Remembering Cole Summers
In late March of this year, I stumbled upon an unusual twitter account. It belonged to a young man who claimed to be working on a host of impressive projects all of which seemed far more ambitious than one would expect from a 14 year old boy. He went by the name of Cole Summers. I was later to learn that his real name was Kevin Cooper, and I’ll refer to him by his real name in this article, but I think I’ll always remember him as Cole.
He said he was working on a movie about two teens who find themselves in a post-apocalyptic landscape and realize that technology had been detrimental to their society. I don’t remember the specifics of the movie, but he said it was to raise funds to combat an environmental crisis where he lived. I was intrigued. I reached out and told him if he ever needed anything he should let me know and that I’d be happy to help. I didn’t really expect much to come of it, but wanted him to know that he had support. He sounded cool.
Less than two weeks later he emailed me letting me know that he had finished a draft of his autobiography about homeschooling and asked if I would read it. This message was rather unexpected, but I was happy to help. My first thought was “an autobiography? At 14?” But I was game. I had a certain impression of the ambitious and prolific but relatively untalented homeschooled kid, doing some weird niche project that sort of misses the mark. I had sort of thought Kevin might fit that archetype, but remained open minded. This is to say that I was not expecting Kevin’s book to be good. I definitely wasn’t expecting him to have hired a ghost writer to help write it. The content, however, is what blew me away. I told him it might take me a while to get through because I had a small baby and didn’t often have time to read for long periods. I started at night after my baby went to sleep, and finished the book in one sitting. It left me reeling, feeling like I was flying. It busted apart all my ingrained expectations about what people are capable of. I decided then and there that I was on team Cole, and I was going to do whatever was needed to help him succeed.
Just over a week ago, a friend sent me a tweet from his account. It was a post from his father, announcing that Kevin had died over the weekend in a kayaking accident. Some totally innocuous event, turned tragic.
I will tell you now that I was a little credulous that a kid like Kevin could exist when I found him. He sounded too good to be true. Too good an example of hope for the future. I can only say that it feels even less real to me that he could be gone. I can feel my mind trying to disbelieve it. It feels like it would be so normal to get a message from him updating me on an article he was writing, or scheduling another time to talk on the phone.
I am sitting down now to try to process the devastating news of Kevin’s death, and reflect on the short time I knew a remarkable young man who went by the name Cole Summers. I only knew Kevin for two short months, but the impression he has made upon me was enormous. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was talking to someone who was going to accomplish great things. His energy was infectious, I found myself completely believing that he was going to achieve all the incredible and seemingly far-fetched things that he had set his mind to. It was easy to help him. The work editing his book felt like a privilege, not a task.
After I read his book I told myself I would do whatever I could to support him and his work. So here goes.
When I read Kevin’s book in early April of this year, his working title was Just A Kid. The book started off really sweet. The original version didn’t give you any hints as to just how impressive Kevin’s accomplishments are. He started talking about how adults don’t take kids seriously, why that is and why they should.
He then tells the story of his family, and what shaped his mindset. As you read, his story gets crazier and crazier and funnier and funnier. You should really go read it yourself, but by page 30 I was transfixed. After that, I was either grinning or had my jaw hanging open the whole way through. He started his first business breeding rabbits and selling them for meat at age 7, and was repairing cars, purchasing land, and making savvy trades for what he wanted. The feats that Kevin undertook continue on for the whole book and include purchasing a 350 acre ranch and buying and fully renovating a run down house. By the end of the book I felt like I was flying. I was blown away, inspired more than I thought was possible. How had this kid stumbled across my path? Or rather how had I stumbled into his?
While the book boasts of incredible feats for a child to accomplish, Kevin himself is incredibly humble. Humble, and unceasing. I don’t exaggerate when I say he never stopped. He worked at a pace and voracity which shocked me. An obstacle would arise, he would immediately start to work on it, without pausing to breathe. Not manically, I should add. He just continued forward without hesitation. After reading his book, I invited him on my friend’s podcast. He said he hoped to have his book finished so he could promote it. What? I thought to myself. Didn’t he just get the first draft done a couple days ago? I expected his finish date to be in the range of 6 months, not a couple weeks. Yet he just kept ploughing on, all while running his ranch, and managing what seemed to be a million different things. It was humbling and awe inspiring. Reflecting on it now, I think Kevin was one of the few people in this world who didn’t self sabotage, and I see now that it was born of selflessness. He was earnest and dedicated. He considered himself only insofar as it was necessary to accomplish his goals.
There are lots of ambitious people in the world, but few of them have pure hearts. Kevin’s was pure. He had a heart of gold. He was constantly thinking of his family, how he could take care of people, animals, and the earth, and how to accomplish the things he needed to. He knew that his ambition was necessary to secure the thing he cared about most - a livable future in his desert home in Utah.
The degree to which Kevin really believed in his ability to make changes was amazing. He didn’t have it all worked out, but he figured if he kept trying he was going to succeed. I’d like to write more about this at a later date, but Kevin’s plan to restore the water table in his area and prevent aquifer depletion was incredibly well thought out. Much of it I still don’t understand very well. He wanted to slowly buy up hay farms that would otherwise be put to fallow and convert them into regenerative animal agriculture with landscaping and earthworks to increase water retention and prevent soil erosion. It was a really sophisticated and intelligent plan, and I hope that somebody takes it up. The odds were incredibly stacked against him. Large scale hay producers pretty much had the go-ahead to use intensive irrigation systems which pulled way more water from the aquifer than could be recaptured through the ground, and the government’s plan was to simply slowly put the fields to fallow. He simply believed he had to persist. Kevin had a spreadsheet with information on all the farms in his area. He knew which farmers didn’t have family to pass the farm onto, which ones would be likely to sell and when. He was going to buy farms as he could, and train and employ people in regenerative farming through a worker-cooperative model. It was a beautiful vision, and Kevin was dead set on achieving it.
The way Kevin took feedback was fascinating to me. He was always very thoughtful. He guarded his plans and ideas carefully, but methodically integrated anything I said that he saw value in. At one point I suggested he would need investors if he was going to succeed in plans to tackle aquifer depletion, and he carefully considered it and then said he was very hesitant because he didn’t want any outside influence corrupting his vision. His plan was that, through his book sales and income through other ventures, he would raise the money needed himself. He understood the potential value, but wanted to go his own way first.
Messaging Kevin, it was easy to forget he was 14. When we spoke on the phone for the first time, I was a lot easier to remember. He sounded pretty much like a regular 14 year old kid. He was a bit awkward, but we were there to practice his public speaking. Looking back now, I think this was partially because he felt bad that I didn’t know his real name. His father told me this after he died. He told me about his projects, I asked questions. We found places where he didn’t really know how to explain how his plans worked to people who didn’t already understand he world he was living in. We realized he assumed I would understand how water rights worked where he lived. I live somewhere where there’s lots of water, and water rights are never something I’d had to understand. I tried to explain to him that there would probably be people who also didn’t understand what a water table was or how the specifics of how it worked. “Wait, seriously?” he said. He was floored. He was so used to understanding the physical systems around him, he couldn’t fathom the degree of abstraction from the physical world that most people live in these days.
Despite his competence and great energy, Kevin’s work never seemed a great burden to him. He seemed incredibly playful, he obviously was having an extraordinarily good time of life. He seemed to wake each day excited and eager to tackle his projects. It feels so different to the way so many of us live, dragging our feet through each day, excited to go to bed, avoidant of the responsibilities we carry, and perhaps more than anything afraid to really be in the world, to be seen, to try, to encounter hardship, to fail. Kevin never stopped playing. He never learned to see the world as something to be afraid of or to hide from.
What Kevin brought to my world was a burgeoning hope for what the next generation might accomplish, and specifically what would be accomplished at the hands of this remarkable young man. He was a fountain of energy, endless possibility. I found myself relaxing a little, like maybe things were in less dire straights than I had thought.
Then last week I was wrenched painfully out of that sense of security. Kevin’s death left a hole in the world. Not only in the lives of his family and those he loved, but in the work he was surely going to do, the impact he would have had was enormous. What will become of the aquifer around his hometown? Kevin wrote in his book “I want to raise my own kids here one day. I want my kids to enjoy watching the wild rabbits, deer, and pronghorn that live here. I want them to look forward to seeing bald eagles migrate in and live here every winter, just like I do.” Will the next generations get to see this future? Will the hay farmers and their intensive irrigation systems continue to drain the aquifer, dropping the depth needed for a well by 3-6 feet per year? Who will take up this work? The fields will slowly be put to fallow, but as Kevin explained to me, the fallowed fields don’t recover. He was adamant about the need for humans in regenerating the earth. He saw the fields that had been fallowed for 30 years, and they were still barren wastelands. If they were to recover, he knew that active intervention was needed. This counters the prevailing view that the world would be better with less humans. That nature would return to equilibrium if humans were removed from the world. Yet, I believe this is a premature loss of faith in humanity, in the possibility that we might have a positive impact on our lands. In seeing how much harm we have done the earth, we must not forget the capacity we have to heal it.
Who will tackle the problems in the Great Basin Dessert around Beryl Utah now that Kevin is gone? He was set on presenting a more creative plan to stop aquifer depletion than the government’s, which made the problem worse. Who will take it up? Will anyone?
This question extends beyond Kevin’s hometown to all of our homes. There are few if any places that don’t need tender care and hard work to bring back their full potential. Who will do the work of healing the earth? It will require a lot of us all. Kevin showed us what was possible if we set our hearts and minds to trying. What if we set out where we are, looked at the problems facing our lands, learned about the farming practices in our area, and tried to understand how we might be part of the restoration of the earth’s health and fertility?
These thoughts weigh heavy on my mind as I reflect on Kevin’s life and death. When I found Kevin I gained hope for the world, but it was hope not through my own actions but through his. I could help him, I thought. But now that he’s gone I can see things as they always were. That the responsibility rests with me just as much as any of us; and perhaps a little more now that a young man in Utah has left this world for the next. He was remarkable, surely. I don’t believe we are all born of equal talent or ability. I don’t kid myself in thinking that I’m going to gain his drive and energy overnight, or that any of us should fill his shoes. Still, it’s too easy to excuse ourselves and leave the hard work to remarkable people like Kevin. There’s only so many of them, and as we have seen, they’re only here for so long.
I am reminded that I may never have happened to meet Kevin. I could have spent my life a little less hopeful about the world. But he came into my life, and now that he has gone I’m realizing I can’t afford to be less hopeful. I can’t afford not to be hopeful, but the good news is I’ve had someone to show me how.
My thoughts have been turning to God a lot this last week. I’m asking myself how He could have let something like this happen. To pull such a remarkable young man out of this world as he was just getting started in life. As I wrestled with the apparent divine injustice of Kevin’s premature departure from this world, my husband left me with something to consider. “Maybe he did exactly what he needed to do” he said. Maybe he did. Maybe it’s up to us to pick up where he left off, and let his legacy guide our way.
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You can buy Kevin’s book here, and support his family through their loss here.
