by Carrot Quinn
The groups that organized the march in DC have set up all sorts of infrastructure, including a website that leads me to a gathering space in an old church, where I am able to sign up for a place to stay, a volunteer shift cooking meals, and which arm of the march I want to join. Do I prefer to march on foot, or would I like to be on a bicycle? If I want to bike, there’s a separate sign-up sheet to borrow one. I hold the Sharpie in my hand and hesitate, looking at the paper taped to the walls. I read the names already on the sheet—Milk Crate, Yarrow, Warbler, Spindle. Does no one here go by their real name? I look at the bag of baby carrots in my other hand, which I grabbed from the cardboard box in the corner labeled Free Food.
“Carrot,” I write on the sign-up sheet for the bicycle contingent. Carrot is as good a name as any. I wander into the adjacent room, which is crowded with people, and that’s when I see her.
The woman is short, with crooked teeth and huge, tangled black hair. She’s unpacking a box of zines and arranging them carefully on a table. A man with face tattoos approaches her and they engage in conversation. The woman’s hands fly about like wild, angry birds. I walk over to the table and pick up one of the zines. The cover is a beautiful illustration of a freight train, some mountains, trees.
“Did you make this zine?” I ask, after the man is gone.
“Yeah,” she says. “My name’s Willow. I need to go help prepare lunch.” She’s looking at her watch. “Do you want a zine? Here, take one.” She waves as she hurries out of the room. I turn the zine over. Her email address is on the back, as well as her mailing address: a P.O. box in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The march is permitted, which means that there’s a police escort and intersections are closed off so that we can pass through the city without blocking traffic. The day is gentle and warm; I slept last night on the couch of a local politician who volunteered to house protesters, and he also lent me my bike. Breakfast was from Food Not Bombs: tofu scramble and oily potatoes in the park where everyone gathered before beginning the march. Now we’re wending our way down a large, empty boulevard, waving signs and clanging our bike bells. I’ve never been to a protest before, and the energy of all the people around me is flowing through my own body, a current that feels like it could lift me off the ground. I am overcome with wonder. Look at all of us here! I can’t think of a time when I’ve felt this alive, when I’ve been such a part of something so large. Then the bikes ahead of me stop; there’s something going on just out of view. I wait, but the march doesn’t continue forward. What’s going on? The people around me are murmuring, jumping up and down, trying to see. We just arrived at a park, Pershing Park.
Then I can see it—a row of riot police, dressed in intimidating black body armor and helmets. They’re carrying assault rifles and they’re making their way through the crowd. Soon they’ve encircled the entire park. They turn and face us and then go completely still, as though they’ve been turned to stone. Those at the edge of the crowd move toward the riot police in an attempt to pass through, but the riot police just raise their shields and push the marchers back. It appears as though we are now trapped in the park, in this circle of police. But why?
The crowd mutters to itself. Groups have been separated, and those on either side holler back and forth, trying to figure out what’s going on. Fear moves through the crowd in waves.
* * *
—
I am sitting on a city bus, resting my head against the window glass. The bus is parked on the street outside Pershing Park. It’s been parked here for the last ten hours, since a fleet of these repurposed buses arrived and we were forced into lines, our wrists were zip-tied together, and we were herded aboard—all four hundred or so of us who were in the park. Some buses rumbled away, to who knows where, and some have simply been sitting, like mine. It’s dark outside now. The plastic zip ties cut into the skin on my wrists and I rub them against each other, trying to loosen them. The others on the bus—there are about twenty of us in total—are in the same shape as I am—tired, demoralized, hungry, and thirsty. They lean against the windows, and against each other. Some of them doze off and then wake, then doze off again. When I was first loaded onto the bus, I was excited, almost high; our march has taken a wild turn! What will happen now? We weren’t given any food or water, but I had a bagel and a package of tofu in the pockets of my puffy vest, and I got a lot of laughs from my comrades on the bus when I was trying to open the package of tofu with my wrists zip-tied together, after which we passed the tofu and the bagel around until they were both gone. The hours had dragged on, though, after that, and no additional food and water had been forthcoming. None of us had been allowed to contact anyone on the outside, and no one could tell us how long we would be here, or where we would be taken after. Eventually we all fell silent and just stared out the windows at the empty street, or slept. There’s a cop sitting in the driver’s seat and if someone hollers at him that they need to pee he’ll begrudgingly lead them off the bus to a porta-potty and shut them inside, where they have to figure out how to get their pants down, and then back up, with their wrists zip-tied together.
Sometime in the night there is a squawk of radio and the bus rumbles to life. I feel relief. We’re going somewhere. Anywhere is better than this, right?
Rows of gymnastics mats have been arranged on the floor of a school gymnasium. We are herded into this room, instructed to choose a mat, and a third zip tie is added, joining our wrist restraints to one of our ankles. Thus hobbled, we lie in the fetal position while guards pace between the mats, barking questions. What are our names? What are our addresses? What are our phone numbers? The banks of fluorescent lights on the ceiling of the gymnasium are blinding. Okay. This is worse than the bus.
It is impossible to sleep. I have no idea what time it is. I shut my eyes. Some people are crying and the sound echoes off the walls of the gymnasium, adding to the din.
It’s dark outside again when we are finally taken out of the gym; it must be the evening of the next day. We are each given a bologna sandwich in a paper bag that we can attempt to eat with great difficulty. Our ankle zip tie is removed, leaving just our wrists tied, and we are again loaded onto the buses.
We are moved to a cold metal holding cell. I sit on the floor, my back against the wall, and watch the heavy door with its small glass window latticed with wire, waiting for something, anything. There are many other women crowded into this cell with me, all from the protest. Some of them are crying, some are talking quietly. A woman in a long brown skirt is hollering and banging her fists against the door, demanding to speak with someone. She’s been yelling for a while, and her voice is hoarse. I’m so hungry, and we still haven’t been given any information: where we are, why we are here, how long until we will be released. At least we have a toilet—a steel contraption bolted into the cell—and we can pee whenever we need to.
The door wrenches open, and two guards grab the woman who was pounding on the door. They drag her into the hallway by her hair. She screams and then the door slams shut, muffling her sounds. I close my eyes. All the fun and excitement of this wild turn of events has worn off. Now I just feel terrible and very, very trapped. Being in a holding cell makes me think of my mother. Is this where Barbara has always been? In a cell, alone? Hidden from the rest of the world? With no idea how she got there, or what she did to deserve it?
A few hours later I am standing in the sunshine, weak with hunger and relief. I’ve just been released. People were called out of the cell one by one, until it was just me and two others. Finally the guards came for me and I was led through a network of cold cinderblock hallways and heavy locking doors to a foyer and a glass door bright with sunlight and then out, into the open air. And now I am free.
Why am I free? I think, as I stand blinking in the light, looking at the way the trees move in the afternoon breeze. What have I done to deserve to be free?
The community cen
ter is still open; there are still boxes of dumpstered food lined up against the walls. I fill a grocery sack with sprouted bread, hummus, juice that may or may not have gone bad. A huge sheet of butcher paper is tacked to the wall: a rideshare list.
Carrot, I write, in black Sharpie. Looking for a ride to Charlottesville, Virginia.
* * *
—
Willow lives in an ancient house at the top of a long hill. The house is three stories and she shares it with five other people. There is a peeling porch with a couch on it, and bikes are stacked in the hallway. In the kitchen is another couch, and Christmas lights are tacked in the corners. Flyers from shows, protests, and gatherings paper the walls. A huge pot of soup is bubbling on the stove, steam rising into the humid air.
Willow is pulling everything out of my backpack and tossing it onto the kitchen floor. “You don’t need this,” she says, looking at my full-size hairbrush. “How many pairs of pants did you bring?” I don’t really know what’s in that backpack. I just packed it until it was…full. Willow shows me the backpack she uses when she travels. It’s a daypack. All of her things are rolled neatly, and everything fits together like pieces of a puzzle.
“I ride freight trains with this,” says Willow. “And hitchhike. When your backpack is this small, it’s easier to move around. And you don’t look as sketchy. You can get away with a lot.” Willow tells me stories as she tosses aside my sewing kit, my extra pair of shoes, two paperback books. She spent the summer riding freight trains across the country until her Carhartts were shiny with grease and stank of diesel exhaust. She navigated massive inner-city trainyards and ran from rail cops. Willow doesn’t have a job, and she spends her time making art and zines, organizing protests, reading dense political theory, fixing and building bikes, and sourcing discarded food. Sometimes she works the beet harvest in Minnesota in the fall, feeding sugar beets into giant machinery in the bitter cold for six weeks at a time for minimum wage. Between that, dumpstered food, and her low rent in this small town, she is able to get by.
“But what about everything else?” I say. “What about the food you can’t dumpster—olive oil, almond butter, honey…” I touch the jars on the kitchen shelves. “How do you live?”
“Shoplifting,” says Willow. She’s absentmindedly folding my extra T-shirts for me, pressing them flat. “There’s a way to shoplift everything.”
* * *
—
Willow and I push the cart through the aisles of the upscale grocery store on the other end of Charlottesville. Jars of olives, fancy cheese, small cartons of berries. Tofu. Three containers of hummus. Fresh apple juice. Bell peppers and spinach. A pie. It all goes into the cart. This morning Willow traded her ripped jeans and pit-stained, sun-faded tank top for a clean pink T-shirt and slacks, and her wild hair is bundled into a neat ponytail. I’m wearing a long-sleeve shirt to cover my tattoos. We’re in the toilet paper aisle, which is a relatively quiet aisle, and as soon as the man loitering over the baby wipes makes his selection and disappears around the corner Willow explodes into action: her messenger bag whips around to the front side of her body, the flap comes up (the Velcro is covered with duct tape so that it doesn’t make a ripping noise), and the things in the cart begin to fly into the bag. I stand at the end of the aisle, idly fingering the paper plates. A woman with a basket approaches.
“Hey, Willow,” I say casually, as if I am about to ask her which paper plates she wants. The flap on Willow’s messenger bag closes and the bag swings around to her back. A serene expression settles on her face. She contemplates the price of a jumbo pack of recycled toilet paper.
“You know what?” I say. “I think I left my wallet in the car. Let’s leave the cart here and go get it.”
We approach the sliding glass doors at the front of the store. There had been a small rectangular magnetic tag stuck to the bottle of vitamins I wanted, and I had pulled it off while we were shopping, holding the bottle in my hand and picking stealthily at the tag with my fingers until it transferred to my palm. I had then lifted a box of pancake mix and attached the tag to the box, replacing the box on the shelf afterward. The alarm towers stay silent as we make our way through the sliding front doors and out into the bright sunshine, and I let out the breath I’ve been holding. In the parking lot, everything is still and calm. We force ourselves to walk slowly. Normal. Casual. We reach our bikes where they are chained to a stop sign at the corner, and I fumble with the lock. I drop my keys and have to bend over to pick them up from the ground. This store has a no-chase policy, which means that even if we set off the sensors or they suspect us of shoplifting, no one will run us down. We know this because Willow found an online forum where professional shoplifters share all the information they’ve gleaned in their research. The employees might yell at us, ask us to come back inside, or ask to search our bags. But we can just say no, and keep walking. We’re safe.
On the bike ride to the shopping center this morning, Willow explained the other rules she lives by: She only steals from large chain stores, never from independent businesses. The larger the chain, the better. This is called “victimless crime.” We aren’t stealing the jar of almond butter; we’re “liberating” it. I am exhilarated as I finally fumble the key into the bike lock and free our bikes. We pedal out of the parking lot, into the warm sunny street. The stores with their prices no longer have any power over me. I’m rich!
A few days later, on a busy Saturday, we return to the same store. We fill an empty cart with everything that catches our fancy, everything we can think to eat. And then we simply push the cart out of the store.
“People only see what they’re expecting to see,” says Willow. “It’s the same with freight trains. Part of it is white privilege. You can be right in front of someone, breaking the law, but if you’re white, and a woman, and you look clean and like you have money, they won’t see you. They just won’t see you.”
In order to look clean and like she has money on our shoplifting trips, Willow needs specific clothes. She steals these clothes from the mall.
“Just take a whole armload of stuff into the dressing room,” she tells me, as we lock our bikes outside yet another huge shopping center. I’m sweaty from the ride, and already looking forward to the burritos we’ll eat after. “But only in stores where they don’t count what you take in.” In the dressing room, Willow pulls a multi-tool from her pocket. She shows me the white plastic sensor fixed to the hem of a shirt that she wants. “This sensor isn’t an ink tag,” she says. “There’s no ink inside it. It’s just a magnet that sets off the alarms at the store entrance. You can tell the ink tags because they say Warning, Ink Tag! all over them. The ink is meant as a deterrent, so they really want you to know that it’s there.” Willow works the pliers of the multi-tool around the metal pin that attaches the two sides of the plastic tag, and begins to wiggle the pliers back and forth. A moment later, the pin snaps with a small popping sound. “Always bring something into the dressing room that has pockets, like a pair of pants,” she says. “Then, after you break off the tag, put the tag in the pocket of the pants that you don’t want, and hang the pants back up on the rack as you leave. But do it in a tidy way, like put the pants back where you found them, so no one will have to mess with them and the tag will stay undiscovered for a while.” Willow opens her messenger bag and folds the shirt neatly inside, along with the hanger. Together, the shirt and hanger barely take up any space; Willow’s bag looks just as empty as it did on the bike ride. “If you’re getting something larger, you can fill out your bag somehow at home, like with a cardboard box. And then you can fold the box flat when you’re in the dressing room. That way your bag is the same size when you leave as when you came in.”
We eat our post-shoplifting burritos on the floor of Willow’s room, which is a kaleidoscope of colors: one yellow wall, one magenta, one blue. She has a futon on the floor, sourced from the curb, rumpled blankets,
stacked milk crates for shelving. In the milk crates are hundreds of marker pens in every imaginable color, organized in rainbow order. Stolen, a handful at a time, from craft supply stores. And her drawings, in small piles all over the floor.
“My mother is a painter,” says Willow, as she hunches over one of these sketches, her black hair in a huge, messy ponytail, adding a few more intricate lines to a drawing of a tree. “I grew up in New York City.” I’m lying on Willow’s futon, digesting my burrito and watching her draw. I have never met anyone like Willow. She doesn’t make herself small. And she’s not afraid to not know something. She asks questions constantly and I can almost see her brain working, cranks and wheels turning, weaving it all together. I feel like I can learn everything I need to know secondhand, just from hearing her stories. Here is a person, finally, who can show me a way to be in the world.
A week later Willow is packing up her zines; she’s leaving for an anarchist book fair in the Northeast. It’s time for me to go home, to Portland. I can’t just hang around her house forever, trying to absorb her vibes. At night I dream we’re on a train; the wind is whipping her hair around, and she’s teaching me to read maps. Willow moves her fingers over the black lines in an atlas. This is how we know where we’re going, she says.
My savings from my restaurant job in Portland are mostly gone and I find a young punk woman, a recent college dropout from Florida passing through Charlottesville, who’s down to hitch with me back to the West Coast. After a long wait in the cold, and a couple of rides that take us just a few exits, we are picked up by a pair of truck drivers piloting a rig to Texas. The men chain-smoke and drink Red Bull but are kind, and they hardly speak. My friend and I ride in the dim top bunk, drifting in and out of sleep and listening to bursts of radio chatter and breathing in the stale smoke. Time unspools into a long ribbon of dark highway and after twenty-four hours they drop us at a truck stop in El Paso, Texas, in the care of another pair of truck drivers, who are headed to Oregon.