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The State of Waiting

Photos and artwork throughout courtesy of Wafa Almaktari. Background image of Sana'a by Santiago Urquijo/Getty Images. Illustration by Cheri Lucas Rowlands.

Caitlin Dwyer| Longreads | May 2021 | 22 minutes (6,168 words)

 

This story includes audio interludes. Listen to Wafa talk about her life, her relationship, and Yemeni culture through cherished objects.

Read an interview with Caitlin about her reporting and writing process for this story.

She is in a Toyota RAV4, somewhere in the mountains of south-central Yemen. It is hot, desert hot, and the AC doesn’t work. There is no road. The driver maneuvers the car through dry riverbeds, which show the cracks of prior floods. 

In the back seat, Wafa Almaktari tries not to throw up. She tries not to think about the men with guns who will stop them, demand money, and search their baggage over 50 times in the next 16 hours. If they don’t like her, or she cannot pay, she may disappear in these hills. She tries not to think about the fact that the driver, hired privately for $300, does not have a map.

How the hell does he know where he is, in the middle of the mountains? she wonders. But the alternative — a bus that blunders at even slower speeds, and attracts even more attention at armed checkpoints — was unthinkable. She has to get through the mountains as quickly as possible, because Moutaz is waiting for her.

It is June 2019. Moutaz Al-Qershi, her fiancé, lives in the northern Yemeni capital city of Sana’a. He was going to meet her when she landed in the port city of Aden. But she knows she can’t trust herself not to fling her arms around him and kiss him. In the U.S., where Wafa has lived for the last four years, public affection is normal for young couples, but in Yemen, unmarried couples can’t publicly embrace. She told him to wait at her family’s home.

Not that Wafa cares about what other people think. She’s waited too long. She has a lady in Sana’a baking her wedding cake (she found her on Facebook). There is a butter shortage, but she’s got connections. She’s even got a female DJ lined up.

“If Moutaz was not in Yemen, I would not go. I would not even visit,” she says. But he is here, and so she has returned — enduring the heat, the nausea, the armed checkpoints —  to a country in the midst of violent civil war. She does not know if she will be allowed to return to the U.S. after her wedding.

“Home is where Moutaz is,” she reminds herself. She twists the ring on her finger. She hopes — no, she knows — coming back was the right choice.

* * *

In 2021, the small Middle Eastern nation of Yemen ranks as the world’s largest humanitarian disaster. Civil strife has mired the country in famine, cholera outbreaks, and violence. Since 2015, a complex set of combatants has battled for control: armed rebels in the north, known as the Houthis, who rule the capital; Saudi Arabian forces, who are determined to stop the Houthis; Al-Qaeda in the Arabic Peninsula, who rose up briefly to fill a power vacuum; and southern separatists in the port city of Aden.

Wafa and Moutaz met before the war. Although a poor country, Yemen had been a democratic one. During the Arab Spring, protesters had demanded reforms, leading to a transitional government. In 2014, the transitional president was struggling to stabilize the country. Soon, international embassies would begin to close, and the militant group Ansar Allah, often referred to as the Houthis, would take the capital. Saudi Arabia would step in to oppose the Houthis, whom they saw as Iranian proxies. By 2015, ports would be blockaded, airports closed, and cities bombed.

But politics mattered very little to two young people who, despite societal restrictions and the potential scandal, were falling in love. 

Wafa and Moutaz exemplify the long-haul love story of many immigrants, whose children, parents, and spouses remain on the other side of geopolitical barriers.

At the time, she was in high school and he studied electrical engineering at Sana’a University. Wafa had a huge, trusting smile, expressive eyes, and a laugh that rose up out of her chest. Moutaz was a serious, slender introvert, prone to long conversations on mathematical concepts. He was detail-oriented; she was all big ideas. She recalls how taken aback he was during their first interaction: “All the ideas that I tell him, and my hijab is not very on point. … I don’t have makeup on my face. So he’s like, you’re not normal.”

Despite the differences in their education, Moutaz didn’t intimidate her.

“It was this very weird chemistry that was between us,” she says.

They kept their relationship secret. Young Yemenis couldn’t date without being engaged or married, but the two of them did “all the crazy things in a very conservative society,” Wafa says. On one of their dates, Moutaz thought it would be romantic to ride Arabian stallions. The huge horses terrified Wafa. They were out in a sunlit field, beyond the city limits, far from prying eyes. She remembers watching him feed the animals, showing gentle care. “Although I was scared, around him I was very safe,” she recalls.

At the time, she had been suffering from tonsillitis and had been told not to eat any ice cream to avoid a possible surgery. On the way home, Moutaz stopped for a treat.

“I was like, oh, this is love. You’re giving me ice cream that I’m not supposed to eat, so I know you love me,” Wafa recalls with a smile.

That subtle spirit of rebellion would permeate their relationship for the next seven years. Soon what divided them would not be family objections, but the policies and decisions of world nations: who allied with whom in the war, who offered visas for Yemeni citizens, who blocked the airports. Surrounded by immigration restrictions and bound by national policies they cannot control, Wafa and Moutaz have refused to give up on each other. For them, love has become a kind of defiance of boundaries, borders, and rules. Separated for years, they search for ways back to each other.

* * *

In the movies, love resolves itself quickly: Two chemicals combine, and either reject each other or dissolve into a single solution. It’s more difficult to convey the reality on screen. Love hits, and we wait, watching the colors creep up the pH strip, waiting for the hiss of reaction. Sometimes we know what the result will be, but still must wait for proof.

Most people wouldn’t watch a film of all those empty hours. We like the catharsis, the moment of triumph, the release of tension: a climactic kiss in the rain. But for many people whose loved ones live across borders, separated by visas, wars, or financial circumstances, there is no such easy resolution. Patience becomes the story.

Sometimes — as in Wafa’s case — waiting feels unendurable, and migrants buck against the helpless hours, months, and years. They might act to gain a sense of advocacy or autonomy, but rarely do the massive national circumstances that surround their situation shift.

Wafa and Moutaz exemplify the long-haul love story of many immigrants, whose children, parents, and spouses remain on the other side of geopolitical barriers. They want to be together. They long for the normalcy of family dinners, daily commutes, and coffee dates. And so they wait.


 

* * *

Wafa arrived in the U.S. in 2015, joining her mother, Susan Kassim, and leaving her secret boyfriend behind. The two had been separated for a year, first by visa processing and then by war.

Kassim hoped her spirited, outgoing daughter would acclimate well. Three weeks after arriving in Oregon, Wafa started college, taking ESOL and math classes at community college. She then transferred to Portland State University to study business. 

But Kassim soon noticed that Wafa locked herself in her room for hours a day, talking on the phone to a “friend” back in Yemen. Like many moms of teens, she became suspicious. It wasn’t that a romantic connection back home was bad; in fact, if the phone kept Wafa from staying out late and going on unsupervised dates, Kassim was all for it. But she didn’t want secrets. 

So she watched. She saw that Wafa didn’t clean her room or make her face up for video dates. She noticed that they laughed a lot. She liked that Moutaz had a calming influence. Afraid he would get frustrated with Wafa’s sass, Kassim urged her to be more demure.

Wafa didn’t agree: “This is me. If I change then I’m not going to be me. It’s like fooling somebody.”

Satisfied, Kassim gave her blessing — but required that Wafa finish college before any marriage could take place.

So they waited. Donald Trump became president. Anti-immigrant rhetoric in the U.S.  rose. And in January 2017, Trump signed Executive Order 13769, which banned U.S. entry for several Muslim-majority countries, including Yemen. Before the ban, the wait time for a family visa to the U.S. could range from months to several years — and Moutaz hadn’t even proposed yet. After the ban, they were faced with an indefinite wait.

Wafa knew she had only one choice: “I’m going to fight.”

Trump’s travel ban worked the way it was intended; it forced immigrants to choose between their families and their visas. It deterred. It broke hearts, if not spirits.

Her defiance shifted to her new country, which seemed to be rejecting her love and her future. She became more outspoken about immigrant rights. At her job, she began questioning a manager about microaggressions. She joined her school’s Muslim Student Association and developed her campus activism, starting her own student coalition in 2017.

A few years before, Saudi Arabia had begun an aerial bombing campaign called Operation Decisive Storm. Originally planned to last only a few weeks and drive the Houthis from the Yemeni capital, it instead became a prolonged aerial bombardment of the city. Sections of old Sana’a, built before the 11th century, were destroyed. Thousands of civilians died in those and subsequent airstrikes. The Houthis remained in control of the city.

Moutaz was working on an MBA when Operation Decisive Storm began. Bombs fell while he commuted to and from classes.

“At first it was intimidating and scary, but with time I got used to it so quick because the airstrikes would last for long hours and would occur daily,” he wrote in a WhatsApp message. “It took me two weeks to get used to the fear, the loud bombing, and accept the reality that I was living in.”

He adopted an attitude many Yemenis would come to embrace: If he was going to die from a bomb, so be it. If it wasn’t a bomb, it would be something else. Life had to go on.

“Although it was hard to be lonely during that time, when Wafaa left the country I felt much better. I worry about her more than myself,” he wrote.

They spoke every day on WhatsApp, sometimes trying seven or eight times before they could get a connection. When she heard about a new bombing, she would often call, panicked, to make sure he was all right. Video dates helped Moutaz get through the stress of school, separation, and airstrikes.

While Wafa grew more outspoken, Moutaz developed a stoic endurance. “I never saw our separation as a goodbye; rather I saw it as ‘see you soon in better circumstances,’” he explained.

In late 2017, Moutaz sent her a ring — ostensibly to ward off interested men from whom Wafa got a lot of attention. But along with the ring came 365 handwritten reasons why he loved her. A proposal came the following year.

“Hell yes, I want to marry you,” Wafa recalls thinking. They both knew what that meant: He was banned from coming to the U.S., so she would go to him, perhaps putting her green card in jeopardy. On the day that she submitted her last final exam to graduate, against the best advice of nearly everyone, she flew back to Yemen.


 

* * *

Americans often think of immigration policy as a grand national project. Politicians wax hopeful or fearmonger, drawing broad statements about the way we view ourselves as a nation, or the way we think of the Other. Such thematic strokes capture the immensity of the issue, but they fail in the details. 

Details like these: One day, Wafa walked into a grocery store in Beaverton, Oregon. There were tulips in pots, cheap sweatpants on racks, and sale bins of candy. Behind the standard smells of rotisserie chicken and plastic was another scent: Moutaz’s cologne. Someone in the store was wearing it. The smell overwhelmed her, and she collapsed on the floor in grief.

Starting in 2017, Donald Trump’s immigration policies explicitly used family separation as a means to discourage migration to the United States. This was a new twist: not just to separate families currently in violation of immigration law, but to use separation as a deterrent against future migration. 

Soon what divided them would not be family objections, but the policies and decisions of world nations: who allied with whom in the war, who offered visas for Yemeni citizens, who blocked the airports.

But for many years prior to Trump’s administration, U.S. immigration policies had been de facto separation policies. Undocumented parents could be deported, while their U.S.-born kids remained in the country. The parents often had little legal recourse. Long processing times, high fees, and complicated paperwork have meant that husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, kids and parents, are often separated for months or years while they wait. In Moutaz’s case, and the case of thousands of other applicants sidelined by the travel ban, the separation became indefinite.

“I talk to a lot of people every day [about] how hard it is,” Wafa says. “It’s just emotionally draining. It is expensive, it is risky.” 

Wafa has filed an I-130, Petition for Alien Relative, for Moutaz. It costs over $500. Add an international flight: When his case finally comes up for processing, he will need to fly to Malaysia, Algeria, or another transit country; the U.S. embassy in Yemen has been closed since 2015. Add $300 to hire a private driver for the 16-hour trip through mountains to Aden, which has the country’s only functioning airport.

“The Yemenis who have fled the country are very often from the middle and wealthy classes. For the most vulnerable, there are very few opportunities to leave the country,” write Solenn Al Majali via email. Based in Jordan, Al Majali studies Yemeni emigration at Aix-Marseille University and the French Institute of the Near East, and is a non-resident fellow at the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies.

Wafa knows she is lucky. Her dad studied abroad in the 1980s, and her eldest brother was born in the U.S. He was able to sponsor some of his family members and help them escape the worst of the war. As a U.S. permanent resident, she has some leverage.

“If I didn’t have the resources or the money, I would not be able to apply for him. If he didn’t know how to speak English, he’s not going to come. If they see him at the embassy and he is not dressed well or he doesn’t speak well or he doesn’t have a career, you know, anything, they can just reject it,” Wafa says.

Since 1965, the U.S. has been relatively open to family immigration, mostly as a result of the Immigration and Naturalization Act. That legislation got rid of quota systems based on current U.S. census data. It opened the country up to immigrant families from more diverse countries. Thought about generously, the 1965 act was “driven by recognizing that family units are critically important for happiness, well-being, economic prosperity,” says Duncan Lawrence, the executive director of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University. (Full disclosure: Lawrence is a friend of mine.)

Support for families — from permission to find work to early access to ESOL programs — are the backbone of healthy immigration policy, according to Lawrence. But there’s one overwhelming factor in the health and well-being of families: keeping them together.

“If you had this magic wand of tools that you could use to positively impact families, I think that is probably one of the most powerful things you could do,” Lawrence says. Kids are especially vulnerable to separation from their parents, but all families suffer from the threat and reality of being apart.

No matter where we live, we take refuge in those we love.

There is a kind of helplessness to this process that overwhelms Wafa. Despite her defiance of the travel ban, which was lifted by President Biden in January 2021, she remains at the mercy of international law. She cannot speed Moutaz’s visa interview or guarantee that he will not be rejected. Will U.S. Customs and Immigration Services see their relationship as one of convenience? How does she prove that she truly loves this man who she has seen only twice in five years?

There have been times when she felt like giving up and going back to Yemen. At least they could be together. In that sense, Trump’s travel ban worked the way it was intended; it forced immigrants to choose between their families and their visas. It deterred. It broke hearts, if not spirits.

That kind of heartbreak leads a young woman to collapse in a grocery store. It sends her, desperate, back to a war zone.


 

* * *

Wafa arrived at her family home in Sana’a at night, after a harrowing 16-hour drive through the mountains. She still had the taste of vomit in her mouth. The smell of sweat clung to her. She dropped her bags off inside, briefly greeting her father before running out the back door.

Moutaz was waiting. Completely forgetting where she was, she burst out into the street and hugged and kissed him, not caring they were in public.

“I kept telling him, ‘This is a dream. This is not real,’” she says. “I think that night was the best night of my life.”

Planning a wedding in a war zone posed challenges. In 2019, four years of fighting had cost many Yemenis their businesses. Moutaz told Wafa that Houthis demanded a cut of private sales; the extortion, combined with the high price of goods, forced many people to move their businesses online. A 2015 Saudi-led blockade of the port of Hodeidah, where most Yemeni food had been imported, created massive shortages. Women especially had become Facebook entrepreneurs, making sweets and doing makeup from home. 

If he was going to die from a bomb, so be it. If it wasn’t a bomb, it would be something else. Life had to go on.

Wafa recalls the mixed emotions of that moment: “You feel guilty because you’re celebrating and you’re doing all these plans, and people are dying. People are dying out of hunger. People are dying in the airstrikes. Even the availability of things like who’s going to do the wedding cake. … I was telling him, should we downsize it? And he was like, ‘I loved you for five years. I’m not going to downsize my wedding and the celebration of love that we have.’”

Wafa also struggled to adjust to her Yemeni relatives. Her naturally ebullient personality, combined with years of living in American society, made her relatively intolerant of strict traditions. She invited Moutaz to tea at their family home, only to have her father kick him out. When an aunt complained that Wafa shouldn’t see her fiancé before the wedding, Wafa bristled: “I don’t really care what you think.”

Despite the tensions, a week later an imam proclaimed them married.

After the religious ceremony, she hugged Moutaz freely in front of others for the first time. It no longer felt wrong. “It just felt like, here we are. We worked hard. We waited. It was beautiful. And then we just danced the night out.”

More celebrations followed: a spa day for the women, donations of food to the poor. Wafa and Moutaz were still required to keep their distance from each other, a tradition they mostly ignored. They weren’t trying to anger their relatives; this formal celebration period just felt like another barrier to being together.

Finally, they had a party with hundreds of guests. Wafa wore a white, sparkling off-shoulder dress with a sheer cape. Moutaz wore a black tuxedo, his beard shaved close, and a dapper chain clipped to the vest. Their initials hung on the wall in huge gold letters, the W and M intertwined. They went back to a hotel afterward, without secrecy or shame.

They had agreed to write their own vows, but to read them privately. In the hotel, Moutaz pulled out a sheet of paper. To her horror, Wafa realized she had forgotten to write hers.

“He was like, ‘babe, you crossed the ocean for me,’” she recalls, smiling. “‘That’s your vow.”’


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* * *

As Solenn Al Majali points out, Wafa and those like her, whose families have emigrated to escape violence, make up a small and privileged minority of Yemeni citizens. Most remain stuck in Yemen. 

Bordered by only two countries, neither of which is accepting refugees, Yemen remains geographically isolated. Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s neighbor, has been a main player in the conflict. The United States and other Western countries have supplied Saudi Arabia with weapons, tactical assistance, and training. The bombs that fall on Yemen are American-made. In turn, Iran has given some tactical and financial support to the Houthi rebels.

For those who remain, safety has shattered. The United Nations has found that all parties in Yemen share responsibility for war crimes, including “arbitrary deprivation of life, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, gender-based violence, including sexual violence, torture,” and more. Children are greatly at risk for death in airstrikes, but also from common childhood diseases and hunger, for which there is limited medical assistance. Saudi and United Arab Emirates blockades of the ports where Yemenis import food have created famine conditions. According to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, “More than 16 million people are expected to go hungry [in 2021]. Nearly 50,000 Yemenis are already starving to death in famine-like conditions.”

Back in Yemen, she faced physical risks unimaginable in Oregon — but she also had a sense of worth and belonging. She wondered if the two of them could make a life in Sana’a. Could survive, with just each other.

Before leaving office, the Trump administration designated the Houthis as terrorists, making international aid delivery trickier. While the Biden administration has reversed this decision and pledged to end support for the conflict, it remains to be seen how much they can disentangle themselves from Saudi allies.

For many Yemenis, the conflict no longer seems to have a foreseeable end. The civil society they knew is gone. There is only endurance and the slender hope of escape. For Moutaz, that hope is Wafa: “She always find[s] a way out,” he told me.


 

* * *

In the past, Yemen had coffee shops where people could gather and chat. There were seaside towns with beaches along the Indian Ocean. Men chewed qat at house parties, sharing the news. Ancient rammed-earth buildings were beautifully inlaid; brick minarets and winding stone streets were part of a long, proud history of Arab culture, from the Queen of Sheba to rare Islamic manuscripts.

“I keep that beautiful image for my country inside me,” Susan Kassim says.

When she flew back for her daughter’s wedding, the first time she’d been home in five years, her beloved Yemen had been transformed by war. The seaside towns where she had vacationed were destroyed. Community institutions struggled to operate. Buildings had been destroyed in aerial bombing campaigns, leaving swaths of ancient cities in ruins. The highway between Sana’a and Aden, formerly a brisk six-hour drive, was blockaded, forcing her to endure the same harrowing mountain journey her daughter had taken. More than anything, the guns scared her. Armed men patrolled the streets and stopped cars. There was no government, only martial law.

“But people there, they accept the reality. They are not afraid,” says Kassim. Her local relatives teased her that living in the U.S. had made her soft. “And I say no, it’s normal to be afraid. This is horrible.”

To her newlywed daughter and son-in-law, however, the summer of 2019 was bliss. They seemed so elated, Susan asked if they had been taking drugs.

“I’m like, ‘everything is perfect,’” Wafa says. Airstrikes hit a building nearby, and the couple slept through it. 

Being together had made them immune to fear — or perhaps it was a deliberate blindness. If they paid attention to the reality of their situation, they could see the precarity of it all. Wafa only had six months of travel allowance before she had to go back to the U.S. Despite court battles, Trump’s travel ban still stood in modified form, and visa processing for Yemeni citizens had ground to a near-halt.

For many Yemenis, the conflict no longer seems to have a foreseeable end. The civil society they knew is gone. There is only endurance and the slender hope of escape.

Ten days after the wedding, Moutaz got called back to work. Every six months to a year, he was given a new project-based contract by an NGO. He traveled outside the city to small villages, interviewed tribal communities about their needs, and attempted to provide infrastructure: bathrooms, running water, menstruation products, housing. The work fulfilled him, but it was dangerous. Soldiers often stopped his car, demanding to see travel authorization and receive bribes. He would make a few phone calls, and he could keep driving. But Wafa worried about a time when his answers didn’t satisfy them, when his bribe was insufficient, when he didn’t come home.

“It’s living without a government. It’s crazy I would say, because nobody is held accountable at all,” she says.

Moutaz didn’t have much choice. Humanitarian work, paid for by foreign NGOs, was basically the only viable income in Yemen in 2019. Government officials were paid sporadically; teachers had worked for years without pay; private businesses had suffered from ongoing power outages, infrastructure damage, and a shrinking economy.

He knew the risks. This is war, he figured; to survive, Yemenis have to support each other. Against those who threatened his safety, he bowed his head, then persisted. Mostly, he refused to be afraid — a form of defiance that Wafa tried to imitate, especially when her mother begged her to return to Oregon.

“It broke my heart to leave her in that situation that I saw with my own eyes,” says Kassim. Other than official wedding events, Kassim had refused to go out of the house for most of her visit, refused to acknowledge the changed city. She flew home, hopeful that she would reunite with Wafa at the end of the allotted six months.

Wafa wasn’t sure. She felt like she was living in an alternate reality: “We don’t have gas. So what? We walk. We don’t have electricity, so what? We have candles.” 

As the day of her U.S. flight approached, Moutaz refused to say whether he thought she should go. He wanted the decision to be hers. Once, when she woke in the middle of the night, he was sitting up in bed, tearing up. He would miss her, he said, but he felt relief knowing she would be somewhere safe. “So I’ll just trust you,” he told her.

She considered staying. Like so many emigrants, her heart was torn between her old home and her future in the U.S. In the end, she left Moutaz and was allowed back into the United States.

* * *

Love can blind us to reality, binding us only to our beloved — a person, a nation, a memory. We might refuse to see danger, or turn away from transformation, because to acknowledge the horrors of the world would be to betray a beloved relationship. We want to ignore everything except that sweetness.

No matter where we live, we take refuge in those we love. They shelter us, protect us, comfort us. When those people live far away, the best we can do is pretend. We wrap their late-night texts and dropped phone calls around us like a blanket, and rapt in a combination of memory and expectation, we close our eyes.

But love can also clarify. For many families separated by national borders, there are hopes of happy endings, but no illusions. Brokenheartedness can become a kind of resting state, which isn’t to say it hurts less — simply that it becomes a kind of ever-present harm. And as anyone who has ever hurt before knows, pain wakes us up. It focuses us, fixes us to the present moment. For some, the pain becomes a kind of a beloved, a stand-in for the real thing. For others, like Wafa, it becomes an itch you can’t stop scratching.

* * *

Wafa struggled to readjust to the U.S. A six-month newlywed, she felt more like a widow. Reckless, angry, she started graduate school and also a full-time job. She was trying, she thinks, to numb herself with endless work.

It wasn’t just missing Moutaz. Going home also meant resuming a role as an immigrant, rather than a citizen. It meant accepting a status shift that she hadn’t realized she resented so much.

“Back in my country, I live in a villa. I have a driver. I have people that do shit for me. Yet when we move here, people don’t know that. We start from zero,” she says. “It hurts … I’m this established person back home, yet here I’m irrelevant.”

That pain had started early. During her own emigration process in 2015, she had flown to Algeria for an interview at the U.S. Embassy. As the passengers disembarked, an officer in the airport asked who was a Yemeni citizen. Without further questions, he told them to get back on the plane and fly home.

“Just having the idea that an officer has the power to kind of humiliate me, target me, and say, ‘just go back to your country,’ I can’t go through that again,” she says. “If I ever have a child, I never want them to get the feeling that [they] are nothing.” 

Wafa wanted to give Moutaz the safety and freedom of the United States, but she increasingly wondered if the process was worth it. Back in Yemen, she faced physical risks unimaginable in Oregon — but she also had a sense of worth and belonging. She wondered if the two of them could make a life in Sana’a. Could survive, with just each other.


 

* * *

She had four brand-new iPhones in her bag, including two for the man with the ghost ticket. She dialed him when she landed in Cairo, but he didn’t respond. Airport security took her passport, and she had no ticket forward. 

It was July 2020. COVID-19 had transformed the world, including immigration routes. Countries tightened their borders, citing health and safety concerns. One of two routes to Yemen, through Amman, Jordan, closed down. Traveling through Egypt remained the only way back.

Wafa had a ticket to Cairo, and no farther. And now she was stuck in the Cairo airport with no passport.

After eight months of separation, she was trying to get back to Moutaz. She had quit graduate school, thrown herself into work at a bank, and saved her money. She applied for U.S. citizenship. Trump was still president, the travel ban was still in place, COVID had changed the rules, but she had to see her husband again.

If you could die from an airstrike, there was no time for distress about a virus. It raged, invisible, behind the more immediate dangers of war.

Following a nebulous web of diasporic Yemeni connections, she contacted a man named Khalid in Egypt. He strung her along for a week, promising a ticket in exchange for large amounts of money. Reckless and desperate, she agreed: “This is my last paycheck. I’ll just spend it all and go to zero balance.” She sent him $750 to buy her a Cairo-Aden ticket.

The limited flights from Cairo to Aden were coveted by Yemeni migrants living in Egypt. Over 500,000 Yemenis live in Egypt, according to the Yemeni Embassy in Cairo, more than a 700% increase from before the war. They often come to Egypt or Jordan on two-month visas for medical necessity and remain, applying for refugee status. Many see Egypt as a temporary refuge. They are often stranded in legal limbo, hoping for resettlement, but not recognized as refugees by the United Nations for geopolitical reasons, says Solenn Al Majali. As such, they have little access to resources like jobs, schools, or humanitarian assistance.

Wafa’s class and nationality privilege did not endear her to those she contacted: “I am a lady living in the U.S. trying to go to Yemen, when they [Yemeni refugees] are freaked out.” The people she spoke with had more pressing issues than leisure travel. They were worried about paying rent, buying food, and finding employment. Wafa understood their bitterness.

A few days later, Khalid created a ghost ticket: It looked like a real flight but did not guarantee her a seat on the plane. She would have to trust that someone would cancel so she could fly standby. In exchange for the ghost ticket, he asked her to bring two iPhones to his relatives in Sana’a.

If her first time going back to Yemen had been inadvisable, this time was worse. COVID-19 had killed several members of Wafa’s Yemeni family, including three relatives in a month. People had worn masks for perhaps the first month of the pandemic; after that, a mindset of numbness took over. If you could die from an airstrike, there was no time for distress about a virus. It raged, invisible, behind the more immediate dangers of war.

Wafa flew to Cairo in July, having spent the last of her money, clutching the ghost ticket like a talisman. After a few terrifying hours, airport security returned her passport, and Khalid texted her a link — for a real ticket to Aden.

* * *

Wafa had been in Sana’a for four months when it came time for Mawlid, the birthday of the Prophet. A traditional Islamic holiday, the 2020 Mawlid celebrations took a different turn. The city was bright with lights (Where did this money come from? Wafa wondered). The Houthis paraded tanks through the streets, and soldiers stood on every corner.

“I felt like they came out of a grave. They had guns and they had paint of green all over them,” she says. The soldiers frightened Wafa; to her, it wasn’t a celebration, but a show of military force. She was beginning to see how deeply the war had infiltrated everyday Yemeni life. Last summer’s newlywed blinders were finally off.

Airstrikes hit a building nearby, and the couple slept through it.

There were other signs of change, too. In 2019, Moutaz and Wafa had gone out to coffee shops and enjoyed their favorite snacks in the markets. Now, even married women and men could not associate on the street. Nonprofit work had become more difficult, as the Houthis refused NGO authorizations; Moutaz found himself unemployed for long periods. Due to a Saudi embargo, there was no fuel except at exorbitant black market rates, so they couldn’t drive anywhere. They stayed in their apartment and watched TV.

After the wedding, they had considered staying together in Yemen. A year later, that life seemed impossible. Wafa told Moutaz, “I can’t have a family here where education is corrupted. They teach kids what they want them to know, and it’s all about sacrifice, sacrificing themselves, and it’s just toxic. People don’t have dreams.”

Moutaz knew his wife would not survive long in Yemen. She had always been too big, too bold, too unwilling to follow the rules. Even if she ducked political trouble, her spirit would wither from the restrictions on daily life. He saw it happening already, in the shrinking of their ambitions: Find food. Find a good movie to watch, and an internet connection to watch it.

She told him, “I wanted to go into politics. I wanted to go into law school. I had dreams. But I don’t have dreams here because there’s not even space for dreams.”

* * *

As of winter 2021, Wafa is back in Oregon. Rain falls softly and constantly on the pavement outside. Home is no longer where Moutaz is, as she once thought. Home is the state of waiting, of not acting on her worst impulses to scream in frustration and cause a huge fuss and fly back to him.

The easy route would be to give up on the U.S. Move to Egypt together, or Jordan. Make a new life. The harder, lengthier, more painful route is continued separation. Despite her desire to be with Moutaz, she has chosen not to give up, because his future is more important than her own immediate happiness.

“I want him to have an opportunity to get out and see the world, or just have the power to choose,” she says. 

She wants to give one thing to him and their future children: a U.S. passport. She never wants them to be humiliated, or trapped, or in danger because of their papers. She wants to give them the space to dream.

For them, love has become a kind of defiance of boundaries, borders, and rules. Separated for years, they search for ways back to each other.

He, too, wants more. He doesn’t want to apply every three months for a new NGO job and then face another bout of unemployment. He doesn’t want to take another application test on his Excel skills, or endure invasive background checks, or bribe armed militants on his way to get villagers clean water. He wants to work in engineering, but more importantly, he wants to be his own boss, set his own hours, have power over his future. He wants to see Wafa smile.

“Your smile is the best thing [to] happen in the universe,” he wrote her in a message. 

Does love always resolve? Perhaps a cross-border relationship is less about cathartic reunion than the slow, patient intention to help someone else find joy. Like Wafa, Moutaz says migration is about the fight for his partner’s dreams. National policies may require a shift in how we imagine our futures, but they cannot negate the audacity of wanting a loved one to be safe and happy.

Perhaps love means deferment. Or the refusal to defer. Or the unshakable belief that someday, you’ll walk together to get coffee, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

* * *

Caitlin Dwyer is a writer from Oregon. Her writing has appeared in Longreads, Narratively, Creative Nonfiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Quartz, and Oregon Humanities, among others. She holds an MA in journalism from the University of Hong Kong and an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop. She also hosts the podcast Many Roads to Here and teaches at Portland Community College.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Nora Belblidia

Happy is a Relative State

Images courtesy of West Virginia University Press and the author

Renée K. Nicholson | Fierce and Delicate: Essays on Dance and Illness | May 2021
1,977 words (7 minutes)

***

Imagine, once you had performed splits in midair. Now, sitting in a doctor’s office chair, you’re shown an X-ray that confirms you no longer have any cartilage in your right knee. For years, you’ve hobbled around with the aid of a cane, but now even that’s not an option. You have two choices. You either have a total knee replacement or you figure out how to get around with a walker or wheelchair.

You are thirty-six years old.

One of the few times I’ve cried in public was that day in my rheumatologist’s office. I guess it wasn’t so public, but it wasn’t alone. I hate that I broke down like that, but finally I couldn’t keep my composure. My rheumatologist is a kind man, with a no-nonsense way about talking about RA. The choices were limited, and I had to accept that. I already had, of course. By this time, putting weight on my leg was more pain than I could hide, and relying on a cane was not enough. I could barely walk, but I did, perhaps by sheer willpower, to get from one place to another.

Instead of telling me not to cry, my rheumatologist let the sobs flow, until there was a break, and then he brought me into his business office and called the orthopedic surgeon he thought was the best in town. He took such a personal interest in making sure I was going to do this thing I didn’t want to do. I think he knew I’d already decided to have the knee replacement surgery, but both my rheumatologist and the orthopedist gave me the option of calling back with a decision. I slept on it, but I didn’t toss or turn a bit. I knew I had to get the surgery, so first thing in the morning, I called and asked for the next available appointment. Once I made the decision, I was determined to get it done as soon as possible. No waiting around or mulling it over. Once again, I moved on quickly.

Though I was able to get in for surgery within a couple of weeks, I still needed a way to get around in the meantime, and so I found myself in a medical supply store, shopping for a walker. I wanted something basic, because I was hoping that I wouldn’t need it all that much—just pre- and post-op. Strangely, this view betrayed optimism I hadn’t dared to feel in a long time.

There were two elderly ladies in the store with me. Onechecked out a high-end walker with wheels and hand brakes like a bike. The salesperson had tried talking me into a similar model, but I wanted the cheaper one, without wheels, without bells and whistles. Basic worked for me. It seemed weird to think of walkers as having bells and whistles, but they do. The other elderly lady in the store bought a walker organizer—a fabric caddy with various pockets—that fits over the bar across the front of the walker so you can keep things like keys and cell phones handy. The lady suggested I also get a walker organizer. She showed me the fancy ones made of zebra-, cheetah-, and leopard-print fabrics.

I decided right there I would just use a backpack or my pockets. It was too much for me to consider a cheetah-print walker organizer. It certainly didn’t seem fashion forward, and I’d only just accepted the need for the walker. I was not
ready to give in to accessorizing, making the apparatus into a statement, not even when the salesperson asked if I might also like the see the giraffe print.

Before my surgery, my mother came to stay with me to help with the day-to-day stuff around my house. She cooked, cleaned, and drove me to appointments. My father also came for regular visits, both to be with my mom, who he missed at home, and me, as I prepared for surgery. During one of these visits, Dad went to see the orthopedist with me. He always carried a small notebook and a maroon Montblanc pen, and he took notes on what I needed to do and what I could expect, all of the details that only partially sunk in as I sat in the white examination room trying to be brave, or at least to not look nervous. When my father asked the doctor what I would not ask—what were the chances of success?—the orthopedist told
him he would do his best, but certain things were for God to decide. He did say he thought I would be free of pain, but there had been a lot of damage. He explained that many patients could do much more after surgery than before, and in spite of all the hope that had quietly slipped away over the years, I felt like maybe things would get better. Maybe I had to feel this way so that I didn’t feel like a thirty-six year-old getting a surgery usually meant for a senior citizen. And so I could believe it was, in fact, the best choice.

Imagine, once you had performed splits in midair. Now, sitting in a doctor’s office chair, you’re shown an X-ray that confirms you no longer have any cartilage in your right knee.

At this point, perhaps you’re thinking, yes, the happy ending is coming. This might make you sigh with relief, or become disenchanted with the story, feeling the happy ending wasn’t earned. There’s some judgment at the prospect of happiness, just as this entire story opens me up for scrutiny. Even though the surgery would help with the pain I had in my right knee, even though it partially restored what had been destroyed, it did not, of course, cure my RA. I never thought it would, and you shouldn’t think that either. I still have swelling, fatigue, fever, aches, joint damage. I can also get around in a fairly normal way now.

Happy is a relative state.

The night after my surgery I got very little sleep because I had intense pain. The night nurse had already threatened to catheterize me if I didn’t urinate, and so I willed myself to pee, only to be left atop a full bedpan. So things didn’t start off great that evening, and once the meds wore off, I felt like my thigh muscle was being slowly shredded with a cheese grater. My dad stood vigil by my bedside, getting only sporadic sleep in an easy chair. Luckily, I didn’t have to share a room with another patient. My father tried desperately to get the nurse to give me something for the pain, and perhaps she did, but I honestly can’t remember. I remember him holding my hand so maybe I wouldn’t feel so alone, and I remember squeezing because it hurt that bad.

Dancers build muscle memory from the day-in, day-out study of technique. Over the years, my thigh muscle had learned a new muscle memory, trying to pull my kneecap
up from my deteriorating joint. My orthopedic surgeon told me that even under full anesthesia my thigh muscle would not relax at first—the only time he’d ever seen this. The muscle still tried to manipulate the kneecap to avoid painful grinding in the joint. The body’s ability to adapt to protect itself is quite remarkable in this way. Though my orthopedist finally did get it to relax, my muscles retained a dancer’s memory. What could have been a minor curiosity signified to me a small connection to my former self.

After the first night, things did get better, but it was slow going. My leg was strapped into a machine that helped stimulate the new joint by continually keeping it in motion, as if pedaling or walking. I could lie down as this happened or sit propped on pillows, and many times I’d get calls from friends, which were welcome distractions, as the machine churned my leg. I learned exercises I would have to perform daily and made arrangements for physical therapy. When I was released from the hospital, I was given strong pain pills, but within a few days, I stopped taking them because I wasn’t hurting so much, not compared to how much I’d hurt before the surgery, and I worried about becoming dependent on them. Pain, by then, was one thing I knew how to contend with.

Pain, by then, was one thing I knew how to contend with.

In the weeks immediately following my surgery, I still needed the walker. My wound needed to heal, and I had to learn to walk again. I’d limped for so long, accommodating a joint that continued to fall apart, that my legs literally needed retraining on how to correctly put one foot in front of the other.

Dance had taught me how to train. So even though it took three physical therapists and some unconventional approaches, like a Pilates reformer and manipulation of the joint under anesthesia by my orthopedic surgeon, I finally made progress. First, though, a remarkable thing happened. As the wound from the surgery healed, I stopped hurting for the first time in what felt like forever. I felt nothing, and it was bliss. My father said he watched my facial features loosen and soften, too. He said I looked younger because I no longer carried the pain on my face. I didn’t know it was so evident. Perhaps I’d never hidden my anguish at all, that it was there, on display, the whole time.

I’ve never regained full mobility with my prosthetic knee, but I’m able to do things now I thought I might never do again. Take the good with bad, the saying goes, or is it the other way around? The ending isn’t simply happy or sad. It isn’t really an ending.

This past June I had the opportunity to renew my handicap placard for my car. But as the date for this renewal came and slipped by, I’ve yet to have my doctor sign the papers I’d need to file at the DMV. I can walk from any space in the lot to where I need to go. I can walk without the aid of a cane. I can walk at a normal pace and move with relative ease.

Once a week I slip the needle of a prefilled syringe into the fleshier parts of me, dispensing medicinal liquid that helps to balance my whacked-out immune system. During the week, I spend several hours in a studio, in the presence of dancers as their teacher. Twice a day, anti-inflammatories. All this give and take, but I’ve found an uneasy peace. I’ve given you a version of my story, the best I have to give. I crafted it with words I chose and plucked so carefully, shaped through revision. I’ve given you this tale and you will decide what to make of it, what to make of me. I have no control over that. You may judge or feel or discount. Perhaps a concoction of all three. I accept that, once written, my story is no longer wholly mine. Still, I give it to you.

Today I am sick, and tomorrow I will be sick, as I will be every day until I die. I may not like it, but that’s how it is. The rest of my life will always be entwined with rheumatoid arthritis. But it’s my choice to also be something more, to not feel sick, to still find those shadows of a dancer, which is to say tiny flecks of magic, within me. Like anyone who is hopelessly in love, I will always be the keeper of a flame.

***

Excerpted from Renée K. Nicholson’s Fierce and Delicate: Essays on Dance and Illness, published by West Virginia University Press.

The Bees In My Brain

Longreads Pick

“I’d sometimes wonder if my dad had bees of his own. Little creatures that spoke to him in his native tongue, telling him he wasn’t good enough, too.”

Published: May 12, 2021
Length: 8 minutes (2,161 words)

Queens of Infamy: Boudicca

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | May 2021 | 18 minutes (4,866 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on world-historical women of centuries past.

If you love Queens of Infamy, consider becoming a Longreads member.

* * *

She was tall — terrifyingly large, in fact. Her tawny hair fell in a “great mass” to her hips. She was dressed in a colorful tunic and cloak, her outfit completed by a giant fuck-off gold torc. Her voice was harsh, unfeminine. She had spent the last weeks murdering and maiming her way across the British countryside, and now she led a force of hundreds of thousands of Britons in a standoff against the occupying Romans. She had a rabbit hidden in her skirt for occult purposes. She was a bloodthirsty barbarian, devoted to a ghoulish religion, out to destroy the social order of the known world. At least, this is how historian Cassius Dio described Boudicca, a British tribal queen, over one hundred years after her death — every civilized man’s worst nightmare.

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But before we dive into the revolt that literally burned London to the ground, we need some context. The Romans had first cast their eyes toward Britain back in the good old days before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and got himself murdered. Caesar, who had been conquesting his way through Gaul for a few years, decided to take a break in 55 BC and invade Britain as a little treat, although “invasion” is probably a stretch since he didn’t do much more than visit Kent and then turn back. But it must have been a fun caper, because he returned the next year, this time managing to cross the Thames and score a few victories against the Britons. After that Caesar had to put a pin in it due to other pressing business; he had a republic to bring down, after all, and a back that needed stabbing. In the chaos that ensued, Rome more or less ignored Britain for the next hundred years until the Emperor Claudius decided to invade again in 43 AD.

Boudicca appears in the narrative about 17 years after Claudius’ invasion. Her husband, Prasutagus, was the ruler of the Iceni, a British tribe whose territory included modern-day Norfolk and parts of Suffolk. The historian Tacitus, who gives us a near-contemporary account of Boudicca’s uprising, wrote that she was of royal blood, but beyond that we don’t know much about her. Did she come from Iceni nobility or was she a princess from another tribe who had married Prasutagus as part of an alliance? Was Boudicca her given name, or since it’s believed to come from a Proto-Celtic root word meaning victory, was it a title she adopted? We don’t even know how old she was in 60 AD — she had two daughters by Prasutagus who were probably in their tweens or early teens, and if those were her first and only children, she could have been as young as 30. Then again, if there had been other children who had died or if, for some reason, she’d married later or hadn’t been able to conceive right away, she could have been in her 40s or even 50s. All we know about her life are the scraps that Tacitus and Dio left us, and those are the highly biased Roman accounts describing an enemy they considered to be primitive and sub-human.

BOUDICCA: I mean, the Romans barely consider their own women to be people

BOUDICCA: even the ones they allegedly like

BOUDICCA: you know, the ones who’ve mastered the skills of shutting up and spinning wool

BOUDICCA: neither of which are exactly my forte

The Iceni had allied themselves with Rome and been allowed to live fairly autonomously with Prasutagus as their client king in the standard Roman model. They were apparently quite wealthy and prosperous, even as neighboring regions were gutted by invading forces. As long as the Iceni kept bootlicking paying their taxes, everything was going to be fine. Or at least that’s what they believed right up until Prasutagus died and all hell broke loose.

BOUDICCA: my husband had a will, as all responsible adults should

BOUDICCA: if you don’t have one yet, close this tab and go make one right now!

BOUDICCA: anyway, he split his assets between our daughters and the Emperor Nero

BOUDICCA: the Romans, being always fair and just, honored that agreement

BOUDICCA: oh my god, I’m sorry, I can’t even say that with a straight face

BOUDICCA: of course they didn’t honor it

BOUDICCA: but seriously, you need a will if you don’t have one already

The fact that Boudicca was not named as one of Prasutagus’ heirs, even though she was his wife and the mother of his children and was going to rule as regent until they came of age, might be a clue as to what kind of person she was. Some historians speculate that she might have had strong anti-Roman sentiments even before shit went sideways — that perhaps her family of origin may have been involved in some of the earlier revolts against the Empire. Maybe Prasutagus had strategically left her out of his will as a way of reassuring Rome that he was on their side. After all, nothing was guaranteed to stir up ire like naming a possible insurrectionist as your successor. But, as it turned out, the Romans’ ire was going to be stirred no matter what. Prasutagus’ death was the perfect opportunity for a land grab, and the Romans were going to use whatever excuse they could to make it look legitimate.

All we know about her life are the scraps that Tacitus and Dio left us, and those are the highly biased Roman accounts describing an enemy they considered to be primitive and sub-human.

The Romans claimed that Prasutagus’ agreement with the Emperor Claudius was now null and void as both parties were dead. Since there existed no contract between Boudicca and Claudius’ successor, Nero (yes, that Nero), they were under no obligation to honor Prasutagus’ will. When Boudicca pushed back, the Romans turned violent. Their army plundered Prasutagus’ lands and enslaved various members of his family. They stripped the most powerful Iceni men of their land and possessions. Worst of all, they publicly flogged Boudicca and raped her daughters. This last act was not only meant to terrorize the girls both physically and psychologically, but, from a Roman perspective, the soldiers were also marking them as damaged goods. One of the foundational myths of Rome involves a noblewoman killing herself to escape the perceived dishonour of having been raped — that was the only way she could restore her lost virtue. The assault on Boudicca’s unnamed daughters was a way to harm not only their present but also their future prospects as wives, mothers, or even just respectable women. And considering that the girls were the heirs of the King of the Iceni, it may even be seen as an attempt to curtail the future of the tribe itself.

BOUDICCA: I guess they thought they could break me

BOUDICCA: beat me into submission, that kind of thing

BOUDICCA: they weren’t used to women who fight back

BOUDICCA: or women who fight at all, full stop

BOUDICCA: which is why they failed to notice or care when I started rallying my own troops

BOUDICCA: told my daughters to get in the chariot, because we are going to burn this fucker DOWN

PASSING ROMAN SOLDIER: awww, it’s cute that a little lady thinks she has troops!

BOUDICCA: you see what I mean

Part of the reason the Romans were less than attentive to Boudicca’s casual fomenting was that they were distracted by a different British problem. Suetonius, the governor of Britannia, was tired of the turbulent British priests — the Druids — and decided to stamp them out. His official reasons? The Druids were sheltering anti-Roman political refugees on the Isle of Mona (modern-day Anglesey) and it was alleged they practiced human sacrifice. It’s honestly kind of rich that the Romans — who had only stopped ritually sacrificing people about 150 years before and who loved to, you know, watch gladiators fight each other to the death — were so hung up on the sanctity of life or whatever, but people can rationalize anything. Anyway, the real reason that Suetonius and his peers wanted to take out the Druids was because they held an uncomfortable sway over the British population and refused to be assimilated. Basically, the Romans were worried that they would stir up rebellion, and also they just found them kind of spooky.

Worst of all, they publicly flogged Boudicca and raped her daughters. This last act was not only meant to terrorize the girls both physically and psychologically, but, from a Roman perspective, the soldiers were also marking them as damaged goods.

When Suetonius and his men arrived at Mona, they could see the Druids raising their arms and chanting, while a bunch of messy-haired women in black swung burning sticks around. Tacitus would later compare these women to the Furies, which might explain why the Roman soldiers were so uncharacteristically unnerved.

SUETONIUS: it was just, you know, so uncivilized

SUETONIUS: I had to … god, this is embarrassing

SUETONIUS: I had to remind my men that women aren’t worth being afraid of

SUETONIUS: anyway, we pulverized their sacred groves

SUETONIUS: we pulverized them GOOD

SUETONIUS: Druids delenda est and all that

It’s hard to overstate the level of desecration at Mona. It wasn’t just that the island was an important place of worship; in the belief system of the Celtic Britons, every river, every lake, every grove had its own individual god. By destroying the groves, the Romans quite literally killed British gods. The tribes were already primed for revolt, and as the news about Mona reached them, it must have added fuel to their fire.

Another result of Suetonius’ decision to take on the Druids at Mona — which was on the opposite side of Britain from the Iceni territory — was that the Roman governor was conveniently out of the way when Boudicca and the Iceni set off on their tear.

Boudicca found an ally in another local tribe, the Trinovantes. Like the Iceni, the Trinovantes had an axe to grind with the Romans, namely the colonia they had established in Camulodunum (modern-day Colchester), and the rebels chose that as their first target. But before we go deeper into that story, we need to take a brief detour.

One of the Empire’s grifts was that legionaries who fulfilled their enlistment terms received a small parcel of land. So if you were an enlisted nobody from a poor family, you could pull yourself up in the world by serving the required 25 years and getting your own land grant (assuming you lived that long; plenty of legionaries didn’t). The problem, of course, was that land is a finite resource, and these land grants typically stayed in families for generations. This meant that to fulfill their promise to their veterans, the Empire had to keep expanding outward into the ether, annexing more and more territory. Of course, the Emperors had their own reasons for wanting to broaden the Empire’s boundaries! But a side benefit to all that growth was that it meant more available land for veterans — once they’d cleared out those pesky native inhabitants, of course.


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Anyway, back in the pre-Roman times, Camulodunum had been one of the most important settlements in Britain, serving at one point as the capital of the Trinovantes tribe. Naturally the Romans thought it would be the perfect spot for them to settle down. In doing so, not only did the Romans drive the Britons out, but archeological evidence shows that they forced the displaced people to live and work in brutal conditions while re-building the town to Roman specifications. According to Tacitus, the soldiers posted encouraged this abuse of the Britons, even though it went against Roman policy (this was, after all, supposed to be a peaceful settlement, not a battlefield); he noted that those soldiers saw their future selves in the retired veterans and hoped they too would be allowed to treat native populations however the fuck they wanted someday.

BOUDICCA: you can’t spell colonialism without colonia!

BOUDICCA: yes, I know that’s the point

BOUDICCA: I understand how language fundamentally works

BOUDICCA: root words, et cetera

BOUDICCA: but since my husband’s death I’ve had to take up the mantle of dad jokes in our family

As Boudicca travelled across the country, her following grew. Those joining her cause weren’t just warrior-type men from the Iceni and the Trinovantes, they were people of all genders and ages. Farmers abandoned their fields and women loaded their children into carts to join the throng. With every British settlement they passed, the mass of people bearing down on Camulodunum increased in size; according to Dio, by the time they reached the city, they were 120,000 strong. The Britons were done hedging their bets — they were either going to solve the Roman problem once and for all, or they were going to go down in a blaze of glory.

Meanwhile, in Camulodunum, strange things were happening. A statue of Victory fell over, apparently for no reason. Women went into a frenzy, speaking in tongues and making frightening prophecies. South of the city, at the Thames Estuary, people saw visions of drowned houses in the water and the North Sea seemed to turn the color of blood. But even with all these portents and the news of Boudicca’s approach, the leaders told the townspeople not to worry. It was just a rag-tag group of women, after all — and not just any women, but primitive, uncivilized British women. No big deal. There was time to evacuate, but why bother? The procurator of Roman Britain, Catus Decianus, ordered an extra two hundred men to Camulodunum and figured the problem was solved.

BOUDICCA: obviously misogyny sucks

BOUDICCA: and no one likes to be underestimated

BOUDICCA: but sometimes that kind discrimination is a gift

BOUDICCA: a gift called the element of surprise even though they saw you coming

Boudicca’s army did not just attack Camulodunum, they razed it. They slaughtered every Roman they could find, even children and the elderly. They defaced graveyards and set buildings ablaze. The head of a statue of Emperor Claudius was crudely hacked off and thrown in a river. Some townspeople barricaded themselves in a temple, but even that couldn’t save them — after two days’ siege, the Britons stormed it and killed everyone inside. The destruction was so intense and so fiery that the layer of soil from that period is a strange orange-red.

BOUDICCA: some people use the term “scorched earth” metaphorically

BOUDICCA: but I’d say I’m more of a literalist

BOUDICCA: some women just want to watch the Roman world burn, I guess

BOUDICCA: again, not in a figurative sense

One curious thing about Boudicca’s sacking of Camulodunum is that it seems to have left no bodies behind. There’s plenty of archeological evidence to show that the city was gutted, but there are no mass graves or deposits of human remains, even though everyone agrees that the Queen of the Iceni authorized wanton mass-murder. Some historians theorize that the Romans later came back and cremated the dead, while some wonder if the high death toll was a bit of exaggeration. Still others have suggested that Boudicca and her people removed the bodies to a nearby oak grove for darker purposes, perhaps some kind of religious rite to Andraste, a local goddess of victory. While Celts of all stripes did enjoy dismembering those they had conquered in battle — they would apparently embalm their heads and put them on display in their homes as trophies — this last theory is probably a little too far-fetched to be true. Then again, given some of the allegations Dio would later make against Boudicca, maybe not.

The destruction was so intense and so fiery that the layer of soil from that period is a strange orange-red.

After Camulodunum, Boudicca turned her gaze toward Londinium. Although it wasn’t a particularly big or important city, Londinium made sense as her next target because, unlike many of the other towns in Roman Britain, Londinium had likely never been a British settlement — it was a Roman enterprise, a trade outpost whose location was chosen because the river there was narrow enough for a bridge but deep enough to accommodate Roman seagoing vessels. By the time Boudicca went on her tear, the young city had already become a bustling centre of commerce, with goods from such distant locations as Spain, Greece, and Syria later uncovered in archeological digs. To strike at Londinium would, in Boudicca’s mind, have been like striking at the heart of the Roman occupation itself.

The Romans had, of course, by now figured out that this was more than a throw-two-hundred-men-at-it-and-call-it-a-day kind of problem. The IXth legion (or, at least, part of it) was dispatched to deal with the unpleasantness at Camulodunum, but they were routed by Britons just north of the colonia. Meanwhile, Suetonius himself, having finished butchering those old harpies on Mona, rushed to Londinium. He somehow made it there before Boudicca, even though he had to cross the breadth of the country and the Britons only had to saunter down the coast. That’s one of the benefits of travelling without children, I guess!

Suetonius had, at least according to Tacitus, initially hoped Londinium could be used as a military stronghold against the Britons. He quickly realized that Londinium was not fortified and was in no way capable of withstanding the type of attack that Camulodunum had suffered. He immediately abandoned the city to its fate.

SUETONIUS: look, I’m a real-talk kind of guy

SUETONIUS: I tell hard truths, and some people think that makes me an asshole

SUETONIUS: but I think it just makes me honest

SUETONIUS: so I honestly told them they were honestly fucked

SUETONIUS: I’m not a magician, I can’t make defences appear from nowhere!

SUETONIUS: so I told them I was going to make a last stand somewhere else

SUETONIUS: and I invited all the able-bodied men to join me

SUETONIUS: which I feel was very generous

It’s not known how many people took Suetonius up on his offer; it’s not even known how large the population of Londinium was at the time, although some estimates place it around 30,000. The residents there were Suetonius’ own people, they were Romans, they were the ones he was supposed to be protecting. But what are a few civilians — women, children, the elderly or disabled — worth when it comes to protecting the Empire? Not much, as it turned out.

Boudicca did to Londinium what she’d done in Camulodunum, but worse. Her brief presence there is also marked by a red layer of soil, about 13 feet below the surface. It’s full of smashed treasures, ruined food stuffs, and debris from the cataclysmic fires that swept through Londinium, which archeological evidence shows burned in excess of 1,000 degrees Celcius. The Britons continued to show no mercy, and slaughtered everyone they could find, sometimes in exquisitely cruel ways.

Boudicca did to Londinium what she’d done in Camulodunum, but worse. Her brief presence there is also marked by a red layer of soil, about 13 feet below the surface.

After Londinium, Boudicca and her forces descended on the settlement of Verulamium, which might seem like a curious choice, since it was neither a settlement full of veterans like Camulodunum or a Roman merchant town like Londinium. In fact, it was a town populated by Britons — specifically, Britons who were friendly to the Roman cause. Although Verulamium suffered the same fiery fate as the two cities that had been sacked before it, excavations of the red layer there show far less debris from personal possessions, which suggests that the inhabitants had time to gather up what was precious to them and flee. Still, according to Tacitus, Boudicca’s tear across the country had left 70,000 dead (although, again, many modern historians agree this figure is likely inflated).

The Britons didn’t just kill citizens of the cities they razed — according to Dio, they often tortured them first. The Roman historian vividly describes the gruesome acts the Britons were alleged to have committed: stripping the “noblest and most distinguished women” naked, cutting off their breasts and sewing them into their mouths, then “impal[ing] the women on sharp skewers run lengthwise through the entire body.”

Was this another Roman hyperbole meant to paint the Britons in a savage light, or is there some truth to it? Again, dismemberment or disfigurement of enemies was not outside the realm of Celtic practices. If it is true, Boudicca might have found a certain poetic justice in the act of defiling Roman women’s bodies after the violence their men had inflicted on her and her daughters. Sure, these Roman women were innocent civilians, but to the Britons they were still the enemy — interlopers, invaders, colonizers. Hadn’t the British tribes been pushed off their own lands, defrauded, and even killed so that these women could live in peace? A passive beneficiary to violence is still, in some ways, an abettor of it.

The red layer of soil in present-day London has the same curious problem as that in Camulodunum, namely that it isn’t filled with human remains. According to Dio, the Britons followed up each round of sacking with visits to groves dedicated to Andraste and other “sacred places.” There, they held sacrifices and banquets and indulged in “wanton behavior.” It’s possible that the events he’s describing — if they happened at all — were little more than boozy victory celebrations, distorted to fit Dio’s agenda. At this point, who knows? What does seem clear is that Boudicca’s spiritual beliefs seemed just as fervent and uncanny to the Romans as those of the Druids on Mona.

Speaking of the Romans, what were they up to while Boudicca was slashing and burning her way across the country? They were making plans, of course. The Britons had numbers on their side — Dio writes that by the time of the final battle, Boudicca’s army had swollen to 230,000 strong. The Romans only had a tiny fraction of that, but they had the benefit of intensive training and organization, something their enemy sorely lacked.

In fact, the Britons’ whole escapade was a bit haphazard from beginning to end. They seemed more interested in killing and plundering than they were in actually engaging the Roman forces. They’d missed several key chances to attack Suetonius while he was travelling to and from London. Why hadn’t they set an ambush for him the way they had for the IXth Legion back at Camulodunum? Maybe, drunk on their successes (and, no doubt, actual alcohol), they believed themselves to be invincible, or maybe they genuinely didn’t realize that the absolute worst thing they could do was give the Romans more time. Maybe they just thought their uprising was just too big to fail. Whatever their reasoning, it’s possible that victory may have been within the Britons’ grasp and they fucked it up.

No one is quite sure where the final battle took place, although many historians think it was somewhere in the West Midlands. According to Tacitus, Suetonius chose a spot with a forest on one side and open fields on the other, and then positioned his troops so that they weren’t vulnerable to British ambushes. Tacitus also tells us that Suetonius had 10,000 men with him, which means that even if there were only half as many Britons as Dio says, their forces were still more than ten times bigger than that of the Romans. As the two sides arranged themselves on the field, more than one Roman soldier must have wondered if this was going to be a battle or a bloodbath.

Both Tacitus and Dio have Boudicca addressing her troops before the battle; this is where Dio’s description of her as a large, be-necklaced woman with a bossy voice comes from. He has her finish the speech by calling out an invocation to Andraste and then releasing a hare from underneath her skirts (the direction it ran was supposed to predict who would win the battle). In Tacitus’ version, she speaks from her chariot, riding up and down her lines with her daughters on either side of her, telling those assembled that “it was indeed usual for Britons to fight under the leadership of women.” Both versions of the speech give off a noble savage sort of vibe: together, the Britons would throw off the shackles of Rome! Their ways were superior and more natural than those of their invaders! It would be better to follow the ways of their ancestors in impoverished freedom than to live as slaves with Roman wealth! Of course, there’s almost no chance that either of these speeches could be accurate — Boudicca would not have been speaking Latin to her people, and the Romans who were present would not have understood the British language. The words that Dio and Tacitus put in Boudicca’s mouth say more about them and how they wanted to portray the Britons than they do about anything else.

BOUDICCA: I mean, my people don’t need me to explain to them that we don’t mind women leaders

BOUDICCA: especially not when I’m literally in front of them?

BOUDICCA: but I guess Tacitus’ audience needed to hear it

BOUDICCA: at least he didn’t say my voice was ugly, unlike some historians I could name

The battle was an absolute shitshow for the Britons. They might have been numerous, but they weren’t seasoned warriors like their opponents — don’t forget that Boudicca’s following was largely made up of random men, women, and children who had joined her ranks as she marched across the country. They were far more likely to be farmers than trained soldiers, and they lacked the weaponry and armour of the Romans. Not only that, but the Britons had stationed their wagons — packed with their animals and children — in a ring around the back of the battlefield, which meant that when the Romans started pushing forward, the Britons were effectively trapped by their own people. And push forward the Romans did, killing everything in their path — even the women and “beasts of burden,” according to Tacitus. He also reported that 80,000 Britons died, as compared to only 400 Romans.

The words that Dio and Tacitus put in Boudicca’s mouth say more about them and how they wanted to portray the Britons than they do about anything else.

Boudicca died too, although not in battle; Tacitus says she drank poison, while Dio merely tells us that she “fell sick and died.” It’s possible that the Romans had her killed — Tacitus never specifies exactly who administered the poison — but that wouldn’t have been their style. They were more a “dress our conquered enemies up in golden chains and publicly humiliate them in the streets of Rome” type of people. Then again, it’s possible that Suetonius knew that parading a defeated Boudicca around might not have the effect he hoped for. There would have been little glory in having bested a woman on the battlefield, and in showing off Boudicca to a home audience, there was a good chance that he was the one who would have been humiliated. What kind of man nearly has his territory wrested from him by a lady, and a barbarian to boot? This is why the size of the British horde had to be exaggerated, why Dio had to go out of his way to describe Boudicca as large and hyper-masculine — to have struggled so hard against a smaller number of backwoods savages led by a woman would have been emasculating in the extreme. That being said, suicide is the more likely option. Boudicca had seen first-hand what the Romans did to British women who disagreed with them. Like Cleopatra before her and, possibly, Zenobia after her, she might have felt that self-inflicted death was the least painful course of action.

What kind of man nearly has his territory wrested from him by a lady, and a barbarian to boot?

What about her daughters, the two girls who helped spark the rebellion? Neither Dio nor Tacitus says what happened to them, so we can only speculate. Maybe they died in the battle. Maybe Boudicca slipped them a dose of poison. Maybe the Romans captured them. Maybe they escaped, went into hiding, lived out the rest of their lives as farmer’s wives who, on cold nights, would spin tales for their children about watching Londinium burn.

It’s frustrating that so little concrete information about Boudicca exists, not just because it would be satisfying to fill the gaps in her story, but because the existing records reduce her to this one, brief period in her life. What was her life like back before she entered recorded history as a bloodthirsty warrior queen? I try to imagine her in quiet moments of bliss — on her wedding night, or touching her daughters’ hair as they sleep, or hurtling alone in a chariot down a track. I hope that even in her last days she had times when she felt happy, or at least powerful. I hope she enjoyed every second of those debauched victory feasts.

There is no record of where Boudicca was buried. Several theories have sprung up over the years, including one that says her remains are somewhere under Platform 8 at King’s Cross Station. English writer Jane Holland published a collection of poems called Boudicca & Co. in 2006, the final poem closes with the lines “The end/was confused. Some screaming, vomit./It hurt, I know that much./Nothing else. Just good British dirt/and closing my mouth on it.”

This is how I like to imagine Boudicca: somewhere deep in the rich, dark, earth, nothing but nourishment now. She is reborn again and again, in the stories that we tell, in the fires in our bellies, in every fight against injustice, even the ones that feel unwinnable. She is the opposite of those dead red layers of earth that mark her passing. She is nothing but life now.

LONG LIVE THE FUCKING QUEEN

* * *

Previously:

* * *

Anne Thériault is a Toronto-based writer whose bylines can be found all over the internet, including at the Guardian, the London Review of Books and, obviously, Longreads. She truly believes that your favourite Tudor wife says more about you than your astrological sign. She is currently raising one child and three unruly cats. You can find her on Twitter @anne_theriault.

Editor: Krista Stevens Fact Checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo Illustrator: Louise Pomeroy

Finding My Father Among the Astronauts

Longreads Pick

“It took more than a decade for me to realize that I never really wanted to become a pilot so much as I wanted to become like my dad, to achieve what others deemed impossible.”

Source: GQ
Published: Apr 28, 2021
Length: 14 minutes (3,560 words)

‘The Fledglings Are Out!’

Images courtesy of Milkweed Editions

Dara McAnulty | Diary of a Young Naturalist | May 2021 | 1,979 words (7 minutes)

***

Prologue
This diary chronicles the turning of my world, from spring to winter, at home, in the wild, in my head. It travels from the west of Northern Ireland in County Fermanagh to the east in County Down. It records the uprooting of a home, a change of county and landscape, and at times the de-rooting of my senses and my mind. I’m Dara, a boy, an acorn. Mum used to call me lon dubh (which is Irish for blackbird) when I was baby, and sometimes she still does. I have the heart of a naturalist, the head of a would-be scientist, and bones of someone who is already wearied by the apathy and destruction wielded against the natural world. The outpourings on these pages express my connection to wildlife, try to explain the way I see the world, and describe how we weather the storms as a family.

***

Tuesday, 5 June
The garden has blossomed in the warmth of these late spring days. So much light and sunshine, compensating for the heaving tiredness and exasperation that comes, for me, at the end of the school year. Friendship has always eluded me – what is it anyway? A collection of actions and words between two people or more, people who grow and change anyway. It’s a good thing, apparently. That’s what some people say. I don’t have any experience, though. I mean, I play board games with a group at my school. We play, we deconstruct the game. We don’t ‘talk’. What is there to say? Sometimes, I feel that if I start, I might not shut up. That has happened, lots of times. It doesn’t end well. Kids in my class, they walk around town together, they might play football together or whatever other sport takes their fancy. They don’t talk, though. They smirk and snigger at anyone who is different. Unfortunately, for me, I’m different. Different from everyone in my class. Different from most people in my school. But at breaktime today I watched the pied wagtails fly in and out of the nest. How could I feel lonely when there are such things? Wildlife is my refuge. When I’m sitting and watching, grown-ups usually ask if I’m okay. Like it’s not okay just to sit and process the world, to figure things out and watch other species go about their day. Wildlife never disappoints like people can. Nature has a purity to me, unaffected. I watch the wagtail fly out and in again, then step a little closer. Peering in, I see that last week’s eggs are now chicks. Tiny bright-yellow beaks, mouths opening and closing silently. This is the magic. This bird, which dances and hops at everyone’s feet in the playground, unnoticed by most. Its liveliness and clockwork tail, ticking constantly, never touching the ground. It appears again, and the squawking starts in earnest. I giggle inside, in case someone sees. I have to hold so much in, phase so much out. It’s exhausting.

At home, I mooch around the garden and notice the first herb robert flowers, pink wild bloom amongst the verdant. I note it down on my list of firsts in the garden and feel good. I hear Dad come back from work, and with him an injured bat. She’s the first of the year and we tend to it – females only have one pup a year, such precious cargo. We feed it mealworms and put water in a milk-bottle lid. The bat’s mouth is so small I use one of Bláthnaid’s paintbrushes to put droplets on its tongue, hoping it will be something like lapping dewdrops from a leaf or puddle. Dehydration is the main killer of an injured bat, so it’s important to get it to drink. But as they’re getting better they’ll chew up a mealworm like a piece of spaghetti.

They’re such innocuous and timid creatures, not worthy of the silly hype that surrounds the movies and Hallowe’en. They’re insect-controllers: a single pipistrelle eats 3,000 midges a night. Can you imagine the swarms really ruining your camping holiday if we didn’t have healthy numbers of bat populations? It’s unimaginable.

The bat sleeps in my room. They always do because it’s quiet away from the hustle and bustle of the rest of the McAnulty family. I always sleep so soundly when I have a bat staying in my room. I hear it scratching about in the night and am never afraid, I am comforted.

Friday, 8 June
I trudge to school with a leaden heart: the bat didn’t make it through the night, and we didn’t lose just one bat, we’ve lost every generation that could have followed. Her injuries, caused by a cat, were too much and she died, Dad thinks, from infection. I feel so heartbroken. I’ve finished all my exams but that isn’t enough to lighten my spirits.

After school, Lorcan and I arrive home to squeals of delight from Mum and Bláthnaid. ‘The fledglings are out! The fledglings are out!’ Mum roars with all the childish delight that many of the kids I know have lost before they’re eight or nine. The excitement is intoxicating, and it spreads into me and I feel a little airy. We watch through the window as a just-emerged coal tit, blue tit and sparrow rest on the branches of the pine trees, open-mouthed, noisy and boisterous and splendiferous.

Watching the discordant gang, I realise that I won’t see them when they’re fully grown. Not if we move house. I’ve been in complete denial about moving house. Tomorrow, though, we’re going house-hunting in County Down, in Castlewellan – a small town six miles from our new school in Newcastle (which Mum and Dad say is too expensive for us to live in). I’m not sure if I feel really annoyed about the whole thing, or whether that tickle I sometimes get thinking about it is a sign of the excitement there might be in starting over again. The opportunity to reinvent myself.

Mum notices my mood shifting. I give her my best broad grin and a hug. It’s not easy for any of us, but she and Dad will do most of the work – and the worrying.
Every day, ever since I can remember, Mum has sat me down, sat us all down, and explained every situation we’ve ever had to deal with. Whether it was going to the park, to the cinema, to someone’s house, to a café. Every time, all manner of things were delicately instructed. Social cues, meanings of gestures, some handy answers if we didn’t know what to say. Pictures, social stories, diagrams, cartoons. Many people accuse me of ‘not looking autistic’. I have no idea what that means. I know lots of ‘autistics’ and we all look different. We’re not some recognisable breed. We are human beings. If we’re not out of the ordinary, it’s because we’re fighting to mask our real selves. We’re holding back and holding in. It’s a lot of effort. What’s a lot more effort, though, is the work Mum did and does still, so light-heartedly. She tells us it’s because she knows. She knows the confusion. That’s why she and Dad will be doing the worrying about moving, and why Mum will be doing all the planning and mind- mapping, and will somehow know how everything fits together. I’m lucky, very lucky.

Many people accuse me of ‘not looking autistic’. I have no idea what that means. I know lots of ‘autistics’ and we all look different. We’re not some recognisable breed. We are human beings.

Saturday, 9 June
The day is glorious. It’s summer weather, I have a new Undertones T-shirt (the ‘My Perfect Cousin’ one) and I feel good wearing it. I don’t know why I love T-shirts with some part of me brandished on them. Maybe it’s because it will either scare people away or start a conversation without me having to do anything. Well, either way, that hasn’t happened yet!

We arrive at the first house for viewing and Mum hates it, I can tell. I don’t like it either. Everything about it is squashed, though we can see the Mourne Mountains from upstairs. The second house is much better but needs a lot of work – the views are extraordinary. Neither of them lights a fire in anyone’s belly, though, so that’s it for today, thankfully. And because it’s still morning we’re going to explore the Castlewellan Forest Park, a government-owned forest with native woods, conifer plantation and red kites. It even has a lake and a mountain path. Lorcan and Bláthnaid have already been but it’s a first for me. It’s so beautiful. I feel a swell of anticipation – if we move here we could live beside a forest. We could be near trees! We might not be crammed in by suburbia anymore. I could ride my bike without worrying about cars.

You see, this is a big deal for us kids. We can’t access nature the way my parents’ generation could. Our exposure to wildlife and wild places has been robbed by modernity and ‘progress’. Our pathways for exploration have been severed by development and roads and pollution. Seriously, you take your life into your own hands if you choose to cycle anywhere in Enniskillen. The roads are congested, busy and unfriendly, especially if, like me, you want to stop and stare. We always have to travel to forest parks or nature reserves for our dose, returning to the starkness of concrete and manicured lawns. To think we could live beside a forest!

The thought keeps echoing and I feel euphoric, almost delirious. We all feel it in the glow of the sun with swallows, house martins and swifts above us, dancing everywhere. So many. I’ve never seen so many all at once. Not all three together. It’s heady and intense. We’re all springing, bouncing off one another with sideway glances and controlled smiles. Hoping and holding it all in.

We find a peace maze in the park, created after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. It has 6,000 yew trees and was planted by 5,000 school children and others from the nearby community. We rage through it until we come to a rope bridge. I stop and get out my binoculars: red kites, three of them, wheeling and soaring, ascending, dropping right over our heads. It’s staggering. We gawp at the sky and you can feel our family agreement travelling through us, silently: this might be a good place to live.

Exhausted after the long drive and the day’s events, we head back to Granny’s house in Warrenpoint, where we’re staying tonight. My Granny Elsie has amazing views from her back garden. We can see Carlingford Lough and the Mournes and the Cooley Mountains. Every day looks different there, with subtle changes of colour or the way the clouds sit then disperse on the mountains. Today, the sparrows are chattering and the sun is still high. We decide we need another walk along the beach before we get dinner.

We do a beach clean as we go, but not too much today, which gives us plenty of time for exploring. Lorcan has the best find of the day: a cuttlefish bone smoothed by the sea, silk-soft. The bones, which are not really bones at all but a shell, are usually from the females who die a few weeks after breeding, and the dead cephalopods’ skeletons are later washed up on the beach. Lorcan’s find has the kind of piddock holes that we normally see in soft rocks and clays, and there still seems to be life inside them so we carry it back to the sea before it dries out. We find another, bone-dry, which we bring back to Granny Elsie’s.

Later that night, in the darkness, sharing a room with Lorcan, we talk about the move in hushed tones and excitement, until we both sink like stones into sleep.

Excerpted from Diary of a Young Naturalist. Published by Milkweed Editions.

***

Dara McAnulty is the author Diary of a Young Naturalist, forthcoming in Spring 2021. He is the recipient of the Wainwright Prize for nature writing. Dara lives with his mum, dad, brother Lorcan, sister Bláthnaid and rescue greyhound Rosie in County Down, Northern Ireland. Dara’s love for nature, his activism and his honesty about autism, has earned him a huge social media following from across the world and many accolades: in 2017 he was awarded BBC Springwatch ‘Unsprung Hero’ Award and Birdwatch magazine ‘Local Hero’; in 2018 he was awarded ‘Animal Hero’ of the year by the Daily Mirror and became ambassador for RSPCA and the iWill campaign; in 2019 he became a Young Ambassador for the Jane Goodall Institute and became the youngest ever recipient of the RSPB Medal for conservation.

You Robbie, You Baka

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Brian Trapp| Longreads | April 2021 | 26 minutes (7,917 words)

 

At the request of the families involved, some names in this essay have been changed to protect privacy. It includes depictions of bullying and cruelty and contains language that some people may find upsetting.

***

When I first saw him, I thought for a second that it was my twin brother sitting in his wheelchair. It was the beginning of sixth grade, and I was on the dirty gym floor trying not to hyperventilate. I had just moved from a small Catholic school in Baltimore with a class of 25 gentle Christians to a large public school outside Cleveland, and our whole class was crammed into the gym for orientation. 

I spent the summer of 1994 studying MTV with my older sister, taking precise notes on how to be cool, and came that first day armed with a binder covered in band names written in black Sharpie: Mazzy Star, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Belly, Nirvana, The Crash Test Dummies. Never mind that I was thigh-chafingly fat and had boats for feet, wore surfing shirts hundreds of miles from any kind of ocean, and covered my bedroom in puppy centerfolds cut out from Dog Fancy magazine — I knew the names of cool bands, as if I could just walk up to a kid with a skateboard, whisper “Green Day,” and get invited to his house. 

Then, across the gym, I saw him sitting up high in his wheelchair, his wrists curved down like a praying mantis, his body stiff with cerebral palsy. He was skinny with choppy brown hair, his mouth pinched into a nervous grimace with an occasional smile. Just like my twin.

I’d hoped in the move that Danny and I could finally go to the same school, that I could give him wheelies down the halls, slip him high fives in between classes, use his dimpled smile to attract girls, and listen to him laugh when someone got in trouble. We could ride the bus together and play our call-and-response, where my brother heckled me with his version of my name and I gave it right back: “I-an! Danny! I-an! Danny!” I knew twins sometimes switched places and went to each other’s classes, waiting to see who’d notice the difference. With his severe cerebral palsy and bone-thin frame, no one would ever mistake Danny for me, though it would’ve been fun to try. I at least wanted my twin to be in the same building instead of an absence I always had to explain. But Danny — who in addition to CP had intellectual disabilities, was legally blind, and could only say 12 words — was deemed too disabled to be accommodated at my school, and was bused to a larger special ed program 30 minutes away.

So perhaps, in the gym, I was missing my twin and shocked to see this stranger where I wanted my brother to be. His name was Robbie Baka. I introduced myself and said “hi” to him a few times in the halls. Maybe I didn’t need the bands. Maybe, through my brother, I had found my first friend.

***

Initially, I thought Robbie was like my brother but upgraded. While their bodies shared a similar spastic choreography, Robbie could fully control his head, which he used to nimbly toggle his power chair around corners and down ramps, dodging classmates and desks as he navigated the middle school. While my brother was limited to “eh” for “yes,” “eh-eh” for “no,” and several people’s names, Robbie was fully verbal, and spoke with a squeaky voice grounded in his sinuses. My brother was almost all vowels, but Robbie could fit his mouth around every consonant, every “ch,” “sh,” “f.” My brother revealed his intelligence through the jokes he would laugh at or a well-timed “eh-eh!” but couldn’t, for instance, read a sentence or solve a math problem. Meanwhile, Robbie was in mainstream classes — he needed his aide to write and take notes, but he completed the same book reports and took the same tests as I did.

But I quickly learned Robbie was not cool. In the hallways, he sang Disney songs at the top of his lungs, belting out in his gratingly high voice “A Whole New World” from Aladdin. He lapsed into revelry with The Lion King’s “Hakuna Matata.” If he got started on The Little Mermaid’s “Under the Sea,” he would not stop. Then he’d somehow raise that voice an octave higher, and imitate his hero: “Whoo-hoo! Hey guys. It’s me, Mickey Mouse! Whoo-hoo!” If all that wasn’t awful enough, he was also a narc. He told on kids for saying bad words and throwing pencils into the ceiling. In his annoying nasal voice, he’d say, “Mrs. Schoffer, Nate threw a pencil!” Or he’d whisper to his aide, who passed up the intel to the teacher, a game of narc telephone. In the hallways, he drove recklessly, and would run over people’s feet without so much as a “sorry.” In choir, he shout-sang every song, ruining whatever harmony we had. And in history class, he’d derail the lesson to ask stupid questions: “Are there a lot of forests in China?” Sometimes his aide would raise her hand, and he wouldn’t even ask a question, saying, “Oh. Um. I forgot.” Only later did I realize that he was playing the heel, that he knew people like me thought he was annoying, and he wanted to annoy us even more. He wanted to run over our feet.

Robbie was one of the few physically diverse students at our school. In our grade of 130, there was one Egyptian, one Asian, and two Hispanics. Our only Black kid was adopted and swore he was Sicilian. Otherwise, it was an able-bodied white-out. Did I like thinking that the only visibly disabled kid in my school was insufferable? No. I wanted him to be as charming and funny as my brother but with all the words, to be one of the cool and witty crips you see on television nowadays: Speechless’ J.J., Special’s Ryan, or even that wheezy best friend from Malcolm in the Middle. But back then, they were not on television, and every time Robbie opened his mouth, I gritted my teeth.

Part of me hated Robbie for his abilities. What my brother could do with those functioning eyes, that coordinated mouth, that agile head. I rarely wished I had a “normal” brother. What I wanted were more opportunities for my actual brother to express himself: to drive his wheelchair where he wanted, to say, “Hey asshole. Shut up.” If Danny were like Robbie, he would just be more of himself. But what did Robbie do with his abilities? He was a rolling advertisement for Walt Disney. 

And part of me hated Robbie because I was terrified about my own social status. I barely talked that first year. A girl in my class nicknamed me “the silent dude.” If I was his friend, I would have to eat lunch with him and the kid who reeked, the boy who talked to himself and still played with Power Rangers, or the girl who got bit in the face by a horse. He was a dark star of unpopularity, drawing losers into his orbit. Contact with Robbie risked revealing the real me: the Brian with puppy centerfolds.

But no matter how much I hated Robbie, the cool kids hated him even more. Mostly, they ignored him, as if to say, Are you still here? Though sometimes the boys mocked him behind his back, strangling their vocal cords into high-pitched imitations and chopping their hands spastically against their chests. When he was alone on the bus, they bounced erasers and spitballs off his face. They wondered aloud whether, in addition to helping him urinate, his aide also helped him whack off.

At my Catholic grade school, when my friend said “retard,” I told him to stop. I told my mother, who told his mother, and then my friend called me sobbing to apologize. But here, “retard” was everywhere: “Why are you such a retard?” “God, are you retarded?” “You retarded retard.” “You el-retardo.” My generation loved the word “retarded,” using it as a catch-all for anything bad. It was the bottom. It was the worst thing you could be. And it was so fun to say. Maybe we liked how it rolled off the tongue: Curve back and then three quick taps on the roof of your mouth —  re-tar-ded. You could cut it up, remix it: Tarded. Tard. Re-re. Fuck-tard. At my new school, they said it so much that I got tired. I let it happen. I was the silent dude.

But here, “retard” was also Robbie. They made it personal. They said to each other: “You stupid Robbie. You’re such a fucking Baka.” In a twist of the penis game, they’d have competitions to see who could yell “Baka!” the loudest in a crowded room. “Baka! Robbie Baka!!!” In the end, I was relieved my brother wasn’t here. I didn’t want to find out what they’d do with his name. 

“Stop,” I said. “Don’t.” I defended Robbie from the worst of the bullying, but I would not beat up Jim for a thrown eraser or punch Phil for saying “you fucking Baka” every other sentence. I would not fight for him. Because even I found him annoying. If he were my brother, I reasoned, I would make them stop. If he were my brother, I would kill these kids. But he was not my brother.

***

In seventh grade, I brought a Sunny Delight bottle to lunch half-filled with vodka and finally made some friends. They were into cool bands, were in cool bands. We took guitar lessons together. We shared CDs. We smoked cigarettes. We smoked pot cut with pine needles. We slept over at each other’s houses and skimmed our parents’ hard liquor into foul brown tinctures we sipped from Schweppes bottles. 

If he were my brother, I reasoned, I would make them stop. If he were my brother, I would kill these kids. But he was not my brother.

They did not make fun of Robbie. They just felt bad for him. When they met my brother, I was terrified about what they’d think. Would they concentrate on his crossed eyes, his tight and wispy arms, his bony knees, his pastel dog-paw bib, the cavernous gape of his mouth, the string of drool rappelling down his chin? Would they think: Retard. Re-tar-ded. Or would they wait to discover the person in there who laughed when you burped or said the word “bathroom,” who flirted with their mothers, who heckled me with his version of my name: “I-an!”

They were nervous. “Hi,” they said. “Does he shake hands?” They picked up his stiff fist as if it would break. 

My brother, shy at first, flashed them a smile. They smiled back. “Yeah,” they said, breathy with relief. “What’s up, Danny?”

When we were alone in the basement, they asked me questions: What happened to him? Will he ever get better? Can he not talk at all? How much does he understand? How does he go to the bathroom? Do you have to change his diapers? 

With our pool table and my mother’s apple cake, my house became the preferred sleepover destination, and their curiosity developed into acceptance. I’d carry my brother down into the basement, where he’d lie on the couch and listen to us make fun of each other. When they’d catch him laughing, they’d say, “See, even Danny thinks you’re a little bitch.” 

They’d use him to rib me: “Danny, how can you stand your little brother?” and Danny would respond, “I-an!” like I have no idea.

“Oh shit,” they’d say. “He’s making fun of you.” 

We’d play with his adaptive equipment. We took turns torturing each other in his electric hospital bed, jacking up both head and feet, folding our victims into pretzels. We put each other in his Hoyer lift, the small portable crane my parents used to lift him, which held us six feet aloft in its netting and made us vulnerable to kidney shots from below. We convinced one of our friends that Danny’s Hoyer could understand English and would move up for “yes” and down for “no,” hiding the switch behind our backs. The Hoyer moved up and agreed. It thought our friend was a “fag.” When one of us bragged that he could escape from anything, we duct-taped him to Danny’s wheelchair and parked Houdini screaming in the middle of the road. Through it all, Danny smiled and laughed.

They did not treat him like Robbie. They said, “What’s up, Danny? You player. You pimp. You ladies’ man. Dan, you’re the man. Dan the man.” I felt proud to be his twin brother.


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***

While my friends seemed to accept Danny, my other classmates still called each other “retard” and “Baka.” I pretended it didn’t bother me but I held so much anger inside my body. I started taking kung fu lessons. I replaced the puppy centerfolds with pictures of bald and fierce Shaolin monks crouched with spears. I bought a heavy bag and punched the skin off my knuckles. In kung fu class, my classmates said, “It’s like you want to kill somebody.”

They were right. While training after school in my basement, this was my recurrent fantasy: I am pushing my brother at a high school football game, and we walk where the middle schoolers cluster and gossip below the bleachers. I push my brother past the boys who torment Robbie and they say the usual: “You fucking Baka.” But this time, they say it to my brother. 

Cue the violins. “What did you say?” I drawl, readying my fighting stance, tightening my grip on Danny’s wheelchair handles. I’m a pudgy David Carradine. “Say it again,” I say. “See what happens.” 

They surround us, and they say it: “You retards. You fucking Bakas.”

Techno music. My opening salvo: Launch a flying double-side kick from Danny’s wheelchair handles, followed by tipping his chair back for a “footrest of fury.” Then I step out from behind Danny’s wheelchair to snap-kick their knees, to upper-cut their ribs, to crescent-kick their temples, to dragon strike their faces (palm smashing nose into the brain, fingers raking eyes).

When they’re rolling on the ground, writhing in pain, when they know they’ve lost, the last one standing lunges for my brother, and I stop him with a flying kick to the solar plexus and grind my foot into the back of his neck until I hear his bones click. If they survive, they won’t even be mainstreamed like Robbie. They’ll be bused out with my brother, and somewhere in the back of their brain-damaged minds, they’ll be sorry. 

Then I’d come upstairs covered in sweat and chug a glass of milk, my real brother safe in his wheelchair with no idea how many classmates I’d just murdered for him.

***

In eighth grade, my friends and I started a band, with me as the lead singer. My voice was too high and I got kicked out. No hard feelings. We traded copies of Penthouse and porno tapes, wishing that actual girls would let us touch them. We smoked better pot without pine needles. We got older siblings to buy us beer with fake IDs. We snorted Ritalin in the library. We wore hemp necklaces and cargo shorts. We played hacky sack in the middle of town, where we spat and smoked and slouched. We participated in zero extracurricular activities and declared so many things “gay.” When we grew tired of being cool, we escaped into my basement and pretended to be Jedi knights with pool-stick lightsabers.

When my friends slept over on the weekends, they marveled at Danny’s new augmentative communication device, which looked like a chunky proto-iPad. A small speaker on his headrest whispered phrases into his ear and he chose his option by clicking a switch with his wrist. The computer announced in a scary robot voice: “My bro-ther Bri-an is an id-i-ot.” My friends cheered.

But sometimes at school, my violence would squeak out. Once, in the gym, I watched sixth graders pour through the doorway as Robbie and his aide waited for someone to let them outside for recess. “Excuse us,” the aide said. “Please.” No one would stop. 

“Wait,” I said. “Wait!” And still they streamed through. Finally, I stepped into the doorway and hockey-checked a boy onto the ground. The line halted. He stared up at me with tears welling in his eyes. “Why?” he asked. “Asshole!”

Robbie’s aide shook her head. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said.

Yes, I did.

One day at lunch, at the beginning of ninth grade, my friends stared across the cafeteria at Robbie eating Mexican pizza. They watched as Robbie’s aide fed him cut-up bites with a fork, Robbie’s mouth clumsily masticating as the pizza fell onto the napkin stuffed into his shirt. They watched Robbie as he coughed, as his face bloomed red and he struggled to breathe, as he took long swigs from his giant water bottle. 

“Ugh,” one of them said. “Can you imagine what it’s like to be Robbie?”

“I know. You can’t even hold your dick to piss.”

“To never whack off?” said another. “Or touch a girl?”

I got quiet and still. Another friend shook his head: “Dude, I can’t imagine.”

“Someone has to take you to the bathroom? You can’t even wipe your own ass. I mean, look at her feeding him. Fuck.”

“Yeah, I can’t imagine,” said another friend. They all shook their heads, united in this not imagining. My fist clenched. My stomach knotted. But I was silent.

“If I was like that,” my friend said, “I’d kill myself. I’d blow my fucking brains out.”

They all shook their heads in agreement. It was only now that I slammed my fist on the table. “Stop,” I said. “Shut up.”

I stood. “You say that about him, you say that about my brother.”

“Come on,” they said. “We’re not talking about Danny. Don’t be so dramatic.”

These boys didn’t yell “Robbie” in a crowded room. They were my best friends, kids who’d slept over my house every other weekend, who called my twin “Dan the man” and made him smile by whispering in his ear that his brother was a “pussy.” They stayed for dinner and watched my mother feed my brother the exact same way Robbie’s aide was feeding him now, and when my brother coughed food into their faces, they’d yell, “Dan, you got me!” while my brother laughed. They’d watched with curiosity as I changed his diaper and fed him ground-up pills suspended in a cloud of apple sauce. They’d sat in the soft foam of his wheelchair, tried it out on their own bodies, and competed to see who could do the longest wheelie. I thought these were moments of play, of joy, but now I knew what they were really thinking: If I were like you, I’d kill myself.

Standing there, I wanted to flip over their lunch trays and bash in their heads. I wanted to punch their throats, rake their eyes, break their necks. But most of all, I wanted to run away and cry in the bathroom, to find new friends who wouldn’t say such awful things, who wouldn’t even imagine them.

“You are,” I choked out. “You’re talking about my brother.”

Their faces softened. They looked down into the tortured landscapes of their Mexican pizzas. “Alright,” they said. “Sorry. Now sit down.”

What did I think would happen if I walked away? If I went to sit with Robbie? What kind of adolescent hell did I imagine for myself? It is so difficult at that age to picture yourself cast out from the group. You cling so desperately to that “we” no matter what it costs. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be back in that silent year, that lonely and singular “I” on that dirty gym floor, awkward and alone with my binder of cool bands.

So I sat down. I wasn’t dramatic. We moved on. The next time someone said “retard,” I didn’t even flinch. I said it myself.

You retard. You Robbie. You Baka. You brother. You twin.

***

The rest of high school was both better and worse for Robbie. His bullies grew less cruel or more sophisticated in their cruelty: They mostly just ignored him. But if kids no longer yelled “Baka!” or threw spitballs at his head, he also grew more isolated. His middle school friends matriculated to the more diversified subcultures of high school: the goths, the freaks, the math nerds. His parents stopped throwing him birthday parties after freshman year when only three kids showed up. Sometimes the only person sitting with Robbie at lunch was his aide. And Robbie struggled with the more advanced classes and needed increased accommodations, doing subjects like math entirely in the resource room with the special ed teacher. While no genius myself, I was on the pre-college track. We rarely had a class together.

He still loved to sing, but had trouble with the increased rigor of high school choir. He struggled to learn and pronounce the songs sung in Latin and Italian, though when they started to practice “Candle on the Water” from Disney’s Pete’s Dragon, he already knew every word by heart. The more serious singers resented Robbie for his off-key voice, how he seemed to shout-squawk the lyrics, how in their beautiful wall of sound there was always the crack of his voice. He held them back. When they traveled to state-wide competitions, they were thankful that Robbie stayed home.

They’d sat in the soft foam of his wheelchair, tried it out on their own bodies, and competed to see who could do the longest wheelie. I thought these were moments of play, of joy, but now I knew what they were really thinking: If I were like you, I’d kill myself.

One class I did have with him was 11th-grade drama, where I saw a different side of Robbie. There was a lip-synching assignment, which Robbie refused to fake. He sang “Daydream Believer” by The Monkees, his body exuberant as he spun and writhed around the stage to the beat. For the monologue assignment, he inhabited Hamlet in the famous “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy, which he performed in a low strangled rasp that gave the words a doomed weight: “Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered … .” During improv scenes, he couldn’t stop laughing. He seemed so happy to be performing. On stage, he was comfortable with himself in a way that I envied. Didn’t he know what people might think?

He once told a friend that he loved choir and theater because he liked to express himself; he liked pretending to be someone else for a while. Sure. But I suspect Robbie also liked inviting the audience’s eyes onto his body. When so many people either ignored him or stared at him against his will, up on stage he sanctioned that stare. Elevated and under lights, he was impossible to ignore. He invited us to look and listen, translating the characters into his own choreography. In the able-bodied white-out of our small town, here was his disabled body inhabiting our heroes. Here was the song in his mouth, no matter how much he mangled it, and no, mean girl, he would not shut up.

***

Our senior year, I got my wish. My twin brother finally came to school with me. For the past three years, he’d attended Rosemary Center, a specialized school in Cleveland for severely disabled students, but his teachers worried he wasn’t getting enough opportunities to work on his social skills. So for the first two periods of the day, he’d come to my high school for commons and choir, and then they’d bus him back to Rosemary Center in time for lunch. 

I developed spidey-sense. When he was in the building and I wasn’t with him, I tingled. I was a tuning fork for danger. I wondered: As his aide pushed him through the hallway, would the high schoolers whisper: Retard. Re-tar-ded. Would they imitate his moan? Would they chop their hands against their chests? Would they call each other, “You Danny. You fucking Trapp”? Would they take one look at him and think: If I were like you, I’d kill myself. I knew what my classmates had said about Robbie, and how easily their words could ricochet off his body and onto my brother’s, though I don’t think my brother threatened them the way Robbie did. Robbie was too close to normal — he dared to occupy their same space.

The tingle lessened when Danny was with me in commons, the free period in the cafeteria dedicated to socializing and homework. Robbie was also there but mostly sat in the front of the room, parked with his aide who loved to gossip with other teachers. He would always cheerfully greet my brother: “Hello, Mister Trapp. How are you this morning?” He was so nice and upbeat. He spouted inspirational quotes: “You can do it if you try!” At age 18, he still loved Disney, singing The Lion King songs and imitating Mickey Mouse, if a little less often. He told the kind of jokes found on popsicle sticks. I no longer thought Robbie was annoying. He just seemed immature.

We’d talk for a moment. My brother must have known Robbie was like him; he must’ve heard the spastic warble of his voice, saw with his limited vision the blurry outline of Robbie’s wheelchair. And Danny was the only student in a wheelchair Robbie would see all day. What would’ve happened if I’d let my brother linger? Would Robbie have become his friend? Maybe my brother would’ve liked Robbie’s popsicle stick jokes. Maybe the jokes were just an act, Robbie’s warm-up before he got to the dirtier ones, which Danny would’ve certainly liked. Maybe Danny would’ve called him “Eddie,” the name he gave to all his good male friends.

I didn’t give them a chance. Instead, I pushed Danny past him, into the senior lounge where we’d hang out with my friends in a carpeted corner with couches. Danny brought his Dynavox, his upgraded augmentative communication device. Like the old one, it scanned pre-programmed options across a plastic screen, but when Danny clicked, instead of the scary robot voice, it was me. Technology had improved so much that I could record his options into his computer, giving him my voice.

We asked, “Where’s the party at?”

We sang blues lyrics: “I want one bourbon, one scotch, and one beer.” 

We said, “Shit.”

My classmates gathered around, astonished at my foul-mouthed voice coming from his machine, my brother smiling from his wheelchair with his wrist cocked and ready to click another. 

From the computer, we said, “What’s up, bitches?” 

We said, “Hey girl, can I get your number?” 

We said, “Hey Thompson, you’re a fuck-face.” 

They howled with laughter. Even Ben Stanley, who had loved yelling “Baka” in a crowded room four years before, smiled at Danny. “That’s so bomb,” he said to my brother, and then to me: “You are such a badass.”

“Me?” I asked. “Why? My brother said it.”

“Right,” he said and winked.

But one day we got too close to Robbie and his aide, and my brother clicked, “Steve Cooper sucks balls.” 

Robbie rocked with laughter and said, “Mister Trapp, did you just say what I think you said?”

His aide shook her head. “Come on,” she said to me. “That’s not appropriate.”

“What?” I said. “Danny said it.”

She smiled at my gambit. “I see what you’re doing there.”

My brother laughed, knowing we were getting away with something. We were in trouble at school together like true twins.

But eventually, Danny’s speech therapist discovered our page, and we were busted. Our mother made us erase the most explicit options. From then on, she would monitor my additions. A year later, they erased me completely.

At 17, I had literally given my brother a voice, imagining what he would want to say. I knew my brother mostly through translation. Read his body language, listen to the tone of his “I-an,” analyze the context, and guess what he was thinking as “eh” or “eh-eh” options: “Do you want a milkshake? Are you mad at me? Are you sick of this song? Eh or eh-eh?” Through his Dynavox, I could finally lay down the tracks of his personality, and all he had to do was click himself into existence. 

And what did I do with this awesome power? I made Danny into a crude, potty-mouthed cartoon of a teenager, a mirror of my own ID. I programmed his computer to say “bitch” and “fag” without thinking about their relationship to the word “retard.” I’m not even sure my brother always knew what he was saying through the machine, though he certainly enjoyed his audience’s reactions. 

I knew what my classmates had said about Robbie, and how easily their words could ricochet off his body and onto my brother’s, though I don’t think my brother threatened them the way Robbie did. Robbie was too close to normal — he dared to occupy their same space.

For years, I’ve regretted that I treated giving my twin brother a voice as just another joke. But now I see what I did as a reaction to Robbie. I wanted Danny to be a counterbalance against Robbie’s cheerful Pollyanna personality, his squeaky-clean Disney songs, and his Mickey Mouse impressions. I wanted Danny to be funny and subversive. I wanted him to shock those who would pity him. I wanted my classmates to hear a disabled person say “fuck” and “shit” and “shut up, asshole.” I wanted him to make fun of them. And no matter what Danny really wanted to say, he obliged me. He clicked my version of himself out into the world.

In the end, we played the twin trick. We traded places and waited for them to notice. But to this day, I’m not quite sure if they mistook me for him or him for me.

And yet, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t keep Robbie and Danny apart. After commons, Danny joined Robbie in choir without me, adding his moans to Robbie’s squawks. Together they sang a duet against that beautiful wall of sound. 

***

After we graduated, I lost track of Robbie. I assumed he’d follow the path of most people at our high school: off to college, someplace like Wright State, an accessible campus with ramps and lifts, elevators and attendants where Ohio funneled its disabled students. I expected him to at least continue down the mainstream, for him to find gainful employment someplace with that agile head and coordinated mouth, where his coworkers would enjoy his cheerful presence but secretly wish he’d cool it with the Mickey Mouse impressions. I expected him to have a very different future than my brother, who aged out of the school system and moved on to a day program for people with disabilities at United Cerebral Palsy (UCP) in downtown Cleveland. 

On Christmas break my senior year of college, I went to UCP to visit my brother. In the workroom, among the line of people in wheelchairs, there was Robbie. He was still skinny but now had a buzz cut and stubble on his chin. “Well, hello there, Mr. Trapp!” His body seized in excitement, his arms clenching down. His voice was still grounded in his sinuses but it seemed a bit lower. He had become a man, just as I had. On a long white table were scraps of wood, plastic boxes with nails, screws, and containers of glue. There was a stack of square boards, each with a hole in the middle. They were packaging boxes for birdhouses. 

My mother had mentioned that Robbie was at UCP with my brother, that they actually rode together on the bus, but it was hard to believe. Wasn’t there something more he could do? They were both part of UCP’s sheltered workshop. They did “piece-work,” an absurd parody of work. Instead of earning a set wage, workers are paid “by the piece,” a salary commensurate with their productivity when compared to a “normal worker.” My brother, for instance, would click a hand switch that activated a paper shredder. At the end of the month, they’d mail him a check for 45 cents — negative 90 cents when you factor in the cost of postage and mileage for driving to the bank to cash the check. My mother asked UCP, “Can’t you just keep it?” They could not. 

Certainly, Robbie could make a better living somewhere in the community. Certainly, he could make minimum wage. He had been in the same classes as I was. What did he learn — why endure all the mocking and isolation — if he was just going to end up in the same place as my brother? Surely our high school had prepared Robbie for a different kind of life.

No, my mother said. Robbie had significant learning disabilities. He had health problems — asthma and gastrological issues — so here he was packaging birdhouses with my brother.

Robbie said he liked it here. “They treat me pretty good. Everyone is super nice.”

“I wouldn’t go that far, Robbie Rob!” someone else said from his wheelchair, and they all laughed.

Robbie squealed and said, “Don’t start!” He turned back to me. “And your brother has become a good friend.”

“That’s great, man,” I said. “I’m glad you’re doing well, Rob.” I shook his hand and went to the next room to visit Danny.

***

That spring, to save money, UCP contracted with a cheaper bus company. The bus was late. The bus broke down on the highway. The new bus driver barely talked to Danny or Robbie. A mouth breather, my mother said. He often called in sick, and then they’d send a substitute driver who breathed even more from his mouth. When the bus got a hole in its roof, they didn’t fix it. Once, when it was raining, my mother opened the door of the bus to find Robbie with a tarp draped over his head like he was a piece of furniture. Robbie was good-natured about it, but my mother complained: “You’ve got to be kidding me. Here’s a kid with health problems and you put a tarp over him?” They fixed the bus but not the drivers.

I wanted my classmates to hear a disabled person say “fuck” and “shit” and “shut up, asshole.” I wanted him to make fun of them. And no matter what Danny really wanted to say, he obliged me. He clicked my version of himself out into the world.

I was three hours away on the other side of the state, in my last term of college. If I felt the twin tingle, if I sensed my brother was in danger that afternoon, I mistook it for an overdose of caffeine.

The bus driver pulled into the UCP parking lot to take my brother and Robbie home. I know almost nothing about this man, just what my mother told me: that he was skinny and quiet and in his forties. I know he was polite to her but wouldn’t talk to my brother. I know he worked for a company that paid him the least it possibly could. 

When I imagine him that day, I see him drive into the UCP parking lot, past the brick columns at the front of the building. He’s wearing the bus company polo shirt, the insignia that his friends make fun of at the bar after his shifts, before his shifts. His life has not gone the way he wanted. Like all of us, he was once a child and briefly beautiful but now finds himself driving this bus, making chicken scratch working for the only company that would hire him, so bored with loading the cripples on-and-off, on-and-off, while their mothers eye him suspiciously from the lawns of their nice houses. Maybe on his good days, he makes the best of it: He has a picture of his favorite niece dangling from the rearview mirror; he blasts Fleetwood Mac from the blown-out speakers and taps out beats on the steering wheel; he sometimes turns to classical and practices deep breathing.

But today is not a good day. How much does he drink before he picks them up? He gets blitzed in the neighborhood on his buddy’s porch, passing a bottle back and forth as the bus idles on the curb. Or he drinks in a corner bar, trading stories and shots of whiskey and cheap tall-boys. Wherever he is, he stands up and is drunker than he meant to get but cannot be late again. Maybe he’s battled addiction his whole life and cannot have just one even though he’d like to be a responsible custodian of these vulnerable people. Or maybe he thinks: I don’t have to be sober for this. Look who I’m driving? If we get in an accident, it would be a mercy. If I was like that, I’d … .

He stops the bus in front of the one in the power chair, who is running his mouth, as usual, talking to the other one, who stares blankly into space. They have that pretty aide behind them. He puts the bus in park. As he makes his way to the back, the aide opens the side door, and he stares at her through the metal grate of the lift platform. He feels like he’s in a cage. The hydraulic motor whirs as the platform lowers down perpendicular to his feet. No more hiding. He steadies himself. She won’t notice. “How you doing, sweet thing?” he asks. He has never called her that before. Too far? Or not far enough? She glares at him and pretends not to hear. “Damn. No offense,” he says and laughs. 

The platform lowers down to the blacktop, its lip curling flat, and the boy with the big head and the powerchair loads first, backing himself onto the platform. Robbie Rob, they call him. The aide buckles the belt, and clicks the switch to raise him to the bus floor. He shoves the chair into its space, fetches the Q-tie-downs, and straps him in. God, he hopes the kid doesn’t start singing those Disney songs. It’s too much for a man to listen to for 35 minutes. The kid continues talking endlessly to the other one, who, as far as the driver has seen, is like talking to a pile of meat. But sometimes when he glances back in the rearview, they look like twins.

The aide eyes him suspiciously like those mothers on their lawns. OK. On his best behavior. He’s not that drunk. He stands up straight. The quiet one with the bitch of a mom who got him in trouble for the tarp is already on the lift, waiting. He walks to the boy and pulls him in. “Come on, buddy,” he says. It’s easier today. It’s easier like this.

After he straps the boy to the floor, he climbs down the front steps to sign the pickup sheet. Maybe it’s here where he stumbles. Maybe his eyes are too heavy, his cheeks too flushed. Or maybe the aide has seen the signs this whole time: the swaying in the doorway, taking too long to strap in her clients, the “sweet thing” come-on and jovial laughing, the tell-tale slur. Before this, she’d worked as a bartender and knows what to look for in a drunk. She knows how to defuse his demands for another, how to call him a cab, but she’s at a loss on what to do when he wants to drive her two disabled clients half an hour into the suburbs. Now that he is ground-level, she gets a good look and is sure. She can smell it. “You’re drunk,” she says.

He laughs. “What’re you talking about?”

“You’re drunk,” she says again. “Wait right there.” She turns and runs inside the building to get help.

It’s easier today. He climbs back in the bus, slides the door shut, and fires up the engine. She comes back out and screams “Stop! Call the police!” He hits the gas and guns it out of the parking lot, the wheels screeching as he lurches right onto 101st Street. But it’s only a block to the stoplight on Euclid where the cars stream past one-way, and in the rear view he sees UCP staff members sprinting down the sidewalk, closing in. He lays on the horn and nudges the bus out into the lane. An SUV swerves and honks, nearly clipping his bumper, but the cars behind it brake and beep as he pulls the bus into the lane. There. Thank God. He drives straight, his hands at ten-and-two. He watches the UCP polo shirts grow tiny. He’s done it. He’s gotten away. Easy.

Except Robbie Rob, the one in the power chair, will not shut up. He’s been screaming since they left the parking lot. “Stop! You heard her! Stop! Pull over!”

“Quiet back there,” he barks.

“I heard her. You’re drunk! You’re drunk and you’re driving us! You’re drunk driving! Pull this bus over right now!”

The kid is thrashing in his chair, his face turning red. And now the other one starts, his teeth gnashing: “Ehhhh-ahhh-ehhhh.”

“Shhhh,” he tells them both. “That’s enough.”

He stops at the next light. He acts like everything is normal. He’s pointed the wrong way, going deeper into the city, at 95th Street, down in numbers, not up. He’ll have to turn around. He’ll drive the cripples home and pretend it was just a misunderstanding. He will nod to their mothers. They’ll have no idea. 

The light turns green and he hits the gas. “I’m taking you home, fellas. Relax. That woman was crazy.” He looks in the rearview mirror. Robbie Rob isn’t buying it.

“You think we’re idiots? Fuck you! Pull this bus over right now!” 

So the Disney kid can curse. He didn’t think he had it in him. He calls back, “You want to go home, don’t you?” He feels bad about the veiled threat, but that shuts the kid right up. He turns down a side street and goes east down Carnegie Road, finally in the right direction. “Don’t worry, gentlemen,” he says. “I got you.” He’s feeling good again. It’s easy. But then he swerves a little too much into the left lane and the cars honk. He needs to concentrate.

“You bastard!” the one in the powerchair yells. “Pull over right now, you bastard! Let us off!” The driver grits his teeth. That voice. How can one kid be so annoying? “Stop! Ahhhh!” the kid yells. He will not shut up. He will not give the driver a break.

The kid is yelling so loud that the driver doesn’t notice the sirens. But as Robbie pauses to take a breath, the driver hears the whoop whoop, sees the red and blue flashing in his rear view. “Fuck,” he says. It’s hospital security, the Cleveland Clinic police. They’re not real cops, right? He needs time to think. He could run the lights and speed through the intersections. He could barrel down side streets and ditch the bus in an empty parking lot. He could disappear into the city. And yes, there is a chance he could wreck the bus, that he could smash into another car and end up dead or maimed, not to mention what could happen to his passengers strapped to the floor. Their wheelchairs would not do well with the g-force, their skulls rattling against their headrests. If he overturned the bus, they’d hang from the ceiling like bats.

It could also be so easy. All he needs is to concentrate. All he needs is a little silence. If it was just the other one, the quiet one, he could do it. He could get away.

But the loud one will not shut up. The siren seems to make him worse and he’s thrashing more than ever, practically foaming at the mouth, and now the other one is moaning and for Christ’s sake they will not shut up. That Robbie Rob seizes with rage as he screams: “You bastard! My dad is gonna sue your ass, you bastard!”

And suddenly the driver wakes up to his own life: He is running from the cops in a short bus. He’s very drunk, and he’s kidnapped two disabled men in wheelchairs. And Robbie Rob, so annoying with that nasal voice, is right: He is a bastard. This is what a bastard does, and he is not a bastard. So he slows the bus and pulls off into a side street. He puts the bus in park, raises his hands, and waits.

When the cop opens the door, Robbie is still screaming: “You bastard! You fucking bastard!”

My whole life, I dreamed of protecting my brother. I would be there to put my body in between. I would be there to fight for Danny, to save him. But when my twin brother’s life was truly threatened, when a drunk man was speeding a bus down a Cleveland street with my brother in the back, it was Robbie, not me, who protected him. I cringe to think what would’ve happened if it had been just my moaning brother in the back, with the driver unable to interpret his sounds: What’s happening? Please stop. I’m scared. But there was Robbie being so annoying, yelling in that grating voice grounded in his sinuses, refusing to shut up. It was Robbie who fought for him. It was Robbie who may have saved my twin’s life.

***

When Robbie died five years later, I was away again, this time at grad school. My mother and brother went to his funeral. He’d passed away in his sleep. It felt incomprehensible that Robbie would die before Danny. With those functioning eyes, that coordinated mouth, that agile head, he seemed set up for one long life. But there he was, ashes in an urn. My brother was having his own health problems and my mother felt like she was attending a dress rehearsal for the death of her own son. She was right: My brother would last two more years, until the age of 28, one more year than Robbie’s 27. Now they’re both gone, twins in death, riding that bus together into the unknown.

I wonder, on those long rides home from Cleveland, if my brother ever called him “Eddie,” if he used it to heckle him when Robbie would light into his fourth Disney song that trip, or gush about their cute coworker with the long red hair, or for the second time that week ask him, “How can you tell a vampire has a cold? He starts coffin.” Maybe when I wasn’t watching, Danny learned to fit his mouth around the “r” and the “b” and added another word into his repertoire. I wonder if they passed each other’s names back and forth: Rob-bie. Danny. Rob-bie. Danny.

***

When giving directions, I have heard that instead of saying “hang a right,” the boys who tormented Robbie, now almost middle-aged men, sometimes say, “hang a Robbie,” a cruel artifact from their childhoods, an almost affectionate tribute to their tormentee, who by that time had been dead for almost a decade. After 25 years, his name was still a thrill to say out loud, to map the world with, to drive in its direction.

As I work on this essay, I write Danny’s name. I write Robbie’s too. As I approach the end, I feel terrified, like I’m that lonely and singular “I” again on the dirty gym floor, but instead of my binder of cool bands, I have this essay with their names. I want to retreat into silence again. I wonder what audience I’m writing for, if I’m still holding onto that “we” no matter what it costs. When you read their names, do you pity them? Do you secretly think: Retard. Re-tar-ded. Do you laugh along with my scenes of joy, of play, but really think: “If I was like that, I’d … .” Or can you imagine? Do you have a brother like mine? Do you look like my brother?

You Robbie. You Baka. You Brother. You Twin.

***
Brian Trapp is a fiction and creative nonfiction writer who has published work in the Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, Narrative, Brevity, and Ninth Letter, among other places. He teaches at the University of Oregon, and will be a 2021-2022 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University.

Editor: Carolyn Wells 

Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk

Sensitivity reader: Ian Markauskas

The Fracking Lottery

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

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

Excerpted from Chapter 3: The Fracking Lottery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Breai Mason-Campbell, Simon J. Levien, Paola Capó-García, Emma Gilchrist, and Liam Boylan-Pett.

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1. Seeing in the Dark

Breai Mason-Campbell | Pipe Wrench | April 13, 2021 | 5,129 words

“I have to wear all of these dolls, you see, so that Whiteness does not have to wear any.”

2. The Crimson Klan

Simon J. Levien | The Harvard Crimson | March 25, 2021 | 4616 words

Exploring the history of the Ku Klux Klan’s presence at Harvard University.

3. Making Sense Of It All: High School Poetry in the Age of Zoom

Paola Capó-García | Teachers & Writers Magazine | April 5, 2021 | 2,260 words

“I believe that one of our most important roles as teachers is to provide authentic opportunities for young people to heal.”

4. Genetic Mapping

Emma Gilchrist | Maisonneuve | April 12, 2021 | 6,900 words

“Here’s what I know for sure: I have three fathers who love me. One is my true dad—the man who raised me and has always told me ‘the more people who love you the better.’ One has the softest heart and shares my experience of being adopted. And one feels like a soulmate even though we’ve never met.”

5. Ready

Liam Boylan-Pett | Lope | March 29, 2021 | 2,900 words

“On the start of a cross-country race.”

Genetic Mapping

Longreads Pick

“Here’s what I know for sure: I have three fathers who love me. One is my true dad—the man who raised me and has always told me ‘the more people who love you the better.’ One has the softest heart and shares my experience of being adopted. And one feels like a soulmate even though we’ve never met.”

Source: Maisonneuve
Published: Apr 12, 2021
Length: 27 minutes (6,900 words)