Alan Townsend's Blog

I flew to Oklahoma to get him. The flat where he was born was above a Tulsa veterinary clinic, and it housed a chaotic perpetual motion machine of a dozen others like him plus one cranky dachshund. His father proudly wore a green diaper festooned with bowtied bones as though it certified his snorting, slobbering monarchy. He gave the puppy a final approving sniff and me a blast of his foul breath before I deposited the ball of yellow fur in a soft-sided carry-on with mesh windows. When I pulled him out of it back in Colorado late that night, my daughter clutched him to her blue and white nightgown. He was her surgery dog. Her lifeline out of another unimaginable blow.

In time, we’d learn that this second entry to her brain finally got it all. That came after her mother died a year prior from her own brain cancer, after she’d asked me if mom had caught the cancer from her, after the tumor in her own head wrecked her body’s fight or flight cascade, so that her vitals oscillated in terrifying swings as she willed herself to rise above yet another day spent with sterilized instruments snaking their way in from the back of her nose. The dog was the turning point. An avatar of normalcy that let her look beyond. When she hugged him to her chest, I had to look away.

For years, he spent each night in her bed, snoring intermittently like a drunken old man. A white noise machine from hell. She’d pull him close and then thrust him away, sometimes yelling at him, tossing him on the floor or even out of her room. He’d absorb the mild assaults with typical sangfroid, content to curl up and wheeze somewhere else for a bit until he’d return to the bed and brace his front paws on its side, training his bulging eyes on the girl above. No, no, don’t give me those puppy eyes, she’d say in mock rebuke, before she brought him up once more.

She named him Fang. He had none in his wizened face, yet still managed to hoover food as though he were some kind of power tool. Once, he shot in to steal a rawhide belonging to a far larger neighbor dog and received a bite-sized hole in his head for his efforts. He went back for more. Another time, he blew up a piece of chocolate cake all over the girl’s white comforter. She considered doling out her own hole to the head but settled for banishing him to his crate, where he snored happily. When we moved to Montana, he spotted a bear in the backyard and charged it with impunity, prancing and wheezing in outsized pride after the bear shoved off.

When the doorbell rang, he’d attack the larger dog and be tossed into the mudroom for it; there, he’d sometimes sit imprisoned for hours, unperturbed by being forgotten in havoc’s wake. He’d just emerge calmly and resume his favorite position by the fire. Or if the sun was hot enough, he’d decamp to the nearest patch of cement and go to his back, where his feigned rigor mortis was convincing enough that we’d go pull on an outstretched leg. Just to be sure.

When he stole my wife’s sweater while she showered, and then summarily dragged it to the yard, he simply became Pug. As in, the pug did it. In time, he was Pugger. The girl grew and her cancer remained at bay and her room morphed into an early teen temple in which his prolific shedding and predilection to go piss in her closet were no longer welcomed overnight. But he’d curl in her chair and harmonize with the sound machine until he was sent back to sleep by the fire. When she emerged each day, he’d greet her with his Cheshire grin and the barest twitch of his curled tail.

One friend rechristened him as Gerald. Another spun an entire personality for him as a laid-back drug dealer. My parents took him in for a year, where they joined the inevitable chorus of recounting his exasperating path through the world, but so too did my mother hold him on her lap each day, the dog in a softly vibrating ball, the book or tablet balanced just above. He always worked himself into daily conversation.

Three weeks ago, he crashed through the dog door at 2 AM in pursuit of another bear in the yard. This one a repeat visitor who liked to nap on the outdoor sofa. Perhaps in respect for the bruin’s ethos, they reached a détente and the girl awoke to find bear and dog simply following each other casually across the grass. If you knew the pug, this would make sense. Four days before his time came to an end, he slept happily a few feet away while the same bear opened the back door, entered the living room, and looked around for a while. We like to think he’d just come to see his friend, for he left without damage.

Not long after her astonishing gift of a second mother had scooped the stricken dog from where he lay and enveloped him in love and comfort, the girl stood in a semicircle of her family around the blanketed steel table, her hand on his ruff, intertwined with those of everyone else. Including the boy who was taking it all on his shoulders, he too a victim of a cruel twist of fate, his bottomless and generous heart shattered alongside hers. Later, he’d take the girl into his arms.

But in this moment, we all looked down and shed tears and then she leaned over and gave the yellow fur a last kiss before one syringe was depressed, then another. He stunk and he shed like hell and he maddeningly licked the air for hours on end and he refused to listen and we loved the little bastard fiercely with all of our hearts.

Pugger was originally published in State Factors on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As a scientist, I’m prone to seeing the phenomena of our world through a mechanistic lens. A breeze was blowing on my morning bike ride because of a difference in atmospheric pressure. The small ponderosa branch that nearly hit me as it fell came off the tree because it bore signs of past disease. The needles drooping and burnt orange. Those bursts of crimson on the Castilleja plants were always surrounded by yellow Arnicas or purple lupines or a host of other wildflowers because the former is a parasite, dependent on robbing resources from its neighbors to pull off its own showy display.

And, I suppose, you could say that at the end of my climb I sat on the top of the mountain amidst those wildflowers and stupid cried because it had been a hell of a year. A hell of a decade really.

But that explanation is incomplete. It doesn’t reveal how I began to lose it when I heard the voice of my late wife in the words of a media personality best known for hosting a show about professional basketball. Or how the conversation between this man and the one interviewing him — another sports show host — reached into my soul and released and rebuilt it all at once.

Ernie Johnson is the host of a show called Inside the NBA, perhaps the longest running and most beloved show of its kind. If you’re a basketball fan — and honestly, even if you’re not — it’s must see TV because it’s funny and human and insightful all at once. Johnson serves as the conductor for the three galactically famous ex-players who surround him on the set, all of whom are great at this gig, but it’s Johnson who makes the whole thing work. And while it’s always dangerous to draw conclusions about someone based solely on their TV personality, Ernie Johnson has a way of jumping off the screen as a deeply good man. Today, I learned that’s unquestionably true.

Dan LeBatard is not as well-known as Johnson, but if you’re into sports at all, good chance you’ve heard of him. He’s been a staple in the Miami scene for years, but what sets him apart is not just a quick wit and the ability to turn a phrase, it’s the fact that LeBatard has a way of using sports as a vehicle for conversations that are far more consequential than who won or lost last night. He’s unafraid to cut into the blood and guts and connective tissue of our collective humanity in all its simultaneous horrors and beauty, and is delightfully uncaring about those who might grouch that he should just stick to sports.

Which brings me to something I can’t explain from this morning. Why, on the heels of an especially hard week during which I just couldn’t seem to drag myself out of a mental pit, I chose to listen to a podcast that features LeBatard hosting Johnson. It wasn’t entirely random — I like pulling up LeBatard’s show now and then for the reasons noted above — but it’s not a typical choice for one of my rides. And yet there I was, stopped on the trail just after the ponderosa branch fell, scrolling through my phone until I saw the episode and thought: why the hell not.

What followed was an hour that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. When I hit play, my chest and gut and mind were as they had been all week — locked in various forms of circulating turmoil, intersecting threads of grief and anger and frustration and occasional hopelessness weaving through each other like one of the circulating eddies in the snowmelt-laden river that runs through my town, places in which you can find pieces of floating debris that never seem to escape. Yet by the time I sat in those flowers and looked down on that town while I listened to the final words from these two men, I felt as though perhaps I could just take a quick sprint through the blossoms before floating into space and gently landing back at my home.

LeBatard is masterful at simply teeing up Johnson’s grace and humanity, in which I heard and felt and embraced Diana once more. In his piercingly beautiful story of unconditional love and loss, I mourned her once more. And in his comfortably egoless and therefore enormously resonant reminder to be content with what we have instead of longing for what we don’t, a peace which has been elusive of late returned to my core. I remembered that for all of the blows life has wrought in the last decade, above all the cancers which struck both my wife and daughter, they still pale in comparison to the good fortunes of my past and present.

A year after Diana died, I sat in the stillness of a predawn dark and watched the first rays of sunrise begin to frame the peak that is our daughter’s namesake. Later that day, I wrote this about her: She reminded me that while our flashes may be brief, some of them are impossibly bright, and everything that matters is contained in the ways your own light sparks the ones that lie in everybody else.

Today, a couple of men I’ve never met and likely never will reignited a light in me. How do you say thank you to people you don’t even know for a gift that important? I guess you just say it. Thank you, Ernie and Dan. Your profoundly human conversation meant the world to me today.

Thank You Ernie and Dan was originally published in State Factors on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the summer of 1978, just a year into my lifelong obsession with fly fishing, I badgered my father to take three trout-addled middle schoolers on a trip to Yellowstone Park. Our destination was a remote lake reachable only by canoe and portage, the back bays of which were full of big and hungry fish. Or so the magazine claimed.

We headed east from Missoula on I-90, the canoe strapped precariously to the roof of a brown VW Rabbit whose every corner was stuffed with camping and fishing gear. We traveled southeast through Ennis and up the Madison Valley, eventually reaching the Madison’s origin and turning right to follow the Firehole’s serpentine and occasionally steaming course. Past Old Faithful, over Craig Pass where we got a brief glimpse of our ultimate destination, and on to the shores of Lewis Lake.

The trip began with crossing that lake, where sudden winds turned a glassy passage into moments of rising fear as waves lashed at our bow. My father’s calm did not break, but his face tightened while he dug hard with each paddle stroke. Then it was up the Lewis River to Shoshone Lake, a pine and meadow-lined treasure shaped vaguely like a hammer. The river dropped only a few vertical feet between the lakes, turning most of its course into a crystalline fjord whose borders of lodgepole forest and basaltic outcrops blocked the wind. In the last half mile, you could no longer paddle and were forced to attach a bowline to the canoe and drag it upstream to Shoshone’s southeastern corner. We tried to help, but my dad did most of the work, as he did once again in propelling us along nearly ten miles of Shoshone Lake shoreline to where the magazine said the fishing was best.

Those fish proved elusive. They dimpled the surface near our campsite but would not eat anything we offered. And so we convinced my dad to steer us through bay after bay, any pretense of real fly fishing abandoned in favor of trolling inch long flies with olive yarn bodies and splayed rubber legs. He provided our motor with stroke after stroke and a hint of a bemused grin while our hopes faded for a single Shoshone trout, then he restored our morale with cups of hot chocolate as stars filled the sky. The next day, he took us out again. My father did not fish.

The following summer, he sat peacefully on the banks of the Yellowstone River in Hayden Valley, alternately reading a book and watching me make awkward casts. When I finally landed a golden fish with a red slash on its jaw and a spray of black spots near its tail, he stood in shared triumph until the trout was released, then smiled quietly as my words tumbled forth. I’ve never told him that my first choice for my son’s name was Hayden, because of the memories the valley holds. Memories he wrought.

Ones of searches along the valley’s forested edges for the rolling gait of a grizzly bear, of a family of otters sliding down a grassy bank, of the very first time we drove into this luminous stretch of land in the slanting light of a September afternoon. I was not yet six. Determined to spot any animal before my him, I identified no shortage of rocks and bushes on the distant hills as animate in the first few miles. But then we rounded a corner and there was no mistaking the sight: a hundred or more bison in the midst of crossing the water, cows encouraging that spring’s calves, shaggy bulls with massive shoulders unperturbed by the river’s deceptively powerful current.

Forty-three years later, he moved into our house as my wife faced death. His arrival brought near daily moments of staggering heartbreak and sweetness. A tiny girl and her 76-year-old grandfather jumping ceaselessly on the trampoline, Diana somehow willing herself to join them one day for a few brief leaps. Her smile no longer full as the brain tumor’s paralysis now reached her face. Daily walks on a campus path across from the house, my wife determined to make the circuit, my father alongside to ensure she would not fall. Diana swinging her right leg stiffly in robotic arcs, her foot often dragging along the gravel path. My dad holding her left arm.

The day she died, he sat quietly beside me, making space in his own pain to absorb mine.

Today, he turns eighty. He’ll drive up the canyon that has been home for nearly five decades and park his ancient Prius in a small clearing ringed by pines and firs. He will run alone, the pandemic walling me off from being there. Yet I’ll feel every one of his footfalls from a thousand miles away. Each of them both bruising and lifting my heart.

It is fitting that this milestone birthday falls upon a day reserved for others. He will downplay his own moment to celebrate my mother, as he has for more than half a century. But perhaps a few reflective tears will come, for in his later years the emotions flow freely. Now and then, his voice will halt and his eyes will fill. I suspect he knows what I am only beginning to see. That as we age, the beauty of life is rendered more sharply, as though compressed by time from unremarkable rocks into a series of shimmering gems.

He was not a father who pushed me to be tough or strong in typically masculine ways. There were no exhortations to win, or to punch my way out of something. To, in effect, elevate my own stature at the expense of others. Eventually I came to know that the strength he modeled was forged from something precious and rare. The strength to be an unshakeable foundation on whom others can stand.

Upon hearing of his plans for an 80th birthday run, my new wife Sue — who he has also come to love — said he’s just so alive. We may move back to Missoula at some point, where she hopes to build a home that would bring mom and dad in with us. I’m going to get chickens and goats and plant a huge garden and do all of it with your dad. Because you know he’d dive right into that.

He would. Her words took me back to when he was past sixty and decided to tackle a life goal not yet met. A unicycle appeared, first upon the living room carpet where he could put a steadying hand on the wall. Soon after, a certain notoriety spread across the University of Montana campus when he would pull the unicycle from the trunk of his car, shoulder a backpack and finish the commute with a ride to his department office.

At 77, he climbed atop a stand-up paddleboard for the first time. After a few tentative laps around a gentle eddy, he pushed into the main stem of the Bitterroot River and continued downstream for another twelve miles. His granddaughter, now seven and still battling a brain tumor of her own, let the river cleanse the wounds of a gutting year as she happily swam between my board and his. At one point we paused on a spit of mid-river gravel and ate lunch, where I watched him as he did her. And it struck me that the balance required for these moments upon unicycle or paddleboard went far beyond the simple physics of remaining upright.

Today, I still fish and he does not. But each time I wade into a river, each time I slip for just a moment but then find purchase on the timeworn rocks below, I feel him there.

Bedrock was originally published in State Factors on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I took up the guitar as I approached fifty and my wife faced her impending death. Angel from Montgomery was the first song I could truly (kinda, sorta) play. With fumbled chords and a halting voice, I played it as her legs failed and her speech disappeared within her tumor-ravaged brain. I played it again on the night she chose to forgo any more visits to the hospital, a newfound stillness on her face while she listened, even as her body withered away. A few weeks on, the simple chords rang hollow as I sat alone in a sepulchral bedroom, but still I played. Again and again and again.

The years they just flow by, like a broken down dam.

Months later, I stood beside her grave in the slanting light of a Colorado autumn, shaking from thoughts of how grief nearly placed me in the ground beside her. I played the song once more while a trio of ratty deer looked on. The following spring, I sat next to our young daughter, fresh out of a second surgery for her own brain tumor, while she said “Dada play the Monday song.”

Sittin’ all alone on a mountain by a river that has no end.

Long before the little girl and her mother came into my life, long before I knew how to finger pick a few notes, I drove alone through a Wyoming snow storm, rewinding another of his songs and picturing my parents’ tears. “We’ll have to see what the lymph node biopsies show.” She too was still in the prime of life.

It took me years
To get those souvenirs
And I don’t know how they slipped away from me.

How do you say goodbye to an essential friend you’ve never met? Perhaps you sit on the porch beneath a radiant moon and sing his music. Perhaps you’re lucky enough to sit beside a new love you never expected, finding a moment of laughter when you mess up the words to In Spite of Ourselves in a brief duet. Perhaps you play Clay Pigeons three times, above all for its concluding line.

And start talkin’ again, when I know what to say.

Eventually, you realize the loss of the friend you never met broke loose something inside you’ve been holding tightly for the past month. You walk beneath that moon and look upon the snow-capped peaks it frames and the breathtaking beauty of it all instead becomes just breath taking. Each one quick and shallow as you think of the little girl across the small river and upstairs in her bed, think of how she cannot afford any more tragedy in her young life, think of how grief and fear are now defining currencies of the entire world. Of how the effulgent landscape around you suddenly feels like an impossibly thin and ephemeral coating that could simply wash away.

Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in askin…

At one point on the walk, I thought of how a straight line could be drawn from my unmet friend’s death, and those of countless others, to a soulless and floundering president and all who enable him. But the anger wouldn’t flow. Instead there was only heartache, for a man who brought so much light into our lives, and for a world whose own light was flickering amidst a pandemic of division and denial.

Do you look at strangers,
As potential dangers?

The little girl stood upon the porch, shivering in a pair of light pajamas and waiting anxiously for our return. When I lay beside her she stifled a sob before whispering, “when you guys go out in the dark I’m scared the virus will jump out and get you.” I held her for a long time before asking if she wanted me to sing her a song.

Kiss a little baby
Give the world a smile
If you take an inch
Give ’em back a mile
Cause if you lie like a rug
And you don’t give a damn
You’re never gonna be
As happy as a clam.

Eventually I shut her door and slipped into my own bed, but my eyes would not close. At one point, I stood before the window and watched the moon trace its way along a distant ridge before giving way to a riot of stars. I could still make out the jagged outline of piñon pines and junipers in the break between land and sky, and I thought of how the rocks beneath those trees bore the lyrics of worlds past. Of how the mountain they formed had witnessed the ebb and flow of an inland sea. Of how the river at the base of that mountain carried subtle evidence of its presence to a miraculous web of life thousands of miles away. Of how that life would never know of the mountain’s existence and yet, in some small way, depended on it being here. Then I fell asleep.

But dreaming just comes natural
Like the first breath from a baby,
Like sunshine feeding daisies,
Like the love hidden deep in your heart.

Rest in peace John Prine. You meant more to me than I could ever properly say.

Farewell to an Unmet Friend was originally published in State Factors on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The maximum slope, measured in degrees from the horizontal, at which loose solid material will remain in place without sliding.

By my eleventh summer, I knew where the earth would give way just enough. Where it would allow a brief arc beneath my waffled soles before they went airborne again, moments of weightlessness punctuated by dryland facsimiles of ski turns to come. The corrugated trunks of a dozen giant ponderosas marked the run, begun with a sprint towards an ever-steepening angle until each leap would send me yards at a time towards my Montana home below. Launch and lean left, launch and lean right, flinging myself into space with a certainty the world would do as I wished.

The last turn came beneath a clear demarcation, beyond which trees could no longer hold. Here the graveled hillslope was slowly, surely, eating itself from below. Proof of its appetite could be found in regular pebbled staccato against my bedroom window, moments that sometimes jolted me awake. On some of those nights the spreading pines were rendered in ghostly detail, each needle piercing the moonlight while my heart raced beneath widened eyes.

By day, I would race beneath those branches and make that final leap, my feet inevitably giving way to a prolonged slide on one hip, before I’d lean breathless against the weathered brown siding and check my watch. Did I set a record?! Then I’d admire the final few turns above. Each one a crescent pockmark in a carpeting of needles and cones.

At the time, both Stegner’s novel and equations that governed the hillside’s response were years from my consciousness. So too was the realization that my mother’s own angle of repose seemingly approached ninety degrees.

I remained unaware of her law school interview in 1973, when the dean asked what do your husband and young son think about you wanting to do this? During parties at the house with her classmates, I thought little of the fact that her friends Jean and Mae Nan seemed to be the only other women amidst a throng of men. When she joined the county prosecutor’s office upon graduation, I’d occasionally wind my way past the women who sat out front and along a series of offices, each one occupied with potbellied men who seemed to blend into one another, before eventually finding hers.

At one point, I went to see her in court and found it unsettling. There was a man in black behind a high bench, another man in uniform to his right. Just beyond, five more men across two tables. All of them looked at my mother as she faced yet another man to the judge’s left. A hard look in his eyes as he spat out monosyllabic answers to the questions she asked. I remember the straightness of her back and her measured pace as she turned from the witness and strode towards her chair.

As the years passed, now and then I’d overhear the words murder or rape or assault and perhaps witness a moment where her ever tranquil face appeared just a little drawn. But these intrusions of her other world into mine were rare. She’d come home and swap a blue or burgundy suit for something more comfortable, by late fall usually a sweater with 3D bears or jingle bells or reindeer. To me the sweaters were funny, an opening for a gentle ribbing. I never thought how perhaps they soothed something inside.

Her cancer struck during the sweater season of my 27th year. I pointed my car north through limitless undulations of cheatgrass and sage, my view of the road periodically obscured by blasts of snow or the welling in my eyes. But her own eyes filled only for a day, then she quietly said I’m beating this and she did. Striding across courtrooms through most of it, right up and through the moment when a picture arrived of her standing beside an engaged Sandra Day O’Connor. The two of them seeming to share something only they could know.

She appeared to rest so easily amidst the rough and tumble landscape of her own profession that I scarcely considered how, well, rough and tumble it truly was. How her days were filled with stark evidence of humanity’s evil and heartbreak, all the while surrounded by men who secretly — or not so secretly — felt she didn’t belong. Only years later, after real dents came to the boundaries of my own world, did I begin to see the ones she had to absorb or ward off. Only then did I see the stories written in invisible ink all across the blue judicial robe she eventually donned.

Yes, blue. For when she became the first woman judge in the history of Montana’s second largest district, she decided to find out if a black robe was required. If she had to conform to a history that did not include her. The answer discovered, she announced her intention with typical lightness. I look better in blue. But I sensed something more.

Because sense it you must. Only rarely do the sediments of her life shift to allow the molten forces beneath to reveal themselves, ever so briefly, until the fissure anneals almost as quickly as it appears. In those precious few moments you see the imprints of a requirement to be better, calmer, wiser, smarter than the men around her. You see the ever-present threat of a subtle shift in landscape form that could push the angles beyond what even she could grasp. You see, if you are paying attention, yet another example of how those angles are steeper throughout the geology of nearly every woman’s existence. And yet the world travels through, scarcely noticing the adhesion required.

She retired a few weeks ago, trying to do so in typically understated fashion but finding herself celebrated nonetheless. For her grace and wisdom, for her strength and judgement, for her kindness and humanity. Tales were told of the paths she blazed and the hills she climbed. Then she headed off to interview a famous author who once complicated her life, delighting him and the audience alike. An audience of renowned attorneys from around the country, some of whom elected her to join their ranks years before. Ah it’s just my snooty lawyer’s group she would say.

Last night, as I angled my youngest daughter into her own repose, I thought of the blue robe. Of moments that led to it, and the celebrations of the woman it draped. And of how that woman’s blood ran in the little girl before me, a throughline of grace and strength and force of will that kept her too from slipping free even as the world raged around her tiny form. I thought, with renewed certainty: she too can walk her grandmother’s path.

And then I thought: if only she didn’t need to.

Angles of Repose was originally published in State Factors on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An iron wrought deception marks the entrance to Auschwitz 1. Arbeit Macht Frei. It did no such thing for unfathomable numbers of cruelly pyjamaed souls herded past a conscripted orchestra, all of them awaiting an inhuman death.

I stop beyond the gate and pull back from my group. Just behind and to my right, framed by a barbed wire prison fence and a weathered skull and crossbones sign with warnings in German and Polish, I notice that an elderly couple has also paused. She is dressed in all black excepting a patterned magenta scarf, he too in somber hues right through a dark brown fedora that frames a head still thick with gray hair. A cane rests in the crook of her left arm while she leans upon his and I see tears in the eyes of them both.

I manage to contain my own tears until I am before a small glass case on the second floor of Block 6. By now, I have seen perhaps three dozen such cases, each one containing evidence of the horrors of this place. Lists of names. Defiled prayer shawls. Letters ordering the construction of killing chambers and deliveries of cyanide gas. Some of the cases are at waist height, and you must bow your head as though penitent to look within. Others are embedded into the walls, in between covert black and white photographs of possessions ransacked, gaunt bodies, and people being separated train side between subhuman work or immediate death. At these you simply stare.

But in the Block 6 case there is a tiny sweater, pants, pair of shoes. So it is here that I cry.

I lean on the case until the guide from the next group gently ushers me along, where I find myself before an uncountable pile of shoes behind a window on the far wall. All of them are also small. All of them are still only a tiny fraction of those taken from the feet of more than two hundred thousand children murdered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps.

In the next room, another window reveals a carpet woven from human hair. To its side and along the near entirety of a twenty foot wall, hair itself. The tangled and grisly pile is perhaps four feet deep and spans the display. Near one end, a deeply ironic lock of blond emerges from variegated shades of brown. By the time we reach the torture chambers of Block 11, by the time we reach its basement that witnessed the first agonizing deaths from Zyklon B gas, by the time we then climb from this basement to pause in remembrance before the Death Wall, my tears have dried. I wonder why.

They stay that way an hour later as I walk slowly along the terminal train track that bisects the partial ruins of Birkenau, where above all its horrors the murderous gridded order and scale of the place hit hardest. A deliberately planned torture and killing facility that stretches left and right to trees that nearly blend into the horizon. It is then that I realize I’m growing numb. I begin to cry again, this time in fear and shame.

Amidst all human faults, our innate tendency to self-deceive may be the most dangerous of all. It comes in many forms. Here at COP24, the reason I could visit Auschwitz-Birkenau in the first place, it is not only the outright resistance to climate science shown by delegates from my country, it is the fact that just about all of us here — all of us anywhere — are not doing enough to slow an impending catastrophe. For some, deception comes from a political and cultural alignment with denial that a problem exists at all. For others, the very acceptance of the problem becomes the deception too. We numb the realities of the cars we drive or the trips we take or the food we eat or the products we buy with a salve extracted from other compartments of our lives. Who we vote for. What we do for work. Our collective desire to deny, massage or reframe the hardest of truths is deep within our genetic programming. How else do we get on with our days?

Except that some don’t get on with their days. Untold millions see their human potential chronically and cruelly eroded away, in each of those passing days, until an inevitable switch flips and some are displaced or imprisoned or murdered. It is here that our self-deception is all the more gutting, for it is not the future we set aside. It is the past, where the sins of deceit scream loud. And it is the present, where the displacing and murdering is all around us, and where the barbarous tendrils of fascism and hate are once more wrapping themselves around the world’s ankles.

In my own country alone, our president amplifies and normalizes the most violent and hateful sectors of white supremacy, while the powers around him stand complicit. Meanwhile people suffer and die in our churches, mosques and synagogues, in our cities and prisons and schools, on our reservations and along our borders. We are not alone. Nationalism with increasingly bold ties to division and hate is on the rise here in Poland, in neighboring nations, and around the world.

I’m an optimist by nature. I’ve written — repeatedly — of finding hope in the climate challenge we face, and in the very essence of what I believe humanity to be. That hope remains, even after yesterday. Perhaps because I need it to. Perhaps it is a self-deception of its own. But I also cannot escape the reality that my race and gender and privilege have allowed optimism to develop far more easily that it will for others. And while intellectually I’ve known the depths of humanity’s capacity for monstrosity since middle school, I’ve never felt it more starkly than yesterday. My tears at Birkenau came because that feeling is decades overdue.

The WWII Holocaust. The Ottoman Empire. Rwanda. Bosnia-Herzegovina. Indonesia, Kurdistan, Guatemala, Sudan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ukraine, Syria. Many more, throughout human history. And yes, the United States too, from the murder and displacement of indigenous people to the enslavement and killing of Africans, both of which are defining sins of our nation that remain ever-present today. We are, as humans, capable of horrors that our own young children would not believe, and that we ourselves are biologically compelled to deflect, even as we commit the atrocities themselves.

We cannot allow those deflections to prevail. For if we do, we will live in a climate-altered world with failing economies and widespread famine and hundreds of millions of people forced to move, and those tendrils of hate will grow faster and bind harder than ever before.

Unless we refuse to let them.

Author’s note: As those who have read my pieces before know, I often write in the wake of feeling something deeply. Yet I debated this piece, for many before me have written on the Holocaust with far greater right and power than I ever can. But in the end I wrote and share because of a growing certainty that those of us from privilege must, above all, speak out. About our roles in creating a world with too many atrocities, and our responsibility to chart a different future.

Lies We Tell Ourselves was originally published in State Factors on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A joint piece in Scientific American in response to the latest IPCC report, from all of us involved in Let Science Speak. Please follow the link for the full essay.

The Bad News We Need was originally published in State Factors on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This project challenged me to dig deep and open up for the importance of science as never before. To learn more, please visit the Let Science Speak website, where you can watch each of the six extraordinary movies made by the teams at Generous Films and A+B Pictures: Christine Arena, Ben Heretig, Adam Warmington, Matthew Shambroom, Amber Janis and more. I’m humbled and proud to share the screen with Katherine Hayhoe, Marshall Shepherd, Jacquelin Gill, Dawn Wright and Jon Foley — five remarkable scientists and people who are and have been frequent sources of inspiration.

Let Science Speak was originally published in State Factors on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why I left a great job in a top R1 institution to help lead a small liberal arts college. Published in Inside Higher Education.

The Community We All Choose was originally published in State Factors on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The two young women wove through the crowd with set jaws and fierce eyes. On each, a t-shirt with large block letters: Marjory Stoneman Douglas Soccer. An hour later, their classmate Maddie King would launch the Denver March for our Lives with a searingly eloquent speech.

I don’t have to have gone to college to know that something needs to change. Where’s my proof? My friends are dead. People are dying and you aren’t doing anything.

Just before King’s words, ten-year-old Olivia Claudi took the podium and rang out her tale of anxiety born from repeated school lockdown drills. Of a moment just weeks ago when the drill appeared real. Of how she ran to a dark closet and could not contain her sobs until her best friend said you have to stop crying or he will find us. Anxiety be damned, there she stood before a massive crowd, urging change with stunning clarity and strength.

Across the country, MSD student Emma Gonzales had tears on each cheek and bottomless power in her eyes as she held astonishing moments of silence before the D.C. crowd. Yet another Parkland student, Samantha Fuentes, only weeks from taking a bullet to her leg and shrapnel to the face, brushed aside vomiting in the midst of her own speech to still deliver an impassioned plea broadcast around the world.

And then there was 11 year old Naomi Wadler. Her own words are far better than any I can write:

I am here today to represent Courtlin Arrington. I am here today to represent Hadiya Pendleton. I am here today to represent Taiyana Thomson, who at just 16 was shot dead in her home here in Washington, DC. I am here today to acknowledge the African-American girls who don’t make the front page of every national newspaper, whose stories don’t lead on the evening news. I represent the African-American women who are victims of gun violence, who are simply statistics instead of vibrant beautiful girls full of potential.

They are all from a generation oft proclaimed to lack resilience, to be overly safe, to be slower than any before to grow up. Don’t tell that to the thousands of student speakers and leaders who have turned the aftermath of Parkland’s horror into something different. Who have stood tall before obscene dismissals of their right to comment or even their reality. Who are leading this nation as the adults will not.

Just over five years ago I walked off a plane to the news of Sandy Hook. Early the next morning I sat in tears while watching my then three-year-old daughter sleep, already knowing the script that would follow. Knowing the innocence she would soon lose when even kindergartners must undergo lockout drills.

Except I didn’t. The script was even worse. Proposals to arm teachers, rightly labeled by Patrick Keefe as evidence that our country had drifted into “a realm of profound national lunacy”. Widely broadcast conspiracy theories that the slaughter of young children and their caregivers was a fake, a political setup. NRA ads and rhetoric with increasingly violent undertones. Refusals by political leaders to pass even the most incremental of gun reform laws. And then, in the wake of Parkland’s horror, the same thoughts and prayers, the same conspiracy theories, the same proposals to meet guns with more guns. The same dismissals.

And yet I stood in Denver’s Civic Center Park yesterday amidst heartbreaking words and signs and questions from my own daughter about her safety and was still filled with a hope I did not have five years ago.

Because these kids aren’t having it. Because this time, they are not leaving it to the adults who they know will let the cause die alongside their friends. Because this time, Maddie and Emma and Olivia and Samantha and thousands more are leading in ways their elders can scarcely believe. In ways that some of those elders are beginning to fear.

Good. Let them be the ones who are afraid for once. Let them be pushed aside by the power these children are unleashing, so that perhaps someday, kids and adults alike in this country can once again enter schools and movie theaters and nightclubs, or simply walk down the street, and not have to worry about a hail of bullets ripping their bodies and lives apart.

Five years ago, as I watched my daughter sleep, I wrote this:

No citizen needs an automatic weapon. The second amendment does not guarantee the right to such tools of destruction. But gun control is not the only answer. As many have written today, mental health services in this country are woefully lacking, while cultural glorification and desensitization of unspeakable violence only grows. Media coverage of any event has never been more divisive, more sensationalist, more likely to feed into a metastatic circle of violence. As a nation, we are growing apart — financially, intellectually, spiritually, culturally.

But we could change it all. As Nicholas Kristoff wrote, it just takes collective courage. Courage most of our elected leaders are unwilling to display.

If ever there was a reason to hold the government hostage, to threaten its closure, to resort to unprecedented rhetoric and obstructionism, this is it. Our president fought tears yesterday because he is a father and by all indications a good man. Yesterday was for comfort. Today and going forward he should affix himself to the gates of Washingtonian power, refusing to budge until Newtown and its horrific brethren are no longer tolerated.

But he probably won’t, and nor will any of his colleagues. So I sit here and cry.

Today, I re-read these words and find many of them truer than ever. And yet thanks to the very kids who are at the center of the crosshairs, hope is finally there. This time, we cannot let them down.

Hope Amidst Horror was originally published in State Factors on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.