Month: September 2022

Walking composition

“Decolonizing the colonizers is necessary so that they can once again learn how to respect themselves and others.” —As Long As Grass Grows, Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Over the past two or three weeks we’ve been doing a lot of garden harvesting, which means my hands have been very busy. Digging up potatoes, scrubbing carrots, drying onions, throwing on another batch of cucumbers to ferment, cleaning and freezing huckleberries, cleaning and drying mint (my family goes through a lot of mint tea), roasting and canning tomatoes, deciding what to do with the tomatilloes, thinking about hunting season, . . . there is so much involved in gathering and preserving food for the months ahead, so much for my hands to constantly do.

As someone who’s written a great deal about the importance of walking to being human, it struck me as almost funny when I thought this week about the significant role hands—and by extension sitting still to use them—play in my own relationship with life. But it’s a whole-body thing: my feet in their wandering practice a love for the world; most of what my hands do is about a love for human beings, for all our flaws and failings.

Recently, I’ve felt overcome with the uncanny feeling that these hands are a disembodied part of me, a whole different self busy busy busy picking and chopping and digging and lifting and soothing and caring and hardly ever resting. They write, too, and occasionally play music. I forget that sometimes.

It’s made me wonder how many other caregivers—of earth or of people—have this kind of relationship with their hands. What about artists? Musicians? Sheetrockers, finish carpenters, baristas, photographers, lab techs . . . how many people all around you at this very moment are pouring care into their hands, care that you will never see no matter how visible the work itself is?

This seems like a good time to admit that I have never before liked gardening. My parents can both verify this, having witnessed my complaints for many years, including a two-week period in August when I was sixteen and they were in Russia and I failed to water the garden even once. All the peas dried up and died. It was very sad.

This garden has managed to be different, or I managed to be different with it. I like being in there, like watching the bees work the borage, like planting and weeding and picking and turning over. It’s made a difference that it was more of a collective effort than my gardens have been in the past—my father and stepmother did a tremendous amount of digging and planting, along with a retired friend who managed to turn it into a space to grow food rather than mostly thistles and knapweed. But my hands also just plain enjoyed the work for once, like they enjoy so much other work.

Last week Patrick left a comment with a quote from Irish poet Patrick Kavanaugh, whom I’d never heard of before. When I read the whole poem, titled “Sonnet” (I hope I’ve got that right; it was hard to find!), another line hit me: “I am tired / Of loving through the medium of a sonnet.” It brought back to me something I wrote about last year, of being tired of metaphors. Knapweed isn’t white supremacy and thistles aren’t the patriarchy, though they’re very handy metaphors for both (especially as knapweed releases a toxin that makes it hard for other plants to grow, plus wildlife can’t eat it). And the surprising productivity of the garden, despite the clay soil and scant nutrients, isn’t a metaphor for life and birth and death and resilience.

That doesn’t mean metaphors aren’t useful. They’re part of how humans story the world, and I find them necessary when doing science writing because many of the research and concepts are so hard to grasp. But there is something about them that has felt increasingly distancing to me, strangely akin to turning living things and human needs into data points.

The garden didn’t need to become a metaphor for anything. It has had a meaning all its own, its only medium the hands of the people who cared for it.

In his fascinating book The Hand, neurologist Frank R. Wilson lays out a case for the theory that our hands’ evolution and activity shaped hominin brain growth, not the other way around:

“I would argue that any theory of human intelligence which ignores the interdependence of hand and brain function, the historic origins of that relationship, or the impact of that history on developmental dynamics in modern humans, is grossly misleading and sterile.”

Something that happened to a family member recently, a bad hand injury, made me wonder how we might be forced to change if and when our hands can no longer express care in the ways they always have, whether temporarily or forever. How long can I keep picking, hunting, slicing, stirring, serving, stroking, and touching—caring in all the ways that have always come naturally? My hands have been kind to me. I hope I learn not to take them for granted.

I wonder—how many of the metaphors that shape our language and perception come through the use and care of our hands? Maybe it’s not just the brain’s growth that relied on the evolution of human hands, but its ability to transform the world into the stories that in turn mold our lives.

Aspen grove in a forest area near Glacier National Park.

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Before he wrote The Hand, Frank Wilson was interviewed for a 1986 New York Times article in which he made the case that not only can humans learn music at any point in our lives, but that we’re evolved to play music: “‘Because of the unique organization of the human brain, not only can everyone be a musician but,’ he says emphatically, ‘all people are meant to express themselves musically.’”

• Paris Marx on the Team Human podcast talking about his book The Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation: “We also need to recognize that not every new technology is good for us, not every new technology is beneficial, and we need to assess these technologies on their merits to make sure that they’re actually going to serve the public.”

• Kyle Rowe on Traffic Technology Today with an I-couldn’t-agree-with-you-more piece on the long-past-due need for abolishing jaywalking laws.

• Hayley Campbell on the Smarty Pants podcast discussing All the Living and the Dead about the labor of death workers—embalmers, undertakers, mass casualty investigators, executioners, and more, including bereavement midwives, who serve the mothers whose babies are certain not to survive. (This episode was a little intense but I think necessary for Campbell’s repeated reminder of how insulated most of us are from the end of life.)

• Smarty Pants with a slightly lighter episode, a conversation about retelling the Eastern European and Russian Baba Yaga fairy tale, transferred to America in GennaRose Nethercott’s novel Thistlefoot.

• Paul Tullis in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists with a sobering investigative piece on the avian flu strains mixing and mutating in Netherlands’ poultry farms: “With such broad distribution this year, there is now a very real concern that the spread of a virus that originated with human activity—mass poultry farming—is now coming around to bite humans back.”

• Scotland Outdoors podcast with a conversation with Peter Cairns of Scotland the Big Picture on what it would mean to rewild Scotland: “It perhaps means a different mindset so that we don’t see nature as something to be continually extracted from. It’s not a resource that is just there to serve us. . . . We’ve used it as a commodity, and I think we need to turn a switch off in our minds that has a different reimagined relationship with nature.”

• Nicole Iturriaga writing in Aeon on the role of forensic science in truth, and possibly justice, when investigating genocides and political executions: “The countries that require the services of forensics-based human rights are reckoning with rips to the societal fabric so deep they seem endless – and often, for the victims’ families, they are.”

• Followers of Chris La Tray’s work have probably already seen this one, but if not, first of all I highly recommend becoming one, and secondly, Tony Tekaroniake Evans’s essay in Atmos, “Yellowstone Reveals Its Indigenous Soul,” is one of the more instructive and powerful things I’ve read in a long time: “‘It’s OK again to be who we are here. We are connected again to what this world has to give, not just to the small square of our reservation, which is the same as a [prisoner of war] camp.’ Longknife said the whole concept of land ownership is foreign to her: ‘Our culture is based on reciprocity. For us, it’s crazy to think that we have this land inside this fence, and it’s not yours.’”

Walking composition

“Where’s the glory in making mothers weep?” — “Hey I Don’t Know,” Kongos

Last week I was listening to a podcast episode on green energy—I listened to a few back to back and they kind of blended in together; I can’t remember which one this was and I didn’t really like any of them anyway—that reminded me of People of a Feather, a Canadian documentary I wrote about on here almost exactly two years ago, a musing on the tension inherent in being a consumer of the world (that is, being alive), and being an exploiter of it:

“The residents of the community at the center of the film have lived in balance with ice, seal, eider ducks, and the sea for countless years. But as massive Canadian hydropower projects pump fresh water into the ocean at the wrong times of year, responding to southern neighbors’ needs to heat their homes, the resulting imbalance in ocean salinity puts the entire ecosystem at risk.”

Large-scale green energy projects are generally accepted as part of a necessary transition to a future that might evade climate collapse. What bugged me about all these podcast episodes, though, is also what brought me back to that documentary: What is sacrificed for what others deem necessary, and who is being asked to do the sacrificing?

When people are making decisions about what is considered necessary or right, for whatever reason and at whatever scale, what would change if the first questions we asked were 1) who has to suffer for this to become a reality, and 2) do they have a choice?

Before returning to Russia and her son and grandchildren, my stepmother said to me, “You know, Nia, we cannot fall apart. We have to be strong. It’s how we survived. It’s how we survived in Soviet times, it’s how we survived all these things.” How many times over how many centuries in how many lands have people had to tell one another, tell themselves, tell their children and grandchildren, the same?

A few years ago my stepmother was able to retrieve the Soviet-era records on her family—her grandmother in particular, a poet who spent well over a decade in labor camps—the hard evidence of show trials and exile to prison camps that Putin has worked so hard to suppress, to deny even the memory of. I met her grandmother several times before she died, when we lived in the Soviet Union, and since she could no longer speak English she asked me to read her own poetry in English back to her; it’s one of the most vivid memories of my time there.

Part of poetry’s power, it sometimes seems, is that it’s asked to serve far more purposes than any other writing, articulating both the pains and joys of human existence, of possibility, with precision and depth that defy even the language it relies on.

Pregnant with her second child, who would later die of starvation, my stepmother’s great-aunt (a more famous poet than her sister, the grandmother) wrote a poem that always confuses me with its combination of sorrow throughout with an uplifting prospect that carries the weight in its final lines, which read:

"In the dark midnight, under the ancient trees' shroud
We gave you sons as perfect as night, sons
As poor as the night . . .

We never stopped you, companions for marvelous hours
Poverty's passions, the impoverished meals we shared
The fierce bonfire's glow
And there, on the carpet below,   
Fell stars. . ."

Like so much of Russian literature and music, the poem wraps its love in grief, or its grief in love, encompasses its fears in a seeking for the beauty of the world that never fails us. The poetry that weeps but also caresses.

It’s easy to speak of war in terms of strategic maneuvers and capabilities, but in the end the same questions get buried: Who has to suffer for what someone thinks is necessary, and do they have a choice?

“Like tyrants everywhere and all times,” wrote Timothy Snyder recently of Putin, “he has made a fatal mistake, and so his last act will be to make sure that it is fatal for his own people.” Tracking almost exactly with the kinds of pretense democracy described in Spin Dictators, which my father recently had me read, Snyder writes of the upcoming “referendums” in some Ukrainian regions that,

“It is beside the point to say that such numbers are implausible, because they will just be invented. . . . the fictions provided in the media exercise will be implausible. And deliberately so. The way Russian electoral propaganda works is to tell a lie that everyone knows is a lie, and then to show by force that there is no alternative to living as though the lie were true.”

What truths do we tell ourselves about what we think the world needs, society needs, we need? Putin needs the lie of his war to be true. But it’s not the only perceived need in the world that requires the suffering and sacrifice of others who have no choice.

Maybe poetry and love and the beauty of the world are the only truths, or even the only choices, we really have.

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• In Machines We Trust podcast on the AI used to monitor underage student content—its claimed benefits for suicide prevention, and its pitfalls with regards not just to privacy, but to interpersonal trust.

• Cyber-security expert Nicole Perlroth on the Your Undivided Attention podcast on a number of cyber-security issues, including how woefully behind the U.S. is on cyber-security awareness and preparation: “I have seen Russian hackers probe our nuclear plants, and they are not there for intellectual property theft. They are probing these plants for bugs in the software that touches these critical systems, just like Stuxnet did.”

• Along with People of a Feather, the short Canadian documentary Angry Inuk is a compelling look at what sustainable consumption within a global market might actually look like.

• Clive Thompson writing in Medium on “rewilding” our attention: “They’re not wrong about us; but they’re woefully incomplete. This is why I always get a slightly flattened feeling when I behold my feed. . . . It’s like checking my reflection in the mirror and seeing stock-photo imagery.”

• In Aeon, graphic designer Jeremy Shuback with a 7-minute video on the Tabula Peutingeriana, a 22-foot-wide, 1-foot-tall 13th-century copy of a 4th-century Roman map that looks to be a transit map but is actually a map demonstrating the extent of the empire’s power: “How [innacuracies] shape up show how the benefactors of the map wish for the world to be seen. In shaping how someone sees the world, you shape how they see their role in it, how they see themselves.”

• Nikita Arora writing (also in Aeon) on the wonders of moss and the deceptions of touch: “This, then, is the first lesson that moss taught me: you can touch Time. Not our human time, not even mammal time, but Earth Time. . . . It is a species that cohabits our cities and apartments, a witness to human time and its catastrophic speed. If only touching moss were enough to live at Moss Time.” (This is a delight of an essay if you give yourself the time for it. I loved Arora’s comments on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose writings on embodiment have been so influential for me and many others: “Touch reorients us to the fundamental condition of being – to the inevitability of others, both human and nonhuman. In touching, we are most vulnerable because we are always also being touched back.”)

Some days ago I was walking through a gas station parking lot holding a bouquet of roses I’d just bought at Safeway. A couple filling up their car gave me one of those double-take long glances that makes you look down at yourself and wonder what caught their attention. Was it the roses? The camo hat? The knitted wrist warmers? The bear spray hanging from the waist? All of them together? I imagine I looked a little odd, walking seemingly nowhere in a place never meant for pedestrians.

It reminded me of this day during a two-month period I spent in Russia taking a language immersion course at Moscow State University. I stayed with my dad and stepmother in their apartment and walked five days a week to the metro, where I took a subway line that would carry me across the river to the university stop, where I could walk another half-hour to my class and afterward to the stolovaya—cafeteria—that still, just as in Soviet times, served mostly slices of hard, dark bread topped with a couple strips of tasteless waxy cheese, or salami, or just plain butter.

I was there in February and March and it snowed every single day. The city’s plows could barely keep up and they’d run out of spaces to dump the plowed snow. Every morning I looked out of the apartment window and saw someone chipping a path through hardened snow and ice on the sidewalk far below, and every day as I walked to the metro through a park I passed an older man who shuffled on the icy path and fed tiny pieces of food to a stray terrier-type dog, smaller and cuter than most of the wild dogs that populated Moscow.

I was reminded of all this because one day after class I took the metro all the way across the city to Komsomolskaya, the station near where my father’s office was. Komsomolskaya is near Leningradsky Station, where you take the train to St. Petersburg-formerly-Leningrad, and behind both of them is a massive network of rail yards and a small metropolis of random businesses planted along the deeply rutted and broken dirt roads.

I was walking toward my father’s office, bundled in a sheepskin coat and a thick scarf and watching my footing on the snow and frozen mud, when I passed a man leaning on a fence. No hat or scarf or gloves despite the sub-zero weather, but holding a bouquet of a dozen brilliant red roses. He smiled at me, gold teeth glinting, and I smiled back, and ever since that day I have wondered what his story was, who the roses were for, why did he look so happy in a region of Moscow where wary and dour were the norm?

It was fun to think that the couple who did a double-take while filling up their car the other day might have had a moment’s conversation afterward—the bear spray and camouflage hat and flowers, what’s the story there? Or maybe they didn’t think more about it. But I liked being reminded of that man and his roses, and how the deep cold of those months still couldn’t erase the smells stamped around a busy train yard. Urine, mostly, though there were plenty of others, almost none of them pleasant. Somehow, despite the urine and the harsh smell of papirosi cigarettes, the memories evoked are still full of roses.

There’s something relieving about that thread of memory, how vivid it is, how the smells still linger and I can still see the man and the way he held the flowers upright, not letting them dangle.

I got my second Covid booster last week, the one that’s meant to cover Omicron (or whatever, I’ve lost track a little); though the previous two shots made me very sick, this one felt closest to having actual Covid, complete with feeling like my skin was trying to crawl away from me, an unpleasant reminder of what an uncomfortably small amount is known about the virus.

I was pretty loopy for several hours afterward, my brain not quite making connections (sorry for the weird texts, friends and family), which would have been fine except that I haven’t, as far as I can tell, fully gotten my brain back since having Covid in February. Having to copy edit textbooks did feel like it helped build up some initial attention resilience and dispel fogginess (all that attention that I have to pay to minute, tedious detail for hours at a time must be good for something, I guess), but things aren’t fully back to “normal.”

I was telling my older sister about my decreased multitasking abilities, especially in the mornings when I’m doing too many things at once—making breakfast, packing lunches, checking for permission slips, feeding the dog, commiserating over forgotten homework while refusing to do people’s problem-solving for them (holding that line takes an absurd amount of patience), reminding people of various schedules, trying to feed myself. Among other things.

My sister, who is smarter than I am, first wanted to remind me that there’s no such thing as multitasking, so I said, yes, I mean task-switching, I’ve just noticed I’m slower at it. Each task wants fuller attention, for longer, than it did before. It’s not a huge change, probably invisible to anyone who is not me. But it’ll kick in when I’m driving sometimes. Watching traffic from a stop sign and realizing that the automaticity that usually accompanies maneuvering a car has disappeared. What am I looking for? A gap in cars. Why? So I can turn right. Why am I going right? To get to Kalispell. And then I turn right and have to remind myself that red lights on the back of the car in front of me means I should step on the brakes. I wish I could take a bus but there is no bus.

I don’t want to overemphasize these effects. They’re not enormous, just noticeable—nothing like some of the brain fog described in Ed Yong’s recent investigation on the problem in The Atlantic. They’re intermittent except during the morning routine and I’ve probably always been trying to do too much during that hour anyway. Still, it’s my brain and I don’t like this small but significant change.

When I was writing my book, I got very interested in embodiment research, the mind-body perspective that rejects Descartes’ dualism, his conviction that the mind and body are separate. In memory and experience in particular, the mind-body connection seems obvious. Marcel Proust famously evoked it in In Search of Lost Time, flooding into the lifetime of memories that followed his taste of a madeleine dipped in tea. He did it again at the end of the book, except this time with the step of a foot on a loose flagstone in Venice:

“All at once, I recognized that Venice which my descriptive efforts and pretended snapshots of memory had failed to recall; the sensation I had once felt on two uneven paving slabs in the baptistry of St. Mark had been given back to me and was linked with all the other sensations of that and other days which had lingered expectant in their place among the series of forgotten years from which a sudden chance imperiously called them forth. So too, the taste of the little madeleine had recalled Cambray.”

That flagstone scene is my favorite part of the book partly because it shows that Proust wasn’t just playing around for the previous three thousand pages or so—that he in fact knew what he was doing—and partly because the description of that mind-body connection is so clear, so visceral, so close to many of my own experiences that I could feel it in the back of my teeth. “Memory and knowledge come from the body,” I wrote of that scene.

“A flavor can send us back to childhood, and a footstep can send signals, like an electric charge, all the way up the legs, sizzling up the spine and to the brain, where they fire neurons of memory and emotion, snapping connections we’ve yet to fully comprehend.”

After I wrote a first draft of this essay in a notebook while sitting in the town library, I went for a walk around town, so happy for the chance to be slow, to not have to rush or task-switch, and greeted trees I haven’t visited for a while, listening to their rustling as their leaves begin to turn to autumn, and thought of how tired so many of us are, how desperate to have the time to slow our thoughts as well as our bodies and the pace of our lives. 

And then finally I remembered something that had been nagging me all day, like a loose tooth—the missing item from my grocery list: peanut butter. 

To say I was grateful for that thought sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. It was just peanut butter but it was missing and I had the time to wander and meander and let it make its own sweet way back to my mind and onto the list in my purse.

It’s been seventeen years since that Moscow winter when the man and I exchanged smiles over his bright red roses and our frozen breath and the snow-ice-covered ground. What will evoke that memory in another seventeen years? What will I remember then from this time, from the day I walked home with my own flowers, the air thick with wildfire smoke, the road rumbling with trucks and construction, and my mind full of very different thoughts?

I hope something remains. The glance of the couple in the car, the crinkly plastic covering of the flowers, the discomfort of the bear spray on my hip as I walked. Even the way it all reminded me of that winter day in Moscow, the cold in my nose, the wild dogs arguing over food scraps, the trains going east that I always yearned to board. Maybe memory attaches itself to wanderings and meanderings, to actions not taken. To questions unanswered because they were never asked (I will always wonder—why the roses? why the smile?). To a moment whose meaning will always be unknown, a possibility unexplored. To longing.

Walking composition and ANNOUNCEMENT

“Imagine being a traveller, a conqueror. To simply turn up on soil and stamp it as property.”
—Skyward Inn, Aliya Whiteley

A largish black bear, around 300 pounds (136 kilograms), has been hanging around the neighborhood for a couple weeks, spending hot days sleeping down in the nearby coulee. We saw him last week, driving home from a friend’s house in the evening. He was headed toward our backyard and I thought it was a good thing I hadn’t walked home as planned because I would have strolled right into him in the dark.

My neighbor called last night to tell me that the same bear had gotten into an outdoor chest freezer* down the road and ate all the frozen game meat. That neighbor tried to scare it off and then shot it in the behind, at which point it ran one house further down and basically cornered a kid sitting in his go-kart. Kid’s dad, who keeps bear spray pretty much everywhere, sprayed it and scared it off. The kid’s okay, Fish, Wildlife & Parks is trying to trap the bear, and once again we’re stuck in the fraught question of how to live with wildlife that most of us actually appreciate having around.

The big question for me was whether or not to walk my kid to school this morning, which was why my neighbor had called, because she knows we walk every day. We called the bear-spraying neighbor, who had a much less dire assessment of the situation and said the bear wasn’t particularly aggressive. It was his kid who was cornered, after all. Was he being too chill about it, or was the neighbor who shot at it too reactive?

It’s not hard to drive my kid to school. It takes me about fifteen minutes to do the whole drop-off routine and come back home. It’s horribly smoky outside, the sun scoured orange, so I can justify not walking. And then there’s the bear. It all makes it easy to choose the car. But the choice is not a light question for me. The whole thing of commodification and the commons and America being a pyramid scheme weighs into this. Everyone driving their kids to school is enormously destructive on several levels—air quality, climate change, fractured community, deadly risks to pedestrians and cyclists—and a habit I’ve been trying to counter in my community for years.

So at what point does my safety, and the safety of my family, overrule what I think are lifestyle changes necessary for a livable future? What about my pleasure or happiness—what I feel like doing? What about my comfort or my fear? What choices do I make in my own interest that burden others I might never see?

What is required for each of us to informatively weigh the benefits to ourselves of our everyday actions, against the consequences for others?

*I am trying not to be too judgmental about this because keeping a chest freezer outside, if you could afford one, wasn’t actually that uncommon when I was growing up. But still, we’ve had increasing bear presence for a few years now. As I said when a grizzly at all my sister’s chickens last year, that responsibility of bear-proofing our gardens and chicken coops—and chest freezers, I guess—is really on us.

Last week I mentioned an upcoming project I’ve been looking forward to telling you all about. A bit of backstory first: last winter Mike Sowden, who writes Everything Is Amazing, led a group of readers on a new app called Threadable, a “social reading platform” where people can read and comment on and discuss books together. His choice was Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, and I was impressed with how easy it was to read and use, and how fun it was to discuss the book (and criticize Burke) with people across the globe.

I will be leading a Threadable circle on the subject of land ownership starting in October and running about three months. Instead of one book, I was asked to choose 9-12 readings, 10-25 pages each, from a variety of sources. My choices aren’t finalized yet because some of them are excerpts from books still in copyright so we need to see about permissions (ownership!), but I am very excited at the prospect of reading and discussing those plus older source material with lots of people: the 15th-century papal bulls that make up the Doctrine of Discovery, the original Charter of the Forest of 1217, John Locke on how labor begets ownership of property, etc. I want to be able to get to the heart of at least some of the arguments made to justify land ownership, and how those justifications are still used to perpetuate injustice and hoard resources. And I’d really love to do it together.

I’ll share more details when they’re finalized. If you want to participate, you’ll have an opportunity to download the app for free and request access to the land ownership and other reading circles. Mike Sowden will also be running circles again, one on geology and one on color (or “colour,” since Mike is British), and Mike and I are going to try to do one or two crossover selections for land ownership and geology, which should be fun. 

I really think it will all be fun—as most of you know, I read a ton, and am keenly interested in the idea of being able to share my thoughts as I’m reading instead of just distilling them in narrative form here. Like a digital version of the hundreds of Post-It notes and comments I leave in every book except you also get to leave your own Post-Its and comments and we can talk about all of them together.

I’ve had a sick kid at home the past couple days, and this morning while preparing to go back to school, she asked for a mask so she could prevent herself spreading the cold she’s recovering from to others. It gave me this weird torn feeling of sad and optimistic at the same time—how much many people (most, I still think) do in fact want to care for others, want to make that extra effort, but are stymied by lack of societal structures that encourage it; and at the same time how simple it is, how easy. Just to do the small thing that’s a slight restraint on yourself but spreads benefit in all directions, including ones you might not be thinking of.

So I gave her a mask, though I don’t think it will stay on long in school, and in the end I picked up the bear spray—which I usually carry anyway—and a palm-sized fog horn that a friend gave me because the noise is supposedly even more effective at scaring a bear off than pepper spray. And we walked to school and she asked me why the sun was orange and I looked at the air quality and smoke map and said maybe we should wear KN95 masks walking to school after this until the smoke clears. And I wonder with the bear spray in my purse and a mask against the smoke, where the balance is between preparing ourselves to walk in the world, and arming ourselves against the world.

Bonus photo: Some like-minded soul has been upgrading the fence signs around the rail yard in town. The top photo is from when I was paddle boarding on the river in June, when it was near flood stage. That “No Trespassing” sign has always irritated me because I think it encroaches on the legal public access bank, and I wasn’t sorry to see it nearly under water.

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Leah Sottile—of the Bundyville podcast, and Two Minutes Past Nine about the Oklahoma City bombing—has launched a new podcast, Burn Wild, about the Earth Liberation Front and what it means to be labeled an eco-terrorist. I haven’t listened yet but remain convinced that Sottile’s journalism is some of the most important we have (I previously wrote about the importance of her domestic extremism reporting to understanding the January 6 insurrection) and subscribed to it immediately. She has an overview on her own Substack, The Truth Does Not Change According to Our Ability to Stomach It, and it’s very compelling.

• The Oglala Sioux nation was recently able to purchase 40 acres of land that puts all of the Wounded Knee National Historic Landmark site under their ownership: “Oglala Sioux officials said Friday that the 40-acre parcel land includes area where most of the carnage of the massacre took place, including the hill where the soldiers used cannons to shoot people, the ravine where victims fled and the area where the old trading post was located.”

• An interview with particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder about her new book Existential Physics and the limits of science on the Smarty Pants podcast. (I really enjoy Hossenfelder every time I run across her. I often reread her short Aeon essay on becoming a consultant for “crank” scientists.)

• Philosophy and religion professor Alan Levinovitz on the Conspirituality podcast talking about how fear and trauma can lead to seemingly irrational protection measures—like devotion to a fitness cult, or building a weapon arsenal: “Who knows what kinds of circumstances would make me seek out the equivalent of these talismanic forms of protection that you have control over, whether a gun or a supplement.”

• For something lighter, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ September issue is all about the high-tech surveillance state. From the introduction to the issue: “When asked what motivates her to fight against the not-so-subtle tactics of Putin’s surveillance state, Rustamova said: ‘There are 102 million people in Russia; we absolutely cannot leave them alone with Putin’s propaganda and his nuclear weapons. That would be a very foolish thing to do.’”

• And if you ever played Sim City, you might have fun attempting to play Sim Nimby, where every time you try to build something, it just says, “No.” From the Motherboard article on the new game: “Weeks and Nass came up with 54 different anti-development slogans. Some are exaggerated NIMBY talking points for effect and humor—‘The only thing urban I want to see in my neighborhood is Keith Urban’; ‘Apartment buildings cause crime. Where do you think the people who killed Batman’s parents lived?’—while others—‘This is a NICE neighborhood’, ‘Public transport would transport the public here’— could well be said at a community meeting anywhere in the U.S. any day of the week.”

Walking composition

“God money, let’s go dancing on the backs of the bruised.”
—“Head Like a Hole,” Nine Inch Nails

Last week I was immersed in beta-reading a friend’s book that will be coming out in January—Blood Money, by Kathleen McLaughlin, which I highly recommend pre-ordering (and check out the cover!). It’s about class and the international blood plasma industry, which relies on America’s shaky social scaffolding and economic precarity. It reminded me of something that’s lingered in my mind from this interview that Anne Helen Petersen did with Meg Conley last year about multi-level marketing and pyramid schemes:

“America is a pyramid scheme. It relies on people buying into the American Dream and then working hard to get to the top. But of course – almost no one does. Beneath each successful person in America is a downline of unpaid and underpaid labor.”

Blood plasma, I’ve learned from McLaughlin’s book, is an ingredient in incredible, often life-saving medications, including one she herself relies on. But upstream of those treatments is a vast pool made of millions of scantily-compensated people selling their plasma to make ends meet. I knew plenty of people in college who sold plasma for money, but I’d never thought about the industry pipeline they were being bled into.

The same week I was being riveted by Blood Money, my sisters and I were discussing how to set up a GoFundMe to help cover our youngest sister’s upcoming expenses for a major surgery, which is just—it’s insane that this is how we’re meant to think about medical care in a supposedly advanced civilization, which is also saying absolutely nothing new, nothing you don’t already know. Which then brought me back to a recent newsletter from Elizabeth Aquino about her daughter recovering from Covid that really put a fire in my belly. I urge everyone to read it, in particular for the passages she quotes from a friend about what it’s like to care for and try to protect a medically vulnerable person during a still-ongoing pandemic when so much of society just wants it to be over:

“You’re right. It is hard. And one day, you’re going to ‘get your lives back’ and you’re going to forget all about those of us who have to live with the scraps you’re willing to throw us. And, guess what! You all did get your lives back and forgot about us. Disability? We’re just inconvenient now and preventing you from having parties and seeing your friends and running errands without masks on or riding Amtrak and hacking and coughing.”

Something that I had to learn repeatedly while researching walking and walkability is at work in all these realities: if society isn’t working for its most vulnerable, then it isn’t working.

The last couple of weeks, aside from reading (and preparing for a research project that I’m kind of excited to share when it’s ready because it’s one you’ll get to actively participate in if you want to), I’ve been doing a lot of what I do this time of year: skinning and freezing peaches, canning and pickling various things, cleaning my rifle and thinking about where to go hunting this season, waiting for wildfire smoke to clear so I can go up the mountain and see if there are enough huckleberries to pick for the freezer.

I’ve been wandering all over town looking for chokecherries because this is the time of year I usually pick them to make chokecherry jelly, but all of my usual trees are almost bare. Sometimes I’ll see a few strands of chokecherries way up high, but not really enough to make jelly, even if I could climb up to them.

I wondered if it was bears because, as usual, there are a lot of bears around and they like chokecherries, but the trees don’t have any broken branches. Just no chokecherries.

When I mentioned this to a friend she said they might have been hit with the same thing that resulted in no plums for me to turn into fruit leather for the winter: the cold, rainy early summer that culminated in low-elevation snow in mid-June. It’s been so hot that I’d almost forgotten that earlier weather, when we were driving down from Canada warily watching the swollen rivers and suddenly looked around just north of home to say, “Wait, is it snowing?” And it was, indeed, snowing. I feared for a while for the cherry orchards down south of us, along the lake shore, because I remembered that spring twenty-some or thirty years ago when we’d gotten a hard, late frost just after the cherry trees had blossomed and so many of them died. I’ve never forgotten driving down the east side of Flathead Lake seeing chopped-down cherry trees, stacked up high like the heart-shattering aftermath of a small war.

The chokecherries might be missing this year—and I miss them—but wandering around in search of their bitter tannins reminds me of how much I love this place, how much it gives me without my ever asking, and how much I owe it in return.

Sometimes I don’t know how to describe what it’s like living in a place that’s so beautiful it can defy superlatives. Not just the lake-dotted, mountainous part of Montana where I live but the wider geological region, including the prairie and farmlands to the east over the spine of the Rockies, the sprawling, unexpected landscapes that keep drawing me back.

I got a reminder of my own good fortune in living here this weekend when we went paddleboarding on the North Fork of the Flathead River with some friends. The North Fork is a special place among special places; that stretch of river will feature prominently in the “water” chapter of No Trespassing for specific reasons that you’ll eventually be able to read about. It’s not far from where I live, and, like almost everyone else here I know, I love it up there.

But I’ve never been on it. It’s very popular for rafting, but I don’t like rafting much because it combines two things I avoid as much as possible—sitting for long periods and lack of shade—and I have a healthy terror of both deep water and whitewater leftover from a family canoeing accident that almost killed me as a child.

The river’s low now, though. So low that in less than a week we’d probably have to carry the boards across many of the rock bars. But this weekend it had just enough water to carry us over and down for a couple of hours, with enough rapids to challenge my pretense of equanimity and thrill the kids. So I’ll leave you with a bit of that, if you like, a one-minute recording of the river, its voice and muted late-season energy as it carried my paddleboard splashing through tiny, rushing runs of rapids (the thumping sound is the tip of my board hitting as it bumped over the waves).

There’s so much of a river in how we relate to one another, in the ways that we rely on each other and in what breaks apart when we pretend we don’t need to. I don’t know that blood truly is thicker than water, but they both run through our lives in ways we can’t run away from.

Bonus photo: Looking toward the peaks of Glacier National Park from the North Fork of the Flathead River, though in a slightly different spot from the recording because there was no way I was taking my hands off the paddle or my eyes off the river to fiddle with my phone while running through the rocks. As I told a friend later that day, a river has no ego. It just wants to love you and hold you and sometimes drown you.

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Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Unfortunately, this is print-only, but Montana Quarterly’s (summer 2022 issue) short, tightly-written piece “The Town That Refused to Die,” about Garrison, Montana’s, history with pollution and the phosphate industry was a reminder that struggles between life and profit are just new versions of old stories.

• Short and sweet: Amanda Holmes reading Heinrich Heine’s poem “Ich grolle nicht” (“I bear no grudge”) for The American Scholar.

• Luke Burgis caught my imagination with a piece in Wired on how the tensions of culture can be like the seemingly impossible three-body problem posed by calculating the positions of heavenly bodies. Where once faith and reason contested as competing human values, Silicon Valley has placed utility in prime position: “The questions of what is true and what is good for the soul are now mostly subordinated to technological progress—or, at the very least, the questions of Athens [reason] and Jerusalem [faith] are now so bound up with this progress that it’s creating confusion. . . . Humanity is at a crossroads.”

• Via Dark ‘n’ Light Magazine, a 16-minute video celebrating and explaining the yoiking music of the Northern Sami people.

• It’s getting very hard to avoid talk of water and drought issues in the American West. For Grist, Jake Bittle writes about seemingly far-fetched plans to pipe water from wet regions to arid areas. Among other plans: “The basic idea is to take water from the Mississippi River, pump it a thousand miles west, and dump it into the overtaxed Colorado River, which provides water for millions of Arizona residents but has reached historically low levels as its reservoirs dry up.” (Despite how non-feasible Bittle says these proposals are, I’m left with the haunting knowledge that when people want a resource badly enough, they’re willing to throw practicality, as well as other people’s needs, out the window.)

• Also from Dark ‘n’ Light, Arcx, a podcast about literary inspiration, starting with a 6-part series featuring interviews with South Asian science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction authors.

• Neanderthal researcher Bruce Hardy writing in Sapiens on the question of whether Neanderthals made art: “Art must be older than we think. It did not arise de novo with modern humans in the form of durable materials. And yet, that seems to be the narrative in paleoanthropology. Every time a new discovery is put forward that could be Neanderthal art or symbolism, it is questioned. But why?”

• Yevgenia Belorusets has returned to Kiev and is again writing about the war in Ukraine for isolarii: “The farther you are from the war, the clearer the procession of time becomes, and you think half a year of conflict needs a special approach, a rational analysis or a case history like the ones for sick patients, in the hope of a speedy recovery.
  But here in Kyiv, the symbolism of this round number crumbles when the people involved in the war—almost every Ukrainian, in one way or another—cannot afford any distance from the conflict.”