On Day 24, weeks into her mandatory furlough, she applied for unemployment benefits.
Ten days after that, she left her home in the Chicago suburbs, rode a train downtown and joined demonstrators on a windswept Federal Plaza, her cheeks mottled pink from the cold.
“I was never scared during shutdowns in the past,” Kelly, a union officer, said during the protest Thursday, wearing woolen gloves and clutching a sign. “But now who knows what’s going to happen?”
And then on Day 35, with no resolution seemingly in sight, she had her answer in news leaked from Washington: The shutdown was finally coming to an end.
“I’m waiting with bated breath,” she said Friday, glued to her phone for bulletins that congressional leaders and President Donald Trump had reached a deal to temporarily reopen the government. “Hopefully we’ll get a paycheck out of it.”
When the partial government shutdown began at midnight on Dec. 22, it left about 800,000 federal employees out of work, with many continuing to show up at their jobs even without the prospect of immediate paychecks. In the beginning, the episode was easily shrugged off as another Washington dysfunction: the result of an impetuous president making an outsize demand for a border wall, a dispute fueled by partisan bickering and likely to wrap up in a few days.
Initial nonchalance gave way to worry. Worry gave way to panic. And before it ended in Trump’s retreat from an insistence on wall funding nearly six weeks after it began, the government shutdown rapidly reordered American life.
It showed how far the tentacles of the federal government reach into ordinary lives around the nation, and how even the richest country on Earth could be one domestic crisis away from bread lines. And it may not be final yet, government workers reminded themselves even as they celebrated, as the three-week deal does not preclude another impasse.
Although over for now, the shutdown inflicted pain that ran deep.
Stunned middle-class people were forced to moonlight, visit food pantries for groceries and apply for unemployment benefits. A stable government job suddenly felt high risk. Some federal employees who went unpaid for weeks missed mortgage payments, piled up credit card debt and worried about financial doom.
Back pay will make most government workers whole again, but the deal cannot undo all the effects. Many business owners who rely on government workers saw their profits dry up. Many people saw their credit ratings nose-dive. Full of shutdown stress, many saw their marriages fray and noticed as their anxieties were transferred to their children.
The shutdown revealed unflattering truths about Americans’ finances: Even neighbors and friends with steady paychecks and the markers of comfortable lives were suddenly surviving hand-to-mouth, teetering on the edge of despair.
“I have to come here and see people who are homeless and who biked here, as I’m pulling up in my Subaru,” said Jenny Lunsted, a mother of two and the wife of an unpaid petty officer with the U.S. Coast Guard, who browsed shelves of canned pumpkin and fresh tomatoes at a food pantry in Stock Island, Florida, on Tuesday. “It’s heartbreaking because you feel almost unworthy and embarrassed at the same time.”
The shutdown’s effects cascaded far beyond the plight of individual workers, attracting the attention of Americans oblivious to the outsize role the federal government plays in their lives.
Government agencies stalled projects. Plane crashes went uninvestigated. Research projects were deferred. A shortage of air traffic controllers caused flight delays across the Northeast on Friday, snarling air travel at some of the country’s busiest airports.
A lack of workers left some of the country’s most treasured sites in a state of neglect. That included Yosemite National Park, the place the pioneering naturalist John Muir described as a temple of canyons, rushing waterfalls and sun-streaked granite cliffs.
Because of the shutdown, the park was “hanging by a thread,” said Ken Yager, 59, a professional climber who came to Yosemite more than four decades ago and never left the area.
All but a skeleton crew of rangers at the park were furloughed, the visitor center was closed and no one answered the phone at the park headquarters. Nearby, the towns that rely on Yosemite tourism for their livelihoods were hurting. Yager, who runs a cleaning service, laid off most of his employees.
Every day the shutdown stretched on, Yager said, people were “more and more desperate.”
It has been more than six weeks since the blustery Oval Office confrontation on Dec. 11 between Trump and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, now the House speaker, and Sen. Chuck Schumer, the minority leader.
Trump, reiterating his campaign pledge to build a border wall, had said he would take the blame for shutting down the government if Democrats rebuffed his effort. “I will take the mantle,” he said in a vow that has been replayed on cable news countless times since. “I will be the one to shut it down.”
And it did shut down, in the early morning of Dec. 22. The shuttered departments included Treasury, Agriculture, Homeland Security, Interior, State, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Commerce and Justice. More than 420,000 federal employees began to work without pay; another 380,000 were furloughed to wait for a resolution from home.
Yet the notion of a government shutdown still felt to many like a familiar political ritual rather than a fear-inducing event, at least at first. This shutdown marked at least the 21st time in the last four decades that the government has not passed some form of a spending bill on time.
In the first days and weeks, a tangle of complications began to emerge.
Sheila Bailey, 73, had set her retirement for Dec. 31, after working for 34 years as a scientist at NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. And indeed, the date came and went, and Bailey is spending her days at home.
But she found herself in an unusual limbo: She was not sure if she was a federal worker on furlough or a retired federal worker.
“It’s just incredible all the complications,” she said, talking of the difficulties of signing up for Medicare Part B when she could not get the necessary paperwork from NASA. “It’s a mess.”
The shutdown’s effects even came over the airwaves, in one case in the form of an off-color word. At a community radio station in Kentucky, a host accidentally played an Alanis Morissette song with an obscenity in it. The station director pointed out that, given a shutdown, the Federal Communications Commission was unlikely to be fielding complaints.
In Southern California, Joseph Darling, 33, is a member of an elite federal firefighting crew that uses chain saws and hand tools to attack the nation’s wildfires. He would normally spend this time of year clearing away brush to help diminish future fire danger.
But during the shutdown, he was not permitted to do that. Instead, he was confined to his office, waiting to be called to an emergency. “We’re ultimately missing those windows of opportunity,” Darling said this past week. He could not say that the shutdown would cause a fire to break out, but he could not rule out the possibility that the risk of fire had risen because of the bureaucratic standoff.
On Jan. 11, three weeks into the shutdown, the consequences became very real to federal employees as many missed their first paycheck.
Johnny Zuagar, 39, of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, has worked for the Census Bureau for 15 years as a statistician dealing with monthly retail sales reports. At home without a job to report to, he was now dealing with his own finances.
“You have got to have food, and you have got to have gas in the car, and your kids still need stuff,” Zuagar said. “It might take them a while to come get the house, so you work with the mortgage company.”
Critical to getting through the shutdown, Zuagar said, was putting all of that day’s anxiety behind him by late afternoon, when he picked up his boys — ages 8, 6 and 1.
Tiarra Carey, an accountant with the Department of Homeland Security, began to trim household expenses. Her older children — ages 13, 11, 8 and 3 — quickly discovered that life had changed. They were used to stopping at Chick-fil-A or going ice skating. Carey said they could no longer afford that kind of thing.
For contract workers, the situation became especially dire. Unlike federal employees, contract workers are not guaranteed back pay. Voyt Quinn, 55, typically empties trash cans at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., earning $13.55 an hour. But when the zoo closed, Quinn found himself home, racking his brain about how to make ends meet.
His employer, Friends of the National Zoo, gave him a small loan to live on. But he will have to pay it back, little by little. He tried to earn some extra money making food deliveries.
In Gainesville, Florida, the Peaceful Paths Domestic Abuse Network struggled to provide its usual services, particularly essential in a place where domestic violence is a dominant problem; in the region, there are about 1,700 arrests annually on charges for such crimes. About 35 percent of the organization’s yearly budget comes from federal dollars.
For some government workers, the shutdown did not leave them struggling to make ends meet. But it caused other frustrations.
Amy Butler, a contractor, is one of the federal government’s experts on the polar vortex, the giant mass of cold air that normally is contained above the North Pole by strong bands of circulating winds, but which can wreak havoc on North American weather when those winds weaken.
This year, the polar vortex broke apart days after the shutdown began. Butler, like other researchers, could not access government databases, so she was effectively blocked from weighing in on internal government debates and putting out analysis during a weather event of huge significance to their jobs and research.
“It’s disappointing when there is an event which I feel I’m an expert in, but I can’t share my own work during it because I’m not able to access those resources,” she said.
Some families in which both spouses work for the government had to give up two salaries. In Anniston, Alabama, Marlin Kimbrough and Kimberly Askew-Kimbrough had a somber conversation with their teenage son about the hardship caused by the shutdown.
Tuesday was his birthday. This year, he had to skip gifts and a party.
“It hurts the heart, it hurts your feelings,” said Askew-Kimbrough, who like her husband works at the federal prison in Talladega, Alabama. “Thank god that our son is the type of person that understands. I’m quite sure he still feels hurt by it. But he doesn’t wear it on his shoulder.”
The White House had asked agency leaders to deliver a list of programs that would suffer if the shutdown continued until March and April, The Washington Post reported this past week. To federal employees on the cusp of losing a second paycheck, the idea that the shutdown could go on that long was unbearable.
And in recent days, some furloughed federal workers decided they had had enough. Unions representing air traffic controllers, pilots and flight attendants warned that the shutdown was making air travel less safe. A group of federal employees gathered in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington on Wednesday, standing in silent protest for 33 minutes — one minute for each day they had been out of work.
On Friday, as Trump spoke from the Rose Garden to announce he had agreed to reopen the government, Americans watched, relieved and elated. It was finally over, at least for a few weeks.
In western Wisconsin, Kelly Harris had spent two years in financial purgatory — paying off debts and fixing her credit — to qualify for a federal loan program that helps low-income residents of rural areas become homeowners. The money came through. She moved in with her 15-year-old grandson. It was a dream.
But because of the shutdown, she missed her first mortgage payment, due on Jan. 21.
Harris, 55, said the Department of Agriculture offices that handle her mortgage closed before she could get her account number and other basic information about how to pay. She tried calling federal offices, her bank, her senators. Nobody could tell her where to send the check.
“I worked so hard to get into this house,” she said. “For me to miss a payment is heart-wrenching.”
The thought of defaulting on the home made her sick with worry. She had a 10-day grace period, which was quickly ticking by. She said she had no idea what to do.
On Friday, she broke down crying when she heard the news that the White House and congressional leaders had reached a deal.
“I am just sitting here bawling,” she said. She said she planned to call her loan officer as soon as she could on Monday, just in the nick of time. “Relief,” she said. “Absolute relief.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.