Mist Nets: After the Uvalde Shooting at Terrain.org.

On April 20, 1999, when the Columbine shooters were hunting through the school library, our nine-year-old daughters were locked in an elementary school gymnasium a mile away from Columbine highschool. I was in a meeting at a company I would soon leave. This time, on May 24, 2022, when the Uvalde shooter killed two teachers and nineteen children, one of my daughters was teaching fourth grade in the Roaring Fork Valley and I was taking photos of killdeer at Yellowstone National Park and wouldn’t know of the shooting until we drove home.

The essay I wrote, Mist Nets: After the Uvalde Shooting, was one of four finalists for the Terrain.org 13th annual contest in creative nonfiction and is now published on their website. The essay started for me when I ran across this quote by Roland Barthes: “Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do not weep), that is all.” I think it is the enormity of “that is all” that carried me forward into this essay.