Letter from the Editor

Dear Reader, 

I remember the willful ignorance I embodied on that Tuesday in March when we were told we would not be returning for Seventh Block; I remember how I genuinely believed we would be back for Eighth Block, how mindlessly I ignored the severity of a disease that had already taken thousands of lives and would go on to take millions worldwide. It wasn’t until schools started closing and masks became omnipresent and I saw the streets of New York more empty than I had ever seen them before that I realized how real all of this was. The past few months haven’t allowed for that willful ignorance, the kind that so many people already could not afford to have. 

Beyond COVID-19, following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and countless other Black individuals who were killed by police, people from every state and dozens of countries took to the streets, demanding an end to white supremacy and police violence. While racism has existed in this country since its colonization, plenty of people have refused to see the ways it has shaped every one of our systems of power. For those who had been so willfully ignorant, the events of this summer stripped their naivety, and for many Black activists and their accomplices who have been fighting this fight for a long time, this convergence of pandemics strengthened the demand for the abolition of carceral systems. 

What happens when two pandemics exist in your community, one highlighting the disparities of the other? When you can’t trust systems or a government that have proven to not care about their citizens, especially their most vulnerable and marginalized? These are huge questions, and we hoped to approach them with this issue, asking: how have these (or any other pandemics) affected people in our community, and what are they doing to handle or challenge those effects? 

The past few months have been deeply uncertain and oftentimes quite lonely. We decided on this theme so that people would have a chance to think, reflect, talk, write, and share any struggles or experiences they have had during this time. I know I wouldn’t have held up well at all this past summer had I not had my support network who was always there to talk and listen. Let us all be that network for these incredible writers and artists and for everyone else in our community—we are all we have. 

Listening Always, 

Maya and the Cipher Staff 

The Bermuda Triangle of the West

The San Luis Valley is an unusual place. The 2010 census counted 47,000 residents in the valley—roughly 5.6 people for every square mile. It’s empty and expansive. Home to the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, the geographical landscape of the valley is so unique that it is difficult to describe with words. Prehistorically, the region was a massive lake. Its past aquatic history can be felt standing on the flat valley floor, encircled by 14,000 foot peaks that resemble a naturally-occurring cereal bowl. One of those peaks, Mt. Blanca, towers over the dune fields, menacing even from a car window.  

The heart of the San Luis Valley is nestled between the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges. Visitors have described the area as “the Bermuda Triangle of the West” because of the disproportionate amount of UFO sightings that occur from the valley floor. In 2001, Judy Messoline, inspired by countless alien sighting accounts from her neighbors, opened the UFO Watchtower in a town named Hooper, population 105.

Just off a one-lane highway, the “tower” is humble and falling apart. A metal platform raised into the air by a less-than-responsible looking pole, the Watchtower stands in the middle of a barren field. It is the only building around for miles. 

Alien enthusiasts and curious tourists are allowed to camp at the UFO Watchtower year-round for a small fee. According to a Huffington Post article from 2011, more than 20,000 people have visited the tower since its opening. Messoline has described more than 59 extraterrestrial sightings from her tower alone. 

The UFO Watchtower’s website has a list of equipment recommended for alien investigations. The list includes everything from “military night vision equipment,” “biohazard suits,” and “jet packs” to “55 gallon drums of outdoor silver reflective paint.” 

Messoline’s UFO Watchtower is representative of the wider cosmic obsession held by valley residents. The San Luis Valley is certified by the International Dark Sky Association, meaning it meets their light pollution limitation standards. Because of this, it is an unparalleled place for both star and UFO watching. 

UFO sightings are not new to the San Luis Valley; they were recorded as early as the 1600s, long before any human-made object took to the skies. A major spike in extraterrestrial sightings happened in the 1960s during the height of the space race, when the cosmic world was at the forefront of many people’s minds. 

Why is this small valley in rural Colorado home to so many alien sightings? As reported by Out There Colorado, some theorize the extraterrestrial hub could be a ploy to increase tourism. Others say the isolation of the valley, coupled with the sheer boredom of living there, conjures up the imaginative saucers that zoom across the dark night sky.

Author and self-described “open-minded skeptic” Richard Estep told The Colorado Sun the UFO Watchtower is “undeniably a tourist business, absolutely. [But] does that mean there’s no validity to what’s being seen?” Estep described his experience as a paranormal investigator, where he visited some locations that were plainly a cash grab, and others “that [were] worth every penny.”

“Just because somebody benefits financially doesn’t mean there’s not a genuine phenomenon at play,” Estep said.  

Yet many valley locals seem to be justified in their extraterrestrial paranoia apart from tourist dollars, for a tragic and mind-boggling reason. The San Luis region is ground zero for an unexplained animal mutilation epidemic. 

The first widely-publicized animal mutilation took place in Alamosa in 1967, an incident so mysterious it put the quiet valley on the world map. 

A horse called Lady was found dead one September morning. Lady was not simply deceased: her head was stripped to the bone, flesh peeled back like a mask. Razor-like cuts covered the animal’s midsection, laser-esque in precision. A strong chemical scent similar to acetone filled the air. 

The strangest part? Lady appeared to have been drained of blood, but there was not a drop in sight. 

“Although the carcass had lain exposed for several days, it was not bloated and the smell was not that of decomposition. No predators, vultures or buzzards had found it appealing, though the flesh at the base of the neck was pliable,” wrote the Valley Courier of Alamosa. 

There were no footprints indicative of human activity near the body. The horse's footprints ended about 100 feet from its remains. 

The Valley Courier reported that the horse’s owner, Nellie Lewis, “found some gelatin-like green globs and a piece of metal covered with horsehair. After touching these, her hands began to burn and hurt until she could wash them.” 

These materials were then tested by Duane Martin, a U.S. Forest Service employee, and were found to be radioactive. 

Lewis reported the incident to then-sheriff Ben Phillips, who declared the horse had been killed by lightning and no further investigation was needed. Weather reports indicated there had been no lightning activity that day or on the days preceding Lady’s death. 

What followed can be best described as nationwide animal mutilation epidemic. Hundreds of similar reports flooded in from across the country. Such reports are still being filed today—most recently from Oregon in February of this year. The mutilations have several common characteristics, notably the body’s complete lack of blood after death. There are reports of missing eyeballs, ears, genital extremities, and internal organs, and the same razor-like incisions more akin to scalpel cuts than marks from natural predators. There is almost always a lack of footprints or animal tracks around the deceased bodies. 

Toxicology reports by the National Institute for Discovery Science, an organization that studies fringe science and paranormal topics, showed that some mutilated animals had unusually high or low levels of vitamins or minerals in their tissue. Yet it is nearly impossible to determine if such variations are related to the animal’s death or not because of the amount of time passed between death and autopsy.

One particularly curious case was Manuel Gomez’s mutilated bull in 1978. Found dead in Dulce, New Mexico, samples from the bull’s liver showed the organ contained no copper, but four times the normal amount of zinc, potassium, and phosphorus. The autopsy stated there was “no explanation for this condition … available at the present time.”

The mutilations were so horrific that even people outside the realm of paranormal subculture became concerned. In 1975, Colorado Democratic U.S. Sen. Floyd Haskell contacted the FBI to investigate the countless animal mutilations in his state. He said there had been 130 mutilations in Colorado alone and more reports across nine different states. 

The FBI launched “Operation Animal Mutilation” in May of 1979. The investigation was led by agent Kenneth Rommel, who received a grant from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration.

Several correspondences between the FBI and Haskell are recorded in documents made available to the public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In one, dated September 1975, Haskell writes: 

For several months my office has been receiving reports of cattle mutilations throughout Colorado and other western states. At least 130 cases in Colorado alone have been reported to local officials and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI); the CBI has verified that the incidents have occured for the last two years in nine states. 

The ranchers and rural residents of Colorado are concerned and frightened by these incidents. The bizarre mutilations are frightening in themselves: in virtually all the cases, the left ear, left eye, rectum and sex organ of each animal has been cut away and the blood drained from the carcass, but with no traces of blood left on the ground and no footprints.

Rommel released his final report on the investigation in June of 1980, which disclosed that “according to some estimates, by 1979 10,000 cattle have been mysteriously mutilated.” 

His findings? 

The circumstances … are consistent with natural phenomena. According to Dr. Wilson [Chief of the Mammalogy Section of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service], when small mammals such as foxes and opposums feed on the carcasess of large mammals such as cattle that have not decayed, they first feed on soft tissues such as the nose, lips, udders and genital areas … 

State veterinarians, after examination of mutilated animal carcasses, contend dead animals were eaten by other animals or varmints, believed to be foxes due to their sharp side teeth, which were described as “shearing teeth like scissors.”

This natural causes theory has been endorsed by several scientists and veterinary workers. 

In a Canadian study published in 1989, scientists explained the following:

Missing or mutilated mouth, lips, anus and genitalia were attributed to contraction of tissue from dehydration, and small scavengers and parasites that burrow into the carcass where the skin is thinnest. 

Missing or mutilated eyes and soft internal organs were eaten by insects such as blowflies, or birds of prey such as vultures, which are known to feed on these parts. 

The animals appear to have been drained of blood because blood pools in the lowest parts of the body and then breaks down into its most basic organic components. The lack of external blood surrounding the body was attributed to solar desiccation and consumption by insects. 

Surgical incisions in the skin are explained as tearing of the flesh when the body was stretched by post-death bloat, or dehydration that can cause an animal’s hide to split, often in linear cuts. They were also attributed to scavengers or predators such as foxes, though animal tracks were often not found near the bodies. 

Case closed, right? Nope. Enraged ranchers refused to let it go, and argued that the mysterious circumstances surrounding the animal mutilations are too peculiar to be entirely explained by natural phenomena. 

One theory is that cattle mutilations are the result of cult activity. Those in this camp believe mutilations are coordinated acts of ritual sacrifice. Theorists claim that blood draining, organ harvesting, and even the taking of unborn calves from their mothers may have been part of these rituals. 

This idea was most popular during the 1970s and 1980s when fear of cults and satanic practices spiked nationwide: the murders committed by the infamous Manson family happened in 1969. The 1980s was also the height of the Satanic Panic, an era where false accusations of daycare centers practicing ritual satanic abuse became frequent and widespread. 

Another theory is that animal mutilations are caused by government experiments. The government, these theorists argue, is researching emerging cattle diseases and their potential to be transmitted to humans. Perhaps researchers are even harvesting these cows to be used as weapons in biological warfare.

Yet the most widespread theory is that these mutilations are the work of aliens. Some ranchers in the San Luis Valley cite extraterrestrial life as the source of the deaths. 

People have dedicated their lives to solving this mystery, like researcher Chuck Zukowski. 

Zukowski is a Colorado Springs resident and the Deputy Director of Animal Mutilation Investigations for the Mutual UFO Network, a nonprofit that studies reported UFO sightings. He has over 35 years of experience researching paranormal activity, including cattle mutilations. He runs his own website, ufonut.com, where he details his investigations. Zukowski gives lectures at conventions on extraterrestrial life, and he is the subject of the Travel Channel’s TV show “Alien Highway.”  

“I’ve had a few cases where the animal is lying in a round ground depression—not a crop circle—but a ground depression, where something pressed the vegetation down, 16 to 22 feet in diameter,” he explained to the Colorado Springs Independent. “I’ve taken soil samples from inside the ground depression and compared it to a test sample outside the ground depression, and the nutrients, the soil itself, in the ground depression is less water-soluble. The cations and [cation exchange capacity] are different.” 

Zukowski believed whatever the deceased cow came into contact with had the ability to change the fundamental makeup of the soil. “I’ve also picked up an EMF [electromagnetic field] from these ground depressions,” he added. 

He questioned the natural predator theory because of multiple reported observations stating that animals like coyotes wouldn’t get within 20 feet of the mutilated body. 

A recent incident—a cow belonging to rancher Tom Miller was found mutilated in July of 2018—was detailed on  Zukowski’s blog, describing a neighbor who reported a UFO sighting close to the night of the killing. 

This cow was Miller’s 13th animal to die from mutilation in the past twenty years, which is not atypical, as the same ranchers are often hit again and again. 

Zukowski wrote that one of Miller’s neighbors contacted him about a UFO sighting a few nights before the cow’s death. Around  11 p.m., “the witness watched reddish-orange lights in a circular pattern flashing on and off,” Zukowski’s notes read. 

“These lights were going round and round like a Ferris wheel about the size of a bicycle tire,” the witness reported. “The lights were heading west which would be in the general location of the mutilation site. While watching the lights rotate and [move] away from the witnesses location, they suddenly disappeared, as if they were never there.”

Zukowski summed up his best evidence for extraterrestrial involvement in the mutilations: 

Some animals are dropped or placed from great heights leaving internal skeletal compound fractures which cannot be explained unless the predator or scavenger is a “Fricken” T-Rex! Which leaves a scary unknown; who is doing this and why?

Some animals are laying in a round ground depression anywhere from 16 to 22 feet in diameter. When the soil is analyzed, the nutrients...[are] different compared to the test soil sample. The soil is less soluble near the animal [than] away from it. Also, [in] some mutilation cases unusual ground anomalies have been found nearby.

Some of the unusual cuts and surgical-like incisions on the animal are not similar to natural scavenger damage and way out in left field in some cases and just don’t make sense.

Zukowski asks: what if the perpetrator is not interested in animal parts at all, but only the blood? What if the unusual damage to the animal is a diversionary attempt to throw off the ranchers, veterinarians, and law enforcement?

Mike Duran, a rancher from Trinidad, Colo., first found one of his cows mutilated in 1996. “It was on its back with its legs up in the air and what I noticed was they had removed all the teats and the vaginal area and the cow’s horns, which are very, very hard to take off, those were maybe 20 or 30 feet from the cow,” he told Rooster Magazine.  

Upon calling the authorities, the sheriff shrugged and said it must have been a predator. “I’m like, ‘yeah right,’” said Duran. “If it was a predator, it must have gone to Harvard Medical School.” 

In 2009, Duran’s cattle were struck again. This time, he called in an alien investigator—by the name of Chuck Zukowski. 

“The first thing you notice is that this animal is laying there and there’s absolutely no indication of movement. There’s no scuff marks,” said Zukowski. “When an animal dies, it normally kicks and fights for its last few breaths—but not these animals.” 

Skeptics say no conclusive evidence has turned up in extraterrestrial investigations. 

Alison Hudson’s episode on the podcast “Skeptoid” tackled cattle mutilation and its associated theories. “Alien mutilations as an explanation requires a whole host of other unsupported assumptions—that there are aliens, that they have interstellar travel ability, that they use that ability to visit Earth, and that they choose, when they come here, to routinely abduct and vivisect herd animals. None of these assumptions can be even remotely proven,” Hudson said.

She went on to cite Sheriff Herb Marshall of Washington County, Arkansas and his approach to cattle mutilation investigations in 1979. 

The sheriff obtained a fresh cow corpse and put it in a field with similar conditions to the fields bodies had been found in. He then watched the corpse for the next 48 hours. 

“The sheriff and his officers observed as a combination of bloating and blowflies went to work,” Hudson said. “Expanding gases split the stomach and exposed the internal organs; blowflies feasted on the organs and laid eggs in the soft-exposed tissues of eyes, lips, and anuses; and the resulting maggots devoured the soft tissues down to the bone.” 

The ending result was a carcass that matched the common mutilation story—all from natural causes. “For Sheriff Marshall, that was case-closed on the mutilations in his area,” Hudson said. 

Despite the lack of  concrete evidence to pin the deaths on extraterrestrial life, humanity’s prolonged interest in UFOs and aliens is indicative of something greater. 

“[Even] if there is no UFO phenomena, there is still a human phenomena at work, based on the fact that this many people believe they’re experiencing this many things,” Estep told The Colorado Sun.

UFOs have been spotted across the globe. Perhaps the San Luis Valley isn’t a special place, but simply a predictable instance of a larger event. “Seeing a UFO, and interpreting it as something extraordinary, seems a little bit like the doomed, lost kind of romantic love,” Denver author Sarah Scholes told The Gazette. “It comes along when you’re not looking for it. It amps up your ordinary experience, invigorates you every day … And it’s not the kind of thing you can ever really explain satisfactorily to anyone who wasn’t there.” 

Scholes believes extraterrestrial life is fundamentally tied to the concept of faith. “It is a New Age religion,” she said of paranormal fascination. “It’s not a science, it’s not a hobby, it’s a faith system.” 

Any faith system requires a leap from mere logic. At least, that’s what I was telling myself as I drove through the San Luis Valley late one night last November. Surrounding the dirt road were black silhouettes of jagged peaks contrasting an even darker sky. My car’s sunroof allowed dull silver starlight to flood in across my face and my backseat. Everything felt cosmic.  

If you’re ever in the San Luis Valley, be mindful of how pronounced the stillness feels. The sound, the air. Keep watch of the sky. And don’t forget to call Chuck Zukowski if you happen to glimpse the cattle killing alien blood suckers, who exist in a world that is unexplainable, and somewhere far, far away. 

Pandemics | October 2020

No Hugs!

When a tantrum-prone cherub of a 2-year-old informs you that she would like to go to the park, you must do everything within your power to get her to the park. If you can’t, you’ll likely endure a prolonged bout of aggressive, reverberative screaming and flailing that will forever serve as a reminder that going to the park isn’t really a request—it’s a demand. I learned this over the summer in a time when going to the park, or going anywhere at all, looked different than it had in over 100 years.

Me: “Hey peanut, what do we do when we get to the park?”

2-year-old: “No touching other kids, no-touch other kids or go too close!” 

I’m a nanny. I spend a lot of time covered in fingerpaint and boogers that are not my own, carrying plastic baby dolls and singing, cheering, tooting train toys, and generally making myself look silly at the behest of tiny children. But I love it, and I love being around kids. The children I work with are incredibly perceptive. They see things I have forgotten to look for and love things I have been taught are not “valuable” within productive society. When the COVID-19 pandemic left so many without a job, I felt blessed that I could find work as a nanny in Denver.

Nannying at any time is something of a strange task. Taking care of other people’s children is always a huge responsibility, but during a pandemic, there is a whole new host of concerns I had never needed to consider before—most prominently, the lack of playdates and camps and random encounters at the park that allow children to make friends. In my experience, social interaction is incredibly important for young kids, and those I had cared for in the past loved the company of others their age. Their ability to form connections and community is so special to watch. After a kid-filled summer during this pandemic, I realized that I’d seen very little written on children’s perspective, despite the plethora of articles on “how to deal with” children during this tumultuous time. 

How are the youngest members of our society thinking about and processing COVID-19? I decided to ask. The following are a series of interviews I conducted with kids I have worked with— socially-distanced, outdoors, and with masks— or online through surveys sent to families from my local elementary school and churches in southeast Denver. This group of around 20 kids from my area attempts to unpack what it means for them to exist during a pandemic. 

Me: “What is COVID-19?” 

8-year-old: “Is a sickness that is shaped like a sphere with spikes on it”

5-year-old: “It’s just basically like a disease” 

5-year-old: “Staying home” 

7-year-old: “It is a pokey ball that can kill you” 

When I heard these descriptions, I found myself nodding along—maybe they aren’t wrong. I don’t know whether I could answer much better myself. To the kids I interviewed, COVID-19 is a mysterious critter that we can only catch blurry glimpses of, but never fully see. These kids seem to know that they are missing something here, that we are all missing something. They see a computer rendering of a prickly-looking, mysterious beast, and they don’t know what to do with that information. A lot of the kids I talked to are young enough that they haven’t been exposed to the New York Times maps flooded with tiny red spikes and dots, and haven’t experienced the full extent of grief and destruction those maps have come to represent. Instead, they just know they are staying home and maybe that’s better. 

Even if they’re not getting complete information, however, they understand that the “pokey ball” is having major impacts on how they live, what their families look like, when they see their friends, whether they’re going to school. And when asked, they seemed to want to share that understanding. I resonated with the ways in which their answers weave across the canyon carved out by COVID-19’s destructive forces.

Me: “Has the pandemic changed your life? And if so, how?”

(5-year-old): “Yes, it has changed my life because now we are wearing a bunch of masks”

(7-year-old): “Yes, Daddy’s working at home now”

(6-year-old): “There’s a lot of extra rules and things at school”

(5-year-old): “Yes, ‘cause quarantine and staying home” 

Me: “What do you like about quarantine?”

(5-year-old): “I liked that I didn’t have to play with Carver all the time” (Carver is their big brother’s best friend)

(8-year-old): “I like that I have more time to spend with Daddy”

(5-year-old): “I like that I can get two screen times each day” 

Me: “What don't you like?”

(3-year-old): “NO HUGS!” 

(6-year-old): “That I didn’t get to play with my other friends that are good friends”
(9-year-old): “I don’t like that there are a lot of extra rules at school. I don’t like that people aren’t really wearing their masks a lot. I don’t like that Evan, at school, doesn’t social distance in line.” 

(5-year-old): “I don’t like that I can’t be in big groups” 

Me: “Is there anything you miss from the time before COVID? Why do you miss it?”

(2-year-old): “Hold hands? And touch other kids at the park” 

(5-year-old): “I miss my house and friends in Texas” 

(8-year-old): “I miss the part of first grade that wasn’t at home” 

(7-year-old): “I missed our car when we didn’t ever go in our car.” 

(5-year-old): “Being in big groups, like going to movies and stuff” 

These kids can quickly articulate what many of us fumble trying to express. The children I talked to know that COVID-19 has changed their lives; they miss their friends and going to school. They are finding joy in moments with their families and observing the ways that not being able to see people can be a blessing. These children want to travel, drive, hug, play, and just be human. By speaking with these kids, I wanted to highlight their resilience beyond the stress of school reopenings and the narratives regarding 'dealing with children during COVID-19’ that I saw in the media. So often I saw kids depicted in ways that failed to honor their voices. Kids are addressed only as background noise, but in this noise, they serve as main characters in their own important stories. It is imperative to note that the kids I spoke to are often in stable living situations and thus, this series of interviews does not remotely adequately address the plethora of inequitable ways COVID-19 is changing, challenging, and harming young kids and adolescents. Though I do not believe this piece can fully highlight the brilliance of the children I spoke to, or the importance of childhood perspectives in broader conversation, I hope that it could highlight some of the ways children are thinking about the pandemic. Ultimately, the summer I spent around baby dolls, applesauce, and long fights about socks has taught me much about the importance of childhood narratives and what the pandemic might look like when you’re looking up at it.

Pandemics | October 2020

On Knighthood and Oxygen Tanks

I’ve always wanted very badly to be a knight. There is perhaps no accolade so impractical, rendered so useless by time’s ruthless passage, as that of knighthood. If only I could manage to circumvent the tawdry assignments of “dame” and “knight” and their respective gender pairings, skirt around the politics and the issue of notoriety, and just be knighted already. To be addressed as “Sir” is perhaps my greatest desire, if only for my own amusement. I want to stare down the 21st century armed with a title because it would be funny, dammit. Me, a dirty-kneed, weak-ankled teen with a strong proclivity for baseball hats and an unwieldy sense of inferiority, knighted?

It is for the same reason, “because it would be funny and why do you care, anyways,” that I also want very badly to be an Olympic figure skating judge, or a librarian, or a haggard waiter at a five-star French restaurant—a spy, a zookeeper, or an experimental archaeologist. As they say: a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker. 

“Because it would be funny and why do you care, anyways” is also the same reason I pulled an obnoxiously bright beach chair into my grandmother’s kitchen on the night of January 2nd, 2020 and sat, just to sit, my fists buried in its mesh cup holders. It also happens to be what I said when I was discovered, cradled pitifully between its stained polyester arms.

My younger brother was the first to stumble upon me in this weakened state. I should not have been surprised at his appearance: evenings are hard to face, and, like his sister before him, he incessantly self-medicates. I had unfolded my beach chair in the safety of the kitchen, where the munchies and alcohol traditionally reside, to wallow in the soupy darkness of a new year. Brooding, after all, is an activity best savored in the dark. It follows, therefore, that he was the first, given his late-night wanderings and my disguised position, to stub his socked toes on my chair. Hoarsely, he whispered, “What the hell are you doing?”

All I could summon was an irritated grunt. 

Then, “Is that a beach chair? Bro, why?” 

Why, indeed. 

The easiest answer to his question was a pale blue oxygen tank. It was here when we arrived, plugged into the wall. I was sitting in the dark in a stupid tie-dyed folding chair because of that oxygen tank, because of the services it rendered: oxygen for butterfly lungs, fuel for a rebelliously beating heart. The harder answer is that Mimi, my chain-smoking powerhouse of a grandmother, has two types of stage four cancer, both of which were bearing down at an unfortunate speed. This trip had been an emergency one. A panicked drive and pitiful attempts at normalcy. 

The loathsome thing rolls on four wheels, a gloating marker of life’s slow deterioration. I hated that it was in my grandmother’s house, I hated its squeaky approach and the fine tube that snaked from its ironclad stomach. I hated its unblemished surface, the false cheer in its blank face. I hated that Mimi, who mercifully referred to it as “this goddamn machine,” hobbled and wheezed and faded. I hated that pale blue oxygen tank because I knew what it meant. It placed time on a sliding scale and fixed it evenly, stapled heavily on the walls of my stomach. 

The only answer to his question, then, is that pale blue fucking oxygen tank. I was sitting in the dark because of that diabolical piece of plastic: mechanized foreshadowing. 

My brother left, satisfied with my non-answer, and went downstairs. I sat and worried and chewed my fingernails in my stupid folding chair, bare feet clammy on the cold floor. 

It was right around then that my grandma, nightgown clad, stepped into the kitchen. Her deep voice cut through the intervening space, rumbling through the darkness: 

“Is someone there?”

Flicking the lights on, she pulls some cheese dip from the refrigerator, swollen fingers faltering past half-empty ketchup bottles and mottled New Year’s leftovers. She has this fantastic growling voice, one that rises over crowds and cuts right through them, knocking people aside. It seeks out the stale, the pointlessly preserved; it has a way of cramming itself into spaces it shouldn’t fit—between the floorboards and into the rusty mason jars, into the places we hide our secret hurts.

“Kid, you scared the shit out of me.”

Mimi often starts her sentences like this: “Kid, listen to me.” That rueful “kid” is not nearly as important as the comma that follows— heavily pronounced, decibels sagging, a pause burdened with a host of lit cigarettes, a whole lot of knowing. Seeing my stupid tearstained face in that stupid chair, she lets that “kid” hang in the air. The comma unfolds slowly in the sudden light. I watch it stretch, counting the Marlboros and the Parliaments. 

Knowingly, she shoves the cheese dip into my lap and turns the lights off. Deftly, she opens the liquor cabinet and pours two heaping glasses of Baileys. We sit for awhile like that, Mimi on her stool and I on my stupid fucking Tommy Bahama, drinking in the darkness, serenaded by the gently malfunctioning dishwasher.

“You know what, hun?” she says, chuckling, “Everything is so messed up, I sometimes laugh myself to sleep.” 

I start to laugh. “Mimi, how can you say that?”

I guess most things are funny if you squint. Why do you care, anyway? 

Pandemics | October 2020

Coronavirus Culture Shock

August 18, 2020       

           I was warned of the culture shock I would experience upon returning home to the U.S. I had spent a year in France, and it was undeniable that I would be coming back to a Colorado that was different from the one I had left. I was expecting my homecoming to feel odd—international travel in the midst of a global pandemic is bound to feel odd—and I braced myself for the mental indigestion that would set in once I made it home. Despite my preparation, I was confronted with something completely unexpected.

           I didn’t realize I’d be utterly baffled and angered by the country I was returning to.  I wasn’t expecting to feel as though I had traveled back in time to the onset of the pandemic in France. Everything I was taught to do for the last four months became invalid. There, I had been handed a completely separate set of facts by the government than those given to my loved ones in the United States. My expectations and behaviors related to the pandemic were completely different from those of my family, and I struggled to express how my experience living in France played a role in how I chose to interact with the pandemic. 

This was something deeper and more profound than culture shock. I felt I was experiencing the after-effects of time travel and altitude sickness in a parallel universe. Nothing about the United States’ response to the pandemic made sense to me. Why were restaurants and bars not closed? Why were masks not mandatory? Why was interstate travel not banned? Why was there not increased testing? I had been led to expect these things because I experienced the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak in France, and because these are all reasonable expectations. None of the measures enacted by France (and many other countries) are unreasonable; that’s what was most-mind boggling to me. The United States has the resources to respond to this pandemic, but it has simply allowed gross mismanagement and negligence to make it seem like a measured response is impossible.

           For a mere moment in March, I was living at the epicenter of the pandemic. I spent lockdown in Menton, a town on the Franco-Italian border, only a three-hour train ride from Milan. As soon as cases were being reported in Italy, we knew it was only a matter of days until cases would start appearing in Menton. Adding to the seriousness of the situation, the city has the highest population of retirees in all of France, meaning we were a town largely composed of people at especially high risk. We were in the eye of the storm. Things were going to get bad. I so distinctly remember the phone calls from my parents pleading for me to come home, finding it ridiculous that I would even entertain the idea of staying. At the time, the idea of boarding a grossly overpriced and crowded flight seemed far riskier than staying put. So I stayed, despite the overwhelming recommendations I was receiving from friends and family to return, and the citizens of Menton and I experienced something terrifying: a police-enforced mandatory lockdown and curfew that would last 56 days.

           I will never forget the moment that Emmanuel Macron declared war on the coronavirus. I had curled myself into a ball on my bed, alone in my apartment, staring at a TV I had only turned on a handful of times in the previous nine months. I remember the night seeming especially dark and malicious outside my window as I listened to the president of the republic declare a national emergency. I have never understood the French language so clearly as I did in that moment. I have never been more afraid. There was something so unsettling about hearing the president utter those words, and it was strangely evocative of a World War II newsreel. After Macron’s declaration, the country had less than 24 hours to make arrangements for what was first announced as a mandatory two-week confinement. I frantically made plans to move in with a friend so I wouldn’t be living alone, and at 12:00 p.m. on March 17th, 2020, the streets of France went quiet.

           The French government fed us quarantine in two-week chunks, maybe with the intention of making it easier for people to swallow. In some sense it did; it gave us false hope. We were thrice disappointed as the shelter-in-place measures were extended again and again. Every time I left my home, I had a nagging fear that I would be stopped and fined by the police. The patrols combing the streets were constant. A fine was worth anywhere between 150 to 300 Euros—about the cost of a plane ticket back to Colorado in normal times. We were required to have an attestation form and ID anytime we left our homes to prove that we were doing so for a “valid” reason, including exercising within a one-kilometer (a little over half a mile) radius of our residence once a day for an hour. Almost every day, I would flee to the foothills of the Alps on my daily runs to go to the quiet creek I had found in the first couple of weeks of quarantine. I lived a quarter of a mile from the sea but would go weeks without even seeing the beach. It was even prohibited to walk along the winding promenade that wraps around the bay where the town meets the sea.

           There was a crushing social pressure to abide by these protocols. Any violation of quarantine was met with intense judgment from all community members. If you happened to encounter someone on the sidewalk, it was an awkward interaction made up of culpable glances and a vague notion that neither party should be out and about. We all felt guilty about our occasional trips outside. Amongst my friends who chose to stay in Menton, the pressure was even more intense: if we chose to take part in an activity that could potentially spread the virus, we were putting someone’s life at risk. If we chose to be selfish and gather, we could be responsible for someone’s death. Meeting up with groups of friends was completely unessential, yet we felt that some form of socialization was important for our wellbeing. Early on, I was able to form a pod with my three closest friends. This was our moral compromise. These were the only people I spent time with for the duration of confinement. We hatched elaborate plans to sneak between each other’s apartments, carefully choosing the hour of day and route we would take in order to avoid the police. We found solace in sleepovers spent playing French Scrabble and preparing decadent breakfasts. Our gatherings were a necessary retreat from the isolation that we were finding harder and harder to cope with.

           As the weeks passed and I receded into the world that existed solely within my apartment, the only tangible difference in my days was the growth of the plants on my balcony. I no longer called friends back home on a daily basis and I stopped participating in Zoom game nights. Interacting with the outside world became exhausting. I felt I was able to better appreciate this strange distortion of reality from the confines of my own balcony. I would watch the undisturbed shadows on the street below, waiting for someone to walk through them. I would listen as the seagulls grew bolder and louder, completely overrunning our little seaside town. By April, it seemed as though they were Menton’s sole inhabitants. When their wings caught the light, they looked like tiny UFOs darting through the streets. I was greeted by the sweet fragrance of jasmine flowers, whose vines covered every available surface of Menton, and whose scent climbed up to my balcony on warm spring nights.

           On the evening of our 55th—and last—day of confinement, I began to worry that it had all been a dream, that lockdown would start over again when I woke up the next morning. But my doubts were placated, when, on May 11th, we were once again allowed to leave our homes without a permission slip. France’s transition back to post-lockdown life was very gradual. The bakeries and cafes were the first to open, bringing sweet scents and strong coffee back into our lives. It took time for the beaches to reopen. Many weeks passed before the border with Italy could be crossed. Reusable masks were distributed to all citizens for free. It was mid-June when people were allowed to travel more than 100 km from their residence. Despite initial concerns over the proximity to Italy, the PACA region (Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur) emerged from the virus relatively unscathed, possibly due to a combination of warm weather and smaller population centers, and maybe just luck. Paris and the region of Alsace experienced the highest infection and death rates in the country. Though much of France was designated as a green zone, both Alsace and Paris remained in the red through the end of June. In Menton, my friends and I were able to welcome summer when she greeted us, and it was truly a privilege to bask in the summer sun as so much of the world was still shuttered.  We all felt a brief moment of repose.  A repose that was short-lived, because at the end of June, I returned to the United States.

           The other day, while on a long drive with my mom, we were both feeling particularly disheartened and fell into a rabbit hole of coronavirus gloom. We began tracing the parallel timelines of our lives during the initial weeks of the pandemic, back when we were still separated by an ocean. Throughout the months of confinement, my mom had constantly reminded me that the U.S. was a “month behind” France, so it wasn’t fair to compare the timelines of the two countries. But we realized that lockdown in France and lockdown in Colorado began within a couple of days of each other. The response to the pandemic in these two regions started at the same time, so what’s the excuse for where the U.S. is now? I still feel the same panic and uncertainty about the virus that I did at the beginning of March. Why is there a lack of leadership and protocol six months into this crisis? Why have people been dying at such astounding rates? There is no excuse. The summer has come and gone, and the pandemic remains. This virus doesn’t deserve to see the continual changing of the seasons.

     Throughout the pandemic, I have been incredibly fortunate to have a certain level of choice in how I live. I realize the immense amount of privilege I exercised by staying in France and being able to work and take classes from home in the U.S. From this position, it is incredibly frustrating to be back in the United States where there is no unified policy, a mounting death toll, and no consensus on what is actually happening. CC continues to change its protocol every week, and I can’t help but think about my classmates in France who are returning to a relatively normal school year. 

There are so many things missing from the United States’ response to the pandemic, but one of them is more inexplicable than the rest—a lack of public will. Though the lockdown in France was somewhat militaristic in nature, there was an element that felt completely personal. We all seemed to trust one another, to accept that we were all in the same shitty situation and that these circumstances would not change unless we protected one another. I may have broken the rules by sneaking around, but I wasn’t violating the premise for which those rules stood. I ensured that every action I took would not intentionally harm the wellbeing of another, and so did almost every other citizen of Menton. Some may attribute this behavior to an underlying fear of the police, others may say that it is a derivative of the French doctrine of fraternité. Whatever the cause, this mutual trust made a difference. It also made it painfully clear how lacking we are of this characteristic in the United States. I complied with what was considered to be one of the strictest lockdowns in the world because I felt as though I was fulfilling my duty to my fellow humans. Why is there such a lack of this sentiment among many in the U.S.? Why have we decided that some human lives are more valuable than others by forcing the most vulnerable to go to work? Why have those in positions of privilege not done more to safeguard the health of essential workers, elderly people, BIPOC, immunocompromised individuals, and everyone impacted by the intersections of COVID-19 and systemic oppression? It’s as simple as choosing to wear a mask and to wear it correctly. 

           During confinement, I read Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway.” The book was a perfect accompaniment to the distortion of reality I was facing. There was one line that stuck in my thoughts like tar. It comes in a passage when the legacies of WWI are being discussed, and the characters are at a point of reflection, much like we are today. The quote is simple: “What we owe to the dead.” What do we owe to the dead? The 745,000 global deaths (as of this writing). Do we owe them a vaccine or a strong economy? Do we owe them acknowledgement and remembrance? Or, could it be that we owe the dead fewer deaths? The possibility of being responsible for someone else’s death is a fear that has guided my—and many others’—actions since the start of the pandemic. So, I ask again, what do we owe the dead? Maybe it’s the possibility to not have died.

October 20, 2020

It's October. The President of the United States has contracted COVID-19. There are now over one million global deaths. The skies have been choked with smoke for months. I dream of being in France—a France in which I have no impending election anxiety, where there is universal mask-wearing, in-person classes, and fresh, salty sea air. But, as much as I want to believe that my problems would disappear on the other side of the Atlantic, I'm not that naïve.  My time in France was a fantasy made up of days spent lounging on the beach and impromptu train rides to Italy; this is no longer the case. 

My friends in France are back in quarantine—there was an outbreak on their campus. The Alpes-Maritime are in a state of emergency. A few weeks ago, Tempete Alex, an extratropical cyclone, destroyed many of the mountain towns of the region, displacing thousands and wrecking a precious portion of cultural heritage. The death toll from COVID-19 is mounting across Europe as winter approaches. The catastrophes our world faces are inescapable, no matter which corner of the planet you may try to hide in. 

I am no longer shocked by the state of this country. Instead, a thin film of disillusionment coats my thoughts. However, I stand by my initial analysis of the U.S. COVID-19 response. The difference now is that I realize that the solution is not as simple as I wanted it to be. I wanted the U.S. to magically transform into a hyper-centralized state with a more robust social safety net (like France). It is clear that the United States will not adopt the French system of governance, or for that matter, a universal mentality of collective responsibility. In fact, any solution, or progress towards one, seems to be buried under piles of partisanship and distrust. As the president so compassionately said, we’re all tired of this pandemic, but death cannot be exhausted. It continues to churn long after we have all grown weary. American lives are being used as political pawns, and the clock just keeps ticking away. It’s been eight months. 

Pandemics | October 2020

Old Friends

Fiction

There are flies on her salad plate. She talks with her hands; she doesn’t notice she’s swatting them away. They buzz away; they buzz right back to her half-eaten lettuce. Their wings are cut glass. Their heads are full of eyes.

I’m questioning why I came at all. I enjoy watching flies contaminate her salad much more than listening to her talk about whatever she’s been saying for the last twenty minutes. I suppose I came because I’d never been to this hotel before. Some grand historic hotel that New York celebrities have visited for decades. She often stays here on weekends. She told me to meet her at the rooftop pool. I’d never seen a rooftop pool before.

I turn my attention away from the flies for a moment, but I can’t focus on the words coming out of her mouth either. I can only focus on her teeth. All pearls, all pushed and prodded into a neat little line.

Every single night, she flashes those pearls and the world rises to its feet and pounds its hands together. One smile causes an uproar. Every single night.

She says the same words every single night. Every night, she is having the same epiphanies, crying the same tears, smiling the same smile. She lives the same life every single night. Audiences love her. She and her pearls are the biggest new Broadway star.

She’s talking about the play; I learn this once I look past the pearls and register the sounds leaving her lips. It’s a play that was written a long time ago, a play that high schools put on mediocre productions of, a play that, in this moment in time, is having a Broadway revival. Tonight, she will stand on a tall wooden platform and live a life she has memorized. Tonight is no different from any other night. No, tonight will be the same. She is telling me what it will be like tonight, but I’ve seen the play already—most people have.

In the play, she is poor. She wears rags and is desperate. So many girls must’ve played this role before, but to me, she is unique. She has two lives, so jarringly different from one another. In one life, she spends the weekends at rooftop pools; she’s lavish. She orders caviar and extravagant drinks and luxurious names sit on the tags of her clothing. She thinks the world should rise to its feet and pound its hands together for her, but it only does so in her other life.

Now, she wears a gold swimsuit. Her wrists are weighed down with gold. Her neck and her ears are too. Gold is just an element. Gold is just dust in space. She probably never dreamed of being addicted to an element, but expensive gifts led to an expensive taste and now she spends her weekends at rooftop pools, drenched in it. In her other life, she doesn’t wear gold. Some of her lipstick is on her pearls now. Pearls smeared with cherry red wax.

She is looking at me now, lips closed. She is expecting me to talk. I mention how gold is just dust in space.

“You always were so into those science classes,” she chuckles; her laugh is a bell chime.

We head up to her hotel room. She’s showering, getting ready to perform again tonight.

On her desk is a bag of nail polish. I pick it up. It’s heavy. She’s got a million little bottles of paint. She gets out of the shower and puts on a robe, picking out clothes from her suitcase.

“You’ve added to your collection,” I give the bag a light shake.

Her bell chime echoes around me. “I brought that for you, in case you wanted to paint your nails. My character of course can’t wear nail polish.”

I begin taking the bottles out and lining them up. I open one, a pale sparkly purple, and smell the fumes of chemicals. I arrange the bottles by height, then I change my mind and arrange by color. When we were children, we’d go up to her mother’s room and paint our nails with her ruby red polish. We weren’t allowed to have colorful nails at that age. So we would relish the process of painting, and then use soaked cotton balls to remove the evidence. Our fingers would be stained red, the room left smelling of acetone—the crime scene full of clues. 

When we were sixteen, I gave her a set of rainbow nail polish for her birthday. I told her she was of age now. She told me it was the best gift she got that day. We were a cliché back then, two girls with dreams so much bigger than the blue suburban houses we grew up in. We wanted cities and adventure and the world to sweep us off our feet. Opportunity got in the way: I got a good job offer from a real estate agency back home, and she moved around, trying to figure things out and start her acting career.

It happened so quickly. She told me she was moving to New York, then that she got the part, and then that the shows were selling out. I saw her on a magazine cover at the grocery store checkout. There I was, still in my hometown, still stuck in my predictable life, while hers moved faster and farther away by the second. Our duo had split, but I came to New York to meld it together again, if only for a night. 

Her life in the play is the same as I remembered from last time. In the first scene, she is kneeling in a kitchen. The lighting is dim. The audience is taken through laughs and tears, but the destination is always the same—the world rises to its feet and pounds its hands together. It always begins the same; it always ends the same. The man sitting next to me begins weeping in the second act when all hope is lost. I watch him from the corner of my eye. He’s bunched up in his seat, a fist held to his mouth. The rectangular glasses balancing on his nose reflect the lights from the other world he’s observing. He’s completely entranced. He knows that the lack of hope is part of the plot, but is transported nonetheless. The lights dim, and the clapping reminds him of reality. He unclenches his hand; he readjusts in his seat and relaxes.

         I wait in the hotel room for her to return after the show. She comes in babbling about what happened behind the scenes, what mistakes were made that no one in the audience noticed. She wipes her face down. She is in between her two lives, slowly morphing back into the actress.

         There’s a long pause. I’m thinking of new topics to bring up. Do people recognize you in the streets? Do strangers give you flowers? What’s the flower you get most often? Roses? No, no. No more questions about the play. She must be sick of them. Yet, the play seems to be all she has talked about since I met with her this afternoon.

         “I never thought I’d be an actress,” she says.

“You were in all the plays at school.”

         “That was different. That was … silly. I was never the lead anyways.”

         “Do you like being the lead?”

         She pauses again. She brushes her hair in a mirror. Her back faces me, but I can see her looking at her reflection. She stares into her own eyes; her mouth is cracked open. I can tell she doesn’t want to answer.

         “How come you brought the nail polish?” I finally thought of a new topic.

         Her eyes soften, her mouth cracks a smirk, she transforms. “You’re of age now. You should be able to paint your nails.”

         I see my childhood friend before me. Giggling with red nails. Driving in our neighborhood late at night with radio pop music turned up as loud as it could go. Talking about all the places we would see once we got older.

         “I miss being young,” I say. “I miss when painting our nails felt like the biggest deal in the universe. Like it would completely transform you into who you wanted to be.”

         “There’s something powerful in choosing those little details about yourself.” She opens the bag of polish, and the room is an orchestra of glass against glass. She pulls out a royal blue polish.

         “If I were to wear this, I could be spontaneous. I could be wild and funny. I would go to bars all night long.” She digs around in the bag more and pulls out light pink. “But if I wore this. That small patch of color on my fingernails suddenly makes me a respectable businesswoman. Someone who goes to Sunday brunches and has a secretary and a color-coded planner.”

         “What does wearing no nail polish mean?” I gesture to her hands.

         “It means I’m someone else, I suppose.”

         I peer into the bag and grab a red polish. “If you chose this, you would be your mother.”

         She bursts out laughing, not the bell chimes but guffaws and bird squawks. It’s something I haven’t heard in a long time, and I doubt she has either.

         “How is she?” I ask.

         “She’s quite different. Dad left and I started the play. Everything changed overnight. I send her money now and she leaves me alone.” She twiddles her thumbs and stares into the distance. Her blue suburban house and white picket fence family dissolved once she moved out. Her visits back home are rare.

         Another wave of silence washes over us, crashing and intense. She claps her hands together.

         “Let’s get a drink!”

We sit at the hotel bar and listen to the chatter surrounding us. Her fingers idly tap the countertop. We sip, we stare, we talk about nothing. I think about what shirt I’m going to wear tomorrow. My mind drifts. I swirl my drink in my cup, watching the liquid move up and down.

         “You’re someone else,” I say at almost a whisper.

         “I’m playing a character.”

         “No, I know you’re playing a character. I mean that you’re different ever since you started playing a character.”

         I stare into my drink. I want to dive into it. I want to be submerged and fill my ears with it so that I don’t have to listen to this conversation a second longer. I’m hurting her, her brain is going to be full of my words for a long time, but I can’t stop.

         “You’re different,” I repeat.

         “I know.”

         “You’re okay with it?”

         “Most people can predict what’s going to happen to them,” she says. “The change was predictable. I get money, I get fame, I get flowers every night. I spend a little more. I wear more jewelry and designer clothes. I’ve entered a new world, now I’m just trying to fit in with it. At least I’m doing something meaningful with my life.”

         “What does that even mean?”

         Her hand thuds on the table. “Moving back to do real estate? You were never passionate about real estate. You wanted to make some scientific breakthrough! You wanted to change the world! We both did! I just can’t believe you’re pissed off at me for leaving, for doing what I always wanted. It’s not my fault you didn’t.”

         “Life isn’t always what you plan. I didn’t want to spend my life waiting for something grand to happen to me. I saw opportunities and I took them.”

         “I didn’t just wait for this role.”

         “Well it’s a miracle it landed in your lap.”

         She’s rubbing her forehead. “I’m going to go to bed,” she stands up from her seat. “I hope you liked the show tonight. I’ll see you in the morning.”

         I watch her leave. My friend, someone I used to pass notes to in class and whisper secrets to at sleepovers. Now it’s bars and stages and rooftop pools. The scene has changed, the characters evolve. I wonder if I have refused to change with everything. 

         I keep swimming in my glass. People can change. People will change. But why did it have to be her? Why do the good ones have to change?

         I stumble my way back to the hotel room. She’s asleep in one of the queen beds; she left the one by the window for me. The room is blurry.

         “I’m sorry,” I whisper in her direction.

  I wake up and her bed’s empty. Her suitcases gone. A note on the desk.

We’ll always be friends.

         The bottle of red nail polish I pulled out yesterday is still there. I paint my nails. It smells like chemicals. I could’ve just told her the play was fantastic. I could’ve pretended that she hadn’t changed at all.

She went on living her memorized life for longer than everyone expected. I read once that she had a performance where she broke down crying in act one, and her understudy took over for the rest of that night. I like to think that it was me she was crying about. I know it wasn’t.

Pandemics | October 2020

Students Supporting Students

Author’s note:

This piece was written by four of the main organizers of the Colorado College Mutual Aid Fund. Our group is run with a decentralized leadership model. This means that our writing is representative of some of the main organizers’ experiences, but CC Mutual Aid is much bigger than any of the individuals involved in it. We hope and expect for it to evolve as the needs of our community do.

As students at Colorado College, we are surrounded with messaging about the responsibilities we have to our community. Whether communicated through BADASS training or Clean Plate Club stickers, CC students are reminded of the importance of caring for our community from the moment we arrive on campus. But come the absolute chaos that was mid-March this year, many of us felt like those networks of support were harder to access, particularly at a time when we needed them most. With our campus community spread apart due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of us came together to create Colorado College Mutual Aid. We did this in an effort to support our community, in whatever way possible, when it became clear that the school’s official Emergency Fund was not providing adequate aid. The Mutual Aid Fund exists to create an opportunity for our campus community to join together and support one another, regardless of our physical proximity. 

Divisions between students coming from families with higher incomes and those with lower ones have always been apparent at CC, but when campus shut down, these divisions were exacerbated and more visible than ever before. The contrast between students struggling to find a quiet place with a stable internet connection to participate in their Zoom classes and those who left cities to spend the semester in their families’ second homes was striking. For a school that endorses a culture of care, CC’s administration came up short in providing necessary support and resources for its students. Perhaps things got lost in the chaos of logistics, or perhaps the school wasn’t aware of what its students needed, but, like so many other CC students, we were upset with the lack of communication and transparency that came from the school surrounding pandemic support. To us, it seemed like it was time to put the frustration with administration and students’ good intentions to practical use in a way that would attempt to tangibly help our community members.

This work does not exist in a vacuum. Mutual aid has historically been used by marginalized communities to create new frameworks when existing ones do not provide adequate support. Mutual aid is not limited to monetary support; examples of non-monetary mutual aid include the work of the Black Panther Party in providing community services such as the free breakfast program, or the Sylvia Rivera Law Project’s free legal services for trans and nonbinary low-income and/or people of color. There are a couple of key differences between mutual aid and charity that we want to highlight here, as the concept of mutual aid is only recently coming to the forefront of mainstream conversations. Mutual aid focuses on solidarity, not charity. All gifts are non-conditional, which means that no one has to prove their need in order to receive funds or has to present receipts to the organizers. We trust our community members, value transparency and community leadership, and welcome all feedback. Moreover, we function with the understanding that it is the larger systems of inequality and injustice such as white supremacy, capitalism, and the cis-hetero-patriarchy – all of which were further exacerbated and more starkly exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic – that are responsible for individuals’ situations, not the individuals themselves. Every student at CC deserves to have the financial security to take classes without having to worry about paying for groceries or rent.

As mutual aid funds emerged at different colleges across the country, it seemed that the CC community had the potential to greatly benefit from a system of mutual aid. We were particularly inspired by the work of student organizers at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif. in the “Nobody Fails at Scripps” group that pushed for a universal pass/fail grading policy after the shift to online learning. They mobilized in June to organize a mutual aid fund and called for privileged community members to redistribute their wealth – a concept many CC students had been thinking and posting about on social media.

As of 2017, the student body at Colorado College had the highest median parent income out of 2,395 colleges in the United States and had the second highest share of students from the top 1%. Conversely, only 2% of the student body came from the bottom 5%; CC is 2,357th out of 2,395 colleges in the United States in this regard. We attend a school with enormous financial privilege among its student and alumni body, and we started CC Mutual Aid in an attempt to utilize that privilege for the good of our community. 

So, in late July, we established CC Mutual Aid as a branch of the Collective for Antiracism and Liberation at CC (CAL). CAL is a student-led collective that formed over the summer, following the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests and uprisings across the country, to serve as a hub for organizing between students, faculty, staff, and local activists. CAL primarily focuses on issues of policing (they are currently negotiating changes in the contract between CC and CSPD), and the politics of the group are self-described as antiracist and abolitionist. 

We began as a group of about six people, supported by a larger group of fifteen who have dedicated up to hundreds of hours writing documents, creating Instagram posts, tracking donations, and problem-solving in Zoom meetings. Our group uses a decentralized form of leadership and anyone can join at any time (like actually—if you email coloradocollegemutualaid@gmail.com or message us on Instagram and ask to help, watch out because we’ll stick you in the group chat and then you’ll immediately have a meeting to attend in 15). Everyone contributes to the workload, often anonymously, creating a supportive and humble atmosphere where no one seeks credit or recognition. This humility allows for quick-acting functionality and a type of ease in decision-making that still considers all aspects of the issue. We strive to remain thoughtful and genuine, to create a culture in which all members fully listen to each other and actively seek to hear and elevate those whose needs are often lost in the overwhelming privilege of this school. We would love to have as many voices as possible chiming in!

Our values became especially important when we were faced with one of our largest and most influential choices – incorporation into the school. In the first month of organizing, we used an outline for mutual aid on college campuses published by the organizers of “Nobody Fails at Scripps,” fundraising mainly through Instagram and collecting donations through Venmo and GoFundMe. As we progressed further in our planning, Will Schiffelbein, CC’s Director of Annual Giving, reached out to us to learn about CC Mutual Aid. During our conversation, it became clear that our original plan to redistribute funds through Venmo was not in the best interest of the recipients. Redistribution received through Venmo is classified as income, so the recipients would need to file them as such, possibly impacting their future eligibility for financial aid. 

Though we were initially wary about losing autonomy, many positive aspects have come out of working directly with the school. We spent a few weeks drafting the terms of our incorporation in such a way that gave us confidence that this decision was best for our recipients. Our biggest concern was that we would no longer have control over how and to whom the money was redistributed and that as a result, we wouldn't be able to provide the non-conditional support that is at the core of mutual aid. We were also worried that incorporation would make it too similar to the Emergency Fund, which proved to be inadequate in distributing aid, and would render the Mutual Aid Fund unnecessary. Thankfully, this has not been the case – we have retained essentially full autonomy over the fund, and the school’s role is mainly to make sure we are not violating federal or college policy. Transparency is one of the core principles of this group, so our terms of agreement with the school, called a Memorandum of Understanding, are available for all to read via the Linktree in our Instagram bio.

Incorporation has benefited us in many, often unexpected, ways. We are able to use the school’s contact database to email, text, or send physical letters to alumni, which has allowed us to fundraise more effectively and to fulfill a higher percentage of our applicants’ requests. We have also connected with various committees that work to fundraise for a specific cause, like the Senior Class Gift Committee and the Young Alumni Donation Committee, who have offered to fundraise for us. Encouragingly, we have found that alumni and students are more excited to donate to funds that directly support students. Members of the Advancement Office are also working to find matching donors and collaborating with us to publish messages about mutual aid on various CC social media platforms, both of which we hope will increase donations. 

We are now registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, which means all donations are made and redistributed within an official legal framework. We are able to redistribute money through the Office of Financial Aid, allowing the names of recipients to remain anonymous to those on our Application Reviewing Committee. This committee goes through an anonymized version of the application using a formula to redistribute funds based on students’ self reported need. Redistributing funds through the Office of Financial Aid allows us to protect recipients from reductions to their future financial aid. Though we were hesitant at first, and are deeply aware of students’ widespread distrust in the administration—especially in regards to their failure to provide adequate support during COVID-19—we have been so pleasantly surprised by how beneficial incorporation has been for both the students and administration. 

Working closely with the school has brought student voices into places they weren’t before, allowing us to present a new understanding of fundraising and student capability to CC administrators. Since our initial meeting, Will Schiffelbein has been our primary contact and advocate in the school administration. With his support and advocacy for our group, the school has been unbelievably understanding, helpful, and trusting of our decisions, allowing us to maintain autonomy and propel our mission forward.

CC Mutual Aid can now work towards more long-term goals, with the hope of continuously backing those in need and providing security when emergencies arise or when a student simply needs support. Our new recurring donation option is an exciting way for us to  help students and alumni incorporate redistribution of wealth into their lives on a regular basis by setting up monthly donations. In-person, non-monetary mutual aid options are limited at this time due to the pandemic, but we hope to expand to include more in the future (potentially partnering with CCSGA to provide rides to the polls as we did with rides to storage when campus was shut down after First Block of this year). We hope to spend the next couple of months fundraising and plan to roll out our second round of redistribution around winter break. 

We’re excited about the direction that we’re heading in and we hope you all are too! Our experience and newfound relationships with fellow students, alumni, and staff at CC have made us hopeful about the creation of a better and more equitable future for all students at CC. If you’d like to donate, you can provide a one-time donation here, set up a recurring donation here (we’ll send you a sticker!), and learn more on our Instagram or Facebook pages. If you’d like to get involved, please email us at coloradocollegemutualaid@gmail.com.

Pandemics | October 2020