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Forget Congress. Everything You Need to Know Can Be Found in a Trailer Park at the Edge of the World.

Photo credit: Fried_Green_Tomatoes - Getty Images
Photo credit: Fried_Green_Tomatoes - Getty Images

We try as best we can at the shebeen to draw attention to people whose work honors the craft of journalism as we were taught it, and as the avocation towards which we’ve been drawn since we were running a lemonade shebeen on the sidewalk. I do not know Hannah Dreier of the Washington Post, nor am I overly familiar with her work, which is on me. But this piece in the WP on Tuesday guarantees that I will be eliminating that oversight immediately.

It concerns the closing of a FEMA trailer camp in California that was built to house the refugees from the massive Camp wildfire in 2018. But it's about so much more than that. It’s about the lives of people hanging off the edge of the cliff by their fingernails, about a economic safety net that is coming apart. And ultimately, it is a story about how catastrophic climate change already is causing unmanageable refugee crises within our own borders. The wildfires will get worse. The crises will deepen. These are the mathematical certainties that bolster Dreier’s reporting—and, I would note, the mathematical certainties that Senator Joe Manchin and his merry band of conservative Democrats choose to ignore while speaking to the Beltway reporters who hang on their every word.

But Dreier’s gifts as a writer shine when she establishes these themes early on and them uses them as a burning subtext to the story of one couple whose days at the FEMA camp are running out. Mike and Crystal Erickson lost their home to the wildfire started by a faulty transmission line that Pacific Gas and Electric had neglected for years. (Ultimately, PG&E declared bankruptcy, paid out $13.5 billion in settlement money—much of which was paid in shares of stock in the newly reorganised company—and pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter.) Crystal was almost totally immobilised by a stroke prior to the fire. They moved into the FEMA camp and spent over 300 days there. Now, the camp was closing and they had nowhere to go.

I won’t attempt to summarise Dreier’s lucid, devastating reportage, because it would do it a terrible injustice. But I would draw your attention to one quietly cinematic passage in which Mike Erickson, searching for some brief relief from the stresses of his life, takes a walk through the steadily emptying trailer park, where this most tenuous of communities is slowly unravelling.

After a while, Crystal fell asleep and Mike slipped out for a walk. There was no greenery at the site, no shade, and no color aside from the green trash bins outside each home. He walked past Trailer 46, where a small woman who liked to keep to herself peeked through the blinds. Past Trailer 11, where a father, preparing to move out, was trying to scrape off the glow-in-the-dark stars he’d put up for his kids. Past Trailer 7, where a FEMA eviction notice fluttered on the door, warning, “We have not been able to contact you by telephone and must speak with you right away.” Mike knew that the man who lived inside had a hole in his trachea and couldn’t talk.

When he reached Trailer 32, a snarling German shepherd ran at him. The dog had bitten him twice, but Mike liked visiting with its owner, Jay Rose, who was stacking boxes in the truck he used for his job hauling portable toilets.

“You mind if I ask if you found a place to go?” Mike asked.

“No, just putting stuff in storage,” Jay said. “I’m gonna be the last one in here.

Mike told Jay about his efforts to find a place. “I’m so fried now, it’s hard to even make contact,” he said. He didn’t want to stay too long. He’d left his phone charging and worried about missing a call from someone with a lead. He hurried back, climbed the steps and checked his phone in his bedroom. No calls.

It’s the details that deliver the power. The angry dog. The guy scraping the stars off the trailer. Mike and Jay talking about nothing, but talking about everything, really. Read it. Read the whole thing. Read it before you start reading about what’s going on in the Congress, because all you need to know about that can be found in a empty trailer park at the edge of the world.

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