Seen from space, Kaua’i is round as a clock. The island, second to last in the arced Hawaiian archipelago, is mountain wrinkled, vivid green. The center of this clock, perhaps the nut bracing the dials, is Mount Waialeale, which in most years is the wettest place on the planet. Big storms often hit the islands, but in April of 2018 Kaua’i experienced a rainstorm so intense it broke rainfall records and re-shaped local ideas of weather. On the second day of the storm, I got a grainy video message of what looked like a sheet, billowing, but it was rain pouring into my best friend Sari’s yard in Ha’ena, on the North Shore. It wasn’t water discernible as drops, but as a solid wall. She texted me intermittently over that weekend, saying she had never seen so much water. I asked if she was okay and she said, I don’t know. I don’t know. I imagined her house setting off in the night, a ship unmoored. In all the calls since the storm, I talk to my best friend and it feels like hollering into a tin-can phone. She feels increasingly distant. The gap between us yawns.
The world storms every day somewhere, more and more in what feels like a climate tailspin, so why write about a storm so long past? Moreover, no one needs an essay about Hawaii written by a haole from the mainland, no matter how much they love the place. I am writing from the other side of a six-year time gap, and from a distance of some twenty-seven hundred miles. That makes this an outsider story. I’m telling it because I learned about loving something that’s not yours to love. How you ought to let it alone. I was a slow learner, but ultimately, you figure out how to do it, or you’re an interloper. I’m talking about leaving people and places, both. Broken heart be damned.
Fewer than a thousand people reside permanently in Wainiha and Ha’ena, the communities at the end of Kauai’s Kuhio Highway. They are separated from Hanalei town by several single-lane bridges. Sari and her husband Steve and their fifteen-year-old son live in a house they built there, raised on stilts, across the road from a vast acreage of pasture, dotted by cows. Sari’s parents, Audrey and Ron, live on the adjacent plot. Steve moved to the island in 1992, in the wake of Hurricane Iniki to do construction work. He never left. In 2018, the year of this storm, Sari worked at Limahuli Botanical Garden, whose tiny Visitor’s Center sits a mile from the end of the road.
Kaua’i’s North Shore, famed for its green crags and frothy aqua coves, has been, especially in recent decades, overrun. Before the 2018 storm, every day, the narrow highway stretches had been swarmed by thousands of tourists in their cars. They parked willy-nilly on the roadside, maybe arrested by the sight of a waterfall, or a glimpse of blue bay. Visitors abandoned their cars, leaving them jutting in the road or parked on someone’s lawn. Sometimes they walked away from a car idling in the middle of the highway lane. Maybe they were overcome by what they saw, surprised by a waterfall, or the iconic cone of Makana Mountain. It’s perhaps understandable how they came in droves, how they were enchanted and distracted and deranged.
The American naturalist John Borroughs has a quote about how we go to nature to put our senses back in order. I am no naturalist. I am, these days, pretty indoorsy. But I think what Borroughs says is right, because Kaua’i was a harbor for me, as much as anywhere I’ve lived. And maybe other visitors felt something like this, too. I’ve tried a lot to articulate what the place means, how I arrived broken and was restored.
I met Sari on the first day of junior high in San Diego. Two years later, when we were 13, she and her family moved to Kaua’i, I tried my best to follow her. Every summer that I’d saved enough money I flew to Hawaii, and I’d stay at their place for weeks or months. Those teenage years, a long time ago, before I lived, essentially, at a desk in San Diego, we rode bikes or walked to the beach, to a windy spit where we would lay and bake and read paperbacks while our towels tried to flap free. On days when Sari wasn’t working at Pizza Hanalei, we took lunches to the end of the road and hiked to Hanakapiai falls. We trekked off the trail, into the jungle, hunting stalks of shampoo ginger. The bulb seeps tangy jelly that foams when squished. We squeezed the bulbs to make them ooze. We drained them into glass jars and brought the gel home to wash our long hair. Outside at night, bullfrogs moaned. Inside, geckos chirped loud enough to hear over the rain. We lay in adjacent beds and talked about boys and boys and boys. In the morning, roosters howled us awake. And again, and again, and the summers piled up, until we weren’t kids.
After college I wound up back in my home town, trying to decide what to do. An old friend was also back home. He had arrived from somewhere else, fresh off a bad break up, and there I was. We got together for about six months, and when he left again, I experienced the type of broken heart where you think you’re going to die. The background on this is that I had known him since we were little kids, and there might not have been a moment, once I knew him, that I didn’t love him. When we were together, I felt giddy and light. The ground beneath me shifted like a funhouse floor. He was a clever, gentle person, and a person of impermeable loneliness. He told me he couldn’t stay in town, and when he left I felt a kind of madness, a consuming craze. I was deranged by having had, briefly, what I wanted most. This is perhaps a relatable, fragile state. A rite of first love.
Alone again at home, my grief was so corrosive I thought my bones would disintegrate. I know how dramatic that sounds, but that’s what I remember. I called Sari, then I called her parents, who were like second parents to me. Audrey and Ron referred to me as their adoptive daughter, which made me feel a net of kinship, the kind of web that gathers you in when you’re coming apart. They said I could come stay. They always did.
I scraped together plane fare and flew to Lihue. Audrey was in her car, waiting curbside at the airport. After about ninety minutes, on the other side of switchback cliffs and one-way bridges, having followed a stream of tourist cars for miles, we were in Wainiha, then Ha’ena. The road smoothed into a straighter line. The Pacific tossed on the right and pastures opened on the left. Makana mountain reared into view, and soon a long row of Norfolk pines. We turned into the driveway under their skyscraper shadows. Across the street, several horses grazed in a field, penned by a patchy fence. Uncle Walter, a Hawaiian man of about fifty, sat in the bed of his truck in the middle of the meadow, smoking a cigarette. He held up a hand to wave.
During that time, I spent a lot of time crying. In bed, crying. On the toilet, crying. Lying on the beach, crying. On the phone with anyone who would answer, crying. Eventually, gently, Audrey and Ron said it was time for me to get a job. I was hired at a deli in Hanalei, where, over several months, I made a couple friends and a lot of sandwiches and occasionally snuck into the walk-in freezer to cry. I drove Audrey’s car to and from work, following the highway along the cliff’s edge. I took long runs to the end of the road and stood at the foot of Makana mountain and then ran home. Over a period of months, I stopped crying so much. Maybe in all that oxygen. Maybe being near a big mountain every day is a way to get perspective. Anyhow, when my senses were back in order, I went back to San Diego, having taken from the place the healing I required.
Sari got married. She and Steve built the house on a corner of her parents’ lot. Eventually, in San Diego, I got pregnant and then I got married, too. I have taken my two kids to stay with Sari as often as we can afford the plane fare, which in recent years is not often at all.
For a long time after it happened, when I spoke to Sari on the phone, we mostly talked about the flood. We talked about it like it had never stopped raining. She sent me pictures and articles to show me her changed life. I saw her videos and found more on social media. I searched Coast Guard and local news footage. Sari has detailed the shift to me over the past years, her life like a road with a missing tract. The time before the storm is separate from what came after. On a phone call, sometimes I wonder if I’ve heard her right. Cell signal around her house is not great. But also, talking about the storm, occasionally she waxes sort of lyrical. She sounds dreamy and far away. She talks to me the way you talk to a person who you know can’t quite understand you.
The 2018 storm marks a point of inflection, the place in time where Kaua’i got farther from me and from everyone. On Friday, April 13 of that spring, it started to rain. By the end of the weekend, most of Kaua’i was under water. Over a twenty-four-hour segment of the storm, 50 inches of rain fell. The climate event, attributed to a thunderstorm microburst or “rain bomb,” was unlike any in the island’s recorded past, even as Mount Waialeale can get 400 inches in a year. I haven’t found aerial footage from the 2018 storm in progress, but if you Google “rain bomb” there are time lapse videos that capture similar events. In one video, clouds roiling over a flat Arizona landscape turn suddenly biblical. The clouds appear to halt, and their underside opens like a trap door. What looks like a steel sheet of water plummets and detonates. The deluge and ensuing flood on Kaua’i are considered one of the first major storms to be attributed directly to the atmospheric warming of the climate crisis.
In a typical storm, the North Shore becomes a kind of island in an island. When waters rise so high they might overtake bridges, roads close to traffic. During a big storm, residents check an app to see whether the bridges are open, whether they can return from work or the grocery store in Princeville or Kapa’a, or if they might need to crash at a friend’s house or in their car until rivers subside. People at the end of the road in Ha’ena keep pantries well-stocked. Many own portable generators. They’re prepared to be sequestered in their neighborhood. Rain contingencies have always been a part of life.
The weeks leading up to the rain bomb were exceedingly wet, even by local standards. By the time the storm landed, the mountains were saturated. Cliff faces were spongy and dribbling. Two weeks before the storm, a massive landslide covered the Kuhio Highway, obstructing traffic between Ha’ena and Hanalei. Such landslides are common. Towns on the north coast of Kaua’i are cut off several times a year. For decades, the Department of Transportation has done Sisyphean work on the North Shore, scooping the mountain off the road, carving red dirt channels for traffic, then waiting for the cliffs to re-crumble.
In its report on the storm, the Weather Service distinguished three discreet episodes. After a lull early Saturday, when the storm still felt typical, a sustained gush caused multiple landslides over the highway in Wainiha. By the afternoon, Powerhouse Road, a residential drive that snakes inland, was washed out. A wrecking ball of water coursed down Wainiha valley and crushed two unoccupied homes. Then the rain abated.
The second episode began at midnight. Until eight the next morning, the region got five to seven inches of rain per hour. The water was so loud that inside their homes people couldn’t hear one another talk. The sky boomed, light and noise overlapping. Steve and Sari paced around in the strobe, listening to the sky split open. They waited for an inevitability: the moment when one of their 100-foot Norfolk pines would be struck and would keel, slicing through their house. Afterward, people in the area reported hearing hours of continuous thunder and lightning, which sounds like hyperbole, but it’s corroborated by NOAA charts.
At three in the morning, Sari sent Steve to check on Jim, a friend who lived down the road, near the access to Tunnels beach. Steve rode his bike on a street made invisible by rain, water peeling off his wheels, lightning cracking in the pastures. He reached the access and found Jim standing outside his home, dazed. The house had stood twenty feet in air, on concrete-sunk stilts, but now half the house had sheared off, landing in the river below. Jim stood staring at the mess, his home a shipwreck. Steve brought him back to their place for the night.
Noah, a Limahuli Garden staffer, was trapped in Ha’ena when the bridges closed. He ended up sleeping in the garden’s office. That night he lay in a rattling bed while boulders the size of sedans rolled down Limahuli river. Giant lava rocks, buried for decades or centuries, now unearthed by water, careened down the mountain. In the morning, swaths of crushed plants lay in the wake, trees and shrubs and flowers, in particular the shampoo ginger, whose bulbs exploded under rocks, filling the air with perfume.
Between eight and ten the next morning, the thunderstorm dissipated, but by mid-morning it raged again. According to the report, during this third and final episode, the thunderstorm anchored over the North Shore. The drainage basins were saturated, and parts of Kuhio Highway were submerged in as much as eight feet of water. Thunderstorms and rain continued till about sunset on Sunday, when the system lumbered off.
It was just the beginning, Sari told me. She was not talking about the storm, but its aftermath, what they found when the rain let up and they could survey the damage. Sari and Steve live about a quarter mile from the ocean’s lip. Beneath the topsoil, their yard is sand. That porousness means that their lot does not flood, or hadn’t until the storm. She said she didn’t think they’d ever had half a puddle in the yard, even when it rained for weeks straight. But that first night, the aquifers filled and the water pooled in the yard. But not everyone on the North Shore lives on a natural drain. A mile away, in Wainiha, parked cars filled with mud or drifted off. Appliances set off in the night, eventually lodging miles away or sailing to sea. Septic systems overflowed so that waste and chemicals mingled with mud in the old rivers and newly formed rivers, creating a toxic sludge that necessitated rubber waders.
On the road, neighbors found one another, and people recognized a kind of shell shock, an unaccustomed wonder at having experienced a side of nature that none of them knew. Sari tells me that on the North Shore, you are always looking. Weather is not incidental to their lives, but primary. People are attuned and vigilant. She says they have a baseline for weather in their brain and when something shifts—winds, surf, pressure, temperature—they are alert to it, and neighbors trade this info to stay prepared. This time they couldn’t brace for the change. No one had ever seen rain like that.
Sari sent me videos that Sunday, footage of gray water sheets, and on Monday morning a video of the yard between her house and her mom’s, or the place the yard had been, where there was now a shallow brown sea. Remarkably, the power stayed on and cell phones had some signal. But no one had running water or gas for several days. Near the end of the road, there’s a pool everyone calls the Cold Pond, an eddy of Limahuli Stream, full and frigid and clear as glass. North Shore residents, those who could get there, came to bathe. Afterward, they carted gallons of water home to heat for cooking. Sari used a propane camp stove inside her house.
“I wish I could come,” I said on the phone. I thought: What the hell would I do? I imagined myself there in the yard, bailing water with a tin pail, as from a sinking rowboat. Like a cartoon person. Of course, there was no going to Ha’ena to help. It was clear that no one would be leaving or entering the region for the foreseeable future. By the end of the weekend, word was out that multiple landslides separated Ha’ena from Hanalei. Tourists who had traveled north before the storm found themselves trapped. Some were guests at Ha’ena’s one small resort, but day trippers were forced to sleep in cars or tents.
In Wainiha, mud had trapped several families in their houses. On Monday, Sari rode a bike to her office at Limahuli Garden to retrieve the Kubota—basically an all-terrain golf cart. (In the days after the storm, she would eventually drive it so hard that the ignition broke and the vehicle couldn’t be powered off.) She and her neighbors went door to door, bringing supplies to residents who couldn’t leave due to mud or sickness or immobility. In the first days of what were eventually months of hiatus from their public school in Hanalei, local kids were idle. As Sari spotted them, she told them to get in the Kubota. She took them along with her, assigning them small tasks, keeping them occupied.
Any locals with heavy machinery were out, clearing driveways and then the road to town. Early in the week, supplies started to arrive by boat, ferried by the National Guard and locals from Hanalei and Princeville. Residents of Ha’ena and Wainiha formed a brigade to move cases of water from the boats to their trucks. All non-residents (and some willing, fed-up residents) were evacuated on National Guard helicopters or by local boat. More than 100 tourists, miraculously unscathed, who had been in the wilderness of Kalalau trail, hiked out and were flown away. In the space of a week, and without the help of Department of Transportation or other formal agency, locals in excavators had cleared a seven-mile path through the slides, almost the whole distance to Hanalei town. Hawaii DOT would report later that the storm caused a total of fourteen landslides on the mountain-side highway. Residents plowed through them all.
The National Guard established a regular landing spot in an open field near the beach, and several times a day Steve backed his truck up to the giant helicopters to receive supplies, which he drove to residences or to a pasture called Camp Naue, the site of an impromptu food pantry. Private boats brought necessities up Wainiha river. People needed medicines, human and pet food, gas, generators and cleaning supplies. The mire of septic overflow was everywhere. Residents with four-wheel drive crisscrossed the tiny neighborhood hundreds of times in their trucks, receiving and distributing provisions. Sari said the family hardly saw each other for days.
In the weeks after the storm, the contours of the damage took shape. Some changes were obvious. The topography of the island had been physically altered; new rivers carved new paths to the ocean. Over the course of the weekend, the Hanalei River jumped from one side of the bay pier to the other. Coast Guard footage from the days after the storm shows the town of Hanalei in copper soup, broken by the tile roofs of Ching Young Village stores and Hanalei Elementary School and scattered homes. Acres of ancient taro fields were a wash of brown, like someone spilled paint water all over a canvas. In the distance, waterfalls spurted from mountain ridges like slit arteries.
Assistance poured in from private donors, through crowdfunding platforms or direct donations. Food arrived through the Hawaii Food Bank and a local chef did soup kitchen every night with volunteers in an open field. The soup kitchen became the site of a daily community meeting, where people touched base and described how they were and what they needed and everyone brainstormed. Sari reminded me that everyone had grown up together, they knew each other, knew kids and grandparents, aunties and uncles, knew who was suffering from what, and they could rely on each other’s strengths because they actually knew what the strengths were. Still, emotions ran high. Most people were short on supplies. Everyone was short on rest. In the second week, county and state officials arrived to survey the wreckage, to assess needs and decide how to allocate funds, but most of what they proposed was already being addressed by residents.
Within a couple weeks, the road was cleared for use by emergency vehicles, but for more than a year following the flood, the highway was closed except to residents of Ha’ena or Wainiha. Escorted convoys traveled back and forth on a schedule, three times a day. Though they’d cleared mud from the road relatively quickly, asphalt had washed away in multiple areas and the highway was pocked and narrowed. Traveling to and from town, residents kept one eye on the cliff face, which threatened constantly to re-collapse and bury them, or pitch them into the ocean’s maw.
Once the mud was scrubbed from homes, as water and power were restored, boulders prized from roads, driveways cleared, the general supply shortage resolved, when residents returned work, got to schools and appointments and grocery stores, as the crisis subsided and ordinary life resumed—but before the area was reopened to nonresidents—something extraordinary happened. Ha’ena reverted to a sort of Edenic state. In the absence of choked traffic, the region flushed primordial. Exhaust dissipated. Water clarified. Wildlife returned. Sari reported that monk seals and green sea turtles arrived at the waterline in numbers she had never seen. Coral reefs, degraded from sediment deposits and reef-toxic sunscreens, were exploding alive. Piles of fish were born. Sari said that word: Piles. She said you could see their tails wagging at the surface. Local kids rode bikes everywhere without supervision. Sari’s son and his friends pedaled to the Cold Pond and ditched their bikes in the bushes. They bombed off boulders into the mountain water.
Some days, astride Kuhio highway, one of Uncle Walter’s big horses ate a fringe of grass, lifting and lowering its thick neck, flicking its ears, alert for car noise, which never came. In those months, the road was desolate. Everywhere vines twisted und untwisted in the wind, waxy fronds clapped. In the distance a waterfall gushed. The pines towered along the road, their bristles tips tracing circles in the wind, which you could hear. Some days, there was hardly any human sound at all. The crowds had been irritating, even infuriating, but perhaps no one knew just how unsustainable it all was until the strangers disappeared and the land roared back and bulbs and shoots and spires of flora exploded off the mountain and rare birds called.
Sari called me one afternoon, laughing. She said she was walking the path to the beach and had come upon a cow. She said instead of going to the beach, she spent the afternoon trying to coax it back to the pasture. She talked about the sweet cow, those big eyes and soft lashes, her long, unbothered blinks, how stubborn she was. I thought to myself that my friend lives in a dream. Her rural life, her magic life. I also thought about how fast I would run from a loose cow, how I would be useless and afraid, how I am only useful at a desk, writing about animals, never touching them. The cows kept getting out, Sari said, so we all chased them home.
Heaven may not be a sure thing, but Hawaii is very real. Kaua’i finds its way onto all kinds of superlative lists. Among the world’s most beautiful beaches. The best vacations for families. The ten most spectacular hikes. Makua, the beach known in tour books as Tunnels, even found itself among the 1000 Places to See Before You Die—a kind of FOMO index for the privileged.
Hawaii has been a tourist destination longer than it’s been a state. It’s the most isolated inhabited land mass on Earth—nearly invisible on classroom globe. But once you’re there, in the grip of a quick fragrant wind, at the foot of a mountain, it’s you who seem small, and perhaps that’s a relief. I mean, this has been true for me. A person of means may fly to the middle of the ocean and be delivered from the grind of their life—or from the strictures of a pandemic, as a recent example—into balmy air. The water, even the rainwater, is warm, is a comfort. When film productions need a lush backdrop, they often come to this place, which is convincingly Kong Island or Jurassic Park. Otherworldly and uncanny. We recognize it and we don’t. Visitors teem from planes and cruise ships, most spending thousands of dollars on a trip of any length. They spend their money, maybe to see what everyone has raved about, maybe looking for some kind of restoration. They get a hotel. They rent a house. They stay with a friend. Having achieved a drive to the North Shore, over the confusing one-lane bridges, skirting the cliff, peering over the island’s edge, travelers arrive in Ha’ena. They park at Ke’e beach. There’s no more road after that. They unfurl towels and lay them like flags. Looking north, they see the mountain towers of the Na Pali Coast creasing into the distance. They are there, through the door of paradise. They spent good money for this chance.
I understand why the tourists came in droves, how the situation became untenable. When I say that Ha’ena has been a refuge, it’s partly because of my relationships there, with Sari and her family, but it’s also true that from the moment, as a thirteen-year-old, when I walked off the gangway in Lihue, I felt familiarity in that foreign place. Maybe this has happened to you somewhere in your life, so you know what I’m talking about. The sense of home that settles over you sometimes when you’re nowhere near home. But the first rule of heartbreak is that loving anything does not make it yours. When the flood came, I was at home in San Diego, dry on my hill, waiting for texts from the middle of the ocean.
When I write about the time after the storm, it sounds like a fairy tale, one where a kingdom is freed from a malignant spirit, a dark veil lifts and flowers unfurl their skirts, rainbows shoot across the sky, people frolic, unburdened and free. The tale is silly, maybe. Simplistic, certainly. But Hawaii feels hyper oxygenated, the soil is so nitrogen-rich, coppery, in some places as red as blood. The force of plants that thrust through mountain rock or asphalt, the spectrum of living green—it’s hard to overstate. It’s easy to experience it as a fantasy.
Sari says that in Ha’ena and Wainiha, people cherished the reprieve. They learned to work their lives around the rigid convoy schedule. They went to town and when they returned, their home was secluded and safe, as quiet as they’d left it. She also says they spent much of the year looking over their shoulders, aware that time was limited, that the goal was to restore public access to the end of the road. There was the sense of an endless line of cars, revving their engines, waiting to re-flood the North Shore, to cash their ticket to heaven.
I think to myself, of course. Who doesn’t want to be in Ha’ena? Who doesn’t dream of it weekly? The Department of Tourism Instagram flaunts pictures of Ke’e and Makua, mists pooling on craggy Na Pali, dolphins cavorting. The views are dramatic and extreme—the pleats and spires of earth so green they soak the eye. When people can’t access them, if they cannot put their bodies at the center of the beauty, they feel defrauded. In my desk chair, filled with longing, I remind myself that a beautiful thing remains so, even when we are not centered in it, even when we must regard it from the far side of a gap. I was like everyone else who went to be healed, and having received the healing, I left.
North Shore residents saw openings after the flood to try to implement real change before life reverted to tourism-as-usual. The flood of visitors will not abate. It is being facilitated in every way by the government, and many small business and rental owners welcome the return of tourist dollars. But mitigation was possible. When access was restored to the end of the road, a parking reservation system was implemented. There are a finite number of spaces in Ha’ena and they’re allotted on a first-come, first-serve basis. The new system reduces traffic, though marginally. Visitors will still flock to the end of the road, hoping for a loophole. Without a reservation they are sent away, which many take as an affront.
Locals also considered that perhaps visitors just needed specific instructions. An information sheet was circulated to hotels and resorts and vacation rentals, even at Lihue airport: The “Aloha Pledge” is available online now, with guidance about how to tread gently while on vacation. Some of the unofficial pact is specific and pragmatic. I will only use ‘reef safe’ sunscreens and bug repellent products, free of oxybenzone and parabens to avoid ocean and stream contamination. Other lines reveal a very low bar, indeed: I will pick up my trash.
The highway is reconstructed on its old footprint, using the same fallible materials, even as scientists predict that the 2018 rain bomb is just the beginning of similar extreme weather on the island—the new abnormal. It rains and the land slides and slides again. Today, between Princeville and Hanalei, looming over Kuhio highway, a mountain wall is under construction, a great concrete and rebar bulwark, from which water seeps and seeps.
Sari texts me pictures. Her son in the yard. Her explosive garden. Makua beach. A silhouette of the mountain glowing, backlit in the gloaming, the tips of her Norfolk pines spinning circles in the sky. About once a week I dream I’ve arrived on the island but can’t get to her house.
She and her neighbors, people with intimate understanding of it, fight to preserve the home they love. Sari and I have kids and jobs and then there was the flood and that was even before the whole world convulsed. The pandemic. Births and cancers and deaths in our families. When I call her now, she talks about how everything is sliding back to how it was. She describes the loss of their brief reprieve. She talks of what remains to be lost.
Now, more even than before, there is alertness to a change in nature, a swift shift underfoot and in the air. The South Pacific sky is as blue as can be, and on the horizon, gray and pink clouds stack, throbbing with water. Conditions are more extreme, less predictable. I remind myself that I was never of that place, no matter how nice it made me feel, and I will be of no real use when the next flood comes. I think that an adult ought to take their lessons and bear up. I miss the island like crazy and most days I wish I were there. That doesn’t stop for me. But I try to be better at loving and when that means staying away.
Mary Birnbaum’s work can be found in The Week, Tahoma Literary Review, Hunger Mountain, Cagibi, The Potomac Review, and New Ohio Review. She’s earned the Disquiet Nonfiction Fellowship and the Crazyhorse (now Swamp Pink) Nonfiction Prize for a piece later listed as notable in The Best American Essays of 2020. She resides in Vista, California, with two daughters and a husband and one dog who is a dream and another dog who is extremely disrespectful and only gets by on his looks. Mary is a closed captioner, by trade.