PALMYRA, Wis. — CJ’s Coffee n’ Cream was the only coffee shop in town, and Paul Blount sat in the corner of the room, his chair facing the front entrance, his fingers hooked into the sides of a bullet-resistant vest labeled “POLICE,” so that to anyone coming or going, he would be difficult to miss. Paul, 51, believed it was the duty of a police chief in a place as small as Palmyra, population 1,719, to make himself available to the people of the village. And lately in Palmyra, there was a growing sense of unease that he was determined to talk through and, if he could, contain, before it became something dangerous.
PALMYRA, Wis. — CJ’s Coffee n’ Cream was the only coffee shop in town, and Paul Blount sat in the corner of the room, his chair facing the front entrance, his fingers hooked into the sides of a bullet-resistant vest labeled “POLICE,” so that to anyone coming or going, he would be difficult to miss. Paul, 51, believed it was the duty of a police chief in a place as small as Palmyra, population 1,719, to make himself available to the people of the village. And lately in Palmyra, there was a growing sense of unease that he was determined to talk through and, if he could, contain, before it became something dangerous.
It was the day before homecoming weekend, which meant that soon there would be toilet paper streamers in the trees, a football game played under the lights and the largest parade the village hosted all year. The parade, which ran half a mile from one end of Main Street to the other, was a concern. “Given the climate and recent media headlines, we are taking the following precautionary measures for this weekend’s event,” Paul had written to members of the village board that governed Palmyra. The precautionary measures included the use of a neighboring county’s drone program, to scan the rooftops for threats. “My team and I are proactively preparing for the worst-case scenarios while continuing to hope for the best.”
How had such a feeling reached a place like Palmyra? A dot on the map between Madison and Milwaukee, the village had two bars, one grocery store, two gas stations and acres of farmland. It was about 20 miles from the interstate, making it a place where people said, “If you’re in Palmyra, you either intended to be here, or you’re lost.” Palmyra was also in debt, and without enough growth in the village to support its costs, the board had been talking about dissolving the police department, which was already understaffed, with just two other full-time officers and no overnight patrol. So when Paul saw a flier advertising extra funding through a partnership with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he applied.
The program, which ICE called a 287(g) agreement, was offering big payouts to police departments that train and deputize their officers to enforce immigration law. Paul believed in cooperating with the federal government, and had told people he saw the program as a tool to address “serious criminal threats.” He’d also said he would leave it to the village board to decide whether to move forward with the agreement. But before that could happen, ICE had approved his application, and then came a statement from the ACLU, the TV news crews and emails to Paul saying he’d “sold his soul for money,” and now, so much of what he saw unfolding across the country felt like it was creeping into life in the village he was supposed to keep safe.
When Paul had written his email warning the village board about the national “climate,” a gunman had just driven his pickup truck into a Mormon church in Michigan, and, four days before that, a man had opened fire on an ICE facility in Dallas, and two weeks before that, Charlie Kirk had been killed on a college campus in Utah. Now he saw footage of masked federal agents using rubber bullets and tear gas on protesters two hours away in Chicago, just as he was trying to gather feedback about the ICE program he’d signed up for in Palmyra. At the last village board meeting earlier that week, the only item on the agenda had been the approval of a liquor license for the new owners of the grocery store, but more than two dozen people had come wanting to talk about ICE, setting the village board members on edge.
So now more than ever, it was especially important to Paul to make time in the mornings before work to be at CJ’s, where he could hear about life in Palmyra. He nodded along as the regulars he usually sat with discussed the second bird flu outbreak in three years at the egg farm down the road. He shook his head as the woman behind the counter talked about the fight she’d witnessed between two neighbors over a blocked driveway, with “f-bombs flying everywhere,” she said, to which Paul said, “That’s the world we live in.” And when a man named Rudy Hernandez came inside and mentioned that he’d heard about “a little rally going on up there” about the ICE agreement, Paul sat up in his seat and said, “Today? Where at?”
“Up here at the park,” Rudy said.
“Oh, really?” Paul said.
“Yeah, so if you wanna go up there and put your two cents in.”
“For sure,” Paul said. “I hadn’t heard that.”
In his eight years as an officer here, Paul couldn’t remember a rally happening in Palmyra before. He’d been trying to explain to people, one by one, as he did now with Rudy, that if ICE ordered him to proactively ask for people’s paperwork, “the answer to that would be no,” he said. “That’s not the role of the Palmyra Police Department in a small little community.” Palmyra was 87 percent White, but it had a small Hispanic population, which included Rudy. “They think you’re going to go door-to-door,” Rudy said. “Chasing people down. Racial profiling. All that stuff.”
“Not gonna happen,” Paul said, then asked again about the rally.
“I’d say go check it out, man,” Rudy said. “Go tell them how you feel about it. They’ll tell you how they feel about it. That’s the way for a community to be tighter.”
Paul agreed with that idea. Still, he wasn’t sure if showing up unannounced to a rally would be a way to talk through the unease, or make it spread. He didn’t want to scare anyone. “Well, and you gotta fear for your life, too, you know,” said a woman who’d been listening from a few seats away. Paul told her he wasn’t concerned about that, stood up, thanked Rudy and walked to work. The police and fire station was a block away, and by the time he stepped through the front door, he had an email from the village clerk with a screenshot from Facebook that she’d been sent by “a concerned citizen.” Paul glanced at the email on his phone, then wordlessly hurried down the hallway to his office, where the assistant fire chief, Dan Schiller, was standing in the doorway. He gestured Dan inside, closed the door behind him, sat down at his desk and said, “Well, I got my first death threat.”
***
“Awesome,” Dan said dryly.
Paul put on his reading glasses and opened the email on his computer. “That’s why I closed the door,” he said. “I really don’t want to advertise it.” Paul, who’d begun his career as a firefighter and paramedic before becoming a police officer in Palmyra, had only recently taken on the role of interim police chief and public safety director, putting him in charge of all of the area’s essential services, which he promised to run with a “pro-community, pro-relationships, pro-trust” approach.
“Oh, no,” he said when he saw the name of the person who’d written the threat. “I know that person. Wow. You gotta be freaking kidding me.”
The threat itself was harder to decode. Paul read it aloud slowly. “It says … ‘The board is crooked’ … ‘They don’t listen to what we tell them’ … ‘Only way to … to put gun on head and do it!!!!’” He read it a second time, then said to Dan, “So it’s not really a direct threat to me. That sounds like more of a direct threat to the board.”
This was the last thing the board would want to hear. The board that ran Palmyra consisted of seven people elected by their neighbors and paid a small stipend for their time. At least one of them had already told Paul that the attention from the ICE agreement was making them so nervous that they were thinking of quitting. Now he would have to tell them all that there was someone writing things like “put gun on head.” Worse, someone local. “I just don’t get it,” Paul said. “I would have thought that would be somebody out of the area.”
The area formally designated as the village, which was separate from the outlying area known as the township, was 2.2 square miles and a mere 809 households. Most of Palmyra could be traveled in 15 minutes or so, which Paul did multiple times a day in a large black police truck, circling the high school, the lake and the park where he’d been told about the rally that afternoon. Farther down the road, there was the now-contaminated egg farm, where preparations were underway to kill more than 3 million chickens. Beyond that were fields of corn and soybeans, and an agricultural production facility that Paul had visited a few days earlier to hear what concerns people inside the company might have about the ICE agreement.
“Too much happening in a tiny town,” Paul said as he left the station, late to another meeting about ICE. This one was with a woman who was worried about protecting the immigrant-run businesses in the village. “People model what they’ve seen on TV,” she said, asking Paul to consider how images of armed, masked agents in Chicago might “fan those xenophobic flames,” especially in a small, mostly White place. “It’s exaggerated in rural areas because of the lack of exposure,” she said. “You know, we don’t get to interact with a lot of different people.”
Paul, who had worked as a paramedic in cities like Atlanta and Raleigh, had interacted with plenty of people outside southeast Wisconsin, and he thought it had made him someone who embraced points of view that were different from his own. A few hours later, sitting in his truck a few blocks away from the park, he tried to imagine how someone else might view the image of an officer in uniform “barging in” on an anti-ICE rally. He looked out his window. “That’s the last thing I need,” he said. “People thinking I’m coming to check their paperwork.”
The rally was in fact not a rally at all. Rather, it was a gathering of eight people at a picnic table underneath a pavilion, meeting in semisecret to launch the opposition. “The Palmyra Area Concerned Citizens,” they decided to call themselves. Everyone under the pavilion agreed that working with ICE was “terrible,” “shady,” “totally wrong” and no way to make people feel welcome in a small town. Now they needed to figure out what to do about it.
Paul was nowhere nearby. Instead, he’d pulled into the BP gas station, looking for the owner. Virendra Verma, whom people called Mr. V, or just V, was one of the business owners the woman Paul had met with earlier had been referencing. Paul had been trying to ask for his opinion about the ICE agreement for a while, but every time he did, V brushed him off, which he did again now. “I will tell you this,” V said. “You cannot make everybody happy.”
V had taken over the BP a decade before and was at the gas station every day, often running the cash register himself. “It was hard,” V said of the beginning of his time in Palmyra, but that was years ago. Now he was a member of the local trapshooting club. He had the high school mascot hand-painted in the store windows. He felt like a part of the community. And when Paul mentioned that he had a long day ahead of him the next morning, V replied, “Oh, for homecoming? I’m joining.”
“Good!” Paul said.
On his way out, he passed two people wearing windbreakers from a Milwaukee television station. Paul guessed they were here to cover the bird flu situation, which he noticed was becoming an increasingly comforting thought, because of all the things for people to get agitated about, it was at least one that didn’t scare him.
***
“According to Frank,” Paul said the next morning at CJ’s, sitting outside with six other men, all talking about the chickens, which were scheduled to be “depopulated” and turned into compost, “they should start moving them today or tomorrow.”
The men shook their heads.
“We went by there yesterday. There had to be 50 cars there.”
“So what are they doing there?”
“Killing birds.”
As the talk went on, Paul turned to one of the men, Tom Ball, who happened to be a member of the village board, and said to him in a quiet voice, “You mind if we take five minutes?” It was the day of the homecoming parade, and Paul had been working his way through a list of the board members, notifying each one about the threat, which he’d since passed along to state officials. Once he led Tom away from the group, Paul took out his phone, read the Facebook post aloud and said: “We already know who it is. It’s a local. He does have guns, unfortunately.”
“Okay,” Tom said.
“I don’t know that he fully understands what he’s saying, per se,” Paul went on. “I’m not fearful for your life. I’m not fearful for my life. But I’m going to take precautions.”
Tom nodded. “Well, yeah, in this day and age,” he said. Tom had been on the village board for nine years and had never once had to worry about the idea of political violence. “I was kind of considering carrying, and I’m probably gonna until it cools down.”
He stopped talking as two small children passed by with their mother.
“Happy Friday!” Paul said to the kids. “Aren’t you happy it’s Friday?”
The next board member on his list was having lunch at the village diner when Paul found her a few hours later. Stephanie Wallace was 36 years old, making her the youngest member of the village board. She was already dressed in purple, one of Palmyra’s school colors, and she had plans to walk the parade with her kids, who were 5 and almost 2. She’d run for office six months earlier because she thought of herself as pragmatic and proactive, two things she believed the village needed. Now Paul showed her the screenshot and told her what he’d told Tom, and when he was done, Stephanie asked the question that posed the most immediate problem she could think of: “Do you think it will be safe for us to go to the parade?”
Paul did think it would be safe to go to the parade. Even before the ICE agreement, he’d been thinking of ways to guard against the “rogue and crazy” actors he associated with large gatherings nowadays. “It’s the environment we’re in,” he said once he was back at the police station. Everything else that had been happening in the village lately only made the use of a surveillance drone even more of a “no-brainer,” which was why there was now a 26-foot enclosed trailer sitting in the parking lot.
Inside the trailer were a flat screen TV, five mini drones, one medium drone and one big drone, all belonging to Waukesha County, a large neighboring county closer to Milwaukee. The big drone was already out of its case and ready for a test flight. “She’s the Cadillac of what we have,” said Tim Loberg, the detective who’d come to operate it.
“Crazy that our jobs have changed exponentially in the last few years,” Paul told him. Tim knew that firsthand, having been inside another drone trailer during the Waukesha Christmas parade in 2021, the day a man drove his SUV into the crowd, killing six people. “Man,” Tim said, “even with the barricades, and coppers at every block, and three drones in the air —”
“He still did it,” Paul said.
“Still came through,” Tim said. “I mean, it’s just — it’s insane nowadays.”
In the parking lot, Tim set the drone on a circular landing mat. With its legs unfurled and propellers whirring, it launched into the sky, rising to an altitude of 160 feet, then hovering over Palmyra. On the TV inside the trailer, Paul could see everything the drone saw as it surveyed nearby rooftops, passings cars and the street near the BP, where the parade was assembling.
There, six members of the homecoming court, one homecoming princess and one homecoming queen stood on the grass in matching sashes and silver tiaras, unaware of the threat. At the front of the parade, a marching band began to play. Down the street, a line of trucks and flatbed trailers idled in position. Now another car pulled up, and Stephanie Wallace climbed out. She unloaded a stroller, carried out her kids and asked herself if she was making the parade less safe just by being there.
A few minutes later, V arrived carrying a bag full of candy. He’d always watched the parade from the gas station, but this year, a few of the kids in town told him, “V, you have to come,” and that had been enough to persuade him. Now he climbed into the passenger seat of a pickup truck beside a friend from the trap club. The windows were down, and country music was on the radio. A whistle blew. The parade began to move.
“Hey!” V said, and threw a fistful of candy out the window. The truck turned past the BP and started up the road, where people lined the street. “It’s raining!” a boy yelled as V sent more candy flying. They passed the orange barricades that had been set up that morning, the bank, the two village bars, the hardware store and a police car. The bag of candy was almost empty. “Finish it, V,” his friend said from the driver’s seat. V smiled and grabbed another handful.
A ways behind, Stephanie was on foot, looking up at the sky. She’d already seen the Waukesha County trailer on her way in. It was a cloudless day, so it was easy to make out the shape of the drone flying above the village. Even just knowing it was there, Stephanie thought, she felt a little bit better than before.
***
The next afternoon, on a Saturday, two lone figures stood in the driveway of a house down the road from CJ’s. They had with them a clipboard, a list of addresses belonging to likely Democratic voters, and a petition about the ICE agreement that they planned to deliver to the village board at its next meeting on Monday night. The pair had gotten to know each other a few days earlier under the pavilion, where they’d decided to canvass the neighborhood as a first step. Mari Strasser was 26 years old and the leader of the Palmyra Area Concerned Citizens. Juli Miller was 69 and one of the first to volunteer.
“We can take my car,” Mari said, and pointed to a subcompact SUV covered in bumper stickers about LGBTQ+ rights, unions and Donald Trump’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
“Well, this is an adventure for me,” Juli said, climbing in after Mari removed a large drum from the passenger seat. “I’ve never done this before.”
“This is my second time door-knocking,” replied Mari, who had become politically active at the start of Trump’s second term.
“We’re a couple of neophytes,” Juli said.
“Awesome,” Mari said, and off they went to the lake, a slightly more affluent area just outside the boundaries of the village. Technically, it was township territory, but Mari and Juli both believed that a partnership with ICE would impact the entire area, not just the village. It was a matter of community, they thought — which is what they wanted to emphasize as they approached the first house on their list. “If our police are deputized as ICE agents, it could go a little poorly,” Mari said to a woman and her husband, offering them a flier about ICE’s 278(g) program. “It’s a little scary and dangerous.” The couple had been watching a baseball game and instead of signing the petition, seemed to want to return to it.
As they walked back to the car, Juli looked at her packet of addresses and wondered what to write next to this one. “How about ‘no comment’?” she asked. “Yeah,” Mari said, “‘no comment’ works.”
At the next address, a doorbell camera greeted them at the door. Mari pressed the circular button. A chime sounded, and the button began to pulse with blue light.
“We’re on camera,” Juli said.
“Yes, we’re on camera,” Mari said.
They stood waiting outside until an automated female voice said, “We can’t answer the door right now, but if you’d like to leave a message, you can do it now.”
Mari bent forward, face close to the doorbell, and said, “Hey there. My name’s Mari. I’m, uh — and this is Juli over here. We’re with the Palmyra Area Concerned Citizens.” Before they left, Juli leaned forward and said to the doorbell, “Bye!”
“Not available,” she wrote in her packet. Next house. Again, no answer. “This is kind of what it’s like,” Mari said to Juli once they were in the car. It all came back to the idea of community, they agreed, or rather, the decline of it. “There’s no place for people to come together,” Mari said. “I feel like neighbors don’t talk anymore. I could be wrong. It’s kind of like people are averse to answering doors.”
At the next house, another doorbell camera was waiting. Again, they heard a chime and watched it light up blue. “Do you know how these things work?” Juli said. When no one came to the door, Juli introduced herself to the camera and began to leave a message. She paused. She thought she heard a sound on the other end. It sounded like breathing. She kept talking, then the doorbell light went off.
“The blue stopped,” Juli said.
“I think they were listening,” Mari said.
They turned around and walked back to the car.
“That’s all right,” Mari said. “Where do we have next?”
Next was the kind of house they’d been hoping for: a door that opened, a man who described himself as an “old-fashioned liberal” and “totally against ICE and Donald Trump,” and beside him, a woman saying she was heartbroken by what was happening in Chicago. “It’s not us, but it could be us,” the woman said, and Juli and Mari agreed. They left with two signatures, their first of the day.
“That was awesome,” Mari said, and they were both still on a high when they approached another house, this one set back from the road. As they waited by the door, Juli noticed a man in the street, staring at them. She pointed him out to Mari and said, “I wonder if that guy lives here, and he’s hesitating to come here because we’re standing here.”
“Uh-oh. Maybe,” Mari said.
“He’s heading down this way.”
“He is. Well, let’s go chat with him.”
They walked toward the street. The man was standing with his wife. “Hey, there!” Mari said, a few steps ahead of Juli, smiling and waving. “How’s it goin’? We’re going around for the Palmyra Area Concerned Citizens, and —” Before Mari could continue, the man asked, “Do you have a permit to do that? You can’t solicit out here.”
Mari held a smile and said, “We’re not soliciting.”
Juli stepped forward. “We’re not soliciting,” she said, more firmly.
“Okay, well,” the man said, just as his wife grabbed his arm and shot him a look. “This is Juli,” she said to him. “Juli Miller.” The man looked at Juli again.
“Oh!” he said. “Juli!”
“Hi,” Juli said.
“Yeah, so we’re not trying to buy or sell anything,” Mari said, but when the man heard what they were doing, he told them that he had nothing to do with the village. He lived in the township.
“It’s going to affect everybody,” Juli said.
They left without signatures, and soon, they were in front of another doorbell camera. From where they stood, they thought they could see someone moving in the kitchen window. They waited, but no one came to the door. “That’s okay,” Mari said eventually. “I’ll just leave a recording.”
***
On Monday, Stephanie’s alarm went off at 5 a.m., like it did every weekday. It was the day of a village board meeting, which meant it wouldn’t be over for another 16 hours. Stephanie had been telling herself not to be hypervigilant, but all weekend, she’d kept her phone close, “just in case,” waiting for news that might help her make sense of the threat. But no news had come.
Now she laid out clothes for her kids, made coffee, fed the dog, the cat and the parrot, and then she ran out the door, got in her car and began her hour-long commute to Milwaukee, where she worked as a legal assistant. Stephanie had grown up in an unincorporated town 75 miles away. It was even smaller and more remote than Palmyra, and people there relied on one another for help when it was needed. After spending her college years in Milwaukee, she was eager to settle in a place that felt like where she had grown up, and Palmyra, her husband’s hometown, became that place.
When she pulled back into her driveway, it was a little after 4:30 p.m. One child was still in day care. The other was with a grandparent. Her husband was on his way home from work. She climbed out with grocery bags in her hands and kicked the car door closed. There was a little more than an hour before the board meeting. How much work was it serving in local office in Palmyra? “Oh,” she said, “it’s hours.” Each board member served on three committees, and then there were the full board meetings. Many ran until 9 p.m., which meant that her kids were asleep by the time she got back and asleep the next morning when she left for work.
“I have the board meeting tonight,” she reminded her husband when he walked inside.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s going to complicate things.”
“Well, can we have your mom come over for a little bit?” Stephanie said.
“Probably,” he said. “That’s fine.”
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s been board meeting after board meeting after board meeting.” When she had told her husband about the threat, she’d expected him to ask her to resign. Even she had begun to wonder if it was worth it, “with the way things are heating up.” It was easy to say that something terrible could never happen in Palmyra, but all through the parade, she had been thinking, “These are kids. If you miss me, you’re going to hit a kid,” and the thought had horrified her.
But Stephanie’s husband had not asked her to resign. “It’s all right,” he’d said instead. “We’ll be fine.” Stephanie had just started her term. She had things she wanted to do. “Just because something scared me doesn’t mean that I should stop,” she said. “I signed up for it. I want to follow it through. I want to set a good example.”
The example she wanted to set was one for her kids, who would grow up to become people who had been raised in a small town, just like she had. She wanted them to see that there was value in being a part of their community. “You can’t do everything by yourself,” she said, so she’d gone to the parade, stayed on the board, and at 6 p.m., she walked into the Palmyra Village Hall and sat down at the front of the room.
She took notes as she listened to presentations on wastewater, hydrant flushing, sludge, the flag football league, the basketball league and a reading of every recent bill accrued by the village, all of it part of the tedious work she believed in taking so seriously.
In the audience, several members of the Palmyra Area Concerned Citizens listened along. After the meeting was over, Mari, Juli and the others walked to the front of the room, carrying the materials they’d been collecting: the signatures from door-knocking, various letters to the board, and a list of other grants that could help fund the police department without ICE’s money.
Some of the board members were starting to leave, including Stephanie, who rushed off, hoping to get home before her kids fell asleep.
“You guys probably have a lot on your plates,” Mari said to the ones who were still there. “It’s intense and overwhelming.”
“This is an emotional time,” one of them said. “It terrifies me to be in a government position.”
“It is an emotional time,” Mari agreed. “This is so much bigger than this small town.”
***
“Morning, morning,” Paul said when he walked into CJ’s. “The whole crew is here.”
The men today were talking about the smell that was beginning to spread across the village from the egg farm. “First of all, this whole thing can be alleviated by vaccines,” one of them was saying. “It’s a terrible situation,” another said, and once again, Paul turned to Tom Ball, the board member sitting with the regulars. “How was your meeting?” he asked. “Decent?”
“Yeah, it was okay,” Tom said.
Paul listened as the men moved on to other complaints, then stood up and said, “There are a lot of issues here. Not necessarily bad. Just a lot.”
He got in his police car and began his patrol of the village. He passed the BP gas station, where V was having someone repaint an eagle statue he kept by the door. “WELCOME,” the sign on the statue said, in lettering that was now red, white and blue.
He turned onto Main Street, where the parade barricades were gone now, then drove by the park, where no one was sitting under the pavilion.
Soon he came to a road where he had pulled over a woman for speeding a few weeks ago. She didn’t speak English, and had presented a Mexican passport as her ID. Paul issued her several citations, “all of which she very much deserved,” he said, and then sent her on her way. Now he wondered how that call would have gone if the village decided to move forward with the ICE program. “Is that right? Is that the right thing to do?” he said, not answering.
He kept driving, past a cornfield, past a soybean field, past the hiking trails that led into protected forestland. He slowed down the car. “This is beautiful country,” he said.
What to do about it, though?
There was one idea Paul did think would help. Some in the village had been talking about holding a “listening session” that anyone could attend. People could ask questions, talk about ICE, vent, anything at all. Paul thought it should be held no matter what, and he was glad when the board settled on a date and reserved a space at the high school that was larger than the Village Hall.
“People need to be heard,” he said. “A listening session would be a good idea.”
In the coming weeks, this would be what happened to the idea: As word of the gathering spread, Paul would hear estimates of a crowd of several hundred people. Then he would see talk on Facebook of people from Milwaukee and Madison planning to attend. Then would come rumors that ICE itself had been alerted to “potential protests” in the area, leading to fears that agents would be present. Then, a few days before the meeting, it would be postponed due to “safety concerns,” though no one would publicly say what those concerns were. The days would pass, and with no new date set, at least some in the village would begin to wonder if, given everything going on, maybe it would be best not to gather at all. Finally, days after that, the idea of the ICE agreement would be dropped altogether. “We deeply value the feedback we have received from our community,” a statement from the board and the police department would read. “… We believe that at this time, the best course forward for Palmyra is to take no further action on the proposed agreement.”
Today, though, before all that, as he drove in his patrol car, Paul’s thoughts about the village were interrupted by the sound of his police scanner. It was the dispatcher, reading out a long string of police codes about a situation that seemed to be escalating, not in Palmyra, but another town just like it.
“Okay, America,” Paul said. “Happy Tuesday.”
Photography by Joshua Lott. Photo editing by Natalia Jimenez. Copy editing by Feroze Dhanoa and Kim Chapman.
The post On edge in small-town America
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