Photo: barry.pousman

“THE FBI WERE AT MY APARTMENT YESTERDAY.”

We’re sitting in a bar, perched on a rough wooden bench, when Saskia tells me this. Someone is banging on a drum in the back room and the bartenders are slinging $1 beers in the front. It’s supposed to have a rough, divey, frontier kind of vibe, but with an all-vegan menu the place can only muster so much swagger. The crowd is young, attractive, and hipster (whatever that means). People cast glances at one another, size each other up, try to determine who is an authentic local from the nearby lofts, and who is a poser, visiting for the night from (shudder) Manhattan or even (double shudder) the suburbs.

Given the kind of mischief that goes down in the lofts, the presence of the FBI could mean just about anything. In this case, though, a couple of guys that used to live in Saskia’s apartment were arrested down in Texas.

“Which guys?” she turns to ask her housemate.
“It was the French guys.”
“Which French guys? They’re all French guys.”
“You know.. the ones that pissed in the sink.”
“Oh those guys…”

I spent my first weeks in Brooklyn on a friend’s couch, weathering an earthquake that the Californians said wasn’t a real earthquake and a hurricane that the Cubans said wasn’t a real hurricane, and wondering all the while what had possessed me to move to this catastrophe-ridden city.

Every time a decent (read: affordable) room for rent came up on Craigslist, I would go out in search of it, getting lost on the subway and caught in late summer storms that reduced my scribbled maps to dripping, illegible pulp. Whenever I did actually make it to an apartment, it was usually incredibly small, incredibly dull, and already rented-out.

Eventually I followed an apartment listing out to Morgan Av. The listing had warned that it was a weird neighbourhood, heavy on graffiti and light on greenery. I could cope with that. I was lured on by one little four-letter word: LOFT.

A no man’s land of warehouses and spent smokestacks caught between Williamsburg, Bushwick, and the toxic trickle of Newton Creek, Morgan Av. wasn’t exactly welcoming. Most of this area was still part of the East Williamsburg Industrial Park, but a few blocks around Morgan Av. had been dezoned, occupying a grey area between legally habitable and not-fit-for-habitation (which basically meant that landlords could rent buildings out as apartments without having to build fire escapes).

On my way to the Craigslisted loft, I was struck by how unlike other hot Brooklyn neighbourhoods the area felt. This definitely wasn’t Williamsburg. It wasn’t even Greenpoint and certainly wasn’t Park Slope. The street art all looked new; the only vegetation was the smiling, anthropomorphic daisies painted onto the side of a building. The streets were a dusty grid of cinderblocks and padlocks.

The occasional truck shouldered its way along the narrow streets, disappearing through huge roller doors stencilled with Chinese characters. As empty as the area felt, there were people — trendy folk with asymmetrical hair, prominent tattoos and clothes whose colours clashed strategically — loitering about a couple of cafes. Something was definitely afoot.

I found the loft, knocked and entered, then was handed a glass of wine and given a tour. The place was a playground of nooks, mezzanines, alcoves, and crannies. The built-in bookshelves spoke of limitless possibility. Huge, greasy windows filled one end of the place, allowing sunlight to fall poignantly on a random assemblage of vintage furniture.

Pipes snaked their way across the ceiling far overhead. An asthmatic cat wheezed and snuffled away on the couch. There were two housemates; one provided most of the wine, the other did a lot of baking. It was perfect. When the next person arrived to see the place I stuck around, just to intimidate him.

As soon as the hurricane — or whatever that was — had blown over, I moved in. On the first of the month there were moving vans lined up outside all of the loft buildings. While most of our loft had a subtle, don’t-forget-this-used-to-be-a-big-empty-warehouse vibe, my room was partitioned up by curtains and rails and painted in every primary colour, plus a few others.

It looked more like a kindergarten than a loft. I spent my first days there disassembling and removing all the extraneous clutter, and then painted the walls the blankest shade of grey that I could find. Then I told myself to sit down and start writing.

In the mid-17th century, Brooklyn was founded as a series of isolated, mostly-Dutch colonies. Less than 20 years after the first of these were founded the English kicked the Dutch out; Breuckelen became Brooklyn, New Amsterdam became New York, and Boswjick — which had been settled only three years earlier — became Bushwick.

The towns grew, running out of space and annexing one another, but there remained pockets of inhospitable waste, occupied only by barren soils and hostile species. The area separating Bushwick from the river and the sea was this kind of a place, a blighted marsh of salt and thistle, good for nothing except to pass quickly over on the way to the Bushwick Shore and access the outside world. They called it Cripplebush.

Brooklyn continued to grow, consuming the land around it. Eventually Cripplebush was cleared, its gnarled shrubs and thickets becoming fuel for the British during the Revolutionary War. In the 19th century the Bushwick Shore became the village of Williamsburgh (the H was dropped later), but Cripplebush remained a no man’s land. Some called it Bushwick, some called it Williamsburg or East Williamsburg; most had no reason to give it any name at all.

There are two versions of why I came to New York. One has it that I came here to better myself in a vague masters program at a fancy university. This is the version that helped me get a student visa. The other has it that I came to New York to live in Brooklyn with all the artists, and to traipse about the streets of New York, playing at being a struggling writer. This is the version that was attracted to Cripplebush.

A lot of aspiring artists, many of whom were masquerading as starving students (or was it the other way around?), had felt the same lure of the loft and were moving to Morgan Av. The big, abandoned garment warehouses out here attracted them as desolate spaces with cheap rent always do, and they had set up a kind of outpost in the post-industrial wasteland. The same phenomenon has been repeating itself all over New York for decades. Before Prada and Louis Vuitton moved in, this is what SOHO would have looked and felt like.

They also found in the emptiness of the area some faint promise of a utopia-in-the-making. Sure, there were no bodegas or delis or laundromats or really any stores or services, and definitely none of the rich cultural layers that had been forming in adjacent neighbourhoods, but there were a handful of divey bars, a couple of cafes, and one 24-hour organic mini-mart stocking kale chips, red quinoa, spicy vegan chorizo, and other indispensable artist staples.

Certain rites and ceremonies are demanded of anyone hoping to make it in New York. The old you — always from somewhere else, whether another state or another continent, somewhere backward — must be cast off before you can be initiated into this higher realm. The aspiring artists of Morgan Av. shaved or dyed their hair, got pierced or tattooed, pawned their wardrobe, and bought someone else’s pawned wardrobe.

They emptied themselves out, preparing for re-invention, preparing to re-create themselves as something more than they had ever been before: a New York artist. Those not quite brave enough for such acts of devotion painted their rooms a blank, receptive grey, ready to be invested with significance.

Late summer was a great time to move into this fledgling utopia. Very little art was being made, but everyone was out enjoying the long, free evenings. There was always someone smoking or drinking on the rooftop, looking with ambivalence out across the Manhattan skyline. Vendors set up tables outside the lofts selling handmade jewellery and vintage Playboys.

The local dives and speakeasies had flung up their shutters, roller-doors, and awnings, and their patios babbled with earnest talk of planned projects. King’s County — aka that dive bar so dark you can barely see your local lager — hosted its riotous women’s arm wrestling showdown while around the corner, at Roberta’s, classic 90s movies were being played on an outdoor screen.

On Sundays a crowd surged up out of the Morgan Av. subway and joined the line outside Roberta’s, hoping to be admitted to the biweekly Tiki Disco. The locals sneered that the place was impossible to get into since the Times did a piece on it, and then took their places in line.

There just weren’t that many regular Sunday yard parties in Brooklyn where you could be sure of cheap booze, good music, and an attractive crowd. Behind the fence, in a space that looked like a cross between a veggie patch and a junkyard, tents were rigged, speakers were stacked, and a thick layer of crumpled cans spread underfoot as people pulled out their most ironic dance moves.

It was sometime during the final days of summer that I met Saskia. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed and loud-mouthed, she’d traded cheerleading for backpacking and spent the past year wandering across Europe, returning just in time for grad school. We’d been sitting opposite one another in an evening stats class for weeks without realising that we were fellow Morgan Av. loft dwellers.

She’d heard about the lofts while working in Italy, where they were spoken of as a fantastic utopia of art and free love. We were both finding that the rigours of higher education were a poor (and yet prohibitively expensive) substitute for the wild freedom of life on the road.

Whenever I would tell myself to sit down and write, Saskia could be relied upon to interrupt with a call to coffee at Swallow. The local kids couldn’t mention Swallow without recounting that it was way cooler when it was known as Archive and was a total dive. Reincarnated as Swallow, it was still channelling the dive vibe, but in a very controlled, arranged way.

The walls were exposed brick, the floor scuffed wood. Tables were made from old wooden crates (or designed to look like they were); a few of them were mounted on rusted wheels. A metal dolly leaned uselessly against the wall, just to enforce the railyards-of-yore ambience. Exposed bulbs hung from the ceiling.

As one of the few cafes in the colony, Swallow was always busy. This was where people came when they needed to escape their six housemates so they could edit a video, update their blog, or read some experimental fiction. While the bars were for talking up your next big project, Swallow was where you came to think about maybe working on it. More often than not, though, housemates trying to escape one another ended up sitting at adjacent tables and bitching about each other on Twitter while talking up their latest artistic endeavour on Facebook.

Our animated what-the-hell-are-we-doing-here conversations were not appreciated in the studious environment. The bearded boys and horn-rimmed girls at nearby tables clutched their coffees, hunched over their Macbooks, and tried to ignore us. Again and again we calculated just how much further our rent money would have gone on the backpacker trails we had left behind. Neither one of us could shake the growing fear that this Brooklyn loft dream was slowly crushing the life out of every other dream, or that we had unwittingly traded the freedom and inspiration of a nomadic lifestyle for the ennui of endless, identical mornings at Swallow.

There was always at least one person from Saskia’s loft seeking refuge in Swallow. This was how I met Bianca and Annali — both from Italy, both dancers, and both coming to the end of their student visas after a year in Cripplebush. Bianca was into hip hop, her wrists criss-crossed by heavy jewellery and tattoos, always dressed in carefully dishevelled layers of stressed leather, torn denim, and vintage flannel. She could usually be found in a corner of Swallow, enormous headphones cupped over her ears, trying to figure out how to stay longer in the US.

Annali, her hair permanently arranged into an elegant, blonde tussle, was into ballroom and came to Swallow mostly to read through huge volumes of classic literature. She spoke with a prim, Beatrix Potter accent inherited from her father’s family, and seemed to belong more in a cottage than a loft.

I was delighted to discover that among the loft-dwellers there were other international kids also clinging to student visas; if I was going to burn money, sacrifice time, and beat my head against bureaucratic brick walls for the sake of being here, then it was a relief to find other people who also believed that doing so was ultimately worthwhile.

Saskia’s loft was nothing like my humble, 3-bedroom, 1-cat abode. The whole cavernous space had been divided into two levels. Shoes — many of them ownerless — were piled by the door. The floor was painted in long curving bars of colour that lead away from the shoes and past a couple of fridges, a breakfast bar, and a kitchen stacked high with dishes to an immense, open living area. To one side mismatched couches, shelves full of ignored books, and a hammock clustered around a huge TV. On the other side tall windows ran the length of the wall; desks and benches were placed at intervals below the windows.

One was piled with paint-pots, another with homemade jewellery, a third with charging phones and laptops. Light flooded in through the windows, illuminating parasols, lanterns, and elegant fans. The walls were covered with drapes, New York Times clippings, vintage glamour prints, sultry photos of housemates posed against chain link fences, Bob Marley images, and a series of black and white paintings of shoes left behind by some past resident. The bricks, where visible, had been painted a luminous green.

At the far end of the loft was the dance studio, the floor a chessboard of black and white, a mini-trampoline kicked to one side. Mirrors covered one wall, windows that looked out over a forlorn and forgotten patio filled the other two. Every available corner or cranny of the loft was occupied by unnecessary furniture. It was a Willie Wonka version of Ikea.

If the downstairs was a kind of bohemian fantasy, the upstairs was the dark, dingy flipside to this. The loft was big, but not big enough to accommodate two complete levels; all the vibrant space of downstairs had come at the expense of the upstairs. Eight rooms ranged along a narrow hallway that could only be negotiated bent double or on hands and knees. The rooms along one side had windows, but no glass had ever been put in, so these were permanently covered to keep the noise and smells of downstairs out.

The rooms on the other side got no natural light. Like the hallway, the rooms were tall enough only to kneel in; each room was half-filled by a mattress, with the remaining space given over to whatever storage (cinderblock shelves, wooden fruit crates) could be made to fit. The occupants taped up photos of friends and family and whatever art would fit, but amidst the twisted bedclothes, skeins of electrical wiring, and mounds of damp clothing these did little to mask the fact that each bedroom was only marginally more welcoming than the shipping crates that must once have filled the space.

There was only one bathroom.

Every time I came to the loft, I met new housemates. Annali and Bianca were regular fixtures — Bianca was the leasee and had accumulated most of the stuff in the place — as were two behemoth cats that took an immediate shine to whichever couchsurfer was currently established on one of the futons. It was never entirely clear who actually lived in the loft; the answer to “how many people do you live with?” was a range, never a specific number.

On a chalkboard over the shoes by the door was scrawled “the lost kids from the loft that doesn’t exist.”

For a while most of the inhabitants were Italians. Then came a wave of French guys, some of whom would go on to achieve notoriety in Texas. Then came a resurgence of Italians, and most recently an influx of Slovenians. Almost everyone was a dancer, but there was the odd film student about and some of the Slovenian guys were far more interested in beer than art. Almost everyone had, like Saskia, heard about the Loft that Doesn’t Exist from a friend of a friend who had stayed there for a while, and then moved back home to spread the word.

The kids on tourist visas had only three months in which to dance wherever they could with whomever they could, get photographed on as many rooftops as possible, and then maybe see LA or Chicago before flying home. The people on student visas, like Bianca or Annali, were here for grander, but usually less clearly defined reasons. They wanted to make something of New York by making something of themselves. Just like everyone else in the city, though, they were finding that they had to struggle to do that, and that a loft with a constantly changing cast of characters wasn’t the easiest place to get on with that struggle.

They danced, they photographed and were photographed, sometimes they painted or made jewellery, but more than anything they worried over their visa status. Having thrown everything into keeping this brief window of opportunity open for as long as possible, they were discovering that there still wasn’t nearly enough time to take full advantage of it, and that whether in weeks, months or years, the window would eventually snap shut upon them.

Two of the Slovenian guys had been working out at Yellowstone and had crossed the US from there. The America of their experience was all campgrounds and stadiums and theme parks and landmarks; they were living the dream, and they had the souvenir t-shirts to prove it. Above all they loved showing their photos of Six Flags, and re-enacting in detail every twist of the rollercoasters.

Their only lament was that their friends back home wouldn’t understand their experiences; how could they explain the hospitality they’d encountered, or the grand inclusiveness of this dream to people who just wanted to see pictures of the Statue of Liberty? They were spending their last nights in Brooklyn before returning home, and were still determined to sample as much local culture as possible with their remaining hours. We drank German and Belgian beer and ate Thai curry.

The FBI incident was already becoming the stuff of loft folklore; as we served up second helpings of curry, Saskia and Annali recounted the story for the benefit of the Slovenians. Bianca had (somehow) been the only one home when a couple of disinterested agents knocked at the door. They gave little account of themselves, but mentioned that the arrested Frenchmen had offered the Loft that Doesn’t Exist as their address. They asked Bianca a few questions, and then poked around the apartment, discretely informing her that there were quite a few illegal things happening in the loft. Then they left.

It took Bianca and Annali a few days to piece together the full story. The French guys who, on a morning when the line for the bathroom was already about eight deep, decided to piss in the sink. They were living their own American dream. They’d scraped together enough money to buy an old RV and were touring the country. When they needed cash they would break dance on the street. Down in San Antonio a couple of them had gotten drunk and, tempted by a low-hanging fire escape, had crept into a courthouse, stealing a gavel and carousing through the corridors. While wearing sombreros.

The media reported that foreign nationals had infiltrated a government site. After the police went through the RV and found photos of government buildings, dams and national monuments, a few inflammatory headlines reported that a terrorist network, which had been collecting information on strategic targets, had struck in Texas. Both guys were charged with burglary — the sombreros had come from the courthouse library — and spent the remaining time on their visas in prison (where they apparently continued to break dance). They were released in time to take their original flights home.

With so much ruckus unfolding around them, Saskia and Annali were finding it impossible to get anything done. Bianca was constantly worried about making rent, and so kept welcoming new housemates into the loft. Most months she turned a tidy profit from the superabundance of starry-eyed dancers desperate to stay. When her visa expired she’d have to go back to Italy to apply for an artist visa (unless she could get herself a spouse visa, but she wasn’t making any progress on that front).

The other official leasee had already had to return to Europe; they weren’t sure whether he’d be able to get a visa in time to move back into the loft before Bianca left. Bianca had more invested in the U.S. than anyone else in the loft. It was here that she’d found her sense of belonging, living the kind of life she’d always imagined, surrounded by people who dreamed the same dreams as her.

Saskia couldn’t function with so many people around. A new guy had turned up, an immense Frenchmen who spoke no English, ate only meat, and returned home from rehearsals so tired he could barely lumber up the stairs and into the room he shared with a friend. When he eventually did collapse onto his side of the mattress, his snores resounded through the entire loft. Saskia’s door had come off its hinges; there was no way to shut him out.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, one of the cats had shit on the couch again. The entire loft stank, and Bianca, who owned the cats and the couch, wasn’t coping. She stormed about the apartment, murmuring no no no no no no. Someone was supposed to be renting out that couch.

Normally a figure of calm and poise within the storm, Annali was embroiled in the visa application process, too. She’d already dropped $4000 for a lawyer who could increase her chances but not guarantee a visa, and would probably have to pay more. She spent most of her time pretending the apartment didn’t smell of cat shit and trawling Craigslist, applying to every modelling job that came up. All of them, even free ones, helped her application.

She needed to prove she could work even though it was illegal to actually do so. It made no sense to her, but she didn’t ask questions; she was prepared to entertain whatever Kafkaesque logic helped her to stay longer in the US. For all the complications involved, there was nowhere she would rather have been. And anyway, a few of the modelling jobs did pay, chipping away, hundred by hundred, at the massive lawyer’s fee.

By the time Halloween came around, the only other person Saskia and Annali knew in the apartment was Bianca, and she wasn’t talking to them. Everyone else in the apartment was new; people were camped out on the couches, hoping a room would free up for them. Most of them hadn’t even realised that it was Halloween; those that had took one look at the chocolate zombie blood that I’d whipped up during a prolonged procrastination period and decided that they wanted to be shuffling undead historical figures too. My artistic integrity felt compromised; my only successful project was already hackneyed.

While we flung blood over ourselves (and the rest of the loft), a hoarse rasping was coming from the bathroom. The drain in the shower was blocked up and one of the new girls had been plunging it for what seemed like hours. Eventually the rasping stopped and the girl emerged; the drain was working again.

While my zombie minions finished applying their make-up, I got talking to this new girl, a Slovenian dancer still looking composed and bright-eyed even in her least-flattering plumber’s outfit. Despite having arrived the same day and already having plunged someone else’s hair out of the drain, and despite living out of her suitcase and sleeping on one of the lower-ranking couches (even the cats didn’t bother shitting on it), she was elated.

“There’s nothing like this in Europe,” she said, looking across the dance studio to the Bob Marley shrine. She didn’t know how long she’d be staying or when she’d be able to move into a room, but it didn’t matter. This was exactly the kind of artist enclave she’d dreamed of finding in New York.

After Halloween Saskia and Annali moved out. The line for the bathroom was longer than ever, the mound of dishes in the kitchen had been given up as unconquerable, and there were strangers on all the couches. No one had any idea how many people were living in the loft and, worst of all, said Saskia, despite so many hot, young dancers living in close proximity to each other, no one ever got laid.

On my last visit the Loft that Doesn’t Exist smelt like cat shit again. A cluster of unknown, attractive people wearing sweat pants with the kind of grace that only a dancer can muster waited by the bathroom door. When Saskia and Annali told Bianca they were leaving she’d made them share a room for the last nights so other people could move into one of their rooms. They didn’t care, they just wanted out. Bianca still didn’t know when she was leaving, or who would be in charge in her absence.

At its best the loft felt like a hive of creativity in the heart of an up and coming neighbourhood; at its worst it felt like a flophouse for self-absorbed artists. The turnover around Morgan Av. was high for a reason. Still the trashy glamour of the lofts kept drawing dreamers, posers, and procrastinators to the area, even though the same kind of rental price in a different neighbourhood would have brought them two housemates, a picturesque fire escape, and a bedroom door that closed properly, in a building that had a deli across the street and five restaurants on the same block.

More dreams withered than flourished in the wasteland, but there was never any shortage of people convinced that they were different, and that for them the gamble would pay off.

On the first of the month there were again vans lined up around Morgan Av. A girl was standing in the doorway of Saskia’s building, looking flustered. She was moving into the neighbourhood, lured by the lofts, but the landlord hadn’t shown up to give her the keys and she didn’t know which apartment was to be hers. “This is overwhelming,” she said.

I’m staying put, even though by the time the girls moved out I’d still written nothing more substantial than a few artless university papers. As barren as this wasteland is and as constant as the distractions are, there is still this great but uncertain potential. Hip, new venues open; established hot spots are renovated and celebrate their anniversaries.

Every week new flyers appear in the subway station and on café walls advertising a raft of new initiatives and projects, some of them hackneyed, some of them brilliant. The art on the chipped cinderblock walls changes. Layers are starting to accumulate; the void is slowly filling with the elements of neighbourhood — a navel-gazing neighbourhood, but a neighbourhood none the less. I tell myself to sit down and start writing.

Photo: author

I CAME TO THE EASTERN UKRAINIAN CITY of Donetsk, the industrial center of the country, to meet Oleksiy (Alex) Matsuka, a 28-year-old independent journalist. It was a cold and gray morning. Women plunged their chins into the tops of their padded coats; men tugged at the front of their newsboy caps to shield their faces from the wind.

Across the street, a loose corner of a billboard ad displaying two candidates from the Party of Regions — the current ruling party — flapped in the breeze. Some of the party’s members have been the subjects of Alex’s past stories, stories that have led to him being followed and threatened. On the other side of the billboard was another ad, this one with the party’s leader and Ukraine’s President, Viktor Yanukovych, posed in front of a blue and yellow background — the country’s national colors. Next to him were the words, “One Ukraine. One story.”

It was early October. Two months ago, Alex’s Donetsk apartment had been set on fire. The attack was retribution for articles he’d published over the past two years as editor-in-chief of the news site Novosti Donbass. Alex had uncovered scandals, corruption, and conflicts of interest inside the regional government of Donetsk. He had published photographs of million-dollar mansions owned by civil servants and documents that proved the real salaries of elected officials to be many times higher than the amounts publicly disclosed.

I found out about the attack on Alex from a Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty email list. The headline — “Ukrainian Journalist’s Apartment Set on Fire.” — caught my attention. I saw Alex’s name in the second paragraph and immediately contacted him.

He was hesitant to speak about what happened over the phone. Instead of using words like attack and assault, he used “incident.” Even through email he wouldn’t elaborate, telling me only what was already publicly known. So I made the trip from Kiev to Donetsk to meet with him in person.

Ukrainians weren’t so naïve to think that total press freedom and an end to media censorship would happen immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, but both were expected to naturally follow independence.

Instead, press freedoms were rolled back and censorship worsened during authoritarian Leonid Kuchma’s presidency from 1994 to 2004, a decade associated not with democracy, but with lawlessness and corruption. During that time many opposition newspapers were closed, computers and files were confiscated, and 11 journalists died under mysterious circumstances, in ways reminiscent of Hollywood thrillers.

Vladimir Ivanov, editor-in-chief of the Crimean newspaper The Glory of Sevastopol, was mortally injured when a remote-controlled bomb detonated in a garbage can at his home on April 14, 1995. Despite undergoing three operations to save his life, he died at a local hospital four days later. Prior to his death he’d published stories denouncing the Crimean mafia as well as others critical of a Ukrainian-Swedish company’s plan to construct an oil refinery on the Crimean peninsula.

Petro Shevchenko, a correspondent for the Kiev daily Kyivskiye Vedomosti, was found hanged in an abandoned building in Kiev on March 13, 1997. Shevchenko’s death was ruled a suicide, but his colleagues believed he was murdered for a series of articles he published in the weeks before his death about disputes between the mayor of Lugansk and the local branch of the Ukrainian Security Service.

A professional assassin shot Borys Derevyanko, editor-in-chief of Vechernyaya Odessa, at point-blank range on his way to work on August 11, 1997. His colleagues believe his murder was related to the newspaper’s opposition to the policies of Odessa’s mayor.

But the most widely known example in Ukraine of violence against a journalist was the horrific murder of Georgiy Gongadze who, in the months before his death, was investigating government corruption for his online news site Ukrayinska Pravda, based in Kiev.

Gongadze disappeared on the night of September 16, 2000. Weeks later his headless body was discovered in a forest outside the town of Tarashcha, near Kiev. An autopsy revealed he’d been beaten and strangled, doused in gasoline, and then burned. His skull wouldn’t be found until years later.

Gongadze’s murder made international headlines, putting pressure on Kuchma and each presidential administration that has followed to bring those responsible for the crime to justice. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) and many other world organizations have on numerous occasions condemned the Ukrainian government’s poor handling of the case, stressing that it was a litmus test for Ukraine’s shift toward democracy and rule of law.

The case intensified in November of 2000, when Kuchma was heard discussing what to do with the inquisitive Gongadze on a tape recorded in secret by a bodyguard months earlier. The journalist should be sternly dealt with, the president said on the recording, and “kidnapped by Chechens.”

But over the next decade, the government dragged its feet. In March of 2011, more than 10 years after Gongadze’s death, a criminal case was finally opened against Kuchma on charges that he exceeded his authority, leading to the journalist’s killing.

The tape was to be the most damaging evidence against the former president.

But this past October Ukraine’s constitutional court made an “irrevocable decision” not to allow the recording to be admitted as evidence in the case on the grounds that it was made illegally. The president didn’t know he was being recorded, the court stated, rendering the tape inadmissible. Soon thereafter the case against Kuchma was dismissed. An appeal followed, but the court of appeals in Kiev upheld the decision not to proceed with the case against him. The former president was off the hook.

But the man believed to have carried out the murder, Oleksiy Pukach, the former general of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s external surveillance department, had been apprehended and would still be tried. Pukach confessed publicly and in court (the trial is ongoing) that he, personally, strangled and beheaded Gongadze, and that he did so at the behest of Kuchma and other top officials, including Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko.

The latter never had the chance to tell his side of the story and will never see his day in court. He died under mysterious circumstances in March 2005, just hours before he was scheduled to testify in the murder case. The official report, which has been scrutinized by Ukraine’s opposition journalists and political parties, as well as international media rights groups, indicated the cause of death to be suicide by two gunshots to the head.

I first met Alex in the spring of 2011, when we were in Konstantinovka to photograph and report on the city’s defunct Soviet-era factories and their lasting by-product: pollution. The mutual acquaintance of ours who’d arranged the excursion and introduced us described him as an independent journalist who didn’t pander to the agendas of politicians and oligarchs.

That day Alex and I chatted about writing and traveling. We joked about our cultural differences. “Do Americans really wear shoes inside their houses?” he asked. He was friendly and inviting, yet also blunt. He spoke honestly about challenges facing Ukraine. “We have a major problem with pollution, as you can see,” he said, gesturing to the makeshift landfill in front of us, which sat just 50 meters from a large residential area where children kicked a soccer ball back and forth.

After that day in Konstantinovka he and I remained in contact, checking in with one another mostly via email and the occasional text message. In our exchanges we discussed Ukrainian politics, including the jailing of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko on charges that she abused her power while in office when she brokered a gas deal with Russia. (She was convicted in October and sentenced to seven years in prison.)

Like many in the West, the European Union and American government included, Alex condemned her arrest and subsequent conviction as politically motivated. “Yanukovych wants to get rid of all his political opponents,” he wrote.

Through email, we had agreed to meet outside a McDonald’s near the center of Donetsk.

Alex rolled up in his black Hyundai. “Hello, Chris,” he shouted through the open window. “Let’s go. I have a meeting with the police soon.” I got in the front passenger seat and shut the door. Before I could finish asking him how he was he interrupted. “Please, wear your seatbelt.”

Alex fought traffic on our way to the Novosti Donbass office on the east side of the city. We made small talk for the first few minutes. He’d just returned from a three-week holiday in Southern California, where he hoped the warm weather, palm trees, and a trip to Universal Studios would help him to forget about recent events.

Watching him nervously navigate the Donetsk congestion, his hands clenching the wheel at ten and two, eyes constantly shifting from the road ahead to rearview mirror to side-view and back to the road, I couldn’t help but think it must not have been enough.

Stopped at a red light he turned to me, sighed, and then asked, “So, you want to know about what happened, yes?” I nodded.

The morning of July 31, 2011, unknown assailants barricaded Alex’s apartment door with bags of cement, laid out a funeral wreath affixed with the message “To Oleksiy Vitaliyovych, from grieving friends” and set the place ablaze.

“They wanted to burn me alive,” he said.

There were no witnesses to the event, but a neighbor smelled smoke, discovered the fire and tried to extinguish it with water. When that didn’t work, the neighbor called the fire department and then Alex, who was at his office at the time, to tell him that he needed to come home immediately.

“I knew right away why this happened,” he explained. “I have a conflict with very major people in the city that don’t like me writing about their luxurious lifestyles.”

Pressured by media rights groups, Donetsk Mayor Oleksandr Lukyanchenko publicly condemned the attack on Alex and ordered a thorough investigation. He also assigned police protection to Alex, but only for one day.

Driving past a statue of Lenin, Alex told me his meeting with police that morning would be to discuss what progress had been made in the case. But he expressed serious doubts. “I’m thinking that [the police] will not have any new information for me. I don’t think they want this case to be solved, but we will see.”

We arrived 20 minutes later at the Novosti Donbass office. I followed Alex into a narrow and dimly lit elevator, which took us up nine terrifyingly shaky floors.

“Almost there,” he said as we exited. “We must walk up two more levels.” Three women smoked cigarettes in the stairwell. They greeted us with nods as we passed.

The office was neat and bright, though sparsely furnished. The Ukrainian flag hung on the northern wall. On the southern were cutouts of past news stories and maps with districts of Donetsk outlined in red marker. A small table with packets of instant coffee, tea bags, and a teakettle atop it sat against the western wall. Windows made up the entire eastern side of the office.

Beyond them bloc buildings like Tetris pieces rose above pine and ash trees; slag heaps stood gray and plain on the horizon. Six young men pecked at their laptops. Alex introduced me to the staff and assigned me a desk before leaving for his meeting with the police.

“I think you should stay here,” he told me. “If you need anything the guys will help.”

A moment later another journalist, who blogs independently under the name Frankensstein to avoid detection, was standing over me with an empty coffee mug in his outstretched hand. “This is for you,” he said. “You can keep it. There is coffee.”

Alex returned a couple hours later from his meeting with the police investigators. When we heard the door creak open, we spun around in our chairs. “So, how’d it go?” I asked.

“The police have no new information,” he said with a shrug.

Despite the mayor’s promise to investigate the incident, there’d been no headway made in more than two months. Alex leaned back against the wall and mulled it over. Crossing his arms, he added, “This was not a surprise.”

In late 2004, with Kuchma’s second and last term as president coming to a close, it seemed for a moment that Ukraine had turned the page on the authoritarianism and repression endured during the past decade. The democratic opposition, led by Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, was on the rise. Polls showed the presidential race between Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych, who was prime minister under Kuchma and the up-and-coming leader of the Party of Regions, to be tight, but with Yushchenko at a slight advantage.

Ukrainians turned out in record numbers that fall to vote in the elections. But when the ballots were counted, Yanukovych came out the victor, despite exit polls showing Yushchenko with a commanding 11% lead over the prime minister.

When it was discovered days later that the ruling government had rigged the election in favor of Yanukovych, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians — on some days there were more than a million — clad in opposition party orange descended upon Kiev’s Independence Square to protest the result.

This was the Orange Revolution. Demonstrators endured freezing temperatures, rain, and snow for two months, during which time Ukraine’s Supreme Court ordered a re-vote. This time the result came out in favor of Yushchenko. Finally, on January 23, 2005, following Yushchenko’s inauguration, the protests ceased.

Yushchenko, however, would turn out to be a lame-duck president. Infighting between members of his cabinet, and the dismissal of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and other Orange Revolution leaders with whom he fought hampered his mission to clean up corruption and improve press freedoms.

By the fall of 2009, Ukrainians had decided they’d had enough of Yushchenko’s empty promises. In a race that came down to a few percentage points, they elected Yanukovych — the very same man who tried to cheat his way to victory six years earlier — president of Ukraine over his opponent, Tymoshenko, who’d been the prime minister under Yushchenko. Official observers ruled the election fair and democratic.

With Yanukovych in office, Ukraine has backslid yet again. Despite multiple promises during Yanukovych’s incumbency to improve civil rights, there have been numerous cases of censorship and “multiple press freedom violations,” according to a 2010 report conducted by media watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

Another independent journalist has also gone missing. In August of 2010, Vasyl Klymentyev, editor-in-chief of the Kharkov-based newspaper Novy Stil, known for publishing stories critical of Party of Regions officials, disappeared after getting into a car with an unknown man. His mobile phone and keys were found a week later inside a boat floating in a nearby reservoir. He hasn’t been seen or heard from since and is presumed dead.

“Serious conflicts of interest are menacing Ukraine’s media pluralism,” the Reporters Without Borders report stated. The same oligarchs who often grace the front pages of newspapers own a large majority of the country’s media outlets. And their main reason for owning these outlets is not profits, but promotion of their own businesses and political agendas.

Recently, a disturbing trend has popped up. According to the Kyiv-based Institute of Mass Information, with politicians hoping to gain favor with voters ahead of the 2012 parliamentary elections this fall, the practice of paying for approving news is on the rise in Ukraine. Such paid-for news stories have appeared in print publications as well as on television news programs.

Yanukovych made another promise as recently as January 23 of this year to improve press freedoms in Ukraine.

“The protection of human rights is an essential value for democratic European countries,” he said at a meeting in the National Palace on the Day of Unity and Freedom of Ukraine, the anniversary of the end of the Orange Revolution. “We will significantly improve the monitoring and control over the investigation of every case of infringements of human rights and freedoms. Freedom of speech will be the subject of special attention.”

But, given his record, this promise will probably go unfulfilled. It’s more likely that he’ll return Ukraine to the media mentality of the Soviet Union: emphasize the positive, place stories of labor heroes and economic achievements above all else, and do not — for any reason — publish stories controversial in nature, or stories critical of the government.

Alex’s interest in journalism began while studying political science at Donetsk National University. It was there, with the help of some colleagues, that he began publishing his own independent newspaper, which was met with resistance almost immediately.

“The university faculty didn’t like how outspoken we were,” Alex explained. “In teaching Journalism at the university, our teachers still used Pravda as an example of proper journalism. If you don’t know, Pravda was a Soviet Union newspaper. It was propaganda.”

The dean of the university threatened Alex and his colleagues with expulsion, unless they stopped publishing. Afraid of the potential repercussions, his team abandoned him.

Alex, however, continued to publish the paper on his own, printing about 400 copies of each issue, or enough for each faculty member and student in his department.

“I handed all of the newspapers out myself,” he said. “I believed that there was no formal ground for expulsion.”

He was never expelled.

In 2003 Alex founded Novosti Donbass, an online investigative newspaper committed to exposing a regional government fraught with corruption. Independent journalists and opposition politicians here hold the paper in high regard. Its downside, though, if there is one, might be that it’s so glaringly anti-Party of Regions that it’s difficult to find stories having to do with much else, or written as objective pieces of journalism. Someone who knows little about the political, cultural, and social situations in Ukraine might think Alex has a chip on his shoulder.

But all that doesn’t bother Alex. “It is generally accepted that the government is corrupt here,” Alex explained over coffee at the Novosti office. This seemed to be his way of justifying his paper’s stance. If everyone believes the government is corrupt, if you’ve grown up in a society so rife with it, how could you remain impartial when reporting on it?

“In Ukraine, [officials] carefully hide their real incomes and their real life,” Alex told me. “We–” he paused to find the right word using an online translator, “We catch them.”

What Alex meant by “catching” them was that it’s the paper’s mission to shine a floodlight on the situation. In the past year he and his team have published stories about the mysterious and growing Yanukovych family fortune; about illegal coal mining operations with ties to government officials; and about the Donetsk regional governor’s multi-million dollar mansion and his 2010 tax return, which states his primary residence to be a meager apartment in the city center. (The paper discovered that he’d transferred ownership of many of his expensive assets over to his wife to avoid scrutiny.)

Novosti Donbass also exposed a vote-rigging scandal among the Donetsk regional council, as well as a corrupt city council whose members were recorded having voted for resolutions while not in attendance.

Publishing these stories and many others similar in nature have led to Novosti Donbass journalists on multiple occasions being followed, intimidated, and threatened with violence.

In one instance, attempting to frighten Alex, the mayor of nearby Kramatorsk bumped chests with him and slammed his forearm into his chest after Alex had confronted him in a public parking lot with questions regarding a colleague. That encounter was caught on video and later posted to YouTube.

And then, of course, there was the fire at Alex’s apartment.

In the beginning days of Novosti Donbass, the same regional and city officials investigated by the newspaper approached Alex — like they’d approached other journalists — in hopes of arranging a partnership. Alex would hold off on publishing stories critical of them, and in return he’d receive perks. At the least, this could mean having the authorities off his back and that of Novosti Donbass. At best it could mean payoffs, or perhaps a future cabinet appointment for Alex.

He didn’t indulge them. But they returned every so often with more offers, hoping he’d soften his stance. He hasn’t.

Since then, in the eyes of the regional authorities, Novosti Donbass has been considered an opposition news organization, and Alex and his coworkers subversive and “improper” journalists. Essentially, they’ve been blacklisted.

Alex described the reason for the “improper” label best in an op-ed he published on his LiveJournal blog last August, which later was translated and republished at Open Democracy Russia:

Here journalists are perceived as support staff by the regional authorities, and journalism itself as a medium for communicating only news the authorities find it necessary to broadcast. In the opinion of the elite, this is ‘proper’ journalism.

‘Proper’ journalists wind up on the list of regional deputies for the ruling Party of Regions – like the chief editors of prominent newspapers ‘Donetsk News’ (Donetskie Novosti) and ‘The Priazovsky Worker’ (Priazovskii rabochii). In the past week the new governor of the region has appointed Rima Fil’, chief editor of ‘Donetsk News’, as his personal press secretary.

‘Improper’ journalism, in their understanding, is that which dares to mention the double standards of local authorities.

It follows that ‘improper’ journalism is conducted by ‘improper’ journalists. I and a few of my colleagues belong to precisely this category. They burn the flats of ‘improper’ journalists in Donetsk, and they confiscate servers in editorial offices which house the databases of independent mass media.

The sun was setting, turning the sky a deep pinkish-orange, as Alex and I zigzagged slowly in his Hyundai through rush hour Donetsk traffic on our way to the western bus station. I had a 6:15pm bus to catch and Alex needed some time alone after a disappointing meeting with investigators.

The ride was quiet at first. I listened to the news program coming from the radio, not actually comprehending much of the Russian being spoken, just hearing the harsh consonants, the rolling of Rs. Alex had been thinking about his life as a Ukrainian and independent journalist.

“You must understand that here freedom of speech exists only on paper,” he said. “In real life there is no free speech in Ukraine. They want journalists to tell only one story — their story.”

He paused to check his blind spot before changing lanes.

“This makes it dangerous to be an independent journalist here, especially coming after the election victory of Yanukovych — the journalists disappear. I know the goal of journalism is telling the truth, leveling double standards. But [the government] doesn’t want this.”

He’d started in, and I could tell that now it would be difficult for Alex to stop. He began gesturing wildly with his right hand.

“Our society is passive. People do not trust government, do not trust each other, do not trust anyone at all. Without us, without independent free press the people will not see the real picture. It must be shown to them. This is why the importance of our job and independent journalism cannot be overstated. But the authorities think another. To powerful people I am an improper journalist.”

The entire time in the car I’d remained mostly quiet, save for a few acknowledging mhmms and yeahs, allowing Alex this moment of self-aggrandizement, this pressure release. Afterward we didn’t speak for 10 long minutes. The only sound was the news radio show fuzzing in and out.

He released his hands from the wheel while stopped at a red light, let out a long, audible breath, and then spoke up.

“You know,” he said, “when we were children, me and my friends, we painted over the street signs here in Donetsk that were named for Soviet heroes. We painted them Ukraine’s colors.”

He glanced over at me and we both burst out laughing.

Four months later I returned to Donetsk to visit Alex. Since our last meeting Novosti Donbass had moved into a new office. He showed me around the place as we discussed a new law the Constitutional Court of Ukraine had passed on January 20, 2012, banning the dissemination of information about authorities and elected officials without their approval, essentially making the work of many of the country’s journalists illegal.

“This seems like a big step in the wrong direction,” I said.

Flipping on the switch to the electric kettle, he sighed. “Yes, unfortunately it is.”

Though I had an idea of what the answer might be, I wondered whether or not he’d change how he and his colleagues at the newspaper reported stories and whether he was afraid of reprisals if they chose to not do so.

He nodded.

“Coffee or tea?” Alex asked.

“Tea’s fine,” I said. “Thanks.”

He passed me a mug and then stirred sugar into his tea. The spoon clanked against the sides.

“Well, this is our job,” he said, slowly rotating the mug around in his hands. “And we will continue to do what we do.”

Photo: Tonykrinfo

AT THE END OF A RUTTED RED-DIRT ROAD, which snakes along intensely green, cultivated hillsides past makeshift houses and produce stands piled high with plantains, sits the high hill where one of the worst acts during Rwanda’s genocide was committed.

From Murambi there is a sweeping view of Rwanda’s southern countryside. At its rounded top, a series of one-story rectangular buildings stand in neat rows. These were intended to be classrooms for the Murambi Technical School, a facility that was never completed.

Our bus pulled up in front of an enormous purple flag hanging from the exterior wall of the main building. Purple is the color of genocide commemoration. Throughout the countryside, flashes of purple peek out from behind banana and eucalyptus trees, marking the location of a mass grave, a small cemetery of victims, a killing site.

A young guide, sporting a bright red Rwanda Development Board polo shirt, welcomed our group and gave us a scripted yet impassioned briefing of what went on here, and what we were about to encounter.

Murambi is one of the numerous memorials to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, during which nearly one million Rwandan Tutsis were systematically slaughtered over a period of 100 days in an initiative perpetrated by the Hutu-led government. In late April of 1994, local authorities in the Murambi region sent thousands of Tutsis fleeing violence to the unfinished Murambi Technical School. They were promised safety and protection from the Interhamwe, the government-directed killing squads.

Forty thousand men, women, and children crammed into the classrooms, taking refuge in the school’s isolated location on one of the region’s highest hills. They waited for days with barely any food or water, expecting a saving grace from the authorities.

But the authorities had the refuge-seekers exactly where they wanted: sequestered, starved, and in a location where escape was nearly impossible. On April 21st, 1994, in under 12 hours, almost every Tutsi hiding in the school was massacred by the machete-wielding Hutu militia. French troops, part of the pro-government Operation Turquoise, watched the events unfold and took no action.

“In under 12 hours,” the guide repeated, “40,000 men, women, and children were killed with machetes.”

Afterward, the bodies were thrown into mass graves and the site was abandoned. A few years later, as genocide sites began transforming into genocide memorials, hundreds of these bodies were exhumed, preserved in lime, and placed back in the classrooms of the school as if untouched from the moment of death.

The guide motioned us toward the classrooms. “I have explained to you the horrific story of Murambi. But as you enter these rooms, the bodies will speak for themselves.”

The stench emanating from the shadowy interiors hit me instantly. We covered our mouths and noses with whatever loose clothing we could gather and walked from classroom to classroom, our faces emptied of blood.

Inside the concrete-walled, windowless rooms, the lime-encrusted corpses were artfully arranged. Piled on tables, spread on the floor, propped against the walls. Many of the bodies lay in expressive poses, arms outstretched in self-defense or hunched over in fear. Some of the skulls still had patches of hair remaining. One classroom was filled with women. Another, just infants. Shriveled, ghostly human forms, brought back to the rooms within which they huddled in fear and desperation in the days leading up to death. In the spare glow of light from the doorway, the rough, gray-green skeletons looked almost sculptural.

I made this visit to Murambi with a group of theatre artists, writers, and scholars: a few American artists, a human-rights theatre group from Afghanistan, a Mexican performer, an Argentine director, a Belarussian art collective, and a handful of Rwandese students and scholars. Our de-facto leader was Erik Ehn, a pensive, astute playwright whose meditative demeanor set the tone of our trip.

Erik has been traveling to Rwanda and writing plays about genocide for the last decade, and in recent years has invited fellow artists and students to participate in his own exploration of this country. Before returning to the capital, Kigali, to host a theatre festival, we would spend a few days in the countryside, attempting to sense the fragile state of post-genocide Rwanda.

We were drawn to this memorial site — and to other vestiges of the genocide — for reasons that were elusive, yet shared. To immerse ourselves in Rwanda’s devastating history, and wrap our minds around the conundrum of today. How, after Hutus listened to directions on the radio to kill their Tutsi neighbors and trusted friends, this population can live together again, in close proximity, as one Rwandan people. How they can share a town, a market, a field, a church pew.

At the end of the row of classrooms we curved around the building and stood silently on a wide swath of grass, finally able to inhale. Our guide pointed to a small plaque pressed into the ground. “This is where the French troops played volleyball as the Interhamwe were doing the killings.”

We looked away from each other and let our gazes rest on empty space. Before us, the sun-rimmed hills unfurled and glistened in the late afternoon light. The sound of schoolchildren singing floated up from the valley.

I noticed a feeble-looking Rwandese man with a large bump on his bald head walking slowly toward the group. “He is one of the survivors of Murambi,” whispered Vincente, a 28-year old Rwandese student in our group and a genocide orphan himself. “I’ve been here six times and he’s always here, wandering around the hill. He’s usually very drunk, but he looks ok today.”

We moved silently through the field and away from the classrooms, our visit drawing to a close. Just beside the entrance, two Rwandese teenagers and an older woman watched us file onto the bus, their faces expressionless and bodies absolutely still.

Our bus traveled deep into the southern Rwandan countryside, meandering past rice paddies and potato fields. With nightfall we arrived at a convent in the small village of Sovu, where we would be spending the night. During a simple dinner of rice, beans, and boiled plantains, Erik told us a bit about the convent which, like so many other Catholic houses of worship, was implicated in perpetrating the genocide.

In the candlelight of the austere dining room, we learned that this convent was initially a safe haven for thousands of Tutsis in the area. But when asked to assist the Interhamwe in exterminating the fugitive Tutsis, several of the nuns obliged. They provided gasoline with which to burn the Tutsis hiding in the barn and chapel, and pulled others out of various rooms in the convent and handed them directly to the killers. The killing took place for days, and throughout, the nuns continued to pray.

“How could these women of god justify this killing?” Erik asked in a low voice, anticipating our incomprehension. Much of his work deals with the psychology of perpetrators — how pious, hardworking, everyday individuals could bring themselves to take part in such horror. “They felt they were doing God’s work. Cleaning the earth of Tutsis was framed as cleaning the earth of sin. So killing was equivalent to praying.”

After the genocide, the place was abandoned. Years later, a group of nuns — many of whom resisted their superiors who helped perpetrate the genocide — returned, salvaged the convent from complete wreckage, and reopened it as a site for worshippers and visitors.

A few nuns stepped quietly out of the kitchen and cleared our plates, smiling at our murmurs of appreciation. For dessert, they brought out platters of freshly cut pineapple and pots of milky African tea. One nun, with deep lines etched into her forehead and weary, warm eyes, circled the table and poured the steaming tea into small clay cups, her footsteps barely making a sound.

Early the next morning we departed half-dreaming for the sleepy town of Butare, home of the National University of Rwanda, the country’s oldest and most prestigious university. We were meeting with an association of student genocide survivors. During the genocide, the high concentration of intellectuals and freethinking students made Butare particularly challenging for the Hutu militia to penetrate. To remedy that, hundreds of critics and outspoken leaders were slaughtered, and the town was taken over by genocidaires. It quickly became one the bloodiest sites of the 100 days.

The campus of the National University of Rwanda is a lively respite from the dusty, quiet streets of this once-thriving intellectual hub. As we passed through the university gates the scene was familiar: students spread out on lush green lawns, professors hurrying between well-preserved buildings, a flurry of activity at the sound of the bell.

Erneste, the head of the survivors group, greeted us cheerily upon arrival and led us to a nearby conference room filled with gleaming cherry-varnished office tables and plush leather chairs. We gathered around the tables and Erik began with our usual introduction. “We are artists. We come from around the world, and we are here to learn from the work you are doing, from the lives you are leading.”

Erneste was wiry and handsome, and smiled constantly as he talked. The survivors association, he explained, is not just a group that meets weekly to discuss the problems and experiences of individual members. The group organizes itself into a system of families, modeled after traditional family units. The families are formed at the beginning of each year, and stay constant for as long as possible, often three to four years.

As new students join the group, they are absorbed into preexisting families. Two older university students may be the parents, and their children might be younger university students and high-schoolers. A close friend could become an uncle. Another, a cousin. Families meet regularly in addition to association meetings, form intimate bonds, and mirror the roles biological family members might play. The parents advise, guide, discipline, and motivate the children, and the children provide a sense of purpose and pride for the parents.

“We’re trying to rebuild, in some small way, what we once had,” said Ernest, his musical voice lowered. “These families transform us. They’re what keep us alive. They aren’t pretend families — they are real.”

We circled around the room and heard a bit about each association member. Claudine, a fourth-year co-leader, was six years old in 1994. When the Interhamwe broke into her family’s house, she managed to flee. For three days, she and a couple of other kids hid in a nearby school and eluded the militia.

Claudine returned home to find the place in complete shambles and her mother, father, and three older brothers gone. She never saw them again, and still doesn’t know if or where they are buried. As she told her story, she spoke in a clear, confident voice, free of anger or vengefulness. “I have told this story many times,” she said. “It is part of who I am now. I can’t deny it.”

Francois, a stocky second-year with piercing eyes and long lashes, saw his father killed with a machete when he was four years old. The Interhamwe spared him because he was a small child, he said. “For a long time I did nothing but hate.” His voice was gruff, raw. “I hated myself for surviving. I was so angry with the world. But I couldn’t do anything. In order to live I had to move on. I only could do that when I found so many others here, with stories like mine.”

Francois practices meditation and yoga with some of his new family members, and prays every day. Recently, he returned to his village and was introduced to the man who killed his father. “We were civil. He asked me to forgive him, and I did.”

“But how…” blurted Casey, an enthusiastic and emotional first-year university student in our group. “How can you possibly forgive? After what you’ve seen? And lost? How can you possibly move on?” Fabian, also a first-year, responded measuredly. “We have no choice. We don’t forget. But in order to live our lives — to survive — we have to make peace within ourselves. Or we lose the only thing we truly have left. We lose ourselves.”

Reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda is a law, enforced by the National Commission for Unity and Reconciliation. It is a law because, as Fabian made clear, Rwanda has no choice. A million victims, a million perpetrators — that’s what they say. Every single perpetrator can’t be kept in jail for life; every single perpetrator can’t be sentenced to death. In this tiny, densely populated country, everyone must share space. The students explained how, when prisoners are being released back into their villages, both sides receive extensive coaching on how to behave.

Villagers are taught to be respectful and polite, to steer clear of revenge, to allow the prisoners to become part of the community again. And prisoners are taught to be humble, to avoid confrontation, to expect others to be distrustful, and to ask for forgiveness. Genocide ideology, a blanket term for any kind of speech, writing, or behavior that could in some way incite tensions or lead to violence, is a crime. And it’s punished ruthlessly. Officially, through fines, imprisonment, expulsion from work, deportation. Unofficially, through mysterious disappearances and killings that don’t receive further investigation.

“We can behave in a certain way and talk in a certain way because it is necessary,” Fabian continued, “We know we have to do this if our country is to be whole again. But if we — each one of us — actually wants to be whole again, we need to work harder. We need to make a personal choice to reconcile, not just a political choice.”

Understanding the importance of reconciliation — for the sake of the nation, for lack of other options — is teachable. But what the survivors association might be striving toward — with its reimagined families, its emphasis on openness, its tenacious support structure — is how to transform a distanced, practical understanding of reconciliation into a personal decision.

To look within and find a way to quiet poisonous memories, to let go of crippling anger, to live freely. To arrive at some kind of internal peace. It’s a delicate distinction; it’s impossible to mandate. And as so many of these students describe their experiences with clarity, with clinical certainty — it seems as though they’re still making that crossing, floating somewhere in between.

As we drove out of Butare signs of town life faded quickly into dense forest and steep ridges. For hours, we swayed with the rhythm of hairpin turns and watched the lush, barely populated land stream past our windows.

When the trees finally opened up we made an abrupt stop, in front of an enormous iron gate and a line of security guards. Mpanga Prison loomed before us.

Though we had arranged and confirmed our appointment well in advance, the guards were skeptical. At our request to enter, they muttered in Kinyarwanda and shook their heads, smirking at one another. Eventually, the prison chief descended from within and sauntered through the gate. He was exceptionally tall and muscular, and his jet-black suit looked pristine in the blazing midday heat. Our motley, travel-weary group shirked under his militaristic stare.

After the guards muttered something to the chief in Kinyarwanda, Erik stepped forward and stated, in his measured way, “We are artists. We are here to talk to you, and to learn about what you do. We will not take photos. If anything we may write a strange play about what we see.” Looking slightly amused, the prison chief gestured for us to come in.

As we walked through the complex the chief gave us a brief, official description of Mpanga Prison. He had a resounding voice and spoke in short, authoritative phrases.

“The prison is well organized and highly functioning. 7,500 prisoners. Eight international criminals — men whose crimes have been elevated to international court status. 114 women. About 6,500 genocide-related prisoners. Families visit regularly. Prisoners can shorten their term through community service, and most do. They can also shorten their sentences by confessing. Many do. The environment is one of peace and respect. Disciplinary problems are rare, almost nonexistent.”

As the chief led us up the path, we heard a thunderous roar from within. The ground rumbled beneath us. A turbulent, chaotic sound. The sound of thousands of men, yelling. We crossed through a building and it grew more deafening. A collective howl. The sound of anarchy.

We came upon a fenced-in field. Thousands of male prisoners were gathered on bleachers watching a soccer game between Mpanga Prison and another prison in the region.

“It’s the final match in their prison league,” the chief explained. “It’s just about to finish, and we’re winning.” Every prisoner in the stands was dressed in the iconic Rwandan prison uniform: solid-colored scrubs in either bright orange or cotton-candy pink.

“You may notice their clothing,” the chief bellowed over a joyous, blaring eruption from the crowd. “They wear pink if their sentences are still negotiable. Orange, if they have been decided.”

We hadn’t expected to be allowed much access inside the prison. But the chief asked if wanted to see some of the different wings, and we mumbled “yes please,” already astonished by the spectacle of the soccer match. He guided us to the Special Wing, where the eight international criminals were housed.

Most of these men are from Sierra Leone and were leaders in the civil war of the 1990’s, employing child soldiers, cutting off the limbs of civilians, and performing other acts classified as crimes against humanity. At Mpanga, they each have individual, spacious bedrooms and bathrooms, and a shared common room with computers and a television. One prisoner invited us into his room. A Madonna poster hung over his bed; his desk was covered with books.

“I love to read. Especially the dictionary,” he told us. He was burly and soft-spoken; he looked like a friendly uncle. “Every day I learn five new words, and write five sentences for each word.”

Next, we passed through the women’s wing. Their accommodations were far less lavish; they were crowded into one large room filled with triple-decker beds. The room smelled dank and flies were buzzing around, but the brightly-colored, flamboyant patterns of the fabric on every bed gave the space a lightness. Most of the women were gathered on a large patio just outside their sleeping area, chatting, doing laundry, and weaving baskets. They weren’t in uniform; most were wearing traditional East African wrap skirts and t-shirts.

When we entered they smiled and laughed, seemingly thrilled by our visit, and bantered with the chief in friendly tones. In the middle of the bustle, one very old, frail woman sat alone on a flat stone, her bald head bowed. “What did she do?” Casey whispered from behind me.

The 6,500 genocide prisoners at Mpanga are housed in two boxy buildings with a shared, multi-tiered concrete courtyard. As we gathered outside the entrance, the prison chief unlocked the double doors and turned to us. “Please stay in a line. And please keep silent.”

He pushed open the doors and they slammed behind us as we entered the vast, walled-in space. Thousands of eyes fell heavily upon us. The chief raised his arm and parted the densely packed sea of men, all in pink or orange uniform. Their faces turned and followed us carefully as we treaded slowly, single file, through the crowd.

Some smiled at us, some waved. Others stayed perfectly expressionless. One winked at me. Another grunted as my arm brushed his. A few leaned their heads together and whispered. One man called out from the far back, and the chief replied, his voice soaring. Laughter rumbled through the crowd. Every single one of these men played some part in the genocide. They were close enough to swarm us, swallow us up. But they didn’t. They stood calmly and let us pass. And we emerged unscathed on the other side.

When we exited the courtyard, a prisoner in orange accompanied us out.

“His name is D’Israeli. I thought you’d like to talk to him,” said the prison chief. “Ask him whatever you’d like.” We froze, still shaking from the walk-through and unprepared for this.

Vincente broke the silence, and asked tentatively, first in Kinyarwanda and then in English.

“If you could tell us what your role was during the genocide…what your sentence is for?” D’Israeli stepped forward. He was short and heavyset, with soft features. He looked younger than he must be.

“I was a community leader during the genocide. I was responsible for hundreds of killings. This was my job. This was what I was supposed to do. If I didn’t complete my job, my superiors would have killed me. And I received a life sentence, but once I confessed my sentence was reduced to 25 years. I have already completed nine.”

Vincente continued to translate as more questions came in. D’Israeli shifted his weight back and forth and glanced in different directions, avoiding eye contact with anyone.

“What do you remember, about the genocide?”

“I remember doing the killings. I don’t remember every single person. But I remember some.”

“What led you to confess?”

“I prayed to God. I came to realize what I had done. I feel at peace now, because I have confessed, and because God has forgiven me.”

As he spoke, D’Israeli kept touching his hand to the back of his head, and then to the center of his chest. He seemed exhausted.

“What do you think about reconciliation? Do you think it is possible?”

“I believe in reconciliation. I believe in unity among Rwandans and in one Rwandan identity. I understand that the genocide was wrong. I do not want it to happen again.”

Vincente, who lost both of his parents during the genocide, made sure to be absolutely precise as he translated, continually asking D’Israeli to confirm what he had said before relaying it in English to the rest of us. Vincente showed no sign of rancor or fear in dealing with this man whose participation in the genocide had been significant and brutal.

After thanking D’Israeli and the chief for their openness, the group filed into a line to shake both men’s hands. As my palm made contact with D’Israeli’s I felt a jolt in my chest. I watched Vincente give him a firm handshake and, looking him straight in the eye, utter formal words of appreciation.

As we walked toward the bus, Erik turned to me. “What they did wasn’t going to be a crime if they had succeeded. They nearly did.”

I was shaken by D’Israeli’s confident declarations of peace and forgiveness that seemed to echo the words of the students in Butare. Somehow, if he had said that he was still an ardent Hutu, that he still believed Tutsis should be killed, that he wasn’t sorry — that would have been easier to stomach.

I wanted him to seem more like a killer, in order to grasp how he could have done such things. But I couldn’t find a trace of evil in his demeanor. He, like so many ordinary men, was likely promised a better future for his family, a way out of poverty, a new life, a changed society. He found himself in a situation where he was ordered to kill. And he listened.

And yet, his sincerity felt empty, sickeningly so. He said the right things, and he said them almost too well. At the beginning of our visit, the chief mentioned that the prisoners must take classes that help them understand their crimes, encourage confessions, and teach them to forgive themselves. I wonder if the classes that instruct prisoners how to behave when they’re reintegrating into the community also coach the prisoners on what to say about the genocide.

How to express remorse, how to champion reconciliation. As with forgiving, one might admit wrongdoing for political or personal reasons. Whether or not D’Israeli truly believes what he said, he knows how to say it. And saying it has shortened his sentence so that he might one day have a life again.

That evening, Vincente fell sick. While the rest of the group shared plates of grilled meat and sipped Primus, Rwanda’s most popular beer, Vincente was in the bathroom, vomiting. He claimed it was the Ugandan gin from the previous night, but I wondered otherwise. Though he was able to handle himself with dignity and calm in the presence of D’Israeli, perhaps this was his body’s turn to speak. Perhaps it was using its own force to purge itself of a day spent in such close proximity to men who were not unlike his parents’ killers.

Back in Kigali, weeks after the group had left, I met my friend Yvonne downtown for lunch. We decided to try a place we had both heard about, from friends and colleagues, who described it as cheap, tasty, and unassuming: the Kigali Central Prison.

At the grand brick arches of the main entrance, we walked shyly past the guards, unsure of where to go. A group of orange-uniformed prisoners carrying massive bundles of straw strode past us. “Dejeuner?” one of them asked, pointing toward a bunch of tables on the opposite site of the complex.

Beyond the tables was a typical Rwandan lunch buffet: rice, fried potatoes, boiled plantains, kidney beans, creamed spinach, and slices of avocado and raw tomato. We filled our plates and found a spot among the packed tables.

Huddled in one corner was a group of businesspeople dressed in crisp suits. A handful of motorcycle taxi drivers, identified by their official vests, were scattered among the crowd. Just outside the grouping of tables, two prisoners reclined against a stone wall, sipping sodas. A Rwandan mother and her three young children joined the buffet line. An expat sat alone with an open notebook. On a nearby bench, a prisoner was deep in conversation with a hunchbacked older woman.

Behind our tables, the old brick jail looked out onto a stunning valley where a wealthy Kigali suburb filled with newly built homes sprawled over green, rolling hills. At the screech of the afternoon bell, the prisoners at lunch immediately stopped what they were doing and stood up to clear their plates. A hush fell over the crowd. The diners looked up and turned their heads to follow the orange and pink-uniformed men across the lunch area. The prisoners, their faces hard and eyes lowered, took slow, deliberate steps as they walked away, back toward their own small cells.

Photo: Javier Psilocybin

THE WOMAN WAS ON HER HAND AND KNEES, harvesting some sort of plant from the city park lawn. I tried not to stare as she collected handfuls of the plant and laid them to dry on a magenta and yellow striped blanket.

“Indígena,” Maria Rene said, gesturing toward the woman with her jaw. My host mother was stating the obvious. In her white straw hat, two thick braids, pleated velour skirt, and sandals, the woman certainly seemed to be part of Bolivia’s majority indigenous population. But I decided to give my host mom the benefit of the doubt: she was probably just trying to be a thorough guide.

“What’s she gathering?” I asked, hoping to show my interest in something beyond the woman’s race. Maria Rene shook her head and walked on. It’s possible she didn’t know the answer. But the wrinkle that spread across her nose suggested that unlike the time I’d asked her for the name of the purple flowering trees outside my window, she wouldn’t seek out her neighbors to inquire on my behalf.

The night before we flew from Seattle to Cochabamba, Bolivia, I jotted Maria Rene’s name, address, and cell phone number down in my journal. The director of the language school my husband Ben and I were headed to had emailed me these details, along with a short note explaining that she’d arranged for us to live with Maria Rene, her daughter, and her grandson. Our host mother would meet us at the airport. On the same page I had written the contact information for the only other connection I had in Bolivia: the NGO where I’d be writing about human rights and social justice issues.

Maria Rene had photos of both Ben and me, but we knew only to expect a woman who’d been around long enough to be a grandmother. In our minds, this meant gray hair, wrinkles. Instead, as I buckled the waist strap of my pack and exited the Cochabamba baggage claim, I looked up to find Ben in the embrace of a perky woman in fitted jeans with sequins on the back pockets.

“I’m your mama,” she said. Two young boys peeked out from behind her legs.

On the cab ride home, and over a welcome dinner of chicken soup, we chatted. Despite Maria Rene’s energy and fashion, she was indeed a grandmother. Each of her two daughters had a son, but only one daughter and one grandson shared the house with her. The others lived across the courtyard, with Maria Rene’s grandmother. Ben and I explained that we were newlyweds. I had just graduated from a masters program and Ben had quit his job so that we could spend six months in Bolivia, volunteering at NGOs, visiting tourist attractions, and improving our Spanish. Neither of us were Catholic, which Maria Rene dismissed as no big deal. “We’re Catholic, but we’re not fanatics,” she told us. “We accept everyone.”

As welcoming as she was, it didn’t take long to recognize the tone of voice Maria Rene used to show disapproval. On our first Friday night out, we walked around the plaza of an old convent, hoping to come upon some street performers we’d read about. A group of young people sitting along a fountain caught my eye. Where most of the young Bolivians sported sleek-fitting pants, polished shoes, and neat shiny hairdos, this crowd had loose-fitting layers, scrunched-up wool socks, and dreads.

“Hippies,” Maria Rene said. The way she spit out the only hard consonants of that single word punctuated her disgust. We were walking shoulder to shoulder, but she didn’t notice when I stepped out of sync with her to consider my reaction. I thought about telling her how many times I’d had that word assigned to me, back in what my grandmother called my “earthworm stage.” In truth I was only modestly crunchy and took a certain amount of pride when some guy yelled at me from a passing vehicle: “take a shower, hippie.” But as I watched Maria Rene navigate the crowd, careful not to touch anyone or anything, I decided she wouldn’t get it. The following morning in the shower, I took a razor to my furry legs and underarms.

The next time Maria Rene sidled up to me to share one of her observations, we were pushing our way through a festival on the city’s downtown prado. I saw the young couple and their child approaching us, and predicted that Maria Rene would have something to say about them. They were hippies without a doubt — the woman in her bare feet and flowing skirt, the pony-tailed father. But what Maria Rene focused on was the way they carried their belongings. “Mochileros,” she said in her now familiar stage-whisper: backpackers.

If the other festival-goers hadn’t separated us at that moment, I think I would have called her on her superficial judgment. What, after all, had she thought of Ben and me when she first spotted us at the airport, giant packs strapped to our backs? But the crowd came between us, and instead of speaking up, I stashed the comment away for a later laugh with Ben.

It seemed excusable to keep silent in the moments when her remarks were aimed at groups that I identified with, and had been known to mock myself. But when she shared her opinions about race or class, my dilemma grew complicated. It would be condescending for me, an outsider, to try to enlighten her about her own country’s recent triumphs over an oppressive, colonial past. If she’d been the frail grandmother I had expected, I could have allowed age to explain her antiquated beliefs. But Maria Rene couldn’t have been more than fifty. Her own generation of Bolivians had put forth the country’s first indigenous president and created a new constitution that transitioned the old Republic of Bolivia into a new, Plurinational State of Bolivia that recognized 36 indigenous languages in addition to Spanish as official tongues and set the country on a path towards decolonization.

Maria Rene didn’t celebrate these changes. Her look would turn sour at the very mention of Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales. And though she never criticized any of his policies explicitly, it was clear she had problems with the state of her country since an indigenous president had taken charge.

“The indios are becoming just like us,” she said, and she scrunched her nose in the same way she would to indicate ugly weather in the sky.

I respected Maria Rene as my gracious host in a foreign land, but I didn’t want to hear her talk about her dislike of Bolivia’s indigenous people. I worried that my silence would give her the impression I agreed with her, yet my instinct was to keep the peace. Later I would brainstorm the things I could have said — at the park, about the backpacks or the indígenas — to make her think twice about trusting me with her biases. But in the moment I’d lower my eyes or change the topic, hoping she’d get the hint: I’m not interested in your rendition of Bolivian history.

In the mornings, while her daughter and grandson tore out of the house to catch a cab, skipping breakfast altogether, Maria Rene took the opportunity to tell us about her past. Her family’s story was not filled with the exploitation, violence, or oppression of history books, but with domestic drama: affairs, fights over money, abusive men, thieving friends, and estranged family members. When remembering made her cry, I reached for her hand, or walked around the table to offer a hug. “La vida es grave,” she’d say and begin to clear the table, “life is hard.”

There was no question that Maria Rene’s life had hit low points. A widow for twelve years, her husband’s death left her with two teenage girls who quickly became mothers themselves. When her boss also died, leaving her a backlog of unpaid wages, she thought she’d go to Spain, to find work taking care of someone else’s children. But her mother got sick and Maria Rene abandoned those plans, staying to play nurse and help with medical expenses. Her mother died, her daughters went to work, and Maria Rene found herself at home in the days with two grandsons. She began hosting international students to supplement the household income.

Before Ben and me, she’d hosted only two others, and it was clear she still felt new to the job. In the kitchen, she was in charge, but not always confident. We’d wait at the table while she ran across the yard to ask her grandmother’s advice: Can you serve orange juice with pork? How about eggs with avocado?

“She didn’t know how to cook when she was working,” Maria Rene’s grandmother explained. “She had to learn.”

“I used to have a maid,” Maria Rene said. “I was a career woman. I made more money than my husband.” When we mentioned that we needed to buy a bus ticket for our upcoming trip, she lit up with information about which lines had the most comfortable seats or the nicest televisions. Until four years earlier, she’d worked for a company that imported buses and other vehicles from the United States and she remembered all the details. She missed her job. She insisted on accompanying us to the station, verifying the ticket prices, and then hassling the men about not allowing us to carry our large packs aboard with us.

Despite their misfortunes, Maria Rene and her family lived comfortably by Bolivian standards. The taxi that picked us up from the airport had taken us past makeshift brick and corrugated tin shelters, generic highrise apartments, and riverside encampments before finally carrying us up the north hills of Cochabamba and into the Cala Cala neighborhood. From here there was a view of the valley, and the houses climbed three and four stories to take advantage of it. Maria Rene’s house, like all the nice homes in the city, was separated from the street and sidewalks by a wall and an iron gate.

Though Maria Rene didn’t own a car, the house she lived in belonged to her. Some of the houses in their neighborhood were newer and grander — concrete mansions with pillars painted to look like marble and guards standing watch at the gate — but Maria Rene had a matching living room and dining room set, three large bedrooms, two bathrooms, and wood floors. Her mother had paid for the house as a gift to Maria Rene; she had it built on family land, next to Maria Rene’s grandmother’s home. When Maria Rene’s mother was alive, the family contained in those two houses included members of five generations: Maria Rene, her grandmother, her mother, her two daughters, and her two grandsons.

Maria Rene and her grandmother described the courtyard as abundant with all kinds of fruits, vegetables, and small animals for the family. There had been peaches, figs, ducks, rabbits, and chickens. The space that separated the houses by the time of our arrival held no such riches. It had a crumbling patio, a square of lawn that the boys and the dog had worn paths in, a bouncy wire clothesline that hung low enough to decapitate even the shorter adults, and a large plot of hard-packed dirt they said belonged to Maria Rene’s cousins. A tomato plant had volunteered itself in the midst of this dry square, but nobody watered it and the one red fruit turned to a black pocket of dust. The dozen or so terracotta pots that decorated the yard were cracked from the impact of the boys’ soccer balls, and so were the house’s blue plaster walls. Purple flowering jacaranda trees dropped their petals over the wall from neighboring yards, but this courtyard stood barren of foliage.

I sifted through Maria Rene’s past for links to the country’s history, wanting to explain her opinions by connecting her family’s financial decline to Bolivia’s recent political changes. As far as I knew, her family hadn’t lost property when Morales institutionalized his agrarian reform, or lost jobs due to his affirmative action initiatives. Instead I gathered that their diminishing economic status had something to do with the notable lack of men in the household. The picture album that Maria Rene’s grandma showed us was full of wedding photos, but the only male who got a good rap among these women was Maria Rene’s grandfather. The rest, it seemed, were better dead or out of the picture.

The family’s nostalgia for the past was evident in the stories they told about Maria Rene’s grandfather who had lived long enough to celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary. Everyone remembered the party as the last of the great family events. “The invitations were printed in the United States,” Maria Rene’s grandmother told us. “He made me the happiest woman alive,” she said, and then looked pointedly at her single granddaughter and great-granddaughters.

“We had the best band in Cochabamba. And the best venue,” Maria Rene said.

She described how her grandfather traveled all over Bolivia and always returned bearing gifts. He worked for a private domestic airline that, since the president created a state-owned Bolivian airline, no longer existed. “Wonderful company,” she said, “gave each of its employees a free ticket every year.” Her grandfather provided for his family, and took it hard when, in his old age, he could no longer guarantee them the luxuries of the past. “Once he looked out his window when his great-granddaughter was washing her clothes in the sink,” Maria Rene told us. “He cried when he saw that. He never wanted his children to do their laundry by hand.”

Maria Rene did our laundry in a washing machine that she kept in her utility room, but sometimes when I caught her hanging our clothing out to dry, or scrubbing a stain in the outdoor pila, I felt the eyes of her grandfather at my back.

“Am I what you expected?” Maria Rene wanted to know. Ben and I stumbled over our Spanish trying to explain that we hadn’t come with strict expectations. “You probably thought that everyone in Bolivia would be a cholita,” she said. She snickered and gyrated her hips to suggest the full skirts worn by the indigenous women. “We’re not all campesinos,” she said.

I tried to recall what image I’d had of my host mother, or any Bolivian woman, before arriving. I remembered an interaction Maria Rene and I had during my first week of classes. I had felt sick, so I sneaked off to my room, propped my pillow against the wobbly headboard, and opened my book to the dog-ear I’d folded the night before. It was an account of recent Bolivian social movements; I was in the middle of a chapter about the “Cochabamba Water Wars,” in which Cochabambinos fought a transnational company to regain public control of the municipal water. The picture that illustrated the historic citizen victory showed a woman in indigenous dress taking on the Bolivian army with a slingshot.

In 2000, during the Water Wars, this woman’s photo appeared in newspapers around the world. She embodied the international community’s impression of Bolivia: a country whose citizens were quick to revert to protests and blockades; a country whose indigenous peoples were reclaiming power from its colonizers; a country that had had enough of exploitation of human and natural resources; a country of Davids standing up to the world’s Goliaths. Ben and I had come to Bolivia out of fascination with this reputation.

Before I had turned the first page, Maria Rene slipped through the door that I’d left ajar. She carried a saucer and a teacup. “Mate de coca,” she said, “to calm your stomach.” It wasn’t the first time she’d brewed a tea from the infamous Andean leaves for me. Like many in Bolivia, she prescribed them for altitude sickness as well as traveler’s diarrhea. But when I’d asked her whether she also chewed the leaves on occasion, she had said no: “that’s for the campesinos.” Then she’d lodged her tongue between her teeth and her cheek so that it bulged out like a wad of leaves. She waited for me to agree that it looked ugly.

“Why do you have it?” I had asked her, referencing the bag of coca on her refrigerator shelf.

“For the foreigners,” she said.

So I accepted the mate, setting the cup and saucer down on my bedside table and thanking her. But instead of leaving the room, Maria Rene sat down on the edge of the bed. She asked for more details about my stomach pains, and responded to my blunt descriptions and gesturing with concern. And then we just sat there. My right hand held my place in the book that I wanted to get back to, but Maria Rene showed no sign of leaving. I scooched over to offer her more room on the bed and then held my book out for her to see.

On the cover was a painting of a woman in one of the bowler hats that are typical of Aymara women of Bolivia. In the background were colorful adobe homes with red tiled roofs, and in the foreground, a large bag of coca leaves. “I’m reading about Bolivia’s political history,” I said. “The Water Wars, the World Bank, silver mining—”

“Oil, natural gas,” Maria Rene finished the list for me. She took the book in her hands. She couldn’t read the English words that condensed the history of her country into a single paragraph for the book’s cover, but of course she’d lived through the story herself. I drew my knees to my chest and Maria Rene lounged to fill the now-empty space. Her wide-necked t-shirt drooped off one shoulder, revealing a purple bra strap. For a moment she locked eyes with the woman staring out at her from my book, then she returned the book to me.

“It’s good for me to learn about all this,” I said, “for my volunteer position.” But I felt suddenly sheepish and slid the book beneath my leg.

“And what exactly will you be doing?” she asked.

“I’ll be writing about current events in Bolivia. But in English, to inform people in the United States about the reality here in Bolivia.”

“Good,” she said. She dug her elbow into the mattress and rested her head on her hand. Then she smiled at me as though she believed I was just the one to set the record straight.

Our first full week in Bolivia ended with reports of police violently repressing a group of indigenous people who had been marching towards La Paz to oppose the construction of a road through their home in a protected national park. I had told my Spanish teachers that one of my goals was to be able to follow Bolivian news stories, so the march became the go-to topic for conversation. My teachers plopped the newspapers down on the desk before me and, under large red headings like “CONFLICTO,” I devoured features about the history of the protest. In my notebook I jotted down vocabulary for things like “rubber bullets,” “bows and arrows,” “tear gas,” and “to bind with tape.”

The march, which had begun over a month earlier, brought a slew of Bolivia’s current issues to the surface. President Morales, who was an Aymara coca-grower, supported the construction of the road, highlighting improved access to clinics and markets for those who lived in the park. His stance pitted his purportedly pro-indigenous administration against the indigenous marchers. They said that the government had ignored its constitutional obligation to consult the people who were native to the territory. Environmental organizations backed the marchers, arguing that because of its biodiversity and importance as a carbon sink, the area ought to be preserved. Opponents of the road said the project’s real beneficiaries would be the coca producers who had settled in the park. They accused Morales of having more loyalty to the cocaleros than to the country’s diverse indigenous groups.

When footage of the police crackdown aired on television, our host mother appeared alarmed. But she never aligned herself directly with either side. Instead she threw up her hands whenever the march was mentioned: “Que macana; what a disaster.”

Two days after the violence erupted, Maria Rene informed us that a nationwide strike had been called in support of the marchers. Cochabamba’s streets would be shut down for an entire day. “No classes for me,” my host brother chirped. His enthusiasm wore off when his mom pointed out that without public transportation, they wouldn’t be able to go to the movies.

Before they released us from school that day, our teachers had us watch the last scenes from a film about the Cochabamba Water Wars. I watched protests turn places I now recognized upside down. The bridges were checkpoints manned by armed men, the post office was an emergency hospital, and the streets around the Plaza 14 de Septiembre were war zones. The images reiterated the picture of the Cochabamba I’d read about, and in the context of an emerging conflict, they were a tantalizing, if scary, glimpse of what I thought I wanted to witness myself.

Our teachers assured us today’s demonstrations would be nothing in comparison. Still they cautioned us against going anywhere near the center. Their warnings only added to our curiosity. Ben and I decided not to tell Maria Rene that classes had let out early. We planned to check out the protests, and we doubted she’d support the idea.

But in the end we had no reason to hide our outing from our host mother; the real demonstrations had taken place in the morning, and by the time we arrived at the plaza the only people who hadn’t headed home for a siesta were holding a quiet vigil. With the streets cleared of cars, the center was quieter than we’d ever seen it. And when we returned home to confess to our host mother where we’d been, the thing that impressed her most was the distance we’d covered without public transit: “You walked to the Plaza?”

Maria Rene dismissed my interest in current events as mere homework. “Your teachers shouldn’t focus so much on politics,” she said, “You’re here to learn Spanish.”

When a pamphlet about candidates for Bolivia’s upcoming, first-ever nationwide judicial elections arrived at the house, I thought it might make an interesting conversation topic: “My dad was a judge, so I’m interested in how judges are elected,” I told her.

“Your dad must make a lot of money,” Maria Rene said. And when I tried to turn the conversation back to the elections, her eyes wandered to the dishes piling up near the sink.

I flipped through the pages of the pamphlet and tried again. “These elections are actually a pretty big deal. In most countries, judges are appointed. This seems like it should be more democratic.”

Maria Rene smiled at me in a way that made me feel like her overeager student. “The elections are a nice idea,” she said. “But it’s all the president’s people.”

The approaching elections seemed to bring Maria Rene’s frustrations with her indigenous leader to the surface. She dropped dismissive remarks about Morales and the indios into all manners of conversation. In a cab one night, we passed through a poor section of town. “Lock your door,” she said, “it’s awful around here.” Then she struck up a conversation about the elections with our driver: “You know the campesinos are coming to town with extra ballots stuffed in their pockets.” I lined my face up behind his head so that he couldn’t see me in the rearview mirror. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or offended when the cabbie appeared to agree. “Could be,” he told her. “I’m not going to bother voting.”

Like Maria Rene, most of my teachers were of Spanish or mixed descent. If they had indigenous heritage, they chose not to announce it in the way they dressed. Many of them worked two or more jobs to support themselves, but they considered themselves middle class. Besides one who was a diehard fan of Morales, most rolled their eyes at their president. I think they only talked politics to humor me. Everyone I asked admitted they knew little if anything about the judicial candidates. Over and over I heard the claim that most of the candidates had been preselected by the president’s own party, so it didn’t matter who won.

Their apathy shouldn’t have surprised me; I knew plenty of people in my own country who felt similarly about electoral politics. But I had wanted Bolivians to be different. Instead I learned that the high voter turnouts I’d read about were largely due to the fact that citizens were mandated to vote. Bolivians went to the polls. But many went with a grudge.

A teacher whom I’d pinned as a fellow progressive told me about her friend’s voting strategy: “I’m going to look down the ballot and if anyone’s last name sounds indigenous, I’m not going to vote for them.” I sat confused in my chair as she giggled about what she’d shared. This teacher was not much older than I was; we’d agreed on everything from living abroad to gay marriage to legalizing marijuana. Though it was possible I’d misjudged her, I decided to take a risk with her that I always avoided with Maria Rene.

“Sure,” I said. “And same goes for women, right?”

My teacher laughed, and then looked me in the eye: “It’s horrible, isn’t it?”

I wanted to feel relieved at finding a like-minded Bolivian. But her story, and the possibility that she was only agreeing to satisfy me, pointed to a portion of the Bolivian population that was getting harder to ignore.

Despite the disinterest of nearly everyone around me, I couldn’t wait for election day. I was fascinated by the steps the government took to ensure an engaged and informed electorate: no alcohol could be sold for the entire weekend, the clubs and the bars shut down, and people were not allowed to have parties in their homes. And on the Sunday, the day of the elections, nobody had to work and the government banned all automobile traffic from the streets.

The whole family walked up the hill to the school together so that the women could cast their votes. Ben stopped along the way to take photos of the campaign propaganda that had been plastered on light posts or spray painted on the walls. Some of them touted pro-government messages: “Your vote counts.” Others urged people to boycott the elections by casting blank or voided ballots. This campaign appealed to people who were upset with the Morales administration’s treatment of the indigenous marchers. Ironically, the “vote null” campaign also appealed to people who wanted to undermine the elections because they objected to indigenous leadership. And if the number of signs around our middle-class neighborhood were any indication, the campaign had more than just fringe supporters. I wanted to ask our host mother and sisters how they planned to vote, but when my six-year-old host brother asked if their choices were a secret, Maria Rene said yes. He and I both zipped our lips.

The voters had to dip their thumbs in ink and leave a fingerprint before collecting their ballots, which I thought was cool. I imagined I’d leave the stain on my finger for a day or two, the way I always kept my “I voted” sticker front and center until the results had been announced and my contribution was either upheld or shot down. But as we left the polls, Maria Rene and her daughters rubbed their fingers so clean they might’ve been able to convince the officials to let them vote again. The girls wanted to head home and escape the heat, but Maria Rene insisted we check out the food vendors. She took us on a discursive walk past showy cement castles, along crumbling sidewalks and cobblestone paving, and then through the neighborhood market. Without cars, the streets became fair game for kids on bicycles and vendors of everything from sausage sandwiches and cotton candy to pet goldfish, hermit crabs, and painted turtles.

The activity made us forget about politics. Maria Rene called out to people we passed. Once or twice she stopped to introduce us, but most times she gave a little wave and walked on. Her friends greeted us without making a show of their curiosity, but their eyes lingered on our pale faces and blue eyes for a few seconds more than normal. The attention animated Maria Rene, who slid her arm around my waist and hammed it up as our neighborhood tour guide: I’ve known that little girl’s father since I was a child; That restaurant doesn’t look clean but the food is delicious; Can you believe all the trash in their yard? We walked the streets connected at the hip and I let her buy me a chocolate-covered strawberry on a stick.

When we moved out of Maria Rene’s house and into our own apartment, it seemed like our stuff would never fit back into our packs. Maria Rene sat on the bed and watched us shove the final pieces into place, fighting to zip them in. “Aren’t their bags lovely?” she asked when her daughter stopped in for a look. I smirked and wondered whether she’d laugh if I made a joke about our being mochileros.

We stayed in touch. We had them to tea, and they invited us to watch the boys’ end-of-school dance performances. When Ben took a work trip and left me alone for three days, Maria Rene called to check in on me. And on Ben’s 30th birthday, she was the first to congratulate him.

For his party, she arrived dressed to the nines in a black pantsuit, heels, and a ruffled red blouse. She chatted normally to me in the kitchen, then grew timid on the patio among a crowd of young expats. But when one of them shared her most recent medical ailment with us, Maria Rene perked up. “I was having the same problem,” she interrupted. “A woman from the campo asked me why I didn’t drink mate de manzanilla. ‘No,’ I told her,” and here she inserted a perfect imitation of her own face, contorted in disgust, “but I tried it, and it worked. It’s a little white flower, yellow in the center.”

I thought back to the moment when I’d first guessed her attitude toward Bolivia’s indigenous people. I still didn’t like that attitude, but I realized I’d also shortchanged her, imagining she lacked curiosity, and overlooking her capacity to change. Maria Rene wasn’t the guide I had been looking for; she denounced the results of social movements that had sparked my interest in Bolivia, and she resented the people whose defiance I admired. Yet she’d shared with me the Bolivia that was hers to share. And now here she was, taking small steps outside her world, exploring the parts of her country that were almost as foreign to her as to outsiders like me. I caught her eye across the patio, and though I wasn’t sure she’d understand the English, I hoped my tone of voice could convey my gratitude. I smiled and offered her my word for the piece of wisdom she’d provided: “chamomile.”

Photo: LuciusKWok

PERCHED ON A BATTERED SUITCASE, his flat cap pulled rakishly over one eye, he yowls through his stubble while his fingers slide along the banjo. One foot taps a tambourine, the other stamps on a bass drum pedal that thuds against the empty case.

Between verses he closes his eyes and sighs into a harmonica.

Whenever he turns up at an L train station, the subway troubadour draws an appreciative crowd. A waifish girl with suede boots, a flowing skirt, and tangled hair leans up against the billboard beside him, swooning to herself. Headphones are pulled from ears, eyes are drawn away from iPads. Heads nod and half-smiles appear beneath jaunty moustaches and Walt Whitman beards.

On my circuitous route from Australia to New York, living in South America and then Mexico, I’d heard about all the weird hipster antics up north. I’d seen the deadpan photos of people with moustaches drinking PBR and posing beneath stuffed deer heads. I’d been warned that this was irony, and that although these people acted like hillbillies, they were in fact both wealthy and educated, and thus that I should proceed with caution, for fear of appearing ignorant.

At Lorimer St. station on a Saturday night I couldn’t find the irony. The troubadour is far too earnest, too intent upon his banjo. The crowd matches his raggedy, straight-faced style. From woollen hats to canvas bags to flannel shirts to denim jackets to suede boots, everything is carefully textured. In contrast to the smooth, polished, supposedly gleaming metropolis above them, these guys seem set on a coarse, homespun, natural aesthetic. If I got close enough to smell them, I’m sure I’d smell damp wool, musty leather, pine needles, and mothballs.

I’ve got no idea what the troubadour is actually singing, but what I’m hearing is a whole lot of yearning.

Although he’s been playing these subway stations for months, his image — and that of the entire crowd — suggests a kind of Huck Finn vagrancy, just passing through. His songs ought to be played at a Mississippi Delta crossroads, or by a campfire, or on the porch of a log cabin in the days of yore.

He evokes a distant time and place, but he inhabits a subterranean world of cold lights, dripping pipes, and scurrying rats. He may be yearning for a transient lifestyle, but he’s settled in New York City. The crowd has probably chosen to move to New York too, but the way they dress and the way they respond to the music declares that they are also yearning. Exactly what they are yearning for isn’t clear; the important thing is that it is removed from all the hipster irony, from the disposable cosmopolitanism, from the bustle and heave of city life. They are yearning for wherever the authenticity, the transcendence can be found. As long as they can get there without changing trains again.

At a Mississippi crossroads you might encounter the devil himself, but the only crossroads here is the intersection of the L train and the G; on a midnight subway you’ll find only dour-faced shift workers and the stink of fresh hobo piss.

“This song is about all the North Carolina hipsters moving into Brooklyn, taking our barista jobs, playing in our roots bands, and buying up all our suspenders and bandanas.”

With that the Defibulators launch into their next song. Fiddle, banjo, double bass, and harmonica intertwine as the frontman howls into the vintage mic. The crowd is nodding in appreciation; a few people kick up their heels and begin to dosey-do. Everyone cheers as, with a rattle and a clatter, the washboardist staggers to the front of the stage and begins to improvise.

This is Brooklyn’s Chili Pepper Fiesta, one of a host of autumn festivals in New York. While the Defibulators warm up the crowd at one end of the pavilion, at the other end steaming bowls of chili are being ladled out to eager foodies. Outside, kids run around on the grass slick with rain, or drag their parents away from the microbrew taps to the distant cluster of spicy hot chocolate tents.

The band is based in Brooklyn, but they could easily be mistaken for another mob of Southern hipsters come to steal the local style. Between their roaring, twanging style, their antique instruments, their beards, boots, and suspenders, and the bright red long johns of the washboardist, this is a group that sounds like a product of the ’50s and looks like a product of the nineteenth century. The washboardist usually wears a one-piece union suit, but because this is an all ages event he’s put some jeans on.

I’d come to New York expecting to find a kind of hyper-cosmopolitanism that took exotic cultures and cannibalised them into new trends long before the rest of the world could even locate them on a map. There’s plenty of exotic, foreign stuff at the Chili Pepper Fiesta — coarse Oaxacan chocolate, Korean kimchi, Guyanese hot sauce — but it just isn’t getting that much attention. People seem more interested in home-grown flavors and sounds — the kind of corny Americana that is exotic to me, but which New York has long rejected as flyover culture.

Really, the fiesta feels more like an old-fashioned hootenanny. People are eating fairground food — pulled pork sliders and pickles on sticks — and listening to a weave of bluegrass and rockabilly (I think that’s what you’d call it). The whole event is a grab bag of references to the past, to the countryside, to the South — a lot of things usually excluded from the metropolis. Less an authentic, old-fashioned hootenanny, then, and more of a pastiche of jumbled references to other times and places. In its hunger for novelty, New York seems finally to have turned to its own backyard for fresh culture to cannibalise.

This isn’t some distant, new culture that can be mastered with a few carefully pronounced menu items, though. The American hinterland is too familiar to be treated with such aloof curiosity; a stronger response seems to be in order. The dancers by the stage caper about in goofy abandon. Couples hold each other and sway to the music in displays of public affection usually frowned upon in the neurotic, noncommittal city. In embracing square, awkward Americana, the hip young things of Brooklyn may have found the perfect excuse to be spectacularly, earnestly, awkwardly square. The best escape from hipster irony might be a parody so convincing that no one can tell where the earnestness stops and the irony begins.

Jammed into a row of houses opposite a seemingly forgotten construction site, Jimmy’s Diner has just about the worst location in Williamsburg. That might count in its favour, judging by how hard it is to get a Sunday morning table. The only landmark by which I’m ever able to find the place is the shuffling crowd of hopeful brunchers waiting at its door.

The eating area of Jimmy’s is about the size of an average living room. A few worn tables are clustered on one side of the room, each with as many people as possible pressed in around them. On the other side of the room, the serious brunchers are sitting at the bar, with better access to the coffee and cocktails. Loud chatter comes from the tables; those at the bar are more subdued, studying their food or their iPhones. There is no room for flourish or decoration; a few vintage signs fill the scant wall space. By the large windows, plants are growing out of rusted tin cans.

One of my housemates is pouring drinks behind the bar; the other is sitting at a table adjacent to ours with a group of her friends. This isn’t a planned convergence, but it’s not really surprising to find us all here. Jimmy’s is very much a word-of-mouth kind of place. We are a small part of a growing crowd of regulars. Even though there isn’t much nearby, here on the dusty outskirts of Williamsburg, there is an intimate, neighbourhoody vibe.

Menus and heavy mugs of coffee are set before us. The brunch menu is full of weird American stuff that I don’t fully understand — cornbread, biscuits, grits. None of these sound like things people should be seeking out for a Brooklyn brunch, but the three people I’m sitting with coo over the options, reminisce about old family cornbread recipes, debate the perfect biscuit shape and consistency. To me it mostly sounds like empty carbs getting in the way of tastier things. They prefer to think of it as comfort food.

Still, I need to know what all the fuss is about. My housemate the waitress takes our orders, refills our coffee, and absolutely won’t let me call her darlin’, even though I was sure that was the correct form of address in a diner. When it comes, the food is served in solid ceramic bowls, without decoration and usually with a bit of cheese spilling over the lip. Despite the no-frills appearance, each bowl — cornbread with scrambled eggs and tomato, tater tots with guacamole and grilled onions, French fries with baked beans and cheddar — is carefully composed to achieve the optimal greasy, comforting effect.

I pause, watching for cues, unsure of whether I am expected to pour ketchup and hot sauce on everything or not. Ketchup, I feel sure, should be a part of any traditional American meal, but no one touches it. Having determined that there is nothing sacrilegious about hot sauce, I am none the less careful not to spill any on the cornbread. This is not just bread, I keep telling myself; this is the soft, sweet gold of childhood memories.

Our plates are cleared, our mugs are filled again, and our conversation meanders on, oblivious to the cheque that has been discreetly left on our table. After a while my housemate comes over, apologises, and then informs us that we are being kicked out. They’ve got tables to turn and we’ve been nursing our bottomless mugs of coffee for far too long. Either we need to order some real drinks, or else we should vacate the table.

We leave Jimmy’s; people take our place. We wander into Williamsburg in the thick of the brunch rush. The largest clusters of people are waiting outside the joints with the most innovative takes on comfort food: buttermilk biscuits; grass-fed steak and free-range eggs; duck fat-fried, Yukon gold tater-tot poutine with mushroom gravy. The more adjectives on the menu, the more customers clamouring at the door.

Inside all these places look the same: scuffed wood floors, exposed brick, antique junk strategically placed in every corner, antlers hanging over the bar. A carefully contrived, heavily textured, down-home vibe.

People file in and out of these brunch joints, scowling waitstaff fling menus to the new arrivals as they pocket tips from those on their way out. Tables turn constantly. It’s a drive-thru approach to comfort food.

New York might be yearning for the comfort of grandma’s old family recipes — prepared by hand from memory in a cosy kitchen as autumn leaves curl and crisp on the branches outside — but the city is just as frantic, just as entrepreneurial, just as cannibalistic as ever. Comfort food makes a handy symbol of nostalgia, of dissatisfaction with all the broken promises of metropolitan life; the new wave of cold comfort food, however, is also a sign that really New York wouldn’t have things any other way.

On a cold Friday night I press the buzzer at the door of an immense old warehouse in a forgotten corner of Brooklyn. The front of the building is covered in scaffolding and boards; torn fliers cling to the metal. The streets are deserted. I’ve got a sleeping bag under one arm, a sixpack of Tecate under the other, and I’m hoping this all isn’t completely futile.

The door buzzes open and I climb up to the fifth floor, passing heavy iron doors and windows covered in thick, dust-encrusted grates. A few stencilled animal silhouettes lurk in the corners of the stairwell. Thomas is waiting for me on the fifth floor; this is his studio. Tonight we’re going to be camping on his rooftop.

Throughout the summer Thomas has been inviting people to share his rooftop campground with him. It’s his latest artistic project; he has five tents, each able to sleep two people comfortably, as well as a much larger common tent. These are not lightweight, snap-together tents; he has designed and built them himself out of rough timber and treated canvas, modelling them on lean-tos. Layers of carpet padding protect against the cold of the concrete roof. Despite being surrounded by vents, bricks, and cables, the whole campsite has a rustic, rough-around-the-edges feel to it.

Over the last few months many people have shared the common tent, cooking on its gas burners or playing cards on its long table of lashed-together beams. On this particular chilly Friday, though, it’s just Thomas and I at the table, knocking back Tecates.

I’d half-expected to find Thomas wearing flannel and skinny jeans, hiking boots and crampons — an Urban Outfitters lumberjack. When I’d heard about his project, I’d imagined a bunch of strategically scruffy folk taking congratulatory photos of each other with their brilliantly contrived new juxtaposition: a wilderness scene — tents and sleeping bags — arranged in the shadows of spent smokestacks. I’d arrived prepared to ask a few questions and then make some excuse to leave. Thomas is, however, wearing a plain black pullover and matching knit cap. He speaks earnestly and openly, happy to field my questions, explaining that this project was born out of a desire to get to know new people.

Thomas is fascinated by the transcendence of the wilderness. He’s done other projects in places like Joshua Tree National Park; projects that involve stepping out of daily routines and getting back to nature. This time he’s taking an overlooked urban space and investing it with a little more meaning. His goal is re-create the atmosphere within the campsite; a place where everyone pitches in, where you do whatever needs doing, not whatever you feel like doing. It is a place for slowing down and appreciating company. I shelve the escape plan and decide to spend a night on the rooftop.

Overhead I spy a pair of antlers fixed to the common tent.

We take down the Tecates and when I start stifling yawns Thomas laughs. His guests are always surprised, he says, by how quickly they fall into the natural rhythms of the campsite, early to bed and early to rise.

It’s only about 10 o’clock when we eventually retire to our tents. Sickly light emanates from the buildings around us; the silhouettes of old chimneys stand out stark against the charcoal sky. I crawl into my tent and tie the canvas door closed, shutting out the wind and the murmur of distant traffic.

The wind rises and slaps against the tent in the night. It whips through the seams and under the edges of the canvas and chills any exposed skin. I’m fully awake before the sun has risen. The air outside of the tent is even colder; the sky and all of the smokestacks and warehouses and even the toxic sludge of Newton Creek are a hazy blue in the morning light. Beyond the dark shapes of the city a warm glow precedes the rising sun.

I’m cold and tired and hungry and pretty desperate to get off of this roof, but force myself to linger a moment. As forlorn as the city looks at this hour, in the camaraderie of the night before and in the loneliness of the morning there is some vague glimmer of the transcendence of the wilds, brought within the city limits.

In my own kitchen in a Brooklyn loft I’m initiated into the arcane lore of traditional American cooking. Under the tutelage of my housemates — one from the Northeast and one from the South — I’m learning the secrets of dairy-heavy comfort foods. While I’m discovering the staples, one of my housemates (the one who visits but doesn’t work at Jimmy’s) is teaching herself to home-make everything. She kneads her own bread, curdles her own cheese, grows her own sprouts and chilies, pickles her own carrots, infuses her own olive oils, whips her own mayonnaise. She bakes pies and crumbles, and as it gets colder she bakes everything else too. A stock bag of cheese rinds, eggshells, and various vegetable offcuts swells in the freezer, ready to be made into soup. She has fermented her own cider and tried her hand at kombucha. One day she is thrilled to bring home a tin of steel-cut oats, which are a pain in the ass to cook up, but a delight to say, the syllables tripping over the tongue, full of texture. There is talk of her doing a jam-making apprenticeship.

One night, after a round of pizza-making — the table streaked with flour, smears of wine in the bottom of our glasses — my housemate the baking virtuoso presses me, as she always does, for my outsider’s perspective on weird American habits. As she does so, she casually breaks up a block of dark chocolate and dips a chunk into a jar of peanut butter. I tell her I’m having a weird American food moment right now; homemade pizza topped with homemade cheese for dinner, and a pot of peanut butter for dessert. She and the guests can’t believe that I never peanut-buttered my chocolate as a child. I really doubt that many American children were regularly given a jar of peanut butter, a block of bitter, organic chocolate, and carte blanche to do as they would with these. This is the luxury of this nostalgia; the childhood you’re yearning for doesn’t have to be your own.

We get to talking about my housemate’s mania for the homemade. The cheese hasn’t turned out quite the way she wanted, but the guests are still in love with the whole idea of producing your own food. We compare notes on the artisanal bread, cheese, pickle, and pretzel stalls at the Union Square Greenmarket. I mention a volunteer-run rooftop farm that I’ve just visited. My housemate mentions a guy who leads foraging tours through the public parks of the city.

Ever eager to play the Australian card, I suggest that to me this is another weird American habit. Surely guided foraging in Prospect Park is a poor parody of foraging in real forests. Why, I ask, are people so determined to replicate the country within the city? It seems like they’d have a far more worthwhile experience by actually getting out into the country.

My housemate is grinning; she’s heard all this before. One of the guests isn’t so comfortable with my analysis of her lifestyle, though. “I’m just doing what my parents did in the ’60s,” she interjects. I wait a moment, to see if some ironic smirk will ripple across her face. It does not appear. She is, apparently, quite serious about this. I can’t help but wonder when it became cool for liberal arts students to do exactly what their parents did, and I can’t see how much of what is happening in our kitchen is really invoking the spirit of those times. Her nostalgia, like much of the yearning going on in New York, is highly selective. It is a yearning that demands nothing, and that extends only to that which is easy to appropriate into the city. Instead of going back to nature, people are bringing nature — or some stylised version of nature — to them. Instead of checking out of square American society, they’re getting in touch with its roots.

The problem with selectively appropriating the past — or the countryside, or small-town American, or the wild places — is that the urbanised, cannibalised version ends up looking nothing like the original. By the time it is made self-aware and chic and edgy, there is nothing authentic left. The rebellion of the ’60s becomes lip service to following in your parents’ footsteps. A log cabin in the forest becomes a pair of antlers hung over a masturbatory Brooklyn bar. Mac and cheese just like grandma used to make becomes wholegrain mac and gourmet gruyere.

There were barrels of pickles at the Chili Pepper Fiesta. There were jars of carrots pickling in our fridge. There were pickle chips on the menu at Jimmy’s Diner and there were pickle brine chasers served with whisky in the bars full of taxidermy and tattooed forearms.

Growing up in Australia, pickles were those things you picked off your cheeseburgers. I had no idea they could be so adored, and I’d definitely never countenanced the idea of organic green beans pickled in orange and jalapeño brine.

All of New York’s major pickle players turn out for the Peck Slip Pickle Fest at the New Amsterdam Market. Every conceivable form of pickle is represented: traditional kosher dills, Texan chili pickles, kimchi mixes you can smell before you can see, sombre sauerkrauts, watermelon radish pickled in Japanese rice wine.

Many of the picklers are from somewhere else. Whether it is a distant flyover state or down the road in Connecticut, they’d originally come to New York for distinctly non-culinary reasons, but they’ve always been closet picklers. One guy from Chicago, sporting a trim beard and rakish faux-combover, speaks of a long history of putting up jars of pickles for the winter and of gifting the fancier mixes to friends; until recently pickles had been a part of his family lore, but now they are becoming big business. Another guy, wearing a trilby and thick glasses, and with tattoos showing beneath his pinned-up sleeves, confidently declares that he’s found “the kimchi of 2015” – Thai pickle salad flavoured with mustard, sesame, and pomegranate seeds. I wonder if his business plan extends to 2016.

None of them saw New York’s pickle obsession coming. None of them can figure out what is behind it. The Chicagoan guy has never heard of anything like this back home. Nor is he sure how long it will last, but he intends to ride the briney wave as far as it will take him. His operation now involves a team of people (all friends and family) and has moved out of his kitchen. From part-time pickler he’s become an entrepreneur; out of a family tradition he’s built a business.

Others are less cautious. A dapper, plaid-clad Brooklynite, his beanie pushed back on his head, speaks of going big with his pickle operation. They are moving out of the basement and into a huge old loft where they can fit extra staff and a much bigger operation. I know lofts are cool and all, but a whole converted warehouse full of pickles seems like a little too much of a good thing. He, however, plans to take over America.

I have reached my pickle limit. It’s one of the big, old-school kosher dills on a stick that pushes me over my threshold. I thread my way through the crowds, take refuge on the fringes of the market where the non-pickle stalls are set up. A girl in a thick woollen shawl offers me samples of local honey; every time she reaches across the stall her shawl drapes precariously close to the sticky pots arranged around her. From honey I move on to artisanal peanut butter and sourdough.

It looks like others are seeking reprieve from all the pickles too. The cluster of people by the grilled cheese truck is growing; the microbrew and cider stalls are being mobbed. As the crowds start to thin, I realise just how few of the products on display actually resemble traditional pickles. Safe to say that two generations ago few American families were putting up jars of beet caviar with horseradish for the winter. It may be that New York’s interest in actual pickles is already flagging, and that it has now moved on to exotic pickled things.

While the vendors work hard to promote their latest unlikely concoctions, they seem oblivious to the fact that it takes just one afternoon to sample and love everything, and then to feel all pickled out.

When I tell people that I’m going to Idaho they look confused. One or two inform me that I’m actually going to Iowa. A few tell me that they’ve heard it’s beautiful “out there.” When I add that I’ll be doing Thanksgiving with my girlfriend’s family there, people first express understanding; most of them are from flyover states and have to suffer the ritual holiday humiliation of returning home too. Then they become a bit confused; why am I opting into such an experience? They’ve come to New York to escape flyover life; why am I seeking it out?

I get weird looks from the moment I arrive in Idaho, too. My wardrobe has slowly been acquiring its own layers of texture; the kind of flannel and denim and canvas that is unassuming in New York but utterly garish in northern Idaho. The local wild men — the guys who spend weekends gathering their own firewood and catching their own food — all wear Gore-Tex North Face jackets because, obviously, they’re lighter, warmer, and more waterproof. My boots are far too clean for real Idaho boots. I realise that for all the carefully scuffed, folded-down boots on the streets of Brooklyn, I’ve never actually seen a pair of muddy boots.

Thanksgiving dinner takes place on my first day in Idaho, in a house that looks over an endless yellow field to distant mountains covered in stubbly pine forest. An immense elk head hangs over the staircase; the complete body, I am told, weighed about 600 pounds. Antiques and heirlooms are carefully arranged in the living room. One coffeetable is actually a dark leather trunk positioned atop a beautiful old sled. It’s an arrangement that would make any serious Brooklyn vintage shopper break down and weep tears of nostalgic appreciation. Every piece has a story behind it; none of it is bought, all of it inherited.

As potatoes and pies bake around us in the kitchen, I find myself in conversation with a Christian minister with an easy smile and a good tan for this time of year. He and his sons have just completed a great hunting season. Two deer carcasses are hanging out to dry beneath the house; they’ve just been cleaned and gutted and had the heads sawn off. The eldest son shot a bear earlier in the season; its flesh is already in the deep freeze, and will be eaten during the winter. Its skull has been boiled clean and sits on the mantle.

I wonder how long it will take for some of these trophies to make their way across the country, to lose the story of the hunt — the preparation and the wait and the shot and the quartering and the dragging of the carcass in pieces back to the truck — and to end up as history-less curios hanging over a bar in Brooklyn.

The minister is a charming conversationalist, but we chat cautiously. He’s a Christian minister, a hunter and supporter of the Tea Party. I’ve been a vegetarian for about 15 years and have been dabbling with Occupy Wall Street.

Although he’s curious to hear about New York and Australia, we bond most easily over food. The kitchen is filled with his wife’s homemade jams, preserves, and maple pear apple butter; most of the fruit comes from neighbours’ trees. He uncorks bottles of apple and pear wine, brewed in his basement in batches of 100 bottles each year; enough to be gifted and sipped away over the following year until the next batch will be ready.

He is a self-taught vintner; from a few tentative experiments he’s now got the process down to an art. The wine we’re drinking has rested for over a year and tastes amazing.

When it’s time to carve, an immense turkey is hefted from the oven. It’s so heavy the minister can’t flip it over alone; he needs to enlist the help of his burly eldest son. The son heaves the bird about and smiles an immense smile as he points out that no organic turkey ever looked this good; nothing but hormones and steroids could get this kind of effect. I know he’s joking, but I can’t tell how much he’s joking.

Thanksgiving passes in a haze of heavy foods, and much debate about the best way to candy yams or prepare gravy. I siesta in a room decorated with animal skulls, knives, and a hunting bow.

Once the holiday has passed, I am eager to explore the area. The landscape is a bizarre mixture of cornfields, pumpkin patches, rust-red barns, creaking windmills, drive-thru coffee joints, endless parking lots, and strip malls. Every radio station but one plays some variation on country music.

There’s a Jimmy’s in Idaho too, in Coeur d’Alene, just back from the lake fringed by dark mountains. Like the Jimmy’s in Brooklyn, this place is at its busiest during the Sunday brunching hour, but whereas no one bats an eyelid when I saunter into Jimmy’s in Brooklyn, when I walk into Jimmy’s in Coeur d’Alene heads turn and necks crane to see the awkward, impractically dressed visitor.

Here, no one would dream of waiting outside in the cold for a table to free up; patrons come inside, greet the owner behind the till, and hug the waitresses. These waitresses are quite unlike the stylised, waifish mountain maids of Brooklyn. They are platinum blonde, with eyebrows severely plucked; they wear football jerseys and talk with a boisterous twang. They chat up the newcomers. When you don’t know their names, they pretend to stab you with a bread knife.

The menus of Jimmy’s in Brooklyn and Jimmy’s in Coeur d’Alene are very similar. Both offer biscuits and gravy, multi-egg omelettes, meat and cheese-laden breakfast sandwiches and burritos. In Brooklyn, though, patrons tend to order one of these, whereas in Coeur d’Alene any one dish would come with side orders of the others.

The famed pecan rolls — each one some 108 freshly baked cubic inches of butter and glaze — are an almost mandatory side dish. The tables in Coeur d’Alene are accordingly massive; sitting down, I feel like I have to shout to make myself heard on the other side of the table. People at the other tables take their time, smother everything in ketchup, stop to greet people as they arrive, have their coffees refilled and refilled, ask to have their mountains of leftovers wrapped up. I make the dreadful mistake, based on New York portions, of trying to eat everything on the many plates before me.

New York probably isn’t quite ready for Idaho. It likes its hair to be tangled and uncoloured, its boots to be clean, its meals to come in a single serving, its meat to be organic, and its antlers to come without the bloody carcass. While it’s embracing aspects of country America, it’s being pretty selective about what it welcomes in and what it prefers to leave on the farm or fairground. Sunday morning is for brunch, not church, and wilderness is for romanticising, not for exploring.

In some respects, though, New York is more hillbilly than the flyover states these days; there are more flannels and banjos in one Brooklyn subway station than in most of Idaho. If New York can learn to dress like the lumberjacks of yore, maybe it can also learn to enjoy its American heritage for what it is, rather than what it can be turned into. Maybe it can learn to bake comfort food that is actually comforting. Maybe it can even learn to slow down, to remember, to lose itself in the wilds, in search of transcendence.