I texted him for another half hour delay. It was a busy week, and Carol and I had folks over last night for a little holiday cheer. He was there but we had business deep in the Wisconsin driftless on Sunday morning. He picked me up at 8:30. We both knew the way, but he headed out on a different trajectory. When I noticed, he told me that he had pioneered another route that avoided the busy state highways. “More scenic,” he said. Seemed odd for this morning. Gray and fogbound. Couldn’t see much from the road anyway. A 40-degree swing in temps from the previous morning meant black ice forming on the still cold roads. Happy for the relative warmth.
On Monday, Carol e-mailed me. Subject line: “School shooting in Madison.” Luckily not her school. She sent me a link to live local news coverage. That was it. The shooting was over but the aftermath was the story. Anxious parents. Where to meet? How many dead? How many injured? Stay tuned for the live updates. I had a faculty meeting to lead at 11 as news was breaking. Do I say anything? Pretty sure none of our faculty have kids at the Abundant Life Christian School. Pretty sure.
You could tell where you were from the passenger seat, even with your eyes closed. Not that it mattered. The sun never came up and fog was the only light. Driftless backroads wind and twist while climbing in and out of the coulees. You feel it. Maybe you dream it after a while. Something different. Most of the Midwest is laid out on the regularity of the Public Land Survey Grid – with its own characteristic mathematics and four-way stops. Driftless bottomlands are irregular patches of wet soils, often farms, row-crops and pastures, sometimes expanses of rank marsh hay and hummocky seeps. Uplands of steep sided ridges. The ridges are too steep to farm, pastureland at best but mostly oak woodlands, pines here and there, weathered old sandstones – older than time. The math doesn’t work here.
I am empty. Empty again. I saw the map on the news coverage, showing the location of Abundant Life Christian School. It’s in Southwest Madison, on the other side of Lake Monona from where my office was, where I was now, 5.1 miles east from my window. Eventually, they say, it comes to your community too. Here it is. This oily sticky evil. Three are confirmed dead, including the teenaged shooter. There are six others injured, two critically. A shooting at a school on a Monday morning targeting teachers and students. Pajama day — a week before Christmas. Gray and foggy and dark.
I wonder when fog turns to mist because we’re wobbling over and back at the border. We drove to the end of a coulee road, a tiny farmstead site abandoned to the woods again long ago. We headed off in different directions up the ridge, me walking deliberately slowly steeply into the dim woods. Over saturated, the fog itself precipitated into water droplets on the twigs and needles, coalescing and dropping in and on and around me. When I stop and control my breathing, it’s nearly the only thing I hear. It’s random and percussive like honest rain drops – but sparse enough to be almost trivial, though enough to make everything soft. Mist collects on the knap of my hat. I can only see 100 yards or so into the fog and it consumes me, envelopes, covers, holds, me. Like walking in my own little portable world of hazy gray horizons and dark tree trunks. Alone here in a deeper sense. Crows calling. Always the crows. There’s frozen soil under the mud and I learn again how to slip.
The shooter was a fifteen-year-old young woman. Fifteen. What pain and brokenness. Madison’s police chief cautions us about speculating on the young woman’s motive until the investigation is complete. There are obvious questions. Where did she get the gun? Where there warnings unheeded? He hints at bullying as a motive. The depth of pain there pings a sense of sympathy and I am reminded of the stakes for young people. Maybe I’m just wrong, maybe it’s random. Maybe chaos is just that way, coalescing out of the meanness at play. Why are we here again? I can’t understand how cheaply we let our humanity go.
This comely driftless gloom seems essential in some weird way. Part of a rhythm, both familiar and ancient like it sits there in some dusty corner of my DNA. I drop the reins and let my thoughts go slack. And I find that I am singing Christmas songs quietly in my head. Absent-mindedly. I started with a Leigh Nash Christmas album on Spotify on my commute last week and I let the AI algorithm send me all manner of similar and sort-of similar Christmas music. Hymns and ditties. For my part, a woman’s singing, largely unadorned but for a few instruments, maybe a guitar or piano, is as close to musical purity as we get in this life. And I know how this goes. Some bit of that purity will jam the gears and point my attention to the transcendence of the season. You can’t make it happen, but it happens with enough regularity that I think I can expect it. Hoping only illustrates how thin my faith is right now.
Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes leads in the press conferences explaining the circumstances of the shooting and the investigation. He seems like a genuinely good person, showing leadership, care for the Madison community, real grief for the families, and resolve. But it all seems so performative, a Kabuki of grief and shock like we’ve seen now hundreds of times. The Mayor speaks, and the County Executive and I am certain they are sincere in their gratitude to the first responders and businesses providing support and the agencies cooperating. Carol had to sit her students down and tell them again that they are secure in her classroom – you need to. But any of us could have written the screenplay, right down to the phalanx of solemn officials standing behind the speaker at the podium. The grotesque familiarity of it all makes me numb. Even here. The same statistics the same intransiences. We are failing our children. Chief Barnes at one point answered a reporter, “Stop asking why schools don’t have bulletproof glass and metal detectors at all doors. Ask why schools have to.” It’s a searing tragedy that it happened at all, it’s a bigger tragedy that it happened again.
I met him back at his truck as the feeble light was draining. Gray soft focus surroundings growing dark, the horizons contracting. I climbed into the truck and adjusted the heat. Damp air is colder. I don’t know why. Damp dark air is colder still. We drove back through the little driftless towns. There’s a tavern in Hub City advertising it’s famous “hash-burger,” warm light leaking out around the neon sign in the window. We should stop sometime but our wives are waiting back home. I imagine it inside. Worn Formica and vinyl, a pool table, cheap beers and a few good ones on tap, cheap whiskies. He lets me dose off. He frequently carries the conversation when we’re together but he’s good enough to sense when I am tired. My attention merges with the darkness and the road noise and the approaching headlights, giving in to the warmth in the dashboard vent and a mind softened by a day wrapped in drippy half-light.
Sometimes faith distills stubbornly to repeating to each other to “hold on, it gets better in the end.” Sometimes you wallow and slip. Sometimes there is so little left. This enigmatic Advent darkness, holding peace and pain, and the granular residues of our broken world.
