Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives by Gary Younge Page B

“You’ve got your own space,” continues Brittany. “In the city you’re, like, on top of each other, neighbor to neighbor.” I was sitting in a pizzeria opposite Marlette’s only Chinese restaurant, with four generations of the Dunn family: Janet, Lora Dunn Bartz (Janet’s daughter), Brittany (Lora’s daughter), and Ciannah (Brittany’s very well behaved seven-month-old baby), as well as Thomas Bartz, Lora’s husband. “Doesn’t it get boring?” I ask.
    “No,” says Lora. “It doesn’t get boring. It’s like a journey if you have to go to the mall or something. It’s like a day’s worth of traveling.” She says this as though it’s a good thing, allowing her poker face to give way to a wry smile.
    This vast expanse of land, both fertile and fallow, wild and tamed, was her son’s playground. To a city dweller like me, Tyler’s outdoor hobbies make him sound like a character from a Mark Twain novel. Tyler Dunn, who was eleven when he died, loved trapping critters, hunting, catching fish in the creek behind the house, four-wheeling and dirt-biking in the summer, and sledding in the winter. “When children are demonized by the newspapers, they are often described as feral,” wrote George Monbiot in the Guardian . 6 “But feral is what children should be: it means released from captivity or domestication. Those who live in crowded flats, surrounded by concrete, mown grass and other people’s property, cannot escape their captivity without breaking the law. Games and explorations that are seen as healthy in the countryside are criminalized in the cities. Children who have never visited the countryside live under constant restraint.”
    By this definition, Tyler was semiferal. He was free to roam and explore and engage with the natural world and was trusted to do so with precious few constraints. The Dunns lived three miles down a dirt road off Highway 53, which runs straight from the interstate into Marlette. Several miles from the nearest traffic light—or even streetlight—and surrounded by fields, he was safe to do “his own thing” and have his parents check in on him occasionally.
    Yet the call to the wild was always competing with the call to the screen. Like Jaiden, his favorite TV show was Duck Dynasty, with Sponge-Bob and Family Guy close runners-up. But it was gaming that really had him hooked. When he accompanied his parents on errands, he’d take a computer game with him. At home, he’d keep to himself, texting friends on his mother’s phone. And he loved video games. Particularly Call of Duty, which morphs modern warfare into entertainment. Mark Twain never had these distractions; if he had, Huckleberry Finn would, no doubt, have turned out quite differently, if Twain had got around to writing it at all.
    “Whenever he came to my house, it was just a weekend of Call of Duty,” says Brittany. “That’s all I heard on the TV.” “Then he came over to our house and he just raced cars,” says Janet, referring to a different video game. “That’s because you didn’t have Call of Duty,” explained Lora.

    T YLER HAD A ROUND , almost perfectly spherical face, crowned with a crew cut. To look at his pictures from infancy, it’s as though he never really lost his baby fat—he simply grew into it and developed a character that suited it, with a slight dimple in his chin, a button for his nose, and full cheeks that an overly familiar adult might just lose their fingers in. He was, by all accounts, a happy kid. When he was in fifth grade, his class was across the hall from sixth-grade teacher Luke Reynolds. Whenever Luke saw Tyler they would fist-bump. “I don’t know how it started or why,” says Luke. “But that’s what we always did. We wouldn’t even say anything. Just bump, smile, and keep walking.” The next year, Luke washis homeroom teacher. “He was just a very easy kid. There were never any discipline problems. He always seemed pretty content.”
    With a willing