They called us Karens. The women who posted content about renting RVs and driving their untested families across the country to shelter in vulnerable rural communities were, like me, middle-aged and white. I, like them, put my kids in the car and crept away from home at an hour so early that it was still pitch dark. It felt like sneaking away even though it was completely predictable. We summered in Irontown.

Pundits talked of closing state borders. California was becoming a hot zone. Armed with a half-gallon pump bottle of hand sanitizer and a liter of homemade disinfectant spray for masks and shoes, we went east. At the McDonalds in Barstow, the kids changed out of pajamas in the car and went inside to use the bathroom. I sprayed and sanitized them while my husband ordered breakfast. We drove out of California and into the varying shades of colorlessness that whitewashed the Nevada desert under the midday July sun. For a quarter of an hour, the landscape was subverted by brilliantine Vegas hotels and the obsidian casserole dish that would house the Raiders if ever we were allowed to sit together again.

Monochrome gave way. Intimations of pink budded in Mesquite. Rose took over when we cut through the gorge at the northern tip of Arizona. Coming out of the canyon and around the series of curves that followed the Virgin River, the plateaus that walled St. George were so red that we imagined life on Mars.

Pleasure seekers, COVID pilgrims, Karens. Most went north from St. George to Zion or Bryce Canyon. We exited at Cedar City and stopped for groceries at Wal Mart. Cedar City Wal Mart was a cross-section of cultures. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), Jack Mormons, Fundamentalist Latter Day Saint (FLDS) polygamists, Second Ward polygamists, outdoors enthusiasts, Shakespearian actors, Trumpers, college professors, cowboys and backwoods hermits all did their shopping at Wal Mart.

Mormons bought more than one gallon of milk at a time. Jack Mormons bought beer. Walking behind the FLDS in the canned goods aisle, my fingers clutched and curled at air-braids. I tried to follow the intricate plaits in their uncut hair worn high in the front and tight in the back. Second Warders wore present-day long skirts and long-sleeved shirts. Hikers and cyclists looked like they were perpetually dressed and shopping for an arduous trek that would only be survived with dense protein and Camelbaks. Shakespearians had stage presence and voices that carried over the buzz of the meat slicer at the deli counter. Trumpers wore red hats and no masks. In a region where “Utah hair” lived large, college professors stood out with their natural gray. Cowboys were cowboys. Backwoods hermits smelled like sage and looked like they were in a hurry to get back to hidden petroglyphs and caches of gold that tumbled from the saddlebags of overladen mules trodding the Spanish Trail back when polygamist dresses were high fashion.

My husband nodded in the direction of a young FLDS girl in a camo dress. The deviation from solid pastels was an exciting annotation in our mental notebook. From year to year, we catalogued the subtle changes among the FLDS. Eight years ago, we only saw them if we shopped late at night. Four years ago, and for one summer only, they brought their kids to the aquatic center. The children wore long yoga pants, long-sleeved lycra shirts and life vests. One mom walked right into the toddler splash pad in her heavy work shoes and long dress so that her kids could hold her hands and play.

Another FLDS mom joined my six-year-old’s morning swimming lessons. They were private people. I tried not to ask. My desperate curiosity about human beings and their lives was sometimes more like a spectrum disorder than a healthy quality for a writer. It got the best of me on the day I watched her fight panic while trying to do a sustained back float alongside the first graders in her level. Afterward, I told her I admired her. She told me that children in her sect weren’t taught to swim. When she was a child, her sibling drowned beside her. She wasn’t going to let that happen to her own kids. What a woman. What familial, cultural and administrative battles did she have to fight and win to be able to learn to swim alongside my child? When she fought that battle, did it make her a Karen?

What about the FLDS mom who gave my kids popsicles when her family and mine were in the airport parking lot for Fourth of July fireworks two years ago? One of the teenage girls in the family had fumarase disorder, a genetic deficiency that occurred in uncommonly high numbers among polygamous families. She edged closer and closer. I wanted to understand her the first time she spoke because she was clearly working up the courage to say something to a strange woman like me, wearing denim Bermudas and a breezy kimono. Her face was elongated and her mouth taut. I caught the consonants, pieced them together and replied that I was from California. The kids were greedy for information about what it was like to live in Pacific Beach. They loved going to the zoo and the beaches. I couldn’t for the life of me picture them in their Victorian clothes playing in the sand alongside men with bare chests and women in thongs. Earlier that trip, my kids found the bleached skeleton of a deer on a hiking trail near Irontown. They insisted on taking a rib bone that had patches of fur and sundried venison stuck to it. The woman didn’t know how to clean a deer skeleton. I asked her because I thought that someone who dressed like a pioneer lived like a pioneer.

In Wal Mart, on that first day of what we called our “country month,” my kids were bothered that we made them wear masks when others did not. They didn’t like being eyed and scrutinized. It made me wonder if the FLDS women eyed and scrutinized us every year the way I did them. Did they look at my short-sleeved, wide-legged summer jumpsuit, Pons Avarcas with the ankle strap and dark hair carefully managed to cover the gray? Did they point and nod, noting that I was ever more oblivious, privileged, likely to rant and demand to speak to the manager? Did they anthropologize my becoming a Karen?

In West Vegas, before we got to Wal Mart, the cashier at the gas station silenced me with an upheld hand that slapped back for hours and days. He and the only other customer, a male, were standing on opposite sides of the register. They were not speaking or moving. Standoff. Wax museum. The matrix. It was an unreadable situation. My daughter needed the bathroom and urgently. I asked if we could take the key, labeled and waiting, from the counter. His hand went up. “I am helping a customer.” He said it with pauses between each word. The men looked at me. They turned back to the counter. No one spoke. My daughter tugged my arm and did the dance. Long seconds later, the card machine beeped. The customer took his card. The cashier let the receipt curl out through his fingers. He tore it off and handed it to the man. The man went around us and out the door. When the doors automatically closed and it was just the three of us in the gas station, the cashier turned to me and said, “Now…” It was an exercise in domination. I repeated what he heard me say when I came in. He granted permission to take the key. My daughter made it to the bathroom. I thanked him when I replaced the key. He didn’t acknowledge us. He didn’t call me a Karen, but I felt it.

In my life as a female human being, as a mother, as a wife, as a person of intellect who believed in justice and the existence of right and wrong, I learned that powerplays were games with reverberating consequences. When a man biked up to the pedestrian crossing at the busy merging intersection ahead of my son’s preschool, he sat there with one leg on the pedal and one leg off. He rolled back and forth to keep his momentum, but he did not push the button. In this scenario, most men don’t. Rather than use the safety system put in place to protect everyone on the roads, he wanted to choose his Frogger moment and dodge like a man. I came to a full stop behind the crosswalk and made eye contact with him. He waved me on. I sat. He waved me on. I folded my arms. The possibility of him being struck by a car concerned me less than the dangerous ramifications of his idea that the rules did not apply to him. He pedaled out into the intersection shaking his head furiously and gesticulating at me. He was angry because he didn’t get to make my choices. He didn’t get to decide how I drove my vehicle. I was raising two girls and a boy. All three needed to see that men did not control traffic, let alone their mother.

What could I have done in the gas station that would have been as subtle and effective in the battle against subversion as folding my arms behind the wheel of my minivan? I could have taken the key, likely made accessible for that very reason, and used the bathroom without waiting for him to give the go-ahead. I didn’t because I was afraid of being a Karen. The realization made me uncomfortable. The world knew the pandemic would hit women harder than men socially, economically and physically. The fear of a virus that couldn’t be controlled fueled the fury that took our tiny acts of daily feminism and twisted them into Karenism.

The cyclist and the gas station clerk gestured to subvert. That was laughable compared to examples of gender subjugation in recent history. Picture Anita Hill sitting in front of a panel of loose-necked senators so embalmed in political and societal privilege that it was okay for them to mockingly and publicly ask her about large breasts, penis size and if she was a “scorned woman.”

Bright-eyed Breonna Taylor was dead in the hallway of her own apartment because of gender inequity. Why did the police come to her place looking for evidence against Jamarcus Glover? Because they erroneously believed that she, a young twenty-six-year-old woman, lived alone. Breaking down her door when the rest of Louisville was asleep made for an easy night’s work.

“What happens when a man kills his woman? He gets another woman.” That was the saying that Honduran women repeated to my husband and me when we drove twenty miles south from our own home to volunteer with migrant caravanners sheltering in Tijuana. Mothers walked with their children for thousands of kilometers from Central America to the US/Mexico border to flee the Mara Salvatrucha, or mareros, who ran their neighborhoods and called dibs on the maturing bodies of their tween daughters. They also left because the men who chose them as girlfriends told them to. If they broke up with them or didn’t go with them, the women were afraid they would disappear.

My injustices were wisps compared to what other women faced, but I believed that by standing up to the wrongs in our own small spheres of influence, we were turning ripples into waves. In a time as crucial as the pandemic, I suddenly wasn’t doing my part. I wasn’t fighting the fight.

From Cedar, we backtracked twenty miles west to Old Irontown Road. Late afternoon was a dangerous time to take Highway 56. I hit a deer the summer before. Locals expected to hit one a year. I chafed at irony and watched for deer in the headlights knowing that I had been just that when broadsided by the rise of Karen.

A doe stood in the middle of one of the troughs on Old Irontown Road. We saw her from the top of the hill, and she saw us. She didn’t bound away like most did. She eyed us, put her nose back down to the pavement, finished what she was sniffing and then walked into the sage. The difference between confident and bitchy was in the eye of the beholder.

The patio at my mom’s was walled in on the south side by the house and on the north by stacked wood, cut and ready for winter. Fat collared lizards chased grasshoppers the size of fingers across the roof sheeting. Breezes announced themselves in the grove of juniper trees before making their way into the back yard and the open country beyond. When the sun was low enough that the sky looked like watercolors, telling silence came in. It was telling because you thought you knew moments of soundlessness in the city. In the mountain desert, you realized that, while it was sometimes quiet, cities weren’t silent. Old Irontown was. The heat gave up for the day and the sage got lusty, pushing scent like pheromone. A mourning dove cooed on the fencepost as if in front of a microphone and a rapt audience and did so without bothering the overall silence. A blue jay said nothing as it flew into and then roosted in the junipers. In that kind of company, a woman could sit down and think things through.

The miles were traveled, and the day’s wild landscapes settled into known memory. The cyclist and the gas man rankled but no longer rioted in my thoughts, but other burns did. A catcall, a dog bite and the irksomeness of hollow victories needed sorting before I would know if I was a Karen. If I should Karentine as well a quarantine for country month.

Pre-pandemic, an eighteen-month-old was bitten on the finger by an unleashed dog at a birthday party. It was not a nip, but an actual bite. She cried, and it bled a lot of blood for such a wee finger. Unleashed dogs were on my radar. My middle daughter was cynophobic. I don’t mean the fear of animals common in young children. I mean an actual and pathological fear of furry animals, especially small dogs. Twice in her little life, off-leash dogs jumped into the open door of our minivan while I was loading children. Both times, she was fastened into her car seat and could not escape. They did not hurt her, but they did not have to hurt her to terrify her. It was a week or more before she could sleep through the night without fever dreams. They were not necessarily about dogs, but we knew their source.

I had my eyes on the dog when it bit the little girl. The mother of the girl and some other mothers tended to the bite. I offered to track down the owner. After asking a few moms and nannies, I started asking the families who were at the park but not the party. I noticed two dads standing at the edge of the grass.

“Excuse me,” I said, “Do either of you know who that dog belongs to?”

They turned slightly.

“Yeah,” said one dad, “She’s mine.”

“She just bit that little girl, and the girl is bleeding,” I said.

“The girl put her fingers in my dog’s mouth,” said the dad.

It was a lie. He didn’t know that I knew he was lying, and in that moment, it didn’t matter. His dog bit a toddler and drew blood, and yet there he stood continuing his conversation.

“Would you mind putting it on a leash?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, this time turning fully toward me. “I would mind.”

I was startled by his answer.

“Oh,” I said. “It’s illegal for you to have an unleashed dog here.”

“Oh really? Then call someone.” He stepped into me and put his face in mine. Proving his ultimate cowardice by hiding from responsibility and then trying to bully me out of pursuing it, he expected me to cower.

“All right. I will,” I said.

Pulling my phone from my pocket, I dialed 911.

“I’m making that call,” I said to him.

The man left with his dog and his two kids a few minutes later. He may have exchanged information with the girl’s mom before he left. I don’t know because I was still on the phone with the dispatcher who eventually asked to speak to the mom. A police car was also called to the scene. If the police arrived, it happened after the party was over.

A week later, a mom of some other kids at the party told me that the mom of the bitten girl was upset with me for involving the police. I didn’t do it for her or her daughter. I did it because a dad behaved irresponsibly and tried to use his size and aggression to have his way. I did it because, in that specific case, the law protected my child from being sidelined by fear, and I didn’t believe that letting an animal run free was more important than the mental, not to mention physical, health of one and possibly many children.

The comparison was unavoidable. In May, Amy Cooper, the “Central Park Karen,” called the police on birder, Christian Cooper, when he asked her to leash her dog. Wasn’t I on Christian Cooper’s side? I asked a pet owner to follow the law. Wasn’t I a Karen? I called the police. 

Rising from the gentle patio rocker, my husband interrupted my dog bite inner dialogue to ask if I wanted to go on a walk, “sin niños.” He is an Australian who learned palabras sueltas on our many taco runs south of the border. I, a gringa who came to bilingualism via study and a mission in Northern Spain. Scraps of Spanish were our parental lingua franca. Not only did he mean “without kids,” he meant, “For the week of country month that I am here, we can do as many things as we want without kids because your mom is happy to watch them.” Remembering the freedom available to us, we bolted. We forgot to take a stick.

Old Irontown Road had three destinations: the iron works ruins, the pond or the abandoned schoolhouse. We walked a half mile on the hardpack dirt road to see how last year’s cattail retrenchment affected the pond’s shoreline. If anything, the cattails were bustier. A Surf Scoter paddled into the stalks to hide. A fish jumped. In a year or two, stocking would be complete, and the kids could bring poles and try catching bass and trout. Cottontails, lizards and jackrabbits with ears the size of satellites crossed in front of us on the way home. The sun would soon set, and the animal kingdom had places to be. With the mountains in the background, it was perfectly bucolic. So perfectly bucolic that in a month’s time, we would lick up the angry honking, loud voices, long lines and, even in a pandemic year, crammed beaches

that made our house a home. So perfectly bucolic that when two German Shepherds came at

us full speed from the driveway of one of the four houses between my mom’s and the pond, I

didn’t immediately realize that we were in danger.

Baring vampire teeth, their barks were punctuated by guttural snarls. They were angry and mean. We knew better than to walk in Irontown without a stick, but euphoria had gotten the best of us. I remembered the training my cynophobic daughter received during her therapy classes at the Helen Woodward Animal Center. Don’t make eye contact. Stand still. Don’t talk or move. My husband and I stood back to back while the dogs circled us growling and lunging. I was certain the leg of my jumpsuit would have a hole in it, that’s how close they were. All that time, the owners of the dogs watched from their driveway. They called the dogs, but the dogs ignored them. They made no attempt to come and get their dogs or to put themselves between us and their animals. Instead, the man called out, “They won’t do nothin’.” That was the sum total of their intervention. 

When the dogs were sufficiently satisfied with our cowardice, they ran back up the drive. The owners did not come out or call out to apologize. By the time we got to my mom’s, I was shaking with equal parts rage and terror. It was a terrifying experience. Worse, I, the woman who called the police on the owner of a small dog who hurt a child, was too cowed by social media culture to confront the people who allowed their dogs to threaten me in a public space. For the rest of country month, I walked softly and carried a big stick. I shook it at those two devils whenever they went by in the back of their owners’ pickup. An impotent gesture for an impotent woman. Was that better than calling the police or reporting them to the Old Irontown neighborhood association, surely the actions of a Karen? I didn’t know. How does a person measure betterness when both sides of the scale are filled with putrescence?

Before I began weighing my actions, which is to say before the pandemic, the driver of a seafood truck catcalled me. I had just finished volunteering in a third-grade classroom and was dressed accordingly. A fishmonger desperate enough for female attention to force himself upon a middle-aged mom was tragic in so many ways. After all, that’s what a catcall was. It was a passive/aggressive way of defying consent. Man saw woman. Man liked woman. Woman dared to be involved in her own life and not pay attention to man. Man whistled or yelled something lewd or made a gesture. It wasn’t about compliments or flattery. It was about forcing a woman to notice a man who noticed her. It was about men forcing themselves into the center of someone else’s universe.

For me, the deeper problem in the moment was that the sad little man chose to catcall in front of one of the hall-less outdoor elementary schools unique to Southern California. He slowed down, leaned out his window and gave a long, low whistle where there was nothing more than a chain link fence separating us from the kids pulling snack wagons to the playground or lining up for art class. I went home and called the company headquarters. Their flagship restaurant was blocks from my house. The man who took the call was appropriately unsettled and then apologetic. He asked for the exact time of day, the street name and the direction the truck was heading. I said, “It’s 2019. If a man doesn’t know better, he should.”

Where did that woman go? I missed her. I was also afraid of her. Costume makers launched a Karen mask for Halloween and billed it as “the scariest thing you could be.” Scarier than the virus that killed hundreds of thousands. Scarier than police killing black people. Scarier than wildfires and North Korea and the difficulty of assuring a fair and democratic election. I had the potential to be scarier than all those things. It made me feel hollow. According to Slate, that’s all a Karen would ever feel; the emptiness of victories snatched from the hands of others more deserving.

I couldn’t pinpoint the exact factors, but there was a data set of circumstances in which I read the “Dear Prudence” column in Slate. I didn’t read it for the advice. I read it for the concision of language. For Prudence, words were scalpels. She put the tip right on the problem spot and cut into it with an exactness and deftness that gave me a physical buzz akin to what I guessed other sensory people felt when they watched ASMR videos. Actually, no, it was exactly what they felt. I looked it up. Wikipedia taught me that auto sensory meridian response was “a tingling sensation that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine.”

That was precisely how I felt when I read phrases like “if your thoughts have changed on the subject and you want to apologize for being so highhanded decades ago, that might prove meaningful now.” “If your choices are ‘be in a big, confusing family fight in our own home’ or ‘be in a big, confusing family fight in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with my wife’s family,’ I think Option A is categorically better than Option B.” “You don’t have to answer a question that you know to be insincere.” “I think setting a goal for yourself like ‘forced cheerfulness’ is a bridge too far and is part of what you’re internally rebelling against, even as you also long for a sense of optimism and peacefulness about your future.” They set me on fire, in a pleasing and satisfying way. 

One morning, mom and I headed to the patio. I liked being outside when the heat came into the day. A chipmunk took a bite from the sole strawberry growing in my mom’s pot and ran away before I could convince myself to shoo it. They were the cutest of Utah’s rodents. And the rockers were so comfortable. A hummingbird hummed at the geraniums next to the strawberries. It relaxed me to lean back and listen to its gentle noise.

The hum was harsh. It was more of a buzz. My mom and I simultaneously realized the hummingbird wasn’t a hummingbird. It was the largest wasp I had ever seen, large enough to be taken for a good-sized hummingbird. It made concentric circles above my head, getting lower and closer with every round. It sounded like a motorcycle and had red wings and a stinger that hung down like a sewing needle. Not overly phased by bugs, it made me nervous enough that I went inside even before googling to find out that it was a tarantula hawk and considered to have the second most painful sting of all stinging insects.

Settling into the soothing sounds of hummingbirds only to be circled by a tarantula hawk was what happened when I dipped into Dear Prudence for a tingle and came away stung. On July 16^th, “Was I Wrong?” wrote to Prudence about her daughter’s birthday. “Was I Wrong” reserved the premium gazebo at the local park and paid in advance for the permit because she didn’t have the space to host a socially distanced party at home. On the day of the party, another family was using the gazebo when “Was I Wrong” arrived. Disagreement ensued. Park rangers intervened. The family without a permit was moved to a smaller gazebo. For the rest of the day, they called “Was I Wrong” a Karen and told “Was I Wrong’s” guests that she was ungenerous.

Part of Prudence’s response was this:

“You had the reservation, you got what you wanted, but it didn’t feel good. Investigate that tension! What might that day have looked like if you’d decided to let this go and partied in a smaller gazebo? What might it look like to let go of ‘I’ve got a piece of paper that makes me right’ and to allow someone else to have something they weren’t bureaucratically entitled to? What would it look like to prioritize playing safely in the park over ‘My gazebo, right or wrong’? You can absolutely pursue letter-of-the-law victories if you want. Pursuing such a policy means that sometimes other people will resent you or that you rack up a hollow victory. You can ask park rangers to kick people out of a gazebo you’ve rented, but you can’t make them like you for it. There’s a limit to how much control a park ranger can exercise over the human heart.”

“You had the reservation, you got what you wanted, but it didn’t feel good. Investigate that tension!” Circling. “What might it look like to let go of ‘I’ve got a piece of paper that makes me right’ and allow someone else to have something they weren’t bureaucratically entitled to?” Circling. “Pursuing such a policy means that sometimes other people will resent you or that you rack up a hollow victory.” Stung!

Gazebo Karen made the plans, paid the fees and when push came to shove didn’t let herself be bullied or harassed out of the end result of her preparation and financial investment. In return, she got the gazebo, a day’s worth of name-calling and a lifetime of victories that could only be hollow, per Prudence. Hollow because Karen wouldn’t give up or in. Hollow because Karen, like suffragists and the women who are still working for the ratification of the ERA, believed that she had a right and it was worth fighting for. The difference was that Karen believed her one-woman battle was as worthy as any other battle for fairness. No one argued that Christian Cooper shouldn’t have asked the Central Park Karen to leash her dog. The law was on his side. The law was on Gazebo Karen’s side, but instead of vindication she got a hollow victory and a pejorative label. The waters muddied fast.

At Pinto Creek, the water gurgled. It meandered, as creeks did, between a red cliff face on the west side and fields to the east. The kids jumped across narrow banks and sank into mud past their ankles. My husband and I spread a blanket under a cottonwood and pretended that the kids would let us lounge. The first crawdad was as big as a finger-sized grasshopper. The second was bigger. Fascinated and afraid, like they were on the day of every country month when we played at Pinto Creek until the sun was low enough for crawdads, the kids watched the crustaceans at their daily parade, rising in rank as they went. The third was the length of my outstretched hand. He came out of the shallows, and the smaller ones scuttled back. A crawdad equal in size came out and squared off. It was missing a pincher. It didn’t matter. They pushed and shoved and snapped until they both retreated. The little ones came out. Feeding time began. We didn’t understand the rules of engagement or the final outcome. We just knew we didn’t want to get pinched. Was something lost? Was something gained? Did it matter?

Did it? We were all labeled. I explored Karenism because that was the label that fit me demographically, not because it was less deserved or more damaging than other labels. Did it matter that I wasn’t likely to destroy property or tell a person, of any race or gender, that he or she didn’t need to be in my neighborhood… Oh, but wait. I did just that to a white man before we left home.

My eighty-one-year-old neighbor, Joanie, never married and outlived all of her family – parents, siblings, nephews, the whole lot. In her career, she owned a restaurant, ran x-ray labs and worked in real estate. In retirement, she bought chickens and built the two-story coop herself, watered and mowed her lawn, climbed a ladder to clean her gutters and hosted neighborhood parties. When her car broke down, my husband saw her come staggering up the street after walking more than a mile each way to price out used cars. She flatly refused rides or the use of our second car while we were away.

Instead, she took in two boarders. As neither a full-time landlady nor a techie, she didn’t do background checks. Things spiraled quickly. One of the tenants had three felony convictions not to mention a behavior disorder that was induced by substance abuse or mental illness or both. He shouted at her, put his hands on her and locked her out. The police came multiple times but absent clear physical assault, there was little they could do. One afternoon, I heard him yelling at her. My husband and I went over. Joanie was in her driveway leaning on her inert car. He locked her out again. I heard myself say to myself that enough was enough. Joanie told me not to tangle with him. The police were on the way; he called 911 alleging that she hit him with a broom.

He said as much when I stormed the porch and told him to unlock the door and keep the door unlocked. He came out, lifted his shirt and showed me a mark on his stomach that was the supposed evidence of being struck. Never mind that he scratched himself in the opposite direction of the hit he was replaying. I told him that he got no sympathy from me if his actions caused an eighty-one-year-old woman to feel like she needed to defend herself from him. I also said that he wasn’t paying his rent, he was guilty of verbal assault and that his presence was a disturbance to the entire neighborhood.

The evidence was incontrovertible. I was a Karen. Sure, there were degrees of difference between coming to the aid of an elderly neighbor and recent examples of Karens who racially stonewalled census workers or trashed the mask display at Target, but pandemic labels weren’t about fine lines. Pandemic labels were about broad strokes that gave names to our big fears.

Embracing the label made me realize that being a Karen wasn’t my fear. There was something thornier underneath. Prudence might say that I had been investigating the wrong tension.

I wasn’t afraid of being a Karen. I had reasonable trust in my own behavior, decision making and social discernment. I was afraid of being called a Karen. That was different. I wanted to be free to make choices about justice and injustice and take action accordingly without being judged or scrutinized. I wanted to cool myself in the creek in the middle of the crawdad parade without getting pinched.

It didn’t work that way. Not in a fear-laden pandemic year, not ever. Actions could never be guaranteed to be without reproach. That was the sneaky difference. A bad Karen believed that her whiteness or her self-righteousness or her privilege or her money or her education ameliorated her choices. She believed herself to be above reproach. A good Karen knew herself to be below it. She believed that there were things worth fighting for. She knew that sometimes the fight would leave her bloodied or maligned. She knew that others were pinned down by labels more charged and hateful than hers. A good Karen knew her place. It was right there in the label soup with the dad bullies, the birders and the Wal Mart shoppers.

Up Pinto Road from the creek, a half mile hike leads to Lion’s Mouth Cave. At the summit, the views of Dixie National Forest were blue and green and gray and grand. The pictographs on the cave wall were grander. In the high-altitude stillness, a person could stand face-to-face with ancient ocher paintings of deer, snakes, spirals and a gorgeous two-tone human-bird with spread wings. The drawings of people were confounding. Some had rectangular bodies with heads. Others had one large oblong for body and head. All had three legs. For the nuanced mystery of the other artwork, a third leg seemed overtly phallic even for a culture too old for us to guess at. Inside the lion’s mouth, people stopped, stood, stared. They moved for views from different lights and angles. They walked up as close as they could without damaging the surfaces. Stymied, they sat down and watched to see if the images would reveal themselves. We didn’t know how to process people we couldn’t label. In a cave on a mountain, it was thrilling. On flat earth in the middle of unprecedented times, it was terrifying.

Three FLDS girls were doing their shopping at the Carters in Enterprise. They were young and pretty with daring embroidered flourishes around the small waists of their prairie dresses. I wondered if they were sisters or sister wives. Sisters from different mothers? Friends taking comfort in each other’s company before they were farmed out to be seventh wives to octogenarians? My mind forced them into parameters made with labels. They could have been anyone and anything. All I knew was that they dressed in a recognizable way.

They smiled at me when I ragged my mom for passive aggressively saying that if she were me, she would get four more boxes of mac and cheese instead of straightforwardly asking me to get more. I smiled back. Two aisles down, I remembered that I was wearing a mask. They likely thought I returned their camaraderie with a stone face. Maybe they muttered “Karen” at me under their breath.

Heading back to Old Irontown, we saw the same three girls working in a front yard garden the size of an actual front yard in any place where land and wives weren’t at a surplus. It was strange to see them in daylight in a setting other than a grocery store or, more rarely, a swimming pool. That same dogged curiosity flared up. I considered pulling over to ask about their garden as a pretense for asking all the other questions I wanted to ask of my cousin religionists. It crossed my mind that they would recognize me as the Karen who snubbed them in Carters.

Fair enough. It was easy to lose with grace when, so far, I hadn’t actually been called a Karen. In a pandemic, invisible threats boxed us in. I needed to stand my share. When it did happen, I would get angry. That felt right, too. COVID was anger’s acolyte and labels the byproduct of our worship. If someone turned their anger on me, being a Karen felt better than waffling between identities, grinding at the wrong tension or avoiding eye contact with dogs.