Oregon is, of course, a great place for a resistance. By the eve of the trial, the state had the quirky reputation of having been chosen as an oppositional stronghold by a whole bunch of other renegades. It had been the home of Rajneeshpuram (the community of orange-clad religious devotees who made their own city in high desert until they poisoned a few salad bars) and the frontline of the takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by antigovernment types bent on free cattle grazing and other militant notions of land management. But these rebels and standoffs weren’t what made Oregon an ideal staging ground for Juliana v. United States.
The reason for that is Oregon’s legal history. Oregon’s district court is in the Ninth Circuit of the federal court system. And by October 2018, the courts in the Ninth Circuit already had experience doing what the Juliana plaintiffs wanted them to do. They had intervened in disputes and acted as an intermediary between the wronged and the other branches of government. A key illustration: the Northwest Fish Wars, years of treaty rights cases in which the district courts of Oregon and Washington had helped tribes, states, and federal agencies work together on plans to protect salmon, plans that were supervised by judges. In the words of Mary Christina Wood, the thinker behind the legal theory underpinning Juliana, these cases are “the absolute best example of a judicial remedy.” They are better even than cases involving segregation or prison crowding, or any other case in which judges have intervened in executive operations.
It didn’t hurt, either, that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was comprised of judges who were denizens of the West, and two of the judges were from California, where extreme temperatures were already fostering drought and wildfire that was far more serious than in most other states. The court had already weighed in on California’s aggressive efforts to regulate pollution and environmental toxins. And Judge Ann Aiken, the judge in the US District Court of Oregon, “completely understood the type of case it was, the urgency,” Wood noted. “She said, ‘This is a civil rights case.’ So she was talking about institutional remedies.”
These kinds of ideas were in sync with the place from which they sprang. Embracing the unconventional and fighting for natural values have been hallmarks of Oregon life for nearly a century. Deep care for the environment is not a partisan thing in this state. Instead, it is a lesson learned from the days of Manifest Destiny, when Oregon’s bounty was something that capitalism exploited until it occurred to its citizenry that abundance was a thing to protect.
In terms of its natural endowment, Oregon is a place unlike any other in the nation. Made from ancient tsunamis and plate shifts, followed by millions of years of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and floods, the state is like a sampler of the most dramatic landscapes in America. As a land, it is eye candy and splendor, an adventurer’s dream from earliest days. Despite the assaults modern life commits against it, the dazzling spectacle of its landscape manages to never be anything less.
Oregon rises out of the frigid, hard-charging Pacific as a series of headlands, rock islands, and reefs. In between lie stretches of estuary, rocky beach, and incomparable dune. Here, mudflats and shore pines quickly give way to riparian forests and the Coast Range, so at points along the 362-mile coast, mountains practically shoot out of the sea, rising so steeply they are visible from miles offshore.
Oregon’s eastward border is no less dramatic. It took hundreds of glacial floods to carve the state’s gorges and rivers from the east. To the south, those floods left canyons between high deserts, a lowland desert in the dry southeastern corner, a few salt lakes, and a geothermal oasis. Volcanoes, including one called Mazama that erupted into ash and left the splendor of Crater Lake behind seventy-seven hundred years ago, still ride the ridge of the Cascade Range in the peaks and snowcaps that are the backbone of central Oregon and the pride of its skiers, hikers, and backpackers. To the north, a mountain lake keeps the Columbia River and its tributaries flowing, a system once so stocked with salmon that Nez Perce fishers could catch one hundred a day to a man.
Native peoples who lived here for thousands of years found this land had all they needed. They wove baskets and hats from grasses and tree roots, built canoes from towering cedars, and longhouses from frames covered with woven tule and cattail. They traded furs and salmon and buffalo meat and hides, made jewelry from shells and arrowheads from obsidian, and carved tools from pipestone and basalt. White traders and settlers pillaged it quickly, wiping out sea otters and nearly decimating the beaver population in the decades leading up to 1820, all in the name of shiny hats. Logging, mining, fishing, and farming became prime industries early on, and fishers fished so hard that Oregon had its first hatchery to support salmon by 1877. Within twenty years, the federal Carey Act allowed corporations and individuals to divert waterways into farm irrigation. The damming of the Columbia River plunged Celilo Falls—a sacred site for Native fishers and a long-occupied hub of trading and culture—underwater in 1957.
In short, early colonization was such an eventual mess that by the mid-twentieth century the pendulum had swung widely in correction. The federal Mitchell Act paved the way for the Oregon State Sanitary Authority, charged with boosting support for salmon habitats and regulating water and, eventually, air pollution. Fixed fishing traps were banned for salmon, and the state started requiring the timber companies to replant the trees they were cutting. State efforts also dropped millions of seeds over a burn area east of the Coast Range, creating today’s Tillamook State Forest. In 1967, it was the state’s Republicans, not Democrats, who set aside the entire western shore for public use, the act memorializing Oregon’s unique brand of conservative conservationists. The seventies brought the first bottle bill in the nation, also created by Republicans; the eighties, the preservation of the Columbia Gorge.
In between, Mount St. Helens erupted and forests burned, whole towns flooded, and Oregonians learned there’s only so much humans can do to exert their dominion over nature after all. Today this radical corrective streak remains in the form of some of the most comprehensive land-use planning in the world, as well as citywide bans on plastic bags, local climate ordinances, attempts at carbon taxes, and state subsidies for renewable energy, electric cars, and wave power.
Of the eleven Juliana plaintiffs from Oregon, six are from Eugene, a liberal university town roughly a hundred miles south of Portland and home to one of four divisions of the US District Court of Oregon. With Portland to the north, Eugene anchors the southern end of the Willamette Valley, one of the most fertile valleys in the world, known for its rich soil, its many rivers, and the convergence of the Cascade Range with the valley floor. This particular geological windfall was made possible by massive floods that rose up off the coast of Washington and swept the topsoil off the northern state, pushing it through the lowlands between the Cascade and Coast Ranges and leaving it there. Owing to the dazzling fertility of this soil, farmers in the Willamette Valley now grow 90 percent of the world’s organic seed and 22,000 acres of wine grapes, and are notorious for their beer hops and their greenhouse and nursery stock. They also produce most of the grass seed, hazelnuts, and Christmas trees sold in North America. Thus, civic life in the town of Eugene revolves around these things: whole-grain foods, fruits and vegetables and potlucks, beer and wine, things made by hand or strummed, hiking and school. Still, Eugene’s wholesomeness is tinged with Oregon’s misfit disposition, a place where senior citizens dye their hair purple, a town of people who break things and set trends in a state full of people whose inclination is to go it alone, sometimes together.
Small wonder then that Zealand Bell, a self-described “outdoor person,” refers to the meadow behind his home as the place he likes to relax. At age fourteen, the high school freshman, clear-eyed and clad in North Face, can lucidly articulate how nature makes him feel. And how the thing he likes best about the outdoor hobbies that steal his time—basketball and crew, kayaking and mountain biking, surfing, hiking, skiing, and jaunts to the beach—is that they allow him to be close to this feeling. “I just like being out in nature and having fun,” he says. “A lot of times when you go to certain places outside, it looks different than the time before because nature keeps growing and changing with seasons. . . . I just like to take it all in.”
In the days before trial, before anyone knows that there will not be a trial, Zealand describes himself as excited to have reached this stage but nervous about the info dump that is about to take place in the courtroom. He has no question about whether he wants to be there. He has been there since age six, when he first learned how climate change affects basic life and the outdoor ecosystems that are dear to him. After a summer camp run by Our Children’s Trust, back in the days when the organization helped kids undertake local advocacy, he was one of the few plaintiffs who lobbied Eugene’s city council for the most stringent local climate ordinance in the country. When he was asked to join the case later, the yes that followed was easy.
His parents didn’t hold him back. He was a child with a strong sense of justice who had not lost interest in what this issue meant to him. And because they are both teachers, his parents also understand what the issue of climate change means to most kids, who learn about it in school and grow up deeply unsettled by the adult inaction that persists as they age. Still, by fall 2018, in the lead-up to trial, Michael Bell and Kim Pash-Bell, like a lot of the plaintiffs’ parents, are slowly awakening to the mayhem that trial will soon inflict on their lives. The attending chores will soon include chaperoning plaintiffs and probably hosting extra children, with or without their families. The pure logistics of it will also include planning for Zealand’s days off school and ferrying him to and from the court on the way to work. Already the support rallies are gearing up, and there is such a momentum, such an energy around what is about to take place, that Zealand’s parents are learning about much of it on Facebook like everyone else. The excitement is palpable, decentralized, external to much of what Our Children’s Trust and its staff might do.
Michael never imagined the case taking on this kind of dimension. “At the beginning I didn’t even fully appreciate the size of it,” he says; he only vaguely daydreamed that the case could become what it has. Now that it has taken on a life of its own, all the usual activity—family and school and the plaintiffs generally being slammed before court—is rolling up with talk about impending depositions and trying to arrange the holidays around the court calendar. In the bright kitchen of their two-story ranch home, as Michael and Kim discuss these details, they wear expressions that seem tinged with a combination of surprise, bemusement, and a little bit of panic.
———
This is the backdrop against which I have dinner with Avery McRae and her parents, where we eat at a picnic table in their backyard, under the alder tree that grows through the middle of their deck. Avery is the only child of Matt and Holly McRae, the trio snug in a house of 600 square feet with a player piano and a wood stove and the rest of their life lived outdoors: a kitchen garden, fruit trees, and space for Avery’s five chickens and two rabbits. If a plaintiff could be an avatar, Avery would be the animal empath, a kid who started raising money for endangered animals in the first grade and never stopped.
The chickens are named for flowers. Poppy, Lupine, Rosie, Jasmine, and Yarrow. The five are one short of the limit set for backyard chickens in Eugene. Before these, there were others. Buttercup. Dahlia. Iris. Clover. Clover was a rooster, actually, and was retired to a farm.
“Do you know what imprinting is in birds?” Matt asks me. He says this as the legging-clad Avery, flowers trailing down the sleeves of her sweatshirt, comes dashing to the table with Rosie in her arms.
Rosie, Matt explains, “definitely thinks that Avery is her mother.”
Avery straddles the bench beside me, hugging and nuzzling the bird, her light-brown hair falling around the bird’s face. I look closely and learn it is possible for a chicken to be delighted. Rosie—rusty red with fierce-looking golden claws—tucks her head into Avery’s neck and closes her eyes. Avery strokes her wing, holds her tight, and Rosie clucks. It’s a chirping, happy sound, one that moves from short bursts to lengthening warbles, like a child’s squeal. There is no arguing the bond. Sometimes, Avery says, she calls the bird’s name when she comes home, or variations of it, like Tosie, and Rosie runs to her. Now, the comb on Rosie’s head—stoplight red—folds into Avery’s chin. Primitive. Like the fleshy spine of a dinosaur.
“I read an article one time saying you shouldn’t let your children handle chickens and kiss them and stuff,” says Holly, right before she admits that she lost that battle and laughs.
The bird makes a flapping play for a grape on the table and is sent back to the coop in favor of a rabbit. A few moments ago, Matt told a story from the weekend, when Avery noticed a spider hitchhiking on the side mirror of the family car. She urged Holly to save it before the wind whipped it to its death. Holly tried but couldn’t, and Avery was shaken by this. By the death of a single spider.
It is just like this with this child, they say. It was always like this.
It was the book about snow leopards that triggered the activism. Avery was in the first grade, and the story laid bare the impacts of a warming climate, detailing the effects of habitat loss on the leopard. Avery was dismayed. Holly encouraged her to throw a party to raise money for the leopards. An environmental educator, Holly knew the party was a way to do something, to feel better. Avery raised $200 for the Snow Leopard Trust. By the end of third grade, she’d raised another $250 for wolves and $300 for salmon. She learned more about climate change in the fourth grade at a camp run by Our Children’s Trust, then testified before the Eugene city council in favor of the climate ordinance. Later Our Children’s Trust asked her, like Zealand, if she wanted to join the lawsuit, and she said yes.
When I ask Avery’s parents whether allowing their child to sue the federal government was a big decision, they look at each other—blue eyes meet blue eyes—and nod. For a long time. They say they knew it would impact their lives but they didn’t know what that would be like, how stressful it would feel three years later, when they’re thinking about Halloween and the rest of their lives with an eight- or ten- or twelve-week trial looming. We all feel it then, sitting in the last light of the evening, the fall breeze swaying the leaves overhead: this sense that normal life is about to be upended.
I ask Avery what climate impacts made her want to sue the government, and she says she thinks about the ocean the most. Acidification. Erosion.
“No one wants to see a place that they love go through that. I’ve grown up going to the beach a lot. It’s probably my favorite place in Oregon, just the Oregon coast, and thinking about what impacts will be there in thirty years if we don’t turn this around is pretty sad.”
It’s not just that the beaches she loves will no longer be there. That she won’t walk along Strawberry Hill hunting agates, or watch the seals follow her path along the shore. It’s that many of the animals she loves won’t be there either. That they will die. Marine mammals, the little critters. Everything.
Scientists have known for more than a decade that we are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction on Earth. Within the year, a consortium of 145 experts from fifty countries will crystalize that view, concluding that one million of the eight million species on the planet are at risk of extinction, many within decades. Much of that risk is just fallout from human impacts, with three-quarters of Earth’s landscapes “severely altered” since humans began rearranging things, and 80 percent of wetlands lost in the last three hundred years too. Add climate change, and a temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius will account for a portion of those extinctions in the years ahead. Even species that are projected to survive will see their ranges “profoundly” shrunk.
The oceans Avery loves will endure some of the most profound impacts, simply because oceans absorb much of the extra greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, warming faster than the earth overall. More than half of the world’s coral reefs have been lost in the last one hundred and fifty years already. And oceans are also becoming more acidic, with oxygen levels and nutrient flows changing, too, so that a quarter of fish could die by the end of the century. These losses spell downstream impacts for humans in coastal communities, as well as mammals, birds, and amphibians that thrive near coastal wetlands.
“It’s not their fault that we’re screwing up their whole future. They can’t even go to the courts like we are. I feel like I’m kind of talking on behalf of the animals,” or other people, she says, kids like her who don’t feel like they have a voice.
It’s not a stretch to imagine this particular child speaking for animals. To underscore the point after the dinner plates are cleared, Avery begins a tour of the backyard, a long city lot tucked under pine and bisected by a dome of spirea. Behind the dome—it conceals an outdoor shower—there’s a robust kitchen garden ready for winter planting, organized in raised beds. Alongside it, a wire aviary runs half the length of the yard, an enclosure that stands about 6 feet tall and nets not only chickens but a grove of small apple trees too. We step through a door between a fence and the chicken coop, a raised wooden structure emblazoned with a Tibetan prayer flag, each panel bearing a chicken in lieu of the Buddha’s prayer.
Poppy, a black chicken with puffy feathers, rules the roost, Avery says. She’s not a mean bird. She is charitable to her subordinates, even. But she’s the boss of things. Jasmine is at the other end of the pecking order and—understandably, says Avery—a bit jittery. Avery takes a handful of seeds and tosses them to the birds, then dumps another handful into her palm. Jasmine fusses outside the fray.
“It’s hard to get them to her, but if you try, she appreciates it,” she says, giving me a handful of seeds. I offer them to the bird, who pecks eagerly enough to drive a hard beak into my palm, grabbing some skin that she tries to rush off with. It’s a little uncomfortable, but Avery seems not to notice.
Rosie, she says, loves to sit in the crook of the apple tree nearest the coop. She flies up to roost there most days, about 3 feet off the ground, and while she’s content once she lands, she tends to screech on the ascent. Avery demonstrates by flapping her arms, making her best nervous chicken sound.
———
Avery had just graduated from the fifth grade when the lawsuit began. By then, her preoccupation with animals was in full force.
“She came out with a love for animals that only gets stronger as time goes on,” Matt says. “It’s remarkable. Her depth of empathy is herculean.”
Certain moments stand out. Like the time her parents took her to watch the salmon spawn on Whittaker Creek, and she lay on her stomach on a little peninsula, mesmerized, for about an hour. Or the time—age four or five—she was riding on her great-aunt’s Appaloosa, and both got tired so she lay down and took a nap on the back of the horse. There’s a picture of it. Now Avery takes riding lessons at a nonprofit where she works at camps or handles therapy horses in exchange for lessons.
We are on the deck watching Matt pull agates from a rock tumbler when Holly mentions the horses. Avery makes a dash for her phone so I can see the pictures, and sits down on the bench again.
Easy Dancer is her favorite horse, she says. She’s a paint mix, brown and white, eighteen years old. And she’s a horse that likes to move. Avery shows me a video of her riding Easy Dancer at a canter. Both are steady, confident. It’s plain to see that Avery likes to run as much as the horse. She tells me several times how cute Easy Dancer’s face is. There are a few photos of this, of Easy Dancer’s nose pressed against the frame. I see the same face over and over, but Avery sees something else. Expressions and moods that she narrates as she goes.
Then there’s Moon Time, who’s not as fast but still pretty fast, and good for a lot of different levels of riders. She’s a paint too. Then there’s Kitty, an older white horse who has arthritis in her shoulder but can still carry the younger kids. Sky Cat and Tabs are the two stallions. Tabs is kind of a pistol but also really cute. Then there’s Shadow.
Her phone is full of these pictures the way some phones are full of selfies. She says horse politics are kind of confusing. Because they don’t have a pecking order like chickens, they’re not consistent in how they behave, and she’s still trying to catch on to their cliques and their temperaments. Still, they seem to be in her blood.
Avery has spent a few days each summer riding horses at Matt’s aunt’s home since she was young, Matt says. He tells me this while rinsing the agates. He and Holly plan to pass the rocks out on Halloween instead of candy. Last year they gave out 350 agates before 7:30, Holly says. This year they hoped to close the street, but the trial will make it too tough to manage the details. Again, there is that sense of foreboding, of time closing in. The music cueing up, the act coming to an end.
Avery tells me she has already ordered the horse onesie she plans to wear for Halloween. Then she takes a brief intermission by climbing a tree. Next, she takes me to the rabbit hutch.
The hutch itself is a wooden cabinet bisected by chicken wire. Each side has a bed, a blanket, a bottle of water, and some food in a bowl. The rabbits can’t be together—they’re both male and they fight, Avery says—but they are cozy side by side like this. Then she brings me around the hutch. Behind it, ensconced in chicken wire, is a full-fledged warren the size of a four-door car and half as tall. It is quite unlike your standard domestic rabbit habitat. She says her two rabbits made this hilly sculpture after the humans dumped a mound of dirt in their runs and let them dig. Ginger, the red one, is the better digger, she observes, having made an elaborate tunnel on his side of the run. She points out the entrances and exits, and she seems to know from watching how the tunnels flow in between. She traces the routes with a finger through the air. Odin, who is gray and white, over-renovates, she says. He digs until his tunnels collapse. She laughs.
Avery says sometimes the rabbits sleep in her bed, but only naps. She’s tried to bring a couple of the chickens indoors but they poop, so it’s a no-go.
She takes me to her bedroom—it’s getting dark—to show me the spa-like den of fluffy things that is her bed. It’s a bit like the galley of a boat. Because their home is tiny, and her family’s property is mostly yard (like a lot of urban Oregon homes, an inversion of suburban values), her bed is built on a carpeted platform, its underside a burrow for storage that’s not unlike the warren in the yard, only clean and very tidy. The bed is decorated with a deer pillow and the odd stuffed animal. On the wall at its foot is a string of photos draped in white lights. She narrates each picture, moving left to right. There are girls from school, the details of who is still friends with who, how tall her cousins have gotten, and how old her baby cousin is now. She tells stories of trips. Of birthdays. Of shared events. Every third photo, though, is not a person. It is a horse or a rabbit or a cat.
If a child’s room can be like a child’s heart turned inside out, this one says it all. Artwork of a blue jay, a bear, a leopard, and horses. Tie-dyed pillows and flowers. A button declaring “Rachel Carson Was Right.”
A guitar hangs on the wall, and when she retrieves it, the song Avery plays is “A Horse with No Name.” Her desk chair is a western saddle mounted on a wheeled crate. On her bookshelf, a favorite book: Unlikely Loves, which tells tales of true but unlikely animal romance and friendship. She pages through. The story of the owl and the cat. The fox and the hound. An otter and a badger. Then there are the trios. A rabbit and a guinea pig with a macaw. A turtle and his dogs.
“You know, I love these,” Avery says. “It’s just these things that bring me so much joy. A tiny cat and farm dogs. Look at that! It’s just too much. The seal and the dolphin? And then the goat and the giraffe? They’re like best friends! Isn’t that cute? Whenever I’m sad, I just read that.” She is sitting cross-legged on the carpet, and I believe her. That animal love stories are what she needs when being thirteen is too hard.
———
It is good that she has this, because being thirteen is about to get difficult. The next time I see Avery, she is on the steps of the federal courthouse in Eugene with her parents and most of the rest of the plaintiffs, looking dashed in a blazer, the Juliana trial having been canceled.
There had already been a missed trial date back in February, and Avery had learned from the experience not to get too excited. But this time around, the trial was near enough that the planning seemed legit. Her grandparents were coming for a month to help her attend one day a week and still manage school. There were plans—about who would arrive when, who would be available to do what—and they were down to the granular details.
Then this: “Dad comes into my room and says they have delayed trial. And I pretty much lost my ability to function for like two days,” Avery says. It was a Friday. And for the next days, she couldn’t find a thing to make her happy. Nothing. She could eat. She could sleep. But she was angry all the time. Angry at the government’s attorneys. Angry at herself for falling for this bait and switch. “When you have emotions like that that come quickly and also are super strong, it’s really hard to think clearly and do stuff in the well-thought-out way that you were going to. Everything I did was just kind of fumbly and huffy.” She says she felt clumsy. Couldn’t shake off the mad.
On the steps, Hazel Van Ummersen and Sahara Valentine are standing near her, both fourteen-year-old plaintiffs, also from Eugene. Hazel is sturdy, the smallest of the Juliana plaintiffs and a blackbelt in tae kwon do. She’s only recently started to drift away from martial arts, fatigued with the competitiveness of fighting, already doing another kind of battle with her first year in high school before this latest with the government. Sahara, whose parents are longtime friends of Avery’s, is a hiker and a biker, avid in her outdoorsiness in spite of asthma and also a first-year high school student. Later she’ll describe how, in these days after the canceled trial, when school presses on like normal and classes are still the same but the world feels nevertheless off-kilter, she will look for Hazel in the halls, look for Zealand, try to find a connection to the other people who are living this thing with her. Federal litigants. Canceled trial. High school freshmen.
The legal details of what had transpired were dizzying. The briefest way to say it is that Alex was right: the government used all its tools. After Kavanaugh was confirmed, its attorney tried again to stop the case, petitioning the Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals once more to dismiss it. The Department of Justice argued the plaintiffs’ claims were overbroad and that the District Court of Oregon lacked jurisdiction to conduct an expansive review of executive branch policy. It also argued there is no right to “a climate system capable of sustaining human life.”
The Supreme Court had ruled against a similar effort in a unanimous, single-paragraph decision in July. But when the Department of Justice asked it to dismiss the case for a second time, and the Ninth Circuit to delay trial while the Supreme Court decided what to do, this time the Supreme Court stayed the case, freezing Juliana v. United States to consider the government’s charge that defending against the plaintiffs was a “burden” and that their claim they had a right to a habitable planet was “manifestly wrong” to begin with.
The legal gymnastics were exhausting, even for the press. Practiced as I was, I wanted a glossary and a running scoresheet, like at a sporting event, so I could keep track of how many such emergencies were normal as opposed to the count we had. Everywhere was befuddlement. Befuddlement and protest. While demonstrators rallied in more than seventy places nationwide, and in four countries, the support didn’t buoy moods for long.
———
By the time Halloween arrives, the McRae family is worn out. By then most of the out-of-town plaintiffs have been sent home—Jayden to Louisiana, Nick to Colorado, other plaintiffs elsewhere, and the college-age plaintiffs back to class—and the fever of the rallies has died down. In its place is worry, depression. Nobody knows what to do with it, including me. After hours of watching Netflix with Larry the cat and the raccoons, my suitcase full of court clothes and groceries scattered, I consider going home to Portland but go into town instead to visit with local plaintiffs and try to get a read on how long the case might be delayed. Plus, Halloween is the stuff of legend in Eugene. And everybody needs the pick-me-up.
The Friendly neighborhood, where Avery lives, delivers on its Halloween cred. It is mobbed with trick-or-treaters trailing parents, or the other way around. At the McRae house, fifteen jack-o’-lanterns stand in a pair of grinning towers and candlelit mason jars burn in the trees. Holly is dressed as a witch, passing out the agates in labeled bags and dancing to “The Time Warp” again and again in the front yard. Kids funnel around the pumpkins and into the grass, drawn to all the other kids already there. Matt kicks up the music with each new mass arrival while Holly gathers the children around her, transformed.
Practiced educator that she is, Holly’s voice has a tone that quickly overrides the command codes for anyone shorter than 4 feet. There is a kid dressed as an Uno card and a sumo wrestler in an inflatable fat suit. Tween girls—wearing light makeup and wizard outfits—and tiny satin princesses and little boys with bird wings cover the lawn. A ninja turtle too. All of them set their candy down in the leaves, surprisingly without anxiety, and throw their hands in the air and channel The Rocky Horror Picture Show on command. It happens over and over, for hours, for hundreds of people, and Holly is a woman bewitched, a witch bewitched. After two difficult weeks, she wants this, she says. To just dance and make kids happy.
Avery is not happy. Standing in the driveway in her horse onesie, she is aghast. She is thirteen, after all, the age to be embarrassed by your parents. Plus, Avery’s funk is in full force. The horse onesie isn’t all she had hoped for. The ears are small enough that people keep asking her if she is a squirrel, and the tail is more like a cat’s than a horse’s. She has her grandmother’s dog and people are drinking beer in her yard, and Avery is at home with the flannel and the beards, the mild adult misbehavior and general mayhem, but her humor is faltering when it comes to the rocky horror of her front lawn. Straddling the line between able partygoer and mortified adolescent, her mood an irregular thing since the trial that wasn’t, she says hello to her grandmother, returns the dog, and takes a seat on the front steps for what looks, in turns, like seated resignation and mopery.
Two mannequins make battery-operated movements in the driveway, to the occasional surprise of the real people who encounter them. Matt offers me a beer and tells me to read the expert reports in the Juliana case. If I can understand those, he says, I can understand everything that is at stake.