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Garibaldi, OR’s Tsunami Evacuation Signs Still Point to a Coffee Shop That Closed in 2019

Hal Cranston
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Garibaldi, OR’s Tsunami Evacuation Signs Still Point to a Coffee Shop That Closed in 2019

GARIBALDI, OR — The blue-and-white evacuation signs posted along Highway 101 in this Tillamook County fishing town have, for the past six years, directed any survivors of an incoming tsunami to a brick storefront on Mooring Lane that was Coastal Grind Coffee from 2014 until the morning of October 9, 2019, when owner Pat Lavigne taped a handwritten note to the door reading “thanks for everything” and drove to Bend.

The signs have not been updated. Most residents, when asked, say they are aware.

“We figure if the wave comes, we’ll just keep going past it,” said Donna Frese, who has waited tables at the Troller two blocks west since 1998. “Pat’s place was never really the high ground. That was always sort of the joke.”

The Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries lists Garibaldi’s evacuation route as compliant with current standards, which a department spokesperson on Tuesday clarified to mean “the signs are present, legible, and securely fastened to their posts.” The standard does not require the destination to still be there.

Alan Verbeke, who runs a one-man emergency-planning practice out of Newport called Coastline Readiness, said the situation is more common than people realize along this stretch of coast. “You’ve got towns where the route ends at a Dairy Queen, towns where it ends at a vacant lot, towns where it ends at a duplex somebody actually lives in now,” Verbeke said. “Garibaldi’s at least is a building with a door.”

Mayor Tina Kerr said the city has taken up the matter at three council meetings since 2021 without resolution, in part because the next stretch of high ground belongs to a private landowner who has informed the council, in writing, that he would prefer not to host a panicked crowd. A motion to redirect the signage to the Lions Club lot failed in March on the grounds that the Lions Club keeps a chain across it on weekends.

Residents have, in the meantime, made their own arrangements. Charter captain Russ Kohlmann said he plans to drive his pickup up the logging road behind his property. Frese said she will follow the line of cars. Lavigne, reached by phone in Bend on Tuesday afternoon, said he had not realized the signs still pointed to his old shop and seemed, briefly, moved.

The storefront, listed at $189,000 since 2020, is showing this Saturday. The listing agent’s office said attendance is expected to be light.

Every Suburban Dad Suddenly a Lifelong Sabbath Devotee, Hayden’s Mom Confirms

Tara Sparks
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Every Suburban Dad Suddenly a Lifelong Sabbath Devotee, Hayden’s Mom Confirms

SHAKER HEIGHTS, OH — Mark Trumball, 54, who spent the last three decades referring to all heavy metal as “that noise that gives Hayden migraines,” stood in the Trader Joe’s checkout line Tuesday morning telling a 19-year-old cashier that he and Ozzy Osbourne “basically came up together.”

Trumball, who owns zero Black Sabbath records and one Jimmy Buffett tote bag, is among an estimated 41 million American fathers who learned of Osbourne’s death overnight and immediately reclassified themselves as primary mourners. By 9 a.m. Eastern, group texts nationwide had been overrun with grayscale Ozzy photos captioned “a real one” by men whose Spotify Wrapped is 88% Coldplay.

“My husband told our daughter that Ozzy ‘raised him,'” said Karen Trumball, who has been married to Mark since 1996 and can confirm he was raised by a CPA named Greg in Parma. “Then he asked Alexa to play ‘the bat one.’ He meant ‘Crazy Train.’ ‘Crazy Train’ is not the bat one.”

Spotify reported a 12,400% surge in streams of “Crazy Train” by 11 a.m., with internal data suggesting roughly half the plays came from accounts that had to first unpause a Brené Brown podcast. The platform’s algorithm has reportedly begun panicking, serving Megadeth to dental hygienists and recommending Pantera to a man in Naperville who has logged into Spotify four times since 2019, all to play “Margaritaville.”

The performance has spilled onto Nextdoor, where the woman who runs the Glenwood Estates page said she has personally deleted nine separate posts from men insisting they once “locked eyes” with Ozzy at concerts they did not attend. “One guy claimed Donington ’81,” she said. “He was nine. In Toledo. His mother commented on the post.”

At Guitar Center in Westlake, manager Devra Holst reported a 600% spike in middle-aged men asking to hold a Gibson SG “just to feel something,” with most leaving without buying anything after their wives texted them about dinner. One customer reportedly air-guitared the opening of “Iron Man” so aggressively he pulled a lat and had to be helped to his Subaru Ascent.

Actual longtime Sabbath fans have responded with the weary resignation of a community that has seen this before. “Same thing happened with Bowie. Same thing happened with Eddie Van Halen,” said Dom Petrocelli, 61, who has owned his Sabbath “Vol. 4” vinyl since 1973. “In two weeks these guys won’t be able to name a single song that isn’t ‘Crazy Train’ or ‘the bat one,’ which, again, is also ‘Crazy Train.'”

By Tuesday afternoon, LinkedIn had logged 14,000 posts opening with “Ozzy taught me three things about leadership,” the most viral of which was written by a regional VP at a Cleveland insurance firm whose third lesson was “don’t be afraid to bite the head off underperforming Q2 initiatives.”

At press time, Mark Trumball was explaining to his daughter Hayden, 22, that her generation “will never understand what it was like” to watch “The Osbournes” on MTV in 2003 while doing homework in the next room.

My Grandson Had ChatGPT-5 Write My Column and It Knew Who Coach DiMaggio Was

Duke Holloway
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My Grandson Had ChatGPT-5 Write My Column and It Knew Who Coach DiMaggio Was

My grandson Marcus came over Sunday with his laptop under his arm and that look on his face he gets when he’s about to ruin my afternoon. He set the thing on my kitchen table next to a half-eaten kaiser roll, spun it around, and said, “Pop, watch this.” He then typed, with two fingers like a man texting a ransom note, the following: Write a 700-word Duke Holloway column about NFL training camps opening this week. He hit return. The fan inside the laptop made a noise like my refrigerator does before it gives up for the season.

What came back was a column with my name on it that I did not write and, here is the part that’s been eating at me since about four in the afternoon, mostly would have.

It opened with a guy at a diner counter complaining about padded practices being capped. It moved into a riff on heated sideline benches, which I have in fact mocked in this paper on three separate occasions, including once in a Veterans Day piece where it didn’t really belong. It used the word “soft” twice and the word “content” once, in italics, the way I do, like the word itself is something I just stepped in.

Then, somewhere around paragraph four, it quoted Coach DiMaggio.

Now. Coach DiMaggio coached me at St. Brendan’s from 1962 to 1966. He has been mentioned in this column, by my count, somewhere north of two hundred times. So I understand, on a technical level, how a machine that has eaten every word I’ve ever filed could spit his name back at me. What I do not understand is how it got the cadence right. The line it gave him was, “You don’t get tired, you get tired of trying.” Coach DiMaggio never said that. But he might have. He could have. If you’d handed him a clipboard and a humid August afternoon and a sophomore guard who was dogging it on a sled, that is exactly the kind of sentence that would have come out of him, and I sat at my kitchen table reading it off a screen and feeling, briefly, like I had betrayed the man by letting a computer get that close.

It also invented a guy. Some old-timer named Sully Bregman who, the column claimed, used to drive a beer truck for Schaefer and had opinions about two-a-days. Sully Bregman does not exist. I have never written about Sully Bregman. But here is the thing, and I want you to understand this is the part that has me looking at the ceiling at one in the morning: I know six guys who could be Sully Bregman. One of them is named Sal. The machine made up a man and the man was correct.

I called Ray Kowalczyk. I read him three paragraphs. There was a long pause and Ray said, “Have it write mine too, I’m tired.” Ray has not written a column in his life. That is not the point. The point is Ray heard it and his first instinct was surrender, and Ray fought in a war.

What the thing got wrong, and I want this on the record, is the ending. It closed with a sentence about “the soul of the game” being something you can’t measure on a spreadsheet. I would sooner choke on a bratwurst than file the phrase “soul of the game.” That’s a sportswriter’s idea of what I sound like, not what I sound like, and the difference between those two things is the entire reason any of you have read me for forty years instead of one of the other guys.

So that’s where I’ve landed. The machine is not smart. It has read everything I’ve written and figured out the shape of it, which is exactly what every kid I ever coached did when he was trying to make varsity by imitating the seniors. We had a name for those kids. We called them “juniors.” They got better, or they didn’t, and either way they were not the seniors. Marcus took his laptop home around six. He said the thing also writes wedding toasts. I told him to go ahead and have it write my eulogy, save everybody the trouble, and he laughed in a way I did not entirely care for.

Denise is bringing chili tonight. She says it’s from a podcast. I am going to eat it and I am going to write tomorrow’s column myself, with my own hands, like an idiot.

Airbnb Host Charges $340 Cleaning Fee, Then Hands Guest a Mop

Tara Sparks
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Airbnb Host Charges $340 Cleaning Fee, Then Hands Guest a Mop

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — The Henderson family of four arrived at their $1,840 weekend rental Saturday afternoon to find a freshly laminated 14-page checkout manual on the kitchen counter, a mop leaning against the fridge, and a yellow Post-it written in cheerful cursive that read, simply, “Welcome! Relax! :)”

The cleaning fee, charged separately at booking, was $340. The first item on page one of the manual instructed guests to “strip all beds and place linens in the labeled bin (NOT the unlabeled bin — the unlabeled bin is decorative and a gift from Doug’s mother).”

Subsequent pages required the family to wipe down the inside of the microwave, vacuum under the couch cushions, hand-wash any wine glasses they did not use, water two named houseplants (“Margot and Reginald — Margot is the dramatic one, please speak gently”), and “spritz the throw pillows with the linen mist provided, but only the pillows in the den, never the bedroom pillows, we will know.”

Page nine politely asked guests to “kindly not perceive” a small stain on the bathroom ceiling. Page eleven introduced the mop by name — Gerald — and included a diagram of Gerald’s preferred direction of travel across the reclaimed-pine flooring, which guests were warned was “emotionally porous.”

Marisol Pena, who worked five years as a turnover cleaner for short-term rentals across three states before quitting last spring, said the math no longer makes sense. “It used to be that the cleaning fee was for cleaning,” she said, eating a yogurt in her car. “Now the fee is just vibes. The guests do the cleaning. I don’t know what the fee buys anymore. Possibly the laminator. Definitely the laminator.”

The host, identified on the listing only as “Carla & Doug — Your Mountain Hosts!,” responded to the Hendersons’ one-star review by writing that the family had “failed to engage with the spirit of the home” and noting that Margot the houseplant was now “noticeably wilting from the energy left behind.” Doug added a separate reply clarifying that Gerald the mop had been found “facing the wrong way.”

According to a recent survey by the rental advocacy group GuestVoice, the average Airbnb checkout in 2025 now requires 47 minutes of guest labor, three loads of laundry, one trip to a municipal recycling drop-off, and what the group’s report describes as “a moment of quiet dissociation in the driveway, generally with the engine running.”

Hosts have largely defended the trend on the platform’s community forums, where one popular thread argues that asking guests to deep-clean the oven is actually “a love language” and that “if they don’t want to take care of the home, they can stay in a hotel, which is what people who hate beauty do.”

The Henderson family eventually completed approximately 60% of the manual before the parents made what the mother later described as “an executive decision” to leave the remaining $340 worth of tasks undone, accept the inevitable retaliatory review, and drive home four hours early listening to a true-crime podcast in total silence.

The Hendersons’ nine-year-old son, who had been promised a vacation, was last seen mopping the back deck at dusk while his father knelt beside him and whispered, with the calm intensity of a third-base coach, “Gerald goes north-to-south, buddy. Gerald always goes north-to-south.”

Marlene’s Walmart Flamingo Has Off-Gassed in Her Sunroom for 11 Days and the Twins Slept on It

Brooke Ellery
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Marlene’s Walmart Flamingo Has Off-Gassed in Her Sunroom for 11 Days and the Twins Slept on It

Marlene called me over Tuesday to “see the new setup,” and I knew before I crossed the threshold of her sunroom that something was wrong, because the smell — sweet, slightly sticky, the chemical ghost of a brand-new shower curtain — had already drifted across the side yard.

It was a flamingo. Six feet of hot-pink PVC, fully inflated, hogging most of her wicker loveseat. She bought it at Walmart for thirty-nine dollars on July 8 and has been “letting it live in the sunroom” ever since because, in her words, the twins love it and it “feels festive.”

Reader, that flamingo has been off-gassing into her family’s airspace for eleven consecutive days.

I don’t know how to explain PVC to a person who isn’t already in the Facebook group “Plastics, Plasticizers, and the Pediatricians Who Won’t Tell You” (4,800 members and climbing), but the short version is: big-box pool floats are polyvinyl chloride softened with phthalate plasticizers, which is why they feel squishy and faintly oily and why they smell like a 1996 inflatable raft the second you slit the box. The smell IS the chemical leaving the plastic. The smell is the warning label. When I tell people this they nod politely, the way Garrett does when I read aloud from a Lunchables.

My sister-in-law Renee, who works the front desk at a pediatric office in Hendersonville and is basically a nurse, told me last Christmas that DEHP — that’s one of the phthalates, and yes I know the letters — is “the one they keep quietly taking out of teething rings.” She said it like it was a fun fact. I have not been the same.

Marlene, when pressed, told me she “aired the flamingo out on the deck for two days” before bringing it inside. Two days. For a six-foot vinyl object that smells, I am not exaggerating, like the inside of a brand-new bowling ball bag. The Pool Pal company’s own website, which I read in her driveway on my phone, says “some odor is normal and will dissipate.” Dissipate WHERE, Pool Pal. Into Marlene’s lungs? Into her decorative pillows? Into the bloodstream of two seven-year-olds who, and I cannot stress this enough, slept on it Saturday night during a thunderstorm because they thought it was funny?

Garrett thinks I’m being dramatic. Garrett also thinks the smell of a new car is “kind of nice,” so I have stopped consulting him on indoor air quality. When I asked him to come smell the sunroom he said he’d “swing by,” which in Garrett-speak means approximately never.

Here is what we’re doing at our house this summer instead. We have one float, a heavy black rubber inner tube my father bought from a tire shop in Spartanburg in 1994, and it lives in the garage between uses. The kids have a wooden paddleboard I found on Marketplace from a woman in Weaverville who refinishes old ones with linseed oil and a single coat of beeswax. Is it heavier? Yes. Did Tully cry the first time he tried to drag it down to the dock? Yes. Did his developing endocrine system thank me? I have to believe so.

The podcast “Slow Skin, Slow Lungs, Slow Children” did a whole episode on summer plastics in May — I keep meaning to send it to Marlene, but you can’t just text someone a 94-minute podcast and expect the friendship to survive it. So I sent her a screenshot of the Pool Pal ingredient breakdown with the phthalates underlined in yellow highlighter, and she replied with the laughing-crying emoji and a photo of the twins lying face-down on the flamingo’s back.

She also added, and I am quoting directly, “it’s just a pool toy Brooke.” It is not just a pool toy, Marlene. It is a six-foot continuous-release vapor source in your sunroom, where you also keep your sourdough starter and the dog’s bed. And if you’d like the link to the group, I am happy to send it. I send it to everyone eventually.

GPT-5 Arrived Tuesday. Eliza Used It to Write Her Toast.

Margaret Thorne
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GPT-5 Arrived Tuesday. Eliza Used It to Write Her Toast.

What does a city actually believe in, if not its own laws? OpenAI released GPT-5 on Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, every committee chair with jurisdiction had managed to say nothing about it, which is a kind of statement, if you squint.

I went to dinner Friday night at Eliza’s — same Georgetown table, same bipartisan lobbyist whom I am still not going to name, same Judy, my sister-in-law, in from the National Archives for the weekend. The wine was decent. The conversation, somewhere between the salad and the entrée, became the future of the human species.

Eliza had written a toast for her parents’ fortieth. She read it, we cried in the appropriate places, and as the plates were clearing she mentioned, the way you mention you’ve started using a new pharmacy, that GPT-5 had drafted it. She’d given the thing three sentences about her mother and “a wedding-toast vibe,” and it had given her the rest. “It was better than what I had,” she said. Nobody at the table disagreed.

The lobbyist — bipartisan, in the sense that he bills both parties — said he’d used it that morning for a client memo on agricultural subsidies. He said this while examining his cufflink. He did not say which client. He did not need to.

Judy, who works at the National Archives and is the one person at the table whose paycheck comes from preserving the difference between a real document and a fake one, admitted she’d asked it to draft a finding aid description for a collection she has not yet processed. She caught herself halfway through the story and laughed the laugh you laugh when you have just realized something about yourself in public.

There was a Senate Commerce staffer there too — junior, ambitious, drinking water. I asked him what was moving on AI. He said hearings were “scheduled for September,” which in this town is a euphemism for “we are hoping the news cycle eats this before we have to vote.” He said the word framework four times in eight minutes. I counted.

I am old enough to remember when a technology that could write a passable eulogy, draft a regulatory memo, and impersonate the National Archives in a single Tuesday afternoon would have produced, at minimum, a press conference. We got a blog post from the company, a polite acknowledgment from the White House science office, and a “we’re monitoring developments” from the Hill, which is what Congress says about everything from screwworm to nuclear proliferation.

Washington has quietly stopped pretending to be a regulator of this industry and started behaving like a customer. Half the people at the table had paid accounts. The other half were on the free tier and complaining about the rate limits. Nobody at any point asked whether any of this was, in the older sense of the word, allowed.

I asked Eliza on the way out whether she’d told her mother the toast was machine-written. She said her mother had asked for a copy to frame. We agreed, in the doorway, that there was no version of telling her now that wouldn’t be cruel. We did not agree on whether that was a problem.

Eliza emailed the toast around on Saturday morning. Three of us asked for the prompt.

They Settled the All-Star Game With a Swing-Off Tuesday Night and I’m Going to Need a Minute

Duke Holloway
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They Settled the All-Star Game With a Swing-Off Tuesday Night and I’m Going to Need a Minute

I went into the den around the seventh inning, came back with a sandwich, and the National League was winning a baseball game by hitting three home runs in a batting cage. My wife asked who won. I said I genuinely could not tell her. I said it the way you tell somebody a relative has passed.

For those of you who didn’t watch — and based on the ratings, that’s most of you — Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game ended in a tie Tuesday night and was decided by what they’re calling a “swing-off,” which is when three guys from each league stand at the plate and take cuts off a coach and whoever hits the most home runs wins. That’s it. That’s the tiebreaker. They settled the Midsummer Classic with a carnival game.

I called Ray Kowalczyk about this because Ray called me first and I didn’t pick up. When I called back he didn’t even say hello. He said, “Duke, they had a HOME RUN DERBY to break a TIE in the GAME.” I told him I knew. He said, “In the GAME, Duke.” I told him I knew, Ray. He hung up. He called back twelve minutes later to say it again.

Now look. I am aware that the All-Star Game has not been a real baseball game since approximately the Carter administration. I am aware that nobody pitches more than an inning, that half the roster is some guy named Tucker, and that the whole thing is essentially a corporate retreat with batting practice. I made my peace with that. I made my peace with the home jerseys. I made my peace with the fact that the winner used to get home field advantage in the World Series, which was the single dumbest idea this sport has had since the designated hitter, and I am on record about the designated hitter.

But there is a line. And the line is: when nine innings of a baseball game end and the score is tied, you play another inning of the baseball game. You do not roll a giant inflatable die. You do not hold a dunk contest. You do not have Kyle Schwarber take three swings against a guy in a windbreaker to determine who represents the future of the sport on a Tuesday in July.

My old coach, Sal DiMaggio, used to make us run the bases until somebody threw up if a practice ended in a tie scrimmage. He said ties were what happened to people who weren’t willing to find out. He once kept us at the field until 9:40 at night in October because the JV couldn’t break 14-14 in a glorified pickup game. We learned a lot about ourselves that night. Mostly that Petey Corrigan could not, under any circumstances, be trusted to bunt.

You know what would have happened if Sal DiMaggio had been told the All-Star Game ended in a swing-off? He would have asked what a swing-off was. Then he would have been told. Then he would have walked into Lake Erie. Hand to God.

The defense of this thing, which I have now read in three places because I am a masochist, is that the players don’t want to keep playing extra innings in an exhibition game. Fair enough. Players are tired. The All-Star break is short. Nobody wants Paul Skenes throwing his 47th pitch of the night to settle a fake game. I get it. I genuinely get it. The solution to that, in a sport that has been played for a hundred and fifty years, is — and stay with me here — to let the game end in a tie. Print TIE in the box score. Hand out two MVPs. Go home. Eat something. We did it for decades and the republic survived.

Instead we have invented a new event, the swing-off, which exists for approximately four minutes once a year and which my grandson is going to grow up thinking is a normal part of baseball, the way he thinks the runner on second base in extra innings is normal, the way he thinks pitch clocks are normal, the way he thinks a man named “Elly” can be a shortstop. I love the kid. He is lost to me.

The thing that really gets me, and I’ll wrap up here because Denise is coming over with chili, is that the swing-off worked. It was, by all accounts, exciting. People liked it. The crowd cheered. Kyle Schwarber hit three home runs in three swings and was named Most Valuable Player of a game in which he went 0-for-2. He gave a nice speech. His teammates dumped a Gatorade cooler on him. Everyone went home happy.

That is the part that scares me. Not that they did it. That it played. Once a thing plays in this country, it stays. I will be eighty-one years old watching the seventh game of the World Series end in a swing-off and I will, against my will, find it exciting, and that is when I will know I have lost.

Denise is bringing chili. She says she got the recipe from a podcast.

Day 12 of Fireworks: Local Dad Insists ‘Freedom Doesn’t Have a Calendar’

Tara Sparks
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Day 12 of Fireworks: Local Dad Insists ‘Freedom Doesn’t Have a Calendar’

NAPERVILLE, IL — Software engineer Brad Henson, 47, launched a Saturn Missile Battery into a cloudless July 16 sky Tuesday night, marking the twelfth consecutive evening he has personally refused to accept that Independence Day was, technically, one day.

Henson, who purchased $834 of unregulated explosives from a tent off I-355 on June 28, has been steadily working through inventory with what neighbors describe as ‘the relentless, patient cadence of a man billing hours.’

‘Freedom doesn’t have a calendar,’ Henson told reporters from his driveway, holding a Roman candle in one hand and a half-warm White Claw in the other. ‘The British didn’t surrender on July 4. They surrendered when they got tired. That’s where I’m at with this — that’s where I want my neighbors to get to.’

According to a logistics spreadsheet Henson voluntarily produced, he still has 41 mortars, two ‘cake’ assortments, six smoke bombs deemed ‘for the kids,’ and one item labeled only ‘THE BIG ONE’ with a hand-drawn skull next to it. At current burn rate, his remaining stock will carry him through the second week of August.

Across the cul-de-sac, neighbor Janet Perlmutter has entered what therapists are calling the bargaining phase. ‘At first I called the non-emergency line. Then I called the emergency line. Then I started waving from my porch like we were friends, because at this point it felt humiliating to keep pretending I didn’t know who it was,’ she said. ‘Last night I just stood at the window and clapped. He saluted me. I think we’re in something now.’

The Henson children, ages 8 and 11, have begun referring to their father in the third person as ‘The Cannoneer’ and have set up a folding card table at the end of the driveway selling lemonade and earplugs as a bundle for $3.

A representative from the Naperville Fire Department, reached by phone, sighed for approximately nine seconds before clarifying that no, technically the city’s fireworks ordinance does not include an exemption for ‘a guy who’s really committed to it,’ but that enforcement at this stage felt ‘spiritually complicated.’

Asked when the campaign might end, Henson gestured vaguely toward the garage, where a tarp covered something roughly the size of a beer fridge. ‘When the people are free,’ he said, ‘and not a minute before. Also when I run out, which will be soon, but not as soon as you’d think.’

At press time, a single mortar shell could be heard going off four blocks away, followed by the faint, unmistakable sound of a man saying ‘WOOOO’ entirely to himself.

Kerr County Is Still Counting. We’ve Moved On to Swift-Kelce.

Margaret Thorne
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Kerr County Is Still Counting. We’ve Moved On to Swift-Kelce.

What is the half-life of a regional disaster these days — eight days, ten? I ask because the Guadalupe River is still giving up the missing, and I cannot find the story anywhere above the fold. I had to scroll past a wedding rumor, a software update, and a recap of a music video shot in a stadium tunnel before I found the body count, which is the order of priority a serious country uses when it has decided in advance not to be one.

The numbers, in case you, like the rest of us, have stopped checking: more than a hundred dead, dozens still unaccounted for, a children’s camp washed off the map, and a search effort being conducted in part by volunteers with airboats and a Facebook page. The state has asked for federal help with the kind of sheepish indirection a man uses when he has run out of his neighbor’s gasoline. The federal answer has been, broadly, that the matter is being looked into, which in Washington is a phrase that means the matter is being looked away from.

I went to a dinner in Kalorama on Saturday — Eliza’s, the second one this month, the lamb again — and I will tell you that Kerr County did not come up until I raised it, and when I raised it the table treated me as though I had asked everyone to take their shoes off. There were eleven of us. One had a niece at sleepaway camp in the Adirondacks; she said the words “so awful” and reached, with admirable economy, for her wineglass. Another, a lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan, examined a cufflink as though it had been recently insulted.

The conversation that did flourish, at length and with real animation, concerned a pop star, a tight end, and a rumored engagement ring whose carat weight my sister-in-law Judy — who works at the National Archives and has not, to my knowledge, ever held a diamond — described with the confidence of a woman who has read three Substacks on the subject. Judy is not the problem. Judy is doing what the country has asked her to do, which is to take an interest in something manageable.

I would like to be clear that I do not begrudge anyone their distractions. I begrudge the institutions that have built a national life out of providing them. We have a press corps that has decided a missing-persons list in the Hill Country is, at best, a Tuesday item, and a political class that has located, with the precision of a metal detector, the exact moment at which a tragedy stops generating donor calls. That moment, in my notes, was a week ago Thursday.

The bipartisan lobbyist, pressed, allowed that “the response had been complicated,” a sentence I have now heard him deploy about three different catastrophes and one merger. He explained that the disaster-relief supplemental was “in a difficult posture,” which is what people in this town say when they mean nothing is going to happen and they would prefer you didn’t ask whose fault that is. Eliza said, “Margaret, please,” in the tone she uses when she would like the salad course to proceed without incident.

I want to know, and I am only asking, what we believe a country owes the people who lost children at a summer camp. I want to know whether the answer is a press release, a presidential flyover scheduled around a fundraiser, and a polite collective agreement to stop mentioning it after the second weekend. I want to know whether “thoughts and prayers” has been formally upgraded to “thoughts, prayers, and a content pivot,” because if so I would like that noted in the Federal Register, where we keep track of our other surrenders.

There is a particular kind of civic cowardice that does not look like cowardice at all. It looks like a feed. It looks like a producer deciding, reasonably, that the audience has moved on, and an audience deciding, reasonably, that the producers have moved on, and the two of them shaking hands over the grave of a story neither one will admit to burying. Kerr County did not stop being news. We stopped being readers.

I drove home from Eliza’s thinking about the airboats, and the volunteers, and the parents who are still, as I write this, waiting on a phone call from a county morgue. By the time I reached Dupont, the radio had moved on to the engagement, and a man I have never met was breaking down, with real feeling, the symbolism of the ring’s setting.

The lamb, I should say, was excellent. We called it the lamb course, and we asked for the recipe.

Our Emerald Isle Rental Has 11 Plug-In ‘Coastal Linen’ Diffusers and I Yanked Every One Before We Unpacked

Brooke Ellery
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Our Emerald Isle Rental Has 11 Plug-In ‘Coastal Linen’ Diffusers and I Yanked Every One Before We Unpacked

We pulled into the driveway of the Emerald Isle rental at 4:47 p.m. Saturday, the twins were already half-out of their car seats, and the first thing that hit me when Garrett opened the front door was a wall of what the listing photos had described as ‘a fresh coastal welcome.’ That is a marketing term. The actual term is Glade PlugIn Scented Oil in ‘Coastal Linen,’ and there were eleven of them. I counted before I let a single child past the entryway.

Two in the foyer. One in the half-bath off the foyer, which I want to be clear is the size of a coat closet. Three in the open-concept kitchen-living area, including one plugged into the outlet directly behind the toaster, which is its own conversation. One in each of the three bedrooms, at toddler face height. One in the laundry room. And one — I am not making this up — plugged into the GFCI outlet on the screened porch, outdoors, where it was simply scenting the Atlantic Ocean.

I want to say I handled this calmly. Garrett would say I did not. What I did was set my purse down, walk the perimeter of the house with a Trader Joe’s tote bag, and harvest every single one of them before a suitcase came inside. The bag went into the trunk of the car. The car got moved to the far end of the driveway. The twins got herded onto the porch with watermelon while I opened every window the rental agreement would let me open.

Here is what ‘Coastal Linen’ is, according to a woman named Daphne in Fragrance-Free Families of the Carolinas, which is a Facebook group I joined the night Lainey was born and have not regretted once. It is a proprietary blend, meaning the company does not have to tell you what is in it, meaning it is at minimum a cocktail of phthalates, synthetic musks, and what Daphne calls ‘the linalool family,’ which sounds like a sitcom and behaves like a respiratory event. There is no linen in it. There is no coast in it. There is, per the SDS sheet Daphne posted, something called ‘Hexyl Cinnamal,’ which I cannot pronounce but which I can tell you my body does not want.

I texted my sister-in-law Whitney, who works the front desk at a pediatric allergy office in Raleigh and has watched Dr. Pemberton diagnose enough kids to be, functionally, a nurse. Whitney’s response was three words and a skull emoji. The three words were ‘pull them all.’ I had already pulled them all. Whitney and I are simpatico in this way.

Garrett, bless him, made the case that we are here for six nights, that the house is otherwise lovely, that the owner — a woman named Cheryl whose VRBO profile photo shows her on a paddleboard with a labradoodle — clearly meant well, and that perhaps I could ‘try to enjoy the trip.’ I told Garrett that Cheryl had plugged a fragrance-emitting device into the outlet behind the toaster, which is a heat source, and that this was not a difference of opinion, this was physics. He went to get groceries.

I did message Cheryl, politely, through the app. I said the diffusers had been temporarily relocated for the children’s comfort and that I would reinstall them at checkout. Cheryl wrote back within nine minutes, and her message contained the phrase ‘I get them at Big Lots, four for ten dollars.’ I have read this message six times. I cannot decide if it is a confession or a brag. Whitney says both.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure: I did bring my own diffuser. It is a ceramic ultrasonic unit from a small company in Bend, Oregon, and it is currently running a blend of organic lavender and Roman chamomile in the primary bedroom because the twins will not sleep without it and because that is a real essential oil, distilled from a plant, not synthesized in a New Jersey lab to evoke the concept of a beach towel. These are not the same thing and I will not pretend they are.

The kids fell asleep in fourteen minutes last night, which is a vacation record. Garrett admits the house smells better. The Trader Joe’s tote in the trunk is, in his words, ‘humming a little,’ and I have asked him to stop opening it. We have five nights left. Cheryl, if you are reading this, your toaster is fine. Your outlet is fine. The ocean, against all odds, smells like the ocean again.

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