The Determinants of Gun Violence in America: an empirical paper

Abstract:

Rising rates of gun violence has become a severe public health crisis across America. While the media focuses on mass shootings, the plague of firearm-related homicides and assaults stretches far beyond the heinous incidents that catch the attention of the American public. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a comprehensive regression analysis aimed at identifying the key determinants of gun violence in the United States. In 2022 alone, there were more than 40,000 incidents of criminal gun violence resulting in almost 20,000 fatalities across the nation. With politically divided and motivated statements of causation dominating the news cycle and social media platforms, often without any grounding in scientific or data-driven facts, it is imperative to gain a deeper understanding of the true factors that contribute to this pressing issue. My goal is to enhance public awareness by presenting the statistical findings in a comprehensible, easily understood manner, ensuring that my research can be utilized by professionals, researchers, and policy-makers to objectively examine the plague of gun violence and use data-driven decision-making to create policies that effectively deal with this public health crisis.

Key Findings:

Although gun safety laws, also known as gun control measures, have been on the rise over the last decade with the overall United States experiencing a greater than 55% increase in the number of laws, a few states have chosen to eliminate nearly all of their gun laws, with Mississippi and Georgia leading the charge by reducing their gun safety laws by ~50%. At the same time, many states have legislated a sharp increase in gun regulations, led by Colorado which tripled its gun safety laws, adding 21 to the books over the 8-year period. Also during this time period, 22 states have eliminated the requirement to obtain a permit in order to carry concealed pistols, bringing the number of these states who have “Constitutional Carry” from a mere 5 up to 27, more than half the states in this country. My objective with this study was to see if states that increased their gun safety regulations experienced less gun violence than those that maintained or decreased their laws, and to see if there was an adverse effect to removing the licensing requirement for concealed carry. My research found that there was no statistically significant effect on the rates of gun violence by either implementing gun safety laws, or by removing the licensing requirement for concealed carry. In fact, states that implemented more gun safety regulations tended to have increased incidents of gun violence, though the data failed to rise to any level of statistical significance.

Conclusions:

I gathered data on six independent variables for this study: number of gun safety polices, poverty rate, concealed carry permit rate, the adult prevalence of mental illness, the unemployment rate, and the population density of the state or district and regressed these against the dependent variables of both total incidents of gun violence by state, and gun violence by state per capita. Of these variables, the only one that remained statistically significant throughout all of the regressions was the poverty rate. To analyze these variables, I designed and ran four regression models. The first model is a partial model testing for both unconditional and conditional convergence between states with different initial steady-state gun violence rates. This model was meant to test if states with lower incidents of gun violence in 2014 tended to converge with states with higher incidents of gun violence. The unconditional model tested only those variables while the conditional model controlled for gun safety regulation, the poverty rate, the mental illness rate, and unemployment. My expectation was that there would be convergence between these states as the tendency for states with lessor incidents of gun violence in 2014 was to reduce gun safety legislation and implement Constitutional Carry, while the tendency for states with higher initial gun violence rates was to increase gun safety laws. I found that instead of the expected convergence, the unconditional model found divergence between these states, though the magnitude of the divergence was very small at .01796. The conditional model which controlled for the several variables listed above found a very small convergence effect with a magnitude of -.0036.

The second regression model is a partial model testing for the effect of changes (increases or decreases) in gun safety laws. In this model, I stacked gun safety regulations and gun violence incidents from both 2014 and 2022, and added a dummy variable with 0 and 1 representing 2014 and 2022 respectively. The regression resulted in the “year” dummy variable showing a coefficient of 241.77. The positive coefficient indicates that gun violence levels in 2022 (dummy=1) are higher by 241.77 cases compared to 2014 levels (dummy=0 baseline) after controlling for differences in gun safety laws. This model also found that a one unit increase in the strictness of gun safety laws is associated with a predicted INCREASE of 19.666 gun violence fatalities (p=0.003), a statistically significant effect controlling for other factors.

The third model is another partial model testing for the effect of the increase in states with Constitutional Carry laws. Prior to 2014, five states had implemented concealed carry without a permit (AK, AZ, AR, VT, WY). Between 2014 and 2022, 20 additional states implemented this law. There are two states (FL, NE) that have implemented Constitutional Carry in 2023. To test only the 20 states that implemented this regulation in the intervening years of interest, I set the listed seven states to the dummy variable of zero to maintain consistency with the tracking data. For this model, I took the natural log of the difference in gun violence between 2014 and 2022, and, using that as the dependent variable, I ran a regression with the natural log of the base year (2014) as the explanatory variable in order to turn the coefficient into a growth rate. Using Constitutional Carry as a dummy variable with only the 20 states of interest set to 1 and the remaining states set to 0, the model showed a coefficient of .00938 on the variable log(GV2014), indicating a growth rate of effectively zero, with a 95% confidence interval of -.04974 to .06851 and an R-squared of 0.0061. This model showed that implementing Constitutional Carry had almost no effect on gun violence rates in those states.

The fourth model is a complete model regressing all six explanatory variables plus a dummy variable for Constitutional Carry against the dependent variable “Gun violence per capita in 2022.” The model has an F-value of 4.72 and a Prob > F of 0.0005 making the model statistically significant at an alpha of .01 (three stars). The R-squared for the full model is 0.4346 indicating that it explains more than 43% of the determinants of gun violence. Of all the regressors, the only one that is statistically significant at any recognized alpha level is the poverty rate with a P > t value of 0.000 (three stars). The coefficient on the poverty rate is 1.824, implying that every 1.824 increase in the per capita poverty rate is associated with a 1-point increase in the per capita gun violence rate, a result that comes with little surprise. The coefficients on gun safety policies, population density, and the concealed carry permit rate were all positive implying that an increase in each of those is associated with an increase in gun violence, though none were statistically significant at any recognized level of alpha (0.215, 0.398, and 0.161 respectively).

The conclusion derived by the models is that increasing gun safety policies does not have a statistically significant negative effect on gun violence rates, and that states that have implemented Constitutional Carry laws have seen no statistically significant increase in gun violence rates greater than those that have not. According to this model, if America wishes to decrease gun violence rates, the most significant efforts should be directed toward reducing the rate of poverty.

Introduction:

Gun violence in America has risen dramatically over the past decade. Between 2014 and 2022, total incidents of gun violence increased by 74.5%, from approximately 25,500 shootings in 2014 to 44,200 shootings in 2022. During that same time period, states increased laws designed to protect against gun violence by an unprecedented 55.2%, from 627 total laws in 2014 to 949 in 2022. These gun law changes were not equally distributed among the states, however. States like Colorado, California, Illinois, Oregon, and Washington implemented significant increases in the number of gun safety laws on their registers, while other states, led by Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Oklahoma actually decreased the number of gun laws governing firearm ownership and usage in their states.

Much of the attention on incidents of gun violence by both the media and policy-makers is focused on mass shootings, typically defined as four or more dead including the shooter. However, this heinous act, while drawing the attention and wrath of the public, accounts for only about 1% of all gun violence incidents. The overall plague of gun violence is not well represented in the number of mass shootings. The focus of efforts to decrease gun violence in general should have an adverse impact on mass shootings as well, yet most of the policy measures implemented by state legislatures are instead focused on controlling this one-percent event.

There exists in this country a polar divide between liberal and conservative lawmakers on how to handle the gun violence problem. Policymakers on the left are convinced that gun safety legislation and gun control acts will decrease gun violence, while policymakers on the right are convinced that gun violence is a criminal problem brought on by weak prosecution and lax application of law and punishment by liberal prosecutors and a weak criminal justice system. Very little usage is made of the data available on gun violence, and much of that data is misleading or compiled in biased fashion. Most data on gun violence includes instances of suicide by firearm, accidental deaths, and police legal intervention, and these inclusions skew the actual problem of criminal firearm violence that is plaguing the community. Suicide by firearm alone makes up the majority of gun violence in this country, with suicides accounting for 56% of all firearm deaths. While suicide is a serious problem, it is a separate problem from the plague of gun violence, and as such, should be removed from any data sets analyzing firearm violence.

Gun violence continues to inflict devastating costs in lives lost across many parts of the United States. Over recent decades, debates have intensified over potential policy and legislative strategies to curb firearms deaths. Some advocate for stricter state limits on gun purchases, possession regulations, and investing in prevention programs. Others argue additional restrictions fail to impact violent offenders while impeding the rights of law-abiding gun owners. 

Disentangling the complex linkages surrounding gun policies remains imperative but challenging. This study seeks to provide state-level empirical evidence using data regression models evaluating the direction and degree of association between, among other things, stricter gun safety legislation and gun violence rates from 2014 to 2022. Controlling for underlying socioeconomic drivers such as poverty, unemployment, and mental illness rates, this study will test for the factors that influence the rising rates of gun violence. Understanding the trajectories of firearm-related deaths amidst a patchwork of diverging state laws stands essential to move towards solutions balancing individual rights with violence prevention. This analysis investigates the role legal restrictions may play in shaping overall gun violence outcomes across locales providing longitudinal evidence integral to an issue central to public safety and public discourse alike.

Organization:

In this paper, I’ll first discuss the related literature and studies done in the past. The study of the determinants of gun violence has been attempted by numerous scientists in a wide variety of fields. As gun violence grows, trying to solve why it occurs becomes ever more crucial. This paper will examine some of the related studies and the polar conclusions that have come from these varied efforts to understand this phenomenon. I’ll then explore the explanatory variables that I’ve determined are most likely to be important in determining causation for gun violence. After discussing the meaning and significance of the explanatory variables, I’ll go over the models I’ve run.

For this study, I’ve chosen four models that I felt were the best explanatory models for the regression variables. While these four models only begin to scratch the surface of this serious problem in America, they do bring some surprising conclusions that I’ll discuss in depth. Following the outline of the models, I’ll go over the data that I compiled to prepare this paper. This data, grabbed from numerous sources and checked carefully for reliability and accuracy, is extensive but not necessarily thorough, a problem I’ll address in the conclusion. The data and descriptive statistics section will have tables showing the variables and their ranges, followed by a matrix and some scatterplots showing the level and magnitude of correlation between the variables, and then looking at the statistical significance of both the regressors and the models themselves.

Finally, the paper will conclude with a discussion of the purpose of the study, the key findings, the policy implications, and some suggestions of where we need to go from here.

Related Literature:

There have been numerous previous studies regarding gun violence. The Rand Corporation (Rand, 2018) has compiled a list of many of these studies into the determinants of gun violence. One such study by John Lott and David Mustard, (Lott and Mustard, 1997) found that states that had “shall-issue concealed carry” laws observed a decrease in violent crime, murders, rapes, and assaults. Lott would partner with John Whitley and Florenz Plassman a few years later, (Lott and Whitley, 2003) to confirm these findings, specifically that an annual reduction in murder rates between 1.5 and 2.3 percent occurs for each additional year that a right-to-carry law is in effect. Ian Aryes and John Donohue, publishing in the Yale Law School Repository, found that shall-issue states saw an increase in more crime categories than saw a decrease (Aryes and Donohue, 2003), a finding that Lott and Whitley found great fault with, and Donohue alone later found that effects were mixed and sensitive to model specifications and data (Donohue, 2003). According to Rand, nearly all of the early studies into the analysis of shall-issue states failed to control for serial correlation in the panel data set and that led to gross exaggerations of the statistical significance of the study results while elevating the risk of finding effects that were in the opposite direction of the true effect (Rand, 2018).

Mark Gius published a study in the Royal Statistical Society in 2014 that showed that assault weapons bans have no statistically significant effect on gun-related murders, and that permissive concealed carry laws may actually reduce gun-related murders. Gius found that states with more restrictive concealed carry laws had gun-related murder rates that were 10% higher than those states that had less restrictive laws (Gius, 2014). In 2013, Michael Siegel, Craig Ross, and Charles King published a study for the American Public Health Association that found that there was a robust correlation between higher levels of gun ownership and higher firearm homicide rates, although they were not able to determine causation in their study. (Siegel, et al, 2013)

There seems to be little doubt that although there have been dozens of these studies all with similar goals and supposedly similar data sets, much of the research into this phenomenon has been flawed or biased in one way or the other. Inclusion of suicide statistics, accidental deaths, and legal intervention, along with misinterpretations of causation have created flaws in many of the research to date. While it likely exists, I was not able to find any regression analysis using the same or similar explanatory variables to the ones I’ve used for this study.

Descriptive Statistics:

Table 1

Table 1 shows the descriptions and sign estimates for the variables in my analysis. When looking at gun violence per capita, I’ve collected numbers for all fifty states plus the District of Columbia. The first variable is gun violence per capita in 2022. This is the dependent variable, and the variable for which I’m attempting to find the determinants. The first explanatory variable is the number of gun safety policies by state in 2022. States have the Constitutional right to decide the relative strength or weakness of their own gun laws provided such laws do not violate the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. As such, there is wide disparity in the number of gun safety policies legislated into the laws of each state. For this study, I identified 54 possible gun safety or gun control laws that are present in the laws of the various states. The implementation of those potential laws is widely disparate, with a minimum of just three in Mississippi, to a maximum of 45 in California. These various laws and policies include things such as a ban on “assault weapons,” a ban on high-capacity magazines, background checks, waiting periods for firearm purchases, minimum ages to purchase a handgun, whether or not firearms are allowed on school grounds, in bars, or in state buildings, seizure laws for domestic abusers and felons, castle doctrine, duty to retreat, gun-show loophole closures, and many more. The expected sign of the coefficient for this variable is negative as I expect that states that have taken the greatest efforts to control firearms will see the lowest number of incidents of gun violence per capita.

The second regressor is the poverty rate per capita. This ranges from a low of 7.42 in New Hampshire to a high of 19.58 in Mississippi. As I anticipate that higher poverty is correlated with higher rates of crime, the expected sign of the coefficient for poverty rate is positive. The third regressor in the chart is the population density. Population density ranges from a low of 1.3 persons per square mile in Alaska to a high of 11,295 persons per square mile in Washington D.C. The second highest population density in the United States is in New Jersey, with a density of 1263 people per square mile, making the Washington D.C. figure an outlier in the data. In addition to this outlier, Washington D.C. also showed an outlier in gun violence per capita with a number of 105.388, with the second highest rate being Louisiana at 37.035. To avoid skewing the data with these outliers which are genuine values and not data errors and should be included in the regressions, I chose to treat them by trimming them both under the Winsorisation approach. As I anticipate that more dense populations provide for more opportunities for crime, the expected sign of the coefficient is positive.

The third regressor in the list is the rate of concealed carry licenses issued in the state. States that license their citizens to carry concealed weapons vary widely between “shall issue” and “must issue” states, and courts have repeatedly held that denial of a permit to carry a concealed pistol must be accompanied by specific and justifiable reason. Some states make it very easy to obtain this license, and some make the process as arduous as possible while attempting to avoid being sued. This permit issuance rate varies quite widely from 0% in Vermont and Hawaii up to 32.5% in Alabama. Hawaii issues very few licenses and essentially requires that permit applicants provide a valid reason and qualifiable necessity that has yet to be challenged, while Vermont is at 0% simply because the state has never required a permit to carry a concealed firearm, and thus has never issued such permits. The sign of the coefficient on this variable is rather tricky to estimate as there are two very reasonable schools of thought. The first is that more people carrying concealed firearms makes it less likely that criminals will engage in firearm violence knowing that citizens around them are more likely to be armed and willing to engage them. In this case, I would expect the sign of the coefficient to be negative. However, the other reasonable school of thought is that more people carrying concealed firearms equates to more guns in public and therefore more opportunity for gun violence to occur, a scenario where a positive sign on the coefficient would be expected. For this paper I have estimated that the first scenario is more likely than the second as criminals intent on firearm violence are not dissuaded by laws requiring them to obtain a license, but that beneficent individuals who might stop such gun violence will tend to follow the law and therefore may not be armed without a permit, depending on how arduous the permitting process is. Therefore, the expected sign of the coefficient here is negative.

The next variable is the rate of mental illness. Although I expected mental illness rates to have very little deviation among states, there is significant disparity. The per-capita rate of diagnosed mental illness ranges from a low of 16.37 in New Jersey to a high of 26.86 in Utah. I have anticipated that much gun violence is a result of mental illness, and thus have assigned the expected sign of the coefficient to be positive.

The unemployment rate of the state is the next regressor, and I’ve estimated the sign of the coefficient to once again be positive. The more unemployed people a state has, the greater the chance of gun violence through either necessity or ennui. I also anticipate that unemployment leads more often to increased gang affiliation, particularly among the youth, and since gun violence and gangs are likely to be correlated, I anticipate higher unemployment rates leading to higher incidents of gun violence.

The final coefficient on this list is a dummy variable representing whether or not the state has implemented Constitutional Carry laws—the right to carry a concealed firearm without a state-issued license. For the same reasons outlined in the variable for the rate of concealed carry licenses issued by states, I anticipate the expected sign of the coefficient here to be negative.

Models:

Model 1

Due to the complicated nature of this study, I’ve identified four regression models to use in the analysis. The first is a two-part, partial model that tests for both unconditional and conditional convergence between states from 2014 and 2022. I want to see if states with lower initial levels of gun violence tend to converge with states with higher levels of gun violence both with and without controlling for other factors such as gun safety laws and socioeconomic concerns. For model 1A, I used a log-log model where I took the natural log of the difference in gun violence by state between 2014 and 2022 and regressed that against the natural log of the steady-state gun violence rate in 2014. The model equation is as follows:

where Y is the natural log of gun violence in 2022 minus the natural log of gun violence in 2014, and X1 is the natural log of gun violence in 2014. The regression results are:

In this regression model, convergence between states with lower initial levels of gun violence and those states with higher levels is indicated by a negative coefficient on the natural log of the initial level in 2014. Here we see that the coefficient is actually positive, indicating that we have divergence between these states. The coefficient itself however is close to zero with a value of .01796, meaning that the divergence is marginal if it exists at all. This model tests for unconditional convergence without controlling for any conditional differences in state demographics or efforts toward gun violence prevention. The next model looks at convergence in a conditional sense, controlling for these variables.  The equation of the conditional convergence model is:

where ln Y is again the natural log of gun violence in 2022 minus the natural log of gun violence in 2014, and X1-X5 are the natural logs of the regressors. The regression results are:

In this model, we see evidence of conditional convergence indicated by the negative coefficient on the variable the initial rate of gun violence in 2014. However, similar to the previous model, the magnitude of the coefficient is very close to zero, even closer to no effect in this model with a measurement of -.0036. This magnitude is small enough that there is little confidence in the statement that states with lower initial levels of gun violence tend to converge with states seeing higher initial levels.

Model 2

Model 2 is a partial model examining the effect of gun safety laws, otherwise known as gun control laws, on the rates of gun violence. For this model I’ve used data from 2014 and from 2022 on both gun safety laws and gun violence. During this eight-year period, gun violence has increased by 74.5% while gun safety policies across the nation have increased by 55.2%. In 2014, American states had a total of 627 gun control laws, a number that grew to 949 in 2022 mostly due to an increase in high profile mass-shooting events like the Aurora theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado in 2012 that killed 12 people, the Orlando nightclub shooting in 2016 that killed 49 people, and the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting in Las Vegas in 2017 that killed 60 people.

For this database, I relied on gun safety laws identified by Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a non-profit organization that has a charter to prevent gun violence. Giffords scorecard methodology is detailed and transparent, and although their grading of states may be biased, their sourcing of historical data on state law changes is sound. Giffords has identified state gun laws in several policy areas such as background checks, weapons bans, sale and transfer regulations, gun owner accountability, consumer safety, guns in public, and investigative tools for gun violence. In total, Giffords has identified 54 potential gun control laws currently on the books in at least some states. (Giffords, 2022)

Gun control measures have not been uniformly implemented by states, and some states have in fact reduced the number of gun safety laws during this time period. Eleven states in total either reduced or maintained the number of gun control laws between 2014 and 2022, led by Mississippi which had six gun safety laws in 2014 and only three in 2022, a 50% reduction. The remaining 39 states plus Washington D.C. all increased the number of gun safety laws during this time period, led in total number of new laws by Colorado which added 21 laws, and in percentage of new laws by Vermont which legislated an increase from four laws in 2014 to 18 laws in 2022, a 350% increase.

For this model, I first regressed the dependent variable “gun violence rate in 2014” with the explanatory variable “gun safety policies in 2014,” followed by the same regression for 2022 numbers. Both of these models were statistically significant at an alpha of .05 with the 2014 model showing an R-squared of .1011 and the 2022 model an R-squared of .0781. The coefficient on gun safety policies was nearly identical for both years at a value of 19.777 for 2014 and 19.62 for 2022, indicating an increase of a little less than 20 incidents of gun violence for every gun safety measure enacted for both years, the similar coefficients indicating a steady state of gun violence despite the growth of gun safety policies.

Regressing Gun Violence rates in 2014 with Gun Safety Laws in 2014.

Regressing Gun Violence rates in 2022 with Gun Safety Laws in 2022.

To further test this, I stacked both gun violence incidents and gun safety laws for both years and regressed those stacks with a dummy variable called “year” with a zero representing 2014 and a one for 2022. This model returned an almost identical value on the gun safety coefficient with a value of 19.666. The coefficient on the dummy variable was 241.77. The positive coefficient indicates that gun violence levels in 2022 (dummy=1) are higher by 241.77 cases compared to 2014 levels (dummy=0 baseline) after controlling for differences in gun safety laws, suggesting that gun violence has increased from 2014 to 2022 by around 242 shootings, holding gun laws constant in the model. The size of 242 cases is a meaningful effect size indicating rising gun violence post-2014.

The combined model had an overall P-value of 0.0007, and the P-value of the combined gun safety explanatory variable was 0.003. The model and the explanatory variable are both statistically significant, and the R-squared for the stacked model is 0.136, indicating that gun safety laws explain 13.61% of the variation in gun violence. The positive value of the coefficient on gun safety indicates that for every gun control law implemented between 2014 and 2022 approximately 20 additional gun violence incidents were observed. My initial estimate of this coefficient was that it would be a negative value, so these results were surprising. Although it is unlikely that implementing gun safety regulations causes an increase in gun violence rates, and more likely that states with higher gun violence tend to implement more gun control laws, the model is clear that the null hypothesis must be rejected and there is no evidence to support the notion that gun control laws decrease gun violence.

This conclusion was so surprising that I had to regress a few more things by setting up dummy variables first to test if only states that INCREASED gun control laws saw a decrease in gun violence rates, and second to see if states that increased those laws by 25% or more saw a decrease. In these regressions, both of these coefficients on gun safety policies remain positive with almost identical values of ~15, however the P-values at 0.226 and 0.264 respectively show that they are not statistically significant. Either way, we fail to reject the null hypothesis and have to state that there is no evidence to support the notion that gun control legislation adversely impacts gun violence rates as was anticipated.

Model 3

In model three I wanted to see if states that have implemented Constitutional Carry laws have seen an increase in gun violence incidents over states that have not done so. Constitutional Carry is defined as the rights of the citizens of a state to carry a concealed firearm without a permit. Prior to 2014 only five states granted their citizens this right (AK, AZ, AR, VT, WY). The remaining 45 states had varying laws between “shall issue,” the requirement that providing a citizen isn’t statutorily prohibited from having or carrying a firearm, the state must provide a concealed carry license, which may require testing and training, and “may issue,” which leaves the decision to issue the license up to the discretion of the issuing authority in the state, typically the county sheriff. In “may issue” states, the applicant is typically required to provide supporting evidence to show that they have an actual need to be armed, along with character references and possibly additional documentation that shows good character, while in “shall issue” states the applicant must only pass the background check and occasionally the requirement to attend classroom training and qualification testing on a gun range.

Between 2014 and 2022, twenty additional states changed their laws from either shall issue or may issue to Constitutional Carry, removing the licensing requirements entirely. Two additional states have added this law here in 2023, but since this dataset is for 2022, those states were removed from this model. It should also be noted that the only remaining “may issue” states today are Connecticut and Delaware, and both of them are likely to be forced to remove this discretionary aspect due to the Supreme Court case NYSRPA v. Bruen in 2022 in which the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association challenged the state of New York’s “may issue” law. The Supreme Court held that New York’s 1911 Sullivan Act requiring concealed carry applicants to show “proper cause” to apply for a license was a violation of the rights granted under the Second Amendment (Root, 2022). Prior to this case in 2022, eight states were “may issue” states, and in 2022 there were a total of 27 states with Constitutional Carry laws.

The addition of 20 states to list of Constitutional Carry states between 2014 and 2022 made for an interesting database to determine the effect of this important change of law on the rates of gun violence. Advocates of Constitutional Carry insist that criminals have always carried concealed firearms without regard for the law, and hurdles that make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to acquire a concealed carry license serves no lawful purpose. Many also insist that law-abiding citizens having concealed firearms will cause criminals to reconsider violent crimes and lessen the potential victim pool. Detractors of these laws claim that adding more firearms to the streets will only increase gun violence incidents. My estimate was that the former was most likely to be true, thus the negative anticipated sign of the coefficient.

For this model, I was interested in the growth rate of gun violence between 2014 and 2022 in those states with Constitutional Carry and those without. I created the dependent variable (logdiffGV) which is the natural logarithm of the difference between gun violence in 2014 and gun violence in 2022, and the independent variable (logGV14) which is the natural logarithm of gun violence in 2014. I then created a dummy regressor variable for the 20 states that added Constitutional Carry during the same time period, using one for those CC states and zero for the 30 states (plus Wa. D.C.) that either already had Constitutional Carry, implemented it in 2023, or do not recognize this still today. The regression results show a coefficient of .009385 on the independent variable (logGV14) indicating that controlling for states with Constitutional Carry, gun violence has increased by less than 0.1%, meaning that while there has been an increase in gun violence in these states over states without Constitutional Carry, the magnitude of the increase is miniscule. The 95% confidence interval for this coefficient is -.0497 to .0685, and the P-value is 0.743, indicating that the regressor is not statistically significant at any level of alpha, nullifying any definitive conclusion.

The dismally low R-squared of 0.0061 with an adjusted R-squared of -0.0491 shows that not only is the variable not statistically significant, Constitutional Carry laws have little to no explanatory power for the explosive growth of gun violence between 2014 and 2022. In conclusion, there is no evidence to support the notion that Constitutional Carry laws have any impact (positive or negative) on gun violence rates.

Model 4

The final regression model for this analysis is the full model with all explanatory variables and the rate of gun violence per capita in 2022 as the dependent variable. This model uses the three key variables I identified (gun safety policies in 2022, the poverty rate per capita, and the rate of concealed carry permits or Constitutional Carry) as well as the three lessor explanatory variables (population density, the per capita rate of mental illness, and the unemployment rate). The model has an overall significance level of three stars with a P-value of 0.0005, making the model statistically significant at all levels of alpha. The R-squared for the overall model is 0.4346 indicating that this model explains about 43.5% of the variation in gun violence per capita.

Gun safety policies in 2022, the poverty rate, population density, and the rate of concealed carry permits all have positive coefficients, while the unemployment rate and the dummy variable for Constitutional Carry have negative coefficients. The only variable that is statistically significant at any level of alpha is the poverty rate with a P-value of 0.000. The poverty rate also has the largest positive value at 1.824, indicating that for every unit increase in the poverty rate there is a 1.824 unit increase in the rate of gun violence. Since this variable is the only one that is statistically significant, the poverty rate is the most reliable indicator of gun violence per capita in all states for the explanatory variables in this model.

Data and Descriptive Statistics

Table 2

Table 2 shows the descriptive statistics of the variables used in the preceding regressions. The observations for all variables numbers 51—the 50 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia. An important note about the statistics for the District of Columbia. Washington D.C. is the most population dense variable and also has the highest rate of gun violence per capita, by far. These numbers were so much larger than the next closest number that they were actually outliers in the data. In order to avoid having these outliers adversely impact the standard errors, it was necessary to treat these outliers. There are several scientifically legitimate ways to deal with outliers, and the method I chose was Winsorization—reducing the outliers to their next largest values. The true values for gun violence per capita for Washington D.C. is 105.388. This was reduced to the next largest value, that of Louisiana at 37.05. The true value for the population density of Washington D.C. is 11295 persons per square mile, and this value was reduced to the value for the next largest, New Jersey at 1263 persons.

Table 3

Table 3 is a matrix of correlation coefficients with the primary explanatory regressors used for this analysis. There are several correlation coefficients that are of interest in this matrix. The first is the correlation between gun violence in 2022 (GV_2022), and gun violence per capita in 2022 (Gvpercap). If gun violence was equally spread amongst the states, we would expect perfect correlation between these two regressors, however, the correlation is only 0.4877, indicating that gun violence is somewhat concentrated in some states regardless of population. Another measurement of interest is the correlation between gun violence in 2022 (GV_2022), and the number of gun safety policies embedded into law in 2022 (GS2022). As gun safety laws increase, we hope to see gun violence rates falling, a correlation that would result in a negative number, but here we see a positive correlation, indicating that increased gun safety policies are associated with increased gun violence.

The largest correlation present is with the poverty rate per capita (POVrate) and gun violence per capita in 2022 (Gvpercap). This correlation of 0.5244 would seem to indicate that poverty and gun violence go hand-in-hand, a result that is perhaps not too surprising, but interesting nonetheless. A final item of interest in this correlation matrix is the negative coefficient on the correlation between the number of mentally ill persons per capita (Men_ill) and gun violence in 2022 (GV_2022). This negative number would seem to indicate that increased mental illness is associated with a decrease in gun violence, the opposite of what we might expect. It’s possible that gun laws prohibiting access to firearms by those diagnosed with a mental illness may be effective in curbing a measurable amount of gun violence.

Scatterplots

Scatterplot 1: gun violence per capita and gun safety policies

Scatterplots provide a visual depiction of the correlation coefficients matrix. In scatterplot 1, the fitted regression line shows the very slight positive correlation with states that have implemented more gun safety policies seeing higher incidents of gun violence per capita.

Scatterplot 2: gun violence per capita and the poverty rate

Scatterplot 2 shows a strong, positive correlation between the poverty rate and gun violence per capita. This fitted regression line depicts this highly correlated pair, with a small standard error evident in the closely spaced data points.

Scatterplot 3: gun violence per capita and population density

In scatterplot 3, we see the slight positive correlation between the population density and gun violence per capita. There’s a lot of room in America, and as such, the 51 observations are congregated toward the left of the chart. However, there is a clear upward trend in the datapoints that shows that although it’s a small correlation, higher population densities are associated with higher incidents of gun violence.

Scatterplot 4: gun violence per capita and the concealed carry permit rate

This scatterplot shows the results of the correlation between the rate of concealed firearm carry permits issued and the rates of gun violence per capita. This data may be somewhat misleading or unreliable due to the number of states that don’t require a permit to carry a concealed firearm. Since 2014, 22 states have dropped the requirement of its citizens to endure the process of applying for a permit, allowing concealed carry without any permit.

Scatterplot 5: gun violence per capita and the rate of mental illness

Scatterplot 5 shows the surprising results of the correlation between mental illness and gun violence per capita. My initial anticipation for this regressor was that mental illness would have a positive correlation with gun violence, but this scatterplot clearly shows the reverse is true. Higher incidents of confirmed mental illness are consistent with declining rates of gun violence, a result that may be consistent with the vast majority of states prohibiting gun ownership to anyone diagnosed with serious mental health issues.

Scatterplot 6: gun violence per capita and the unemployment rate

With a positive correlation between the poverty rate and gun violence, it should come as no surprise that we see a similar positive correlation between unemployment and gun violence. Scatterplot 6 depicts that correlation, a medium correlation but undeniably positive.

Empirical Results

Table 4

In table 4 I’ve taken the regression results from the full model (model 4) and placed the explanatory variables into a table to more easily view and understand their values and the meanings and implications of those values.

From this table, it’s easy to see that my initial expectations were vastly different from a few of the results. I fully expected higher numbers of gun safety policies to result in lower incidents of gun violence, but from the coefficient, it’s clear that this is not the case. The rate of concealed carry also shows a different than expected sign, however, I was initially ambivalent about those results as I could see merit in the argument of both gun control advocates and Second Amendment defenders as to how allowing more guns into the public could affect gun violence. For the rate of mental illness and the unemployment rate, I anticipated those to both have a positive correlation toward gun violence with incidents rising as those rates increased, but it’s easy to see that this data shows the opposite, albeit with P-values well outside the bounds of any acceptable statistical significance.

There were 51 observations for this model, all 50 U.S. states plus Washington D.C. The model has an R-squared of 0.4346 indicating that it explains a little more than 43% of the variation in gun violence rates amongst the states. The calculated F-value is 4.72, and the probability of observing a value greater than F is 0.0005 making this model statistically significant at an alpha of 0.01 (three stars).

Conclusion

The purpose of this paper was to examine the alarming increase in gun violence over the past decade and attempt to identify some of the causes of that increase. America is diametrically divided over guns and the root causes of gun violence, particularly the mass shootings that make up such a small percentage of gun violence but capture so much of the attention of the American psyche. Political narratives and talking pundits have only served to further entrench the often mistaken or uneducated viewpoints of the majority of Americans, and social media has become a cesspool of screaming, faux intellectual idealogues who are convinced that their viewpoint is the correct one, despite the nuance of this incredibly complex problem.

Are guns the root cause of gun violence? Well, sure, the same way that cars are the root cause of fatal automobile accidents. The solution to the problem of auto-related fatalities is not to get rid of cars because our society relies too heavily on rapid and reliable transportation to possibly justify eliminating them. And the solution to the problem of firearm violence is not to get rid of guns. Not because we need them, but because we absolutely can not get rid of them. The United States of America is founded on the principles of a Constitution and a Bill of Rights that grants certain rights to its people. The Second Amendment guarantees U.S. citizens the right to “keep and bear arms,” and the political divisions in this country ensure that this amendment will not be repealed in the foreseeable future. In addition, firearms outnumber people in this country. This is what makes laws that attempt to reduce firearm access or ownership so futile. None of these things are going to change, regardless of efforts or attempts to do so. It’s only when we understand and accept that fact that we can attempt to make meaningful progress toward reducing gun violence.

With this research paper, I wanted to take an unbiased approach to the causes of gun violence. Although I have personal biases regarding this subject, as do most people, I did my utmost to set them aside and compile unbiased data and come up with hypotheses that were completely objective. I was fully prepared to discover that gun control laws decrease gun violence, or that Constitutional Carry laws are associated with increased firearm fatalities. The data was derived from unimpeachable sources that are highly respected by both political divides, and I did my best to fact-check or cross-verify every source that I used.

The key finding of this paper is a difficult one for many to accept—gun safety laws do not have a meaningful negative impact on gun violence rates, despite what politicians may claim. Other findings may be surprising as well. Constitutional Carry states, and states with higher numbers of concealed carry permit holders do not see a statistically significant increase or decrease in rates of gun violence. Mental illness rates are not a reliable indicator of gun violence, and in fact, increased mental illness is associated with decreased levels of gun violence. Finally, the most important finding, and the only one that was statistically significant in every regression ran, higher poverty rates per capita are associated with sharp increases in gun violence rates.

One surprising state that has done a great job in controlling the rate of gun violence is California. In 2022, California had a gun violence per capita (100k people) of 7.812. This puts them at 14th in the country, and since 2014, California has seen an increase in gun violence of 47.7%, far below the national average of 74.5%. California also has the most gun control laws of any state in the union at 45. Politicians like Governor Newsom love to soapbox these stats and claim a correlation along with causation, but the results of this study make it clear that increased gun laws are not associated with decreased gun violence. However, it is clear that California is doing something right when it comes to gun violence. The poverty rate in California is 12.58%, putting them right at the national average of 12.595%, so lower poverty is not the cause of California’s gun violence success. It would be a wonderful surprise if the politicians of that state would decide to actually look at the facts and the data and determine what it is they are actually doing right instead of grandstanding with performative speeches associating their highest-in-the-nation gun control laws with lower rates of gun violence.

Washington D.C. has so much gun violence that the number was an outlier that had to be Winsorized to avoid contaminating the regressions. Gun violence per capita in D.C. in 2022 was 105.39, well above the next highest on the list, Louisiana at 37.035. This is in spite of D.C. passing 43 gun control bills, just two fewer than California, and 30 more than gun violence runner-up, Louisiana.

Not all gun violence is equally distributed. Chicago is notorious for its rampant deadly shootings. Illinois has a very high gun violence rate of 29.335 with the third highest number of gun safety laws in the country at 42. But most of Illinois is very safe, with a large percentage of its violence concentrated in Chicago. The gun violence per capita rate in Chicago is higher even than in Washington D.C., at 106.37. This is, however, down from 2021 when the gun violence per capita rate was an eye-popping 128.74. Even in Chicago itself, gun violence is not equally distributed with most incidents congregated in the southside and in the west. This should indicate to us that blanket gun safety laws that are not targeted toward the actual problem can not be expected to solve the problem.

Gun violence in Chicago from 2014-2022. Yellow dots indicate a shooting injury while red dots indicate a shooting death.

I have no doubt that some gun safety laws are useful and, if data could be compiled and regressed successfully on the impact of individual gun control laws, then we could identify the ones that are actually useful in combating gun violence. As of now, with the shotgun approach toward gun legislation, gun safety laws are performative only. They look good to politicians pandering to their liberal bases while accomplishing nothing useful and serving only to distract from any meaningful solution to this deadly problem. My hope is that this paper will serve to disseminate true factual data that will be used to actually combat gun violence and make a meaningful dent in the rising problem. In addition, we need to gather more and better data. Data on gang affiliation is spotty at best or doesn’t exist at worse. I suspect that much gun violence is gang related, but without that data, we can not make meaningful decisions or implement regulations that have a meaningful impact. Domestic violence is another area where I suspect much gun violence results. Although police departments are supposed to identify domestic violence incidents, this often doesn’t happen. While researching the data for this paper, I found many incidents where the association with domestic violence was listed as “unknown.” Clicking on the incident and reading the details, I found numerous incidents that were clearly DV related despite the “unknown” tag, and this is an important statistic. If any gun violence law is going to have a meaningful impact on gun violence rates, it would seem that keeping them out of the hands of convicted domestic abusers would be crucial, but we can’t know this for certain without solid and reliable data. Police departments need to ensure that this type of data is accurate at a much higher rate than it currently is. This type of data would assist in future analysis into the determinants of gun violence, and would allow policymakers to make meaningful changes to impact this persistent and deadly problem.

References:

Number of gun safety policies adopted per state:

https://sightmark.com/blogs/news/states-ranked-by-how-strict-their-gun-laws-are

Number of gun safety polices historical numbers:

Click to access 2013-Gun-Law-State-Scorecard.pdf

Adult prevalence of mental illness:

Click to access 2022%20State%20of%20Mental%20Health%20in%20America.pdf

Population rates for 2022:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population

Historic population rates:

https://www.statsamerica.org/sip/population.aspx?page=all&ct=S05

Number of shootings and deaths:

https://www.gunviolencearchive.org

https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-shootings

Poverty Rates:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_poverty_rate

Population density:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories_of_the_United_States_by_population_density

Concealed and permitless carry data:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4279137#:~:text=Alabama%20has%20the%20highest%20concealed,Georgia%20is%20third%20with%2015.5%25.&text=Six%20states%20now%20have%20over,states%20with%202.57%20million%20permits.
https://deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=964083123101071095018082095011100104000082090035005036124002115090079000102005005087123102061029031045017126107091084093082080016018074003068073016094009085094042033063070010096070007066107112125085109079021106091117022008025093107094121114119105&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE

Gang stats:

https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/stats-services-publications-national-gang-report-2015.pdf/view

Unemployment data:

https://www.bls.gov/information-guide/home.htm

Data on firearm violence from 1993 to 2011:

Click to access fv9311.pdf

Suicide rates:

https://everystat.org

Suicide rates by state:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/suicide.htm

US population growth by year

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/population#:~:text=The%20current%20population%20of%20U.S.,a%200.49%25%20increase%20from%202019

Gun policy research review:

https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis.html

Gun death information

What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S.

Other gun violence studies referenced:

Effects of Concealed-Carry Laws on Violent Crime – Rand Corp, Jan 2023

https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/concealed-carry/violent-crime.html

Paper on firearm ownership and correlation to homicide rates, Siegel, Ross, King:

https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301409

Gius 2014 study on shall issue states

https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2014.00732.x

Lott and Mustard 1997

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/467988

Ian Ayres, John Donohue 2003

Click to access Shooting%20Down%20the%20More%20Guns%20Less%20Crime.pdf

Wikipedia article on NYSRPA v. Bruen 2022

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Rifle_%26_Pistol_Association,_Inc._v._Bruen#:~:text=In%20a%206%E2%80%933%20decision,guaranteed%20by%20the%20Second%20Amendment

Root, Damon. June, 2022. Reason.com. “SCOTUS Affirms Right To Carry a Handgun for Self-Defense Outside the Home.” https://reason.com/2022/06/23/in-landmark-2nd-amendment-ruling-scotus-affirms-right-to-carry-a-handgun-for-self-defense-outside-the-home/

Trekking the largest cave in the world: Hang Son Doong, Vietnam, part four.

Day 4 (This is part four of a multi-part series. To start at part one, click here: https://authorrickfuller.com/2024/03/24/trekking-the-largest-cave-in-the-world-hang-son-doong-vietnam/)

Waking up on the final day of a long trek brings a bittersweet feeling. The tour has been lengthy enough that you’re ready for it to conclude, yet you know you’ll miss it once it’s over. You’ll look back on this moment, wishing you could return, spending more time soaking in the sights, smells, and the magnificence of this transient experience. The outside world awaits with its ebbs and flows, the hectic, frenetic pace of normal life that we’ve nearly forgotten while immersed in this incredible cave with no external contact. We understand that we must rejoin that world, ready or not, and so this ultimate wakeup carries a sense of anticipation tinged with a slight foreboding, blending into that undefinable bittersweet sensation.

I’m awake this morning at 4am, the darkness and peaceful quiet of the still camp telling me the approximate hour before my watch confirms it. I know that this is going to be a taxing day full of grueling ascents and descents, and sleep is going to be paramount toward getting the most enjoyment out of the effort, and yet the anticipation of the day forces sleep to elude me. I lay restlessly until 7am and then finally exit the tent to a dot of blue sky in the doline far above. The normal routine of coffee and organization of our gear follows before the call to breakfast is given. Our fare this morning is French toast, called “egg toast” by our team, which allows me to pretend that I’m not eating French toast after all and thus, do not need any maple syrup. Accompaniments include fried rice with and without meat, and lots of fried and steamed vegetables, and there is, as usual, too much for us to even come close to finishing.

After breakfast, we don the five-point safety harnesses which the safety assistants secure under the watchful eye of Hieu who double-checks their work when they finish. Today we’ll be exiting the cave via a strenuous and long climb, and harnessing us here in the light from the doline is much easier and safer than trying to do it in the darkness later, despite the large distance we still have to traverse before they’re actually needed.

The final group photo before leaving camp three.

We leave camp at 9:15, trekking away from the light and into the darkness once more, headlamps atop caving helmets illuminating the gloom, carabiners clanking rhythmically to our steps. Even our group’s safety assistants are quiet this morning, a pensive and almost maudlin countenance on every face that flashes though my light. I have no doubt that for them, this is always rather difficult. They’ve gotten close to many of us, chatting and sharing life stories, and they know that they’ll likely never see us again after today. And then, after a few days of resting at home, they’ll meet a new group of ten and start over, in a repeating cycle of almost getting to know someone before they leave your life forever. While we’ll remember their faces for a long time, both in the memory of an incredible experience and in photo, the memory of our faces will quickly ablate to them, fading away to be forgotten in the blur of client group after client group.  

Our path today is flat and easy, well-marked with ribbons that keep us from marring the ancient formations we pass. And these formations are absolutely magnificent. Massive stalagmites once again greet us as we wind around them, trekking over voluminous calcite flows that often seem to have sprung from the walls. We stop at a stalactite formation with a very unique shape called “The Dog’s Bollocks” that comes to a point maybe four feet off the ground, a perfect spot for posed photos, and all but one of the group participates with joy, the lone holdout a curmudgeonly old naysayer dashingly youthful adventurer who looks on with impatience and annoyance contentment and delight.

*Confession: It was me. I was the lone holdout.  

While the photo shoot ensues, I take the time to study the incredible formations caused by millennia of dripping water. My writing skills are not up to the task of describing these ridiculous etchings which seem to somehow have both uniformity and chaos, a random walk in a roomful of mirrors perhaps. I’ll let the picture speak where my skills lack.

Just one of the dozens of massive columns that adorn this ancient cave.
The intricate carvings and colorations from millions of years of water leeching are strangely captivating.

After an easy walk in the magnificent forest of cave formations, we traverse massive underground sand dunes, safety assistants spreading out once more with powerful lights to display the full grandeur of the massive cave that houses these unique dunes. We then pass an area that is packed with cave pearls trapped in intricately weaving gour dams formed by shifting waters and swirling minerals. These alone would be fascinating artifacts were it not for the massive sensory overload of four days of this cave. There are only so many ways to say, “magnificent, huge, amazing, spectacular, incredible, and mind-blowing,” and my brain is spilling over with the sights I’ve seen. I can’t take any more magnificence, and this more than anything else tells me that it is indeed time to get back to the real world.

Ride along with me for five minutes of cave trekking.

We move on, crossing a region of sand dunes and then through a massive cavern which the crew lights up for us again. After an appropriate amount of marveling, we trek across the cavern and drop down by means of a rope handhold and soon arrive at the lake zone. This is a wide spot in a massive cavern, and in some seasons, this is a tremendous (magnificent, huge, amazing, spectacular, incredible, mind-blowing) lake that is held at bay by the natural dam known as the Great Wall of Vietnam. More on that in a minute.

Sand dunes in yet another massive cavern.

This lake is often deep enough so as to require passage by boat. Today, it is a huge field of mud, and these boats are tied up in front of us, resting on the mud as if waiting for the tide. Because there is no lake at the moment, our destiny is a muddy trek away instead, and we wind down into a very narrow channel approximately six to twelve inches wide, with steep, muddy slopes spanning up and away ten to fifteen feet high on both sides. The channel contains three to four inches of mud with about a foot of water on top, and we splash through that channel in single file, using our hands against the muddy walls of the bank to steady our approach. The mud sucks at our feet with every step, and the serpentine path winds its way forward, unseen deeper spots forcing a slow passage lest we trip or stumble and end up covered in the viscous goo that now surrounds us.

Forlorn trio of boats waiting for the flood.

One of the safety assistants leads the way, and Jeremy and I follow, quickly outpacing the rest of the group, the only sign of their passage the occasional reflection of light from their headlamps. After thirty minutes of walking the thin line like a drunk performing a sobriety test, with, much like that drunk, many stumbles and lots of arm waving for balance, we finally arrive at the Great Wall of Vietnam.

This wall was first encountered by the British caving team during their exploratory surveying. A massive vertical wall that disappears into the darkness above, they originally had no way to scale it. By turning off their lights, they could see a faint glimmer of daylight far above, and they had no way of knowing if they were seeing the exit from the cave or yet another doline. Returning with climbing equipment, they now had to figure out how to drive anchor bolts into calcite, a task that does not inspire confidence when one is ascending a great height. The story of these cave experts solving the puzzle of conquering the Great Wall is a good one, but beyond the scope of this blog, however, one line tells the tale better than any other:

“8 meters up seems a long, long way when you’re 5 kilometers into a cave, 10,000 kilometers away from home, hanging from a bolt installed in something with the consistency of wet putty.” – Sweeny, member of the BCRA, who first conquered the Great Wall of Vietnam.

Because the ascension of the wall remained difficult and dangerous for many years, until 2017 tours ended here, clients forced to retrace their steps all the way back through the cave, exiting the same way they came in, a longer and more exhausting tour undoubtedly. Today, the wall has been solved via a massive (amazing, spectacular, incredible, huge…) ladder.

This ladder, made of steel and reinforced with supports that have been drilled through the wall and massive struts, rises 120 feet in height, its top disappearing into the darkness, beyond the reach of our headlamps. Jeremy and I stand on a narrow ledge below the ladder, the river roaring away just barely visible below us, a potential fall disastrous as any slip would lead us to undoubtedly be swept away, into the river and underground, and the waiting here seems rather pointlessly dangerous as we shuffle on tired feet trying not to bump each other off the ledge and into oblivion.

There is a pipe that is tapped into the river, and water pours from it into a bucket with scrub brushes. The safety assistant who led us here scrubs himself clean of mud before calling us over one-by-one to scrub the mud from our boots and legs. Any trekking of mud onto the ladder or onto the wall that awaits somewhere above the ladder would make it slippery and dangerous for those following, and the crew takes their time removing all vestiges of mud with scrub brushes dipped into the bucket.

Waiting our turn at the foot washing station prior to ascending the Great Wall of Vietnam.

When we’re clean, we stand on a curved and sloping rock just inches away from that potential tumble into the rushing river, and I hope that I haven’t done anything to offend Jeremy over the last three days as we await the arrival of the rest of the group. Luckily the surface on which we stand has the consistency of sandpaper, and traction is great, though the looming chance of death behind us serves to keep our apprehension elevated.

Tha arrives along with the other safety assistants, and they clean themselves off before the assistants scoot up the ladder to secure their positions on the wall where they’ll be helping guide us from section to section of this long climb back to the surface. The waiting game drags on as orders are shouted in Vietnamese up and down the height of the wall, and the anticipation of this exercise keeps all of us buried in our own thoughts. Finally, Tha signals that we’re ready to begin.

We pair off in groups of two, and Tracy and I are elected to be the first to climb. Tracy motions me forward and I step first onto a horizontal ladder that spans ten feet over the raging river. Iron bars rammed into the muddy bank provide handholds and I quickly cross the span and then stand at the bottom of the massive ladder. I can’t help but marvel at the herculean effort required to move a gargantuan contraption like this first into the cave, and then into position at the base of the Great Wall. 120 feet in height and bracketed into the wall with thick steel supports, the story of how it was placed is one I want to hear. However, there is no time.

Tha checks my boots once more and finds them not clean enough, so he takes another scrub brush to them to eliminate the remaining mud. He then clips my center ring into a rope and shouts up into the darkness far above. Slack is pulled up and my harness straps are pulled taut. Tha and I nod at each other and he gives me the green light to begin the climb.

Stairway to heaven

I move quickly, admiring the views as I ascend into the darkness, the vertical wall getting closer as I near the top. I’m breathing hard when I reach the top, and beads of sweat have begun to coat my body in the thick humidity. There’s a narrow ledge here where the pitch of the Great Wall turns from 90 degrees to about 60 degrees, and I step off the ladder and onto that ledge. The safety assistant waiting there clips my two free carabiners onto a safety rope that is anchored to the wall, and then clips a new support rope to my center ring. He asks me if I want to rest, but I am amped up and I reply, “No, let’s go.” He calls up the slope far above and the slack in the new rope is pulled up, and I begin to climb again, leaning back with the rope between my legs and my boots grabbing purchase on the sandpaper-like slope of the wall. I again move quickly, climbing as fast and hard as I can in some bizarre race to outclimb the safety rope. I have no idea why I feel that I need to outclimb the safety rope or why I can’t just enjoy the climb, but the purely fabricated competition drives me to the top. By the time I reach the next ledge, perhaps forty meters above the top of the ladder, I’m drenched in sweat, panting for breath, my arms weakened through the effort. Here, I do take a quick break, until I hear the shouts from below and realize that Tracy has begun her ascent of the ladder. Panic over potentially being a cog in the operation rears up, and my race against my own brain begins anew. Still panting like Seattle Slough on the 10th furlong, I nevertheless grab the new line and step onto a 45-degree slope, racing my way up this last section until I triumphantly arrive at the very top of the wall.

I’ve won the race. Against myself. Yippee.

I’m drenched in sweat but I couldn’t be happier.

The Great Wall of Vietnam is a truly amazing feature of Hang Son Doong, and by my estimation, more people have ascended to the top of Mount Everest than have climbed this wall, which means very little except in my head, but which is still a pretty cool stat nonetheless. After Tracy reaches the top, we are escorted off to the side of the cave where a large shelf juts out, providing a nice viewing area of the top section of the climb. From there, we cheer on the rest of the group, taking pictures and videos and shouting encouragement. After the last climber, the rest of the safety team climbs up, moving far quicker than any of us, including myself, while carrying their big, heavy packs. They are truly impressive.

The last few steps of the great climb.
Tracy, Rick, and Damien: sweaty, tired, and very happy.
Just a few more ups and downs before we exit the cave for good.
The final treacherous descent. At least the final one INSIDE the cave.

When all have safely navigated the climb, we have lunch, the light from the cave exit visible in the distance. The cave trek is ending, and we are all flying high from the much-anticipated climb of the Great Wall. Lunch finished, we move quickly the remaining distance and then climb a steep, rock-strewn slope toward the light of day. After three days of immersion inside the largest cave on the planet, we step out of the cave and back into the jungle.

Only a few steps from the exit, the dark maw of the cave is swallowed by the jungle, all traces disappearing, and once again, this really reinforces the previously inconceivable idea that the cave had remained hidden for so long. Here, in the middle of a dense jungle, very high on the top of one of thousands of limestone monoliths, far from any civilization, this narrow opening, covered by the thick vegetation, could very conceivably have never been found.

Mere feet away from an entrance to the largest cave on Earth, and the jungle already begins to conceal it.

Although this feels like the end of the trip, it is anything but. In fact, the hard part is yet to come, a nice little secret not talked about by most. Unlike most, I spread truth, and I’m therefore going to be the first to tell you, that the descent from the cave exit is one of the toughest downclimbs I’ve ever done. We first pass a ranger who guards the cave from unauthorized visitors. I marvel at his camp which is perched very high on the mountain. Tha tells us that he will stay here for three to four days straight until he is relieved, and that this cave entrance is guarded 24/7. This job, sleeping in a tent in the deep jungle, far from civilization, out of cell phone range, all alone for three to four days, is one that I think would drive me completely crazy after more than a shift or two.

This guard stays here alone on top of a mountain, deep in the jungle, guarding the entrance to Hang Son Doong.

After passing the one flat spot on the jungle-covered mountain, we begin the descent. We’re told that our caving helmets are required for this descent, and though it annoys me to wear this thing in the heat of the day in the steamy jungle, I completely understand the necessity. The slope is rock-covered mud, with many spots that require holding onto a rope while navigating a slope of 70+ degrees. When we’re not trekking barely manageable slopes, we’re moving from knife edge to knife edge, wobblily stepping across chasms just waiting to break a leg. Tha tells me that he was seriously injured once on this descent when he gashed open his leg on one of the knife-edge rocks, and Hieu was so badly hurt in a fall here that he had to be carried out by the porter team. This descent is absolutely no joke, and we are all panting, aching, and covered in sweat by the time we finally reach the dry river bed that marks the bottom of the valley. Although it took only an hour to get here from the cave exit, it was by far the toughest hour of the entire trek, and we are exhausted.

The hardest part of the tour is the descent from the cave exit to the river valley far below.

We rest here for a bit, drinking water to rehydrate. I move up the river valley to relieve myself and find an entrance to yet another massive cave. Returning, I tell Tha about my discovery and ask if we can name it Hang Rick, but to my utter disappointment, he claims to already be aware of it, and in fact tells me that Oxalis provides a tour through it.

As I pick up my pack, I realize that Tha has filled the outside pockets with heavy river rocks, a rather funny joke that would have been better if he’d put them into the zippered pouches so I didn’t see them. I empty the pockets and we now climb out of the valley. It takes us 20 minutes of tough climbing on the well-trodden path before we pop out of the jungle and back onto the Ho Chi Minh trail. Jeremy, the old man of the group is the first to arrive, and when I pop out, he has already cracked open a beer which the crew has thoughtfully provided in an ice-packed cooler that is awaiting our arrival.

The porter team has beat us here (of course) and they lounge around in the shade, smiling and cheering for each of us as we pop up out of the jungle and onto the road. It’s 3:30pm and we are exhausted as we chug the beer and high-five all around. We truly feel that we’ve accomplished something incredible, and we’re excited and proud to have successfully and safely completed this incredible trek.

Celebrating an incredible, memorable trip with a well-deserved beer.

Epilogue:

The tour doesn’t officially end at the roadside, though it may feel that way. The price includes a stay that night in a beautiful bungalow at a place called Chay Lap Farmstay, where the ten of us gather for a last supper with our guide Tha Tran, and our safety specialist Hieu Ho. The dinner is wonderful, and afterwards we take another group picture and then Tha and Hieu hand out wooden medals to commemorate our trek.

On the nightstand in our bungalow room was an envelope where we could provide an optional tip to the 26 members of the Oxalis staff who catered to our every need for four days straight and ensured that we successfully turned this dream into reality. When we first booked this adventure a year previously (the tours fill up early, and a one-year advance booking is usually the minimum) we weren’t sure that it would end up being worth the $3,000 per person that they charge. It seemed like a lot of money at the time, especially in a country like Vietnam where a dollar goes a long way. After taking the trek, we were actually stunned that it was so cheap. Two full-time chefs who make every meal into a delectable feast. 17 porters who each carry monstrous packs through an arduous trek where us clients sometimes struggled with just day packs. 6 safety assistants who watched our every step to ensure we were safe and injury-free. A safety supervisor specially trained by the British Cave Research Association with top-notch modern cave trekking knowledge and skills. And lastly, an incredible guide who had the most magnetic, energy-filled personality you could ever want. And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the staff at Oxalis who put all this together from the time of booking to the time of our departure. The fee includes round-trip transportation from Dong Hoi, the two nights in the different bungalows that bracketed the actual trek, the roughly $750 per person fee that the Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park charges for entry, and many more things. After tallying up what it should have cost, we were actually amazed that it was so cheap.

Upon embarking on this trip, we made sure to bring enough Vietnamese money to tip the staff at the end. We planned on a local-appropriate tip of somewhere in the 5-10% range, depending on the level of service and our satisfaction with the tour. After we finished, we realized that this was nowhere near enough. The level of service was absolutely exemplary, and the professionalism of every member of the staff was far and above any reasonable expectation. We were so appreciative that we felt compelled to show our gratitude in the only way a client truly can, and that was through a much more generous tip than we’d originally planned, and it still felt like it wasn’t enough. It’s incredibly rare to experience 6-days and 5 nights on a tour and not think there was at least some mishap or room for improvement, but Oxalis has managed to create an exemplary tour that addresses every conceivable issue with first-class service that I am dying to repeat sometime soon. My recommendation could not be more glowing.

The day after we exited the cave we had time to relax in the very nice bungalow and resort area. Every bit of our laundry, which had to be as disgusting as possible after most of our clothes sat wet for three or four days in a plastic bag, was professionally done at a total cost of somewhere around $10, and was waiting outside our room when we woke up. I took a complementary bicycle and explored the town with a 5-mile ride on an idyllic country road that winds through lush farmland with the cloud-enveloped and jungle-covered limestone mountains as the backdrop. At noon, the provided car service picked us up and we were driven to the train station in Dong Hoi where we weren’t taking a train, but were instead picked up by another car service I’d booked to take us back to Hue. The rest of our Vietnam trip, both before and after the cave tour was absolutely wonderful as well, though those details will have to wait for another time.

A trek through the incredible Hang Son Doong is an unforgettable, life-changing experience, and if you get the chance to take this journey, have no qualms or second guesses, just jump on it. You will not regret it!

Trekking the largest cave in the world: Hang Son Doong, Vietnam, part one.

The thick jungle canopy provides a welcome break from the sweltering Vietnamese sun, casting a verdant shade over our group of ten as we trek along the narrow, slippery trail. We’re as out-of-place in this environment as newborn fawns, blinking and staring around with wide eyes and flaring nostrils at the unfamiliar terrain and the musky scent of the dense foliage. The air is thick with humidity, causing perspiration to soak our clothes despite the dappled shade. The cacophony of cicadas fills the air, their relentlessly loud chirping serving as a rhythmic backdrop to our trek. As we descend along the narrow trail toward a river bottom, the temperature rises, enveloping us in a warm embrace. Limestone cliffs spring triumphantly and majestically from the lowlands, their jagged edges and crevices a testament to the relentless erosion of both water and time. These towering monoliths dominate the valley, creating a stark contrast against the vibrant greens of the surrounding vegetation which climbs their flanks. Swirling misty clouds born of the thick humidity lazily circle their tops, occasionally dipping down their flanks invoking Jurassic-era vibes to the remote jungle.

The misty limestone promontories of the Vietnamese jungle.

With only brief pauses, we navigate the uneven terrain, descending steeply, stepping carefully over exposed roots and jagged rocks that threaten to trip the unwary. The soft thud of our footsteps mingles with the burbling of the river below, creating a symphony of nature that seems to envelop us entirely. One of our group slips in the mud and lands painfully on her back. A safety assistant rushes to her and helps her up. She’s okay, but the safety assistant stays close, ready to catch her if the tread of her hiking shoes fails her again.

We are alone in the thick, steamy jungle of the Phong Nha – Ke Bang National Park in the north-central part of Vietnam, very close to the Laotian border. Access to the park is carefully controlled by the Vietnamese government, and though the roads through the park are open to traffic, strict laws prohibit anyone from leaving the roadside without being part of an official tour group, operated by only one company in Vietnam, Oxalis, and strictly limited as to number of persons, both per day and per season. As if to emphasize these laws, a park ranger catches our group and plods past us, his nimble feet well-accustomed to the hazardous trail. He carries a heavy backpack that contains bags of rice poking out the flap and a thick green vegetable like a cucumber on steroids strapped to the top. We are told that he is headed to his post where he will stay for a week, guarding the jungle access against unauthorized visitors.

As we press on, the cicadas get louder until their drone becomes almost piercing, and the jungle canopy begins to open up. The absence of any breeze only adds to the stifling atmosphere, and the sun’s rays begin to pierce through the sparse tops of the tall trees, casting a golden glow upon the land around us. We keep a wary eye out for snakes including several types of vipers, a cobra, and a constrictor that are all native to this area. The scent of decaying vegetation and damp earth fills our nostrils, a welcome change from the smell of burning garbage and plastic that permeates the cities we transited on our way here. There’s a certain magic to this place; this humid jungle gives a sense of adventure and discovery that fuels our determination to press on and uncover its secrets.

After about 45 minutes of descending, we finally reach the river bottom, and our tour guide lead, Tha Tran, steps into the knee-deep water. The river is not wide, and rocks provide a platform upon which to leap and avoid getting our feet wet, but Tha, with a mischievous grin on his face, uses his staff to splash the rocks, turning them from dry and easily navigable steps into slippery instruments of chaos. Its time to get our feet wet, and Tha makes it clear that there is no avoiding the wading of the rivers that will become part of our very existence for the next four days.

Making our descent through the jungle toward the river bottom.

The ten of us, strangers until the previous evening, are gathered together here in this remote national park of Vietnam for one purpose: to explore Hang Son Doong, the largest cave in the world. This behemoth cave, created by eons of rushing water through the vast permeable limestone cliffs that inundate the landscape of this country, was only officially discovered in 2009 by members of the British Cave Research Association. Prior to the discovery of Hang Son Doong, the largest known cave in the world was Deer Cave in Malaysia. Deer Cave enjoyed this prestigious title from its survey in 1985 until the completion of the survey of Hang Son Doong in 2010 which would reveal a volume more than twice that of Deer Cave. An absolute monstrosity that lay unseen by human eyes for eons, its secrets waiting patiently to be mapped, and we were all giddy to be some of the very few who have had the pleasure of bearing witness to its glory.

The full story of the discovery of Hang Son Doong (Hang means “cave” in Vietnamese, so this is the Son Doong Cave) began in either 1990 or 1991—the literature is unclear, along with, perhaps the memory. In the rainy season of one of those years, Mr. Ho Khanh, a local villager who relied on illegal logging to support his family, was searching the jungle for aloe wood, also called agarwood, a very precious, very valuable, and very difficult to find wood which exists sparsely in the deep jungle. Here again, the story varies, as some, including our tour guide, Tha, tell us that Ho Khanh was actually searching for the Sua tree, an even more rare tree than agarwood, and one that is prized by the Chinese and that can sell for up to $1000 per kilo. Whichever account is accurate, what seems true is that Khanh was searching for a rare tree, and perhaps he was looking for either of these rare and valuable woods, something that seems quite plausible for an opportunistic and knowledgeable logger who risked illegally scouring the dense National Park junglescape in an effort to support his family.

Initially with two compatriots, Ho Khanh separated from the others and trekked through a massive cave called Hang En, following the river that flows through it, the easiest path through the dense jungle. After Hang En, the river disappears underground, and Khanh climbed above the valley, his eyes scouring the jungle for the elusive tree. Rainstorms appeared and began dumping on him, and his eyes noticed mist swirling and streaming from the side of a limestone cliff, a sure sign of a cave entrance. He worked his way over to the entrance, a cave he had never before seen nor heard of, and hunkered down just inside and out of the downpour. When the rain finally ceased, Khanh returned home and promptly forgot about his discovery. Caves are generally meaningless to the local people as with few exceptions, they provide nothing of value. This one in particular was of no value as the entrance was narrow and the cave descended steeply into a yawning maw of blackness where a cold wind rose from the inky, stygian depths, meeting the warmer and humid air of the jungle to create the mist that Khanh observed. That deep blackness and the accompanying roar of a great river in its mysterious depths held only nightmares and prehistoric limbic fear for the young man who wanted nothing to do with whatever monsters waited below.

Fast forward to 2007 when Howard Limbert of the British Cave Research Association fortuitously met Ho Khanh. A prodigious searcher of caves and a world-renowned caver with decades of experience, Limbert’s group had discovered and mapped hundreds of caves in the limestone cliffs of the Vietnam jungle over the previous decade. Ho Khanh had been engaged by the British caving team for the previous season to help them discover new caves, and his expert guidance had been fruitful with dozens of cave discoveries during his tenure. In 2007, the British crew enlisted Khanh’s help once more, and at the end of that season, Khanh met Howard. In their talks, Howard told Khanh that he was specifically looking for a cave that would connect the massive Hang En with another cave known as Hang Thoong. The river that flowed through both caves disappeared underground at some point in the impenetrable jungle, and Howard Limbert suspected there must be another cave hidden in that area. This description triggered the memory of the rainy night almost two decades past that Khanh had spent bunkered in the entrance of an unknown cave in that very area, a cave that spewed cold air from unfathomably stygian depths with swirling mist revealing its existence in the dense canopy, and Khanh led the group out in search of this cave he vaguely remembered. Their search was unfruitful, and the team returned to England at the conclusion of the season. The following season, in 2008, Khanh, wanting to impress the group he admired and that probably compensated him well, went out on his own, searching for the cave of his distant memory. This time, he found the entrance and marked it in his mind. The vast depths were too steep and dangerous for him to explore on his own, but he returned to his village to await the return of the Caving Expedition. When they returned in 2009, Khanh excitedly led them to the entrance. He was worried that this cave might be a dry cave with no special significance, its depths merely imagined, the subterranean river for which they searched located elsewhere. His worries were for naught though, as the British Cave Research Association stepped up to the tiny hidden entrance, unaware that they were on the brink of the greatest and most exciting discovery in their history, and arguably in all the history of caving expedition.

Jungleman Ho Khanh, original discoverer of Hang Son Doong.

In 2024, the new cave, named Hang Son Doong, or “Cave of the Mountain River” has become a carefully regulated tourist attraction, bringing cave afficionados from around the world who pay $3000 each for the privilege of being one of the lucky few to explore its depths. Joining Tracy and I on this adventure are eight others, the maximum tour allowable size, and we have all booked this tour at least a year in advance, so great is the demand for the limited number of annual slots. Shockingly, our group is composed entirely of Americans, though the majority are of Vietnamese descent, returning to the land of their parents to bear witness to one of the world’s greatest discoveries. Two friends, middle-aged wanderers and explorers Kay and Phuong have traveled from Orange County, California. Kay owns a successful travel and tour company that focuses on Southeast Asia packages and tours. Phuong is Kay’s lifelong friend, and she spent months preparing for the rigorous hiking and climbing we’ll encounter on this tour by hiking all over southern California. Along with Kay, Phuong is very involved with a charity called Hope for Tomorrow which provides much needed medical and dental support to the numerous struggling communities of Southeast Asia, a worthwhile and magnanimous endeavor.

Two sisters, Truc and Ly have traveled from Houston and Tampa Bay respectively. Joined by their boyfriends, Anthony and Justin they are the youngest of the group, in their twenties and thirties. Truc is an accomplished orchestra musician and violinist who was born in Vietnam but emigrated to America to study music. She was also once a contestant on a reality show, making her the celebrity of the group. She’s an adjunct professor at San Jacinto College teaching violin, quite an accomplishment for someone of her youth. Her older sister, Ly spearheaded their involvement on this tour, convincing Truc to join her on this once-in-a-lifetime expedition. Originally from Ho Chi Minh city, Ly moved to the United States in 2001 and works as a General Medical Technologist. She has the ambitious goal of visiting every American National Park, a goal that apparently was deferred by the importance of this trek in her native country. Anthony and Justin were friendly and bright, completely devoted to the security and comfort of their girlfriends while I often wasn’t sure if Tracy was still on the trail or had turned back. Justin is an engineer who was born in Hong Kong but grew up in Canada. He studied chemical physics and medical biophysics and works as a designer of MRI scanners. Along with elevating the collective IQ of our group, his other role was to carry a larger-than-normal backpack for most of the trip that contained not just his own gear, but also all of Ly’s belongings. Anthony, a commercial pilot who studied Geology at USF was fortuitous enough to be friends with Justin when Ly set up this trip. I say fortuitous, because two’s company and three’s a crowd, and when Ly invited both Justin and Truc to join her on this expedition, they needed a fourth, and with a flourish that would make a magician proud, Anthony appeared. When I talk about the formidable nature of this trek, I’m not exaggerating, and Anthony would find himself sick on day two, which could have spelled disaster on such an arduous endeavor. Although he had to rest on a couple of occasions while coughing up mouthfuls of gunk, never once did he complain or slow down the group. He accomplished this trek while sick and coughing and still managing to help Truc along and tend to her needs, and while that devotion may have made me slightly nauseous, I found myself in awe of his strength and fortitude.

Rounding out our ten are Damien, a Vietnamese-American finance specialist with a global oil and gas company from Houston and Jeremy, the elder of our group at the age of 65. Damien and Jeremy are polar opposites, Damien flashy, splashy, and swashbuckling, a jester who had us all in stiches on numerous occasions with his hilarious stories, while Jeremy is much more reserved, stoic, and conservative, an intellectual who spends his mornings engaged in meditation and yoga while the rest of us are still stumbling around looking for coffee. Jeremy is a dual-citizen American-Canadian Jewish expat currently living in Melbourne, Australia. The business success and intelligence of each member of this group is amazing, making me by far the least successful of the group, an inferior tagalong and an outsider, though this probably should be no surprise as the cost of this tour is a steep barrier to entry, drawing only those with a good amount of disposable income. Or significant others with such. Ahem.

Our trekking group, from left to right, upper row: Rick, Tracy, Kay, Damien, Phuong, Jeremy. Lower row: Justin, Ly, Truc, Anthony.

As disparate and diverse as this group is, we comfortably and casually chat and get to know each other as we journey along. We met for the first time at the mandatory safety briefing the previous night, where our shoes and backpacks were inspected by Tha and by our safety specialist, Hieu Ho, a local man who has worked extensively with the British Cave Research Association, and who has spent a remarkable two full years of his young life inside Son Doong Cave, with more than 150 unique trips into its depths. This briefing occurred at Oxalis headquarters in Phong Nha, a small town that has prospered with the plethora of tourism brought into the region by Son Doong and the many other magnificent caves that dot the national park.

The first river crossing complete, we rest a bit to dip our heads in the refreshing water and sip from our bottles to replace some of what we’ve lost in sweat. As we lounge, two trekkers pass us going back the other way. They are in the jungle illegally and they’ve been caught by the ranger who passed us earlier. He has sent them back out of the jungle and Tha tells us that they’re lucky they haven’t been arrested. Our break over, we sling our packs onto our sweaty backs and along with Tha, Hieu, and the six capable safety assistants who accompany us, we continue our venture deep into the heart of the Vietnamese jungle. Despite the weight of their heavy packs, loaded with safety equipment and emergency supplies like a satellite phone and several well-stocked first-aid kits, our guides navigate the terrain with effortless grace, their movements fluid and purposeful. Unlike the trekking boots and heavy-tread trail runners worn by our group, our guides (as well as the porters and chefs) all wear thin sandals, albeit sandals with a heavy tread. The sandals dry out overnight, and with new socks every day, keep their feet from acquiring jungle rot from repeated trekking tours. Our feet will be fine being wet for four days straight, but with shoes like ours, their feet would be wet perpetually.

The official uniform sandals of Oxalis trekking employees.

We continue on through the flatlands of the river valley, crossing and recrossing the river numerous times, a task we begin to find refreshing as the water cools our overheated feet each time. Tha takes the time to stop and teach us all about the flora of the Vietnamese jungle, paying particular attention to pointing out what he calls, “itchy plant,” officially Nang Hai, a devil’s club or poison ivy-type plant that is prodigious throughout the terrain. This plant looks innocuous and innocent, tough to discern from the similar foliage that surrounds it, and Tha and the other safety guides are quick to point it out when it intrudes on our path, the call of “itchy plant!” ringing out every few minutes. As terrified of this plant as the guides, who aren’t scared of anything we’ve yet seen, are, we all give it a very cautious, wide berth.

After a bit more trekking through the wide-open spaces, our bodies no longer protected by the jungle cover, we arrive at a remote village home to an ethnic minority Vietnamese community. The village is called Bru Van Kieu, and their simple dwellings and way of life stand in stark contrast to the world we’ve left behind, a testament to their isolation and self-sufficiency. At least this seems the case, until we encounter a device that looks suspiciously like a cell-phone tower. Tha confirms that this is what it is, however, the tower is solar powered and does not connect to any tower to the outside world, serving only to allow communication between the small villages that dot the bottomlands of the verdant valleys. 52 live in this community, and they are shy and reclusive. We get a few waves and shouted “hellos” from some children, and some curious stares from a couple adults, but we otherwise see nobody. In the heat of the day, the village seems to have embraced a languid pace, its inhabitants seeking respite from the oppressive sun. A quiet hush has fallen over the settlement, broken only by the occasional murmur of muted conversation, or the light, playful laughter of the few children. The few adults we do see glance our way and nod or raise a hand, their weathered faces etched with the stories of a lifetime spent in harmony with this remote and rugged land. We cross their cattle fences using small built-in ladders. Dogs languish in the shade, giving us barely a glance as we pass, and cattle and chickens likewise ignore us to go about their busy lives with no regard for our group of interlopers.

Bru Van Kieu village schoolhouse, built thanks to funds contributed by Oxalis and tourists like you.

We stop at the home of the local chieftain where a lunch spread is laid out for us in the shade of his home. We see no sign of him, but the two chefs assigned to our group have spread out delicious fare, and a lot of it. We remove wet shoes and socks and lay them out in the sun for drying, a futile effort in the humidity. Camp shoes, a must for this trek, are donned, and we sit for a delicious lunch of rice paper wraps, hoagie rolls, meats, veggies, and large bowls of various Vietnamese noodle soups. Fruits, yoghurt, and cookies round out the dessert portion. Everything is delicious and there is plenty of everything except for the packages of Happy Cow cheese which Tha guards ferociously against my hungrily snatching paws, insisting that there is only one for each person. I play along like a good tour member eager for group harmony. For now.

Lunch at the chief’s home in Bru Van Kieu village.

Bellies full and spirits renewed, we don our wet shoes and bid farewell to the lethargic village, continuing our journey, winding our way through the lush, verdant valley. The wide expanse of the river basin stretches out before us, its meandering course beckoning us forward as we cross and recross the snaking channel numerous times. One of our eagle-eyed safety assistants, his vision honed by countless expeditions, suddenly motions for us to pause. With a deft gesture, he points toward a distant tree high atop one of the jungle-covered limestone ridges where a monkey perches, its form almost camouflaged by the branches of the tree in which it rests. We marvel at the creature as Tha borrows Damien’s cell phone, an Android with a 100x zoom camera. The monkey, a long-tailed lemur, comes into sharp contrast in the cell phone camera and we watch with joy as it swings its way out of the highest tree branches and out of sight.

Onward we press, our path continuing to follow the serpentine river that carves its way through the valley floor. As we round a corner, our eyes, guided by the pointing finger of Tha, are drawn to a sight that leaves us awestruck. In the distance, camouflaged and partially hidden by the jungle foliage is a limestone cliff and the top edge of a gaping maw, a massive cave looming in the cliff side. Tendrils of mist curl lazily from the cavernous entrance, adding an air of mystery to the already imposing spectacle.

“Hang En,” Tha announces, his voice tinged with reverence for this ancient geological wonder. Although he’s seen this view hundreds of times, it is apparent that he understands the importance and magnificence of this site to our group. He also embodies a sense of pride in the wonder of these marvels that draw tourists from around the world to his small, battle-weary country.

Our first view of the magnificent cave, Hang En.
A closer shot of the mysteriously beckoning entrance to the massive cave, Hang En.

It takes an hour to close the distance, and as we draw closer, the sheer magnitude of this cave becomes increasingly apparent, its towering entrance arch dwarfing us with its immensity. We work our way along the river which flows out of this cave. We won’t be entering Hang En via the immense arch, but rather through a small entrance carved by the river with which we’ve become intimately familiar. We step into the shaded darkness, take numerous photos, and then don our caving helmets and caving lights which strap to the top of the helmets. With a sense of eager anticipation, we activate the headlamps, their beams cutting through the encroaching darkness. Leaving behind the vibrant jungle and its now familiar sounds, Tha leads us as we take our first steps into the inky blackness that lies beyond. The silence is eerie, punctuated only by the muted roar of the river and the sound of water dripping from the cavernous ceiling above our heads. We cross the swiftly flowing river holding onto a rope to avoid any slip and falls. A few steps further and we encounter a massive rock fall, boulders the size of cars that have fallen from the ceiling over eons. Tha leads us up a path, cautioning us in the slippery parts as we trek across the dominating rockfall. We are working our way upward toward the massive entrance that was our first view of this cave, and as we cross under an overhanging lip of rock, we crest one of the plateaus of the rockfall where a magnificent view meets our eager eyes. Our first camp for the night, sprawled under the dome of the largest cavern any of us have ever seen.

Approaching the lower river entrance to Hang En.
Crossing the river and entering Hang En via the lower entrance.
Leaving the darkness of Hang En and entering the light-strewn rockpile below the magnificent upper entrance.

Hang En is where we’ll spend our first night, and the camp has been already laid out for us via the efforts of the porter team that accompanies our group. 17 local Vietnamese men comprise the porter group, and if there are harder working, stronger and more capable men in the caving world, I would be shocked. These 17 men have carried a full complement of equipment and gear for our expedition, and they have beat us to the cave to have it set up for us when we arrive. I’ll talk more about this later.

For now, we are perched like mountain goats on a house-sized rock far above our camp, and we look down at it in awe at the sheer magnificence of the scene below us. Cameras emerge, and we take time posing for photos. The river we’ve crossed deepens and widens below us, and a raft awaits to take our group across to the campsite which sits on a flat, sandy beach in the gloom of the cave. Light from the massive entrance is muted but bright enough for us to move about without fear of tripping or falling. Tha and Hieu lead us carefully down the sprawling rockfall and to the raft where we board and are pulled across the 50-foot gap via a rope that spans the length. On the shore, we find our tents and drop our packs. Our porters have carried half of our personal gear in provided dry bags, and we find our dry bags to gather our belongings, remove our wet gear, and don comfortable, dry clothes. Some of us choose to go for a swim instead, and I’m one of them, putting on swim trunks and grabbing a required life jacket to head back to the water. A signal is given to the safety assistants, and one of them brings a chair to the beach to act as lifeguard. The water is cool and refreshing, drawing a gasp initially as I dive in, but then warming appreciably in feel. I scrub the sweat from my body and then toss the offensive lifejacket back to shore as I commit to staying within the 15-foot limit from shore to go without. Tha joins along with a few of the group, and as we stand there chatting excitedly fish begin to nibble at my feet. A “fish foot spa,” Tha calls it, and I let the fish enjoy their feast of my objectively nasty, pruned and peeling feet. Surprisingly, nobody else is getting a nibble while I’m being swarmed by no less than eight hungry mouths, and I make a joke that these fish must rarely get to enjoy white meat. The reality is that my feet are probably just more disgusting—and thus yummy to fish—than most.

Our first view of our day one camp inside the magnificent cave, Hang En. This lake was wonderful to swim in after a sweaty day trekking.
The standard Oxalis photo requires that you pretend you see something amazing somewhere “over there.”

After the swim, we change into dry clothes and then sit around a charcoal fire as the light begins to fade over the cave entrance. Birds swarm above us, mistaken for bats at first until Tha corrects us. They are Swiftlets, and there are thousands of them. They nest in the ceiling of the cave, hundreds of meters above us in the gloom. Tha shines his intense flashlight up to the wall and points out what looks like sticks jammed into the rough-hewn walls. He informs us that this is rattan, a vine that grows in the forest and that he pointed out to us a few times along the trek. We’ve all heard of rattan furniture, a highly desirable and high-priced rugged export from the area. As we struggle to understand how the jungle vine came to be lodged into the rock walls of Hang En, Tha ends the suspense and tells us that prior to Hang En being a tourist destination, for centuries, the local villagers have scaled the walls of this cave to reach the Swiftlet nests in the ceiling, seeking the baby Swiftlets which are a delicacy to the tribes. Our mouths drop in disbelief as we try to fathom villagers climbing these walls with no safety equipment, jamming rattan sticks into cracks for handholds, hanging upside down hundreds of meters above the cave floor, and tossing baby birds down to their deaths for some delicious soup. I wonder at how many human deaths must have occurred alongside the Swiftlet deaths right in this spot from a slip by a young climber over the many centuries of this practice…

Dinner is ready at 6pm sharp, as darkness is descending on the campsite. Lights are produced, and we gather hungrily at the table as our bountiful fare is laid before us. Chicken, beef, and lamb, stir-fried vegetables and rice, both steamed and fried. Various soups, wok-fried eggplant, and eggrolls. Our eyes are wide as we pile the food into the small cups used by locals for every meal. We gorge ourselves by repeatedly refilling the cups, but put hardly a dent into the lavish bounty spread before us. Tha ensures us that the porters eagerly await our leftovers, so we don’t feel bad about wasting any food. Although they’ve already eaten their own dinner, the calorie-burn of the work they put in leads them to a ravenous hunger that is satiated by our untouched leftovers as a midnight snack.

View from camp one looking back at the upper entrance to Hang En. A person standing in that rockfield for scale is only barely visible in this photo.

After dinner and some light conversation over the charcoal fire, full darkness descends, and I can hardly keep my eyes open. I’m ready for bed at 7pm but hold out until 8:00, thinking that must be the earliest acceptable time to slink away without disgrace. I’m not the first to disappear though, many in our group still suffering the effects of jetlag from the 12-to-15-hour time difference from the U.S. and exhausted by the arduous hiking we endured. Tomorrow will be even tougher as we’ll transit through Hang En, following the route of Ho Khanh from a quarter-century earlier. We’ll make our way to the hidden entrance to Son Doong and tomorrow night we’ll sleep inside that magnificent cave. Although I am filled with trepidation and anticipation for the next day, I’m sound asleep by 8:05pm, mere minutes after laying my head on the pillow.

Death and Life

The old woman lies supine in her soft recliner, her thin legs stretched out, heavy blankets covering her body, her face caressed by a thousand wrinkles, each of which represents a story, a veritable roadmap of a lifetime of hardships, joys, worries, fears, heartaches, and exuberances. A machine hums in the background of the crowded room, forcing air through small plastic tubes that feed into her nostrils. She’s awake and alert, her bright eyes sparkling, her lips, freshly coated with lipstick turned up in a smile. The smile quivers, and her eyes change from sparkling to glistening as she chats with her grandson over FaceTime. The old woman is dying. She has cancer, and it’s in her lungs, one of them already shut down, the other struggling. She lives entirely in the past now, her future non-existent, as is the case for so many elderly people. She lives through her memories of her life, both good and bad. Her eldest grandson has called to say goodbye one final time. It’s a tough call, forced and awkward with both of them emotional, the conversation more difficult than it should be, heightened by the distance between them.

Ten miles to the east, the old woman’s great-granddaughter also reclines, her legs stretched out, her eyes closed as she rests, her hands lightly rubbing her swollen belly. She can feel the child inside her yearning for his freedom, restlessly moving about in her womb as if he knows that his time in eternal darkness is drawing to a close as rapidly as his great-great-grandmother’s is drawing nigh. The great-granddaughter’s face is smooth, her few wrinkles showing merely a hint of what they’ll one day become, only really visible when she smiles brightly. She feels joy and hope for the future as she awaits the impending birth of her fourth child.

The grandson is me, and I’m a thousand miles away from both my grandmother, who’s waiting to die, and my grandson, who’s waiting to be born. I’m caught in the middle of two momentous events, and the polar difference between them tugs and tears at me. I FaceTime’d my daughter yesterday, and my grandmother today…two very different calls, the parties on each end in vastly different places. One waits for death, and the other waits for life, and, like things have been for time immemorial, the loss of one family member will be accompanied by the gain of another, though rarely seen in such a close time frame. The circle of life will soon come together for my family, the iconographic ouroboros personified. My grandmother has mere days to live, and my grandson has mere days left before his birth, and I will experience the sadness and loss of one and the joy and gain of the other in very close proximity.

I’ve often felt that we shouldn’t mourn too deeply the loss of those who’ve achieved great age. I’ve been wrong. That’s an easy enough thought in isolation, but much more difficult when it becomes less abstract and more personal. Loss is loss, and mourning accompanies that loss, regardless of how far the dying person has outkicked their coverage, to borrow an adage. Rarely does a person live long enough to meet their great-great-grandchildren, and my grandmother has already met three of hers. She won’t get to meet the fourth, but she’ll pass on knowing that he’ll be filling the void that she’ll be leaving, and I hope that gives her some comfort. It takes both genetic longevity and a proclivity for youthful procreation to experience five generations in a family. And, to perhaps an even larger extent, it takes a great deal of luck, and I know that my grandmother understands this. Her life has often been difficult, marked with challenges and struggles, and she’s overcome them all. But her life has also been filled with joy and happiness, as evidenced by the size of the family she’ll leave behind. She’s the matriarch of a very large clan, and her legacy will live on in so many lives that are traced directly back to her.

I hope that the thoughts of so many people who have loved her for their entire lives gives her comfort in her final few days. I hope that the birth of the boy who will fill the emptiness she leaves eases her final transition. I hope that she understands that our last call was marked by only the awkwardness of emotion and sadness on my part, because of the love that I feel for her.

I hope that the knowledge of our love for her envelopes her final thoughts in the coming days.

Hunting The Beast

I’m stalking The Beast with an all-consuming focus that’s almost manic in its intensity. The Beast is a disgusting, vile creature, and I’m merciless in my quest for its death. An outside observer would doubtlessly question my sanity, and a miniscule part of my mind concurs that I may very well have lost a touch of my grip on reality as I hover motionless, still as the vacuum of space that yawns beneath my precarious perch. The Beast eyes me, warily. It knows I’m there. It knows that I deign for its demise, and it waits, ever so cautiously for my next move.

We’re in a standoff, The Beast and I. We’ve gone several rounds already, and the score is Beast 6, Rick 0. It’s an embarrassing tally, and I’m ashamed to admit that I’m losing in such horrendous fashion. This is how Eli Manning felt every time he faced Tom Brady, and it’s not a good feeling. The Beast has a mottled gray body sprouting six legs and bulbous eyes, and I can see my reflection in those hideous eyes as it waits just out of my reach. As if to mock me, it rubs two of its legs together, defying gravity, hanging from the side of a sheer and smooth cliff by some magical means. I have no such magical ability. I perch on the impugnable edge of the rickety ladder knowing that a sudden sharp move will mean serious injury or worse. The Beast seems to know this too, and it waits for me to make my play. It knows it has all the time it needs, that I’m the one who desires its demise. It has no such ill intent for me.

There’s motion below me. My dog, Malibu, walks by. She’s aware of The Beast, of course. She’s ferocious in normal circumstances, but eerily ignorant of the danger the disgusting beast poses right now. It’s as if The Beast has cast a spell over her with the same wicked sorcery that allows it to grasp nothingness without even using all of its legs. Malibu walks on. She has her own beasts to chase and harass. We are normally on the same page, but not today. I call her beasts chipmunks, and I care as much about her beasts as she does about mine.

I’m like Walter White in my mania with The Beast. This vile thing is a major contaminant, and, although I don’t have the sanctity of an illicit lab to protect, this beast is screwing with the venerability of my very sanity. It must die, and I must be its vanquisher.

It moves suddenly, away from me, and, much like Malibu who waits patiently at the bottom of a tree for her own beast before jumping far too soon, allowing it to escape into the upper branches, I react toward mine. I swing my weapon with all my might, the flimsy, plastic bludgeoner making a mighty “thwack” on the window where The Beast stands with such sorcery. It can fly, of course, and it does so now, nonchalant, unhurried, seemingly and painfully aware that I’ve now dropped the ineffectual weapon in my effort to grab frantically at the ladder, the force of my stalwart swat throwing off my balance and nearly causing me to fall to the hard ground below. The Beast disappears, and I hang my head in shame. The score is now Beast 7, Rick 0, but I’m undeterred. I shall vanquish this evil, disgusting foe. With shaky legs, I descend the ladder and retrieve my weapon.

Back on the hunt I go.

The Courage of 9/11

Next week marks the twentieth anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack to ever take place on American soil. Muslim fundamentalists became terrorists and planes became missiles, filling the skies with terror and carnage that would forever change the course of history for the entire world. While the death and destruction from that day is an immutable memory seared in our heads, we should remember that there was more to those incidents than the havoc and devastation that dominated our screens. On that day, twenty years ago, courage and heroism were in abundance across the gamut of attacks that took place, and, while some of that courage has been documented and acknowledged, other examples have been mostly overlooked, or the courageous aspect of the deed ignored. Next week, while a splurge of articles and media reports will no doubt fill our synapses with memories of that history-changing day, I want to take a moment to talk about the courage of 9/11.

Courage is defined as action in the face of fear. There are many people who think that they aren’t courageous simply because they’re scared, but courage actually requires fear. Courage is being scared but acting anyway. Fighting your base instinct to take no action, or to remove yourself from the action that is necessary, wanting to turn back, to run, to hide, but moving forward regardless. Not everyone is capable of courage. There are many who freeze with fear, paralyzed by the magnitude of the event or the decision. When people push through that paralysis and act, we marvel at that action, and we acknowledge it. Not all courage is equal, and not all that we call courageous is actually courage. Too often that term is thrown around in situations where it doesn’t apply, diminishing the word and weakening the actions of those who truly earned that brand. The courage on display on 9/11 was pure and it was undeniable, though not all of it resulted in good. I think it’s important to recognize the courage both pure and impure, both heroic and anti-heroic, on that day, for reasons that I hope will be clear.

We’ve all discussed and acknowledged the courage of the first responders—the police officers, firefighters, and others who ran toward the towers that day. The shock of seeing a jumbo jet slam into a skyscraper that before this day had seemed indomitable, an everlasting symbol of not just our nation, but the entire world of capitalism and finance, could have, should have, and, in many cases probably did cause many to freeze, to stand in shock, overwhelmed by the sights and sounds, their bodies immobile with gut-wrenching fear. When the second plane, United Airlines flight 175, crashed into the south tower, the majority of us were watching from home, safely in our living rooms while the scenario played out on our televisions. It was shocking even from there. From the ground, the ear-splitting scream of the turbofan engines as the hijackers shoved them to full throttle, the gut-wrenching explosion above your head which would have rained glass, steel, concrete, and debris across the entire World Trade Center complex, the smell of jet fuel permeating the air, the shaking of the very ground you stood on, and the visceral screams of all those around you, the stumbling, shell-shocked walking wounded with blood pouring from them, the thumps as bodies splashed onto the ground around you, and the knowledge—no longer in any doubt—that this was not an accident, that this was intentional, an attack on America, and that your country, your city, the very patch of concrete that you stood on right now was ground zero of a warzone…this could have and should have been immobilizing.

And still, they ran into the buildings. Toward the fire and the screams and the carnage. This is courage.

There was much more courage on display than just the rescuers who ran into the doomed buildings. When the planes smashed into the towers, the twisted metal and blazing flames blocked off all access points to escape routes for the majority of those trapped on the floors above the wreckage. They had nowhere to go, imprisoned in their offices as smoke and heat rose to greet them. So many of them made heart-wrenching calls to loved ones. Calls to tell their families that they were trapped and they didn’t know if they would be able to escape. In so many of these calls, the speaker is calm and collected, saying goodbye in their own unique way, their voices shaky but confident as they leave messages of love. The courage to overcome the near panic of being trapped to be able to leave a message of hope and love, and to say goodbye in a calm voice should not be overlooked.

On the floors below those leaving messages for their loved ones, the floors that were just above or just below the wreckage of the planes, things were much more desperate. The heat and smoke and noxious fumes of burning steel and debris were overpowering. Fear exploded in these helpless beings as they broke windows and hung themselves out over the void, grasping to ledges for dear life as they prayed and shouted for rescue to the responders who were tiny dots a thousand feet below them. Rescue was impossible, and the situation for these poor souls was unimaginable. Many of them took an extraordinary step to escape the inferno.

The Falling Man – Richard Drew/AP

This picture is known as The Falling Man. It’s an everlasting image that was captured by photographer Richard Drew of the Associated Press, and it probably should have won him a Pulitzer. Instead, it won him scorn and derision. It represents, without words, so much of the fear and devastation of that day. This is a jumper. One of approximately 200 people who chose to jump to their deaths from the hellscape in which they were trapped. The decision to loose yourself from the burning building and plummet for 10 to 15 seconds to a certain death on the pavement 1000 feet below is hard to imagine. It’s a decision that takes incredible courage.

If you’ve never seen this picture of the falling man, there’s a simple explanation. Many news agencies refused to show it. Many showed it once and received such backlash from citizen complaints that they never showed it again. There’s a good chance that something in you recoiled from looking at it here. And there’s a simple explanation for that.

It shows a man committing suicide, and our society shuns that stigma as morally wrong.

It doesn’t matter that this man was doomed to die in one of the most painful ways imaginable. It doesn’t matter that there was no escape for him, that he was hanging by a thread with flames licking at his body when he gave up. We can not acknowledge his decision because in so many of our minds, he made the wrong decision. He jumped. He committed suicide, and we can’t accept that.

I’m here to tell you, not only do I accept it, I consider this an act of extreme courage.

When Peter Cheney, a reporter for the Globe and Mail, set out to determine the identity of The Falling Man, he started with his clothing. It was the clothing of a chef, he realized, and that led him to the famous north tower restaurant, Windows on the World. By tracking down all of the employees who were present that day and those who’s bodies were identified, along with the locations of their remains, he was able to figure out that there was a very distinct likelihood that The Falling Man was Norberto Hernandez, a pastry chef at Windows on the World. When he contacted Hernandez’s family to show them his evidence that he may have identified their loved one, he was met with incredible backlash. Hernandez’s daughter went so far as to make a statement, saying,

“That piece of shit is not my father.”

That piece of shit. The family of one of the victims of the World Trade Center attack was so fearful of the stigma of suicide that they could not bear the idea that this jumper may have been their loved one. There was no way that their Norberto would have jumped to his death. Only a “piece of shit” would choose his own death in that way.

Such is the stigma of this action in our society that the medical examiner responsible for identifying the bodies didn’t even refer to them as “jumpers.” The picture is titled The “Falling” Man, not The Jumper. On the official report of the deaths of 9/11, the 200 jumpers are referred to as “fallers.” No doubt this is partially accurate. Unquestionably with all of the people hanging from the broken windows, many of them precariously leaning with most of their body over the gulf, some accidentally fell. There’s also no doubt though, that many of them jumped. And I think those jumpers showed enormous courage.

There is courage in making any tough decision in the face of fear, particularly a decision that guarantees your death. Humans have a strong desire to live, and none of the 200 from that day thought they might have a chance at life by jumping or falling. There was no doubt that they were making a decision that was going to be their last. It is so tough to imagine the hell on Earth that they were experiencing in that tower that made jumping a better option than staying. There was no way for them to know if rescue was coming, or if the fire suppression system would somehow kick on, or if the wind would shift and push the flames away from them. And yet, they knew that none of those things were likely, and that staying meant a continuation of the incredible pain and suffering as the devastating inferno raged through their former offices. And so, they jumped. Or let go. And by doing so, they chose 10 seconds of cool, rushing air, followed by a painless eternal blackness. The fear of jumping had to be overwhelming, and yet they made that decision, and I think that makes them incredibly courageous. I can not fathom calling them cowards, or “pieces of shit” for that choice. Yet, our society is such a moral backwater that this is what we do.

When Mohamed Atta, the hijacker piloting American Flight 11, banked that 767 onto the collision course with the North Tower and then jammed the throttles forward as the building loomed and his own death became certain, he still had a choice. He could have veered off the collision course at any time. He could have changed his mind and decided that what he’d agreed to do, what he’d trained to do was madness. There’s no doubt that his heart was racing. There’s no doubt that he was terrified as he and his copilot confronted their own deaths. The hijackers of the second plane, United Flight 175, had a great view of the smoking hole that used to be their friends and co-conspirators. They saw first-hand what happened to their comrades and they still turned their own jet inbound and powered into the skyscraper. It’s one thing to imagine your own glorious demise. It’s quite another to see exactly what will happen to you and to still proceed. There’s no doubt that following through with the slamming of those two jumbo jets into the two towers and the one into the side of the Pentagon took prodigious amounts of courage.

The hijackers deserve our scorn and derision of course. They were homicidal terrorists who murdered thousands. But we can both disparage them and, at the same time, acknowledge that what they did took incredible courage. In fact, we need to acknowledge their courage in order to ascertain what it was that gave them such courage. What was it that allowed these men to turn those jets onto a collision course with concrete and steel, push the throttles forward to their stops, and immolate themselves into the fire of oblivion? When we acknowledge that these actions took true and pure courage, we can begin to figure out where that courage came from, and we can try to take steps to ensure that this type of courage, this homicidal courage that is indoctrinated into these men doesn’t happen again.

What is it that causes men to become radicalized suicide (or homicide) bombers? Is it the same courage that causes a soldier to jump on a grenade, or is it something different? When a soldier jumps on a grenade, he’s committing suicide, there’s no doubt about it. Even when he somehow lives, his actions were still suicidal. And yet, we call him hero. We award him with our highest honors and medals. We do this in spite of the fact that he committed suicide, and we don’t call it suicide, even though it very clearly is. We do this because his suicidal action was done with the intent of saving others. When a man straps on a suicide vest and blows himself to smithereens in a crowded market, we call him coward. We call him a murderer and a terrorist. The act though, is the same. In both cases the men are making the decision to blow themselves up. So shouldn’t we acknowledge that both actions require the same level of courage? In fact, can’t we posit that the suicide bomber, who has all day to think about his decision and the consequences of his decision and still goes through with it may be even more courageous than the soldier who jumps on a grenade and may not have even considered the consequences of his actions? Some of the survivors of such actions have said that they, “didn’t even think, they just acted.” This shows that these types of actions may not involve courage at all. They may actually just be indicative of an inability to think through the consequences of your actions, something we despise in everyday life.

Once we acknowledge the courage of the 9/11 hijackers, then we can figure out the source of that courage. We can track that courage back to one basic concept. The same source that gives suicide bombers their courage. The courage of both comes from exactly one source: religion. The type of religious courage that can only arise from the surety that your place at God’s side is secure, that the action you’re taking, this homicidal maelstrom that you’re unleashing is exactly what will secure you the grace of your God. It’s this kind of religious zealotry that has caused more pain and suffering in the history of humanity than any other source. From paganism and polytheism and their human sacrifices, to the Crusades of Christianity and their witch hunts and heretic burnings, to the terrorism of Muslim fundamentalists with their suicide murderers, extreme religious beliefs have caused incalculable death and anguish throughout time. Religious certainty leaves no room for opposition, it elevates its believers to the status of the pious and the righteous, and it excuses literally any act that can be justified as furtherance of God’s will. The 19 hijackers that day showed astounding courage, and that courage was born of religious fervor and righteous certainty, and that is something we should all be striving to vanquish from our society.

The first responders, the trapped, the jumpers, the passengers on the flights who called authorities in defiance of their hijackers to report the hijackings, and those on United flight 93 who attempted to take back their airplane, causing it to crash into a field in Pennsylvania instead of its intended target in Washington D.C., and, yes, even the hijackers of those four flights all showed incredible courage that day. Some of the courage was admirable. Some of it was despicable. All of it was unquestionable. The courage of 9/11 presented itself in many different aspects, and, as we look back to that fateful day twenty years ago, we can both admire and learn from all who showed it that day.

*Cover photo credit Seth McAllister/AFB

Bringing Gavin’s Harley home to Vegas

“Debris! Bobo, we have debris!” I shouted.

He couldn’t hear my movie quote, of course. I was safely nestled in the luxurious comfort of Matt Russell’s brand-new BMW X6 SUV. The driving rain, large hail, gusty winds, and occasional chunks and bits of refuse that zipped hither and thither across the highway as if they were animatedly playing some real-life version of Frogger, were of no real concern to me. Bobo, on the other hand, was riding a Harley Davidson motorcycle. The recently deceased Gavin Smith’s Harley Davidson motorcycle, to be more accurate.

And we were heading directly into tornado-spawning thunderclouds.

When our good friend Gavin had died unexpectedly three months earlier, his family made the decision to sell his belongings to support his two young children. It was decided that the best option for selling his Harley Davidson was to leverage his fame in the poker world by auctioning the bike at a charity event in Las Vegas that would be coinciding with the kick-off of the 50th annual World Series of Poker. The bike was being stored by Matt Russell in Houston, Texas, and we needed to get it up to Las Vegas, so Bobo and I jumped at the chance to make the ride. Matt, who wanted to get his SUV to Las Vegas for the WSOP anyway, volunteered to let us use the BMW as a support vehicle for the ride so that Bobo and I could switch back and forth between the two vehicles. We caught a Southwest Airlines flight into Houston on a Sunday evening, spent the night at Matt’s condo, and departed early the next morning for the planned two-day trip. Now, here we were seven hours out of Houston, just crossing into the Texas panhandle near the town of Memphis, and heading right into some serious storms.

And, gloriously, it was my turn to be in the SUV.

As rain followed by hail pelted the windshield of the X6 and the outside temperature gauge showed a plummet of twenty degrees in a matter of minutes, Bobo, dressed in only camouflage cargo shorts, a thin, olive-colored t-shirt that was plastered tightly to his Michelin Man body like one of OJ’s Isotoners, and a pair of red and white Vans low-tops that I’m guessing he stole from a teenage girl at a Venice Beach skateboarding park, finally whipped the Harley to the shoulder of the highway and sloshed his way through standing water back to the SUV.

In the previous ten miles, we had passed thirty to forty “storm chasers” jockeying about in jacked-up pickup trucks, SUVs, and vans adorned with flashing yellow strobe lights, twirling antennas and satellite dishes, and rapidly spinning wind gauges. This hodgepodge of amateur, semi-professional, and professional tornado enthusiasts had flooded the area we were traversing, presumably in anticipation of the tornados that would surely be spawning from the heavy, darkly brooding, funnel clouds that hung low over the flat purple-hewed landscape. The farmhouses and fields that dotted the terrain seemed ripe for victimization as the occupants no doubt kept one ear tuned to their emergency radios and prepared to evacuate to the ever-present storm shelters that are a necessity in this part of the country.

I have never seen a tornado. Part of me ecstacized at the ominous tone of the sky which was so reminiscent of the numerous movies I’ve seen where a twister comes screeching and roaring through a town’s trailer park. The part of me that was a loyal friend to the motorcycle-bound Bobo was less thrilled, particularly when we entered Memphis, Texas and the town’s tornado sirens suddenly began wailing in an ear-splittingly spooky, surreal warbling that sent chills down my arms. I scanned the sky with wide-eyes and took video to document the distinct possibility of a motorcycle becoming an airplane as Bobo, stoically undeterred and seemingly unimpressed, rode on, dodging the debris that littered the roadway, hunching his rotund body into the driving hail, and soldiering through conditions that would have made lessor men curl up into a ball in the back seat of the SUV.

When lightning and thunder began shaking the earth with sizzling smells of ozone and soul-rattling booms, and standing water on the road had reached the foot petals of the motorcycle, Bobo finally pulled into a gas station and parked under the portico. We took shelter inside the small convenience store and watched the raging storm as an early afternoon darkness brought on by the thick clouds descended over us and the store clerk listened to an emergency storm radio that would hopefully provide us with enough warning to cover our bodies in softly cushioning Hostess cupcakes before the tornados arrived.

After several cups of coffee, hot chocolate, and some hot-case gas station burritos, the storm subsided without even a single tornado ripping up the roof of our refuge. The sky lightened into a second dawn as the clouds began to break. The pelting rain slowed and then quit completely, and the weather warmed several degrees. I told Bobo that I figured it was now my turn on the bike. He gave me a wry look but handed over the still soggy helmet and climbed into the BMW to turn on the heater and finish drying his clothes. We left the storms behind us, never even having seen a tornado, much to my dismay.

Crossing into New Mexico, we hit Interstate 40 and headed due west into the setting sun toward Albuquerque. As it got dark for the second time that day, we stopped in Santa Rosa, New Mexico on historic Route 66 and checked into the Route 66 Inn. This was a simple but decent motel with a community firepit, and we grabbed some dinner-to-go and a few beers, enjoying the fire for a couple of hours before heading to bed.

The next morning, we toured the Route 66 auto museum which was probably the most interesting thing in Santa Rosa, but still definitely skippable unless you’re a real classic car buff. We got back on the road before 10 o’clock and made our way west to Albuquerque. By the time we arrived, the wind had stiffened from an annoying headwind that was blasting us around on the Interstate, into a truly treacherous gale that constantly threatened to upend us, regularly sending us careening across the lane divider or onto the shoulder of the highway in spite of our best efforts to stay safely in one lane. It was a clear, sunny, otherwise beautiful day that would have been perfect for riding had the wind speeds not topped fifty miles per hour. To make things worse, the winds were directly in our face and the Harley had no windshield, which meant that even at a modest 60 mile per hour speed—which was much slower than the posted limit of 70 and 75, and almost dangerously slower than the average speed of the normal vehicle which was 80 to 85—we were still experiencing a direct wind in our chest and face of 110 miles per hour, a thrashing wind that left us beaten and exhausted like we’d spent the day breaking a bull.

We stopped for gas in Albuquerque and then hit the highway again with me on the Harley. After fifteen minutes of riding, my neck was aching from the pure strain of holding it upright in the 110 to 120 mile per hour winds that blasted the heavy, full-face helmet I wore. I tried lying flat against the tank of the bike and tipping my head down to let the wind press on only the top of the helmet, and that helped some, but looking at the ground while riding a bike isn’t very conducive to safe operations, and I realized this wasn’t going to be a good permanent solution. To make matters worse, we had no leather chaps to protect our legs, and small rocks were ripping into us constantly from the driving wind and the semi-trucks that would get blown onto the shoulder of the road releasing a maelstrom of dust and debris from the dormant shoulder, each of those grains of sand feeling like shotgun pellets as they blasted our denim-clad legs. It was nightmarish, and Bobo and I started switching rides every twenty to thirty minutes from our previous switching times of every two hours. At one point early on, I tried to convince Bobo that the conditions were just too hideous and dangerous to continue, and that we should spend the night in Albuquerque and finish the ride the next day, but he was insistent that he wanted to be back in Vegas that night. Knowing my misery, and making me feel like a complete wuss, he powered through a 1.5-hour straight ride that had me shaking my head in awe. He could hardly speak when he stumbled off the bike at the next stop, his ghoulish face conveying his misery with nary a word as we switched spots. It had been a Herculean effort that pushed us through the worst of the hellish wind, and I was grateful for his selfless stamina.

Once we’d left the wind behind, the rest of the ride went smoothly. We made quick work of Arizona, flying along the macadam in perfect riding weather, and crossing the top of the state at speeds that must have averaged more than 90 miles per hour. As we approached the Nevada border, Bobo asked for the honor of taking the final stage of the ride, bringing Gavin’s Harley back home to Las Vegas, and I gladly ceded him that honor. We crossed the Pat Tillman bridge over the Colorado River as the sun was dropping toward the horizon, painting the sky in dazzling brush strokes of reds and golds shining through heavy clouds, our journey ending in a magnificent display that so well represented the end of the era of Gavin Smith. Twenty minutes later, we eased over Railroad Pass and the expansive desert valley spread out before us, the vividly blazing lights of Las Vegas welcoming us home.

The ride had been objectively one of the most hazardous and despairing motorcycle rides I’ve ever been on, and yet, it seemed that the very things that made it such a tough ride were the things that made it so worthwhile. We spent three days with the spirit of our good friend Gavin riding beside us, and the toils of the ride ensured that it would be one we would never forget. Two weeks later, I would ride Gavin’s motorcycle to the charity auction where it would sell for significantly more than its true value, and the money would go to the pool of donations contributed by the poker community to ensure that his children, now effectively orphans, would be well-taken care of. Although Bobo and I had lost a close friend, we will forever have the story of the incredible journey we made bringing Ol’ G Smith’s Harley Davidson home to Las Vegas.

The Memorial

The room is already busy when we walk through the door, the steady din that mutters ceaselessly just under the threshold of consciousness in every bar amplified by the murmuring of more voices than usual. The voices are muted and somber, the typical joy that underlies the normal conversations of friends meeting for drinks conspicuously missing. The occasional laugh rings out above the din, but the expression behind the laugh is rarely anything but hollow and pained. Memorials are like that. We give them names like “celebration of life” because we want them to be joyous events full of mirth and memories, but they so often don’t start out that way. The sadness is an undercurrent that’s present in every face, even the ones that are smiling. I nod at friends and acquaintances. Hands stretch out toward me as I pass tables. I stop to shake, fist bump, and hug, muttering “good to see you” to those who I haven’t seen in too long. So many of them are friends who float in and out of my life with varying amounts of time and importance. I know little about their current lives, and they know little about mine, and there’s a sadness in that as well. I’ve spent too little time nurturing and cultivating these relationships, and the recent deaths of so many mutual friends are a stark and stabbing reminder that I need to do better.

In addition to the normal melancholy of any wake, there’s also the underlying fear of the times in which we live, the knowledge that in any gathering as large as this, Covid is likely to be present, a stalking menace for those who are unvaccinated or have immune system issues, or those like myself who have international travel coming up and can’t test positive. The handshakes are quicker than normal, the hugs given with held breaths. Like so many of the things we do these days, the virus rules over our actions and our exuberance, to the great detriment of the purpose of our gathering.

The room is filled with personalities, poker players and industry personnel, many of whom are known mainly by their monikers. People with nicknames like Chip, Savage, Weez, World, JRB, JDN, Miami, and Erik123. We’ve gathered to mourn the passing of our friend, Layne Flack. Known as “Back-to-back” Flack, a moniker given to him when he won two poker tournaments in a row on two different occasions, Layne was a scion of the poker community. Quick to smile and slow to anger, he seemed ever-present, his huge white teeth gleaming as his laugh rang out over every gathering of players. It’s hard to fathom the death of someone who shined as brightly as Layne Flack. No matter the size of the event, you always knew when Layne was present.

We all know people who command attention every time they enter a room. Layne was one of those people. If you didn’t notice him before he noticed you, you were likely to be a victim of one of his sneak attacks or one of his jokes. His quick, sharp wit endeared him to so many, his infectious laugh and beaming personality quickly winning over those who were so often the target of that rapier-like wit.

Layne was a legend. He made a life out of reading people’s faces. If Kenny Rogers had known Layne prior to writing “The Gambler,” I have no doubt the lyrics would have been rewritten to incorporate Layne’s endearing quirks. As Matt Savage so astutely points out, Layne was the best no-limit hold’em player in the world around the turn of the century, and there wasn’t a close second.

Layne was not without fault, as none of us are. He had problems with drugs, alcohol, women, and gambling. He borrowed quickly, and too often paid back slowly. He gambled big with no ability to pay if he lost, and he left this world with some debts unpaid. There’s little doubt that he was one of those rainbow addicts who are susceptible to so many of life’s vices. Layne had an insatiable appetite for fun, and his captivating presence along with his vivacious and immutable personality led to so many of his friends unwittingly becoming his enablers. It was hard to say no to a guy like Layne. Nobody wanted to be the one to dim the bright bulb that accompanied his every appearance. There are only so many watts in a human lifetime though, and when a bulb shines as bright as Layne’s, it tends to use up its life too quickly.

The celebration of life starts with a slideshow set to music, as so many of them do. These shows are supposed to make us smile, and laugh, and remember the great times with a great friend, but so often they just make us cry. And that’s okay. In fact, I think that’s probably good. Tears allow us to feel more connected, to shed the bottled grief, and when we smile and laugh through the tears, we know we’ll all be okay. Maybe not today, but someday soon.

In my experience, people tend to be reticent to pick up the microphone and tell stories. Sometimes it’s because the stories aren’t appropriate to tell to a room full of strangers, although, that doesn’t seem to dissuade several of tonight’s orators. Other times it’s because the stories involve some level of embarrassment to the speaker. More often though, it’s because people just simply have a fear of public speaking. My speech is written with the goal not of telling my own stories about Layne, but rather to encourage others to come tell their stories, stories that would certainly be more interesting than the few unique times that I experienced with the legend. My speech is less about Layne and more about life and death in general. The poker world has lost a terrible number of people in the last couple of years. A painful number of deaths that have left a gaping hole in the community, and those losses have weighed on me. I recently read an article about death by a great writer named Sean Dietrich, and some of his words and thoughts have found their way into my speech. I’ve attached my speech below in the hopes that the words may give comfort, not just to the friends of Layne, but to friends of Gavin, Mike, Joy, Matt, and anybody else who has experienced loss.

My speech starts off rocky. It’s been a while since I’ve spoken publicly. I used to be comfortable with these things, but tonight I’m a little nervous and it shows. The microphone cuts out just after I get started and I have to shout over the rumbling of the bar at large, the majority of which is open to the public who have little interest in the wake being held behind the curtains. Karina Jett finds me a new microphone and I unintentionally skip several lines of my planned speech. It’s probably unnoticed by the crowd, even though it means that one of my points isn’t driven home. I make a call for those who are hesitant to tell their stories and then I hand the microphone back to Matt Savage. Layne’s sister reaches out as I pass her booth. She has never met me, but her eyes are glimmering as she nods at me and mouths, “Thank you.” I smile through my own glimmering eyes and nod warmly to her.

There are no breaks in the action as attendees tell their stories. Nobody uses notes, speaking from their hearts, and many of the stories are great, drying up the tears as the laughter gets louder and louder. And it’s here, in this moment, when the purpose of these gatherings shines through. Smiles and laughter pervade, and people forget their grief for the moment as they listen to the stories and remember that though he may be gone, Layne left us all with a lifetime of memories that will allow him to live forever in our hearts.

Layne Flack

I first met Layne in 2004 at a WPT event in Reno. I had just made the final table of the main event there and I won a little bit of money and I was hanging out having drinks with a few players when he walked up. He struck up a conversation and he found out I’d just won some money so he asked me if no-limit hold’em was my favorite game. I told him my favorite game was actually limit hold’em and he replied, “Step into my office, young man.” He just happened to know of a nice 75-150 limit hold’em game that was starting in the poker room. Somehow when we got there, there was a dealer sitting at an empty table with one plaque that said “75-150 limit hold’em” and another that said “reserved.” To this day I don’t know how he managed to set that up on the walk to the poker room, but we became friends right then and there. You wouldn’t be incorrect if you said that I bought my way into our friendship.

Many of you here knew Layne longer than I did, and no doubt many of you here knew him better than I did. I don’t want to take a lot of time up here to tell stories about Layne because I know that so many of you have such great stories, and I’d like to hear them. So, I just want to take a moment to talk about life and death.

As humans, it’s in our nature to try so hard to find deeper meaning in events which just simply have no meaning. We want to know why, and we want to know how, and we want answers, and those answers are just so often complicated and impure and unsatisfying. The truth is, that life is like embroidery. You know, when someone is stitching a piece of embroidery, when you watch them, it just looks like a completely tangled web of knots, an utter mess with no sense of organization. It’s only when they flip it over that you see the true beauty of their creation.

Layne Flack had a vibrancy about him, an energy and joie de vivre that were incomparable. But he showed only that beautiful side of his life to most of us. If you saw the complicated side of his life, the tangled web of knots that makes up all of our lives, then you know that you were a close friend of his, a true friend.

Most people wander through life with their eyes closed. Layne may have been the most open-eyed person I’ve ever known. He was a complete pragmatist. He was worldly. He never walked, he glided, or he strutted. He had more confidence—not false confidence but completely merited confidence—than anybody you’ve ever seen. Others, I’m sure, will come up here and tell you stories about how quick-witted he was, the quickest wit I’ve ever known. They’ll tell you stories about how fun it was to be around him. How good he was at making and nurturing friendships. Listen to those stories because they’re important. Layne made the world brighter, and we need to all strive to brighten our own lights to make up for the one that has dimmed.

Isaac Newton and Emilie du Chatelet taught us about the first law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy. This law says that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, made nor unmade. It can only be transformed from one form to another. Water falls to Earth as rain and lands in rivers and lakes. We use that water in our swimming pools and in our showers and in our beers. The water is expelled and evaporates once more where it condenses into clouds and then falls to Earth again, in a cycle that has continued since the dawn of time.

Conservation of energy.

Life falls under these same laws. We say that Layne is dead. We gather tonight to celebrate his life and to mourn his passing, but he’s not dead. He lives here (heart) and here (head) and he lives in all of us gathered here. As long as you’re alive, Layne is alive. As long as you’re alive, he’s alive and Layne is alive. As long as I’m alive, you’re alive. We may not be able to pick up the phone and call Layne right now, but he’s here in this room with us, and he always will be. Because Layne, though he may have argued that he was above it, was indeed quite susceptible to the law of conservation of energy. He is not gone; he cannot be unmade. He can only be transformed, from one form to another. He will always live on, in our hearts, in our memories, and in our stories.

So come up here and tell your stories of Layne. Even if you think they’re stupid, because I promise you, there are no stories of Layne that don’t involve at least some level of stupidity. We all want to hear them. Come up here and tell your stories about Layne, and help him live on in all of us.

The Fire

The thick, noxious smoke hangs low and heavy over the Okanogan valley, an oppressive hand that is felt in the trepidation of the three weary travelers in the speeding truck and trailer. My dad, my brother, and I are racing to our cabin which lies in the path of a hungry fire that’s feeding voraciously on the hot, dry forest. The reports have been grim: The Fire had been growing slowly, 10,000 acres a few days ago, 12,000 acres today. The beast eagerly awaits what it seems to somehow know is arriving in a few short hours…a weather front carrying twenty mile-per-hour winds, winds forecast to blow from south to north, pushing The Fire directly to our family spread of vacation property and cabins just outside the town of Chesaw.

The news came the night before. Level Three evacuation for all residents in the area, including my aunts who live on the neighboring property. Get Out Now. They had been sitting on a level one alert and the jump to level three came suddenly, frighteningly. We got the news as we sat on the patio of my sister’s house on the west side of the Cascades. Hasty plans were made. I called a friend and borrowed a trailer. My dad, brother, and I would leave at 4 a.m. My brother-in-law would head out four hours later, grabbing another borrowed trailer on the way. We would rescue as much as we could from the cabin and bring it back to safety. We would hope that we were making a completely unnecessary trip. Hope for the best, plan for the worst as they say.

Our little familial enclave was raw land when we cumulatively acquired it forty years ago. Our cabins were all built by our own hands, the blood, sweat, and tears of all of us poured into their creation. We have saved and scrimped and added to our cabin as we could spare the money to do so. Their safety has been threatened many times over the years, but never so directly and direly as this. The last few years has seen a colossal increase in the fire danger of the northeast Washington forest. Many of us have put fire safety precautions into work across the property over the last few years, thinning the forest around our cabins, removing and burning dead trees and underbrush, making strides to hopefully eliminate the majority of the fuel that would nurture the dreaded fire. It has always seemed inevitable that The Fire will one day arrive, and now it seems that formidable day is here.

As we pass through the towns of Okanogan, Omak, and Tonasket, men clad in yellow shirts and green pants loiter in the parking lots and stores. Their vehicles are green and white, light bars of red adorn the cabs, water tanks and diamond-plate bins clutter the beds. A ragtag band of firefighters fueling their vehicles and their bodies, petrol in the former, donuts and hot-case gut bombs of gas station delights in the latter. They are in no hurry, laughing and slouching lazily against their trucks. “Get to the fire!” we shout at them. They can’t hear us through the glass of the speeding truck. Nor do we actually want them to hear our pleas. Unlike most urban firefighters, these wildland heroes work their asses off in a palpably demanding and dangerous job, willingly putting themselves into the path of peril and hazard to protect the property of strangers. We know they’re preparing themselves for the battle that will be coming later today or tomorrow. Right now, The Fire is still in the National Forest. It’s a lightning-strike fire, a natural calamity that must be allowed to burn. The health of the forest requires the cleansing effect of the burn, and these men, and presumably women, though we see none, know this. They’ll begin their assault when it spreads out of the boundaries of the forest and into the adjoining land. Our land.

As we crest the tops of the hills, we get our first view of the beast. Smoke rises and spreads across the sky from numerous hot spots. We watch as The Fire consumes tall trees, the swirling smoke and flame hungrily thrusting toward the sky like a beacon, The Fire letting all know that it is alive and on the move. We take a moment to watch, to marvel at the enemy and all the power that rumbles hungrily under the gray-brown clouds of its anger. We move on.

Arriving at the cabin, we load machines and tools. People tend to think that when a fire consumes a house or cabin, the owners will be made whole by insurance. I have no idea how often this is true, but I know that none of us have insurance against fire. We’ve tried, but no company will insure us. The danger of forest fire in this area is too great. It’s inevitable, and insurance companies don’t wager money on guaranteed losers. We’re on our own. Our insurance company is the group of men currently stuffing donuts down their throats twenty miles down the hill. It isn’t a comfortable feeling.

We load our most expensive equipment and tools into the trailer and the back of my truck. We gather irreplaceable mementos from inside the cabin. We take a moment to marvel at the hubris that caused us to pile a collection of fuel cans and propane tanks around the cabin. We’ve created a bomb in the forest, and we disarm it, laughing at ourselves. We place spare roofing—tin panels that represent our only passive defense against the raging flames around our beloved structure, hoping that if The Fire gets close, the tin will keep flying sparks from grasping a purchase on the wood siding.   

The rancher who runs the cattle on our land is loading his herd into trailers to be evacuated. They normally graze their cattle here from May to October. They’re pulling them two months early, and the reason is obvious. The rancher is nonchalant and relaxed as he works to gather the herd. The Fire stirs two miles away, but he has time. He lives in this area. He knows the enemy well, dealing with it in one form or another every year. He’ll move his cattle to safety, and next year, if The Fire has made our property unfit for grazing, he’ll find another place. He has no vested long-term interest here but he wishes us luck nonetheless. We’ll need it.

A National Forest fire truck drives down the dusty gravel road checking on residents, marking those who’ve ignored the order to evacuate. It stops just down the road from our property and we watch as the driver speaks to the isolated hermit who lives there. The man’s dog runs around the truck excitedly. The man’s donkey brays at the strangers who have interrupted its routine. They all seem completely oblivious to the looming danger. One could forgive the dog and the donkey. It’s harder to fathom the man who won’t leave, but it is a free country, and it is his decision, and the firefighters move on.

Finished loading the truck and trailer, we move out, my brother driving the side-by-side. It isn’t street-legal, but this is an evacuation—the normal rules don’t apply. We’ll meet my brother-in-law in Tonasket and readjust our load so we can get all the machines on trailers. We make another stop at the viewpoint to marvel at The Fire once more. It has moved, inching closer, and, as we watch it, the first bit of wind tickles at our clothes, the tickle becoming a push as it increases in strength. We mark its direction. Not due north as we most feared, but northeast. It’s only a few degrees on the compass, but it’s just enough to give us a vestige of hope. Of course, a benevolent course for us is a malevolent course for someone else. We hope that this year will not be the year that anybody has to suffer a loss to the grumbling beast in front of us, but we pray that the wind direction will remain unchanged.

We know that if The Fire doesn’t get its due today, it doesn’t care. It has all the time in the world, and its day will come. As long as the average summer temperature keeps increasing, the forest will keep drying and getting more perilous. One day, if not today, The Fire will arrive at our doorstep. We can only hope that our problems lie in the future. We say very little as we drive off without another look back.

Canoeing the Everglades (part six) Hell’s Bay to the end.

This is part six of a six-part travel series. If you missed part one and want to start at the beginning, you can find it here: https://authorrickfuller.com/2021/08/08/canoeing-the-everglades-part-one/

Two things had to meld together perfectly for our plans for the last day of our adventure to change so drastically. The first was that I had to spot that peculiar white pole sticking out of the mud and be bored and intrigued enough to check it out further. The second was that we had to have cell phone service from the Hell’s Bay Chickee, something that had been spotty and unreliable throughout our Everglades excursion.

Using binoculars, I tried to ascertain the purpose of the white pole that stuck jauntily from the bay at an angle like a flagpole that had drunkenly tipped over and lost its flag, but for the life of me, I was unable to figure it out. Not one to allow a mystery to go unsolved, I hopped into the canoe and paddled out to the pole. It turned out to be a PVC pipe with a couple of black-fading-to-brown lines painted around the top and the number 173 stenciled upon it like it was an escapee from a PVC prison.

Curious.

I paddled back to the chickee and decided to Google it since we had service. It turned out that this pole is the last of 173 marking poles that identify the Hell’s Bay Canoe Trail. I’d seen signs for the trail on the road into Flamingo five days earlier so I knew that the trail would end on that road, making it a possible exit point for us. The only question was, how would we get our copious amounts of gear along with the canoe back to the visitor center? I mentioned the idea I had of altering our plan and taking the trail out instead, and Tracy was down with it. The fact that it was only a reported 5.5 miles of paddling to get out, that we’d be protected from the wind and not as susceptible to the tides in the deep backwaters, that we’d be able to avoid another excursion onto Whitewater Bay, and the fact that we’d yet to see a single alligator save the baby one during the first hour of the trip, and that a canoe trail winding through the heart of the mangrove-choked swamp seemed like our best chance of seeing one, all collaborated in our decision to go for it.

I called up the Flamingo Visitor Center and got connected to the canoe rental kiosk where they told me they would be happy to send a truck to pick us up at the launch point for the Hell’s Bay trail on the highway. We scheduled a pickup for noon, and, figuring that it probably wouldn’t take us more than 2 or 3 hours to work our way down the trail, we planned to take our time in the morning and make a leisurely half-day out of the trip.

We probably should have taken note that there was a reason they called this Hell’s Bay, and a reason that it was the Hell’s Bay Canoe Trail. We probably should have Googled the origin of the name, which would have clued us to the fact that the name comes from the old-timers’ saying that the bay was, “Hell to get into, and hell to get out of.” Of course, I likely would have dismissed this as nothing but a fable or parable, but either way, we didn’t Google it, and we remained blissfully ignorant.

We enjoyed yet another spookily calm and quiet evening, the water of Hell’s Bay in glass-like perfection as the sun set behind us.

As we crawled into the tent that night, Tracy sat on her air-filled sleeping pad and prepared to crawl into her sleeping bag. Suddenly, with a loud popping noise, her pad deflated and she was sitting on the hard planks with a despondent look on her face. Glad that it had at least happened on our last night there, she took a sleeping pill, put our extra sleeping bag under her, and prepared for an even more uncomfortable night. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have much higher quality sleeping pads for multiple nights on the hard platforms of the chickees. These backpacking type pads might be fine for sleeping in the dirt or grass, but they were terrible here. Of course, they were better than nothing, which is what Tracy was looking forward to this last night. Thankfully, the sleeping pill would make her mostly oblivious to the misery, though she would wake up the next morning stiff and sore.

Late that night, or perhaps early the next morning, we were shocked to once again hear dolphins in the weed-choked bay, floundering in the shallow waters and breathing in a raucous cacophony of deep, guttural rasps and gasps as their tails thrashed the water, echoing through the silent gloom as they rutted through the weeds to herd and trap their dinner. It was amazing to us that no matter how far back into the Everglades we went, out of the deeper harbors and safer waters of the big bays, we never managed to escape the hunting grounds of the dolphins.

The next morning, the mosquitos were out in full force, the worst of our journey thanks to the warming weather and the calm conditions, and that caused us to rush out of there, something for which we would turn out to be grateful. We were off the chickee at seven o’clock on the nose, heading directly into the fiery sun as it cleared the horizon, towering clouds all around it appearing like ephemeral skyscrapers against the deep azure sky. We paddled to the first PVC pipe and then spotted the next one against the shoreline, positioned exactly as far away as you could see, the first couple of breadcrumbs that would guide us merrily and blithely along, a naïve Hansel and Gretel, skipping to our fate with joy and glee. As we paddled across the bay through the still, clear water we could see the evidence of the dolphins’ excursions from that night in the form of newly-cut trails through the underwater weeds. The trails swerved and veered through and around the beds of underwater weeds, marking the passages of the hard-working dolphins. The only logical explanation for their presence in this dangerously shallow bay was that the weeds underneath us must have been choked with fish seeking refuge from the sun.

The start of the Hell’s Bay Canoe Trail.

We paddled through a few narrow canals and into a huge, unnamed bay, strangely unnamed because it was larger than Pearl Bay for sure, and nearly as large as Hell’s Bay. I was able to get a great panoramic shot in this beautifully reflective water before we continued on to Pearl Bay.

Popping out onto Pearl Bay, the sun glinted off the blue water, beams of reflected light dancing in our eyes. In the distance we could see a structure, the Pearl Bay Chickee, vibrant colors flashing from its platforms indicating the presence of fellow travelers. Tracy had to use the bathroom, and so we deviated from the canoe trail and headed that way.

Hell’s Bay and vicinity. The large lake between Hell’s Bay and Pearl Bay is where I took the panorama shot.

Since this is part six of this lengthy blog, and since you’ve read this far into the story, I think it’s finally time to discuss something you’ve doubtlessly been on the edge of your seats to hear, and that is the status of the bathroom situation in the deep, wild Everglades. I’ll start by saying that the Everglades is an ancient and remote place, as I’ve mentioned before, but on top of that, though you’re surrounded by what is technically “land,” it’s not really anything like you’re probably thinking. The vast majority of the land in the Everglades is not terra firma, but rather a mucky mess of rotting shellfish mired in primordial sludge and covered in a thick layer of mangrove roots that stick up out of the sludge in a crisscross pattern that looks much like a bowl of spaghetti if that spaghetti was covered in spider webs, ants, bugs, blue and red crabs, and occasionally an alligator that might possibly be lying in wait under the top layer or a twenty-foot Burmese python hanging above your head. There is, quite simply, no easy place to just pull over and go to the bathroom. This applies to more than 99% of the terrain that makes up this part of the Everglades National Park.

The typical quagmire of a mangrove island

Now, for a guy, it’s pretty easy when you have to pee. You tell your girlfriend to hold still, you stand and wedge your feet into the gunwales of the canoe and then lean precariously over the edge and do your thing. For women, it takes a touch more creativity.

When you need to relieve yourself of the more solid version of your bodily rejections, things become a bit trickier. I’ll first note that if you’re clever, and if the strange food in a pouch or yellowish-brown marina potable-ish water hasn’t created havoc with the daily timing of your toilet necessities, then you simply make sure you know where the nearest chickee is located and when you think you’ll need to use it and then make those two things come together. Of course, the pure and near complete silence of the greatest river on Earth combined with the approximate two-foot drop between the toilet seat of the Porta-Potty and the blue liquid that sloshes in the tank means that the privacy you get when you need to do your daily deed is visual only. The audible splash of that two-foot drop leads to a prompt dissolution of any mystery you may have remaining in your relationship.

Now, if you time things poorly, or the edibles and drinkables are indeed throwing off your schedule, you’re left with no option but to ram your canoe into the mangrove roots, climb precariously out onto the limbs, work your way back stepping gingerly onto the trees as your eyes dart nervously for any sort of insect, dinosaur, or man-eating snake, and then hang over the edge with one fistful of bark and the other of toilet paper, and do your thing while your partner turns away. Again, if you aren’t quite comfortable with your partner knowing way too much about you, you aren’t going to do well on a multi-day Everglades excursion.

On this occasion, Tracy was quite non-specific when she said she needed to use the restroom, so with the Pearl Bay Chickee in close proximity, we paddled that way. There was no sign of movement on the sleepy platform so we approached quietly, not wanting to wake our fellow travelers. Unfortunately, the bumping and scraping of our boat against the structure, and the noise of Tracy climbing out of the boat and up onto the dock caused their tent to unzip and a guy to come stumbling out, blinking and stretching like a cartoon owl. We told him we were just stopping to use the restroom and he smiled and gave us a wave and dipped back into the tent.

Done with the restroom, we beat feet south, traversing the length of Pearl Bay and then through a very narrow, very shallow canal and into another large, unnamed bay, following our PVC breadcrumbs which were occasionally tricky to locate. As we came out of the canal and into the bay, rounding the corner we heard a great thrashing noise in the water and saw the surface of the formerly smooth lake churning and boiling. My heart raced as I thought I was about to see an alligator fighting with some other animal, but it turned out to be yet another pod of dolphins that had herded up some fish and gone into a feeding frenzy in the shallow waters, dorsal fins and tails slapping the water into a bubbling cauldron as their panicked breath loudly echoed through the still morning. I was able to get a short video of just the end of the fight before the dolphins headed out of that bay and into the canal we had just exited. It was amazing to think that if we’d been just five minutes later, we would have encountered those five dolphins in that narrow—probably only four to five feet wide and less than three feet deep through most of it—canal. That would have been rather exciting, and I was sorry our timing hadn’t been just slightly better. Tracy, however, thought our timing was perfect.

We paddled on and stopped at Lard Can, an aptly named ground camping site that occupies one of the very few patches of actual solid ground in the entire southern Everglades. During the planning stages of this trip I’d considered this as one of our stopping points for the night, and I’m telling you right now that if we’d arrived at this campsite for the night, I would be a single man writing my breakup story to you. Dismal, murky, muddy, buggy, and depressing, with a pungent, musky aroma of earthen rot and mold, this site, while almost certainly a fantastic breeding ground for mosquitos, is not fit for human habitation. We did enjoy getting out of the canoe and stretching our legs a bit, me walking the trails behind the camp while Tracy nervously waited on the mossy old dock. Ten minutes there was more than enough, and we gladly put Lard Can in our rearview mirrors.

A bad pic of a bad, bad place called Lard Can

At this point, we veered south again and left the open water behind, entering the thick, narrow mangrove swamps and canals that is the Hell’s Bay Canoe Trail proper. How do I describe this trail? First, if you’re in a single kayak or small canoe, this trail is probably great. When you’re in a 3-person behemoth, this trail is a nightmare. A constant stream of tight switchbacks, tumultuous turns, intersections where you can’t figure out which way to go until you are committed to what usually ends up being the wrong direction and then finally spot the hidden PVC pipe behind you, a narrow maze of channels with overhanging mangrove branches that require you to duck and weave all while trying to slow your progress to avoid crashing into the shore, or to back-blade feverishly to cut 180 degrees in the opposite direction while the sun beats down on your head and mosquitos and biting flies swarm your face…it was a truly miserable experience. We saw no animals in this hellscape, but what we did encounter were quite a few day paddlers, all headed in the opposite direction which forced us to grab onto mangrove roots and pull our canoe to the side to allow them to pass.

Any time we would find a straightaway and start to build up some momentum, the path would suddenly come to an end, a 150 to 180 degree turn forcing us to backpaddle furiously, usually slamming our canoe into the bank like a bumper car before bouncing off and making the turn as our bow scraped one side and our stern the opposite. In the front of the canoe, for at least the first few miles, Tracy was experiencing her own challenges in the myriad of spider webs that crisscrossed the canals right at head level, many of which, based on the screeching, sputtering, and scratching at her hair and face that I was forced to bear witness to, she was unable to spot in time to get her paddle up. The only good thing about finally beginning to encounter the day-paddlers was that the spider web fiasco came to a merciful close.

Squiggles may not be to scale, but they’re pretty representative of our path!

We paddled harder this day than we ever had, searching futilely for the veteran canoers’ special balance between speed and maneuverability, sweating copiously under the unrelenting sun with no breaks as branches scratched us and clawed us and we tried desperately to stay on the right path and not become lost in Hell’s abyss which awaited any wrong turn with alluringly clear and appealing canals that beckoned to the unvigilant rower. The PVC pipes became our beacons of hope, their descending numbers encouraging us as we marked the milestones of #50, then #40, then #20. We found ourselves getting copious feelings of elation when we would see three PVC poles in one visible stretch, the daffy joy of ticking thrice in a short distance toward our goal of PVC #1 undeniable.

At post #10, we passed a rather plump couple in a small canoe who were quite possibly having an even more miserable time than us, quarreling loudly and bitterly without a care in the world for our presence in their little spat. When they’d passed, we both laughed and smiled at each other, completely unembarrassed at our blatant display of schadenfreude, gleeful that we were at least keeping our composure after a long and tough journey. This couple must have turned around shortly after we passed them, because they would show up at the launch point still arguing just five minutes after us, a nice Everglades excursion for them that lasted all of a half hour.

When we finally reached the end of the aptly named Hell’s Bay Canoe Trail it was just fifteen minutes before noon. It took us almost five hours to make the journey, much longer than the three to four hours I’d anticipated, though we had stopped a few times and been leisurely with the paddling at the start. We hauled the canoe out of the water, high-fived and hugged each other, and rejoiced at the end of an extremely challenging, extraordinarily rewarding journey. The guy from the canoe rental place showed up just a few minutes late and we loaded the canoe into the truck and helped him tie it down. I jumped in the cab for the ride back to our car, leaving Tracy to wait with our gear. On the drive back to the marina, he asked me how the trip had been.

“It was great until that very last part,” I said to him. “That trail was really tough in this big canoe. You guys probably shouldn’t even allow people to take that trail in your 3-person canoes.”

He gave me a sideways glance and a smirk. “We don’t,” he replied, simply. I guess when I’d made the call the night before and asked if we could be picked up at the canoe trail launch, the clerk hadn’t realized that the dockmaster from five days earlier had upgraded us to a 3-person canoe from our reserved 2-person one.

I dropped off the canoe and popped into the small convenience store to pick up a treat that I knew would be much appreciated. It had been a tough, challenging journey, but one that we’d thoroughly and Truly enjoyed!

A welcome treat after a tough, hot day

Canoeing the Everglades (part five) North River to Hell’s Bay.

This is part five of a multi-part travel blog. If you’d like to start at the beginning, check out part one here: https://authorrickfuller.com/2021/08/08/canoeing-the-everglades-part-one/

The Everglades are a vast and mostly inhospitable landscape of impenetrable mangroves, swamps, and lakes. It is a labyrinth of channels, rivers, inlets, and hidden bays, many of which are so remote and inaccessible that they’re rarely, if ever, seen by humans at surface level. On our third night, the rain came in sweeping sheets carried on the wind, a storm that, by the standards of a land used to tropical storms and hurricanes, was hardly a blip on its collective conscious, but to the two of us, really amplified the isolation and reality of where we were. There are no campers in the Everglades other than at the designated chickees and ground sites. There are no hikers, no wandering travelers. It is the one place in this country where you can be absolutely sure that there is no other human within miles of you, at least at night and in a storm that no boaters would brave. The North River Chickee is far from any of the main channels, and our isolation was palpable and primal. This might have been the worst night of sleep yet, but somehow at the same time, there’s something incredibly satisfying about being woken up by rain pounding on the roof of your shelter knowing that you’re safe and dry.

The rain held off until about 7:45pm the night before, by which time we were ready to close down our LED lanterns and go to sleep anyway. It rained through the night, hard enough at times to wake us from our slumber. At 3:00am, a different sound woke us…the sound of a pod of dolphins fishing in the river right in front of our chickee, breaching and blowing, the rain having diminished completely, allowing the dolphin trumpets to echo through the still night air. By five o’clock, I’d slept enough. I slipped from the tent and gazed out at a clear sky filled with stars. The river was smooth and calm, broken only by the breaching of the shadowy bodies of the frenetically fishing dolphins, their pale skin glistening in the starlight.

As the sky began to lighten, we made coffee and then took down our tent and heaved our canoe onto the chickee so we could dump several inches of accumulated rain water out of the bottom of it. We cast off at seven o’clock and paddled into the heart of the rising sun. The gleaming flat water gave rise to a light mist, shadowing the horizon and mirroring the sky so perfectly and almost unbelievably that I had to stop paddling for a couple of amazing pictures.

A dizzyingly perfect mirror

The paddling was smooth and easy for the first time the entire trip, and I told Tracy that it was about to get even easier. We were headed for The Cutoff, a section of river that joins together the North River and the Roberts River. The Cutoff flows southeast, and with the tide slack and the natural flow of the Everglades southerly, I told her The Cutoff should have a nice current that we could ride like emperors on the backs of our slaves, relaxing and letting nature perform the heavy lifting for once. Boy was I wrong. Somehow, inexplicably, the current in The Cutoff flows northwest, and not a nice, gentle flow, but rather fast enough to make strong ripples around each protruding stick from the bank. What in the actual hell?

We buckled down and dug in, with surprisingly little complaint from the front of the canoe, though I was certain I heard some mumbling and perhaps even a few curse words muttered on the calm air. It was tough to be certain. It didn’t take us too long to reach the Roberts River where we suddenly heard the puttering of a boat motor. We stopped paddling and listened, letting the current bring us first to a stop, and then gently push us backwards. The motor noise seemed to echo and come from every direction at once, and then we heard voices muttering faintly over the rumble of the motor. A boat suddenly appeared from the mist on the Roberts River, headed south and moving at a brisk walking pace, its motor operating barely above idle speed. We had been about to turn onto the Roberts River but were still on The Cutoff, and we held still as the boat passed. It was a sleek, newer-model, expensive, bass fishing boat with a smooth deck and no sidewalls, the large outboard propelling the occupants along at its minimum speed. Inside the boat were three rough-looking men, bearded and bulky, with tough expressions and palpably bad attitudes that could be felt from where we were, just about a hundred feet away. They spoke in hushed tones, their voices just carrying across the water without the actual words. I was certain they were nothing but fishermen…of course, the lack of a single fishing line in the water gave some voice of doubt to that hypothesis. For the first time on the entire trip, we were glad to have the current working against us as we allowed it to drag our canoe silently backwards into the mist, widening the gap between us and the inexplicably disturbingly out-of-place fishing boat.

It was a real Deliverance moment, unsettling to us both though without concrete reasons, and neither of us had to say a word or even share a glance to convey the message that we should make no movement or sound to draw their attention. They slid by the mouth of The Cutoff without a glance in our direction and continued southward on the Roberts River.

“That was weird,” Tracy commented with raised eyebrows when they’d disappeared from view.

“Not really, they were probably just dumping a body,” I replied with a shrug.

Neither of us laughed.

We resumed our paddling, turning right at the Roberts River and following the trail of the three banditos, carefully watching for any sign they had stopped, or any floating object that might have been a body, or possibly a bundle of cocaine. We never saw them again, and at 9:00am exactly, we reached the Roberts River Chickee, a newly rebuilt chickee of Trex and plastic that was secure, stable, and quite comfortable, and that I somehow neglected to take a picture of. You’ll have to take my word for it that it was the best chickee we’d seen thus far. We tied up and brought up our chairs, stretching out and enjoying a relaxing breakfast along with some more coffee. The sun was out in full and the day was perfect, with no bugs and only a light breeze.

At 11 o’clock, with the day warming up, we reluctantly cast off and resumed our paddle down the gently flowing Roberts River. As usual, the wind had picked up and was blowing right in our faces. It was bizarre how this seemed to happen every single day, regardless of which direction we were paddling. The first two days when we were traveling in a northerly direction, the wind was coming from the north, and now that we’d turned south, the wind had likewise shifted direction.

We were aiming for a tiny channel that seemed to cut off a chunk of distance between the Roberts River and the Lane River, but somehow I missed it and we ended up having to paddle around a wide isthmus and hit the mouth of the Lane River, a wide, fast-flowing body of water with a stiff current that we had to dig in hard and paddle relentlessly to overcome. Luckily, it was only a short distance to a canal where we turned back north, out of the main body of the Lane and into a deep, complex labyrinth of backwaters, creeks, tight, twisting canals, and marshes. I kept a close eye on the map as we navigated the intricate entanglement of waterways, matching the unsteady shoreline with the dimples on the map, something at which I’d become significantly more adept in the preceding days. When we reached the channel that we were supposed to have taken from the Roberts River, it was wide and vacuous, and my bewilderment as to how I’d possibly missed it grew. We turned away from that waterway and wandered back into the maze, and the mystery would remain unsolved.

Arrow pointing to the channel that I somehow missed, adding a mile of tough paddling to our journey.

I somehow managed to navigate us through the expansive morass without error, and Tracy was lavish in her praise of my navigation skills, lovingly leaving out my failure to locate the space-shuttle-sized cutoff that had cost us a mile of very tough paddling. Re-entering the Lane at a narrower, much softer-flowing part, we continued up it, paddling once more against both the current, albeit slackened, and the wind, which was stiffening reciprocally, as if in a conspiracy with the river to assure that we earned every mile of this trip.

After a few miles, we reached the Lane Bay Chickee where we stopped once more to rest and have lunch. So far on this entire journey, through the course of five different chickees, we’d yet to have to share space with any other kayakers, something we attributed to the Pandemic, and for which we were very grateful. Lane Bay is an older chickee with just a single platform, so had there been other campers here, we wouldn’t have been able to stop. Hundreds of fish swarmed in the shallow water under the chickee, using the shadow of the wooden platform to protect themselves from the sun.

Lane Bay, day four and still smiling!

We relaxed on the Lane Bay Chickee for an hour and a half, eating lunch and snoozing occasionally in our camp chairs as we watched birds fly around and clouds begin to gather and build in the distance. At 1:30pm, we noticed that the clouds had stretched upwards into billowing towers blotting out the sun and stiffening the breeze. Fearing some impending rain, we scooted out of there, determined to pound out the final two-and-a-half miles and beat the rain to our destination for the night, the Hell’s Bay Chickee. We paddled south down the length of Lane Bay, found the canal we needed to cut through the mangroves into an unnamed bay, across that, through another tight and winding canal and into the large, smooth, and very shallow Hell’s Bay. It did rain on us for about fifteen minutes, but the cooling effect on the hot, humid day made it actually quite enjoyable.

Hell’s Bay is spacious, picturesque, and strangely shallow, the ground covered in thick beds of weeds that stick out of the water in numerous places, and grabbed at the bottom of our canoe quite a few times, forcing us to dig our paddles into the soft mud of the bottom of the bay to propel us forward. I was quite sure this would be the first night we wouldn’t be awakened by dolphins, as the water was clearly too shallow for them. I would turn out to be very wrong about this.

We arrived at Hell’s Bay Chickee, another of the platforms that isn’t quite where the map indicates. My best guess for this inconsistency is that the chickees sometimes get destroyed by hurricanes and the park service decides to rebuild them in a slightly different spot without notifying the cartographers. It only took us about ten additional minutes of paddling to find it, which wasn’t too bad, but it is slightly unnerving when seeds of doubt begin to grow and you think you might be in the wrong bay entirely, a scenario that would be a very real disaster in a maze like this if true.

Hell’s Bay, a very comfortable chickee, though not quite located where the map says it is!

It was not quite three o’clock, and this day had somehow felt relatively easy and relaxing, with plenty of stops and no sensation of needing to rush. In spite of our continued struggles with the winds, currents, and tides, we’d covered approximately 16.5 miles this day, and our muscles were definitely acclimating to the rigors of canoe life. We set up camp and then relaxed, enjoying the views of the expansive and beautiful bay that smoothed completely as evening approached. Birds fished in the distance, and the silence was deep and palpable in the Jurassic-like wilderness. The plan for tomorrow was to paddle due east, through the remainder of the labyrinth and back out to Whitewater Bay where we would turn south and retrace our path from day one, back through the Buttonwood canal to our starting point at the Flamingo Visitor Center.

This was the plan anyway, but that carefully laid plan for our last day would change drastically when, while enjoying the vistas through my binoculars, I spotted a peculiar white pole with black stripes and numbers at the top protruding from the mud of the bay on the far side of a small, thin copse of mangrove trees.

A well-earned dinner
Tired, but still smiling
Goodnight!

Canoeing the Everglades (part four) Joe River to North River.

This is part four of a multi-part travel series. If you missed part one and want to start at the beginning, you can find it here: https://authorrickfuller.com/2021/08/08/canoeing-the-everglades-part-one/

On morning three, we were once again up before the dawn. A thin, waxing crescent moon was rising in the east with Venus trailing in its wake, both illuminated by the yet unseen sun and shining brightly against the backdrop of the morning stars that I rarely see. We’d both slept poorly, the hard wooden planks of the Everglades chickees rendering the thin single air pads that were so highly rated by backpackers utterly useless. Despite our lack of sleep, the brisk air of the Florida morning and the pot of coffee boiled on our propane stove cleared out the cobwebs, and we got an early start to the morning’s journey.

The moon and Venus
Heading off at daybreak

By 7:30am which was just after daybreak, we were on the water, pulling hard against the still, calm bay, a deep vee from the bow of our canoe creating the only disturbance on the water’s surface. We turned right onto the Joe River and followed it upstream, turning right again and heading due east through a (relatively) narrow channel that eventually spilled out into the vast and daunting Whitewater Bay. Setting a landmark of a mangrove island far away on the horizon, I told Tracy to row for the north side of it. Of course, as soon as we entered the bay itself, the wind kicked up, once more directly in our faces, and the tide started to pour in, creating a current from left to right that we had to angle into and pull against. I have no idea how we had managed to have both the wind and the tide going against us on every day of this trip thus far, but here we were again, battling both. The wide-open bay and the unblocked wind meant that we had waves…large enough waves that they were breaking on themselves, and it was hard to even tell if we were making any progress. Eventually, our landmark inched closer and loomed larger, and before too long we had pulled into the leeward side, happy to have a break from the wind.

Resting on a convenient mangrove tree.

After our break, we paddled hard across wide-open rough water, headed for a large group of mangrove islands that marked the halfway point of our journey across Whitewater Bay. When we finally reached them, more than an hour later, we took some time on the calm and smooth leeward side to watch about five dolphins chasing fish. I mentioned in the first blog that our drinking water supply hadn’t been the clean, crisp water a thirsty traveler might have hoped for, but rather a yellowish-brown sickly color that was not appealing in any way. The water tasted as bad as it looked, and we were saved by Tracy who had brought along a couple of small packets of powdered lemonade. Just adding a dash of the powder to a large bottle prior to pouring water from the bags eliminated the terrible taste and made it easy to convince ourselves that the yellow color was from the lemonade rather than some kind of contaminate. Either way, the heavy exertion and warm air had us drinking copious amounts of it and neither of us became ill, so I guess it was all good in the end.

Water bottles full and arms as rested as they were going to get, we pulled out of our leeward oasis and back into the tempest as it were. The tide had ceased creating a current for us to battle, but the wind, as if it were not ambivalent to our trials but rather a malevolent force set against us, had increased to compensate. Having come halfway across the gargantuan bay, we were refreshed by the idea of an impending finish line, and we pulled with renewed fervor for the now visible shoreline. The storm that was building on the horizon helped to incentive our extra energy expenditure.

An hour later we found ourselves in shallower water, protected once more from the most extreme facets of the wind by a steady wall of mangrove islands. The shallow water stymied the waves, and we rested once more, gathering our strength and our wills for the last several miles of paddling we still had to do. The section of the Wilderness Waterway we were now seeing was a thick maze of channels, rivers, islands of mangrove trees, and backwater bays large and small. Keeping one eye on the map and scouring the shoreline for identifiable landmarks, I navigated us through the tricky turns and twists of the cluttered landscape and we turned up what I hoped was the tributary of the North River where the map showed the chickee to be located. The unnamed tributary was narrow but slow moving, and despite the current moving against us, (of course) we pulled our way along it with ease. As the storm built behind us, we approached the end of the long day of paddling.

Happy to be out of the wind and waves, but annoyed that she was taking pictures instead of paddling away from the storm.

There was a moment of concern when the North River chickee did not appear where the map showed it to be, but we eventually located it just a few hundred yards away. Breathing a sigh of relief, our canoe bumped against the planks of the chickee at 4:30pm, a total journey of nine-hours, our longest paddle of the trip. Exhausted once more, we sprawled out on the wooden planks of the chickee and both fell promptly asleep.

Our day three paddle, 18.5 miles across Whitewater Bay and up to the North River chickee.
Navigating the narrow and identical-appearing canals and marshes of this mangrove area can get a little tricky.

Awakened a half-hour later by the rumble of thunder, we noticed the storm brewing on the horizon had reached us. Hurriedly, we strung our tarp across the posts of the platform as a windbreak and then piled our gear on the protected side of it. The North River chickee is a single platform, so we knew that we’d have no company for this night, which meant that we would be somewhat cramped once we’d pitched our rather large tent, so we held off on that until it was time to go to bed. Dinner was once again the just-add-water meals from REI which we’d found to be both delicious and filling. We’d splurged with space by bringing a box of red wine in our gear, and we both enjoyed our well-earned dinner and wine as rain began to fall, pattering against our tarp by the wind. We were glad to be ensconced in our shelter as we celebrated another tough but thoroughly enjoyable day. As darkness fell and the mosquitos began to swarm, we slapped up the tent and scurried inside with our lanterns, enjoying a pleasant evening protected from the rain and thunder that pounded the Everglades on the other side of the fabric.

Protected from the wind and rain.
The North River Chickee is a single, hidden on the north side of a mangrove island in the middle of the river.

Canoeing the Everglades (part three) South Joe River to Joe River.

This is part three of a multi-part travel series. If you missed part one and want to start at the beginning, you can find it here: https://authorrickfuller.com/2021/08/08/canoeing-the-everglades-part-one/

The guttural, echoing trumpet of air woke me from a troubled, freezing, uncomfortable sleep. I opened my eyes to darkness and shivered in the frigid air. I’d neglected to bring a sweatshirt or a wool hat, thinking that it couldn’t possibly get cold enough to need them. Our sleeping bags were the summer-weight type, and I’d shivered all night trying to stay warm. Beside me, Tracy slept soundly in her sweatshirt, knit cap, and gloves.

The sharp blast of air echoed through the night once again, a swishing of water as a body sliced expertly through the small, shallow bay. A dolphin hunting its breakfast, I realized. I got up and stretched my sore joints and muscles, and then quietly opened the tent, slipping out into the chilly pre-dawn morning. The dolphin continued its hunt in the otherwise still and supreme quiet of the pending sunrise. I sat in one of the chairs and listened, hoping the hunter might come close enough to see. He roamed the bay for ten more minutes, and then, as darkness slipped away and the sky began to slowly lighten, he slid quietly out of the backwater and out through the narrow canal to the deeper waters of the Joe River.

I set up the stove to make coffee and watched as the sun, an orange billiard ball of flame, quietly rose into view, fingerpainting the sky with streaks of gold and burnt amber. The water, now sans dolphin, was completely still, a near perfect mirror of the sky that was incredible to see.

A beautiful sunrise to start our time in the Everglades.

The water on the propane stove came to a boil, and I added coffee to a stainless-steel French press, pouring the water over it and stirring the grounds. A few birds flew over, and a fish jumped, briefly disturbing the perfect mirror with symmetrical rings as I sipped the brew and enjoyed an absolutely exquisite Everglades morning. After about an hour, I stepped into the canoe and untied it, quietly paddling out into the bay to take a few pictures of the South Joe River chickee. Designed for two parties, one on each of the platforms, it’s a tight fit, but with us as the sole occupants, with room to spread out with our tent on one side and our living room on the other, it was more than enough room. The chickees are built out over the water on purpose, providing relief from the mosquitos and no-see-ums that swarm closer to the mangrove shores. We were fully prepared for the insect hordes, but had been thoroughly blessed by an almost complete absence of them the night before and again so far this morning.

South Joe River is a great chickee, far enough from the mangrove forest to keep away the hordes of mosquitos.

Eventually, Tracy woke up and stumbled out of the tent blinking like an owl in the sunlight and looking for coffee.

Finally awake
Me in the bay, the entrance canal in the distance. The Joe River is on the other side of the mangroves behind me.

After a leisurely breakfast, the wind began to pick up and we loaded the canoe and pushed off, heading back through the canal and turning left at the Joe River. Here, the wind was gusting right in our face, and the tide, incoming for the last hour, caused the river to flow noticeably against us. We hunkered into the wind and began to paddle hard. We only had 5.5 miles to go today to reach the Joe River chickee, the destination we’d originally reserved for this night, with our original plan of leaving this morning. Our decision to leave the day before and knock out the bulk of the mileage was sure starting to feel like a good one. The wind and current made conditions so difficult for paddling that it was impossible to take even a quick break. Setting the paddle down for even ten seconds stopped all our forward momentum and pushed us backward. Even when just Tracy took a break and I kept paddling, I could barely keep us moving north. If I took a break, Tracy alone couldn’t even hold us still.

It was misery and agony. It took us four hours of non-stop paddling before the Joe River chickee finally came into sight. Our tired muscles groaned as we pulled the final half mile and turned right into an inlet, finally finding a lee from the wind. We stopped and rested our paddles on the sides of the canoe, breathing hard and stretching our sore backs, relieved to finally be done with what had been a torturous four hours of constant and strenuous exertion. We tied up to the chickee, unloaded a few things, and then collapsed with exhaustion.

This is what exhaustion looks like.

Eventually we recovered and discussed setting up our camp. I had booked the Oyster Bay chickee as a backup in case we wanted to do more than 5.5 miles today, but we both agreed that paddling another 5 miles was not in the cards. It was officially settled when we saw another canoe approaching our chickee, our first sighting of another human since dusk the day before. Bill, a solo traveler, stopped to use the porta-potty and told us he was heading up to Oyster Bay for the night. He’d crossed Whitewater Bay from the North River chickee, which was our destination tomorrow. With him headed to Oyster Bay and us not wanting to share our solitude with anyone, the decision was made. We saw Bill off and then set up camp.

The Joe River Chickee…adequate but not much more than that.

In the early afternoon, I talked Tracy into taking an excursion behind the chickee where a canoe trail led back into a swamp that appeared to open up into some small lakes. The mangroves were dense and the path was difficult in our large canoe. After about a quarter mile of bumping, ducking, and spider webs in Tracy’s face as we futilely looked for alligators or other wildlife, we gave up and backed our way out of there, returning to the chickee. We spent the rest of the evening just relaxing and watching a pod of dolphins fishing and breaching right where the Joe River and the small inlet we were camping on met. Toward dusk, a few mosquitos showed up, our proximity to land allowing them to sense us. We covered up with our head nets and sprayed ourselves down with Deet, and that was enough to keep them at bay. That night was another uncomfortable one where we both suffered on our thin, almost useless blow-up mats, and I stove off freezing by putting on all my clothes and stealing Tracy’s wool hat.

The next day we would be venturing across the vast Whitewater Bay, an endeavor about which we were both very apprehensive.

Before we knew the hellish paddle we were about to endure.
Our day two paddle up the Joe River.

Canoeing the Everglades (part two) Flamingo to South Joe River.

This is part two of a multi-part travel series. If you missed part one, you can find it here: https://authorrickfuller.com/2021/08/08/canoeing-the-everglades-part-one/

“Would you like to purchase a SunPass for use on the toll roads?” the callously disinterested rental car clerk had asked the previous day when I’d picked up our car at Fort Lauderdale International.

“How much is that?”

“Eight dollars a day plus the cost of the tolls,” she droned.

Pffft. The car would be sitting in a parking lot for at least four days. Why would I pay for that when I could just avoid the toll roads or pay cash at a booth?

“No thanks,” I said, smugly sure that I’d avoided a rental car tourist trap. The rental agent one-eyed me with a knowing smirk.

“Okay. If you do use any toll road then, it will automatically bill your account along with an added convenience fee.”

“Fine,” I replied, not bothering to ask what the “convenience fee” would be.

I’ve spent a good amount of time in south Florida, but what I’d forgotten is that it is nearly impossible to drive around the Miami-Dade area without wandering intentionally or accidentally onto a toll road. And, the vast majority of these toll plazas that guard the coveted expressways are unmanned. Once you make that fateful turn onto the ramp, there’s no turning back. You’re going to pass through an automatic toll booth, and in a rental car without a SunPass, you’re screwed. And this is what happened on the way out to Homestead the next morning.

After sleeping in and then enjoying a casual late-morning breakfast at an outdoor café in the beautifully warm breeze of a perfect Miami Beach December morning, Tracy and I checked out of our hotel and hit the road for the town of Homestead, our staging point for the journey. Avoiding toll roads adds about an extra thirty minutes to the drive, which is an annoyance, but we were in no rush. Unfortunately, I made one wrong turn and we found ourselves whizzing through the toll plaza of a pay-for-play highway with the rest of the drivers who seemed not at all perturbed by the situation.

“Hmmm. I wonder how much that’s going to cost?” I mused to Tracy who just shook her head as the cameras winked and captured our license plates. This wouldn’t be the only time on the trip that we would zip through a toll plaza, and I wouldn’t find out the cost for several weeks. I’ll just say this…if you’re going to be driving around the south Florida area, get a SunPass. The rental company “convenience fee” may be convenient, but it sure ain’t cheap.

The small city of Homestead sits just outside the entrance to Everglades National Park, and we had a hotel reservation there, planning to gather a few last-minute items before getting a good night’s sleep and an early start the next morning. That was the initial plan.

“Hey, why don’t we get the last few things we need here, and then drive out to the Flamingo Visitor Center and see if we can just start our trip today instead of tomorrow?” I said to Tracy. Somehow, I managed to convince her that this would be a great idea, despite a small part of me that wanted her to talk me out of this lunacy. We stopped at Walmart to grab two folding camp chairs, swung into a Subway for some lunch to go, and drove an hour south to the Flamingo Visitor Center at the southernmost tip of mainland Florida. Knowing that if we were to get started on this journey at such a late hour—already approaching 3:00pm—an 18-plus mile paddle to the Joe River chickee would be a monumental undertaking, we swung in to the ranger station next to the marina and inquired about an opening for the night at South Joe River chickee, another of the wooden platforms that was only about 12 miles away.

The nice thing about Covid was that the vast majority of the Everglades was wide open, including the South Joe River chickee, and we booked it for the night and then scurried over to the marina to see if we could pick up our reserved canoe a day early. The dockmaster looked at us like we were idiots when we told him our plan, then flat-out told us that it was a bad idea, then warned us that the wind was getting bad and it would be in our faces, then told us that the open water ahead would be much worse than the protected and screened canal of the marina—“There’s a reason it’s called ‘Whitewater Bay,’” he said, with an ominous tone, then tried to give us alternative options, then finally relented and slid a two-person canoe into the water for us with a look on his face as if he was calculating his potential liability. When we unloaded the car and piled our gear onto the dock, he took one look at it and then upgraded us to a three-person canoe, something we were very thankful for later. I tipped him well, then found a water spigot to fill our four 2.5-gallon collapsible water bags. The water came out a sickly yellowish-brown color, but I was assured that it would be fine to drink by the “potable” sign next to the spigot. What could go wrong?

Our load of gear, including ten gallons of yellow-tinged drinking water.

Loading the canoe to the oar-wells, we slid into the Buttonwood Canal at 3:40pm and pushed off for the first stage of the journey, the three-mile paddle up the canal to Coot Bay.

The first stage of our journey, up the calm Buttonwood Canal and into the surprisingly large Coot Bay. The narrow canal at the north end of Coot Bay was our self-imposed point of no return.

The breeze, though in our face, was manageable and actually quite enjoyable. We got quickly into a rhythm with the paddling, Tracy in the front of the boat and me in the back, her switching from right side to left at her whim, and me switching as necessary to counter her strokes and keep us moving straight ahead. We passed numerous day-paddlers coming in from the bay with smiles and sunburns, saw turtles, numerous birds, and one baby alligator resting on a log as we paddled out. Along the way, we marked a few key spots on the shoreline where we could return to pitch a tent and camp should the bay be as rough as the dockmaster had feared.

We both felt good when we rounded the final bend of the canal and entered Coot Bay, a small bay on the map but a surprisingly large body of water in real life. I was actually a bit dismayed at the real-life size of the bay…if this tiny, almost insignificant bay on the map was this large in person, Whitewater Bay—which we had to cross several times in the next few days—was going to look like an ocean. Nevertheless, with the wind quite a bit stronger here, we hunched our backs, dug the paddles into the water, and propelled our way across it, making for the far end where we would need to find the small canal that connects Coot Bay with its granddaddy, Whitewater Bay. Our heading was true, and the canal opened up, once more providing a windbreak for us. This was what I figured to be the point of no return, where if we pushed on we would be committed to making it all the way to South Joe regardless of the conditions on Whitewater Bay. Tracy agreed that we should continue, and we hurriedly paddled through the short connector with its sharp turns and overhanging mangroves, ever alert for wildlife as the sun marched its way to the horizon.

We entered Whitewater Bay as dusk neared. The bay was every bit as massive as I’d feared after seeing the size of Coot Bay, and we took a moment to marvel at the flat vistas of open water dotted with mangrove islands. There were very few people anywhere in sight, just a couple of faint dots toward the horizon, speedboats too far away even to hear their motors making their way across the bay or getting in some late-day fishing. I took a compass heading and pulled out flashlights and headlamps. Darkness was approaching and we were now certain to be paddling well after sundown. Tracy became somewhat apprehensive about our position, and we stopped for a moment to discuss the situation. At my urging, she let go of her fears and put her trust in me, something I wasn’t too sure was earned. Luckily, as the sun dipped lower, the wind suddenly ceased and the bay grew calm. We took a short rest, letting our canoe drift with the mild current, and then we dug in again, making our way up the vast Joe River.

The Joe River appears on this map to be small and manageable. It’s actually over a mile wide at the mouth, and in the darkness, the shores are indistinguishable from the water.

Darkness descended on us and the stars popped out, lighting up the sky in a brilliant show that was headlined by Jupiter and Saturn. As it grew full dark, we continued to paddle, the deep vee cut by the bow of our boat on the still water of the flat bay the only sign of our passage, the shores of the river too far off to mark our progress. Those shores faded out of sight with the passing of the last light, and I kept us straight by keeping Jupiter and Saturn at our 11:00 position, as well as occasionally turning to mark the bubble of light pollution from the far-away lights of Miami directly at our back.

As we grew more and more comfortable with the idea of paddling into the inky blackness of the Everglades, far from any other people, an island of human life in the midst of a vast area of wilderness and wild animals, we both relaxed, speaking softly and enjoying the solitude and the calmness of the isolation in which we found ourselves immersed. Several meteors streaked overhead, and the silence of the night was broken only by the sounds of our paddles digging into the water and the occasional fish jumping at an insect.

After about an hour, the river narrowed and turned north, and I marked our position on the map as we pulled for the western shore, prepared to search for the canal that led to the small, unnamed bay where the South Joe River chickee would be located. As our headlamps splayed over the mangroves, the river narrowed further, much more than I thought it should based on the map. We pushed on and discovered we’d paddled into a dead-end bay. Slightly unnerved, I scoured the map, searching for answers and trying to figure out our exact location. Tracy asked me where to go next, and I calmly told her to take a quick break as chills of dismay arched down my back and I realized I had no idea where we were.

There’s something deeply unsettling about being lost at night in the Everglades, but I told myself that the worst-case scenario would be that we’d have to find a way to spend the long winter night in the cramped canoe. We weren’t going to die, and we weren’t going to sink in the perfectly calm and smooth water, so I forced myself to relax and think through the problem. As my eyes searched for where we’d gone wrong, I realized what the problem was. I’d been looking for the river to make a turn to the north, and so when the opening appeared on the north bank, I assumed that was the actual turn, instead of the small bay that was clearly marked on the map. The scale of the map had fooled me again, the darkness and identicality of the shoreline of nothing but never-ending mangroves tricking me into thinking we’d reached our turn when we hadn’t. We paddled back out of the bay, staying close to the inhospitable shoreline in order to avoid being tricked again.

Inlet that, in the darkness, I mistook for the river turning north. It would take a good deal of time and paddling as my fear grew before I realized my mistake.

I soon realized that this map, as high-quality as it was, was going to be a problem for detailed navigation. Large inlets and bays in real-life appeared as nothing more than a squiggle on the map, and every one had to be explored before we could be confident we were not missing the turn of the Joe River to the north. A light mist began to rise eerily out of the mangrove forests, spreading across the calm water like groping fingers, diffusing the light from our headlamps, chilling the air, and giving a spooky, ethereal feel to the night that caused us both to shiver. This was beginning to feel like a scene in a horror movie where the audience wonders how the protagonists could have possibly ended up in such a terrible situation.

Eventually, we paddled all the way across the river, keeping the left shore close to us like lost children in a blind maze who keep their left hands on the wall to find their way out. As it became quite clear that we had finally made the correct turn to the north, I began to breathe easier, and when the canal leading to the South Joe chickee bay eventually opened up out of the mist to our left, my heart began to settle down slightly. We navigated through the turns of the tight, stygian canal with the ghostly mangroves scratching the walls of our canoe. Finally, the small bay opened up before us and the mist cleared suddenly, as if obeying a heavenly command. Pointing the bow of the canoe to where I thought the chickee should be, I told Tracy to focus her flashlight across the small inlet to the far shore. As the beam of light hit the other side of the inlet, a reflective sign bounced the light back to us and we both breathed a sigh of relief at the first sign of civilization we’d seen in hours. We’d found the South Joe River chickee.

We pulled up to the empty chickee at just before 8:00pm. We’d only paddled for less than 4.5 hours, but we were relieved to be done. Tying up to the chickee, we quickly unloaded the canoe, set up our tent, and cooked dinner. We’d covered 13.5 miles, several of which had been hard miles hampered by wind, waves, and the incoming tide. We’d earned a hearty dinner and a good night’s sleep. We sat in our chairs enjoying the perfect stillness, the bright stars, and the calm, temperate evening before eventually climbing into the tent and falling fast asleep.

Canoeing the Everglades (part one)

Fifteen years ago, I spent four days solo kayaking the Everglades on the northwest portion of the Wilderness Waterway, and since that trip, I’ve often felt the siren-call of that vast river of grass beckoning me to return. In December, 2020, while the global Covid-19 pandemic raged, the empty and lonely wilderness of mangroves and prehistoric beasts seemed like a great place to escape the troubled world at large.

My experience during the solo kayak trip from a decade-and-a-half earlier had been amazing, but I really wanted to share this country with someone else, and luckily, I was able to cajole Tracy into coming with me. We spent a good amount of time planning the trip in the months prior to our departure. I’m not a planner by nature, preferring with nearly every trip to just get out there and wing things, dealing with changing circumstances by being adaptable and flexible, but the Everglades is not a place where you want to allow chance or misfortune a handhold. We would be taking a canoe for this journey and exploring the southeastern portion of the Wilderness Waterway, a one-hundred-mile path that skirts through the tidal rivers, lakes, and marshes of the southern coast of Florida. Mangrove forests permeate the land, their vast root systems choking every square inch of solid ground, making unscheduled stops along the way difficult to impossible. Camping is done on chickees—wooden platforms constructed on pilings over the water, usually in small bays or backwaters. Reservations are required, and each chickee can take only one or two small parties of travelers. There are no sources of fresh water in this portion of the Everglades backcountry, the tidal nature of the low-lying swamp making every bit of the vast wetlands brackish. With few unique or distinguishing characteristics of the land and terrain everything looks the same and it’s easy to get lost and difficult to describe your location to any would-be rescuer…if you can even find a cell signal to call for help. Other travelers, particularly during a pandemic when people tend to avoid leaving their homes, would be few and far between, another source of possible assistance that would be non-existent. With all of these factors, careful planning of this trip was imperative.

In the weeks prior to our departure, we ordered a ton of gear that would be necessary for a successful and stress-free trip. I got a large, foldable, waterproof map of the area, several compasses, an astrolabe, and a sextant for navigation. Okay, maybe not the last two, but the waterproof map I ordered would prove to be invaluable for navigating the difficult turns and small, hidden passages along our route. We bought a free-standing tent, a required item for the chickees where tie downs are unavailable. LED lanterns, flashlights, a propane stove, packaged just-add-water meals from REI, waterproof gear bags, collapsible water containers, hats, gloves, ponchos, mosquito nets, sleeping bags and pads for the hard wooden planks of the chickees we’d be sleeping on, first-aid kits, lighters, waterproof matches, chargers, stackable pots and pans, eating utensils, a French press, and numerous other items for safety and comfort all had to be ordered or acquired. By the time we were finished gathering and packing all the gear, it looked like we could have outfitted Henry Morton Stanley’s expedition to find the missing Doctor Livingstone in the dark heart of Africa, but knowing we’d be well-prepared for anything that might go wrong was helpful to Tracy’s continued enthusiasm for this excursion.

Setting up and testing some of the equipment

On December 8th, I packed all our gear into a plastic bin and a large suitcase and flew from Seattle to Fort Lauderdale where I rented a car and then met Tracy’s flight in from Las Vegas. We drove down to South Beach where my perpetually single and devastatingly rakish buddy, Will Riedlinger had just recently moved. The three of us had a fantastic dinner at Joe’s Stone Crab, followed by drinks at a nearby hole-in-the-wall bar that just happened to have a small amount of fifteen-year Pappy Van Winkle gathering dust on the top shelf. Pappy makes Rick happy, so Will and I polished off the remainder of the bottle which garnered us the attention of the bar owner who generously gave us the last half-shot of the precious liquid gold for free. Feeling warmed and full, Tracy and I said goodnight to Will and walked back to our room at the Kimpton Hotel.

Our plan for the next day was to sleep in and then make the long drive out to Homestead where we would gather our last few necessities and spend another night, getting up early the following day to get started on our first day of paddling, an ambitious seventeen miles from the Flamingo Visitor Center up to the Joe River Chickee. Of course, even a well-planned trip doesn’t always work out the way you expect, and our trip would end up taking a much different turn that next day.

Covid can’t get through a Pappy barrier
Fueling up before the big trip

The Man Who Sowed Irrational Fear and Created MORAL PANIC

On August 12, 1958, Congress passed Public Law 85-623, an “act to prohibit the introduction…into interstate commerce of switchblade knives…” This law became commonly known as the “Federal Switchblade Act,” and it was the culmination of a concerted effort by lawmakers backed by an outpouring of public support that can all be traced back to an article published in Woman’s Home Companion in November, 1950. The author of this article, titled, “The Toy that Kills,” was Jack Harrison Pollack, and he was well-known for his overtly inflammatory articles that preyed on the emotions of his readers, mostly women, tugging at their maternal instincts and unashamedly feeding their base fears.

Jack Harrison Pollack wrote and published more than a thousand articles for numerous magazines and periodicals in the 1950s and 1960s, many of them with inflaming titles like “They’ll Steal Your Vote,” “The Shame of our Local Health Departments,” “Six Ways Your Vote Can Be Stolen,” “Do Drinking Fountains Spread Disease?” and “Too Many Babies Die.”

The Toy that Kills was not written to espouse the dangers of children carrying knives. In fact, Pollack doesn’t seem to have a problem with kids carrying knives in general. He only has an issue with the “threat to our children’s safety,” the switchblade knife. He acknowledges that knives have utility and that society shouldn’t try to stop kids from carrying them. He writes, “(Authorities) don’t want to deny boys their pocket knives. They know that a knife to a growing boy is as important as a lipstick to a young lady.” In just one of the many quotes in the article that are attributed to some vague, unidentified figure, such as this one that he says is from “one of the nation’s top law-enforcement officers,” (whatever that means) he writes, “In a person’s pocket, a switchblade knife is a deadly concealed weapon—as dangerous as a dagger and at close quarters as lethal as a loaded revolver.” The article, which is filled with unsourced, vaguely attributed, unidentifiable quotes like the one above, was clearly meant to inflame its readers and to drive them to action.

In one paragraph Pollack claims to have witnessed an actual switchblade murder on the mean streets of Philly:

“I had no idea myself until I saw a youth stabbed with one on a Philadelphia street. Two young men were fighting with their fists. Suddenly one of them reached into his pocket. A second later his hand held an open knife. He jabbed the gleaming blade into his opponent’s chest. As the blood flowed, women onlookers screamed.”

In another, he has a direct quote from a deceased victim of knife violence:

“Recently—in more innocent spirits—two teen-age boys at a high school dance in a Newark, New Jersey, suburb were playfully showing off with a three-inch switchblade. Accidentally one was shoved against the tip of the knife, which pierced his heart. “You punctured me, Jim, please take me to a drugstore,” the wounded youth moaned and collapsed. His seventeen-year-old companion was aghast. But his sorrow couldn’t bring his best friend back to life.”

The article is filled with anecdotal stories from all over the country that are completely unsourced with no names attached and no references listed. Stories that have direct quotes from one subject to another as if the author witnessed the interaction first-hand. Stories that are quite obviously completely fabricated by Pollack who knows there is no way for his 1950s readers to verify or dispute these stories.

“At almost the same time, in Newark, New Jersey, a thirty-five-year-old woman accused her husband of being unfaithful. Before he had a chance to explain, she angrily yanked a switchblade from her stocking and stabbed her husband in the heart. The next day he died. “If she had only hit her husband with a dish or a rolling pin instead!” mused a police official. “A switchblade isn’t something for anybody with a temper to have.””

Immediately after publication of the article, with nobody of intelligence able to discern the obvious lies and fabrications throughout it, U.S. states began to take action, with New York becoming the first to ban these dangerous weapons. Other states followed suit, and after the federal ban against importation in 1958, the mass hysteria spread around the globe, with countries all through Europe, Asia, and the Americas taking their own steps to pass laws banning switchblade knives. And none of it was based on any sort of reality, data, science, or even logic.

In case you haven’t seen an actual switchblade knife before, I happen to own one. Here is a regular, modern pocket knife, completely legal throughout the country, side-by-side with a dangerous and scary switchblade knife:

And here is a video where I show the difference in the way these knives open:

Warning: Graphic content not suitable to the faint of heart!

As you can see, these two knives are nearly indistinguishable. Why did Pollack feel the need to fabricate his way through a story attempting to rouse his readers to take action against switchblade knives? It’s hard to say. Perhaps he was simply inspired to grow his readership in any way possible, or maybe the editors of Woman’s Home Companion preferred sensationalism to journalism. It’s quite obvious from this article that there was a clear and shocking lack of journalistic integrity in those days, at least in the magazines where Pollack’s articles flourished, his audience apparently enraptured by his histrionic prose. Whatever his intent, the article worked. After its publication, and with the release of films like Rebel Without a Cause, 12 Angry Men, and the musical, Westside Story, the public had seen enough of switchblade knives to know that they were a menace to society. Driven with fear by Pollack’s closing statement, “…don’t wait, either, until a youngster—it could be yours—is murdered with a “toy” pocketknife” the entire world went crazy.

Representative Sidney R. Yates, speaking to Congress before passing the switchblade act, was clearly taken in by the national hysteria surrounding the “deadly” knives:

“Vicious fantasies of omnipotence, idolatry… barbaric and sadistic atrocities, and monstrous violations of the accepted values spring from the cult of the weapon, and the switchblade knife is included in this. Minus switchblade knives and distorted feeling of power they beget – power that is swaggering, reckless, and itching to express itself in violence – our delinquent adolescents would be shorn of one of their most potent means of incitement to crime.” 

There’s no doubt that youth violence was a problem in the fifties, however, the switchblade knife was nothing more than a symbolism of that violence, a simple tool embodied in bloodshed by the media, and as such, it was targeted by activists who reacted on emotion rather than common sense.

When considering the Moral Panic created by Pollack against switchblade knives, it’s rather difficult to not draw comparisons to the current state of affairs with society’s Moral Panic about AR-15s. The AR-15 has become the weapon of choice for many of the most heinous mass shootings our country has witnessed in the last couple of decades, and as such, it has become bastardized by society. And yet, the AR-15 is nothing more than a symbol of gun violence. It’s not even the best choice of weapon if you want to create the most bloodshed, death, fear, and violence. A typical AR-15 shoots a tiny .223 round that, in many of its iterations, causes little damage when it strikes a human body. However, because the AR-15 has been used by so many shooters, it has become the target of activists and politicians who think that the murder problem of our country will disappear if the AR-15 is banned. They seem to have lost sight of the same logic missing in society in the 1950s. Banning switchblades didn’t curb youth violence, youths just continued to carry what were now illegal knives, or they just switched to similar knives that were legal. Banning AR-15s will just mean that shooters will choose a different type of weapon for their killing sprees. If I was writing this article sixty years in the future, I might write the previous paragraph this way:

There’s no doubt that gun violence was a problem during the turn of the century, however, the AR-15 was nothing more than a symbolism of that violence, a simple tool embodied in bloodshed by the media, and as such, it was targeted by activists who reacted on emotion rather than common sense.

Gersh Kuntzman is today’s version of Jack Harrison Pollack. In an article in the New York Daily News a few years ago titled, What is it like to fire an AR-15? It’s horrifying, menacing, and very, very loud, he writes the following lines:

The recoil bruised my shoulder, which can happen if you don’t know what you’re doing. The brass shell casings disoriented me as they flew past my face. The smell of sulfur and destruction made me sick. The explosions — loud like a bomb — gave me a temporary form of PTSD. For at least an hour after firing the gun just a few times, I was anxious and irritable.

Even in semi-automatic mode, it is very simple to squeeze off two dozen rounds before you even know what has happened. If illegally modified to fully automatic mode, it doesn’t take any imagination to see dozens of bodies falling in front of your barrel.

If you’ve ever fired an AR-15 you know what complete and utter nonsense this is. Squeezing off two dozen rounds requires a high-capacity magazine and 24 distinct and separate trigger pulls along with the corresponding “bruising” shoulder kicks, “disorienting” brass casings “flying past your face,” and “bomb-like” explosions. I’m pretty sure you can’t accomplish that “before you even know what has happened.” The AR-15 has one of the lightest kicks—a gentle tap to the shoulder—of any rifle you’ll ever fire. Youtube is full of videos of girls and boys under the age of 10 firing AR-15s with smiles on their faces, apparently unperturbed by this alleged bruising this full-grown man suffered from. The AR-15 is almost certainly quieter than every one of the handguns he claims to have fired, (loud like a bomb???) and definitely quieter than most other rifles, and his theatrical, melodramatic claim that he suffered PTSD after firing the weapon…let’s just say that did not sit well with members of our armed forces who took some issue with that, as seen in his retraction statement that was added to the bottom of the article.

Kuntzman’s attempt to summon the spirit of Pollack’s malicious writings through his hammy, histrionically contrived description of his experience firing the AR-15 have only one goal…to raise the ire of the ignorant readers of the New York Daily News by creating an emotionally distorted Moral Panic that will drive them to take action to ban these types of weapons that he sees as unnecessary and dangerous. His efforts to instill the image of “dozens of bodies falling in front of your barrel” should be completely transparent, yet a constant flow of disinformation and fear mongering about AR-15s by journalists and politicians alike would seem to indicate that it is not.

Magazines that publish articles like those by Pollack in the 1950s and Kuntzman today are blurring the lines between established and respected periodicals and sensationalist tabloids by their lack of editorial oversight or journalistic integrity. They care about nothing more than readership, and sensationalism-driven clicks and sales.

Moral Panic has reared its ugly head in numerous examples of legislation since Pollack started the trend. In the 1950s, Dr. Frederic Wertham went on a crusade to warn America about the dangers of comic book violence. He penned numerous articles, including “Seduction of the Innocent,” and “What Parents Don’t Know about Comic Books” in Ladies Home Journal. His completely unbased and unscientific, speculative assertions that comic books were a corrupting influence on youth, a public health problem, and a leading cause of juvenile delinquency created a Moral Panic that spread across the country. The Senate convened a special subcommittee to explore the matter, and legislation was enacted that forced government comic book censorship and “approval” stickers before they could be legally sold. At no time were any serious, scientific studies conducted; the subcommittee members relied almost exclusively on anecdotal evidence and “expert” testimony before coming to their conclusions.

In recent times, the media narrative that police kill minorities, particularly black men, at a higher rate than others, even that they have set out to intentionally murder black men as part of a racist crusade, has created a massive Moral Panic that is currently inflaming the public and dividing the country. This is a narrative that has been thoroughly and completely debunked by numerous scientific studies, and yet groups like Black Lives Matter and far-left media outlets continue to spew it, intentionally keeping America in internal strife as a means of forwarding their own nefarious agenda.  

Most of the Moral Panic in society today seems driven by the political left, however, the right is just as guilty. After the 1 October shooting at the Route 91 festival in Las Vegas, bump stocks became the new Moral Panic of society. A device designed to help disabled veterans and target shooters enjoy their passion was bastardized by a murderer and society reacted in sadly typical fashion. President Trump quickly blamed Obama for the legalization of such a deadly and dangerous device, and ordered the Department of Justice to ban them. This ban was issued in 2018 and went into effect in 2019, requiring owners to destroy them or turn them in to the ATF under penalty of ten years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine. And why? Because one person misusing something that was designed to be simply a tool created a nation-wide hysterical Moral Panic and politicians reacted. This ban was only struck down as unconstitutional a few months ago by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the legal battle is still ongoing.

Is there a difference between a spring-assisted-opening knife and a switchblade? Sure. The blade on a switchblade deploys a small fraction of a second quicker. The switchblade requires a very slightly less dexterous movement to open. And, it makes a slightly louder and scarier “snap” when it opens. (I get a form of PTSD every time I open mine, as well as visions of dozens of bodies falling under my deftly slashing hand as I cut my way through a crowd while the song, “Gee, Officer Krupke” plays in my head.) But are these differences great enough to justify one of the knives being completely legal while possessing the other one gets you sent to jail? That is quite hard to fathom yet that is our reality, thanks to the moral panic riled up by Jack Pollack’s article.

It’s really not until recently, more than 60 years later, that this fugue of nonsensical hysteria has finally begun to unravel. Although switchblades are still federally illegal to import or sell over state lines, most states have now repealed laws against them and made them completely legal to own and carry. I believe they are still illegal to own in 11 states (including Washington) with a couple others having some restrictions on blade length or concealed carry.

Moral Panic causes our society to react emotionally rather than logically to problems our nation faces. It causes us to legislate by fear, to act impetuously and impulsively when confronted with real, germane and critical issues. Whenever we make hasty, impassioned decisions based on an emotional reaction rather than a well-thought-out, logical, data-driven response to an issue, we are much more likely to get the solution wrong, and quite possibly to exacerbate the problem. So, what can we do about the detrimental effects of our emotional reaction to Moral Panic? The first step is recognizing and crushing the driving force behind this plague, namely the media and their incessant drive to generate clicks at any cost. By calling out and demanding an end to the nonsense of histrionic articles like the ones by Pollack and Kuntzman, we can calm the fear they’re attempting to inseminate in our psyche.

The second step is by electing more logical, intelligent leaders to Congress and the Presidency. Political media whores like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Marjorie Taylor Green, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump who thrive on bombastic speech and the susceptibility of their audience to Moral Panic need to be soundly defeated. We need a Congress that passes laws and reacts to situations by using logic, data, and a careful evaluation of facts rather than legislating through Moral Panic. Emotional reactiveness has been a massive detriment to our society and our country. It is the malevolent fiend that has fatefully led us through things like the Red Scare, wars on drugs and in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the implication of a stolen election and widespread voter fraud, and uncountable examples of unnecessary and detrimental Congressional legislation.

It’s time we defeated the sixty-year-old demon known as Moral Panic that was summoned by Pollack and nourished by panicky, emotional simpletons through the decades. It’s time we moved on from the era of reactionary politics and to an era of logic, science, and data helping us drive all of our laws and our decisions.

Pollack, Jack, “The Toy that Kills,” Woman’s Home Companion, November, 1950. https://docplayer.net/209786811-The-toy-that-kills-woman-s-home-companion-november-1950.html 

The New York Times, Obituaries, October 2, 1984 https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/02/obituaries/jack-h-pollack-69-author-of-books-and-1000-articles.html

Whitmore, Zac, “Why are Switchblades Illegal?” Blade Magazine. https://blademag.com/knife-history/why-are-switchblades-illegal

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ncr.4110450704

Kuntzman, Gersh, “What is it like to fire an AR-15? It’s horrifying, menacing, and very very loud.” New York Daily News July 14, 2016 https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/firing-ar-15-horrifying-dangerous-loud-article-1.2673201

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_stock

History of Comics Censorship, Part 1

Who Wants to be a Cop?

There’s never been a better time to be a criminal in America than right now.

There’s never been a more challenging time to be a police officer in America than right now.

Police departments around the country are facing a crisis like they’ve never before faced in their history. An existential crisis in some ways. For most of the recorded history of policing, the enemy of the profession has been those who pursue harm upon the innocent. Today, that has all changed. The greatest enemy to police today is the vocal, bombastic, often good-intentioned, mostly naïve and simplistic, ordinary citizen. This is a terrible statement, and it pains me to write it, but it’s true, more now than ever before. And while police departments are fantastic at addressing their traditional adversary, the lawbreaker, they are terrible at addressing this new, perilously slippery enemy who shouts from the pulpits, rouses the masses through histrionics and illusory ethereal information, and then fades into the shadows to watch the seeds of their discontent blossom.

Ask somebody if they think it would be a good idea for you to pursue a profession in police work right now and the most likely answer you’ll receive is, “You’d have to be a complete idiot to want to be a cop right now.” Ask a police officer if you should join their ranks, and the most likely answer you’ll receive is a hearty laugh before they turn back to their calculations of the earliest possible time they can retire and still afford to feed their families.

Despite this, police departments need new officers in record numbers, and they have no end to the number of candidates lining up for a chance to spend a few hundred hours at a rigid, demanding, stringent academy, followed by months of on-the-job training where they’ll be baptized in the fire of a brutally grim society filled with heinous actors who will force them into split-second life or death decisions while their own departmental representatives criticize every error, the community they’re trying to protect attacks them verbally, physically, and emotionally at every opportunity, and an honest, good-intentioned mistake can lead to civil lawsuits and prison time. And they’ll put themselves willingly into this hellscape for about the same starting salary as an apprentice plumber makes. 

Take a look at this body camera video released recently by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR-Q_qvNiTg

This woman is a teacher, and her child was in the car. Let that sink in for a moment.

What does this type of video, along with all the others showing the citizenry bombarding police officers with physical and verbal abuse tell you about the quality of the candidates who must be lining up in the hopes of earning a coveted spot on the firing line for this masochistic wretchedness?

And if physical, verbal, and emotional abuse from the citizenry they’re sworn to protect wasn’t bad enough, those responsible for their oversite and well-being seem to be continuously attacking them as well. Diana Morales is a candidate for mayor of New York, and she’s running and campaigning on a platform of “defund the police.” Cities across the nation, from Minneapolis, to Oak Park, Illinois, to San Francisco are either seriously considering massive cuts to their police departments, or they’ve already begun them. And the problem keeps growing.

An article last month in Cosmopolitan by Paige Fernandez, the ACLU’s policing policy adviser called, “Defunding the Police isn’t Punishment—It Will Actually Make Us Safer,” in which she pushes for a reallocation of funds from police departments to social programs has gone mainstream, her dangerous and naïve ideas reaching millions. Two months ago, and then again just a week ago, the New York City Council passed sweeping police reforms, some of which were okay, but some of which were horribly ignorant. One of those reforms criminalizes—actually criminalizes—a police officer from putting pressure on a suspect’s chest or back in a way that restricts their airflow. Since many of the grappling techniques police officers learn for controlling a combative subject when the fight moves to the ground rely on exactly these types of control methods, this is a really big problem and has the effect of being completely counter to its intent, that being fewer injuries to suspects. This law not only incentives police to use more violent, more dangerous tools and tactics, it actually mandates it under criminal penalty! Police officers need more training in hand-to-hand combat control techniques, not having these tools removed and criminalized by legislators. Take a look at this video from the Gracie brothers where they do a good job of breaking down exactly why this is so awful and why it will almost certainly result in more suspect and officer injuries and deaths, along with an even greater torrent of resignations from officers who’ve just had enough of the nonsense.

The actions of the NYC council are being echoed around the country, and police officers have had enough. In Minneapolis, since the murder of George Floyd, more than 200 officers have quit or have taken extended leaves of absence. Take a read of this article where a former MPD officer describes why he decided to leave after just four years on the job. https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2021/05/16/former-minneapolis-police-officer-talks-about-his-decision-to-leave/

What happens when good officers like the one in the article above decide to leave a department? They get replaced, often by officers who are not as good. As the pool of quality candidates declines, the quality of the police department declines, more officers decide to leave, and the cycle goes on and on. How do we stop it?

It’s actually a bit shocking that the LASO released that video of the woman spewing venom at the deputy who pulled her over. Police have historically been extremely unwilling to publicly defend themselves from abuse and hate. Police departments have always adopted a stoic approach to the abuse they absorb on a daily basis, and I think this needs to change. When 100% of the police incidents where an officer looks bad or unprofessional are being disseminated on every public platform imaginable, and next to zero of the incidents where police absorb unrequited abuse and castigation like in the video above—a scene that has become depressingly common-place, then the story is incredibly one-sided and unfair. Public records disclosures don’t have to go in just one direction. The public needs to see what is really happening out there on the streets so that they can actually begin to get a grasp of the entire picture.

Police departments are finally beginning to understand that they’re going to have to take a more active role in their own defense. They also need to find a way to reverse the tidal wave of departures from departments around the country. This is not easily accomplished though. Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the police executive research forum recently had this to say:

“The American policing profession may be facing the most fundamental questioning of its legitimacy in decades. The very essence of policing is being debated in many cities, often because of controversial video recordings of police officers’ actions…The country is facing a looming crisis in the hiring of police officers. Agencies continue to rely on hiring standards that were created decades ago, for a different philosophy of policing and a different generation of police officer candidates—even while many cities are having trouble finding enough suitable candidates to keep up with retirements and fill vacant positions…—and for many young people, especially in minority communities, policing is not seen as an appealing career choice in the current climate.”

A recent publication from the U.S. Department of Justice also suggests that police departments are facing a looming crisis with regard to their ability to recruit and hire quality candidates to fill the exploding number of available positions. Here’s a snip from this publication:

There was broad agreement among participants at the Hiring Forum that the process for hiring police officers in the United States is often plagued by inefficiency and a lack of urgency. Compared with most other professions, the police hiring process is slow, cumbersome, overly bureaucratic, and not very user friendly for the applicant. In some jurisdictions, it can be a year or more from the time an individual submits an application to when a successful candidate begins police academy training.

For decades, police agencies have used largely the same process, and there has been little incentive to change, because traditionally, there were more applicants than there were vacant officer positions. Many of the people entering the policing profession came from families of officers who went through the same process themselves, so there was little expectation that things would be done any differently. Agencies were able to fill their ranks using protocols that had served them well for years. Recently, however, those dynamics have shifted dramatically. Police officer vacancies have risen, with some large departments suddenly looking to fill several hundred positions. At the same time, the candidate pool has diversified beyond the core group of applicants who joined the profession over generations. Fewer candidates are coming from traditional “police families.” More are coming with college degrees that provide them with greater flexibility to consider other careers, especially if those professions can complete the hiring process more efficiently and get recent graduates on the payroll more quickly.

Perhaps the biggest change has been generational. Candidates entering the workforce today are largely Millennials and, now, members of Generation Z as well. These individuals grew up with technology that allows them to obtain information on almost any subject in seconds, or to purchase goods and obtain them overnight, rather than waiting days or weeks for delivery. Participants at the hiring forum said that these younger generations can be impatient, making them less likely to tolerate a police hiring process that can last months, is largely paper-driven, and can be frustratingly opaque to the applicant.

So, what do we need to reverse what is surely about to become a dramatic slide in the quality of police departments at a time when they need, more than ever, solid, intelligent, motivated, quality cops with pure motives and unimpeachable ethics? We need you to join the police force. Who? You. The reader. I’m speaking to you. If you would have to be an absolute idiot to want to go into the policing profession right now, that is precisely why the profession needs you. If you’ve read this far, you have either incredible patience, a high tolerance for suffering, or an insatiable thirst for growth and knowledge, and all of those things are critical virtues for a police officer to possess. If, like me, you’ve seen the dangers of a degrading candidate pool for a public position where the actions of one bad cop can taint the motives and accomplishments of thousands, then your local police department needs you. This is the time when you can give back to society. If you’re intelligent, successful, good under pressure, and have a solid moral compass, why not consider leaving whatever your current profession is and giving back to your community by joining the police force?

I know this may sound absolutely ridiculous, but the best way to help right the ship and contribute to the health of a critical piece of the infrastructure of a stable society is to bring in those who don’t really want to do the job. Those who are overqualified for the job. Those who think the job is probably beneath them. You can sit comfortably at home and criticize the mistakes and decisions of police officers. You can complain about their performance, their attitudes, their motives, their education, and their abilities, or you can get out of your easy chair and help make things better. There are, of course, many ways to help your society and to contribute your time to worthy causes. But anybody can go serve meals at the homeless shelter. It takes a truly dedicated, selfless hero to set aside their life and to serve their community as a police officer when they don’t actually want to do the job, and when taking the job means accepting a massive pay cut, putting themselves through a hellish year of training in high-pressure situations, and putting their lives on the line for the greater good. Can you be this person? Can you be one of the ones who decides that they want to be a part of the solution instead of just complaining about the problem?

Police departments across the country are trying to hire quality candidates like you, and they’re struggling mightily at every turn. Will you consider joining them?

An Analysis of the Police Shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo.

An analysis of the police shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo

On March, 29th, 2021, at about 2:36 a.m., Chicago police responded to a report of two males firing a gun, the first report of which apparently came from Shotspotter, an AI technology that detects and automatically targets gunshots fired in the city. Two minutes later, Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old boy was dead, shot in the chest by one of the responding officers.

Today, COPA, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, released the BWC (body-worn camera) footage from the unnamed officer who fired the fatal shot.

The thing that is immediately striking about the video, and in fact about the majority of videos of this nature, is how incredibly quick everything happens. There is no audio at the start of the BWC footage, as the officer is responding to the scene. He pulls into an alley at 2:38 a.m., and gets out of his vehicle. You see him immediately begin running, pausing only to apparently shove a civilian out of the way of danger, before pursuing a shadowy fleeing subject whose shape is only barely discernible in the dark alley and heavily bobbing camera of the pursuing officer.

The foot pursuit starts at the timestamp of 1:47 on the video. A few seconds later, the audio kicks in, and the officer can be heard yelling at the fleeing suspect to stop running. At 2:03, the suspect stops near a break in the wooden fence that lines the alley, and at 2:04 the officer yells, “Drop it, drop it!” which is immediately followed by the officer firing a single shot from his weapon at the timestamp of 2:05.

This is the picture that has been widely circulated by the media, grabbed from the BWC footage at the exact moment of the shot:

Now, some analysis:

On the surface, and to much of the population of a world that has grown accustomed to making resolute, immutable judgements with the most minute quantity of data or information, this looks like just another case of a police officer shooting an unarmed minority, and, even worse, a child this time. Because of that collective predication, there will undoubtedly be rioting in the streets of Chicago tonight.

But is it warranted?

I scanned the video closely to determine what it was that made the officer fire the shot. When you run the video in full motion, it looks like Toledo is complying. He stops running, turns, and puts his hands up. What bothers me, and should bother a prudent person, is why the officer yells, “Drop it, drop it!”

Let’s look at a couple of screen grabs I was able to procure from the video.

Here we have the moment that Adam Toledo stops running, timestamp of 2:03 on the BWC footage, 02:38:38 a.m. Adam’s back is to the officer and his hands are hidden from view. The officer moves to Toledo’s left in an obvious attempt to get a better angle and to see his hands.

The very next second, 02:38:39 on the video, timestamp of 2:04 on the BWC recording, the officer is turning his body toward Toledo who has been out of the frame of the video for just under one second as the officer positions himself.

In this screen grab you can see Toledo’s left hand has come up near his face and his right hand is holding what we can safely presume (based on what I’ll show you shortly) to be a firearm. The police officer is employing a strobing flashlight, a tool used to disorient a suspect. As Toledo is intermittently illuminated / darkened in the strobing light, it becomes evident that the alleyway is dark and isolated. At this point, there is clearly no way for the officer to ascertain that Adam Toledo is a child just 13 years of age. Toledo is wearing a black hoodie, carrying a gun, in a dark alley at 2:30 in the morning, matching the description of one of two suspects who has just fired multiple shots at people or vehicles in the area. When you hear hoofbeats around the corner you don’t think you’re about to see zebras, and when you see a running suspect carrying a gun in an alley at 2:30 a.m., you don’t think it might be a 13-year-old.

At 02:38:39 still, and still at 02:04 on the BWC recording timestamp—so less than a second later—Toledo has turned his face toward the officer. His right hand, which the officer knows is holding a firearm, is now concealed from view. Adam has moved his hand in an effort to conceal the firearm from the positioning officer. We can speculate that this is the moment that Toledo has decided to toss the firearm behind the fence, although there is no way for the officer to know that that is what his intention is. The officer yells, “Drop it!”

The very next moment, now 02:38:39 and 02:05 on the timestamp, Toledo tosses the gun in one motion, taking care to use his body to conceal what he’s doing as he turns fully toward the officer and rapidly brings his right hand into view.

The hand that a fraction of a second earlier was holding a firearm. The motion is quick, smooth, and it’s far too late for Adam Toledo because the officer has almost certainly already made the decision to shoot, the electrical impulse from the officer’s brain is on its way to his trigger finger, and in this fraction of a second that Toledo’s hand comes into view having just tossed the firearm behind the fence, it is too late to recall the order from the brain. This kid is swinging his weapon up to fire it, and the officer has no way of knowing that he’s thrown the gun away with this motion. As the officer yells, “Drop it!” a second time, he pulls the trigger, firing one shot that strikes Toledo in the chest and will turn out to be fatal. In the still shot above, that trigger is already being pulled.

From the moment that Toledo stops running to the moment the officer shoots him, two seconds elapse. From the moment the officer sees the gun in his hand and yells, “Drop it!” to the moment he fires the shot, one second elapses. From the moment Toledo conceals the gun from the officer’s view, to the moment he swings around and raises his hands, less than a second has elapsed.

In a dark alleyway, as the suspect is alternately illuminated and darkened in the strobing flashlight. An officer all by himself. His heart racing as he confronts an armed individual who he knows has already fired this weapon at others. An armed individual who has just intentionally concealed the firearm in his right hand from view and is now spinning rapidly toward the officer.

Less than one second.

Could you do better? Could you avoid pulling the trigger as his hands come into view? Unless you’ve been in this situation, I hope you aren’t even going to consider giving a definitive answer. Or judging the decision made by this officer.

After firing the shot, the officer immediately runs up to Toledo, calling for an ambulance over his radio and assessing Toledo’s injury. You can tell at this point that the officer has realized that Toledo is a kid, and the distress in his voice and his actions comes across clearly. Within ten seconds he is stretching Toledo out on the ground and lifting his hoodie up, searching for the gunshot wound, and yelling for Toledo to stay with him. Other officers arrive and the officer who fired the shot yells for someone to bring a medical kit for a sucking chest wound. His anguish and panic is heartbreaking, as is the look of shock on the face of the child who is dying. The officer begins chest compressions and doesn’t stop until the 5:00 timestamp where he asks another officer to take over. He stumbles away, in shock over the knowledge that not only has he killed someone, but that it was clearly a child. A child who never should have been in a dark alley at 2:30 a.m. on a Monday morning, carrying a firearm that he never should have had access to.

At timestamp 5:33, the officer who fired the shot and another officer step behind the wall and the officer turns on his light, illuminating the gun that Toledo has tossed behind the wall in a vain and hopeless effort to not be caught in the middle of the crime spree that he’s just been on with 21-year-old convicted felon Ruben Roman who was arrested shortly after this.

At the 8:00 mark of the video, the officer sits with his back to the wall, his hands hanging over his knees, shaking. He seems unable to speak, undoubtedly in shock, his whole life now changed. This is a tragedy for everyone involved, there is no question of that. A 13-year-old boy is dead. A police officer and his family have some incredibly difficult times coming up, and, as I said earlier, the officer will be judged by nearly everyone who watches the video. Judged, tried, and convicted in the court of public opinion, undoubtedly found guilty in that courtroom, though it’s highly unlikely there will be any actual criminal charges filed against him for this incident. What will almost certainly happen though, is that an officer’s career will be ruined. It has to be very difficult to return to duty after an incident like this, and very difficult to live with yourself knowing that although you made the correct choice, you still killed a child. An impossible situation. Two lives utterly ruined in a split second.

Here is the full video if you’d like to see it. Just a warning: it’s graphic and heartbreaking to watch.

Full Video: Chicago Police Shooting 13-year-old Adam Toledo

***Adam Toledo’s right hand later tested positive for gunshot residue, indicating he likely fired this weapon at some point that night, along with the other suspect, Ruben Roman, who has been charged in this case.

The seven shell casings recovered from the shooting scene were matched to the firearm that Toledo tossed behind the fence.

Adam Toledo’s mother said that she thought he was home in bed. She said he had been missing for several days but that she thought she’d heard him come home some time earlier that day and didn’t realize he’d left again. She apparently didn’t bother to check on her son that was missing for several days. She’s currently soliciting donations through GoFundMe.

The officer involved is on paid administrative leave. Here’s hoping he makes it through this difficult time.

A brief history of headboards

A brief history of headboards

The first headboard in recorded history comes to us from hieroglyphics in the Great Pyramid of Giza. The ancient Egyptians didn’t originally use headboards, however, when the Pharaoh Khufu’s wife Henutsen found out that he was building this massive pyramid replete with extravagant his and hers burial chambers, she insisted that the rough, oblique stone slabs were not conducive to a good night’s rest, and she demanded matching headboards. Below is the hieroglyph found in the burial passage of Khufu installing the headboard on Henutsen’s bed. It’s lost to history whether that is an ancient prying tool in his hand, a pry bar of course being an absolutely critical headboard installation/removal tool, or whether it represents a stream of blood coming from his head, a result of the nearly universal injuries sustained in all headboard installations.

Of course, we now know from ancient Arabic translations of the scrolls of Turin, that it was indeed the headboard that caused Khufu to kick Henutsen out of the Great Pyramid and have her buried in a much smaller, mostly unknown pyramid called G1.

We next find mention of the use of headboards with the emperors of Rome, starting with Julius Caesar. Caesar, of course, never used a headboard in his royal villa until Cleopatra started coming over from Egypt to visit. On her first visit, she was dismayed to find that Julius slept on a simple platform elevated off the floor on goat milk crates, and on her next visit, she brought from Cairo not just a headboard, but a full sleigh-style bedframe, much to Caesars dismay. It was this bedframe that caused Caesar to not really care about the consequences, throw caution to the wind, and cross the Rubicon, going to war with his compatriots.

Shortly before Caesars death, we know that Cleopatra began having an affair with Mark Antony, and that she also insisted that a headboard be added to his bedchamber. It was, in fact, this headboard that caused Mark Antony to rule that Cleopatra and Julius’ son, Caesarion would not take over as Julius’ heir after his assassination. When Cleopatra fled back to Egypt after the ascension of Octavion, she took both headboards with her. However, the damage the headboards caused to the Roman Empire was irreversible, and, as we know, it eventually fell from glory.

The next time a headboard was used was in England in 1327. Here’s what we know from this dark period in European history:

Edward II was deposed by his wife Isabella of France and her lover, Roger Mortimer, after Edward II refused to install a headboard on the Royal Mattress and Mortimer promised Isabella a headboard if they could rule England together. This, of course led to Edward II’s son, Edward III leading a successful coup against Mortimer in the Hundred Years War and to the eventual locking of both Mortimer and the headboard in the Tower of London where he starved to death after eating as much of the headboard as he could stomach. History lessons are short-lived however, as upon Edward III’s return from the brutal fighting of the Hundred Years War, he discovered that his wife, Philippa of Hainault had also installed a headboard on their bed. Edward III died of a stroke in 1377 while attempting to get the headboard to stop squeaking every time he shifted in his sleep.

The next Monarch to experience his lover’s insistence upon a headboard was Henry VIII. Henry was perfectly content to sleep on a mattress pushed against the wall, and his first (and best) wife, Catherine of Aragon, was fine with that. It wasn’t until Henry shoved her to the countryside so he could hook up with Anne Boleyn that things began to fall apart for him. Not only would the Catholic Church not allow him to divorce Catherine so he could marry Anne, Anne insisted on installing a headboard and a FULL BEDFRAME on Henry’s perfectly acceptable, completely comfortable mattress that was on the floor and shoved against the wall of the Royal Bedroom in Windsor Castle. Henry thought he was fine with it, but, like all men, he soon realized what a completely unnecessary pain in the ass it was to have to deal with a headboard and a bedframe, particularly when one has to move around to various castles and towers, so, with obvious necessity, Henry had Anne beheaded.

Obviously, there are numerous other people in history who have fallen victim to their wife’s insistence on using a completely unnecessary headboard. Emperor Hirohito created a legion of Kamikaze bombers by making pilots remove and install headboards over and over until they lost the will to live. Hitler’s hatred of the Jews stemmed from the fact that they introduced the headboard to Bavaria, headboards being very useful for hiding their bags of gold. In Salem, Massachusetts, witches were identified by entering women’s bedrooms and arresting any who had a headboard on their bed. Joseph Stalin so hated headboards that he had murdered or sent to Siberia every general and politician in the Soviet Union who used a headboard, in what was originally known as “The Great Purge of the Headboard Users,” though it’s been shortened by historians to just “The Great Purge.” Osama bin Laden’s hatred of the United States and the western world in general was not an effect of a difference of religious beliefs, but rather the United States’ insistence on exporting headboards to Muslim countries. In fact, the reason that Navy Seals were able to get the drop on Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad was because the CIA secretly dropped headboards around Pakistan with a note to please deliver to several of bin Laden’s wives, one of whom accepted delivery and had it installed without bin Laden’s knowledge. That headboard had a GPS tracker that led the Seals right to the compound.

As I sit here in frustration after the arduous task of removing the headboard from my own bed in preparation for a move, a task that has led me to have numerous malignant thoughts, I can’t help but wonder when we’ll learn the lessons of history and finally rid this society of the evils of the headboard. We know that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, and I worry for future generations of men who will have to install and remove these unnecessary and burdensome beasts.

Can’t we just end the madness, once and for all?

An open letter to Conservatives – from one of your own

It’s hard to be a Conservative sometimes. This is one of those times, and in reflecting on the status and future of the Republican Party, I think things are only going to get worse. The Republican Party and conservative values seem to be standing on a vast and crumbling precipice.

And, it’s all our own fault.

I’m a right-leaning centrist who was raised with conservative values. Not only do I like the things typically associated with conservatism, I like the idea of those things. I love the Second Amendment. I love the concepts of duty, patriotism, and love of God and Country. I love the idea of teaching our children and our grandchildren how to shoot guns, how to hunt, how to split wood, and how to farm. I like the idea of an honest day’s work for an honest buck. And, even though I’ve personally stepped away from nearly all of these conservative fundamentalisms, my heart and my soul are still instilled in their conceptions.

Nearly half the country holds the values I’ve mentioned above, and yet, these values, this way of life is in big trouble. It’s dying, and that impending death can be easily traced to just one person.

Donald Trump.

Now, I will accept that it’s possible that many conservative values were doomed for history’s scrap heap of failed ideals even without the influence of Donald Trump. The evolution of humanity is something that can be fought only in vain, and conservatives seem to be uniquely adept at disregarding this truism. Traditionalist notions that marriage is a covenant between God, a man, and a woman, or that a woman’s right to choose is nullified by creationism, or that America is divinely inspired and protected are all very clearly destined to fail. And conservatives seem very loathe to accept the defeat of these “ideals.” The rigidity of this type of thinking was always going to be a problem for the Republican party. These ideas are just simply not compatible with an evolving society. One need only look to Islam, a religion that is a bastion of ultra-conservatism doomed for failure, to see the bleak future of conservative Christianity. Those Imams who propagate Muslim fundamentalist ideas such as the stoning of rape victims, forced marriage, and death to infidels and sodomites are appropriately the targets of unremittent scorn and derision, and they’re not that far behind, evolutionarily speaking, ultra-conservative Christians.  

So, Trump doesn’t necessarily hold full responsibility for the downfall of the Republican party, however, his elevation to the highest office in the land will almost certainly be viewed by historians as an accelerant to our inevitable fall.

When Donald Trump stormed into politics in the 2016 elections, he seemed to be a compelling and enticing alternative to the stuffed-shirt candidates normally thrown to the top of the Republican ticket. Trump held many conservative values such as strict border control and immigration policies, a strong military, a vocal opposition to appeasement of aggressive world leaders, and a deep respect for law and order. He showed strength and conviction in his values, both good and bad, he unhesitantly tossed aside traditional notions of presidentialism and decorum. At the same time, he seemed to be somewhat a centrist on liberal ideals like gay rights and abortion. He promised to “Drain the Swamp,” and to “Make America Great Again,” slogans that were objectively amazing from a marketing perspective, even if they were lacking in substance. The tempering appointment of the more conservative traditionalist Mike Pence to the ticket, along with the anointment of arguably the most irredeemably flawed and despicable candidate to ever ascend to the top of the Democratic ticket, Hillary Clinton, made a Trump presidency an assurance.

And, like nearly half the country, I voted for him. I believed in him. I bought in to the enticing idea of a magnanimous and benevolent billionaire who would make decisions that would be for the good of the country, decisions that were business-oriented, immune to the malignant influence of corporate and foreign lobbyists. There were warning signs…plenty of them, and though I had some deep concerns, I was desperate for a candidate who was outside of the establishment, shunned even by that very establishment, and one who was quite vocal about fighting the status quo and stoppering the whirlpool of decrepit swill that Washington politics had become. Like so many of you, I hoped for change and eagerly anticipated the draining of the swamp. And, like so many of you, I was disgusted by the end result. The grifting conman, the charlatan who showed up to the pillar of democracy flashing a beautifully enticing game of three-card monte and convinced us to wager our dignity, our respect, and our future.

The Donald Trump presidency will be remembered as a massive failure, quite possibly the worst presidency in history. Right up until the election in November, Trump had a chance to cement a decent legacy. Liberals will not agree, of course, because they’re blinded by their hatred of the man they call, “The Orange Buffoon,” but Trump actually accomplished some great things in his presidency. For starters, he kept us out of any new wars, and even ended or greatly reduced the engagements of current wars, and this is something that none of his predecessors for the last few decades can lay claim to. He was successful in implementing criminal justice reform, softening the Justice Department’s stand on drug enforcement, tightening and shoring up illegal immigration, strengthening our borders, and rebuilding and refurbishing our military. However, these accomplishments will eventually be forgotten by the categorical disgrace of the last few months of his presidency.

When Trump lost the election to Biden and immediately declared that there was massive fraud, it was a first step in a dangerous direction, but not surprising in any way. He had been saying and implying for years that he would not accept a loss, and that the only way he could ever lose the election would be due to massive voter fraud. His legal team would go on to file sixty-five lawsuits trying to overturn the election. They would lose sixty-four of those cases, their one victory being overturned by the appeals court and affirmed by the state supreme court. Along the way, Trump would claim that the losses didn’t matter, that losses were necessary in order for the cases to reach the United States Supreme Court where he would win a massive victory. With six of the nine USSC Justices conservatives, three of whom were appointed by Trump himself, this didn’t seem like an impossible goal. Trump’s attorneys, consisting of a powerhouse of far-right lunatics like Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, and Rudy Giuliani, made numerous overtures that they were privy to a secret horde of stunning evidence of wrong-doing, information that would shock the world and prove that Donald Trump was the actual victor. Sidney Powell went so far as to state that she was getting ready to, “release the Kraken,” indicating she was in possession of irrefutable evidence the magnitude of which would forever tarnish the Democratic party and completely vindicate Donald Trump.

Cue the crickets.

She went on to make unfounded and easily refutable claims that the voting machines were rigged by their builders, Dominion Voting Systems, which, she claimed, was founded in Venezuela to rig votes for Hugo Chavez. Her further claims that Dominion bribed the Georgia Governor and Secretary of State (both Republicans) landed her with a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit.

Lin Wood has claimed that Georgia Governor Kemp and SecState Raffensperger colluded and conspired with the Chinese to rig the vote for Joe Biden. He called for their imprisonment, claiming that a secret cabal of international communists, Chinese intelligence agents, and rogue Republican “never Trumper” officials contrived to steal the election from Trump whom he claims garnered a full 70% of the popular vote. Just a month ago, Wood claimed that SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts was involved in the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, that Roberts was a child trafficker, and that Jeffrey Epstein—who he says is still alive—can confirm all of these facts. After January 6th, when Vice President Pence certified the election results, Wood called him a child molester and called for his execution. (These comments have since been removed by Parler where they were posted.)

Why do I have to even mention these formerly fringe lunatics? Because the President of the United States listens to these dangerous fools. He believes them, encourages them, and supports them. And that fact alone is incredibly scary.

No evidence was ever presented to any court in any state that even remotely approached proof or even that of the low bar of reasonable doubt of voter fraud or election tampering. Zero credible evidence–not a shred–was ever presented, despite the pompous blustering of Trump’s high-priced legal eagles. The Supreme Court went so far as to refuse to even hear the cases, so lacking in merit that they were. In a 7-2 decision nonetheless, where the two dissenting judges, Thomas and Alito only dissented because they thought the case should have at least been allowed to be filed. Even in their dissent, they stated they would have rejected the claims and granted no relief had they heard the arguments. It was a resounding defeat of epic proportions. And this from the most conservative SCOTUS in more than 70 years!

And still, Trump carried on, shouting from every virtual and electronic rooftop that he had been wronged and defrauded, that he had won the election “by a landslide,” and that the Democrats had stolen it from him. He tweeted the following after the Supreme Court decision:

“The Supreme Court really let us down. No Wisdom! No Courage!”

Tweet after Tweet after Tweet followed, with Trump begging anybody to act illegally and find a way to overturn the results of the election. Vicious attacks against former supporters followed, and he continued his Twitter rampage by making hundreds of unfounded accusations and by repeatedly, maliciously, and intentionally lying over and over and over to the American people and to his supporters.

And, many of them started to believe it all.

If you’re one of those who fell for his con, it’s okay. It’s kind of hard to blame you. Many of you believe that Trump was anointed by God, and that his victory was actually prophesied. And if that’s true, then how else could he have lost other than the devil stepping in to interfere? The devil in this case is, of course, the Democrats. If you think I’m maybe just talking about a few fringe right-wing lunatics, I’m sorry to inform you that this is a movement in the Right that is frighteningly large, and growing. People like Anna Khait with 300,000 Twitter followers, Matt Couch with 500,000, and Jack Posobiec with over a million are preaching this and other far right nonsense to their wide audiences. Anna Khait, as I write this today, has just indicated that Trump is STILL GOING TO WIN THE ELECTION AND BE INAUGURATED TOMORROW BECAUSE GOD HAS DECLARED THIS TO BE A CERTAINTY! Her tweets have had tens of thousands of likes and thousands of retweets reaching many times her actual Twitter follower count. (Which dropped by about 50,000 after the Twitter purges last week.) Memes and images like this one are making the rounds of Twitter, being shared and retweeted over and over:

The very idea that Donald Trump is such a paragon of virtue that he is God’s chosen representative to lead the United States for two terms is so beyond comprehension that it leaves me flabbergasted. Donald Trump is, in the words of Sam Harris, “a walking bundle of sin and gore.” He’s uncouth, immoral, vain, arrogant, and a dozen other adjectives that embody the very definition of sinner. How he became the true north of the Far Right will be forever beyond my grasp.

I’ve often been worried that by voting for Democrats I’m aligning myself with the party that contains what I’ve always considered to be the most dangerous fringe group in the country, the Radical Left. People like Representative AOC who claimed that looters during the BLM riots simply wanted loaves of bread to feed their families, and Representative Ayanna Pressley who claimed that GOP congressmen who didn’t wear a mask were committing chemical warfare. The party of those who believe in diversity of all types save opinion, where intolerance reigns supreme and Cancel Culture via Critical Race Theory is the guiding light. The party that gave power to the fringe and fraudulent group, Black Lives Matter, and gave Antifa permission to rouse the rioters. The party that was just fine with mob violence until it arrived on their doorstep, spearheaded by conservatives. The party that has an insatiable appetite for division and violence—provided such violence meets its unilateral objectives. This element of the left is disgusting and frightening. However, after seeing the awakening and rising of the Quacks of the Fringe Right, I’m far more terrified of them. Raving lunatics like the attorney, Brian, who had tens of thousands of followers before Twitter finally yanked his account, who believed that Trump’s Space Force was going to activate a satellite on inauguration day and black out all communications so security forces could arrest every democrat in Washington D.C. are reigning disinformation upon feeble-minded conservatives, and they’re attracting followers in droves. QAnon and OAN driven fake news is being sourced by millions as of higher worth than true, legitimate news agencies.

These quacks of the far right are the truly scary ones. It would seem to be a no-brainer to disavow and suppress these people, yet mainstream Republicans have capitulated to them—and to their Supreme Leader, Donald Trump—at unfathomable levels.

It’s okay if you voted for Trump in 2016. It’s even okay if you voted for him in 2020, in spite of the woke telling you it’s not. We have reasons for voting the way we do. Maybe you didn’t like Joe Biden, or you believed he’s in cognitive decline. Maybe you’re sick of the left and their judgmental condemnations of all dissenting opinions. Maybe you’re afraid of leftist policies and higher taxes. If you voted for Trump, you had a reason, and that’s perfectly okay. But if you’re not at least a little bit relieved that he didn’t win, if you’re not at least a little bit glad that we won’t have an objectively dangerous and divisive lunatic at the head of the most powerful country on Earth, then you’re in a cult, unable to see through the fog that surrounds you.

Donald Trump has made a concerted effort to overthrow our democracy and burn our Constitution. There are reports that he had Oval Office meetings in the last few weeks where he considered declaring Martial Law in an effort to stop the Biden inauguration. His call to the State of Georgia trying to get them to find enough votes to give him a victory was almost certainly a violation of the law. His efforts to get Mike Pence to withhold certification of the votes in Congress, and his turning on Pence and calling him a coward when Pence refused to violate his constitutional mandate were reprehensible, unforgiveable, and beyond the pale. He is an insurrectionist by any definition of the term, and that alone is enough reason for us conservatives to band together in disgust and outrage and to disavow this man forever.

Trump throwing his own Vice President to the angry mob

What do we stand for as Americans in our current environment? What do we stand for as conservatives, as Republicans, as decent humans with our current belief system? Trump has desecrated our entire system of government. He sent a mob to the Capitol armed with months of lies and misinformation. The sitting President of the United States inflamed a mob of his supporters and sent them storming down Constitution Avenue as insurrectionists to disrupt the democratic process and the certifying of the vote of an election that he lost. What does that say about our democracy? What does that say to the enemies and detractors of democracy in communist countries? What does it say to suppressed people globally who might one day wish to fight for their own freedom, and might look to democracy and to the United States as an answer?

On January 6th, a shirtless Viking, a tactical guerilla with a bundle of flex cuffs, an Auschwitz emblazoned cast-off from Orange County Choppers, and a Confederate flag-waving suppressionist stalked the hallowed halls of the seat of our democracy hunting down the Vice President of the United States and the Speaker of the House of Representatives like some crazed, Stephen King inspired, dystopian version of The Village People, and the President of the United States implicitly and explicitly encouraged and supported this. You can sit and rightfully make claims of the left’s hypocrisy, but you can’t compare these acts to the degeneration of a BLM protest that resulted in the looting and burning of retail stores. This was completely different. This was an inspired, driven, and meticulously planned assault on our democracy and our constitution. This was an act of insurrection. It was an act of war, perpetrated on the American people by the President of the United States.

This was premeditated in every definition of the word. For years, Trump had refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. On at least half a dozen occasions he flat-out said that the only way he could lose the election of 2020 would be through fraud. He verbally freerolled his way to this result in a meticulously planned operation. He knew that his words held power and sway over his legion of cultists in a way perhaps never before seen in the history of our democracy. And he never backed down, he never swayed in his insistency that it was impossible for him to lose legitimately despite losing every court case. The court record alone is a thoroughly resounding quashing of any insinuation of fraud and impropriety, and yet, his cult remains entranced by his lies, his deceit, and his rhetoric. If you think that Twitter was wrong to revoke the platform he used to inspire this insurrectionist, seditious mob of lunatics, then you’re just not thinking this through. With tens of millions of rabid followers who believe his every word, many of whom are knowingly deranged, he has intentionally destabilized our society for years now. Trump used Twitter to summon a mob of his followers to Washington D.C. on January 6th, and then he inflamed them and turned them loose. The ramifications of Trump’s continued access to such a powerful platform are unthinkably severe.

The lies that Trump has disseminated and the poison that he has spread will long outlive him. Trump is maybe the kind of guy you want to hang out with. Have at your hunting camp. Shoot a game of pool and drink whiskey with. Have over to your private island filled with underage girls. He’s Bill Clinton after a traumatic brain injury. But there has never been a man so ill-suited to serve as President of the United States.

According to this new poll by the Pew Research Center, 57% of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters want to see Trump remain a major political figure for many years to come. You have got to be out of your mind, Republicans. Whatever level of conviction you’re going to hold to your values, it has to be clear at this point that Trump is not the standard-bearer of your way of life. Unless you’re a billionaire who wants to play golf 250 days a year, Donald Trump cannot be the man to whom you will pin your hopes, your dreams, and your future. He will be the death of the Republican party, and like an apocalyptic King Midas, anything he touches will be forever inundated with his putrid stank.

We should want Trump to be convicted in his upcoming Senate impeachment trial. Otherwise he will permanently rend apart the Republican party. Should he run again in 2024 and lose in the primaries, there is literally nothing in the history of his life, or his term in office that would indicate he will take that loss gracefully and fade silently into the night. Among allegations of further voter fraud and tampering by the RNC, he will surely splinter the GOP and strike out as an independent, a move that will assure a fractured base of conservatives for decades to come. The future of the Republican party depends on Trump disappearing from the limelight forever.

Conservatives created the monster that is Donald Trump. And then we lost control of that monster. We have been manipulated by a madman, a cretin of the most vile kind. It’s up to us to reign him in by disavowing him, by admitting that we were wrong, and by accepting the punishment that is Democratic governance of our country for the foreseeable future. We took our chance, loaded up on the pass line, and rolled snake eyes. And now, the marker has come due, and it’s time to pay it with a smile on our faces. Tomorrow, Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 46th President of the United States. Donald Trump will be at his home in Florida when it happens, his petty, petulant vindictiveness shining through brightly in his refusal to meet Biden at the White House and welcome him to his new home like tradition and civility demands. Trump is a disgusting human being, and it’s time we rise up and make sure that America knows that we acknowledge it.

Our country is shattered. Our division has never been wider. It’s up to us to bring it back. On our current trajectory, we are headed toward civil war, and that serves no greater good.