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On, In, or Near the Sea: A Book List

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Alison Fields | Longreads | July 2019 | 7 minutes (1,753 words)

My peak beach read moment came in 1999. I sat third in a line of chaise lounges — my grandmother Nana, my Mom, me, my younger sister — beside the pool at the Lowcountry beach resort we’d visited every summer since time immemorial. All four of us were sun drunk. Three of us were at least tipsy from cabana cocktails. Nana, Mom, and my sister glistened with Hawaiian Tropic — a trio of golden-tanned nereids in black swimsuits and designer sunglasses. I was lobster pink, slathered in 50+, and cowering under long-sleeved shirts and towels like I was going out for a part in a zero budget Lawrence of Arabia because genetics are cruel.

Nana wasn’t much of a reader. Her preferred tomes were pricing guides for antique Japanese porcelain and the Horchow catalog. That year, however, she’d packed a paperback copy of The Starr Report amidst her Breton tees and linen shorts. Nana was a vocal critic of the Clinton administration, a fact that surprised no one as her personal politics ran slightly to the right of Divine Right Monarchy. I supposed she thought the book would bolster her already outspoken arguments. All of us knew better than to ask. We had a gentleman’s agreement with regard to politics on family vacations, the central conceits of which were: 1. Don’t bring it up and 2. When Nana does — and she will — change the subject as quickly as possible.

In that moment by the pool, I was lost in a dream of Conquest-era Mexico, wading through a particularly muddy chapter of Terra Nostra, and I could tell Nana was on the verge of saying a thing. My sister had put on headphones and securely hid her face in her college summer reading. Mom, reading an epistolary novel about Empress Josephine, was sitting next to Nana, so she was the most easily available when Nana finally sighed dramatically and tapped her Virginia Slim impatiently against the resort-branded ashtray.

She said Mom’s name about three times. Mom might have been engrossed in her book, but Nana was persistent. When she knew she had Mom’s attention, she shoved The Starr Report toward Mom and tapped a manicured fingernail against the page.

“Honey, would you mind telling me what this is?”

There was a long pause. I listened to the splashing of swimmers in the pool, the ice clinking at the bar, the wheels on a catering tray bound for some beachside fête. I wondered Are they playing the Cardigans at the tiki bar? Mom’s pause stretched, long enough for me to realize with dawning horror that whatever text had stymied my then seventy-three-year-old grandmother was probably not a legal term.

“Anybody want another round?” I stood up and asked.

Nana waved me off, looking expectantly at my mother. Mom gave me a pleading look and told me to add the drinks to her tab.

As I walked down the boardwalk toward the bar, I could hear Mom in the same halting, careful words I remember her using when she explained certain things to me, “Well, Mother, when a man and a woman love each other very, very much . . .” I made a mental note to order Mom a double.

***

Two things I like: 1. Sitting on, in, or near enough to the sea that I can sense it, and 2. Reading books.

My inner pirate captain is a bit of a librarian. And my inner librarian is only ever a breath away from raising the sails and lighting out for ports unknown. She knows that nothing improves the reading of a novel like a salty breeze and sand on the toes, even if said salt and sand are sticky murder on a paperback. I suppose there are people that go to the beach without a book. Those people are perverse. What do they do instead, exactly? How much bocce can a human play?

This time of year friends ask me for beach books because I read more than is probably healthy. Sometimes people even want to know, specifically, what I will be reading at the beach. That’s a gamble, because it’s basically just my TO READ stack and there be monsters. Case in point: I spent the vast majority of a week at the beach some years back with Britain in Revolution, Austin Woolrych’s history of the English Civil War (the book was excellent).

I think I do okay with recommendations. The better I know you, the closer I’ll get to the mark. But critical to the whole endeavor is what you mean by Beach Book. Some people define the genre as a slightly better class of an airport bookstore read — something breezy, either plot-heavy, funny, or both, not too serious, not too academic. Some people see the Beach Book as literal — a book set on or near a beach. Sometimes these two categories overlap and that’s awesome, but you have to be very, very careful or you’ll summon Nicholas Sparks, the literary equivalent of the dude who brings a Filet -O-Fish to a Lowcountry Boil.

For today, I’m going with the second category. Books about beaches, seas, sand, and coastal destinations to accompany the end of the summer season and the first stirrings of the fall.

Let’s start close to home. Many of us end up at the beach on family vacations, always awkward, which Colson Whitehead’s sly, autobiographical Sag Harbor pretty much nails. While vacationing, questions of love and class can arise, especially if there’s marriage on the horizon as is the case in Dorothy West’s The Wedding. In Jill McCorkle’s Ferris Beach, friendships (and friendships with a romantic possibility) blossom around the various impediments of small-town prejudice and adolescence.

Oceanside theme parks and roadside attractions give tourists the chance to mingle with full time carnival-types, like Karen Russell’s Bigtree dynasty at their alligator wrestling park in Swamplandia, or at the eponymous, possibly haunted North Carolina theme park in Stephen King’s slim, enjoyable Joyland. Hotels can also occupy the seaside, and JG Farrell’s extraordinary Troubles offers a darkly humorous critique of colonialism and its obliviousness in face of revolution within a sprawling, cat-infested resort on the Irish coast. If you prefer your seaside hotel on the fancier end, and for your mysterious IRA man to have ‘80s hair, there’s Jonathan Lee’s haunting High Dive.

Moving to a more tropical locale does not guarantee a more peaceful plotline. Proximity to both spectacular island sunsets and titans of Reggae do not prevent against the violence and conspiracy at the heart of Marlon James gorgeous, epic A Brief History of Seven Killings. The ghosts of Trujillo’s Dominican Republic haunt the landscape in Julia Alvarez’s fictionalized recounting of the Maribal sister in her In the Time of the Butterflies. And the generations of Indonesian women inhabiting the lush, fictional port city of Eka Kuniawan’s Beauty Is a Wound survive decades of war and political upheaval amid a landscape buffeted by trade winds and a bit of magical realism.

Islands have always been ripe for troublemakers and hijinks — actual pirate captains, not just imaginary ones ideated in suburbia. Richard Hughes’ deft, surprising (based on a true story!) High Wind in Jamaica, with its pint-sized pirate ship mutineers is just about the best thing ever. Anyone who finished Lord of the Flies back in the day will not be surprised to see kids going very dark in tropical environments. Ugly things can even happen in suburban, post climate-crisis, dystopian Florida in Donald Antrim’s Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World. Things get a little weird in Florida, as in Lauren Groff’s marvelous short story collection, Florida, and really, really weird in Jeff VanDerMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy.

We’ve always known the sea is home to monsters. Sometimes the literary ones have their own perspective on events, such as in Madeline Miller’s wonderful, magical Circe. Some of those who spend their lives conjuring monsters from the deep have their own particularly monstrous ideas. Certainly that was the case with HP Lovecraft, and Paul La Farge’s The Night Ocean is a great novel that tries to make sense of that. On the other hand, sometimes monsters end up being something quite unexpected, as in Sarah Perry’s gorgeous The Essex Serpent, a historical novel about science, faith, and love. Rarely do monsters end up being as wholly and completely hilarious as they do in Mat Johnson’s richly-imagined Pym, which takes on both Edgar Allen Poe and Little Debbie Cakes in its satirical journey through the (very) cold heart of American racial politics, past and present.

Of course, it’s never the destination when it comes to sea voyages, as much as the journey. I like journeys that say something about both the people making them and the world they are traveling through. Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies assembles a fascinating, multinational cast of characters to sail upon ships carrying indentured servants between India, and continues them through the next two books of his Ibis trilogy. Charles R. Johnson’s Middle Passage recounts the horrors of the slave ship from the unlikely perspective of a newly freed slave who boards for its last journey. The title character of Esi Edugyan’s masterful Washington Black begins his journey in Caribbean slavery and then travels a path through several continents and scientific discoveries.

Seaside journeys also offer people an opportunity to meditate — sometimes philosophically — on their various troubles, as is the case in Rachel Cusk’s Faye Trilogy or John Banville’s grieving narrator in The Sea. Dealing with romantic disappointment might provoke an escape to the seaside, even if it happens that your ex is already there, as is the case in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. It’s also possible you might be forced to leave your seaside home, and there’s usually a price to that. Just ask the Little Mermaid or Antoinette in Jean Rhys’ dreamy Jane Eyre “prequel,” Wide Sargasso Sea.

Finally, if you’re the sort of person that demands a dense history to while away your days, might I recommend David Abulafia’s The Great Sea, a survey of the Mediterranean from antiquity to present. It’s well-written, informative, and offers a wider lens view of one of the world’s most fascinating places than, say, your fourth reread of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley or that copy of Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins your friend from book club loaned you. Though, indeed, both of those are peak beach reads.

Don’t forget your sunscreen, and happy reading.

* * *

Alison Fields is a writer in Carrboro, North Carolina.

Editor: Katie Kosma

On Keeping a Notebook: A Reading List

“I can feel my brain changing.” Those were the first words I wrote in what would eventually become a continuous journal spanning thousands of pages and dozens of notebooks.

It was the middle of the night, and after I jotted the thought down, I added, “Is it permanent?”

I felt as if a tuning fork had been struck, its echo reverberating in my head. We were living in Atlanta then, and our house had one of those oversized master suites, inherited from the previous owner, so once out of bed, I was standing in a small sitting room that adjoined the bedroom. Next to me, a lamp I’d spirited away from my grandfather’s house cast a small glow, easing the insomnia I was experiencing. I kept repeating a phrase to myself, “The rough places made smooth.” I wasn’t sure if it was a biblical quote, or whether I had combined two different sayings (Atlanta is the birthplace of Martin Luther King, Jr., and I had the vague idea that Dr. King had said something to that effect). I only knew I felt relief at committing some of my inner turmoil to paper.

The next night, awake again at 3 a.m., I wrote about what I called “adventures in mind-expansion.” The journaling struck me as unusual. I was a reporter at an NPR station at the time and had been a news journalist for more than a decade. But this was different — akin to the writing I’d done when I was 9 and my teachers predicted I would be a writer.

I can partly chalk it up to something that happened a week later — my son’s birth. When I went into labor and headed off to the hospital that warm July day, I packed a notebook, a practice I’d abandoned years before when my expat days in Italy had concluded. One of the first photos I have with my newborn shows me writing in the maternity ward while nursing him. From there, a notebook became my constant companion. Some days in early motherhood, I couldn’t stop writing. I’d fill notebook pages at different intervals of the day, like an ongoing Twitter thread.

I was preparing for motherhood to change my life; it was the transformation I’d trained my eyes on entirely. But instead a parallel transformation involving writing also emerged.

Writing anchored me through my first year as a working mom. I’d pull off the road to write on my way home from work, or jot a few lines in the daycare parking lot. I found the twister of passing buildings, pedestrians, music on the radio, and the sounds of my son floating up from the backseat inspired me to experience new joys or simply savor old ones from a new vantage point. Sometimes I would even write while leaning the journal against the steering wheel, my eye moving between the page and the road.

Motherhood had reunited me with writing, which once again became my confidant, my forever friend. Another event could have been the trigger — a death, a divorce, a relocation. But either way, the pivotal instrument was a notebook — not a computer, not a tablet, not a phone.

Once I began writing again in earnest, I created computer files to record my ideas at greater length. But I wanted to be writing all the time, and one cannot write on a laptop all the time with a baby. A notebook is the solution. You can always write in a notebook — on a plane, in the car, even while out on a lake in a canoe. It’s almost never a breach of etiquette to pull out a notebook. I now teach, and I’ll often write in my notebook if I’ve arrived early for class. A notebook also never loses power and never has a glitch.

I keep lots of notebooks, but perhaps the most important is the small one I stash in my purse. It’s a baby notebook used for appointments and reminders that doubles as a “bits journal,” to steal a phrase from poet David Kirby, since I use it to record any image, phrase, or event that strikes my fancy and could contribute to a piece of writing later. I look at it obsessively throughout the day, re-reading my to-do list or jotting down ideas for stories, articles, poems, or gifts for my son. A typical day reads something like this:

Follow up on sleep pitch.
1 p.m. haircut.
Add “intimacy junkie” to the Di Lascia translation pitch cover letter.
Pick up birthday cake.
Finish book review for the Kenyon Review.
What about a piece called something like, “In Defense of Sleeplessness?”

On my way out of the house, I instinctively grab this daily notebook since I never know when I will think of lines I want to add to a piece in progress.

What’s more, it has given me a constant vocation that doesn’t allow much time for obsessing about other concerns. I’ll get a new phone if I lose the one I have but if my daily notebook goes missing? I’d lose my mind. In fact, it has such power — and provides such security — that I fear (somewhat ridiculously) for its safety.

I now take a notebook with me on every trip, which is fortuitous because I began writing the piece you’re reading while vacationing on a small, remote island in Vermont. The following longreads explore the joys of keeping a notebook and the art of writing longhand.

1. Are We Different Writers When We Move From Longhand to a Screen? (James Draney, August 2017, Literary Hub)

Like an intellectual historian, James Draney brings us a survey of how different authors and thinkers viewed developments in writing — specifically the instruments we use to write instead of writing longhand. He laments that “alas, the page that once contained the essence of the human voice has given way to a simulation of itself on the digital screen.” A simulation. Oh, that’s good. I feel as though I should call the fire brigade or yell, “Stop the presses!”

Draney cites a wide list of authors, including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who viewed the typewriter as something “charged with an unthinkable crime.” Draney writes:

For him, this writing machine was no benign piece of secretarial equipment: it was actually destroying the very essence of the human, click by mechanical click.

Draney weighs the impact of “tapping out a word, perhaps backspacing, deleting, highlighting, copying and pasting,” asking, “how do these mechanical ways of writing change the way we think?”

It’s interesting to note that unlike the other authors or subjects of the links here, Draney is not necessarily pro-longhand. That’s because writing in longhand isn’t a skill he acquired long before learning to type on a computer.

It’s odd to think that writers born today will not have any paper in their archives. It’s even funnier to think that these future writers may never actually learn to write. This was what it was like for me, born in 1990. I learned to write by hand at the very same time I learned to type. But rather than focus on my penmanship, I learned to process words on a machine for which writing, typing and processing were one and the same functions. Before the swirl of the pen, there was the plastic click of the keyboard. Not one continuous movement but thousands of discrete ones: arachnid fingers on a plastic pad.

2. Woke Up This Morning (Louis Menard, December 2007, The New Yorker)

There are many ways to use a notebook: anything from journaling, brainstorming, note-taking, and writing in one’s diary. Louis Menand focuses on that last substratum of notebook use, probably the most common form until recently. He is appropriately skeptical about the average person’s ability to remain faithful to a diary, largely because it requires that one input all thoughts, not just the pretty ones or the ones that sound good. “Most people don’t confess; they repress,” he writes.

“Never discriminate, never omit” is one of the unstated rules of diary-keeping. The rule is perverse, because all writing is about control, and writing a diary is a way to control the day—to have, as it were, the last word. But diaries are composed under the fiction that the day is in control, that you are simply a passive recorder of circumstance, and so everything has to go in whether it mattered or not—as though deciding when it didn’t were somehow not your business.

He adds that if the journal in question doesn’t contain a lot of unimportant drivel (“dross”), it’s not a diary. “It’s something else — a journal, or a writer’s notebook, or a blog (blather is not the same as dross).”

3. Mostly True (Sarah Manguso, February 2015, T: The New York Times Style Magazine)

One of the more noted diarists of recent years is writer Sarah Manguso who, unlike Anaïs Nin, didn’t publish her diary but rather published a book about it called Ongoingness: The End of a Diary. Manguso kept her diary for several decades. In this article from the New York TimesT Magazine, she tells us about the impetus of her diary and its contents, but perhaps one of the most interesting snippets to my mind is that she does not fetishize the actual container of the diary, which is to say the “little black books” she’s used.

In my late teens, overburdened by an excess of life, I built a storage facility for it: a diary. After I wrote things down I could safely forget them. It was the only relief I ever found, and I kept at it. I don’t keep a routine, but the diary gets written daily — usually several times daily, even in transit, in hospitals and at parties. In little black books and, as of this year, on my phone. Since 1992 I’ve created a new text file on my computer every New Year’s Day. Whatever I have written gets transcribed into the file and I throw the draft away. A little black book is a beautiful object, but I don’t care about the objects; I care only about the words in them.

4. 8 Writing Tips from Jeff Vandemeer (Jeff Vandemeer, March 2018, Chicago Review of Books)

The impetus for this article was a single word buried amid some writing tips from blockbuster science fiction author Jeff Vandemeer. Specifically, the word “luddite.” It appears in a tip about recording bits of inspiration whenever they come to you. He writes:

There is an immediacy to writing it on paper that appeals to me, too. This doesn’t strike me as a luddite thing, but a thing about the human brain.

As a journeyman writer, I gained all kinds of useful info on his writing process and the story behind the huge success of his “Annihilation” series of books from the piece, but the killer line for me is the one about being (or not being, as the case may be) a luddite. He seems almost apologetic about suggesting that the offline, old-school technology world might be all right, too. Which is too bad because his ideas are fantastic.

I carry a pen and a small notebook or loose notecards with me at all times. I also keep them on the nightstand next to the bed. I have pieces of paper in the kitchen, too. Over the past twenty years especially, I have not lost or forgotten a single idea or scene fragment or character observation or bit of dialogue because I have always written it down immediately, no matter what situation I’m in (this includes when I had a day job).

Over time, my subconscious has rewarded me more and more for taking It seriously. If your subconscious brain “knows” you are going to write it all down and use what it gives you, a loop is created where, at times, and depending on other factors, the problem isn’t lack of ideas but having too many ideas.

Like Vandemeer, I feel as though similar accusations are coming my way when I think about how a notebook’s “technology” is actually superior to a phone or computer. I open it and voilà, my dear ones, my notebook is ON. Close it, then open it again, and I’ve “rebooted” it. When I want to transcribe a thought, an idea for a project or the next line of this piece, I want to do it instantaneously and a notebook is the only instrument that can meet that demand (excluding, of course, writing on my hand). If I were Vandemeer and had written multiple best-selling novels, I hope I wouldn’t be shy about saying what to me is obvious.

5. Messy Attics of the Mind: What’s Inside a Writer’s Notebook? (Philip Horne, Paul Theroux, Susie Boyt, and Amit Chaudhuri; April 2018; The Guardian)

The way the writers featured in this piece describe their notebooks, I know they are besotted with the practice. They are kindred spirits, and they write beautifully about it. This is especially so with Susie Boyt, who calls her notebooks “messy little attics of the mind.” It’s such a lovely, original description that I almost find it aspirational — do my notebooks really look like messy little attics of the mind? If not, I’ll be working on that today. The expression appears in an extended description of her notebook history:

I have always kept notebooks — messy little attics of the mind, an odd assortment of shapes and colours stuffed into drawers next to defunct phones and balls of string. They feel private and tender, a bit like night clothes; or embarrassing, like over-eager little sisters.

I admire writers who operate their notebooks rigorously, with mathematical co-ordinates of character and plot, in the fashion of the Euston Road School painters, but mine are filled with a jumble of poetry, prose and criticism, lists, plans, with occasional personal anecdotes in which I often emerge the slightee.

6. Joyce Carol Oates: The Art of Fiction, No. 72 (Robert Phillips, Fall-Winter 1978; The Paris Review)

OK, so many writers and artists keep notebooks — this we know. But some actually compose their first versions of their work in a notebook. In other words, they write longhand. In this wonderful interview from the Paris Review, prolific author Joyce Carol Oates includes a brief mention about writing longhand and how typing on a typewriter is now “an alien thing.” Arguably I could have just written “Joyce Carol Oates” and any argument about the potential virtues of writing longhand would cease. Joyce Carol Oates does it. Need I say more? It’s especially so since she has written about five dozen books. And she isn’t just using a notebook — she is composing entirely in longhand before ever touching a computer file. (I assume the practice began after Them, her 1969 novel, which won the National Book Award and runs 500 pages, but still).

“Childwold needed to be written in longhand, of course. And now everything finds its initial expression in longhand and the typewriter has become a rather alien thing—a thing of formality and impersonality. My first novels were all written on a typewriter: first draft straight through, then revisions, then final draft. But I can’t do that any longer.

The thought of dictating into a machine doesn’t appeal to me at all. Henry James’s later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it’s transcribed into written prose.

I love the way she says that “now everything finds its initial expression in longhand.” On a par with the way you might have changed your morning routine once you learned about coffee, or the way you might structure your life once you’ve understood the vagaries of unbridled love.

7. Mary Gordon on the Joy of Notebooks and How Writing By Hand Catalyzes Creativity (Maria Popova, February 2013; Brainpickings)

Mary Gordon, a novelist and memoirist from New York, is a true acolyte of writing longhand. And her essay on the topic, “Putting Pen to Paper, but Not Just Any Pen to Just Any Paper,” is excerpted generously in this piece from Brainpickings about a book of essays by writers on their writing processes. We learn about Gordon’s writing process, how she reads and listens to music before composing anything herself. We also see her deftly locate the essence of notebook use:

For related reading, here’s a piece from BookRiot on the finer points of writing in pencil.

Writing by hand is laborious, and that is why typewriters were invented. But I believe that the labor has virtue, because of its very physicality. For one thing it involves flesh, blood and the thingness of pen and paper, those anchors that remind us that, however thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world.

8. Why I’m Obsessed With Reading Books About Writing in Notebooks (Josephine Wolff, February 2019; The Washington Post)

There is an adjacent topic to writing in a notebook and that’s the publishing industry sector that’s grown up around the practice (or aspirational practice) of writing in a notebook (this is still America, after all). A delightful look into this phenomenon comes to us here by way of a professor not of writing but of cybersecurity. Here, we find notebook devotees — professional notebookers, you could say — trying to indoctrinate everyone by selling specific types of notebooks.

One reason I’m so transfixed by notebook experts is that their systems bring together free-form, individualized artistic expression and the structured formatting and rigid rules of computer science. This may be key to the appeal of notebooking: In an increasingly algorithmic world, these systems let us crack open the black boxes of our lives, allowing us to develop systems of our own and helping us figure out what matters to us along the way.

Selfishly, I’ll add that for me the best line in the piece is where it becomes clear she is truly as obsessed with notebooks as I am. She writes that at any moment, she keeps “one for daily to-do lists and appointments, one for notes and ideas, [and] one for teaching.” If she added a sleep diary (which I began keeping this year), we’d be about even.

* * *

Jeanne Bonner is a writer, editor, and literary translator whose work has been published by the New York Times, Catapult, Marketplace, and CNN Travel. She won the 2018 PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature for her translation-in-progress of Mariateresa Di Lascia’s Passaggio in Ombra. She will be a short-term fellow at the New York Public Library in 2020.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Bundyville: The Remnant, Chapter Five: The Remnant

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 45 minutes (9,790 words)

Part 5 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPBCatch up on season one of Bundyville here.

I.

Stella Anne Bulla was born in November 1949 in Asheboro, North Carolina to Dorothy Ann Lemon and Brinford Bulla, a man who served in the Navy and worked for the federal government as a postal employee most of his life. Stella — who, at some point, preferred to be called by her middle name, Anne — was one of five children: brothers, Artis, John and Brad, and a sister, Cara. The children were raised devout Southern Baptists, attending church meetings once during the week, and twice on weekends. Anne wanted to grow up one day and live in a place where she could ride horses. 

By high school, Anne adhered to the “higher the hair, the closer to God” school of thought: Where other girls of Grimsley High School smiled with youthful innocence from photos, Anne grinned knowingly, hair teased high and wide into a flipped bouffant. 

Later, Anne met a man named Barry Byrd, and the two married, had a daughter, and moved to Stevens County, Washington in 1973, after Barry got out of the Air Force. He took a job in a Colville body shop — finally starting his own in the tiny town of Northport. The Byrds started a band called Legacy. Anne’s brother, Brad Bulla, joined them, playing mandolin, lead guitar, and banjo along with the Byrds’ vocals. The group released two records: Sons of the Republic and, in 1984, Judah’s Advance — which were sold via mail order by Christian Identity groups as far away as Australia. “Legacy is unique in that their music is designed with the Israel Identity image, and is an excellent way to introduce the subject to thousands of people,” the Australian group wrote in a newsletter. 

 

Keep the characters of Bundyville: The Remnant straight with this character list.

The Judah’s Advance cover features a drawing of a ship bearing down on a rocky coastline, where a stone tablet engraved with the Ten Commandments sat amongst a pile of rocks that had fallen from the sky. In the center, an American flag — bearing just 13 stars and the number 76 — whips in the wind.

On Judah’s Advance, Dan Henry, the pastor at The Ark — the Christian Identity church where Byrds worshipped, but that has also helped produce violent acolytes — read a line of scripture, and the band thanked him in the credits. The producer for the album, they said, was YAHWEH. 

The back of the album is even more Christian Identity than the front. Alongside a photograph of the grinning musicians, the band lays out its beliefs: “Our forefathers understood that the establishment of this country was the fulfillment of the prophecy concerning the re-gathering of the nation of Israel,” it explains. The savior, the band writes, was a descendant of the “Judahites”, while “the true children of Israel,” after being freed from captivity, migrated westward, settling in “Scotland, Ireland, Britain and every other Christian, Anglo-Saxon nation in the world today.”

It reads like the liner notes to a Christian Identity concept album, and it made Legacy a popular feature on the Christian Identity and white supremacist conference touring circuit. In 1986, the band played the Northwest Freedom Rally in Richland, Washington alongside a bill of racist speakers. And from 1987 to 1989, the group reportedly traveled yearly to Colorado to play Pete Peters’ Rocky Mountain Bible Camps. Peters had been a guest at The Ark and the Aryan Nations, lecturing on the end of the world, and his hatred for Jews and homosexuals.

But Legacy was more than a band providing musical accompaniment to racists: In 1988, Barry Byrd and his brother-in-law and Legacy bandmate, Brad, were two of just 15 men who deliberated for about a week about their beliefs, and authored a document entitled “Remnant Resolves.” 

The document elaborates that the men felt a “spiritual burden”: “This burden was the need and desire to see Biblical principles of government once again established in our nation,” it reads. The men agreed that if they could not come to a consensus on solving that burden, they would not proceed with writing the document.

What comes next are resolutions to fix society for “the remnant” — the way for the chosen people to live in the fullest realization of liberty. Biblical principles should be put into practice at every level of government. The band maintained that in the home, women should be submissive to their husbands. Locally, the civil government should punish evil and protect the good. And at the federal level, taxes need to stop, since you can’t tax what God created. 

“It is blasphemous to regard antichrists as ‘God’s chosen people’ and to allow them to rule over or hold public office in a Christian Nation,” it reads. “Aborticide is murder. Sodomy is a sin against God and Nature. Inter-racial marriage pollutes the integrity of the family. Pornography destroys the purity of the mind of the individual and defiles the conscience of the Nation.” 

At the end, when it was all down on paper, there they are smiling wide for a picture — as if someone had said “say cheese” when they took it — and all fifteen men signed their names. 

A year after the Remnant Resolves, Legacy (now named Watchman) was back on tour, scheduled to play a Santa Rosa, California church affiliated with Dennis Peacocke, a self-described political activist turned leader in the “shepherding movement” — a religious movement in the 1970s and ’80s that involved congregants turning over all personal decisions to a spiritual leader, and has been criticized as cult-like

The Byrds made more than one trip to Peacocke’s church for Fellowship of Christian Leaders (FCL) conferences. During one visit, they stayed with a church host family: the Johnsons. Rick Johnson would eventually move his family north to Marble in the mid-1990s, and still lives there today.

At the time, Johnson’s son Jesse was just a kid, but he still recalls meeting the Byrds. Something about Anne immediately stuck out to him. “She has these piercing blue eyes,” he recalls. “I remember kind of being off put by that and … just by her presence. Because she didn’t smile very much. She was really intense and when she talked to you it was about what you’re doing to have a better relationship with the Lord. And I was, like, 8.

Within a week of living at Marble, Jesse Johnson says he and one of his brothers “made a pact that we were leaving as soon as we were old enough.” 

But back in 1992, when the Byrds were still working on bringing their vision of a “Christian covenant community” to life, people in Stevens County were nervous, citing concern over the couple’s connection with Pete Peters. People called the group cultish; the Byrds made a brochure that said they weren’t “the least bit cultish or isolationist.” In that same brochure, the couple predicted “cataclysmic events.” At a city council meeting, they claimed to their neighbors that they weren’t racist, and didn’t “condone hatred”— in fact, Barry told the Spokesman-Review that they wanted to create a ministry and a working ranch to “take youngsters” of all races in. The couple claimed they’d severed ties with Peters and that their attendance at the Rocky Mountain Bible Camp was only to play music. They didn’t mention the “Remnant Resolves.” Debate about the Byrds and Peters raged for months in the pages of the Colville Statesman-Examiner. 

In May, a Colville man expressed concern in the paper: “We would love to have our fears allayed,” he wrote of the Byrds. “But the trail back to Pete Peters appears to be pretty warm.” 

The Byrds attempted to shoot down a list of rumors they were asked to address by Northport’s mayor at a May 1992 city council meeting. They said they had no relationship with Peters, never held white supremacist beliefs, and concluded that people with concerns should come to Marble. Barry Byrd “advised that reading newspapers was not a worthwhile way of attaining accurate information,” according to a report on the meeting. 

Meanwhile, in nearby North Idaho, Bo Gritz — a former Green Beret who once ran for President, and who famously served as a liaison between federal agents and Randy Weaver at the end of the Ruby Ridge standoff — attempted to create his own Christian covenant community, called “Almost Heaven.” Some said he modeled it after what the Byrds created at Marble.

Paul Glanville, a doctor, liked the idea, too, when he heard it. He brought his family north to Marble in 1992, several years after meeting the Byrds. He was delivering a presentation on low-cost or free medical care at a Christian seminar when he encountered the couple, who were  giving a talk on establishing covenant communities. “They are very charismatic,” Glanville recalls. “I really was interested in this idea of a Christian community where I could practice medicine in what I considered a very Biblical way.”

Once at Marble, he says he enjoyed the close community, the focus on church and family. It felt like his family had moved to the promised land. People would get to church early, chattering with the company of the other people who lived there, hurrying downstairs to stake a claim for the casserole dishes they’d bring each Sunday for a potluck, before rushing up again for church. 

But over time, cracks emerged in the smooth veneer of the Marble promise. Nothing drastic, just small fissures that, over time, built up. In the spring of 1997 Glanville noticed a strangely competitive drive behind — of all things — Marble’s softball teams. He says he felt there was a need to win, to conquer all of the other church teams from the area, as if to prove Marble’s superiority. Glanville sometimes skipped the adult games to watch his kids play softball. Soon after, the leaders called an emergency meeting to chastise anyone who skipped the adult games. Glanville found the suggestion that he watch the Byrds’ team over his own child’s bizarre. 

After a few years, Glanville started to feel that he hadn’t made a covenant with God so much as with the Byrds. “What they mean by ‘covenant’ is total, absolute obedience to the leadership without questioning, and that the leadership eventually has your permission to question you and scrutinize your life in the most invasive ways that you can possibly imagine,” he says. “They might not start that out from the beginning like that, but they will end up that way.”  

From the pulpit, the couple preached about “slander,” about never questioning their leadership, and turning in anyone who did. The Byrds gave sermons about submission, obedience. The word “individual” was sinful — individuality being a sin of pride. 

The church leaders would encourage the families there to turn against their own blood — parents reporting on children, children reporting parents, neighbors against neighbors — if that meant preserving perfection at Marble. 

Glanville says his own children went to Marble’s leadership and told them that he was skeptical of their intentions and teachings. By the summer of 1994, he says, “My kids and wife had been totally brainwashed.” He continues, “They were turning me in to Marble for negative talk.”

But even he didn’t understand how quickly he’d lost them: When he finally decided to leave, Glanville was shocked that his wife and family refused to come with him. “My wife filed for divorce when I left. And my kids basically all signed the divorce papers,” he says. 

“I could do a lot of things in this church,” Barry Byrd said in one 1994 sermon. “I have the authority. I could misuse it. I could manipulate you and intimidate you, which you know, I’m sure we’ve done some of that. Not meaning to, but that’s just part of the deal.”

The pulpit too, was Barry Byrd’s megaphone for talk of a country ruled by Biblical law, of the sins of the government, about the entire reason Marble was here at all.

“We’re fighting for something that much blood has been shed for, beginning [with] the blood of Jesus,” he said. “If the spirit of the Lord does not reign supreme and this book is not the law that governs all of life and living, then there is no peace and there is no liberty!” He spoke of righteous anger and “holy hatred” for those getting in the way of “the government of God.”

Byrd even glorified martyrdom as a way to achieve the church’s goals: “So you see, I don’t have any problem being martyred if I know it’s what God’s called me to. If I know that my blood is going to water the tree of Liberty and build for future generations, I would gladly give my life today.”

Two decades since he left Marble broken-hearted, alone, Glanville still sometimes hears the Byrds’ words in his head, nagging at him, pulling him back to that time, making him question how he could have fallen under the place’s sway. 

His mind goes back to the moments he still blamed himself for not being perfect. Times when Marble convinced him he was the problem, meetings when Barry Byrd stood over him shaking a fist, making him believe he was lucky they were being so patient with him.

“And you could say ‘well why did you put up with that?’” he tells me this spring. “A lot of people who are trying to leave a cult have magical thinking. That if they just could say the right thing, or do the right thing, the leaders will suddenly see the truth and repent and everything will be alright.”

***

Back in 1988, when the Byrds’ band was on tour, Anne Byrd’s own brothers, too, were positioning themselves as chosen ones. 

The Bullas were a family of prophets. It was as if they believed their ears were calibrated to pick up the unique pitch of the Lord’s voice.

Anne’s eldest brother, Art Bulla, at the time, was living in Utah and had converted away from the family’s Southern Baptist roots to his own racist interpretation of Mormonism. He found himself maligned from the mainstream LDS church in the early 1980s when he called himself “the one mighty and strong,” claiming he was receiving revelations. He also expressed his belief in polygamy, but admitted he’d had trouble recruiting women to marry him. He split from the church when it started ordaining blacks. 

Art Bulla, who I reached by phone at his Baja, Mexico home, says he visited his siblings Anne and Brad Bulla, and his brother-in-law Barry, in the early days of their Marble community. And though he says his sister and Barry were still practicing racist Christian Identity beliefs — which he points out he actually agrees with — he thought the couple seemed to be controlling the people who would form Marble. 

“Barry had a very strong personality, and Anne did too, and so they were able to hornswoggle if you will, the gullible,” he says. “I had suspected that Anne had gone too far with the controlling thing.” 

Art Bulla tells me he’s the only prophet in the family — not Anne and not their brother I found who pastes notes that say “God’s only priest” to cutouts of naked women and posts the pictures to Twitter. Art says he is the chosen one. 

“[Anne] always felt that she had to be in competition with me. And since I’m receiving revelations, then she’s got to receive revelations, too,” he says, “You see what I’m saying?” 

***

By the late 1990s, Paul Glanville, the doctor who had come to Marble hoping to bring God into his medical practice, was hardly the only person questioning Marble’s leadership, and the Byrds’ true intentions for the community. According to letters written during this time, between 1997 and 1998 Anne Byrd excommunicated her brother and Legacy bandmate, Brad, and his family. (Requests for comment by Brad Bulla were not returned.) 

The excommunication drew the attention of Jay Grimstead, an evangelical scholar who had briefly lived in the Marble community and become known for pushing dominionism. Grimstead wrote several letters to the Byrds detailing his concern for what he saw as the community’s increasingly authoritarian structure. 

In one letter to Barry and Peacocke, from September 1997, Grimstead wrote that Marble “is a clear, ‘top down’ monarchy that is governed primarily by a queen, ‘Queen Anne,’” he wrote. “The people at Marble live in great fear of displeasing the Byrds, particularly Anne.” 

Grimstead also excoriated Barry for not publicly condemning Christian Identity, which he referred to as “weird, unbiblical stuff.” He was even being told by Marble members that the ideology was still being discussed in 1997. 

In January of the next year, he wrote to Anne and Barry: “Please respond in some way to the letter of grave concern wherein I told you I was receiving an increasing amount of evidence that Marble, under your leadership, was fast becoming an authoritarian cult,” he wrote.  Read more…

Bundyville: The Remnant, Chapter Three: The Widow’s Tale

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 25 minutes (7,518 words)

Part 3 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB

I.

I have seen LaVoy Finicum die and die and die. 

Log onto YouTube and watch Finicum’s end, spliced, paused, and dissected by people who never knew him but who, too, have again and again watched it happen.

When Finicum was killed, law enforcement officers were acting on an opportunity to arrest the leaders of the weeks-long Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation in Oregon. Finicum was one of just a few actual ranchers who joined the Bundys’ occupation. Ranching was Finicum’s dream — something he’d only started doing once he turned 50. He didn’t grow up a rancher, but he intended to die one.

In the final seconds of his life — on the very last day of his 54th year — Finicum proved to be even more of a true believer in the purpose of the occupation than the Bundys themselves. 

 

Keep the characters of Bundyville: The Remnant straight with this character list.

That frigid late January day, an informant tipped the feds off that cars carrying the Bundys and other leaders would be traveling to Grant County, Oregon for a meeting with citizens and the area’s sheriff, who was allegedly sympathetic to the cause.

But the group never got to the meeting. Before they could arrive, members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and Oregon State Police SWAT team stopped the cars on a remote bend. Ammon Bundy followed law enforcement orders to get out of the car with his hands up, kneel on the ground, and crawl towards the officers. But Finicum refused to surrender.

Suddenly Finicum, who some viewed as a grandfatherly voice of reason back at the refuge, was yelling at the officers from his driver’s seat. He told them: “Back down or you kill me now.”

“Boys, you better realize we got people on the way,” Finicum yelled. “You want a bloodbath? It’s gonna be on your hands.”

In his back seat, the other occupants of the car — Ryan Bundy, a grandmother named Shawna Cox, and 18-year-old gospel singer Victoria Sharp — frantically tried to call people back at the refuge, but realized they’d been pulled over in an area with no cell service.

“I’m going to be laying down here on the ground with my blood on the street, or I’m going to see the sheriff,” Finicum yelled out the window. Finicum told the occupants of the car he would leave, try to get help. “You ready?” he asked. 

“Well, where’s those guns?” Ryan Bundy responded, telling the other passengers to duck down. 

“Gun it!” Cox said. “Gun it!” 

Finicum slammed the accelerator. Driving at over 70 miles per hour, careening around a bend, the sound of bullets pecked at his truck. Up ahead, the FBI and Oregon State Police had blocked the road. 

Finicum jerked the wheel — either to avoid hitting the road block, or to speed around it altogether. “Hang on!” he said. The truck crashed into deep banks of snow, sending up a white wave that made it look as if he’d plowed over an FBI agent. Finicum leaped from the truck, hands raised. All around him, officers yelled, “Get on the ground!”

This is all on the internet: Cox’s cell phone captured the conversation and fear in the truck, drone footage shot from above shows the lone white Dodge Ram pickup. 

You can see the crash, see the driver’s door fly open. You can see Finicum hop out as he taunts at the police that they’re “gonna have to shoot me.” You can hear the three bullets — bang, bang, bang. Dead. 

Every time I watch the video I think I’ll hear some new intonation, some missed revelation, and yet Finicum always dies the same. Three pops. He doesn’t jump or yelp. He simply crumples: a body tense and alive one second, a heavy sack of bones dropped to the ground for eternity the next. A puppet without a hand. Gravity stronger than spirit.

As Finicum stumbled in the snow, he yelled to the officers to shoot him before reaching multiple times toward his jacket. The overhead video captures that. Later, official reports said Finicum had a loaded 9 mm handgun in his inside jacket pocket. The shooting was ruled justified.

And yet now, three years later, a movement of people across America see his death another way entirely: As an assassination. An execution. A carefully-calculated hit on a lifelong member of the LDS church and short-time associate of the notorious Bundy family. Finicum is seen as a friend to men whose favorite part of the U.S. Constitution is the line about well-armed militias. The snowy road where he died is Finicum’s own Golgotha. The FBI roadblock is referred to, in some corners of the internet, as “the killstop.” Read more…

Whole 60

Evgeny Buzov / Getty

Laura Lippman | Longreads | July 2019 | 15 minutes (3,660 words)

1.

When I was in high school, I would walk to the Waldenbooks in the mall near my home and read novels while standing up. This was the 1970s, long before bookstores became places that encouraged people to sit, hang, browse. There were no armchairs in that narrow store on the second floor of Columbia Mall in Howard County, Maryland.

Reading while standing up felt like stealing, a pathetic thrill for this straight-A goody-goody. I had money — I babysat, I eventually worked at the Swiss Colony in the same mall. I could buy any volume I truly desired. But my stand-up reads were books too embarrassing to bring home. I remember only two.

One was The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden, a British novelist perhaps best known today for inspiring the name of Bruce Willis’s and Demi Moore’s oldest daughter. It now strikes me as a perfectly respectable book; I could have forked over $1.25 for it.

The other one was — I couldn’t begin to tell you the title. It was a slick psycho serial killer tale that began with a young couple parked on Lovers Lane, where they were attacked by a man with, if I recall correctly, a metal hook for one of his hands. He used his hook to slash the roof of the convertible, or maybe it was a knife, and as the metal blade (or the hook) pierced through the canvas, the beautiful, vain sorority girl — it was implicit that she deserved to die if only for her smugness — thought: “I should have had that slice of cheesecake at dinner.”

It has taken me more than 40 years, but the singular achievement of my life may be that if I am attacked by a serial killer on a deserted Lovers Lane, I almost certainly will have had dessert. Not cheesecake, because I don’t like cheesecake. Possibly some dark chocolate, preferably with nuts or caramel, or a scoop of Taharka ice cream, an outstanding Baltimore brand, or one of my own homemade blondies, from the Smitten Kitchen recipe.

Maybe a shot of tequila, an excellent digestif. Maybe tequila and a blondie.

But only if I want those things. Many nights, I’m not in the mood for anything sweet after dinner. Every day, one day at a time, one meal at a time, one hunger pang at a time, I ask myself what I really want. I then eat whatever it is.

It is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.
Read more…

Bundyville: The Remnant, Chapter Two: The Hunter and the Bomb

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 25 minutes (6,186 words)

Part 2 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB

 

I.

Bill Keebler dumps a sugar packet into his coffee and calmly explains that the government is after him. They’re always watching him — constantly surveilling his every move, he says. He’s even at risk here, inside a Denny’s attached to a Flying J truck stop, about a half hour outside Salt Lake City.

He’s also pretty sure that Bundyville producer Ryan Haas and I are federal agents, posing as journalists. “I’m gonna be honest with you, it wouldn’t surprise me if both of you pulled out a badge,” he says. 

Just after 4 p.m. on a frigid February day, Keebler, 60, shuffles toward the back corner table we’d staked out for the interview.  He’s about a half hour late, uttering his deepest apologies for getting the time wrong. He’s never late, he says. 

Keebler is a raspy-voiced Southerner with skin that looks brittle from working in the sun all his life as a horse wrangler, ranch hand, hunting outfitter, and construction worker. At Denny’s he’s wearing a sandstone-colored canvas work jacket, and his hair sprouts from underneath a khaki Oath Keepers hat, which covers a shiny bald spot on the top of his head. He smokes a lot. Drinks a lot of coffee.

 

Keep the characters of Bundyville: The Remnant straight with this character list.

On the phone a few days before, I told him that I’d read the court documents for his case and was surprised by what I saw. I wanted to hear his version of what happened in June 2016 on the day three years before when Keebler believed he was detonating a bomb at a building owned by the Bureau of Land Management, only to find that the bomb was a fake given to him by undercover FBI agents embedded in his militia group.

The bombing itself was shocking. But the part that surprised me at the time was that, despite having pleaded guilty, serving 25 months in jail, and being released on probation, most of his case was still under federal protective order. Keebler’s attorney told me he’s not allowed to say why. I’m at the Denny’s hoping Keebler might be willing to tell me anyway.

In reading about what happened that day in the desert with the bomb, I learned — through the few court documents available — that Keebler was close friends with LaVoy Finicum. He’s the rancher who was a leader at the Malheur occupation, in Oregon, and was shot and killed by authorities after fleeing from a traffic stop.

But before we can talk about that, we’ve got to calm him down. He nudges his head in the direction of a young waiter, walking in a loop around by our table. Under his breath, Keebler says, “We’re being watched.” 

“Right now?” I ask. 

“Yeah.” 

“By who?” 

“A fed or an informant,” Keebler says. 

Haas asks if he means the Denny’s server, who’s walking by to see if we need any refills on coffee. That’s the guy, Keebler says.

If there’s so much at risk, why meet us? Why tell your story?

“Because if I don’t it’s going to die with me,” he says. “I’ve been on borrowed time for years.” He says he survived cancer, a massive heart attack, and “four heart procedures, looking at a fifth.” That’s not to mention the other stuff — things much harder to believe but that Keebler swears up and down are real, like the federally organized hits on him by the gang MS-13 while he was behind bars.

So I assure him: I’m not a fed. Google me. And I tell him he’s in control of what he says. If I ask something he doesn’t want to answer, something he thinks might get him in trouble, he doesn’t need to respond. He agrees, and for three hours, Bill Keebler gives his side of what happened leading up to that day in the desert with the bomb — a version of the story in which he is the hero, the government is the enemy, and where America is so rapidly nearing its demise, he can almost taste it. 

***

In the three years since the Bundys mobilized a force to take over the Malheur National Wildlife refuge in Oregon, the world has morphed in ways I couldn’t have imagined. For one thing, Donald Trump became the president of the United States. He has increased his attacks on media, stepping up from calling the very newspapers I write for “fake news,” to neglecting to hold the Saudi Arabian government accountable for putting into motion the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In June 2019, Trump — in a meeting at the G20 Summit — laughed with Russian president Vladimir Putin about journalists. “Get rid of them,” he said. “Fake news is a great term, isn’t it? You don’t have this problem in Russia. We have that problem.” And Putin responded: “Yes, yes. We have it, too. It’s the same.” They both laughed. 

Oft-cited research collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center has shown that since 1996, anti-government activity surged when Democratic presidents were in office. Militia groups that claimed to see proof of tyranny thrived in the 1990s — specifically when Vicki Weaver and her teenage son were killed during a standoff with federal agents at Ruby Ridge in 1992, and when the feds stormed into the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993. 

In President Obama, the anti-government movement saw the embodiment of tyranny: someone upon whom they could project their worst fears. They called him a socialist globalist Muslim who, after ascending to the highest seat of power, would bring Sharia law upon the people. There was no proof or evidence to support this. But that didn’t matter to them.

Under Trump, suddenly, anti-government groups are pro-government. Nearly everything about Trump’s rhetoric — from questioning Obama’s nationality, to draining the swamp of elites, to building a border wall, to pushing for anti-Muslim legislation, to zealous nationalism — is lifted from the anti-government handbook.

“It blows my mind. The Patriot militia movement, anti-government movement — however you want to refer to them — under Obama was so concerned about tyranny and executive power … and yet they’ve been some of the most vocal advocates for Trump unilaterally grabbing and exerting executive branch power,” said Sam Jackson, an assistant professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany-SUNY. Jackson researches the militia movement — he wrote his dissertation on the Oath Keepers. 

“If Obama had talked about declaring a national emergency … they would have been up in arms in a heartbeat,” he said.

So what gives? How do the anti-government go pro-government? 

“It makes it really hard to take them at their word,” Jackson told me. “It really makes it seem like all of that was just rhetoric that they deployed in pursuit of other goals that perhaps they perceived would be less popular amongst the American public — whether that’s Islamophobia or anti-immigration or whatever else they’re really interested in. It seems like perhaps now they’re willing to talk about these other things more blatantly than they were in the past.” 

***

Bill Keebler tells us he was born in Mississippi and grew up in Georgia the descendant of a long line of military veterans. During the Cold War in the early 1980s, Keebler says he enlisted in the Army and served in Aschaffenburg, Germany. There, he says, he was on the frontlines of the fight against communism. And it was also during this time — he claims — that he placed third in the 1984 World Championships in Kung Fu.

It’s clear that he’s not the guy he used to be — or at least that the person I’m seeing before me at Denny’s isn’t the fighter he is in his head. Keebler claims that, after winning that championship, he created his own style of martial arts, called “Jung Shin Wu Kung Fu” before a “board of masters,” but the Bundyville team wasn’t able to confirm this.

After years of working on farms and ranches, Keebler found himself in Utah — far, far from home — where he worked as a hunting outfitter, trained horses, and says he became a member of the Utah Oath Keepers. Around Tooele County, Utah, he was so well-known as an ardent prepper and varmint hunter that the Salt Lake Tribune ran a story on his coyote hunting skills. In one scene in the story, Keebler crouches in underbrush and wears camouflage that’s been drenched in coyote-urine scent. 

In 2011, he was running a hunting outfitting business called Critter Gitter Outfitters and often posted photos on social media of his excursions into the wild. In one, a muscled, tanned Keebler poses with a baby deer he’d rescued. 

Keebler spends a lot of time on the internet — has for years. Online, Keebler makes lots of dad jokes and even more jokes where a woman’s demise is the punchline. In one video he shared on his Facebook page, a blond woman in a white robe pleads with her husband until he hands her the keys of a black SUV with an oversize bow on the hood. When she starts the car, it explodes, the man smiles, and the words Merry Christmas, Bitch fill the screen. 

By 2013, Facebook had become a place for Keebler to vent about Obama — “I call him O-bummer,” he told me during one phone call — where he openly shared his belief in an encyclopedic number of conspiracy theories. “FEMA camps are everywhere, Muslims and illegals are taking over, Obama is the biggest Traitor this country has ever known, No Jobs, 16 trillion in [debt] and no relief in sight,” he wrote one February morning. “Anyone protesting Obama is assassinated and turned into a monster by our own media.”

None of this is true — his sources are websites that are notorious for generating fake content. His words dipped in and out of coherence, in and out of overt racism. “Our jobs have all gone over seas to other country’s as they get Fat off our money and we send them aid, weapons and anything else they desire for free. Jets, food what ever they want because we OWE it to them somehow,” he wrote in one such post. “I have been patient, tolerant and offended too much for any more. I am an American, have lived as I will die as my ancestors did, As A FREE MAN. I speak fucking English and you can press 1 and kiss my ass ya muslim, communist Jackasses! If this offends you then I have succeeded in my intentions.” 

He signed off on another post: “Stay safe, armed to the teeth, prepared and with God. Bill Keebler.”

Later that month, he wrote that “Someday SOON chit is gonna happen and this country will l;iterally EXPLODE, and when it does it will be a very messy situation… soon BOOM, we will explode. Hope you are prepared.”

Keebler hunting coyotes in 2011. (AP Photo/Al Hartmann – The Salt Lake Tribune)

By spring 2014, Keebler seemed to have a new personality altogether. He wrote near-constantly about what to do when SHTF (prepper-speak for “shit hits the fan”). He signed his posts “th3hunt3r.” He breathed in false information about the Bureau of Land Management killing endangered species and exhaled posts about the hypocrisy of not letting Cliven Bundy graze his cattle. 

Much has been written about the algorithms employed by sites like YouTube, which keeps users on the site — generating more and more advertising dollars — by directing them toward more extreme content. Reporters and analysts often reflect on how this affects young people. But the algorithmic drive toward extreme content has taken hold with a much older generation, too, with guys like Keebler. Online, they can fantasize about who they’ll be when the end finally comes. They water their ignorance and hatred at an online trough with others who think just like them.

In April 2014, Keebler sprung into action after seeing a video on Facebook of a confrontation between Bureau of Land Management agents and protesters who’d assembled at the Bundys’ side — that video I mentioned way back at the beginning of this story, of Ammon Bundy being tased in the midst of a chaotic confrontation. Keebler loaded up his camper and drove several hours south to Bunkerville, Nevada, where he says he set up a mess hall and provided supplies.

Well, I made it to the ranch, all is well, getting settled in, been intersting so far, and I aint shot no one, YET! lol” he wrote on his Facebook page on April 10 after he arrived. 

Once there, Keebler solicited money online to help pay for supplies. He claims he kept hot tempers under control. 

“I stopped some people wanted to shoot people,” he says to me at the truck stop. “One of them got mad about it and put a gun in my face. He wanted to start the war. … He said, ‘I’m gonna fire a shot just to get it started.’ … Things were that close. Volatile.”

Keebler also takes credit for ejecting Jerad and Amanda Miller — who would go on to murder two police officers in Las Vegas and die in the midst of a shoot-out with officers inside a Walmart. He claims that if it wasn’t for him, Bundy Ranch would have been a bloodbath. Less than a year later — according to Keebler’s defense attorney’s presentencing memo — an undercover FBI agent was embedded in Keebler’s own militia and then began to regularly talk about stepping into action, about blowing up federal agents and federal properties, and scouting a mosque as a potential target alongside Keebler. 

And yet, Keebler never kicked that guy out. 

 

II.

After the militias assisted in preventing the BLM from seizing the Bundy family’s cattle, Keebler left feeling excited about the movement. He lived on Bundy Ranch for about two weeks. “To me it was one of the biggest events in this country … short of the Boston Tea Party,” he says. “It was a wake-up call.”

“After the standoff and everything, we had momentum,” he says, offering his mug to the waiter for a refill. “It started because Cliven Bundy, but we started a movement that had the potential to be tenfold what it was.”

When he came back home to Utah, he quit the Oath Keepers. He proudly recounts a story about trading heated words at Bunkerville with the group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes. Keebler claims he asked whether Rhodes would accept “radical Islamic Muslims” into the group; Rhodes said the Oath Keepers doesn’t discriminate. Back at home, he started his own militia: Patriots Defense Force (PDF). 

At the height of its membership, PDF had just seven members including Keebler. They held “field training exercises” where they’d shoot targets. They’d talk about raising “backyard meat rabbits” and chickens, and living off-grid. Mostly, they were a bunch of preppers. 

But before PDF was even formed — even had a name — the FBI began to monitor him, according to court documents submitted by Keebler’s defense team. They began immediately upon his return home from Bundy Ranch. The Bureau eventually embedded three confidential informants in his militia and three undercover agents, including two men who went by the names Brad Miller and Jake Davis. Miller and Davis  — people Keebler believed to be other God-loving Patriots — were sworn into PDF in May 2015. Excluding Keebler, the FBI agents, and informants, there were — at most — three members of PDF. 

According to the defense, one informant was paid $60,000 for his undercover work inside the militia. The stories the FBI agents gave to Keebler must have seemed like he found a gold mine: Davis told stories of his expertise in hand-to-hand combat; Miller positioned himself as an expert in mining and explosives. Another FBI agent played the part of a successful business guy interested in funding a militia.

Unlike all the other times Keebler imagined the government conspiring to snoop on him, this time they actually were — but he was so focused on the “deep state” that he didn’t seem to notice what was happening right in front of his face. 

As the FBI surveilled Keebler, he frequently spoke about martial law. “Under marshal [sic] law, Mr. Keebler expected the federal government to turn against the people…” His attorney wrote in his sentencing memo, “He envisioned house-to-house gun confiscations and the government putting ‘undesirable’ and ‘unsalvageable’ people in FEMA camps.”

By fall 2015, Keebler was meeting with LaVoy Finicum. Finicum, too, had been excited by what he had encountered at Bundy Ranch: a group of citizens who believed in Cliven Bundy’s conspiracy theories about the federal government coming to get him. 

Finicum, after seeing Cliven Bundy successfully get away with shirking his grazing costs,  had recently violated the terms of his own BLM grazing permit — accruing fines for grazing his cattle out of season. Finicum spoke to Keebler about fortifying his property in case of a situation like Bundy Ranch — or maybe even Ruby Ridge or Waco.

“At the Bundy’s we got there after the fact. If we knew it was coming, we could be there prepared,” Keebler says. Finicum was expecting the same. He’d stopped paying his grazing fees after going to Bundy Ranch and assumed the BLM would come get him, too. “We were going to stop them from taking the cattle,” he says. “Now I don’t mean ambush assault and kill and shoot. None of that crap.” 

Keebler walks Haas and I through the plan: When the BLM came in, apparently the group planned to dig out the road the agents came in on with a backhoe — making it impossible for them to leave. Miller pushed for the group to instead explode the road, he says. Keebler said that was crazy, and the two traded words over it. 

The group, without Finicum, drove toward Mt. Trumbull, where the government says Keebler got his first view of a building owned by the BLM — the remote property that, months later, he aimed to destroy with a bomb. 

Over the course of our interview, Keebler mentioned several arguments with Miller. But he always let him stay. 

If he was so extreme, such a loose cannon, I had to wonder, why keep him?

Because Miller, Keebler says, paid for gas to go to Arizona to meet with Finicum, and Keebler alleges, even to Washington State for a secret ceremony in which he was inducted into a Coalition of Western States militia by Washington state representative Matt Shea. Read more…

Lions, Tigers, and a Rabbit Named Bugs: A Reading List on Animal-Human Interactions

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I don’t remember how I first met her — did I catch a glimpse of her shimmying through a gap in the fence? — but I know that it was love at first sight, at least on my end. Part of my joy, I think, came from the fact that I never expected to see a rabbit within 10 feet of my kitchen window. At the time, I lived in a house on the corner of a small-town neighborhood street, and my backyard was relatively plain. No brush or trees shaded any part of the yard from the Oklahoma sun, trucks regularly revved past, and a number of kites and hawks threaded patterns in the sky above. Why would a rabbit visit a balding patch of fenced-in lawn rather than take cover in the murmuring field of tall grass nearby?

After that first sighting, years ago now, I searched for her within the movement of shadows at sunrise and sunset. Sure enough, she returned. I began learning her patterns: clover by the kitchen window until the sky painted itself into the color of morning, clover near the back corner of the lawn just before sunset, and occasionally, a nap near the fence post to escape the late afternoon heat. One morning while she was out, I eased the back door open and stepped in slow-motion, out onto the patio. Her ears perked up and swiveled, marking the source of the sound. She drew her feet close and twitched her nose. I took a seat on the concrete and, before long, she returned to eating.

As the summer months wore on, I sat with her often, and I also began buying carrots that I would throw in her direction. Timid at first, she crept closer and closer to me until I could feed her from an arms-length away. She would let me sit in the yard nearby while she rolled around in a sandy spot, her way of bathing, and when I returned from my morning runs, she would often sniff the air, stretch her body like a cat who’s just risen from a nap, and then hop in my direction. I named her Bugs.

After she disappeared that first fall, I didn’t fully expect to ever see her again, but Bugs returned for two summers. Sitting with her day after day, morning and night, encouraged me to engage with parts of the natural world I otherwise would have ignored. Over the course of our time together, I watched a pair of kites build a nest in a tree overhead, hoping that I’d never catch the sight of their shadow if they decided to swoop down one day. I studied the nuances in what I thought had been a plain lawn: purple flowers speckling the space in spring, dandelions during the height of summer, a flurry of minute insects hovering and crawling in the heat. I watched the sun melt down over powerlines and neighboring roofs, starlings and skeins of geese alternating overhead.

Over the years, my relationship with Bugs prompted me to think more critically about how I treated the natural world. I fed Bugs carrots daily and began videoing our encounters for Instagram, so that even strangers became invested. The second summer I knew her, she had a baby, and the two of them frequented my yard. There, Bugs taught her offspring to crouch low when the form of a hawk passed overhead, roll in the sand pit, and wriggle lightning-like through the slats in the fence. Though my intentions were borne from love and respect — and a desire to be close to another creature — was I harming Bugs by giving her food? Would she think other humans were safe or did she only know my scent? By inserting myself into her routine, was I disrupting an ecological web I had no right to be part of?

There are bigger questions that arise from those encounters, too. How have animals adapted to survive in a world increasingly overrun with humans? What kinds of relationships exist between humans and animals, and what well-intentioned actions from humans bring harm? The following essays address the oft-complicated connections between animals and humans, explore fascinating forms of adaptations that have sprung from living in increasingly inhospitable environments, and wonder about the future of us all.

1. Are Cities Making Animals Smarter? (Paul Bisceglio, August 16, 2018, The Atlantic)

Night after night, goldfish and koi began disappearing from an office pond protected by concrete walls. Worried, the landlord installed security cameras, only to find that the intruder was a surprising one: a fishing cat, better known for living in swamps than in the center of a bustling city.

In this fascinating read, Paul Bisceglio chronicles the work of Anya Ratnayaka, a conservationist who started tracking several fishing cats in the heart of Colombo, and wonders about how — and which — animals will successfully adapt to life as cities continue to infringe on natural habitats.

Mizuchi’s GPS-collar data had placed him not only in local ponds and canals, but also in the parking lot of a neon-lit movie theater and in the middle of a multilane traffic circle. His territory, which stretched about two square miles, was mostly covered with asphalt and packed with cars.

2. Horseshoe Crabs Have Survived All of History – and Remind Us How We Could Too (Lenora Todaro, July 3, 2019, Catapult)

Lenora Todaro meditates on intersections between human life and the natural world in New York City in her monthly Sidewalk Naturalist column. In this riveting installment, Todaro writes about horseshoe crabs, who somehow continue their “450 million-year-old lineage” despite “ice ages and asteroids,” low survival rates, and currently, in New York City, harrowing encroachments by humans on already too-small hospitable environments.

So here is New York city water, not at its best: a swirling mass of plastic bottles, glass shards of airplane size liquor bottles, coffee cups, candy wrappers, plastic straws, abandoned IHOP sugar packets. To find horseshoe crabs, we had to peel aside the sewage to see if any creatures were stirring beneath, oblivious and perhaps impervious to the garbage.

3. The ‘Othering’ of Animals and Cultural Underdogs: Debut author Pajtim Statovci on Kosovo, migration and cats (Pajtim Statovci interviewed by Carolina Leavitt, April 27, 2017, Electric Lit)

Pajtim Statovci, author of the novel My Cat Yugoslavia, speaks with Caroline Leavitt about the othering of people and animals; ways animals are used as symbols in literature and life; and his attempts to undermine conventional means of representation in his work.

We place animals in different contexts, such as literary works, where they are anthropomorphized and interpreted through the human world, for example as symbols of human characteristics, even though we don’t have access to animal consciousness, and we certainly don’t know what it’s like to be an animal.

4. How rats became an inescapable part of city living (Emma Marris, April 2019, National Geographic)

With urban rat populations on the rise, Emma Marris visits several cities around the globe, meets with rat experts, and studies the history of the rodents to give a better understanding of their immense capacity for adaptability, as well as the ways they mirror the way we as humans live.

Some of the things we hate most about rats—their dirtiness, their fecundity, their undeniable grit and knack for survival—are qualities that could describe us as well. Their filth is really our own: In most places rats are thriving on our trash and our carelessly tossed leftovers.

5. The Man Who Made Animal Friends (Ian S. Port, September 21, 2015, Rolling Stone)

At The Institute for Greatly Endangered and Rare Species (T.I.G.E.R.S.) in South Carolina, visitors can pay to take pictures with lion, tiger, and liger cubs, and visit apes, elephants, and other animals during tours through the park. Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, the founder and director of T.I.G.E.R.S., views his establishment as a community where animals and people live in harmony. Others, like zoo experts, view his park as being harmful to animals.

All of T.I.G.E.R.S. staff members must complete an intensive apprenticeship. No formal education is required, but recruits must be single and childless. They cannot expect any time off for any reason. They must be within 20 pounds of their “perfect athletic weight or working to get there,” able to do push-ups, pull-ups, and run a 12-minute mile.

6. Animal magnetism (David P Barash, May 13, 2014, aeon)

Why are humans fascinated by animals? How do our interactions with animals change depending on the context in which we observe them? What do we see of ourselves in other species? David P Barash, in considering animals in zoos, in veterinarian offices, as pets, in the wild, and across time, hypothesizes a variety of reasons why we remain enthralled by other creatures.

We are living, breathing, perspiring, seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, eating, defecating, urinating, copulating, child-rearing, and ultimately dying animals ourselves. It is plausible that deep in the human psyche there resides the simple yet profound recognition of a relationship between Us and Them.

7. Can Elephants Be Persons? (Sarah Kasbeer, Summer 2019, Dissent Magazine)

Does only harm come from anthropomorphizing animals, or can respect for other living beings stem from the inclination? Are zoos an ethical place for creatures to reside, or is it better we let them free, even while we destroy their natural homes? What makes a person a person instead of an animal, and where do we draw the boundary between the two?

Sarah Kasbeer considers these questions and more in this nuanced and vital essay, one that centers around the predicament of Happy, an elephant living alone at the Bronx Zoo.

It has long been said that to anthropomorphize—ascribe human characteristics to animals—while intuitive and enjoyable, is unscientific and misguided. But given the recent research into animal consciousness, what was once considered a cardinal sin of ethology has since returned to favor, so long as it’s implemented responsibly.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, GuernicaTin House, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

Live Through This: Courtney Love at 55

Mick Hudson / Getty, istock / Getty Images Plus, Michael Ochs Archive / Getty, Vinnie Zuffante / Getty, pidjoe / Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | July 9th, 2019 | 24 minutes (6,539 words)

It’s hard to tell whether Thurston Moore is being sarcastic or sincere. It’s probably a bit of both. “The biggest star in this room is Courtney Love,” says the Sonic Youth singer and guitarist in a scene from 1991: The Year Punk Broke. The documentary follows Sonic Youth’s summer 1991 European tour and features performances and backstage antics from their tourmates, including a pre-Nevermind Nirvana, Babes in Toyland, and Dinosaur Jr.

Moore comments during an interview with 120 Minutes, an MTV program that spotlighted alternative music in the days before the music channel became the home of teen moms and spoiled Laguna Beach brats. As Moore declares his love of English food to the host — most definitely sarcasm — Love is behind him trying to get the camera’s attention. She waves and appears to stand on something to make herself taller. Her efforts pay off and soon she is in front of the host, all brazen, blond, and sporting blue baby doll barrettes.

Tongue-in-cheek or not, Moore was right. Love’s band Hole wasn’t on the European tour bill that summer and their debut album Pretty on the Inside hadn’t even been released yet, but Love was already on MTV.

Read more…

We Still Don’t Know How to Navigate the Cultural Legacy of Eugenics

Illustration by Tom Peake

Audrey Farley | Longreads | June 2019 | 13 minutes (3,381 words)

 

On May 28, Justice Clarence Thomas issued an eyebrow-raising opinion. It concurred with the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold an Indiana law that requires abortion providers to follow a certain protocol to dispose of fetal remains and prohibits abortions on the sole basis of a fetus’s sex, race, or disability. It wasn’t the justice’s position that caught attention, but rather his method. In speaking to the law’s second provision on selective abortions, Thomas launched into a history of eugenics, the debunked science of racial improvement that gained popularity in the early decades of the 20th century.

Arguing that abortion is “an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation,” the justice offered a lengthy discussion of the origins of the birth-control movement in the United States. In this discussion, written for the benefit of other courts considering abortion laws, Thomas explains how Planned Parenthood grew in tandem with state-sterilization campaigns, providing the foundation for the legalized abortion movement. (As historians corrected, legal abortion preceded birth control, as it was not regulated until the 19th century.) The justice cites the disturbing rhetoric of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who wrote in The Pivot of Civilization that birth control was a means of reducing the “ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.” While conceding that Sanger did not support abortion, Thomas nonetheless argues that “Sanger’s arguments about the eugenic value of birth control in securing ‘the elimination of the unfit’ apply with even greater force to abortion, making it significantly more effective as a tool of eugenics.”

Thomas does not offer concrete evidence that American women actually abort fetuses solely because of sex, race, or disability. Nor does he explore the possible reasons for abortions related to these criteria, such as financial hardship or the lack of societal support for individuals with chronic conditions. His grievance with abortion boils down to this point: the practice is ill-borne. This claim is inaccurate, for reasons that historians swiftly noted; it also obscures the fact that eugenics did in fact initiate many traditions in this country, not all of which are perceived to be heinous today. Thomas’s incautious opinion, which echoes other voices in the abortion debate, unwittingly invites a more nuanced discussion of eugenics’ legacies.

Read more…

School for Girls

Illustration by Xulin Wang

Jasmin Aviva Sandelson | Longreads | June 2019 | 28 minutes (7,121 words)

 

I loved being one of your girls. I wasn’t your favorite, but I didn’t need to be. What we had was different.

I found you on that hiking trip to the Spanish mountains. At first I was wary — at our all-girls’ secondary school you were never alone. But in the thin air we climbed together, lotioned each other’s backs, and hand-washed our socks side-by-side. By the end of the week we felt joined, invincible. Remember how we made those campsite boys pitch our tents? That’s not character-building, the male teachers sneered. We just laughed. We were girls: 13 and power-thrilled. While the others hauled their packs up the dusty hill, we lay together on sleeping bags. Your hazel eyes beamed noise and mischief, and I had found my place.

Back in London, I came to you each day, bounding to your classroom after lunch in the cafeteria. The others were with you, but that didn’t stop me. It made me want you more.

Before all the danger, we dashed about, frantic. We sprawled on desks or piled in a corner. You whispered about our classmates — plain girls, weird ones — and the four of us laughed in sly peals. It was both cruel and loving.

Five sounds like an unstable number, but it wasn’t. It was safe. Maybe because there was one of you, and four of us. We gathered at your house each Saturday, and I passed the journey — the bus, two tubes, and the uphill walk — listening to those songs you liked that I’d Limewired onto my iPod: Death Cab for Cutie, The Arctic Monkeys, Coldplay.

The others lived far away, too, some farther than me, but we all hauled our clothes and makeup across the city to get dressed in your bedroom for whatever we had planned: Smirnoff Ices in the park, a lax-bouncered bar, a house party with boys from our brother school.

We shook out our stuff on your big bed, which had space on either side like an adult’s bed, like my parents’ bed, not like my bed, pushed against a wall. We tried on each other’s things and crowded your full-length mirror as Jack Johnson sang through your iPod speaker.

“Pass the panox!” Ashley said, and you tossed the thumb-sized tube of medicated zit cream that you could only get in America, where your mom was from, and where you went every year. In the drawers that pulled out from under from your bed, you stored the things you brought back from New York: moisturizer with fake-tan, spray deodorant, and panoxyl.

We called it panox because we abbreviated everything.

“Emma, your skirt looks beaut,” I said, as you smoothed the white denim.

Oh em gee, totes,” Ashley said, dabbing her chin with the pad of her pinky.

We all spoke the same way, rhythms charged and exclusive like an electric fence.

Ashley was your best friend. She didn’t need panoxyl. Her skin was clear and framed by gold hair that reached the lean arcs of her waist. But even though she had all that I didn’t envy her. She didn’t crackle and sparkle like you did; she couldn’t combust into cackles like you and me.

As Ashley capped the cream, I sprayed the air around myself with your perfume and pulled on your leggings. I’d liked my legs covered since I was 6 or 7, back when my friends in gymnastics learned back handsprings while I was stuck with walkovers. In the cool gym, my thighs stayed pink when chill laced theirs with that wine-colored mottle. Mine touched all the way up. Theirs didn’t. To practice, I wore shorts over my leotard.

But you didn’t need leggings. Your legs were firm, cut with muscle down each thigh and behind the knees. I liked your legs. I also liked your straight white teeth — American teeth — and your full, flushed cheeks. I liked your honey-colored hair, the way the thick drape glinted in the light like amber. You were insecure about your stomach and hips — a little bigger than mine and the other girls’ — so I pretended not to notice when you tugged your shirt off your skin so it didn’t cling. To me, all parts of you, hard and soft, were lovely.

Once we were dressed, spritzed, and painted, the five of us — you, me, Ashley, Kat and Kay — trooped down three flights of stairs. In your kitchen, we piled around one corner of the wooden table that could seat 12, and ate whatever your mom cooked, something like pasta with tomato sauce, because she, like you, was a vegetarian. Your mom perched as we ate, not eating herself, but watching you chew with bird eyes, hard and blue. I was usually still hungry because she didn’t cook that much, so I’d buy a chocolate bar from the shop at the station. I always shared it around, but you never took any. Neither did Ashley. The two of you linked arms as Kat and Kay and I ate it up, square by square.

We also bought drinks at the station shop. Kat was 4’10 and looked even younger than 14, but she flashed her older sister’s passport and heaved our low-shelf vodka onto the counter. Glenns or Kirov tasted fine with enough Diet Coke. Kat and Kay bought regular Coke — “full fat Coke,” we called it. You glanced at them and clutched your own bottle closer.

At house parties, we’d flirt limply with whoever, but then you and I would run off. We peeked in bathrooms, jumped on boys’ beds, had swordfights with baguettes grabbed from bread bins, and gave each other hickeys. We looked each other in the eyes and laughed — laughter like a fist around our stomachs as we shook with devilish synchrony.

When we left one party for another, staggering down the sidewalk and dodging the cracks, I wanted to walk all night instead of going to some boy’s preened Hampstead house. I liked the in-between times best, and the befores and afters.

The afters looked like this: when we’d banked enough fun to last the school week, we all turned to you. We caught the last tube or you called a cab from Addison Lee, which we called Add Lee or just Add, and we lay our heads on each other’s shoulders as we waited to pull up at your front door. At the top of your house, in the “upstairs living room,” we flopped on those couches big enough to sleep four. The fifth, usually Kat, who was small and unfussy, lay on the carpet so thick she didn’t even need a sleeping bag. At home it took me hours to fall asleep. But beside you, my body unclenched and I slept deep and dreamless.

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