her first word, apple. Heard her first word, juice. I decided punishments, and I chose rewards. For every birthday, I woke her by walking into her room with a lit candle in a pastry and singing, “Happy Birthday.” On the days when daycare was closed or I couldn’t afford it, I took her to my office or into my classrooms. I explained to every pediatrician and one ER doctor that no, I don’t know the father’s medical history. I shook hands with the boys who picked her up for dates, set her curfew at 11:30, the same one I had had in high school. Then that morning three years ago, when I had to tell her that her grandfather was suddenly gone, and two months later, when I waited for her to get home to say the words, “Gramma has cancer. Stage IV.” I taught my daughter how important it is to apologize, and I told her, “I’m sorry,” every time I made a mistake or yelled or we had to move, again, because for 11 years, the academic job market awarded me only visiting positions. The first time we moved, from Colorado to Utah, Indie was 16 months old, and by the time she entered eighth grade in Texas, we had lived in nine states.

And because of that, we are most who we are when we’re on the road.

As the weeks went by, I worked at our kitchen table teaching my creative writing workshops on my laptop, while Indie studied on her bed in her room. Around six each night, we’d meet on the couch to watch our shows and visit, often agreeing how lucky we were that we get along so well, that we enjoy each other’s company. Because that’s what we were for months, each other’s company.

And because of that, we are most who we are when we’re on the road.

We stayed up late, and we slept late. For the five years we’d lived in this apartment, I’d hear the wail of trains in the middle of the night, and in the mornings, the roar of planes in their descent to the DFW airport, 25 miles south. That spring, no train whistles called out in the night, and the morning skies were empty.

After a while I could sense a looming sadness and restlessness in both of us, so one night I asked Indie if she wanted to go the next day to see what the World’s Largest Casino looked like closed. Her face lit up. The next morning, we drove 45 miles north, crossed the Oklahoma border, and took Exit 1 to WinStar. We drove slowly around the sprawling property the size of a community college campus, if one were to have a three-tower hotel and 600,000 square feet of gaming centers. No cars or people in sight, except for a security guard patrolling on a bike. I rolled down my window and snapped a few photos of the desolation, an eerie site. On the way back, we saw an abandoned one-story motel and pulled over to wander among the empty, exposed rooms, the diamond-shaped windows, most of them broken. That out-and-back drive would turn out to be our first half-tank trip.

After that, every two weeks I’d pick a place for us to go, somewhere a half-tank of gas away. Far enough to get away, but close enough not to have to use a gas station restroom. Only after we were in the car would I tell Indie where we were heading — a hotel on a corner square where Frank Sinatra once stayed and Bonnie and Clyde had been spotted, a vacant Futuro house (orange, shaped like a spaceship), a drive-in theater, an empty hotel featured on Ghost Adventures, and once, an abandoned post office with a collapsing porch. Along the way, we’d reminisce about all the places we’d lived, as if touring unknown towns reminded us of all the towns we’d known. Or maybe it was facing the ending to the 18 years we shared, so we wanted to remember those places and houses and rooms, to honor them as we passed mile markers and took exits along with Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits.

***

The forecast for that Friday read like all the other days before that week. Rain chances at 100% for 7:00 p.m., the hour of Indie’s graduation. Instead of the traditional ceremony inside the coliseum of the university where I teach, graduation would be held at the Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, where parents and families would park on the infield to watch graduates cross the checkered finish line on a big screen. The world’s largest at 218 feet wide and 94.6 feet tall — 21 stories.

Indie wanted a white dress for graduation, and even though Texas reopened on May 1, I told her I preferred she order a few online. We’d return the ones she didn’t choose. I think I’ll always see it in my memory, the afternoon she stepped out of her room in a dress rehearsal. A sleeveless, above-the-knee dress, falling in folds between the panels of her purple gown. Cap on. And because the instructions for the ceremony advised against heels because of the long procession around the track, she decided on her white platform Vans.

Over the previous few months, Indie and her friends had had to accept everything that was gone — classes and crowded hallways, prom, playoffs, end-of-the-year concerts, award ceremonies and banquets, yearbook signings, the senior walk, the senior breakfast. The senior walk was the only one that didn’t hold any meaning for Indie, a day when DHS seniors put on their caps and gowns to walk the block to the elementary school to thank their first teachers. If Indie were to walk to the elementary schools she attended, she’d have to head north to Oklahoma, on to New York, and back south to Ray Elementary in Chicago. 3,412 miles. Miles she and I drove together over the years, one road after another.

While Indie got ready that Friday, I ironed her dress. I took my time, and every now and again secretly checked the rain chances on my phone. At 4:00, 80%. Students were to arrive at the Speedway by 5:30 to have their temperature checked, to answer questions, and to turn in their signed health waiver. If it rained, graduation would not be rescheduled. It would be canceled. I stood there ironing, wanting to ask, “What if it rains?,” but I held the question in my throat, knowing Indie already carried it and that she was pushing it to the far back of a drawer of the year’s losses.

The first school event of Indie’s I attended was when she was in first grade at Will Rogers Elementary. It was a morning assembly, each class from K-3rd performing. When I got out of my car and started walking to the school’s office to sign in, I remember whispering, “I’m coming, Indie. I’m here. I’m coming.” Inside, I joined other parents leaning against the walls of the gymnasium/auditorium. The students, cross-legged and squirming, sat in rows on the tile floor. When Indie got to her spot on the stage, her blonde hair a bob, wearing a sweet dress my mother had mailed, she began searching for me. I raised my right arm and held my hand as high as it would go. I stretched out my fingers and held them still. I thought my motionless hand might be easier to see among all the waving ones. “It was,” she told me when I picked her up from school that afternoon. I told her it was also a secret message — you are strong, you are steady, I am here.

Through the years, in the stands of volleyball and basketball games, the auditoriums of plays and choir concerts, the stadiums of band half-time shows and contests, I have sat alone and raised my hand high for Indie, still and steady, even when I knew she couldn’t see me because the auditorium lights had already lowered, or I was too far away in the stands.

A few days before graduation, Indie picked up her car passes in a drive-through procession at school, the same way she had returned her textbooks, picked up her yearbook, and turned in her drum major uniform. Each senior was given only two passes — a Student Pass and a Parent Pass. One car for each student, one car for each family.

By 6:00 that night, a reprieve. Blue sky. I got in the car I had been driving for 11 years, one my parents had given me. I headed toward I-35 West for the 20-mile drive, my Parent Pass on the passenger seat:

VILLAGE OF CHAMPIONS
at Texas Motor Speedway
Parent Pass
Class of 2020 Graduation Ceremony
Present this pass for entry into the infield of
TEXAS MOTOR SPEEDWAY

As I joined the line of cars into the Speedway’s massive parking lot, I whispered, “I’m coming, Indie. I’m here. I’m coming.” I know she can’t hear me when I do this, but it always feels like she does. I showed my pass to an attendant, drove through the south tunnel, and followed the directions from orange vests to turn into a gravel space between two pylons.

As the massive screen directed, I tuned my FM radio to 97.7. All around me, the families of 459 graduates. As we waited for the ceremony to begin, the screen featured the graduation photos and activities of each senior. Suddenly, there was Indie, her long blonde hair, her smile, and her accomplishments, including the name of the university in New York she had chosen. I clicked a photo with my phone.

The following Monday, NBC’s TODAY show would feature the Speedway graduation, showing a long line of seniors in purple DHS masks as “Pomp and Circumstance” played, the rows of white chairs on the track placed six feet apart, and a parking lot of vehicles on the infield facing the 22,000-square-foot screen, honking in celebration.

Imagine the largest drive-in theater in the world — that’s what the Speedway became that Friday night, the temperature 90 degrees — a 1,500-acre facility, hundreds of trucks, SUVs, and cars lined up inside an oval track of 1.5 miles ending in a checkered finish line.

What a fitting end — to watch Indie cross a finish line on a road after all the roads we’ve known. Sitting in my car by myself, ever at the wheel, felt like an honor I had earned by raising her alone.

The students were allowed to remove their masks only as they crossed the checkered line where the superintendent, wearing a mask and gloves, shook their hands and gave them their diplomas. As each graduate crossed, some bowed, some gave a thumbs up, some did a funny dance. I wondered what Indie might do.

As the T names approached, I shifted in my seat, looking for blonde hair, a pink stole, a white dress, Vans. When I heard Indie’s name, the first time I had ever heard her full name announced in public, I pressed on my horn and held it, shouting, “Indie! Indie!” She accepted her diploma with a nod, then turned to the camera with a big smile and a wave. Full of joy.

If memory proves anything, it’s that we always miss something. Either we can’t call up a detail or someone tells us what we didn’t see. I suspect there are times when we take in the meaning of the moment more than the details of the moment itself.

Because later that night, when Indie rushed through the front door, still in her gown, she asked, “Did you see it?” She plopped down next to me on the couch, scrolling through her phone. “I figured out a few days ago what I wanted to do. Hold on, someone took a picture of me and got it.”

I stared at the photo of my daughter crossing the finish line, beaming, mid-stride.

“I couldn’t see you,” she explained, “but I knew you could see me.”

And then I saw it.

Her right hand held high.

Still and steady.

***

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together, and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her writing has been named Notable in Best American Essays for the past four years in a row and has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, LitMag, The Normal School, The Paris Review Daily, and The Rumpus. She teaches in the creative writing program at University of North Texas.

 

***

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo shows the aftermath, at east corner of Greenwood Avenue and East Archer Street, of the Tulsa Race Massacre, during which mobs of white residents attacked black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, US, June 1921. (Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Victor Luckerson, Tristin Hopper, John Drescher, Steve Shorney, and Pamela Petro.

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1. The Women Who Preserved the Story of the Tulsa Race Massacre

Victor Luckerson | The New Yorker | May 28, 2021 | 2,882 words

“Today, the work done by Parrish in the nineteen-twenties and Gates in the nineteen-nineties forms the bedrock for books, documentaries, and a renewed reparations push that, a century after the massacre, is experiencing a groundswell of support.”

2. Why So Many Children Died at Indian Residential Schools

Tristin Hopper | The Vancouver Sun | May 29, 2021 | 1,700

“This week saw the discovery of something outside Kamloops, B.C., rarely seen in North America, much less in any corner of the developed world: Unmarked and previously forgotten graves, all belonging to children who died at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.”

3. Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Mega-Donor, and the Future of Journalism

John Drescher | The Assembly | May 30, 2021 | 3,00 words

“UNC-Chapel Hill’s largest journalism-school donor warned against Nikole Hannah-Jones’ hiring. Their divergent views represent a new front in the debate over objectivity and the future of the field.”

4. ‘I Took Part in the Psilocybin Trial and It Changed My Life’

Steve Shorney | The Independent | May 30, 2021 | 5,663 words

“I had seen an alternative reality, another way of being, and knew beyond anything I’d known before that day that life is extraordinary. And in that moment I felt happier, more alive, and more Me than I imagined was possible.”

5. Cooking Backwards

Pamela Petro | Guernica Magazine | May 24, 2021 | 4,044 words

“On becoming a kitchen archivist.”

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Desiree Stennett and Caroline Glenn, Imani Perry, Bethany Marcel, Joshua Hunt, and David Alm.

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1. Locked Out

Desiree Stennett, Caroline Glenn | Orlando Sentinel | May 13, 2021 | 9,200 words

A three-part investigative series about how the pandemic exposed Florida’s eviction crisis.

2. Stop Hustling Black Death

Imani Perry | New York Magazine | May 24, 2021 | 4,300

“Samaria Rice is the mother of Tamir, not a ‘mother of the movement.'”

3. How to Tell a Trauma Story

Bethany Marcel | Midnight Breakfast | May 27, 2021 | 1,700 words

“For a decade I’ve been trying to write this story. This is always as far as I get.”

4. Did Paying a Ransom for a Stolen Magritte Painting Inadvertently Fund Terrorism?

Joshua Hunt | Vanity Fair | May 27, 2021 | 5,477 words

“Modern art crime, like the arms trade, still thrives in the shadow of global conflict, which gives rise to criminal networks that make from the detritus of war immensely profitable commodities.”

5. The Marathon Men Who Can’t Go Home

David Alm | GQ | May 21, 2021 | 4,800 words

“Each had come to America with the hope of making life-changing money that they could send back home to their families. What they found was an often desperate existence in their adopted homeland.”

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

(Photo by Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Nathan Thrall, H. Claire Brown, Alexander Chee, Jean Garnett, and Erica Lenti.

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1. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

Nathan Thrall | New York Review of Books | March 19, 2021 | 20,500 words

“One man’s quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule.”

2. How Corporations Buy—and Sell—Food Made with Prison Labor

H. Claire Brown | The Counter | May 18, 2021 | 3,810

“The notion of work as punishment has enabled prison administrators to compel incarcerated people to work on farms and in dairies for low or no pay and without basic labor protections, sometimes in service of secretive billionaires they’ll never meet.”

3. What My Korean Father Taught Me About Defending Myself in America

Alexander Chee | GQ | May 14, 2021 | 3,680 words

“And he said something I would never forget. ‘The best fighter in tae kwon do never fights,’ he said. ‘He always finds another way.”

4. There I Almost Am

Jean Garnett | The Yale Review | May 19, 2021 | 4,933 words

“I can be a very generous sister—maternal, even—as long as I am winning.” Jean Garnett writes about envy and being a twin.

5. My Quest to Make My Dog Internet Famous

Erica Lenti | The Walrus | May 17, 2021 | 2,138 words

“When I spoke with several people behind some of Canada’s most influential dogs, agents and managers for pet influencers, and even researchers on canine-influencer culture, I began to understand. Whether they’re couch potatoes partnering with your favourite snack-food company or high-falutin divas posing beside expensive cars and decked out in the latest couture, pet celebrities have one thing in common: they are symbols of inspiration. Even if Belle was a dog, she needed to portray a life that could be. To be famous, she’d have to convince others she was already living the carefree millennial dream.”

Solving the Mystery of Dyatlov Pass

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In late 1958, Igor Dyatlov, an engineering student at the Ural Polytechnic Institute (U.P.I) in the Soviet Union, planned a cross-country ski trip for himself and some fellow students in the Ural mountains. It was a “lively and strikingly handsome group of young people” that set out to have the adventure of their lives. However, U.P.I never heard from them again, and their partially clothed remains were eventually found with a bizarre range of injuries — from burns and bruises to catastrophic trauma. It was a true mystery, and as Douglas Preston discovers for The New Yorker, one that spawned at least 75 different theories as to what happened, including a yeti attack, without conclusion.  

Two years ago, the case was reopened, and a young prosecutor in Yekaterinburg, Andrei Kuryakov, was put in charge. He came up with a new narrative — one, which, personally, I see as very plausible. However, his conclusions have been greeted with scorn by the families of the dead. 

Read this gripping story, and decide for yourself whether a mystery spanning many decades has finally been solved. 

Four bodies remained missing. In early May, when the snow began to melt, a Mansi hunter and his dog came across the remains of a makeshift snow den in the woods two hundred and fifty feet from the cedar tree: a floor of branches laid in a deep hole in the snow. Pieces of tattered clothing were found strewn about: black cotton sweatpants with the right leg cut off, the left half of a woman’s sweater. Another search team arrived and, using avalanche probes around the den, they brought up a piece of flesh. Excavation uncovered the four remaining victims, lying together in a rocky streambed under at least ten feet of snow. The autopsies revealed catastrophic injuries to three of them. Thibault-Brignoles’s skull was fractured so severely that pieces of bone had been driven into the brain. Zolotaryov and Dubinina had crushed chests with multiple broken ribs, and the autopsy report noted a massive hemorrhage in the right ventricle of Dubinina’s heart. The medical examiner said the damage was similar to what is typically seen as the “result of an impact of an automobile moving at high speed.” Yet none of the bodies had external penetrating wounds, though Zolotaryov’s was missing its eyes, and Dubinina’s was missing its eyes, tongue, and part of the upper lip.

A careful inventory of clothing recovered from the bodies revealed that some of these victims were wearing clothes taken or cut off the bodies of others, and a laboratory found that several items emitted unnaturally high levels of radiation. A radiological expert testified that, because the bodies had been exposed to running water for months, these levels of radiation must originally have been “many times greater.”

Read the story

The Fracking Lottery

George Hagemeyer in front of his new living-room wall mural. Credit: Tristan Spinski

Colin Jerolmack | Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town | April 2021 | 2,303 words (8 minutes)

Excerpted from Chapter 3: The Fracking Lottery

Like state-run lotteries (and unlike most of real life), the fracking lottery was also rather random from a sociological perspective, in that lessors’ socioeconomic status had little bearing on their chances of coming out a winner.7 In fact, some of the biggest winners were land-poor folks like George Hagemeyer, whose inherited properties were millstones before fracking. Not long before I met George, he was barely getting by on his custodian’s pension. Duct tape traversed his linoleum kitchen floor. The cabinets sagged. A faded wallpaper mural of a fall landscape that had enjoyed pride of place on his living room wall for forty years was peeling. A tarp had been hastily draped over the leaking roof of a ramshackle trailer parked in his front yard that George used as a shed. He drove a jalopy.

Not that George was one to complain. “If you wanna look at the bad things all the time, that’s all you’re ever gonna see. You hafta look at the good side, too.” The good side was that, out of seven siblings, he was the one who had been gifted his dad’s land. He planned to die here, but he worried about what would happen to the property afterward. The natural order of things, according to George, is for a father to entrust his son to be the land’s next steward. But George didn’t have a son, and neither his adopted daughter nor his teenage granddaughter showed interest in living on the estate. His brother, who used to live next door, on a sliver of the family farm, had already sold out.

George’s fortunes did not change overnight. Like the Shaners, he leased in the mid-2000s, before anyone in the region had even heard the word fracking. The going rate at the time was only $5 per acre, roughly the amount that wildcatters had been paying for decades for the right—which they almost never exercised—to probe for trapped pockets of underground methane. Given the region’s historic experience with vertical gas wells, which were low impact, few in number, and almost never put into production, a visit from the landman didn’t set off alarm bells for George. (Some lessors complained that gas companies intentionally glossed over how horizontal drilling would be different—i.e., far more disruptive for lessors and far more lucrative for the industry.) George ran the lease, which offered $12 per acre for the first year and $4.50 per acre for the remaining four years (for a total payout of $2,360), by his lawyer. He was told it was a good deal. George smirked. “How many times do you think I’m ever gonna hire that lawyer to do anything for me again? It’s between zero and none.”

Sociologist Stephanie Malin and colleagues argue that leasing disempowered lessors like George, “precisely because negotiations occurred privately between industry representatives and individual landowners.”8 Most lessors, including people with counsel, lacked full information on what they could bargain for. The structure of private land leasing played into the industry’s hands. In most instances, gas company representatives were able to convince landowners to lease through one-on-one negotiations—situations in which the industry held all the cards. It never occurred to George that he could have collectively bargained with his neighbors, as the Crawleys did; as a result, he arguably got fleeced.

When I asked George if he felt cheated, though, he responded, “I can’t holler.” He noted that he “made a nice chunk of money” for the pipeline under his field. More than the gleaming Ford Explorer SUV and the $8,000 Scag riding mower, what mattered most to him about the windfall was being able to start a college fund for his granddaughter Maddie. Her portrait—knees tucked close to her chest, her blond hair framing a shy teenager smile—was the only tabletop adornment in his living room. Tearfully glancing at her photo, George managed to blurt out, “I love that girl to pieces,” before momentarily going silent to collect himself. “She deserves everything.”

George hoped to be able to give his granddaughter everything in the near future. I stood with him on a scorching July afternoon in 2013 as he supervised the workers preparing to bring his moneymakers—that is, the six gas wells in his backyard—online (i.e., connected to the pipeline). Despite the heat, the roughnecks were required to wear thick fire-retardant suits. “Ugh,” George commented, “I’d rather go pick shit with the chickens than wear one of those damned things!” As was his wont, George chatted up the nearest hard hat, who happened to be a field analyst who told us he recently migrated here from the oilfields in Wyoming. “We’re hopin’ for some pretty good wells here,” the man remarked nonchalantly. “You are?” George asked excitedly, rubbing his hands together as if caressing an imaginary stack of royalty checks. “I am too!” he exclaimed, before becoming overwhelmed by belly laughs. The worker readily indulged George’s fantasy. Based on the wellheads’ high-pressure-gauge readings, he had “a feeling they’re gonna be some pretty good ones.”

Once the man walked away, George began chuckling as he imagined life as a “shaleionaire.” He told me he would be the lousiest rich person alive, because he would give it all away. In addition to planning to pick up the tab for his granddaughter’s college tuition and buy her a car for graduation, he wanted, he said, “to be able to take care of my brothers and sisters that were born and raised here.” On second thought, George conceded that he didn’t plan to give all the royalty money away. “I wanna protect my home as much as possible.” Materially, that meant remodeling his careworn kitchen and installing a new roof—ideally, a metal one. Legally, that meant rewriting his will so that part of his new-found fortune stayed with the property, meaning that his daughter would forfeit any claim to her inheritance if she attempted to sell or transfer ownership of the estate. George also entertained more fanciful visions, like constructing a pond in his field “big enough to put two islands in,” with “an arch bridge going from one to the other with a flowering cherry [tree] in the middle of each one,” and like buying out his neighbor and bulldozing the house, so he didn’t have to look at it.

When the money, such as it was, began rolling in, George had some fun. He purchased a kayak and a large passenger van to transport it, so that he didn’t have to bother attaching a trailer to his SUV. On one visit, I found his table littered with ads torn out of magazines for resorts in the Poconos, casinos in Atlantic City, and even a fourteen-day cruise in Alaska. He had taken to purchasing decorative plates painted with American flags and animals like deer and eagles—which he displayed on counters, sills, and almost any other flat surface he could find throughout the house—and to collecting limited-edition Monopoly board games (the crown jewel, which he said he picked up on a day trip to Corning, New York, with his granddaughter, was gold-foil-stamped and constructed of mahogany). And he sported a fancy new watch that he had seen on TV and had to have. ‘They said the list price was $1,500, but I got it for a little more than $500.’*

It took some time to get his kitchen remodeled, in part because George acted like a self-described “pain in the ass.” Seeming to relish a rare opportunity to play the part of a bigwig, George gleefully recounted how he fired two contractors for not following his detailed specifications (he said one bought the wrong sink; another “hung the cabinets too darn high!”). The kitchen was finally completed in the fall of 2016, and it was such a total transformation that it could have been featured on Extreme Home Makeover: all stainless-steel appliances, including (finally) a dishwasher; wraparound stained solid-wood cabinets; marble countertops; an embossed ceiling that imitated the tin ceilings of old; and, of course, a new tiled floor to replace the duct-taped linoleum. The bathroom, whose origin as an outhouse attached to the kitchen meant that it was perennially dank, was also gut renovated. Its newly installed cedar paneling (including on the tub), wall-to-wall carpet, and insulated walls emanated both figurative and literal warmth. The showpiece, which George couldn’t wait to present to me, was a walnut bay window installed in the laundry room, off the back of the kitchen. Previously, he had no view of his backyard from the kitchen. Its three panes now framed an archetypal rustic scene: the lush green expanse of his lawn extending toward distant tree stands, with the misty mountains looming in the background. (He shrugged off the occasional odor of industrial chemicals like benzene that wafted in from the well pad through his window, noting that the problem was easily solved by jamming rags between the window and the sill.) ‘They were gonna do that window with pine,’ George said with disgust. He went on, ‘Now, pine would’ve only set me back $800, and this cost ten times that. But you ain’t doing my window with pine! Over my dead body!’

Though the living room was relatively unchanged, George did make one significant alteration as an ode to his mother: he replaced her faded, flaking wallpaper mural. The new mural, also a fall scene that took up the entire wall, consisted of dozens of painted vinyl squares glued together. George had actually purchased it four years earlier with his pipeline bonus money, but it sat rolled up behind his loveseat for want of the additional funds required for a professional installation. Knowing that I used to rib him about the unfinished job, George proudly sat for a portrait session with the mural as a backdrop when I visited him in the fall of 2017 with a photographer. Although the declining productivity of his wells, along with the bottoming-out of natural-gas prices, reduced George’s monthly royalties from five figures to four figures in less than a year, he fulfilled his dream of surprising his granddaughter with a new Ford Escape for her high school graduation, in 2017. He joyfully recounted the story of driving Maddie to the dealership under the pretense that his own car needed repairs, and then parking by the white SUV and announcing, “It’s yours!” George sold his two-year-old passenger van to finance the $28,000 cash purchase, which was a reminder that his newfound wealth was finite. Yet the fact that George had grown accustomed to paying in full up front for big-ticket items was an indicator of how privileged fracking had made him. One way he expressed his gratitude was by donating $500 worth of food and new clothes to a shelter on Thanksgiving; he said he made his granddaughters tag along, ‘to show them how to be charitable.’

Thanks to land leasing, George had finally broken free of a lifetime of relative deprivation. Though he was hardly alone in turning to the fracking lottery in an effort to escape hardship, George certainly made out better than most. Of course, those who didn’t own any mineral estate couldn’t participate in the fracking lottery. What’s more, in some places—especially Billtown—tenants faced rising rents, and in 2012 residents of the Riverdale Mobile Home Park were forced out after a company bought the land in order to construct a water withdrawal site. In the rural places of Lycoming County where most drilling occurred, though, almost everyone owned rather than rented (in Gamble Town- ship, where George lived, only 10 percent of the population were rent- ers).9 And, unlike in parts of the Midwest, almost all the landowners here held the mineral rights. Everyone who leased got something, but it’s a minority, it seems, who wound up with life-changing money.10

The fact that few lessors hit the jackpot, while most of them experienced some degradation in their quality of life, has led some analysts to conclude that petroleum companies exploited the vulnerability of marginalized small-scale farmers and homeowners. Like the disproportionately impoverished group of people who buy lottery tickets, the thinking goes, many lessors felt they had little choice but to sign, because leasing was their only potential escape from economic insecurity. Some scholars call scenarios like this “environmental blackmail,” because, they argue, residents must choose between their health and their livelihood.11 In addition, fracking introduced new inequalities among neighbors: members of the Shaner clan earned enough royalties to endow college funds and hire maids; the Crawleys, just down the hill, received just a $7,000 one-time bonus, which came at the expense of their fresh-water supply (now laced with methane from a neighbor’s gas well). The Department of Environmental Protection shut in the faulty well, foreclosing the possibility of it generating royalties for the Crawleys.

As for his own misfortune, Tom Crawley resignedly concluded that “accidents happen” and optimistically pointed to the Shaners, implying that he could just as easily have been in their shoes. His neighbor Doyle Bodle, whose water was also impacted by drilling, reiterated that most lessors “are not having any problems,” and that even people not impacted by drilling can wind up with bad water, suggesting that geology itself shouldered much of the blame. “Losers” like Tom and Doyle saw themselves primarily as victims of bad luck—in particular, of an unfortunate location—rather than of bad actors or systemic inequity. And the fact that topography and luck largely determined the winners appealed to residents’ egalitarian sensibilities. Anyone could win, regardless of occupation, education, or wealth. In this way, private mineral ownership, a peculiarly American idea, made fracking compatible with the American Dream-even as it created new socioeconomic disparities, exposed landowners to significant environmental risks, and oftentimes left lessors holding the bag.

***

* Throughout this book, double quotation marks signify that the utterance was audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Single quotation marks represent my reconstruction of dialogue based on handwritten notes. I make this distinction to signal that utterances inside single quotation marks may be less reliable than those inside double quotation marks, as it seems almost impossible to capture speech verbatim with notes, even if they are written contemporaneously.

7. While it is plausible that wealthier and more educated residents were advantaged in negotiating lease and royalty payments, the biggest predictor of whether or not one hired a lawyer was not socioeconomic status but the size of one’s property (small landowners surmised that lawyer fees would eat up most of their leasing bonus). Dylan Bugden and Richard Stedman’s survey of lessors in northeastern Pennsylvania lends additional support to my claim that socioeconomic status did not play a significant role in determining outcomes in the fracking lottery. They find that “outcomes tend to vary by firm-specific rather than sociostructural factors.” See Dylan Bugden and Richard Stedman, “Rural Landowners, Energy Leasing, and Patterns of Risk and Inequality in the Shale Gas Industry,” Rural Sociology 84, no. 3 (2019): 459–88

8. Stephanie A. Malin et al., “The Right to Resist or a Case of Injustice? Meta-Power in the Oil and Gas FieldsSocial Forces 97, no. 4 (2019): 1811–38.

9. “Gamble Township, Pennsylvania Housing Data,” TownCharts.com, accessed July 15, 2020.

10. Public data only allow estimates of the total amount of money of leasing bonuses and royalties paid out to lessors by oil and gas companies, not how much each lessor received (see, e.g., Timothy Fitzgerald and Randal R. Rucker, “US Private Oil and Natural Gas Royalties: Estimates and Policy Relevance,” OPEC Energy Review, 40, no. 1 (2016): 3–25). Anecdotally, few if any journalistic reports of shale communities turn up more than a few local instances of shaleionaires. See, e.g., Tom Wilber, Under the Surface: Fracking, Fortunes, and the Fate of the Marcellus Shale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Andrew Maykuth, “Shale Gas Was Going to Make Them Rich. Then the Checks Arrived,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 21, 2017.

11. Stephanie Malin, “There’s No Real Choice but to Sign: Neoliberalization and Normalization of Hydraulic Fracturing on Pennsylvania Farmland,” Journal of Environmental Studies and Science 4 (2014): 17–27.

***

Excerpted from Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town. Published by Princeton University Press.

When Refugee Families are Separated, Women Carry the Burden

Author photo by Jill Filipovic, used courtesy of St Martin's Press.

Ty McCormick | Beyond the Sand and Sea, One Family’s Quest for Country to Call Home | April 2021 | 3,518 words (20 minutes)

A few weeks after Maryan gave birth to her first son, Mohamed, word came from Dadaab that her parents and younger siblings were going to America. The Ashraf had been given priority for resettlement by the UN, and thousands of people seemed to be were leaving at once. Believing her brief marriage to Yussuf had run its course, Maryan took the first bus back to Dadaab with little Mohamed in tow. She had yet to tell her parents about her husband, in part because there was part of her that always doubted their marriage would survive. Now there was no hiding the fact that she was married and a mother. Sharif and Kaltuma would never approve of her plan to leave without Yussuf. But if they were going to America, she was going too.

The sight of Maryan with an infant child was a shock to her parents. Her mother broke down in tears, and she and Sharif both begged her to reconcile with Yussuf. “Think of the damage you are doing to our reputation,” they said. But Maryan was adamant that she was done with him. A day or two before the family was scheduled to begin the vetting process for resettlement, though, Yussuf showed up in Dadaab demanding to know why Maryan had left with their son. He had heard from family back in Moyale that the UN was taking her to America. Suddenly, the wife he had abandoned was his ticket to a better life.

Initially, Maryan rejected the idea out of hand. But her parents pushed and cajoled her. Divorce was simply out of the question as far as they were concerned. It wasn’t just taboo; it was unspeakable, a religious and moral failing that she would take to the grave. Leaving Yussuf behind, she realized, would wound her parents in a way she could never repair. What’s more, she harbored her own feelings of guilt at having agreed to marry him. You picked this guy, she thought. You can’t just walk away.

Reluctantly, Maryan agreed to give her marriage a second chance. She and Yussuf hadn’t had a legal wedding in Moyale, so they organized a hasty one at a mosque in Ifo in order to obtain the marriage certificate they would need to be resettled as a family. A sheikh named Jawad Abdi presided over the ceremony, and his signature is affixed to the bottom of a handwritten document from that day, specifying a dowry of “a cow of three years.” Sharif’s signature appears as a witness, above a statement clarifying that the improvised certificate, written in English and in Arabic, “should serve as proof of said marriage because currently marriage certificates are out of stock.”

Once they were officially wed, Maryan and Yussuf were given their own resettlement case with baby Mohamed, instead of remaining attached to Sharif, Kaltuma, and the rest of their children. That fateful decision, made to accommodate Yussuf, would end up splitting the family in two for years to come.

* * *

Maryan came off the plane in Phoenix carrying one-year-old Mohamed and a white plastic bag stamped with the blue insignia of the International Organization for Migration. In addition to immigration and work authorization papers, the bag contained a four-by-six-inch card bearing the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Unlike the generation of Somalis that would follow her, including her three youngest siblings, Maryan hadn’t grown up dreaming of the United States. The words “land of the free and home of the brave” held no meaning for her. All she knew was that she wanted a better life for herself and for her family. That meant being more than a mother and a wife, more than a woman for whom a suitable dowry was a cow of three years.

Their journey had lasted more than forty-eight hours, taking them from Nairobi to New York to Houston and finally on to Phoenix. Neither she nor her husband had ever seen an airplane up close, let alone ridden on one. Now as they exited the terminal at Sky Harbor Airport, Maryan suddenly froze in terror. In front of her was a glass-encased stairway that appeared to be collapsing. The steps were grooved and sturdy-looking, but they fell away, one after the other, each time she went to step on them. It took a moment for Maryan to grasp what was happening. The concourse had been relatively empty when they arrived at the top of the escalator, but now a small line had formed behind them and people were anxious to move.

“It’s okay, you can walk on it,” came the gentle voice of a woman behind her. The woman must have guessed they had just arrived from somewhere far away—Maryan in her black hijab looking fearful and confused, and Yussuf at a loss as well.

The escalator wasn’t the only thing about their new life that seemed odd. When Maryan would ride the Number Eleven bus with baby Mohamed, people would fawn over them and say what a cute daughter she had. It wasn’t until she made friends with a few Americans that she figured out the source of the misunderstanding: children’s clothes were gendered here, and Mohamed’s light pink pajamas were throwing people off. The grocery store was another locus of confusion. For months after they arrived, Maryan kept buying things by mistake because the pictures on the labels were misleading. A packet of tea bags, for instance, showed huge cubes of sugar, which was what she had intended to buy. Nothing was packaged this way back in Kenya. You bought things loose, not in bags or plastic wrappers. But Maryan was curious and outgoing by nature, and she didn’t mind learning by trial and error. In fact, she bought lots of things on impulse, without even trying to guess what they were. A box of shiny red strawberries jumped out at her, so she bought them on a whim, only to recoil in disgust at what to her was their strange, sour taste.

Many new arrivals in Tucson who had come from Dadaab, including Yussuf, had never lived outside of a small rural village. Some of the children had never seen the outside of a refugee camp. Maryan was unique in that she had lived alone in Nairobi. She also spoke decent English, and was used to a level of independence that was unusual in conservative Somali communities. This was a source of constant friction in her marriage, but it was also a font of opportunity in America. Because she could read and translate, she was an invaluable resource to the dozens of refugee families living in the area, the person inevitably called on to resolve all manner of misunderstandings with landlords, employers, and the police. It wasn’t long before the International Rescue Committee started hiring her for little jobs assisting other new arrivals, translating at job interviews or helping decipher training videos. She liked helping other refugees, and she could make as much as $75 for a single day of work.


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With the help of the International Rescue Committee, Maryan soon got a full-time job at Jack in the Box, cutting tomatoes and iceberg lettuce for Caesar salads. The pay was only $5 per hour, but the work was more regular than the translating jobs and the restaurant was close enough to the apartment complex that she didn’t have to waste money riding the bus. There were a few mishaps in the beginning, like the time she called a colleague fat and caused her to break down in tears. In Somali culture, girth signifies wealth, so she hadn’t anticipated this reaction. But on the whole, things went smoothly on the food-prep line. She made friends with her manager, a young woman named Nancy Rodriguez who was also a new mother in a tempestuous relationship. The two women liked to gossip and often confided in each other when things weren’t going well at home. Sometimes, Nancy would knock quietly on Maryan’s window at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. Maryan would slip out of the house, careful not to wake Yussuf, and zoom off with Nancy in her silver Honda Civic. The two of them would drive for hours before the sun came up, talking and listening to music. Eventually, Nancy started letting Maryan drive, teaching her to maneuver along quiet back roads even though she didn’t have a license.

Yussuf was having a different experience in his new country. Much less comfortable than his wife in their new surroundings, he was even more determined to control her than he had been in Kenya. The International Rescue Committee had helped him get a job, too, first as a night-shift cleaner at the Hilton and later as a landscaper. But the work was hard and he was constantly confused and embarrassed. Unable to speak English and unwilling to learn, he took his frustrations out on Maryan. He disliked that she worked, and he hated that she thought it earned her a measure of autonomy. The way Maryan saw it, she brought in more than half of their income, so she should have at least half the say in how the household was run. Yussuf disagreed, often forcefully. Over time, their fights grew even more ferocious. She would yell and cry, and he would slam his fists against the tables and the walls. Sometimes, he would physically block her from storming out into the hall. More than once, the neighbors called the police. But there was part of Maryan that felt sorry for Yussuf, part of her that knew she couldn’t leave him in a place where he couldn’t survive on his own. Each time the cops came, she kept her mouth shut.

Yussuf seemed threatened by Maryan’s prominent position in the community. He grew incensed when people he didn’t know called the house asking for her, and more than once he ripped the phone out of the wall. He also tried to sabotage Maryan’s friendships by spreading rumors that she had neglected their son. Once, when he and Maryan were meeting with an employment counselor at the International Rescue Committee, he announced that he had forbidden her from working outside the home. The counselor calmly reached across the desk and lifted up baby Mohamed, who had been swaddled in Maryan’s arms, handed him to Yussuf and told him to take the bus home. “You can control your child,” she said flatly, “But in America, you can’t control your wife.” Enraged, Yussuf stormed out of the room with the baby, a torrent of insults pouring out of his mouth in Somali. “You just follow the cadaan,” he sneered at Maryan, using the Somali word for whites. “You just follow their rules, and you don’t respect our religion.”

* * *

Maryan began to dread being in the apartment. Whenever Yussuf was there, she would find an excuse to go somewhere else with the baby, whether it was to the Reid Park Zoo with Nancy, who had a yearlong entry pass, or to Chuck E. Cheese with other friends from work. But the bond between her and Yussuf wasn’t completely severed, and feeling lonely and isolated, she sometimes let herself be drawn back into his arms. A little more than a year after they arrived in Arizona, she realized she was pregnant again.

Ambia was born with jaundice, a common blood disorder that made her skin appear slightly yellow. “You have a cursed child,” Yussuf said, when he first laid eyes on her at the University of Arizona Medical Center. The doctors said she would be just fine, but that Ambia needed to stay overnight for special therapy under a halogen light. They discharged Maryan, though, and told her to go home with Yussuf, a notion that struck her as preposterous. She wasn’t about to leave her baby in the care of people she didn’t know to be treated with a light machine she didn’t trust. In Kenya, no mother would leave her newborn at the hospital, but here the impassive white robed physicians clearly expected her to. She broke down crying, and implored them to let her stay. Eventually, they relented, and Maryan and Ambia were given a room together for the next three nights.

The counselor calmly reached across the desk and lifted up baby Mohamed, who had been swaddled in Maryan’s arms, handed him to Yussuf and told him to take the bus home. “You can control your child,” she said flatly, “But in America, you can’t control your wife.”

A few weeks later, when they were back home at the apartment on North Alvernon Way, a bill arrived in the mail. When Maryan read it, she let out a gasp: $16,000, for the care she and her daughter had received. It was more than a year’s salary at Jack in the Box. A knot forming in her chest, she dialed the billing department, unsure of what exactly she would say. But after she gave her patient code and verified her date of birth, the woman on the other end of the phone sounded surprised Maryan had called. “I’m showing no balance owed,” she said. “It’s been paid in full.”

Maryan never found out who paid that bill. She wondered if maybe it was the employment counselor from the International Rescue Committee, a woman whose name she can’t recall but who was always kind to her. Two years later, after her second daughter, Najma, was born, Maryan got up the courage to ask the counselor if she had been the guardian angel who had wiped out her debt. The woman scoffed at the suggestion. “I don’t have that kind of money,” she said.

But the counselor did have ideas about how Maryan could earn more money of her own: by pursuing a GED. With a high school equivalency certificate, a whole range of new job opportunities would open up—ones that paid better than $5 per hour and wouldn’t leave her clothes smelling like fried food.

Soon, Maryan was spending several hours a day at Pima Community College while an elderly Somali woman in their apartment building looked after the children. Maryan liked being back in school, but in the beginning, she was bewildered by her classmates. They put their feet on their desks and ate food during class. Acting like that at Abdul Aziz Primary would have earned you a beating. Were these students not afraid of the teachers? Did the teachers have no self-respect?

One of her courses at Pima was English as a Second Language, or ESL. Most of the assignments were simple worksheets that involved identifying errors in grammar or spelling. But the worksheets were supposed to serve a secondary function as well: introducing foreigners to American traditions and customs. Tailgating at sporting events was the subject of one memorable ESL worksheet, which advised students that the boozy tradition was “a fun part of college life and for sports fans in Illinois.” Maryan often found herself giggling quietly over assignments like these, which struck her as random to the point of absurdity. They weren’t even in Illinois, she thought to herself. And why on earth would she ever need to know about drunken college football parties?

Six months later, Maryan had her GED. Not long after that she got a job at St. Joseph’s Hospital, mopping up the surgical theater after operations. The pay was better than at Jack in the Box, and she was able to afford a drivers’ education course and eventually a used car. She was also able to send more money home to her parents. There had been all manner of expenses to cover, including tuberculosis medication for her father, whose health had taken a turn for the worse. Lately, she had also noticed additional charges on her credit card statement for e-books that her brother Asad had downloaded from Dadaab. The books were expensive, certainly more money than she would have spent on small luxuries for herself. But remembering the monotony of life in Dadaab, she was glad her brother had become a passionate reader. She hated to think of him wiling away his days in the heat, waiting in humiliating food distribution lines, and cooking over a fire pit. Books seemed to light him up, and thinking of him that way made her happy.

The two of them corresponded more frequently as the years wore on and Asad matured into a reserved and sensitive young man. She would create email and social media accounts for him so they could communicate more easily, then give him the log-in credentials over the phone. Sometimes, she would get email alerts warning that someone was trying to access her accounts from abroad. Those emails always made her smile.

She had come to think of Asad not just as a little sibling in need of direction, but as a partner in caring for their parents—she as the breadwinner in Arizona and he as the caregiver and problem-solver at home. Now instead of talking to Sharif about difficulties with doctors or the UN, it was always Asad she coordinated with. His was a comforting voice on the other end of the phone, and as time passed she felt herself leaning on him as well. When he was young, she had tried not to burden him with her own struggles. But the worse things got with Yussuf, the less of her suffering she was able to hide. It was strange opening up to someone she remembered only as a small child, someone whom fate had taken away from her and whose life was now so different than hers. They existed in totally separate universes, and yet there were things that only he could understand.

* * *

Maryan had another phone besides the one she used to call home with her $20 calling cards. It was slim and black and its existence was a closely guarded secret. In the contacts, there was only a single number saved: 911.

The emergency phone had come from a domestic violence counselor. Because Maryan had high blood pressure and crippling anxiety, her doctor had come to suspect she was in danger at home and referred her to a shelter for battered women. Even before that Maryan had thought about running away with her children, but she didn’t know who she could trust or where to turn for help. Yussuf had succeeded in turning much of the refugee community against her, spreading vicious rumors about his wayward “Western” wife who thought she was better than other Somalis and didn’t value their traditions. Even the idea of domestic violence was viewed with suspicion by many of the refugees she had helped translate for over the years. “If you are married and your husband beats you up, you have nothing to say because he’s your husband,” was how she summed up their thinking.

She hated to think of him wiling away his days in the heat, waiting in humiliating food distribution lines, and cooking over a fire pit. Books seemed to light him up, and thinking of him that way made her happy.

Yussuf never hit Maryan, but his constant emotional and psychological abuse had slowly broken her down. She would wake up in the middle of the night, heart racing, unable to bear the thought of another day with him. Even so, she felt paralyzed. Faith had always been important to her, and while divorce was technically allowed in Islam, it would make you an outcast. There was part of her that felt she had a religious duty to stay in the marriage as long as her husband did. And nothing had changed her belief that leaving Yussuf would crush her parents and forever change the way they looked at her. Running away to avoid getting married had been one thing. Divorcing the father of her three children would be quite another. “It felt like there was something holding me down that was heavier than me,” she recalled. “Like I was in the ocean and the waves were just overpowering me.”

But the situation had become untenable. She had started breaking down in public, crying in front of coworkers and in the middle of shifts at the hospital. She had missed work after one particularly painful fight, and then she had missed another day and another. Eventually, her boss had let her go. Yussuf had finally gotten his wish: a wife without a job.

Not long after that Maryan found herself alone on a ledge, looking down at what seemed like her only avenue of escape. As Yussuf pounded angrily on the locked door of their apartment, threatening to break it down, she teetered on the edge of a sliding-glass window, the smooth pavement of the parking lot beckoning from twenty feet below. She had reached the limit of what she could take. But as she contemplated stepping out of her life, it occurred to her that Yussuf probably wouldn’t care if she died. The thought of his indifference filled her with rage, and she pulled back from the ledge. Suddenly, she knew what she would do, and it was something that would hurt Yussuf, too. The next day, she sold her car and bought four plane tickets to the farthest place from Arizona she could think of that was still in the United States. Then she picked up the phone to tell her parents she was leaving Yussuf and moving the kids to Seattle.

Excerpted from Beyond the Sand and Sea by Ty McCormick. Published by St.Martin’s Press.