If they\u2019d been asked to write an autopsy of their marriage, Walter and Amanda Smith might have agreed that the cause of death was their lack of understanding of the institution. By the summer of 2021, they were like two people who had formed their own country before agreeing on the rules of citizenship. Walter was drinking too much and going through the motions; Amanda felt trapped and separated from the identity she\u2019d been handed as a child. \u201cI was raised to be a ray of sunshine inside,\u201d she liked to say. \u201cI\u2019m supposed to be the joy of the room.\u201d To which one day Walter blurted out, \u201cYou are not a ray of sunshine. You\u2019re a black cloud.\u201d Since they\u2019d collided 10 years earlier in a Texarkana roadside bar \u2014 Amanda was the waitress who didn\u2019t mind that Walter had already had too much to drink \u2014 they\u2019d never spent a night apart. Both were easy on the eye and quirky and impulsive and extraordinarily willful. Both were also unhappy. Walter had ballooned to 250 pounds and was going through two six-packs of Budweiser a night. Amanda had decided that marrying Walter Smith after knowing him for only five months was the biggest mistake of her life \u2014 which was saying something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, at first glance, they appeared to have built a life together. They\u2019d bought a place with land around it outside De Queen, Arkansas. Walter had taken a good, if all-consuming, job fixing anything that broke inside a massive coal-fired power plant an hour\u2019s drive away. At one stretch, he worked 12-hour shifts for 93 straight days. They\u2019d accumulated a vast number of animals: chickens, goats, rabbits and cats, along with a surprising number of dogs. \u201cI pick up dogs off the side of the road,\u201d explained Amanda. Inside of six years, Amanda had given birth to three children and was pregnant with a fourth. Walter insisted on naming their first, a boy. Hunter, he\u2019d called him, after one of his favorite writers, Hunter S. Thompson. By cobbling together names from Amanda\u2019s side of the family, he\u2019d named their second child, too, a daughter: Alaina. After that, Amanda seized back the naming rights and, for reasons Walter has never learned, called their third child Henry. The fourth time around, Amanda was racked with indecision. \u201cInfant Smith,\u201d read the baby boy\u2019s birth certificate for the first three months after his birth. \u201cI thought, she\u2019s going to come up with some wild shit,\u201d Walter said. \u201cAnd one day she says it: Johnathan. And I\u2019m like, \u2018You got to be sh*&^ing me.\u2019 It took you three months to call him John Smith?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At a glance, they were a union, but by the summer of 2021, they were engaged in something closer to civil war. \u201cI\u2019m doing all the things I\u2019m supposed to do,\u201d Walter said. \u201cBut I wasn\u2019t willing to do the shit that made her happy. I was doing the shit that would shut her up. I would do everything I could to keep her off my ass so she would feel guilty to ask me to quit drinking.\u201d For example, he knew that Amanda wanted to rely less on processed foods and more on what they grew themselves. The soil on their farm was poor \u2014 just gravel and red clay that required a pickax to dent. And so before Amanda could think to ask him, Walter hauled in endless sacks of enriched soil and erected four massive garden beds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As he worked, Alaina, then 5 years old, went out to watch and play. She loved hanging around her father. Making mud pies was her favorite hobby. Walter thought nothing of it until he looked up and saw Alaina enveloped in a dust cloud. \u201cHey, baby, get out from downwind of that,\u201d he said. For a moment, he worried about the effect on her lungs of the dust. But then Alaina moved, and Walter returned to the job of making his wife unhappy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so their small nation was divided when its first external threat presented itself. The moment from Sept. 10, 2021, is still vivid in Amanda\u2019s mind. \u201cHunter runs in and says, \u2018Mom, when I\u2019m talking to Alaina, she\u2019s not talking back to me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Read it all<\/a>.<\/p> Putting a face on rare deadly diseases, federal bureaucrats, dedicated medical researchers, and working class America all in one brilliant piece of beautifully written journalism from Michael Lewis: https:\/\/t.co\/1u4fGFcaoO<\/a> #Balamuthia<\/a> #CUREIDs<\/a><\/p>— Stephanie Sy (@TheStephSy) March 13, 2025<\/a><\/blockquote>