C

God, Influence and

Conservative Networking
Inside the closed-door world of the Council for National Policy
BY ROBERT O’HARROW JR.

What caregiving taught me Climate change and trauma Covid vaccines for zoo animals
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○ Art With a Point
Title: “Spooky Season”
Artist: Katty Huertas, Washington
From the artist: Masks have become
such an integral part of life now — it
only makes sense to include them in
our Halloween costumes as well. This
year, with so many hit movies and TV
shows, there are lots of characters to
choose from.
For more art from the magazine, go to
wapo.st/art-with-a-point.
On the cover: Illustration by Nick
Ogonosky
Banca do Antfer
Telegram: https://t.me/bancadoantfer
10.31.21 Issuhub: https://issuhub.com/user/book/1712
The Amplifiers
The closed-door Council for National Policy is a D.C.
hub of conservatism. But what does it do? 10
Golden State of Climate Trauma
Three years after the Camp Fire in California, many
residents still face mental health issues. 20
What Caregiving Taught Me
You can fight only so hard to save a loved one. And
none of it is actually in your control. 30
Opening Lines
Zoos are starting to vaccinate animals against the
coronavirus. 2
Inside
Just Asking 6 Date Lab 8 Dining 39 Crossword 42
Second Glance 44 Wide Angle 45
Editor: Richard Just Deputy editor:
David Rowell Articles editors: Whitney
Joiner, Richard Leiby, Alexa McMahon
Dining editor: Joe Yonan Art directors:
Christian Font, Clare Ramirez Photo editor:
Dudley M. Brooks Copy editors: Jennifer
Abella, Angie Wu Food critic: Tom Sietsema
Staff writer: David Montgomery Editorial
aide: Daniele Seiss Production coordinator:
Mark Giaimo Account manager: Trish Ward
Marketing manager: Travis T. Meyer
Production manager: LaShanda Swancy
Production coordinator: Tyesha Greenwood
Graphic designer: Jill Madsen
Web: wapo.st/magazine
Twitter: @wpmagazine
Instagram: @washingtonpostmag
Facebook: The Washington Post Magazine
Email: wpmagazine@washpost.com
Editorial: 202-334-7585
Advertising: 202-334-5224
Opening Lines
Covid Vaccines
for Zoo Animals
Have Arrived
Some institutions have started
immunizing as others wait for supplies
BY MATT BLITZ
J
ust like 189 million Americans, Molly the
tiger is fully vaccinated against the
coronavirus. This summer, 16-year-old
Molly was one of several tigers and more
than 50 animals at the Oakland Zoo that
received at least one dose of a vaccine
made by the New Jersey-based company Zoetis.
Unlike some humans, she didn’t hesitate when it
came time to get her shot. A keeper gave a verbal
command, and she slinked up to the enclosure’s
fence, offering her hip for the jab. After a few
warm-up pokes, a veterinarian injected the vaccine.
Then, Molly got a treat: “For all of our large, exotic
cats — that’s lions, tigers and mountain lions —
they’re being positively reinforced with goat’s milk
sprayed in their mouths,” Alex Herman, vice
2 OCTOBER 31, 2021
president of veterinary services at the Oakland Zoo
in California, told me. “They really love it.”
The big cats aren’t the only zoo residents who’ve
been trained to receive the vaccines. “The bears got
ice cream and whipped cream. To get the chimp to
stay still, we gave her marshmallows and M&M’s,”
Herman says.
The Oakland Zoo was one of the first to
vaccinate, but others are moving to do the same.
The San Diego Zoo, the Denver Zoo, the St. Louis
Zoo and the Smithsonian’s National Zoo all have
started vaccinating some animals, while the
Nashville Zoo and Maryland Zoo were, as of press
time, waiting on vaccine shipments from Zoetis.
“Is covid-19 a risk to animals? Clearly, yes. Is it
safe to vaccinate? Clearly, yes,” Herman says. “We
are trying to minimize the spread through
vaccination. There’s so much data that shows that’s
the path forward for humans and animals.” Though
the virus’s origins remain murky — and the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention says there’s no
evidence that wildlife is a source of infection for
humans — it’s clear that all animals, mammals in
particular, can get sick from it.
In early 2020, two sniffling dogs in Hong Kong
tested positive for the coronavirus. Later, it was
discovered that farmed minks were dying of the
virus, decimating Europe’s mink fur industry and
forcing Denmark to cull 17 million minks.
The first animal in the United States to test
positive for the coronavirus was a tiger at the Bronx
ILLUSTRATION: CLOVER LI
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 3
 Archie the ferret gets
a dose of a
coronavirus vaccine
at the Oakland Zoo in
California. Archie is
one of more than 50
animals at the zoo
that received at least
one dose of a vaccine
made by the New
Jersey-based
company Zoetis.
Photograph by the
Oakland Zoo
Zoo in April 2020. Months later, gorillas at the San Diego Zoo
started coughing — and the zoo called Zoetis to ask about a
vaccine for animals. It turned out the company, known for
providing pharmaceuticals for livestock and pets, had already
begun working on one.
Zoetis, a former Pfizer subsidiary, started by focusing its
research on cats and dogs, but the U.S. Department of
Agriculture “said that they didn’t feel like cats and dogs were
going to be a significant concern, so we parked that program,”
Mahesh Kumar, vice president of global biologics research and
development at Zoetis, told me. The company then shifted
toward making one for minks, whose pelts are a nearly
$50 million industry in the United States. From that program
of vaccines, which Zoetis tested on minks, the company was
able to provide batches to the San Diego Zoo for its primates.
“Obviously, we are not able to individually license a profile
for every species. It’s not practical,” says Kumar. “So what we
decided was to [develop] a vaccine formulation that was safe
for all animals.” Soon, Zoetis was “inundated” with requests
from zoos and, in July, pledged to donate 11,000 doses to
nearly 70 zoos across the country. In total, the company has
made about 4 million doses so far, most of which have gone to
the farmed mink industry.
The animal vaccine has some similarities to the human
ones, though they were developed differently. Like the Pfizer
vaccine, the Zoetis version is designed to be two shots given
three weeks apart. Vials of the vaccine also require refrigeration
and need to be used within 24 hours of being opened.
But the Zoetis vaccine doesn’t employ messenger RNA like
the Pfizer or Moderna human vaccines. Instead, it uses a viral
spike protein created in a lab. When injected, it triggers an
immune response in the animal’s body. It’s a technique that
4 OCTOBER 31, 2021
Zoetis has used before to create vaccines for animals. In terms
of efficacy, Kumar says, it’s similar to the human vaccines.
So far, according to zoos, the side effects appear to be
minimal, perhaps even less so than with humans. Only one
brown bear at the Oakland Zoo, according to Herman, seemed
to experience soreness at the injection site after receiving the
vaccine.
Zoetis is planning to ship a second round of vaccines in the
coming weeks to zoos to immunize mammals that veterinarians
and keepers view as most at risk. This list includes primates,
big cats, mustelids (such as river otters, wolverines and ferrets),
canines (wolves and coyotes), bears (including pandas), flying
foxes and hyenas. And this protection is coming not a moment
too soon. In September, the National Zoo announced that nine
of its lions and tigers had covid. Several got very sick, including
the zoo’s 16-year-old lioness, Shera, who was showing signs of
kidney failure.
The conditions of the felines have since drastically
improved, but there is still the possibility of significant lasting
impacts, as happens with people. Some “domestic dogs and cats
have been shown to have cardiac disease, post-covid infection,”
the National Zoo’s chief veterinarian, Donald Neiffer, told me.
“Shera is not out of the woods yet. Whether or not she’ll have
problems in the future remains to be seen.”
It’s unclear how the cats caught the virus, with the National
Zoo saying it’s possible that an asymptomatic person infected
the animals. The zoo requires masks in all indoor areas,
including for employees. An employee vaccination requirement
goes into effect in late November.
Many who work at zoos are concerned that big cats are
much more susceptible to covid-19 than other mammals,
including their smaller relatives. “The contact you have with a
cat at home is much closer, obviously, than a lion at the zoo,”
says Ellen Bronson, senior director of animal health at the
Maryland Zoo. “Even people that are really sick with covid are
still cuddling their cats, and [only a few] of them are getting
sick. ... But there are cases showing up in zoo cats. It’s quite
surprising.”
While studies are ongoing, it remains a mystery why that is
the case. Neiffer believes it comes down to DNA and genetics
— that there’s something in the larger cats’ genes that puts
them more at risk. “A cat is not a cat is not a cat. A lot of
smaller species of cats are the genus Felis. A lot of the big cats
are the genus Panthera,” he says. However, it still might be
advisable to get your house cat vaccinated eventually, he
explains, noting that owners should consider making it part of
their “preventive medicine protocols” when a coronavirus
vaccine becomes available for pets. (While the USDA continues
to assert that there’s little need to vaccinate domestic pets, the
agency does note that the best way to protect furry friends is for
their human counterparts to get their vaccines.)
The Oakland Zoo did get some citizen pushback for its
vaccination efforts, from those “not really understand[ing] the
science,” as Herman puts it. She isn’t fazed by the criticism,
though, and knows the decision to be an early adopter of
vaccination was absolutely the correct one. “Humans are being
devastated around the world” by covid, she says. “Animals are
being devastated by it as well. It’s one health. We have to take
good care of the environment, take good care of our human
community, and take good care of the wild animals too.”
Matt Blitz is a writer in Virginia.
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Just Asking
“I think our journey, as a country, as a
society, really tracks my own journey.”
Anita Hill
INTERVIEW AND PHOTOGRAPH BY KK OTTESEN
Anita Hill, 65, is a professor of social policy, law, and women’s, gender
and sexuality studies at Brandeis University. After testifying in the 1991
Senate confirmation hearings of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence
Thomas about alleged sexual harassment, Hill became a leading voice
in the fight against sexual harassment and gender violence.
October marks 30 years since you testified before the Senate
Judiciary Committee. Since then, there have been a lot of
changes. How do you measure progress on issues of gender
violence at this inflection point?
There has been some progress in terms of better
representation on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and
throughout the Senate, so that when these kinds of issues come
up in the political forum there is a more diverse body of
knowledge that goes into how they should be considered. We
can also measure progress in terms of changes from the #MeToo
revelations and the acknowledgement that sexual harassment in
the workplace is a serious problem eating away at our
institutions. And we can look at [legal] cases — the R. Kelly
case. And the Epstein case. The Weinstein case.
But even with the awareness, and even if there has been
change, the numbers are still exorbitantly high; the problems
persist. And then, once again, we had the Senate Judiciary
hearing [for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh]
with Christine Blasey Ford, showing that there was much that
had not changed with the process.
You’ve said that you never set out to be a crusader. And even
after realizing you were going to need to be a voice to help
educate people about sexual harassment, you thought you’d
give it two years.
[Laughs.] It sounds silly, doesn’t it? To think that I was naive
enough to think that two years would do something. But I had
mentors. One was Lillian Lewis, the wife of Congressman
[John] Lewis, who told me about her own activism in Atlanta
6 OCTOBER 31, 2021
and how important it was for there to be an African American
woman — and a woman with my skills as a lawyer and as a
teacher — in this issue of sexual harassment at the time, to have
that voice as one of the voices heard.
And then there were thousands of letters. Letters that helped
me grow my ideas about what I needed to be talking about.
Did any letters, stories stick with you particularly?
One of the most compelling was a man who described
himself as an incest survivor who connected his experience of
telling his parents that he was being abused and their disbelief of
him with what he thought when he watched the Senate
Judiciary Committee. There was a woman in Kansas City in a
line for a book signing, and she came up to me, and she said, “I
left my husband because of you.” I said, “What?” She said, “I was
in an abusive marriage. And I knew I needed to get out. And
when I watched your testimony, I knew then that I was going to
do it.”
So those are my stories of inspiration.
How have you changed since you were thrust into the
spotlight 30 years ago?
I’ve always felt that I’m a private person; authentically, that’s
who I am. But what I have learned is that there are moments
where it’s very important for me to be a public person. Having
the right people around helps sustain you. I had a wonderful
family that supported me. I had colleagues who supported me.
And I don’t take any of those things for granted. But even with
all of that, I had to grow.
In many ways, I think our journey, as a country, as a society,
really tracks my own journey in the sense that we, as a society,
have to grow. We have to raise our voices in places that we never
thought we would be before, which is what I’m doing.
KK Ottesen is a regular contributor to the magazine. This interview has
been edited and condensed. For a longer version, visit wapo.st/
magazine.
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 7
Date Lab WITH RICH JUZWIAK
Things got hazy by
the end of the night
B
elieve it or not, a mutual love of filling out surveys is what
brought these two Date Lab specimens together. A sheer
love of being polled rarely is cited as a driving force for
participating in this column, but that was what drew in Aaron
Blackmon, 37, and Vin Testa, 32. “I find surveys to be revealing,”
explained Aaron, an account executive for a software company,
“and sometimes you can get questions asked that normally you
would not think to ask yourself.”
Mind you, neither had indicated this on their applications;
Aaron and Vin were matched for an array of other similarities.
They’re both dog owners and fans of trivia nights, and both have
an affinity for sophomoric humor. The survey thing they
uncovered together.
Aaron and Vin arrived that evening from very different places:
Aaron had just moved from Austin to D.C. two weeks before his
date, while Vin has been here for more than 11 years. Aaron is
fresh out of a relationship that spanned his lockdown, while Vin
spent that time single. “I took a lot of lockdown to get my stuff
together,” noted Vin, a manager at a fitness center.
Vin got to Maketto on H Street NE early only to find an even
earlier Aaron, who promptly offered him a shot of Japanese
8 OCTOBER 31, 2021
Vin Testa
(left) is 32 and
manages a fitness
center. “Tattoos and
facial hair” make him
swoon, plus
“someone who has
their stuff together.”
Aaron
Blackmon
is 37 and works at a
software company.
He is seeking
someone athletic,
talkative, smart and
funny.
Sign up for Date
Lab at washington
post.com/datelab.
whisky “to take the edge off,” having just downed one himself. Vin
accepted. His first impression of Aaron: “He’s very handsome.”
Aaron said Vin was cute. “The first thing I noticed about him was
how warm and welcoming he was,” Aaron recalled.
Settling into their seats, Aaron ordered them a bottle of
cabernet. They dove into what Aaron deemed the “first-date
rundown”: where they’re from, their family background, etc. They
chatted about music, discovering they’re both into R&B. “We both
bonded over Beyoncé and Erykah Badu and Brandy — some of the
more seasoned divas,” Vin said.
Their conversation turned to the cherished Date Lab
questionnaire in an attempt to figure out why they were matched.
Vin, who is White, revealed that in the section on his type, he
wrote: “Open to everyone, but find myself more attracted to men
of color.” Aaron, who is Black, said that he wasn’t surprised to hear
that, given Vin’s taste in music and movies, but he pressed him on
it a bit. Vin assured Aaron that he doesn’t fetishize the Black men
he dates. Aaron countered by asking what the difference is
between frequently dating men of color and fetishizing them.
“Preferences do not live in a vacuum and they are all informed
by something,” Aaron said in his interview. “[Vin] explained how
he grew up around a lot of Black people and he’s always had close
platonic relationships with Black people and that’s extended to his
romantic life. That makes sense to me.” Vin appreciated and
respected Aaron’s questions. “I’m not just dating Black men to
date Black men and take advantage of whatever stereotypes there
are around them,” Vin said.
PHOTO: DANIELE SEISS
“I’m pretty sure I just gave him a hug because
my concierge was right there, and I don’t think
I wanted to kiss in the lobby like that,” Aaron said.

And with that, they shared a pleasant dinner of bao, spring
rolls, scallion pancakes, glass noodles with pork and wings. “It
wasn’t not flirty, but I wasn’t like, ‘You know you’re coming back to
my place, right?’ ” said Aaron. “I thought it was very first-date
appropriate.”
After about an hour and a half at Maketto, Aaron offered to
bring Vin home, but when they walked past nearby H Street
Country Club, they noticed that it was holding drag bingo hosted
by Shi-Queeta Lee, a queen Vin knows. So they popped in. When
Shi-Queeta spotted Vin, she told the crowd that her friend is a
“twerkin’ White boy” and commanded Vin to dance. And so he
regaled the bar and his date with his talents.
“It was a White boy twerking. It wasn’t bad!” went Aaron’s
review. He added: “I was blown away. A spotlight came on. It was
an out-of-body moment.” They also drank shots there with a
straight couple they met, who happened to also be on a blind date.
“I wasn’t feeling drunk at that point,” said Aaron. “I started to feel
drunk at the end of the second bar.”
That’s right: They soon migrated from establishment No. 2 to
No. 3, Biergarten Haus, the workplace of their new hetero female
friend. Vin said they were there for the shortest amount of time.
They soon walked to Aaron’s nearby building and waited in the
lobby for Vin’s Uber. Their goodbye remains unclear in both of
their minds. “What was it like? Good question,” said Vin. “Maybe I
was drunker than I thought.”
“I’m going to be honest with you: It was kind of fuzzy at that
point,” said Aaron. “I’m pretty sure I just gave him a hug because
my concierge was right there, and I don’t think I wanted to kiss in
the lobby like that.” In fact, they had already kissed between the
bars, according to Vin, “but it wasn’t making out or anything like
that. It was a cute little peck.” (Aaron couldn’t confirm.) And here
you probably thought two survey buffs would be boring dates.
Wrong!
RATE THE DATE
Aaron: 4.8 [out of 5].
Vin: 4.5.
UPDATE
They texted after the date but didn’t meet up again.
Rich Juzwiak is a writer in New York.

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The Amplifiers
The closed-door Council for National Policy is a
D.C. hub of conservatism in the age of Trump.
But what does it do?

STORY BY ROBERT O’HARROW JR. ILLUSTRATION BY NICK OGONOSKY

10
I
n October 2015, Donald Trump was still a laugh line for
right-wing Christian activists. By their lights he was a
failed casino owner and thrice-married playboy. He had no
apparent principles, no policy blueprint and no grasp of the
Bible. He didn’t even understand free-market theory,
something they consider to be a fountainhead of American
liberty. Yet here he was in a conference room at the Ritz-Carlton
in McLean, Va., soliciting support from a closed-door group of
conservative leaders called the Council for National Policy.
Trump looked the part. He wore a blue suit, white shirt and
shiny blue tie. But he seemed to lose his way during the pitch and
began riffing about his hair. He turned his head to various angles
for the crowd. “It looks pretty good back here,” Trump said, as
CNP’s president, Bill Walton, would later recall during a
confidential talk captured on video.
It was too much for Marjorie Dannenfelser, an antiabortion
activist also in the crowd. “This is insulting,” Dannenfelser said,
according to her recorded recollection. She pulled on Walton’s
sleeve. “Can you believe what is happening here?” she asked.
For months after the event, Dannenfelser and some other CNP
members were determined to stop Trump. While he solidified his
lead as GOP front-runner, they denounced him as a “charlatan” in
the conservative magazine National Review, blasted his prior
support of abortion rights and implored Republican voters to
choose another candidate.
“America will only be a great nation when we have leaders of
strong character who will defend both unborn children and the
dignity of women,” Dannenfelser and other women wrote in an
open letter to Iowa voters in January 2016. “We cannot trust
Donald Trump to do either.”
Then came a great swerve that would upend politics in
America: Millions of conservatives — Dannenfelser and other
CNP members among them — got firmly behind Trump. Today,
the Republican Party has been transformed, and Trump or one of
his ideological heirs is likely to be the GOP nominee in 2024.
Much has been written about this turn of conservatives toward
Trump. But I wanted to learn more about the political and
communications infrastructure that converted this support into
votes and influence. How did these leaders and activists — once so
critical of Trump — end up helping shape and advocate for his
agenda? And now that he is almost a year removed from the
White House, how are they continuing to serve him and his cause?
Working with fellow Washington Post reporter Shawn
Boburg, I started gathering documents and cultivating sources.
We zeroed in on key figures and groups, making charts of their
ties and timelines of their actions. We identified networks of
groups that served as a kind of nerve system for conservative
influence campaigns.
Enmeshed in these efforts was the Council for National Policy.
CNP may be the most unusual, least understood conservative
organization in the nation’s capital. A registered charity, it has
served for 40 years as a social, planning and communications hub
for conservative activists in Washington and nationwide. One of
its defining features is its confidentiality. In a town where people
and groups constantly angle for publicity, CNP bars the press and
uninvited outsiders from its events. All members — even such
luminaries as former vice president Mike Pence, Ralph Reed and
Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
— agree to remain silent about its activities.
Other bastions of conservative influence — from policy groups
like the Heritage Foundation to media outlets like Breitbart News
— generally have clear missions. By contrast, CNP’s executive
12 OCTOBER 31, 2021
director, Bob McEwen, told me that the organization itself does
not “do anything.” He and other CNP leaders will tell you it is
merely an educational venue aimed at uniting its conservative
members.
Yet as I began to learn more, I came to see that it would be a
mistake to underestimate the group’s significance. I also realized
that researching CNP represented a rare opportunity: to get a
behind-the-scenes look at the outlook, goals and methods of
activists who have so successfully promoted Trumpism. “I just
wanted to thank you and the Council for National Policy for your
support and for consistently amplifying the agenda of President
Trump and our Administration,” Pence wrote to CNP last year. “I
know our collaboration with CNP will only strengthen and
deepen this year and beyond.”
T
he Council for National Policy began taking root on Jan.
22, 1981, when six religious and social conservatives
gathered for dinner at a home in Dallas. Most American
conservatives were still jubilant about the inauguration of Ronald
Reagan two days earlier. They rejoiced at the prospect that
Reagan might make good on one of his campaign slogans: “Let’s
Make America Great Again.” Over dinner, they resolved to bring
together Christian activists, business interests and wealthy
donors under one umbrella to cajole and pressure the new
administration.
Details about CNP’s history have emerged periodically over
the decades, as journalists, authors and left-leaning activists
pieced together leaked internal documents and other material. In
early June this year, Nick Surgey, executive director of a
progressive watchdog group called Documented, reached out to
say he had obtained a speech from a CNP meeting in May that
celebrated the group’s 40th anniversary. Did I want it?
The speech offered a wealth of new information and context.
And it supplemented dozens of hours of confidential conference
recordings and documents that I obtained from Surgey and other
sources. “I’m not going to crystal-ball-gaze about the way ahead,”
speaker Ed Feulner told the crowd gathered behind closed doors
in Naples, Fla., on May 21. “Rather, I’m focusing on the early days
of CNP. How we started, who did what and how the foundations
were laid for us now, four decades later.”
One of the organizers of the initial dinner was Tim LaHaye, an
evangelical minister, writer and political activist. LaHaye later
wrote the popular Left Behind series, books about the end of times
and the Antichrist, using themes derived from the Bible. He
thought the Christian right would have greater force if its
components banded more tightly together. “This new
organization could help bring America back to moral sanity,” he
told Feulner, according to the speech.
LaHaye knew the endeavor would need funding, so he reached
out to Cullen Davis, a wealthy Texas oil scion. Davis — who told
me recently that the original organizers thought that communists
were going to take over the U.S. government and that Christianity
in America needed staunch defenders — agreed to host the
dinner. He called his pal Nelson Bunker Hunt, another wealthy
oil figure known for trying to corner the global market in silver.
They also tapped Richard Viguerie, a fundraising pioneer and
master of far-right persuasion campaigns who once said he
mailed out 1.5 billion letters for more than 100 public policy
groups.
During the dinner they agreed to reach out to a long list of
other influential evangelicals and social conservatives. Several
weeks later, more than two dozen activists gathered around a

conference table at a hotel near Dallas/Fort Worth International
Airport to sketch out CNP’s ambitions. Together, they made up a
formidable force: Paul Weyrich spoke about a group he was
building to help elect conservatives to Congress. Phyllis Schlafly
described her campaign to thwart the Equal Rights Amendment.
For his part, Feulner, a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation,
spoke about how religious conservatives needed an alternative to
the Council on Foreign Relations.
On a rainy evening in May 1981, the group had a coming-out
party in the suburbs of the nation’s capital, or, as Feulner put it in
his speech, “the belly of the beast.” Some 160 activists and
politicos ventured to tents set up in the backyard of Viguerie’s
home in McLean. It was a rare exception to the fledgling group’s
rules around confidentiality. Guests found a spread of Peking
duck, lobster, sushi and piña coladas served in coconuts,
according to Feulner’s account.
The special guest, David Stockman, Reagan’s Office of
Management and Budget director, received a standing ovation for
his efforts to scale back the government. Optimism and good
cheer wafted through the tents. But even then, CNP members
grumbled that the Reagan administration needed to change how
it was selecting political appointees. “Appointments have been
made on the basis of credentials rather than shared values,” one
CNP member complained, according to Feulner’s speech. “The
council hopes to identify people with these values and put them
forward.”
Feulner told me recently that CNP has always aimed at
providing a forum where certain conservative elites could
socialize and strategize — and raise money from wealthy donors.
“You could let your hair down and just talk candidly about shared
visions,” he said. “You also have a lot of people who can write
significant checks.”
From the start, CNP members cultivated political power at the
highest levels in Washington. In an early letter to the Reagan
White House, a CNP leader wrote that the group included “some
PHOTO: ERIC BARADAT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
The Council for
National Policy
provides a window
into the conservative
political and
communications
infrastructure that
boosted Donald
Trump.
of the most influential business, political and religious leaders in
America” who wanted to “plan together the future of our country.”
Their goal was a “moral rebirth” for our society.
CNP’s leaders had much experience in political fundraising,
organizing and communication. Among them was a political
operative named Tom Ellis, who had played on White racial fears
as he helped build the career of the late former senator Jesse
Helms of North Carolina. (Helms, who became a revered member
of CNP, was once described by The Post’s David Broder as “the last
prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country.”)
Others included televangelist Pat Robertson; Ed Meese, the
attorney general under Reagan; Sam Moore, the nation’s largest
Bible publisher; and Rich DeVos, billionaire co-founder of
Amway and funder of conservative causes.
CNP members showed they were willing to participate in
behind-the-scenes activity in support of their values. Consider the
covert campaign run by Oliver North, a member of the National
Security Council staff from 1981 to 1986. In 1984 — apparently
before he became a member — North spoke at a CNP meeting
about the importance of supporting the contra rebels opposing a
leftist regime in Nicaragua. At the time, Congress had imposed a
prohibition on government financial support for the contras.
According to an audio recording of the session, North told
CNP members that Nicaragua’s leaders and their Soviet
supporters had more than Central America in their crosshairs.
“The real target is the United States,” he said. “This country is in
great, great jeopardy from these people, who are truly godless
communists.”
North sought financial support from CNP members, including
a wealthy elderly woman named Ellen Clayton Garwood, whom
he met at a CNP meeting. “With tears in his eyes,” a Senate report
later recounted, “North explained to her that the Contras were
hungry, poorly clothed, and in need of lethal supplies.” Garwood
eventually gave about $2.5 million to support North’s off-books
effort, according to the Senate report. Using old CNP directories
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 13
CNP members have included, from left, former
vice president Mike Pence, Trump counselor
Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon, who was
chief executive of Trump’s campaign.
and other documents, I determined that four CNP founders,
members or funders were cited in the Senate report as
contributors to North’s mission. (I reached out to North, but a
spokesman declined my requests for an interview.)
In internal videos, audio and documents, the conservatism of
CNP members often seemed linked to fear — not just of the
godless foreign communists that North invoked but of liberal
Americans as well. In September 2017, a guest of CNP was invited
to discuss his efforts to map leftist organizations. “I almost think
we might want to call it tracking and defeating evil,” an
unidentified CNP leader said during the speaker’s introduction,
according to an internal CNP audio recording. “The activists on
the left and the people who fund them are out to destroy
everything you hold dear,” the leader explained. “Your families.
Marriage. Your businesses. Your freedom of speech. Your
freedom of religion. Everything.”
W
hen candidate Trump arrived at the CNP meeting in
the fall of 2015, many White conservative evangelicals
were still aggrieved about Barack Obama’s presidency
and his promotion of progressive policies, such as near-universal
health care. The presence of a Black man in the White House
served as a reminder of a new demographic reality: They
constituted a diminishing proportion of the electorate and were
losing their power to shape America’s culture and politics.
Trump’s appearance was part of a weekend-long meeting in
suburban Washington; CNP usually holds these meetings three
times a year in posh hotel conference rooms around the country.
All the candidates had been invited to speak, but only
Republicans responded, a CNP official told me.
I obtained an internal CNP directory for 2015 and examined it
for insights about the kinds of people Trump would be courting.
There were about 400 members from across the country, many of
14 OCTOBER 31, 2021 PHOTOS FROM LEFT: ATTILA KISBENEDEK/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES; DEMETRIUS FREEMAN/THE WASHINGTON POST;
them leaders of relatively small nonprofits focused on social and
religious conservatism. But I also saw some now-familiar names:
Leonard Leo, then of the Federalist Society; Steve Bannon, then
leader of Breitbart News and later chief executive of Trump’s
campaign; David Bossie, the head of the group Citizens United
and later Trump’s deputy campaign manager; and Kellyanne
Conway, who would become a White House counselor.
On hand for Trump’s presentation was Ralph Reed, an
evangelical political leader and CNP member. By his own
account, he had come to know and admire Trump. But Reed
sensed intense skepticism from other CNP members, as he writes
in his book “For God and Country: The Christian Case for
Trump.” Then, at the meeting, something unexpected happened.
After his presentation, Trump, like the other Republican
candidates, answered questions and offered to stand with any
CNP member for a photo. The line went clear out of the ballroom.
Still, in early 2016, just months before the election, Hillary
Clinton appeared to be ahead in the esteem of most Americans. It
was increasingly clear Trump needed the conservative evangelical
vote to win. “The Trump train kept rolling, and Evangelical
leaders were either going to have to get on board or get out of the
way,” Reed writes. That March, Trump and Donald McGahn, who
would become a White House lawyer, hosted a meeting with Leo,
who was involved with a nonprofit network that was raising
hundreds of millions to fund media campaigns and other
initiatives in support of conservative judges and causes. The three
men focused on the Supreme Court seat left open after the recent
death of Justice Antonin Scalia. McGahn thought Trump could
benefit by releasing a list of nominees to replace Scalia, an
unusual move that would reassure religious and social
conservatives who wanted an antiabortion jurist. Trump
expressed support for one of Leo’s long-cherished goals: a federal
court system dominated by judges who would interpret the
Constitution in ways that favored business and conservative
views.
As Leo later told members of CNP — where he served on the
board of governors — that was only going to happen through a
campaign by the conservative movement. “We’re going to have to
understand that judicial confirmations these days are more like
political campaigns,” Leo said, according to one of the videos I
reviewed. “We’re going to have to be smart as a movement.”
 On May 18, 2016, Trump greatly boosted his prospects when
he released the list of judges. The next month, he convened a faith
advisory board of conservative evangelicals at Trump Tower.
Reed and James Dobson, a Christian activist who had been with
CNP from the early days, were on the board, according to Reed’s
book. The meeting was followed by an extraordinary closed-door
conclave at a Times Square hotel for nearly a thousand
conservative Christians.
The Religion News Service account asked in a headline:
“Could conservative Christian leaders rescue a Republican
presidential candidate whose personal lifestyle and religious bona
fides have been punchlines more than a testimonial?” But
something else in that story popped out at me: It said a chief
organizer of the Times Square conclave was CNP member Bill
Dallas.
Dallas was an unusual figure. He had been convicted two
decades earlier on felony embezzlement charges. He was sent to
San Quentin State Prison, where a newfound commitment to
Christianity deepened, according to his book, “Lessons From San
Quentin.” Now he was a data entrepreneur who headed a
nonprofit called United in Purpose, which gathered and parsed
information about Christian voters. Among the board members
was CNP executive director Bob McEwen, who is also a former
House member from Ohio.
United in Purpose’s network of allies and clients included
other CNP members from groups such as the American Family
Association, the Family Research Council and Reed’s Faith &
Freedom Coalition, according to Anne Nelson, a research scholar
at Columbia University and author of “Shadow Network: Media,
Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right,” a book that
examines CNP. Dallas’s operation seemed a perfect complement
to other initiatives by groups affiliated with CNP members. “What
the CNP has done is convene these forces in a highly strategic way
and create an environment in which they can collaborate and
leverage each other’s work off the radar,” Nelson told me. “It’s a
well-oiled machine.”
In a chat with me, Dallas said he is no longer a member of CNP
and is stepping back from political activism. He expressed pride
about the 2016 Times Square event and recalled one remark there
that he believes won over the Christian activists. It was when
Trump told them not to be ashamed of their own religious culture
EDUARDO MUNOZ ALVAREZ/FILE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
and beliefs. “He said, ‘Christians should not be afraid to say Merry
Christmas at Christmastime,’ ” Dallas told me. “I think that was a
turning point.”
I
n the summer of 2016, Trump made another strategic move
that would seal the deal with Dannenfelser, the antiabortion
activist, and other CNP members. He pledged to oppose
abortion and put the promises onto paper in September. “Dear
Pro-Life Leader,” Trump’s letter began. “I am writing to invite you
to join my campaign’s Pro-Life Coalition, which is being
spearheaded by longtime leader Marjorie Dannenfelser.” Trump
said he would nominate “pro-life justices to the U.S. Supreme
Court,” defund Planned Parenthood and take other measures that
the antiabortion activists had demanded.
Dannenfelser was thrilled. “Before that we were still stomping
our feet,” she said last year at a CNP meeting, according to one of
the internal videos. “Little did we know that this man, who was a
performer and can incite audiences in ways we never even
thought could be, would galvanize audiences in battleground
states all over the country and put life at the center of the project.”
The CNP crowd whooped and hollered at her remarks. In Reed’s
book, he writes that Dannenfelser told him: “Trump was my last
choice until he was my first.” (A spokeswoman for Dannenfelser
declined my request for an interview.)
Pence acknowledged CNP’s support in his letter last year: “We
are grateful for CNP’s timely counsel and unique capacity to
rapidly garner support for the difficult decisions the President
and I are making each day.” And CNP meetings reflected the
group’s standing with the administration. In May 2017, for
instance, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott
Pruitt appeared at a CNP meeting and crowed about the rollback
of regulations, with an emphasis on Obama administration
measures aimed at climate change. “With respect to the EPA, the
future ain’t what it used to be,” he said, drawing cheers.
Surgey, the director of Documented, who first obtained the
internal CNP videos I reviewed for this story, said he “started
studying CNP because it seemed like its members were becoming
a power base, in terms of their public support of the Trump
administration.” He added, “I was surprised by just how many
leading Trump advocates appear on the videos.”
Activist David Horowitz spoke at a CNP meeting later in 2017.
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 15
Horowitz, leader of a nonprofit group called the David Horowitz
Freedom Center, captured the sense of desperation expressed by
many on the right — a feeling that had drawn them to Trump.
“What the
“For all of Donald’s faults, and everybody knows them, he stood on
the right side. We are in a civil war,” he said. “This is the CNP has
standard-bearer for us in this war.”

met Bob McEwen at the small suite of offices CNP maintains

done is
I in the Hall of the States building, just down the hill from the
U.S. Capitol, a remarkably tiny space for a group with such a
large reach. Joining us was lawyer Alan Dye, a CNP member and
convene
nonprofit specialist.
Meeting with someone like me was a departure for a group
that has spent decades trying to avoid attention from the
these forces
mainstream media. McEwen emphasized that CNP was not
involved in political campaigns and exists only to educate its
in a highly
members, leaders of allied nonprofit groups across the country
who are invited to join. Like all tax-exempt charities, CNP may
not under Internal Revenue Service rules engage in political
strategic way
activity or support particular candidates for office. An affiliated
group called CNP Action — another type of nonprofit — is
permitted by the IRS to focus more on political activity.
and create an
McEwen, also president of CNP Action, told me he would not
discuss the conservative movement in general or the activity or
advocacy of CNP members. When I asked about his group’s
environment
efforts to operate in secret, he rejected the premise of the
question. “It’s not secret,” McEwen said. “It’s just private. And
in which
anything that we want to elevate is going to be elevated by the
members.”
He said CNP and its members have privacy rights, and
they can
confidentiality helps create an atmosphere where participants
can freely exchange ideas without unwanted judgment. “Quite
frankly, in a nonpolitical sense, this is like a Rotary Club,”
collaborate
McEwen said. “CNP is a convening organization of patriotic
Americans that love their country and have increasingly been of and leverage
the opinion that the information they receive is unreliable. And
there’s not very many places they could get the truth. And CNP
seeks to deliver the truth.”
each other’s
I asked about the influence campaigns — the advertisements,
social media and such — run by various networks of people and
groups linked through CNP. As an example, I mentioned the
work off the
concerted efforts of interlocking nonprofit groups allied with
Leonard Leo.
“What you’re really talking about is a whole bunch of different
radar,” says
networks. You could do a Venn diagram, I suppose,” Dye said. “So
there’d be pro-life. There’d be this and that. All the various issues,
scholar Anne
and in every place they overlap would be a network. And clearly
there’s a network of people supporting conservative judicial
nominees. And Leonard, of course, would be in that network. It
Nelson.
might not encompass the entire CNP membership, but it might
encompass a fair number of them.”
Both men asserted the networks on the left are far larger and
better funded than those on the right, and that some are financed
by billionaire philanthropist George Soros. “They’re much
bigger,” Dye told me. McEwen said, chuckling, “We’re a gnat.”

learned about another dimension of CNP through a video

I featuring Jim DeMint, a former senator and tea party

favorite. It was 2018, and he was telling CNP members about
an initiative called the Conservative Action Project, which had
been launched years earlier by CNP leaders.
CAP claims to include more than 100 groups “representing all

16 OCTOBER 31, 2021

major elements of the conservative movement — economic,
social, and national security.” Its website publishes policy memos
signed by the leaders of its member groups. It turns out that,
according to documents, CAP shares an address with CNP, and
many CAP activists are members of both groups. CAP also works
hand-in-hand with yet another group that DeMint had started
not long before called the Conservative Partnership Institute.
(“The Conservative Partnership Institute arms, trains, and unites
conservative leaders in Washington ready to fight,” its website
until recently stated.)
“The whole point was to support people on the inside,”
explained DeMint, listed on the 2018 video as a CNP executive
committee member. “But that doesn’t work unless we’ve got
people like the folks here tonight with the Council of National
Policy on the outside building public support for the right ideas to
get things done. We’ve got an outside game. We’ve got an inside
game. And it’s the only way to win.”
DeMint said CAP’s efforts were coming to fruition under the
Trump administration. “Folks, there are more of us than there are
of them. There is no reason for conservatives to be losing,” he said.
“We got the power in our hands.”
At one point in the video, DeMint praised Trump. “We’ve got
an amazing opportunity here,” DeMint told them. “And it’s
incredible with this president, who is the last person I ever
thought would promote religious freedom, pro-life. I mean, the
Lord confuses things!” He grinned and paused while the CNP
crowd broke into laughter and applause. “But this guy’s more
genuine than anybody I’ve ever known,” he said. “I mean, I don’t
know, I’m just really confused. But then, he seems willing to work
for us because he’s confused, too.”
I recalled another internal CNP video where others described
how a delegation of CNP and CAP officials met most every week
with Trump administration officials, often at the White House.
“It’s kind of this little secretive huddle that meets every
Wednesday morning,” Paul Teller, director of strategic initiatives
for Pence when he was vice president, said on the video.
Yet another video included Rachel Bovard, a conservative
activist who works closely with DeMint at CPI. She said CAP
people worked behind the scenes with the White House and allies
in Congress to maintain public support for Trump during
impeachment proceedings. “We worked a lot to coordinate
messaging,” Bovard said. Throughout the Trump administration,
she explained, CAP leaders also collaborated with White House
officials to select political appointees. “We work very closely —
CAP does and then we at CPI also — with the Office of
Presidential Personnel at the White House to try and get good
conservatives in the positions, because we see what happens when
we don’t vet these people,” she said, adding: “All these people that
led the impeachment against President Trump shouldn’t have
been there in the first place.”
ast year, in the months before the election, there was a new
L air of desperation in some of the rhetoric of CNP members.
L. Brent Bozell III, a CNP executive committee member,
claimed in a closed-door meeting that “evidence is pouring out of
an attempt by the far left to steal the election,” an internal video
shows.
“Today we’re as close to losing this nation as we ever have
been,” Kay Coles James, then president of the Heritage
Foundation, said at another CNP session, according to an internal
video. “And make no mistake about it: This November is not
about winning or losing an election. It’s about winning or losing
our country.”
The integrity of elections has been a preoccupation on the right
for years. In 2017, Trump announced a Presidential Advisory
Commission on Election Integrity, which included two CNP
members: Kenneth Blackwell, the former secretary of state in
Ohio, and J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal
Foundation. In August 2019, Lisa Nelson, a CNP member and
chief executive of the American Legislative Exchange Council,
launched an initiative called “ALEC Political Process Working
Group,” according to an internal email. Among other things, the
group was going to focus on “election law and ballot integrity.” (In
a letter to funders defending that effort this year, Nelson said the
group “connected legislators with each other as well as federal
officials to discuss process and governance issues including the
census, redistricting and other issues related to how state
governments work.”)
Among those working with her was a CNP board of governors
member named Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who often speaks in the
closed-door meetings about issues around election integrity.
Mitchell has described herself jokingly as “consigliere to the vast
right-wing conspiracy.” She was a driving force behind the
allegations a decade ago that the IRS and Obama White House
engaged in a political witch hunt against tea party groups — and
later worked closely with Trump as he disputed the 2020 election
results.
In February 2020, Nelson told a CNP Action session that
ALEC, in collaboration with Mitchell and other CNP members,
had begun prepping state lawmakers on rules they could invoke
during an election dispute. “And I think we’ve identified a few,”
she said in the meeting. “They can write a letter to the secretary of
state questioning the validity of an election and saying, ‘What did
happen that night?’ So we are drafting a lot of those things. If you
have ideas in that area, let us know and we’ll get those to the state
legislators, and they can start to kind of exercise their political
muscle in that area.”
That spring, the election preparations coincided with efforts
by CNP members to push back against pandemic restrictions.
Working through newly formed coalitions, the members pumped
out messages aimed at opposing face masks, business closures
and other measures to contain the coronavirus.
The campaigns received attention in mainstream media. But
the fact that CNP members played leading roles was not generally
understood. One new push was called the Save Our Country
Coalition. It was announced by FreedomWorks, whose leader is a
CNP member. Other participants included Nelson from ALEC
and Jenny Beth Martin, a CNP member and leader of Tea Party
Patriots. Nearly two dozen participants in all were CNP members.
The group called for a resumption of normal economic activity, an
end to federal control of the nation’s pandemic response and
protection of “individual liberties of our citizens from
unconstitutional power grabs by the federal, state and local
governments.”
Weeks later, McEwen and other members hosted a
confidential conference call for activists that included Trump
campaign officials. Their goal was to make recommendations to
the campaign and coordinate efforts to pressure state and federal
officials to reopen the country. According to a recording of the call
obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, a left-leaning
group, McEwen opened with a prayer: “We would give you the
praise in Christ’s name.” He described government efforts to
contain the pandemic as “tyranny.”
CNP member Nancy Schulze told the campaign officials about
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 17
“a doctors coalition who are extremely pro-Trump that have been
preparing and coming together for the war ahead in the
campaign, on health care.” A campaign official expressed
enthusiasm. “Those are the type of guys that we should want to get
out on TV and radio to help push out the message,” the official
said.
The next few months became a whirlwind for CNP members.
At a CNP meeting in August, the organizers of the health-care
initiatives offered more details on what they were up to, internal
videos show: It was an advertising campaign crafted or promoted
by several nonprofits and CNP allies, including former House
speaker Newt Gingrich and Tom Price, former health and human
services secretary under Trump.
In a video of the session, organizers showed examples of ads
featuring doctors in white lab coats. “And so I remind people that
what we’re trying to do is put on theater here,” said Alfredo Ortiz,
president of a group called Job Creators Network and chief
executive of its affiliated foundation. “It’s the stage. It’s the script
and the actors.”
During another CNP session that August, various members
also discussed the upcoming election in breathless terms. Some
zeroed in on the proliferation of mail-in balloting as an ominous
trend, claiming it made the system ripe for fraud. “We need to stop
those ballots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us
what to do,” said Tom Fitton, CNP’s new president and the leader
of Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group.
J. Christian Adams, the former Justice Department official
who served on Trump’s election integrity commission, described
mail-in voting in the video as “the number one left-wing agenda.”
He urged CNP members not to be cowed by criticism about efforts
to stop such voting. “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a
voter suppressor, you’re a racist and so forth,” Adams said. (Fitton
and Adams did not respond to requests for comment for this
article. In a previous email, Adams stood by his remarks. In an
interview last fall, Fitton told me: “The left has war-gamed this
out. … And it could cause civil war.”)
As I watched the video of these men and other CNP members
describing the election with such passion, I wondered: Were they
trying to outdo one another in the zeal department in a play to
wealthy donors? I knew from tax filings that donations to some
groups led by CNP members had soared during the Trump years.
Donations to Judicial Watch, for example, rose to $104 million
last year from $44 million four years earlier, tax filings show.
In October 2020, I wrote a Post story about those and other
election-related discussions at the group’s meetings. But of
course, I learned later that much more was in play. Multiple
people from far-right groups were promoting a movement to
“Stop the Steal” that included specious claims that Trump won.
One of the most prominent leaders was a former CNP fellow
named Ali Alexander, formerly Ali Akbar. “We will not go quietly.
We’ll shut down this country if we have to,” Alexander said at a
Phoenix rally in December, later leading the crowd in a chant of
“1776.”
At least five other CNP members and their groups worked with
other Trump supporters to amplify the Stop the Steal claims. On
Dec. 30, Cleta Mitchell wrote to White House Chief of Staff Mark
Meadows and offered to send some 1,800 pages of documents
purporting to support claims of election fraud, according to an
email included in a report this month by Democratic staff of the
Senate Judiciary Committee. Three days later, Mitchell joined
Trump on a call aimed at pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state
“to find 11,780 votes,” the report said.
18 OCTOBER 31, 2021
Several CNP members were involved in the organization or
promotion of the rallies preceding the Capitol insurrection on
Jan. 6. Jenny Beth Martin was listed as a speaker in promotional
materials (though she did not speak, in the end) and Tea Party
Patriots was listed as a “coalition partner.” CNP member Charlie
Kirk — the leader of Turning Point USA, a group oriented to
conservative students, and Turning Point Action, its political
advocacy arm — offered to transport and house student
protesters. Months earlier, Turning Point Action was behind a
secretive campaign that relied on teenagers to pump out social
media postings in favor of Trump.
Meanwhile, Ginni Thomas, then a CNP Action board member,
praised rallygoers in tweets: “LOVE MAGA people!!!!”
Ultimately, Stop the Steal organizers urged protesters to “take to”
the Capitol steps “to make sure that Congress does not certify the
botched Electoral College” on Jan. 6, according to webpages that
have since been removed.
Thomas did not respond to a request for comment. She wrote a
note on social media stressing that her encouragement came
before the violence. Kirk, Martin and other CNP members who
helped the rallies condemned the subsequent events at the
Capitol. “We are shocked, outraged, and saddened,” Martin told
me in an e-mail in January.
McEwen also condemned the insurrection, saying CNP had no
role in the events or its members’ activity. “What they do on their
own time — I won’t say I don’t care — we have no interest or
capacity to monitor,” McEwen told me earlier this year.
That reminded me of something he told me last year: CNP
itself “doesn’t do ad campaigns. It doesn’t do brochures. It is a
meeting of leaders,” he said. “Anything that’s done is done by the
membership, not by the Council for National Policy.”
A
fter it was clear that Biden was the next president — and
nothing was going to undo that — CNP members and their
allies dove headlong into new initiatives. Much of their
activism now seems focused on state legislatures and election
rules. And once again, groups with ties to CNP appear to be closely
coordinating with one another.
In March, two months after Biden’s inauguration, a CNP
leader named Kelly Shackelford hosted a private Zoom session
organized by CNP Action. Shackelford is president of First
Liberty Institute, a legal organization that promotes religious
liberties. The call focused on H.R. 1, sweeping reform legislation
that Democrats promised would, among other things, make it far
easier for Americans to vote. Shackelford said the bill represented
“the existential threat for our country.”
“The number one priority of the Nancy Pelosi Democrats was
to change the rules for our elections to ensure that the Democrats
would never, ever, ever lose again,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.),
according to someone participating on the call. “This bill is a
partisan power grab at an order of magnitude we have never
seen.”
For nearly an hour, speakers urged CNP members and their
allies to coordinate their efforts to pressure Congress and sway
regular Americans. They recommended the use of billboards,
websites, social media, Internet memes and “on the street” videos
of people opposed to H.R. 1. They suggested organizing protests at
the homes of certain Democratic lawmakers.
“Urban art is another really exceptional strategy, both for the
media and for actually awakening the American people with a
visceral campaign,” one official on the call said. Instead of a Stop
the Steal movement, “we want to establish ‘Stop the Pigs’ or ‘Stop

the Corrupt Politicians,’ ” as social media themes. It was vital, the
official said, to “kill this bill” without getting “trapped in a voter
suppression conversation.”
In an interview, Shackelford defended the call. “I’ve looked at
that bill. It’s just crazy stuff,” he told me. He also defended the
persuasion tactics. “I mean, I’m sure everybody on every side does
that, right?”
At the same time, CNP members have expanded related
campaigns regarding voter laws. An effort called the Election
Transparency Initiative was started with the endorsement of
Dannenfelser, who has continued to make dubious claims about
the election. “The integrity of our electoral system was severely
compromised in 2020 when pro-abortion Democrats — utilizing
the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse — weakened state laws that
ensure free and fair elections,” she said in a Feb. 23 news release.
Leonard Leo and a former Heritage Foundation official have
ties to a group launched last year called the Honest Elections
Project. Kenneth Blackwell took the lead of a group called the
Center for Election Integrity. He told me election-rule changes
during the pandemic to encourage mail-in balloting created
significant vulnerabilities in the electoral system. He said that
allied groups would collaborate to become “force multipliers” on
the issue. Cleta Mitchell and FreedomWorks, meanwhile, are
teaming up for the National Election Protection Initiative. “What
is urgently needed today is the involvement by conservative and
patriotic Americans in the election process at the local and state
levels, challenging the vast resources of the leftist groups who
have dominated election activism for too long,” Mitchell told
Newsmax. By early October, 19 statehouses had passed 33 laws
curbing voting access, according to the Brennan Center for
Justice in New York. (Mitchell declined to comment for this
story.)
CNP members have also joined Advancing American
Freedom, a new group co-founded by Mike Pence. About half of
the 40-some people on the group’s advisory board and its board of
PHOTO: JABIN BOTSFORD
Charlie Kirk, center,
listens as President
Donald Trump speaks
at the 2018 Young
Black Leadership
Summit in the East
Room of the White
House. Kirk, a
member of the
Council for National
Policy, is leader of
Turning Point USA, a
group oriented to
conservative
students.
directors have been CNP members or guests in recent years, a
review of internal directories and videos shows. And Pence
himself recently became a “dues-paying CNP member,” according
to Feulner’s speech.
Marc Short, Pence’s former chief of staff, told me that, for AAF,
Pence wanted a combination of people who served in the Trump
administration and those “who represent the more traditional
elements of the conservative movement.” “I think we can marry
them together to sort of build a winning coalition,” Short added.
That will be a tall order. Some conservatives I interviewed for
this story said that Trump had effectively fractured the
movement. Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics & Public
Policy Center who was previously a speechwriter for Ronald
Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, said the
conservative movement was in a long decline by the time Trump
was elected. “The conservative movement, I think it was already
sort of stuck in a time warp,” he said. “It was like every day was
January 20th, 1981.”
That remark stuck with me. It captured a feeling I had about
CNP throughout my efforts to understand the group. In their
quest to remake our country — to purge it of the cultural and
political decay they believe has sapped it of virtue — CNP
members are looking backward to receding triumphs. But it’s
clear they’re also looking forward — and they are as determined as
ever to shape the nation’s future.
Late this month CNP leaders and the Conservative Action
Project are slated to host a strategy summit in the nation’s capital
for the leaders of more than 100 conservative groups. They want
to seek ways “to slow the Administration’s left wing policies” and
advance a conservative agenda in Congress and the states,
according to an invitation obtained by American Oversight, a
left-leaning group in Washington. The title of the meeting?
“Saving the Country: The Pathway Forward.”
Robert O’Harrow Jr. is an investigative reporter at The Post.
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 19
 T H E G O L D E N S TAT E

20
O F C L I M AT E T R A U M A

It’s been three years since the Camp Fire swept through Northern California,
but many residents still face serious mental health issues.
Is what’s happening there a warning to the rest of us? BY ANDREA STANLEY
This page: Downed
power lines during
the Camp Fire in
Paradise, Calif., in
November 2018.
Previous pages:
Smoke from the fire
covers Butte Creek
in Paradise in 2018.

J
ess Mercer received a call from her stepmom, Annette, that morning, a
little after 8 a.m. “We’re coming,” Annette said, her voice so unrecogniz-
able it sounded foreign. Jess was at her apartment in Chico, Calif., a
slightly overgrown university town that sits in a valley below the hilltop
community of Paradise, about 20 minutes away. She was confused. It
was early, on a weekday: Thursday, Nov. 8, 2018. She wasn’t expecting a
visit from Annette, or her dad, Tommie.
But then Annette was saying it again: “We’re coming.”
Things got stranger: The sky turned dark. Ash fell like black snow,
except it was warm, and carried the smell of smoke. Her family, Jess
realized, was trying to escape a massive wildfire.
She heard her dad’s voice on the line. Everything he spoke was in
short phrases: “Remember everything I’ve ever said to you. I don’t
know. I’m trying.”
And then nothing.

22 OCTOBER 31, 2021 PHOTO: SCOTT STRAZZANTE/SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE/GETTY IMAGES

 The call left Jess panicked, and it got her thinking that “I don’t
know” must mean that they didn’t know if they were going to get
out in time. She jumped in her car, pointed it toward Paradise,
and went almost nowhere before realizing that the roads had
already been closed. So instead, Jess stood at the mouth of the
scenic highway known as the Skyway, near the Walmart parking
lot, and watched as cars streamed away from Paradise. She called
her family back 60, 70, 80 times, but the cell towers were burning
like pitchforks and service was unreliable.
For an hour, she scanned the panicked faces inside every car
that went by, looking to see if she recognized them. A woman with
six kids inside her vehicle, good. Sedans piled with so many people
their heads hit the ceiling, deep breath. No sign of Tommie and
Annette’s green truck, damn.
Jess, now 36, had moved to Paradise from Wyoming when she
was 16. For the first year, she lived at the Lantern Inn, with
Tommie and Annette. Their small motel room had thin walls and
one bed; Jess slept on the floor. Money was tight. In the evenings,
the staff at the Cozy Diner across the street would give Jess
leftover food from the salad bar, usually rolls and vegetables.
Eventually, her family moved to a three-bedroom, light-beige
house off Dolores Drive in Paradise. Jess remembers how proud
her dad was to move in. It was the first house he’d been able to buy
since moving to California, some 20 years earlier.
When Jess turned 18, she moved to Chico so she could be closer
to her job as a cashier at a big-box store. Even then, she still
somehow spent all her time back up on the hill, an area known to
locals as the Ridge. Over the next decade, she’d bounce back and
forth between Chico and Paradise, until 2018 when she moved
into a bright-blue house in Paradise with her partner, Ashley, and
planned to stay for good. But in May of that year, they discovered
that the house had foundational issues, and once again they found
themselves in an apartment back in Chico.
That’s where Tommie and Annette showed up at the door, four
hours after they’d called Jess. Tommie, then 70, was wearing
burned sweatpants, tattered shoes and no dentures. He carried a
cat crate but had forgotten to put the cat inside.
By the time the Camp Fire was done burning, it would level the
town of Paradise, and a large portion of nearby communities:
Magalia, Concow, Pulga and Butte Creek Canyon. Over 150,000
acres would be burned, 18,000 structures destroyed. At least 85
people would be killed. It was, and is, the deadliest and most
destructive wildfire in California’s history.
Gone was the Lantern Inn off Skyway and the light-beige
house on Dolores and seven other places that at one point Jess had
called home. What remained, cruelly, was just enough to remind
her that once upon a time she used to have a town: ash-faded
advertisements at the Cozy Diner for $4.99 cheeseburgers, movie
posters at the cinema for “A Star Is Born.” Three years later, the
signs remain, which frustrates Jess. “To be vacant is one thing,”
she says. “To be frozen in time is triggering.”
In May 2016, Jess had been formally diagnosed with post-
traumatic stress disorder, largely due to living in a home with a
schizophrenic brother. But after the fire, her trauma compound-
ed. Now, she sees a therapist a few times a month and is on
multiple medications. In the six months after the fire, her partner
described her as “vacant.” The first time she had a panic attack
was on the one-year anniversary of the fire. The second was last
December. Both times she had to be hospitalized.
She always feels like she’s in fight-or-flight mode, she says. If
she reaches down to pick something up, she never bends her
knees. That way if she has to take off running, she’ll be ready to
PHOTO ON PREVIOUS PAGES: RAY CHAVEZ/DIGITAL FIRST MEDIA/THE MERCURY NEWS/GETTY IMAGES
sprint. A split second can determine if you live or die. She knows
this. Recently, a fire alarm went off during a work meeting and she
ran out of the room.
Sometimes she feels angry, like there’s a “beast” inside of her
that could come out at any moment. Other times, she’s so numb,
she can talk about painful memories like she’s ordering a
sandwich.
She can feel the trauma in her body. Always being reminded of
the fire has caused her to throw up and ache to the point where she
has to soak in a tub; it has even led to seizures. When the seizures
happen, it’s like her body is trying to release the PTSD, she
explains.
To say that everyone in the area affected by the Camp Fire
suffers from PTSD would be incorrect. But of the dozens and
dozens of people I spoke with for this story, nearly everyone
reported experiencing PTSD or PTSD-like symptoms. There were
other things, of course: increased alcohol and drug use, anxiety,
depression, anger, survivor’s guilt, grief. A select few were
completely fine, telling me how the fire gave them a chance to
rebuild their lives in a better way. But mostly, I heard about PTSD.
From Hippie, a 60-something war veteran who still has burn
marks from the day he had to ride his motorcycle through flames.
From Iris, a shop owner who lost her boyfriend in the fire. From
Dawn, a mother of two who still has full-blown panic attacks.
From Sean, who got so tired of fire sirens triggering his PTSD that
he drove to a lake and thought of taking his own life. From Corinne,
an artist who had a heart attack in her early 50s because of stress.
A more scientific gauge: A study conducted by scientists at the
University of California San Diego that was published in February
in the International Journal of Environmental Research and
Public Health found that an overwhelming number of Camp Fire
survivors were suffering from various mental health disorders,
most prominently PTSD. “The amount of PTSD we saw in
individuals was striking and very significant,” says Jyoti Mishra,
senior author of the study and a professor in the department of
psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine. “It was on par
with what we’d expect to see in war veterans, but now we’re seeing
it in communities where individuals are exposed to wildfires. It
really shows how climate change is a mental health stressor.”
What comes next, experts say, is a different kind of disaster.
The mental health care system is not built to handle a world in
which entire populations of people are routinely and consistently
traumatized or living in a state of anxiety, and its outdated
approaches mean most people will never get the help they need.
“Therapists, counselors, the mental health community in general,
is very late to the game,” says Susanne Moser, a leading expert on
climate change adaptation. “They’re 20 years behind — at least.”
Lise Van Susteren, a general and forensic psychiatrist in D.C.,
says she “can’t think of anything more important than mental
health and climate.” She adds, “In many cases, the physical
damage from climate can be corrected. You can rebuild, you can
restore, you can replant. But the profound impact on our mental
health takes such a cumulative toll that it can determine how
society functions. The problems of mental health are not invisible
scars. They drip into our lives individually, politically, economi-
cally and socially, day after day.”
It’s impossible to ignore that climate change is a politicized
topic. Not everyone acknowledges it as an existential threat.
Maybe that’s why it’s even harder to admit, or easier to overlook,
the slow strangle climate change will have on our mental health:
that before the pollution from emissions engorges our lungs, it
will likely drive many of us mad.
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 23
I n 2014, Van Susteren flew to London. It felt like a last resort. For
years, she and some of her colleagues had the sense that the
mental health community was largely in denial about the impend-
ing wave of climate trauma. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005,
various studies revealed a sharp rise in long-term mental health
issues, even as the floodwaters receded. It was casually called
“Katrina brain,” but the reality was alarming: One study in the
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry found rates of serious mental
illness doubled after the storm. A later report would show that 12
years post-disaster, 1 in 6 people were still struggling with PTSD.
For Van Susteren, and certainly others, it was a preview of
what was to come, given that in a warming world, disasters like
Katrina would only hit faster, harder, stronger and more often.
The planet was changing, not only in a way we could see in
crumbling, hurricane-battered houses along the coast, but feel in
our crumbling, climate-battered minds.
Van Susteren’s meeting with the Climate Psychology Alliance
in Britain would eventually lead to the creation of two groups back
in the States: The Climate Psychiatry Alliance, formed in the fall
of 2015, followed by the Climate Psychology Alliance North
America in 2018.
Among other things, the groups work to influence policy and
educate providers of mental health care. Earlier this year, they
24 OCTOBER 31, 2021
developed a climate-aware therapist directory. The network is
currently made up of 97 psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors
and social workers located across the country (to put it into
perspective, there are roughly 150,000 psychologists and psychia-
trists in the United States). Each signs a pledge, which in part
reads: “A climate-aware therapist accepts that new forms of
distress are arising as a result of global crisis, and believes that the
professional training of the allied mental health therapy and
counseling community can attend to this distress.”
This is important, says Ariella Cook-Shonkoff, a licensed
psychotherapist in Berkeley, Calif., and a steering committee
member of the North American psychology alliance. “Climate
distress is on the rise, from eco-anxiety to PTSD to suicidality,”
she says. “It is our responsibility as mental health practitioners to
identify the evolving needs of our clients and respond accordingly,
so that we can best serve and support them.”
California, a state of roughly 40 million people, has 19 mental
health providers in the directory. The closest one to the Camp Fire
area is an hour and a half away in Sacramento. States prone to
climate disasters, like Florida, Texas, Louisiana or most states
along the southern and lower-east coasts, have none. Nearly all of
the providers are in urban areas, though membership continues
to grow.
PHOTO: LIPO CHING/MEDIANEWS GROUP/THE MERCURY NEWS/GETTY IMAGES
“Physical damage
from climate can
be corrected. ...
But the profound
impact on our
mental health
takes such a
cumulative toll,”
says psychiatrist
Lise Van
Susteren.
An aerial view of a destroyed cul-de-sac in Paradise.
Yet the problem in Butte County isn’t just about finding a
climate-aware therapist. It’s about finding any therapist. “There
are very few counselors to help with the need,” Jess says. “It’s
terribly sad. People bring it up in every town meeting.”
One woman, Pat Bryant, 66, tells me over coffee in a church
auditorium in Magalia that she couldn’t find anyone to help her
after the fire. Her home didn’t burn down, but her entire
neighborhood did. Living in the debris and dust haunted her.
For months she did nothing but sit in a chair in her living room,
only getting up to go to the bathroom. She doesn’t remember
eating, although she’s sure she did. As a breast cancer survivor,
she eventually turned to her oncologist, who prescribed her
medication. She ended up throwing the pills away and got
involved as a volunteer at a church instead — a move that saved
her life, she says.
In part, it’s nobody’s fault. The fire didn’t spare mental health
providers. Their offices and homes burned down, too. In fact, the
hospital was one of the first buildings to be destroyed. It still
hasn’t reopened.
There were some services, like a program offered by the United
Way that offered eight free therapy sessions to fire survivors. The
program quickly ran out of money, though, and by the time many
people had heard about it, it was gone. “The amount of people who
needed aid was a little shocking to us,” says Melissa Jamison, a
community service specialist with the United Way of Northern
California. “We knew that people were struggling, but the need
just kept growing. It’s a need that still exists. There is still so much
work to be done. While the area is in the full swing of recovery, it
still has many years ahead.”
The system isn’t necessarily broken; it’s working how it’s
designed to. The mental health response set up after disasters is
meant to be short-term. Yet as Katrina and the Camp Fire show,
the mental health needs are not just acute and immediate, but
chronic and long-term.
“The resources that organizations like [the Federal Emergency
Management Agency] make available for mental health services
post-disaster is time-limited,” Moser says. “After a year, the
resources typically go away. And what they are providing is
absolutely inadequate. You don’t heal trauma in 10 hours of
therapy. That’s just ridiculous.” FEMA administrator Deanne
Criswell responded through a spokesperson via email: “A
survivor’s mental health is as much a part of their recovery from a
disaster as shelter, employment and safety; they are all directly
connected. FEMA will continue to leverage all of our capabilities,
and those of our partners, to ensure survivors receive the support
they need on the road to recovery.”
O n a Saturday morning in late June, in the midst of a heat
wave in the dry season, I drive 25 miles from Paradise to
Concow, passing by grasses the color of exhaustion and a red sign
warning me that I’m entering a wildfire zone. There are trees,
many of them still charred. A visible reminder that the destruc-
tion of a wildfire hurts — that here, it still hurts.
Before the Camp Fire got to Paradise, it burned down Concow,
a rural town that sits off State Route 70, deep in the Sierra Nevada
foothills, where most people live off single-lane dirt and gravel
roads. It’s a community of off-the-grid hippies and pot growers
and artists and retirees. To outsiders, it’s a poor, middle-of-no-
where place, but to those who call it home, it’s a pocket of
close-knit people.
There, Jenny Lowrey, 61, and her partner, Bruce Matthews,
72, are part of a group that runs Lake Concow Campground. The
80-plus-acre property has traditionally been used as a recreation-
al getaway, a place where families can spot bald eagles, snag a fish
or sneak in a swim, for $15 a night.
More recently, they’ve opened up the campground for dis-
placed fire survivors to stay for free. Many are from Concow, but
others have pulled in from Paradise and Magalia. “It’s rough
living out here,” Jenny says. Most people live in RVs, some
without water, air conditioning, electricity or plumbing.
There is a battle over housing in Paradise. Of the 12,000
houses burned in the Camp Fire, just over 1,000 have been fully
rebuilt. Many people were underinsured. Many more had no
insurance at all. In 2020, Pacific Gas and Electric, whose aging
power lines sparked the blaze, agreed to pay victims $13.5 billion.
Most people are still waiting for settlement money.
It’s common to see parcels of burn-scarred land with RVs
parked on them. But when the town began telling people they
could no longer live out of RVs on their own lots if they didn’t have
a building permit, many felt they were being forced off their
properties with nowhere to go.
As Jenny and Bruce walk me around the property, Jenny
often calls the fire survivors living there “their PTSD communi-
ty.” We pass by a run-down RV, the size of a middle-class living
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 25
room, and Jenny tells me there are five people living inside.
“PTSD is one thing, but brokenness is different, and these
people are broken,” she says. “They’re traumatized on unimagi-
nable levels.”
She and Bruce are, too. They’ve buried friends who died in the
Camp Fire. Bodies burned, right there on the road. Even scarier,
they almost lost Bruce’s daughter after she got trapped on Granite
Ridge Road. A burning telephone pole hit a truck with a trailer
and turned it over, blocking the only exit off the mountain. The
fire was moving quickly. With nowhere to go, she put the car in
reverse and drove until she got to the last house on the road. She
put a running water hose on top of her car, secured it in place with
a rock, and texted her husband. “I love you. Here it comes.” Three
days later, she was rescued.
“That will mess up your head,” Jenny says. “Sitting in your car,
watching the flames come at you with your dog and 12 chickens —
how do you even process that? We can’t.” Bruce’s big, friendly eyes
well with tears.
The temperature hits 104 degrees and Jenny introduces me to
Dinah Coffman, a Camp Fire survivor from Paradise. She lives on
the property in a white RV, neat and tidy with an air fryer outside
the front door. We sit in mismatching plastic lawn chairs in the
shade, and two other women join us, Tami Donnelson and
26 OCTOBER 31, 2021
Tamatha Romer, 53, both fire survivors from Concow.
In the hour I spend talking to Dinah, she tells me of everything
she lost in the fire. Her cats, the irreplaceable possessions she’d
just inherited from her mother, her sense of home. She cries as she
tells me about the nightmares that won’t stop and how uneasy she
gets when the wind blows. She cries when she tells me she can’t
stop scrolling Facebook, obsessively checking community groups
for news of any potential fires.
Then it’s Tamatha in tears. “Since the fire, I can’t do math in
my head,” she says. “I can’t remember anything. I can’t do a job
interview without crying.”
Here, people talk about PTSD symptoms fluently and matter-
of-factly. But it’s not just that they tell me about it; I see it. When a
firetruck pulls into the campground and disappears into the pine
woods, the women’s demeanor visibly changes. “I feel like I have
the shakes,” Tami says, pacing. “My hair is standing up on the
back of my neck. My heart’s pounding.”
Already she can’t sleep most nights, waking up multiple times
so she can go outside and smell for smoke. She doesn’t really want
to talk about what she saw the day of the fire, except that her
11-year-old daughter had to help burn victims dress their wounds.
None of the women have been to therapy, mostly because their
time is consumed with physically rebuilding their lives. This
PHOTO: MARCUS YAM/LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY IMAGES
“No part of
the country is
going to remain
untouched” by
climate trauma,
says Gary Belkin,
founder of the
Billion Minds
Institute.
A rescue worker looks for possible human remains in
Paradise in 2018.
prioritization is typical in most places post-disaster — but therapy
also doesn’t seem like an option for them. A drive to Chico, the
nearest large town, means traveling 80 miles round-trip and
spending as much as $30 in gas. There are online and telehealth
options, but cell and Internet services are spotty.
Down the hill from the women, in an RV parked in a clearing,
lives Lucas Anderson, 34. His partner Pamela, their two young
kids, ages 3 and 7, and Lucas’s 71-year-old mother live there, too.
Like everyone, Lucas has an evacuation story, and it ends the way
so many of them do: He lost everything.
Lucas works six or seven days a week doing plumbing,
landscaping and general construction, but finding permanent
housing has been hard. They didn’t have insurance on their home
in Paradise. Over the past three years, they’ve bounced from
motels to a temporary house to living in an RV, parking it in
vacant lots, their friends’ properties and once a church lot. “I have
plenty of trauma,” Lucas says. “I can tell when it starts getting to
me because I’ll get into fights with my boss, my wife.” Nightmares
keep him up at night. When there’s a fire, how will he get his family
out safely if he’s sleeping?
He’s never gotten therapy because he has kidney stones to deal
with and a family to provide for and his boss calls people with
mental health issues “weak” and other family members have dealt
with hard stuff without going to therapy and how much does
something like that cost anyway? He doesn’t call what he’s
suffering from PTSD. He interchangeably refers to it as stress and
trauma and “something he’ll eventually need to deal with.”
Experts quibble over this, but some say he isn’t wrong, and that
what we’re seeing is a different form of PTSD — or a new type of
trauma entirely. There’s even a push among members of the
Climate Psychiatry Alliance to get the American Psychiatric
Association to change the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM-5). A formal diagnosis, using the
DSM-5, could potentially open the door for insurance to cover
different types of treatment and improve access to services. The
process is slow, though, says David Pollack, a founding member of
the Climate Psychiatry Alliance and professor emeritus for public
policy at Oregon Health and Science University, because “of the
very convoluted and complex process that the APA has for making
changes to the DSM.”
“The DSM-5 has not adapted to this particular situation,” Van
Susteren says. “We need to have a proper nomenclature for it so
that we can validate what people are suffering from.”
Moser agrees: “There are researchers who think of this as a
new category of trauma. This is an existential kind of trauma, and
so I’m not certain it’s the same thing as PTSD in the way we think
of it now. There are three different kinds of trauma: trauma
associated with distinct, time-limited events; trauma due to
ongoing but clearly defined perpetrators; and trauma that is
chronic with more diffuse perpetrators but typically not a threat
to all of humanity. Climate change has aspects of all of these.”
However, she says, a study that would establish this as a novel
kind of trauma is still years away from happening, and it will be
difficult to prove.
T here were clear signs that the students were not all right. Jess
could see it in the way they slugged around in baggy
sweatshirts on 100-degree days, the way the smell of smoke would
make them hyperventilate or completely freeze, the constant
mention of “fire brain” — a way to describe loss of memory,
feelings of fatigue and lethargy, and trouble performing everyday
tasks.
Administrators at Achieve Charter School saw it, too. Their
high school campus in Paradise burned in the Camp Fire and the
elementary school was seriously damaged, forcing some students
to travel to Chico to go to school at a pop-up site of portable
buildings and porta-potties in a megachurch parking lot.
Mary Tickle, Achieve’s school psychologist, tells me that over
the past few years the number of suicide risk assessments
conducted within the school population has more than doubled
compared with previous years. A survey done this year among
fourth- through eighth-graders revealed that more than 40
percent of students were still experiencing PTSD symptoms.
What they were seeing wasn’t unique. According to Scott
Kennelly, director of the Butte County Behavioral Health
Department, the area saw an increased risk of suicide, especially
in teens. It’s impossible to know what can be blamed on the Camp
Fire, given the effects of the pandemic, and even before the fire,
the area had some of the highest ACE (adverse childhood
experiences) scores in California. Still, Kennelly says the rise in
PTSD, along with depression, anxiety and substance abuse, is
undeniable and significant.
Immediately after the fire, Jess knew she wanted to help. She
had a background in social work and previously worked with kids
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 27
in foster care and juvenile hall. “We needed a changed mind-set in
addressing the PTSD within our youth,” Jess tells me as we eat
sandwiches in a back booth at Nic’s, one of the first restaurants to
reopen in Paradise. “I really wanted to use art to help kids heal, to
help myself heal.”
She got her first grant, for $15,000, in February 2019, along
with a donated white van, which she named Gertie. She used the
money she’d been awarded to load Gertie with art supplies and
began taking it to schools, youth programs and community
events. Kids would draw their feelings on the exterior of the van.
PTSD as seen in crayon-colored graffiti. In one drawing, there’s a
picture of a boy, his head scribbled in red flames. Next to it,
another stick figure, this one blue, and a thought bubble above his
head that reads, “Thanks for letting me do art because it helps cool
me down.”
Over the next year, Jess upgraded Gertie to Marge, a newer van
that she didn’t have to sit on a phone book to drive, and began
developing something more formal. The result was a 13-part,
trauma-informed art curriculum called the Balanced Brain
Project. This fall, she began teaching it to kids at Achieve’s
after-school program in Paradise and Chico, as well as at a local
homeless shelter. The topics include nightmares, body language
and communication, to help kids work through their “trauma
residue,” Jess explains.
Leading mental health experts say that this is exactly the kind
of approach that will have a life-changing impact on communi-
ties. “The existing mental health system focuses on crisis and
illness, one person at a time, only after they show symptoms of
psychopathology,” says Bob Doppelt, coordinator of the Interna-
tional Transformational Resilience Coalition, a network of
professionals working to address the mental health effects of
climate change. “For decades, this has been shown to be
extremely ineffective and inefficient. Even in the best of times,
only 50 percent of those who need mental health assistance
receive it. The crisis clinical treatment approach has zero chance
of addressing the scale and scope of mental health problems, or
the alcohol and drug abuse, adverse childhood experiences,
violence, or other psychosocial problems generated by the
climate emergency.”
Instead, we need more programs like Jess’s, says Gary Belkin,
former deputy health commissioner of New York City and
founder of the Billion Minds Institute, an organization working to
modernize the country’s mental health infrastructure. “We need
to think of mental health as a community-owned function and
build up programs that will allow the community to respond,” he
says. “Help should be so easy to find, you should trip over it.”
Alternative approaches are not just for kids, either. Thanks to
the Ecological Reserves at California State University Chico,
healing is happening through a forest therapy pilot program.
“Other countries are sending their firefighters who have PTSD
out into the forest as a way to receive trauma care, and it’s
working,” says Eli Goodsell, director of the reserves. “In talking
with my friends who were definitely suffering from significant
PTSD after the Camp Fire, I wanted to change the outdoors from
being a triggering environment to a healing environment.”
Goodsell started the pilot program in late July, after years of grant
writing and training and pandemic delays.
How forest therapy works is both woo-woo and grounded in
science: It’s based on a Japanese practice called shinrin-yoku
(also known as forest bathing), and the idea is that nature can be
therapeutic. A trained guide walks a small group of people
through the outdoors. The aim is to go slowly and take in things
28 OCTOBER 31, 2021
around you, mostly in silence. The process ends with a tea
ceremony made of items foraged along the route. Sessions
normally take one to two hours. The program is offered free to fire
survivors and had over 200 participants within the first few weeks
of operating.
Guides go through six months of training to become certified
through the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy and can be
from any background. The Chico State program has guides who
are mental health practitioners, outdoor educators and Parks
Department employees.
“Too many of our approaches to mental health are about
staying in the frontal lobe,” says Kate Scowsmith, who became a
trained ANFT guide through the pilot program. (The front lobe of
the brain focuses on executive functioning.) “There needs to be a
lot of ways to process trauma out of your body. Forest therapy is a
beautifully simple approach where nature is the therapist. It’s
very healing centered.”
After Scowsmith lost her home in Magalia to the Camp Fire,
she too, experienced PTSD, causing her to have nightmares,
difficulty sleeping and frequent visualizations of her home and
belongings burning. “Forest therapy was part of my continued
healing from the fire,” she says. “It has helped me find peace, calm
and something dependable.”
Like anything, these programs take money. Before Jess got
hired as a staffer at Achieve this summer to teach her art therapy
program, she had to apply for 14 grants just to keep her work
going.
The hope is that funding from the federal government may
help: In February, Democratic lawmakers put forth the Climate
Emergency Act of 2021, which proposes that climate change be
declared a national emergency, a designation that could help
drum up money for myriad things, from more electric-vehicle
charging stations to mental health services. But the bill hasn’t
seen much movement.
S ince we choose to live in burn-prone zones, in houses made of
wood, coveted for their nearness to trees and privacy, it would
appear the easiest solution would be to move. Leave the street
named for the generations of family that lived there before you
and the land where you made a living raising cattle or growing
apricots in the California sun. Leave your job, your school, your
community.
After the Camp Fire, many residents did just that. The town of
Paradise clocked in at just over 26,000 people before the fire.
Three years later, about 6,000 remain. There were similar
exoduses in other towns affected by the fire. People migrated to
Washington and Tennessee and Idaho and anywhere but there.
Abandoned lots sit where family barbecues used to be.
But the idea that we can just move, just outrun the threat, is an
illusion. A place that won’t be affected by climate trauma? Experts
like Belkin don’t know of one. “We used to think of disaster
trauma as reactions to one-off events, where one could escape to
recover, regroup and rebuild,” he says. “But no part of the country
is going to remain untouched.”
Wildfires are becoming more destructive and frequent. More
than 5 million acres have burned in the United States this season.
The Bootleg Fire, which hit Oregon in early July, was a blaze so
massive that it became capable of generating its own weather: fire
whirls (spinning vortexes of air and flames), lightning and wind.
In August, a fire swept through the Greek island of Evia, burning
more than 100,000 acres. The country’s prime minister declared

it one of Greece’s greatest ecological disasters. At the same time,
historic droughts in Siberia, an area typically known for its
exhaustingly harsh winters, led to fast-spreading wildfires that
raged bigger than all of the other fires burning in the world
combined. This is an incomplete list.
If it’s not a wildfire, then it’s something else. California is also
experiencing devastating droughts, and there were recent floods
in Miami and Houston as well as hurricanes battering cities like
New Orleans and New York. This past July was the Earth’s hottest
month on record, according to data from the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration. It’s a record that will likely be
short-lived, given the dire findings in the latest report from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Just this summer,
nearly 1 in 3 Americans experienced a weather disaster.
Climate trauma isn’t unique to the Camp Fire area. The
Northern California disaster is a microcosm of the problem, and a
warning. It’s a reminder that there are questions we have been
unwilling to prioritize: What should a mental health response
look like in the wake of a climate disaster? How can we better
prepare communities for the moment when they are forced to
confront climate change? Do we need to prepare people for a
climate dystopia, where climate trauma is ever-present and
ambient? What do we call what we’re all feeling?
The second time I talk to Dinah, it’s via text in mid-July after
she just evacuated the Lake Concow Campground: “My PTSD is
PHOTO: MARCUS YAM/LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY IMAGES
A doll hangs from
a string in the
backyard of a
destroyed home in
Paradise in 2018.
going … Blood pressure up, heard racing, stomach churning,
anger, helplessness … you name it I feel it lots of tears.”
Then two minutes later: “I’m a mess I can’t even spell.”
There’s another fire.
It would come to be known as the Dixie Fire, and, unbeliev-
ably, it started in the same spot (Camp Creek Road) and allegedly
in the same way (a PG&E power line sparking) as the Camp Fire.
At the time of publication, it had been burning for months and
still not fully contained. Already it had engulfed nearly 1 million
acres, including the entire gold-rush community of Greenville,
making it the second-largest blaze in California’s history.
Paradise was at risk of evacuation, too. Videos uploaded to
Facebook by Camp Fire survivors of the smoke across Feather
River Canyon came with PTSD warnings about how the content
might be triggering.
Everyone was ready to run. Jess told me she was feeling angry
but was trying to stay calm. “It’s eerie to relive flashbacks in real
life,” she wrote in an email.
Days later, the smoke from the Dixie Fire made its way to New
York, turning the sun into a hazy, gray pearl. On a midafternoon
call while staring at the sky, I ask Moser: What does this kind of
trauma feel like? “As if you lost your mother in a car accident four
times,” she says. If we’re lucky, that’s all it will be.
Andrea Stanley is a writer and editor in New York.
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 29
30
 W H AT

CAREGIVING

TA U G H T M E

You can fight only so hard to save a loved one.

And none of it is actually in your control.

STORY BY TRACY GRANT ILLUSTRATION BY DEREK ABELLA

The author, Tracy Grant, dancing with her mother, Alice Ramsey, at the wedding of Grant’s son Christopher in 2019.

32 OCTOBER 31, 2021

T
he text with the video attachment landed in the
middle of an important work meeting on Zoom. I
should have stayed focused on the discussion at
hand, but instead I let my finger hover over the
image on the screen and then let it tap “play.”
My mother, 85 and her mind riddled by dementia, was
dancing at a happy hour at the assisted-living center near me
where she lives. There she was: her hair perfectly coifed, still jet
black, the slight swivel of the hips, the intentional way she
tapped her Mary Jane-clad feet in time to “When the Saints Go
Marching In.” My mother. The woman who had come to the
United States from Ireland as a new bride in 1957 — not the pale
imitation of the woman I had last seen dance this way at her
grandson’s wedding in August 2019, the night before a stroke
would set off the tumbling dominoes of dementia. The 15-second
snippet would carry me — giddy — through the rest of the day’s
meetings. I eagerly looked forward to visiting her that night to
hear her tell me about the afternoon that had clearly brought her
so much joy.
“Mom, I’m here. It’s Tracy,” I called as I knocked on the door
of her apartment in the Riderwood retirement community in
Silver Spring, Md. The doors are not locked, but I am always
mindful to knock and announce my presence before entering the
apartment. Even as compromised as she is, she deserves some
semblance of privacy and dignity.
I moved through the kitchenette and living room toward
her spacious bedroom and found her sitting in bed propped
up with pillows. “Why would you even bother to come see
me?” she practically spat. “I’ve been sitting alone in this
apartment since Friday. Nothing to do but stare at the four
walls. Don’t bother to come at all if you’re going to treat me
this way.”
It wasn’t the words that were said but instead the way she said
them — in what my sister and I have come to refer to as “the cold
voice.” Anyone who hears my mother speak this way would
swear she was in full control of her faculties; she conveys a
certitude that sometimes makes me question my own recollec-
tion of the facts.
I could have pointed out that this was Thursday and that I
had been over Saturday, Sunday and Tuesday or that in addition
to the wonderful staff, she’d had daily visits from her private
caregivers. But I had learned that rebuttal is useless, reasoning is
pointless, so I went for distraction and redirection.
Acting as if she had said nothing to me, I went over and gave
her a peck on the cheek. In my most upbeat, encouraging voice —
the one I had used to cajole 3-year-old twins to try a new food
and which I thought I had retired permanently two decades ago
— I said, “Mom, I heard you were cutting a rug at the happy hour
today. Was the band good?”
“What are you talking about?” Still the cold voice.
“Did you dance to ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’? I heard
you stole the show on the dance floor.”
“The band was very good.” Her tone was just a touch softer.
“Your father really enjoyed them.” (My father’s been dead for
nine years, but we were making progress.)
“Well, I think they’re doing happy hours every Thursday
afternoon, so you should absolutely go; they seem fun.”
“They’re bringing in a different band each week; I might not
like them all.”
“Well, you don’t know if you don’t try. You can always decide
next Thursday if you’re up to going.”
“Yes, that’s what I’ll do. We did all have a ball today. Everyone
PHOTO: MARVIN JOSEPH
here is so nice, and it’s such a beautiful place.” She said this with
a smile on her face and warmth in her voice. And in the moment,
I was happy that she was happy.
I might not always have found such pleasure in a small
victory. I have played the role of caregiver to loved ones who were
seriously ill three times in my life — and I did not used to believe
in settling for minor triumphs. As a 30-something mother of
critically premature twins, I convinced myself that the sheer
power of love could help one of my boys overcome a diagnosis
that had left nurses in tears and doctors recoiling. Ten years
later, I brought the same self-styled hubris to my husband’s
Stage 4 cancer diagnosis. A reporter’s doggedness, I thought,
would be my secret weapon. If I found the right doctor, the right
hospital, the right treatment, I could rewrite the ending.
Someone had to be in the 5 percent that survived past five years,
right?
When I moved my mother across the country at the start of
the pandemic, I was more than two decades past that premature
birth and more than a decade past the cancer diagnosis. I was
about to become a primary caregiver again, and yet none of this
felt familiar. The disease itself was different — dementia cannot,
of course, be defeated — but so was I. Once I believed that if I
cared enough, I could solve any problem. Now I knew this had
been a fiction all along.
B
ut it’s too soon; what about Baby B?”
That was how I responded to my OB/GYN announc-
ing my twins were going to be born this day, a cool, crisp
November afternoon, even though they weren’t due until
mid-January.
“Baby A isn’t moving much, isn’t growing; he’ll do better out.
And Baby B is bigger; he’ll be fine.”
It was my personal Sophie’s Choice: bring my boys into the
world too early to help save Baby A, or let them stay inside to let
Baby B’s lungs, blood vessels and other organs develop while
Baby A atrophied. Except my doctor’s tone of voice made it clear
there really was no choice. Within three hours and via
emergency C-section, Baby A, who would become Andrew, and
Baby B, Christopher, would enter the world — whether they, I,
their dad or the world was ready.
Andrew, weighing just 2 pounds 13 ounces, was born first; he
looked like every March of Dimes poster you’ve ever seen.
Fragile, birdlike, translucent and with a cry like a billy goat.
Christopher came a minute later. At 4 pounds 11 ounces, he
looked like a chubby-cheeked Gerber baby compared to his
brother.
Both were sent immediately to the neonatal intensive care
unit where, over the next week, they would be fed by tubes; food
intake would be charted, diapers weighed, tests conducted. An
electrocardiogram followed by an ultrasound revealed that
Christopher had two holes in his heart. It’s a testament to the
complexity of the diagnosis to come that this would be a footnote
in our family story.
The complication of prematurity that reporter-me had
become most obsessed with in the waning weeks of my
pregnancy, when it had become all but certain that these babies
would arrive early, had been intracranial hemorrhage. Turns out
that the atmospheric pressure in utero is different from that out
in the “real world,” and the linings of blood vessels, particularly
those in the brain, don’t typically thicken enough to deal with
outside air until about 34 weeks of gestation. My boys were born
at 32.5 weeks. What can happen is that blood leaches out of the
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE I 33
weakened blood vessels, bathing the brain in blood. In the days
after the boys were born, I asked every doctor I encountered
about intracranial hemorrhage. My hand was patted. Scans
would be done in due time, when the boys’ overall health was
more stable, but I shouldn’t worry.
Due time turned out to be the week after their birth, and by
then, to be honest, we had settled into the rhythm and the
routine of the NICU. I pumped breast milk and learned about
kangaroo care, cuddling the boys next to my bare skin; we got
used to the nurses who were relentlessly upbeat and those who
acted as if optimism were to be avoided at all cost lest it lead to
heartbreak.
When Bill and I arrived at the NICU on that Tuesday
morning, Day 8 of our boys’ lives, we were greeted by a
grim-faced team of doctors who ushered us into a windowless
conference room that easily could have been mistaken for a
book-lined broom closet. “We got the results of the brain
scans. Christopher had a Grade 1 intracranial hemorrhage.
We grade them from 1 to 4; Grade 1 bleeds normally resolve
by themselves; the brain heals. He may need some
intervention, but you probably won’t see any long-term
impacts.”
I wanted to ask more questions about Christopher: How did
this affect the issue with his heart? What kind of intervention?
What were the possible long-term implications of a Grade 1
bleed? But I had failed to read the room. None of the doctors
wanted to talk about Christopher. That was news to get out of the
way quickly; it was not news that required a team of doctors to
pull parents into a private room, a place where their reaction to
the unspeakable would be shielded from other parents visiting
their sick babies.
“Andrew has had a high Grade 3 bleed. Either just before or
after his birth, he had a massive hemorrhage on the left side of
his brain.” The rest of the conversation I recall only in
snatches of words and phrases. “Profound.” “Brain damage.”
“Could be blind.” “Deaf.” “May never walk or talk.” “Will
require intervention.” “Prognosis very unclear.” “So very
sorry.”
The sheer sonic shock of the news left me unable to cry,
unable to speak. All the questions I had regarding Christopher
just crumpled inside me. The magnitude of the gut punch was
impossible to absorb. But as Bill and I left the claustrophobic
conference room and walked over to the incubator where
Andrew lay, tears started leaking down my cheeks. When we got
there, Andrew was on his belly, lifting his head, moving his arms
and legs purposefully as if trying to crawl out of the Lucite box
that was his home. Squealing in frustration at his inability to do
that.
Bill turned and saw the tears. “Why are you crying?” He
sounded frustrated and bemused; I was flummoxed and
annoyed. “Did you hear what they said in there? He is going to
have such a hard life.”
“Look at him; there is nothing wrong with that child. I don’t
care what they say.” He then slid his hand into the incubator to
fist bump his firstborn. “Isn’t that right, big guy?”
Bill’s take on Andrew’s situation was unique. Medical
professionals over the next few weeks would only reiterate how
dire the prognosis was. The day Andrew was diagnosed, one of
his nurses, a nun, came up, hugged me and said, “It’s okay for you
to be angry with God. I’m angry with God today.”
Several days later we ran into a doctor in my OB/GYN
practice while waiting for an elevator. She asked how the boys
34 OCTOBER 31, 2021
were doing. “Okay,” I replied. “Christopher was born with two
holes in his heart.” “Oh, those will resolve by the time he’s 1,” she
replied confidently. “And Andrew had a Grade 3 ICH,” I added.
She took two steps back, trying to get away from us as if this kind
of catastrophic diagnosis were contagious.
We had chosen our pediatrician because he’d had premature
twins, one of whom had some long-term but surmountable
issues. Two days after the boys were released from the NICU, we
brought them for their first appointment. The doctor’s
demeanor was grim. He outlined tests, interventions, things to
look for that would be concerning. I was trying desperately to
cling to some reason for hope. “But your boy was born with some
challenges and he’s doing well now, right?” I prompted. “Yes,” he
replied, “but my boy was never as sick as yours is.” We got a new
pediatrician.
What everyone recommended for Andrew was “early
intervention”: having a pediatric physical therapist start
working on assessments and exercises as soon as possible. When
you have a medically fragile child in a county where the
well-educated population pays high taxes, you learn that there
are abundant services. And so, when Andrew was about 10 weeks
old, he had his first physical therapy session with a lovely woman
who got him to laugh while she moved his arms and legs as he lay
on his back on a colorful play mat in our family room. She
commented on how he looked at her face, followed her hands
with his eyes, and mentioned that the way he arched and scooted
on his back was a common practice that preemies developed that
“we need to break him of.”
As the 45-minute session ended, this chatty, competent, wiry,
middle-aged PT looked at the file she had on Andrew and sighed
in deep frustration. “Is something wrong?” I asked nervously.
“I just hate it when they mess up the paperwork. How hard is
it to get a diagnosis right?”
“What does the paperwork say? What’s wrong?”
“Well, it says Andrew had a Grade 3 bleed.”
“Oh, that’s not wrong. I have the scans of the left side of his
brain. I can show you them if you need to see them.”
“Mrs. Grant, I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I work with a lot
of children who have high-level brain bleeds. Let me tell you: I
have never seen an infant with a Grade 3 bleed who looks like
your son. Your boy is a miracle.”
There would be years of intervention, tests, visits with
pediatric specialists. Andrew would walk and talk later than
his brother; he would learn to ride a bike later; inexplicably,
he would never learn to pump his legs to swing on a swing.
But ultimately what had seemed to be the worst news we
could ever receive turned out to be a story with the happiest of
endings. And an idea took root: that fierce love and dogged
determination could overcome all. As Bill had said so
resolutely at the outset, “There is nothing wrong with that
child.”
C
hristmas Eve 2006 dawned with a thud and a cry. I was
downstairs making coffee when something hard hit the
floor upstairs. “Tracy!”
I don’t recall where Andrew and Christopher, just turned 11,
were but probably in the basement playing video games. There
are many wonderful things about twins, and the ability to
entertain each other is high on that list. At this stage of our lives,
it was a necessity. Since a July evening when a dizzy spell started
a month-long cascade of tests showing that Bill had three tumors
in his brain and a large one in his lung, the boys — for the first
 The author’s
husband, Bill,
with their twins,
Andrew, left, and
Christopher, in
June 2006. Bill
was diagnosed
with cancer two
months later.

time in their lives — were not the center of my universe.

We had gone I raced up the stairs and found Bill crumpled on the floor
next to our bed. “I can’t move my right arm and leg,” he said.
through hell I placed my shoulder under his right side and helped him get
to a sitting position on the side of the bed. And in a split
with the boys’ second, I felt singular abject rage. Unexpressed but surging
through my being was one thought: “Christmas Eve. Are you
premature births; f---ing kidding me, God? You couldn’t let us have one last
Christmas. You’re taking my husband. You’re taking my
why were we being sons’ father … but that’s not enough? You need to take
Christmas too?”
visited by medical Instead, I phoned the on-call oncologist at MedStar
Georgetown University Hospital, where Bill had been treated
demons again? surgically with chemotherapy and state-of-the-art CyberKnife
radiation over the previous four months. Stage 4 melanoma had
been the diagnosis. About as grim as diagnoses come. He was 53
years old. We had been married 19 years.
“He needs to come to the ER right away,” I was told. “But,
doctor,” I said, “it’s Christmas Eve.” It was a plea and a prayer,
born out of knowing how hospitals work. They would want to
run scans and tests, but they would not do those on Christmas
Eve or Christmas Day. And if they did, the results wouldn’t be
quickly or definitively read.
Up until this conversation, I had not allowed the certainty of
the diagnosis to take hold. In fact, I had seen it as an enormous
obstacle to overcome, a cruel twist of fate but not a death
sentence. I made calls to the leading melanoma researchers at
the National Institutes of Health, Johns Hopkins University,
MD Anderson Cancer Center and the University of
Pennsylvania. My job was to keep Bill alive long enough for a

PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 35

 The author, who moved her mother from Chicago to the D.C. area at the outset of the pandemic.

36 OCTOBER 31, 2021

cure to be developed. I asked about experimental treatments,
was told they might not be covered by insurance and made clear
that I would sell my soul for a treatment that might work. For the
briefest of moments, I allowed myself to feel sorry for our family.
We had gone through hell with the boys’ premature births; why
were we being visited by medical demons again? And yet, the
outcome of that earlier crisis sat next to me at the kitchen table
each morning: two beautiful, healthy boys. We had beaten the
odds once, I told myself; we would do it again.
But by the time I found myself on the phone with Georgetown
Hospital on Christmas Eve, I knew he was dying; I knew we were
counting months, not years. I had not, however, given voice to
the timeline. Now, speaking to the doctor, I drew my voice down
to a whisper. “We have 11-year-old sons,” I reminded him. “What
if this is his last … ?”
The doctor sighed heavily, cut me off and said, “Call if he gets
worse, and then you’ll have to come in.”
We would, somehow, make it through Christmas morning
with the boys squealing in glee around their dad, who held his
coffee unsteadily in his left hand. Christmas dinner involved
having Bill’s sisters and some of their children over. I managed to
dress Bill, put dinner on the table and marvel that he ate as if he
were ravenous. He had, over the course of 36 hours, figured out
how to use his good arm and leg to move around the house so
well that he stood at the front door to wave goodbye as they left.
“I think that went really well,” he said, and looked down at me
and gave me a kiss. The oncologist would, after the end, tell me
that he thought we were absolutely crazy to not come into the
hospital on Christmas Eve. He was no doubt right, medically.
But if Bill had been in the hospital for his last Christmas, it would
not have changed the outcome; it would simply have deprived
him of Christmas morning with his boys, Christmas dinner with
his sisters, and a few more days of believing that maybe, just
maybe, we could beat this thing.
The cause of the paralysis was eventually seen on a
devastating scan. Tumors up and down his spine. Literally
dozens of tumors that had not been in his body six weeks before
when the last set of scans had shown “stable disease.”
“You should consider hospice at this point,” the oncologist
intoned grimly.
“I am 53 years old; I have a wife and two boys; I am not giving
up,” Bill replied evenly.
“People often live longer, do better on hospice care, have
better quality of life,” the doctor pushed back.
“Did you hear what he said?” I snapped, an overly protective
lioness. “We’ll need to discuss what the treatment options are.”
I no longer believed it could be beaten; but I couldn’t let Bill
think I had stopped believing. “I’m not doing hospice; I’m not
leaving you a widow at 43,” he said to me after the doctor walked
out of the hospital room. He lived another 2½ months and died
nine days before my 43rd birthday.
W
hen my mom suffered a stroke on Aug. 11, 2019, I
knew enough to be grateful. I thanked God that she
was stricken in the hours after Christopher’s wedding
reception had concluded. She had posed for pictures, glowed at
the praise heaped on both of her grandsons and danced the night
away. Perhaps the God who had decided to visit tragedy on us in
the hours before Christmas a dozen years earlier had fine-tuned
his sense of timing.
The morning after the wedding, my sister, who was staying at
Mom’s house with her husband, reported that Mom wasn’t
PHOTO: MARVIN JOSEPH
feeling well. I was largely unconcerned; lots of activity, I
assumed, had taken it out of her. When I stopped to say goodbye
before heading to the airport, I was stunned. Stunned at how
profound her confusion was and stunned that she wasn’t already
in the emergency room.
After several days in the hospital and another week in rehab,
Mom seemed to be recovering well, and the idea of her
continuing to live an active life on her own — driving, meeting
with friends, going to the theater — seemed possible. However,
over the next six months, she would experience a precipitous,
inexorable decline of cognition. Our nightly calls would
increasingly require repeated explanations of how to hang up the
phone. On good nights, it took three or four attempts. On bad
nights, I would text the neighbor to go over and help her. Once,
about 40 minutes into a conversation about how her TV was
broken and she couldn’t change the channel, it occurred to me
that she was trying to change the channel with the phone.
We started with in-home help and occupational therapy.
Wonderful people who were caring and attentive. But we knew
Mom needed to be closer to family. Retirement communities
were researched, and plans were made for Mom to move from
Chicago to the D.C. area, where I live. And then the pandemic
hit.
The email landed in my inbox as I sat among two dozen
socially distanced colleagues at scrubbed but circa 2002 desks in
a dingy office park in Laurel, Md. That we were all there was
nothing short of a miracle. Eight days earlier, the vast majority of
the newsroom of The Washington Post had been hastily sent
home to wait out a global pandemic that would change just
about everything for just about everyone.
I had been tasked with setting up an emergency, redundant
newsroom. Computers had been ordered and installed. High-
speed Internet had been routed. Those desks had been scrubbed
and separated. Chairs had been transported from a sleek office
blocks from the White House. Air purifiers had just about
eliminated the smell of stale ink from printing presses that had
not whirred to life producing community newspapers for a
decade. Today, we were doing a dry run. Seeing if we could
actually produce the website and newspaper.
Ping.
“Does this change your plans for your mom?” read the email
from my son’s mother-in-law, a relationship still sufficiently new
that whenever I realize Christopher has a mother-in-law, I have
to stop and let the thought pinball around my consciousness for
a few moments.
The email included a link to a Chicago Tribune story. Illinois
Gov. J.B. Pritzker was “locking down” the state. As the pandemic
took hold of the country, I had made the decision to bring my
frail, 84-year-old mother to live temporarily with me. The plan
had been for that to happen the following weekend, after the
emergency newsroom had been tested, after I’d had some time to
talk to my mom about the plan and prepare her to leave the city
she had lived in since coming to America from Ireland.
It was just after 2 p.m. on a Friday; the last flight to Chicago
out of BWI was at 3:55. I had to make that flight. I had to get to
Chicago. I had no idea how I would get back to Maryland. In
those early days of the pandemic and “stay at home” orders, there
was more confusion than clarity. I presumed — incorrectly it
would turn out — that the airports would be shut down. But I
took solace in a line in the Trib story: “Interstate highways will
remain open.” At least I could make the 14-hour drive with mom,
I thought. Followed immediately by “Sweet Jesus.”
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE I 37

Alice Ramsey on the back porch of her daughter’s house,
where she lived for five months during the pandemic.
I booked the Southwest Airlines flight as I bolted from the
newsroom. And booked two seats on a return flight the next day
just in case. Ready or not, my mom was coming to my home.
Mom would live in my house for five months. Every aspect of
life would change. I would tell executive editor Marty Baron, one
of the most powerful people in American journalism, that I
couldn’t meet after 5:30 p.m. because Mom expected dinner on
the table at 6:15 and no later.
She would calmly announce at breakfast one morning that
she wanted the windows in the bedroom closed and locked. “But
it’s nice and cool, and I know you like the breeze coming into the
house,” I replied.
“The men come in the windows at night, and that scares me,”
she replied.
“But, Mom, you’re on the second floor; no one can get into
your bedroom.”
“That’s fine for you to say. They don’t come into your bedroom
and bother you.”
So the windows remained closed and locked. I confirmed that
for her every night. Like a mother checking for monsters under
the bed and in the closets.
Most of the time she didn’t know the day of the week or even
the year. But there were moments when the complexity of the
brain was on full display. Asked who the president was, she
would purse her lips and spit out a single word: TRUMP. Asked
38 OCTOBER 31, 2021
at a doctor’s office for her Social Security number, she could
recite it without a pause.
However, she couldn’t make new memories, the doctors
explained, and her executive functioning — remembering if she
had taken medication, ability to look at a calendar and
understand it — were all but gone. And she knew it: Asked by a
neurologist what she was experiencing, her eloquence left me
speechless. “It feels like my mind is shrinking, doctor.”
I’m not sure what I knew about dementia before my mother’s
stroke, but it had not registered to me that the cruelty of the
disease was that people are aware they are losing their own
minds. Some, like my mother, try to fight it, working hard to
cling to what is left of their sense of self. My mom knew what she
should be able to do, and she knew she couldn’t do it; that
dissonance led to delusions, anger, frustration, allegations,
recrimination. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
This time, unlike with Andrew or Bill, I wasn’t sure what to
pray for. For Andrew, it was a “normal” life. (Yes, I know, but
that’s what the prayer was. It’s what every parent’s prayer would
be.) For Bill, it was for “one more.” One more night of TV and
pizza in the family room. One more game of cards with the boys.
One more chance to make him laugh.
But two years after her stroke, I barely recognize my mom.
She wears diapers. I bathe her on the three or four days each
week when I visit her. I remind her that she doesn’t need to put
shoes on when she’s going to take a shower.
The decline has been in some ways so quick and in others so
excruciatingly slow. She still fights “to get better” even as she
talks about speaking with her dead siblings and the people who
come into her apartment to steal her chocolates and potato
chips.
But each Sunday, we have dinner together. She usually
picks from three choices: chicken quesadilla, pizza, Potbelly
sandwiches. When the weather is good, we dine alfresco in the
courtyard at Riderwood. Sometimes we get fancy and have
“fizzy water” with our meal. We always bring crackers to feed
the ducks despite the stern warnings prohibiting such
misbehavior.
And I bring my iPhone and call up a playlist of standards.
“It Was a Very Good Year.” “Georgia on My Mind.” “Danny
Boy.” “America the Beautiful.” On good nights her head bobs
to the music, and she sings along to the refrains. Not all
nights are good, but we always end with her favorite song,
“Let It Be.”
She knows all the words, and beyond knowing the words she
seems to understand them as well. Or maybe that’s just me,
trying to find something there that isn’t.
I know there will come the evening when I queue up the song
and she will not know it. And it will be then, perhaps, that the
words will matter most. Not for her, but for me, as we enter the
final stage of caregiving. With Andrew and Bill, I allowed myself
the delusion that there were aspects of their care that I could
control. I have no such delusions now.
But the truth is that I am no less and no more powerful in
caring for my mother than I was for my son and my husband. No
more or less in control than I ever was. Just more aware of the
limitations of being a caregiver — which is to say, the limitations
of being human.
Let it be. Let it be. Let it be. Let it be. There will be an answer.
Let it be.
Tracy Grant is managing editor of The Post.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Something was fishy about these claims
An occasional look at reader communication.
F
or his recent birthday, Marc Ferrara was treated to dinner
by his partner at Clyde’s at Gallery Place. “We hoped for
lobster and crab cakes, but neither was on the menu. We
could understand those limitations in these times,” wrote the
Washington reader in an email. Ferrara opted for a swordfish
steak, but not before asking his server if the catch was
sustainably harvested.
“She replied that the swordfish was sustainably farmed,”
wrote Ferrara. “Neither my partner nor I could envision a
swordfish farm, so we asked her to confirm that with the chef.” A
few minutes later, she returned with confirmation from the
kitchen. When his entree arrived, Ferrara says he archly asked
the food runners, “ ‘So this is the farmed swordfish?’ and one of
ILLUSTRATION: KYLE ELLINGSON
TOM SIETSEMA Dining
them replied, ‘Yes, 100 percent farmed.’ ”
Ferrara asks, “Are they all in on a deception, or am I behind
the times in what can be farmed? My research today has not
shown me that I am. Thanks for any investigation.”
When I reached out for comment from the restaurant, a
spokeswoman confirmed the staff’s mistake. “We really dropped
the ball on that one,” says Molly Quigley. While the restaurant
company likes to innovate, she says, “Clyde’s has yet to invent a
swordfish farm. Those suckers are fast and migratory.” Ferrara’s
entree turned out to be wild-caught North Atlantic swordfish,
currently rated green, a “best” choice, by the Monterey Bay
Aquarium Seafood Watch.
The restaurant’s admission of error and speedy response won
it a new fan, says Ferrara. “I will be sure to eat at Clyde’s an extra
time this year because of their practices and customer service.”
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 39

SERVICE AT THE PUSH OF A BUTTON
Earlier this year, I wrote about restaurant pivots that I hoped
would outlast the pandemic, a list that included cocktails to go,
takeout from more than the expected Chinese and pizza places,
and year-round outdoor dining. The story prompted Arlington
reader Jeff Liteman to add to the list. “No, it’s not QR codes in
place of paper menus. Definitely not,” he joked in an email.
Rather, Liteman liked what he saw while dining outside Thai
Select in Arlington: “Fastened to each table was a button that
connected wirelessly to a bell indoors, where the wait staff could
hear it.” He wishes more restaurants with alfresco seating would
adopt the idea, which he considers a better strategy than
40 OCTOBER 31, 2021
Among other
things, call buttons
mean servers
don’t have
to hover over
a large party
pondering
menu choices.
“standing and gesticulating wildly” to catch a server’s attention.
(There’s precedent for the system. Before the pandemic, for
instance, some Chick-fil-A locations tested a “butler button” that
allowed customers to order more food or summon a server or
manager after their initial order. Shades of “Downton Abbey” at
fast-food prices!)
Debbie Ratanaprasith, who manages the family-owned
restaurant, says the call buttons — inspired by those used by
seniors to flag caregivers at home — were installed about six
months ago, after Thai Select added 24 seats outside. “We want
to make sure we take great care of customers,” no matter where
they’re sitting, she says. Among other things, call buttons mean
ILLUSTRATION: KYLE ELLINGSON
servers don’t have to hover over a large party pondering menu
choices. “We just tell them to ring us.”
The restaurant spent about $40 to make life easier for all
involved, an investment with potential rewards for the business,
figures Liteman. “Happy customers write positive reviews, pay
return visits and leave bigger tips,” he says.
THE SCOOP ON BRINGING YOUR OWN WINE
Nadine Brown has worked in Washington restaurants since
1997, including a 14-year run as sommelier at Charlie Palmer
Steak, which set itself apart from the competition with an all-
American wine list. I thought she would be the ideal person to
address some wine questions sent to me by Ed Curvey of Silver
Spring, who wants to know what the policy is for diners who
want to bring their own wine to restaurants and “what’s a
normal corkage fee?”
Easy question first: While there are “no fast rules,” the
average price to bring wine from outside tends to be between
$25 and $50, says Brown, the founder of At Your Service, a wine
consulting and private event company. The fee generally varies
depending upon the caliber of the restaurant and the level of
service it offers. Brown says the pandemic has changed her
thinking about wine from outside. Whereas she was fine with
the practice pre-covid, “restaurants are struggling now,” and the
profit on wine sales helps the bottom line. She proposes a
compromise: “Bring a bottle, buy a bottle” from the restaurant.
My informal survey of Washington restaurants at different
price levels supports Brown’s response. All-Purpose Pizza
charges a $25 corkage fee per bottle — and has no limit on the
number. The fee at the Knightsbridge Restaurant Group, a
collection that includes Annabelle, Modena, Rasika and Sababa,
is $35 per bottle with a maximum of two bottles. Oyster Oyster
charges $40 per bottle, while Reveler’s Hour asks for $50, the
same price as Marcel’s, the fine-dining French establishment,
which permits two bottles. Restaurants can pretty much set their
own rules; some, including the top-tier Fiola, do not allow
outside wine. “Our team is delighted to assist you in making a
selection from our award-winning wine list,” featuring “deep
verticals of top Italian wine producers and selections from the
rarest vineyards, including some no longer in production,” reads
a note on the restaurant’s website.
Bill Jensen, a co-owner of Reveler’s Hour and Tail Up Goat,
speaks for many of his peers in the business when he asks
customers to consider the time and attention sommeliers put into
their lists. “I have mixed feelings about outside wine as someone
who populates our lists with the same passion that chefs compile
a menu,” he says. “I recognize that wine has sentimental value,
and I understand the appeal of making it a central part of a night
out. I’m genuinely honored when people want to share those
kinds of bottles with us. That said, the beverage experience is a
massive part of any restaurant visit and something I personally
would never want to opt out of. Allowing corkage but limiting it to
one bottle feels like a nice balance for us across both restaurants.”
Like All-Purpose Pizza, Oyster Oyster doesn’t limit how
much outside wine can be brought in, although, per Brown’s
advice, diners should “consider supplementing anything they
bring with a purchase from our list if they’re going to be enjoying
multiple bottles,” says Sarah Horvitz, beverage director at the
plant-based, sustainably focused restaurant. “From our guests,
we’d just ask that they consider the fact that beverage sales are a
crucial part of covering restaurant expenses, like keeping the
lights on and supporting our staff. Also, we love to highlight
producers whose ethos aligns with our own, and thus being able
to support them while potentially introducing a guest to
something new they’ll love is really exciting for us.”
Got a special wine that needs decanting? Moez Ben Achour,
general manager and sommelier from Marcel’s, advises guests to
bring the bottle to the restaurant ahead of dinner, so he can
show it to best advantage. Early is better than later. Brown
recalls the time a guest at Charlie Palmer Steak dropped a case of
wine off at 5 p.m. for an 8 p.m. reservation — and this on a
Friday. “That’s excessive,” she says.
Next week: A review of Maiz64 in Washington.

KEY TO THE PREVIOUS SECOND GLANCE SOLUTION TO PUZZLE

OCT. 24 “SEA CHANGES,” OCT. 24

1. Missing mouth 6 $ < 0 $ 6 6 2 : / ( 7 6 7 $ % / ( '

$ 7 ( , 1 7 2 5 2 $ ' , ( 2 % / , * (
2. New hubs : , / / < 2 8 & $ 5 5 < 0 & 2 5 $ 1 * (
6 7 / 2 5 5 $ 7 ( ' $ 1 ' 2 5
3. Closed fender - $ 1 , ( 1 2 + $ 5 0 & 2 1 (
& $ 0 / ( * ( 1 ' 6 8 5 ( ' 2
4. New spelling 2 3 , $ 7 ( 6 2 8 7 * 5 2 : 1 6 3 $
5. In red : $ 5 6 6 / 8 0 3 ( $ 6 7 ( 5
$ 5 7 + 8 5 $ 1 * & $ 7 7 / ( 7 $ / &
6. Bigger boxer 1 7 + ) , 6 7 6 $ 8 ' , 2 $ * ( 6
& 2 2 . , ( 2 ) 7 + ( < ( $ 5
7. Lost lasso 7 , 9 2 , 1 ( 5 7 ( 6 6 $ < / 7 6
$ & ( : ( & / 2 1 ( ) 5 , 5 ( % 2 5 1
8. Less green 3 $ 6 6 ( 5 $ 5 ( 1 $ $ * 8 $
9. Solid red ( 1 7 / $ 0 % * < 5 2 5 ( $ ' , 1 *
% $ 5 1 8 0 6 / $ 0 ' 8 & . 6
10. New roof 7 5 8 7 + 6 & 5 8 0 + 2 3 , 6
5 ( 7 5 2 2 + , 2 $ 1 ' , ( 8
11. No windows , 1 7 , 0 ( 6 ( & 7 2 ) 7 + ( 3 $ & 7 6
7 ( ( 7 ( 5 8 1 % 2 / 7 2 1 ( 0 2 5 (
12. Bigger tail 7 ( 5 ( 6 $ 0 2 6 ( < 6 6 7 $ 1 1 ( '

If you change the C’s in the theme answers so

that they make real phrases (for example, WILL
YOU CARRY MC becomes WILL YOU MARRY
ME), you spell out MEDITERRANEAN.

ORIGINAL SECOND GLANCE PHOTO: WASHINGTON POST READER DAVID C. KENNEDY THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 41
Crossword “THE HAUNTED HOUSE” BY EVAN BIRNHOLZ

Welcome to the haunted house! Your mission is to identify the monster who lives here and collect the two sets of items you need to defeat it, but beware: Each room has its own devilish
trick. Each of the first seven puzzles will yield a secret word 4-12 letters long. How you discover the secret words will change from room to room, but hold on to them, as they will come in
handy for the eighth and final puzzle (the Safe). If you get stuck, you can visit washingtonpost.com/people/evan-birnholz for the solutions. Good luck!

ROOM 1: ENTRANCE HALL   ROOM 2: LABORATORY   

As you enter the mansion, you become disoriented, The laboratory is filthy. Decrepit machines and

gripped by the creeping dread of such a gloomy place. broken glassware are littered about the damp floor.
In this puzzle, you don’t have Across or Down clue  This used to be the site of some ghastly cloning 

headings, and there are no clue numbers, but there experiments, the effects of which are still felt today. 
 
are five numbered squares. The clues are listed below
in alphabetical order, but it’s up to you to determine ACROSS DOWN 

where each word belongs in the grid. 1 Bedazzled state 1 Split bit
   
4 “Revolver” drummer 2 Fall back
Chopping down Outer limits 5 Oprah Winfrey and 3 Takes the wrong path 

Golfer’s shout “Poison” hitmakers Bel Biv ___ Meryl Streep, e.g. 4 “Halloween” clip, for  
Lairs for lions or bears Sent, as a document, to an office 6 1972 Bill Withers hit instance
7 Palindromic bread 5 Newton who wrote 
Martini fruit Talked nonstop (2 wds.)
Melancholy Word after Caesar or Cobb 8 Spotted beast the treatise “Opticks” 
12 “___ girl!” 6 Game featuring

13 Went out with Reverse cards
ROOM 3: LIBRARY socially 9 Certain glove
You pull an old, dusty book from one of the library shelves. Written in blood on the first 15 “Iliad” author material 13 Breaking point?
page are the alphabet and the code (1, 3, 7, 4, 5, 2, 6). What could this mean? 16 “Iliad” warrior 10 Playful swimmer 14 Accumulate
17 Boulder growth 11 Small trace 15 Salt-cured meat
Each clue in this puzzle begins with a different letter, but these letters have been removed
and replaced with blank spaces. Fill in the first letter for each clue and transfer the letters
ROOM 4: BASEMENT       
to the corresponding numbered spaces in the grid. Then, match each clue to a different
It’s pitch black in the basement. You begin to
spot in the grid and enter its answer there. Note that each answer begins with a different  
tremble in fear. But if you search a little farther,
letter of the alphabet, and that no clue begins with the same letter as its answer.
you may find light in the darkest of places.  

1 __eginning (hyph.)      
ACROSS 23 Twist on one’s head
2 __iti or penne   1 Nursing ___ 24 It’s all in your head  
shapes
 4 Hammer part 25 “Mare of Easttown”
3 __uick swim   
7 Hit by the Kinks star Winslet
4 __ood-natured and 
cheerful 8 Dug-up material 26 Some TV rooms 

5 “__tar Trek Beyond”   9 “The Haunting” 27 “Dropped” letters?

   
actress Saldana  
actor Wilson
10 Slugger Williams DOWN  
6 __ought in the ring
   11 Making contact 1 Black mark
7 __-ray source in  
space  with one’s 2 Spur wheel
fingers? 3 Trebek of trivia  
8 *__ix up, as cards  
9 __rawer handle 13 Destroy slowly 4 Skin applications
10 __rofessor Xavier’s  14 Disavows 5 “On Revolution” 14 Had visions 19 Like a Jekyll-and-
mutant team (hyph.) 17 Author Bagnold author Hannah 15 Trap Hyde personality
11 __ntil now 18 Substituted for 6 Cheese chunks 16 Fruit similar to 20 Bakery treats
12 __eak, as an excuse 22 Disfigure 12 Fair ___ a lemon 21 Marooned
13 __ane Austen, e.g.
14 *__early deliveries ROOM 5: CRYPT ACROSS 11 Search in the section DOWN     
to Santa Claus A hidden passageway 3 Naked hero in where you’ll find the 1 Pubs hosting the nude  
15 __rending to the opens, leading to a broken-down bus secret word: the people, maybe (7)
heavens crypt. This may be the summoned car middle column (4) 2 Lite Subway choice (5)  

16 __ne-hour final resting place for rides (5) 12 Bell finally 4 Buddy’s first rough,  
refresher, say the monster’s victims. 6 Stirs drink around redesigned Unix rough embrace (3,3)

17 *__ickoff Note: If you are new (4) operating system (5) 5 David, for one, has
18 *__owhere to be to solving cryptics, 8 Marco ruined 13 Refined guy goes nuts, time for law (7) 
found we suggest this guide: billiards shot (5) oddly (4) 7 Artie’s awful spoof (6)

19 __east enigma.puzzlers.org/ 10 Pressure swindler, 14 Company division 9 I’m upset: Old king
contaminated guide/cryptics1 losing bit of cash (4) takes a cruise, I hear (5) held up social event (5)

42 OCTOBER 31, 2021 SOLUTION TO LAST WEEK’S PUZZLE: PAGE 41. ONLINE: CLASSIC MERL REAGLE PUZZLES AT WAPO.ST/CLASSIC-MERL.
ROOM 6: KITCHEN         ROOM 7: BEDROOM        

There is a foul-smelling  
It’s said that the ghosts of  
cauldron filled with ashes and visitors who slept in this room
   
eyeballs and tarantulas. You remain here, trapped between
wonder what else the monster   this world and the beyond. You  
added to this vile mixture. may even see them yourself.
       

ACROSS ACROSS
     
1 Film about a deep terror?  
1 ___ and haw
5 “Lemon” fish dish   5 Part of a hand  

9 Accessible 9 Be quite fond of, with “on”  

10 Blokes 22 Rocker Chris 3 Recently painted 12 Common batteries 10 Taiwanese laptop brand
 
11 Testing phase 23 Pic, in ads 4 Say “Grr” to 14 “Ew, a roach!” 11 “You’ve got mail” co.
12 ___ butter (Jif 24 Sandwich fish 5 Allows to go free 15 Passing through 12 Bathroom, briefly
or Skippy spread) 25 Flaunt, as biceps 6 ___-and-done 16 Buckeyes’ sch. 13 Supposed psychic DOWN 8 “___ and the
13 Still-life fruits 7 Poker pro Ungar 17 Author Fleming 15 Personal letters? 1 Project for a beaver Women” (Gere film)
15 Black or green DOWN 8 Mysterious 19 GIF reply, maybe 16 Beefy guy at a circus 2 Tilling tool 14 Heart singer Wilson
pizza toppings 1 Monster.com ability in “The 20 Had this puzzle’s 22 “It burns! It burns!” 3 British prep school 16 Cubs great Sammy
18 “Frozen” character listing Dead Zone” “mixtures,” say 23 It’s aimed at a fire founded in 1440 17 “Terrible” stage
made of snow 2 “Great” beast 10 Econ. indicator 21 Wolf relative 24 In 15 minutes, say 4 Emotional explosions 18 Pal of Pooh
25 Certain predator’s 5 Prime minister who 19 Janitor’s implement
FINAL PUZZLE: THE SAFE ROWS PIECES descriptor preceded Thatcher 20 Like people battling
The monster has found you! If A Register contents 1 Eldest Brady sister 26 Eeyore, e.g. 6 Rainforest palm berry the kraken
you’ve collected the correct secret Canine woe 2 Freddy Krueger’s marks 27 D.C. baseball pro 7 Guns, as an engine 21 “What’s ___?”
words from the seven rooms, they Fishy bagel topping 3 Corn ___ (cereal)
will reveal to you who it is. Now B “Witchcraft” singer 4 Late-night host broadcast
you need to open the safe and Frank in “Skelevision” in 2006 A
collect the two sets of items that Papier-___ for Halloween (2 wds.)
will defeat it once and for all. C Vehicle that takes off 5 Photographer Adams B
Agitated, as cream 6 Do some quick test prep
The answers to this puzzle are D Underwear brand 7 Salt Lake City’s state C
laid out in Rows and Pieces. Each Blood red, e.g. 8 Course of action D
Row contains one, two or three “I’m off,” in Italy 9 On a larger scale (2 wds.)
answers side-by-side; their clues E “Carrie” school event 10 Unclear, as ideas E
are given in order, but it is up to Wispy clouds 11 Admission need, often
you to determine the dividing “Just my ___ cents” 12 Lambs’ mothers F
points between them. Each Piece F 1887 Chekhov play 13 ___ a better mousetrap G
answer begins in its numbered Org. with a black and 14 A flat one is bad for driving
square and proceeds in a winding white flag 15 Chilled like beer (hyph.) H
path. The Pieces can be placed in G Holders of lit items 16 Composer Badalamenti
the grid without needing to rotate H Freudian mediator 17 Fastening metal bolt
I
them or overlap them with other Marks from a zombie 18 Utterly despises J
Pieces. Use the Row answers and “Um, excuse me ...” 19 Transform, as in sci-fi
the Pieces’ shapes to help you I Signal during a show 20 Bodily pouches  

determine where each Piece goes. Bit of Moscow money 21 “Nope!” (hyph.) 
Dog that escaped a 22 Ridiculous, as ideas 
When the grid is complete, read witch’s castle 23 Like many birdhouses
 
the circled squares Row by Row to J Song evoking nostalgia
spell out a hint to unlocking Item Recent app downloader, 

Set 1. Then, look again at the grid say (2 wds.)

carefully. The name of Item Set 1,  

along with the safe combination

(5, 2, 6, 7, 3, 1) in tandem with
its missing number, are the keys  
 
to unlocking Item Set 2. 

 

  
Second Glance

A touch of
autumn
BY RANDY MAYS

Find the 12
differences in the
photo of goods at a
cafe in Ellicott City in
October 2020.

PUZZLE ANSWERS
See them online now
at washingtonpost.
com/secondglance or
in next week’s issue
of the magazine.

SEE YOUR PHOTO

To submit a photo of
the Washington area
for use in Second
Glance, email a high-
resolution jpeg
attachment of 8
megapixels or larger
to secondglance@
washpost.com. For
information about
our guidelines for
user content, see
washingtonpost.com/
secondglance.

44 OCTOBER 31, 2021 PHOTO: WASHINGTON POST READER BEN BARLOW

 PHOTOGRAPH BY MARVIN JOSEPH Wide Angle

I
t would be so much easier
if I could speak their
language,” says
photographer Marvin
Joseph, joking about the
challenge of photographing
animals. This particular photo
shoot was hilarious because the
dog, Hershey, was extremely
rambunctious. Luckily, Megan
Jones, who owns the dog boutique
Furever Fab, had doggie snacks
on hand. She and Hershey had a
great rapport. “Hershey followed
Megan everywhere she went —
and he’s not even her dog!”
Joseph says. Jones had borrowed
him from a friend for the photo
shoot. Joseph says he enjoys
photographing the bond between
people and pets. “Such incredible
loyalty from the pet and the pet
owner is a love that the world
needs every day,” he says.

THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 45

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