The FugHouse is empty this time of day. The sun has yet to rise. I let myself in silently so I don’t disturb my wife who’s still in bed in our house across the driveway from the radio station’s front door. Inside, everything is disheveled. Some walls are bare, computers are gone. Redwood Voice has moved out, though the where and why I’m no longer privy to. I’m sure there’s a reason. It’s been a strange couple of weeks.

Just last month, two Redwood Voice reporters and I went all the way to Los Angeles for a conference and everything seemed fine. More than fine, really. We were gearing up for a slew of youth media programs for the summer; our new antenna mast and hardline lay on the floor of the garage waiting to be hoisted into place. We were nearing denouement with our pending Klamath Promise Neighborhood proposal, which, if executed, would take our organization into entirely uncharted waters, expanding everyone’s role, cementing Redwood Voice’s place as Del Norte’s news source. It was an exciting, if fraught, time to be the director of a nonprofit community radio station with a youth media program at its core.

Then, in a matter of mere days, everything changed. There was board room drama, and relationships shifted with the sudden violence of a strike-slip fault. Though I’m being purposefully vague, ironically, I want to be clear: no one did anything wrong, nothing illegal or immoral or any of those other messy reasons board rooms get dramatic. Everybody acted and reacted according to Hoyle. Everybody except me.

Alissia Northrup and I pass through a room with multiple computers at parade rest and I recognize it at once, though it looks different from down here. It’s the room where the County Clerk and Registrar of Voters, Alissia, and her staff tally the votes each election night. I’m used to the perspective of the web stream, somewhere up near the margin of wall and ceiling; passing through the room at this angle feels funny, like being backstage, a kind of liminal sense that isn’t dispelled by the familiar anonymity of the conference room we enter. 

Alissia settles in a seat at the large table and I join her with my digital recorder. She has a message for Del Norte County voters. It’s written on the small piece of paper she’s holding. “I just want to tell the voters of Del Norte…” she begins. “You want me to do it now?”

Before I can answer, one of Alissia’s staff ducks a head in from behind the door. She presents a mangled mail-in ballot. “This person would like a replacement ballot,” the woman chuckles and holds the ballot up for Alissia’s official inspection. The end has been punctured repeatedly and perhaps slobbered on. “Her dog ate it.” 

“No fibbin’ on this one, huh?” Alissia laughs and leaves me to go replace the ballot. I look around the blank laminate room. The last time I was in this room I was with Jessica Cejnar-Andrews. We were interviewing Dr. Rehwaldt about why we all had to start shaking hands with our elbows. Funny how time works. 

“Sorry about that.” Alissia reappears, having successfully dealt with the canine ballot tampering, and picks up the thread of a thought she’d begun expressing on the phone earlier. “I have this…” she tells me, allowing her pause and matter-of-fact shrug to speak for her. “…for young people voting. I like to get young people volunteering at the polls. It’s good for them, but it’s good for us, it’s good for the community, seeing young people at the polls. I’ve had people say it gives them hope.” 

There’s a handwritten sign on the door of the Gallery of Arts and Culture across H Street from the Post Office. Though the message it conveys is simple — a straight-forward designation of a future event’s time and place — if you peer through the glass, as I did, at the Gallery’s blank walls and empty shelves, the wastes of open cardboard boxes and bare track lighting, then the piece of yellow lined paper taped to the inside of the door tells an entire story. The note informs any interested passerby that the family of Barbara Burke will be holding an estate sale this weekend. 

Barbara passed away this past spring after a brief illness. “A brief illness” is obituary-speak for that final series of events that brings a person’s time on Earth to a close, and, as phrases go, it’s about as loaded as they come. For Barbara, it meant a growing sense of confusion, followed by a car accident serious enough to require hospitalization and rehab. While in the hospital, doctors found a pancreatic mass, which she decided — at age 84 — not to treat.

The last time I saw Barbara, she was sitting in a chair in the hallway outside her room in the assisted nursing facility. I’d been visiting someone else, and was in no way prepared to see Barbara’s swoop of preternaturally jet black hair in the institutionally gray hall. I stopped, wide-eyed. “Barbara?” At the sound of her name, Barbara looked up at me, and my heart broke a little.