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Hi, I'm John the Wallom. I'm a writer at large for the New York Times magazine, and I live on Bainbridge Island outside Seattle. I'm going to read an essay I wrote for the magazine's recent voyages issue about a trip I took late this summer. By the time I pulled into Spokane, I was furious at myself for coming to Spokane.
I'd had a bad pandemic, though not nearly bad enough that I feel entitled to complain about it, and definitely not to complain about it publicly. In the most important ways, my family was fine, healthy, housed, employed, and buffered from the crisis by circumstance, privilege and luck. Relatively speaking, we were exquisitely comfortable and safe. Literally on an island, the semi-rural suburb of Seattle where we live.
We had space, we had trees, until recently the case counts were low. Even so, at the onset of the pandemic, my wife and I were both working, and our daughters were 11 and 6. While there were many moments of laughter and togetherness, life in our household also felt precarious, strained. Beneath the warm opioid glow of family movie night, there seemed to be the potential for some darker disorderedliness and pain.
And so I gradually put my career into an induced coma to prioritize our kids. It was a luxury that felt like a necessity, but it carried its own complications too. As our family's collective hard time eased, I began having my own personal hard time. The details aren't important.
Let's just say I felt as if I were moldering in place. Time passed, summer came. I was slow to experience any of the combustive euphoria of the reopening while it lasted. I didn't fly anywhere, didn't eat inside a restaurant, didn't see a movie, scarcely set foot in a city, seldom managed to leave my small town.
Then Delta swept in, and gazing out, I felt like people were being reckless, and I was primed to take their recklessness very personally, on behalf of my one still unvaccinated child. But I couldn't judge what on the sliding scale of prolonged disaster counted as reckless anymore. Here's what I think was happening. It hadn't been too painful initially to settle into a small, circumscribed life, going grocery shopping, volunteering at our local vaccine clinic, getting together with friends outside.
But it meant I'd never been forced or forced myself to acclimate to the virus as much as other people seem to have done. I wasn't learning to live within the odds. And this made me uneasy, personally uneasy because I interpreted it as a lack of toughness, but also ethically uneasy because I knew that in a broken society like ours, my comfort came at the expense of other people's demoralization and discomfort. So that's what happened.
And while I'm sure this left me with an exaggerated sense of the risks of leaving my particular bubble, the real problem was I started chronically undervaluing the reward I'd been for going so much that for going felt easy. Too many things I imagined doing began to feel skippable, arbitrary, not a tragedy to decline. Either I was approaching some new state of equanimity and contentedness, or I was depressed. Then, as if I'd won a sweepstakes, this magazine offered me the seemingly wide open opportunity to fly somewhere for its travel issue.
By then, I'd spent almost 17 months parenting two demanding children on an insular island. I needed to get back to work. And so, I considered the buffuddling risks, stresses, uncertainties, child care, complications, psychic agitations, and relative irresponsibility of traveling anywhere at all and asked. What if I drove to Spokane?
Spokane, Washington, first place of Father's Day, hometown of Bing Crosby, a city with a sequence of wide rocky waterfalls pouring through its center like a cubist boulevard, cracking it in two. I've been genuinely curious about Spokane for years, though I heard a lot of liberals around Seattle disparage the city, young people kept rediscovering the place, opening businesses there, moving in. I also knew that Spokane was a city with a history of minor league baseball that stretched back more than 100 years, and I unreservedly loved going to baseball games. A minor league game felt like a manageable, belated step into the mid-pandemic lifestyle that people were calling post-pandemic life.
I would be in a crowd, but a smaller scale crowd, buffeted by currents of fresh, beading air. The problem was, in the two weeks leading up to my trip in mid-August, the Delta variant swamped the city. Spokane County had 535 daily cases for 100,000 people, a full vaccination rate that had stalled out at 50%, and its highest rates of hospitalization since the pandemic began. Still, there were a handful of counties in Washington state doing far worse.
At some point during my six-hour drive to the city, the governor re-instituted a statewide mask mandate for most indoor public spaces, but it wouldn't take effect until the following week. In Spokane, the replans were a protest downtown. I arrived around dinner time, found the classy cavernous lobby of my hotel, hacked with maskless strangers drinking and eating, but also not even drinking or eating, just lingering, loping through, working on their laptops, working in the restaurant kitchen, bellowing, plosive consonants at one another, cavalierly clearing their throats. I went to my room in order to hamburger, and when the knock came, I fumbled to mask up, open the door, and discovered a young woman smiling at me at close range, for a bare mouth saying complete casualness.
As you're evening going, getting up to anything fun tonight, this was foreign to me. I was a god, and at that point, my consciousness started thrumming, haplessly recalibrating to an unfamiliar magnitude of risk, this place called Spokane. I worried about carrying the virus home to my unvaccinated daughter, my in-laws, understood those odds were still quite low and manageable, but also understood that even a mild case in my orbit would create anxiety and disruptions to my family's already tenuous daily routines and require uncomfortable conversations with friends, foisting the same stress and nuisances on them. School was about to start, fully in person this year.
I didn't want my kids stranded at home or a ballooning network of other eight-year-olds needing to be swabbed just because somebody's idiot father let his guard down in Spokane. Heard the dad's a writer, I imagine some understandably infuriated parent writing on her community Facebook page. He got paid to write about his feelings at a baseball game, LOL. The Hillsborough Hopps were in town from Oregon for a six-game series against the Spokane Indians.
The name Indians was first used for a baseball team in Spokane in 1903, but in 2006 the current team began seriously grappling with how to bear that name respectfully, and whether it should continue to use it at all. The baseball Indians reached out to the Spokane tribe of Indians, whose people have inhabited the area for at least a unique partnership was forged. One, for example, the tribal leaders shared the urgency they felt to preserve their dialect of Salish. At the time there were roughly a dozen remaining fluent speakers.
The baseball team put Salish translations on the sign of D'Ranit Stadium. Since 2014, there's also worn the Salish word, Spokane, across the chest of its jerseys. The jerseys are auctioned off at the end of the season and then the team donates the proceeds to the tribe's youth initiatives. When I talked to the chairwoman of the Spokane tribal business council, Carol Evans, she expressed great pride in the partnership and emphasized the fundamental difference between the Spokane Indians baseball club and other teams.
We are not there mascot, she said. They're named after our tribe. In fact, the Spokane Indians have four mascots, two dinosaurs, a superhero named recycle man, and a local species of fish. When I met the team's senior vice president Otto Klein on the field during batting practice, he told me about each of these characters gushing with the blind fervor of a man bragging about his zany college age kids.
Klein has worked for the Spokane Indians for 29 seasons. His skillset was sports marketing, but his essential nature, it seemed, was host. He saw his job as hosting the entire greater Spokane community and is welcoming on pretentious little baseball stadium at the edge of town, impeccably engineering, a cozy and communal feeling for everyone, every night. The mascots were part of that experience, of course, but everything was.
That's why you look around and it's immaculate, Klein told me. I dare you to find a piece of trash. That's why there was a kid's zone beyond the right field fence with hopscotch and chalk and a wiffleball field beyond the fence and left. That's why everything looked freshly painted, or the bathrooms were well-lit and staffed by attendants.
Klein was confident I would have a positive bathroom experience that night. That's why parking at a vista stadium is free. See that? Klein said at one point, you could eat off that.
I thought he was gesturing at the seats behind home plate, but he meant the concrete floor. With Indians really offered their fans as their hospitality. At this level of minor league baseball, Klein explained, the show has to be bigger than the nine guys on the field. The Indians are the high-A affiliate of the Colorado Rockies, three tears down from the major leagues, one tear up from the floor.
Players pass through the roster rapidly. Virtually every week, someone is called up or sent down. This year, three of the Indians five starting pitchers vanished within weeks of opening day, just poof like a rapture. That churn scrambles the usual sports marketing logic, Klein explained.
As soon as a ballplayer, Garner is a little star power in Spokane, becomes a fan favorite, a potential bobblehead, a draw. He's spirited away. Last year, the pandemics grabbed the entire minor league season. Now, Klein said, people were returning with relief and abandon, chasing that normal summer feeling of sitting at a game, even if the world still hadn't entirely returned to normal.
One of the things that I think sports allows us to do is escape our problems, you told me. Right now, you're here at the ballpark. You're not thinking about your cranky boss or the way your wife spoke to you this morning when you left home. It gives you an outlet to be kind of free emotionally and be a part of it.
That's why I'm here, I said. It was dollars in your dog night with two hours to go before the first pitch staff members in the stadium kitchen were wrapping hot dogs in foil and randomly inserting play money into some. These bills and denominations of one to one hundred dollars were redeemable for real bills. A total of two thousand dollars would be given away during the game.
Dollars in your dog night was one of the most beloved promotions out of this stadium, and the Indians seemed to run a different one every night of the season. Halloween night, pajama party night, bark in the park when fans bring their dogs. Hot dog sales spike on dollars in your dog night. The two thousand dollars has sprinkled among hundreds of dogs.
The potential for a payoff for any individual hot dog eater feels attainable and real. There's a really good likelihood that you're gonna win money in your hot dog tonight, Klein told me encouragingly. After so many months of tracking covid statistics and deciphering health department dashboards of being forced to visualize formerly mundane situations and make bungling calculations about distances, densities, airflow, the trajectories and life spans of billions of invisible aerosols, eddying on the directionally through the air, and the odds of too many of them lodging up my nose. It was fun to imagine something random happening to me that was good.
I might come home from Spokane with covid, but I might come home with a $20 bill. I haven't mentioned the smoke. I saw the fire in the mountains north of Spokane as I drove into town, discharging its spectral ashy cloud. The Ford corkscrew fire had more than doubled in size overnight, chewing up thirteen thousand acres and forcing evacuations.
Still, it had to be regarded as a relatively puny disaster compared with the megafires in California, and even the other fires ravaging Washington state, some of which were also lofting smoke towards Spokane. For days leading up to my trip, I'd watch the city's air quality numbers rise on my phone alongside its covid numbers, tracking this data as compulsively as I track baseball statistics as a kid. It was another stressor that I couldn't control, another catastrophe that we had largely inflicted on ourselves that seemed to be getting inescapably worse everywhere, just at different rates and on different scales, in which, therefore, seemed also to require a modulation of our discouragement and alarm. Then, the evening before I left home, the air quality in Spokane deteriorated starkly, edging above 200 on the color-coded meter, purple, very unhealthy.
The Indians had a game that night and tried to wait out the smoke for an hour while the crowd sat in the stands, swaddled in the abrasive weighted blanket of planet Earth's air. When the team finally took the extraordinary step of postponing the game, everyone booed. It was kind of yucky, but we fans didn't care, Karen Kaiser told me. Kaiser's been watching the Indians play in Spokane for fourteen years.
She works as a curator at the Jump Art Museum on the campus of Gonzaga University across the river from downtown. When we met in her office one afternoon, she set out a small, faded baseball card of a former Spokane Indians player for me to see. The back of the card described Jack Lorkey as one of the luckiest boys in baseball. He was also Kaiser's dad.
75 summers ago, in 1946, Lorkey was the Indians 22 year old third baseman and a standout slugger hitting 345. On June 24th, Indians owner received the inevitable phone call. Lorkey was being promoted to the Pacific Coast League. He should report to San Diego right away.
Lorkey wasn't reachable, however. The team had left Spokane several hours earlier, traveling west across the state for an away game the following day. Shortly after nightfall, Indians bust was climbing through the cascades in the rain when the drivers swerve to avoid an oncoming car. The bus skidded along the guardrail, scraping up a shower of sparks, then broke through the barrier, plunged off the road, and bounced 350 feet down the side of the mountain until it hit the riverbank below.
Then the gas tanks exploded. Everything burned. Six of the 13 players aboard were killed instantly. Everyone else was severely injured.
Three more died in the hospital within days. But Jack Lorkey was totally fine. After receiving the call about his promotion, the Indians owner enlisted the help of the state patrol and a patrolman managed to spot the team's bus parked for hamburgers at a truck stop in the middle of the state. He relayed a message to Lorkey, who dispensed quick goodbyes to his teammates, and began hitchhiking the 175 miles back to Spokane to pack his things.
That is, Lorkey went east while the Indians continued west. Their bus crashed about 45 minutes later. It was an astonishing story, and the media ran with it. Lucky Lorkey, they called him.
But the nickname turned out to be even more apt than it seemed. Two summers earlier, Lorkey landed in Normandy with the 35th Infantry Division just after D-Day, then slogged through France and Germany fighting in some of the grisliest campaigns of World War II. On four separate occasions, he'd watched the soldiers standing on either side of him get killed, but was never harmed himself, then trying to get home to Los Angeles after being discharged. Lorkey was bumped off an army transport flight at the last minute to clear his seat for a military VIP.
He was miffed. Not only was he burning to return home, he'd never flown on an airplane before and was looking forward to the experience. The flight took off without him, then crashed, killing everyone on board. Oh big yah, the Lexus bragging about money.
Those are just props. That's not the engine. That's not the emotion that my music is running on. That is, of course, Jay-Z.
I'm John Caramanica, one of the critics behind the New York Times is 30, greatest living American songwriters project. We interviewed some of the songwriters on our list, including Taylor Swift, who has him set for a video like this in a long time. Yeah, criticism has been a huge fuel for me, like a creative writing prompt or something. These are not ordinary conversations.
These creative superstars are sharing parts of their process in ways that you rarely have access to. On top of the mad task of picking only 30 people, we also went out and got some music world heavyweights to weigh in. Watch all the video interviews for free and check out the entire 30 greatest living American songwriters project at nytimes.com slash 30 greatest or in the app. And let us know if you agree with our picks.
I bet you won't. Growing up in Southern California in the 1950s and 60s, Karen Kaiser did not hear any of these stories from her dad. He retired from baseball in 1953 after seven mediocre seasons in the big leaves and took a job as a security guard. As a father, Kaiser told me he was somewhat forbidding and withdrawn.
Everyone would say, Jack, you've got six kids. You must really love children, she remembered. And Lorky's line, always delivered flat was, not especially. Kaiser relished anytime she could hold her dad's attention.
She loved playing catch with him, even though he threw so hard, he would turn her glove hand red. She described herself as a solitary artistic child and a family of fanatical athletes. And it meant the world to her, she said, when Lorky snapped at her brothers and sisters to leave her alone and let her draw. Lorky never talked about the bus crash, Kaiser said.
And the only war story she could remember the man telling were Pat little anecdotes, like the time he had to sleep in a hay bale, woke up so stiff his legs wouldn't work. Not a word about watching his friends die, Kaiser told me. Not a word. It wasn't until she moved to Spokane after winning a scholarship to study art that Kaiser learned more of her father's history.
She was still Karen Lorky then, and people in Spokane kept surprising her by recognizing her last name. It was amazed how many people knew about my dad, she said. It was around this point in her story that Kaiser paused and asked me to follow her to the museum's loading dock, where Ken Speering, a burly genial older man in work paints and suspenders, was backing up his truck to unload some art. Speering, it turns out, is one of Spokane's best known artists.
He moved to the city in 1968 and has spent his entire adult life in town. In 1989, he created a 12-foot tall sculpture of a red radio flyer wagon that still sits in Riverfront Park at the very heart of Spokane, probably the most iconic piece of public art in a city that seemed to brim with it. The wagon is a tourist attraction. Now, at 71, Speering was transferring his personal collection to the museum, a transaction that Kaiser helped engineer.
She and Speering had been friends for decades. That's one thing she loved about Spokane, and its artistic community specifically, Kaiser told me, the intimate scale, the unpretentiousness of the scene. It's folksy here, she said, stripping the word of any feeling of the little man. I helped carry in a couple of Speering's printmaking matrices, detailed woodcuts of a boy sitting by river, fishing.
As we worked, Kaiser noticed her friend's fingers were bandaged and asked, what'd you do to your hand? Burned it, Speering said, right across these four fingers. The torch Kaiser asked, you were making something? No, on the grill, Speering said.
He began to good-humouredly outline a mundane barbecuing accident. Smells a little different than hamburger, doesn't it, Kaiser said. It was a nice moment, that's all. It made Spokane feel like a welcoming place.
Back in her office, Kaiser stressed that nobody other than reporters ever called her father Lucky Lorky. He was deeply uncomfortable with the nickname. This was important to understand, Kaiser said. All these stories about Jack Lorky narrowly escaping death didn't feel breezy and wondrous to Jack Lorky.
To him, they were traumas. They were stories about a succession of his closest friends not escaping death, all while Lorky kept on existing, knowing they were dead, or even watching them die. As a result, he seemed incapable of delivering the kind of light-hearted soundbite that reporters wanted. I'm a fatalist, he told the Los Angeles Times.
It was awful for him, Kaiser said. After the Indians bus crashed, Lorky took it upon himself to drive one of his teammates' widows back to her parents' home in San Francisco. Then, continuing on to San Diego, he can sold another teammates' widow there. When he finally reported to his new team, the owner chewed him out for taking so long to arrive from Spokane.
Where have you been, man-barred? Lorky replied, I've been delivering widows. Suddenly, I heard myself thinking aloud in Kaiser's office, struggling to process my own more banal good fortune as much as her dad's. How could Jack Lorky, how could anyone with moral integrity, look back on his survival and feel unequivocally good in deserving of it, and also not wind up or act with compassion and hypersensitive to risk?
I think, Kaiser said, you'd have to be pretty egocentric to think there's some overriding meaning about the importance of your life, as opposed to somebody else's. He was always worried about us, Kaiser went on. Lorky usually seemed quite even keeled, but he would fly into a panic whenever one of his children failed to get home before dark. Kaiser remembered one day when she was seven or eight, her dad was up on the roof fixing something, and she begged pitifully to be allowed up to help.
Finally, her father caved. Dad said, I'll bring her up here, and she was hoisted up. Lorky sat his little daughter down, pulled the extra denim of her pant legs away from her body, and proceeded to hammer nails due to fabric all around, securing his child to the shingles so she wouldn't slide off. I was happy as a clam, as you told me, just sitting up there, just being where he was.
I bought two hot dogs on the top of the fourth, but didn't win any money. In truth, I suspect I didn't even have a chance of winning money because I happened to order my hot dogs at a moment when the smaller of a Vista Stadium's two concession stands momentarily ran out of hot dogs, a fleeting and completely forgivable collapse of hospitality that nevertheless, I'm sure will pain auto-clined to read about here. Within minutes, workers scuttled in from the stadium kitchen first with a tray of hot dogs, then with two bags of buns to clear the backlog of customers. I watched the people behind the counter assemble and wrap them together as fast as they could.
In their haste, they seemed to have abandoned the project of stuffing any dollars in the dogs. Later though, I learned that this wasn't an oversight. All the money was dispersed in the early innings. I misunderstood and missed the whole thing.
Honestly, I didn't care. It was a trivial blip of disappointment at worst. I realized I hadn't been to a baseball game since I chapped around my daughter's field trip to see the Mariners in the spring of 2019, and I felt grateful just to soak up all the usual wonderful baseball stuff happening around me, the nuanced inflections of an experience that I've known all my life. I was reconnecting with all the nostalgic cliches, the crack of the bat, and so on, but also a sudden particulars, the helpless sensation of scampering to the bathroom and hearing from the other side of the stands a tense collective roar and a terrible collective groan, and knowing I'd missed an opposing player's home run.
Watching a little red-headed girl, the age of my younger daughter creep down the right field seats toward the Indians bullpen clutching a green crayola marker, flip through her program, and match the number on the closest players back to his name, then screw up the courage to ask Mr. Whoever he was for his autograph. The anesthetizing, stadium-wide wash of white noise and murmuring that can miraculously set in during the doldrums of a very long at bat. Auto-clines people meanwhile were putting on their show, spackling every crack in the action with giveaways, games, and promotions.
Down on the field between innings, little kids tried to throw pizza boxes into fishing nets to win prize packs, or jumped up and down with pedometers strapped to their foreheads. These contests were relentless. Okay, guys, it's really simple. We're going to take those toilet seats and throw them like horseshoes, and the mascots kept coming to the blue dinosaur, the other dinosaur, and most beloved of all, making his traditional appearance in the middle of the sixth, Ruby the Red Band trout.
Ruby is a homage to an ecologically precarious subspecies of rainbow trout that spawns in the Spokane River. The fish totted in from left field, anthropomorphically upright, then planted his feet to perform his signature dance. A quick, perfectly perpendicular vibration of the torso, executed with uncanny evenness and precision, as though they were not a human inside the Ruby suit, but a pneumatic paint can shaker from the local hardware store. My jaw dropped, people howled, the woman in front of me buckled over with glee.
It was the most unusual thing I've ever seen a mascot do. Hope you enjoyed Ruby, the Indians PR officer texted me proudly once the euphoria had passed. I replied, that shake is really something. I was enjoying myself, I was energized, the moon was low and radiant behind the stadium lights, and the air quality had ease to moderate.
Baseball is good, I texted my wife. Still, concurrent with all that, I never stopped clocking my proximity to risk. All this expert entertainment and distraction, and I still couldn't mentally escape the pandemic as fully as those people just sitting around my hotel lobby seemed to have done. All evening, I would hop from one mostly vacant tract of seats to another, so I could take off my mask and feel marginally less self-conscious.
Originally, no one else was masked, and there were small unmasked children everywhere. It can speak to you as a violation of the stadium's policy that unvaccinated people must wear masks. I preferred not to breathe on them, just in case. I've never managed to embrace that one pandemic mantra.
It's probably fine. The game went into the bottom of the eighth, tied up three to three. The Indians first baseman hit a grounder to the right side and reached first when the pitcher failed to step on the bag. Then he stole second.
Then he bolted for home on a double to deep center field. The throw to the plate appeared to keep rising and rising. The Hillsborough catcher left but landed empty-handed. The Indians took a lead, four-three.
The Spokane closer, Dugan Darnell came in to stitch up the ninth. Darnell is a 24-year-old Michigander who, after graduating from college in 2019, didn't have any opportunities to play professional baseball. So he made a resume and eventually got a job as a financial advisor recruitment consultant and an analyst for him in Chicago after interviewing for the position five times. He was midway through his second day of work when he got a call on his cell phone from the South Shore Railcats in Gary, Indiana, offering him a spot in a small independent league.
He quit his white collar job on the spot and hopped two trains in a bus to meet his new team. He was lucky, he explained to me before the game. I told my bosses, I didn't want any what-ifs. Now Darnell was striking out the first battery faced, then another one too.
After the final batter lined out the crowd exploded, the Indians outfielders converged for a leaping three-way high-five, then trotted into hug shake hands. The joy for me was Pavlovian, the home team won. Soon the field was empty, except for Riddy, the Red Band trout, and my watch-toddle and wide pointless circles near third base, not fully performing anymore but not exactly taking a break. Then don't stop believing, started cranking on the PA, and the children appeared.
A long parade of them, tightly clustered and impeccably straight, filing in from beyond right field, where they'd been organized for one last warm-hearted Avista Stadium tradition. The chance to run the bases after the game. Presiding over this exercise was auto-cline. Standing in front of home plate, he pointed the antenna of his walkie-talkie at the first child's feet and started flicking it sharply, again and again, signaling to the kids one at a time when it was time to take off.
I watched them run and run. The young clunky ones who slingshotted uncontrollably around first base, and the serious face tweens who crouched and sprinted with something to prove. One or two scuttled by holding an older sibling's hand. Suddenly, something surprising happened to me.
I missed my own children. The same two girls from whom I'd wanted to peel myself away for a year and a half, who had infuriated me, depleted me, screamed at me, taken me for granted, picked insultingly at the dinners I cooked. I missed my younger daughter, a sweet, complicated, anxious, and stupefyingly talkative child who'd been marooned with a Chromebook at our kitchen table with an agonizing backlog of things to worry about and say. And I missed my older daughter, a contemplative and perceptive girl, who a few days earlier when we'd had our first bout of summer smoke at home, looked up from our driveway and wondered aloud if her own children would think the yellow sun's she drew as a kid were strange, because by then the sun would always look red.
In that moment, I understood that I was failing them. I don't mean as a father, not one on one. I mean, as part of a society that seemed with increasing bluntness, to be sending its children's signals that it would not prioritize their well-being or their future, that it would not keep them safe. Why, from the very start of the pandemic, had I felt an inescapable responsibility to stay focused on my daughters, even when I couldn't do it gracefully, which was a lot of the time, even when I felt resentful, even when it became obvious I suspected them as well, that this compulsion was neurotic and had left me feeling rudderless and stuck.
It wasn't over-protective it was shame, it was grief. The one meaningful thing I had to give them was my attention. I wish this epiphany had passed before the time came to write it down. I'm not sure I have a right to be so gloomy, but why bother reentering the world and not be honest about how it went, that I traveled somewhere, tried to get a feel for the place, but struggled to feel much beyond the heaviness of my own head, that I was the melancholy dufe in the mask behind the dugout in Spokane, feeling lucky, heartbreakingly lucky, just to be there, and to feel as good as I did, while all the other parents crowded in around me, screaming for their kids to round third and run home.
This story was written and narrated by John Mulalum. To listen to more stories from the New York Times and other publications, download the Autumn app on the App Store or the Play Store. For more details, visit autumn.com.