Search Results for: Olympics

Olympic Destroyer: The Cyberattack on the 2018 Winter Games

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As the opening ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympics began, a cyberattack crippled the games’ digital infrastructure, jeopardizing WIFI connections, event tickets, and even the Olympics app, packed full of information on event schedules, maps, and hotel reservations. At Wired, in this excerpt from his book, Sandworm, Andy Greenberg unravels this digital whodunnit. Who was bent on creating chaos at the Olympics to publicly embarrass South Korea? Was it China? North Korea? Or was it Russia?

Over the next two hours, as they attempted to rebuild the domain controllers to re-create a more long-term, secure network, the engineers would find again and again that the servers had been crippled. Some malicious presence in their systems remained, disrupting the machines faster than they could be rebuilt.

A few minutes before midnight, Oh and his administrators reluctantly decided on a desperate measure: They would cut off their entire network from the internet in an attempt to isolate it from the saboteurs who they figured must still have maintained a presence inside. That meant taking down every service—even the Olympics’ public website—while they worked to root out whatever malware infection was tearing apart their machines from within.

For the rest of the night, Oh and his staff worked frantically to rebuild the Olympics’ digital nervous system. By 5 am, a Korean security contractor, AhnLab, had managed to create an antivirus signature that could help Oh’s staff vaccinate the network’s thousands of PCs and servers against the mysterious malware that had infected them, a malicious file that Oh says was named simply winlogon.exe.

At 6:30 am, the Olympics’ administrators reset staffers’ passwords in hopes of locking out whatever means of access the hackers might have stolen. Just before 8 that morning, almost exactly 12 hours after the cyberattack on the Olympics had begun, Oh and his sleepless staffers finished reconstructing their servers from backups and began restarting every service.

Amazingly, it worked. The day’s skating and ski jumping events went off with little more than a few Wi-Fi hiccups. R2-D2-style robots puttered around Olympic venues, vacuuming floors, delivering water bottles, and projecting weather reports. A Boston Globe reporter later called the games “impeccably organized.” One USA Today columnist wrote that “it’s possible no Olympic Games have ever had so many moving pieces all run on time.” Thousands of athletes and millions of spectators remained blissfully unaware that the Olympics’ staff had spent its first night fighting off an invisible enemy that threatened to throw the entire event into chaos.

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Flagrant Foul: Benching Teen Moms Before Title IX

Illustration by J.O. Applegate

Britni de la Cretaz | Longreads | August 2019 | 27 minutes (6,922 words)

Before the pregnancy, before the ineligibility, and before the lawsuit, Jane Christoffer was one of the best basketball players in the basketball-loving state of Iowa. As a freshman in 1968–69 at Ruthven Consolidated High School, a school of just 106 students located in northwest Iowa, the 5-foot-11 Christoffer averaged 35 points per game, leading Ruthven to the state tournament for the first time in more than a decade. She upped her scoring average the next season to 47 points, and was named third team all-state, which prompted Richard Barber, her coach at Ruthven, to say, “Jane’s as good a player as we’ve had in the 20 years I’ve been here.” Read more…

Shared Breath

Illustration by Homestead

Caitlin Dwyer | Longreads | July 2019 | 20 minutes (5,624 words)

 
It was late afternoon in Virginia, humid but not too hot. The Hampton River rippled with a light breeze, lifting skirts and blowing ties. Guests sipped their beer and swayed a little — the way one does when watching a slow dance, unconsciously mimicking the movement of other bodies — as Chris Nalley led his mom on the floor. His bride stood nearby, red-gold curls framing her face, watching her new husband with a smile. Chris looked poised, in control of the dance, as a man looks when a long-awaited moment arrives and he steps confidently into its shape. A moment later his mom stepped away, and he gestured toward another woman standing nearby, a blonde in her 40s.

“Who’s that?” I asked my husband, who grew up with the bride.

“It’s his donor mom,” he whispered back.

Vicky West stepped into Nalley’s arms and laid her ear to his chest. Inside she could hear Nalley’s breath. The warm Virginia air moved through two lungs donated by a boy named Hans, who died of a brain aneurysm at age 20. West’s son’s lungs.

“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, what if I have a breakdown in the middle of the dance floor?’” West recalls. She had brought her sister and her best friend to the reception to help her prepare for the emotional moment. “I’m never going to dance at my son’s wedding, and he’s my only child. They gave me something that I never thought that I would get.”

West and Nalley didn’t know each other when Hans died. For years after his organs arrived at the University of Virginia, on ice, to be inserted into Nalley’s body, they didn’t even know each others’ names. But over time, they’ve developed a relationship that is both tentative and incredibly tender. They consider each other family, but each of them worries about putting pressure on the other person to have a relationship. West thinks of Nalley as her own child in many ways, but she knows he has a life, a marriage, his own separate identity. Nalley struggles with survivor’s guilt, knowing that Hans died and he is here. He refers to the lungs as not his own, as if they were foreign objects inserted into his body, which medically, in some ways, they are. Both Nalley and West are passionate about organ, tissue, and eye donation and the gift of connection and continuation it provides — even as it accompanies, inevitably, great grief.

* * *

“The science behind how I have these lungs, and they’re not mine, and they’re hooked up like you change a pipe under the sink — you know, switch the plumbing out — is just amazing,” says Nalley. As the recipient of two separate lung transplants, most recently from West’s son, Nalley has a healthy awe for modern medicine.

Complex medical procedures can seem to the layperson almost magical. We can snip out someone’s heart, put it into someone else’s body, and it starts beating. We can graft tissue and replace corneas. We can sustain heartbeats and blood pressure using complex machines, which loop the blood out of the body, oxygenate it, and feed it back in. These procedures come with great risk, but at least they are possible. For most of human history, the things that killed us just killed us. Now, with the help of machines, doctors, and humans who give pieces of their bodies to complete strangers in death, we can live longer, healthier lives. As modern people, we exist not only as ourselves any longer, but as the interconnections between various humans and technologies.

This is true for most people who have faced a medical crisis and relied on a network of humans and machines to save them. In such a crisis, the boundaries of identity become more permeable and the sense of self expands. Organ donation brings this node of connections, this strange, nebulous feeling of trust and gratitude, into sharp focus because of the physicality of the connection: Those who have received a donation literally carry the DNA of the other person inside them. Sometimes recipients also become invested in relationships that nurture, honor, and remember the donor, and they find a relationship with the donor’s family and identity. Communicating can help all sides make sense of a complex, emotionally challenging situation. In some cases, the recipient never learns about the donor and comes to accept these new body parts as their own, creating a new sense of wholeness as they heal.

It wasn’t that long ago that the idea of cutting someone’s lungs out and surgically implanting them in someone else’s body would have been absurd. Just 175 years ago, doctors used ether anesthesia for the first time. The first successful kidney transplant was only 65 years ago. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the first successful lung transplants took place. In 1986, the date of the first successful double-lung transplant, Chris Nalley was 6 years old.

* * *

I was 17 years old when my parents announced that we were going on a 10-day silent Buddhist meditation retreat. Despite initial doubts, I ended up enjoying it: long quiet walks around the UC San Diego campus, tasty vegetarian meals, morning meditations rung in by a bell. I especially remember our teacher. At the time, I thought of him as a brown-robed, slow-talking old man. After almost two decades of meditation practice, I now know him as Thich Nhat Hanh, a renowned Zen teacher and peace activist.

Toward the end of the retreat, he sat onstage in front of a line of candles. Cupping one hand to protect the flame, he lit a candle, then blew out the match. He used the first candle to light a second. He used the second candle to light a third. And so on. Then he gestured to the last candle and asked us whether the flame in this final candle was the same flame that had lit the match.

As modern people, we exist not only as ourselves any longer, but as the interconnections between various humans and technologies.

I didn’t understand that demonstration until many years later, when I became a mom. At one day old, my son was hooked up to a ventilator, unable to breathe on his own, heavily sedated with morphine. The doctors said he had holes in his lungs, and they suspected brain damage as a result of oxygen deprivation during labor. As a newborn, my son was not eligible for a transplant. We could only watch and wait to see if his lungs healed.

Standing over his crib, my hand on his softly moving chest, I understood how the self could transfer into another body and also be separate. This tiny creature had been inside me less than a day ago, and now struggled to breathe on his own. He still felt like a part of my body that had been recently extracted on an operating table. I had a thick, puffy scar across my abdomen where they’d pulled him out, and I could see the dimpled chin he’d inherited from me, the same chin I had inherited from my father, beneath all the plastic tubing.

“We think of our body as our self or belonging to our self. We think of our body as me or mine. But if you look deeply, you see that your body is also the body of your ancestors, of your parents, of your children, and of their children. So it is not a ‘me’; it is not a ‘mine,’” writes Thich Nhat Hanh in Lion’s Roar, a Buddhist magazine. “Your body is full of everything else — limitless non-body elements — except one thing: a separate existence.”

Buddhists call this lack of separateness “no-self.” It’s not a denial of our existence, but the acknowledgment that we exist only in relationship, in community, in continuation. In my family’s experience with the health care system, I saw how fragile our bodies are, how quickly they can come to rely on others for survival. When my son got sick, I stopped seeing myself as an isolated individual, a person who makes individual choices and suffers individual consequences. Instead, I saw the ways in which bodies are made up of both personal characteristics and the myriad influences of their environment, carrying with them the DNA, the traumas, the bacteria, the gifts and generosities of other people. We carry our parents, but also our doctors, nurses, teachers, organ donors: All these people flicker in us, tiny, guttering lights shielded from the wind by cupped hands.

* * *

The last thing Nalley remembered, it was January. He’d been arguing with the doctor. He needed an antibiotic for pneumonia, but as a manager for a busy shoe store, he had used up his limited days off and had to get back to work. He remembered getting angry at being detained. He remembered yelling a little.

Now as he looked out the hospital window, unable to move, heart racing, he saw leaves on the trees. It was May.

Nalley panicked. He had been asleep for five months. His heart rate and blood pressure shot up, and the staff surrounded him, trying to calm him down. They gave him something and he slipped back into sleep.

They woke him a few times, until, gradually, he understood what had happened. Admitted to the hospital in January 2005 with pneumonia, Nalley had become angry when the doctor told him he would be there at least a week. “I just wanted to go home and go back to work the next day,” he says. Eventually, he had fallen unconscious from lack of oxygen. He was intubated, given a tracheotomy, and placed in a medically induced coma for months while his lungs fought off the infection.

Nalley had been in the hospital a lot. He was born with cystic fibrosis, a chronic, progressive disease that gradually impairs lung function. The disease typically worsens in late adolescence and early adulthood, just as a person’s identity begins to crystallize. Infections like pneumonia become more common, leading to long-term antibiotic use and complications. While treatments are available, there is no cure.

When he had learned to walk and eat again after months of muscle atrophy, Nalley went home, still dependent on supplemental oxygen. Anytime he went outside, he carried portable oxygen tanks with him. “So much oxygen would flow out of the tank that it would burn your nose,” Nalley recalls.

Running errands became a negotiation of time versus liters. He could carry smaller oxygen tanks, each of which lasted about four hours, so he had to think ahead: If he got caught in traffic and ran out of air, he could get sick from oxygen deprivation. “I felt like an astronaut,” he says.

Being in his early 20s, all he wanted was to go to bars, hang out with friends, and flirt with girls. Instead, for a year and a half, his day-to-day life became a dull routine of television, computers, and forced social interaction. As his lung function declined further, doctors offered Nalley an opportunity: He could get on the list for a lung transplant.

* * *

When a potential organ or tissue donor dies, several teams kick into immediate action. For a case like Nalley’s, there are two surgeries: the donor and the recipient. First, the donor’s lungs are removed, a process that involves stapling shut the major vein and artery that take blood to and from the lungs, as well as closing off the bronchus, the main passage through which air passes. The organs are cut out, treated with blood thinners and preservation solutions, checked to make sure they don’t have too much fluid or any signs of infection, and kept cool.

“You want to be ready to sew the lung very close to the time it arrives,” explains Frederick Tibayan, a surgeon who heads the advanced heart failure and transplant program at Oregon Health and Science University. That’s because “when the lung or lungs have been removed from the donor’s body, it’s no longer being perfused with blood that is giving it nutrients and keeping that organ alive.” So while the lungs make their way to the recipient, possibly from another hospital or city or even state, in haste, another team of surgeons preps the recipient.

It’s a “highly coordinated dance,” says Sarah Kilbourne, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Virginia who works on Nalley’s care team. A nationwide computer program matches organs by blood type to the highest-priority recipient waiting for a donation. This happened in 2006, and again in 2013, when Kilbourne got a telephone call saying there was a lung available for Nalley. Both times, Nalley got to the hospital as fast as possible. In preparation for a potential procedure, he’d been trying to gain weight, doing physical therapy several times a day on his failing lungs, and keeping himself as healthy as possible for major surgery.

“I was gung-ho, let’s get this thing over with,” Nalley remembers of the first surgery. “In pre-op my parents were crying and I was, like, so ready to have this transplant. I was at the bottom of the barrel of life. Anything would have been better. Half a lung, one lung, a whole lung. Anything.”

Complex medical procedures can seem to the layperson almost magical. We can snip out someone’s heart, put it into someone else’s body, and it starts beating.

Nalley was having a bilateral transplant, which meant both lungs would be taken out. In this situation, the surgeons either do a clamshell incision, which involves slicing up the sides of the body and across the breastbone, or they simply divide the breastbone and open up the torso. They take out the worse-functioning lung first, again by stapling shut the bronchus and blood vessels and removing the organ, then sewing in the donated organ. “This is obviously stressful for the patient because they’re working on one lung. The heart is having to pump all the blood through one lung and having to work harder,” explains Tibayan. In around 25 percent of cases, the patient has to go on cardiopulmonary bypass, a machine that helps the heart handle the stress. Once the second lung is sewn in, the goal is to get the patient up and moving as fast as possible, to strengthen the heart and get the lungs working on their own.

“I tell people that after the first transplant, that first breath I took was the longest, deepest breath I’d ever taken in my life, and it wasn’t even … it was someone else’s lungs that were doing all the work,” says Nalley. He knew that a stranger’s body had been joined with his, letting him take these deep breaths. Generally, donors’ names and identities are kept anonymous. Nevertheless, the sense of breathing as or with someone else hits home for Nalley. “It messes with your mind, similar to thinking about how small we are in the universe. That the universe is so vast and then you think, there’s this part of me that’s not me … but I’m alive because of it.”

* * *

When Tibayan mentioned to me using a form of cardiopulmonary bypass called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, in transplant surgery, I remembered what it looked like. The ruby blood in thick tubes. The sound of the nurses banging their fists against the machine to prevent clots. The way the patient is sometimes drugged up to prevent him from moving, so that the canula feeding directly into his carotid will not jostle and detach.

My son was on ECMO for 10 days. He was kept alive effectively as a cyborg, his vitals inextricably linked to the machine that kept him breathing — and to the nurses who monitored the blood as it circulated out of his body, and the doctors who checked for air leaking into his chest cavity. I remember the strange attachment to the machines that were keeping him alive, a simultaneous revulsion and tenderness for the care he received. Beside the high-tech instruments in the room, a small electric candle flickered in the window, near the cot where I or my husband slept each night. I had never imagined that parenthood would begin mostly as a vigil.

“Impermanence means being transformed at every moment. This is reality. And since there is nothing unchanging, how can there be a permanent self, a separate self?” writes Thich Nhat Hanh. “So what permanent thing is there which we can call a self?”

The son I have today exists as the confluence of machines and humans. Ten years earlier, the ECMO technologies and caregiver training wouldn’t have been in place to save him. In 2017, they were. He may not be attached to those devices any longer, but they resonate in him with every breath he takes. Most people who have gone through a major medical event understand that we emerge back into health connected to our caregivers and to the expansive web of lifesaving practices that make up modern medicine. My son is not a machine, but he is alive because of them.


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* * *

“I thought of my donor as a guardian angel type of figure,” says Katy Portell.

When she was 4 years old, Portell received donated tissue to repair a faulty valve in her heart. She grew up aware of her heart condition, but not very engaged with her donor. He was a mysterious figure, rather abstract. As she grew up and became more involved in organ donation advocacy, she realized a hard moment was coming: “I knew that I would have to be ready to face the reality that there was a person on the other side whose life was cut short, who was meant for something more.”

Portell, who is the organ donation ambassador coordinator for NHS Blood and Transplant in the United Kingdom, took a series of extraordinary steps to discover her donor’s identity, more than 20 years after the tissue transplant. First, she had to find her organ procurement organization (OPO), a group that acts as a bridge between the recipient and donor hospitals. Because it had been so long, she had to get in touch with the surgeon who had done her transplant many years before. Once she found the OPO, she wrote a letter, using guidelines from a transplant coordinator; the letter was scrubbed of identifying information and sent to the OPO, who reached out to the donor family: Would they be willing to receive correspondence?

When she received a letter, she couldn’t wait to open it. Photos of a young boy spilled out of the envelope. “That was the moment when everything became very, very real, because suddenly there was a real person who had died,” says Portell. “That was devastating.”

Her donor was P.J., an 8-year-old who had been hit by a car while riding his bike. “He loved Indiana Jones, was obsessed with secret codes, and wanted to be a jet pilot or archaeologist when he grew up,” says Portell. He also made an extraordinary choice; he had told his mother he wanted to be a donor in several conversations during his life. Portell’s sense of guilt and gratitude was crushing.

She corresponded with P.J.’s family for about six months before she felt ready to meet. “I had a fear that was, frankly: Will they like me?” It’s a strange pressure, to carry a piece of someone’s son’s heart in your body. She had to carry P.J., too. She had to channel his spirit, and to live in a way that felt worthy of his choice to donate.

She thinks of him now like a big brother. When Portell applied for her current job, she emerged from an interview and felt confident about her chances. She walked the streets of London imagining P.J. walking beside her — not as a child, but as a man. She imagined high-fiving him. “I was strutting down the sidewalk and saying, ‘We did it,’” she says. “Nothing I do is without him.”

Portell met P.J.’s parents on New Year’s Eve 2016. Their first meeting was captured on video. It’s impossible to watch without crying: Portell running into the arms of P.J.’s mother, burying her head in her neck. They sit together, laughing, weeping, sharing photos. “You have fulfilled my child’s dreams,” P.J.’s mother says to Portell. “How could we be anything but proud?”

* * *

Not everyone meets their donor family. Although it is becoming more common, largely thanks to social media, Portell says, it’s a mistake to assume everyone is willing or ready to make that connection.

Tom Martin does not know his donor. He received a heart in 2013, after many years of heart failure eventually left him hospitalized. Disqualified at first from receiving a transplant because his doctors suspected he had precancerous cells, he fought to stay on the transplant list. He wanted to see his youngest son grow up. Martin had family and friends write letters to the hospital’s transplant program, proving that he had a network who would support him in recovery. When a heart became available, he was rushed to Oregon Health and Science University; he posted on Facebook before the surgery: They found me a heart! Then he went under. He doesn’t know whose heart he received, and he doesn’t want to know.

“I was freaked out. I felt weird about waiting for somebody to die,” he says, now six years out from his transplant. He chokes up as he continues: “I knew it wouldn’t be nice. It would be a young person in an accident, or a suicide. That was the only part I hated.”

It’s hard to get an estimate of how many recipients end up meeting their families. Because each OPO operates independently (there are 58 in the United States), nationwide statistics are tough to track down. Current estimates hover around 50 percent, a much higher number than in previous decades. For tissue recipients like Portell, meetings are even rarer, as the donor’s tissue is often donated to multiple people. Meeting the family “should be an option,” says Portell, but she cautions against expecting a close connection.

* * *

Nalley resisted meeting his donor family for a long time. After his first transplant, he started running races, first an 8K and then half-marathons, testing out his new lungs’ capacities. He joined recreational sports leagues in Richmond, where he met his future wife, Martina. The freedom of being able to move where and when he wished was exhilarating. Finally, he could be a normal young man: “I’m going to spend an all-nighter at a girl’s house. Or go out with friends in Richmond and not have to worry about being home at a certain time,” he says. “Literally the tether was gone.”

A few years after his first transplant, in 2011, Nalley was competing at the Transplant Games of America, an Olympics-style series of events. A donor mom was helping to organize one of the events, and she pushed him to connect with his donor family — but the thought of communicating seemed like an imposition. “If I contact them and they’ve already put closure to this tragedy, am I just going to be pulling a Band-Aid off?” he wondered. “I didn’t want to disrupt someone’s life.”

Eventually he did write, and he met Terri, whose son Ryan had been in an accident at age 16 and donated his lungs, kidney, and heart. Nalley and Terri became close. They went for brunch and dinner regularly, and ran a 10K together. “We just kind of connected,” says Nalley. “The first time we met, I gave her this great big hug and she put her head to my chest and listened to me breathe.”

In 2013, just two years after they connected, Terri died. But Nalley missed her funeral. He was back in the hospital, getting another double lung transplant.

* * *

A transplanted organ or tissue never quite gets used to its new home in the recipient’s body. Although the organ or tissue can function well for many years, recipients have to take immunosuppressant drugs to keep their bodies from rebelling against the donation. Organs can be rejected by the immune system immediately, which is called acute rejection; the more insidious problem is long-term rejection, in which the body slowly begins to kick the organ out. That happens because the immune system doesn’t recognize the antigens, or foreign proteins, in the organ.

“Unless it’s being suppressed, the foreign proteins are recognized as ‘not-self,’” says Tibayan. “That would normally start a cascade of responses that is usually reserved for a viral infection, and so to keep that from happening, at the very least to slow it down from happening faster, patients have to be on immunosuppression.”

This can be a tricky juggling act for the care team, who — unlike most other surgeons, who are in and out of the patient’s body — work with a recipient for the rest of their life. Lungs are exposed to the outside world, to all the cold viruses and smoke and fungal spores that float around in our air. While most pathogens won’t bother a healthy pair of lungs, says Tibayan, people who are immunosuppressed are less likely to fight them off.

Even when the immune system accepts donated organs, it can take time for the recipient to mentally identify them as their own. For a long time, Martin carried a sense of “not-self” about his heart. “I had always thought I had this other person’s heart in me,” he says. Then, a few years after his transplant, he attended a music performance where the composer asked the audience members to listen to their breathing and heartbeats as part of the show. “I’m a super straight Lutheran. I’m definitely not woo-woo,” laughs Martin, but he closed his eyes and joined the visualization.

“I was kind of picturing our cells, and how they’re kind of like fish, like little waves. And I was picturing my body and all the waves going one way, and my heart going another way, like it was separate from me. And as I was sitting there,” he pauses, “they lined up.”

From then on, it was his heart.

When working with new recipients, Kilbourne asks them to take ownership of their new organs: “Those are your new lungs,” she tells them. And yet Nalley never felt that his lungs were quite his; they were always Ryan’s. And around 2010, his body started to reject them.

Chris got sicker. He went back on the transplant list, hoping for another call.

* * *

“There is no guidebook for this,” says Portell. “I wonder every year on the anniversary of P.J.’s death, what do I do?”

Portell always celebrates P.J.’s birthday. She imagines him as he would be now: a grown man in his early 30s. She imagines him going out with friends to a pub in London. But during his last birthday, she wondered if that was really the right thing. She texted a friend, asking for a change of plans. They stayed in, ordered a pizza, and watched Indiana Jones.

“It’s something P.J. would do,” says Portell.

When I asked her if she feels like she enacts his personality, if some part of him lives in her, she hesitates. She wants to talk about P.J., not herself. Sometimes the line between them gets blurred, and other times it seems so clear. “Every once in a while I think …” she trails off. This deep intimacy that recipients feel with their donors was hard for them to describe. It was self, and it was not-self. It was both.

We carry our parents, but also our doctors, nurses, teachers, organ donors: All these people flicker in us, tiny, guttering lights shielded from the wind by cupped hands.

For donor families, this distinction can often be hard to navigate. West doesn’t want to take her relationship with Nalley for granted; she tries to give him space. “I’m so thankful and blessed that he’s willing to be a part of my life,” she says. She creates mental barriers for herself because, given unlimited access to Nalley, she says she would treat him like her own child.

For Nalley, the boundaries are less important. “I guess she’s afraid to mess up the donor dynamic by involving herself,” he says. “But I’m like, ‘We’re family. I have your son’s DNA in me.’”

* * *

Robert Bartlett is an average-looking older white man: combed gray hair, a large nose, a University of Michigan lab coat. He has a long and well-funded career of medical research, and he’s famous for one thing in particular: pioneering the use of ECMO in children.

Heart recipients like Martin usually spend some time on ECMO or a similar technology. Basically, the blood is drained out of the right side of the body, goes to an oxygenator, then is pumped to the other side of the body to provide circulatory support. It’s used for bypass in heart surgeries and, in some cases, for lung transplants as well.

Bartlett began using ECMO to treat acute respiratory failure in infants in the 1970s. Until around 10 years ago, it wasn’t very effective, says Tibayan; recent progress in both training and technology have greatly improved outcomes. In other words, fewer babies die.

My son is not a machine, but he is alive because of them.

When I search for Bartlett on Google and find his picture, I start to cry. I’m never going to meet this guy, but he saved my son’s life.

Staring at his picture, I feel strangely connected to him. My son is alive because Bartlett is alive and because Bartlett chose to study medicine and chose to research this specific machine and because people in the past decade have been trying to improve ECMO so that fewer babies die. It is very difficult to describe that level of gratitude, to explain how my son is his own individual self, a happy little boy with no memory of being on ECMO, and that he also owes who he is, at least in part, to a gray-haired man from Michigan.

ECMO is now being investigated for use in ex vivo lung perfusion, a process that essentially keeps donor lungs healthy and oxygenated during that key, quick transfer window between donor and recipient. It’s being considered for use in keeping alive a brain-dead patient with healthy organs, so that those organs might go to people who need them. According to the University of Michigan, where Bartlett’s lab conducts research, “ECMO is very good at treating acute lung disorders. But it can’t help patients with chronic progressive lung diseases like COPD, pulmonary fibrosis or cystic fibrosis. Eventually these patients are left with just one option: a lung transplant.”

* * *

Nalley’s second transplant — the one where he received Hans’s lungs — was complicated. Usually a patient leaves the ICU within a week and starts physical therapy, but Nalley had a lot of scar tissue to cut through from his first transplant. His body didn’t recover from the surgery as quickly.

“He had some bleeding in the areas around his lungs after the transplant, and he had an infection, so he was in the ICU for a much longer time,” explains Kilbourne.

Cystic fibrosis patients, who are often young, are good candidates for retransplant. The care team evaluates a retransplant based on survival rates. According to recent studies — with extremely small sample sizes, considering how few people receive retransplants each year — the one-year survival rate of a pulmonary retransplant is around 71.5 percent. The five-year rate is about 34.5 percent. Nalley’s lungs are on year six.

“They told me the only reason I did it is because I’m stubborn and that stubbornness pushed me through the after-transplant process,” says Nalley, laughing. But he’s serious: The likelihood that the lungs will be put to good use, and that the patient will live a long life, is one thing the care team considers when looking at transplant recipients. Donated organs are a scarce resource; to give someone a second pair of lungs is to take them away from someone else. The team wants to be sure the recipient will be able to use those lungs as long as possible.

Nalley isn’t messing around with his time. He knows he may someday need another set of lungs, but he’s not sure he’ll get them. He lives in Richmond with his wife and two dogs, and they travel a lot. They’ve been to Lebanon, Thailand, and the Caribbean. He chats with West at least once a week. He got a tattoo sleeve that shows a pair of lungs with the words Donate Life.

* * *

The choices of others — to pursue medical training, to serve in the health care field, to give the body to others in death — are choices that we ourselves do not get to make, but they have a profound effect on our survival. In her book On Immunity, essayist Eula Biss describes how medical decisions are often thought of as individual acts, yet they have powerful consequences for entire communities. “We have more microorganisms in our guts than we have cells in our bodies — we are crawling with bacteria and we are full of chemicals. We are, in other words, continuous with everything here on earth. Including — and especially — each other,” Biss writes. She posits that a sense of interconnectedness should govern our health care choices; that we cannot live in a bubble, mentally or physically, because our bodies exist in relation to one another.

Anyone who has spent a lot of time being sick, or has had a family member who has been very sick, has a network. We build connections to keep ourselves whole. Our medical experiences become our emotional makeup, our belief systems, our anxieties, our literal bodies. Some of these connections we can’t control. Others we can. The choice to donate an organ can be a checked box at the DMV or a conversation with a spouse. You strike one little match with that action, then probably forget about it. But down the line, someone else may carry that fire inside them — a flicker that binds body to body, the hiss as the wick catches, becomes a steady flame.

***

Are you interested in becoming an organ donor? If you live in the United States, register today. If you still have questions, learn more about what it means to become an organ donor.

***

Caitlin Dwyer is a writer from Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared recently in The Rumpus, Narratively, Creative Nonfiction, and Tricycle. She studied journalism at the University of Hong Kong, fiction at Pomona College, and poetry through the Rainier Writer’s Workshop.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Bundyville: The Remnant, Chapter Four: The Preacher and the Politician

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 27 minutes (7,641 words)

Part 4 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB

I.

To get to the Kingdom of Heaven, drive a long twisting road that dips in and out of wide green fields dotted with hay bales, skim alongside a crooked river and stop at the sign that says Marble Country. A wooden ranch gate — a tall archway of timber and American flags — marks the spot. Keep going past it for 20 more minutes and you’ll leave the country altogether; drive under that gate, and in a way, you’ll leave America, too.

For nearly 30 years, speculation about what goes on beyond the threshold to Marble Country has confused, scared, and angered folks here in Stevens County — a far-flung region of thick forests and dirt roads, cow pastures and low hills deep in the northeastern corner of Washington state.

Before the first barn wall could be raised on the site of a ghost town, people were already whispering. “Religious Group Says Fear Of Cult Unjustified,” a 1992 Associated Press headline read, “Pentecostal Sect Plans To Move Into Ghost Town.”

That religious group, led by a married couple named Barry and Anne Byrd, intended to create its very own Western-themed shining city on the hill: what they termed a “Christian covenant community.” They called it Marble Country, and they built houses and a church — Marble Community Fellowship — and painted “Holy Ghost Town” on an old barn. They raised families, planted crops. It wasn’t just a new town put down in an old place, but an old place resurrected. A brochure said Marble would get into all levels of politics, offer alternative civil courts and an alternative media.

 

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

“We are committed to uniting the generations to labor together to bring the dominion of Christ in every area of life,” the Byrds promised in the brochure.

For most of the time Marble Country has existed, the Byrds have hosted an event each summer called the God and Country Celebration. As the Patriot movement has made more and more headlines — between the standoffs at Bundy Ranch in 2014 and Malheur in 2016, and the subsequent trials — the name Marble kept popping up in my reporting. People who’d once been in the movement told me the festival was a gathering of militia bigwigs, Patriot celebrities, and politicians with extreme beliefs. It sounded like some kind of Patriot Woodstock, but it’s closed to the media, so I couldn’t go see it for myself.

In the summer of 2018, Jeanette Finicum was a “special guest” at the festival, bringing with her the message of her murdered, martyred husband. During the weekend, children in cowboy hats and jeans waved big white flags from the Marble stage bearing her husband’s distinct “LV” cattle brand. 

Finicum chose Marble as one of the first places to screen LaVoy: Dead Man Talking, a multipart film about her husband. There she delivered a speech that differed greatly in tone from the one she gave when I saw her speak in Salem, Oregon, just six months later. Someone sent me a recording of her Marble speech: She wasn’t the diminutive chuck-wagon mom I’d seen in Salem, but a pissed-off activist with a message ready for an audience who cheered her on.

“The media is not in the business of telling the truth,” she spat into the microphone. 

The Marble crowd murmured approval — yes, yes, that’s right, amen.

“Their job, their motive, their mission is to create an illusion in order to blur our reality. I was label-lynched by them as a sovereign citizen, anti-government terrorist. Profiled as a domestic right-wing extremist and judged by the American public for standing with my husband,” she said. She told them she was on a watch list. The feds monitored her home.

She never used that word — lynching — when I saw her speak in Salem, but here, both she and Mark Herr, the film’s producer, spoke it as if it were a word created for them. They have been lynched, they told the crowd, again and again. Lynched

The lynch mob, by their estimation, was the media: inflicting extrajudicial punishment to God-fearing freedom lovers. How dare anyone go after them?

“Your political opponents are using labels and the force of government to lynch you out of existence! What can you do?” Finicum asked. “You can make label-lynching a hate crime.” She told the crowd to lobby state legislators to make Patriots a special class. 

“We should be a protected class,” she yelled. “After all, everyone else is!”

To that, the crowd cheered so loud it was almost hard to hear her anymore. 

***

For decades, Stevens County, where Marble Country is located, has served as somewhat of a wooded, mountainous petri dish for conspiracy theories to grow, flourish, and find new hosts. For most of that time, one daily newspaper reporter was there to document the crimes committed by fringe groups who’ve found haven in the Stevens County’s sparsely populated areas. His name is Bill Morlin, and for decades he worked at the Spokane Daily Chronicle, then The Spokesman-Review. Now in his 70s, I first met him in the federal courtroom during the Bundys’ short-lived trial in Las Vegas. 

In the spring of 2019, I called him up to get a crash course on Stevens County’s right-wing extremist history. Something that may come as a surprise to people who aren’t familiar with the Inland Northwest is that the Northwestern United States isn’t all rain showers and mountains and Nirvana records, coffee shops and weed stores on every corner. 

In fact, Eastern Washington and North Idaho couldn’t be less in line with that image. It’s a deeply conservative area of the West. It’s hot and dry in the summer, cold as hell in the winter. In the past few years, some people have started to call this region the American Redoubt — the nickname survivalists and preppers have given Eastern Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, arguing that it’s a safe haven for libertarians. The term was popularized by James Wesley Rawles, who calls the people who migrated there for that reason “the remnant. Libertarians and preppers from around the country have been encouraged to make a home here. There are even “redoubt realtors” who’ll sell you a house, complete with a bomb shelter.

I came to talk to Morlin about Stevens County, but also about this region as a whole. He came prepared for our meeting with three pages, single-spaced, detailing various murders, robberies, kidnappings, and bombings committed by people from the county.

You can’t talk about the violent history of Stevens County without first understanding the Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi group who had a compound in nearby north Idaho — two hours from Stevens County. It was one of the first violent groups in the Pacific Northwest he recalls writing about. Morlin tells me about a 1983 cross-burning ceremony at the Aryan Nations he covered.

In the late 1970s, Richard Butler, who would become one of the most famous white supremacists in the country, had set up the swastika-emblazoned compound near Hayden Lake, Idaho, attracting racists from every corner of the country to the Idaho Panhandle. Butler allowed Morlin and a photographer to document the event, which the newspaper had been trying to cover, as a way of attempting to understand who, exactly, was gathering at the compound. 

“There was sort of a division, like do we pay these people any attention or do we ignore them?” he recalled of his paper’s coverage of cross burnings. “In fact a columnist at the other newspaper thought we were foolish for writing about the fact that there’d been a cross burning. He was of the school of thought that if you ignore them, they’ll go away, and by writing about them all you’re doing is giving them publicity. 

“I have never to this day signed on to that belief system,” Morlin continued. “Neither do major civil rights organizations. They believe that turning the lights on is the only way you can deal with hate groups.”

The cross burning was called the Blessing of the Weapons and was presided over by former Michigan KKK grand dragon Robert Miles. (In 1973, Miles was convicted of conspiring to bomb ten school buses in Pontiac, Michigan.) 

“It was very uncomfortable,” Morlin said. As the group of 40 to 50 people lit three crosses wrapped in diesel-soaked burlap, “each person in the circle would walk up with with his weapon … knives or handguns or long rifles. And each of them would be blessed by the master of ceremonies. The ceremony was to signify that these people were committing to the white cause and the fight for the white race that they envisioned was coming any day.”

That night, Morlin didn’t know who exactly all those men were that had their guns blessed in the name of a white war — but soon, he would. They would become known as the Order. It was an all-white underground domestic terrorist organization established by an anti-government extremist and racist named Bob Mathews, who had been actively recruiting people to create a “White American Bastion” in the Pacific Northwest and was motivated, in part, by an extremist ideology called Christian Identity. 

It’s an ideology that relies on the belief that Jews are descendants of Cain, and people of color are soulless and “beasts of the field,” while whites are the true “House of Israel.” Some Identity adherents believe Jews are the spawn of Eve and Satan. Butler, too, preached Christian Identity from his very own church at the compound. Around the nation, neo-Nazi groups and the Ku Klux Klan also believed in the radical ideology. 

Nationwide, as violent white supremacist fires flared, Christian Identity — time and time again — was the pitch wood making it burn hot and constant.

The men of the Order met at a cabin on Mathews’s Northeastern Washington property which was located in the county next to Stevens County. They “stood in a circle secretly and pledged a blood oath to each other to jointly fight this race war that they believed was coming,” Morlin told me. 

Morlin believes the men were inspired by a work of racist, apocalyptic fiction, a novel called The Turner Diaries that details a race war, and that, later, compelled Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.  

According to Morlin, the men at the ceremony eventually committed “a litany” of violent acts, most notably the 1984 assassination of a Jewish radio host named Alan Berg, who’d mocked a tenet of Christian Identity — that Jews were evil incarnate — on his Denver talk show. They committed a robbery in Spokane, bombed a synagogue in Boise, and robbed armored cars in Seattle. But investigators were baffled, unable to figure out who was responsible for so much violence. 

“This is in an era before the term ‘terrorist’ meant anything to anybody. I mean it’s like ‘Domestic terrorism? What’s that?’” Morlin said.

During a Northern California robbery of several million dollars from an armored car, Mathews left a handgun behind — a mistake that would eventually lead to the downfall of the Order. Mathews died in a shoot-out before the group’s 1985 trial in Seattle, which Morlin covered for the Spokesman-Review.

“A lot of the East Coast networks and newspapers had pretty much ignored the fact that the Order trial had occurred,” he says. “It was really a big deal, but it had happened on the West Coast and it didn’t get the news coverage, in my view, that it would have received if it had been in Florida or New York or Ohio or Pennsylvania.”

In fact, the Order created a new legacy for up-and-coming racists to follow: Today, violent white supremacist groups still cite an adherence to a mission statement called “The 14 Words” — “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” — which was coined by one of the Order’s members. 

The men of the Order weren’t exactly quiet about the ideas that drove them: Mathews and other members of the group were known to convene at a Colorado Christian Identity church led by an anti-Jewish, anti-homosexual, and racist preacher named Pete Peters. Despite its small population, by the 1990s, Stevens County was home to at least two Christian Identity churches: the Ark, near the Canadian border, and another founded by a former Ark acolyte, the Christian Israel Covenant Church. (The Ark is now called Our Place Fellowship; the Christian Israel Covenant Church disbanded in the early 2000s.)

“Those churches taught that white people are the superior race, that Jews are biologically satanic,” Morlin told me. 

The churches were small — and though the pastor at the Ark, Dan Henry, told The Spokesman-Review in 1992 that he rejected the “hate mongering” of the Aryan Nations, he also acknowledged preaching antisemitic ideas. 

But word had gotten around. People knew who was attending services. So it was common knowledge that the couple trying to start that new Christian covenant community called Marble Country — Barry and Anne Byrd — had attended the Ark for years. 

It was like the county knew what was about to happen — that this tiny bastion of hateful ideas was about to cross the rubicon, producing a number of followers who would spill blood in the name of Identity ideology all around the American West.

***

The racist services at The Ark were attended not only by adults who wanted to hear the sermons of Henry and other extremists, but also often by the children of those people, too. Chevie Kehoe fit the profile of one of those kids. Raised in part in Stevens County, his parents, Kirby and Gloria Kehoe, brought their children to services at the Ark, likely around the same time the Byrds attended. As his children grew older, Kirby Kehoe, an adamant racist, grew increasingly skeptical of the government, pulling his kids out of their Colville, Washington, public school, viewing schools “as a threat,” according to his son. In a 1999 New York Times interview, Chevie said his parents were interested in the notion of a whites-only region preached by the Order’s Mathews, and over time Chevie believed that he himself could bring the plan to fruition in the Northwest. He called the region the Aryan People’s Republic, and began committing robberies and acts of violence in devotion to the concept. 

In the late 1990s, he launched a cross-country trip to recruit people to his white region — a trip that turned into a spree of murders, shootings, and robberies.

In 1996, Chevie Kehoe robbed and murdered a man, his wife, and her 8-year-old daughter in Arkansas, then tossed their bodies into the Illinois Bayou. The next year, when police officers in Ohio pulled over Kehoe and his brother, Cheyne, and in two subsequent shoot-outs, Kehoe fired 33 bullets, seriously injuring a pedestrian before fleeing. Both were arrested after a brief manhunt, and Chevie was later sentenced to three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. 

Even decades after Chevie Kehoe’s imprisonment, the whites-only nation idea that invigorated him, Mathews, and the Order before him, would keep surfacing in new ways and in new forms.

Kehoe is now incarcerated at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Fremont County, Colorado, alongside McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing accomplice Terry Nichols and 1996 Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph, who was inspired by Christian Identity to bomb abortion clinics, a lesbian bar, and the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

In 2012, serial killer Israel Keyes, who grew up with the Kehoe brothers and who also occasionally attended the Ark as a child, confessed to committing robberies and murders from coast to coast before reportedly dying by suicide in a jail cell. It’s unclear if his crimes were inspired by any sort of ideology, but during the 1990s, his father wrote a letter of support for both the Byrds and Pete Peters that was published in the local paper.

Keyes wrote that it wasn’t illegal to practice Christian Identity: “It is my understanding that the Marble Community Fellowship has very little to do with the Christian Identity Movement, but so what? Haven’t we as Americans a right to exercise a belief in God and celebrate our white heritage and Christian religion? After all, many Jews consider their race to be God’s chosen people. Is this not racism at its zenith?”

Morlin told me that he reported from a meeting of the Stevens County Assembly — an anti-government militia — in 2012, in which neo-Confederate Pastor John Weaver spoke. Weaver gives racist sermons from the pulpit — sometimes in front of a Confederate flag, sometimes wearing a Confederate flag–printed tie — railing against interracial marriage, and advocating for slavery. By the time of the meeting, he was no stranger to Eastern Washington. In the early 1990s, he appeared at a Spokane conference of white supremacists, during which he promoted his book that urged Americans to break laws should the government become occupied by Jews.

In 2015, Weaver was back in Stevens County to give another speech — this time, he was onstage at Marble Country. 

 

II.

Marble’s God and Country Festival wouldn’t be what it is without a speech from a Washington State House Representative from a district two hours away. 

His name is Matt Shea. A clean-cut Army veteran with a law degree, Shea wears thin glasses, dresses in crisply ironed shirts, and smiles tightly. He positions himself as a voice of rural people, but actually represents a district that includes Spokane Valley, a largely suburban city of almost 100,000. 

Rep. Matt Shea at a January 2017 gun-rights rally in Olympia, Washington. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)

Shea, over the course of six two-year terms, has become a fixture at the far-right edge of what Washingtonians consider Republican. He rarely speaks to reporters — unless they work for publications that have the words “liberty” or “redoubt” in their name. I know more people who’ve done in-person interviews with President Trump than with State Representative Shea, and for years, I worked at newspapers that covered his district. 

In order for Shea’s constituents to get an understanding of his ideas, they need to tune into his podcast. The show always takes the same format: Shea reads off some headlines from right-wing news sites, then interviews a guest, while often piping up in agreement with their outlandish theories. 

Those guests tend to hold views reflected in the bills Shea introduces in the Washington House. They’re unflinching Second Amendment advocates. This spring, a woman on the program preached abstinence-only sex education and an anti-vaccine “researcher” claimed that child immunizations are contaminated with aborted fetuses. 

Mostly, they’re conspiracy theorists and bigots with views Shea parrots. This spring, the legislator hosted a representative from an anti-abortion and homophobic group that has participated in burnings of the Quran. He interviewed a man who spouted talking points from conspiracists who believe in Agenda 21 — a theory that sustainable development is a shady plan hatched by a “New International Economic Order” to control people and take their freedom. Recently, he hosted a conspiracy theorist who believes the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks were actually a “controlled demolition.” 

You could say Shea is a lot like Bill Keebler — except he wears a suit and taxpayers pay him a salary. 

Shea, for years, has seemed at home among the creators of fake news and conspiracy theories that turn violent. As early as 2009, he made several appearances on conspiracy king Alex Jones’s InfoWars show, where Jones introduced him with reverence. “Representative,” he says, “good to have you on with us.” In that February 2009 interview, Shea and Jones spoke of their belief that the federal government was setting up camps to imprison Americans. 

It seems as though in Shea’s world, the country is on the verge of collapse. People will have to fight for their lives. And he intends to be prepared: “If you do not have 5,000 rounds of .223, 5,000 rounds of .22 and a thousand rounds of handgun ammo as a minimum, you’re wrong!” he called from an Idaho stage in 2013. 

“We want to prepare for the inevitable collapse that’s gonna happen. And yes, I said that as a politician here onstage. It’s gonna happen! We all know that! The question is, and I think the question should be for all of us, what are we gonna do afterwards? What are we gonna do with that opportunity?”

Apocalypse, government collapse, anarchy — in his world, these are exciting prospects. Opportunities even. A chance at a fresh start, a time to get society back on track. 

In this fantasy apocalypse, perhaps being well-prepared and well-armed will be so necessary that the person you were in the past — in the pre-collapse — won’t matter. Money will be obsolete. Laws won’t be enforced. Maybe a violent past will suddenly be seen as an asset. 

This might have special appeal for Shea. His ex-wife, who filed for divorce in 2007, alleged that Shea grabbed her so hard during two arguments that he left bruises on her arms. In those same divorce filings, she told stories of a controlling man; by her account, he commanded her to always walk on his left side because a soldier needs to be able to draw his sword from the right. (Shea was in the Army and served in combat, but his wife said he did not traditionally carry a sword.)

Shea did not respond to requests for comment, but when asked a decade ago about his divorce by the Spokesman-Review, he denied any violence and said, “I love my wife and, when I married, I intended it to be for life. Unfortunately, my former wife didn’t and decided to pursue her third divorce.”

In 2011, Matt Shea was involved in a road rage incident in Spokane, in which another driver alleged Shea pulled a gun. In a police report, Shea told officers that as an Iraq war veteran he had to use “evasive techniques” to avoid hitting the man’s car (which Shea described as engaging in “Baghdad driving”), and proceeded to follow it. Shea admitted to officers that he had a gun in his car, that he produced it from a glovebox during the incident, and that he had an expired concealed carry permit. The other driver said he saw the handgun and was afraid Shea was going to shoot him. Later, Shea’s attorney made a deal with prosecutors that resulted in the charges being dropped.

Even now, in a time he surmises is the end of civil society, all of this has become standard Shea stuff. None of his past did real damage to his standing with voters. But it didn’t mean the things he said didn’t set people on edge. 

In the spring of 2014, a woman was eating at a Spokane Valley Mexican restaurant when she overheard a conversation between two men at the next table over. Later, she found out those men were Shea and the head of the Oath Keepers militia, Stewart Rhodes. 

But sitting there, hearing them, she became so concerned over what they were saying that she took their picture and called the police. According to a police dispatch, the woman overheard “a conversation from a group of males talking about snipers, Clive [sic] Bundy, and public militias.” One of the individuals, she told the police, had “thermal imaging binoculars,” and the group sounded “like they were planning something.”

Still, Shea won the election that year with 57 percent of the vote. 

If he could sit in a diner with one of the biggest militia leaders in this country and openly talk about military tactics, it seemed like Shea could be as extreme as he wanted — and it wouldn’t cost him any support. And even some of the most conservative Republicans in Eastern Washington were baffled by how Shea stayed in office. 

Two of those people are Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich and a former Republican state legislator from Stevens County, John Smith. In a three-part podcast on white supremacy in the region, the pair suggested that Shea’s involvement at Marble Country was something voters should worry about. It was a part of a deep history of racism and hate that had found a home in this region going way back.

Smith was raised by his grandparents in southern Idaho — and his grandfather was friends with people in the Aryan Nations and in the Order. Their home often had new people coming through the door. He remembered his grandfather laying maps out in the kitchen nook and drawing up plans for “an armed revolt.” 

Smith realized on his own the ideology he’d been raised around was rotten and that he had to find a way out of it. He took a job as a ranch hand when he was 16 years old, and as a young adult, he attended church at the Ark. He was later married there, though he says he and his wife have since cut their connections with the church. 

But he told me that it’s become something of a mission for him to speak up when he sees ideas rooted in Christian Identity catching on here. Stevens County has a history — he knows it, everyone does, even though racists have always been a fringe minority. And in a podcast with Knezovich, Smith hoped people would hear stories of his childhood as a cautionary tale. 

“I grew up in that environment, and that stuff doesn’t wash off you. I acknowledge that darkness might still be inside me,” he told me. He maintains that he’s constantly trying to make sure he’s free of it, that he root out any part of him that might still carry what he learned as a kid — asking friends who aren’t white, who weren’t raised around neo-Nazis, if he’s changed. 

“I actively go to them and say, ‘Look at me and tell me, is it still in me? Am I still saying the wrong things? Am I still thinking of this in the wrong way?’ I’m trying to not have that be in there anymore. And maybe part of that is standing up and saying this is not OK.” 

Smith, in the video versions of the podcast was small and diminutive next to Knezovich. The latter is a tall, hulking man with a bald head and a sidearm, who shook my hand firmly and didn’t smile once when I interviewed him in a conference room at the Spokane County Sheriff’s office last summer. 

He told me he sees Shea’s increasingly conspiratorial rhetoric and the allegations of aggressive behavior against him through a lens of one reality his department deals with regularly: that racism is alive and well in his county. He talked about getting a call one morning that KKK flyers had appeared plastered all over a suburb called Millwood, and about teenagers spouting white nationalist talking points in the hallways of local high schools. 

He also talked about threats. Since Knezovich — a member of the local Republican party and a man who twice endorsed Shea — started speaking up about Shea, he has received death threats from people associated with the legislator. 

“I’ve got my estate in order. I’ve got my will done. The kids have all been briefed. And don’t take this as me being flippant. Nobody wants to die. I came to grips with death a long, long time ago,” he says. “And there’s been more people than I that have died for this country. And if that’s what it takes for people to wake up to what’s happening around them. All right. I love my nation. And if it takes fighting these people on these terms? Bring it on.”

***

In 2015, Shea was at the God and Country Celebration again, this time next to John Weaver — the neo-Confederate preacher. The next year, many of the legislators from around the West who sympathized with the Bundys in both 2014 and 2016 showed up to Marble, too. 

In some years, Anne Byrd posted photos to Facebook of the people who came to Marble. In the caption of a picture of Val Stevens, a former Washington state rep, Byrd wrote that Marble was “blessed” for legislators to be “standing in the gap” for the people.

By the summer of 2018, in the months before the election when many legislators campaign in their districts, Matt Shea appeared alongside Jeanette Finicum at the God and Country Festival. He talked about an idea he’d been shopping for years in the Washington statehouse: He wanted to secede Eastern Washington and create “a safe haven,” a 51st state called Liberty. 

Shea insisted people east of the Cascades just didn’t agree with the values of “downtown Seattle,” so why even try to get along? “I would submit, here in Eastern Washington, we believe in the right of self defense. We also believe the constitution means what it says,” he told another crowd. Seattle doesn’t because, he says, it is filled with communists. “And communism, real communism, has killed more people as an ideology than any other ideology in this history of the world — atheist communism.” 

All this time Shea spent up here in Stevens County, far from his district, he wasn’t recruiting any new voters. But it did appear he was amassing a following for a political movement, of which he was a leader and visionary. 

I wanted to ask him about that, but last summer he didn’t respond to my email requests for an interview. In his personal security detail (having one is atypical for a state rep), Shea is known to employ a man who lives at Marble, and who once tried to bring an AK-47 onto the grounds of the Spokane federal courthouse, but he has no press liaison. 

So I figured if I really wanted to ask him a question, and get any kind of an answer, I should show up to a gun rally where he was slated to be a featured speaker.

It was a hot August day — a dry heat, as people in Eastern Washington like to say. The rally was to be held at a large, grassy green park on the northside of Spokane — much closer to his district than Stevens County, but still not in it. A place where people play softball and lay out picnics. On this day, a small crowd gathered. For the most part, they wore shirts emblazoned with proclamations of love for guns and freedom, but several wore militia gear and carried militia flags. Several carried AR-15s.

I listened to Shea give a speech,  one that would go on to make headlines around the West, in which he called journalists “dirty, godless, hateful people.” The small crowd — which included leaders and members of the 63rd Lightfoot militia and a local politician who once stomped on the United Nations flag in front of Spokane City Hall — loved it. They cheered Shea on as he yelled, wide-eyed, pumping his fists. 

When he was finished, I trudged across the grass, introduced myself, and said I was hoping to ask him some questions: about this 51st State idea and his affinity for speaking at Marble each year. To my surprise, he agreed to talk. 

Read more…

The Gymnast’s Position

Illustration by Homestead

Dvora Meyers | Longreads | June 2019 | 25 minutes (6,257 words)

More than two decades ago, a billboard went up in Salt Lake City near the 600 South exit of the I-15. It featured a young woman in repose clad in a sleeveless black leotard, her back to the viewer and her head tilted up. The weight of her upper body rested on her right arm, which was extended behind her; her left arm lay languidly on her bent left knee. Her right leg was extended straight in front of her, its foot arch, creating the appearance of a straight line from hip to toe.

The angle of the woman’s head seemingly bathed her face in light, her long curly blonde hair falling freely down her neck. The pose was reminiscent of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, only inverted.

Passersby unable to make out the words printed in small text beneath the image would be forgiven for not knowing what exactly the billboard was advertising. Was it selling a dance performance or was it an ad for workout apparel or a photography exhibit at a local gallery? Visually, there were few clues.
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Busting Broncos and the Patriarchy

Cal Sport Media via AP Images

The world still can’t stand seeing women’s ambition, women’s independence, women’s sexuality, or women’s pain. For Deadspin, journalist Jessica Camille Aguirre writes about an emerging contingent of professional female bronco-riders who are changing the structure of rodeo. Women aren’t new to the sport. They’ve been riding angry horses for over a century. What’s new is the way Daryl and Michelle McElroy, of the Texas Bronc Riders Association, have been creating tours and sanctioned events for women to compete in. “Ever since 1929, when a 32-year-old bronc rider named Bonnie McCarroll was thrown from her horse during a rodeo in Oregon and died in the hospital eight days later,” Aguirre writes, “women’s saddle bronc riding has been more or less wiped from the rodeo event roster.”

But McCarroll’s death prompted the rodeo where she rode, the Pendleton Round-Up, to cancel women’s bronc riding, and other rodeos followed. The Rodeo Association of America formed the same year, and since there were no women rodeo producers, there were also no women in the organization. The RAA did not include women in its published standings, or print photos of women in the finalist shots in its magazine. In 1931, rodeos started hosting sponsor girls, who led parades and were judged on their attractiveness instead of their athleticism. A decade later, Gene Autry started a rodeo company and from then on, none of his rodeos hosted any competitions for cowgirls at all. Deciding that they had better do something or watch themselves be relegated to beauty pageants, women started their own organization, which put together some all-girl rodeos and managed to get barrel racing back on the roster at the larger rodeos.

Since then, women have competed publicly in nearly every sport, including ones that openly involve physical peril. The first woman climbed Mount Everest in 1975; the first woman bullfighter to become a full Matador de Toros in Spain did so in 1996; women’s boxing was included in the 2012 Olympics. It has become passé to fête the achievements of women athletes as though they were interesting only by virtue of their having been accomplished by women, but there is still something liberating about watching women conspicuously demonstrate that they are free to make use of their own bodies however they please, danger or no. In a sense, though, reviving women’s rodeo bronc riding is less of a trailblazing move than it is a throwback to a model of gender roles that prevailed during a certain American moment and that has been dimmed by the passage of time. Eight years before McCarroll was fatally thrown from her horse at the Pendleton Round-Up, an author named Charles Wellington Furlong wrote about the cowboys and cowgirls who rode there, noting that, “few queens have vouchsafed to occupy thrones less secure than that supreme one offered by the parliament of the Round-Up each year—the world championship saddle of the cowgirls’ bucking contest.” By less secure he didn’t mean at risk of being cancelled. He meant that bucking horses buck.

After the video of Wimberly’s bad ride starting circulating and the same old tropes that shut down women’s saddle bronc riding the first time starting appearing again, Wimberly thought, what the hell, flaunt the hurt. Being up front about the injuries and danger, and nevertheless still pursuing glory, would show everyone what women were capable of and what the sport was about. “The way I see it, it doesn’t show the weakness of women, it shows our strength,” Wimberly told the RIDE TV camera crew. There was no reason to hide the hurdles women faced—if anything, they were tougher for it. “When you can get dragged across the arena on your head, get a bad concussion, get your feet nearly jerked from your leg, and get up from that, and stand up, wave to the crowd, walk off—okay, I might have limped a little—to me, that’s impressive.”

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The Day New York Rose Up Against the Nazis On the Hudson

A demonstration near the German ocean liner SS Bremen in New York, after Hugh Wilson, the American ambassador to Germany was recalled in the wake of Kristallnacht, 1938. (FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Peter Duffy | An excerpt adapted from The Agitator: William Bailey and the First American Uprising Against Nazism | PublicAffairs | March 2019 | 20 minutes (5,458 words)


Hear it, boys, hear it? Hell, listen to me! Coast to coast! HELLO AMERICA!
—Clifford Odets, Waiting For Lefty

Seven million New Yorkers, few of them in possession of the luxury item known as an electric fan, woke up to the best news in three weeks on Friday, July 26, 1935. During the overnight hours, the humidity plunged by 33 points. By sunrise, the temperate air from Canada had completed its work. The heat wave was over.

“Humidity Goes Into Tailspin,” the New York Post exulted. “Rain Ushers in Cool Spell,” declared the Brooklyn Eagle.

The New York Times and Herald Tribune didn’t make much of a fuss that morning over Varian Fry’s revelations about his conversation with Ernst Hanfstaengl. “Reich Divided on Way to Treat Jews, Says Fry,” was the cautious headline on page eleven of the Tribune. One faction of the Nazi Party, the paper went on in summary of Hanfstaengl’s comments to Fry, “were the radicals, who wanted to settle the matter by blood.” The other, “the self-styled moderate group,” wanted to “segregate the Jews and settle the question by legal methods.” The Times ran its version on page eight and devoted most of the article to Fry’s retelling of the Berlin Riots. “There were literally hundreds of policemen standing around but I did not see them do anything but protect certain cafés which I was told were owned by Nazis,” Fry was quoted as saying. The paper saved its preview of the Holocaust for the ninth of eleven paragraphs. The nation’s newspaper of record didn’t see the value in highlighting the disclosure that “the radical section” of Hitler’s regime “desired to solve the Jewish question with bloodshed.”

Reached for comment in Berlin, Hanfstaengl called Fry’s account “fictions and lies from start to finish.” Read more…

Cowards and Accomplices

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Judith Hertog | Longreads | Month 2018 | 13 minutes (3,153 words)

The first thing I did when I learned the alphabet at age 6 was to spend a weekend writing out a stack of flyers that said, in large, uneven block letters: “Ret de weerelt!” a clumsily misspelled Dutch phrase that translates into English as something like “Sav the worlt!” I finally had a chance to express the urgency I felt when I discovered that, outside the idyllic life my parents had created for me in our small apartment in Amsterdam, the world was a dangerous and terrifying place where children starved to death in famines, innocents were killed in wars, factories poured chemicals into the water, and nuclear warheads stood ready to destroy everything in a flash. The world was in trouble and something needed to be done urgently.

So I copied the words “Sav the worlt” 50 times, folded my manifestos into paper airplanes and aimed them from our fourth-floor bathroom window down into the neighbors’ backyards at the center of our block. I assumed the neighbors were not aware of the state of the world, or else they would be busy trying to save it. I imagined my fliers would alert them to the seriousness of the situation and spark a worldwide activist movement under my leadership, even though I had not signed my name to the rallying cry or included a return address. Only when I saw the paper airplanes gliding into the neighbors’ yards, getting caught in tree branches or plunging into mud puddles, did I realize the futility of my act. I didn’t get any responses, and I never told anyone about it.

I recently thought back to this because I don’t know how I’d react now if I found one of my own paper planes in my yard.

I’m sitting here at the gym, waiting for my son’s tumbling class to end, and I just read a Facebook post by a friend in Gaza whose updates have become increasingly desperate amidst yet another Israeli bombing campaign on his city.

“Today I suffered a lot. I almost forgot what it means to be human. I was a THING,” he wrote. I have never met Mosab in person. A friend introduced me to him online because he is a poet who is trying to establish a library in Gaza, to take people’s minds off violence and desperation. I have sent him books and an occasional message to cheer on his project. But today I can’t even respond to his despair. Words seem inadequate. They can’t stop bombs from killing people. I should be back in Israel and doing something. But instead, I live in Vermont, where life is comfortable and my kids don’t have to face war. I’m aware the world is falling to pieces all around me. But for now, I just want to shield my children and keep them away from pain and evil. And I’m afraid I’ve become just as complacent as my old neighbors.

Nobody told me that this is what it means to be a parent: to have your soul placed inside another’s body. One mishap, and it can all be gone. My son is practicing his backflips. My heart stops each time I see his slender 14-year old body balanced in the air. He wants to become a circus clown, and I want him to live a life of razzle dazzle and applause. So I take him to tumbling class, even though I can almost see the world end just before he makes that last-second spin to land on his feet.
Read more…

Finding True North

Illustration by Kevin Whipple

Amy Bracken | Longreads | August 2018 | 27 minutes (6,729 words)

Samuel* bears the scars — above his mouth, on the top of his head, on both arms, on one leg — six bullet wounds in all. They’ll be considered as evidence when he goes before a Canadian immigration judge and he’ll have to tell the story that still makes his voice shake, about how gunmen attacked him at a Port-au-Prince intersection in 2013 and left him for dead. As a young police officer, he had witnessed men transporting weapons and drugs hidden in a truckload of plantains. Two of Samuel’s colleagues who were also present at the time have since been killed, he says, and when Samuel was shot at again in 2015 while taking his children to school, he knew he “had to leave Haiti.”

Thus begins the story of how Samuel, his wife, Darline, and their 1-year-old boy found themselves in a basement apartment on a chilly fall day in a quiet neighborhood of Montréal. They are part of a massive influx of asylum-seekers — mostly Haitian — who fled the United States for Canada last summer. They came at the peak of that influx, in early August 2017, when every day more than 200 people took a bus to upstate New York, then a taxi to the border, where a country road ends in grass and a well-worn dirt path. They breached the invisible boundary and turned themselves in to a Canadian Mountie, setting in motion the long process of trying to start a new life in a new country.

The urge for so many to leave the United States began to build with the election of Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant rhetoric. Then, in spring 2017, John Kelly, Secretary of Homeland Security at the time, announced that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians would expire in January 2018. TPS had been granted to some 50,000 Haitians living in the United States, protecting them from deportation, after a massive earthquake struck their country in 2010. Although Secretary Kelly said that renewal of TPS was possible, he suggested it was unlikely, and he urged recipients “to use the time before January 22, 2018, to prepare for and arrange their departure from the United States.” (In November, the Trump Administration announced that TPS for Haitians would instead end in July 2019.)


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Canada became the destination for TPS recipients and many others when, in June, social media messages encouraging Haitians to apply for residency here, some even falsely claiming that the Canadian government would cover all fees, went viral. The messages spread feverishly among Haitians across in the United States and beyond.

The number of asylum claims at the Québec border had climbed since the start of 2017, but then it shot from 975 in June to 2,775 in July, and more than doubled again to 5,650 in August. Most of those claimants were Haitian.

A so-called “safe third country” agreement between the United States and Canada, in place since 2004, means that anyone presenting himself at a U.S. border station crossing to seek asylum in Canada must be turned back — with few exceptions made for some, like those with close family ties in Canada. The rule does not apply to those who cross between official ports of entry, have themselves arrested, then apply for asylum in Canada. With much of the U.S.-Canada border dominated by lakes, rivers, and remote fields, and with much of the U.S. Haitian population based on the eastern seaboard, the accessibility of the New York–Québec stretch made it the chosen entry point for the vast majority of migrants.

Samuel* bears the scars — above his mouth, on the top of his head, on both arms, on one leg — six bullet wounds in all.

As the number of irregular border-crossers mounted, public officials, service providers, and the media focused heavily on the misleading social media messages that encouraged them to come north, suggesting that deception was largely responsible for the influx and that those messages were setting migrants up for disappointment.

Indeed, most of the travelers I interviewed for this story said they had been inspired by WhatsApp and Facebook posts. One said that fellow travelers were startled by the sight of a police officer arresting people at the border, and most were unaware that in 2016, Haitian asylum claims were only accepted about 50 percent of the time.

However, newcomers’ assessments of whether or not coming to Canada was the right choice goes well beyond merely weighing the odds of getting residency or considering the fees. By other measures, there is enormous benefit in coming north.

For one, immediate deportation from Canada is unlikely for most. The fate of many who entered last summer will still be unresolved months or years from now, thanks in large part to a backlog. More than 50,000 asylum claims were made in Canada in 2017more than double the number in 2016. One result is that many saw their scheduled eligibility hearings pushed back indefinitely. A spokesperson for Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board said in February 2018 that projected hearing delays were about 20 months — despite efforts to step up capacity, such as the temporary designation of 17 Refugee Board members to focus specifically on processing the claims of recent border-crossers. The process will be longest for those whose claims are rejected, as they are entitled to appeal multiple times, dragging the process out for what might be several years.

Meanwhile, as they await a ruling on their fate, the life that Haitian asylum-seekers are able to live in Québec is often starkly different from what they had experienced in the States. Many quickly gained a foothold in Canadian society, are beginning to integrate, and are breathing easy in a way that they never could south of the border. But for some, the delays can be excruciating, for one reason above all: They prolong the time before they can send for family members they had to leave back home.

* * *

Samuel didn’t aspire to live in North America. He tried to make his way in Haiti as he was able. “I entered university but wasn’t able to finish,” he says. “I had to make a living, so I entered the police because it’s the one institution in Haiti that will hire anybody who is intelligent and physically fit.” It wasn’t a great job. He says his life was at risk on a number of occasions, yet he didn’t have a choice but to stick with it. Until he didn’t have a choice but to leave.

After Samuel was shot in Haiti in 2013, he spent two months in the hospital. Even today he has some pain in his right hand, and his fingers don’t work properly, jutting out awkwardly like sticks. And the violence did not affect him alone. He says it hurt his oldest child most.

“My daughter, who was four at the time, was shocked and traumatized,” he says. “When I returned from the hospital, she wouldn’t come near me, she was so afraid of me when she saw the scars.”

After Samuel was shot in Haiti in 2013, he spent two months in the hospital. Even today he has some pain in his right hand, and his fingers don’t work properly, jutting out awkwardly like sticks. And the violence did not affect him alone. He says it hurt his oldest child most.

When he was shot at the second time, the gunmen missed, but Samuel lost control of his motorcycle, throwing himself and his children to the pavement. Later, he says, “my daughter kept yelling, ‘Look, there’s the car that made us have an accident! Look at it, Daddy!’”

Like most Haitians crossing into Canada last summer, Samuel and Darline had entered the United States legally, flying in with five-year tourist visas. But they had been unable to get visas for their children, so they left them in Port-au-Prince with Darline’s mother. It was the hardest thing about being in Boston, but it was far from the only major challenge. Their visas did not allow them to work. Being broke, they couldn’t pay for an attorney to take Samuel’s asylum case — nor could they find one who would work pro bono. They couldn’t afford housing, so they stayed with a cousin until, Samuel says, “after six months, my wife and I needed to be independent, so we set out to find our own housing.” They wound up in a family homeless shelter an hour outside Boston, where they would spend the next year.

Samuel says messages kept circulating on Facebook about the promise of moving to Canada, but at first the couple ignored them, feeling that moving to a new country held too much uncertainty.

In July 2017, Samuel finally got his work permit, but Darline did not. And there was a drumbeat they could not ignore. “Trump was really applying pressure, sending messages that if you don’t have papers, you can’t stay in the country,” Samuel says. “I couldn’t return to Haiti. There was too much at stake. We decided it wasn’t worth [staying there]. We had to cross over to Canada.”

* * *

On an evening in August 2017, on a strip of highway in, Plattsburgh New York, near a Dollar Store, a Super 8 motel, and an A&W fast-food restaurant, a bus pulled into a Mobile station parking lot. Slowly, the front door opened, and a plastic toy truck tumbled down the stairs and hit the pavement. A family followed, lugging bags bursting at the seams. Then out came another, then another. About 20 Haitian men, women, and children descended from the bus and began looking around for taxis. Those days there were many more cabs than usual. After migration through the area exploded, new companies popped up, and old ones began working extra hours and longer routes. They also began charging astronomical prices. The New York Attorney General’s office fined a taxi company for charging migrants up to hundreds of dollars in excess of the going rate.

The cabs headed north on the highway, then along some country roads through vast stretches of cornfields punctuated by trailer homes, then down quiet, green, Roxham Road, until, at the end, beyond a thicket of vines and Queen Anne’s lace and signs that read Road Closed and No Pedestrians, a white canopy tent appeared. A Canadian police officer stood before it, poised like a nightclub bouncer, ready to check IDs at the door.

Matthew Turner had moved into a trailer home on Roxham Road in October 2016 and said that ever since then he’d been seeing taxis drive past his house to the dead end. Last summer it was a steady stream of cabs, often with names he’d never heard of. He said he found it annoying when cars unloaded in his driveway, especially if the travelers dropped trash. But he placed blame elsewhere. “All they’re trying to do is escape a pretty crappy system that we constructed because a blond wig got elected into office,” he said. “It’s sad, really. The whole Ellis Island thing just went out the window, and now they have to leave our country and seek it in a country that’s, honestly, at this point, better than ours.”

Turner, who lives with his wife and young son, works temp jobs, mostly loading and unloading for shipping companies. He said finding work is hard, but the best companies — in terms of safety, pay, and organization — are Canadian. He, too, imagines life to be better on the northern side of the border, in part because of universal health care.

As we spoke, a taxi marked WISH TRANSPORT passed, reached the end of the road, and deposited three people.

As we spoke, a taxi marked Wish Transport passed, reached the end of the road, and deposited three people. They formed a single-file line where the dirt path began. The middle-aged man at the back stood stiffly, clutching the handle of his zebra-print wheelie suitcase as he watched the others cross. I asked why he had come.

“I had problems in the U.S.,” he said.

“Is it because of TPS?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

In loud, slow English, the officer asked him, “Monsieur, do you speak English?”

“A little.”

“OK, this is the Canadian border right here. OK? Over there, you’re fine. As soon as you cross over here, you’ve entered Canada illegally, and you’ll be placed under arrest. OK?”

“OK.”

“Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“OK, so you decide if you want to enter Canada. If you come in here, you’re under arrest, and then whatever the consequences are, you’ll have to deal with them.”

“OK.”

With that, the man soberly approached the policeman, luggage scraping along the dirt path. The officer told him he was under arrest and had a right to an attorney. He didn’t handcuff the man, though. Instead, he pointed to a sanitizer dispenser and asked him to wash his hands, before escorting him into the tent for processing.

Where Roxham Road picks up again, as Chemin Roxham, cornfields give way to orchards and houses obscured by high hedges. At the corner, there’s a turtle-crossing sign, and the air smells of apples. From the white tent, a bus took the new arrivals down narrow country roads and across a highway to a camp at the official border crossing a few minutes away. In August 2017, with the number of new arrivals exploding, the Canadian military set up rows of green canvas tents at the official crossing, as well as at a conference center in Cornwall, Ontario, with a combined capacity of close to 2,000 people. The Canadian Red Cross was at this camp, handing out blankets and hygiene kits, assigning beds, and performing medical checks.

* * *

In late September, perhaps unaware that the military had begun dismantling the camp at the border because of a decline in the number of border-crossers, the anti-immigrant, right-wing Canadian group Storm Alliance had chosen the spot for a rally. Several dozen men and women, looking like a motorcycle gang in black clothing and bandanas, marched toward the border, between the highway and the tent camp, some waving signs with crossed out pictures of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But they were stopped short by a boisterous crowd, a bit larger than their own, of young anarchists and members of Solidarité Sans Frontières, who chanted, “Haitians in, racists out!” and held signs with slogans like Make racists afraid again, and a banner with a sketch of President Trump’s crossed-out face, and the words Resist the Far Right — some of many indications that these activists also worry about a threat from south of the border.

In the province of Québec, public sentiment about the new arrivals has been mixed. At the height of last summer’s migrant influx, a poll by the media agency SOM-Cogeco Nouvelles found that 51 percent of Québec residents believed migrants should be prevented from crossing the border into Canada. It also found that 39 percent of the Québecois surveyed believed the influx would make the province less secure.

Still, generally what the newcomers experience upon arrival is a relatively warm welcome by the Canadian government and key organizations working alongside it, like the Canadian Red Cross. When Samuel and Darline spent a few days at the border at the height of the influx, the military camp hadn’t opened yet, and they say the government was clearly not ready for such a flood of people. For them, it meant standing in long lines for medical checks, photos, and fingerprinting. But they’re quick to add that the welcome was generally good. “They don’t push you around,” Samuel says. “They don’t handcuff you. They speak with you intelligently and in a way that you can understand. Everything went really well.”

Still, generally what the newcomers experience upon arrival is a relatively warm welcome by the Canadian government and key organizations working alongside it, like the Canadian Red Cross.

The language helps. Although many of the Canadian police who are greeting and arresting people at the unofficial border do not speak French, most officials in Québec after that point do. And for Haitians who do not speak French, at some points there are Haitian Creole interpreters.

Last August, after spending a few hours to a few days at the border, newcomers were bused to an immigrant shelter in Montréal. Normally there is only one such shelter, a YMCA. Over the summer, 12 more were added. Now there are just four.

Samuel and his family were dropped off at the Y, where they were connected with all the information they needed about government services, such as health care, and then they went to stay at Samuel’s brother’s place in Montréal. On August 14, 12 days after crossing the border, they began getting their monthly check from the Canadian government — about $1,122 Canadian ($883, in U.S. dollars) for the family, and they began looking for their own place.

The apartment hunt was hard at first, with landlords demanding references and credit reports, but then a Turkish immigrant, who lived above a rental unit, “saw our temperament and saw what kind of people we are,” Samuel says, “and demanded neither credit nor references.” He charges $600 Canadian ($472 U.S.) for the one-bedroom. With the government stipend, it left the family a little over $400 a month for food and incidentals, but Samuel says they were used to being frugal.

It’s easy to understand the landlord’s assessment of the family. Samuel is thin, with delicate features, and a soft, contemplative air, defying any stereotype of a police officer. And when I visited, Darline smiled warmly from the couch, where she nursed a robust 1-year-old, before releasing him to trot around the living room, making eye contact with each adult before bursting into delighted laughter.

A paper banner on the otherwise blank wall proclaimed Bon Fet – a Haitian Creole birthday celebration to honor Samuel, turning 36, and his son, turning 1. The rest of the place was immaculate, with only a few objects — synthetic flowers adorning a shiny yellow varnished wood dining table.

After more than a year of being homeless, lawyerless, and jobless in the States, Samuel and Darline were able to get their own place in Canada in less than a month. They’d also been assigned a public defender, accessed basic health care, and started getting free monthly public transportation passes. “Everything is moving much faster here,” Samuel told me last September. He knew he might never get to bring his two older children here to Canada, and that they might instead end up back in Haiti, but at the time he felt he’d placed his bet on the right country. “I don’t know tomorrow,” he said, “but I don’t regret coming to Canada, because the three of us, we’re really comfortable here.”

After more than a year of being homeless, lawyerless, and jobless in the States, Samuel and Darline were able to get their own place in Canada in less than a month.

Two months later, in November, the couple got their work papers, and Samuel found a minimum-wage job through a temp agency, scanning orders at a clothing-rental company.

But not everything was as fast as they’d like. It took months more for Darline to find work, and the asylum eligibility interview Samuel had scheduled for December was postponed indefinitely.

Most of the new arrivals stay at shelters for their first weeks in Montréal, until they start getting their monthly check and find their own place. When the provincial government saw that the YMCA would not be enough to meet the need, it cast around to see who had space, and managers of the Olympic Park, used in the 1976 Summer Games, offered up part of the stadium to eventually accommodate 900 people in rows of cots, while all around international competitions, concerts, and the renovation of the stadium’s landmark skyline tower whirled on. Other shelters opened around town, including in an old hospital and an old convent, but it was the image of refugees — mostly from Haiti, but also from around the world (other top asylum-seeker nationalities were Nigerian, Turkish, and Syrian) — being bused to the stadium that brought in waves of international media.

It also attracted activists. An anti-immigrant demonstration to be held outside the Olympic Stadium was canceled, but a pro-immigrant counter-rally went ahead, drawing hundreds of people, many carrying Réfugiées Bienvenues signs.

The stadium stopped housing migrants in September 2017, and today, due to the drop in new arrivals, the only shelters in use are an old hospital, an unused youth center on the grounds of what feels like a leafy boarding school campus, and the YMCA near downtown.

* * *

Jesula and James moved into the Y after coming to Québec in August. Their story is starkly different from that of Samuel and Darline, but it’s not unusual among new Haitian arrivals from the United States. For them, Canada is the eleventh country — and, they hope, last — on an odyssey that began more than a decade ago.

The two were high school sweethearts in the dusty northern Haitian city of Gonaïves. James remembers relatives who lived in the States coming back to visit and being treated like royalty. “I thought the sky over the U.S. was different from the sky over other countries,” he says with a laugh. Still, he never wanted to leave Gonaïves. He excelled in school, participated in a local debate club, and played on a national youth soccer team. But after their city was virtually wiped out by floods from a tropical storm in 2004, he decided to move to the Dominican Republic to live with his mother and continue his education there. His dream was to get a medical degree and return to Haiti to help meet a desperate need for doctors.

Jesula, meanwhile, stayed in Gonaïves. In the market, she sold goods imported from Canada with the help of relatives here. Assuming she had money because of her business, she says, thieves raided her house, stole her things, and raped her.

Asked if the perpetrators were caught, she laughs bitterly and says, “In Haiti, it’s not like it is here.”

Traumatized and fearful, Jesula fled to the Dominican Republic to live with James. But things didn’t work out there either. Both lacked the funds to complete school, and both were unable to find work.

Soon Brazil beckoned. Its economy was booming, and it needed workers to prepare for the World Cup and the upcoming Summer Olympics. In 2012 James made his way there, and in 2013 Jesula joined him. “There was no stress because from the moment we got there we were so lucky,” Jesula says. “I arrived in September, and in January I had residency. Imagine how comfortable we were.” Both found jobs easily, learned Portuguese, and settled in, forging strong friendships and a sense of community. But by 2015, the Brazilian economy was in serious trouble, jobs were lost, and Haitian migrants were no longer welcome.

Like thousands of other Haitians, Jesula and James made their way north, through Colombia, Central America, and Mexico, and finally to the United States. Once there, also like thousands of others, they were thrown in detention.

Their treatment by U.S. officials came as a shock. “I thought the U.S. was like Canaan, like paradise, like something out of the Bible,” James says. But as soon as they crossed the border, the couple was split up and sent to separate detention centers.

On an August afternoon in 2017, the couple sat in a park across the street from the Y, where they’d stayed for the previous four nights. Swing music blasted from a speaker nearby, and a man came over to ask if they want to join a free dance class. They politely declined.

Both said they felt at home in Canada. James dreamt of getting a doctorate in anthropology, and Jesula wanted to go to nursing school and learn to draw landscapes. She was pregnant for the third time. She’s miscarried twice — once in Brazil and once in the United States, but here she said she believed everything would work out. “I’m better here,” she said, “because I don’t like living in stress, and there [in the U.S.], the president would say something different every day, so I didn’t know where he really stood on anything. Here I can just be at peace.”

After arriving in the United States, they were detained for just a few days. They say they were lucky to be released much sooner than other Haitians, but the rest of their time in the States was hard. They moved to Boston, and eventually James got a work permit and a job, but the permit was set to expire last September, and he’d been unable to renew it. He also didn’t feel he was making progress in his asylum case.

Finally, Trump took office. “We heard about people being deported for nothing … people who went to see a judge and got deported,” James says. “We were afraid.”

Removals overall have slowed under Trump, but for Haitians they jumped from 300 in the 2016 fiscal year to 5,500 in 2017. That’s largely due to the end of a stay on deportations and a surge in Haitian migrants entering through Mexico. Meanwhile, arrests of immigrants with no known criminal conviction by Immigration and Customs Enforcement more than doubled from 2016 to 2017. Behind those stats are countless stories of men and women who have lived in the United States for decades being taken from families, jobs, and communities, often at a regular check-in at an immigration office.

* * *

Comparisons between the United States and Canada are constant, especially among those who entered both countries illegally. One man describes surviving a harrowing boat trip from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico only to be shackled at the wrists and ankles by U.S. border patrol agents. Others talk about being thrown in cold cells at the Mexico-U.S. border.

Elsie is a nurse and a resident of Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, in plateau farm country north of Montréal. She has been living in Canada for 30 years, but occasionally returns to her Haitian homeland. “I’m proud to be Canadian and proud to be Haitian, too,” she says. And she stays tuned in to the experiences of Haitian migrants around the region.

She spent a Sunday afternoon in October 2017 like she spent most Sundays: cooking rice and beans for family members and venting about what she’d been hearing. “There was that little Haitian woman who went to the U.S. from Brazil,” she said, “and she had to pay $20,000 to get out of prison! It’s a business! If people don’t pay $15,000 to $20,000, they put them on a plane.” Elsie understands that people are not deported merely for failing to pay the required bond, but she also knows that asylum-seekers are much less likely to get asylum if they are stuck behind bars. “Canada respects asylum law,” she said. “They don’t respect asylum law in the United States right now.”

In his first week in office, President Trump issued an executive order expanding the grounds for which immigrants can be detained, and limiting the use of parole for detained asylum-seekers. Over the first eight months of his presidency, according to a report by the nonprofit Human Rights First, parole rates for asylum-seekers appear to have plummeted, asylum-seekers are held for many months, and sometimes their release is contingent on payment of bonds as high as $15,000 to $20,000.

Canada respects asylum law,” she said. “They don’t respect asylum law in the United States right now.

Elsie’s Sunday gatherings now feature a special guest — her younger brother Yves. In July, Yves walked across the border at Roxham Road, then skipped the shelter by staying with his sister. He says he fled Haiti for the United States after “jealous” people attacked his business in Port-au-Prince. But with Trump in office, he says, he had a bad feeling about his prospects there. “He was withdrawing everything, banning refugees, talking about eliminating TPS, getting rid of protections for immigrants who came as children … so I didn’t know if I could get asylum.”

Like Samuel and Darline, Yves says he had to leave a child back in Haiti, so he’s anxious to get papers to bring her here.

Within a few months, Yves had his own place and a job at a pig slaughterhouse, but in April, a judge rejected his asylum claim, saying he should have sought protection in the United States. Yves is appealing the decision and says, whatever the outcome, he’s still convinced he made the right decision in moving to Canada. “Even if some of us are not qualified [for asylum],” he says, “the welcome is completely different here.”

* * *

In my conversations with asylum-seekers last year, I kept bringing up the statistic I’d seen, that only about half of Haitian asylum-seekers with cases finalized in 2016 were granted asylum. (For 2017, the acceptance rate dropped to 22 percent.) The response was usually a recognition that they might not succeed but an insistence that they made the right choice in coming to Canada anyway.

As Matthew Turner, the Roxham Road resident, suggests, “that Ellis Island thing” is more evident in Canada than in the United States today. This is certainly true in public discourse. In October, Canada swore in a new Governor General, an important Canadian figurehead selected by the Prime Minister. Trudeau chose astronaut Julie Payette, who delivered an installation speech in a mix of French and English, dotted with phrases in Algonquin. The speech seemed a delineation of what distinguishes Canada from its southern neighbor today. She talked about the importance of trusting science, of internationalism, tolerance, and compassion, and among her last words were these: “We are the true north, strong and free, and we should always look after those who have less, stand up for those who can’t, reach out across differences, use our land intelligently, open our borders, and welcome those who seek harbor.”

When it came to Syrian refugees, in the past couple of years, Canada has served to inspire and shame Americans wishing to be a more welcoming country. Since November 2015, more than 54,000 Syrian refugees have resettled in Canada, compared with fewer than 19,000 in the United States. Facebook video posts showed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greeting families at the airport with winter coats and words of welcome. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of regular citizens stepped in to help. Private sponsors actually brought in and supported 43 percent of those refugees for a year.

It would be hard to draw comparisons between pre-approved Syrian refugees flying in and Haitians crossing the border and being arrested. For one, there is no private sponsorship system in place to care for the new arrivals from the States. However, many private organizations in and around Montréal are committed to helping them get settled and integrated.

Take Christ en Action church. It’s in an unmarked brick box-shaped building in a quiet neighborhood, but on Sunday mornings the drums draw you through the open door and into a vast space packed with parishioners in a full spectrum of garb, from form-fitting dresses to suits in black, white, and shiny pastel damask. Several turn to greet unfamiliar faces, offering greetings in French.

The churchgoers — largely Haitian and African — pride themselves on the warm welcome. At a service last September, Pastor Fofy Ndelo, who is Congolese, said a few words in Haitian Creole, then returned to French to give an update on which donations were now needed for “the refugees” — winter coats for adults and children, as well as furniture and bedding for those who’d found their own places to live.

About 15 so-called refugees sat in pews at the far end of the church, and after the service they filed into a back room for lunch. They found out about Christ en Action when members visited their shelters and brought them here on buses. While a number of them now lived in their own places, after their meal a volunteer would drive them all home. Later, another volunteer would pick them up to bring them back for dinner. These are services orchestrated by the church’s social action team, which, team member Shirley René told me, has 10 subgroups. “One group serves nonperishable food, a follow-up group sees what your needs are, another team gives clothes and bedding and furniture, another helps people find a place to live. … There’s a group that visits them in their homes,” and so on.

René, who is of Haitian descent and has been with the church for more than a decade, said about 50 new arrivals were regularly coming to the church, “because they love the way we welcome them.”

Many other Montréal churches also stepped up to help the new arrivals, especially in the heavily Haitian Saint-Michel neighborhood. So did Maison d’Haiti, a 46-year-old organization now housed in a modern, windowy, art-filled space that bustled last fall with Haitian men, women, and children, picking up and dropping off clothing and diapers, standing in line to get help with things like filling out asylum applications, or grabbing a Haitian meat pastry in the organization’s café.

A few blocks away, on Boulevard Crémazie, is CPAM, one of several Haitian radio stations here, and down the street is a towering, shining example of Haitian success in Montréal. Groupe 3737, named after its street number, inhabits some of the 12 floors in the curtain-glass-wall building, using them for start-up incubation and training. Frantz Saintellemy, Haitian-born and Saint-Michel–raised, founded the group with his wife, Vickie Joseph, with the intent of encouraging talented young people, mostly immigrants or children of immigrants — a reflection of the community — to invest in this long-depressed neighborhood.

Saintellemy wanted to help his community thrive by capitalizing on what is true in Canada as well as the United States: Immigrants are far more likely than the rest of the population to start businesses. And he sees particular promise in Haitian immigrants, who make up about a third of his group’s participants.

“If you’re from Haiti,” he says, “you were trading. It’s the number one business in Haiti. Trading is in their DNA, so a lot of them have an entrepreneurial mindset.” In Haiti, with so few formal jobs available, many people buy food or clothes in one part of the country — often on the Dominican border — to sell in another.

Saintellemy smiles as he speaks, sitting in a bright, spacious office behind a large desk cluttered only with some copies of Groupe 3737’s glossy bilingual magazine Black is Beautiful. He says in Montréal there are great prospects for new Haitian immigrants importing food and other goods from Haiti to sell to members of the diaspora here. There are also artists and artisans, and educated Haitians who spent years in the United States and are well-positioned to work as translators. What’s more, belying the image of asylum-seekers arriving on foot and staying in shelters, many actually have money to invest in a new business, Saintellemy says.

For those with tenuous status, he says, they’re particularly worth investing in for several reasons: For one, many employers are leery of hiring people without permanent status, and for another, creating a business could help them get asylum. “The quicker you can generate income [and] hire your own lawyer, your chances increase significantly,” he says, “and if you’re working and paying taxes, the harder it is for the government to tell you to leave.”

Saintellemy says that “without question” enthusiasm for starting a business is higher among people with tenuous status. He knows this because, in addition to doing clothing drives for new arrivals last summer, Groupe 3737 offered regular Business 101 classes for those living in immigrant shelters. Participants were taught about business laws and policies in Canada, specifically Québec, and given tips like how to advertise and bid on contracts online. Saintellemy says the courses drew up to 50 people.

Before founding Groupe 3737, Saintellemy spent years in the States, including studying electrical engineering at Northeastern University and taking a fellowship at MIT Sloan. I ask him about something James told me: that in Montréal, “the Haitians ahead of you help you,” but in the United States, not so much.

“Yeah,” Saintellemy says. “The Haitian community is very well organized here in Québec.” He says Haitians generally thrive more here. “I think it’s easier because of the French. Language isn’t as much of a barrier,” he says. “Second of all, the Haitian community is more financially secure here than in Boston or even New York or Miami … if you look at the percentage of Haitians doing well. … So it’s easier for them to help others when they’re doing well.”

James told me…that in Montréal, ‘the Haitians ahead of you help you,’ but in the United States, not so much.

Of course, many Haitians in Canada live in poverty and obscurity. But there are also plenty of Haitian luminaries in Canadian sport, arts, and politics — including several Olympic athletes; the novelist Dany Laferrière, inducted into the prestigious Académie Française; parliamentarian Emmanuel Dubourg; former Governor General Michaëlle Jean; and the deputy premier of Québec, Dominique Anglade.

* * *

Migration across the border into Canada has fallen considerably since last summer, and Haitians now make up a small portion of that population, down from more than 80 percent. By last fall, Nigerians were overtaking Haitians in number, with shelter residents talking of horrors in Biafra.

Jean Nicolas Beuze, of the UN refugee agency UNHCR, says the overall decline in numbers might be due to falling temperatures and the start of school (the summer’s migrants included hundreds of children), and he believes the particularly precipitous decline in the number of Haitians coming across is likely because messages were sent through consulates and visiting politicians to correct misperceptions about the ease of getting asylum in Canada.

However, with the Trump administration’s announcement on November 20 that TPS for Haitians will end in July 2019, officials in Canada prepared for more Haitian asylum-seekers, with 27 winterized trailers — able to accommodate 200 people — set up at the border. The TPS decision affects at least 50,000 Haitian-born people who’ve been in the United States for more than eight years, and their American-born children, estimated at some 27,000.

Canada’s own version of TPS for Haitians expired in 2014, but most of its recipients were not made to leave the country. The estimated 3,200 undocumented Haitians living in Canada at the time were given almost two more years to apply for permanent residency without threat of removal, and most have been able to get permanent residency through “H&C,” or humanitarian and compassionate grounds, which takes into consideration the ties one has forged to Canada while living here.

Still, coming to Canada does not make Haitian border crossers safe from deportation. Canada deported several hundred Haitians last year — a dramatic increase over 2016, and 120 just in the first seven months of this year.

James is well aware that deportation from Canada is possible, and it’s a terrible thought. “If I’m deported, it’s like the end of the world,” he says with a nervous shriek of a laugh. “Haiti has no work. And when you are overseas, you have like 20 people depending on you, who are waiting for your help. Imagine, if they deport me to Haiti, you’ll see how many people will suffer.” He says his brothers, sisters and some friends rely on him for school and other expenses.

James doesn’t wallow in the fear of deportation though. “We have to await a response, we have to pray, and we have to accept the response, whatever it is,” he says. “But for now we have to recognize how well Canada has received us.”

Haitians who left the United States to seek asylum in Canada essentially left one uncertainty for another. And yet, for now, there is a sense that they can breathe easy because there is reason and justice in the system, that the rules will be followed, and that meanwhile the tools are there for asylum-seekers to make a life for themselves while they wait.

For Samuel, the only problem with being in Canada is that his two older children aren’t with him. “That makes me feel really, really bad,” he says, “because I grew up without my father, and I don’t want the same for my children.” He talks to them on WhatsApp every day, but, he says, “It hurts to hear them say, ‘Papi, when are you coming back? Papi, come get us!’”

A year after coming here, Samuel still has no idea when he’ll go before an immigration judge. It’s clearly wearing on him. His life is better here in many ways, but even with both of them working — him during the day and Darline as a night caretaker for handicapped adults, the cost of living is harder to manage here. Meanwhile, their two older children are growing up in another country, and there’s no knowing when and where they will reunite.

Now, when I ask him if he regrets moving to Canada, he hesitates, but then gives a firm no. “It’s a choice we made, without knowing how things would go.”

*The names of all asylum-seekers in this article have been changed to protect their identities.

***

Amy Bracken is an independent reporter and radio producer. She covers migration, economic development, religion, and human rights. She’s based in Boston, but in recent years she’s reported from Europe and across the Americas, especially Haiti. Her stories have been aired and published by PRI’s The World, Latino USA, USA Today, and Al Jazeera America, among others. She’s a graduate of Columbia University’s Journalism School and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where she wrote her thesis on the detention of asylum-seekers.

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Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Fact-checker: Matt Giles

The Country Where Fútbol Comes First

Candace Rose Rardon | Longreads | July 2018 | 11 minutes (2,824 words)

They call it the Maracanazo — the final match of the 1950 FIFA World Cup, held in Rio de Janeiro. Host team Brazil was the obvious favorite, set to take on their much-smaller neighbor to the south, Uruguay. Victory was nothing short of inevitable.

The match took place on July 16, in the newly opened Estádio do Maracanã. The official paid attendance was 173,850 — of whom approximately 100 were Uruguayans — but because the stadium’s grandstands had no seats, the actual number might be closer to 210,000. It’s still one of the most-attended sports events of all time.

On the morning of the match, in true Brazilian style, an impromptu carnival began at dawn, with the crowds chanting “Brazil must win!” A samba, “Brazil The Victors,” had been composed, and the mayor of Rio addressed the Brazilian team with a rousing speech: “You, players, who in less than a few hours will be hailed as champions by millions of compatriots! You, who have no rivals in the entire hemisphere! You, who will overcome any other competitor! You, who I already salute as victors!”

That day’s morning edition of O Mundo ran a photo of the Brazilian team on its front page, beneath which a caption read five fateful words:

There was only one problem — they hadn’t played the game yet, and Brazil’s small but mighty opponents weren’t ready to go down without a fight.

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