Author: john-borgmeyer

In early March, the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement Task Force arrested 18 people, ages 17 to 30, following almost a year of undercover operations in Belmont. Eight men and one woman face charges of distributing marijuana. One man faces charges of distributing both marijuana and imitation cocaine. Eight suspects face cocaine charges.

In JADE press releases and the accompanying daily newspaper articles, pot and cocaine were cast as equal threats to Belmont’s “quality of life.” But in real life, JADE honchos admit that marijuana dealing really isn’t a problem in Charlottesville.

“We could make marijuana arrests all day long, but that’s not our mission,” says Task Force commander Lt. Don Campbell, an 18-year City police veteran. “Our main goal in Charlottesville is reducing the violence and disorder associated with open-air drug markets. We don’t see the violence from pot that we see from cocaine.”

On one hand, Campbell’s line reflects the popular view that marijuana poses relatively little danger to public safety. Yet when agents nab a pot dealer, they are pleased that they have eradicated a social menace, perhaps because Federal drug laws still classify marijuana with other drugs—like cocaine and methamphetamine—that threaten the social order. And even as the area’s police officers acknowledge they face enough challenges just keeping up with citizen calls for service, other law enforcers, like the JADE Task Force and the Commonwealth’s Attorney, will happily wring stoners through the legal system if the opportunity arises.

Midway through his studies at UVA, “David” started feeling depressed. He took time off school, experimented with prescription drugs, and finally discovered that smoking pot helped him function. David started getting high every day.

“I went back and got my degree,” he says. “My last semester was one of the best I had at UVA, despite being a so-called pothead.”

David, who is being identified by a pseudonym for this article, graduated in 1995. He stayed in Charlottesville, working about 40 hours a week at a handful of service jobs and setting aside about $200 for recreational marijuana use per month.

“I had about five different friends who hooked me up. If one of us needed a hookup, we helped each other out,” says David. “It’s a social thing, not business.”

David, his friends and probably most of Charlottesville’s recreational marijuana smokers buy and sell the drug for fun, not profit—the point being to maintain a safe, steady supply chain instead of generating easy money. The marijuana trade is generally not conducted with the mercenary salesmanship and violence that police say describes the City’s cocaine market.

“Cocaine and crack drive the violence in this community,” says Campbell. “We know we can’t stop drug dealing. People will always want drugs, and other people will always make money off that. But we can disrupt it and drive it off the streets.”

City courtrooms reflect JADE’s emphasis on cocaine, says defense attorney Denise Lunsford. “Are they out there pounding the pavement looking for pot dealers? That’s not my perception,” she says. “They’re not going after it the same way as crack, cocaine, meth.”

But marijuana users do end up in court—last year Albemarle and Charlottesville Police collectively sent about 303 pot cases to courts, most for misdemeanor posession. Lunsford says these are usually wrong place-wrong time situations. A lead-footed driver might be pulled over with a joint in the ashtray, for instance. First-time offenders typically face misdemeanor possession charges.

“It’s fairly routine,” says City Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman. First-time offenders can have the charge dismissed and expunged from their record if they agree to pre-conviction probation. A second offense likely will earn a suspended jail sentence.

“I can’t remember the last time someone went to jail for simple possession,” Chapman says.

For Charlottesville police officers, busting marijuana smokers is like office work—unfulfilling, with lots of papers to shuffle. When police catch someone dumb enough to speed with weed, police will issue him a summons and let him go. The officer must return the evidence––all of it––to the station, tag it, bag it and place it in a locker, filling out forms along the way. The officer hopes the suspect will plead guilty, because if he fights it, the evidence must actually be driven to a Richmond lab to determine whether it’s cannabis sativa (for the sake of traffic and taxpayer concerns, we suggest all further such tests be conducted at C-VILLE offices). In the end, the marijuana is unceremoniously incinerated.

“A lot of officers feel like it’s a lot of paperwork for nothing. I hear a lot of comments like that,” says Officer Dwayne Jones, who patrols the Corner. “I treat it like a traffic citation. Sometimes I have to calm people down and let them know it’s not the end of the world.

“We don’t make the laws,” he continues, “but I have to say I believe the worst drug out there is alcohol. The overwhelming majority of calls we get, for traffic accidents and disorders, involve alcohol. I’ve never seen anyone behave violently when they’re high on marijuana.”

The JADE Task Force is not your average beat cop, however.

If the President’s drug policy had more to do with public safety, alcohol would be the first substance banned. The White House Office of Drug Control Policy and the Drug Enforcement Administration are multi-billion dollar bureaucracies arguably interested only in doing what they did yesterday. So the Drug War marches on.

In Charlottesville, Washington’s hostile posture toward pot allows JADE and the Commonwealth’s Attorney to treat smokers like enemy combatants, if they choose. It is often in their interest to do so.

The JADE unit––six police officers from Charlottesville, three from Albemarle County, two from UVA and one from the State, plus help from a DEA agent and three agents from the federal department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives––works out of an office below City Hall. Access is obtained by entering the correct digital code and then passing through a heavy wooden door. Inside the offices, there is a coffee machine and two posters. One shows Osama bin Laden in crosshairs and reads “Wanted, Dead or Alive,” with “Alive” crossed out. The other poster is a collage of marijuana plants and piles of buds with the words “It’s not medicine, it’s an illegal drug.”

After September 11, JADE added terrorist investigations to its list of mandates, and images of war and terror adorn the office walls. A cartoon eagle sharpening its claws is posted near Polaroids of weapons and drugs seized by JADE officers. A photo of the World Trade Center hangs in the room where undercover agents don wigs and bulletproof vests for undercover ops.

Campbell says JADE “is looking at some people” in their terrorism investigations, but won’t say more. Like the battle against pot, the war on terror is not his primary focus.

It used to be, Campbell says, that agents would find 50 people milling on a street corner dealing cocaine. Most arrests were “jump outs,” says Campbell, as in “jump out” and grab the slowest crackheads before they run away.

As City Hall tries to court middle class homebuyers, Charlottesville Police Chief Tim Longo says eradicating open-air drug markets is his department’s foremost mission. Campbell says it’s working.

“We don’t see people blatantly dealing in the streets anymore,” he says. “We had to adjust the way we do things. The dealers are moving indoors, and that’s more dangerous for us. Now we do more monitoring with devices. Civilian informants are our bread and butter.”

As a pot smoker, David’s interaction with the black market happened discreetly. He was not involved in either violence or big money, so in the era of “jump outs” he never would have registered on JADE’s radar screen. Because the Feds continue to classify marijuana as an illegal Schedule I narcotic, however, people like David have no choice but to associate with criminals in pursuit of their pleasure. This makes them fair game for JADE.

A mutual friend introduced David to “Brian,” a fellow pot enthusiast (also identified here by a pseudonym), in 1995, and David obliged when Brian asked for a hook-up. Four years later, Brian was arrested after twice selling cocaine to an undercover JADE officer.

According to documents in Albemarle General District Court, Brian agreed to a “cooperative agreement” to “do certain things in exchange for favorable consideration by the Commonwealth at his trial.”

Defense attorney Lunsford says some of her drug clients choose to inform in exchange for leniency. She says officers ask for names and whether the informant could immediately go buy drugs from that person.

“If they hear about someone dealing, especially in large quantities, they’re more than willing to use it,” Lunsford says. “Body wires, phone taps are no problem.”

In February 2000, Brian asked David if he was still “helping people out.” David said yes, and over the next five weeks he sold Brian marijuana three times in one-ounce and two-ounce quantities.

Nine months later, an unfamiliar number appeared on David’s pager. When David called, a member of the JADE Task Force answered the phone.

“I asked if someone was in trouble,” says David. “He said, ‘Yeah, maybe you.’”

According to David, the officer arranged to meet him at night in a parking lot near Downtown. When David arrived, he found three officers sitting in a parked car. Flashing badges, they asked David to take a ride with them. They told David they didn’t think he was a threat, and that he could help himself by helping them. He was facing three potential felony charges for distributing marijuana, with a maximum of 30 years in jail.

“They were sweating me. They wanted me to inform on anyone I could for any drugs—anyone selling marijuana, ecstasy, mushrooms,” says David. “They wanted me to give names and tell them if anyone had a gun. They gave me a beeper number and told me to think about it.

“It was a tough decision,” he says. “They asked me to betray the trust of people I’d known for a long time, to basically be a judge and jury on my friends.”

David never beeped the agent, and two months later he was arrested. “I have to say they were cool about it,” he says.

After consulting a lawyer, David pled not guilty “to buy time.” After his trial date was set he negotiated an agreement to plead guilty to two felonies if the prosecution would not request jail time. During sentencing, David’s character witnesses and pre-trial probation officer argued on his behalf. According to David, Commonwealth’s Attorney Chapman argued he was a “drug dealer” to the judge and “said something about how I might possibly involve kids.”

In January 2002, David received a five-year jail sentence, of which all but 30 days was suspended. He served 15 weekends sleeping on a mattress on the Regional Jail’s gym floor.

“It sucked. No heat, no blankets, and they left the light on all night,” he says. (Brian, by contrast, received no jail time for his cocaine conviction. Presumably his willingness to narc out his acquaintances helped his case.)

David paid his $1,800 fine and refrained from alcohol and drugs for his 18-month probation, during which time officers were allowed to search him or his property at any time, for any reason. He enrolled in substance-abuse counseling through Region Ten.

“If somebody says your name, then the agents know you,” says David. “Even if you don’t do anything that gives an officer probable cause, you can become a suspect just through the people who know your name.

“All this wasn’t exactly a nightmare,” David says. “But in my opinion, someday marijuana will be legal, and I’ll still be a felon. There’s a lot of resources being thrown down a black hole.

“Marijuana is part of the social setting in Charlottesville—business owners, students, professionals, lawyers, people in the media. Are we really saying that these segments of our society are bad people?”

The resulting contradiction couldn’t be sharper: While developers and their supporters on Council hammer a “Wealthy Buyers Only” sign on the top of the City gates, a new breed of disenfranchised City dwellers is sprouting below. Lynn Wiber is among them. Educated and employed, she has no home of her own and few prospects of getting one. Hers is the new face of homelessness.

As night falls and the wind picks up in Charlottesville, a local radio station broadcasts the weather report: Lows tonight will be in the single digits, with highs tomorrow in the teens.

Lynn Wiber always pays close attention to the forecast, especially in winter, and meteorologists predict tonight, January 17, will be one of the coldest nights on record. To keep warm, Wiber wears a substantial portion of her entire wardrobe, which she keeps in four shopping bags stacked atop her employee locker at Barnes & Noble in the Barracks Road shopping center.

“I’ve got a place to stay tonight,” Wiber assures her co-workers, who have heard the forecast and worry for her safety.

But she couldn’t divulge many details about her shelter for the night. She had recently arranged to pay an acquaintance $90 per week to sleep in the woman’s apartment (her part-time job nets Wiber about $127 a week). Since the subleasor’s primary income is from disability payments, she and Wiber have to keep the arrangement hush-hush. Otherwise, the woman’s government assistance check could be cut.

“She needs the money and I actually have a bed,” Wiber says. “It’s great for both of us… as long as nobody rats us out.”

To avoid arousing suspicion, Wiber doesn’t want to go to the apartment near Downtown until late. She will kill time with one of the few entertainment options available to Charlottesville’s poor and homeless—walking the streets.

Outside Barnes & Noble, people grimace in the bitter night air, scurrying from their cars toward the warm, glowing shops. Wiber starts walking south toward UVA. Tonight she hopes to meet some friends, a couple expecting their first child. Since they’re also homeless, they likely will spend the evening as Wiber does, walking around trying not to freeze.

As Wiber passes Harris Teeter, she mentions that before she found regular shelter she would often spend the night sitting in the 24-hour grocery’s café, reading one of the more than 400 books she has borrowed from Barnes & Noble since she began her employment there in August 2000. Checking out books is an employee perquisite Wiber says has proved invaluable in the fight against boredom that comes with homelessness.

“I can just get into a book and ship my mind off to somewhere else,” she says. She’s currently reading The Mouse that Roared , a 1955 allegory about the United States going to war that Wiber, 46, first read when she was a child in Richmond.

A black Ford Explorer pulls alongside her. The tinted window drops halfway, and a pink-cheeked face yells out something unintelligible. The truck roars up Arlington Boulevard.

“The best and the brightest,” Wiber says. She laughs with a tinge of bitterness. “They’ve been given everything, and they think they’re entitled to it.”

Wiber professes no resentment towards the well off per se, but she is offended, she says, by those who feel entitled to wealth and view poor people as failures. As traffic rushes by along Emmet Street, she reflects on money’s place in society. In a City with so much wealth, why must some people scrape and struggle just to keep a roof over their heads?

Wiber is no materialist, claiming that by choice she limits her possessions to what can fit in a car. A trained nurse, she never expected to get rich. Nor did she figure she’d ever be homeless; that is, until she moved to Charlottesville.

“I’ve made it on minimum wage before, I thought I could do it here,” she says. “Maybe I was blind or stupid, but I didn’t realize how expensive it is to live here.”

As part of its long-range planning, City Council is now forming a task force to examine Charlottesville’s housing market. Included in the task force’s mandate are instructions to consider protecting “diversity” and “vulnerable populations.” Wiber doesn’t believe these phrases apply to her.

“Diversity isn’t just ethnic, it’s economic,” she says. “Council’s motto is ‘A World Class City,’ but they really just want Charlottesville to be for the nice people, the rich people.”

 

Conclusive data on the composition and trends among Charlottesville’s homeless population do not exist, but anecdotal evidence suggests Wiber’s situation is not uncommon, says Reed Banks. As co-chair of the Thomas Jefferson Area Coalition for the Homeless, Banks says he wants to refute common myths about local homelessness.

“These are not transient drunks,” says Banks. “For the most part, the homeless in Charlottesville are people who have lived here all their lives, and they’ve fallen out of the community because they can’t afford housing. They are working people. They are families with children.”

In January, workers from the Coalition and volunteers from the Salvation Army combed the City and surveyed more than 100 homeless people. According to Evan Scully, who is directing the information-gathering project, the survey reveals that:

•62 percent had been homeless for less than six months;

•36 percent said they were currently employed; and

•39 percent were homeless with their families.

“It appears that the number of homeless families in the area is on the way up,” Scully says. “It fits what you find nationally, but it’s a surprise to many people.

“By far,” he says, “the biggest problem in this area is affordable housing.”

Scully says the market for Section 8 rental assistance is one measure of the low-income housing crisis. Section 8 is Federal money that helps low-income people pay for housing. In Charlottesville and Albemarle County, there are approximately 613 and 458 housing units, respectively, where poor people can use Section 8 vouchers.

Yet demand far outstrips supply. In Charlottesville, for instance, there are more than 1,000 people on the waiting list. In the County, about 475 people are waiting. A person applying today for Section 8 rental assistance can expect to wait between one and two years or more before getting help, Scully says.

“In a crisis situation, that’s too late,” says Scully. “By the time help reaches someone, they’ve had to go on to some other desperation move.”

The Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development funds Section 8 housing and emergency homeless shelters. But HUD won’t fork over money unless local governments endorse the projects. Banks says the City has consistently refused to endorse developments that would benefit the poor, such as a homeless shelter Banks recently pitched. By contrast, Albemarle County agreed to endorse the shelter, says Banks.

“We’ve consistently run into problems trying to get the City to endorse these kinds of projects,” he says. “The jurisdictions don’t work together as well as they could in providing housing for the indigent.”

City Strategic Planner Satyendra Huja says it’s up to developers, not the City, to build low-income housing. But the City can use its clout to fight proposed low-income housing, as it did several years ago when a developer wanted to build 200 units on Elliot Avenue. “We thought that was unreasonable,” says Huja. “Now, that land has 36 units available for home ownership.”

Huja acknowledges that the City’s housing strategy is focused on helping people buy homes, not easing rent burdens.

“Charlottesville has 22 percent of the region’s population, and 50 percent of the region’s subsidized housing,” says Huja. “Affordable rental housing is a problem, but we have more than our fair share. The surrounding counties should take their share of the burden.”

The problem is simple economics. For developers, affordable housing in Charlottesville isn’t as lucrative as higher-end units. In the City’s view, rent assistance is an ongoing financial commitment, while helping a new homeowner is a one-time expense.

Also, says Huja, lots of low-income renters in the City put a greater strain on the City’s budget in areas like police protection and social services.

High rents may discourage poor people from moving to Charlottesville, but for the working poor who already live here, the housing market is what drives many to seek social services for the first time, those providers say.

“The assumption is that people in poverty are not working, and that’s simply not true,” says Jon Nafziger, Vice President for Community Initiatives at the local United Way. “Many are working full time or working two jobs, and they’re just not making enough money to completely support themselves.”

 

For Wiber, Charlottesville was supposed to be the perfect place to begin life again. She arrived here in June 2000 after a lifetime of starting over. At 17, she had left her home in Richmond to join a kibbutz in Israel, where she worked as a physician’s assistant. There she married a man named Ari who died six months later when he stepped on an anti-personnel mine. She traveled across Europe working as a nanny. Eventually, she borrowed thousands of dollars to attend Virginia Commonwealth University in her home city. While working in the emergency room at the Medical College of Virginia, she completed degrees in English literature and psychology in 1993. She worked in an emergency room in Richmond. She was a nanny in Colorado and Pennsylvania.

When Wiber’s mother died in 1997, she returned to Richmond again and moved in with her brother, David. She planned to stay in Richmond, but in April 2000 David died while rock climbing in West Virginia. She claims his last gifts to her were a $900 phone bill he incurred ordering expensive digital options for his computer and a depleted bank account. Wiber says David had used his Internet savvy to steal most of the $10,000 Wiber had socked away in a Pennsylvania bank.

“He was your classic sociopath,” she says. “He stole from our parents, from his jobs. I didn’t think he’d be able to get into my bank account, but I guess it’s not that hard if you know how to use computers.”

Wiber declared bankruptcy and left Richmond. “I always thought my family was cursed,” she says.

After surviving Beirut, the Golan Heights and Denver, Wiber saw Charlottesville as a small-town utopia, judging by its “10 Best” ranking among U.S. cities from magazines that calculate that kind of thing for golfers, tennis players and retirees.

“This community has everything I want,” she says. “There’s things to do, there’s good conversations, there’s music.” Alas, Charlottesville isn’t a very good place to be poor.

Wiber came to town with $600 and the Acura Legend she inherited from her mother. She got a full-time job at Barnes & Noble, but says she soon realized her $7.50 per hour salary, most of which went to pay her $400 a month rent, wasn’t enough to make ends meet. In February she moved into the Salvation Army’s transitional housing.

About that time she started frequenting the Army’s cafeteria, which provides free meals every day, as well as soup kitchens run by various local churches. “One good thing about Charlottesville is that, no matter what, you can always get fed,” says Wiber.

She lived at the Salvation Army for about one year before she started suffering mysterious seizures.

“The doctors told me I might be losing my mind. I wasn’t too happy to hear that,” she says.

She spent a week at Martha Jefferson Hospital undergoing tests. Doctors told her she had a lesion in her brain. Barnes & Noble cut her hours and her pay because, she says, the company felt her medical problems made it too difficult for her to reliably work full-time. With the demotion, she could no longer afford to pay the Salvation Army’s $255 monthly rent. In late March 2002, on her first night “outside,” she was robbed.

 

During this, her first winter as a homeless person, Wiber says she’s learned a few things:

•Layers are the key to warmth;

•Many people are just a bad decision and an unlucky break away from losing their homes;

•People sincerely want to help others, but…;

•Money almost always trumps morality.

After her first night on the street a year ago, Wiber called Barnes & Noble district manager Bob Crabtree to complain about the demotion that put even the Salvation Army’s transitional housing out of reach. “I didn’t know what else to do. I thought I’d probably get fired,” she says.

Instead, the company put Wiber up for a month at the Red Carpet Inn on Route 29. After that, she found a room at a reduced rent from a woman who worked as a touring musician during the summer and needed a house sitter in her absence. After a few weeks, however, the woman’s daughter decided to move into the house, and Wiber had to leave.

She moved into the Drop-In Center on Fourth Street. Also known as On Our Own, the house provides transitional shelter and other services for people with mental illness. Wiber traded shifts as a night monitor in exchange for rent. That arrangement came to an end in October when Wiber suffered a bad burn, caused, she says, by accidentally igniting her blouse with a candle.

Wiber spent several days at UVA Medical Center. Before her discharge, On Our Own Director Will Gallik told Wiber she could no longer live there. Wiber and Gallik agree that the outcome was her return to homelessness. Citing confidentiality, Gallik would make no further comment on Wiber’s situation.

She could not return to the Salvation Army, she says, because she was in arrears there. She was discharged from the hospital in the leopard-print pajamas she had worn when she was admitted. So she just walked to Barnes & Noble in that outfit to retrieve her paycheck.

“I was astounded she was out on the street,” says Mike Thompson, retired director of human resources for Albemarle County and now one of Wiber’s co-workers at the bookstore. He let Wiber sleep on his couch that night and for a few days afterward. He says he’s troubled by the City’s lack of emergency shelter, especially for single women. He’s also troubled by the paradox of Charlottesville.

“There’s a lot of wealth in this community,” says Thompson. “But the cost of living is high and the wages are low. That hurts a lot of people, and creates some social service problems that I don’t think many people are taking seriously.”

Wiber’s co-workers sincerely care about her hardship, she says, but they aren’t sure how to help. One day, for example, she joked about having holes in her socks. During the next few days, she received “an avalanche” of socks from her co-workers.

She says she never asks to stay in people’s homes and is reluctant to accept their offers for temporary shelter. “I don’t like asking for help,” she says. “And it’s awkward taking someone into your house who you don’t really know.”

For the desperately poor and homeless in Charlottesville who have no family to turn to, there are myriad social service agencies offering help with everything from rent to transportation to child care. The City’s Department of Social Services gave Wiber a list of dozens of local agencies. Wiber says she’s tried them all.

But in a City that allocates only 6 percent of its annual $94 million budget to social services, there almost always is someone who needs the help more than Wiber does. She’s neither mentally ill nor addicted to substances. She has no children and is not a victim of domestic violence. So aside from Federally funded food stamps, she’s not eligible for many local social services.

“Everywhere I go, people told me that I was one of those that fell through the cracks,” she says.

Patching the cracks evidently is not on the City’s agenda. The cracks are only getting bigger. Local agencies say, for instance, that their list of new applicants is growing.

“We’re seeing an increase in Food Stamps, and in general case-load relief. All the financial programs are showing growth, whereas all of them had been declining during the ’90s,” says Buzz Cox, director of the City’s social services department.

Cox says many agencies are hamstrung by State and Federal regulations that dictate who they can serve. People like Wiber, the working poor who are needy—but not the neediest—are out of luck.

“The bad news is that people who need these programs don’t qualify, and the amount of assistance the agencies provide may not be enough to really help,” says Cox. “The so-called safety net isn’t what you may hope it would be. For the people in [Wiber’s] situation, it’s going to be difficult for them to get help.

“In the big picture,” he adds, “the real issue is the lack of jobs that pay enough to afford the housing. If you’re not making enough money, emergency services won’t really help you.”

 

People in Charlottesville worried about how rising rents will affect the working poor won’t find much comfort in City Hall. When City Council talks about protecting “vulnerable populations,” they’re talking about middle-class homebuyers, not low-income renters. Indeed, rental assistance was not even in the FY 2004 budget that City Manager Gary O’Connell presented to City Council on Monday, March 3.

The City’s housing strategy is to replace renters with owners. Charlottesville contracts with the nonprofit Piedmont Housing Alliance to buy and refurbish run-down rental homes in low-income neighborhoods like Starr Hill and 10th and Page. In the past five years, the City and PHA have sold about 20 homes, according to PHA director Stu Armstrong. The homes sell for about $100,000, and Armstrong says more than 100 people a year sign up for PHA’s help in buying a house. Generally, prospective buyers must earn less than 60 percent of the area’s median income, which is $63,600 for a family of four. The County operates a comparable service, called the Albemarle Housing Improvement Program.

While City Council preaches the mantra of “diversity” and “mixed-incomes” in its housing strategy, housing activists say those are merely code words for gentrification. The City seems willing to subsidize the flow of middle-income residents into low-income neighborhoods, but not the flow of low-income residents into middle- and upper-income neighborhoods.

“The plan doesn’t seem to include lifting our own working class up into the middle class. The idea seems to be bringing white, upper-middle class folks in from outside,” says Ben Thacker-Gwaltney, a housing activist at the Virginia Organizing Project. “The renting population has pretty much been left high and dry.

“The City is using public dollars to accelerate the gentrification process, which is chugging along fine on the strength of market forces,” he says.

From the City’s perspective, renters are a risk. They tend to utilize social services, for example, but contribute less to the tax rolls than homeowners do. Furthermore, police say that replacing renters with homeowners has a positive effect on crime. Owners have a vested interest in neighborhood stability and are more likely to report suspicious activity to the police. (The one area where the City makes exception for these perceived liabilities is a University renter. Indeed, the City hopes to capitalize on the massive influx of UVA undergraduates expected in the next decade. The City’s rezoning proposal currently under consideration would create University Precincts in the midst of owner-occupied single-family neighborhoods where density could reach as much as 150 renters per acre.)

Among Charlottesville’s non-University dwellers, however, the people who most feel the pinch are those who do the City’s dirty work for low wages and few benefits—operating cash registers, cleaning toilets, serving dinners. They are the working poor, says Joe Szakos, director of the Virginia Organizing Project.

“Most of the people working minimum wage jobs in Charlottesville are not teenagers looking for spending money,” says Szakos, a “Living Wage” activist who follows local labor trends. “They are people working two or three of these jobs trying to make a living.”

In the long run, Wiber predicts, pricing out poor people may backfire on the City’s economy. “I think Charlottesville still has vestiges of a plantation mentality. The attitude is, you should work for subsistence wages and you should be happy about it,” she says.

“But if you get rid of all the poor people, who’s going to do all the grunt work?”

Wiber compares poverty to a steep slope. The further you fall, she says, the harder it becomes to climb back. Because she once declared bankruptcy, for example, landlords ask her to pay as much as three months’ rent up front. “I can understand it. I’m sure they’ve been scammed,” she says. “But if you’re homeless and you’re just trying to get through this week, it’s hard to get that money together. When you’re poor, you have to worry about what you’re going to do right now.”

Being poor means having no choices, she says. It means playing by other people’s rules in a game that is often unfair and humiliating. Living with little control over your own life has, in Wiber, fostered an unexpected combination of feelings.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m paying off bad karma from a former life,” she says. “But you have to have a sense of humor about it.

“When I first came to town there was a homeless camp behind the Monticello Visitor’s Center. I thought that was hilarious.”

Using the latest DNA technology, Charlottesville police in November linked a series of area rapes to a single perpetrator. The attacker’s modus operandi—violent sneak attacks on carefully selected victims—led police to suspect the serial rapist could be responsible for as many as seven assaults since 1997.

Hoping for a tip that could lead to an arrest, police released a composite sketch of the suspect (black male, late 20s, stocky) and encouraged citizens to report suspicious characters. The Daily Progress and WVIR-TV picked up the rape story, dutifully displaying the black-and-white sketch of a pudgy African-American. Their reports quoted police accounts of the attacks, warning women to lock their doors and travel in groups.

The Hook, an upstart weekly, went further than most other media, pandering to the tired racial cliché with a January account of a dozen attacks packed with pulp language like “terrorizing,” “brutal,” “stalking” and “predator,” the kind of words that create the notion that the rapist is an alien beast.

“People want to believe he’s somebody they don’t see every day,” says Charlottesville Police Lt. J.W. Gibson. “This guy is not going to be some drooling, rabid dog. He’s probably going to be just the opposite. He’s going to be somebody who blends in. When we catch him, his friends and neighbors will probably say, ‘I can’t believe it’s him.’”

In fact, despite media treatments that suggest rape only happens when an unknown black man crawls through the window, the reality is this: Most sexual assault victims in Charlottesville know their rapists as friends, lovers, leaders and parents.

The numbers tell the story. In 2002, the Charlottesville Police Department received 57 reports of “forcible” sex offenses (including rape, sodomy and fondling) and four reports of “non-forcible” incidents (incest and statutory rape). By contrast, the Sexual Assault Resource Agency (SARA) received 583 calls to its rape hotline last year. Of those, 380 were new callers. Most had suffered either rape or attempted rape. In 75 percent of SARA’s cases last year, the attacker was someone known to the victim.

Only a small percentage of local rapes make it to the police blotter, making the true story of sexual assault in Charlottesville’s homes, schools and churches more difficult to report than a composite sketch of a bad man might suggest. Very few rape victims share their stories with anyone. Their reluctance to rehash past trauma for the public record is understandable.

Joyce Allan is an exception. For many years, the 58-year-old nurse and psychotherapist remained silent about her childhood sexual abuse. She is speaking out now, however, because she wants to steer the conversation about rape away from street crime.

“Sexual abuse isn’t about sex, really,” says Allan. “It’s about power and control. We as a culture are not comfortable talking about abuse of power.”

It’s strange, says Allan, that sex sells—everything from toothpaste to mutual funds and daytime TV—yet frank talk about basic human appetites for sex and domination remains taboo.

“How many people do I know who have West Nile virus? None. But I know everything about it,” she says.

“But how many people in Charlottesville do you know who are suffering the emotional and physical effects of abuse?”

 

George Culbertson sure didn’t look like a rapist. In one of Joyce Allan’s childhood family photographs, her dashing father poses with his bride, Marjorie, shortly after their college graduation. In another suburban portrait, he stands with his children, Joyce, Gary and Dorene, beside a boxy station wagon parked in their driveway.

With his skill at fixing machines and his fondness for the Colorado mountains, Culbertson seemed to embody all-American manhood. He hid a dark secret, however. Culbertson was a pedophile. During his life he molested many children—neighborhood kids, scouts entrusted to his care, even his own daughter.

One day in 1955, in a moment Allan would later describe as the “atomic bomb,” Marjorie Culbertson walked into an upstairs bathroom to find George standing naked with 10-year-old Joyce kneeling before him, his penis in her small hand. Her mother “can still recall that I had a shocked look on my face as she walked in,” Allan wrote in her autobiography, Because I Love You. “What she and Daddy said to each other remains a complete blank to her. The only memory I have of this event, a clear visual memory I can still see today, is of a tiny rust spot on the bathroom window screen. I don’t remember the house, the bathroom, or event at all. Just that spot.”

Forty years after the “atomic bomb” detonated in that bathroom, Allan spent seven years tracing her family’s history of sexual abuse. The result was Because I Love You, titled to reflect the tangled relationships that set sexual abuse apart from other crimes.

Allan says she wrote her book to counteract a pair of popular myths about childhood sex abuse—that it is rare and that when it happens the rapists are creepy-looking men whose names are registered on the Internet as sex offenders.

“It’s much easier for us to think about rapists as people who are outside the institution,” or mainstream, says Allan during an interview at her workplace in Staunton. “But violent serial rapists are the smallest percentage of dangerous people. The church leader or the scout leader, however, is not likely to get arrested.”

Whether a rapist derives power from the blade of a knife or from his stature as head of the household, abuse of power is a common feature in all types of sexual abuse, according to police and rape counselors, be it an anonymous street crime or an assault in the kitchen.

In interviews, several local women said they knew people who had been sexually abused––although none admitted being victims themselves––and most said they view “sexual abuse” to be a wide range of behaviors from peeping and stalking to domestic violence and forcible rape. Indeed, on its website SARA defines sexual abuse as “any sexual contact through the use of threats, intimidation and/or physical force or violence.”

By this standard, sexual abuse is shockingly common: SARA data indicates the majority of last year’s 380 new clients suffered a “date rape” or attempted date rape; according to the American Medical Association, which in 1995 declared child sex abuse an “epidemic,” one in five boys and one in four girls will be sexually assaulted before they turn 18, most likely due to ongoing abuse by a parent or step-parent; and in 2001, Virginia’s domestic violence centers received more than 28,000 hotline calls, according to the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Data Collection System.

“Sexual abuse is part of domestic violence. Women in those situations feel like they don’t have the right to say no to their partner,” says Brandi Painter, an assistant director at the Shelter for Help in Emergency, a Charlottesville center for battered women.

In Allan’s view, it’s easier for people to think about rapists as boogiemen creeping through windows because our society offers myriad ways to ease that fear—police, courts, jails, handguns, even gated communities.

“People’s value systems tend toward protecting male authority figures, or protecting institutions like family and church,” says Allan. “To speak about sexual abuse is to create a huge conflict.”

The untold story of rape is a shadow, says Allan, a dark truth that trails victims long after the violence has ended. Even though it’s underplayed in the media, the legal system and even everyday conversation, intimate violence lingers on. “Silence doesn’t make the problem go away,” says Allan. “It just makes the problem harder to deal with.”

 

The Code of Virginia prohibits sexual intercourse enacted through force or intimidation, through a victim’s mental or physical helplessness or with a child under the age of 13. It’s punishable by a prison sentence of five years to life. The clean simplicity of the Commonwealth’s rape law contrasts with the messy reality of most sexual abuse.

“The huge problem with sexual abuse cases is that it’s very rare for any incident to have more than two witnesses, so it often comes down to one word against another,” says John Zug, Charlottesville’s assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney. “That’s always a problem, because the law requires a burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

SARA encourages rape victims to go to the UVA Medical Center emergency room immediately following the assault. There, nurses will gather physical evidence, using special lights and swabs to collect hair, saliva and semen samples. The process lasts about an hour. Nurses are supposed to summon both police and SARA counselors, and all rape-related emergency room visits should be reported to the police, say SARA counselors.

But SARA data indicates most rape victims do not visit the emergency room, and instead seek counseling weeks or months after their attacks. “Many women will deny it the first time they get raped,” says Jessica Cochran, a counselor for SARA. “They’ll tell themselves it didn’t really happen. Then when it happens again, they report it.”

Zug trains new SARA counselors about rape and the legal system; to help the counselors empathize with rape victims, he asks them to tell each other the details of their most recent sexual encounter.

“They’re embarrassed just talking about consensual sex,” he says. “Imagine telling a roomful of strangers about being raped. For people who haven’t been a victim, it’s easy to say they should go to the police. But for the victims, I don’t think it’s realistic.”

When it comes to legal action, things get even more difficult, particularly when the victim is a child, or when the rapist is a family breadwinner. In Joyce Allan’s case, for example, her father kept the young girl quiet with the pressure of family ties. “He told me he molested me because he loved me,” she says. “He told me to be a good girl, to keep our secret, that if I told they might send him away and I wouldn’t have a family anymore.”

Even a seemingly protective statute like Megan’s Law, which was passed locally in 1996 and allows police to post the names and addresses of convicted pedophiles, can backfire on a young victim. “If a child knows their father will be a registered sex offender the rest of his life, that doesn’t exactly encourage reporting,” says Allan.

If the legal system intimidates victims, so do the social and economic consequences of reporting rape. Women who are sexually assaulted by someone in their social circle must often make a choice between reporting the abuse and keeping their friends, says SARA’s Cochran.

“Often, the survivor will be ostracized from that group,” says Cochran. “People don’t want to believe that their friend is capable of such a violent act.”

In domestic abuse situations, the most vulnerable women are either very rich or very poor, says SHE’s Painter. “They are most likely to feel very dependent on their abusers,” she says. “They’re less likely to leave their situation.”

Faced with such roadblocks, women are left to deal with their sexual abuse by themselves.

When Marjorie Culbertson caught her husband molesting Joyce, she offered him a choice—commit himself to a psychiatric institution or go to jail. George chose voluntary commitment. Decades later, Allan would learn the details of his pedophilia from taped conversations with his doctors. Culbertson insisted, even after he was released in 1958, that there was nothing wrong with what he did with his daughter.

At the time, Culbertson’s chronic abuse was shadowed in secrecy. Joyce and her siblings were sent to live with relatives while Marjorie prepared for single motherhood. On a counselor’s advice, she told the children their father had a nervous breakdown and never discussed his behavior with Joyce.

“She was trying to protect me,” Allan says. “She couldn’t understand why I might have needed to talk about it.”

As Joyce grew up, she says she came to associate romantic feelings with her father’s abuse, even as she defensively blocked out specific memories of her childhood trauma.

Allan’s attempts to establish a normal life by marrying and bearing children ended in divorce. As a single mother in the 1970s, Joyce supported her children, Joe and Jenny, by running a day care service and accepting Welfare. At night, she drank heavily, cried often and burned through a series of sexual relationships she says were devoid of friendship or emotional intimacy. She contemplated suicide.

“It’s like I had two selves,” Allan says. “I was in a deep clinical depression.”

At the time, Allan says she did not connect her depression to her sexual abuse. In fact, Allan says she has few clear memories of her childhood to this day. She was so emotionally numbed that when Culbertson, who had spent two years in the hospital, asked Joyce to send her children to visit him in Colorado, she agreed.

“I made him promise he wouldn’t touch Jenny the way he touched me,” Allan says. “And I believed him.” It was a bad decision, she admits. But at the time, Allan says the shadow of her childhood trauma left her denying the truth about her father’s sexual desires, and perhaps contributed to other mental problems.

In 1979 doctors, having observed symptoms of amnesia, dissociation, memory distortion, flashbacks, depression and addiction in Vietnam veterans, identified Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder an official medical diagnosis. Today, Allan believes PTSD fueled the depression that nearly claimed her life, the hidden weight of an unseen shadow pulling her ever closer to darkness.

SARA trains its counselors to diagnose the long- and short-term symptoms of what’s called Rape Trauma Syndrome, a reaction to sexual assault and the related fear of serious injury or death.

Cochran says women respond to rape in various ways, but in the first six months following an assault they commonly have trouble eating, sleeping and concentrating. Additionally, they have feelings of anger, guilt and shame. Later stages of RTS include stress-induced headaches or stomach cramps, chronic gynecological problems and difficulties with work, family and personal relationships. Some women who call the SARA hotline say they are afraid to leave their houses, says Cochran. A song, a whiff of cologne or the glance of a strange man can induce powerful flashbacks in some women.

Rape counselors say if victims of sexual abuse are left to grapple with their shadows alone, the results can be catastrophic. Unable to claim emotional or financial independence from a powerful figure, battered women often return to their abusive spouse, says Nicole Lloyd, a SHE legal advocate. Some women may also pass the cycle of violence to their own children.

Other women turn to self-destructive behavior. Many women in prison, for instance, have histories of sexual abuse, according to Linda Hamilton, director of Region Ten’s substance abuse treatment program.

“A large percentage of women in prison are there because of substance abuse,” says Hamilton. “There’s a very high correlation between substance abuse in women and sexual trauma. More than 80 percent of female addicts we see are either victims of incest or sexual abuse as an adult. Many of them accept it, because their friends have been assaulted. It’s part of the culture, in a way.”

The prevalence of sexual abuse and its powerful after-effects makes sexual abuse not just a problem for victims, but of the community at large, says Allan.

“These walking wounded are a part of our community,” she says.

 

In 1985 George Culbertson, who, despite hospitalization, continued to molest children during the rest of his life, committed suicide in his trailer in Colorado. With considerable relief, Allan believed his influence on her life was then over. She was wrong. In the mid-1990s, her children revealed that their grandfather had molested them during their summertime visits.

“I was determined to break the silence that had kept the shadow of sexual abuse running through generations of my family,” she says.

While researching her autobiographical book, Joyce interviewed Culbertson’s second wife, Irene, whose marriage to him ended after he molested a friend’s daughter. When Culbertson explained that fondling children’s genitalia was, for him, a form of affection, that he wasn’t hurting them because he didn’t penetrate them, Irene realized he needed help.

Culbertson had confided a secret to Irene, which as far as Allan knows, he never told anyone else. When he was a boy, his uncle had sodomized George during summer vacations. The news was a revelation.

“For the first time I saw the wounded, terrorized and silenced little boy that grew up to be my father,” Allan writes in her book.

Today, Allan is Director of Nursing at the Commonwealth Center for Children and Adolescents in Staunton. In her work, she helps emotionally disturbed children confront their own shadows. She says that because sexual abuse tends to be passed from one generation to the next, understanding the reality of rape requires showing compassion for abusers and victims.

“We don’t know why people become sexual offenders,” she says. “There are contributions of childhood experience, father absence, family violence and sex abuse of their own. Maybe there’s genetic pedophilia. We don’t know, because we’re not trying. We’re not being intelligent. We’re making emotional responses. We’re not exploring this. We just want to lock up the bad guys.”

Because most rape victims never have their day in court, rape counselors say the job is to help abuse victims regain a sense of power and self-esteem. “Women are guilt sponges,” says Region Ten’s Hamilton. “They take responsibility for [the abuser’s] behavior. We try to show them that they’re not bad people.”

Despite the terrifying ubiquity of rape, childhood sexual abuse and domestic violence, experts aren’t adopting a posture of alarm. Education, they say, is more effective than fear mongering.

“We need to focus on childhood sexuality so children know what’s normal,” says Allan. “If we just talk about abuse, we create the sense that sex is bad. Cultivating a fear of strangers is not a good thing.”

Counselors at SHE and SARA say sexual and physical abuse knows no class or ethnic boundaries. They teach women that they can’t spot a rapist or a violent person by looking at his wardrobe or listening to his accent. To find the rapist, look for behaviors.

Rape, says Charlottesville Police Lt. Gibson, is a form of domination. He hopes the much-publicized serial rapist’s desire to dominate will eventually put police on his trail, maybe through tips from someone who can look beyond his appearance to see suspicious behavior. “It’s possible he has a wife or girlfriend who was exposed to his manipulative behavior or role-playing that reflects a desire to dominate,” he says.

Most sexual offenders, from peeping Toms to serial rapists, commonly view women as possessions. They also tend to emotionally or physically manipulate others. Confronting the reality of sexual abuse does not mean wallowing in fear and mistrust of strangers, says Painter. To protect themselves, people should instead learn to recognize when powerful people take their control of others too far.

“That sense of possession is important, because it means you’re taking away someone’s humanity,” says Painter. “The first step in committing an act of violence is dehumanizing another person.”

Rain…The word alone forms a complete prayer. Spoken as a plea or demand, the simple invocation has been a common mantra across the Southeast this year. The congregation of thirsty supplicants included, until recently, those of us living in the Rivanna Watershed, which in the past four years has been shy about 40 inches of rain.

To everyone’s relief, our prayers have been answered. In the past two months, a blessing from the jet stream dropped roughly 10 inches of rain on the Watershed, bringing this year’s precipitation levels in line with annual norms. Around here, perhaps no one is more relieved to see the drought subside than the City and County water officials responsible for keeping a clean, cheap supply of life’s elixir swirling down our toilets.It’s refreshing to again see full reservoirs and real dinnerplates in Charlottesville. Yes, the rain soothed a shortage and mitigated an emergency. It did not, however, solve the real problem, which is this: The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority has seen this crisis coming for more than 25 years, and yet now, coming out of it, our water supply remains at the mercy of divine intervention.

 

When in drought…

Charles Ancona has lived in Albemarle County since 1967, and in that time he has seen, he says, “many brown Augusts.” He remembers a drought in 1976 that prompted government conservation ordinances. It also convinced many people that, although water had been taken for granted as a “natural resource,” dominated by technology to serve economic growth, water might begin to limit the region’s blossoming development.

“All these years later, and we’ve still done nothing,” says Ancona. Although he draws his water from a well in rural Albemarle, he has followed the water situation for 30 years, and he’s mystified by the response of local officials.

“You can’t have the growth we’ve had, and the reduction in supply, and expect to have sufficient water,” Ancona says.

The last time Charlottesville impounded a water supply was in 1966, when the City built a 1.68 billion-gallon reservoir on the South Fork Rivanna River. Since then, the region’s population has more than doubled, to at least 124,000. But along the way, rather than meet increased demand, the South Fork reservoir has lost about 500 million gallons of its capacity, thanks to sediment filling in its bottom.

In 1972, Charlottesville and Albemarle launched the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority as an independent agency to manage the region’s shared water resources. Within a few short years, when studies showed that demand would outpace supply sometime early in this century, one of the RWSA’s main jobs became to provide enough water to satisfy the growth.

The RWSA met this challenge like an ostrich, Ancona says: “They must have their heads stuck in that sediment.”

Indeed, the rain has been followed by a deluge of criticism for local officials, who critics believe are as culpable as God for the recent water shortage.

“What are you going to do when it’s gone? Vote your ass out of office!” says local bartender Al Zappa, playing on the City’s cartoonish conservation posters. They depict a man examining the dry nozzle of a garden hose, apparently unaware that he’s standing on the hose with a bulge of water building up behind his shoe. Is that cartoon Charlottesvillian supposed to be us, Joe and Jane Car Washer? Is the City saying we’re morons, dumbly pinching off our hose, about to get squirted in the eye?

Many people say the cartoon better represents the RWSA. Some say the water officials must be truly idiotic––after all, they’ve seen a water crisis coming for decades, and yet they’ve done nothing to increase or maintain supply.

Others believe the RWSA feigned surprise at the water shortage. Henry Weinscheck, for one, thinks public officials are the ones standing on the hose, intentionally blocking our water.

“Was it bad planning, or a determined effort? That’s the question,” says Weinscheck, who owns Express Car Wash on Route 29. “The water shortage was not ineptitude. It was deliberate.”

Granted, Weinscheck has never been a cheerleader for the City. He’s a member of the North Charlottesville Business Association (comprising mostly people who own land or operate businesses on 29N), a group most famous for unilaterally supporting the Route 29 Western Bypass. Weinscheck himself defied City Council’s order on August 23 to shut down all commercial car washes.

“It was a knee-jerk reaction [by Council] to get people’s attention,” he claims. “It didn’t do much to reduce water consumption.”

City public works director Judith Mueller admits she doesn’t know how much water was saved by closing car washes. “People understood that car washes were not a good use of our drinking water,” she says. “No one ever called me to complain about it.” Most car washes, she says, imported their own water and reopened.

The notion that some leaders of the RWSA have conspired to limit water and stifle growth is popular among business owners, real estate developers and others for whom growth means profit. Their official house organ, The Daily Progress, parroted the sentiment in a series of editorials last month. But it’s not solely the usual pro-growth advocates who express skepticism about the RWSA.

“It’s all about keeping people out,” says Stephanie White, a UVA-trained climatologist who works at Perrin Quarles Associates. “It’s outrageous.”

Indisputably, there was a drought. White, however, points out that local reservoirs, including Sugar Hollow and Ragged Mountain, were full in July, and it took merely a couple of dry summer months to drain them. Drought or no drought, she says, such a dry snap could happen anytime. “In the summer, the weather is much more volatile,” she says.

The skeptics have some pretty damning evidence on their side. It’s been established that for 30 years the RWSA knew demand would skyrocket. Yet only now, with doomsday on the horizon, did the RWSA move to expand the region’s supply with what most observers characterize as a “Band-Aid” solution.

The RWSA denies any conspiracy––to a point. The current Chairman of the Board, Rich Collins, along with former chairs Treva Cromwell, Francis Fife and Jack Marshall, this year founded Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population (ASAP). They called for a debate on how to slow and ultimately cap regional growth. Collins and Cromwell say the chairs have never forced their agenda on other board members. But Collins admits he likes a soapbox.

“I look at my role as a voice for stewardship of the watershed,” says Collins. “To say that growth is a holy grail is absurd, and to be concerned merely with supply at all costs is a short-sighted vision for the future. We don’t have unlimited supply. We need to include growth in our planning. I use the pulpit that’s there, for good or bad, to highlight these ideas.”

Conspiracy or not, water shortages disturb our quality of life and can seriously dampen the region’s economic prosperity. The RWSA blamed the drought, but rainfall wasn’t actually the issue. The drought merely exposed our real problems, which now lie in the open like dead tress strewn across the crusty mud at the bottom of an empty reservoir.

Water provides; growth consumes––when the two balance, there’s no problem. The RWSA’s dams and pipes have restrained and shaped the Watershed to fulfill dreams of unlimited growth. For the past 30 years, however, Charlottesville and Albemarle have failed to take water into account as the region grew.

The drought just proved something the RWSA should have already known, that water can destroy as well as create. Similarly, the deluge didn’t resolve the conflict between growth and water. It just submerged the tension once again—for now.

 

Water fight

The simple, miraculous liquid from which all life springs has been the source of some bitter disputes between Charlottesville and Albemarle. On the surface, the arguments seem to be about land and money. In truth, the real font of City-County tensions has most often been the question of water.

Before a revenue-sharing agreement reached in the 1990s helped the two jurisdictions fairly divide tax revenue, the question of who pays for water was answered by land grabs and courtroom battles. Pre-RWSA, the City built water infrastructure (such as reservoirs, treatment plants and pipes) for both localities. To help pay for those costs, Charlottesville would occasionally annex portions of Albemarle where business had boomed—along the water and sewer lines—thus bringing more property tax revenue into the City. Annexations had to be approved by a judge, and these hearings, which the City almost always won, were bitter, say those who recall them. The courts’ reasoning was that since Charlottesville incurred the cost of growth, it should reap the spoils.

After losing a particularly vicious annexation battle for businesses on 29N in 1961, Albemarle grew tired of Charlottesville triumphantly using water to justify territorial incursions. The County wanted to build its own network of pipes and treatment plants, and it applied for federal funds to do so. But when the State bureaucrats who doled out the cash saw that Albemarle wanted to duplicate City services, the Commonwealth withheld support for funding until the two jurisdictions learned how to play nice.

“They said the City and County share a common resource in the Rivanna River,” recalls Bill Brent, director of the Albemarle County Service Authority since 1971. “It wasn’t in our best interest––or the river’s––to compete.”

In 1972, the two jurisdictions created a corporation, the RWSA, with a dual mission: provide water and sewer services for the expected growth rate, as determined by City Council and the Board of Supervisors; and protect the Watershed. The RWSA is led by a board of directors (comprising two City officials, two from the County, and a non-affiliated, appointed chairman) as well as an independent executive director.

“Some referred to it as a shotgun wedding,” says Brent. The RWSA’s marriage of convenience solved long-running spats between the two jurisdictions. The epic struggle between water and growth, however, has proved far too complicated for any single agency.

Those two goals clashed soon after a brief, cooperative honeymoon during which the RWSA succeeded in vastly improving the region’s sewage treatment capabilities.

Before the RWSA, most of Albemarle didn’t have water and sewer lines. County leaders tried to make do without them, allowing developers to build subdivisions using well water and septic tank systems.

“You could see a water crisis coming,” says Peggy King, then president of the local League of Women Voters.

That’s because just beneath Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall and a few feet below the County’s spectacular rural vistas, local geology is a hostile foundation for big developments. Under a layer of topsoil and finely crushed stone, there’s a chaotic pile of impermeable rock laced with crevices. The only groundwater the land can contain is what fills up these cracks. In Western Albemarle, groundwater is especially scarce.

“I think a scientist told us the geology was confused,” says Gerald Fisher, chairman of the County Board of Supervisors between 1976 and 1987.

Local geology makes it nearly impossible to discern whether wells for subdivisions like West Leigh will last three years or 30. During the drought of ‘76, that and other subdivisions ran dry, and the RWSA had to truck in water for several weeks.

To make things worse some residents woke up to raw sewage on their lawns––Albemarle’s geology also makes it hard to tell whether wastewater from septic systems will filter deep into the ground.

“The residents eventually had to pay to get connected to the water and sewer systems, at a considerable expense to them,” says Fisher.

 

Turning off the tap

In 1976, drought brought water shortages and government-imposed restrictions to Charlottesville for the first time in recent memory. Newspapers reported that the crisis made people aware of water’s “true value.” Some people wondered how much more growth Albemarle could tolerate. The RWSA promised to take action.

Sound familiar?

When that drought hit, the government was already using its control of the water supply to manipulate free enterprise. “We never talked about limiting the supply of water,” says former County Supervisor Fisher. “We talked about limiting where it would be delivered. At first, the Albemarle County Sewer Authority would hook up services wherever they could, and that caused sprawl. Then we tried to set some limits.”

Albemarle made baby steps toward integrating water and land-use planning. By the mid-’70s, officials knew the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir was rapidly filling with sediment trapped by dams (according to current data, the SFR can safely provide 16 million gallons of water per day; by 2050, sedimentation will reduce that to 5 million gallons daily). At the time, experts believed that erosion caused by development was exacerbating the siltation process.

So between 1975 and 1980, the County Supervisors passed ordinances designed to protect the Rivanna River from the effects of development. They enforced erosion control methods and put most of the public land around the reservoir into conservation easement. Supervisors also down-zoned all the rural land in the Rivanna Watershed, about one-third of Albemarle, drastically reducing the County’s supply of commercial-ready real estate.

Developers revolted. In those years, Fisher says, developers fought the new rules with lawsuits, and some took litigation to ridiculous extremes.

One developer sued every individual supervisor personally, for $1 million each, says Fisher. Another developer sued for libel several members of the League of Women Voters and Citizens for Albemarle, two groups that had opposed development projects during public hearings. None of the developers won, says Fisher, but the experience was expensive and traumatic nevertheless.

“Trying to hold a public meeting at that time was agonizing,” says Fisher. “You’d have the developer up there speaking, and all these people with clenched teeth and intensity in their faces. But they were afraid to say anything. That’s a period I hope we don’t have to relive.”

“The question then was pretty much the same as it is now: How many people can we support?” says the League of Women Voters’ Peggy King. “Looking out for the good of the overall public went against the grain for a lot of locals.”

But in the ‘70s, no-growth or slow-growth voices were muted by RWSA promises to build a new reservoir on Buck Mountain Creek, a waterway originating in the northern Albemarle mountains, then flowing down through Free Union to the South Fork Rivanna River. Numerous studies said Buck Mountain was a prime spot for a dam.

After arguing for months on how to divide the project cost, the City and County settled on a surcharge system. New water customers still pay a $200 surcharge to cover the $6 million of land RWSA bought along Buck Mountain Creek.

Treva Cromwell, who chaired the RWSA between 1978 and 1986, said at the time that the new reservoir could not be developed overnight—and she didn’t think that should be a problem. After all, studies predicted the existing water supply could meet demand until 2012; the RWSA predicted it would take eight to 10 years to build the Buck Mountain facility. They were so confident that when Cromwell retired from the RWSA, she received a plaque engraved with an image of the Buck Mountain reservoir.

In the early 1990s, the RWSA began the long process of applying for State and federal permission to build the reservoir. In the ‘60s, it only took four years to build the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir. By the 1990s, however, State and federal regulators at the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency were no longer keen on new reservoirs.

“The regulatory agencies reflected the new national mood, that you don’t build dams on creeks and change the hydrology cycle,” says Cromwell.

On top of that cultural shift, in the mid-’90s, scientists discovered an endangered species, the James River spinymussel, living in Buck Mountain Creek. The rare invertebrate effectively killed the Buck Mountain Reservoir.

“The DEQ said they wouldn’t permit a reservoir until we had tried everything else first,” says Cromwell. “If there ever was a shock that went through the community, it was when we couldn’t build the reservoir.”

So the RWSA hired new consultants to figure out the best alternatives to a new reservoir. By then, the doomsday scenario was moved up to about 2000, when consultants predicted water demand would eclipse supply. The consultants, Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, Inc., further predicted that by 2050, the County’s growth rate and the reservoirs’ siltation rate would combine to produce a water shortfall in the neighborhood of 12 million gallons per day.

But the RWSA had other problems, namely the Ivy Landfill, which had polluted nearby groundwater. It needed to be closed and monitored at high cost to the RWSA and, ultimately, to taxpayers.

“Landfill issues were taking so much of Rivanna’s time for so many years,” says former City Councilor David Toscano. “Council was not as engaged in water issues as it should have been. But, until a crisis emerges, people aren’t focused on it very much.”

 

An unchanging tide

It’s said that there are no new problems in government––just the same issues appearing and disappearing in the public’s field of vision. Conflicts between development and resources have been around a long time, but as Toscano implies, only in times of shortage do people pay heed.

The recent crisis reminded us, once again, that water is not unlimited. It also showed that people can work together to protect a common resource. For that reason, the experience was valuable, says Downtown restaurateur Tony LaBua.

“The City did exactly as it should have done,” he says. “People really stepped up to the plate.” LaBua says that after the deluge he’s keeping the waterless hand sanitizer in his bathroom at Chap’s. The posters––”If it’s yellow let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down”––are staying up indefinitely, too.

“It’s nothing a little incense can’t take care of,” LaBua says.

People’s willingness to conserve water is certainly part of the drought story. On August 23, when the City and County first passed mandatory water restrictions, the municipal water system used about 12.5 million gallons per day; by October 25, consumption had dropped below 7 million gallons per day. Water officials laud the public for their efforts while simultaneously “rewarding” them with hiked water rates––from $3 per 1,000 gallons last summer to $7.48 per 1,000 gallons in November.

“People feel like they’re being punished,” says leading City Republican Jon Bright, who keeps close tabs on public sentiment at the Downtown branch of his Spectacle Shop business. “I’ve heard so many people say that we’ve sucked it up, we did our part, and now we’re being punished.”

The rate characterizes RWSA’s Catch-22. Because all the Authority’s money comes from water sales, when people conserve water, the RWSA has to raise rates to keep up its revenue.

The money is also helping to pay for the $13.2 million, three-part plan to dredge sediment from the South Fork Rivanna, raise the dam by four feet and re-open a pumping station on the Mechums River—a plan widely viewed as a quick but temporary fix. RWSA Executive Director Lawrence Tropea says raising the dam will take at least two years. The pump station should be open by next summer. There’s no telling how long it may take to clean out some 70,000 cubic feet of silt. Right now, the RWSA is waiting for the Service Authority’s Bill Brent and the City’s Public Works Director, Judith Meuller, to hash out a cost-sharing scheme.

Clearly, the deluge hasn’t solved our water crisis. Groundwater, which feeds the streams that flow into our reservoirs, is still below normal. More significantly, there are no clear solutions to the long-term conflict between growth and water.

Any government efforts to slow down growth would be “disastrous,” says Leigh Middleditch, an attorney for McGuire Woods who serves on a water advisory committee. “Growth is inevitable, and managing growth should not be dependent on the water supply. What’s the best approach beyond these temporary fixes? Anything is going to be terribly expensive. The community’s got to debate these things.”

RWSA Chair Collins agrees with Middleditch’s call for a public debate. He believes it would be best to talk about limiting demand as well as increasing supply. Given the State and federal reluctance to approve new reservoirs, building new water impoundments won’t be easy; nor will it be simple to stop growth, either.

“Anyone can come, but not everyone can come,” says Collins. “At some point, we’re going to have to plan and seek the optimum level of population.”

These debates may go on for another 30 years. But by then, water, in its own soft way, will have attacked Albemarle’s solid trend of human and economic growth. In the past 30 years, Charlottesville and Albemarle haven’t made much progress resolving their liquid arguments. That trend likely could continue if the recent deluge dilutes the public water consciousness, which lately made everyone so proud.

George Garrett is a storyteller and has been since his age was measured in single digits. It was then that Garrett says he decided he wanted to be a writer, even though he had no clue, at the time, what it meant to be one.

Today, after more than 60 years practicing his craft, Garrett has learned something about creating stories. In the introduction to his 1998 book, Bad Man’s Blues, Garrett writes that the "intricate, subtle, and shifty relationship between fact and fiction" is a puzzle that has always piqued his interest; it underlies much of his creative work.

Garrett’s life and work have been versatile and prolific. He is an athlete, soldier, scholar, writer and teacher; he’s written fiction, essays, plays, literary criticisms and Hollywood scripts, everything from four-line poems to a trilogy of historical novels that took 30 years to complete. In August, Garrett was selected by Virginia’s General Assembly as the Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth, and he’s currently the Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at UVA.

Garrett says he never figured out exactly where fact meets fiction, but he’s never been the kind of writer who needs a finish line. To Garrett, the most important thing is always the act of spinning history and imagination into stories that impart us something. Last week, he talked to C-VILLE Senior Staff Writer John Borgmeyer about writing, war, boozing it up at UVA, and his brief career as an African-American writer. An edited transcript of that interview follows.

John Borgmeyer: How has the writing scene changed since your career began?

George Garrett: Young writers always see themselves as a continuation of the old generation, when in fact, the world is always changing. I don’t know where things are going, but one of the facts about the scene is that creative writing programs are springing up all over the country. Therefore, the overwhelming majority of American poets are employed by colleges and universities, community colleges and, more and more, high schools. So they’re almost all teachers. Nobody knows if this is good or bad. We don’t know yet. Certainly, to my mind it duplicates an ancient situation where monasteries were the sources for poetry through the Middle Ages and on up through the Renaissance.

If you look at literary history, there have only been a few very short periods of time when it was possible for writers——at least the kind we’re talking about——to make a living. For example, in the Victorian age both poets and novelists became quite well-to-do. Books were like movies and television are these days. Today John Grisham or Stephen King might make out OK, but you have to figure that an advance for a Grisham book is probably five times the total lifetime earnings of William Faulkner. There are probably about a dozen writers right now whose salaries are approximately that of a junior executive, so it’s not a highly profitable thing. But it never has been, except for these little windows of time.

A lot of people think it might be a good idea for writers to dissociate themselves a little bit more from institutions. The question is: How much freedom do writers give up for the security of being involved with a university? But in the meantime, for the first time in recent history these writers aren’t starving to death.

Academic creative writing has been absolutely positive for the students. I’ve noticed the kids never really understand how much work they’re doing, because it seems like fun reading other students’ manuscripts. Some may become great American novelists; most won’t, but they’re learning, reading, writing——that’s worthwhile.

How did you get involved with UVA?

I went to Princeton on the GI Bill. I had no clear, confident plan. When I got out, I was just drifting. I must have had 15 different academic jobs, moving from one thing to another. The longest were the two times I’ve been here at UVA. I came here in 1962, ostensibly to start the first creative writing department. When I got here I discovered people had been teaching what we call creative writing in disguise for years, in what was called Advanced Composition. But the students wanted more, and there was no place for them to go. Students were leaving here at that time to go places that gave credit for creative writing. So they hired me to start the beginning of a program.

How has UVA changed since the 1960s?

I was here from 1962 until 1967, then I was gone until 1984. During that gap I was running all around the country. When I came back, the University had changed considerably in certain ways. For example, it was co-educational. The one thing that did was raise the level of academics. You can’t make points with the opposite sex by being dumb in class, so all of a sudden it was OK to be interested in the subjects, and in fact it was a better way for you to make friends.

Before co-education, the big thing was the "Gentleman’s C." Your classes weren’t supposed to interfere with real life, which was on the front porch sipping a julep or crawling around in the Mad Bowl. So the co-educational thing turned out to be a wonderful benefit for the University. It got much more serious.

I think UVA is a much more academic institution than it was. But I don’t think its totally escaped the long shadow of a party school. You know, it didn’t surprise me when they had that big dope bust three or four years ago. What was funny about that was the pressure from the administration. Several guys from our program worked in the information office, and they were under pressure to come up with a story that will get us in The New York Times. So the day of the drug arrest they sure enough got on the front page of the Times.

A thing happened to me when I came back here. I had not been in Charlottesville for 17 years, and when we came from Michigan, where I was teaching, I rented a house on Fendall Avenue from a friend. I have this dog, a big hound, and when I arrived the first thing I did was take him for a quick walk. So I’m walking along with the dog on Winston Road, where I lived in the ‘60s, and a guy comes out on his porch with a drink in his hand——a drink as dark as iced tea——he sips that thing, looks at me and then he says "Hiya George. I haven’t seen you around for a while." I didn’t have a clue who he was. Seventeen years, and he hasn’t seen me around for a while.

Charlottesville is changing and unchanging. The night before I left Charlottesville in 1967, we had some big party and got totally sloshed. On the way home I insisted on stealing a traffic cone. The next day, we left and I put the cone behind the house, right by the fence. Seventeen years later, I come back, and that thing was still there. That figures. Whoever owned the house must have thought if they moved it the whole thing would fall down.

Then there are the traditional things. The football team is always spooked. Every year we have the same sort of season. Its always "two years from now, we’re gonna be a power," meanwhile we’re likely to lose to Wake Forest.

You’ve written a lot about the intellectual constraints of political correctness, especially in universities. Do you see that sort of thought-policing at work in the current conversations about war?

Yes. I have the advantage of having been alive and alert during World War II. It’s shocking all the aspects of what you might call military censorship that were in place. One small example is that it was almost the end of the war before we found out any of the facts about what happened at Pearl Harbor. They sank the whole Pacific Fleet that day, except for the aircraft carriers, but we didn’t know that. Thinking about it now, I don’t know what the reaction of the American public at that time would have been. They might have said, "Hey, fuck it, let’s get out of here. Let’s make a deal, let the Japs have the Philippines if they want it." So with great deliberation the leaders of the government from both parties did not tell the American public what happened. And, when Pearl Harbor happened, we had 30,000 American soldiers in the Phillipines and they were just written off. There was no way to supply them, no way to reach them and most of them died. Today we would have The Washington Post discussing what to do about those 30,000.

For better or worse, World War II was fought in almost total ignorance. That’s a very great difference from now. You’ve got people talking, everybody’s a military expert. So it’s quite a bit different. I don’t know if it was better or worse; it may inhibit the military quite a bit——which could be good or bad.

But you know, they did the same thing early on in the Afghan thing. The press was crying for footage, so they had a whole lot of footage of guys dropping in and parachuting on an airstrip. Ranger action where they landed and shot up the place a little bit and then left. A little bit later, they discovered that the major operations were going on someplace else. I mean, it was nothing. The real action was going on way across the country somewhere, where they dropped in Special Forces and nobody knew about it until now. I think the press has more power now than then, and they’re more intensely skeptical and critical than they used to be in World War II. A lot has happened since then.

What do you see as the duty of a writer?

Pretty simple from my point of view. The writer is to tell the truth as accurately and honestly as he can, which is a little tricky.

What’s happening more and more is that in the last 20 years or so, American writing has been dodging some of the big problems and settling in on very safe problems, where the issues have pretty much been resolved. You get lots of domestic drama and dysfunctional problems. That’s all well and good, but American writers are ignoring some of the really big and basic problems.

What are the big and basic problems, as you see them?

Well, if you were reading novels about America you would not be aware, for example, except in some kind of slapstick version, of the huge nature of white collar and corporate crime, and the gap between rich and poor that is seriously compromising the plausibility of a democratic government. Our votes don’t count very much, yours and mine. Right now I don’t see any writers where this topic appears in their fiction. It’s too hot a topic. And you’ve got agents and publishers who don’t want anything too controversial——or they want it safely controversial. You know, in half these novels people don’t even go to work. So there’s something lacking.

Who are some of your favorites right now?

I’m interested in writers who haven’t received a lot of attention, former students. There’s a wonderful black writer, a young guy, Percival Everett, who teaches at the University of Southern California. In one of his novels, Eraser, the hero is this black writer who’s been accused of never being black enough. So he goes, "Well, I’m going to remedy that. I’m going to move to the urban ghetto and really learn my stuff." So the hero writes this novel that’s really crap, full of bogus rhetoric and stuff, but he becomes a big success, and the next thing you know he’s a national hero. It’s very funny. Everett can get away with that better than you and I could, but he’s still considered very daring.

We’re in an era without any big stars. That’s good, I think. It’s not a horse race, and it shouldn’t be. Everybody tries to make it into a horse race, the whole Oscar and Emmy syndrome. We can do without that in literature.

Are there any particular works that you go back to when you need inspiration?

I guess I could give you the standard answer William Faulkner always gave. He used to say he liked to spend his time with the old masters, and people would very seldom ask, "Like what?"

I keep going back to Chaucer and Shakespeare and Swift. What I try to do now is, if I’m working on a novel of prose, I mostly try not to read novels. And if I’m working on poetry, it’s probably not a good idea to be reading it all the time, because you pick up all the other poets’ habits.

Is it to your advantage as a writer to be accomplished in a variety of forms?

No, it’s not. It’s slightly disadvantageous as a matter of fact, because, as in everything else, a brand name figures in. They always want to know what’s most important to you, so you can be categorized as a poet who happens to write fiction or a fiction writer who happens to write essays. But that’s boring. I’ve been trying to do the maximum. It’s probably foolish, but it’s been more of a pleasure for me.

When you sit down to write, what kind of process do you go through? Do you have a point or a structure in mind first, or is it more improvised?

You know, it varies completely. The only thing that has been a rule in my life is that I want to try everything at least once to see if I can do it. It’s probably ridiculous, but the one thing I’ve done is I’ve tried not to repeat myself. Faulkner did 25 novels or so, and no two of them were alike in structure or strategy, all completely new, very rich in voices.

You always give yourself a challenge. That’s a peculiar American thing that I think comes out of a democratic country. There are fabulous writers in Great Britain, but those guys all sound exactly alike. They all went to the same school, probably learned from the same teacher how to do a sentence and they can’t escape that. Whereas we in the States have so much language variety you can never catch up with it all. You can never really master American speech. Ever since Mark Twain made it possible to use American speech, it’s been a whole different kind of literature.

You’ve been labeled as a Southern writer. What does that mean to you?

I don’t buy into that. We’re all part of one country. Especially now, with all the creative writing schools, there are Northern writers who come to live in the South and Southern writers who go North. It’s not an easy category the way it was, say, in the 1930s where you wouldn’t confuse Faulkner as being anything but a Southern writer. People of that generation didn’t move around anywhere near as much as they do now. There are anthologies out there that have writers with no connection to the South, other than they’ve written a story that takes place in Georgia, listed as Southern writers. I’ve been listed as a black writer twice by mistake, because I had a story about a knife fight in a public school. It was something out of my experience that I had witnessed, so it never occurred to me to mention race at all. I got a letter from two African-American writers in Chicago saying, "We read your story and we want this for our anthology of African American literature." They assumed anyone who talked and acted like the characters in my story was a black guy, that they would be the only ones fighting with knives. I didn’t ask any questions. I had a brief career as a non-black black writer.

What sacrifices have you made for your art?

None that I know of. I sincerely believe everything is a trade-off, so I don’t anticipate things being different than they are. What I don’t think people have the right to do, and I’d rather not do it if I can help it, is drag others into sacrificing for your art, like dragging your kids and family through some miserable life so Daddy can write another half-decent book. They might take a dim view of that. Self-sacrifice is a choice. There’s an awful lot of writers who created some wonderful stuff, but a lot of them have hurt people around them. The question would be, "Was it worth it?" I don’t think so.

Do you think about how you want to be remembered?

I think of my books as my children, so I tend to favor the ones who’ve had a tougher time of it. The wounded child is the one who needs attention. I would like to do better, keep growing, keep learning until I cash it in, which is getting closer now than I used to think. I always remember what Groucho Marx said: "What did posterity ever do for me?" I’m not sitting on any one accomplishment; I would rather not repeat myself. I’m going to try new things.

What advice do you have for young writers?

Persistence. Some writers, particularly the young ones, feel that it’s somehow not right to know the rules of the road and how the game is played. They sort of expect to do the work and have somebody else take it from there, but there isn’t anybody else. I think they owe it to their talent to know as much as they can about the whole literary scene, so it won’t baffle and defeat them.

By the same token, young writers should develop the possibilities of a day job somewhere to support this habit. I’ve never thought that it’s a good idea to say I’ll give myself three years, and if nothing happens I’ll become a brain surgeon. I think you have to give your life to it, and take whatever comes to you. Writing is not for a living, it’s for a lifetime. Luck has a lot to do with it, but you can get to a place where you transcend luck. If you can live with good luck and bad luck, if you can forget it and get on with your work and not become a slave to fortune, you’re home free.

Do you ever have moments of self-doubt?

That’s something I encounter every day. I think it goes with the territory. When you sit down at the desk you feel there’s a very good chance you’re wasting your life because there are other things you could be doing. Being in the Peace Corps in Africa would probably be more helpful, so there’s a lot going against you. You have to overcome that every day by some kind of hypnosis, whatever you can summon up. You’ve got every good reason to doubt, and that’s real, and it can be heavy. There is not enough reward and acknowledgment to change that. I’m sure that if I woke up tomorrow and the Swedes called me up and said, "You’ve just won the Nobel Prize," within 15 minutes I’d think, "They’ve made a terrible mistake. Who the fuck am I?"

Does it matter if the work is relevant? I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t think the urgency or value of fiction or poetry is determined by the number of people who may or may not read the work. If you think about it, reading is an interchange between two people. You’re hoping to reach a reader——singular——and if you reach thousands, that’s all well and good. But to understand writing in terms of "how many" is to put it in competition with "Ally McBeal."

Ideally, do you think there should be a clear line between art and commerce?

No. At the time Shakespeare was writing, the drama he was writing was not considered a high art form. Art changes with fashion. The things that were high art in Shakespeare’stime——things he would have loved to have done——were pastoral poems, pages and pages long. They’re not around anymore, but it was the top of the heap then. Mediums change, and time changes the status of mediums. You can’t let that worry you. You’ve got to have certain things you love to do. If you happen to have the talent to write great movie scripts, you’ll make a good living. The good movies are probably the great literary art form of our time, because they can do things in terms of color, sound, action, words, that can’t be done in novels or short stories. The work of a few passionate souls is considered high art, but then a lot of it is crap and highly commercial.

What’s the most important skill you think a writer should have?

Writers can learn by trial and error what their weaknesses are. The temptation is to stick with your strengths and dodge the weaknesses. But I think what you’re aiming for is to have everything balanced, so an outsider can’t tell what’s hard and what’s easy for you.

One of the key things is to exercise your imagination, so you can imagine what it’s like to wear other shoes. In terms of history, one of the biggest mistakes is judging people in the past on the basis of modern thinking. It takes a little effort, but if you can imagine what it’s like to be a character different than yourself, that’s the beginning of a kind of wisdom as a writer. And it helps for certain practical things. I spent some time in class last year on how to send out a manuscript, and I discovered that very few of them imagined what it was like to be an editor at the other end. It’s practical, but it’s also very vital——the ability to cultivate the understanding of the other persons’ point of view. It’s a great liberation. Art and writing should be liberating, not inhibiting. Anything that serves to inhibit your life and art is the enemy of what you’re trying to do.

In The Right Thing to Do at the Time, you write about your father taking on the Ku Klux Klan as a lawyer in Kissimmee, Florida. In the last lines, your father says, "If they want to stop me now, they’ll have to kill me. And I don’t think they’ve got the guts for it."

Then the narrator writes, "Then he laughed out loud. And so did I, not because it was funny, but because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time."

Somehow that speaks to our situation today, where there are so many reasons to be fearful and pessimistic. Where do you find laughter?

In surprising places, I think. I was out of town at the time, in Maine, when C-VILLE published two little poems of mine. Somebody wrote in that I was homophobic because I use the word "sissies." I thought that had to be some kind of joke, because the more you think about it, the dumber that is.