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Landlocked on Purpose

In the fall of 1922, Aldo Leopold and his brother Carl paddled a canoe into the delta of the Colorado River and found a wilderness of green lagoons, a hundred channels braiding through two million acres of cottonwood and willow, egrets standing in the shallows, deer in the cane, and somewhere beyond the firelight the jaguar they never saw and never stopped feeling. Leopold wrote about that trip a quarter century later and confessed that he never went back. He preferred the delta as memory held it, because he understood what was coming for it. He was right to stay away. In November of that same year, in a lodge outside Santa Fe, commissioners from seven states signed the Colorado River Compact and divided the river on paper. The canoe and the signature belong in the same paragraph because one of them canceled the other.

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Raise Your Right Hand: The Blind Oath

First, swear. Then we will tell you what you are accused of. Sit with that order of operations for a moment, because the order is the whole instrument. A man is summoned before the court. He is not told the charge, because there might be no charge to tell. The summons brings him in, the book is offered, and the oath is administered before any indictment is read: swear to answer truthfully every question this court intends to put to you. After that, if anything is coming, it comes inside the interrogatories he has just sworn to answer. He has pledged his answers before the questions exist.

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You Have to Drink Hot

The building had a service corridor on the ground floor, and at the end of it a room about the size of a closet with a hot plate, a percolator, and a folding chair that had been repaired with wire. The man who kept the building running sat in that chair most afternoons. He was older than my father, Black, raised in the South, and he had been doing the work long enough that tenants asked him about the boiler before they called the managing agent. On the worst afternoon of that summer I came through with an iced coffee going soft in my hand, the cup so wet it kept trying to leave my fingers, and he was sitting there holding a mug with steam coming off the top of it.

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The Clock Came Off the Wall

In the spring of 2018, schools in England started taking analog clocks down from the walls of their examination halls. The reason arrived in the education press without a trace of shame: teenagers sitting their exams could no longer read a dial, they grew anxious watching a circle that told them nothing, and the schools judged it kinder to remove the clock than to teach the child. A deputy leader of the head teachers’ association explained that students were more accurate with digital displays. So the ladders went up, the hands came down, and an instrument that had governed rooms of learning for two centuries was carried to the storage closet as a courtesy to the people it once served. I have kept that ladder in my head ever since, because it shows the modern school system performing its signature move in a single gesture: confronted with an untaught skill, remove the evidence.

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Make a Game of Life

In North Loup, Nebraska, where I spent my boyhood summers with my grandfather, the television pulled one signal out of the sky, channel 10/11, and when the picture dissolved into snow the day still had eight hours left in it. A boy in a town like that learns the oldest technology on earth. Boredom is a raw material. A long afternoon wants shape, and shape comes from rules: the stick is a bat because we agree it is, the crack in the walk is a foul line because we say so, the score matters because we decide it matters. Nobody sold us that afternoon. We manufactured it ourselves, on the spot, out of dust and agreement, and the dust became the best part of the summer.

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Preplay: The Courtroom in the Wings

The news of my removal from my own show came from the producer. I had obtained the rights, signed us to a first-class theatrical option, and written the book and lyrics, all of it inside the year the rights contract granted to us. The director hired to stage the all-or-nothing reading was not my choice, and he was friends with my collaborator. After the failed previews, I was unceremoniously let go. When I asked my composer collaborator why this had happened, the director called me instead, and said that nobody wanted to talk to me. I had no choice but to sever the show, and my attorney fought to get me paid, credit on show. Everyone stonewalled him as well. That is the whole record, at the width the print ruling allows, because the identifying details of the production and the collaboration stay blurred in print for the privacy of the living, and the blur is logged in the specimen record beside its telling.

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The Paper Scalpel

In 2022, after years of court fights, Donna Langan became the first person in federal custody ever to receive gender confirmation surgery. The Bureau of Prisons directory listed her as female. In February 2025, three weeks into the new administration, she was notified that the system holding her was moving her to a men’s facility. Her body had changed years before, under lawful medical care ordered through the government’s own clinical process. What changed in 2025 was a signature in Washington, and the signature was enough.

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