For The Bitter Southerner, writer Wendell Brock pored over notebooks and photo archives to create this deeply ruminative and compelling portrait of Paul Kwilecki, a self-taught artist who spent his entire creative life—four decades—documenting the people and places of Decatur County, Georgia.
“But with photography — and his eye for the beautiful and the poignant — he could express feelings that might be impossible to put into words. The process was a way of looking inside his heart, and out onto the world, in an instant.”
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What happens when a prominent Dallas attorney gets ticked off about thousands of his fellow citizens being thrown out of their homes in violation of the law? Courtroom fireworks, for starters. An exquisite, seething profile from J.K. Nickell:
More than 37,000 evictions were filed in Dallas County in 2023, disrupting roughly 8 percent of renter households. That tally doesn’t include untold numbers of unofficial evictions, in which landlords oust renters from their homes without going through the courts. Melton has seen cases in which property owners have smashed a tenant’s electrical box with a sledgehammer, removed a home’s front door with a circular saw, and placed a two-by-four full of nails across a renter’s driveway to pop the tires of the family car. He’s taken a middle-of-the-night call from a twenty-year-old single mother whose landlord had employed gang members to pound on her doors and windows, trying to intimidate her into moving out.
A few years ago, he got word that a complex in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Cedar Crest was trying to evict more than seventy residents. When he showed up at the Volara apartments, multiple residents told him about long-running problems with their gas—they were unable to use their stoves or take hot showers. Melton stormed into the management office and threatened litigation. Days later, he got a call from a whistleblower, a former manager at Volara who made a startling claim about what was allegedly going on: a new owner had ordered employees to do anything necessary to rid the complex of Black residents and replace them with “better tenants.” Melton recorded the call, and he said he later played it in a courtroom, successfully abating the rash of evictions that had been filed. (The city attorney’s office subsequently investigated Volara, which has made significant improvements.)
Melton is quick to note that plenty of landlords in Dallas scrupulously maintain their properties and are patient with tenants who are struggling financially. And certainly some tenants unfairly try to game the system. But, Melton says, “there are a lot of slumlords, and the only message that they are able to understand is a smack in a courtroom.” That single mother suffering without AC at the Rosemont, Melton said, “is a perfect example of the average tenant we deal with, just getting f—ed three ways from Sunday, and with no recourse. Nothing she can do about it. She’s almost breaking down in tears just recounting it.”
When the Rosemont residents’ requests for working AC went unheeded, they appealed to the city. Kevin Oden, the head of Dallas’s Office of Integrated Public Safety Solutions, a crime-prevention unit that operates independently of the police department, deployed a team to investigate. (The complex has “needed good, solid ownership for thirty years,” he said.) That’s when a scrum of code officers descended on the property, a clipboard-carrying battalion in khakis and navy polos. They split up and went door to door, discovering that roughly forty units didn’t have functioning ACs, many more than had been reported. (Tenants are often reluctant to report issues because they fear retaliation from their landlord.) The code officers ticketed the complex for every unit without cool air, and they planned to return in three days to see if the problem had been resolved. “I can’t compel them to do anything today,” a city official lamented.
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Artificial intelligence promises a new dawn of innovation and liberation. Or oblivion. Or simply another profitable hype cycle. It depends on who you ask.
For many, AI helps fuel a faith that technology will deliver us from ecological disaster, even as that disaster takes hold. This techno-optimism is often framed as the foe of the “ecological turn”—a constellation of beliefs that instead see salvation in living more ecologically, as a part of nature.
As usual, this is a false dichotomy: if AI enables interspecies communication, it could actually help facilitate an ecological turn. As an environmental journalist, I’m fascinated by the social and cultural impacts of this possibility.
From King Solomon’s supposed ability to speak with animals to indigenous peoples’ widespread cooperation with other species, the pieces below show communicating with animals to be an ancient human concern. But now, converging scientific and technological advances present remarkable new possibilities. From the mycelial “wood wide web” to smart slime molds and political honeybees, science is demonstrating that humans don’t monopolize language or intelligence. And cutting-edge AI, drone, and sensor technologies are allowing us to interpret non-human communication like never before.
These possibilities contain profound implications for conservation, law, politics, and culture. Non-human communication is already being integrated into environmental management and governance—as Karen Bakker’s pieces below explore. The Rights of Nature movement is securing ambitious legal rights for non-human organisms, like Ecuador’s Los Cedros forest. Scientists, technologists, conservationists, and philosophers are exploring interspecies democracy with renewed vigor. And discussions about what this all means ethically and culturally are gathering pace.
The effects of interspecies communication will depend on how we interpret, translate, and “speak” with other organisms—processes that raise enormous questions. Can technology translate multisensory languages? What is language? Is true interspecies understanding even possible? What are the potential applications, good and bad, of even partial success? Why are we doing this? The pieces below offer a cross-section of the emerging perspectives on these questions.
This New Yorker essay by Elizabeth Kolbert offers another good introduction, in the form of a deep dive into Project CETI: “the most ambitious, the most technologically sophisticated, and the most well-funded effort ever made to communicate with another species.”
This interactive report provides an excellent introduction to the topic, from key technologies and ethical questions to headline projects and possible applications. The Financial Times produces some of the best visual storytelling in journalism, and here audio and graphics bring infrasonic elephant rumbles and synthetic chiffchaff calls to life, conveying technical concepts like spectrograms and embedding spaces. Fascinating details—like lemurs and dolphins getting high—also surface throughout.
The piece clarifies the multi-sensory nature of non-human communication and the resulting challenges. Even if AI can interpret these forms of communication, how might it translate into something human-perceptible? The authors quote Aza Raskin, founder of the Earth Species Project, a non-profit using AI to decode non-human communication:
Maybe the translation ends up not looking like a Dr Dolittle or Google translator where you get specific words, but maybe it ends up as flashes of colour and some sound, and you get a sort of a felt sense of what maybe they mean.
The writing also powerfully demonstrates the potentially seismic consequences of using AI to speak to animals. Cetaceans have transmitted oral culture for around 34 million years, over 10 times longer than humans. Given humpback whales can disseminate a song across the planet within a couple of seasons, attempting to speak to a whale, says Raskin, “may create . . . a viral meme that infects a 34mn-year-old culture, which we probably shouldn’t do.” Shane Gero, the lead biologist at Project CETI, which is working to translate sperm whale communication, agrees:
The last thing any of us want to do is be in a scenario where we look back and say, like Einstein did, ‘If I had known better I would have never helped with the bomb.’
One of the most fraught philosophical and ethical questions involved in interspecies communication is whether humans can ever be sure of correctly understanding another species. This fine piece by Philip Ball explores the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to certain translations, but also the profound value in trying and failing.
Language is an enabler of, and a constraint on, what we can say and even think. Diverse biologies and environments equip organisms with radically different sensory worlds (the scientific term is “umwelten”). Bees see in ultraviolet, for example, and bats hear in ultrasonic. Can unfamiliar umwelten ever be comprehensible to humans? Though AI may help interpret non-human language in meaningful ways, there seems an almost unavoidable risk of projecting anthropocentric ideas and prejudices during translation—of “overinterpreting what we see,” in Ball’s words. He cites the Swadesh list, which contains 215 supposedly universal concepts across languages. Many of its words, he notes, would have no “dolphish” equivalent.
Nevertheless, the most stirring part of Ball’s essay is his eloquent articulation of why it’s still worth trying. Mystery, he writes, is a possible antidote to human hubris:
It may be that the most interesting, revealing part of dolphish is precisely the part that lies outside our own lexicon—which is to say, outside our own minds. If, in fact, we find ourselves unable to fully reconstruct another creature’s mental world, it may be enough just to acknowledge the reality of what we can’t articulate.
In other ways, even basic communication may be of value. Some of our mistreatment of other species is obviously callous and selfish, as in factory farming, but some of it arises from a communications breakdown.
Moreover, Ball writes, “Even the attempt at translation suggests a deepening of respect for [non-humans]—and a willingness to free ourselves from our human preconceptions and prejudices.” Failure could well bring a different form of success: deepening interspecies respect.
This other Noema piece by Bakker makes an excellent companion. It charts the confluence of technologies, including AI-powered whale interpretation, being incorporated into shipping logistics and other marine-governance initiatives.
The late Karen Bakker was one of the world’s leading thinkers on interspecies communication. This essay, on the dazzling linguistic capabilities of honeybees, is one of the essential Noema pieces she wrote on the larger topic.
Bakker opens with an important reminder that interspecies communication long predates AI. She tells the story of pioneering ethologist and zoologist Karl von Frisch, whose work illuminating non-human language won him a 1973 Nobel Prize (and ample opprobrium). Bakker also acknowledges the many indigenous peoples that, long before von Frisch, developed vibroacoustic devices like bullhorns to communicate with bees.
Bakker then traces a string of remarkable discoveries around honeybee communication. Honeybees’ waggle dance, “still considered by many scientists to be the most complex symbolic system that humans have decoded to date in the animal world,” can relay nectar sources miles away. Vibroacoustic research has determined that honeybees can distinguish and recall complex information, and learn and teach skills through cultural transmission. Dr. Thomas Seeley’s research has combined computer vision and machine learning to make other striking discoveries:
Perhaps Seeley’s most startling finding was that, in choosing a new home, honeybees exhibit sophisticated forms of democratic decision-making, including collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, consensus building, quorum and a complex stop signal enabling cross-inhibition, which prevents an impasse being reached. A bee swarm, in other words, is a remarkably effective democratic decision-making body in motion, which bears resemblance to some processes in the human brain and human society.
This research lineage culminated in RoboBee: a robotic bee able to communicate with bees through programmed waggle dancing. “A statistically significant number of bees would follow the RoboBee’s dance and then fly to the specific location that [researcher Tim] Landgraf had coded into his honeybee robots,” reports Bakker. “He had created, in essence, a bio-digital equivalent to Google Translate for bees.”
Bakker’s work engages thoughtfully with potential applications of even rudimentary interspecies communication. Here, she considers how RoboBee might enable smart hives that help bees avoid threats and locate food sources. She also outlines the wider bio-sensing possibilities in decoding waggle dances:
When gathering nectar, bees continuously sample from the environment, so who better to act as a sentinel for environmental risk? Bees and other insects have been successfully trained to detect a range of chemicals and pollutants. Decoding a large number of dances from a specific area could help evaluate landscapes for sustainability and conservation. It could also make pollination more efficient and provide insights into how to ward off the widespread, alarming phenomenon of colony collapse disorder. Bees could also be recruited as live bioindicators: surveying, monitoring and reporting the landscape in a fine-grained, inexpensive way that would be impossible for humans to achieve alone.
But there is a violent shadow to this possible light. The United States military has already started testing bee bio-detectors—what military scientists dub “six-legged soldiers”—for security objectives. This requires “genetic and mechanical manipulation of the bees’ nervous systems, migration patterns, and social relationships,” Bakker writes. She goes on:
To witness biohybrid bees engaging in reciprocal (if rudimentary) interspecies communication gives me a numinous sense of awe. To witness bees being converted into disposable, militarized sensing devices gives me a sense of dread. These two choices are emblematic of humanity’s relationship with nature. Will we choose dominion or kinship?
The notion of idly chatting with a sperm whale elicits sci-fi awe. But what if interspecies communication facilitated joint governance?
Notwithstanding the oppressed worldviews of many animistic indigenous cultures, a steadfast belief in human exceptionalism has long hindered any meaningful consideration of interspecies democracy. But Donaldson and Kymlicka, two thinkers at the forefront of the field, say this is changing:
A century of orthodoxy that viewed animals—from horses to hyenas, from crows to cuckoos—as tightly scripted and instinctive creatures is being overturned. It turns out that many animals are genuinely social and cultural beings—reasoning, norm-complying, and behaviorally flexible individuals who come to be who they are within a particular social and cultural group whose practices are passed down through social learning, not (or not just) instinct.
Science has now shown many animals can learn how “we do things around here,” reinterpret songs and skills, and form political systems that involve voting, deliberating, splitting, and regrouping. Instinct and hierarchy play only a partial role—much like with humans, who are not, it turns out, Earth’s only “zoon politikon.”
Melanie Challenger is a writer and ethicist at the vanguard of interspecies democracy. This poetic Emergence Magazine essay (also a podcast) interweaves personal experience and emergent frameworks.
Donaldson and Kymlicka sketch two dominant strands of thought within interspecies political theory: a conception of non-human organisms as political agents to be represented by humans; and the view that “wild animals should be viewed as self-determining political communities or ‘nations,’ with rights of self-government, territorial sovereignty, or grounded jurisdiction, and that relations between humans and wild animals should be seen on the model of international diplomacy.”
The missing piece, which technologically enabled governance models are starting to explore, is collaboration:
Neither offers a vision of politics as something humans and animals do together. The first insists humans should take animals’ interests into account while continuing to exercise sovereignty over their lives; the second insists animals have the right to exercise their own forms of collective political agency. But neither offers an account of how humans and animals can exercise political agency together as part of shared political communities, how they can be mutually responsive and accountable and coauthor social norms and ideas of the public good.
This last piece zooms out, lest we lose the forest for the trees. James Bridle is an insightful thinker on AI and intelligence. This conversation with Emergence Magazine (also available as a podcast) exhibits his irreverent, thought-provoking perspective on political and philosophical questions around interspecies communication.
For Bridle’s similarly critical assessment of generative AI beyond the context of interspecies communication, this Guardian essay is also excellent.
Bridle begins with a critique of humans’ anthropocentric understanding of intelligence as simply “what humans do.” He argues that although AI should alert us to the possibility of diverse intelligence, we persist in programming and assessing AI along human-centric lines. He instead calls for a multiplicity of embodied, relational, and analog forms of intelligence:
When you try and put everything into ones and zeros, something is lost. What happens in between those ones and zeros is lost, and the result of that is a deep violence, because what is lost is either erased or violently suppressed; because then you’ve started to act in the world according to the model that the computer provides. And you try to make the world more like the model.
Bridle champions listening over knowing and curiosity over control as prerequisites for interspecies kinship:
Once you are prepared to pay attention to [non-human organisms]—and that’s really, really key—once you are prepared to admit the possibility of their intelligence, it becomes almost instantly undeniable. And so the project, really, then is to integrate that awareness into our lives.
Building on the hope he sees in the unfolding ecological turn, Bridle finishes with a powerful vision of a more just technological culture, guided by decentralization, non-binary thinking, and unknowing:
Inter-species solidarity is fundamental to new politics. And it doesn’t require knowing. And by ‘politics,’ more broadly, I mean the ability to think and make decisions together, hopefully for our common benefit. And the politics that best fits that, for me, is this idea of solidarity, which simply starts from the position that you—unknowable you; unknowably, incredibly different you, who I cannot imagine—I still care for you and value you and think you are as important, and I will stand with you. That, for me, is the heart of solidarity. It’s a simple acknowledgment of the value of all forms of life and of our common, shared goals that have to lie at the heart of any movement towards a more just and equal world.
Sam Firman is a freelance writer and editor based in Vancouver, Canada. He writes a newsletter about how we relate to our environments, and how this might help build better systems.
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Nearly every day, a child unintentionally fires a gun and injures or kills someone, often themselves. It’s one of the most preventable forms of gun violence—but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to solve. Suzy Khimm tells the story of Skye McBride, a toddler who shot herself in the head when she found a gun at her father’s home. Her father has since been charged with a crime under a Michigan law pertaining to safe gun storage:
This clearly wasn’t a drive-by shooting, police concluded. But it did fit another pattern, one that unfolds too often across America: curious young children picking up guns and unintentionally firing them, often with catastrophic consequences.
Investigators found that Tolbert had left the loaded revolver on his bed, police told her relatives the next day. While her father was in another room, they said, Skye had grabbed the revolver, held it with the barrel pointing toward her face, and pulled the trigger.
As Skye lay unconscious in a hospital bed in the days that followed—with doctors telling her family that even if she survived, she might never speak or walk again—local officials prepared to make a major announcement.
The day before Skye shot herself, Michigan’s new firearms storage law went into effect. The measure made it a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison if a gun is left unsecured and a child finds it and injures or kills someone. Skye’s father would be the first person charged under the law.
“I did not ever dream that within days of the law going into effect, we would need it,” state Sen. Kristen McDonald Rivet, a Democrat who sponsored the bill, said at the news conference announcing the charges, six days after the shooting. “But here we are.”
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For Eater, Jaya Saxena interviews Estelle Lamotte, Sodexo’s director of the Olympic Village, and senior executive chef Jeff Leidy to learn how they’ll meet individual food requirements for 15,000 athletes who must fuel medal-winning performances at the Paris olympics. Anyone have three million bananas to spare?
I’m curious how you went about sourcing the sheer quantity of ingredients that you have for the Olympics, while still ensuring that the quality is good enough, that this is sustainable, and that this is going to be flavorful, good food for everybody eating it.
EL: The meat will be 100 percent French, mostly vegetables from France, and the rest will be European. We are fortunate enough that we are physically able to get the resources from nearby. There are a couple of exceptions, but that’s because of the volume and the quantity and the range of products we have. And it’s great that the producers have played a part as well. Since last year, we could give them the information of what was needed to be planted and harvested according to our needs, and they’ve adapted. Eggs will be one of the massive products that will be consumed during the games. For the purchasing team, and procurement, it’s been a fantastic journey to really start from the beginning of the chain and work alongside producers.
There are a few products we need to source internationally: coffee, chocolate, bananas. Bananas are an athlete’s favorite thing. We anticipate getting two or three million bananas. At peak time there will be 15,000 people living in one place. So that means per day, at peak time, we’re going to go up to 40,000 meals. At the end of the entire journey, it’s over 1.2 million meals. I was working on quantifying the volume of coffee, how to produce it. And then someone said, “Can we get the coffee grinds back to us to use as a fertilizer?” So what’s the volume of grinds we’ll produce? I’’s 20 tons of coffee, so that means it’ll be 40 tons of coffee residue. But all of this is going to be used to grow mushrooms.
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Science has come a long way in uncovering some of the mysteries of Earth. But we don’t know where and how life emerged on the planet. “For more than two centuries,” writes Ferris Jabr, “Western science has regarded the origin of life as something that happened on or in Earth, as if the planet were simply the setting for a singular phenomenon, the manger that housed a miracle.” This thought-provoking read explores the idea that the living creatures on Earth—humans, animals, plants, microorganisms—aren’t just products of evolutionary processes over millions of years, but rather participants in their own evolution. In other words, we are Earth. Jabr recounts his descent deep into the Earth’s crust, witnessing the very hot, very active interior of the planet—a subterranean environment teeming with ancient intraterrestrial microbes that may well have helped form the continents and laid the foundations for terrestrial life.
The history of life on Earth is the history of life’s remaking Earth. Nearly two and a half billion years ago, photosynthetic ocean microbes called cyanobacteria permanently altered the planet, suffusing the atmosphere with oxygen, imbuing the sky with its familiar blue hue and initiating the formation of the ozone layer, which protected new waves of life from harmful exposure to ultraviolet radiation. Today plants and other photosynthetic organisms appear to help maintain a level of atmospheric oxygen high enough to support complex life but not so high that Earth would erupt in flames at the slightest spark. Marine plankton drive chemical cycles on which all other life depends and emit gases that increase cloud cover, modifying global climate. Kelp forests, coral reefs and shellfish store huge amounts of carbon, buffer ocean acidity, improve water quality and defend shorelines from severe weather. Animals as diverse as elephants, prairie dogs and termites continually reconstruct the planet’s crust, facilitating the flow of water, air and nutrients and improving the prospects of millions of species. And micro-organisms, like those I observed deep within Earth’s crust, are now thought to be important players in many geological processes.
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This is an excerpt from issue no. 152, “The Extra Mile.”
One hundred and twenty runners stood in a clearing overlooking the Mississippi River, listening as a man with a curly gray beard needled them. He checked his watch; an unlit cigarette dangled from his fingers. “Thirty seconds,” he announced to the crowd. “You’re running out of time to change your mind.”
Over the next ten days, these ultramarathoners hoped to cover 314 miles on foot. From the clearing in southeastern Missouri, they’d board a ferry to cross the river, disembark in Kentucky, traverse a narrow corner of the state, then cross Tennessee to finish at the Rock, a cliff on a ranch in northern Georgia. “Remember, the earliest quit was at the Tennessee state line,” the man with the beard said. Someone in the crowd yelled out, “I can beat that.” Everyone laughed. Tennessee’s border with Kentucky was less than ten miles away.
Other than the ferry ride, the participants would have to run or walk every inch of the course. Most wore a hat to protect their face from the July sun and carried a small backpack with water and other essentials. Some stood with a crew, people who would supply them with necessities along the course. Runners without crews were called “screwed” runners. Among them were the Barcelonas.
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Todd and Allison Barcelona, 57 and 55, respectively, had completed 20 ultramarathons together. Allison stood with her hands clasped in front of her polka-dot running skirt. Todd’s nerves had kept him awake for most of the previous night, and he felt a little sick to his stomach. But evidence of his grit and the battles he’d already waged in his life was etched into his skin: a jagged-edged divot in his lower left shin.
“Five seconds,” the bearded man warned. A dark wall of clouds encroached on the pale peach sunrise behind him.
At 7:30 a.m. exactly, the man transferred his cigarette to his mouth and lit it, cupping his left hand around the flame to shield it from the wind. He tilted his head back and exhaled a puff of smoke.
“You’re off!” he announced.
Whooping, the throng surged forward. The 2023 Last Annual Volunteer State Road Race was under way.
The beginning of Todd and Allison’s story is the stuff of a sweet country song. They attended the same elementary and high schools in Memphis, where Allison was a year behind Todd. When their friendship turned romantic, Todd asked Allison if she would go with him. Allison asked him where he wanted to go. He still teases her about that.
When they were dating, they mainly stayed home, preferring to save money for their future. Allison’s parents joked that they were “16 going on 30.” Allison finished school a year early to be with Todd; they graduated together in 1984. Three years later they were married—Allison was 19 and Todd was 21.
The Barcelonas welcomed a daughter in 1988, another about a year later, and a son in 1991. After they moved to Atoka, a small community about 40 miles north of Memphis, Allison gave birth to their youngest child, Ashleigh. Allison worked full-time as a paralegal, and Todd as a line mechanic at a Cadillac dealership.
In his mid-forties, Todd was diagnosed with high cholesterol. To avoid medication, he changed his lifestyle. He bought a treadmill and began running. He didn’t enjoy it at first, but it grew on him, and after a while he began jogging outdoors.
Eventually, Todd graduated to races. He enjoyed the camaraderie he felt with other runners. Each finisher medal he received was a point of pride. On August 31, 2014, Todd ran a marathon in Tupelo, Mississippi. His goal was to finish in under five hours; he did that with about ten minutes to spare. Allison ran a half-marathon at the same time.
Whether racing or training, the Barcelonas usually ran separately. Allison liked to run with friends, while Todd kept to himself. It might have stayed that way if not for what happened on September 29, 2014.
During their workdays, Todd and Allison stayed in touch. That afternoon, Allison called Todd to let him know that Ashleigh, the only Barcelona child still living at home, wasn’t going to her guitar lesson as planned. When Todd didn’t pick up, Allison assumed that he was still working. But when she looked at the clock a little while later and saw that it was almost 6:30, she got worried. Todd always called her by six.
When their friendship turned romantic, Todd asked Allison if she would go with him. Allison asked him where he wanted to go. He still teases her about that.
With Ashleigh standing next to her at the kitchen table, Allison called her husband again. A male voice she didn’t recognize answered. She still recalls how it felt hearing a stranger on her husband’s phone: “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else.”
The man asked her who she was, but she didn’t respond and repeated the question to him. The man said that he was with the Tennessee Highway Patrol and that Todd had been in an accident. He was at a hospital in downtown Memphis. Allison felt sick.
Allison hung up the phone and turned to Ashleigh. “Dad’s been in an accident,” she said. “We have to go.” Ashleigh said nothing, and mother and daughter got in the car and left.
As Allison drove, she and Ashleigh were both crying. They began pleading with God aloud. “Lord, please, please keep him here,” Allison prayed. “Please don’t let this be his time.” Later she recalled, “I told Him I couldn’t do life by myself.… We still needed Todd.”
En route to the hospital, Allison tried to take the Austin Peay Highway into Memphis, but it was closed. She didn’t know that it was because of what had happened to Todd.
fter getting off the ferry, the Barcelonas climbed a ramp to a two-lane road and strolled past a blue “Welcome to Kentucky” sign. Rounding a curve, they passed a cornfield, ears heavy on the stalks. Vol State, or LAVS, as this ultramarathon is sometimes called, winds through urban and rural communities. The course’s terrain is also varied—sometimes flat, sometimes steep.
The Barcelonas, like most of the other race participants, walked to start with, because speed isn’t the most important factor for a successful finish in Vol State. With such a sizable distance to cover, most racers gain little by bolting ahead and tiring themselves out. The key to Vol State is the ability to put one foot in front of the other, hour after hour, day after day. “Many will fail,” a website advertising the race explains. “But, for those who find the steely will and muster the sheer dogged tenacity to overcome the impossible obstacles … [it] can be a transcendental experience.”
Nonetheless, participants would need to manage their pace, because per the race’s rules, Vol State must be finished within ten days. At 7:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. every day, runners are required to check in via their phones to report mileage. A spreadsheet tracks their progress, and among the names in the document, one always stands out: Oprah. That is the moniker given to the minimum pace—15.7 miles every 12 hours—runners must maintain to stay in the race. Every morning and evening, Oprah advances up the spreadsheet, and any participant whose name falls below hers risks disqualification if they don’t hustle.
Quirks like Oprah are one of many attributable to Vol State’s founder, the man with the beard at the starting line. Even the full name of the ultra—the Last Annual Volunteer State Road Race—is an inside joke. Amused by race directors who, confident about the long-term prospects, declare an inaugural event the “first annual,” Vol State’s founder decided to dub his the last. (It’s now been run for more than forty years.) The founder once explained his choice to call the minimum pace Oprah: “She is real life. A world of celebrities and politics and ‘luxury.’ ” In other words, she represents the world the runners had left behind when they entered Vol State.
Even the founder’s name has a peculiar backstory. Born Gary Cantrell, he began using Lazarus Lake online years ago for privacy reasons. Now he’s equally well-known by his self-anointed nickname, or Laz for short. In the ultra world he’s a legend: a showman whose long, grueling races, designed with signature flair, have attracted a devoted following.
As the Barcelonas and other runners headed toward Hickman, Kentucky, the first town on the Vol State route, a boxy van approached. This was the meat wagon—another race fixture, driven by a woman named Jan. When runners fell too far behind Oprah, or if their willpower was simply crushed, they’d call Jan and wait for her to deliver them from the course. For now she drove alongside the crowd, a harbinger of what would be the runners’ greatest obstacle: the temptation to quit. Then she honked and drove on.
Chatting with two other runners, the Barcelonas entered Hickman. Todd stopped to take a photo of a black-and-white mural of Mark Twain. The author had once described Hickman as “a pretty town perched on a handsome hill.” Touches of Twain’s pretty town were still visible in the decorative brickwork and keyhole doorways of buildings along Hickman’s main drag, but few places seemed to be occupied. One structure, a popular hotel of yore, stood out with its horseshoe-shaped entryway and windows running the length of its facade. “LaClede,” the name of the shuttered hotel, was painted above the door.
Time and creativity were invested in building Hickman. Now it was a shell of its former self.
On the afternoon that changed his life, Todd was driving home from work in his sky blue 1994 GMC Sierra truck. He had purchased it used and lowered the suspension so it sat closer to the ground. It did not have airbags.
Todd approached the intersection of Austin Peay Highway and Old Brownsville Road heading north. A Shell gas station, fields of crops, and stands of trees filled his view. The light ahead turned yellow, and he continued through the intersection. A gray Honda Accord driving south made a left at the light at the same time, failing to yield the right of way. It smashed into Todd’s truck almost head-on.
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