KINGMAN, Ariz. — It was the kind of day that Cydni Irving liked most. The kind of day where she could be the best version of herself, which was how she was feeling when she arrived to set up her table in the park, in the best version of Kingman that she knew: clear sky, sun, the Hualapai Mountains stretching out behind her, and on the table in front of her, a stack of fliers for the program where she worked, helping people in need.
Cydni stood at her table and smiled.
She was there for a resource fair for poor families in Mohave County, the rural desert of northwest Arizona where she had spent her life. All around the park on this Wednesday in November, there were mental health counselors, free clothes and free Narcan kits. Across the street, three motel rooms waited with showers and towels. And to Cydni’s left, another table was already set up.
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It belonged to a church in town that she knew to be conservative. There were plenty of those in Kingman, but now she heard what the people at the table were saying.
“Did you see how much God changed everything?” one said.
“God saved us by sending Trump.”
Her colleague told her: “Cydni, don’t pay attention.”
She told herself: “Cydni, don’t say anything.”
But it was becoming harder to stop herself. Kingman was a red town in a red county. That had been true for as long as Cydni, 37, could remember. What bothered her was the polarization she was increasingly encountering, especially in the face of need. “Don’t enable the homeless population,” a woman had written on Facebook just a few days earlier, when someone suggested delivering sandwiches to families on Christmas Eve, and Cydni found herself responding: “So because they’re homeless, they don’t deserve sandwiches? Are you kidding me?”
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Clinging to compassion
Cydni Irving looks out the window at her dog, Zuta, at her home in Kingman, Arizona. (Anna Watts for The Washington Post)
In deep-red Arizona, “a genuinely good person” tries not to surrender to anger and resentment.
By Ruby Cramer
December 22, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST
26 min
KINGMAN, Ariz. — It was the kind of day that Cydni Irving liked most. The kind of day where she could be the best version of herself, which was how she was feeling when she arrived to set up her table in the park, in the best version of Kingman that she knew: clear sky, sun, the Hualapai Mountains stretching out behind her, and on the table in front of her, a stack of fliers for the program where she worked, helping people in need.
Cydni stood at her table and smiled.
She was there for a resource fair for poor families in Mohave County, the rural desert of northwest Arizona where she had spent her life. All around the park on this Wednesday in November, there were mental health counselors, free clothes and free Narcan kits. Across the street, three motel rooms waited with showers and towels. And to Cydni’s left, another table was already set up.
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It belonged to a church in town that she knew to be conservative. There were plenty of those in Kingman, but now she heard what the people at the table were saying.
“Did you see how much God changed everything?” one said.
“God saved us by sending Trump.”
Her colleague told her: “Cydni, don’t pay attention.”
She told herself: “Cydni, don’t say anything.”
But it was becoming harder to stop herself. Kingman was a red town in a red county. That had been true for as long as Cydni, 37, could remember. What bothered her was the polarization she was increasingly encountering, especially in the face of need. “Don’t enable the homeless population,” a woman had written on Facebook just a few days earlier, when someone suggested delivering sandwiches to families on Christmas Eve, and Cydni found herself responding: “So because they’re homeless, they don’t deserve sandwiches? Are you kidding me?”
Pro-Trump and Route 66 merchandise hangs in a window of a motorcycle shop in downtown Kingman. (Anna Watts for The Washington Post)
Kingman at sunrise. (Anna Watts for The Washington Post)
“Most of the country is sick of the whiny cries and aggression of phony liberals,” the woman had replied, and Cydni wrote back again: “This has nothing to do with liberal or conservative. This is literally American citizens that are struggling, and it’s not whining, and it shows me that you have a lack of compassion and humanity.”
Those were the qualities Cydni valued most in herself: compassion and humanity. In the days since the election, at a time when anger and resentment seemed to be settling into everyday American life, she had refused to let her idea of herself become “clouded,” as she put it, and she was not going to let it slip here, on the kind of day she loved most. But now she heard the people from the church talking about how much of the country had voted for Donald Trump.
“Everything was red,” she heard one of them say.
She looked more closely at their table.
On it, she saw a display of Bibles, including a Bible she recognized from social media as the only Bible “endorsed” by Trump. The Bibles were bound in brown leather, with an American flag on the cover beneath the words, “GOD BLESS THE USA.”
“They are not offering Trump Bibles,” Cydni said.
“Sure looks like they are,” her colleague said.
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She made a mental list of everything that she thought would be more helpful than what she was seeing and hearing. They could be offering food or parenting classes or clothing or diapers or child care.
She wanted to walk over and tell them, but instead she went over her list again, getting hotter in the face until she felt so clouded by her own anger and disappointment that the thought came into her head before she could stop it.
The thought she had was this: If she ever saw those people next to her on the ground, struggling or hurting, she wouldn’t stop to help them.
Even as the thought formed, Cydni told herself it wasn’t true. But the fact of it was enough. She had never had a thought quite like that. Now she had. It was a problem.
The person Cydni had always imagined herself to be had been present just eight days before, on the morning before the election, as she approached a house and rang the doorbell. On the doorknob, someone had left a flier that read, “Arizona can bring back the American Dream with Trump!”
“Cydni?” a woman’s voice came through the doorbell intercom. “Hi. You can just come in.”
Inside, a young woman sat on a couch with her baby.
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The Washington Post’s best immersive reporting and narrative writing.Sometimes, Cydni learned of people who needed help through the program she worked for, other times by messages she saw posted on Facebook. In Mohave County, where 17 percent of people lived below the poverty line and more than half of young children qualified for safety-net benefits such as reduced-price school meals, there was no shortage of people in need, including the woman who said she lived on her own and could use some extra clothes and help with her utility bills.
Cydni sat on the edge of the couch. “So,” she said, beginning to ask the questions she often liked to ask, “what are three things that make you feel good about yourself?”
The woman looked down at her baby, who was drinking from a bottle. “One is I’ve got this beautiful baby. I didn’t think I was going to be able to do it.” The baby spit up some of his milk. “Silly,” she said to him and looked back up at Cydni. “And then, I don’t know, just my nature.”
“Your nature?” Cydni said. “Like, you’ve got a kind heart?”
“Yeah,” she said, “and I still push to have a happy life.”
“You’re resilient. That’s a good one.”
“I found my inner peace,” the woman said. “My center ground. And that’s hard to come by, you know?”
Cydni nodded. “It’s hard to find that.”
“I’m only 23,” the woman said.
Cydni was 14 years older, and she thought she had only just found that center ground herself. She’d spent part of her childhood in a pink one-bedroom trailer where, at times, dinner was cereal or beans. When she was 8 years old, she and her brother moved with their mother Vickie to Chloride, a mining town where most families had to haul their water into tanks outside their homes. Soon, the family moved in with a man named Seth, who became Cydni’s stepfather. In addition to teaching Cydni how to handle a gun, Seth told her about some of his left-leaning political views, and Cydni became someone with opinions and a willingness to voice them, even if it put her at odds with the people around her. She began to describe her view of the world as humanitarian, and when it came time to pursue work, she looked for ways to act on that view.
Now Cydni had four kids of her own and a double-wide trailer a few minutes away from the one where she grew up. There were still times when she needed the kind of help she provided to others, even more so since her husband, Jon, 39, had stepped back from his landscaping business to start welding school. The reason Cydni was good at her job, she had always thought, wasn’t because of her formal training. It was because she knew what need felt like in Kingman.
“I’m 37, girl,” she told the woman in front of her. “It took me that long to get there. So you being there already — it’s a big thing.”
Cydni stood up to leave. She promised to bring over some clothes and point the woman toward a utility assistance program. “If you ever need to be like, ‘Hey, I’m having a hard day, can you come over?’ I will come over,” she said. “Just reach out.”
“Okay,” the woman said.
“Okay?” Cydni asked again.
She left the house and drove along the streets of Kingman, a place she loved, despite the reputation she knew it had as a coarse and angry town. As a young girl, she grew up hearing stories about a man named Timothy McVeigh, who had lived in Kingman as he planned his attack on a federal building in Oklahoma City, leading to the deaths of 168 people. She recalled a sign in town warning Black people that it wasn’t safe after sundown. She passed the park where she had seen someone spit on her Black friend at a rally she’d attended after the police killing of George Floyd, and the Walmart where she’d once heard a man tell someone speaking Hualapai to “go back to your own country.” She often felt a tension hanging over the city, like something was about to happen, and now, her worry on this November day, on the afternoon before the election, was what could unfold in the morning, especially if Trump lost.
Twice now, Trump had won Mohave County by the biggest margin of any county in Arizona, with about 75 percent of the vote.
The week before, Cydni and a few friends had hung Kamala Harris signs on a chain-link fence across the street from the grocery store. They chose to go at night, when they thought it would be safest, and covered the signs with glitter and a spray that left a skunk-like odor to mark anyone who might try to take them down. “A bit of zing,” Cydni had said as she recorded the moment on her phone for a TikTok video. As they worked, two men stepped out of a truck in the grocery store parking lot and began shouting. “So we already have some hecklers,” Cydni said and started shouting back. “I was born here!” she yelled across four lanes of road. “America! USA! Freedom is awesome!”
For days now, she’d been carrying a handgun in a pink holster, and when she got home and told her husband what had happened, they decided they should spend some time at a gun range to practice their shooting. But when they stopped by an ammo shop nearby, the bullets they were looking for were out of stock. They tried a second shop, then a third. Out of stock. “That tells me something is wrong,” Cydni said.
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She posted on TikTok again, this time to tell her liberal friends to buy a gun and take down the Harris signs from their yards. “Protect yourself,” she said. “It sucks, but this is how our world is right now.”
Now she pulled up to the trailer where she lived. In the yard, animals rattled around their pens: chickens, ducks, turkeys, pigs, dogs, a goat. The animals were Cydni’s. The flag outside that said, “We The People,” was Jon’s. He was a Republican, and though he and Cydni both disliked Trump, he often worried about how outspoken Cydni could be.
He showed Cydni a new post he’d written on Facebook about the election the next day: “What’s everyone wearing to the civil war?” He scrolled through more posts and put his phone down. “I can’t stand the fact that whenever I get on social media, whenever I get on the TV, whenever I get on the freakin’ radio, everything is political, and I’m just like, dude, I can’t wait for this to be over.”
“It’s not going to be,” Cydni said.
Now her phone rang. A friend was calling to say she was downtown and thought she could see a woman trying to take down Harris signs. “You need to call the cops,” Cydni said. “Send me pictures.” She hung up and repeated the story for Jon.
“I would be over there reporting her. I’m not even lying,” she told him.
Jon shook his head. “I don’t like the fact that you would put yourself in harm’s way like that, though.”
“I’d have my gun on my hip.”
Jon looked at her. “You think you can pull it faster than somebody can get to you?”
“Yeah.”
“I know for a fact that I could get to you before your gun goes. Before you even have the gun in your hand,” Jon said.
“Okay,” she said. “But I would still confront her. That’s just me.”
***
On the morning after the election, Cydni told herself that she would accept what had happened. “He won,” she said. “That’s how it is.”
All of Kingman seemed to be quiet.
“At least I don’t have to outwardly carry today,” she said.
She had spent the night before with her family in the living room: her 13-year-old son, Tyler, looking up from his video game to say, “Mom, Trump is gonna win”; Cydni, holding one of her ducks in her lap, saying, “Tyler, you stop it right now”; Jon, coming in and out of the trailer, rolling a cigarette, looking at the TV, saying, “That’s a lot of red”; Seth, her stepfather, calling and saying, “Oh my God,” again and again. Finally, Cydni stood up, put a pie in the oven for Jon, turned off the TV and went to bed. And now, on her Facebook page, she changed her profile picture to a black circle and wrote out a new post: “I’m on a blocking spree today,” it began.
And then she told herself to focus on her work.
She went by her office to pick up baby supplies for some families.
She saw a comment below her black profile picture from someone she used to work with. “Aw, we won,” the woman wrote. Cydni blocked her.
A friend texted: “How do we act? I’m so disappointed.”
“We just need to be patient,” Cydni wrote back.
And then she was back at the house, on her phone, looking at a series of maps. The first was a map of the results, where she could see Kingman colored in red. Trump had won Mohave County once again by more than any other county in Arizona, this time by an even bigger margin: 78 percent. The second was a different map of Kingman, on a real estate app. She began zooming out, away from her trailer, away from her neighborhood, away from Arizona, east to West Virginia, where she knew of some relatives who had been able to buy acres of land. Then she moved south. She zoomed in on Biloxi, on the coast of Mississippi, where she knew a friend who was making more than $20 an hour at a casino nearby, more than Cydni made in Kingman.
A lot of the houses on the app were right on the water.
Four bedrooms for $235,000. “Brand-new home,” Cydni said. “It has a freakin’ porch on it.”
Another house: a cottage, lawn, trees in the yard. “Jon’s landscaping business, with all the grass out there, it would take off.”
It was a long time before she put down her phone.
“I don’t know what I’m doing with myself right now,” she said. “Dreaming. I don’t know.”
Two nights later, she found herself at a store downtown, owned by two friends who were hosting a post-election support group. At the entrance, a man named Ray stood with his arms crossed, wearing a nine-millimeter gun, a knife, nonlethal pepper gel, a stun gun and handcuffs on his belt. He was a friend of one of the owners and had offered himself up as protection during the event.
Cydni eyed the gear. “I’m carrying mine, too,” she said.
Now two people Cydni didn’t recognize walked into the store. Aaron and Jeanette had just moved to town from Florida to escape “all the negativity,” Jeanette said. Aaron was Black, and Jeanette was White. They hadn’t known much about Kingman before they arrived, but had been noticing how many people wore hats that said things like, “God, Guns and Trump,” more even than they had been used to seeing in Florida.
“Are people being nice to you here?” Cydni asked them.
“Yeah. I think so?” Jeanette said.
Cydni looked at Aaron, who didn’t say anything.
From the doorway, Ray turned to Cydni. “How long you been in Kingman?”
“My whole life,” she said.
“Okay. So you remember the —”
“The billboard? Yes.”
“What’d it say?” Aaron asked, and took a guess. “‘Make sure your ass is out of town before the sun goes down’ or something?”
“Pretty much,” said Cydni.
Two more people arrived: a man and his grandmother, who told them that she used to be a Democrat, until “I saw how much they whine.” She held up her hands. “Don’t bite my head off.”
Cydni leaned against the back wall and listened as the woman began to argue about Harris and Trump, and the way they had spoken to each other during the election. “You know what?” Cydni said, trying to cut in, but the argument went on: Trump didn’t like Harris. Harris didn’t like Trump. “Do you actually want to go out and talk to somebody that you do not like?” the woman asked.
“You know what?” Cydni said again, louder now. “I don’t like Trump, but if he were laying in the street right now bleeding, I would pick him up. That’s giving someone human respect. I don’t care what kind of race you are, what ethnicity you are, what culture you are, what side of the party you are, man or woman. Human respect used to be a thing in America.”
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She took a breath. “I work in the community,” she said. “I service a lot of Trump supporters. Do I like what they support? No. Do I see them as a human being? Yes. And if I let that cloud my vision, I’m not gonna help them the way I should.”
At the end of the night, she said goodbye to her friends, to the new couple in town, to the man and his grandmother, and to Ray, still at the door with the gun he hadn’t needed to use, and she drove home.
She was beginning to see the election results as an endorsement of all the emotions she was trying to push down, and a few days later, she received a call from a woman she had helped the year before. The woman had come from Mexico and, with Cydni’s assistance, had become a naturalized citizen. She told Cydni she was scared that in addition to mass deportations, Trump might try to denaturalize people like her. Cydni found that for once, she didn’t know what to say. Instead, she messaged a group of her friends later that afternoon. “I’ve found myself crying on and off today,” she wrote. “I’m f---ing floored and worried.”
The next day: the resource fair she had been looking forward to all month, the table with the Trump Bibles, the conversation she overheard and then the thought she had about not helping someone who needed it. When she got home, she wanted to cry. Jon asked her what was wrong. “So you’ve been carrying all this for the last few days?” he said when she told him, and Cydni said yes. He suggested she take some time off. Cydni said she’d already called her boss.
She had two days of mental health leave, plus the weekend. Four days.
“I need to go get centered again,” she said.
***
She tried a spiritual cleansing at a friend’s house, with quartz crystals, sage, oils, tarot cards and incense, and thought she felt better. She tried to stay off social media, but she didn’t, fighting with strangers who left comments on her TikTok videos. She tried visiting her family and got in a fight about Trump with her brother and walked out of the house. The four days had helped, but not entirely.
On Monday, she was back out in Kingman, where she heard from a friend, on the verge of homelessness, who needed a place to park her RV, and Cydni started making calls.
Here she was, back to the best version of herself. She looked up the number for the local housing authority and spoke to a woman at the front desk. Who transferred her to a man in the housing department. Who told her that they didn’t have vouchers for RV parks, but that she should try a rapid rehousing program in a different city. She looked up the phone number for the program, called the number, got a fax-machine dial tone, tried another number, and spoke to someone who gave her the cellphone number for one of their housing case managers. She called the case manager and got a voicemail. “Good morning!” the voicemail message began. “Please understand that right now we are having a high volume of calls so expect at least four days from the date of your call, not including weekends, for a response.”
Cydni left a message and hung up.
“Four f---ing days,” she said.
She put her head in her hands, felt anger come on, and then chose to push it away, something she had taught herself to do, because she knew firsthand how corrosive anger could be.
When she was a teenager, she used to punch holes in the walls of her home in Chloride. She listened to angry music. She got into physical fights with Vickie and Seth. For a time, she was cutting herself. Years before, she had been sexually abused as a child, and it had taken her a long time to understand why she had been so angry and what she could choose to do about it.
Jon knew anger from his upbringing, too.
Foster care. Group homes. Feelings of abandonment that led him to turn away from people, making himself more and more hardened, “like a solid rock,” he said. “Emotionless.” Then came an arrest for domestic violence, and Cydni, whom he had met by then, telling him he needed to change. After that: years of counseling, and now this life with Cydni.
“There is very little good left in the world,” he said. “She is a genuinely good person.”
Not that he still didn’t get angry. He did.
The kids misbehaving. A light left on in the house. Cydni, forgetting to do something she said she would.
“Did you get dog food?” he asked her one day, knowing she hadn’t.
“I just ordered it. It’s ready to be picked up.”
“You didn’t get that f---ing dog food,” he said.
But then there was the sound of her voice, coming through the electronic doorbell as he approached the house one day, and she saw him walking up to the door. “Hey, hot stuff,” she said.
One thing about their relationship: They could talk about anything, including about what was happening in the country, and in Kingman, and what they were trying to keep out of their house.
“Being angry makes you sick,” Cydni said one day, and Jon responded, “It will kill you.”
“I know from personal experience,” he said. “It kills you slowly.”
Cydni looked at her husband.
She was still thinking about the thought she had had, that if the people she saw at the resource fair had been out on the street, she wouldn’t have helped them.
It had been an uncharitable thought, and more than that, an angry one.
“I lost my humanity for a minute,” she said. “I really did.”
How many times had she told herself that if Trump were hurt, she would pick him up and help him? She’d said it to herself, to her friends, to the people she had met at the post-election support group, and most of all, she’d said it to Jon.
Now she said it again.
“I would help him up,” she said.
“I wouldn’t,” Jon said.
Cydni looked at her husband again.
“You would,” she said.
***
Once, when Cydni was still in elementary school, she met two young brothers soon after she moved to Chloride. She knew they were poor, and that they sometimes tried to steal food from the general store in town. She began talking to them, and soon, inviting them over to eat with her after school. More and more, the boys were at the house, and when her mother asked why, Cydni said it was because they were hungry, and maybe that was when she began to think of herself as a person of compassion. Or maybe it came later: high school, age 16, when she stood up in front of the county board of supervisors for the first time and asked them not to shut down the animal shelter where she volunteered. Whenever it was, and whatever caused it, she knew that compassion was a part of the life she had come to live, and she didn’t want to lose it, especially not in this place, at this moment, and so one day, when she picked up two of her daughters from school, and they said they wanted to go for a drive, Cydni said to them: “Buckle up.”
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It was another clear day, nearly December now — blue sky and cold, dry air.
“Mom, I’m hungry,” said her 7-year-old, Ariel.
“Mom, me and Ariel are hungry,” said her 5-year-old, Leilani.
She stopped for milkshakes and headed north.
The girls wanted to see the Christmas lights that went up each year at a house in the hills. It was a big house, with a bright blue roof. Each year, the owner put up thousands of lights in his yard, open for anyone in Kingman who wanted to visit.
They drove past strip malls and fast-food restaurants, up the same four-lane road with the chain-link fence where Cydni had hung her Harris signs and shouted, “I was born here.”
They turned left, onto streets that had no trailers, and started climbing higher into the hills.
Here there were houses with long driveways, pebble lawns and cypress trees.
“I’ve always liked this neighborhood,” Cydni said.
Ariel looked out the window.
“That’s a pretty house,” Ariel said.
“There’s a bird bath,” her sister said.
“It’s nice,” Cydni said.
They drove higher, and the houses got bigger as they came to a bend in the road, and there was the house with the blue roof, with the owner out front, bent over a line of string lights.
Cydni stopped the car so the girls could watch.
“Mom, no turning,” Leilani said.
“Why?” Cydni said.
“Because Ariel wants to look.”
But a moment later, Cydni had the car in drive and was moving again.
“We’re not going back that way,” she told the girls, and instead, kept driving higher.
She turned onto the next street, and the next, heading up a long stretch of road. Higher and higher.
“Where are we going now?” one of the girls asked.
She kept driving, until she was as high as she could go.
The pavement ended, and then there was only red dirt and gravel, and nowhere else to drive.
She turned the car around and came to a stop.
She looked out from the top of the hill, past the big houses and the long driveways. She saw desert and the peaks of the Hualapai Mountains, and down below, stretching out before her, in all its anger, beauty and need, there was Kingman. From here, she could see it all.
“Ain’t it pretty?” she said.
.
