Junk Man Dreams

Steve Wood is an artist, organizer, and Colorado College graduate who founded Concrete Couch, a nonprofit focused on building community through creative art projects in the Pikes Peak region. I spent two afternoons with Steve walking around Concrete Coyote—a community-centered park in Colorado Springs that Steve helped to build. In this piece, I imagine Steve is named “Junk Man,” if only to accentuate his zany, creative, and dream-like qualities. What follows is my interpretation of Steve, his mission, and the Concrete Coyote community of South Royer Street: 

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Junk Man dreams about playing soccer. He wants you to come. He says that in Mexico, people play against the church wall and everyone watches. Junk Man says the old women pinch your cheeks and call you bonito and pequeño.

“Soccer is the universal religion,” says Junk Man. “No—too strong—the universal language. You only need a ball and people.” He craves what he found in Mexico. That is a community. 

For now, just two people pass the ball back and forth in a pen. Junk Man hits the ball against the concrete, sending it skidding along the rugged surface to me. We play in an enclosure tucked in a corner big enough for three on three, outlined in plastic with metal posts and two tiny goals.

Around us is a place called Concrete Coyote: like an education center meets modern art park. It has housing and trails and a river with a bridge. It has pathways and people and, of course, a soccer pit. From the soccer pit, I can see a giant pumpkin, pointy wooden sculptures, and a traditional tea house. Sandwiched between railroad tracks, houses, and grungy auto body shops, Concrete Coyote is like the hippie neighborhood: always friendly, always inviting, but a little out of place.

As we play soccer, our movements are disrupted by the sporadic horn of a train as it passes by. The Junk Man tells me to imagine people playing soccer together. Then, the smell and noise won’t matter. “If you use the small ball and everyone comes, it will be fun,” he says. Suddenly, I’m dreaming about Wednesday night soccer matches on Royer Street. As he talks, I begin breathing in the smell of community bbq, imagining the train’s horn drowned out by the cheering crowd. 

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Hey Junk Man, what's your vision? 

Junk Man dreams about filling the soccer pit with people. Junk Man wants everyone to come and play. Junk Man wants the troublemakers, the cheek-pinching Mexican ladies, the dirt bikers, the “wacky white guys,” the Switchback soccer team players, and the train enthusiasts. Junk Man says it’s worth it if just one person comes. 

Junk Man wants to strengthen the community and he knows there is no playbook. You can study how to build a community for years, but you cannot come in and build a community alone. Junk Man says that community comes from barbecues with unhoused people and bioretention systems and rock sculptures and listening to people’s wants and needs. Junk Man says you don’t need expensive houses, you need tiny homes without leaks and warm fires and, of course, people. 

Beyond the soccer pitch, Concrete Coyote is not just Junk Man’s vision. The people of Royer Street dreamt of a park, and he provided the tools to build it. Junk Man helped build dirt tracks for dirt bikers, tea houses for architecture enthusiasts, and long grass prairies for environmentally-minded girl scouts. 

As we walk around Concrete Coyote with a group of high school students, someone has the idea of a zipline between two ravines. “Sure,” says Junk Man. “We just need some anchors.” “Have you considered vegetable oil cars?” says another student. “I’ll talk to my brother-in-law.” Every idea is a serious inquiry. Concrete Coyote has rock statues and a dinosaur-sized pumpkin. It has a 20-foot sparkling hammer, two tiny houses, traffic cones, and a tea house. That is what happens when you take every idea seriously.

Junk Man wants you to know it’s a community effort. Concrete Coyote only exists because the community showed up to create it. What Junk Man is not telling you is that these five acres of concrete slopes, gravel paths, and community-built sculptures interlock together only because Junk Man figured out how to fit them. Junk Man talks with the train company and the government and the skeptics. He raises money and wakes up early on Saturdays to meet with the community. There’s paint infused in his fingers and covering his car. Junk Man hustles and converses and builds and thinks and never stops moving. 

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If you see the world as art, everything and everyone has potential, there’s little time to talk about yourself. 

Junk Man doesn’t like to talk about himself. You’d never know that he’s traveled to Mexico or that he studies community engagement unless you ask, and even then, you might have to ask twice. Junk Man prefers to disappear into other people’s stories. 

“Not the best craftsmanship,” Junk Man says, pointing to a wooden statue. “But they had fun and learned how to use the tools and plan and create.” Junk Man keeps walking as we pass an overgrown birdhouse. “My friend’s son designed this, he comes up with all these crazy ideas and I just help him.” 

Some people think if you build something, people will come. Junk Man thinks differently. He thinks if they build it, they will come.

Junk Man expects a lot from other people. “Sorry, my coworker isn’t here, she said that she’d come,” Junk Man mentions to me in a moment of exasperation. Then Junk Man sighs, “Lilly manages community meetings and takes care of her sister, it’s her third year on the payroll. But she’s only 18, I keep forgetting.” 

Junk Man knows he wants children to play next to train tracks and girl scouts to use power tools and 18-year-old professionals as coworkers. And it always works out because Junk Man believes in people. 

“Hey Junk Man, remember that time when you listened to the problem child who wanted to build with the cardboard?” asked a woman stopping by. “Remember when everyone thought he was troubled, but he wasn’t so troubled?” Junk Man does not remember. 

If you only give out respect then you’ll only receive positive results and mature responses. 

Junk Man knows a lot about a lot. He uses big words like a “bioretention system,” but then he pauses. It’s not that complicated: “Just trees that absorb water.” Junk Man speaks with an awareness of his education and works to make complex ideas approachable to everyone. Junk Man wants to be approachable.

Junk Man finds people. High schoolers who can’t cut glass, school teachers, government officials, the train lovers and haters. 

If you treat the world with kindness, if you just try to talk to people like humans, they will come. 

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The trains still make a lot of noise as they honk, but Junk Man says that once the trees grow in, you won’t hear them as much. Maybe he can have campouts. “Imagine,” he says. “What the kids will think—s’mores and tents and you won’t hear the train as much.”

Some call Junk Man crazy. He wears wild in the blues of his eyes. His pants hang with splatters of paint, he wears two hats and camouflage gloves. He talks about Lilly and his son and asks you what you think instead of talking about himself. Junk Man makes art but he also does art. He dreams and he creates and he doesn’t need to speak a lot because he does a lot. Junk Man wants you to come and play soccer on Wednesday at 1100 S. Royer St. by the big hammer. Even if you don’t play, it will be fun. 

Living for Jupiter

CW: Suicide and gun violence 

Author’s Note

Alex Ocken and I met last January. I was visiting Tri Lakes Cares, a social services group in Monument, to help my friend Sofie cast for her thesis film. We spoke to many women, mostly working single mothers, and learned about their lives in 15-minute segments. These meetings often felt rushed and shallow, and in many senses they were, but not with Alex. As soon as she started speaking, I was amazed by her warmth and her openness to sharing her life with us, both her triumphs and her traumas. She spoke with such a deep recognition and appreciation of her past but also as if she were an entirely different woman than the one in the stories she shared. I felt like I could listen to her talk for hours, and I soon would. 

Sofie decided to cast Alex, and I decided to write about her. I was in a journalism class on profile writing, and our final assignment was a 2,000-word profile on someone in Colorado Springs. While Sofie was in Utah for Sundance, I started spending a lot of time with Alex: once or twice a week, I would walk to Good Neighbors or Wild Goose (fuck those places though!) and meet her for lunch. Afterward, we’d usually either pick her son Jupiter up from school or head straight to the hospice center in Monument where she worked. Sometimes, we would just drive around and she would tell me stories about the places we passed: the shitty and very racist trailer park she once lived in or the school she chose not to send Jupiter to, each part of her life now a Colorado Springs reference point in my head. I have seven hours of conversations recorded with Alex. During some, I was very reserved, just listening to her share whatever she felt drawn to; others have the tone of two close friends gossiping, my gasps and “you’re KIDDING”s caught on tape. 

To spend this much time with a stranger (even if I only considered her that briefly), especially a stranger as warm, vulnerable, and selfless as Alex, has been one of the most special experiences of my life. I got to know this woman (and her child) so intimately, and that has had a lasting effect on me. We still check in with each other every month or so, and we have hopes of meeting again in Colorado post pandemic. I am endlessly grateful to Alex for her time and her stories. She touched my heart in a lasting way, and I hope that, in reading this piece, she will touch yours too.  

I.

As she lay on her back in the middle of the road, sobbing and praying for a truck to hit her, Alex could hardly remember Florida. The palm trees in her grandparents’ backyard, the sound of stiff grass crunching under bare feet, the places and things she considered home—all of these memories were out of her reach. All she could think about was how much she wanted a truck to just fucking hit her. “You know those days when you wake up and just know it’s going to be a bad day? It was one of those.”

An hour earlier, in the midst of setting up the house for her and Chris’ 10th anniversary, Alex checked Facebook. Brooke’s page was flooded with condolences, RIP posts, and old photos. Alex’s husband Chris was best friends with Caleb, Brooke’s husband, and the four of them were all close. Disoriented and disturbed, she then went to Caleb’s page, only to be greeted by the same things. The world began to spin, her heart began to race. “I started calling everyone, even the people I hated, just to try and figure out what the fuck was happening.” Each voice refused to give her what she needed, most of them saying things like, “I’m sorry, Alex, I can’t be the one to tell you.” When she got through to one of Brooke’s friends, they finally told her. Chris and Brooke had had an affair. Caleb found out, and it was bad. Caleb and Brooke killed themselves. Chris had slept with his best friend’s wife, and Alex didn’t find out for a month—not from Chris, not until it was her anniversary, and not until two people were dead.

In the middle of the road on that cold October night, Alex thought her wish was about to be granted when she saw the lights of a semi-truck hurtling towards her. In that moment, she could hardly remember Jupiter. The bright blue eyes of her then 4-year-old son, the way his laugh could warm a heart, how his tiny hands curled around her finger; all of these things were out of her reach. But the truck stopped before breaking her bones and crushing her heart and freeing her from all the pain she felt in that moment. Instead, an angel appeared to her in the form of a white, skinny, salt-and-pepper-haired trucker, who laid down next to her in the middle of the road. “I begged him to hit me, I was weeping and screaming and he just turned to me and said, ‘Whatever you’re going through isn’t worth your life.’”

II.

Alex Ocken has never been afraid of death. The first time she saw a dead body, she was nine. It was during a brief period of time when Alex was living with her mom in “a shitty fucking apartment​”​ in Queens. New York wasn’t like Florida. The buildings were huge and the streets were crowded and everything was concrete. It didn’t have Valrico’s sun or palm trees or bike paths. Alex’s mom used to leave her home alone while she worked, and Alex would spend hours feeling claustrophobic in the stale apartment. One sunny day, Alex decided she wanted to ride around the park across the street. When she got into the elevator with her brand new pink-tasseled bike, she found a body bleeding out. Little Alex wasn’t scared or sad—she hardly flinched. She simply made herself as small as possible, lifted her bike to squeeze into the corner, and went down to the lobby. “The cops found me because they were following bloody footprints, thinking they were following the murderer. Really they were just following little Alex to the park so she could ride her bike.”

The second time Alex saw a dead body, she was 14. She was sitting on the curb outside of her brother Adrien’s apartment in Brandon, Florida. The building was pale orange, like a washed-out SunnyD bottle, the kind of orange you only see in Florida. Adrien was 16, riding around the block on one of those cheap little motorcycles that looked a lot more like a dirtbike. When he got back to where Alex was sitting, a car was following him. A man got out and accused Adrien of cutting him off. A screaming match between the two of them ensued, escalating until the man took a gun out of his car and shot Adrien several times. Alex held her brother’s body on the side of the road, the same way countless other Black women have held their loved ones, weeping while waiting an eternity for an ambulance to come. “I lost a lot at a young age, and I’ve lost a lot throughout my life, but losing my brother was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with.” Alex’s brother died in her arms, changing the course of her life forever, while the man who killed him spent three years in jail for aggravated assault.

“I did my own thing after that, I turned to destruction.” Within a year of Adrien’s death, Alex had started driving for a gang that lived in his building and was regularly using cocaine. Within two years, she had used a fake ID to move into his old apartment, leaving her grandparents’ beautiful Valrico home to live in a dingy two-bedroom with Vanessa, her best friend since third grade. On the surface, Alex seemed like a typical 16-year-old; she attended a big public high school, she wore those mid-2000s Hot Topic flat-brim hats, and she took flash selfies with her friends on flip phones. But she also took bumps of coke in Walmart bathrooms, purposefully provoked cops, and threw parties so outrageous international drug lords would make the trip to Brandon.

Alex was happy. She was living a life that was fun and exciting and always busy. She wasn’t caught up in the past. There was no time to dwell on its pain, and there was no need to think about the future when the present was so vivid. Yes, she was doing cocaine every day, but she wasn’t addicted. She didn’t have a problem. She was still functioning like a normal person in the world, not like any of the crazy drug addicts in Youtube videos or movie scenes she had seen.

That’s how Alex saw it, but some people in her life disagreed. Time and time again, Vanessa asked her to get help, which Alex adamantly rejected. By 19, she had been using cocaine for almost five years, becoming increasingly dependent on it. Vanessa decided to step in. She called Alex’s estranged father, a military doctor stationed in Colorado, and told him that Alex was a drug-addicted gang member. He then called Alex and demanded that she move out west. Alex didn’t want to go; she didn’t want to leave her life behind. But her best friend had sold her out, and the man she was seeing told her there was a better future for her in Colorado, so what reason did she have to stay? Within four days, she had packed up an entire life and moved across the country. Alex didn’t speak to Vanessa for the next two years, addiction and a deep sense of betrayal nearly bringing a lifelong friendship to an end.

III.

Colorado wasn’t Florida, but boy, was it something. Alex and Chris started dating soon after she moved; they had met two years beforehand when Alex was working at Disney World and Chris’s family was on vacation there. They lived in Palmer Lake; rows of mobile homes lined a dirt road before the looming backdrop of the Rockies. The entire scene looked like a postcard: tall snow-capped mountains, pines as far as the eye could see, a red barn off in the distance. It was beautiful, but Alex and Chris were an interracial couple living in a trailer park in rural Colorado. There was an abundance of racist neighbors and even threats to burn down their home. “I love Colorado’s mountains and I love how beautiful the state is, but I’ve met more racist [people] here than anywhere else I’ve lived.”

“I pushed through cause I knew I was only there temporarily … the trailer park was temporary, that became my mantra.” For the most part, everything was so new and refreshing. It felt good; it felt healthy. She patched up her relationship with her father, who still remains a crucial part of her life. She hopped around working in fast food for a while, eventually making her way up to a high-ranking position at Arby’s (where, of course, she wasn’t paid as much as her white male predecessors). Alex stayed clean-ish. She didn’t touch cocaine, but Chris introduced her to a whole new world of drugs: Colorado’s potent weed, magic mushrooms, LSD—the kind of drugs that make everything feel warm and fuzzy. Alex and Chris had a rose-tinted kind of love, psychedelics giving everything a golden light, as if they were swing dancing through life with no issues and the world working around them. “Life doesn’t seem bad when you’re on drugs every night.”

Then came Jupiter. Thrown into the world on March 3, 2014: a blue-eyed, cocoa-skinned, full-lipped bundle of energy and laughter and warmth. Born nearly two months early, he was so tiny, delicate, and helpless. Bringing a child into the world was beautiful, and also terrifying. All of a sudden, things were so real: there were responsibilities and obligations, diapers and baby food, and this tiny, tiny person with a beating heart and fragile bones. 

The two of them grew together. “Jupiter has taught me to be a better listener, to breathe, and just assess the situation. I’ve learned to have patience.” They’d spend car rides singing along to the radio, afternoons dancing around the trailer, and bedtimes telling bad knock-knock jokes. “He has taught me about love, proved that it can be truly unconditional.” After the kaleidoscopic honeymoon phase of her relationship with Chris began to fade, Jupiter was the person in the world she could count on the most. “I hate that, putting that kind of pressure on a kid, but it’s true. He’s my world.” In these moments, she could hardly remember her old life. Outrageous underage parties, spending nights in jail, drug-hazed evenings: all of these memories were out of her reach.

“I’m not scared of dying, I’m scared of leaving my loved ones not knowing what to do without me.”

As she lay on her back in the middle of the road next to a stranger on that painful night, Alex remembered Jupiter. She thought of her little boy, the funny faces he would make, how he would say ‘I love you’ every night before bed. “The way he laughs, watching him grow. I live for him.” Before Alex would go on to divorce Chris and work in hospice and move into her own house and fall in love all over again, she had to stand up. When she picked herself up off the ground, she did not accept the trucker’s hand to help her. In that moment, she did not think about Chris and how badly he had hurt her. She did not think about Florida and how much she had grown. All she could think about was Jupiter. ​I live for him​. ​I live for him​.

I Told My Mom My Pronouns Yesterday

To Susan; To Samantha; To Judith; To Octavia; To My Family; To Juliana; To Antonia. To Me.

I told my mom my pronouns yesterday. Weeks earlier, I had named the feeling that held me back from telling her, the one that lives deep within my chest: Susan. Susan is dark and heavy and often feels like an old and cold anvil from “Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner,” forever falling from a window (or wherever they fall from). It sits on my chest and weighs me down, deep into the earth. Yet I still find myself floating out of my body. Susan is less aggressive now, but she’s still chilling on my chest. When my therapist asked me if I wanted to give her a name, I was almost embarrassed how fast I said it. I had just watched the vice presidential debate a day or two earlier and I think I felt a lot of animosity towards the facilitator, 

Susan.

Susan?

Susan!

I sobbed to my therapist. She likes to remind me that imposter syndrome is a normal feeling, but this space still feels so unnatural and abnormal. She suggested I give it a name so it would seem less scary and unknown. I do butterfly taps on my chest until the tears dry up and my soul feels less like a hand around my neck. Sometimes the hands are gender and sometimes they are myself (or perhaps my subconscious). I used to think I was good at arm wrestling, but I don’t think I would win this round on my own. Maybe I could thumb wrestle instead.

I am trying to come to terms with my gender not being a set idea. It’s okay that it changes and moves. I can want to be different people on different days. Some days, a tight t-shirt over my binder is the best feeling in the world. Other days, it’s my dress I got from Aritzia when I was sixteen and wore short skirts everyday. All of Portland, Maine has seen my ass at some point, and I say this with confidence. I like that I can decide who I want to be everyday and still be the same person (me). Clothes are a great way to assert who I am to myself. I’ve started accepting that I can be an enby and like the occasional dress. 

I think about imposter syndrome a lot and it usually causes me to dissociate. It’s strange to feel so stuck in one body, yet also exist outside of it so often. Even when I dream, I’m not usually the main character. I watch these people from above, almost like a dream movie; yet, my dreams are so often nightmares. Now I find myself painting windows every day as a sort of escape from this world, this body, this mind, the reality of life, the loud construction outside my bedroom. I think of different gods and the future.

I don’t believe in God, but I do think I’m real. God bless Judith Butler. God bless performativity. God bless God, who lives within me. Me bless ephemerality. Thank Me that I’m outta here one day. Before then, though, I’ll never stop wondering if Jesus would find Me hot.

Paul was trans and Jesus was gay as fuck and liked to FUCK. Maybe if I had learned that in Sunday school I would feel safer in church today. I remember a couple Christmas Eves ago I had a panic attack in the middle of the 5 p.m. service. I felt trapped in this space where everyone believed. I didn’t know what I believed, except My belief in the unknown, which came with a fear. I still don’t really know what I believe, but it sure isn’t an old white man in the sky. To be fair, it’s an Episcopal church and My family is very accepting of queer folx, but religion has still just been this scary black smoke that I’ve been too afraid to step into. Anyways, My flashlight is always out of batteries and I’m scared of the dark. 

And then I remember My phone’s not dead and it has a flashlight too. Still, it’s not as good of a light as the IKEA reading light I use when the star light My girlfriend and I have above our bed is too bright. Under that light, I recently read Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” for the first time. I’m trying to be a sci-fi reader, so she felt like a good place to start (and I was right). The religion in the book, Earthseed, and Butler’s idea that God is Change made me feel so whole. Our society fears change and what is different and unknown, but wouldn’t that fear go away if we worshipped that same change? Maybe if we accepted that change is beautiful and infinite but still fleeting? If this is the case, then why shouldn’t I worship My own change and differences? Why shouldn’t I worship Myself?

I like change. I  c r a v e  change. I dye My hair every other week. I pierce My skin when I need to feel pain. The numbness comes and I run to make sure I’m still alive. I like to be different people, like a non-manic-pixie-dream-girl Ramona Flowers, but only because she changes her hair. I’m okay only having that in common. 

Was Kilgore Trout right? Am I really just a robot? Who’s the main character in this story? Because it’s certainly not Me. I’d like to be the narrator in your story. I think I’d do you more justice than you would. I see you how you truly are––eternal beauty and love. Does the narrator outlive the main character? I sure fucking hope so, if this is my story. 

So who am I? It’s none of your fucking business. One thing I’ll tell you is I’m definitely not on straight TikTok.

Albert in the Nile of Death

In the dark of his living room, Albert pulled the binoculars up to his face and rolled the lenses until they focused on the chipped wood of his tall brown fence. He leaned forward in the blue armchair and sniffed at the window, nose wrinkling. The musk of outdated furniture was compounded by a foul stench—a rotting odor. 

He pressed the binoculars against the glass and squinted into the dark, surveying the perimeter that separated his property from the rest of the neighborhood. Every waking moment—and every resting moment, for that matter—he was in danger. His days were numbered, so he counted them: according to his journal, he had 99 years, 13 weeks, and 11 days to his name. He was proud of that, but he feared that soon, when he was least expecting it, the neighbors would tiptoe into his house, pull back the bedsheets and carry him away. They had taken many of his friends in their 80s, they had come for his brother when he was 90; they must have been salivating at the chance to snatch a man on the verge of turning a century. His back was tight that morning. He did not want to read into it, but as he pulled back from the window, a sharp pain in his spine gave him pause. His dancing days were over, that was certain. He only hoped that his frail body could still muster the strength to protect him when the time came—he counted on it. And he was ready. Like a scout behind enemy lines, he holed up in the blue armchair by the window, just as he had done every day for the past 10 years, and held a keen eye to the house, the yard, and the neighborhood at large.

Albert checked his wristwatch, a gift from his Ruthie. 6:03 a.m. According to the weatherman, sunrise was three minutes ago. The yard was still dark, unintelligible save for the dim contour of the fence, rimmed with red light from the low sun. These early rays cast a soft shadow of the fence on the foyer wall behind Albert. The sharp point of each plank reminded him of teeth. Fangs, more like. He shifted his slight body deeper into the armchair. Above the shadows, a silver-framed portrait on the wall caught his attention. He met the eyes of a younger Albert standing in a dance hall, his arms wrapped around a beautiful woman—Ruthie. The swinging commotion of dancers blurred the backdrop, couples blending into amorphous unity while lone dancers became vague specters. The young couple shared a confident grin. Albert scoffed at their naiveté, but he had to admit there was a certain lightness to them. The younger man’s face was pink with sweat, and Ruthie’s blonde hair fell across her shoulders with a golden glow. He admired his own hair, too. At the time, girls his age had considered Albert good looking, even handsome, but Ruthie was the only woman who still told him so. She was sleeping in their room upstairs and, as far as Albert was concerned, glowing with every ray of her former lightness.

When he fell in love with Ruthie, Albert was 40 and a librarian, pining from behind his desk after the young reader who visited twice a week. Ruthie liked the classics, which was quite the coincidence because that section always seemed to need rearranging, even when it had gone untouched since her last visit. Peering between bookshelves and above the covers of her novels, Albert saw the youth of angels in her face. He conceded that his sneaking around was a bit uncharacteristic for someone his age, but he liked to believe he fell in love with her books instead of her looks: her rosy cheeks and sharp eyebrows which seemed to have a life of their own, tilting and curving with the twists and turns of whatever new plot she consumed. But only after their first date did he realize that while she was a decade younger than him, her maturity and intelligence far surpassed his own. At the time, he tried not to be mushy about his feelings for her, but he would occasionally tell dinner friends that when he saw her in the library, she read with the voracity of a woman ten years her senior. These dinner friends, who had long since been taken by the neighbors, would never know that 50 years into marriage, Ruthie’s touch still made him blush, her hugs made him giddy, and when she pecked him on the cheek it was like coming home for cocoa on a snowy winter’s day. 

Ruthie was the one person Albert could confide in when his brother disappeared, the only one he trusted with what he knew about the neighbors: he saw them take Edmund. The folks in town spread rumors that Edmund had died, but Albert knew a ruse when he saw one, and he told Ruthie so. She had wept when he said it, but then she surfaced from his shoulder, her face dry and hardened like a soldier’s. She agreed that protecting themselves from a similar fate—in essence, barricading themselves in—was the proper thing to do, but Albert felt he struck a dissonant chord in her. She dodged his gaze when she said, “I’ll take the first shift.” He saw her crying in the bathroom that night, the door slightly ajar, black drops of mascara dripping from her face and staining the white ceramic sink. 

After that night, she kissed Albert less than before, opting more often for a quick hug. Albert missed her typical signs of affection but, if anything, he was surprised their sex life had not declined sooner. They had been married for almost 50 years when Edmund died, and Albert had read that marriage erodes a couple’s passionate love. Or perhaps Ruthie told him that. She read more than he did, and most of what he knew had come from her. He was nothing without her. No more than a vague specter. She was the only friend he had left; all the others, at some point or another, had been taken by the neighbors.

These days, the house was a dormant shell of the home it once was—the kitchen was quiet and still, and the coffee table collected more dust than it did mugs. Albert no longer used the living room to read, nor did he doze on the sofa, bathed in warm sun from the window. He did not wander into the guest room anymore, the office upstairs, or the unfinished basement. At night, he slept by Ruthie’s side and in the morning, he absconded to watch the neighbors. Every day brought the same dreary routine: wake up at six, bagel, watch the yard until all the neighbors have driven off, tea with second bagel, pretend to read the paper, watch through well-placed eye holes, tea with evening bagel, wait for darkness, fall asleep, and hope to wake again. He felt almost safe with this schedule, but a deep sense of impending danger loomed over him at all times. Sometimes, he wished he did not know the horrible secret of what his neighbors did to the elderly, but then again, he was glad he knew better than his missing friends.

A new wave of the repugnant stench wafted through the house. It smelled like cabbage left in the sun, although it carried a hint of meatiness to it. He was reminded of a time in his childhood when he caught a whiff of the same smell at his grandparents’ house. It was the day Whiskers ran away. The parents had found her sleeping under the porch, which was odd because she never slept there, except when she had her first litter. Albert’s mother told him not to go looking under the porch, that Whiskers was an old cat and very tired. This was fine with Albert because the smell was horrible. He could not begin to understand how Whiskers slept in it. After he had his own nap, the parents told him that Whiskers had run off. 

Albert pulled away from the binoculars to gather a wider view of the yard. The late sun finally poked its head over the horizon, shedding light on the sidewalk. Down the street, sunshine poured through the monkey bars, burst through the leaves of the oak trees, and ran through the nearest neighbors’ lawn only to stop short at Albert’s heavy, brown fence. He had built the fence the day his brother was taken. 

Albert had received a call from Edmund’s wife that day. She said to come quick, Edmund was in bad shape. When Albert arrived, he saw four suited men loading a long wooden box into the trunk of a long black car. He only caught a glimpse inside before the men closed the box, but his brother was in there. Edmund’s face was grey-green, and his head lolled as the men shifted to balance his weight. Edmund’s wife held her nose in a handkerchief by the door, and she didn’t move to stop the men. She just cried as they lifted Edmund into the car and drove away. Albert ran after the car. He got close to it, almost had the license plate, and then it turned the corner. That was the last he saw of Edmund. When he got home that day, he swore never to let his guard down lest the neighbors take him in their box, slide him in their car and drive off, leaving his wife in tears. His sister-in-law called that night and then once more a few weeks later. Albert blocked the number. He could not imagine a world in which Ruthie stood idly by as he was abducted. 

Ruthie was a beacon of light in the darkness that life had become. When Albert needed rest, she watched the window. When he was bored, she read him stories. When he crossed his arms in a huff, she put on a Glenn Miller record and danced around the room. He liked it when she swayed from side to side, humming to herself and slipping a hand under his chin. He kept his eyes on the window, but he could always feel her stepping and turning behind the chair, and he would softly smile, feeling the old warmth of memory take him by the hand. She danced just like she did the night they first touched—the night she taught him to dance. 

It was a Saturday night, 1935, when Albert found himself standing in the dance hall, hugging the white wall most of the night with a cup of punch in hand. He showed up because it was the social thing to do and, he supposed, he liked to watch the folks dance; it was a vicarious joy. They looked so happy when they danced. He wanted that happiness, but without the wild romping. He ladled himself a punch for the road when Ruthie approached him. She stood square to his shoulder, hands clasped behind her back. 

“Do you want to dance with me?” 

He recognized her. “You’re the woman from the library.”

She did not bat an eye. “You didn’t answer my question.”

Her candor surprised him. All this time he had admired her from afar, never expecting to be this close to her. And now, when the time was right, he was at a loss for words.

“Do you want to dance with me?” she asked again.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Then why did you come?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Everyone else is here.”

She took his hands and stepped away from his chest. They stared at each other, and she grinned with a twinkle in her eye. He looked at the ceiling, a brown haze of warm lights. Her hands were steady.

“I’m afraid,” he said. 

She let go of his hand and stepped away. “I know you are,” she said, backing towards the mass of dancers, eyes still locked with his. “And you always will be afraid as long as you’re alone,” she said, stopping at the edge of the dancers. She reached out a hand to beckon Albert forward. “Join me.”

Albert set his binoculars on the sill. His fingers were stiff. He smelled the persistent odor hanging in the rafters like an overripe pomegranate, pungent, and he ignored it. There was a pang in his stomach around the second button up from his belt. 

A hollow gurgle spoke to him from below. He had, in his haste to surveil the neighbors that morning, forgotten to have his routine breakfast. Craning his neck to see over the back of the chair, he cast a longing looking toward the baby-blue kitchenette. The bagel he had missed that morning left a hole in his stomach. But he had to stay to watch the window. The sun shone high outside and a bird swooped past. Albert shuddered. A van drove by. Albert’s finger scratched at a worn hole in the armrest.

Albert hated to leave his post by the window. He was only comfortable when he had an eye on the front yard, where all potential threats politely funneled through the front gate of his tall brown fence. But the neighborhood was quiet in the morning. Only the birds and the worms kept his company at this hour. The chances of the neighbors coming while he was in the kitchen were slim, and he would be fast, but could it also be the perfect moment for the neighbors to rush him? Who would suspect it? Everyone expects crimes to happen in the night, and no one would be there to come to his rescue. Not that anyone would save him. Edmund’s grey-green eyelids flashed in his mind, his wife crying at the door. For all Albert knew, the neighbors were on their way to his house that very moment. For all he knew, some vacuum solicitor would stick his foot in the door, or a missionary his book, or one of those cookie girls her cookies. Any of them could be a kidnapper in disguise, thought Albert, holding the door open for the other neighbors to file in, hoist him up in their box, and leave without more than a light tussle. That said, Albert believed if worse came to worst, he could get the best of a child. 

He made no assumptions about what his kidnappers would look like and when they would come. That could lead only to a false sense of security. When his friends were taken, they had been caught unawares, snatched from quilted beds like hens from the roost. Take Gertrude, the knitter: she was 92 when the neighbors took her. He’d heard that she had nodded off with a ball of yarn at her hip when it happened. One could hardly call that a defense. Or what about his brother, Edmund? According to his sister-in-law, sweet Edmund was taken in the midst of a heart attack. Of all times. Or, heavens, Mary Ann, the centenarian. Albert heard through the grapevine that she had called it a night on her 100th birthday when the neighbors took her “of natural causes.” As Albert’s friends were taken one by one, a pattern developed; all of the victims were over 80, ailing, and extremely slow-moving. Hardly a coincidence, he thought. These bastards preyed on the town’s weak and defenseless—pathetic. 

Albert sat up in his chair and pressed his ear to the window. It was silent and tense, like every neighbor in every bed in every waking house held their collective breath so that he might forget them or let his guard down or make an error. The fact of the matter was that he had not lasted this long by sheer luck. He was a clever man, and with his trademark wit, he thought of a maneuver that would allow him to get some breakfast and protect Ruthie. For breakfast, he would have the usual: a bagel and tea. Neither needed much attention in the kitchen. The kettle would signal him with a whistle when the water was ready, and the toaster would give a metallic whoosh to report that the bagel was finished. Following that logic, if he prepared the water to boil and set a timer on the bagel, he could return to the window within minutes and wait for his food to heat up. If the neighbors did anything suspicious while he was in the kitchen, made any movement on the house, he would be back at the window in a flash to catch them with their pants down. 

He could imagine it. The neighbors would see him abandon the window and think that he had let his guard down. They would encroach on his house like snakes in the grass, maybe have a laugh at his expense. Ho-ho, the leader might say, this will be the quickest snatch of the month. And the neighborhood henchman would laugh, ho-ho, as they carried the long wooden box to stuff him in. Little did they know, by the time they reached his window, Albert would be back in the armchair, waiting for them, and they would see that he had duped them. Turning their tails in defeat, the neighbors would not take a second look as they slunk back to the long black car and drove back to their homes. They would not notice when Albert left his post again, becoming truly vulnerable, to collect his warm breakfast. Giddy with his own genius, Albert allowed himself another indulgent thought. He would boil enough water to make tea for Ruthie. It would take a little longer, but she would be so pleased by the aroma of chamomile that she would surely wake up and plant a kiss on his cheek. Albert padded into the kitchen, gleeful, and clicked on the back burner. Everything was going according to plan. He would be back in the chair in no time. But, just as he reached for the highest cabinet, searching for a box of tea, the doorbell buzzed. 

Albert jumped, banging his head on the thin cabinet door. His mouth dried and he grabbed a paring knife. Beads of sweat formed on his back. The doorbell buzzed again, like a moth on a light. Poised in the still kitchen, he worked his feet around to face the sound. He gripped the knife in both hands, its tip quivering at the front door. He bent his neck to see around the stairwell and, through the frosted glass by the door, Albert saw a tall figure. The blurry silhouette of a dark shoulder conjured images of mobsters and hitmen. If worse came to worst, Albert would not get the best of this man. He grabbed a second knife. 

The man rapped on the door, and Albert flinched. He felt exposed in the middle of the kitchen, so he moved to a safe crouching spot behind the counter. Easier said than done with knees like his, of the holding-on-by-a-thread variety. He looked around for clues, for something to tell him what to do. The back door was near. He could sneak out and call the authorities. But if he fled, the man outside would take Ruthie before reinforcements came. He rasped and felt his joints moan to be oiled. The man banged at the door and Albert fell to his knees in earnest. God, he never should have left the window.

“Hello,” the man called, his voice flat. 

Nice try, thought Albert. He wasn’t going to respond to that. 

“Ruth, are you home?” asked the large man. 

What did he know about Ruth? Was Albert to believe that this stranger knew his dear Ruthie?

“I have a package for you,” he said. 

He’d sooner take a leisurely stroll around the block than greet a man with a package. Albert tried to quiet his breath, but his body betrayed him. The sound of the man’s toe tapping echoed through the hall. Between taps, the house was silent, save for the kettle whimpering on the stove. Albert grabbed the counter and pulled himself up. He clicked off the burner. The ka-chunk of a truck door closing preceded the low rumble of a large engine starting up and trundling off. When he looked back at the door, the man was gone.

Albert crept down the hall. He checked the yard from the front window. It was empty. He stood on the entrance mat, one hand on the lock, his brow pushed against the door as he peeped through the peephole. The distorted picture of the yard looked safe, but he had to be sure the man was not lurking. He was still for a moment, the quiet before the storm, he thought, and then he opened the door. 

The sun blinded him, forcing him to draw up an elbow to shield his face from the harsh light. It was his first time out of the house in a month. Cowering under an elbow, he noticed the fresh air. The scent of lilacs wandered into his nose and tickled his brain. He heard peals of laughter from kids on the playground down the street. Cars hummed on neighboring blocks. He noticed that the chip in the fence had worsened. As he moved to examine the fence, he kicked something, pushing it down the front porch steps. It was a small brown box tied with black ribbon. 

Albert knelt in the brown grass adjacent to the pavement to inspect the parcel. It was the size of a shoebox. Attached to the black ribbon with twine was a pale note:

Albert, I know you are afraid, but I want you to dance with me.

This was Ruthie’s handwriting, no doubt. He took the box inside and balanced it on the windowsill. He recognized the insignia on the side of the box as Alexander’s Shoe Repair. He undid the ribbon, lifted the top, and pulled out the filler. Nestled inside were his old dancing shoes, the ones he’d purchased for his second date with Ruthie. The layers of dust that had collected on the toes were now gone. The brown leather that had dulled over the years now shone with new light. The laces that had frayed from overuse now strung together without a loose thread in sight. He slipped his heel into the cold leather, and it felt like an old friend. 

…I know you are afraid, but I want you to dance with me… 

Albert spent the rest of the day wearing the shoes. Dancing them across the floor, sliding and clicking the heel and toe to his own rhythm, settling for toe tapping from the chair when he got too tired to stand. The blue chair seemed to embrace him while he tracked the cars and the passersby. The shoe box remained on the sill beside the glass of dentures. He picked it up frequently, reading and rereading the note. He called upstairs to thank Ruthie, but she did not hear him over the TV. She left it on at all hours of the day and into the night. Albert saw the value of a constant buzz from the TV; the reclusive life could be boring at times, and the sound of a show helped him sleep. He liked giving his neighbors the impression that he watched telenovelas deep into the night. They wouldn’t come for him if they thought he was awake.

By the time the sun had set, the dentures stood in a dry glass, and Albert’s eyes hung heavily. With the sun gone, the evening’s dusky veil unfurled over the house. The pale moon painted the blue chair silver. The dark walls crept in, and they smelled like rotten flesh. In the dim foyer, the spokes of the stairwell rose and vanished into a black abyss. Albert hoped the rooms up there had not vanished, too. It was time for the best part of the day, when he joined Ruthie in bed. Albert checked the locks on each door and window, turned the kitchen lights on to make the house look inhabited, and checked each lock once more.

 He pulled himself up the stairs, one hand heavy on the railing and the other holding the shoebox. The odor came to Albert, stronger than before, but he pushed it away. He imagined Ruthie’s smile when she saw he was wearing the old dancing shoes. He thought of how she’d jump from the bed, as spry as she was the day they had first met. He would take her by the hand and spin her about. Their old bones would hoot and holler on the hardwood floor, pulling one another in and then pushing out, holding tension with fingers entwined, oozing into each other as one amorphous figure, like when they were young. As Albert leveled with the landing, he saw the TV light flash white-blue under the door. The stench grew putrid as he drew closer. He thought of the old days. Of Ruthie, her smiling face. The rotten smell burrowed into his head. It pulled him in, and his legs moved of their own accord. He locked his knees to reign in the limbs gone rogue. He hoped Ruthie was not still asleep. Fighting his better instincts to crumple to the floor, he opened the door. The air was sticky—it tasted like iron. 

Ruthie sat propped against the backboard, her swollen face lit unevenly by the TV’s wavering white-blue light. Her hair fell like a delicate curtain over her grey-green eyelids. Albert locked the door and the window. Placing the shoebox on his nightstand, he undressed and lay next to Ruthie. Naked. The covers held him softly, and the room was warm.

“I want to dance with you.”

'It's What They Did the Day Before'

The Line 3 replacement pipeline proposed by Enbridge Energy cuts straight across northern Minnesota. It deliberately snakes around three Ojibwe reservations before slicing through Fond Du Lac Reservation to reach Duluth, its final destination. I imagine Enbridge saw this proposal as an improvement, since the current pipeline runs through both Fond Du Lac Reservation and Leech Lake Reservation. Enbridge proposed the new pipeline as a replacement to the chronically leaky Line 3, which is roughly 50 years old and running at half capacity due to its structural flaws. The Enbridge website states that the replacement pipeline will “maintain our high safety standards … create fewer disruptions to landowners and the environment, and restore the historical operating capabilities of Line 3.” 

Needless to say, many Indigenous and non-Indigenous environmental activists do not agree that the pipeline will be safe or necessary. Opponents of the replacement pipeline cite the obvious threats: climate change and water quality. The new pipeline will continue to transport tar sands oil from Canada to Duluth, where the crude oil will be processed into fuel. With the replacement, Enbridge is planning to increase the diameter of the pipeline from 34 inches to 36 inches, doubling the pipe’s carrying capacity to a total of 790,000 barrels of tar sands oil per day. The project’s environmental impact statement says the oil flowing through the pipeline would add 193 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year:the equivalent of a dozen of the country’s largest coal-fired power plants’ annual emissions.

Furthermore, some activists argue that the phrase “replacement pipeline” is not even an accurate way to describe the project. Enbridge has proposed an entirely different route for the portion of Line 3 that runs through Minnesota. So, rather than replacing the existing pipeline, Enbridge will just be burying a new, larger pipeline and leaving the old one to rot under the earth.

Activists have battled against the pipeline for years, along with non-profits, tribal governments, and even the state government. Enbridge officially proposed their new pipeline to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC) in 2015. Since then, the PUC’s approval of the pipeline proposal has been appealed by the Minnesota Department of Commerce three times, citing Enbridge’s failure to prove that there is sufficient demand for tar sands oil to justify its construction.  

Tribal governments and environmental groups have filed numerous motions over the years, with some success in temporarily blocking the pipeline. Most recently, on Dec. 24, 2020, a federal appeal was entered by Honor the Earth, Sierra Club, and White Earth and Red Lake Nations, arguing that the permit issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did not properly evaluate the environmental impact of the pipeline. 

Based on the performance of the existing Line 3 pipeline, activists have a right to be concerned. Since the original Line 3 pipeline was put into service in 1968, there has pretty much been an oil spill to mark each decade of its operation. 

In 1979, 449,000 gallons of crude oil spilled near Bemidji, Minn. Twelve years later, in what was then the largest inland oil spill in United States history, mistakes made by Enbridge workers resulted in a 1.7 million gallon spill near Grand Rapids, Minn. (Interestingly enough, Enbridge is also responsible for the largest oil spill into an inland waterway in the U.S. In 2010, Enbridge’s Line 6B pipeline poured more than 1 million gallons into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan.) After the incident in Grand Rapids, Line 3 continued to wreak havoc on northern Minnesota. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a quarter-million gallons of oil “caused injury” to wetlands near Cohasset, Minn. in 2002. Before Enbridge’s decision to reduce the capacity of its infamous Line 3, the pipeline exploded in the late fall of 2007, killing two people and igniting a fire that burned through the night. Enbridge officially had blood on their hands.

Due to the damage Line 3 has done in the past and because of the link between producing and utilizing tar sands oil and climate change, both Indigenous activists and other environmental activists see this pipeline as yet another existential threat to the health of the planet. However, for Ojibwe activists, the approval of this pipeline is also linked to the destruction of their ancestral homelands. 

“I live from this land. Indakiingimin. This is the land to which I belong,” says Winona LaDuke in the federal appeal issued Dec. 24. LaDuke is an enrolled member of White Earth Nation and the executive director of Honor the Earth, an Indigenous-led organization that advocates for issues of environmental justice. “The waters, or Midewaaboo, of our territory—including the waters of lakes, rivers, and underground springs—are full of manitoowag, or spirits, with whom we reaffirm our relationship through ceremony throughout the year.”

Ojibwe are deeply connected to the water. In their migration story, it is said they came to the Midwest from the Eastern seaboard. They were following a prophecy that told them to travel until they found a place where food grew on water. Their traditional lifeways are tied to the water. Thus, for many Ojibwe, the battle over Line 3 becomes existential.

Ojibwe have been traveling by canoe across the Midwest for centuries, even braving the massive, ocean-like Lake Superior in handcarved, birch bark canoes. They’ve harvested traditional foods, such as walleye, cranberries, and wild rice, from the Great Lakes since they began their slow journey westward from the coast around 1,500 years ago.

“I am afraid for my children and grandchildren, and I particularly fear that the gifts from the Creator are being put into extreme risk and danger by this pipeline,” says LaDuke. “Water and oil do not coexist, and this territory is the land of life and spirits.”

Because of their ancient connection to this land, many Ojibwe conceptualize their relationship to it differently than colonizers do. I spoke to Frank Bibeau, an Ojibwe attorney for White Earth Nation and Honor the Earth, this past summer. As an attorney, some of his biggest legal battles in recent years have been over oil pipelines in northern Minnesota. First was Sandpiper, Enbridge Energy’s proposal to help North Dakota move crude oil by pipeline to Wisconsin. Now, Line 3. Over the years, these extensive legal fights have made Bibeau skeptical of some of the state agencies’ motives.

“What you see is the state … trying to get to the minimum standard possible, not the maximum level to protect the environment,” Bibeau says. “Their report says there’s not a good place [to put Line 3] that won’t damage wild rice. So, they’re just saying, ‘Well, whatever, put it anywhere because there’s no good spot.’”

Bibeau sees this logic as faulty. “To us, it’s like, this isn’t a good spot, so you shouldn’t put it anywhere because it’ll harm the resources,” Bibeau says, “When you talk about culture clash … if there isn’t a good spot, they’ll just do it.”

Bibeau knows that there are non-Native people who care about the health of Minnesota’s waterways, but he thinks that, for Ojibwe, the fight is different.

“Nobody wants it goofed up. But they’ll move away,” Bibeau said, of non-Native Minnesotans. “We can’t move away. And so we have to be even more respectful of the land and the water because our reservation is where our reservation is.”

Line 3 is the latest installment in one of the oldest American battles. It is the showdown between the government and those it purports to represent, the clash between a bottomless desire for capital and a need to preserve the lands and waters we rely on. 

“It’s the historical way colonization operates. They presume what they’re doing is enough and everyone should accept that as sufficient and go with whatever the fallout is,” Bibeau said. “It’s the same practice as yesterday. It’s what they did the day before and the day before that.”

Recently, public opinion has shifted somewhat, and it’s become more difficult for companies like Enbridge to continue to do what they did yesterday. Non-Native environmental activists have been diving into fights against pipelines with increasing vigor in the past decade. They, too, see the threat pipelines pose to the lands and waters they cherish. 

But the non-Native environmental activists fighting Line 3 are not here to rescue Ojibwe. In fact, they couldn’t win this fight without Ojibwe. And the biggest reason why has to do with the rights Ojibwe reserved in treaties with the U.S. government hundreds of years ago. 

Ojibwe were brought to the treaty table for the first time in 1837, where they ceded a swath of land in what is now central-eastern Minnesota to the United States. Over the next 20 years, they were called to negotiate over their homelands three more times, which shaped the landscape of Minnesota today. These deals were not fair, and the U.S. government largely swindled Ojibwe out of their original homelands. However, Ojibwe did come away with something important: treaty rights.

In perhaps the most consequential sentence for modern Ojibwe sovereignty and tribal law, the 1837 treaty states, “The privilege of hunting, fishing, and gathering the wild rice, upon the lands, the rivers and the lakes included in the territory ceded, is guaranteed to the Indians, during the pleasure of the President of the United States.” 

In other words, although Ojibwe ceded most of their territory to the U.S. government, they fought for and won the right to keep practicing their traditional lifeways in that area. Today, after the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have given Line 3 the green light, treaty rights are all that’s left. Preserving their right to hunt, fish, and gather is the argument tribal lawyers are using to dismantle Line 3.

“[Non-Native people] don’t have a mechanism in their own government to protect them. I’m in a position where I can protect both Indians’ and non-Indians’ way of life and resources,” said Bibeau. “The Indians themselves and our rights and laws might be the things that protect [the water], not the structure they’ve built to oppress us.” 

Tribal law, Indigenous ways of knowing: these are the safeguards left after state agencies and local governments bow their heads to corporations. And, hopefully, the federal government will honor these safeguards this time around as they consider the Dec. 24 appeal. 

Enbridge, however, won’t be waiting until then. On Dec. 7, ground broke on the Line 3 replacement pipeline, despite pending legal challenges. Since then, both Native and non-Native activists have been camped out in northern Minnesota, literally standing in Enbridge’s path, attempting to halt the pipeline until Red Lake Nation, White Earth Nation, Sierra Club, and Honor the Earth get a chance to combat Line 3 in federal court. Supporters of the pipeline see the start of construction as a much-needed jumpstart to the local economies and an opportunity to bring paychecks home to over 4,000 workers in a time of economic troubles. The pipeline’s opponents, of course, are devastated.

When I talked to Frank Bibeau this summer, long before the final permits were granted and the bulldozers began plowing through the northwoods, he seemed grim. Bibeau saw the Line 3 replacement pipeline as just the beginning for northern Minnesota.

“My primary concern is the same thing we’re talking about, just exponentially. When, all of a sudden, [sea level] does come up, those people don’t have a place to live. Then, they want to check the list,” said Bibeau, “Who has fresh water and something to eat? Looks like northern Minnesota, where all the fish and game and lakes and rivers are. And so, I think we’re just a target waiting to be overrun.”

For daily updates on the frontline protests, follow @honortheearth on social media. If you’re looking to learn more about how you can get involved, check out honortheearth.org or stopline3.org. And, as always, if you can, please consider donating to their cause. 

Us, Our Bikes, and the Strangers Rooting for Us

After months of planning and anticipation, I was finally staring out over the Pacific Ocean, watching the white multi-tiered ferry ease its pace and squeeze between the decaying wood pilings before coming to a rest. Bicycle by my side, I was feeling a mix of excitement, uncertainty, and an urgency to start pedaling. With zero out of 4,000 miles logged between Anacortes, Washington and Portland, Maine, we needed to get started. 

The August before my first year of college, I asked my dad to join me on a trip that I didn’t have the slightest idea how to begin. The idea had come into my head and wouldn’t leave. I texted him: “Let’s bike across the U.S. next summer,” quickly followed by “I’m serious.” But at the time it felt more like a sarcastic joke or lofty fantasy. The truth of the matter was that neither of us were cyclists or even leisurely bike riders. I didn’t own a bike, and my dad’s 37-year-old rig was coated in a thick layer of dust. 

Since I was a kid, he had always tossed around the idea of biking across the United States but more in a “maybe in another lifetime” fashion than anything else. We weren’t a super outdoorsy family. With four rowdy kids to take care of, my dad had long given up a regular fitness routine. But finally, he and my mom were going to have an empty nest. It felt like a pivotal moment in my family, especially for my parents. 

 I’m still not entirely sure why I decided to try and make a cycling trip the answer. Perhaps it was the magnitude of the idea that seemed alluring, fantastical even—the sort of thing you read about in a magazine. I guess I wanted to prove to myself that I was capable of some big project: something that could only be completed if I logged the hours and willed it into existence. But in truth, I don’t think there was ever a single straight-cut reason. More than anything, it was an idea that captivated me, and I felt hellbent on making it happen.

 Hours of research followed that first text. We were absolutely clueless. It started with Google searches: What bikes are good for touring? What route should we follow? How do I carry everything? How do I shift? Then there were YouTube videos explaining bike maintenance 101. How do you fix a flat tire? Lube a chain? Slowly, answers started to materialize. I got a bike. I fixed my first flat tire (only after Ubering home with my bike first). My dad revamped the drivetrain on his “vintage” 1980 Nishiki International that he had bought his freshman year of college. I made an account on Strava, a fitness tracking social media app that reigns over the cycling world. My dad ordered a helmet that wasn’t from the late ’90s. We set the start date for May 16th—a few days after the end of my freshman year. With each small piece of the puzzle coming together, the momentum of the trip began building, and it went from a whimsical dream to something material.

A day after finishing my last final of the year, I boarded a flight from LAX to Seattle, while my parents did the same in Boston. The hours spent discussing the logistics of miles, waypoints, dates, elevation profiles, camping, and bike maintenance were over. There was nothing more we could plan for. It was simply time to start. Standing by the ocean, the sun making me squint and the breeze carrying the smell of salt and seaweed, the reality of the trip suddenly dawned on me. We were choosing to abandon the controlled comfort of closed doors, headphones, and cars. We would be open and vulnerable to the outside world—its smells, summer heat, sudden downpours, harsh headwinds, and kind tailwinds. These would all become parts of our experience, and we were choosing to embrace them. For the next two months or so, we would constantly exist in public spaces: grocery store lunch tables, town parks, the shoulders of roads, driveways, and parking lots. Knowing full well I liked to micromanage my environments, I wondered how this lack of control would wear on me. But there was also something liberating in the concept. A forced opportunity to step back from this detail-oriented “exactly as planned” mindset, and accept that things were simply not going to go exactly as planned. With this realization on my mind, we said goodbye to my mom, turned our backs to the Pacific, and began biking up a steep hill that took us away from the shoreline. Fueled by excitement, I biked quickly to the top and then paused to wait for my dad. After a couple minutes, I grew impatient and decided to go back down and see what had happened—my dad is notorious for dawdling, but we had literally just started. 

I found him only a quarter of the way up the hill, my mom standing beside him and his bike flipped upside down as he adjusted his rear wheel. Less than a half a mile in, his rear tire had separated from the frame (he had forgotten to properly tighten his axle). Unable to unclip from his pedals in time, he had fallen at zero miles per hour, hands on the bars in perfect cycling posture. While he and his bike were fine, it certainly was an early (and comical) demonstration of how inexperienced we were, and how easy it is to run into unexpected issues. My mom was there this time to make sure we were alright, but in a couple of hours, we would be completely on our own. 

By day two of the trip, we had left the seaside towns and entered the thick, mossy rainforest on the western slope of the Cascades. To get across the brilliantly glaciated landscape of northern Washington there was only one option: Route 20, a two-lane highway with a 43-mile climb to the top of Rainy Pass, followed by a steep descent before another climb over Washington Pass, and then finally a descent into the small town of Manzama. The day before, we had biked the farthest distance I had ever cycled, and now we were gearing up for the biggest climb either of us had ever done. The anxious anticipation that precedes new beginnings was gone, and in its place was pure excitement over everything that still felt novel. We were breaking up the climb by sleeping partially up Washington Pass the first day and finishing the rest of the slog the next. Due to the lack of services in North Cascades National Park, this also meant carrying enough food for two days, and according to our maps, the grocery store in Newhalem was the last option before our campground. 

Around 4:25 p.m., we arrived in Newhalem, a small, unincorporated town centered solely around the hydroelectric plant that runs on the white waters of the Skagit river. We parked our bikes and took in our surroundings. The town, nestled in a valley against a backdrop of the towering Cascades, consisted of a small general store, a few unnamed buildings, the Seattle City Lights turbine plant, and a tiny outdoor museum explaining the history of the plant. We took a short break to refill our water droms and walked across the road to read a bit about the place. My dad—an astrophysicist who comes off as more of a train-loving child (seriously, he got several to blow their horns for us over the course of this trip)—nerded out over the efficiency of the water turbines while I played the despondent teenager act and silently ate a Clif bar. He was just getting down to the numbers when I noticed the grocery store’s neon green “OPEN” sign blink off. It was 4:32 p.m. He was marveling over the fact that Skagit hydroelectric power provides 20% of Seattle’s electricity when I interrupted him, and we rushed to the store. It was already locked, but with some extra knocking, an employee came to the door. We explained our situation: foodless bike tourers with 75 miles between us and the next services. They apologized; they had already shut down the computers for the day. We offered to pay cash if it meant eating a meal other than energy bars and trail mix for the next 48 hours. Still, the answer was no. The employee explained that the store was owned by Seattle City Lights and that they weren’t at liberty to make after-hours sales, even if it meant selling more food.  

So there we were, stunned that a grocery store would close at 4:30 p.m. and facing a daunting two-day climb with only snacks for sustenance. To retreat was out of the question. It wasn't an ideal situation, but technically we did have enough calories. The solution, like always, was simply to get back on and start pedaling. 

We made it 11 miles farther up the road and began setting up camp at the relatively vacant Diablo campground right before dusk. While we were constructing the tent and laying out our sleeping gear, we noticed that the one other occupied campsite was set up lavishly. There were two massive tents making a circle with two long tables topped with a healthy variety of liquors, wine, a few coolers, neatly cut vegetables laying on baking sheets, and a full-size grill. A blurry heat mirage was visible above the grill, and an older man stood placing steaks on the grate talking to his friend as he drank from a wine glass. It was a comical scene of glamping that would have been humorous in any other situation, but at that moment, it felt more like a glimmer of hope. Our bodies were in a sort of shock with the sudden introduction of hours of physical exercise. We desperately craved calories, and with nothing to do but pedal each day, my mind would frequently wander off into a world akin to “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.” 

After a bit of a conference, my dad headed over and explained our situation, asking if we could possibly buy any extra food they had. The man, who had just introduced himself as Johnny, laughed and said, “No, but I can do you one better! How about you join us for dinner instead?” They had just finished their cocktail hour with cheese and grapes, and dinner would be ready soon. The spread that looked big enough for a family of six was just for the two of them—there was more than enough to share. The starter was a kale salad with asiago cheese and sliced almonds, followed by roasted bell peppers, asparagus, corn on the cob, and the finale: perfectly prepared flank steaks. 

Over dinner, we learned more about them. Johnny and his friend Brian were on their annual fly fishing trip and had worked together at a boat building company for a number of years. They talked like siblings, cracking jokes at each other’s expense and riffing off each other’s statements. Johnny had cooked the steaks and jeered mercilessly at Brian’s kale salad. Johnny claimed that he wouldn’t shop at grocery stores that sold kale because he would have to “turn in his man-card.” Brian responded with an equally sarcastic quip regarding Johnny's “man-card” credentials, and so the evening went. 

They weren’t cyclists, but they had once done the “Seattle to Portland” (affectionately called the STP), a two-day, 200-mile charity ride from, you guessed it, Seattle to Portland. How cycling became the topic of discussion makes sense, but it still caught me off guard: I didn’t perceive myself as anything close to a “cyclist.” But when they talked about their experience cycling the STP, sharing the struggles of seat-bone suffering and vicious headwinds, it was clear that my dad and I shared a connection with them through biking, even in our limited experience.  Moreover, they definitely understood the result of hours of exercise coupled with limited calories. As we talked, Brian made sure to keep our plates fully stocked. 

But Brian and Johnny’s hospitality was much more than dinner and conversation. The warmth and generosity they displayed through their playful banter, immediate invitation, and genuine curiosity about our trip stunned me. In a classic teenage manner, I had forged a false sense of independence and had never wanted to feel reliant on anyone for my wellbeing. But the truth of the matter was that my dad and I were trying to do something we had no experience doing, and we weren’t going to be able to do it alone. Talking with Brian and Johnny, I realized that once people understood what we were trying to do, they wanted to help and be a part of the journey, a part of its success in some small way. Complete strangers were rooting for us. And that idea started to prove itself to me time and time again.

Our desire to stay off main roads brought us through many rural small towns across the northernmost states. The public water sources where we filled up were often few and far between. We regularly resorted to asking strangers for water from their garden hoses or kitchen sinks, knocking on front doors, asking people who were out on their morning walks, or pulling into industrial complexes. The locations ran the gamut, and so did the people: single moms, long-haul truckers, kids selling lemonade, cattle ranchers, nurses—all helping two strangers slowly make their way across the country.

On day 28, we were nearing Fargo, the largest city in North Dakota. We passed a beautiful park on the south side of the road with a lake, trees (a rarity in this plains state), expansive grounds, picnic tables, playsets, a pavilion, bathrooms, and best of all: a disc golf course. For reference, my dad has long loved ultimate frisbee and used to play pick-up games after work. I didn’t know how to throw one at the beginning of this trip, but my dad had insisted on carrying a disc, and pretty soon, driven by the lack of other activities, we would stop and play whenever we passed a disc golf course. Each one we stumbled across felt like a special occasion and a chance to break up the monotony of pedaling. So there we were, in Casselton, N.D. trying to figure out where to get started. As we surveyed the course, a couple with a dripping wet golden retriever loping about with a ball in its mouth approached us, curious about our bag-laden bicycles. My dad enjoyed a nice conversation with them, Jim and Gwen, while I played fetch with the dog. After getting some intel on the course they said goodbye, and we started to play with a single disc. 

We were closing on the basket of the elevated 8th hole when we looked around to see Jim and Gwen approaching from the parking lot. They marched up the hill and unceremoniously presented us with Gatorades, energy snacks, a bag of almonds, and—here’s the kicker—two-disc golf frisbees. They had taken the dog home, prepared the care package, and returned to the park to deliver it in no more than 20 minutes. My dad and I were like kids getting the two coolest Beyblades at Target. Totally caught off guard, we thanked them profusely, which they nonchalantly brushed off and wished us a good rest of our travels. 

As with Gwen and Jim, we soon realized that as much as we approached people for help, an old white guy and millennial Asian girl dressed in neon yellow with bikes loaded down with bags made a pretty curious and approachable sight. There were two primary ways a conversation would start: a suggestion that we were married (which we would then have to awkwardly correct) or, if we got to the father-daughter relationship first, the classic comment, “Oh, so your mother must be the Asian one.” While neither of us were particularly thrilled by this line of questioning, it didn’t make me angry or frustrated either. Neither comment was made with malintent, and I felt like the people we met genuinely wanted to understand who we were and what we were doing. It became almost expected that whenever we would enter a store or sit down for lunch, someone would come over and start talking to us, asking us what we were doing and then excitedly sharing their local knowledge of the next 40 miles of riding. As someone accustomed to the New England and New York City “ignore everyone” attitude, this took some time to get used to. But it also felt a whole lot more human than walking past people avoiding eye contact and acting as if they didn't exist. There was no car to climb into, door to shut, or urgent errand to rush to that meant we didn’t have time. There was just us, our bikes, and whoever wanted to come and ask what we were up to. 

We got the chance to hear people’s stories about their own travels, their kids, grandkids, their school districts, careers, local issues, religious beliefs, hobbies. I learned what happens when a train hits a rancher’s cattle (and how to avoid it). I learned that the day you cut your hay, it will probably rain too (a sarcastic farmer’s comment). I learned the behind-the-scenes of boat racing off the Strait of Gibraltar, how the Blackfeet lived through harsh winters on the Great Plains, what goes into maintaining an oil rig, that the mosquitoes in Sleeping Buffalo, Montana are worse than in the Alaskan bush. I learned that ghost deer are real, what the process of becoming a monk at a Benedictine Abbey looks like, and that there are food deserts throughout Northern Montana that local botanists are trying to fix with greenhouses. 

I might not have agreed with everyone’s viewpoints, but conversations with strangers certainly humanized stances that I often saw villainized in my own small bubble. I had spent the past year in college reading Huxley, Foucault, Freud, and Said, forming opinions in a contradictory microcosm of liberalism and privilege, naively believing I had some understanding of the world. This trip forced me to reconsider the black and white nature that would sometimes take hold of my perspective. Issues which seemed clear-cut on paper were transformed into people, into complicated human experiences. While we were beyond fortunate to pass through scenic landscapes at 13 mph, the riding and transient nature of bike touring was only secondary to the people we met. We were shown unbelievable kindness and found that people would share heartfelt conversations with a couple of funny looking people wearing all Lycra, eating lunch in a soybean field in North Dakota.

Lettitor

Dear Reader,

The word “liminal,” which I can’t help but think of as epitomizing the small-liberal-arts humanities classroom, can feel at times like an almost comical buzzword. And yet there seems to be a reason it worms its way into every conversation with frustrating relevance—it has felt applicable in too many situations to count, academic and not. The in-between spaces, the thresholds, the portals, the gates, the transitions.

As we come to the one-year anniversary of the first COVID-19 related shutdowns in the U.S., I chide myself for still thinking of the past year of quarantine and isolation as one of those liminal spaces. I know that for me (and I believe for many),time has warped beyond recognition during the past 11 months. So much of that time has felt like waiting, but I have to remind myself that a year in limbo is no less of a year. And though I have often defined a liminal space in the negative—that is, a space that is neither this nor that—it’s starting to feel necessary to think in the positive, too: both this and that. With the articles in this issue, I can start to think of the liminality occupying space between both/and and neither/nor.

These pieces tackle false binaries and prod at the places seemingly oppositional forces converge. Anya Steinberg looks at the ways in which Indigenous activists are resisting the continuing legacies of colonialism, as ground on a new pipeline is broken while a federal appeal is pending. Maya Rajan’s profile on Alex Ocken recounts with grace the ways in which the past shapes but does not limit the future. Bergen Hoff’s piece asks us to step into the end of a life where death is always present. Annalise Groves writes of a bike trip across the country, moving between people and landscapes. Nina Goodkin looks at Concrete Couch, writing about new ways to conceive of community. And finally, Clay Bessire writes of the ever-changing, capital-M Me.

From me in my ever-shifting threshold to you in yours, happy reading. 

Anna and the Cipher staff