Kids’ Table’s Modern Fables

My cousins in my room in October. Faces redacted (and certain details changed below) for privacy.

My cousin Maggie, thirteen and translucent, is a seasoned veteran of the culture wars.

Her brother Quinn, two years Maggie’s senior, prefers to keep a safer distance from the fray—a fact quite in keeping with his comparatively reserved manner. Quinn plays the angsty, sometimes cagey tenth grader to Maggie’s outspoken, idealistic, tell-all eighth grader. He is smart and witty, often good for a biting one-liner, but his sentences regularly trail off with an uncertain grimace at the floor, or, more often, they are trampled over by Maggie’s animated, triple-speed narration of what both siblings view as an impossibly boring adolescence in Chicago’s northwest suburbs. 

They live in a suburb where the two-story ranch houses all look identical, and apparently, the same is true of the people inhabiting them. I have spent many a college weekend there, being pampered and plied with Trader Joe’s snacks by Quinn and Maggie’s mother—my aunt Lizzie—but I’ve never spent enough time outside their house to learn the local demography. It is far whiter, more Christian, and more conservative than anywhere I’ve lived, Quinn and Maggie inform me on a Sunday in October, visiting my Hyde Park studio apartment for the first time. 

They sprawl across my shedding, muted blue carpet, leaning against the foot of my bed and an armchair that goes un–sat in for hours, while I curl up alone on the couch. I am far more shocked than I should be to learn that Quinn and Maggie’s school district is crawling with fledgling fascists, or at least, people whose proclivity for Trump can be attributed to their parents’ politics. Enemy lines regardless, in the battles Maggie wages daily.

“I started an anti-Trump account with one of my friends—wait, can I talk about this?” Maggie asks, turning to me for confirmation. Quinn chimes in with a knowing, “Ohhh…!” setting the stage for what will, indeed, prove an outlandish and disturbing commentary on the intersection of contemporary American middle schoolers, internet, and politics. 

“Please talk about this!” I beg.

“Okay, so, on Instagram, my friend and I—”

“Alexis,” adds Quinn.

“Yeah. So we made this account, where we were basically posting people that went to our school, that were Trump supporters, said the N-word, were homophobic, or [who were] just racist people, um, and, like, maybe that’s not the best way to deal with it,” Maggie admits with a hint of self-aware sarcasm, “But like, I hate these people so much and if I can’t change them, at least I can have the people that are friends with them, who aren’t racist, know that they’re racist. So, within minutes of starting this and following a bunch of people, like seven of the Popular Girls DMed us, saying, ‘Oh my god, I love this account, whoever’s running this, I love you.’ They were sending us their friends, who are Popular Boys, saying, ‘This person said the N-word; this person’s a Trump supporter.’”

 The Popular Kids, albeit not friends or fans of theirs, are frequent characters in Quinn and Maggie’s storytelling. The two of them are at different schools for the time being, as Maggie’s finishing middle school while Quinn’s nearly halfway through high school—and both are learning virtually for the time being, anyway, due to COVID. But the nature of local teen popularity is such that Maggie’s invocation of “the Popular Girls” or “the Popular Boys” is immediately, wholly understood by Quinn, as the Popular People are basically interchangeable. Popularity is inherited; a rite passed down from micro-generation to micro-generation such that the constituent parts of the machine—the names, faces, hairstyles, and sometimes, even, the norms and views—shift slightly from year to year, but the whole that these parts comprise—the Popular Group—is forever.

The Popular Girls were mean to Quinn in sixth grade. They made fun of him, which he initially chalks up to his being “kind of weird” back then, but then he adds that it could’ve been rooted in homophobia, or transphobia, or something. In a largely cis/het/closeted school district, Quinn is still one of very few openly trans students. “I was still kind of figuring out identity in sixth grade,” Quinn tells me. 

Two years later, when she was in sixth grade, Maggie dangled on the outskirts of the Popular Girls’ group. She was a second-choice friend, mostly good for gossipping to when everyone else was busy, then ditching as soon as they weren’t, and she was also trying to figure out her identity. In sixth grade, Maggie had short hair, which was interpreted by everyone as a sure sign that she was gay, and she identified as a lesbian for a time, too. She’s no longer sure about her sexuality.

Maggie used to go to Pride Club, a rare piece of school that she really enjoyed, but she tells me that it’s no longer a thing. “All the Popular Boys, the day after [Pride Club] was announced, would all ask each other, like, ‘Yo, Jake, are you going to Pride Club after school?!’ but in a bullying way.” The Popular Girls are different—as a rule, they loved Call Me by Your Name. Maggie and Quinn haven’t watched Call Me by Your Name—Maggie tried, but found herself too disgusted two minutes in to continue—but both of them rail against what they take to be a truly offensive representation of LGBTQ people, citing the age difference between Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet’s characters, and preemptively dismissing Italy’s legal age of consent as a morally invalid argument in the fictional couple’s favor, though that isn’t something I’d have ever thought to bring up. 

Maggie’s under the impression that Hammer is meant to portray a categorically abusive forty-two-year-old, though I double-checked, and she has the digits inverted. (Hammer plays the twenty-four-year-old lover of a seventeen-year-old Chalamet.) With their newfound love of Call Me by Your Name, the Popular Girls have officially okay-ed (white, cis, stereotypically masculine) gayness, and now find themselves in search of a collective Gay Best Friend who fits those parameters and will look good next to them on social media. 

Maggie professes her aversion to this sickly-sweet brand of Popular Girl Ally with loud imitations of them (“My gay bean!!!” and “I love Timmyyyyyy [Chalamet]!!!”) interspersed with louder sighs of disgust—but I still get the sense that she craves their approval. 

(To Quinn, a natural-born lone wolf in a way that his sister never has been, I don’t know that the same is true, at least not anymore. But I digress.)

Maggie continues her call-out Instagram saga, relishing its building drama. An hour into the account’s existence, she tells me, she and Alexis had racked up 24 followers, and an hour later, they had 40 follow requests pending approval. Immediately, though, “these people—the people that I was exposing—found out, and they tried to dox me—”

“WHAT?!” I ask, blown away by the trajectory of society in general.

“All in one night. Yeah, this was crazy,” Quinn confirms.

“Yeah, so this kid who went to my school DMed me, ‘Who is this?’ and I was like, ‘Um, the point of this is to be anonymous, because some people at my school don’t really like me, so if they don’t really like me they might not support this as much…’ And this kid really wanted to know who I was, so he was like, ‘You know, I could just grab your IP address and find out,’ and he was [also] like, ‘I promise I’m not a Trump supporter,’ and so this whole fight went on, but this absolute idiot kid—it was so stupid—he sent me a link, and it said ‘grabify.com,’ the most obvious link ever, and the link [preview] showed a video [titled], ‘50 Reasons to Like Trump,’ and he was like, ‘This is why I like Trump.’ So I said, ‘Well, first of all, earlier you said that you don’t. And also, this [link] says grabify.com.’” 

Maggie pauses briefly, trying to decide if there’s a version of this scenario in which she reports something like this to the police. She decides that there isn’t. “But I said ‘You know doxxing is illegal, right?’” Maggie confides to Quinn and me that she doesn’t think it is illegal, at least not in every situation. “But this kid’s dumb; he believed it. He started apologizing, and he deleted all of his messages, but I’ve got screenshots of all of them. He just started being like, ‘I’m just gonna kill myself, goodbye.’”

“Jesus!”

“I know… We spammed him with the suicide hotline number, and were like, ‘You okay mate?’ and he just blocked us. I mean, I genuinely don’t think he was really trying to kill himself.” Quinn reaches for his phone, and tries to send Maggie a grabify.com link of his own to test its IP-tracking savvy.

“And then this other kid posted saying that he had my address,” Maggie continues, “so I deleted the account. But I have some evidence of some really weird sh—uh, poop poop—that he did in fifth grade, that also isn’t that big of a deal, but I don’t think that he wants that stuff getting out, so if he ever doxxes me, I can just post about that, because he did some really weird stuff to my friends.” (Later, Maggie clarifies that the “sh—” in question was his sending her friends unsolicited dick pics, and begging them to send nudes of their own. In fifth grade.)

“That’s crazy. So wait, if they were to dox you, that would mean… exposing your identity and giving people your address?”

“Yeah. I mean, it’s just people from my school, but they’d know who I was, and these are the kind of boys that, if they knew who I was, they could probably cyberbully me to like—uh, like, they could really be mean… I wish I weren’t scared of them, but they’re kind of terrifying.”

And then Maggie laughs. She quickly launches into another sub-story, this one about a local fifth grader who also stormed into the account’s DMs with a vengeance and a MAGA-hatted selfie, in which he looks three. Maggie didn’t know, at first, that the kid was in fifth grade, and he didn’t know that she wasn’t. He would spam her with repeated “FUC* BIDEN”s—just like that, with the “K” bleeped. He tried to get her to fight back, but sometimes the most infuriating thing a person can do is staying calm, and that’s what Maggie did. He switched tacks; tried to intimidate her. He kept insisting that, at five-foot-seven, he was probably taller than her. (To his credit, that is far above average for a fifth-grade boy, and Maggie’s only five-foot-six.) “‘I’m eleven, I bet I look older than you,’” he wrote. “I was like, ‘dot dot dot,’” Maggie giggles. “He didn’t threaten to dox me. I don’t think he knew how.”

(Of course, they don’t teach doxxing until sixth grade these days.)

Beyond exposing their peers’ Trumpism and general racism, Maggie and Alexis’s account also reposted “stuff” (petitions and Canva-style infographics), and it helped circulate anti-racist petitions for people to sign. 

“And I got so many nice responses. I’m so mad that I had to delete it!” 

I ask Quinn and Maggie if there’s anybody who they would consider an activist at either of their schools. Maggie says yes. “Some people went to [Black Lives Matter] protests” early this summer, Maggie tells me. “I mean, I went to one…” 

Quinn, though, tells me that “activism culture in [his] school was posting a black square for that one day”—referring to the tide of black that swept Instagram on June 2, 2020, for a supposed “#BlackOutTuesday,” which received flak in its immediate aftermath for being both misguided and disruptive to actual organizing efforts—“and then never saying anything about it again.”

Maggie tells me that she and Alexis and a few other girls at their school “try to post things every day, if we can” (the same sorts of petitions and Canva-style infographics). I don’t think she yet knows the now-ubiquitous term “virtue signaling,” but Maggie assures me that that isn’t what she’s doing with her platform. On the subject of her personal Instagram activism, and the one protest she attended with Alexis, Maggie says, “It’s not like us flexing, like, ‘I'm trying to be cool,’ but yeah, we sometimes do a little bit of stuff. I mean, as much as we can do when we're thirteen-year-olds in a mainly white suburb.”

Maggie muses that she might bring back the short-lived call-out project, this time on Snapchat. She’s still worried about the chance that she could be doxxed, but she predicts that it will be harder for people to capture her IP address over the more instantaneous, mobile-exclusive photo-sharing platform, since it’s harder to share links there than it is on Instagram. She starts ranting about another kid, Phillip, whose Instagram profile picture reads “White Lives Matter,” whiny and nasal as she mourns her deleted criticisms of him, taken down quickly over credible fears of retribution. “And, I really—GOD—I’m gonna start this up again and I’m gonna, like, demolish them all.”

The one problem that remains? Maggie really doesn’t know what she’d use for the account’s Bitmoji, Snapchat’s customizable cartoon version of a profile picture.

“Do you have to have a Bitmoji?” I ask, having happily deleted Snapchat years ago, and consequently unaware of its latest updates.

“It’s sketchy if you don’t,” I am quickly informed.

—

When Quinn was little, he was stunningly precocious, but in a cute way. He was a voracious and early reader. As a toddler, he could serve up esoteric dinosaur facts at a moment’s notice, and his vocal pitch (to my tone-deaf and attention-hungry younger self’s chagrin) was widely praised as “perfect” from the moment he hummed along to his first tune. His ear for music clearly came from Lizzie, a professional violist, but Quinn’s smarts seemed uniquely his own, a golden anomaly in a family of quite average intelligence. As a nine-year-old, I was (slightly) prouder to have a genius in the family than I was jealous.

But now Quinn’s older and a cynic, and the promise of his early youth hasn’t translated neatly to performance in school. Especially while learning remotely, Quinn explains, he’s focused solely on getting through each day, and he can’t bother attending to the quality of his work. His highest grade in any class right now is a C. 

While Maggie loves learning remotely—or not learning, as the case may be—Quinn sees cons (and I suppose, by default, the pros) to both in-person and virtual learning. He has begun to long for the six hours of escape from his family that school once reliably provided. “I think I'm under less stress now, because [school is] online, but also more stress, because Liz is around, and she’s even more… on top of what I'm doing, homework-wise. But it's also nice, because I get to be at home and in a familiar environment, with fewer people that I don't like—only three people that I don't like, instead of a whole school full.” 

Quinn seems stuck. Rationally, he knows these three things to be true: first, that everyone from school still exists even if only in their social media posts, second, that he is still technically aging and advancing through the education system despite spending all of his time in his room, and third, that teenagers do not stay teenagers forever, and therefore he’s due, soon, to experience some crushing pressure to figure out his future. 

But he’s having trouble internalizing any of it.

Music is Quinn’s dream career, if he can swing it. He’s recently picked up bass guitar, and, not one to own up to liking just anything, he cops to enjoying his School of Rock cover bands—first Bowie; now The Who. He has a Spotify playlist of all of his favorite songs that is thirty-one hours long, but he refuses to show me. He’s private about his music. But if he could join a real band eventually, and find some success, and live on the road in between big cities, “that would be cool.”

With his sweep of dark brown hair usually dyed, today streaked an understated red, and half of his fingernails painted teal, and a smile that’s tight-lipped and quick and requires the briefest of upturned chins and subtlest of raised eyebrows, he looks the part. 

But Quinn seems unconvinced, and characteristically underwhelmed, by his own dream of being in a band—maybe it’s not his true dream (insofar as any of us can know our “true dreams,” especially as teenagers), or maybe it’s too far-fetched to believe in. Shrugging in preordained defeat, Quinn tells me, “I feel like I have all these plans of things I want to do and places I want to go, but then the second I can, I’ll probably just be too scared and I’ll be like, ‘Oh, this takes a lot of effort,’ and then nothing will really happen.” 

(Touché.)

Maggie is far more animated than Quinn when describing her life goals, even though they seem less purpose-driven than those of her older brother. Most urgently by far, Maggie plans to find minimum wage work the moment she’s fourteen and legally old enough to do so, and then to squirrel away her earnings from that job for two years, so that at sixteen she can buy a van (à la #vanlife) and have her dad help her “fully convert it.” 

Mark is a handyman of epic proportions, and is currently building a fourth bespoke bed frame for Maggie in the span of just a few years, always using scraps material and machinery at the metal parts manufacturing plant that he owns. The first of this PB Teen parade of beds was a loft, suspended from Maggie’s ceiling and walls, and then briefly from Quinn’s, when Maggie tired of it in just a month or two. Reminiscing on his brief but beautiful loft bed days, Quinn says, “Yeah, I kind of miss that one. That was nice!” To which Maggie emphatically tags on, “Me too!!! God, I’d do anything to have it back.” 

(I am dumbfounded.) 

At my request, Maggie runs through the bed list: “There was the loft bed, the skid, the nice bed frame, and now this one [that’s still under construction].” The “nice bed frame,” which she and Quinn easily agree is Mark’s masterpiece so far, simply didn’t look good in her room, she says. Too many LED lights—the whole place looked too much like “The Backrooms,” Maggie tells me, referring to an Internet-generated horror-fantasy about a series of endless rooms that I had never heard of before today, and doubt I will ever understand. “No one believes me when I say this,” Maggie says, “but genuinely, when I move out and like, have an apartment, I’m gonna bring that thing with.”

Her forthcoming bed frame is based on an Instagram ad Maggie saw once, and, when shown a screenshot of the advertisement alongside a photo of Mark’s progress so far, Quinn and I agree that the resemblance is uncanny. Maggie firmly did not inherit any of her father’s construction skills, she says. Nor was she gifted Lizzie’s musical bent, as Quinn is quick to point out. (The best one can give Maggie is the benefit of the doubt, tracing her nascent passion for [re]decorating back to our grandmother, now a semi-retired interior designer.) Nevertheless, Maggie claims to have “helped build this recent [bed] a lot.” However, she doesn’t believe that it’ll hold up very long under her negligible weight. “It’s not the strongest,” she thinks. “I’m not expecting it to last that long. And when it breaks, I’ll put the other one back in there.” 

(Precisely which other one remains unclear, but two things do seem abundantly obvious: First, the bed frame will not break, and second, before it’s given a chance to even think about breaking, Maggie will simply dream up an entirely new bed and Mark, unable to resist the new design challenge, will build it for her.)

Once equipped with an Insta-worthy itinerant abode at sixteen, Maggie would like to move at least as far as her parents’ driveway. She became obsessed with #vanlife in fourth grade, she tells me, and she performs an indignant pout—but seems ultimately unbothered—whenever her family ridicules her plan, which is daily. 

She hopes, too, that her earnings from two years working part-time at an as-yet-undetermined service industry job will later cover both her college tuition (ideally at any school in London that will have her), and rent money for an apartment like mine. 

Maggie once dreamed of visiting France, too. But TikToks have cautioned her against it. She tells me about a particularly worrisome brand of TikTok whose initial captions usually read something like, “Me going to France,” immediately followed by scenes depicting “My mom telling me to hide my Jewish star or I’ll get shot.” This isn’t to suggest that Maggie wears a Jewish star, or even that she, technically of half-Protestant heritage, looks particularly Jewish. But I suppose that one need not fear a personal confrontation with anti-Semitism to feel unsure about visiting a place where, TikTok (and, admittedly, sometimes the news) would have one believe that anti-Semitic hate crimes abound.

And while their town hasn’t proven to be especially anti-Semitic in their experience, it’s not nearly as Semitic as my East Coast upbringing, or my UChicago present. Maggie guesses that there are about four other Jews at her school—a population still double that of Black students—and she adds that she only knows about one of them because she saw someone wearing a Jewish star one time. 

I am confused (apparently still caught up in memories of Quinn’s low-key 2018 bar mitzvah, which I attended on a rainy October weekend and in fact photographed) so I ask them to clarify the demographics and whereabouts of the other congregants of their synagogue, which is located minutes from their town. “I don’t go to temple anymore!” Maggie is quick to respond. Quinn adds that he doesn’t even say he’s Jewish anymore, normally. This isn’t particularly surprising, given the noncommittal Judaism of our family as a whole, but their mother recently re-committed. In 2019, Lizzie went on a Birthright Israel knockoff catering specifically to Northern Illinois moms, and the trip served its purpose. She became a bit of a born-again Jew. 

(I’d venture to say that Lizzie’s faith has since shifted again—away from organized Judaism and toward Peloton—but she still wears a Jewish star necklace, anyway.) 

After his bar mitzvah, Quinn decided, “‘This isn’t serving me. I don’t feel anything about it.’” Maggie says she still wants to have a bat mitzvah, though her temple-assigned date has come and gone, and her mom cried when the day passed. Maggie says she’s not sorry. Still, eventually, ideally somehow without returning to Hebrew school, she thinks she might like to have a bat mitzvah. For the “experience,” she says—and also the money. “But I’m not, like, blatantly doing it for the money,” she assures me. Maggie says she doesn’t really care that much if it happens, either way. But part of her passive interest also lies in her mother’s Jewish Renaissance; empirical proof that she may, in fact, someday feel called to return to the faith, however unlikely that might seem from where she sits hunched over right now, balling up the lint that she’s been methodically extracting from the fibers of my carpet.

Maggie is exhilarated by the idea of having her own space, and the freedom to travel and live in a city, even one as close to home as Chicago if it comes to that, financially. Ever the young apartments.com savant, Maggie knows that Chicago is more affordable than New York or London, the only other cities apparently on her radar (a fact I’d be more inclined to mock if it weren’t also disturbingly true of myself). Maggie shows me a newly redone Manhattan one-bedroom that she’s had her eye on, drooling over its clever use of so little space; lamenting its unfathomably high price tag. She and Quinn agree that she’s the more likely of the two to remain in Northern Illinois for the foreseeable future.

Maggie is not exhilarated by the idea of actually working the minimum-wage job that she envisions as the key to her future, nor working to pass her classes—middle school, high school, college, or otherwise—nor is she excited about the prospect of working “another boring desk job,” for which, as she sees it, college is a bona fide breeding ground. Most miserable of all, of course, would be her “worst fear in the world” coming true: “Marrying a boring person, moving to the suburbs, and having two kids and a big house. Basically the life that my parents live.” Quinn points out that some people are happy with that. “I would not be happy with that—,” Maggie retorts. 

Quinn, interrupting her with a revised question and in so doing, proving himself a savvier interviewer than I a mere eight minutes into our wandering conversation, asks Maggie, “Are you afraid of being happy living like that? Is that what you’re really scared of?” 

“...Yes.” 

Luckily (???), Maggie cannot quite imagine her worst fear coming true. That stems from the same core truth that I think she’d also blame for her lack of longer-term ambitions: She doesn’t think that she’ll live past thirty. Quite matter-of-factly, without any of the fast-talking fervor that she reserves for topics like van remodeling and the existential agony of living in the suburbs, Maggie blames her impending demise on her poor diet. 

Maggie’s diet is infamously limited to simple carbs (white bread; white potatoes) and simple cheeses (mozzarella; cheddar; American). More recently, she’s added heavy cream to the rotation, sipped in secret and straight from the carton. This general diet—which, as I recall, has stayed fairly stagnant ever since Maggie was weaned off breast milk—has doubtless taken its toll on her health, as well as being a near-endless source of drama for over a decade. Her eating habits have served too many times as unsolicited referendums on her parents’ parenting skills, as children’s troubles so often do, and have caused the (alleged) first defeat of a renowned pediatric food therapist in the area. Maggie, I was once told, was the therapist’s first client too stubborn to be saved. 

Much like Quinn feels that his tendency toward homesickness will have faded by the time he leaves home for good, Maggie thinks that age might expand her taste buds’ horizons, with everything but fruit—whose juiciness causes her psychic pain—seeming like relatively attainable food goals for her (older) self to work toward. Regardless of the possibilities for a future expanded palate, though, a general distaste for aging mixed with a lifetime of unsubtle hints from Lizzie have left Maggie casually convinced that her proclivity for grilled cheese sandwiches with nothing on the side will be the literal death of her. “Probably I’d get some sort of disease—coronavirus, or something—and then I’d just… not live on because of how unhealthy I am,” she predicts, utterly nonchalant. “Peace out!” 

Extremely skinny and somewhat tall; with large eyes and large circles around them; pale-complexioned and with wavy, light brown hair that, like Quinn, she’s always bleaching and dyeing at home, in the right clothes and a certain light, Maggie might look to a passer-by like a miniature model whose work walking grungy, high-fashion catwalks has worn her to the bone. Her front teeth feature an impressively large gap (the largest you’ve ever seen, I’d wager) and are being orthodontized tomorrow. She doesn’t want braces, but she doesn’t have a choice. 

I start to ask Maggie if she’s ever seen those iconically gap-toothed “Get the London look” eye makeup commercials, and before I can finish, she recites the Rimmel tagline back to me in its original British. Quinn pipes up that Maggie has the London look “and more.” 

She says she’d prefer Invisalign, but I don’t quite understand Maggie’s angst surrounding the optics of her forthcoming braces, because she simply won’t be seeing anyone. She’s been only hanging out with one other person, anyway (Alexis, her only consistent friend for the past six years), but now their school is reopening on a voluntary basis for in-person instruction, and Alexis is going back, whereas Maggie and Quinn have chosen to stay home for the rest of the year. 

And while they’re officially required to keep their cameras and microphones on for Zoom class, both Quinn and Maggie prefer to ignore that rule. 

Maggie takes that obstinacy to new extremes, opting to respond via Zoom’s chat function, rather than vocally, whenever she’s asked a question or is otherwise addressed in class. She estimates that nobody from school, other than her teachers during virtual breakout rooms, and Alexis, has heard her voice since March. She tells me that she prefers to fly under the radar; to avoid the prying eyes that necessarily accompany the thin green line around one’s name/profile picture/live video stream when one speaks on Zoom—and I wonder whether her muteness ultimately deflects attention, or accidentally attracts it.

Now that Alexis might be exposed to the coronavirus at school, Maggie plans to stop seeing her, and therefore anybody outside her family, for the foreseeable future. 

—

Neither Quinn nor Maggie has ever had very many friends. Whenever they discuss their past—anything further behind them than a year or so—they rely heavily on describing themselves as weird, or annoying, but they don’t seem to be particularly upset about those versions of themselves. The one exception, maybe, is a semi-secret seventh grade relationship Quinn tells me about. The girl—who would not be named—broke up with him after three months, claiming they needed to take a break, which, three years on, shows no signs of ending. Quinn seems to think that the cause of the split was his innate annoyingness. The whole thing was really bad, he says, “because I didn’t understand what, like, love was.” 

Of the two, Quinn especially relies on the internet for his friendships. He tells me about an Instagram group chat that he’s been in for a few years now, whose participants hail from all around the country and world, and whom he considers his best friends. “I only really talk with them, and like, two other people.”

Maggie’s part of a few similar groups online. One is a Twitter microsphere whose members first found one another on TikTok, and another is a group Instagram DM featuring e-friends with whom she sometimes plays “Among Us,” an online multiplayer game that I hadn’t heard of until today, but which I’m told rivals Fortnite (which I’ve never played but have heard of) in its newfound virality. Quinn says he doesn’t play Among Us, but that it’s somewhat similar to Animal Crossing, which I have also never played.

“No one has Facebook anymore,” my cousins laugh dismissively, confirming what I already strongly suspected. On second thought, Maggie technically holds an account. “I only have it so that I can play Subway Surfers and not lose my progress.”

Maggie seems further emotionally removed from her online communities than Quinn. She brings up the possibility that all of her Instagram “friends” could easily be middle-aged men posing as teens, and she seems completely at peace with that. She mentions with a giggle that one of her interlocutors went inactive a few months ago when he was sent to jail, supposedly for stabbing someone. 

(To be fair, if one of your friends is going to be armed and dangerous, it’s best that he only exists within the confines of your phone screen, anyway.)

Quinn and Maggie emphatically declare that TikTok is ruining their attention spans. I’m denied any real insight into the so-called TikTok “spheres” they fall into, though Quinn does tell me that he and Maggie have similar taste in TikToks, and that the app and its highly addictive content is best described as “a mess.” YouTube videos, formerly sources of inspiration and usurpers of Maggie’s precious screen time, now seem far too long for her to stomach; fifteen seconds has become the ideal timeframe for a shot of content.

“Do you read, ever? Like, reading for pleasure…?” I interject, knowing the answer as I pose the question. Their answers are, indeed, two slightly embarrassed variations on “never.” 

When Quinn was only a year or two old, he began reciting favorite fairy tales as their pages were flipped in front of his face. We all marvelled, and periodically weighed in on whether we thought he was reciting purely from memory, or if he’d somehow taught himself to read. I proudly got him hooked on Harry Potter the moment I deemed him ready for it. He was young; years younger than I’d been when I reached that modern reading milestone. The Harry Potter franchise—particularly its films, audiobooks, and online fandom; not so much the printed books, anymore—is one of the few that’s loomed large for an extended period of time in both Quinn and Maggie’s lives. So many obsessions have come and gone in blinks of their eyes, but Harry Potter, for better or worse, has stuck.

But it’s been tainted now by J.K. Rowling’s transphobia and racism, ugly truths that seem to pop up at the forefront of the online discourse every few months, now. Quinn and Maggie comfort themselves with the knowledge that Rowling’s probably not earning any more royalties whenever they indulge in her audiobooks as a way to lull themselves to sleep, given that the content has long been downloaded on their iPads, and it’s a sunk cost. There’s no getting that money back from Rowling now, so might as well make use of it. Maggie spends a few minutes hate-flipping through an online shop Rowling sometimes promotes; one which specializes in transphobic handicrafts. She passes around her phone, showing Quinn and me a particularly offensive selection of cheap buttons featuring TERF-y cartoons and slogans like, “A woman is not a costume,” and “Biology isn’t bigotry,” and we respond appropriately, in choruses of “ew”s and “I hate her”s.

A pause. “I wanna be that cool…canvas tote always filled with books…like, dark academia, canvas-tote-book-girl. But also, I don’t like books! There’s no good books that I can find,” Maggie complains. 

(What the hell is “dark academia”?)

Harry Potter movies are the only things longer than TikToks that Maggie will watch, from time to time, nowadays. Confused, I ask her what happened to Umbrella Academy, a popular YA Netflix series about (I believe) teen superheroes tasked with saving the world. The last time I was at their house, I’d heard that Maggie, with her ever-agreeable father, was bingeing the series for the third consecutive time, and consequently spent most of her time downstairs in family living room, on the sectional couch in front of the big TV, rather than remaining fully out of sight, upstairs in her bedroom.

“I mean I like it, but I stopped rewatching it!” she tells me. “This is the thing: I get obsessed with things so quickly. I go crazy about them for like, a month, and then I just completely abandon them. Like Star Wars—I usually even create fan accounts to be, like, included in the fandom and the jokes—but the only one that I’ve been obsessed with for that long is the Harry Potter fandom. But it kind of sucks because the author sucks.” 

—

The internet is where Quinn and Maggie spend entire days and weeks, their time in the digital space interrupted only by the occasional bike ride—sometimes together, sometimes alone—often to the gas station in the center of town, where they buy Monster Energy drinks, and then drink them in the deserted upper levels of a nearby parking garage, indulging in streaky sunsets, sometimes smoking tea bags. With Lizzie in my apartment again, back from a grocery run and now humming along to folk rock as she cleans parts of my kitchen that I’d never even thought to check for grime, they won’t confirm or deny whether they ever smoke anything more psychoactive than chamomile or Earl Grey. But Lizzie is also the woman who, little do they know, mere weeks ago read aloud Maggie’s recent search history to make my brother and me laugh—she can access that on Circle, the same Disney-owned app for omnipotent parents that she uses to distribute and withhold WiFi. The Google history, which Lizzie performed for us in the style of spoken word poetry, read something like a weed treatise: “CBD vs. THC; where to buy edibles; green world IL; greens for teens; megamarijuanastore.net; chicago northwest dealers,” and it went on. 

A few months ago, she was forced to flush an expensive bottle of Oregonian weed gummies down the toilet when her children discovered their hiding place and broke in.

I am surprised when Quinn and Maggie insist that they grew up too fast—or at least, faster than their more conservative peers were ever allowed to—online. They both warily refer to “that part of Tumblr” like it could reach out of any nearby device and hurt them if they weren’t careful, and I don’t press the subject, unsure if I actually want to know what went on in “that” particular corner of cyberspace. 

For the past three or so years, Quinn estimates, he and Maggie have been subject to Circle. It can limit devices’ screen time and betray untoward search histories, but it can also filter out certain websites that are deemed inappropriate. Now that they’re finally filtered on the internet, Quinn and Maggie complain, it’s far too late for them.

In between anecdotes proving how barely restricted internet access since infancy taught them everything they know, Maggie and Quinn vehemently lambast their public school health education curricula. Quinn confirms that “middle schoolers are insane now.” He firmly believes his peers’ claims about their crazy sex lives; is steadfast in his confidence that “pretty much everyone was on coke last homecoming.” I don’t believe that, but I remember the embarrassment of being thirteen, and showing my cooler, older friend Ben a video that one of my classmates had posted on Vine, in which she purported to be snorting cocaine, only for Ben to laugh and reassure me that it was just flour. I nod gravely, and ask Quinn to continue. He is adamant about the need for earlier, more comprehensive, sex education. 

School is not Maggie’s forte. Though I’ve heard through the grapevine that she’s secretly a very strong writer, the only academic successes that Maggie recounts for me come from health class. Last year, in seventh grade, her health class played “drug bingo.” Maggie handily won the game, having answered every single question correctly, and she earned a rainbow eraser for her efforts. But her success came at a cost: A classmate in both health and Spanish class, Bennett, took to constantly accusing her of being a drug (Juul and weed) addict. “One time, I was walking in the hallway during a class break, or something. And I had really bad posture, just slouching—like, swimming along in the hallway. I looked blazed out of my mind. I wasn’t, but I looked really high. [Bennett] was like, ‘Daydreaming about buying weed?’” Quinn snickers, and Maggie pauses for dramatic effect. “And like—I was, that’s the thing.” Bennett was so weird about it, Maggie insists, rolling her eyes. “Like, fan behavior, Bennett!” 

(Fan behavior. Noun?: “Someone who is always stalking your social media’s [sic] and wanting to know your business. They may even want to be like you and begin to copy your style/moves despite not liking you. They don’t want the best for you and are typically jealous of you and/or your success. They talk about you/think about you/lurk on you/copy you/are in your business as if they were your biggest fan.” – Urban Dictionary)

In the more sex-based units of health class, too, an unfiltered childhood on the internet made Maggie the resident expert, much to her classmates’ displeasure and confusion. In this instance, like so many, “People always thought I was really weird,” Maggie says. She consistently got the spicier anatomy reproduction questions right (think “nocturnal emissions,” not just “ovaries,” she explains). She found herself unable to keep quiet, unthinkingly declaring aloud, “YES, I got them all right!” whenever she got them all right.

A regular—if fairly unbothered—victim of shaming herself, Maggie consistently goes out of her way to qualify her reflections on the peers she considers harmless with very genuine disclaimers of “no judgment.” Referring back to her call-out Instagram page, Maggie explains, “Another service I offered was, ‘Give me a Trump supporter’s @, and I’ll bark at them in their comments.’” By way of explanation, Maggie says, “I just sometimes bark at people—but I’m not, like, a furry,” referring to a community of people who adopt  “fursonas,” anthropomorphized animal characters, per furscience.com. Quickly, she clarifies her stance on the matter: “I’m not anti-furry, unless they sexualize animals.”

Maggie, who, like Quinn, fancies herself a bit of a stoner—in fact, she’s steadfast in her belief that one basically needs to be, in order to survive the monotony of the suburbs—is similarly quick to reassure me that she has nothing against people who she describes as “drug-active,” though she and Quinn are both slightly worried for their peers who do cocaine and recreational Xanax. And when it comes to both of their former obsessions with super-popular Korean boy band BTS, Maggie says, “I feel so sorry for anyone who was friends with me during that time, ’cause, like, I’m not gonna bully anyone about their interests, but… it’s all [BTS stans] post about.” 

(Stan. Noun/Verb?: “The terms [sic] means a very very overzealous and obsessed fan of a celebrity/band/cast of a tvshow [sic] or movie.” – Urban Dictionary. I knew this one.)

I ask Quinn and Maggie if anything’s cropped up in the past seven years to replace Ask.FM, an anonymous online question forum that dominated the cyberbullying scene when I was in eighth grade. They describe, to my mounting horror, “YOLO,” a Snapchat add-on that functions on peoples’ smartphones more or less how Ask.FM once did on our parents’ bulky, white-hot laptops—but which caters to a Gen-Z infinitely more cruel and sexually explicit than I could’ve conceived of back in the early 2010s. Girls known to struggle with mental illness and self-harm, including a friend of Maggie’s who everybody knows spent time in a psychiatric ward last year, are routinely coaxed into public “wrist reveals.” On the heels of demands to see girls’ mutilated wrists come incessant requests for their nudes, and for hook-ups. “Oh yeah, every time a girl posts a YOLO, everybody’s asking—” Quinn says, and Maggie cuts him off: “It’s like, ‘I wanna see your tits,’ or something. Like, ‘Send me pics.’ It’s horrible. It’s really gross.”

“Ewww,” I begin, physically nauseous. But Maggie cuts in again. “I’m not, like, shaming these people for being sexual,” she clarifies. Let the record show.

Asked about cancel culture, Quinn and Maggie equivocate. “There’s a difference between ‘canceling’ someone for saying something wrong,” Quinn points out, “and calling out people who’ve done horrific things, and are awful people.” Maggie agrees, adding, “I wasn’t gonna be like, ‘CANCELED!’ I was gonna be like, ‘’Kay, do better.’ Like, ‘Stop doing this, or face the consequences—deal with the fact that people aren’t gonna really want to hang out with you if you’re racist.’”

Later, though, she seems to amend that position: “If they’re not gonna change, I might as well attack them.” 

“[Fighting] is a good way to educate yourself,” Quinn agrees.

“And if it doesn’t work, then it’s just a pastime, I guess,” Maggie admits, unbothered.

—

Omegle, a website whose sole purpose is to automatically pair its users with strangers to talk to (or worse) over video or text chat, has been around at least since I was a middle schooler who sometimes had sleepovers with friends who had their own computers. Given its bizarre functionality and enormous potential for harassment, the site has enjoyed a longevity that would be shocking to me if it weren’t so deeply not. 

Alexis, Maggie says, frequents Omegle—alone!—to video chat with strangers, expressly intending to pick fights with those who support Trump. Alexis was fighting with a Trump supporter called Trevor just last night, actually. But Trevor is no far-off forty-year-old. He’s just one of the local cast of characters. He had a crush on Quinn in sixth grade, before Quinn came out; also in sixth grade, he openly bragged to Quinn about having seen his mother’s nudes (flirty and fun!); he was creepy toward Alexis when she was eleven and he was thirteen; he almost definitely sold Alexis’s fifteen-year-old sister Bailey the Xanax she took at homecoming and didn’t enjoy.

Maggie lovingly reads aloud from Alexis’s text messages to her from the night before: “[Alexis] said, ‘gave [Trevor] a quick grammar lesson then blocked him, catch me coming home days early to commit a murder.’ She’s in Michigan right now,” Maggie explains. “And he wasn’t using the right ‘yours’ or ‘theirs.’” The Trump supporters she and Alexis pick fights with, Maggie’s already told me, are notoriously bad at grammar, and the girls delight in correcting their mistakes.

“I might start DMing him tonight,” she muses.

“Just to argue with him? Just for fun?” Quinn asks.

Yes.

Trevor’s the kind of guy who posts fishing pictures and runs cross country, Quinn and Maggie tell me.

“Yeah…,” decides Maggie. “I think I’m gonna inform him a little bit tonight. See what’s gonna happen. I’m not that scared of him.” 

—

I ask Quinn and Maggie whether either can imagine a world in which they’ve deleted all their social media accounts.

“I think about it every day,” Quinn admits. But he already deleted his public Instagram, he explains, so now the one Instagram account that he does use is fairly intimate anyway. And, he adds, “I don’t have anything else to do.”

“I mean, I could [delete social media] if I had more things I was involved in. But I just have nothing,” Maggie tells me. “I did singing for a little bit, but it’s really hard to do that during corona. I just don’t really exist anywhere else except on the internet.”

Take a Hike

England is ripe for walking, but it’s never been that simple.

Lila, Ruba, and Taegen on England’s South West Coast Path in 2018, heading west in the late afternoon. Photograph by Julia Holzman.

Late in June, 2018, I found myself without a car (or a driver’s license, not that it mattered) somewhere along the Jurassic Coast of southern England. But I wasn’t on the coast, exactly. I was staying about a mile inland, and rolling fields of farmland stood between me and the frigid saltwater I craved. I was with three friends from high school—Lila, Ruba, and Taegen—and we set off on foot that first day in Dorset, in search of the sea.

We wandered southward through pastures of uncaring cows, their tails swinging lazily, their owner nowhere to be seen. We made it to a set of stairs that took us down to the water’s rocky edge, and walked and swam our way up and down an empty beach, audibly in awe whenever the late afternoon sun would push its way partially through the clouds and cast raked, golden rays along the horizon.

We collapsed, delirious, into the twin beds and fold-out couches of our rental cottage later that evening, but before succumbing to my exhaustion, I scribbled observations in my journal. Somewhere in between approving notes on the prevalence of actual ice cream in seaside England (as opposed to London’s gelato tyranny), and musings about whether Britain’s North Atlantic in early summer was colder or warmer than Chicago’s Lake Michigan in late spring, I wrote:

I’m beyond ready to do another, ~longer~ walk, though the exact whereabouts of this so-called ‘South West Coast Path’ are unclear @ best. We did a bit of bush-(farm-?)whacking today, though Taegen says that it’s all public land in the U.K., or something? Which sounds vaguely right? Into it.

Alas, it isn’t all public land in the U.K. 

To Taegen’s credit, as a rule, land in much of the U.K. is more public than that of the U.S., where we were both born and (mostly) raised. As of 2000, the uncultivated mountains, moor, heath, down, and historically common lands of England and Wales are largely open to off-trail recreation, where comparable activity in the U.S. would be considered trespassing. While U.S. national parks are generally subject to stricter conservation rules than those in the U.K., the latter cost nothing to enter, whereas just over a fourth of U.S. national parks charge for admission. And the “farm-whacking” that I mentioned in my journal was, indeed, completely legal, thanks to the land’s designation as part of the “coastal margin”—made public by the 2009 Marine and Coastal Access Act, and therefore open to people as well as livestock. 

But still today, England and Wales lack anything close to the freedom to roam that Scotland touts just to their north, and although land-access laws all across Great Britain trump those of Northern Ireland, barriers to access continue to inspire passionate individual walkers and “rambling” organizations to carry on the good fight. 

While the pandemic has boosted the status of the simple stroll the world over for the past year, we as a species—and England as a country—are by no means new to the pleasures and escapism that walking, and nature, can offer. But public land, industrialized capitalism, and colonialism don’t mix easily. So for long centuries, England has been engaged in battle with itself over the rights of its people to their land. 

As England grows ever more diverse, and struggles with the myriad meanings of access and belonging, while also contending with tensions raised by divergent land policies across the four devolved countries of the U.K., this battle for the land isn’t getting resolved: It’s only getting more complicated.

In 1649, in the immediate wake of the second English Civil War and from a still-functional printing cooperative then located in the smog-black heart of London, Gerrard Winstantley published an open letter to the city; one whose title might be considered cause for alarm. 

The letter was not a “letter” so much as it was a “watch-word”—more specifically, “A Watch-word to The City of London, and the Army: Wherein you may see that England’s freedom, which should be the result of all our victories, is sinking deeper under the Norman power, as appears by this relation of the unrighteous proceedings of Kingstone Court against some of the Diggers at George Hill, under color of law; but yet thereby the cause of the Diggers is more brightened and strengthened: so that everyone singly may truly say what his freedom is, and where it lies.”

Winstantley’s snappy title references the April 1649 occupation and attempted cultivation of St. George’s Hill in nearby Surrey. Led by radical anti-royalists William Everard and Winstantley himself, a group that quickly grew to about 30 had been accused of trespassing. Treating it as common land to which they had a legal (not to mention God-given) right, the protestors tilled the land, and together began planting it, but they lasted little over a week before the government decisively retaliated.

Of course, the “True Levellers,” or “Diggers,” as they came to be called, didn’t believe that their utopian experiment could be construed as trespassing, as the land was held in common. 

In his 16 page–long “Watch-word,” Winstantley, a devout Protestant and religious reformer himself, accuses his prosecutors of having “burned their Bibles long ago, because they have so quite and clean forgotten that petition in the Lord's prayer, forgive us our trespassers as we forgive them; for they make this a trespass against them, for digging upon the wasteland of our mother the land of England for a livelihood, when as their law itself sayeth, That the commons and wastes belong to the poor.”

These agricultural “commons” are a fairly foreign concept in present-day England, as in today’s U.S. and, inevitably, most of the capitalist world. The word as used in this context nearly evades definition, yet is wholly unavoidable when it comes to questions of land access, particularly in England, where its history is long and fabled. Historian Allan Greer provides my favorite definition in his 2012 article “Commons and Enclosure in the Colonization of North America”—though, be warned, minds raised under capitalism might struggle with the concept anyway. Writes Greer:

The commons might be thought of both as a place—the village pasture—and as a set of access rights, such as gleaning and stubble grazing. This portion of the commons located in the tillage zone of a given community might be designated the ‘inner commons.’ ‘Outer commons’ can then be used to refer to collectively owned resources in the surrounding area beyond local croplands. This was called ‘the waste’ in England: the zone of moor, mountain, marsh, or forest that rural folk used as rough pasture for their livestock as well as for cutting wood or peat for fuel, gathering herbs, taking rushes for basketry or thatching, felling timber for construction, and so on.

And as Winstantley’s “Watch-word” highlights, in much of 17th-century England, the commons—including uncultivated wastelands—did belong to the poor. Starting in earnest halfway through the 18th century and lasting well into the 19th, those rights would be stripped away, parish by parish, through Parliament’s insidious “Inclosure Acts.” Unsurprisingly to those on both sides of the fight, the poor would become poorer; the rich, richer. For those legions of peasantry on the wrong side of enclosure, food would become scarcer, and the world would become smaller. 

And even as the Industrial Revolution took hold, and England’s population was increasingly drawn from rural to urban life (at least partially in response to enclosures); from communally based subsistence to wage labor, the loss of the commons remained keenly felt across the country. As the English were pulled—and at times forced—out of their muddy farmland and onto the unforgiving, unclean pavement of larger towns and cities, their emotional attachment to their land didn’t disappear: It just shifted.

The urban proletariat of post-enclosure industrialized England no longer “required” the shared grazing rights, the foraged foods and raw materials, and perhaps even the mutuality that their agrarian forefathers had so enjoyed, but soon enough they turned back to nature in large numbers as a necessary site of escape. They were often turned away. 

A sense of righteous indignation at this long-since-codified turning-away propelled “approximately 500 enthusiastic men and women … up to the summit of Kinder Scout, the highest point in Derbyshire’s Peak District” on a crisp Sunday morning in April 1932, as Sinclair McKay describes in his 2012 love letter to British walking, Ramble On. These Manchester-based walkers were very intentionally trespassing on the well-guarded grounds of the ninth Duke of Devonshire, some singing socialist anthems as they waged what would become a famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) offensive against exclusive property rights. Five were jailed in the aftermath of the action. 

It was a similar communal anger—one rooted in a deep and abiding love for the land—that inspired “Diggers 350: St. George’s Hill Re-Occupation” in 1999, exactly 67 Aprils after the Kinder Scout action, and 350 after Gerrard Winstantley and his merry band of Diggers had valiantly attempted to cultivate the very same land.

The 1999 re-occupation in Surrey drew 300 marchers up St. George’s Hill, led by the nascent “This Land is Ours” movement. The protesters bore a stone memorial to the Diggers, and some carried posters, including a meters-long banner that quoted Winstantley’s own “Watch-word”: “Words and Writing were all Nothing and must Die, for Action is the Life of all and if thou dost not Act, thou dost Nothing.”

That early April day in 1999 was a typically gray and drizzly one in southeast England, but there was an unusual electricity in the air—palpable even 22 years on, infectiously apparent in the 10 minutes of low-resolution footage still available on YouTube. Small children marched hand in hand with their parents, and tentative half-smiles at the camera bubbled into jubilance and swaggering confidence as the walkers—raincoats and sweaters tied around waists—made their way from overcast suburban streets on to and up the hill.

 A skinny young man with glasses and an orange acoustic guitar around his neck attracted a small crowd with a spirited rendition of Leon Rosselon’s 1975 tribute to the Diggers, “The World Turned Upside Down,” as popularized later by Billy Bragg:

All things in common

All people one

‘We come in peace—’

The orders came to shut them down

The man finished the song with a triumphant strum of his guitar, and shouted, “We come in peace, and we come BACK!” and his audience cheered and whooped along.

The same crowd was likely cheering a year and a half later, in late November of 2000, when Parliament ushered in the new millennium with the landmark Countryside and Rights of Way Act. CRoW, sometimes known as England and Wales’ “right to roam,” was a major victory, returning to the English and Welsh public a significant amount of what had been taken during previous centuries’ enclosures. 

That legislative victory was hard-won, and it hasn’t been easily accepted by all—notably, pedestrian-wary landowners—in the years since. 

Of course, there’s a bitter irony to this ongoing epic struggle over land in England: Its imperial past and present. But really, it makes perfect sense. That England, the preeminent metropole of world history, should forever be engaged in a fight for agency over its own land is only natural. That the very same landed class whose economic and political might has been, for centuries, derived from the exploitation of foreign lands and peoples, should wish to maintain that power at home at least in part through strict proprietorship, is unlikely to raise many eyebrows.

Even before English colonizers reached and colonized foreign soil, enclosures on the home front gave rise to the conditions that bred colonization. In The Many-Headed Hydra, socialist historian Peter Linebaugh offers the Virginia Company as an early example of this phenomenon, writing that the endeavor, like capitalism writ large, was brought about by a series of drastic socioeconomic changes in late 16th-century and early 17th-century England. Linebaugh in turn assigns these developments “[A] profound and far-reaching cause: the enclosure of land and the removal of thousands of people from the commons, who were then redeployed to the country, town, and sea.”

And so began the reign of the English in the Americas: with mass expropriation on one side of the Atlantic bringing about the reproduction of those conditions on the other. 

But depending on contemporary agricultural norms in the different parts of England that colonists hailed from, once “New World” land had been taken from its Indigenous residents and forced into an essentially English brand of (English) ownership, colonized regions for a brief time exhibited either open-field tendencies (i.e. with more held in common), or closed-field systems (i.e. with  more hardline private ownership), according to William Cronon’s 1983 Changes in the Land. “In the long run, it was this latter conception of land—as private commodity rather than public commons—that came to typify New England towns,” explains Cronon. “More than anything else, it was the treatment of land and property as commodities traded at market that distinguished English conceptions of ownership from [American] Indian ones.”

Well-known British labor historian E.P. Thompson writes in his 1980 book Customs in Common about the capitalist obsession with exclusive property rights sweeping England as enclosures reached a fever pitch in the late 18th century. “The concept of exclusive property in land, as a norm to which other practices must be adjusted, was now extending across the whole globe,” Thompson writes. “The concept was carried across the Atlantic, to the Indian sub-continent, and into the South Pacific, by British colonists, administrators, and lawyers, who, while not unaware of the force of local customs and land systems, struggled to construe these within their own measure of property.” Indeed, English imperialists were consistently just as hell-bent on “improving” (privatizing) land in Asia, the Americas, and Ireland, as they were on enclosing the pastures and woodlands surrounding London.

Furthermore, says Thompson, “The notion of absolute property in land which triumphed in England in the late eighteenth century had both a legal and a political aspect. Property in land required a landowner, improving the land required labour, and therefore subduing the land required also subduing the labouring poor.” That same century, advocates for enclosure argued often and unabashedly in favor of creating such a wage labor–dependent underclass. In her authoritative 1993 book, Commoners, J.M. Neeson writes that “[P]roletarianization, instead of damning enclosure and the disappearance of common right, justified it.”

All across England and the world that it seized, the poor were put to work for the benefit of landowners and colonizers, and the alienation of people from land was well underway.

Rachel wandering the site of the disused Botallack Mine on Cornwall’s “Tin Coast” in mid-December, 2019. Photograph by Julia Holzman.

Tracking the downfall of the English commons is relatively simple. Tides began turning against the system in the 1600s, and two major waves of acts of enclosure had largely eliminated England’s commons by the end of the 1800s. But it’s much more difficult to identify when the system took hold. 

The commons were not, as one might assume, a given throughout all of pre-Victorian English history; therefore, they require a start date. This date is not so much “contested” as it is defined completely differently by everyone whose work alludes to it—or so I’ve surmised from my research. 

Many, including Karl Marx in Capital, suggest that the system of English commons truly began in the 15th century. Oliver Rackham’s comprehensive History of the Countryside instead posits the commons’ extended “start date” as located sometime after the eighth century, firmly in the wake of the Anglo-Saxon takeover of Roman Britain. 

The Romans, partial to an ultra-precise field-division system known as “centuriation,” had arrived in a Britain already divided into individual holdings, if somewhat haphazardly. Most of this land remained enclosed until the dawn of the second millennium, A.D. “In what is now Planned Countryside, much of the enclosed landscape was effaced when medieval open fields developed,” writes Rackham. “By [the 1086] Domesday Book, as we used to be taught, the arable parts of England were covered with immensely complex systems of cultivation in strips, which were to last until the Parliamentary Enclosures.”

Open-field, or “strip” cultivation, was defined differently in each parish (or perhaps more accurately, by each manorial estate, as manors owned the lands to which commoners enjoyed rights). General hallmarks of the system included organized methods of land division by crop, grazing rights shared by all participants at once, and regular commoners’ meetings to ensure effective self-governance—but open-field cultivation often also included other distinctive features, such as neighborly labor-sharing across crops.

But England’s commons encompassed so much more than the (already diverse) array of agricultural and pastoral land access rights they’re known for. The commons dictated how entire communities lived, gathered, and provided for one another. Their existence often meant, too, an economy in which employment and wage labor did not define people’s lives. As Neeson writes in Commoners, “[I]t was customary to make a living first out of the materials on hand… Looking for regular, constant employment was unnecessary where commons were rich reserves.” The commons also meant public “highways” and footpaths; access to recreational walking; a communal sense of appreciation for natural beauty. The emotional importance of the commoners’ rights to their local landscape cannot be overstated.   

John Clare, a preeminent anti-Enclosure poet writing in the first half of the 19th century, reminisces fondly about common access to land made for wandering in his poem “The Mores”:

Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene

Nor fence of ownership crept in between

To hide the prospect of the following eye

Its only bondage was the circling sky.

Clare ends his poem “Remembrances” with this chilling stanza, mourning the loss of human joy in the wake of enclosure:

O had I known as then joy had left the paths of men 

I had watched her night and day besure and never slept agen 

And when she turned to go O I’d caught her mantle then 

And wooed her like a lover by my lonely side to stay 

Aye knelt and worshipped on as love in beautys bower 

And clung upon her smiles as a bee upon her flower 

And gave her heart my poesys all cropt in a sunny hour 

As keepsakes and pledges to fade away 

But love never heeded to treasure up the may 

So it went the common road with decay.

It’s worth noting that access to the commons—to grazing and agricultural rights, especially—was not simply a matter of English birthright, even in the commons’ heyday. 

In her 1985 paper “No Tragedy on the Commons,” which uses England’s commons as a case study to rebuke Garret Hardin’s infamous, eugenicist-leaning 1968 paper “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Susan Cox explains that the use of the commons, especially for grazing, was actually subject to many (productive) restrictions. She hails as a victory the prolonged success of community-led land management until its Industrial Revolution–era downfall. 

“The commons were carefully and painstakingly regulated,” Cox writes, “and those instances in which the common[s] deteriorated were most often due to lawbreaking and to oppression of the poorer tenant rather than to egoistic abuse of a common resource.”

Neeson would agree, similarly praising commoners’ ability to self-regulate so effectively, maintaining workable, grazable land for thousands of years. She describes a number of different possible statuses held by commoners: There were those whose rights of pasture came with the land they worked, and those whose rights were attached to their cottages, as well as all of the “landless” (or simply “land poor”) commoners. Neeson tells us that, “Of all the complaints against enclosure, the loss of the commons by the poorest commoners is heard the loudest.”

Despite their loud anger, as history would have it, the poorest were ignored, and were pushed further into poverty. Not only was a class that had previously subsisted mostly on the fruits of the land forced into wage labor—often, Neeson claims, the local encloser-in-chief became the area’s primary employer—but, as John Clare’s poems exemplify, a sort of emotional, or spiritual poverty also accompanied loss of the landscape and permission to walk it.

As Jerry L. Anderson explains in “Britain’s Right to Roam: Redefining the Landowner’s Bundle of Sticks,” English enclosures did preserve a number of public footpaths over private land, but “the public’s access to many areas over which they previously enjoyed a general right to roam was summarily extinguished.” Anderson specifies that a “right to roam” allows access to general wandering over private lands, whereas a footpath—though usually useful and often still scenic—confines its users to a predetermined route. 

As former commoners’ labor became commodified, so became their landscape, and it slipped from their fingers (and toes) into the exclusive clutches of the upper class.

Anderson argues, too, that Britain’s commitment to its countryside is uniquely rooted in the beauty of its landscape; that “While many Americans find bucolic scenes pleasant, Britain’s reverence for its rural scenery rises to a much higher level,” and that “While Americans may lament the loss of the family farm and attack urban sprawl, there is no similar national commitment to the countryside.” 

But of course, such a sweeping claim is hard to prove, and perhaps finds a counterweight in the U.S.’s reverence for its most striking “wilderness” areas. (The term “wilderness,” though, is misleading: It remains in common parlance as well as in official use under U.S. land management, but it tends to obscure the long history of Indigenous groups shaping and preserving the lands that only look untouched today.)

The U.S.’s long-time pursuit of the dramatic as opposed to the bucolic is apparent in the timeline of the two countries’ establishment of national parks. Yellowstone became the U.S.’s first in 1872, nearly eight decades before England’s Peak District was accorded the equivalent distinction in the U.K. It’s evidenced, too, by the U.S.’s literary tradition of mythologizing the great American outdoors in all of its grandeur. A canon like that comprising Thoreau’s Walden, Muir’s writings on the American West, McPhee’s Coming into the Country, Strayed’s Wild, and even recent cinema like Free Solo and 127 Hours does not, and arguably cannot, exist in the U.K.—where the scale is simply smaller, visibly uninhabited land scant, and the spotlight still on the pastoral.

In the U.S., though, much of the land—revered, under-appreciated, or neither—is owned and managed by the federal government: 28 percent of U.S. land was federally managed as of 2020. It’s trickier to identify just how much of Britain’s land is government-owned, but an oft-cited 2019 report estimates that the figure is only around 8 percent, with the other 92 percent owned primarily by corporations, and members of the aristocracy.

So while Britain’s landscape remains nominally private, just as it was three centuries ago, the government is (somewhat) intent on maintaining its value for human recreation, as well as its ecological and climatic health, and is quick to regulate private development to these ends. Natural England, a body responsible for conservation and sustainable development oversight, was created by the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act of 2006, half a decade after the CRoW Act returned to England and Wales’ people a portion of their long-lost roaming rights.

Still, England’s most passionate walkers retain an air of collective resentment about all the access still denied. The Ramblers Association, founded in 1935, initially aimed to build on the momentum of the Kinder Scout trespass in the campaign for improved public access, and has tirelessly continued that fight for the past 86 years. Within a year of their founding, the Ramblers had amassed 1,200 members spread across hundreds of affiliated clubs—but their membership has since jumped by 8000 percent. Today, they boast nearly 100,000 members across three branches. (Wales’ “Ramblers Cymru” split off from the original, England-based branch in 1974, and Ramblers Scotland split in 1985, though the three groups remain closely connected.)

Today, the Ramblers promote not only access to land for walking, but the activity itself. Through a combination of national, partnered campaigns and over 500 affiliated local clubs, the Ramblers Association has increasingly aimed to improve British health of mind and body through walking since the 1990s. 

The Ramblers’ primary campaign at the moment, called “Don’t Lose Your Way,” is a crowd-sourced attempt to identify and save tens of thousands of miles of historical pathways, which, if not officially entered into the public domain by 2026, risk being handed back over to private landowners—a frightening provision of the CRoW Act.

Mya-Rose Craig goes by “Birdgirl.” (Or “Dr Mya-Rose Birdgirl Craig,” on Twitter.) She’s 18, British Bangladeshi, and, indeed, a Doctor of Science—an honorary degree conferred upon her by the University of Bristol last year, in recognition of her impressive, multifaceted work in addressing climate change, as well as racism in the outdoors. 

Craig is also a lifelong birder. In 2015, she organized a short bird-watching camp in her home county of Somerset, England, and tells me via email that the first time she did, “[I]t was all white boys that signed up.” Then she began realizing that whenever she was out walking, “[T]here was no one else who looked like me. I realized I was doing it wrong, and needed to aim to give VME [Visible Minority Ethnic] people this opportunity.” 

So in 2016, Craig founded Black2Nature, a nonprofit whose stated mission is to “Entice VME communities to engage with their natural environment in order to better reflect the ethnic diversity of the UK in nature.” 

Craig contends that people of color face significant barriers to accessing nature as compared to their white counterparts, and she’s not alone. Research conducted by Natural England in 2009 and 2016 shows that white adults are considerably more likely to frequent the “natural environment” (any public green space, including that abroad) than non-white adults, with nearly 60 percent of the former claiming to have spent time outdoors at least weekly in the year prior to their being surveyed, compared to only about 40 percent of the latter. 

Part of this discrepancy might be chalked up to population demographics. The most recent U.K. census, taken in 2011, determined that 83 percent of the country’s urban population was white, whereas nearly 98 percent of its rural population was white. (Both of those percentages are growing steadily smaller, as the forthcoming 2021 census is sure to show.)

But the simple fact of living in an English city should not be—is not—a determining factor in whether one has access to its bountiful outdoors. The U.K.’s Department for Environmental, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) published a comprehensive “Landscapes Review” in 2019, which in part examines the disproportionate whiteness of British nature, highlighting at one point the idea that even when cities are well-linked to national parks by public transport, “[U]nderstanding can [still] be a barrier.” 

The Landscapes Review cites interviews conducted by a government body called the Policy Lab; conversations with young people and people of color who view themselves as outsiders to nature. “It is as if access to the countryside involves joining a club,” the report states. “Those on the inside get the benefits. Those on the outside need ways in which to join.” 

At the root of these problems, DEFRA finds a generally tepid, surface-level “interest” in diversity, “rather than a burning desire to change.” But this dispassion should come as no great surprise: DEFRA points out that “[T]hose governing the bodies looking after our national landscapes … are almost all white, almost all male and many are retired.”

Londoners in early January, on the eve of the U.K.’s first lockdown of 2021, atop Parliament Hill in Hampstead Heath. Photograph by Julia Holzman.

Much of what drew me so immediately to northwest London when my family moved there from New Jersey in 2015 was Hampstead Heath. The park’s sprawling borders were draped around our extended neighborhood to the north and east. I hadn’t been familiar with the concept of the “heath” before moving to England, but quickly grew intimately so. 

Indeed, heathland—while by no means uniquely English—has a deep English history, being both a partial product of ancient human intervention, and a traditional landscape of the commons, according to Rackham’s History of the Countryside chapter on the subject. “[Heathland] destruction has curtailed the Englishman’s already meagre right to explore his own country,” Rackham writes, and he claims that protecting what’s left of it is “a special responsibility of England: the Dutch, Danes, and Swedes have been even more single-minded in destroying their heaths, and most of what is left in Europe is [England’s].”

But Hampstead Heath, for me, is not classified ecologically, by its particular makeup of undershrub plants in the way that it might be for Rackham. Instead, the Heath is known to me emotionally, as treasured grounds for exploring a country I can barely claim as a home. 

Hampstead Heath, which is run by the City of London Corporation, is far more expansive and unmanicured than its Royal Parks–managed sisters to the south. Where central London’s Hyde Park/St. James’s Park/Green Park/Regent’s Park quartet can boast close proximity to royal residences, ornate fountains, and immaculately landscaped lawns and gardens intersected at each turn by purposeful, lamppost-lined concrete footpaths, Hampstead Heath offers tucked-away patches of dense woodland interspersed seemingly (though not actually) at nature’s will with picnic-perfect clearings, and a series of muddy-bottomed bathing ponds that house a diehard year-round fandom.

I cherish Hampstead Heath so dearly—despite only sharing a continent with it for at most a few months each year, ever since returning to the U.S. for college—that I often forget others’ capacity to feel the same. 

But it’s also why it’s so thrilling to see unfettered Hampstead Heath adoration crop up consistently in the brilliant works of northwest London–bred writer Zadie Smith. The Heath meanders into the lives of Smith’s characters when one leasts expects it—or, rather, they into it. 

In her 2005 novel, On Beauty, Smith describes the Heath as magnificently as I’ve ever seen it described: 

A sprawling North London parkland, composed of oaks, willows and chestnuts, yews and sycamores, the beech and the birch; that encompasses the city’s highest point and spreads far beyond it; that is so well planted it feels unplanned; that is not the country but is no more a garden than Yellowstone; that has a shade of green for every possible felicitation of light; that paints itself in russets and ambers in autumn, canary-yellow in the splashy spring; with tickling bush grass to hide teenage lovers and joint smokers, broad oaks for brave men to kiss against, mown meadows for summer ball games, hills for kites, ponds for hippies, an icy lido for old men with strong constitutions, mean llamas for mean children and, for the tourists, a country house, its façade painted white enough for any Hollywood close-up, complete with a tea room, although anything you buy there should be eaten outside with the grass beneath your toes, sitting under the magnolia tree, letting the white blossoms, blush-pink at their tips, fall all around you. Hampstead Heath! Glory of London! Where Keats walked and Jarman fucked, where Orwell exercised his weakened lungs and Constable never failed to find something holy.

And while its treatment is less ecstatically reverent in her nonfiction, Hampstead Heath leaves its mark on Smith’s body of cultural criticism, too. 

In her 2013 essay “Love in the Gardens,” Smith, whose mother Yvonne was a Jamaican immigrant to the U.K., and whose father Harvey was white and English, takes trips to Europe with the latter as a vantage point from which to explore so much else. Smith explains soon into the essay why she and her father—an odd couple, in the eyes of strangers—naturally gravitated toward parks and gardens above all else on their initial trips to Europe: “In public parks it is a little easier to feel you belong. I felt this instinctively as a teenager (and, thinking back, as a child on Hampstead Heath).” 

Later in the same essay, Smith considers the privilege of believing in the openness of public green space through the lens of her late mother’s experiences:

Harvey and I knew from experience that it takes a while for immigrants to believe a park is truly public and open to them: my mother always used to complain, exaggerating somewhat (and not without a little pride), that she was the only black woman to be seen pushing a stroller through St James’s Park in 1975. Sometimes a generation of habitation is needed to create the necessary confidence; to believe that this gate will open for you, too.

Oge Ejizu became London’s regional leader for Black Girls Hike U.K. this past April. The group, originally based out of Manchester, was only founded by Rhiane Fatinikun in 2019 but has already gained a sizable following, online and outside alike. 

Ejizu was interviewed by Liv Bolton this past December on The Outdoors Fix podcast, and muses toward the start of the conversation, “I didn’t really grow up with the outdoors; I didn’t really think it was something for me.” Ejizu’s family was never interested in hiking, and it took some repeated coercion from a best friend to get her hiking as an adult. One day, something changed. “I don’t really know what turned,” she says, “but I just really started to take it all in, and really enjoyed being outdoors, and being able to see the landscape. I was able to … clear my head, think more, and just kind of slow down the pace of life.” 

But much like Mya-Rose Craig, as soon as Ejizu began hiking in earnest, she was struck and saddened by the dearth of people who looked like her among the outdoor crowd. “So I just went on Instagram and was like, ‘Black girls hiking,’ and typed it in, and yeah, that profile came up!” Ejizu says in the interview, explaining how she first came to follow Black Girls Hike, which in turn led to her helping to expand the group’s presence in southeast England. 

Fatinikun founded the group after having also connected with hiking as an adult. As she tells the Guardian in a late-December article touting women-led outdoor diversity efforts, Fatinikun was aboard a train in England’s Peak District when she watched a group of fitted out hikers disembarking for the mountains, and felt an immediate fascination. She bought boots and went on her first hike soon after—this all in 2019—and later set up an Instagram page that quickly became a registered charity.

“‘Many people grow up in cities where they experience racism on a daily basis so it feels uncomfortable to them to head out into the countryside—the last bastions of whiteness—where it is even less diverse,’” Fatinikun tells the Guardian. But there’s power in numbers. Black Girls Hike, its founder explains, “‘gives black women the confidence to go to places they might not have done before.’”

Ejizu would agree. Asked about her dream for the future of the Black Girls Hike London branch toward the end of the Outdoors Fix interview, she laughs, and ponders for a moment. “I guess my dream would be for it to be just a great walking group; for people to come and feel like they’re in a community of other hikers and walkers; for people to feel like it’s their safe space.” 

Then she adds: “Also, that [the group is] able to cater to different people’s accessibility needs; that it’s not just for able-bodied people, but that we have walks and hikes that cater to everyone. I think that for me, that’s kind of the dream.”

Barriers to entry in nature don’t stop at legal ownership status, or class, race, or gender. And the fact that Oge Ejizu highlighted this in her interview, calling attention to the inaccessibility of England’s outdoors for those with limited mobility and other disabilities, seems a positive sign of the times. 

Paula Brunt was raised in northwest England, in Cumbria’s beloved Lake District, where the eponymous lakes and the low-slung mountains that cradle them create an irresistibly English idyll, drawing tourists each year by the tens of millions. 

Brunt lives in southern England now, and serves as secretary and rambles organizer for the Disabled Ramblers group (not technically affiliated with the Ramblers), which she joined in 2014. The year she became a club member, she tells me over Zoom in early March, she was still living in rural Cumbria, and her medication prevented her from driving. She was stuck at home.

Then Brunt got an off-road scooter; an all-terrain vehicle called a Tramper. “It just transformed my life, really,” she tells me. On her scooter, Brunt began regularly joining outings led by the Disabled Ramblers, who organize monthly group rambles (aside from during pandemics) from May to October across England and Wales. Three years ago, Brunt was asked if she wanted to lead one such trek. “Which was terrifying,” she admits. “But nobody died! So that was a good thing.” 

On the heels of her first successful regional ramble, group leadership asked Brunt if she’d like to take on a “national” ramble. (Once a year, the charity organizes a weeklong trip to a particularly scenic spot, and these national rambles, excellent for community-building and built-in vacationing, attract group members from all across Britain.) “Yeah, so I did the rambles and said, ‘Can I help in any other way?’ And I seemed to have managed to get myself onto the committee at that point.”

Now on the committee, Brunt does a little of everything, at every level. 

She and I speak on a Tuesday. The coming Thursday, Brunt and her husband are planning to go down the road and meet a woman who’s lodged a complaint with her local council about a gate that she’s been unable to open, but which Brunt has already successfully opened once from her wheelchair, at the behest of the same council. Her plan is to teach the woman how to hook a walking stick around the loop locking the gate closed, and spring it open.

More frequently, though, Brunt and the Disabled Ramblers work on a larger scale, collaborating with other organizations and government bodies like DEFRA and Natural England to lobby for better accessibility provisions in environmental legislation. Right now, much of Brunt’s work with the Disabled Ramblers involves consulting with Natural England on accessibility plans for the England Coast Path, an ambitious route which aims to be the longest of its kind, once complete. On one section of this path, in southwestern England near a town called Weston-super-Mare, Brunt tells me, “They’ve taken out steps and put in ramps—so it’s making quite a big difference for a lot of people.”

Brunt has a fundamental principle; one which she and the Disabled Ramblers apply to all of their consulting work in the access space, small-scale or large: “‘By the least restrictive means.’” The gate that she’s revisiting on Thursday, accessible or not, probably doesn’t need to exist in the first place, Brunt thinks. Luckily, removing it entirely would be the council’s cheapest option. Also luckily (or perhaps the result of a generations worth of activist work): People are finally starting to listen.

A lot of what Brunt has to say about the financial inaccessibility of all-terrain wheelchairs, and the many intersections between disability access and broader U.K. land access, as well as the intersections between campaigning for accessibility for people with limited mobility and those with sensory and/or mental disabilities, is echoed nearly verbatim in my interview with another English rambler working on access for the disabled—a former head primary school teacher named Debbie North.

Years ago, getting into the hills on foot was North’s way of managing the stress of jobs in tough schools. But then she got sick, and lost some of her mobility—and with it, the freedom to lose herself in the outdoors. “Not being able to do that had a very significant impact on the way that I thought that my life was going to go,” she tells me. “I had to give up my career. And I gave up my passion for hillwalking. 

But what North hadn’t realized before losing mobility, and would soon come to know well, was the vast meaning of “access”; the leaps and bounds in wheelchair technology that have been achieved in the past decades. And so a new passion of hers was born: Using, and helping others use, all-terrain wheelchairs. 

Today North, like Brunt, works on a wide variety of accessibility issues, ranging from helping national parks draft access statements, to crossing the country to test out the alleged accessibility of tourist spots that tout it, but want (and often, as it turns out, desperately need) firsthand input from wheelchair users themselves.

And for the past six years, North has been building out the accessibility section of The Outdoor Guide (TOG), which is where I found her. The Outdoor Guide, created by Gina Bradbury Fox with the aim of broadening the reach and scope of her sister Julia Bradbury’s nationally televised British rambles, added an “AccessTOG” branch with North at the helm in order to broaden peoples’ horizons about all that was possible with limited mobility.

 For her role at AccessTOG, North researches accessible alternatives to the rambles that Julia Bradbury films, and then completes them using a 4x4 all-terrain wheelchair of her own, a film crew trailing behind. The videos are short and sweet, yet thorough right down to the best and most wheelchair-friendly spot to purchase the requisite British cup of tea, post-ramble.

 “For The Outdoor Guide, we try and keep it within sort of a family-type walk,” North says. “We’ve got some of the extreme walks on the website, but the majority of the 100 walks that we’ve got on are what people could probably do in a normal mobility scooter. And then we’ve got the other ones.”

 When North first dipped her toes into “the other ones,” the national parks called her a “madwoman”; an “extremist.” But craving the thrill of summiting mountains, she pushed through the bias. “I’ve come across prejudice with mountain rescue, for example, who don’t really feel that I should be at the top of the mountain—but they haven’t seen the preparation that has gone behind the expedition … People are twitchy when they see a person like me on the top of Helvellyn,” North says, referring to England’s third-highest peak. “They’re like, ‘You’re not supposed to be here, you’re supposed to be down on a duck pond walk.’” (At this, Bradbury Fox, also on the Zoom call, chuckles and shakes her head.) “Mountain rescue got really, really twitchy. And now they say, ‘Where are you going this time, Debs? Where’re you heading to?’”

 It’s a rare rambler who truly craves the extremes, taking uncertainty, bad weather, and physical discomfort in stride. I am not such a person (much as I wish I were), Debbie North just might be, and Mark Newton most certainly is. A middle-aged Welsh veteran equipped with a Tramper, a caravan attachment to sleep in, and his two cats in tow, Newton circled the entire British coast in under two years, circling back around to Scotland’s Mull of Kintyre in late 2014. He raised thousands of pounds for his favorite charities with the feat, and won the Guinness World Record for “Longest journey on an electric mobility vehicle.” Not long after, Newton set out again.  

Late at night, mid-September, 2019. Quintin Lake comes home, but feels unwelcome. Lake, too, has traversed the entirety of Britain’s coast on his own. His journey began in 2015, and ended, nearly five and a half years later, at London’s iconic St. Paul’s Cathedral, in his native England, steps north of the River Thames—right around the spot on the map where the slim, snaking river first hints at opening itself up to the North Sea some 30 miles east. 

Lake is no stranger to Britain or to long walks, but this walk—“The Perimeter,” he calls it—was his longest, and arguably his most British, yet. “It’s been said that Britain is more edge than middle, and I think it’s kind of true,” Lake muses over Zoom, explaining one of his reasons for taking the long way around this time. (In the late ’90s, when he was 21, Lake walked the more common Land’s End–to–John O’Groats, or “LEJOG,” route, trekking solo across contiguous Great Britain from its southernmost to northernmost tip.)

“It’s an island, and there’s separateness to it—it’s a place of arrivals and departures. So whether that was the early Christians coming from Ireland, or the Vikings coming from Scandinavia, or whether it was a French, or Spanish, or German invasion, or whether when it was physically connected to the continent, with the land bridge, there are all these echoes of different past connections [along Britain’s coast].” 

Lake—still young, but with a former life as an architect already behind him—is now an architectural and landscape photographer, and undertook this epic journey–cum–art project in part to connect more deeply with the landscape beneath him. But this sense of true connection proved hard to come by at times, especially in England and Wales. 

As Lake clung to the coastline, regularly going days without human contact, or trails to walk on (especially in Scotland), he often resorted to pitching his tent despite the elements, and “wild camping”—which, when applied to England and Wales, he calls “stealth camping.” In lowland England and Wales, where wild camping is illegal, Lake figured that so long as nobody could see him, they couldn’t catch him. His days in England and Wales were strenuous, often solitary, and made extra long by the need to set up and break down a covert camp under the cloak of darkness; he looked for well-hidden spots that lacked any sweeping vistas, in order to avoid being spotted by landowners.

 “Whereas in Scotland, you can camp anywhere,” Lake wistfully explains. “And that makes you feel much more connected to the landscape, like you’re not a criminal.”

 In 2003, Scotland passed the Land Reform Act, and, with some minor exceptions, its people gained the comprehensive freedom to roam (and swim) perhaps the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen.

Granted, I visited the craggy, moody, sheep-heavy northern coast of Scotland for four days, four years ago. Quintin walked the country’s vast coastline for about 200. Encouraged by his glowing reviews of land access in Scotland, I prod a little. “So there’s kind of more of an ingrained culture, just on a face-to-face level, of… freedom?” 

“I wouldn’t say it’s ‘ingrained,’ because [the access law] is quite new … I found that the majority of people were really proud of it, and that the majority of people, if I met them somewhere wild and asked, ‘Would it be alright if I walked down this road?’ nearly always—every Scot I met—would say, ‘Oh, you can go wherever you like, because we have open access!’” The rare prickly landowner Lake did come across in Scotland, he recounts, usually had a telltale English accent. 

“I felt angry about the restrictions in England when I came back to it,” Lake tells me. It was late at night; September. “There’s a tiny little sign on the coast saying ‘Welcome to England,’ and then you cross the border, and immediately you’re in this kind of corridor of barbed wire. And there’s this immediate sense that you’re not to be trusted, and you’re in trouble. And it’s a really visceral thing when you’re just walking on the ground.”

Sam, Rachel, and John near Scotland and Britain’s rainy northeasterly tip, at Duncansby Head. August, 2018.  Photograph by Julia Holzman.

Scotland is home for Fiona Ferguson, youthful and Zoom-savvy but all the while busy cooking up elaborate outdoor plans for her nearing retirement. Currently living in the small city of Perth, not far north of Edinburgh, Ferguson agreed to talk with me after I posted about my research in a Facebook group for British walkers. She’s been in Scotland nearly her whole life, save for a decade-long stint in South London.

Ferguson is not a walker by trade (so few are!), but rather a casual hobbyist. She’s been walking and hiking for fun since before the pandemic made it cool—and her dogs will always need to be walked anyway, she jokes, “So you might as well make the most of it.”

I ask Ferguson about the massive expansion of access rights that came with Scotland’s Land Reform Act, eager to hear a local’s perspective on the paradigm shift that Lake’s version of post-2003 Scotland seems to suggest. But that roaming-friendly culture that Lake so cherished in 2018 and 2019 has been around as long as Ferguson can recall—which holds up against history. The 2003 legislation didn’t exactly usher in a radically new era of land access in Scotland, largely responsible, as it was, for codifying the country’s already extensive tradition of roaming rights.

“My understanding is that there’s never been trespass laws in Scotland. That basically … you can go anywhere you want in Scotland, as long as you’re not damaging anything; as long as you leave it the way you found it,” Ferguson tells me. “But I was aware that the English laws changed a bit a while back, to make places more accessible for walkers and things like that, because it used to get quite dangerous if you were crossing a field and a landowner decided they weren’t too keen on you being there. That’s not something I’ve ever encountered in Scotland.” 

Ferguson is the first to admit that she doesn’t make much use of her thorough right to roam off-piste. For all the stormy days Lake spent traversing the wildest reaches of the Scottish Highlands with nothing but a paper map (and a handful of offline mapping apps) to guide him, Ferguson has spent countless more enjoying Scotland’s marked paths and trails. When she’s out on her own, it’s simply a matter of practicality: “If I was to turn an ankle, I would be wanting to see that I’m on this path, not somewhere difficult to find,” she tells me.

On path or off, though, Ferguson and Lake seem to agree: Scotland is for walkers. Comparing Scotland with England, Ferguson says, “When you’re out walking, [Scots] are much more likely to say hello. And, you know, they might even stop and have a chat. And there’s usually some comment about the famous Scottish midge; the biting insects that attack you.” 

I ask Lake whether Britons have adopted any American thru-hiking culture, and he tells me that they haven’t. “American online communities; ultralight hiking; wearing trail-running shoes; things like that—all that culture is American … We don’t have ‘trail names.’ It sounds like enormous fun. We don’t have ‘trail angels,’ we don’t have any of that stuff, unfortunately.”

But in my conversations with both Lake and Ferguson, Scotland’s West Highland Way comes up as a glowing example of a trail that’s often crowded, in a good way. On the West Highland Way, Ferguson tells me, “There was a real sense of camaraderie that I haven’t experienced anywhere else, walking in other parts of the U.K.” Lake says that on busy trails like these, “You meet the same people over multiple days, and you get to know them, and you chat and meet them in pubs. There is a real sense of trail solidarity.”

But circumnavigating the British coast, no such community exists. Only history and shifting light; shoreline pollution and community beach clean-ups; toxic agricultural runoff water and copious rain and worrisome cliff erosion and the remarkable proliferation of wind farms. And maybe a tourist like me, out for a summer day’s jaunt down the South West Coast Path with three friends, an amateur’s camera swinging from her neck, offering a nod and a smile.

And then there’s Northern Ireland. Nearly 100 years ago to the month, on May 3, 1921, the aptly nicknamed “Emerald Isle” was officially partitioned. While the Catholic-majority south gained its partial independence the very next year, and was known as the “Irish Free State” until the Republic of Ireland Act came into effect in 1949, Protestant-majority Northern Ireland has remained a full-fledged nation of the United Kingdom to this day, albeit not without significant contest, and always a choppy Irish Sea away from the metropole.

Three decades after partition, Seamus Murphy was born. As a child growing up about a mile north of the ultra-porous north-south border, Murphy felt free to roam his local hills, now a designated “Area of Outstanding National Beauty” (AONB) called the Ring of Gullion, and he took ample advantage of that freedom.

But as the 20th century drew to a close, Murphy’s children and their generation found themselves without the same liberty to explore the countryside. “The Troubles,” which lasted from the late 1960s up until the turn of the millennium in Northern Ireland, left Murphy’s treasured hills markedly unsafe, and therefore unfree. “The British Army had a series of forts on the hilltops with exclusion zones around them,” Murphy explains in an email before our interview. “And given the possibility of attacks on the forts, it was just unwise to walk in the hills.”

So in January 2011, he founded the Gap o’ the North Hill Walking club. In a way, it was a reclamation of the land he grew up on—but also, Murphy has always been more interested in the history of human interaction with the landscape than in untouched “wilderness.” And in Ireland, very little land looks untouched, anyway. So the club was also formed as a way for Murphy to share and expand his knowledge of regional landscape history, and to deepen fellow members’ appreciation for their ancestral land.

“Our club differs from probably most of the other ones in Northern Ireland and indeed all of Ireland, by virtue of the fact that we actually live within the mountains,” Murphy ventures. “We don’t have to travel to hillwalk.”  

(Murphy explains that to him, the word “hillwalking” carries a more free-range connotation than the word “hiking,” which he generally takes to mean that a defined trail is being followed. In Ireland, where the few mountains that do exist might be condescendingly deemed mere hills by outdoorspeople of more vertiginous heritage, Murphy says that trails aren’t always necessary.)

About five years ago, in the midst of retiring from the club’s leadership committee, Murphy looked around, and noticed that four extended families were more or less running the joint. A few years later he took stock again, and the same was true. “They were no longer the same four families—well, three of them were the same—but my cousins were on the committee, and another guy’s brother was, and so on. [It’s] very close-knit like that.” This deep-rooted localness has served the Gap o’ the North club well in their quest for better access to walking routes.

In their 2017 Environmental Law Review paper, “The trouble with accessing the countryside in Northern Ireland: A comparison with Great Britain,” authors Linda Price and Mark Simpson explain that Northern Ireland was not only the last U.K. nation to codify any provisions for expanded recreational land access (which it did, eventually, in 1983’s Access to the Countryside Order), but also that it’s since followed through on using these provisions to a far lesser extent than its British neighbors.

The reasons for Northern Ireland’s continued resistance to public roaming rights are plentiful and intersecting, which Price and Simpson’s paper makes clear. Among these many reasons is the widespread sense that Northern Ireland’s farms are mostly small and family-owned, as opposed to the perceived profusion of vast, faceless swaths of corporate farmland across Great Britain. 

Price and Simpson’s Northern Irish interview subjects tended to understand the relative strength of Northern Ireland’s farming and landowning lobbies (as compared with those in Great Britain) as rooted partially in the intimate scale of farming there, given that the public’s misuse of one footpath has the potential to wreak proportionally greater damage in Northern Ireland than it might on a sprawling British farm. (Granted, Price and Simpson note that their interviewees’ perceptions of British scale might be skewed.) 

Murphy, while no great fan of strict Northern Irish landowners himself, brings this point up in our interview, too, almost verbatim. He also mentions a fear among these smallholders that usually goes unspoken: that the introduction of better rights of way might compromise their abilities to sell farmland for housing. 

Luckily for Murphy, the Gap o’ the North’s intrepid hillwalkers are local—and therefore closely intertwined with the farmers and smallholders whose hills they like to walk each Sunday. The club asks farmers they know for permission to cross their land, and generally, they’re warmly invited to do so. But when the club asks permission to advertise the walks on their website, they’re uniformly greeted with resounding nos. 

“In other words, on a neighborly basis, they will allow us to walk, but they are very wary that we’re trying to extend that access to all hillwalkers,” Murphy says. “And the farming organizations are actually combing the literature and checking the websites for anybody advertising routes … This has created a culture where the statutory agencies are afraid of the farming lobbies. This is why our access officers in our local council are utterly useless.”

Without any help from the impotent access officers (a task administered differently across Northern Ireland by individual local councils, as dictated by the 1983 law), the Gap o’ the North has been diligently trying to stake out a 60-kilometer “marked line of walking” (not a built path) around the Ring of Gullion since the club’s inception. They just want some signage, and unlocked gates where necessary.

“So we made a list of farmers that we needed to talk to. And then we deliberately picked members of their extended family to go talk to them. And we used kinship networks like that. But many of them said, ‘Look, how can I be sure that I'm not going to get another group here next week?’ So they were specifically looking for that assurance that we were not transferring access to a wider walking community.”

On an interpersonal level up in the hills, and on a national level in the courts, Northern Ireland’s farming lobby remains prohibitively powerful. But hillwalking has been on the rise, too. Murphy estimates that the sport gains 10 to 15 percent more participants each year across Ireland—notably, he says, many of these newcomers are women, whereas the hillwalking of Murphy’s college years was almost entirely male-dominated.

And since the early 2000s, Northern Ireland has been deeply conflicted  over whether or not to establish its first and only national park in the picturesque Mournes Mountains. All three countries of Great Britain, as well as the usually more land-restrictive Republic of Ireland, are home to multiple national parks. Northern Ireland—which, as, Price and Simpson write, has little “physical and emotional distinction between urban and rural,” and is lacking Britain’s looming cities full of people dreaming of escape to an idyllic, open countryside—is holding out tooth and nail.

June 2018 ended fast, before I had time to savor it all. My journal entries began tumbling over one another, out of my control; I wasn’t used to experiencing so much so quickly that the actual living of life edged out the time and will to record it. 

 And I certainly had no time to rigorously fact-check Taegen’s suggestion from our first day in Dorset, about the radical publicness of the land we lived on that summer. Our second and third days on the Jurassic Coast, we roamed the most vibrant and varied landscape I’d ever seen. We spent steep and sweaty hours walking our seven-mile stretch of the South West Coast Path, from Osmington Mills, a popular 17th-century port for smugglers offloading loot in England, to Lulworth Cove, where 21st-century parents were out in droves, springing for those 50-pence-extra Cadbury Flakes to adorn their children’s ice cream cones. And then we walked back again.

Ruba and Taegen walk England’s South West Coast Path, approaching Durdle Door via the clouds.  Photograph by Julia Holzman.

This is the online version of my B.A. Capstone project, submitted to the UChicago History Department on April 9, 2021. To see a cited version, please get in touch.

Profile of a 21-Year-Old Water Cremation Evangelist

Portrait of California’s soon-to-be youngest funeral director, in plaid. Courtesy of Chris Taktak. 

Studying for the California Funeral Director Examination is not like studying for the written test one must pass in a grimy, electric blue booth at the DMV before obtaining an Illinois Class D driver’s license. It is not like studying to take the SAT, and it’s not even like studying to take the SAT’s avant-garde younger sister, the ACT. (I checked.)

Christopher Taktak, who graduated from Columbia University a semester early this past December, is no stranger to studying. And now, locked down in L.A. with three friends, he’s doing it daily, for hours on end, dutifully memorizing thousands of pages’ worth of regulatory minutiae of the most macabre sort. If your plan is to become California’s youngest funeral director before the clock strikes February, this is what it takes. 

I interrupt his studying to speak with Chris virtually on a Friday afternoon in mid-January. The clean, white walls and high ceilings that frame his face are sun-dappled and distinctly Californian. He is as warm and inviting as ever, quick to laugh, and occasionally twirls a turquoise Muji pen in one hand—a pen which, he knows as well as I do, he could sell me in a matter of seconds.

In June, Chris plans to launch Doola, a user- and eco-friendly virtualized alternative to traditional body disposal. Someday, he anticipates, Doola will be the whole country’s go-to for water cremations.

Otherwise known as alkaline hydrolysis, water cremation is a rising star in the funeral industry. It’s legal in 21 states and counting, with the strongest opposition coming from the Catholic Church. To be cremated by water, the corpse enters a metal chamber filled with warm water and an alkaline solution, which raises the pH level until all but bone has dissolved. Those bones are then dried and heated, and pulverized into a much whiter ash than flame cremation yields. Of course, “ash” is a misnomer here, Chris clarifies. It’s bone that you get. But—and they won’t teach you this in school—the same is true of traditional cremation.

In L.A., traditional cremations normally face strict quotas, part a county-wide effort to lessen harmful emissions in an already smog-choked city. That these limits were just temporarily lifted due to record-high COVID-19 deaths seems only a greater reason to turn to alternate methods of disposition, whose effects on air quality will not compound other public health crises.

As urban cemeteries fill up, and cremations as a whole are on the rise, the affordability, stunningly small carbon footprint, and perceived gentleness of water cremation have afforded it moderate buzz across the U.S. in the decade since the initial commercial water cremations were performed.

Doola, Chris explains, will make the entire end-of-life process gentler for all parties involved. “You can basically just go online and order cremation through our website… And once you've ordered a cremation with us, first of all, [there are] no hidden fees, no need for price comparison, none of that. We’ll send the ashes back to you via mail.” 



I first knew Chris only peripherally, as a lifelong family friend of my friend, Ruba. Chris was popular—he was friends with more or less all of London, as far as I knew—and he attended an actual British school, as Ruba and her younger sister Lila had before they made the switch to the American School in London, where I met them. 

When Chris and Ruba moved into their dorm rooms at Columbia and Barnard, respectively, each was relieved to have a pseudo-sibling by their side.

Raised in West London with frequent visits to Beirut, his mother’s hometown, Chris has always been outgoing; the open-armed host of the first party I ever stayed at until well past sunrise. I’d have guessed that he was moving to L.A. to produce a Hollywood blockbuster long before I’d land on funerary entrepreneurship.

But Chris has been “this way” as long as Ruba can remember. When he was about 10, she recalls, he encountered a box of cereal that didn’t meet his discerning standards. So he sent it back to corporate with a note, “and then he got like, a year's worth of cereal.” 

Chris says that it didn’t happen precisely like that. “Hahaha,” he texts when I reach out to fact-check. “Ruba is right that I liked to voice my dissatisfaction a lot when I was younger. Though I didn’t get free cereal for a year, I was thoroughly rewarded for my comments and suggestions.” With all the requisite modesty of someone 11 years older and wiser than they once were, Chris adds, in parentheses, “I’m not sure why!”

The youngest of four sons, Chris was his mother’s right-hand businessman in his early teens, helping her found not one, but two businesses: a now-defunct Arab-centric media and lifestyle website called “Arab Women Now,” as well as her own clothing and jewelry brand.

“He took advantage of New York and lived his life to the fullest, but he never took his studies for granted,” Ruba recalls, telling me that Chris stood out, even at Columbia, for the exceptionally hard work that he always made look effortless. But it’s his skill with people that’s always been his most valuable asset. “I knew whatever he did, because he’s a great communicator… he’d do it well.” Then Ruba adds, with a giggle: “I did not expect this. I’ll be honest.”

From left: Chris, Ruba, and Lila in New York. (Not pictured: Aida Nadar and Daniel Taktak, the other members of this crew.) Courtesy of Ruba Nadar.

Chris came to Columbia on a student visa, which allows him 60 days to find an employer after graduation. Of those 60, about 25 remain. He thinks that his application for an entrepreneurship visa, which is how he plans to stay in the country once his current permission elapses, hinges on a vote of confidence from the Small Business Administration, from whom he’s requesting a loan of $1.2 million. And that money is staked on his provision of collateral: $300,000 raised from a first round of investments. 

When I ask Chris what a “high” investment looks like right now, he deftly evades the question. “My end goal is an investment that an angel is comfortable with; an investment that a VC is comfortable with… What I really appreciate is the fact that people are trusting me with anything at all. Because that means that people believe in me, and I really take that as a big sign of respect.” 

Chris’s polar opposite in more ways than one, I’m an American who yearns for the right to work in the U.K. Since he’s lucky enough to be a British citizen already, I wonder, what’s stopping him from pursuing Doola back in London instead?

“I think the U.K. isn't really ready to have a brand made out of this death process,” he offers. In addition to California being the obvious choice in other ways—he cites its innovative, eco-conscious culture, and its still wide-open market for water cremations—Chris says that the U.K. operates locally in a way that’s increasingly rare in the U.S., motherland of franchising and Starbucks. 

For now, a virtualized crematory brand with a Glossier-influenced aesthetic and an outspoken, friendly marketing strategy that draws inspiration from a weed-delivery service called Eaze, might make for a uniquely American success story.

The current concept for Doola’s logo. Courtesy of Chris Taktak.

Chris’s pitch is well-polished; no doubt shined and sharpened at each of the hundreds of investor meetings and market research interviews he’s conducted over the past ten months, not to mention the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) course he took on a whim last spring, which—alongside the tragedy of this age of mass death we’re experiencing—first gave rise to Doola. 

Chris majored in Urban Studies at college, always with an eye toward sustainability, and generally assumed that he would go to architecture school after graduating. “I [had] never taken an engineering class at all. [I’d] never taken an operations course at all. But the class, you know, sounded interesting… Little did I know that a month into it, we would be virtual,” he reflects. “A lot of other students chose to focus on more, perhaps, banal problems, like food packaging, or advertising, or marketing, while I couldn’t get my head around the whole death process that was going on. [Death] was all around me; it was on the news. You couldn’t get away from it. So I decided, Why not focus on that?”

That IEOR class took an approach to product-building that centered people rather than problems. Initially, as the world bore witness to families forced to say goodbye to loved ones on FaceTime rather than in person, Chris considered crafting a service that would improve virtual funerals. “But that didn’t really seem to tackle the root of the problem. And so I decided to take this project outside of the classroom. I focused on death for three months, I did a lot of research, I interviewed a lot of people, and then I came up with what I have today.”

In October, Chris entered the Columbia Venture Community’s 10th Annual Columbia Alumni Demo Night. Of hundreds of applicants, Doola was selected as one of five finalists, the four others each from graduate students at Columbia Business School. Chris, and Doola, won the evening.

When Lila told me in December that Chris had moved to L.A. to found a funeral start-up, I laughed, and she did too. I asked what he was really doing in California—just riding out the darkest, coldest days of the pandemic in the sun? 

Still laughing, she told me that she was serious. Chris had already amassed significant investments, and was rapidly building out his own water cremation business.

I was delighted by the news, and I hurled questions at Lila. Hearing Chris practice his pitch for meetings and presentations over long dinners in the fall had armed her with statistics, so she tried her best. She couldn’t explain how alkaline hydrolysis worked, but she stressed that it produced up to 60 percent more ashes than traditional cremations.

“Is that something people want?!” I asked, incredulous.

Lila paused for a moment, trying to conjure up how Chris would phrase it, but came up blank. I privately doubted that anyone my age could convincingly sell any one method of body disposition over the next.

At some point, Lila and I moved on to lesser news, sipping cappuccinos at either end of a long wooden bench as we observed clouds passing along the surface of a shallow pool in the heart of Regent’s Park. Triton and Dryads Fountain, it’s called. In its center, a bronze-sculpted sea god triumphantly blows into a conch shell held aloft, sending a stream of water forcefully into the sky, and then back into the fountain, where two mermaids at the god’s feet are caught in a ceaseless spray. They stare at one other in alarm. 

(Or maybe, they’re impressed.)

Triton and Dryads Fountain. Photo from The Royal Parks website.

The Simons

Below is a slightly edited version of a paper I submitted in March 2020 for Tara Zahra’s class, “Writing Family History: Migration Stories.” I apologize for the atrocious endnote formatting!

For a photo gallery, a potentially helpful family tree, and a link to sources and so forth, see the end of the piece.

— PROLOGUE —

Once upon a time in foggy, mountainous, mid–19th century Transylvania, glamorous vampires mingled with gentile royalty in foreboding castles. Meanwhile, underage Hungarian Jews—“congenital embellishers,” (1) for better or worse—bought late-night drinks for “very cool Gypsies” in and around their suburban shtetls whenever the Romani passed through Hungary, about four times a year. (2, 3) 

Hani’s father was a butcher and cattle dealer. Simon Baruch was blond and handsome, another local butcher who worked a different cattle stall at the same market. He caught Hani’s father’s eye, and was promptly whisked away to dine with the family. Hani was the oldest of her sisters, a skilled cook and housekeeper, and she served dinner that night. The men went into another room to talk dowries, and when Baruch left, Hani’s father asked if she knew who the boy was. She did not.

“Your husband! Your future husband!”

They lived happily ever after. (4)

— “THE SIMONS OF BECLEAN?” —

Simon Baruch was a butcher, and Hani was a housewife. 

Their sons Andrew and Louis (whose name might have really been Leopold, but who might’ve been an individual brother of his own) were butchers too; their son Salomon (“Pop,” to me) mostly waited tables before opening an extermination business a little later in life; and no one talks about whatever it was that their daughters, Rosie and Julia, did for work. (5) No one really talks about Malvina, another (potential) daughter of theirs, at all. (6) 

When Salomon was a very young boy, likely years before Andrew was born, his family moved to a new Transylvanian shtetl town: Beclean, in what was then (Austria-)Hungary. Two men in the town were talented at burning mud to make bricks, and so the family built a burnt-mud-brick house, which successfully withstood a flood. Hani would walk 15 or 20 blocks to do laundry at the river, and would carry the clothing home on her shoulders, dripping wet. And she often visited the butcher shop, cared for “five or six kids,” and would somehow still find time, every Thursday night, to bake more loaves of rye bread than she had children, and she’d make cheese patties to be served with sour cream. “Mothers like that, you don’t find in America.” (7)

Some 20 years after his family’s move to Beclean, around 1910–1914, Andrew was a high schooler in Dej, Hungary. Dej and Beclean are about 15 miles apart, relatively nearby suburbs to Kolozsvár, Hungary. It’s unclear whether the Simons moved from Beclean to Dej at some point, or if their 15-mile separation is a pedantic distinction that really only exists within the bounds of Google Maps in 2020. About a decade after beginning high school, Andrew’s hometown(s) of Beclean/Dej/Kolozsvar would become Romanian territory. Koloszvár officially acquired its new name, Cluj, when Hungary signed onto the contentious Treaty of Trianon in 1920 (Case 25). (8) 

The Simons were Jewish, although they became less strictly religious as the years went by. They were religious enough so that as a child, Salomon Simon knew to hide from his father while covertly devouring the fried ham that the Roma brought to town when they passed through; (9) not so religious that Andrew even pretended to run a kosher butcher shop when he bought his own in Hell’s Kitchen the early 1930s. (10) (Though pretending to sell kosher meat, was, indeed, a relatively normal practice among New York’s Jewish butchers in the early to mid–20th century [Diner 183]. [11])

Their Judaism seemed to fit them well as the punch line to a storied achievement that shouldn’t have been possible for a Jew, like Baruch being a rough rider in the Hungarian army. Or, less often, as a reason why an opportunity, like Salomon graduating college, didn’t pan out. (12) At its most productive, religious observance was a catalyst for Andrew’s getting a raise in one of his earliest butcher shops in New York. Later, Andrew’s empty threat of labeling a German-descended meat supplier as anti-Semitic took his butcher shop to greater heights of financial success in the midst of the Great Depression. (13)

In 1946, the Simons’ Judaism was the reason that their European contingent never showed up on the 150 beautiful acres in upstate New York, that Andrew had purchased three years prior in order to help secure their farmers’ visas, thinking that the war would end soon. In 1946, Andrew found out that everyone still at home had been killed. (14)

— “POP” —

Big shots pervade Salomon and Andrew’s stories. The Simon brothers arguably weave in and out of “big shot” territory themselves over the course of their respective careers and migration stories, but perhaps no alleged big shot is so crucial to Salomon’s story as the nameless one who “came down from America” right at the turn of the 20th century—just after Salomon had lost a job, as it happened—and “told big things about ‘our country’” and possibly inspired a 17- or 18-year-old (15) Salomon to make the leap across Western Europe, and then the Atlantic Ocean, himself. (16) His leap turned out to be quite a prolonged one.

Salomon spent a month in Leipzig, eastern Germany, before moving on to the port city of Hamburg, where he spent “a year and a day” in waiting. He was faced with investigations at the border, but Salomon wouldn’t submit to the border officials’ scare tactics. Wearing “nothing but a winter—no, spring!—coat, and a small satchel,” Salomon was doggedly persistent in showing officials the letter permitting him to work in the U.S., meanwhile learning German and working at a big store so he could send payments to the shipping company he planned to sail with. Salomon ideally would have travelled on the faster, newer boat, that took only seven days to cross the Atlantic. But too many people were sailing, and the days started getting colder, so at the beginning of December, 1906, he gave up and sailed on a ship that had previously been used to shuttle cattle overseas. Salomon slept in the steerage of the S.S. Blücher, (17) where vomiting occurred regularly on the heads of bottom bunkmates, meals were served on the deck, and Russian Jews abounded. Storms at the back end of the journey caused the ship to arrive in 13 days, two longer than expected, but no matter: On December 13th, Salomon arrived at Castle Garden, then New York’s major port of arrival. He was investigated; they were particular. Salomon presented his passport and resume. He had no job, and $25. He could speak Romanian, Hungarian, Hebrew, German, and Yiddish, and thanks to rabbinical lessons as a boy in the shtetl, he could write in all but the latter. English—spoken and written—would come soon enough. According to Salomon, Castle Garden’s border agents let him in because “they thought that [he] fit into America.” (18)

So, too, did many other Hungarian immigrants of the time, it would seem. Salomon wasn’t unique in his 1906 emigration: It fell right in the middle of a three-year peak for the country, 1905, 1906, and 1907 being often cited as the “most intense years of emigration from the territory of Hungary” (Vida 128). (19) 

When Salomon got onto the streets of New York, his $25 went quickly. Each night around 10 or 11 p.m., he’d join a line of hundreds (Italians; Jews; “all kinds of people”) and the line would wait outside, in December, until about eight a.m. He was one of many immigrants looking for a job, though I don’t completely understand how the line-waiting was supposed to help with that. He had no friends in America, but he had a tangential acquaintance from the old country, who tried to train Salomon to join him in the printing business. Salomon felt no allegiance to printing, and so, when his money ran out, he somehow “found a family” who took him in at their small farm in Lynbrook, Long Island, where Salomon worked from six a.m. until dusk for six dollars a month. From there, he took a train to Long Beach, and found a restaurant where the employees tended to be Hungarian. Salomon was a waiter, but worked his way up to some sort of treasurer position for the boss. At the beginning of the surge of Hungarian Jewish migration that spanned from the 1870s until World War I, by far the most popular trades upon arrival in New York tended to be in the garment industry (Perlman 146), (20) rather than the service work that Salomon took up. However, most Jewish immigrants of the time also lived in clusters around the Lower East Side of Manhattan (Perlman 138), (21) and Salomon didn’t fit into that mold, either. Alongside being a waiter in Long Beach, Salomon developed a side hustle: His restaurant neighbored a big hotel that was being painted by a crew of about 100, who would come next door for drinks after work. Salomon started buying cases of beer at 15 cents per bottle, and sold the bottles to the painters at 25 cents each. Salomon bounced around Long Island, working various restaurant jobs, and in the meanwhile he got a little sick, and he also got married. (22)

It was 1909 when Salomon and Aranka “Gussie” Simon were married in a hallway. Gussie’s family was able to pay for the wedding, perhaps because her uncle was “a very rich lawyer.” The rich lawyer and other wedding guests were subjected to a foodless hallway wedding, after which Salomon went out with his friends. Their first apartment was purchased for either $8 or $80. (Roughly $250—or $2500—today.) In March 1913, the couple moved to the Rockaways, in Queens, with their two babies. Alexander (“Allie”) had been born two years prior, whereas Morris (“Mo”) was only born in August 1912. Half a decade later, in 1918 or 1919, Salomon and Gussie started renting a bungalow in the Rockaways, and had their youngest child, a daughter named Charlotte. (23, 24, 25) The whole place cost Salomon and Gussie $250 per year, and Salomon couldn’t afford it. Luckily, Gussie was a talented dressmaker with her own patterns and apparently lots of hungry customers, and Salomon tried to help make ends meet by spending nights at the ocean, bagging whitefish to be pickled. But ends did not meet by the time rent was due, so they left. Gussie got a job making dresses for $35 per week, and Salomon went to work at a laundromat, delousing infested clothes. When Salomon told Gussie what he was doing, he said, “My wife started to cry and said, ‘No, you stay home and take care of the children and house, I’m making $35 a week, and that’s enough money.’ So that’s what I did.” (26) 

Salomon became a naturalized American citizen on March 14th, 1921, (27) about 15 years after his arrival on U.S. shores. Rarely—if ever—did he return to the old country, perhaps due to a combination of factors: his marriage to Gussie and the children they had together; his status as an older child who needed to serve as an independent provider rather than a dependent on his parents; World War I, which consumed Europe during the heart of those 15 years Salomon took to acclimatize to the U.S. before becoming a citizen. Right as he migrated, Hungary ramped up its efforts to draw emigrants home, taking a more practical approach than it had previously by “‘easing the acquisition of estates’ for return migrants from the United States…” (Poznan 654), just one piece in a longer history of Hungarian repatriation tactics. (28) None of these governmental efforts seemed to “speak” to Salomon, though the extent to which they were even intended to speak to Jews is unclear to me.

Salomon left the restaurant industry in favor of extermination, and eventually—likely during the 1920s—he founded his own company, “Simon & Sons.” He wanted at least one more son working with him to fit the plurality of the title—and probably for cheap labor purposes—but the younger of his two sons, Morris, was never as helpful as he’d have liked. My mother described Grandpa Mo as “smart, but a ne’er-do-well [who] couldn’t get it together.” (29) 

Robert Perlman’s analysis of New York census data also suggests that Hungarian Jewish men experienced a professional surge in the U.S. by the late 1920s (Perlman 214). (30) Salomon was part of this trend, having successfully upgraded from low-paying service industry jobs to an entrepreneurial pursuit of his own. Salomon and Gussie did well for themselves; Gussie making dresses before becoming a full-time mother and housewife, (31) Salomon executing pests alongside his son Allie, and executing perfect one-liners decades later when being recorded for an oral history, like, “You can’t kill a louse with church; you have to kill ’em with a good insecticide.” (32) Insecticides weren’t the only pest-killers being used by early to mid–20th century exterminators: Ferrets, too, were a common rat-killing mechanism. For most of their lives, Pop and Gussie lived in a large house at 167 Beach 87th Street, in the Rockaways. Their property also included three smaller bungalows, and much of the space was rented out each summer to beachgoers, while my grandfather Bruce was brought up in one of the small houses. Last week, he recounted his late-1930s memories of the extermination ferrets: 

“When I was seven or eight years old, I got a 50-gallon oil drum, and some chicken wire that I put on top. And Pop [Salomon] would catch live rats in order to ‘blood-train’ the ferrets about killing them. We would put the live rat in the drum, and then toss in the ferret, which would promptly break its neck—that’s the way they killed [rats]—and I would charge the neighborhood kids a penny to stand around the drum, look through the chicken wire, and watch the slaughter… I made probably four or five cents a session, which meant I could buy two issues of the Daily News and spend a penny on gum. A Coke at the fountain was probably a nickel.” (33)

— “ANDREW” —

Andrew had different priorities than his exterminator brother when it came to delousing. He was only about seven years old when Salomon left for the U.S., and didn’t join his older siblings Salomon and Julia in New York until his mid-20s. He got held up in Europe by the First World War, but when he did decide to leave home, he had Julia’s advice to guide him on his way. Julia’s biggest bits of travel advice were to wait in Hamburg for a big boat, and to scrupulously disinfect and shave himself to prepare for the voyage over, as German ships were plagued by lice. To the latter piece of advice, Andrew retorted, “I have beautiful, wavy, big black hair, so no, no dice. I wouldn’t cut my hair for nobody.” (34) 

The big, modern boat, however, was something Andrew was willing to wait for. But like Salomon, he found himself without a suitable boat in Hamburg, and an English shipping  agent arranged for his passage on to England so he could ship out from there. Having landed in Greenwich, Andrew made his way up north, to Liverpool. No big boats were to be found there either, so with a new group of friends—two or three men in similar positions—Andrew meandered down to Southampton, but he and his crew stopped in London on the way. All in all, it took Andrew three months to get from his shtetl to the English port from which he’d finally sail, but he was in no rush: “I wanted to see Germany, England, whatever.” He was fairly unusual in this twisted, leisurely path to the U.S. via Southampton, unlike his older brother, who had taken the road most traveled in successfully migrating through Hamburg. As Tara Zahra writes in The Great Departure, “Hamburg and Bremen were the most common outlets for East European emigrants, but it was also possible to depart from Rotterdam, Antwerp, or Liverpool” (Zahra 40). (35)

Andrew sailed with something like $300 he’d collected over the course of his wanderings, having exchanged cash from Romanian currency wherever he stopped for coffee. When he arrived in New York, he felt secure in that he “still had $70.” I am unsure as to how he spent $230 aboard the S.S. Adriatic. Nonetheless, he had written letters back and forth with Julia. She arranged for him to have a place to stay, among fellow Hungarians, when he landed in New York. (36)

In Ties That Bind, Ties That Divide, Julianna Puskás writes that “The Hungarian middle-class element … was most strongly represented in New York. Adapting to their surroundings with difficulty, they were most diligent in protecting their Hungarian characteristics” (Puskás 110). (37) Beyond that initial housing set-up—which didn’t last long—Andrew did not seem overly invested in maintaining connections with [now Romanians] on American soil. He talked about getting a “businessman lunch” at a Hungarian restaurant in midtown later on in his New York life, when he would deliver meat around the city as part of a butcher shop job: “I came there, took the meat in the kitchen, and they said, ‘You wanna eat?’ I said, ‘Yeah, what you got?,’ and they said, ‘Goulash!’ I said, ‘I don’t come to America to eat goulash!’” and though Andrew claimed he was joking, he also said he was given roast beef—a delicacy he’d acquired a taste for on the ship from England—instead. (38) This checks out, according to Hasia Diner’s analysis of immigrant Jewish foodways in the 20th century in her book Hungering for America. Diner writes that these migrants largely “rejected the idea that back home foods tasted better and were more authentic. They expressed little emotional longing for … the old tastes and smells” (Diner 190). (39)

Of his arrival on American soil, Andrew said, “I went out to Rockaway to see my brother; he didn’t buy me even a nickel’s worth of bread! … He told me he has a lot of mortgage, he has three children, and so on.” Salomon was able to do a little networking on his younger brother’s behalf, though, as he was in the restaurant industry, with valuable connections to the butchers who supplied the restaurants where he worked. Salomon got Andrew his first butchering job in New York, where he was content earning $10 or $12 each week, for two weeks. At that point, Julia came down from Manhattan to see her two brothers, and Andrew said, “Well, Julia, I got a job, and I stay here with my brother; he has plenty of room!” Holding true to her reputation as someone who “no one liked,” (40) she said, “Never mind my brother in Rockaway, you come with me to the city. Don’t stay here in this dump.” 

Andrew followed Julia back up to Manhattan, and lived in a room on 79th Street. He got a job working for a Ninth Avenue butcher’s shop managed by a neighbor who’d drive to work every morning via horse and buggy picked up from the 78th Street Stable, whereas Andrew would usually either take the subway, or drive a delivery wagon around the city before arriving at the shop, making three or four early deliveries and eating nearly as many rounds of breakfast as he went. Andrew was for a while considered by his coworkers to be a “greenhorn,” or a naïve newcomer to the industry—though he did, of course, have years of butchering experience from back in Europe. Desperate to get his hands on some actual meat, and prove his worth while improving his skills, Andrew began doing more, and harder, labor in exchange for permission to do actual butchering. “I knew if I carried all the loads in, they’d let me cut it up. So in no time I knew every trick of the trade. I was … getting already $35 [per week], which was big money,” he said. (41) 

Andrew generally worked Saturdays, but when Yom Kippur rolled around, he took the day off out of respect to a promise he’d made his father that he would “keep the big holiday.” This behavior was typical of immigrant Jews of the time. In Jewish New York, Deborah Moore writes that central and eastern European immigrant Jews in New York tended to “[neglect] strict Sabbath observance in favor of economic integration … Indeed, only a minority of New York Jews observed the Sabbath or affiliated with a synagogue … But many more, perhaps as many as three-quarters, attended synagogue annually on the High Holidays” (Moore 106). (42) When he came back into work Monday, Andrew received his late envelope of the last week’s pay, and it was $10 short. When he pressed his manager about why, he was told, “Well, you wanted the day off. I had to hire a man and I had to pay him $10.” Andrew replied, “Well, if my work is worth $10 per day, then I don’t get enough pay! I want more money.” And the boss said, “No more money, no more work.” 

Thus began a veritable saga of Andrew’s bouncing back and forth between neighboring butcher shops on Ninth Avenue, whose respective managers “were enemies in business but otherwise they [were] friends.” He worked hard to prove himself at the second location, and ended up being pulled back into the first by a conniving manager who seduced him back to work with an early-morning horse and buggy ride replete with quality cheesecake at a Hungarian casino/restaurant. “I was a big cake eater!” Andrew confessed. Me too. And history backs us up: “‘Unlike the other groups of the Ghetto, the Rumanian is a bon-vivant and a pleasure-lover; therefore he did not long delay to establish the pastry-shop’” (Diner 202). (43) 

Only nine months into his second stint at his first Ninth Avenue butcher locale, however, Andrew went back home. He didn’t like making deliveries, just as his brother hadn’t enjoyed printing. When he announced his imminent departure, Andrew’s boss said, “You know, you’ll be back.” Andrew said, “Why the heck do you—”

“You’re making so much money; you have the chance to make more money.” 

“This is no money! You know how much I made at home? One day I went to a market and bought a couple cattle and made a whole week’s paycheck in a couple hours’ time!” 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

So Andrew sailed home. (44)

When he got back to interwar Romania, Andrew managed to sneak around the mandatory army reporting rule thanks to a little bribery and a lucky high school connection to the local police captain in his district. But soon a little bribery turned into a lot, and Andrew was losing five dollars every other day for six months, keeping sergeants quiet about his able-bodied Romanian presence. He decided to return to the U.S., and did, nonchalantly, just a few days later, via Cherbourg. Finally, Andrew knew how to easily get himself on a big liner. Once he landed back in New York and cleared customs, Andrew headed for a payphone and called his old manager, who sounded appropriately unsurprised to hear from him. For a dollar, Andrew and his suitcase took a taxi to the shop, only four or five blocks from the pier, and got straight to work. It was about two p.m. “That happened maybe three or four times.” (45)

In all, Andrew went back to Europe five times. He’d go back every two or three years; stay a couple months; sort of wish he could stay permanently. Like his older brother, and most other migrants from the region, government incentives did not draw him home; as Kristina Poznan writes, “Most migrants, in the end, based their decisions to return on family, economic, and work-related factors … [R]eturn migrants would migrate again if they believed that conditions in the United States to find work improved” (Poznan 657), (46) though that wasn’t exactly Andrew’s case, either. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in either 1925 (47) or 1928 (48) and that sweetened the deal even more: “American citizens, the Romanian army can’t bother,” he said. 

Andrew’s brother Louis (or Leopold?) was also a butcher, and he supplied a big Romanian bologna producer. The man who’d successfully run the operation for years was getting old, and he passed the company down to his less business-savvy son. The son wanted everything modernized, and that meant big expenses that the bologna business started failing to keep up with, so Andrew’s brother pitched a homeward-bound Andrew as a consultant of sorts. Andrew said, “I didn’t know much about bologna-making, but I know how to manage a store, and think like that.” And Andrew was finally a big shot: He had about $5,000—the equivalent, he thought, to about two million Romanian leu. Andrew was almost set on investing half of that sum into the bologna business, and going in as a partner and manager himself. His fifth trip to Europe would be his last. But at the eleventh hour, another big shot—this one a family friend and advisor, a well-known lawyer in Cluj—advised Andrew against it. As an American citizen, he’d be limited to the role of silent partner, and the risk was too high. Andrew turned around, and went back to America. It was 1928 or 1929, and the Great Depression was on the doorstep. (49)

When the Depression arrived, Andrew lost everything from property to stocks to a third of his regular weekly salary—at that point it was about $60, and was to be cut down to $40. Disgusted, Andrew simply gave up: “I decided, ‘I’m not gonna work then, I’ll be a hobo.’” He vacationed in the countryside for a summer on the cheap, working a bit to earn the $22 per week he needed to pay room and board. Then he came back to New York, too proud to ask his old boss for another job, but as luck would have it, he bumped into the man at the market on 14th Street. The ex-boss asked Andrew what he was doing there, in a fancy suit, smoking a five-cent cigar, and Andrew retorted, “I have an appointment with a friend, a butcher—we want to buy a store together.” “Are you crazy?! Nobody buys, everyone wants to get rid [of their businesses]!” With no prior plans to venture into peak-Depression entrepreneurship, Andrew talked a big game. His old boss asked what he was doing in the meantime—nothing—and so, Andrew reentered the game, but decided only to work weekends, telling his boss that he’d go looking for a store of his own on the weekdays. (50)

In 1932, the Meat Cutters Union was organized, and Andrew was a member. Soon afterwards, he spent a few weeks in Europe, but upon his return to New York, he and his on-again, off-again boss went out for coffee. The boss was in distress, and told him, “I can’t hire nobody no more! The union sends me any man they feel or they want … Andy, I can’t hire you. Only thing you have to do is go to the union headquarters and tell them that you worked for me so many years and I want you back and they should give you the job.” Andrew tried, but the union bureaucracy proved as unhelpful as advertised. Still, Andrew needed a job, so he agreed to take a union-sponsored weekend gig. It was in Brooklyn at Fulton Street Market; Andrew was staying with Julia in the Bronx temporarily. It took Andrew two hours to find the place, and when he got there, he found himself mistreated and unable to speak the shop’s local language (Italian). Back at union headquarters, the union president, Albert, listened to Andrew’s complaints and said, “Yeah, but you have to take what I give you.” “No I don’t.” But Andrew did, once more, take what he was given, and this time the gig was even more remote, on City Island, and took Andrew three hours to reach. Andrew said, 

“Finally I got there, the same story. A small butcher shop. I didn’t even take off my coat—I looked around and said, ‘I don’t want this job.’ A couple hours later I went back to the union office, and they used to give me a ticket for working, and I was a hot-headed Hungarian. I took the ticket and said, ‘Albert, stick it up your butt! If that’s the kind of job you’ll give me.’ So since then with Albert, I’m black-marked. I can’t get no jobs in the union, and the jobs they could give me I didn’t work, because I couldn’t work at that kind of place! I’m used to big business! The bigger the business, the better I like it. What do you do? You have to go into business.” (51)

So Andrew went into business. He’d found a young man in a marketplace, a guy by the name of something like Arthur Lefgutz, and they were both looking for shops. Andrew proposed that instead of settling for two small shops, they combine forces, and buy a bigger one as partners. Arthur found a shop at 49th Street and 10th Avenue, in Hell’s Kitchen, and Andrew happened to know the owner from whom they’d buy it: a Mr. Cutlet, or Cutlev? (I’d prefer the former, from a butcher pun standpoint.) Arthur and Andrew took the place over on a Saturday, and showed up Monday to a picket line. Little did they know that the first man they’d fired, on their first night of operations, had been a union man. Their inauspicious start didn’t prove telling for the business’s fate overall. The shop kept its previous name, Liberty Meat Market, and Andrew and Arthur abided by union rules. Business picked up, and “Maybe a year or a year and a half later, we had already $12,000 in the checking account.” The men picked up credit at various slaughterhouses, and cut deals around New York and New Jersey, often choosing cheap, would-be-discard meat over the fancy stuff, knowing that customers wouldn’t know the difference. 

One day, Andrew called up Mr. Miller, a German slaughterhouse director he did lots of business with, despite suspecting him to be a Nazi sympathizer, and managed to squeeze 500 cattle heads out of his Connecticut slaughterhouse. A truck driver showed up at 11 p.m. with the 500 skin-on, brain-in heads, about 40 or 50 pounds apiece, and Andrew paid a cop on a nearby beat five dollars to help carry the heads in for an hour or two. Around seven a.m., delivery men began showing up, but “couldn’t get in the store because it was full of heads. A little while later my partner arrived and looked in the store and was fainting. He said, ‘what the heck is this?!’ … My partner opened the store and couldn’t open it for business because nobody could step in.” When all was said and done, Andrew estimated they’d made about $3,000 off the heads, double their initial investment. People didn’t know their names—“they called me Mr. Liberty”—but Andrew and Arthur were succeeding. (52)

It was 1941, the U.S. was on the brink of World War II, and Andrew was walking to the bank to deposit money one evening, when he passed a four-story building on the corner of 49th Street. A sign on its door read “CONDEMNED,” and Andrew immediately called some lawyers to enquire. He was told that yes, it was condemned (it was not adequately fireproofed), but he could buy the building, with its two stoops, for $6,000 cash. He spent half of Liberty Meat Market’s checking account on the property. Andrew’s brother-in-law was in the rooming business—he specialized in flipping buildings and turning space into apartments—so he agreed to do as much for Andrew with the top floors, such that he could make some profit. The brother-in-law was able to secure some material under the table, despite its being wartime, and promised to get all the necessary permits sorted when all was said and done. “He says, ‘Don’t worry, when I finish the job I go down to City Hall,’ and he’d see the mayor—no, not the mayor, some crook. Some politician. Everyone has a price. He says, ‘I pay my duty call to him and come back with a paper.’ I said, ‘I don’t care what you do. How much would everything cost me?’”

All the improvements and briberies ended up costing the second half of the butcher shop’s checking account—another $6,000—but Andrew and Arthur each had a full floor to live on, and got $50 per month in rent from the Yugoslav family who moved in on another floor, whose patriarch also agreed to take care of the buildings and sidewalk when they moved in. “We had a roof garden! In the evening we used to go up, we had some reclining chairs; it was cool up there! And my dog used to walk around the roof … Nobody came near, they were afraid of the dog.” (53)

To Andrew, content on his roof garden with a booming business and a feeling of settlement in the U.S. at long last, things seemed at peace in the world—though of course, it was 1941, and they were not. Andrew planned to bring his family across the Atlantic. He and a brother were in correspondence, and all the details were settled: Whenever he received word that they were ready to travel, Andrew would buy a farm in his brother’s name, and the family would be on their way. But “while writing back and forth, they missed the boat.” Having missed the boat, the extended family was stuck, silent in Europe as WWII picked up steam, and the Holocaust ravaged eastern Europe, its horrors at the time unbeknownst to the rest of the world. 

In 1943, Andrew figured, “The war will be over sooner or later. I’m gonna buy a farm, so when the war is over [they] can come over. Big farm, with plenty of buildings and bungalows. A place to make a living.” So he purchased a farm in Ulster County, New York. It was near New Paltz, and it occupied 150 acres. Andrew’s wife, Margaret, went upstate (only about 80 miles north of Manhattan), and ran the farm for three years while Andrew stayed in business in Hell’s Kitchen. In 1946, he found out that everyone who’d been meant to come live on the farm had been killed in the Holocaust. (54)

“Margaret was there, three years alone. She gave me, ‘Either you sell the butcher shop or you sell the farm.’ And the butcher shop, I’d already made my money, and I didn’t want to sell the farm. It was a beautiful spot, one of the nicest spots there.” (55)

— “THE SIMONS OF NEW PALTZ?” —

My grandparents, Bruce and Arlene Simon, bought a smaller place just outside New Paltz in 1998, while my mom was pregnant with me. It’s called Breezy Lawn, and it, too, is a beautiful spot, complete with a main house, and three small buildings. As Bruce and Arlene’s progeny have spread out over the years—spouses aside, we were all born in Manhattan, but have since moved to England, Switzerland, Miami, Chicago, and the Bronx, among other places—New Paltz has been a constant second only to the Upper West Side apartment my grandparents have called home since before my mom could walk. I suppose New Paltz has only been a true constant to myself and my brother and cousins, all of whom are younger than me, since we’re the generation that grew up going. Still, it’s a permanent home; a family farm minus the barnyard animals and tractors.

Listening to Andrew’s oral history tapes a few weeks ago—painstakingly recorded in the 1980s by the legend who I think can only be described as my first cousin twice removed, Tom Yarmon—I was dumbstruck by the punch-in-the-gut insertion of this family farm that should’ve been home to so many of my ancestors who instead fell victim to the Holocaust. (I’d formerly been under the impression that I had no such relatives in my family history.) I was almost as shocked to hear about its location: It seems like no one’s talking about this New Paltz–adjacent property that long precedes Breezy Lawn in the family timeline. I immediately emailed my grandpa asking if he knew about it, and received a quick, “Yes. Visited the farm many times. Tried to find it 20 years ago but could not. Shame it was sold before we could buy it.” (56)

When I told my brother Sam about all of this in Cobb Café the other day, he got choked up, and his eyes welled up with tears; he’d also had no idea about the existence of Andrew and Margaret’s farm, much less its intended purpose that could never come to pass.

Next time we’re in New Paltz, I think we have a pilgrimage to make.

•••

Click here for sources/bibliography/endnotes.

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