Sordid little stories: of class and living poor

by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment on Sordid little stories: of class and living poor
Somewhere just west of Calgary, Alberta, listening to Meadowlarks at the roadside.

When I was 17 years old, my family’s car was repossessed. It happened at night, the Dodge sedan my parents had bought used towed away late one evening while we were watching TV.

Cars get repossessed when their owner—who doesn’t really own the car yet, just pays for it—misses enough car payments in a row. For the Dodge, the payments were around $60 a month, an amount my parents often couldn’t afford for the same reason we never bought new clothes and my sisters and me were fed via the federal government’s free school lunch program: for most of my childhood, we lived with an income below the already absurdly low official poverty line. That is, we were poor.

I’ve thought a lot about what to write in this essay, and the more I’ve thought about it the more it seemed to fall apart under my pen. There’s a way of sharing one’s personal life that invites people in, another that almost pushes them away with its need to scream “understand me!” and something in between that falls too much into apology. Lauren Hough has described the former along the lines of, it’s not about telling the story, it’s about figuring out “how to write what it felt like to be you.” I tried to take that advice to heart when writing for Aeon about childhood trauma, but in this case, it feels trickier.

I spent all of my upbringing poor, and struggled financially for many years after that. In more recent years, I was buoyed by a spouse who grew up in Britain equally poor but who had the skills and interest to land in a professional field—cybersecurity and data privacy—that promised a solid income. His constant work travel and resistance to recalibrating parenting and household duties meant that it was his income—which was much higher than mine and, unlike mine, includes health insurance—I ended up relying on for stability. Which has led to me not-so-sarcastically chiding myself many times over the last year with the unkind reminder online pundits give to tradwives: a man is not a plan.

In the year since our divorce was finalized, I’ve spent many sleepless midnights, feeling the tangible reality, often the terror, of financial insecurity. Not because it’s foreign to me, but because it’s far too familiar.

“We had food,” I said to my older sister over the phone, trying to untangle the visceral knot of fear about being able to feed my kids, and my own sense of worry about whether and when I’d eat. I couldn’t figure out exactly where that fear was coming from. Federal food stamps—now known in the U.S. as the SNAP program—didn’t cover enough to feed a family in the 1980s (it covers even less now), but our parents hunted deer and elk, which were our only meat, and our mother gardened, giving me a lifelong loathing of eggplant but at least providing us with vegetables and berries during Montana’s short growing season; and she knew how to can and preserve food, extending the garden’s lifespan into winter.

We had food, my older sister said, but we were generally on our own until dinnertime and the poor quality, carbohydrate heavy food provided in the free school lunch program wasn’t enough to get growing kids through the day, especially after a breakfast that usually involved cereal, powdered milk, and as much sugar as we felt like pouring on because sugar was cheap and we were always on our own in the mornings. She remembers being hungry constantly and dinner was, in our house with its daily violence and often hours of our mother’s screaming, a time of stress, anxiety, and, regularly, tears and loss of appetite.

I knew we were poor and I’m aware of it now. But it wasn’t until we moved to a Montana town (the one I currently live in) with noticeable wealth that I consciously felt the lack that comes from being poor, as if there were something wrong, something lesser, not just with our family income, but with me as a human being.

Until then, everywhere we’d lived it seemed that almost everyone was in the same financial situation my family was in, even if they weren’t moving to a new rental every year and a new school nearly as often.

In this new town where I ended up graduating high school and making lifelong friends, my upbringing of poverty, abuse and neglect was glaringly different, even if I wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time. One of the boys I dated, whose family was comparatively well off, used to make personal comments that I only realized years later were reflective of my socioeconomic status. He didn’t mean to be derogatory, and neither of us would have had the language for it at the time: what my lack of access to dental care meant, or why my $5 thrift store skirts and hand-me-down T-shirts weren’t fashion choices but rather an effort to dress myself with some sense of personality and within the school’s dress code but with little money. He had as many brand-new clothes as he wanted, and his own car, which was never at risk of being repossessed.

He took me out for dinner once to a nice restaurant, and I didn’t realize that it was a joke for him and another friend to go to this place and only order soup. I didn’t only order soup. I was hungry.

It wasn’t until the last few years, through many conversations with the writer Kathleen McLaughlin and reading her extensive work on class and the American precariat, including her incredible book Blood Money, that I had a language for understanding what my own experiences reflected about my family’s life within the broader society.

Since coming to know Kathleen and her work, I’ve thought a lot more about how class issues play out in America, and how easy they are to erase, especially when most people within widely read and widely published media come from wealth or at least the upper middle class. It’s a running joke online how many times we can see a story about a 30- or 20-something-year-old person who paid off their student loans and bought a house “all by herself” except it turns out a parent or grandparent gave them a down payment for the house, or paid off their student loans, or supported them financially so they could take a high-profile but unpaid internship in publishing.

Having a cushion of financial support affects not just a person’s access to health care and education and functional cars and food for their kids and the kinds of jobs and vocations they can pursue, but their lives at all levels of existential crisis.

Last year, drowning in constant worry about how to support myself and my kids, I tried anti-depressant medication for the first time.

I’ve always struggled with depression, but during my 26-year marriage I realized that comparative financial security created a buffer for depression and worry that was almost tangible. I used to tell my older sister I could feel it—the soft landing beneath me when I couldn’t cope, or hadn’t had a freelance editing job for a while. Every time our kids needed new shoes and I could just buy them new shoes, I felt the gratitude of that, what a fortunate thing it was to be able to get them shoes and clothes when they needed them—even ski lessons and Legos. And when I was depressed, I could take a few days to walk and spend time in nature and go to the gym and garden, all the activities that have been shown to help with depression and anxiety but that a person needs time and access to even try.

Those extra privileges—ski lessons, Legos, time off—took some juggling, but they were possible and, I constantly thought, how incredible is that?

Since getting divorced and walking knowingly into a drastically different financial situation, my considerations around economic security have become the same: drastically different. The fear brought by financial precarity is constant, and I can feel the way it feeds, and feeds off of, depression that I can’t always alleviate. (The medication trial only lasted four months; I turn out to be one of those people who has bad side effects with pretty much every mental health medication available).

There is research to back up lived experiences of the relationship between mental health and worries about money. One of my favorite Universal Basic Income trials to cite is Stockton, California’s. Objections to UBI often point to trials in countries like Finland and Canada, saying it could never work in the U.S. because the cultures of those countries is fundamentally different (the word “culture” is carrying a lot of water here, and the history of Scandinavian countries’ turn to robust social welfare programs, which Garrett Bucks has written about, shows that culture can be changed). Stockton is located in a huge agricultural region of California whose median income is far below the more well-known and wealthier coastal parts of the state. Its UBI experiment showed that an extra $500 a month in a low-income household not only provided more food and housing stability, but decreased diagnoses of depression and anxiety among those who received it.

When your skin crawls with anxiety over how to feed your kids because you’ve run out of money for the month, or you had to delay a needed doctor visit because you couldn’t afford the medical bills, or you don’t know if you’ll be able to make rent next month, and if you can’t, don’t know where you’ll go; when the fear turns to depression and you move between not being able to sleep and not wanting to do anything but sleep, you know better than any economic analyst or highly paid political commentator what it feels like to never have enough.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it was like for my parents raising three girls and constantly moving either for work or housing. Over the last year, maintaining a foundation of safety and care for my kids has been my top priority. The financial support from their dad isn’t even close to enough to cover rent and groceries and accumulating bills, and the worry feels corrosive. For my parents, it must have been far worse. Yet for all the other problems my family had, for all the abuse and violence and belittling far into the night, my memory is that they did the best they could to provide a basic physical structure that gave us a roof to sleep under and something to fill our bellies, even if a lot of it was sugar.

Trying to maintain stability—both physical and psychological—for my own kids while moving from one home to another, and then doing it again in less than a year, has brought up memories of childhood I thought were buried, or at least dissipated. But the financial reality of life on my own versus with my ex-husband has forced me to see what’s behind the very real but also overwhelming fears: The apartment we lived in where I slept on the floor next to the kitchen and my younger sister on the floor of the one bedroom, all of my possessions (which mainly consisted of some plastic bracelets and a set of Patricia C. Wrede’s Lyra novels) in one small box; the exhaustion of once again packing up our family’s boxes to move to another rental; my younger sister’s description of the expression on the school receptionist’s face when my sister turned in her free school lunch application form and the receptionist read our family income.

The car getting repossessed, a landlord’s anger when we didn’t leave a place clean enough or quickly enough, the depression I sank into when, in college, I had to refuse an offer for an unpaid editorial internship at a literary magazine because my waitressing job took too much time and I needed the money. The time my father was arrested for not having paid a traffic fine.

My finances now aren’t quite as dire as my brain wants me to believe—our amicable mediated divorce and my ex’s willingness to continue sharing the garden and to co-sign so I could qualify for a housing loan makes me feel, again, fortunate—but the familiar fear turns out to have been dormant rather than dead.

The town I live in is known throughout Montana as one with incredible wealth. The influx of extreme money is relatively recent, but even when my family moved here in 1992, when I was 16, it was known as a place with more money on average than the rest of the state. The desire now of literal billionaires and multi-millionaire vacation homeowners to buy land and buildings here has had very real consequences for housing affordability and the health of the community, even though there are a few notable people putting effort and money into mitigating those consequences.

As attached as I am to this place and my community, I’ve eyed the year my youngest kid will finally graduate from high school and considered whether I’ll need to move simply due to the cost of living.

The undeniable wealth where I live also brings on derision from outside the town, but my experiences living and raising my kids here include the many, many hours I’ve spent volunteering in the schools and knowing intimately how many kids go home with bags of what’s known as Friday food—food to get kids on the free lunch program through the weekend. The program in my town alone is enormous and might shock anyone who looks at this community and sees only wealth.

Even when the Friday food bags aren’t visible, I see those kids partly because I see myself in them. The faded winter coat from the thrift store that’s a little too short in the arms but needs to last another season, the broken-soled shoes, the mornings before school spent alone with a television or video games for company and some form of sugar for food, the lack of participation in programs like team sports or theater because you’re a bus kid and have no way to get home if you stay longer after school. My high school love for debate was fostered partly because the very kind debate and speech coaches lived near me and often gave me rides. It might even be partly why I was so drawn to writing about walking—I knew too well that car dependence is expensive and restricting.

The fear of not having enough money to live on sinks into the marrow. I’ve wondered recently if I never truly felt financial stability while married, if I was simply waiting for the other shoe to drop even when we’d finally reached a point where I could stop juggling credit card balance transfers. And when the shoe did drop, some subconscious part of me said, “Here, you see? This is where you’re meant to live.”

Class issues come with shame as well as fears about survival. When my ex-husband’s new girlfriend, who comes from a much higher socioeconomic class, came to visit and meet the kids a couple months ago, I gave myself an evening to indulge in my feelings about it. I cried all night, texting with a close friend, and the next day I realized the grief was only in part about mourning our relationship. The rest of it was feeling once again, as I had with my boyfriend in high school and on many other occasions, the invisibility and shame that comes from being, or at least having grown up, poor.

I read Betty Smith’s classic novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn so many decades ago that I barely remember the plot. But the passage where Francie’s teacher is giving Francie feedback on her stories without knowing they depict her family’s poverty, has always stuck with me:

“Now that we’ve talked things out, I’m sure you’ll stop writing these sordid little stories.”

Sordid. Francie turned the word over. It was not in her vocabulary. “What does that mean—sordid?”

“What-did-I-tell-you-when-you-don’t-know-a-word,” sing-songed Miss Garnder drolly.

“Oh! I forgot.” Francie went to the big dictionary and looked up the word. Sordid: Filthy. Filthy? She thought of her father wearing a fresh dicky and collar every day of his life and shining his worn shoes as often as twice a day. Dirty. . . . Gross . . . Also mean and low. . . .

Her face got hot. She couldn’t see the next words because the page turned red under her eyes. She turned on Miss Garnder, her face twisted with fury.

“Don’t you ever dare use that word about us!”

“Us?” asked Miss Garnder blankly. “We were talking about your composition.” . . .

Walking home from school, Francie began to understand that her life might seem revolting to some educated people. She wondered, when she got educated, whether she’d be ashamed of her background.

It’s easy to tell someone there’s nothing to be ashamed of, that there’s no reason to feel shame, but every single societal structure in the dominant culture for the past several thousand years has said otherwise. It’s only in times of rebellion, like the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and centuries of mass resistance against enclosures of the commons, and violent revolutions like the Russian Revolution of 1917, which eventually resulted in the death by starvation of millions, that lip service is paid to the damage done by class-based systems. That being poor is not a personal failing.

But the aftermath of those revolts has shown that it’s still just that: lip service. King Richard II made his and his class’s sentiments clear to the rebelling peasants in 1381 when he said:

“You wretches detestable on land and sea: you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues: rustics you were and rustics you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we shall strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity. However, we will spare your lives if you remain faithful and loyal. Choose now which course you want to follow.”

Richard did not, in fact, spare their lives no matter what loyalty they expressed. He had every rebel, known or suspected, murdered.

Even the U.S.’s New Deal programs that reformed wealth inequality and boosted working class solidarity in the 1930s only lasted a few decades. A few changes in tax policy and we’re right back to a version of the Gilded Age that preceded the Great Depression, along with the idea that being poor is purely the result of personal choices.

The class structures rebuild themselves and the shame along with them. I don’t think that’s a reality that’s easily shaken off. I’ve written before about the echoes in rhetoric between how people view homelessness now and how the condition of being a legal vagabond was described in 15th-century England—a condition that was most often caused by theft of one’s home through enclosures of the commons, and that at times and by royal decree resulted in enslavement.

No matter how progressive any of us think we are, there remains a lurking belief that someone can avoid poverty by working harder, eating better, not having sex, marrying more intelligently, or simply by being someone other than who we are.

The power of wealth and class has to be reformed at a tax and compensation level, but also at the level of society’s values—even the subconscious ones.

I have a car now that is unlikely to ever be repossessed, mostly because it’s 16 years old, is paid off, and has over 213,000 miles on it. I’m hoping to keep it going to 300,000 because it’s hard to envision a future where I can afford a new one. Given the realities of America’s economy—and many other countries’ economies—outside what large media outlets report of a booming stock market that benefits only a small percentage of people, I know I’m far from alone.

Even if I’m better off now than my family was while I was growing up, that identity is still there, waiting for me to accept it back.

Private property: bedrock . . . or shale?

by Antonia Malchik1 Comment on Private property: bedrock . . . or shale?
On a short, easy hike with a friend last week we saw all kinds of delicate, quiet bounty emerging, including one of my favorite native plants, the lovely Arrowleaf Balsamroot.

I recently came across a news story about the community of Lake Tahoe, California—a place known as a ski resort, as my town in Montana is also known but, also like my town, a place where thousands of people live full-time. People who keep the community running, whose taxes and labor pay for the infrastructure necessary to make ski vacations and second homeownership possible; and who, like the majority of humans, struggle to survive.

The company that provides Tahoe’s nearly 50,000 full-time residents with electric power has informed them that they will have to find another electricity source within a year. NV Energy, the electricity distributor, told Liberty Utilities, the electric company serving the Tahoe community, that it needs to divert all of Tahoe’s previous capacity to power AI data centers.

This isn’t really a new situation, but the scale of it is mind-boggling. The details, which I recommend reading the original reporting for, are tangled in a complex knot of jurisdiction and state law—NV Energy is located in Nevada, while Tahoe is in California. The legalities of cross-state electricity production and consumption in the U.S. depend on federal regulations from FERC (the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), as well as each state’s laws and regulatory oversight from that state’s Public Service Commission. In Montana, where I live, three PSC members are elected to well-paid, powerful positions, all of which are currently held by zealous anti-regulationists; other states vary on PSC positions being appointed or elected, and their power over ordinary people’s lives through regulatory oversight of utilities—or lack thereof—is often overlooked.

Like most of the commons we rely on, electricity is being treated not as a public good, a technology necessary to living in this modern world, but as a resource ripe for further privatization and enclosure. It’s treated as a property right that can be taken from those with less power (pun unavoidable) and given to those with more.

There’s a line I’ve often heard among environmental and conservation groups: “private property is bedrock.” Local and regional resistance to conservation is more likely when private property rights are perceived as threatened, so private property is a third rail that environmental advocates rarely touch.

This concept was evident in a 2025 court case that came before the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals regarding what are known as “corner crossings”—the practice of stepping over (but not physically touching) intersecting corners of private land in order to access public land. Without corner crossings, private property owners can, in effect, privatize public land by denying access. The case originated in Wyoming, and the 10th Circuit found that that corner crossing was legal; the practice remains illegal elsewhere, like in Montana.

In the decision, the judges referenced a previous 2021 case in finding first that

“protection of private property is indispensible to the promotion of individual freedom,”

which in turn referenced an even earlier 2017 case that came to the U.S. Supreme Court out of Wisconsin:

“Property rights are necessary to preserve freedom, for property ownership empowers persons to shape and to plan their own destiny in a world where governments are always eager to do so for them.”

In the 49-page decision, the judges waded into the U.S.’s own laws against enclosure (or “inclosure”) of public land, passed in 1885 to “‘prevent the absorption and ownership of vast tracts of our public domain’ by the cattle barons.”

Though that Wyoming case was a win for public lands and public access, it’s clear that the judges first made an effort to solidify the “private property is bedrock” notion—avoiding, or attempting to avoid, the third rail of private property rights.

In America, private property is akin to religion. You do not touch private property, we’re told. To do so is anathema—property ownership is the bedrock of American individualism, and innovation, and freedom.

Unattributed advertising still from a conference on the Doctrine of Discovery

The truth is almost exactly the opposite. America was built on stolen people, stolen labor, and stolen land. The taking of property—the creation of property—through violence and dishonored treaties was exactly what created this country. And once you accept that that taking, that theft, was justified or at least irreversible—once you accept that the creation of private property in land, water, and other forms of life and necessities is an immovable foundation of a society and nation—then by that same logic you must accept that nothing is in fact so insecure as private property ownership.

That is, if the original theft is accepted, if it’s left standing, then any subsequent theft is just as easily justified.

Once you’ve created an idea, a value, a story, that acts like bedrock in the imagination, it becomes almost impossible to fight against. Any land or right can be taken for any reason. The person or entity—a corporation, for example—doing the taking need only have more money or more power, and the two often go hand in hand.

Take the following examples of private property’s fragility, just two from my piles of research:

  • Residents of New London, Connecticut, lost their homes when the city took their properties, via the government’s power of eminent domain, to sell to a private developer. The 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case (Kelo v. New London) expanded the power of eminent domain “for public use” to essentially cover any kind of economic development, even if the public couldn’t access those benefits. The homes were bulldozed for shopping, a hotel, and luxury condos—high-end development that was in fact never completed.
  • In 2016, a family of Maple tree farmers lost 558 trees on their land when crews working for a natural gas pipeline company, arriving with the protection of armed federal marshals, cut down the trees to make way for a gas pipeline. The natural gas company had won a court case in 2015 to take the family’s land via eminent domain. (The pipeline was never built, and in 2020 the family won a court case regranting them ownership of the land. They were planning on replanting trees to replace those lost.)

Societies structured similarly to the United States are forced into an odd juxtaposition: on the one hand, ownership of property is almost our only security—just ask anyone whose rental apartment building was bought by an investment company and their rent doubled or more—and on the other, relying on ownership as the basis of security is ridiculously tenuous.

Private property rights are less “bedrock” than a narrow, sometimes maintained and sometimes neglected, path on a steep, shale-covered mountainside. The kind of trail I’ve hiked countless times, knees quivering at the thought of a single slip, a single step out of place that can send me and half the hillside heaving uncontrollably downhill.

Traversing the terrain of life under a private property regime without understanding how fissile these rights are is like walking that path in fog. I’ve done that, too, and in snowstorms and heavy rain. It’s terrifying, not knowing where your steps are landing, what might send you and all you hold dear into the abyss.

Shale slope somewhere on the Dawson-Pitamakan trail, Glacier National Park, Montana, August 2019

Another recent story came out of the U.S. state of Georgia, where over the last year a Blackstone-owned AI data center drew 29 million gallons of water from the local utility without permission, and without paying for it. When the usage was revealed—only through a local resident’s government records request—the water company collected back pay from the data center but there was no fine, no accountability, and no reconsideration of how local water is used, and by whom.

Instead, the water company said, “They’re our largest customer, and we have to be partners. It’s called customer service.”

I live in an area served by a small cooperative electricity company, which sounds fairly secure until you find out that most of its power comes from the massive Bonneville Power Administration and its many hydropower dams all through the Columbia River Basin, starting in Canada. Some of those dams were powering data centers and damaging salmon habitat long before AI was more than a pipe dream—all those photos in the cloud, all the emails from online retailers, all those GoPro videos that seem necessary every time someone bikes a trail or skis a line. All these Substack essays. I have little confidence that Bonneville would choose local communities’ electricity needs over corporate-backed AI data centers.

It’s not even about the kind of money that corporations have to wield influence over policy; the people who cover these stories have also noted that individual rate payers are stuck paying for the needed infrastructure upgrades and expansion for years to come, even if they don’t benefit from it. I’ve seen it happen with our regional natural gas company’s insistence on buying a struggling coal-fired power plant and recouping that cost from their customers over the next few decades.

This is what power and wealth grant, whether they come from individual people or corporations: the right to take from others who have no real recourse. That was true when wealthy landowners privatized the commons—that is, stole them from the people—for private profit in 15th-century England; when the East India Company and the British Crown stole generations of wealth and resources from India from the 1600s until 1947 (read Swarnali Mukherjee’s incredible writing on Britain’s wealth extraction from India); when the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan conquered, controlled, and extracted so much wealth from other regions in the 12th–13th centuries, including areas of China, Russia, Persia, and Afghanistan, that from my understanding Genghis Khan remains, corrected for today’s values, the wealthiest individual in history.

I could list examples all day, many of them within an hour’s drive of where I live. I’m sure everyone reading this can think of any number of similar examples within seconds.

During a conference I attended a couple years ago on the Doctrine of Discovery, Steven T. Newcomb, author of Pagans in the Promised Land and co-producer of a documentary on the Doctrine of Discovery, said that private property rights do not in fact grant ownership. What they do is grant a right of domination: “Property isn’t a right of possession,” he said, “it’s a right of domination.” If you “own” land, you have the right to extract from it, abuse it, forbid other humans from stepping on it, or even care for it if you wish. You could stop treating land as “it” and instead treat land as kin. But there’s no requirement that you do so.

And if someone more powerful comes along who wants to dominate that land in a different way, the bedrock contained in the idea of private property allows them to do so.

The same is true of water, electricity, seeds, air, trees, rare earth minerals; knowledge, imagination, your mind, your relationships. The law as it currently stands does not protect life. It doesn’t even truly protect rights. It protects property. And the transformation of property into power compounds over time.

The reality we live in is, in fact, exactly the kind of economy that Adam Smith, the famous advocate of laissez-faire capitalism and author of The Wealth of Nations (published in 1776), warned against: one controlled by monopolists and rentiers, in which those who already own extract their wealth from everyone else.

The only way to shift this reality is to build a world around the collective good—of people, but also of wildlife and wild waters, of Tamarack trees and Mountain Chickadees, of starry nights and air you can breathe, of mountains as sacred and oceans as sovereign. And of histories that deserve sunlight and reparations.

Some places are beginning to enact those values in real time. In the state of Oregon, the Public Service Commission just passed a rule that forces data centers to pay for any needed infrastructure upgrades, rather than passing that cost on to individual ratepayers. In Idaho, the state legislature is moving on legislation that restricts data centers’ use of water. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) has been working on community-controlled electricity for over 50 years, and their work expands to all kinds of community power. In countries all over the world, people are pushing back against the rights of data centers’ owners to extract water and electricity and land and make the rest of us pay for it.

Ownership will never guarantee rights, much less safety. Security lies not in pride and what we can own individually—not in our ability to dominate—but in humility and in what we can care for and manage together.

Trespass against

by Antonia Malchik2 Comments on Trespass against
Holland Creek running out of Holland Lake, Montana

All wild waters have a different flavor. The North Fork of the Flathead River, the river near the off-grid cabin I stay at most often, is wide, and fast enough I wouldn’t risk trying to swim across it. Its headwaters are in Canada, and it has so far been saved from toxic selenium levels by an international agreement that turned its sister rivers, the Elk and then Fording Rivers, into a sacrifice zone for the waste of mountaintop removal coal mining in British Columbia.

The saved river tastes of snow and rock, a little pine and something of the young otters I once watched playing in the rapids just off the opposite bank. The uncanny warmth of ice.

A little-visited creek on the other side of the mountains where I search for caddisfly casings in late summer tastes of dirt, like fresh-planted geraniums, and the fireweed and kinnikinnick where its waters gather high up in the eastern portion of the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

Caddisflies, like many macroinvertebrates, are a sign of a water’s health. They need water that runs, chortling and burbling along rocks and moss, well-aerated and low in pollution. Caddisfly larvae build tiny, nearly perfectly cylindrical casings out of various materials, usually gravel. They’re hard to spot, bits of washed-bright gravel clinging to similarly colored rocks under rushing water.

I fell in love with caddisflies during my son’s fifth-grade field trip to a local wetland, less than 10 years ago. Although I grew up fishing Montana’s waters, and my mother is an expert fly fisherman, the kind of fishing I did involved worms rather than flies, and I was never taught much about the waters themselves, much less the tiny creatures that make up their vast ecosystems. I’d never seen a caddisfly before that hot spring day with my son’s class, learning about rescue birds of prey and macroinvertebrates at a hidden wetland sanctuary in the shadow of the ski mountain on the edge of town.

Caddisflies fascinate me. Miniscule creatures! Maneuvering miniscule bits of rock to form perfect little temporary homes! What more does one need to be awed by creation?

Caddisfly casing

Learning about them and other macroinvertebrates from scientists near where I live, I learned about rivers, too—the level of cleanliness they need for health, the way their ecosystems spread underground, far beyond the borders of their visible shores.

Architect and planner Dilip Da Cunha wrote a book I haven’t yet read called The Invention of Rivers. He wrote in the book’s introduction, of Alexander the Great’s military campaigns, that they were not just empire building projects, but “more fundamentally and necessarily to articulate an earth’s surface with a line separating land from water.”

“. . . to articulate an earth’s surface with a line separating land from water.”

I bought the book after hearing an interview with Cunha, floored by his obvious but revolutionary argument that of course rivers don’t have solid boundaries. How could they? Maps of rivers’ flow, length, shape, and course are deceptive. Rivers are living, breathing creatures. Expecting one to adhere to a mapped route is like expecting a toddler to fall in line with your expectations of behavior just because you read a seemingly smart book about parenting your spirited child.

I was recently able to turn back to No Trespassing, the book I’ve been promising readers here for far too long, and came across a passage in Chapter 2—the chapter on water—that I ended up repurposing in an essay for the “Air” volume of The Center for Humans & Nature’s Elementals anthology:

“Trespass is fluid. It’s a transgression. In the case of pollution, trespass is far more physical than simply breaking through somebody’s property line. If I sneak through my neighbor’s yard to get to the nature preserve on the other side I might annoy them, but if my neighbor burns a pile of tires in that same yard and I don’t go near it, his waste will trespass into my family’s bodies just the same. This form of trespass, though, is exactly what the law currently allows.”

In the published essay, this passage is about what is carried through the air and into all living beings, contrasted with barbed wire fencing and No Trespassing signs that keep our physical bodies from wandering.

In the unpublished chapter, though, it follows a section I wrote about Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent in a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court case involving decades of pollution from a mining company layered in the soil of Anaconda, Montana. The court’s opinion leaned on lack of jurisdiction, but Gorsuch’s dissent went straight to the issues residing deeper within legal history: the plaintiffs’ arguments, he wrote, relied on “ancient common law causes of action like nuisance and trespass.”

The majority decision, he wrote,

“strips away ancient common law rights from innocent landowners and forces them to suffer toxic waste in their backyards, playgrounds, and farms.”

This wasn’t what the law was written to do, Gorsuch claimed, “it was what it was written to prevent.”

(For my American readers: Gorsuch, right? I know. He can surprise, as in he did in McGirt v. Oklahoma.)

The most commented on essay I have ever published here was about borders, particularly the violence that borders perpetuate by their very existence. The most read essay remains one I wrote about my Russian-Jewish grandparents in the Soviet Union, of their time during dictator Josef Stalin’s violent political purges, which killed millions. It’s an essay about moral codes that might not defeat the face of evil, but will withstand the wreckage of history. The second most read essay is about an early American court case involving a fox, a hunter, and a landowner, and provokes the question of ownership contrasted with a right to exist.

The commons, I believe, is all of this and more. It is all that is shared, cared for, carefully managed and husbanded. Enclosures of the commons sought to wall in land’s abundance for a privileged few. For nearly 800 years those enclosures were fought by commoners in England and elsewhere, often in bloody battles that killed thousands. Those people knew what was at stake when the commons were stolen. Their thriving, livelihoods, and even survival were trespassed against. And so they trespassed back—against unjust laws, in defense of life and freedom.

I firmly believe that just about everything imaginable and unimaginable is connected to a commons—air, water, ideas, food, soil, stories. Survival. Thriving. Liberty. A person’s right to determine their own identity. But I am aware that my writing here strays in and out of a strict scholarship definition of the commons as a subject. Because of that, the title of this newsletter has been bugging me for a while. The concept of trespass is more fitting for what happens in this space. It is, after all, what sparked rebellions against theft of the commons in the first place. Who gets to define what is trespass, and what is law?

The answer, as is always true of hardened borders and hardened ideas: they are defined by those in power.

A river embodies trespass. It refuses to remain where it’s told. It lives not simply according to its needs, but also the needs of all the beings that rely on its unique ecology. When circumstances demand that a river change its borders, it does not hesitate, even when human expectations have relied on it staying put. A river can be dammed, drained, poisoned, siphoned off for agriculture or hydro-fracking for fossil fuels, built against so heavily that its banks erode, but it cannot, in the end, be conquered. In whatever form, its waters refuse to stop living.

Braided river coming out of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, eastern portion

Like wild waters, every form of trespass in every fold of Earth has its own flavor, its own unique ecology. Trespassing, really, is what this newsletter is about.

I am writing this at a cabin near a lake where my family used to camp regularly when I was growing up. I have many memories of this place. Most of them are not great—my childhood was defined by fear, violence, and poverty—but the ones that involve the water itself feel so lively, so embedded as small sparks of joy, that by now, in my fourth year staying here alone as an adult, I feel welcome.

This lake knows me. And I her—the pounding falls at the far end, pouring out of the western half of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the mountains still covered in snow at the end of April. The Loon that called this morning (stupid Canadian wolf-bird for you fellow Heated Rivalry fans; shout-out to my younger sister for getting me hooked on that show), the Eagle that soared for hours yesterday, the Red-breasted Nuthatch I spent some time watching clear out a nest cavity, and the Ruby-crowned Kinglets who will not shut up.

The Grizzly Bear whose very fresh, very large pawprint on the trail turned me right around a couple years ago. The memories of my sisters and me jumping from the rope swing you could only, in those days, reach by canoe. The laughter of children and murmurs of lovers echoing across the water for hundreds of generations before colonialism sought to dominate these places.

Caddisfly casings, like rivers, aren’t built like nuclear bunkers. If you watch them for long enough, you can see the insects crawl partway out the end now and then, gather more material and wiggle back inside. Their boundaries are fluid, like water. Like life.

Waters trespass against the demands of a world that asks too much, gives too little, and yet somehow is still granted so much life, so much abundance, that nature’s generosity is almost a trespass itself. Against capitalism’s need for scarcity. Against the desire of a few to own everything. And against our own fear that we’ll never survive it all.

When the world shut down

by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment on When the world shut down
Making tracks next to Black Bear’s in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, Montana. What story would someone 100,000 years from now stitch together from our footprints?

Somewhere between 112,000 and 121,000 years ago, a person walked along the muddy residue of a lake that today is so long gone it might be found only in myth. And maybe not even there—the oldest known story of humankind reaches back only 100,000 years.

Whoever walked those shores, whoever it was who pressed their toes in the mud of an area that has recently been called Alathar, left a ghost of their own life behind: seven of their footprints were fossilized and remained long after the land turned to desert and became known as Saudi Arabia. Left alone, the fossilized footprints could remain long after even the memory of that country—of all the nation-states we know now—disappears.

In my book A Walking Life, I wrote about another set of fossilized footprints, left by another species of hominin (likely Homo antecessor) between 850,000 and 900,000 years ago, on the coast of what is now Norfolk in England. Those footprints included children—an indication that the people were living in that relatively inhospitable climate, not just a group passing through in search of food.

Cast of 850,000- to 900,000-year-old footprints found on the coast of Norfolk, England. Thanks to Dr. Nick Ashton of the British Museum, whose team found the footprints, and who spent hours talking with me about walking, paleoanthropology, and migration. And who let me sit in awe while holding these casts.

In reports of findings like these, timeframes are given casually: “between 112,000 and 121,000 years ago”; “between 850,000 and 900,000 years ago.” In the case of Dink’inesh’s people—Australopithecus afarensis, of which Dink’inesh, popularly known as “Lucy,” was one—it’s 3.2 million years ago, such a vast reach of time it’s usually not even given a range.

Can you imagine how many lives, worlds, stories, are folded into even one decade of those hundred thousand- or million-year time ranges? Eyes reflecting the starscape and watching every rise of Sun, following the phases of Moon, ears tuned to the rustle and brush of trees, feet wandering in search of food or some other urge of the heart or mind familiar to us, leaving a ghost of story on the shores of Alathar.

Lingering on the life of just one person in that vast stretch of years can make time feel infinite. It often makes me wonder: How have we survived this long?

The first year or two of Covid have come up in conversation frequently over the last several months. Quiet, muttered exchanges with women I meet briefly or barely know, mentioning how Covid broke them. Mothers especially, and people working in the health care industry, anyone with a disability or long-term illness, caregivers, and many working in the service industry. It has always stuck in my head that, at least for the first year of the pandemic, the cohort with the highest death rate were line cooks. When I think of my own years dishwashing, prep cooking, and waiting tables to make ends meet, and the chronic exhaustion and lack of health care access combined with poor ventilation and the heat and steam of a commercial kitchen, it makes sense.

When I’m in conversation with other mothers in particular, all I can say in response is that Covid broke me, too.

Six years ago, the world shut down. That’s what we say. Though heaven forbid anyone in a caring or serving profession shut down.

Six years ago, the world shut down. But during that shutting down, much of the world re-enlivened, like the water and air overstressed by billions of people dependent on fossil fuels.

And for a brief time, care and mutual aid were considered governmental priorities. For a brief time, before such community and public-minded thinking was considered too risky to economic growth.

Even before governments large and small ditched that modicum of responsibility, the amount of effort required simply to hold a family together was crushing. And afterward? The only comparison I can think of is the final book of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, in which a weapon called Dual-Vector Foil is deployed, curving spacetime to flatten entire solar systems and all the life within them from three dimensions into two. My life felt like that, crushed under immense gravity and flattened beyond repair.

Cross-stitch by Amy, one of my oldest friends and among my favorite people.

Six years we’ve been living not only with the virus and its continuing risk, but also with that whisper of a promise—what a society could be if care, kinship, and an ethos of community were our priorities.

Despite persistent Long Covid effects in many aspects of my own health, the beginning of that six years feels like a lifetime ago.

Somewhere between 112,000 and 121,000 years ago, a hominin person walking along the shores of a lake was having their own six years. In that timespan, hundreds of generations of peoples had six years that to us, to now, feels so inconsequential that we mention 9,000 years as if it’s nothing. A brief period. One in which entire civilizations could rise and fall and be forgotten. Entire creation stories shared and spread and handed down from so many ancestors that their beginnings can only be found in rock itself.

The persons walking the Norfolk coast that 850 or 900 thousand years ago had children with them. Their footsteps are scattered and energetic, like those of any kid intent on the world around them. I wonder sometimes if it was their parents with them, or aunties and uncles, grandparents, other relatives, all of the above. Human infants are uniquely helpless among mammals; we evolved to work in community to care for our young and help one another survive. There’s a reason our species is described as being obligatorily social. Hominin brains evolved to be interdependent.

That is, humans are wired to respond to one another, to rely on and trust one another. We might also have learned how to manipulate, dehumanize, and reject one another, but that reality can’t change billions of years of evolution.

Living lockdown “care for one another” art by my younger kid, circa 2020

I recently finished editing an incredible book that will be published next year, by the neuroscientist Dr. Ruth Feldman. Our ability to love and care for one another, to treat all life as relations, goes back, I learned from Dr. Feldman, to the earliest evolution of life on this planet, before hominins or any other mammals even walked this Earth—before there was even much Earth to walk.

Our own species, Homo sapiens, is estimated to be around 300,000 years old, give or take. Barely a hairsbreadth on Earth’s timeline. And yet we’re still the inheritors of evolution’s incredible gifts—of the ability to walk upright and use our clever hands, but also of the highest intelligence of all: how to care for one another. How to love and be loved. How to value life.

Thousands of years of “civilization” have never yet broken that inheritance, though it has tried repeatedly. The determination to keep wealth and power flowing to a few needs a different kind of shut down, that of our stronger evolutionary instincts, the ones that allow us to simply care for one another.

The continued press and violence of domination societies leave us with a choice each of us makes every day, consciously or not: Do you give up, or do you stand by your values and what you know to be moral and just? What are you willing to compromise, or to risk, so that the world might become welcoming to all, so that future generations might have a chance for a fully realized life?

Before my father returned to Russia most recently, we had lunch together, and I got him to tell me again the story of a family relative, his Uncle Oskar, who came home from World War I in 1918 to find German soldiers occupying his village in Ukraine, a German captain living in his mother’s house and treating her as a servant. “He expressed his displeasure in a very aggressive way,” as my father describes it, and fled through a window when the captain took out his gun. Oskar then had to escape, secretly and on foot, to Romania, where he worked as a doctor in the next war.

We meandered to more recent history, my father’s 30 years running a small coffee roasting company in Moscow, Russia, and his regret at not having made better use of the contacts and connections he made during those decades.

Aleksandr (Sasha) Malchik: “If you’re a businessperson, you have to use this.”

Me: “As much as you wanted to be successful, and to be visible, and public, and seen, in my experience of you as my dad—for my entire life—I have never known you to want a relationship to be transactional.

And as far as I’ve seen of people who use it the way you’re ‘meant’ to, the ‘right’ way, those relationships are always transactional. Always. Even the personal ones. . . .

Anybody who doesn’t treat those relationships as transactional is shifting the paradigm, even if it feels like those opportunities slipped away. . . . That’s huge.”

Even when it feels like we’re losing, if we’re living relationally, there’s a chance that in the long run we might be winning.

I would bet a jar of chokecherry jelly that the person walking the shore of Alathar 100,000-some years ago dealt with manipulators and abusive people, greedy leaders and selfish relatives. I would also bet that there were plenty of others who weren’t. That maybe, even, the manipulators and abusers and selfish people became outcasts from the community. As David Wengrow and David Graeber covered comprehensively in their book The Dawn of Everything, humans have formed pro-social and community-minded societies, as well as destructive power-rewarding ones, all over the world, many, many times over the past few thousand years.

Depending on who you are and what kind of agency you have, there is an element of choice in these formations. An enslaved person in 4000 BCE Uruk—6,000 years ago—had almost no choices. But the middle class and elites probably did. And so do many of us.

How and where to take action, what to do in the fact of injustice and violence, are questions constantly in the ether. They follow a deeper question, one that asks us to sink into our evolutionary inheritance and decide at every moment, in every encounter, whether with humans or not: am I being relational, or am I being transactional?

And likewise, to have the discernment to know when we ourselves, or others, are being treated transactionally rather than in relationship. This second aspect can be more difficult: it can be easy to excuse how someone treats people in their personal life when we perceive their public actions as beneficial, without realizing the interpersonal and even soul-level harm that’s perpetuated by private cruelty and lack of personal accountability.

One of the gifts of the work I do, whether when editing, or research and writing, is being constantly reminded of the vast timeframes of human existence, and the even vaster ones of life itself. One of the fossils I wrote about in A Walking Life is of Sahelanthropus tchadensis, dated to around six or seven million years ago.

There is nothing that has made me believe in miracles and magic more than getting grounded in the millions of years and countless tiny shifts of evolutionary biology that somehow resulted in our own lives, in today. Excuse my language, but it’s fucking awesome. It really is.

Somewhere in that biological history we evolved a capacity for partnership, interdependence, and caring, and it’s been far more influential in our continuing evolution than traits for domination and competition. I don’t know how the latter started to become predominant in human societies reaching back nearly 10,000 years ago—there are theories related to a shift from hunter-gather to settled agricultural societies and the subsequent rise of city-states—nor do I know fully how to make the former the expected norm again.

But I think we can begin by each strengthening our own innate capacity for relationship. By slowing down, observing and being part of the lives we exist within; by getting to know people well enough to see them clearly, and ourselves well enough to see us clearly.

We all have the right, and the capacity, to shape a world around relationship.

Billions of feet are wandering Earth right now. Each of them leaves a story, whether it’s fossilized for the study of scientists and poets 100,000 years from now or not. Whether those stories will show future generations our time’s shift from harm to care, from extraction to kinship, rests partly on obvious and visible choices our societies make now, but also on the thousands of imperceptibly small steps each of us takes next.

Bound for hell

by Antonia Malchik2 Comments on Bound for hell
Sergeiv Posad, outside of Moscow, Russia, winter 2005

My father recently sent me a photo from outside the apartment he and my stepmother share in Moscow. It’s a tiny one-room flat that once belonged to my stepmother’s grandmother, Anastasia Tsvetaeva. Anastasia’s sister, Marina Tsvetaeva, is still one of the most beloved poets in Russia; it was lesser known that Anastasia wrote poetry, too, but the hardship and heartshatter that both women endured is well documented.

I once read Anastasia’s own poetry back to her in that tiny room, poems she’d written in English but could no longer understand. The memory of sitting with her there, next to the piano that took up most of her small room, has the flavor of another time, another life. Sometimes it makes me miss a Russia I never knew.

“No, be assured, my gentle girls, my ardent

And lovely sisters, hell is where we’re bound.”

—Marina Tsvetaeva, from “Bound for Hell,” 1915

The photo my father sent shows snow-covered sidewalks and bare birch trees, someone shoveling in the distance. I have older photos very similar to it—different apartments, different winters, a different someone shoveling in the distance. Different times I’ve sat in small rooms being served cucumbers with dill, or blini pancakes.

Though I was born and mostly raised in Montana, I’ve been homesick for Russia ever since I left in 1991 at the age of 14, just weeks before the coup that collapsed the Soviet Union. Even while watching Moscow and St. Petersburg morph into unrecognizable cities, I missed it, that land, that language, some indefinable, ancient pull. It’s an ache of belonging, and of loss.

I’d like to say my longing is generational, since my father was born in the Ural Mountains and grew up in Leningrad. But his parents weren’t from Russia, at least not as its current borders lie. They were Jewish, and so were confined, as all Jews in the Russian empire were, to shtetls in the Pale of Settlement, the only band of territory Jews were allowed to live, their lives and occupations and movement strictly controlled and their communities at the mercy of violent pogroms. My grandfather came from a small village in Ukraine, my grandmother from another near Belarus.

The history of that entire part of the world is thick like blood. Miles of forests, birch and poplar, and wide grasslands, holding fast through shifting territorial lines and allegiances all through Eastern Europe and the Caucuses, lands and peoples linked by thousands of years of invasion, control, tribute, and trade with the Ottoman and Mongol Empires.

Its history runs like blood, too: there’s the raiding and enslavement of Slavic peoples, who knows how many tens or hundreds of thousands or more kidnapped and sold away from their homes to the wealthy in empires south and west of the Black Sea. That slave route operated unbroken for nearly a thousand years.

There are the Jews whose ancestors had migrated to Europe centuries before, who ended up in lands controlled by the Russian empire after over a thousand years of oppression, expulsion, and massacres so violent and comprehensive that it’s estimated the DNA of almost half of Ashkenazi Jewish people comes from only four mothers. Four women who survived in a community that by their time had been massacred down to a few hundred people.

That land bears other scars, too, ones that run a different kind of heartblood. Lithuanians were the last people in Europe to convert to Christianity, first enduring over a century of invasions and battles pursued by the Crusades, and other pressures from Catholic and Orthodox powers—all that after the previous century’s attacks from the Golden Horde in the north of the Mongol Empire. Jogaila, who in 1386 was crowned king of Lithuania in exchange for being baptised and forcing conversion on his people, subsequently allowed Christian churches to be built for the first time. He also ordered sacred oak trees to be cut down. Household grass snakes, who were kept in homes as protective spirits and were considered dear to the sun goddess Saule, were ordered killed.

The cutting down of sacred groves and the destruction of sacred springs throughout Britain and Ireland as the lands and people were bent to Christianity—having spent previous centuries recovering from Roman occupation—is more well-known than the histories of the same happening throughout the European continent. But those lands, too, are laced with memories of spiritual land, water, and animal connections that power spent centuries erasing, usually with violence.

What became of the people whose cultures the Roman general Tacitus recorded in 98 CE in his Germania—the Vangiones, Triboci, Nemetes, the Gauls, and countless other peoples? Tacitus wrote that their sacred places were trees and waters rather than human-built temples, and he wrote of the role of women in leadership. What memories does the land hold of those peoples? When were their holy trees cut down and how did they cope with the loss?

“To your mad world—one answer: I refuse.”

—Marina Tsvetaeva, from “Poems to Czechoslovakia”, 1939

When I was researching my first book, I read a great deal on the science of epigenetics, related to what’s become known as intergenerational trauma, focusing on the work of scientists like Rachel Yehuda and Lars Bygrov.

“What Yehuda found in her early research was that the children of Holocaust survivors were three times more likely to develop PTSD if exposed to a traumatic event than were demographically similar Jewish people whose parents were not Holocaust survivors. This is not, to be clear, a change in a person’s genetics; it’s a change in how a person’s genes will respond to their particular environment.”

Yehuda repeated those results in studies of the children of women who were pregnant and present at the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center. Other researchers have shown epigenetic effects in children whose mothers survived the Dutch Hunger Winter; and still more comes from Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart’s research on historical trauma in Native American people. Epigenetics is still a relatively new field, but its conclusions about intergenerational trauma are well established.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917 that overthrew the tsardom in favor of communism, my grandparents came to Leningrad. They walked straight out of the pogroms, massacres, restrictions, and theft of children that Jews had endured for over 2000 years, a history that had not yet ended when they each left their villages behind to help build a new nation.

My grandparents, Jacob and Anna, enjoyed an extremely short few years of believing they could finally live and work in the world simply as people. A few years, before Russia’s—and especially dictator Joseph Stalin’s—anti-Semitism kicked back in. They endured returned restrictions on Jewish people, Stalin’s paranoia and threats of violence against and expulsion of Jews, and then the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, which my grandfather barely managed to survive, almost becoming one of the thousands dying each month of starvation. Jacob and Anna endured war and poverty, dictatorship and societal upheaval, and never escaped the millennia of prejudice and hate that had stalked their ancestors.

I’ve often wondered what of their experiences I carry in my own genes. And that of their parents and their parents and on and on and on. Those histories, and my own personal traumas, made their way into my children, through the blood and cells we shared as they became. The effects that accumulation will have on their lives is unpredictable.

As far as I know, there is no study on intergenerational trauma that gives it an end date, an end generation.

I read a study a while back on probable PTSD symptoms showing up in the medical records of men of ancient Mesopotamia who’d been at war. The reports say they were haunted by ghosts. What happened to the man of 14th-century BCE who’d just come home from his mandatory three-year rotation in the Assyrian army? Could he find healing in the land, or in his children; or did his pain turn inward to depression or outward to attack others?

What happened to the young mother in 1226 who’d been kidnapped by slave traders in her Swedish village and found herself serving in an Ottoman household? Did she ache for home, for the relatives and sacred trees and waters she’d been torn from? What happened to those people’s children, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and those of their villages and nations?

What happens to us?

Patrick Teahan, a licensed therapist who maintains a YouTube channel specializing in childhood trauma, recently posted a video of a bit of his own family history: One day in the winter of 1920, his great-grandmother, who had just days before given birth to twins, was at home in County Kerry, Ireland, when members of the Black and Tans, a paramilitary British force, dragged her, her newborn twins, and the rest of her children, outside while the soldiers raided their home.

Teahan’s grandfather, who was 14 at the time, came home to find the house ransacked. His mother died the next day. The experience, Teahan says, reverberated in cycles of violent abuse, from his grandfather to his father and onto him.

“My grandfather’s home invasion was 106 years ago. The trauma didn’t just pocket in 1920 and filter out. It went through the generations until someone did something different.”

His point in telling the story is to demonstrate the ways intergenerational trauma plays out. He gave background on who the Black and Tans were, how they were recruited and trained, and the enormous violence they inflicted on Irish people; and the parallels between their makeup, recruitment, and training, and that of the U.S. government’s ICE terrorists today. Those who inflict violence on others, he reminds us, are rarely rewarded in the end—power will discard them as soon as they no longer serve a use. In Teahan’s words, “Power does not love you,” but all have to live with what they have done. Many Black and Tans, when the the force was disbanded, were rehired and posted to then British-ruled Palestine.

Teahan’s story reminded me of Arnold Schwarzenneger’s personal video a few years ago, about his father, an angry man hiding in alcohol, the inevitable outcome of rage and shame many men experienced after participation in World War II as Nazi soldiers:

“They drank to numb their pain. Their bodies were riddled with injuries and shrapnel from the evil of war, and their hearts and their minds were equally riddled with guilt. . . . They were all broken in the same way.”

The perpetrators of violence have to live with what they have done, but so do their victims, and descendants of both not even born.

It wouldn’t surprise me to know that all of us carry widely varying degrees of ancestral hardship, oppression, violence, and shame deep in our marrow. I wonder about the grief of those who saw the sacred groves felled or witnessed the massacres of their mothers, sisters, and brothers as witches; and what is carried by those who themselves participate in massacres of people, and what each passes onto their descendants, and for how long.

I wonder, a lot, about my own lineage, how an ancestral legacy of fear and oppression and violent prejudice that extends back millennia can transmute itself. How it turns, in cases like my grandparents, to unshakeable moral codes of honesty, hard work, and generosity; yet in others warps into a strangely shaped sense of entitlement, license to perpetuate the violence of generations on others.

The neurochemical balance that helps humans maintain a sense of right and wrong, love and hate, is shaped by shadows, some of them ancient, some of them hiding in our own cells.

Maybe my yearning for Russia is a short intergenerational root, or maybe it comes simply from having lived there and fallen in love with it as a teen. Maybe if I visited my grandfather’s Ukrainian village I’d feel something entirely different, something closer to what I feel in Montana, as if I want to spend every day of the rest of my life walking the lands barefoot and drinking the waters unfiltered. Or maybe I’d feel the terror of generations living with that land under the threat of violence and expulsion, never quite able to feel safe, never able to feel at home. Never feeling a sense of belonging at all.

The say ars longa, vita brevis—roughly translated as “skill takes time, life is short”—but maybe vita is far longer than we care to think about. One story might take a lifetime to write well, but it draws on years and generations beyond count.

Our stories don’t just live on by being told. They live on because the lives of those long gone are carried as complex messages in our DNA, as sparks in our hearts. They live on because we live on.

“A kiss on the forehead—erases memory.”

—Marina Tsvetaeva, “a kiss on the forehead,” 1917

Healing Long Covid

by Antonia Malchik2 Comments on Healing Long Covid
Alpenglow somewhere near home, Bald Eagles somewhere nearby

Recently, I stopped at the county landfill to tip my recycling into their dedicated bins. The region I live in doesn’t have much recycling. Cardboard, paper, and aluminum cans. No plastics. We used to have glass recycling but the person who owned that equipment got ill, and nobody else has been able to find enough market for the recycled products from glass. I pay for a weekly compost service, which makes me feel a little better, especially when I order compost from them in the spring and bury seed potatoes in it.

Going to the landfill is both gut-wrenching and surreal. When I was a teenager, the dump was a pit in the ground. Now it’s an ever-growing small mountain. A few years ago, the county I live in purchased 90 more acres to expand the landfill, a reality that’s a bit of a brain-twister: arable, beautiful, life-giving, and expensive land is needed so that we can dump our waste, probably most of which is the result of entirely unnecessary consumption, including my own. All I can say is that most of that waste stays local. There is no out of sight out of mind; you can see the landfill just off the main highway.

The recycling bins are near the appliance dump: a growing hill of dishwashers, washing machines, stoves, and refrigerators backed by stands of spruces and lodgepole pines.

I often see Bald Eagles at the dump. While the sight is sad—it’s obviously the trash that draws them there—a Bald Eagle never fails to be majestic. The soul bows, as I wrote once, at the sight of that grand white head, or the speckled one of a juvenile, those enormous wings almost unmoving through the air, staying aloft with only an occasional downdraft.

This time, I glanced around for Ravens and instead saw a Bald Eagle fly to the top of a tree. Then I looked more closely, my car still running with Nine Inch Nails on the CD player, and couldn’t help saying out loud to myself, whoa.

I counted fifteen Bald Eagles roosting around the appliance area of the landfill, occasionally lifting off to soar over to another tree. Fifteen Bald Eagles.

When I was a kid, I could not have imagined such a sight, at the dump or anywhere else. From consuming DDT in fish and other dangers—like the lead from hunting bullets that linger in animals the Eagles eat—Bald Eagles were in crisis. It was something we learned about in Montana schools, or at least the ones I attended. A passing mention: they were an endangered species but the adults had it covered, we were assured. They were fixing it.

I’m going to turn 50 this year, and for about the last decade those long-ago lessons have been one of the most hopeful things I carry with me, somewhat unexpectedly. Bald Eagles were delisted from being endangered in 2007, and though we obviously live in a world run by a domination ethos, one that does not value life and in which there are very few adults “fixing” anything, a dominant culture whose soul does not bow to Eagle overhead, whether in the wilderness or at the dump, I now see Bald Eagles quite often. As a child growing up in Montana I can barely remember seeing even one.

A week or two after counting fifteen of them at the dump, I was away for a weekend with some of my closest friends, near home but out of town, with long views to the mountain ranges and over farm fields. Two of my friends kept spotting Bald Eagles flying back and forth over the fields, and resting in the trees across the road. I took a few very bad photos of said Eagles. We cooked food and smelled the snow and two friends taught me and another to play pinochle.

All my friends but me ventured out for forest walks and cross-country skiing. Much as my physical and mental self ached to be moving through the woods, I am only just beginning to feel a bit of strength and stamina return after at least two years of being flattened by Long Covid, and recovering from a hip surgery in October.

The reality of Long Covid has been maddening. I’m tired all the time, struggle with brain fog, really feel like I shouldn’t be driving but where I live it’s almost unavoidable, and want nothing more than to lie for hours in the sun by a river. Any river.

Last summer I regretfully canceled my volunteer wilderness trail crew commitment and didn’t sign up for a single barbed wire fencing removal weekend. My entire being desperately needed wilderness, and barbed wire removal in particular is one of the world-repairing tasks I like doing most, but I knew I couldn’t handle the long miles of hiking into camp, much less the longer days of manual labor.

Long Covid has no real fixes from medicine yet. I am very fortunate to have a number of friends with extensive experience on both sides of medicine, both providers and patients. They have advice, and send me scientific studies and reports of treatment trials. I try different remedies. So far, what’s worked best has been excrutiatingly slow, gentle exercise, along with any long hours I can spend by myself lying on rocks near running water, doing nothing at all.

I hesitate to say that nature cures, even though I believe it does and research backs that up, but it feels like about the only thing that might work in the long run.

The slow, frustrating reality of trying to heal Long Covid—which I don’t even know is possible—reflects a little too closely the slow, frustrating nature of trying to heal the scars left by several millennia of domination cultures and subsequent intergenerational traumas. If we could just get a start, I keep thinking, the way I finally got a start on slow, frustrating exercise by grumbling my way to the community gym last month because the sewer backed up into my basement and I needed a place with a shower.

But all those forces of domination and commodification, they don’t want to give room for a start. They might lose profits, and they might lose power, and for people whose only sustenance, whose only meaning, comes from those two things, the thought of losing them probably feels like death.

The rest of us have to find our way to stopping them anyway. And in the meantime, as I try to remind both myself and readers here, there are people all over the planet getting a start on healing, on revitalization and life-giving practices, on reclaiming the commons despite forces that want nothing but more extraction, more oppression, more pain and poison and harm.

The only reason humanity has survived this long is that enough people have fundamentally refused to give up caring, no matter how slow or how frustrating its results might be in coming.

While hanging out on the couch of the house my friends and I were staying at, where Bald Eagles flew across much prettier landscape than that found at the dump, I thought about longstanding debates over what is deemed “natural.” About why wilderness was invented in the first place, and why protection of it is fought for: quite simply, because the dominant culture can’t seem to help destroying everything else.

I had an essay published recently in American Prairie Journal with the title “Where Land Repairs the Soul.” (My essay is on p. 38, or 40 on the Issuu platform; excellent reading throughout this issue!) Among the subjects of enclosures of the commons and the meaning of wilderness, the essay was really about belonging. About what it would take for every person in every place to feel, even for a few moments, what it might mean to belong to land. Not to own it, not even necessarily to use it. Simply to belong to it.

That sense of belonging comes easily to me out in the million-acre wildernesses around where I live, where I take photos to share here, photos that try to evoke some of the incredible sense of rest and being-aliveness those places give me.

But if I take enough time and give enough attention, I feel it, too, at the dump, watching a Bald Eagle soar and knowing right through the soles of my feet that under and even within the appliances and mountain of trash, everything is alive. I can never disentangle myself from interconnection with it all even if I wanted to.

And I don’t. I don’t want to. Learning to repair both the world and our individual selves might turn out to be one of the greatest gifts humanity has ever received, right below the gift of this miraculous planet herself. I wish the repair weren’t necessary, but it’s a process worth doing well. Who knows what this landfill will look like in a hundred years, or five hundred, or a thousand, what world the Bald Eagles’ descendants might know.

Your trash might be a Bald Eagle’s treasure, and in some strange way it’s mine, too.

One truth to rule them all

by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment on One truth to rule them all

–or none

Bohemian Waxwings’ New Year’s Eve feast: Mountain Ash berries

Nearly two decades ago, I had a premature baby. “Had a baby” is a strange phrase, isn’t it? It sounds so simple, like having a loaf of bread, or an itch. Whereas even in the best circumstances there is nothing simple about “having a baby.” My son’s and my circumstances were hardly the best—I’d come down with HELLP Syndrome, an extremely rare and almost always deadly pregnancy-related illness. Its only treatment is delivery of the baby, no matter how underdeveloped they might be.

My son had nearly 8 weeks to go, time he needed for his lungs to develop and time to grow larger than his 4 pounds. But either he came out or I died of liver failure, there was no other choice.

So while I was unconscious, he was taken out by Caesarian section and whisked off to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. I was wheeled to Normal Adult Intensive Care, where I complained all night every time the machines started shrilling at me, and my then-spouse told me, each time, that they were beeping because I’d stopped breathing.

My son, who survived, spent a month in the NICU. That month remains one of the worst periods of my life. For the first ten days in particular, I had no idea whether he was going to make it or not, and nobody involved in his care was making any promises.

I spent a lot of exhausted hours in the NICU being terrified, reading to my infant in his incubator and engaging in what was, at that time, a known but not widely used practice called Kangaroo Care. The NICU nurses had told me about it. Every day they set me up in a nursing rocker chair with pillows for support and a blanket over my shoulders because I was shirtless, and handed my baby over. I held my son for hours like that, skin to skin, his oxygen and various monitors still attached, dangling wires between my arms. His heart and lungs repaired until, finally, he could breathe on his own. And so could I.

Kangaroo Care was first used in hospitals in Colombia, and it was found that premature babies held in this way, skin to skin, actually fare better than babies warmed and held in incubators. In many ways it’s an obvious practice—of course human newborns need to be held!—and in others revelatory.

I recently had a conversation with Ruth Feldman, the scientist who has done the world’s leading research on Kangaroo Care and its effects on health outcomes, about her decades of related work on “synchrony” and the neurobiology of attachment.

It was a mind-blowing conversation that I hope will lead to more, and reminded me of a book I often return to, Rianne Eisler’s Nurturing Our Humanity. In that book, Eisler—better known for her classic The Chalice and the Blade—draws on decades of research on authoritarianism and its adherents, in particular the correlation between authoritarian upbringings and later tendencies to vote for and support authoritarian leaders.

As Eisler points out in her later chapters, it is a continuing folly to assume that how children are raised has little or nothing to do with the eventual shape and character of the society they live in.

These ideas circle around what has become, for me, one of the most pressing problems of our time: the fracturing of societal and interpersonal trust.

A friend recently sent me a New York Times article about artificial intelligence, detailing some of large language models’ (LLMs, which is most of what is called AI actually is) lifelessness and predictability when it comes to written prose. In response, I told my friend that I’ve been thinking a lot about how the widespread adoption of large language model chat tools for uses like therapy, friendly conversation, and editorial feedback is indicative less of the usefulness of the tools than it is of how bedraggled human trust has become.

When you don’t, or can’t, trust other people with your secrets, your heart, your pain, your struggles, or even to give helpful and non-shaming editorial feedback on a piece of writing, it’s the most natural instinct in the world to turn to systems that feel objective, intelligent, and firm yet supportive. Systems that have been trained enough in the ability to predict natural language patterns that they feel real. They also, it seems to me, feel to many people like the kind of nurturing they didn’t receive in early childhood, like the friendships and close human relationships a crisis of loneliness makes little room for.

Where do we put our trust if it seems that all else, especially all things human, have failed us?

I was close personal friends with someone for several years who I know now to be one of the most self-serving, deceptive, and manipulative people I have ever met, someone who has sabotaged good causes and projects and taken credit for other people’s work.

This person has a large public following, speaks and writes passionately on issues that are close to my heart and the hearts of many, and appears at events and in photos with others who are admired and respected. Yet I know from my and others’ experiences that every aspect of the public image this person creates serves only to increase their own status and access to wealth.

How, I have wondered, would most people ever have a clue about this person’s true nature? I can hardly judge anyone else’s ignorance. After all, despite small early misgivings, I spent years in seeming friendship believing this person was who they presented themselves to be.

Between the adoption of and misplaced trust in LLMs and the ease with which manipulative people can twist good causes and good hearts to their own ends, human trust feels like the psychological equivalent of a broken road in a wracked land, crumbling to pieces, pitted with sinkholes and buried land mines, its clear tracks disappearing under dust and the growth of new life.

In a world where anyone can use digital tricks to manipulate and deceive, and those who don’t wish to go that route can simply use their innate abilities to do the same, how do you know whom to trust, or what?

Where, even, does trust come from—our judgment, our experiences, our gut feelings? Or maybe that neurobiology of connection, wired in early childhood to tell us what is safe, no matter how misguided those instincts might have become.

Who knows.

I have said on this newsletter that learning about the Doctrine of Discovery might be one of the most important annual goals for anyone who wants to see a better world. I still believe that’s true, but we need to know ourselves, too.

Outside learning will always hit a barrier if we do not match it with equivalent learning inside each of us.

Over the past many years there have been several writers and thinkers I gravitated toward whom I later become disillusioned with. I’m starting to think that getting to know the answer to “why”—what drew me to them? what did I miss early on?—might be more serious than I’ve given it credit for. I have found, and maybe you have too, that truths I once held close can morph into something unrecognizable.

Do I, or you, trust someone because of the work they’ve done or claim to have done, because of their identity, because of whom they associate with? Is that trust warranted? How do we know?

Maybe we can no more “have” trust than we can have a baby. The moment you have a baby, after all, is the moment you will never fully have that baby again. Over time, they slip away, growing and changing and becoming their own entity apart from us, as they should. Maybe trust is the same.

But maybe research into human connection can show where the broken road of human trust might also, in part, be repaired, so that we can see it clearly, if only for an instant before it disappears again.

When that road has vanished in my own life, I have always been able to turn not to other humans or some digital comfort, but to the living world. In Chasing Nature recently, Bryan Pfeiffer wrote far more beautifully than I could of the power of life in rooting us to where we are:

“Plants are rooted, literally and figuratively. They exist or do not owing to location, climate, bedrock, soil, fungi, microorganisms, and the brute forces of humanity: culture, economics, hubris. Plants are perhaps the most genuine expressions of history and place and community — a natural community. They grounded me as well.”

Like Bryan, I find grounding in the natural world. It’s also where I reorient—to myself, and what I think I know to be true.

I don’t know where this world is going. I know the changes I’d like to see and the healing I desperately wish for—for rivers, for trees, for Cutthroat Trout and Goldfinches, for Elk and Bison, for Long-horned Bees and Caddisflies, and for the human heart.

In the meantime, all I know is that it makes sense to hold one another, and the world, until we can all breathe again.

On greed: how much is enough?

by Antonia Malchik5 Comments on On greed: how much is enough?

The North Fork of the Flathead River, northwest Montana.

A few days ago, I was sitting by this river, near a U.S. Forest Service cabin where I went recently for a sorely needed offline, off-grid, off-network recalibration. It’s been too long since I sat in the woods by myself for a few days.

Late October, the larch trees have yellowed, turning mountainsides bright and the woods full of unexpected sunshine even on gloomy days. Larch in autumn is a spirit-lifter, an anti-demon spell, a joyous shaft of light when the world is shifting dark.

It snowed the first night I was at the cabin. I trekked down to the river carrying my coffee the next morning before sunrise, happy despite knowing that in my rush to pack water, food, sleeping bag, and books, I’d grabbed a coat too thin and decided against snow boots—a mistake and I knew it, as the hole in the sole of the thin canvas shoes I’ve been intending to replace reminded me.

Ravens flew down the river and high above the trees, more than I usually see at this place. I could hear more further off in the woods and wondered what was keeping them so social. I wondered that for the next three days and never got an answer. They sounded not anxious exactly, but somewhat like me getting my stuff ready to stay in the woods and my kid packed up to stay at their dad’s: busy, harried, organized but frazzled.

The river at that spot is wide, its rapids gentle but the rushing tumble of water strong enough to be heard a long way off.

I watched some rapids tumbling around opposite bank from where I sat, the burble and leap over hidden rocks tricking my mind into thinking they looked like two otters playing in the water.

Wait, I thought. Those are two otters playing in the water.

I recently spent several days pitting, pureeing, and dehydrating a vast amount of plums picked from a friend’s trees—trees so heavy with fruit that after an hour of filling my bucket, the branches looked untouched. My friend had already picked and dehydrated his own many batches of fruit leather from his other trees, which ripen earlier, but I’d been too busy with the rest-of-life, the crises and plans and bureaucracies and commitments that translate into too little time in the garden and out foraging.

But this one bucket made it into my home, my fingers purpled dry by the slicing and pitting and feeding to the blender—a many bladed monster that, as I texted to the friend I’m renting a furnished house from, looks like something from a horror movie.

In the kitchen now is enough fruit leather and dried apples—from another friend’s August generosity—to see my kid and me through the winter if we’re not too greedy.

How does one get that way? Too greedy. Or perhaps the question is, how does a human, or a whole society of humans, lose perspective on what is enough?

From fruit to food

I recently finished Caroline Dodds Pennock’s book On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe, and in it Pennock described briefly the value of cacao beans in Mesoamerica in the late 1400s and early 1500s, which were a form of wealth: a turkey egg or avocado could cost three beans, a small rabbit thirty.

Only the very wealthy could feast with gourds of cacao to drink; when resource-hungry European people came, claimed, and took, they took so much that even just reading about it felt like watching land being actively drained of life: gold, emeralds, brazilwood, cacao, people.

And yet, as many Indigenous people of the time noted after having spent time in the “noble” houses of Seville and Lisbon, no matter how much wealth was siphoned from their homelands, it did nothing to change the circumstances of ordinary European peoples. The poverty of the majority of people’s lives was often remarked on, especially when contrasted with the opulence of royalty and their hangers-on.

How much is enough?

What breaks a belief in kinship and reciprocity—how does one lose the knowledge that it is mutual care, not taking more for ourselves, that gives the best assurance of security?

I’d like to have a functional health care system that doesn’t bankrupt people, and to not worry about food and housing, but beyond a certain point can’t imagine an amount of money that would replace the kinds of relationships woven among people, and between humans and ecosystems, inherent in nature sharing gifts so wealthy that even multiple families can’t use them all—like my friends’ plum and apple trees, or the potatoes and strawberries I grow, or the wild huckleberries throughout the nearby mountains—and in people sharing them with one another.

Maybe “enough” is forever undefinable, guided only by that clear thread of relationship and reciprocity, of what keeps life life-ing.

There were in fact two otters in the river. I watched them for a long time, absolutely filled with delight. They tumbled and rolled upstream, all along the far shore, their sleek bodies and tiny whiskered heads popping out of the water every few seconds, their slim tails flying up to dive back down.

I wanted to step into my real skin, like a Selkie, and swim across the freezing water to join them. I wanted to not feel the frozen ground so acutely through my thin-soled shoes, to be indifferent to the bite of chill wind through my inadequate coat. I wanted to dance a song to Moon that night and to know each Raven by name, and to soar with the Bald Eagle who circled over the river downstream, toward the new-snowed mountains.

I wanted these minutes to be my entire life. I was, in fact, greedy for them to last forever.

How to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich

by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment on How to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
Bison Bison, free-roaming Buffalo, eastern Montana

When I was in sixth grade, ten years old, my family moved briefly to Chico, California. My father, then an electrical engineer, had gotten a job there after being laid off from his firm near my hometown—Belgrade, Montana.

I was only in school in Chico for two months, but my teacher, Mr. Davis, made a lasting impression on me. Even at that age it was obvious how hard he worked to give everyone in the class an education tailored to their needs and strengths. Nearly forty years later, I still have my Davis Dollars, which he used as a reward system with which we could purchase certain classroom privileges, and I still remember his kindness, energy, ability to connect with kids, and his creative, innovative lessons.

One of those lessons was to write instructions for how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. For an alien.

That is, imagine an alien is visiting Earth for the first time and wants to know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and you undertake to teach them.

It sounds simple, but anyone with some experience of algorithms, coding, and perhaps teaching will know where I’m going with this. How do you explain bread, or peanut butter? What about “knife,” “slice,” or “spread”? How do you make the instructions comprehensible to an alien, who has no concept of objects, actions, or ideas you might consider basic?

The lesson was a very early one in computer programming—this was in 1986—and would haunt me in college. My undergraduate degree was in mathematics, which required me to take and pass one computer science course. I dropped the class twice before barely passing it a third time, and each time was reminded of the difficulty I had as a ten-year-old breaking sandwich-making instructions down into granular, specific enough steps that an alien could follow them.

Though mathematics and propositional logic were always difficult for me, they were still far more accessible than computer programming. Programming, counterintuitive as it might seem, has something of the narrative about it. How do you break human relations, actions, and expectations into specific, step by tiny step instructions usable for a computer system?

The peanut butter and jelly sandwich has its corollary in one of the most referenced episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Darmok,” in which Captain Picard must learn how to talk with a species of people who communicate only in metaphor and allegory, using references to stories and myths specific to their own culture.

It is remarkably difficult to understand another human being’s thoughts, motivations, and ideas even amongst people who share a common language. We each carry our own vast experiences into every interaction, mapping our own needs, wants, fears, expectations, and unacknowledged trauma responses onto others.

As someone who writes about complex ideas that counter dominant narratives, particularly regarding private ownership, and perhaps even more as a longtime editor a little obsessed with the worlds and histories contained in every choice of word, this idea of comprehension, and its relationship with compassion, is something I think about all the time. When is compassion enough? When is comprehension necessary?

It’s fascinating, and disheartening, to consider how different, even oppositional, people’s information bubbles are, and how impossible to reach any kind of shared understanding if one’s own comprehension of reality is completely different than another’s.

But there is power, too, in spending time with that difference. I don’t just mean for empathy and understanding, though there is that. I mean for clarity and where to focus one’s energies.

I, for example, live in a small, politically progressive-leaning town in a northwest part of Montana dominated by hard right-wing beliefs, particularly Christian nationalism and anti-government extremism. I pay a lot of attention to local news and issues, far more than I do to national. Doing so is important for many reasons, one of which is that I know which battles I’m not going to win, and why.

Our right-wing county commissioners, for example, do not believe in zoning regulations or in spending government money (except, evidently, on their own salaries). If I want to see a county-wide bike and pedestrian system and actual regional public transportation someday, which I do, it helps to know I shouldn’t waste my energies on arguments focused on good uses of government funds, not with people who believe government funds shouldn’t exist.

And there is no point using arguments for tax policy, universal preschool, bodily autonomy, health care, and other issues that focus on how they affect me as an independent female trying to make a living and support her kids, with locally elected state officials who believe that I should do nothing more than raise those kids and keep house for the husband I never should have left.

If I want to make any headway with those legislators, or more to the point with the people who vote for them, I have to understand that they don’t see me as human, as worthy of equal rights and freedoms, and act accordingly.

The reality that women have been treated as subhuman, disposable, and ownable for at least five thousand years makes this galling, but for the purposes of making any kind of change, at least at the local and regional level, my rage and disgust are only useful if they’re aimed in the right direction, or at least framing the right narratives.

You can’t teach someone how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich if you don’t know how concepts like “peanut butter” or “sandwich” appear in their own minds.

Likewise “freedom,” or “humanity.”

One of the books I read over the last few years that became a touchstone for me was James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games. In it, he plays with many ideas I find intriguing, all circling around the concept of how to live, framed as being a player of games. Of Storytelling, he wrote,

“Storytellers do not convert their listeners; they do not move them into the territory of a superior truth. Ignoring the issue of truth and falsehood altogether, they offer only vision. Storytelling is therefore not combative; it does not succeed or fail. A story cannot be obeyed.”

And while there are an infinite number of finite games,

“There is but one infinite game.”

The photo at the top of this essay was taken on American Prairie land about 400 miles—around 640 kilometers—east of my home. I drove out there to spend a week, for a writing assignment, and spent most of my time thinking about relationships, between people, between humans and animals, between animals and ecosystems, between myself and that place.

It was a place, and time, where I got to linger in the concept of what it feels like when energies are given to relationships and repair, when they’re given to life and how it interconnects, including with humans.

I don’t think of life or society or culture as a game—the phrasing feels to tech-bro-ish maybe, or maybe game theory was, like computer science, a subject I was never much good at—but I still like Carse’s idea of finite and infinite games as a clarifier for living.

For me, and something he alluded to throughout the book, the only game worth winning is the one that enables life to keep living. Teaching an alien to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is a finite game that might or might not be worth doing. Working toward a world in which everyone has enough to eat, not limited to peanut butter-and-anything sandwiches, or even just to sandwiches, is a larger finite game that almost always supports the infinite one. And understanding? What seeks to comprehend, to know another, to soften toward their heart and their suffering? Maybe that’s the infinite game, one we only see glimpses of.

The infinite game sees a world whose laws are relational and life-supportive, where we are all kin with all of creation. And act accordingly.

Thanks to B. Lorraine Smith for a prompt tthat reminded me of that peanut butter and jelly sandwich assignment!

Hope is the heartwood

by Antonia Malchik3 Comments on Hope is the heartwood
Lower Two Medicine Lake, Blackfeet Nation, Montana, host of the 2025 black/death metal music festival Fire in the Mountains

Some years ago when I still lived I upstate New York, I began working at a sawmill. I had two very small children at the time, and had never intended nor desired to be a full-time stay-at-home mom, not to mention be one and working at the same time (due to the full-time stay-at-home mom reality, most of my work happened in the middle of the night, a capacity I no longer have). But I was doing exactly that, and rapidly dying inside because staying at home with children all day is not, to put it mildly, my calling in life.

One of my kids went to part-time preschool twice a week at a nature museum, which also offered adult classes like beekeeping and wild foraging, both of which I took—out of curiosity but also to stay sane—along with rustic woodworking, an activity I’d never imagined myself doing. I am the kind of person who can’t be trusted with a table saw or even, frankly, a spirit level. The rustic woodworking artist who taught the class introduced me to New York Heartwoods, a micro-mill run by a woman (coincidentally, also from Montana) who’d bought a Wood-Mizer LT40 and specialized in milling wood from downed and diseased trees on public and private land.

Working at the sawmill a couple days a week—interning, really, since I was there to learn and wasn’t being paid—helped keep me from going completely numb, from depression and dissociation from life, and it got me into research on embodied learning, but I was also intrigued by the mill’s mission: the owner only worked with fallen or scavenged trees. The point of the mill was to introduce circularity within the wood milling system, which fit right in with efforts I’d been making toward supporting local food systems and fending off long-term despair over single-use plastics.

We worked with a lot of city Ash trees felled by emerald ash borer, and Cedar that had been cleared from farm fields. I spent one entire day planing Cedar planks for someone who’d rescued them, already milled, from her family’s farm and was making an art installation out of them.

Rescued Cedar planks, before planing down to their gorgeous hearts

Another time we spent most of a cold, snowy day dragging out enormous old beams from a fallen barn, taking them back to the mill to be sawn into boards that would be lightly sanded and used to make shelves.

Reclaiming beams from a fallen barn. That’s me in the blue coat and black hat, sometime right before or after I punctured my leg with a 100-year-old nail and went to get a tetanus shot. Photo credit: New York Heartwoods.

The mill’s shady, forested yard was full of beauties, every one of them cared for, whether already milled and kiln-dried or not. I don’t ever plan on moving away from Montana, whose forests are full of soft-wooded Pine and Fir, Aspen and Spruce, but do sometimes miss working with hardwood.

One day, we were milling reclaimed beams from an old barn for a client. Old barn beams are a pain because they’re often full of nails—long, heavy, rusted nails that are hard to spot. We ruined a few blades as hidden nails made it through and wrecked the metal, and finally gave up. That barn beam went back to its owner, or maybe to a scrap pile, joining the piles of beautiful wood resting around the property, testimony to one woman’s commitment to making sure their lives continued.

Barn beams can be a nemesis, too

It only occurred to me later to wonder why we hadn’t taken the time to look for and remove the nails ahead of time, why we sacrificed several saw blades and in the end the beam itself rather than take the time to remove as many nails as we could find and make the wood workable again. It obviously would have been a waste of time, but then again, the entire endeavor could be classified a waste of time, if all we use for measurement are the standards of capital and efficiency.

A couple months ago I succumbed to the urge to crawl through all the essays and posts in this newsletter, starting from the very first essay in late summer 2020, about Marcus Aurelius and my own cognitive disconnects around the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when my older sister was still in the military.

I ended up deleting almost 200 out of nearly 300 essays and posts. Some were from before Substack launched its Twitter-like Notes platform, and were brief photo + quote + sentence or two “walking compositions,” a practice I’d migrated over from my deleted Instagram. Many posts I thought were pointless, and others need more revision work. The ones I kept, I’m slowly revising and recording audio for, since I only started doing audio versions in late 2023 (I’ve made my way through nearly 20, starting from the beginning).

This was actually a super fun process. I played around with my work, scrawling all over posterboard with Sharpie markers, in a way I haven’t in years.

Many of the posts and essays I deleted, I saved in offline Word documents, collecting them by theme. By far, the largest of these collections is one I’ve labeled “Abundance and Commodification,” with over 40 pages of text. Some of what I’ve rewritten here about my time working at a sawmill are lines scavenged from that document.

Out of all the writing I do on the commons, the complementary topics of abundance and commodification—of food and seeds in particular, but of everything in general, including labor, creativity, and ideas—overwhelms the amount I have written about land ownership, which surprised me because I feel like I never shut up about land ownership, and repeat myself to a tiresome degree.

Something about rereading all of those words and stories, and collecting together the ones that I felt needed more editing, or perhaps shaping into a larger, more cohesive project, reminded me of my faith in storytelling, how deeply I believe in its power, and in the world’s need for it. For more stories, stories with heart and truth, as many as possible from as many different perspectives as possible, especially from voices, people, and places who’ve been heard the least. Every iteration, not for the purpose of telling anyone else how to feel or what to think, but sharing the unique experience of what it is to live one’s own individual life. The joy, the pain, the traumas, the grief, the love, the visions and losses and hope.

I don’t think we can ever have enough ways to help ourselves feel what it’s like to live in someone else’s experience.

Yet it often feels like the world is awash in stories. Good stories, important stories. Stories we need to hear and stories we need to tell. Fantastic fiction that opens up possibilities for imagining different ways of living; investigative reporting that unfolds the truth of the world. I have been floored by the work of brilliant documentary filmmakers, by novelists who are bona fide geniuses, many of them personal friends.

And what changes?

It is very easy for the path opened up by that question to lead to despair. I’ve been there myself more than once—I’m there myself more than once on any given day, and I don’t think it’s solely a genetic half-Russian Jewish fatalism. It’s looking at the world, and humans, as clear-eyed as possible. It’s seeing people I believed in and trusted coopt genuine need and good causes for their own benefit; it’s seeing the hard work of millions crash against the walls of capital and power.

But down that path is also possibility. My father used to say, and still does, that the biggest problem in the world is lack of imagination. He meant a capacity to place ourselves in other people’s lives and experiences, a capacity for empathy. It’s both true and bigger than that.

Every story shared is a chip in the systems and structures that seem unbreakable and insurmountable. Most of the time we don’t see what’s changed until long after the fact. Real life isn’t a Hollywood apocalypse movie with sudden shocks to the system and people screaming for the walls. We’ll never know what cracks it all open. But those stories, that work, looking at life slant and seeing what can change, that’s how the light gets in.

After taking my first rustic woodworking class, I couldn’t get enough of working with the diversity of hardwoods that grow and fall in the U.S.’s northeast. I learned about the different high-end uses of varieties of Maple, and how bad Black Locust smells—there is no other way to say it but that Black Locust smells like ass—but also how useful it is. Black Locust is so hard that it can be used in decking. It’s like cement board.

I learned how bacteria and fungi cause spalting and how beautiful its black lines are lacing through decaying stumps or sawn boards. In midwinter, the mill’s owner sent me on a day-long chainsaw safety course, where, after several hours of learning to care for chainsaws and safety equipment and looking at photos of people who’d had horrifying accidents, I stood in knee-deep snow and cut down a Pin Oak. I decided I never wanted to use a chainsaw again because I am clumsy and it was terrifying.

The entire project of New York Heartwoods was at core anti-capital. It was inefficient, time-consuming, space-consuming. Slow. Laborious.

It was an enormous amount of work simply to find markets for the wood products, much less retrieve the trees and logs and mill and kiln-dry and shape and sand it all. That entire day one employee and I spent planing someone’s recovered stack of Cedar planks? The client probably could have bought something similar from IKEA for far less money than that day’s labor cost. Even though I was working at that sawmill for free, nobody else was.

But that’s the point. The work was slow and laborious. And smelled heavenly. I could eat my winter-cold sandwich on a stump of spalted Sugar Maple and smell the melt-snow damp of coming spring. I could peek into the kiln and its stacks of Ash boards. I could do work, and feel alive while doing it.

What does efficiency in our lives get us? The question sits like an invisible monster in the center of capitalism: if “the economy” isn’t there to serve human and ecological well-being, what is the point?

If working with wood by hand gave me and others pleasure and satisfaction, and gave clients connection to their ecosystem and its cycles, why not engage in that kind of work? And why are we prevented from doing that work simply because it doesn’t provide enough income to feed our families?

It’s the reason I recommend reading Wengrow and Graeber’s book The Dawn of Everything as a balm for despair. Or at least listening to interviews about it, or reading summaries. Whatever works. It’s an enormous book and what’s important is the message behind it: there have been countless ways of forming human societies over the past several thousand years. Just because our current industrialized culture feels like some kind of inevitable endpoint doesn’t mean it’s true. Those endlessly varied histories remind us what might be at the core of true freedom.

It also gives an opening into that question, “What changes?” Well, a lot can change. We never know how, not completely. Working toward change for the better doesn’t guarantee success, nor does it guarantee lack of pushback, but without stories we don’t even know how to imagine something different.

I heard someone recently—one of the tarot readers I follow on YouTube—talk about leaning into fear with curiosity. Despair, too, I suppose. That’s where we can find self-empowerment, and perhaps an entirely different way of perceiving both problems and possibilities.

Like in K-Pop Demon Hunters: perhaps a failure to seal the Golden Honmoon isn’t a failure at all. Maybe it’s a way to discover something more powerful and more honest, with a capacity to connect us all.

Me making a bowl out of discarded Maple and an axle grinder in the workshop of Dan Mack, rustic woodworking artist, where I found something akin to hope, by working with my hands at one of the lowest points of my life.