James Whorton Jr. | Longreads | October 13, 2026 | 5,932 words (25 minutes)

I live in Edgewood, a subdivision of quarter-acre lots in the town of Brighton, New York. Before the house was here, Edgewood was a farm, and before the farm, there was a forest. On a July day in 1788, a 55-year-old man named Hugh Maxwell set out to cross the forest in straight lines.

Not kind of straight. Maxwell’s job was to walk 1,100 miles on ruler-straight lines through this vast, obstacle-filled forest, to divide it into a grid of parcels that could eventually be sold as property. To shrink it down to the scale of human imagination. To look at the forest and see something else in its place.

I first learned about Maxwell from Mary Jo Lanphear, Brighton’s town historian. I had gone to Lanphear to research the racially restrictive housing covenants that made home ownership in Brighton exclusive to white people for decades. Whose fault was this? I wanted to know. Some racist real-estate developer? Something to do with the Federal Housing Administration? Lanphear printed out a copy of an old deed linking the Edgewood land to the Phelps and Gorham Company, a group of New England speculators. For a bargain price, Phelps and Gorham had acquired the title to 2.6 million acres of forested country along the Genesee River, in what is now western New York. The company then hired Maxwell—a Revolutionary War veteran, father of seven, and the first recorded white person to pass within shouting distance of the place where I now live—as surveyor. 

As Maxwell crossed the forest, he imagined the nation he believed would one day replace it. “The land in this country is exceedingly good, but it wants good inhabitants,” Maxwell wrote to his wife, Bridget, imagining “many worshipping assemblies of Christians where now the wild beasts howl.” In place of the forest, he envisioned schools, churches, cash crops, and county clerks. However, he wrote, “these things are in the womb of futurity, and will be brought about in the proper way and time, as also by the proper means.” 

Maxwell’s walk—through leechy ponds and tick-infested brush, down and up creek banks, over the rocky exposures that rattlesnakes prefer, in those remarkably straight lines—was like the act his fellow new citizens were performing daily, striving and pretending a nation into being. At the time he set out, the United States were only loosely joined, under the Articles of Confederation. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the first essay of The Federalist Papers, had recently asked “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” Neither the new government nor the grid of lots for sale were to be discovered on the ground. They were ideas in people’s heads, notes on paper. In the “womb of futurity,” maybe. 

The forest, however, was real. 

Have you ever retraced your steps looking for some lost thing you had no hope of ever finding again? More than two centuries after he walked the forest into the future, Maxwell’s path persists, as lines on a map and on the ground in my neighborhood. I wanted to find the forest he walked through. 

So I set out to follow Hugh Maxwell—through books and archives, on maps and over the ground, across the state of New York and, finally, across my neighborhood, looking for traces of the forest in what is here now.

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On July 25, 1788, Maxwell set off from the southeastern corner of the Phelps and Gorham purchase, on the Pennsylvania line, headed due north. He led a small crew, whose job it was to drag a Gunter’s chain, a surveyor’s tool used to measure distance. The chain was 66 feet long; 80 chains made a mile. Every six miles he marked a township corner, hacking Roman numerals into the sides of a convenient tree, Vs and Xs being easier to cut in bark than 5s and 10s. 

While his helpers dragged the chain, Maxwell carried the grid in his head. The job was to lay this imaginary grid over the forest itself, to parcelize the land into numbered squares—to cut it up and shrink it. In a notebook that first day, he wrote:

From the 82 mile Stone

120 Rods the groth is Beech

Maple birch ash Basswood

and Hemlock mixt

Throughout Maxwell’s young life, the forest had been a chaotic place, subject to accident and force, to the wars that would determine its fate. During the French and Indian War, Maxwell, in his early 20s and part of a Massachusetts militia, barely escaped a violent death at Lake George. Following a surrender, Indians pulled militia men from the retreating lines, killing some on the spot and taking others prisoner, to be ransomed in Montreal. Maxwell was pulled aside, too, and had his boots, coat, and shirt stripped from his body. But he got loose somehow and escaped into the forest, running at least 14 miles to Fort Edward, barefoot in his pantaloons. Later, during the Revolutionary War, Maxwell was shot at the Battle of Bunker Hill. A musket ball entered his body just beneath the right collar bone, breaking Maxwell’s shoulder blade and exiting through his back. He survived field surgery and gangrene, and wrote home to Bridget with his left hand, fretting that his nurses fussed too much over him.

Now, as Maxwell walked off the eastern line of the Phelps and Gorham purchase, the forest wars were coming to an end. Still, the forest itself resisted him in its way. It did not lend itself to being crossed in straight lines, as though it were a blank page awaiting the pen’s touch. Branches snagged his clothes. “I am of the opinion,” he wrote to Bridget from his walk, “that if I live to return, I shall stand in need of some winter shirts for I think my old ones will be pretty much worn out.”

What makes a forest? How do I know when I’m standing in one, and not just under some trees?

To reach Maxwell’s starting place—his “82 mile stone,” a roadside block of granite 82 miles west of the Delaware River—I drove a hundred miles south to Caton, New York. A welcome to caton sign marked the town line, which was also the state line. I took my phone out, opened a map on the screen. The phone is able to locate itself using pings from four satellite systems: GPS (“a global public service brought to you by the US government”), GLONASS (same, but brought to you by Russia), Galileo (European Union), and BeiDou (China). The screen suggested there should be a marker right in front of me.

Crouched inside a brushy spot, I shoved skinny branches out of my face and slapped at my hair. I found a tangle of rusted barbed wire. I found a deer skeleton. But no mile marker. Feeling things crawling on me, I climbed out into the sunlight and slapped down my shirt and pants. 

The growth I saw around me now was not so mixed as what Maxwell described in his notebook. I was standing on a stone chip road, looking across a hay field. My phone screen showed a satellite image with a red pin to the west of the road, in the brush I’d climbed out of, and a blue dot in the road, which was me. This had to be the spot, though. I walked to my car, felt my head for ticks again. Then I walked back up the road, to check under the welcome to caton sign. There, I found a block of pink and gray granite with an “82” cut into the side and several loops of orange surveyor’s tape tied around it. It wasn’t hidden—I’d simply been looking on the wrong side of the road. Looking for what was in my head instead of seeing what was there.

It was a slow march from here for Maxwell and his crew, dragging their chain in a straight line through the thickness of mixed trees and across creek cuts. It took them two weeks to cover the first 54 miles. For me it was an easy drive, a straight shot north between fields of sweet corn. I stopped to examine an occasional historical marker, and again at a roadside farm stand, hoping to say hello to someone who lived on this line. The little stall was well stocked with honey and dried garlic, but there was nobody to say hi to: Sales were on the honor system, with a Mason jar on the counter to leave your cash in. I had only brought a credit card.

Maxwell’s notebook was a memento of a different world. He passed massive chestnut trees such as I could only read about. One spot he judged “moist and good and springy,” another “good for grass.” He noted with approval where a stream was big enough to support a sawmill. And yet the gaps in his notes are astonishing. A few weeks into his survey, he crossed “some old clear land” and “through the old castle.” Castle was the colonial way of referring to an Indian town. Here was proof on the ground of what Maxwell already knew: People had been living in this forest for a very long time, cultivating this land in a different way than European settlers did. And yet Maxwell found little to note about the old castle. He carried on instead with his catalog of trees—”white ash, basswood, elm, &c.”

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What makes a forest? How do I know when I’m standing in one, and not just under some trees?

The Latin precursor of the word “forest” meant something like an unenclosed outdoor space. In early English law, the silva forestis was a place for lords to chase game and for ordinary people to gather wood. In the 13th century, as the Magna Carta encoded the rights of English barons, the Carta de Foresta laid out the rights of commoners to pasture cattle in the open places among the English forests. Similarly, the forest Maxwell entered in the summer of 1788 was more than just mixed trees. Its openings included the towns, orchards, and farm fields of the Seneca Nation. The Senecas had long used fire to manage areas of the forest, clearing thick undergrowth to attract deer, and they moved their farming fields from time to time to prevent exhausting the soil.

A forest is too big to see all at once, and maybe too big to describe. Writing about it, one is moved to grand language and weird leaps of perspective. The historian Francis Parkman devoted his career to what he called “a history of the American forest,” which is really a history of empires. Writing in the 1880s, with no satellite photos at hand, Parkman borrowed the point of view of a flock of Canada geese flying north from Albany. “As the aërial travellers winged their way, the seat of war lay spread beneath them like a map. First the blue Hudson, slumbering among its forests, with the forts along its banks. . . .” Parkman’s geese paid special attention to military architecture, noticing Fort William Henry by the “glistening breast of Lake George” and the white flag of the French at Ticonderoga. Onward they flapped: 

“Lake Champlain now spread before them, widening as they flew: on the left, the mountain wilderness of the Adirondacks, like a stormy sea congealed; on the right, the long procession of the Green Mountains; and, far beyond, on the dim verge of the eastern sky, the White Mountains throned in savage solitude.” 

This is silly poetry, but I am in deep sympathy with it, having also spent countless hours staring at different maps, trying to transplant a whole forest into my head. 

At the heart of Parkman’s seven-volume France and England in North America was a question about property. “To whom belonged this world of prairies and forests?” he asked. Parkman wrote that France had “claimed it by right of discovery and occupation,” adding that the French had an “excellent system” for distributing land: “Whoever received a grant from the Crown was required to improve it, and this within reasonable time. If he did not, the land ceased to be his, and was given to another more able or industrious.” The English eventually outdid the French in this regard, Parkman wrote: “New England was pre-eminently the land of material progress . . . nay, in defiance of the four Gospels, assiduity in the pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of a duty.” The quickest way to gain from the forest was to sell or burn the timber and put a cash crop in the ground. 

Sir Albert Howard, an English botanist, saw the forest as a model for sustainable farming. In what he called “Nature’s agriculture,” variety is the first rule: “Many species of plants and of animals all live together,” he wrote in the early pages of An Agricultural Testament, published in 1940. Economy is another rule: “Nothing is wasted” and “nothing is lost.” Somehow, life and decomposition continue across millennia with no one in charge. 

Wendell Berry, referencing Howard in The Unsettling of America, writes that the forest is a place where “the forces of growth and the forces of decay are in balance.” I like this way of putting it very much. A forest tree dies in place, and its slow decay swells with life—mosses, fungi, beetles, and things that eat beetles. A living hardwood tree throws its leaves away every year. In The Great American Forest, Rutherford Platt calls this “the deciduous idea”—a funny way to imagine it, as though the founding fathers of the forest had written this leaf-shedding principle into their charter. But it is a brilliant idea, a world-changer. In balance, growth and decay work in cycles. The mat of discarded leaves becomes the food of millipedes and the habitat of worms. In spring, the snow sinks into it. A thick, black soil builds.

This is silly poetry, but I am in deep sympathy with it, having also spent countless hours staring at different maps, trying to transplant a whole forest into my head.

I had already traveled to Maxwell’s starting place; now, it occurred to me that I had never followed Hugh Maxwell’s route where he passed nearest to my house, along the eastern township line, which is not a road at all and which happens to be covered over with trees. From my front door, I followed the sidewalk along Edgewood Avenue, where the utility poles shrink away into the distance like an exercise in single-point perspective. 

The place where I live has gone through a lot of changes in the 20,000 years since the most recent ice age, from deglaciation to migration and cultivation. At the time Maxwell began his walk, the towns, orchards, and farm fields of the Seneca Nation were openings in a vast forest that still covered half of North America, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. The houses in my part of Brighton were built beginning in the 1930s, but the older eras of this place are visible on any road map. The early roads go from some important place to some other important place. Monroe Avenue, a very old road, follows a route from the north end of Canandaigua Lake to a shallow, fordable spot in the Genesee River. It is not straight, but bends sensibly between Cobbs Hill and Pinnacle Hill. People have been walking that way for a long time, since long before Maxwell arrived. 

After Maxwell, there came an era when all new roads were cut parallel to his township lines. The logic of the Brighton-Henrietta Town Line Road, for instance, has nothing to do with terrain, and the things one passes when driving it—an auto body shop, a small church with three steeples, an Asian market, a sex shop, Dunkin’—have little to do with each other. It’s as though Maxwell set the place to auto-arrange, so that every major surface road for the next two hundred years would snap to grid. 

I stopped at the former site of the old Rowland farm. My friend Roger lived next door to the farm as a boy. Mr. Rowland had a stand of virgin timber on his place, Roger recalls, and the soil in his fields was so fertile that a person had to take care not to get knocked over by his produce. “Dig a hole, drop a seed in, and stand back,” Mr. Rowland warned. 

As late as the 1950s, there still were some farms along Edgewood Avenue. But it wasn’t long before they were subdivided into residential lots.The timber now is mostly whatever people have chosen to set out in their yards. Norway maples are common—tough street trees, not from around here, indifferent to road salt and car exhaust. Rows of arborvitae make living privacy fences. Shading the Briar Manor apartments are seven big sycamores, handsome monsters with paint-by-number bark of yellow, gray, and lilac brown.

Past the row of sycamores, I turned onto a paved bicycle path that follows a chain-link fence. A little further, a sign marked the town line. I found a low place in the fence and stepped over, into the trees, following Maxwell again.

It was dark under the high canopy, and the underbrush was sparse. Maxwell had once described this section of his route as “very good beech and maple land with a mixture of ash, elm, oak, basswood, etc.” I found a beech tree, its pale sides smooth, its trunk a good two feet across. Beneath the beech tree was a shattered porcelain toilet. There was no plumbing attached; somebody had brought this toilet out here, set it on the ground, and taken a hammer to it.

I checked the map on my phone. In the satellite photo, the woods were more or less featureless except for the town line, superimposed in yellow over the treetops, and a blue dot, me, on top of that yellow line. I was still on Maxwell’s course. There was no trail on the ground for me to follow, though. The only trails were the soft, narrow animal trails that passed under blown-down branches or veered away into low cover.

The growth was mixed: saplings, mature trees, dead standing, and dead fallen. I found a red maple with circular fractures erupting like a target in its bark. I found an ash tree, its bark split open and buckling, the meandering tracks of an emerald ash borer scoring the bare wood. A lean musclewood with ten trunks, one with its bark chewed at the height of my knee. A basswood with a stripe of red spray paint on it and rings of woodpecker holes.

If this was a forest, it was a half-wrecked one. Much of the soil was exposed and cracked from flooding. Variety was here, though, and life among the decay. Deer tracks crossed a muddy trench. Bright moss blanketed the softening fallen trunks, and ferns grew. I heard chattering overhead and a rainlike sound in the leaves. Somebody was up there taking nuts apart. Chunks of green and yellow hull hit the ground around me, cycling back to the soil. 

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In September of 1788, Hugh Maxwell took a fall in the woods and hurt his shin. He made things worse, he wrote, “by wading in the swamp and through wet brush.” For three weeks, he was laid up in the Seneca town of Kanadesaga, where he had nothing to do but think and write home.

He missed Bridget. “I feel anxious for your welfare,” he wrote to her. “I long to hear from you and love to hear from you.” He reminded Bridget to have their son get the haying done, get some long shingles to fix the roof, cart the dung to the field, plow the field on time, and do the sowing.

He also missed church. Shortly after his near-death experience at Lake George as a young man, Maxwell had joined a church and, judging from his letters, devoted himself to a stern code under which he must strive constantly for an approval that he would never earn. For Maxwell, life on earth became a moral exercise, an attempt to deserve immortality. God, he wrote, “is Daily Loading us with his Benefits, though we are evil and unthankfull.” Now, once more wounded far from home, Maxwell wrote to his wife of “unprincipled fellows and drunken savages,” adding, “Religious society is quite out of the question here.” 

It had been only nine years since the Continental Army’s expedition across Seneca country. After Senecas joined with Tories to raid White settlements along the Mohawk, the young United States had set aside European conventions of war in an attempt to drive Seneca communities from their land. “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible,” George Washington wrote in his orders. “It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” At Kanadesaga, the Continental Army had burned at least 50 Seneca houses, tore ripe corn and beans from the fields, and bayoneted pumpkins. A whole orchard of apple trees was girdled, a circle of bark stripped from around each trunk, creating an unhealable, fatal wound. The Continental Army took few hostages: The Senecas moved west just ahead of the approaching troops and then returned again when the troops went home, rebuilding their houses and replanting their fields. 

Nine years later, laid up in Kanadesaga while his shin healed, Maxwell now found himself surrounded by Indians. “I am in hopes their time with us here is short,” Maxwell wrote to Bridget. “I do think that the Great Governor of the universe is about to plant a glorious gospel in this wilderness,” he predicted—with the help of his own survey, of course. “May it be so and soon spread over this land.” Maxwell, in effect, had two tough jobs: crossing the forest in straight lines, and convincing himself that he was a good person for doing so.

After more than a month’s recovery, Maxwell resumed his survey. “First mile through excellent land,” he wrote from the woods, on the line of a future township along the east bank of the Genesee River, noting nearly a half-dozen different trees in the area. The next mile: “Same sort of excellent land and growth but considerable mixed with chestnut.” The third mile was less good: “80 rods over a wet low land.” Then more very good land again. He crossed a brook that ran one way, then the other. Both Maxwell and the brook were headed to the same place, north to Lake Ontario. The brook took the easy way, downhill. Maxwell took the straight way, leading his team and their chain through swamp and timber, mile after mile.

At the end of the 18th mile, he chopped a “XIII” into the side of a small basswood tree, marking a corner of the 13th township—“with trees marked for witness about it,” he wrote, for the benefit of some future settler searching for the corners of his lot. 

Maxwell, in effect, had two tough jobs: crossing the forest in straight lines, and convincing himself that he was a good person for doing so.

When the blue dot on my phone told me I had reached the southeast corner of the town of Brighton, I spent some time looking for the basswood tree with the XIII in its bark. But I was kidding myself, of course. Maxwell’s hatchet marks were meant to last years, not centuries. I slapped at mosquitoes, scanning for some connection between the forest Maxwell had walked through and the place I was in. A scrap of fluorescent pink tape caught my eye. I’ve been seeing this stuff in the woods for my entire life, weatherproof trash that will outlive me and, I suppose, every other individual living thing in the woods as well. I looked past it, because I can’t pick up every piece of garbage in the woods and carry it out. Then I looked again and my understanding of the place shifted. 

The pink plastic was a piece of surveyor’s tape, tied to a branch. Near the branch was a short, square concrete pillar. This was the marker—a “monument,” in surveyor-speak—that had taken the place of the basswood with the XIII in its side. It was a more durable monument than a tree, and though it was short and unobtrusive, the little non-decaying flag of pink plastic made it hard to miss, even for me. 

Maxwell wrote of this site:

The line of this town is very

good land covered with a thick

growth of Beech Maple Elm Basswood

Ash Butternut &c. Not very uneven.

No elms now, but I had seen the others he mentioned. This wasn’t “virgin timber”: The nearest big tree was a two-trunked silver maple, second growth, sprouted back from a stump. This was the place, though. 

I stayed there awhile doing nothing, a little dazzled, a little jarred by the impression of two forests coming together—the one Maxwell crossed and the one I was in. The forest wasn’t gone, but it had changed, and so had the way we live with it. In imagining the forest as a wild place, it seemed to me, we had imagined ourselves right out of it. It’s become a place to visit, a resource or a park, not our home. 

Or something like that. Half-stumped, I managed to stand there motionless long enough that a red fox, not noticing me, stopped nearby with its nose in the air and its tail extended. I watched it for a while as it watched something else. Then a leaf blower whined, and the fox and I went our separate ways.

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In a healthy forest, the forces of growth and the forces of decay are in balance. But those same forces are the conditions of life everywhere—balanced or not.

Reaching Lake Ontario, Maxwell cut his initials into a tree, then went home to Heath, Massachusetts. In years to come he served as a deacon and justice of the peace in that town. He applied for an invalid officer’s pension, but was denied. At 67 years old, in debt, he bought some horses and embarked with them for the West Indies, where the animals, along with enslaved humans, were in demand on sugar plantations. It was a nightmare world where both humans and horses were routinely worked to death in brutal heat. I wonder how he justified that new venture to himself. Maxwell took a profit from the sale, but died of yellow fever on the voyage home, and his body was buried at sea.

I couldn’t visit Maxwell’s final resting place. Instead, I drove to western Massachusetts, to his house. On Route 2 I locked on to an excellent Albany radio station whose signal held through the Taconic Mountains as far as Williamston, Massachusetts. The road had been graded and guard-railed in the 1920s, on top of an older road that people had been walking since the last ice age, for all one can know. The road sided a stream tumbling over rocks. And what was so important about that? Why did I love it? I loved this road because it was no one’s idea. A glacier put this road here, and people followed. 

The house that once belonged to Maxwell was surprisingly modern-looking, with its solar panels and a Prius in the driveway. I knocked and a woman came to the door. Sue, the owner, invited me in. In the kitchen, one wall was almost all fireplace, paneled above with a single blond board 20 inches wide—spruce, Sue thought. In the next room, there was more of that broad paneling, and a row of cupboards over a smaller fireplace with a grow-light installed inside it over a collection of potted cacti. Sue showed me a copy of Maxwell’s only portrait, a silhouette on horseback that was made during the Revolutionary War. She also had a copy of The Christian Patriot, a biography written by Maxwell’s daughter, Priscilla, who recalled her father’s strong singing voice and a gory song about the courage of the Bunker Hill heroes that he liked to sing for the children. Near the house was a cemetery with a marker for Maxwell, a tall obelisk with worn stories in its sides.

I also drove to Lake George to see the place where 22-year-old Maxwell had first spied death coming for him through the forest. I followed US Route 9 past a sprawling outlet mall and Bloody Pond, where the bodies of slain men had been thrown at the end of that chaotic day early in the French and Indian War. Then I emerged from under clustered trees to what Thomas Jefferson once called “without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw.” Lake George was “ limpid as crystal,” he wrote, the mountains on either side “covered with rich groves of thuja, silver fir, white pine, aspen, and paper birch.” Today the groves of thuja are interrupted with summer mansions and the sandy parking lot by the beach is jammed with cars, but the mountains are still mountains and the long lake still stretches far away between them. When I arrived, the beach was crowded with boogie boarders, volleyballers, and people just splashing. A man threw a tennis ball into the lake, and a dog took a fierce running leap to retrieve it. 

I’d booked a camp site nearby at the Lake George Battleground Campground. A few pines were all that separated my site from Route 9, its four lanes roaring with traffic. I set up my folding camp stool by the sidewalk, across from an Exxon. 

I tried to picture a young Maxwell loping through here shirtless in his bare feet, enveloped by the forest and afraid for his life. Among the English-speaking settlers, the events at Lake George would be remembered as a massacre, and the Indigenous people whose home this was, whose conventions of war did not match those of the European empires, were called savages. It was powerful storytelling, indispensable to the colonial project. 

Every story I could imagine about this place, and about Hugh Maxwell, seemed another work of fiction, a mechanism for assigning blame.

Maxwell trained himself on a version of that story: He had outrun death, sought God, and sought profit while declaring himself unthankful. He hardened himself into a professional fighter, banking on the next life while he improved an ancient forest by drawing a checkerboard on it. He wrote home about the “womb of futurity,” a bizarre metaphor I still do not understand. Whom did he think made futurity pregnant? Was it God, or the Phelps and Gorham Company? I didn’t understand the guy. On the other hand, I didn’t go to war when I was 22. I was working in a restaurant and writing stories. 

Every story I could imagine about this place, and about Hugh Maxwell, seemed another work of fiction, a mechanism for assigning blame. Blame has to be assigned—Indigenous communities did not displace themselves, nor did the forest wreck itself—but it is also necessary to keep looking and to try to keep noticing how much one does not understand. Among the Native allies who joined the French at Lake George all those years ago was a band of ten Iowas who had traveled a thousand miles, from beyond the Great Lakes, to fight the English. What were they thinking, and what had their journey been like? They had only themselves to tell their story to, because no one at Lake George spoke their language. 

As I tried to conjure the experiences of these men nearly 270 years ago, it occurred to me that I ought to be more concerned for the daring pedestrians trying to cross Route 9 from the campground to the MiniMart attached to the Exxon. There was a crosswalk, but the traffic was coming in fast. 

There was too much here for me to make sense of. The seat of war was now a vacation spot. War is violent and so are four-lane highways. Lake George is beautiful, and it puzzled me to notice that the MiniMart was pretty, too, with its high-wattage red-and-white Exxon sign and its glass front glowing softly yellow.

I walked over. Inside, the MiniMart was lit up like a minor carnival, aggressively air-conditioned, and it had a sweet, grimy, convenience-store smell of burnt coffee and potato logs. People were getting chips, jerky, gasoline, and party ice. The forces of growth and the forces of decay were jostling. I liked being there. I selected two cold singles, thanked the cashier, and followed the crosswalk safely back to my campsite and my folding camp stool, from which I watched the people coming and going late into the night.

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When Hugh Maxwell wrote home to Bridget with his story about the womb of futurity, he got a couple things wrong. 

He was right that the country was changing. While he was in the forest tramping out lines, trying to get his head around this thing that was too big to fit inside anyone’s head, the United States ratified their second constitution. The document was a little over 4,000 words long, and it relied heavily on the word “shall,” a modal verb used to indicate a future action, which was used 191 times. The official copy covered four big sheets of parchment in ink made from oak galls. 

He was wrong about the Senecas’ time being short. They are still here. On the Tonawanda Territory, an hour’s drive west from my house, Senecas still govern themselves according to the Great Law of Peace—a constitution established by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and recorded in white wampum before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. The Tonawanda Seneca Nation is currently fighting a plan to build a data center next to their woods.

He was right about the coming of new inhabitants. The grid he’d laid over the forest became a map in a land office, and his employers were soon marking squares SOLD in small cursive. Settlers arrived slowly, then in booms, cutting trees, burning stumps, shooting wolves, and plowing the black ground with teams of oxen, raising vegetables for their families and wheat to sell over the Erie Canal.

The land in Township 13, my township, turned out to be mixed. The ground was clay in some parts. Brighton became known for brickyards. That industry is gone now, but the high school had an ugly surprise this year when it tried to replace a grass playing field with plastic turf. Chunks of brick, glass, and metal were buried a few inches down; tests showed high levels of arsenic, lead, and semi-volatile organic compounds. The field where my daughter played soccer is now sheeted in plastic while the state decides what to do next.

In Edgewood, the earth is as rich as Maxwell said it was, but he might have been surprised to learn how briefly that would matter. Soil fertility is mostly beside the point, and even an inconvenience, since lawns have to be mowed, leaves blown into piles, and pollen hosed off windshields in the spring. 

No description, no story, is big enough to capture the forest Maxwell walked through. The best I can think to do is to keep looking for better questions about it. Here’s one: If a forest had a constitution, what would it say? Its coequal branches might be soil, air, water, and sun. It certainly would have no president. Its bill of rights might hold that differences exist, that living things may strive, that life includes an accumulation of wealth, and that death includes the release of that wealth. Nothing is wasted, nothing is lost, but eventually everything has to be let go of. When you die, you simply spread out your wealth on the ground.

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James Whorton Jr. grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.  He is the author of three novels, and his writing has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Washington Square Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Washington Post.  He teaches at SUNY Brockport.

Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

This feature report was co-produced and is being co-published in partnership with How Things Work by Hamilton Nolan and The Valley Labor Report.

On a plain, blue-lit stage in a plain event space at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, a gruff man with white hair and a thin goatee is complaining about Las Vegas. How it is too hot. How it is too expensive. And how the hotel’s convention-management bureaucracy is driving him nuts.

“You can’t even move a box from left to right without contacting someone to do that!” he barks into the microphone.

Far from all the political bluster about the police being defunded, six years after the earth-shaking George Floyd protests swept the US and public approval for law enforcement plunged to a generational low, these guys have never been more politically and monetarily supported than they are now.

This will become a communal ritual by the end of the week. Without fail, like some sort of morning prayer, the convention begins every day with opening grumblings about the convention itself.

We can see why. After all, the organization convening here is supposed to be a strong union representing nearly 20,000 members around the country. Far from all the political bluster about the police being defunded, six years after the earth-shaking George Floyd protests swept the US and public approval for law enforcement plunged to a generational low, these guys have never been more politically and monetarily supported than they are now.

But there are only about 50 people in the room here with us (28 delegates, 10 alternates, and some wives and family members mixed in). The proceedings are pretty boring and energyless, the attendees are grumpy, and the air is thick with middle-age resentment.

Clearly, the convention organizers and speakers were expecting something much different than this. To be honest, so were we. Because it’s 2026, Donald Trump is president again, and this is the 23rd Quadrennial Convention of the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA), which represents tens of thousands of cops in departments from coast to coast.

The convention was billed as “The premier gathering for law enforcement leadership… An event you don’t want to miss!”

But it’s absolutely dead here. Even the speakers and attendees don’t want to be here. In fact, they won’t shut up about it.

THE BLUE SHEEP OF THE FAMILY

It is by no means the largest police union in America, but IUPA has the distinction of being the only police union that is a member of the AFL-CIO. It joined the labor federation in 1979, making it a formal but uncomfortable partner to every progressive labor union and every rank-and-file union member in the AFL-CIO who has ever had to question why they should be affiliated with a union representing the same kind of cops who beat and arrest them, their union siblings, and their neighbors at protests and on picket lines.

The plainspoken man on stage right now grumbling about the convention, the one with white hair and the thin goatee—that’s Sam Cabral. He’s been IUPA’s president for more than 30 years.

Cabral certainly sets the right wing edge of the AFL-CIO’s unions and union leaders. In 2014, when grassroots racial justice protests rocked Ferguson, Missouri following the killing of Michael Brown by police, the AFL-CIO’s then-President Richard Trumka, who was by no means a hard-left figure, joined calls for police reform and an end to police militarization.

That really pissed off Cabral. In a Strongly Worded Letter to Trumka, he proved what citizens have long known about how law enforcement “workers” wielding the might and prejudice of state violence see the rest of us: “[Police] are not the cause of the problems facing the black communities in America. They are not responsible for the single parent families, the unemployment, the school dropout rate or its attendant unacceptable literacy rate among black youth. They are not responsible for the gangs, black on black crime or the infant mortality rate.”

It is by no means the largest police union in America, but IUPA has the distinction of being the only police union that is a member of the AFL-CIO.

In true “nothing-to-see-here” fashion, Cabral also noted that, when it comes to police department staffing, “we have not ever seen racism or systematic exclusion of minorities.”

In 2020, as populist fury and protests swept the nation (and beyond) following the filmed police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, parts of the labor movement (including Hamilton’s own union, the Writers Guild—East) renewed their push for the AFL-CIO to disaffiliate from IUPA, on the grounds that police unions have clear, unique, existential interests that are irreconcilable with the shared interests of the rest of their alleged union siblings. AFL-CIO leadership disagreed, and they decided instead to speak out in defense of IUPA and its membership: “We believe the best way to use our influence on the issue of police brutality is to engage our police affiliates rather than isolate them.”

Yet the federation’s nominal support for some general accountability and police reform was still too much for Cabral. Stepping back into the political fray to hold the Thin Blue Line, he fired off another furious letter to Trumka, saying that the AFL-CIO President criticizing police over what happened to Floyd was “reprehensible” and an act of “profiling.”

“[Police] are not the cause of the problems facing the black communities in America. They are not responsible for the single parent families, the unemployment, the school dropout rate or its attendant unacceptable literacy rate among black youth. They are not responsible for the gangs, black on black crime or the infant mortality rate.”

Sam Cabral, President of the International Union of Police Associations

“Your recent statement where you speak of ​‘America’s long history of racism and violence against black people’ is inflammatory and patently false,” Cabral wrote. “Further, your call to end racial profiling and ‘demilitarize’ police forces makes assumptions that are, again, ridiculous.”

Shocking no one, IUPA endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential reelection bid in 2020, and Cabral full-throatedly joined the MAGA chorus. “Every top Democrat currently running for this office has vilified the police and made criminals out to be victims. They seem to take any union’s support for granted,” he wrote in an official statement in September of 2019. “Many of them still refer to the tragedy in Ferguson as a murder, despite the conclusions of every investigative inquiry to the contrary.”

“THEY OBSTRUCTED EVERYTHING”

The mood-deadness and industrially chilled air here in the half-empty Concord Ballroom at the Paris Hotel contrasts so starkly with the grassroots intensity fueling the 2020 George Floyd protests—and with the heat and fury of the longstanding, ongoing debates about what the proper relationship between the labor movement and the police should be.

“Police unions are a conservative force in every institution they find themselves in,” Bill Fletcher Jr.—a lifelong unionist and racial justice activist—tells us over the phone. Fletcher recounts dealing with the police sections of his union during his time as Director of Field Services for the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest federal employees union (and Jacob’s own union), which represents many members who are employed as law enforcement.

“It was like having a ship trying to leave the harbor with an anchor still out,” Fletcher says. “They obstructed everything.”

They could even openly flout the rules of their own union and face no consequences, Fletcher tells us. AFGE’s ICE Council did exactly that when they de-facto endorsed Donald Trump in 2016, against AFGE’s endorsement of Clinton. Guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

In order to secure member support for an agenda that is more challenging to the police state—an issue that is becoming more urgent by the day in Trump’s America—the labor movement needs “serious education” and an “open discussion that begins with the fact that the politics of the IUPA” and other cop unions “run counter to the rest of the labor movement.”

At one point during his time as an AFL-CIO staffer, Fletcher remembers trying to get the labor federation to encourage then-President Bill Clinton to issue a pardon or clemency for political prisoner Leonard Peltier. His proposal was not enthusiastically received. No one asked if taking such a step was worthwhile. No one debated whether it was the right thing to do. Instead, they just asked, “What does IUPA think?”

“They blasted the idea,” Fletcher says, “and that settled it.”

Therein lies the problem, and it’s not a new problem. As Fletcher puts it over the phone, in order to secure member support for an agenda that is more challenging to the police state—an issue that is becoming more urgent by the day in Trump’s America—the labor movement needs “serious education” and an “open discussion that begins with the fact that the politics of the IUPA” and other cop unions “run counter to the rest of the labor movement.”

But Fletcher has his issues with the “Defund the Police” camp, too, and he’s certainly not the only one. While agreeing with many of the goals of police accountability activists—in particular, the need to demilitarize the police and to delink police unions from the rest of the labor movement—Fletcher argues that many in the movement for police accountability have marginalized themselves.

“People have a right to safety,” Fletcher tells us, recalling a terrifying incident when his daughter was held up at gunpoint. “If a cop had killed the guy who did that, I wouldn’t have cared. The way I see it, when you point a gun at someone, those are the chances you’re taking. And I’m a Marxist.”

Fletcher makes the point stick by telling us about a 2020 forum he attended organized by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA). The union had also put out a statement in response to the police murder of George Floyd, which Fletcher commended as “a good statement.” That pissed off a lot of NYSNA members at the forum. Many of those members were married to cops, he says, and they felt like the statement attacked their partners.

Fletcher wonders aloud if certain segments of the left today—those who say they support unions but have no patience or tolerance for law enforcement of any kind—have any patience or tolerance for working people like those NYSNA members and their families. They should, he says.

A THIN BLUE WHINE

Over the course of the convention, IUPA’s relationship with the AFL-CIO is the target of more than one sarcastic barb. Cabral refers to IUPA’s “friends” in the House of Labor with all the contempt of Denethor II in his voice.

Far from eschewing the negative popular stereotypes about cops in America—and far from heeding or caring about assertions from organized labor that the interests of police unions run directly counter to the shared goals of the rest of the labor movement—most of the cops here seem to revel in not caring at all (and not having to care) about those things.

Many at this convention make it clear to us that police unions and their members feel no need or duty to consider, accept, or align themselves with the goals of the broader labor movement. According to them, it is the rest of the labor movement whose politics and priorities are out of whack.

Presenters frequently point to a Gallup poll from last year that shows 74% of Americans having confidence in their local police, and 76% being satisfied with the relationship between the police and the public. Gallup’s long-running “Confidence in Institutions” poll also shows that 45% of Americans have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in police. Another 32% have at least “some” confidence.

In the six years since Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis—and the furious eruption of demands for racial justice and police accountability that followed—law enforcement unions (at least at the national level) have done absolutely nothing to try to meet the rest of the labor movement—or the rest of the country—on this issue. It’s also true and fair to say that neither unions in general nor the AFL-CIO specifically have made any attempt to seriously “engage” police unions on this issue.

In the six years since Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis… law enforcement unions (at least at the national level) have done absolutely nothing to try to meet the rest of the labor movement—or the rest of the country—on this issue

During the convention, when we speak to delegates about their relationships with other unions back home, they don’t have much to say.

One IUPA local president tells us his union is affiliated with the local labor council, but they don’t participate in council activities anymore, due in large part to rifts caused by political differences.

In Florida—the state where the IUPA international headquarters resides and where some of its largest locals are—labor reporter McKenna Schueler says the union is more or less a nonentity. IUPA members and leaders don’t really work with other labor leaders and unions down there. And the other police unions, which are much bigger in size and have much more political influence, don’t really need IUPA to see their priorities supported in Ron Desantis’s Florida.

“Police get what they want here in the state of Florida,” Joey Davis, a Florida firefighter and member of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), sums it up to us. As a member of the IAFF, Davis says he’s worked with the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) and the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) on shared policy priorities. But, echoing Schueler’s assessment, he says that IUPA has never been all that relevant.

Police unions and their members feel no need or duty to consider, accept, or align themselves with the goals of the broader labor movement. According to them, it is the rest of the labor movement whose politics and priorities are out of whack

Here at the convention, there’s certainly no love lost for the Fraternal Order of Police. To Cabral, FOP is less of a union and more of an advocacy organization with a bad insurance plan, which he contrasts with his own union, boasting about IUPA’s huge resources for members’ legal defense costs.

A FEW GOOD APPLES DON’T UN-SPOIL THE BUNCH

To put it bluntly, Cabral pretty much looks and talks exactly like you’d expect a cop union leader in America to look and talk like. But it would be dishonest not to mention that there are other attendees and speakers here who either buck the stereotype or at least complicate it. John Covington, Vice President of the Memphis Police Association (MPA)—an IUPA affiliate—is one of those people.

We speak with Covington on a Zoom call after the convention is over. He freely admits that he is “very active” in Republican politics in the state of Tennessee, but says he doesn’t see a contradiction between that and his commitment to labor.

“Supporting workers—advocating for the backbone of the city, the working class—doesn’t have to fall on any political spectrum ” he tells us.

There’s a disconnect sometimes between national politics and locally what’s most effective. When it comes to police unions, what we run across is the left is very suspicious of us because we’re police, and the right is suspicious of us because we’re in unions. We get it from both sides. [But] we use whatever influence we have to let it be known that we don’t stand alone and if you’re gonna support us… you have to support these others.

My advice for a lot of local [unions] in cities, especially Republican cities that naturally the right is going to gravitate to: be supportive of first responders. Those other unions may want to find ways to find that common ground and work together and… look out for each other, and get that mentality of “Look, we may not agree on every single thing, but when it comes down to the voice of the workers, of making conditions better, we’re all on the same page—and if one of us falls under attack, we all fall under attack.”

And then, for police that have more Republican support [my advice would be] to garner more Democratic support, to create coalitions together, because the biggest thing you could ever lose is that voice and right to collectively bargain… We understand the responsibility we have being one of the bigger [unions]; we’re not going to let any of our brothers and sisters fall by the wayside.

Of course, we bring up the fact that many police unions don’t see things the way Covington does. Hamilton recounts how collective bargaining rights for public sector workers are frequently attacked by austerity-horny politicians while police and fire departments get special carveouts. Covington doesn’t dispute the point, but tells us, “We’ve recognized that if you let one fall, you’ve started the domino effect to let all fall, and we take that very seriously. We’ve been under attack for 30 years—all of us. Sometimes the powers-that-be come after us, and the other unions stand with us. Other times it’s them that are the focus, and we stand with them. The bottom line is: advocating and giving a voice to all these folks that make the city run—that’s really unifying. We’re stronger together. ”

To put it bluntly, Cabral pretty much looks and talks exactly like you’d expect a cop union leader in America to look and talk like. But it would be dishonest not to mention that there are other attendees and speakers here who either buck the stereotype or at least complicate it.

Covington isn’t just a one-off figure. According to Memphis Labor Council President Kevin Bradshaw, Covington’s whole MPA local—one of IUPA’s largest—bucks the long-established trend of how cop unions operate.

Bradshaw is a leader in the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers (BCTGM) union representing Kellogg’s factory workers in Memphis, and he has led the labor council since 2022. He says the Memphis Police Association has been active in his labor council since Bradshaw started coming around well over a decade ago—and they continue to be a valued partner.

With 2,000 members, the MPA attends Labor Day parades, supports candidates endorsed by the labor council, and walks picket lines with other union members. Bradshaw also recalls multiple instances of the MPA helping to connect members of other unions to needed resources; particularly, women fleeing domestic abuse. Then he shares an important memory with us.

During the 2021 Kellogg’s strike—a strike that lasted 77 days and involved workers at Kellogg’s plants in Battle Creek Michigan; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Omaha, Nebraska; and Memphis—Bradshaw recalls the company trying to weaponize the cops and the courts against BCTGM strikers by claiming they were breaking the law, trespassing, and blocking the entrances. But Memphis police officers stood up for the BCTGM members and set the record straight. No one was arrested.

“We got calls from anti-union folks and from the company about the picket line,” Matthew Cunningham, MPA President and IUPA Region 15 Vice President, tells us after the convention. “We have to go when there is a call. But the BCTGM members were always following the law, so when we got there and investigated, we just told them they were doing a great job and went back to the station.”

When it comes to police unions, what we run across is the left is very suspicious of us because we’re police, and the right is suspicious of us because we’re in unions. We get it from both sides.

John Covington, Vice President of the Memphis Police Association

Cunningham also recounts an incident last year with Memphis Mayor Paul Young—a “Democrat in name only” who, according to him, is backed by “business owners and old money.” Mayor Young and the Memphis City Council sparked a furious uproar when they tried to revoke collective bargaining rights for city employees last October. What we hear from Cunningham—and what other labor leaders in Memphis have corroborated—is that MPA worked with the other municipal unions to fight back and save union rights, not just for cops and MPA members, but for all city unions. Rather than carve out a side deal for his members—as many police union leaders have repeatedly done in cities and states across the country—Cunningham led that fight to protect bargaining rights for all.

To be honest, Cunningham seems like a genuinely solid guy who is trying to do the most good he can. And of course there always are, always have been, and always will be genuinely good-hearted people who choose to make a living wearing a badge on their chest.

But the reality that there are decent people who work as law enforcers doesn’t negate the reality of what law enforcers do to poor and working people across the country (and what the police exist to do in our society). Two things can be true at the same time. Many things are true at the same time, in fact.

The reality that there are decent people who work as law enforcers doesn’t negate the reality of what law enforcers do to poor and working people across the country (and what the police exist to do in our society). Two things can be true at the same time.

Everything Memphis Labor Council President Kevin Bradshaw recounted about what happened (and, more importantly, what didn’t happen) between the Kellogg’s strikers and the MPA cops is true. So are all the documented and completely unwarranted murders of people by police. So are all the verified, horrifying images of police brutalizing and crushing student demonstrations, strikes, and countless forms of protest or righteous civil disobedience. So are all the other abuses of power people have experienced firsthand, witnessed with their own eyes, and recorded with their phones. So are all the things that the Fraternal Order of Police and its president Patrick Yoes have said in public and written down. So are all the things IUPA president Sam Cabral has said in public and written down.

When we’re talking to Bradshaw, we show him IUPA’s 2020 statements about George Floyd, racism in policing, etc. He is shocked.

As a contrast, he points to the way the MPA reacted to the brutal killing of Tyre Nichols, an unarmed black man who was beaten to death. While the association didn’t explicitly condemn the officers in press statements, they also offered no public defense of them. They did, however, provide a legal defense to the tune of $4.2M and counting.

Regarding the Nichols case, Covington stresses that the legal defense fund is a distinct entity that they pay into, and that it is ultimately that entity that makes decisions about which cases to take. (Here at the convention, funding the Tyre Nichols defense is something that the administrator of the fund openly brags about.) The Memphis Police Association never took a vote on whether or not to expend funds defending Nichols’ killers. But Covington reiterates what the union said at that time: that everyone deserves due process.

Defending “bad workers” is something that all unions have to deal with. When required to defend workers who actually have sub-par performance records or who have committed some other form of misconduct, most unions will generally defend this practice by arguing that protecting the contract is their paramount duty, that everyone deserves due process and a good defense, and that it is management’s job, not the union’s, to discipline.

But does that entitle the officers who killed Tyre Nichols to a $4.2 million Cadillac legal defense when they are so clearly in the wrong, should clearly never be entrusted with law enforcement duties ever again, and should (under the logic of our carceral system) be serving serious time for their crimes? Doesn’t it stand to reason that such defenses just embolden cops to use more force than they otherwise might? Is it the responsibility of the union to consider social ramifications like that, even if discipline and performance are supposedly the sole responsibility of management?

These questions are neither brought up nor wrestled with at the IUPA convention. Instead, a resolution is passed supporting qualified immunity for cops—unanimously, as far as we can tell.

IS THIS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE?

In hindsight, the cops won the fight over police reform.

Police departments were not defunded; their budgets are bigger than ever. As IUPA members are quick to point out, confidence in police is still quite high—significantly higher than in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Even Zohran Mamdani, New York’s socialist mayor and erstwhile supporter of defunding the police, went on an apology tour to placate the police.

The AFL-CIO’s momentary enthusiasm for police reform collapsed into a symbolic committee that released a report rejecting calls to “Defund the Police.” Richard Trumka died suddenly in 2021. Now Donald Trump is in charge again. IUPA is still an AFL-CIO affiliate. And under the gaudy, chandeliered ceiling of the Paris casino, Sam Cabral has just been reelected as IUPA’s International President.

No doubt the record drops in crime the US is experiencing have something to do with the decrease in grassroots movements that are more antagonistic towards police. Ironically, current drops in crime can be attributed, at least in part, to policies advocated for by these very movements, from investing in non-carceral solutions to societal ills like poverty, homelessness, and drug abuse, to pushing local governments to hire and employ more people as social workers, teachers, counselors, clinicians, etc.

Eric Blanc, a prominent socialist writer and member of NYC-DSA, argues that an approach of emphasizing the addition of social services rather than subtraction of policing is a better agenda to pursue anyways. “Fight for a massive redistribution of wealth,” which could be used to fund programs like these, ultimately “taking jobs away from cops,” he says, instead of fighting them head on. With respect to the demand to kick police unions out of the AFL-CIO, Blanc cautions that, to many working people, it is “not so obvious how kicking out cops makes the world better.”

The slogan itself definitely needed some work, but it’s important to remember that “Defund” was as much about diverting public money away from police as it was about putting more money into social services. It was about questioning whether armed police officers should be asked to be the primary first responders when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis. Cops are being asked to do too much, with deadly consequences, and the Defund movement sought to take some of those responsibilities off their plate.

When we ask Covington about this, he enthusiastically endorses the call for increased spending on social services, acknowledging that they help a lot. “[The system] we have now is you take them in and in two days they’re back on the street, and we have no control over that. We want to see more support, more programs for people… We don’t like having to do all these roles that fall on us.” However, when it comes to “defunding” or replacing police with social workers on distress calls, or even adding them to a team of police, Covington is still very wary. “Situations can get out of hand quickly, violence can happen very quickly… For us, to bring a social worker on a scene—that’s one more person you have to protect. It’s that much more dangerous.”

Earlier this summer, the AFL-CIO’s quadrennial convention was held in Minneapolis. The federation made it a point to uplift and honor the role that Minnesota’s unions had played in the hard and grinding grassroots opposition to ICE that traumatized the city this year. A few months later, one of the AFL-CIO’s member unions has its own convention and goes out of its way to feature speakers who talk approvingly about union members working hand in hand with ICE to sweep up their immigrant neighbors.

A union like IUPA, and a convention like this, helps to illuminate the boundaries of solidarity. You see here how that admirable quality can be turned backward on itself and become meaningless, nonsensical, even harmful. How much solidarity are we expected to have—how much solidarity is it possible to have—with the people who arresting, deporting, and killing us? Will that solidarity be recognized and reciprocated by law enforcers when it counts? If the past is any precedent, and if this convention is any indication, our advice is: Don’t hold your breath.