This piece originally ran a year ago, Sept 22, 2018. Right now I’m in the bowels of the Grand Canyon, sending up a flare of a redux. I often think back to this story, especially when violence swells in the world. This is one small antidote.
I was with a group kayaking and camping on the coast of south-central Alaska — seven adults, five kids from four years old to twelve. One of the adults was a muscular late-20s man named Everett, a friend who came along to get out of the city for an adventure. A street cop from Aurora, Colorado, Everett quickly became the favorite of the children. They hung on his arms, begging for a lift or a twirl.
Everett wouldn’t tell them he was a cop. He kept his work a secret.
Called uncle by the kids, he was soon the group story-teller. For hours they gathered all over him as he spun story after story to their breathless anticipation. He became our babysitter. The rest of the adults were free to hike or start food cooking in our mobile kitchen, while Everett picked a rock outcrop near the water’s edge and kids crawled onto him as if he were a bean bag.
Everett happened to be working the intersection in front of the Century 16 Theater in Aurora the night of July 20, 2012. He was the first law enforcement on the scene of a shooting that left 12 dead and 70 injured. He had run into the thick of it, blood and smoke, the movie playing at full volume, the killer still present.
He didn’t tell the kids this either. Continue reading
I don’t know when I first saw Cisco, Utah. My early memory of it is imprecise, gathered from a series of impressions over years into one blurry composite. A crumbling edifice of corner store, covered in a mural of eagle and mountains that is in turn covered in black scrawls of graffiti. Dead cars. Piles of brick, concrete and twisted metal. Great expanses of balding, cracked earth scattered with gunshot glass and rusted cans. Little shacks of gapped, silvered wood, standing like ribcages picked clean of meat by some scavenger. The wind, maybe. Or time. There is no hungrier thing lurking in the desert that surrounds that place. 
I have a friend who is worried about our country. Haw haw. Who am I kidding? All my friends are worried about our country, every single one of them, even the Republicans I know. We are living through an incredibly bonkers and troubling moment: climate change is starting to actively bite us in the ass here in the United States, via intense hurricanes and wildfires; overt racism and fascism have come out of hiding to parade in the streets; children are being locked up in cages; and the rich keep getting richer while everyone else gets poorer—just to get the list started. My friend wants to do something about all this. 