The Lost Vortex

2022 was the last best chance to turn things around.

Three years have passed since I contemplated writing this story. I kept changing my mind. What’s the point of a story in which nothing happens, and no answer is found?

Then again: does anything sum up the middle of 2022 better than that?

In November 2016, the weekend before the election, I took my children to southern Illinois on what I came to call “the last good day.” They were five and nine. We drove three hours and back from St. Louis to show them the southlands of our neighboring state. We visited Shawnee National Forest, home to the Garden of the Gods: giant towers of rock where even small children can climb on cliffs of arboreal splendor.

It was a perfect day, a free day, the kind you keep in your mind to revisit in darker times. After we climbed the rocks, we took the kids to the Ohio River. I have photos of them skipping stones near an old bandit cave, clapping in joy as they skimmed the surface, unaware of the future behind them.

“I want to go back,” I told my husband in 2022. “I want another perfect day.”

There is no such thing as a perfect day when you’ve already lost what could have been. You can have one when peril is impending and fragility makes the smallest things shine. But when you live in the aftermath, and no one will admit it, you’re forever seeking balm for an unrecognized wound. A cloud of lonely certitude follows you and blocks your spirit from the sun. That cloud is perception, and you’re grateful, but you envy the bliss of ignorance. Perfection requires a sense of possibility. In the aftermath, you can have a good day, but not a perfect day.

Or you can try to find a vortex and leave this shitty dimension behind.

We told folks we were renting a cabin in the woods because it was a new moon and we wanted the kids to see the stars. In reality, we were searching for the Max Creek Vortex, a remote hiking trail that was said to open a door to an alternate universe.

I had collected information about the Max Creek Vortex from now-dead blogs, because the internet is a vortex too — the bad kind. My online guides are now 404 tombstones and AI swamps. I miss the days when real people provided earnest tips for inane quests. When the internet felt human, instead of humans feeling like machines.

We returned to the Shawnee National Forest in May 2022. It was an interim period: between when Elon Musk said he would buy Twitter and when he did, when Roe was rumored to be soon overturned and when it was, when covid was proclaimed to be over and was not, and when the DOJ was said to be stopping Trump and never did, because that was always a false promise cooked up by mafia state enablers.

No government countenances sedition unless they want the seditionist to return. No government weaponizes or buries public health data unless they are content with mass death. We were on borrowed time in too many ways, losing the safety nets, like digital media, that had kept us grounded during the first Trump term.

I knew we were headed for a reinstallation. But no one believed me, so I started googling vortexes. Strangers screamed to focus on midterms, so that luminaries like John Fetterman could fix things, but that only made me crave the vortex more.

One of the strangest things about 2025 is the way people discuss Trump’s second term as if the first never happened. As if the plans he is carrying out now are not extensions of those that he announced a decade ago, and as if those plans were not born of a life in organized crime. It reminds me of the feigned media amnesia of 2016, when Trump was portrayed as a neophyte outsider instead of a career criminal long associated with fraud, bankruptcy, and violence — one who had run for president multiple times, and whose kleptocratic connections were laid plain.

One reason for the feigned amnesia about Trump’s first term is that We’re Not Supposed to Talk About Biden. It is permitted, in book-peddling cable news circles, to discuss Biden’s allegedly real amnesia: the senility that prevented him from recognizing his team of corrupt advisors. But Democratic partisans insist the topic of Biden is irrelevant and we must disregard it. The root of their panic is not Biden, but Trump: namely, that the Biden administration refused to hold the Trump administration accountable. This is the disaster they do not want to discuss.

The Biden years were the best opportunity to gut the US mafia state, expose elite criminality, and bring consequences to those who committed state crimes and those who enabled them. Since this describes nearly everyone in government and also alienates those who seek to profit off this catastrophe instead of stopping it, they decided to let criminal impunity flourish instead.

As I wrote in 2023, Biden was a Placeholder President meant to fill time between two terms of Trump while a right-wing apparatus launched an attack on civil rights and the activist movements of the prior decade were drained of their power.

For four years, propagandists barked that the Biden camp was fixing problems “behind the scenes.” In reality, the Biden camp was countenancing sedition, abetting genocide, and assaulting the rights to free speech and assembly. Whether Biden was lucid during this time matters less than all the people who suffered and died.

We should discuss state abuse: under Trump, under Biden, and under Trump again. It’s one intertwining tale: not a story of interchangeable parties, but of abusers and enablers working across the aisle, backed by the same monied crowd.

If the American government is three killers in a trench coat, Biden is in the middle, between Trump and Ultra-Trump. The trench coat is made of bodies and Bitcoin, with pockets so deep they extend to the ends of the world.

* * *

Our cabin was in a part of Illinois known as “Little Egypt” with town names like Thebes and Cairo. Little Egypt is said to be haunted, likely because the juncture of clashing states produced so much bloodshed. Here, Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln debated slavery; here, a Confederate secret society, The Knights of the Golden Circle, thrived. For centuries, the region was overrun with white violence: slave owners, gangsters, the KKK. If they didn’t live here, they were passing through.

The land is eerily beautiful. The forest is dotted with enormous rocks shaped like pyramids, which some believe inspired the “Little Egypt” nickname. I doubt it, seeing how remote they are — but at the time of the coinage, nearly everything was remote. Perhaps the pyramids were landmarks in an endless sea of green. If there is a lusher land than the Shawnee National Forest in spring, I don’t know it.

We saw the pyramids on one of our “normal” hikes. We explored popular places first, so we could see the glory of nature before leaving our earthly dimension behind.

My plan to find the vortex — a joke, mostly, at first — had taken on the wild urgency you get when confronted with unbearable horror. The day we left, a school shooter massacred 19 children in Uvalde, Texas, while police stood by and let it happen. Later, many called it a microcosm of a national crisis of violence and cowardice.

But at the time, all I could think of were little kids, and I could not stop crying. That school shootings are unsurprising, along with the indifference of US officials, does not make them less painful. I was glad to be in the forest, where my phone could not catch callous commentary. But I longed for permanent escape. I wanted the vortex to be real.

* * *

The closest town to our cabin was Harrisburg. It has a history of tragedy and violence, from a 1937 flood and a 2012 tornado to being the terrain of prohibition gangster Charlie Birger and the site of a mysterious beast known as the “Tuttle Bottoms Monster,” who some locals believe was released by the federal government.

On the way to buy food at the Harrisburg Walmart — an internet-famous Walmart where a child went viral for yodeling Hank Williams’ “Lovesick Blues” inside — we saw a sign and pulled over.

THE PAUPER CEMETERY, it read. Behind it, a small yard. “Not only people from the poor farm were buried here but it was the county burial site for unknown vagrants, murder victims, people killed in the nearby coal mine, abandoned and deceased children. ‘Colored’ and Caucasian children were buried side by side from the very beginning, death being the only criteria for a place.”

60 children were among the 263 people buried there. A few people were murder victims of Charlie Birger. When I looked up Birger, I was shocked to find his real name was Shachna Birger and he was buried in a historic St. Louis Jewish cemetery near my house. It bothered me that his victims were considered so unimportant they landed in an unmarked grave while he was interred on exalted grounds.

The Pauper Cemetery’s mass grave of children upset me more, especially after the Uvalde massacre. We drove back to the cabin.

The night was idyllic. We grilled after the sun set and the stars appeared, so bright you could spot them early. We got out ice cream and blankets and settled on the couch, excited for the return of Stranger Things, which we had been watching as a family since 2016, the year of the perfect day.

A warning appeared that due to recent events, some scenes may be disturbing. The show opened with a massacre of children, their bloodied bodies lining a hall.

I’d like to say we turned it off. But we didn’t.

* * *

The next day we set out to enter the vortex. But first we returned to the sight of our old perfect day: the Garden of the Gods. I was convinced it would be mobbed and made everyone get up at dawn to avoid the crowds, only to find we were alone.

I had never been there in spring. Our first foray was in autumn, the colors bright but the leaves falling, revealing layers of stone. Now flat rocks poked out from trees like landing pads for otherworldly visitors. We wandered between the boulders until a shadow appeared on another cliff, growing larger until it revealed itself to be a family of four, like ours, and we waved at each other across the chasm.

And it was America, and simple, and restored me for a time.

Satisfied, we headed for the vortex, passing strange sites on the way. The ruins of a bootlegger cave tavern. A plaque honoring a pig named King Neptune, who raised $19 million in war bonds during WWII. King Neptune’s grave was festooned with flowers. I wondered if they were for Memorial Day or if that pig got love all year round.

When we got to the Max Creek trail, two sunburned hippies lay in the dirt. They said they had been camping for days but had forgotten to bring anything to drink. None of us could understand how they were alive. They pondered if they had found a cooler in the other dimension and forgot. The hippies gave us trippy platitudes — “It’s, like, a vortex, you won’t see it, but you’ll feel it” — and we gave them water.

We set off on land somehow soaked with mud even though it had not rained for days and it was over 90 degrees. There was barely a trail, more an absence of gnarled branches that others attempting to find the vortex had cleared.

I had printed directions off the internet like a MapQuest traveler from 1999 because that was the year to which I wanted to return. But they were useless in this wild land, where the only semblance of a path was literally horseshit. We followed the piles of horseshit anyway, like it was the internet in 2025.

Mosquitoes feasted and thorns scratched my feet. I had dressed poorly for interdimensional travel. My son sized me up and grabbed my hand.

“Mama,” he said. “Let’s stop looking for a vortex and start looking for AC.”

“You never stop looking for a vortex, son. The vortex finds you.”

“Dale Gribble mama,” he muttered, and kicked dirt.

My daughter had sprinted ahead. I became worried she’d enter an alternate universe without me, but I think I was just nervous about college.

She returned, hands on hips.

“There are no signs. No trails. No creek like you said there’d be,” she said. “My phone doesn’t work and also it smells.”

“Does it smell like a vortex?”

“How would I know?!”

“Does it smell cold? Or like you’re jumping through time?”

“If jumping through time smells like shit.”

“It might!” I said, excited, turning to my husband, who was wearing the heavy backpack with our supplies.

“It’s hot,” he said, and nothing more.

“The vortex is supposed to feel cold. That’s how you’ll know you entered.”

“What if it’s cold in the vortex but then you go through and the other dimension is even hotter than here?” my son asked.

I hadn’t considered that. He was using nutjob logic and it worked.

“He may have a point,” I said to my husband.

“That’s the point?! That’s the winning argument, not ‘There’s no vortex to another dimension on a half-assed, hot-as-hell trail in southern Illinois?!’”

“Yes,” I said. “In all my wanting to leave this dimension, I hadn’t considered that the next one could be worse.”

I thought about this three years later, when Trump took office for the second time.

* * *

We returned to our cabin, showered, grilled, watched Stranger Things and ate ice cream. I was happy in our dimension that night, being with my family, doing the simple rituals we had done for years. If nothing changed, I thought, we would be happy forever.

But the next day I returned home, and reentered reality, where lack of pushback was the problem.

That weekend was the last time I remember feeling at peace in 2022, a terrible year. No officials challenged the mafia state in a meaningful way. Musk bought Twitter and gutted its utility. Roe was overturned and Congress sang in approval. Layoffs flooded media. AI began its enshittification creep. The backlash to civil rights grew more vicious and violent. Communities fractured, inflation soared, and propaganda thrived.

Throughout it all, liberals clung to institutionalism. They sicced mobs on anyone who did not defend Biden, in a manner mirroring QAnon and Trump. People I once trusted sold their social media brands to PACs in order to parrot talking points. If they had souls, they sold those too.

It was a fake world with real victims. It was a democracy simulator with a broken mouthpiece.

It is appropriate to discuss Biden’s failures. But his tenure should be seen as part of a broader betrayal. The stakes were always existential, and while both parties said it, neither acted like it — unless the existential goal was to kill us all.

“You don’t have until 2024,” I said in 2021, after the Democrats won the House, Senate, and Presidency. “You have until 2022. You need to act now, while you have power and public approval. You can’t pretend crises will fix themselves. There is no moving on without accountability, and there is no accountability without the truth.”

I did not have high hopes for the Biden administration. But I had thought that out of self-preservation alone, they would enact basic laws to protect democracy. Instead, I found a wormhole of betrayal and was saddened to see how deep it goes. I watched time run out until it lay in careless piles, like dirt on a pauper’s grave.

In 2022, I got no accountability, no truth, and no vortex. There were ways to leave this hell world behind, and no official sought to find them.

At least I looked, and failed only myself, instead of all of humanity.

* * *

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Garden of the Gods in the Shawnee National Forest, Illinois.

So beautiful.

Mystical pyramid in the forest!

King Neptune, hero pig!

The Pauper Cemetery.

An old bootlegger tavern with a cave for cooling refreshments.