His mother's prison was his home.
Kelton first stood before prison gates as a toddler — barbed wire against a blue California sky — on his way to see his mother, taken from their apartment by federal agents a year earlier. They colored with crayons on butcher paper. When the visit ended, he sobbed.
"I couldn't describe my feelings then, but looking back, it was the feeling of incarceration. My mother's prison was my home, and my grandmother's car was like a prison." Kelton's journals — The Bittman Project
The land claimed him.
After her release, the family of three retreated to a little cabin wrapped in ferns and redwoods. He ran to the woods before he ran home; he grew up hiking to the rugged beaches of Marin County.
Kelton, ~4 — "in a different tree." Courtesy Kelton O'Connor
~10, mid-flight. Courtesy Kelton O'ConnorWalls changed his address.
Not his responsibility.
Incarcerated since 2013, Kelton rebuilt himself the slow way: education through Mount Tamalpais College, Wednesday nights in a creative writing workshop, self-study in medical literature and policy. Then one afternoon his cell radio reported that warming water and urchins had erased 95 percent of Northern California's kelp forests in about eight years — an hour from where he grew up. He decided distance and walls were details.
"Environmental crises don't impact us less in here just because there's walls around us." Kelton O'Connor — KALW / Uncuffed
