Last spring, the Slims River in the Yukon’s Kluane National Park abruptly disappeared over the course of four days. A team of geologists and geoscientists that had been monitoring the retreat of the Kaskawulsh Glacier, the source of the Slims River, arrived to find dust where the mighty glacial river (one-third of a mile across at its widest places) had tumbled boulders and tree trunks just days before. Because the Alsek River, the glacier’s other outlet, had swelled to sixty times its usual flow, the field team concluded that the glacier’s intense, rapid melt had forced all of the water into the Alsek and away from the Slims.
This is the first time this kind of “river piracy” has been observed in recorded history, though the geological record indicates that it probably happened millions of years ago during other periods of extreme warming.
This is the first time this kind of “river piracy” has been observed in recorded history, though the geological record indicates that it probably happened millions of years ago during other periods of extreme warming.
What matters: the Slims River is gone. What once roared toward the Kluane River and into the Yukon to the Bering Sea now spills south into the Alsek toward the Gulf of Alaska. Instead of river in that once green valley, the wind whips up dust storms; the air is oddly silent.
I walked along the Slims River twice. Once, in June of 2005, my friend Lia and I backpacked up the trail that followed its west side. We intended to hike all the way to the toe of the great Kaskawulsh, but the first day — a grueling fourteen miles that included an intense crossing of the swollen Bullion Creek, a grizzly bear encounter on the edge of some willows, a trudge through sticky glacial silt, and a scramble up and down a trail the park ranger at the Sheep Mountain information center had described as “more or less flat” — had nearly defeated us. We set up camp at Canada Creek, in full view of the massive river of ice, and poured vodka into orange Tang for supper. In the rose-red light, we grinned at each other, giddy with weariness and whatever was blossoming between us, which was not mere friendship anymore, and which seemed as raw and gorgeous as that landscape. Did we notice the Slims River? It roared, gray-blue milk, just yards to the east of our tent all night, as impassable as the steep walls of rock on either side of the valley. It roared, and there was never darkness; the sun set close to midnight; we could still see to trace each other’s faces in the early hours of the morning.
Painting by MK MacNaughton, used with permission.
In the rose-red light, we grinned at each other, giddy with weariness and whatever was blossoming between us, which was not mere friendship anymore, and which seemed as raw and gorgeous as that landscape. Did we notice the Slims River?
Eight years later, in June of 2013, I backpacked alone along the same trail on the west side of the Slims River, climbing up Sheep Mountain to a place where I could trace the braided curve of the Slims in the vast valley up toward the place where we had camped in view of the Kaskawulsh. In my two hands, I clutched a plastic Ziplock bag that contained some of Lia’s ashes. Not just ashes. Bits of bone. A piece of metal. When I sank my fingers into the bag, the white dust clung to my skin. I concentrated on the flowers that bobbed their heads in the wind on that rocky edge: the purple Ogilvie Spring Beauty, the yellow Maclean’s Goldenweed. Beyond, the Kaskawulsh curved in its frozen S. I knew the glacier moved, that it retreated daily, melting fast into the Slims and the Alsek, but I could not observe that action. I could barely breathe. When I filled my hands with Lia’s ashes, my fingertips remembered how soft her skin had been in the alpenglow at Canada Creek; when I opened my fingers, the wind swirled bone fragment and dust and threw it, laughing, into my eyes, my ears, my nostrils. Later, I crouched on the shore of the Slims, sinking my hands into the gray-blue milk. Ash swirled with silt, turning my hands to clay.
When I filled my hands with Lia’s ashes, my fingertips remembered how soft her skin had been in the alpenglow at Canada Creek; when I opened my fingers, the wind swirled bone fragment and dust and threw it, laughing, into my eyes, my ears, my nostrils.
Sometime after Lia died, I wrote: The Kaskawulsh Glacier in the Yukon’s Kluane National Park moves forward in the summer at an average velocity of 16,380 meters per day. The current glacier reached to its furthest extent in the early 1700s, when Bach wrote cantatas, Louis XIV of Spain ceded world domination to Great Britain, the slave trade between Africa and the American colonies increased, hostilities between Native American tribes and the colonists increased, and the Persian army sacked Delhi. Scientists know the age of the Kaskawulsh because they have conducted dendroglaciological studies. “Dendr-” = “related to trees.” Ring series from white spruce trees divulge the advances and retreats because the Kaskawulsh sheared, tilted, killed. Velocity, simultaneous events, exact day and time. Shatter the ice, break the rock. I want to know what is inside.
The violence of the glacier fascinated me with its unpredictable advances and retreats, its ancient insistence on destruction. On the alpine ridge of Sheep Mountain that day in 2013, I stood feeling insignificant, aware of the mountains that rose ancient on all sides of me, of the glacier that told me time does not move as human beings believe it does. What is eight years, after all? I wondered, briefly, if the mud flats and the meadows purple and white with Alaska cotton remembered our footsteps, but I barely considered the braided river.
But now, when I visit that place again, I’ll find a valley of dust, sculpted by wind into phantom shapes, as if the Slims River never was.
This is what a death is like for those who continue living. Once, a person stood there, infuriating or enamoring us with a face alight with anger or sadness or frustration or joy. Once, a person reached out arms to embrace us or threw up hands to ward us off. Once, there was skin to caress, a mouth to kiss, a mind to question. And then, very suddenly, no matter if the person dies at forty-two, as Lia did, or at ninety-eight, as my grandmother did, there is an eerie, silent absence. As if the person had never been there at all.
This is what a death is like for those who continue living.
The body is cremated or buried or donated to science. We stand in an empty room and try to remember how a voice sounded, exactly what a face looked like. Photographs are flawed historians; our memories tilt, filtered. If only we could ask her one more question, touch her cheek one more time, look upon her face just for one more moment. Only absence answers.
The Slims River in the Yukon is gone. I could walk across the entire broad valley from west to east, now. Lia is gone. Her raucous voice, her wild hair, her sacrilegious sense of humor, her paradoxical softness and edginess will never ripple in the world again. And others that I have loved are gone: Fern, John, Ida Ruth, Bill. I stand on a shore and close my eyes, straining to remember.
The Slims River in the Yukon is gone… Lia is gone… her paradoxical softness and edginess will never ripple in the world again. And others that I have loved are gone: Fern, John, Ida Ruth, Bill. I stand on a shore and close my eyes, straining to remember.
Years ago, when I wrote the first drafts of Grief Map, which releases from Brain Mill Press today, I was still desperate to recreate what was gone. I wanted my words to do what reality refused to do: bring back flesh, restore breath. Fiercely, I imagined myself walking that trail west of the Slims again: When I study the mud, I know I might find the overlapping footprints she and I left here in 2005 . . . Here in this air our laughter and our words exist, still. Here are the descendants of the same plants – lupine, penstemon, fireweed — that we flattened with our steps, touched with our fingertips, picked for each other’s hair. Here is the same grove of aspens, grown a little taller, and the same spruce forest . . .
What I did not yet understand was that I am still alive. It is not time for me to sink into the glacial silt and disappear from this world. I have more walking to do. I have other river trails to explore; I have others to love well.
In her poem “When Death Comes,” Mary Oliver writes that we can each make a choice about how to live until that inevitable moment when we must “step through the door” of death. She says:
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this
world.
In my dreams, I do sometimes walk through a meadow of Alaska cotton on the west shore of the Slims. I do sometimes taste orange Tang and vodka. I do sometimes hear Lia’s infectious laugh. But when I wake, I snuggle close to my wife, Meredith, delight in her soft warm skin, treasure the crazy energy of our ten-year-old daughter and the dog leaping onto our bed. I am here, though the Slims River is gone. I am here, and I do not plan to merely visit this world.
***
Sarah Hahn Campbell’s book of linked essays, Grief Map, published by Brain Mill Press, releases today in print and ebook, available from sellers and distributors everywhere, and in fine first edition print and ebook directly from Brain Mill Press.
I haven’t exactly had writer’s block for the past month, but I haven’t been writing. This is a red flag.
Until a month ago, I maintained a strict writing discipline: I’d wake at 4:30, eat my breakfast and read for an hour, and then sit down at my computer to begin. My goal: write for an hour, at least, before I had to drive to school to teach. For two years, I followed that discipline. Before that, for many years, I wrote every night after I put Mitike to bed; I refused to let myself go to sleep until I had reached at least 1,700 words.
But lately, I’ve allowed myself to fall into a place I know all writers visit at some point, or at many points (because I have read so many memoirs by writers, like Stephen King’s On Writing, like Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird). It’s a place that looks like despair, except it also looks like regular life without the requirement to get up at 4:30 a.m. or drink strong coffee at 10 p.m. to reach those 1,700 words. In fact, it’s a more relaxing place. The in-progress novel about the girl whose brother is shot by the police? I no longer have to figure out how to make her reaction both powerful and believable. The other in-progress novel about the high school classroom on lockdown? I don’t have to solve the mystery of why, exactly, they’ve been put on lockdown. The historical fiction about Anna Dickinson? I don’t have to research anymore. The nonfiction work on coffee? I don’t have to walk through my life connecting everything to coffee any longer.
Lately, I’ve allowed myself to fall into a place I know all writers visit at some point, or at many points… It’s a place that looks like despair, except it also looks like regular life without the requirement to get up at 4:30 a.m. or drink strong coffee at 10 p.m. to reach those 1,700 words.
It’s easier to not write. Regular, non-writer people have calmer, far less obsessive lives. I never knew.
I’ve fallen into this place because I’ve been rejected on almost every possible front lately: a PhD program put me coldly on their waiting list; five colleges failed to call me for an interview for their posted composition or creative writing positions; four magazines informed me I have “high-quality work,” but they do not plan to publish the essays I submitted to them; and three writing residencies thanked me for my applications for their summer programs but informed me I am not quite for them. And the two books in the world with my name on them as author make only a few dollars (literally) each month. Only one book waits in the wings: the book of essays on grief, which wonderful Brain Mill Press plans to publish soon.
So, pitying myself, I decided to stop waking up at 4:30. Or, rather, I still get up at 4:30, and then I lie down on the couch and sleep for an additional hour. On the weekends, I choose to read instead of carve out my writing time, as I used to insist to my family I required. I spend my hours outside in our backyard, building a square-foot garden. The kale plants appreciate the water; the cabbage never asks me to turn a beautiful sentence; the eager broccoli never tells me my work is “not for them.”
It’s easier to not write. Regular, non-writer people have calmer, far less obsessive lives. I never knew.
Then, this week, in one of those moments that make my entire teaching career matter, a student came to my classroom to ask for help on a scholarship essay. The student’s name is Nasra Yusuf, or at least that is what I’ll call her here, to protect her identity. Nasra Yusuf has faced nearly every imaginable challenge this year: a Somalian immigrant from a traditional Muslim family, she chose to come out to her family as lesbian this fall and was promptly disowned. Technically homeless now, she lives with a friend’s family and is scrambling to apply for as many scholarships as possible, as her parents refuse to assist her with college unless she renounces her identity as a lesbian. She has endured depression and anxiety, crippling self-doubt, and the grief of standing separated from literally everything and everyone she has known. Secretly, she still prays to Allah for comfort, though she has chosen to take off the hijab, to wear 1980s T-shirts and jeans, to unbraid her long hair and wear it free.
In her scholarship essay, which only needed some editing, Nasra Yusuf describes the way her father called in the Muslim sheikhs to surround her in a prayer intervention when she first came out to her parents, the way she kept herself separate and distant inside even as they chanted, certain in her new awareness of who she is. It is a beautiful and powerful essay—the kind of writing we read because it matters and it’s honest and it reminds us to be honest in our own lives, too.
Technically homeless now, she lives with a friend’s family and is scrambling to apply for as many scholarships as possible, as her parents refuse to assist her with college unless she renounces her identity as a lesbian.
“You’re brave,” I told her, as I often do.
She grinned at me, pushing up her glasses. “Writing about it helps. It really does.” Then she thanked me, gathered her laptop and books, and rushed out to a meeting with another scholarship organization. I sat alone in the sunshine that streamed through the tall classroom windows. Writing about it helps. It does. Of course, I am the one who has taught Nasra Yusuf that this year. Again and again, I have encouraged her to write about her experiences, to discover how she feels by writing herself onto the page. Again and again, I have told her that I have survived the most difficult parts of my life because I have refused to stop writing.
In those times, I didn’t care whether anyone wanted to publish or pay me for my writing. I wrote because I had to. I wrote because I knew that was how I would survive.
And now I’m going to quit because of a handful of rejections?
“You’re brave,” I told her, as I often do. She grinned at me, pushing up her glasses. “Writing about it helps. It really does.”
Last week, I heard the writer Anne Lamott speak about and read from her new book, Hallelujah Anyway. Lamott, who wrote the sage advice in Bird by Bird that a writer should and must create “shitty first drafts” and keep plodding forward, though writing is often tedious and unrewarding misery, reminded us that it’s about the work. She said she remembers that her own father, also a writer, required himself to sit down at his desk every morning by 5:30, no matter what. So you don’t feel successful. So you despair. So you feel like you have nothing left to say. So what? It is the work that matters. In Bird by Bird, Lamott explains, “…this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?”
I never used to write because I wanted recognition or fame or money. From age nine, I have written because I felt compelledto write. I wanted to feel more alive. And Nasra Yusuf is right: it helps. It does.
So you don’t feel successful. So you despair. So you feel like you have nothing left to say. So what? It is the work that matters.
Starting right now, I am returning to my green chair in my orange writing room in our house. I am returning to my 5:30 a.m. writing routine. I have reopened the in-progress novels, the half-written essays. I have returned to my old requirement for myself: write, every day, no matter what.
Writing, of course, is not much different from the spinach and onion and collard green seeds I’ve planted in my square-foot garden. The work is what matters. Something might grow, and it might even be good — but for now, I’ll keep watering, I’ll keep scaring away the rabbits, and I’ll wait.
You’ve seen me before. I boarded your bus last week, in the afternoon.
I was the one wearing round black headphones around my neck like a DJ; I was the one in the slouchy red shorts and the too-large white Nike tennis shoes. I was the black one. My two friends and I crowded into the back of the bus, laughing, loud, because school had ended for the day and we are fourteen and it was only 3 p.m. You glanced back at me, annoyed, because you wanted to read the day’s headlines about Charlottesville in peace, and I was singing Beyonce in falsetto, my two friends in hysterics.
When the white man, age fifty-one, shouted from his seat in front of you, “Shut up, N____!” you bowed your head.
When my friends shouted back to defend me, when the white man lunged for us, when the white man threw his first punch at my black face, you closed your eyes and faced forward.
You’ve talked to me before. Last night in Starbucks, you sat waiting for a friend to meet you for mochas and an hour or two of catching up, and you noticed me at the next table bent over a thick biology textbook, a pen in my hand. Maybe ordinarily you would not have interrupted me, but I looked so young and earnest, and — well — I had brown skin and long glossy black hair. As a student, I surprised you. You wondered if I had been adopted.
“What are you studying?” you wanted to know, though the front cover of my textbook told you clearly.
“I’m in the pre-med program at UCD,” I told you, and then I bowed my head to return to mitosis and osmosis.
“Where are you from?”
“Here,” I said, because I have lived in Denver since my parents brought me here at age five. We waded across the slow-moving Rio Grande on a night so dark I could not see my mother, though I held her hand tightly. My father lifted me up and over a fence that tore at my clothes, and for long minutes I stood in Los Estados Unidos all alone while he helped my mother, who was pregnant with my baby brother. The crickets sounded the same in America as they had in Mexico, and the dusty road my family walked into the outskirts of El Paso, where my uncle waited for us, could have been a road anywhere, too.
“But where are you really from?”
I could have told you I have DACA status, that I emerged from the shadows with hope that I could study thick textbooks in coffee shops like any other American. I could have pointed to today’s headline about Trump ending the DACA program; I could have told you that, if I get deported to Mexico, I will walk into a country I do not know except in dreams and into a language I speak, pero mis sueños son en ingles.
Instead, I said, “I’m from here,” and I turned back to my studying.
You’ve needed my help before. At Chicago O’Hare one morning last month, you passed me pulling a wheeled black carry-on behind you, your turquoise faux leather purse slung across your chest. You looked weary: dark circles sagged beneath your eyes, you walked slowly, your mouth hung slack. I stood beside my duffle reading the day’s headlines in The Chicago Tribune.
“Excuse me, sir,” you said, “I don’t mean to bother you. Do you know if there’s a place to get breakfast nearby?”
I folded my newspaper under one arm and surveyed the area. I was on my way home to Iowa from Afghanistan after two years of duty. The moment I’d landed in New York several hours before, I had rushed to the first McDonalds I could find to buy myself a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit, hash browns, black coffee. Every bite tasted as perfectly greasy and salty as I had remembered. Watching me, people grinned knowingly. The tall slender young man in Army fatigues wolfing down McDonalds deserved this real American food. An old white-haired woman tucked a ten-dollar bill into my pocket. “Thank you for serving us, son,” she said. I used the ten dollars to buy another breakfast.
Now you looked at me with the same mix of respect and awe, the same belief that of all the people in this airport, I was trustworthy because I wore a U.S. Army uniform.
I caught sight of a Caribou Coffee stand. “I’ll walk you there,” I said, and I offered you my arm, because young men in uniform do that for older women. You took it gratefully, leaning on it. You told me as we walked that your mother had just died, that you were so tired.
Would you have leaned on my arm if you had known you leaned on the arm of a man born into a body identified as female? Would you have trusted me so much if you had known that I served for two years in Afghanistan praying my commander would keep my secret for me? Today’s headlines told me Trump will ban transgender soldiers from the military. I am so tired.
“Thank you, young man,” you said in front of Caribou Coffee. I bowed my head to you, and then I turned on my heel. My mother waited in Cedar Rapids to embrace her son.
You’ve watched me on TV before. It was late at night, and you turned on the TV because you couldn’t sleep, and the BBC was running a documentary on North Korea. You decided to watch because your grandfather fought in Korea in the 1950s, and you realized you knew nothing at all about that war. You learned that your grandfather and the other U.S. troops fought to defend South Korea from the Soviet-supported North Korea, that North Korea’s invasion was the first official action of the Cold War. You learned that the UN forces almost lost. You learned that the fighting ended with an armistice and the creation of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, but that technically the two sides are still at war. You wished you had asked your grandfather more questions.
The documentary includes shaky footage of people interviewed on the South Korean side of the DMZ. There I am: a young man with short, well-groomed black hair, a white button-down shirt open at the collar, a shy smile. I surprise you. I speak English well, and I look directly into the camera, telling the BBC reporter that the world must not forget Korea. I do not say “South Korea.” My grandmother and father live in the north still, I say. My great-grandfather fought in the Fatherland Liberation War in the 1950s, I say.
On the bottom of the screen, the day’s headlines scrolled. North Korea has just successfully tested a hydrogen bomb, and the UN is discussing strict sanctions. Trump says he will not rule out a military response. You paused the documentary and stared at a photograph of the DMZ: sky blue buildings, green grass, razor wire looping along a fence edge, a soldier standing guard over a rectangle of empty stone.
Briefly, you wonder if your grandfather ever looked into the eyes of my great-grandfather.
Then you turn off the TV.
I know you. You do not have to read the day’s headlines. You can camp for an entire weekend in the woods, blissfully free from any notifications, and return home rejuvenated. You can do this because they do not attack you or your children on public buses or in the street because of your skin color — you are white. You can avoid the day’s headlines because they do not threaten to deport you to the country in which you were born — your ancestors safely arrived in America, legally or illegally, one hundred and fifty years ago. You can ignore the news because they do not brandish pitchforks outside your door, crying “Monster!” — in your skirts, you safely live as the sex into which you were born. You can refuse to hear today’s latest announcements because they do not cavalierly suggest the annihilation of your homeland — you live in the United States.
And so you imagine you can close your eyes, drink your Starbucks mocha, turn off your phone and the TV and the computer. You imagine today’s headlines, terrible as they are, do not apply to you.
But you’ve seen me. You’ve talked to me. You’ve needed my help. You’ve watched me on TV. And someday, they will come for you.
And in that moment, you will pray that someone else has paid attention, that someone else is brave enough to speak — to act — to stand — for you.
Here’s what you can do today:
read the newspaper, every day (especially papers like The Guardian, which give an outside-U.S. perspective)
donate to an immigrant rights group to support DACA students (I donate to Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition)
donate to the ACLU, LambdaLegal, Human Rights Campaign, and other organizations that support the rights of all people, including transgender people who wish to serve in the military
oppose ANY form of racism and ANY organization that supports or spreads the ideas of white supremacy
call your senator and insist that the U.S. work with the UN on North Korea through careful diplomacy, not military action
refuse to be silent — Trump’s support (even passive) of white supremacists, his discontinuation of DACA, his ban on transgender people in the military, his aggressive stance on North Korea, and many, many other of his actions are wrong — and will hurt us all
When I close my eyes, I stand trembling on the deck of a ship that has just arrived in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. It is 1881, and my hands shake because the journey across the Atlantic was impossibly rough: seasickness, an overcrowded steerage, rampant head lice and rats, inadequate toilet facilities and tainted water. But we had to come, Wulff and I. In Germany, we would have been forced to give up our small farm and move to the city to work in grim factories, but here in America, Wulff said, we could build good lives again. Here in America, in spite of political parties that claim we new German immigrants are dangerous threats to American values and ideals, we can build a secure house, plant seeds in fertile soil, and send our children to school. America has promised us all of that. It is our refuge now.
When I open my eyes, it is 2017 and I stand in a classroom in Denver, facing thirty seniors—mostly immigrants—who bend their heads over notebooks, writing. They live in an America that has abruptly forgotten its best message: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. They live in an America where executive orders demand border walls and travel bans, where self-proclaimed white “nationalists” whisper in the president’s ear, and fear seethes in every turn of rhetoric.
We are all refugees.
As the great-great-granddaughter of Greta and Wulff, I turn to my students and I choose to listen.
I listen to Tesfay, who fled Eritrea to a refugee camp in Ethiopia when he was twelve, fearing for his safety in a country that forcibly conscripts young boys and men into the military.
Tesfay, who arrived in the US alone in 2013, regards his new life with deep brown eyes that have seen too much. In his quiet voice, he speaks of barbed wire, desert crossings, thirst, his cold fear. Friends of his have died attempting the Mediterranean crossing into Europe. Now he sits in an American high school classroom, focusing on the education that propelled him to survive. He sighs when I ask him what he wishes he could tell President Trump. “He needs to understand the story of refugees,” Tesfay says. “He needs to interact with people who are from different countries, which will make him open minded to different people. I wish everyone understood what people go through to get here, and what contributions they are making to this country.” He waits, then glances down at his homework. Back to work.
I listen to Kashindi, who arrived in the US on a rainy day in June of 2010 after living for his first thirteen years in a refugee camp in Tanzania. Kashindi’s mother fled the Congo when Uganda and Rwanda invaded and killed thousands of people.
The refugee camp was safer, but Kashindi remembers they were “held like prisoners.” He says: “We weren’t allowed to leave the camp, or go visit family members in different camps. We were surrounded by huge fences, we were like caged birds.” When Kashindi and his mother were selected by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to come to the US, they both imagined the United States as a kind of heaven, a place where the sky would rain money, where everyone was free and safe and friendly. “We ate, drank, and slept thinking about America,” Kashindi remembers. It hasn’t been the way he imagined, but it’s far better than the camp in Tanzania. Kashindi strides down the hallway to my class in his JROTC uniform, flashes me a grin, thanks me for teaching him today. “Greatness is not where you stand now, but in what direction you’re moving,” he says.
I listen to Nasra Yusuf.
In her black khimar (a head covering silkier and lighter than a hijab) with its green swirling polka dots, her multicolored print sweater, her black and turquoise striped skirt, her glasses with a Malcolm X–darkened top edge, she strikes a revolutionary stance—even the safety pin that secures the khimar beneath her chin seems a bold protest. Nasra Yusuf was born in Somalia, but her family fled to Uganda when she was a few months old—war had broken out, and “it was not safe anywhere,” she says. “We didn’t know where it was safe and where it wasn’t.”
Nasra Yusuf was six when she arrived in America. She imagined it would be a very crowded place where people constantly talked to each other, “just like our villages back home, where everyone is talking, giving each other food.” But for such a populated place, America seemed weirdly empty and quiet: “Here everyone is in their houses. They don’t even go onto the sidewalk. I didn’t expect that.” It was not welcoming, either, in spite of all the resources and opportunities it offered her family. For Nasra Yusuf, America is “a place where everybody’s categorized, and everybody belongs to a certain community, and nobody goes beyond that.” She’s certain that if everyone in America could just slow down long enough to see each other, we could create more understanding. She lifts her chin and shakes her head a little. “Instead of saying, ‘oh, this person’s Muslim, that person’s gay,’ they would see people as people they could connect to.”
I listen to Mohammed.
In 2013, at age seventeen, he emigrated to America from Iraq with his parents and his three younger brothers. They came, Mohammed explains, because: “The terrorists threatened us. My father was working security with a U.S. company in Basra, but we began to feel insecure and scared. We hoped to find a good education and a good future.” Mohammed feels America is exactly what he thought it would be, though it’s been difficult to master speaking and writing English. He thinks in Arabic and then works to translate his thoughts so English speakers can understand. By nature, he is soft-spoken, polite, tall and slender, with a shy smile. When I ask Mohammed what he wishes President Trump knew about immigrants, he hesitates, thinking. Finally, he says, “He should know that people are coming for an education and a better life, and to have a good future. Some people want to be terrorists, and they don’t want to be good, but most want to be good and have a better life. To get into America, we had to move from Iraq to Syria, then we stayed in Syria seven years. Two of those years, we had war in Syria. Then we had to do interviews and lots of papers. If people knew how much we had to do to prove we want a better life, they would help us and support us.” Mohammed does not want to comment on the recent travel ban. “We are here for a better life,” he repeats.
I listen to Ehywapaw, who was nine when she came to America from a Thai refugee camp, where she and her family, all members of the persecuted Karen ethnic group, had taken refuge.
Ehywapaw says, “My parents brought us here to get an education and a better life and resources. Back [in Thailand], we didn’t have a good education, and we had to work really low-paid jobs. Here there was better opportunity for us.” Ehywapaw hesitates. She is quiet in class, but she is an impeccable student and a highly respected Cadet Captain in the JROTC. “If I’d stayed [in the Thai camp],” she explains, “I think I would be married already. I would be working, and I would not finish school.” Here in America, Ehywapaw will do far more than just finish high school. She plans to study social work in college, to help newcomer immigrants like herself and her family. “I wish Donald Trump knew that I’m not a terrorist,” she says. “We just want a better opportunity. I’m not a bad person.” She smiles, amusement crinkling the corners of her eyes.
And I listen to Yoselyn, who came to America from Honduras in 2006, at the age of eight, all by herself.
Her mother had already made her way illegally into California and now wanted her daughter to join her. Yoselyn remembers her mother said she was going to pay someone to bring her north. If that didn’t work, her mother told her, she would have her come on a plane. Instead, Yoselyn says, “I ended up going all by myself. We went to Guatemala, and this guy came and picked me up. We were on a bus and the guy told me to go to sleep. He said he would tell an officer that I was his daughter and these were my papers. I didn’t feel scared. I just felt sad that I had to leave my nana, who was raising me.”
Yoselyn says she wishes people who are against DACA and who are so critical of undocumented immigrants would think about the fact that people come to the US for many reasons, but that “people who come here when they’re young, we don’t have an option.” But it was good she had come, Yoselyn says. If her mom hadn’t paid for her journey north, Yoselyn would have struggled to stay safe and get an education in Honduras. She ducks her head when I ask her if she’s glad she’s in the United States now. “I don’t want to be mean,” she says, examining a strand of red hair between her fingers, “but I want to be in Honduras. I miss going to the beaches.” She smiles wistfully and gazes out the window, where snowflakes fall steadily from a gray Colorado sky.
I listen to my students’ stories. And I ask you, before you make any judgment, to listen, too.
Before you support any law, listen. Before you blindly acquiesce to any ban, to any wall, to any order: listen. These students—Yoselyn, Ehywapaw, Mohammed, Nasra Yusuf, Kashindi and Tesfay—are six of the thousands who have come seeking refuge in the US in the past years. They have sought refuge from controlling governments, unsafe environments, religious persecution, wars, lack of opportunity. And they arrived in a country that promised the opposite of all of that. A democratic government. Secure, sunny neighborhoods. Religious freedom and freedom of expression. Safety. Free and equitable education.
They came seeking the refuge my great-great-grandparents, Wulff and Greta, came seeking. It has long been America’s promise
And yet. Every day of Trump’s presidency, we risk becoming more like the countries these students—and immigrants like Wulff and Greta—have fled
Listen. Listen, and then keep calling your senators, and keep reading, and keep thinking critically about what is true and what is not. Make it your goal to keep this country the nation refugees have dreamed for centuries—and not a country we have to flee.
All names of students have been changed to protect their privacy.
Once, for ten years, I lived in Juneau, Alaska, where I learned about enduring darkness.
In December in Juneau, the sun rises around 9 a.m. and sets at 3 p.m. Further north, my step-sister and her husband in Anchorage see an hour less of daylight than that, and my friends in Fairbanks glimpse the sun for only three and a half hours each day. Barrow, on the northern tip of the state, endures sixty-seven days of total darkness.
More than most people, Alaskans know darkness.
More than most people, Alaskans know darkness.
My first job in Alaska, in 2001, was to travel to far-flung villages to recruit students for a tiny little college, now defunct, called Sheldon Jackson. I spent whole days in pitch-dark northern places like Kotzebue, Nome, and Barrow, hurrying from my taxi to a well-lit high school, unwrapping my scarf from my face so I could give my spiel about Sheldon Jackson College and then hand out wooden pencils and key chains to the students. In the evenings, I ate alone at strange places—a brightly decorated Mexican restaurant in Barrow, a lonely pizza place in Nome—and then I would scurry back to my hotel room to stare out the window at the frigid dark. In Kotzebue, “hotel” meant my sleeping bag on the floor of a classroom in an elementary school.
Sometimes, the darkness was gorgeous. I have never seen stars like I saw in Kotzebue. In Fairbanks one evening, the northern lights ribboned green and pink above the silhouetted trees. In Barrow, the silver moonlight edged the frozen and jagged sea. But always, it was cold, and always I was grateful to retreat to a warm, well-lit place, even the Barrow hotel that displayed an intricately carved walrus penis (called oosik) in its lobby.
Sometimes, the darkness was gorgeous. I have never seen stars like I saw in Kotzebue.
But that first year in Alaska, I most often felt despair in the seemingly interminable frigid dark. It was only the second winter—after the first glorious summer—that I learned what all Alaskans know for certain in the depth of winter: that it is not a season for despair, but for waiting. It is a season to keep vigilant, to remind each other that the light willreturn, that the tilted earth will continue forward on its orbit and bring the northern hemisphere closer to the sun again.
In the Lutheran church in which I grew up, this season of waiting in the darkness is the ritual called Advent, from the Latin Adventus, which means “a coming.” Traditionally, Advent is the time of preparation, penance, and fasting before the celebration of the Savior’s arrival at Christmas. I remember sitting quietly beside my parents in our Lutheran church in Iowa while the pastor, draped in a blue stole, lit a candle on an enormous suspended wreath. At home on Sundays, we lit a candle on our own wreath while my mother read a passage from the Bible. Outside, the wind whipped snow into flurries, and I felt glad for our cozy family of four in our sturdy farmhouse. Advent was the quiet time before the presents and all the cookies and relatives. We waited, gazing at the candle flame: soft light in the cold dark.
It was only the second winter—after the first glorious summer—that I learned what all Alaskans know for certain in the depth of winter: that it is not a season for despair, but for waiting.
Long before Christianity, Pagans kept vigil in the dark before the Winter Solstice and the gradual slow return of the light. Some historians theorize that the Christian tradition of lighting candles on a suspended wreath comes from the practice of bringing wooden wagon wheels into the house to keep them pliable in cold weather. To save room, a household would hang the wheels from the ceiling and then turn them into impromptu candle holders, decorating them with evergreen boughs. I imagine my ancestors huddling around a crackling fire in Schleswig-Holstein, in northern Germany, their faces glowing in the candlelight from the swaying wagon wheel. For months, they would wait, the cold earth outside hard and fallow. And every year, the light would return. Every year, the plants would sprout green again in the muddy spring.
Advent was the quiet time before the presents and all the cookies and relatives. We waited, gazing at the candle flame: soft light in the cold dark.
This December of 2016, in the gathering darkness, Donald Trump has been elected president, and he has chosen a cabinet of people who deny climate change, who want to privatize schools, who want to take back affordable health care, who want to restrict the rights of women, who want to deport undocumented immigrants, who are cavalier about foreign affairs, who want to overturn antidiscrimination and marriage laws for LGBTQ+ people, who want to drill with abandon, and who are openly supported by white supremacists.
We could choose to sink into despair. We could live in that space in which so many of us wandered, stunned, in the days after Trump’s election. We mourned. Those of us who have known grief recognized the numbed, muted emotions, the remove, the wish for any other world than this one.
But my time in Alaska and my childhood observation of Advent teaches me this: the darkness does not endure. Eventually, light returns if we wait, awake, aware, ready. Vigilant.
Now is the very time to get up from the floor and light the candles. Now is the time to keep vigil, to prepare.
Those of us who have known grief recognized the numbed, muted emotions, the remove, the wish for any other world than this one.
As much as I wanted the recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan to reveal that Hillary is the real winner of the Electoral College, and as much as I longed for dozens of “faithless electors” to vote their conscience on December 19 and deny Trump the presidency, I know it’s safest to prepare for the long winter dark. That shaft of light here, that warmer afternoon there—I’ll let them remind me: the dark doesn’t last. The light always comes.
And I remind myself: more than most people, Alaskans—who endure so much darkness in the winter—know light. From May 10 to August 2, the sun blissfully refuses to set in Barrow. In late June in Juneau, we used to hold barbecues on the beach in full warm sunlight at 11 p.m. We basked in those light-drunk days, the freezing dark a bare memory.
Now is the very time to get up from the floor and light the candles. Now is the time to keep vigil, to prepare.
I am still mourning, but I am also keeping vigil: I am teaching, I am advocating, I am writing, I am reading (currently: 1984; up next: a history of the Velvet Revolution), and I am donating money to places that resist the darkness—the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, the Human Rights Campaign, organizations that help immigrants. Every Sunday, I gather with my wife and daughter at our table to light our own Advent wreath and to read poetry that reminds us to hope and to move constantly toward a kinder world.
If we keep our vigil well, our eyes open, the light will come back. It will.
On November 9, early in the morning, I researched emigration to Canada.
I explored whether Canada needs experienced psychologists like my wife (it does) and whether I could get a teaching license there (I could) and whether we could find an Ethiopian community for Mitike there (yes: Toronto).
But I was wrong to try to flee Trump’s America.
Two and a half months later, I know that my responsibility as a woman, as an educated person who grew up in relative privilege, as a teacher in a large city high school that serves a refugee population, as a writer, as a mother, and as an American is not to flee this country but to stay and join the resistance.
I was wrong to try to flee Trump’s America.Two and a half months later, I know that my responsibility … is not to flee this country but to stay and join the resistance.
I must stay to resist because, as a reader and as a student of history, I recognize the symptoms of this time. Suddenly, the words of George Orwell’s dystopic fiction 1984 (written in 1949) and Hannah Arendt’s analysis The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) speak directly about today’s America; suddenly the brave civilian resistance portrayed in books like Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies or Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, or in movies like Schindler’s List(1993) or Hidden Figures (2016) is pertinent to what we need to do now, in America, in 2017.
We must resist. In every way. Immediately.
I hear the alarm bells ringing in every cabinet choice (DeVos, Sessions, Tillerson), in every incendiary phrase in an official speech (“American carnage”), in every moment KellyAnn Conway or Sean Spicer defends “alternative facts” with their doublespeak, in every insecure and unbalanced tweet, in the deleted subheadings from whitehouse.gov, in the reports that government agencies like the EPA have been instructed not to communicate with the public, in every new executive order that threatens human rights. If we do not speak loudly and act swiftly now, our government will go the way of certain other governments in history.
We must resist. In every way. Immediately.
On Saturday, January 21, I pulled on my handmade crocheted pink pussy hat and marched beside my wife and daughter in Denver. We joined over 150,000 other people. Those of us in pink hats grinned at each other, connected. Meredith and I marched holding hands, our daughter leaning close, reading the protest signs to us: “Forward, not backward!” and “No racism, no homophobia, no xenophobia, no Islamophobia” and “Women’s rights are human rights” and “My pussy has TEETH!” and “Nasty women make history” and “LOVE WINS!” and “I’m with her and her and her and her and her!” In Civic Center Park, we cheered for spoken-word poets and singers and leaders and activists, and hope swelled in the air. My mom and I (both in our pink hats) wrapped our arms around each other’s waists as a woman law-maker asked the crowd to shout out the names of women who have inspired us. I shouted Mom’s name; she shouted Gram’s. The atmosphere was inclusive, optimistic, activated, even cheerful. On the way home on the train, I vibrated with the good energy of it all, glowing to think that, though I had marched in Denver, I had marched alongside my friends in Chicago and St. Paul and Portland and San Francisco and D.C. and Des Moines and Juneau and Tucson, and alongside the over one million other people who had marched that day.
The Women’s March was not officially a march against Trump. But in these first days of his presidency, we are all realizing that our resistance must be against him and his government, that in fact, the most American, most constitutional, most patriotic reaction to Trump’s election is to resist it.
Critics kept asking why we were marching, but they only had to read our signs: we marched to insist that we will fight for the rights of all people, for goodness and decency, for a world that is not built on greed or power, but on a deep belief in humanity’s capability for love and progress. The Women’s March was not officially a march against Trump. But in these first days of his presidency, we are all realizing that our resistance must be against him and his government, that in fact, the most American, most constitutional, most patriotic reaction to Trump’s election is to resist it. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, No. 28, in 1787, “If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government.” Resistance is the only way we will keep our freedoms in this country. It is the only way we will keep our country.
Many of those who voted for Trump believe he is the resistance, the wrecking ball come to destroy the government that has failed to support them and failed to improve their lives. They shake their heads at our protests; they tell us to accept Trump’s win and move forward; they claim we liberals just can’t handle the “locker room talk” or Trump’s willingness to ignore political correctness. And this, of course, is another symptom of the serious peril in which we find ourselves. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her preface to The Rise of Totalitarianism, “It is as though mankind has divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.” In other words, if those who believe they are omnipotent can convince the ones who feel powerless that they speak for them, too (though they do not intend to), then they will achieve ultimate power at any cost. Hitler did that with great success for some time. Now Trump, the millionaire businessman, is claiming to his poverty-stricken supporters in West Virginia and Michigan that they are the “forgotten people” and that he is their “messenger” — and when he speaks, they cheer wildly, praising God.
If those who believe they are omnipotent can convince the ones who feel powerless that they speak for them, too (though they do not intend to), then they will achieve ultimate power at any cost.
And that is why marching on one day — even with millions — is not enough. The resistance against Trump’s corporate coup d’etat must be vigilant, constant, aggressive, and committed. We must not put our signs away. We must keep ourselves informed of every executive orderand every bill proposed in Congress. We must write our legislators emails and letters, we must call them until they recognize our voices, we must create and sign petitions, we must organize groups in person so we can keep each other aware (look into registering an Indivisible Group; a group of people and I are meeting to do just that on Monday), we must contribute money to independent media (I support The Guardian, The New Yorker, and Democracy Now!), we must keep yelling the truth when the “alternative facts” are presented, and we must vote and vote and vote in every local and regional election. If we can, we must remain vocal about the issues that matter to us most, even if others pressure us or order us to be quiet.
There are many ways to resist. There are those ways of American democracy that I have just mentioned, and there are other ways that we must learn so we can use them if we need to.
What will I be prepared to do? … Could I shout “TWO PLUS TWO IS FOUR!” even though the authorities tell me I must say five or be tortured, as they told Winston in 1984? … Could I stand strong with others although pipeline construction equipment or tanks roll toward us? I think I could. I hope so.
I’m researching in this way so I can be ready if I need to be. What will I be prepared to do? Could I run secret subversive messages, like the French characters in All the Light We Cannot See? Could I shout “TWO PLUS TWO IS FOUR!” even though the authorities tell me I must say five or be tortured, as they told Winston in 1984? Could I speak publicly against oppression, as the women in Hidden Figures did? Could I smuggle threatened people (like my Muslim students, like my students whose parents are undocumented or who are themselves undocumented) in and out of my own house, as so many people did in Europe during World War II? Could I write and speak and organize, even against threats, like the women in In the Time of the Butterflies did? Could I stand strong with others although pipeline construction equipment or tanks roll toward us?
I think I could. I hope so.
These days and weeks and months ahead will test me, as they will test us all. But what I’m learning from my research is this: years from now, history will ask how people responded to Trump and his plans for America, and I will say that I stayed.
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