Author: Antonia Malchik

All our lives are the commons

There are a lot of new subscribers here at On the Commons, thanks, I think, to Mike Sowden’s overly generous interview with me on Everything Is Amazing. (I’m looking forward to the second half where we geek out over science fiction because I am always ready to geek out over science fiction, which is far more interesting than any words I put out in the world. Let’s talk about Murderbot or A Memory Called Empire and who gets to define personhood, or how climate collapse and societal decay intertwine in The Parable of the Sower, or the power of enforced and self-policed speech, and even perception, in The City & the City, or resource governance and self-determination in The Expanse . . . )

However you got here, welcome. Feel free to ask anything (within reason), either in the comments here or by emailing me directly. As always, if it’s not your thing, no hard feelings. And if you want to go for the paid version but can’t pay, just email me the code word “tribble” and I’ll set you up, no questions asked.

There are three basic formats to posts from On the Commons (four with the Threadable reading circle, which you can read about here; just scroll past the part about the bear that got into a neighbor’s outdoor chest freezer):
1) intermittent longer essays on a variety of subjects, from highways to authoritarianism;
2) upcoming chapters from my book-in-progress No Trespassing on private property and the commons (these will come slowly over at least two years); and
3) what I call “walking compositions,” weekly-ish, which are a kind of triptych three-section mini-essay combined with a curated list of reading, podcast, and sometimes video suggestions.

I haven’t explained the walking composition concept in a long time (have I ever?), but there’s a story behind that title.

A few years back, when I first started writing my book A Walking Life, I was lucky enough to be accepted at an interdisciplinary artist’s residency at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity in Banff, Alberta, Canada. The Banff Centre is a gift to any artist—space, time, beauty, long walks into the mountains or along the river, and really good food. I’ve attended residencies there twice and always dream of going back. Except for the part where the institution is largely funded by tar sands oil money. Which makes it . . . difficult.

I applied for this one because Pico Iyer was heading the writing portion, and the entire residency was structured around the ideas he’d expressed recently in his TED talk and accompanying book The Art of Stillness. It was an Art of Stillness-focused residency that brought together musicians, writers, dancers, choreographers, composers, and visual artists. (Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire led the music section of the residency, and, in addition to being an authentically interesting and down to earth person, managed to completely change my mind about cover songs, which I had never liked—“You mean folk music?” he said.)

The second residency I attended there was one of the writers-only ones and, much as I enjoyed it, I’d take an interdisciplinary group any day. I learned so much from the other artists in that first residency, from the dancer who would spontaneously perform for me outside my studio window, to Christopher House, the choreographer who guided a movement meditation for an hour every morning and who reminded us throughout each session that we were “exploring the deep ethics of optimism,” which I’m still attempting to achieve.

One of the composers in my group, Alex Mah, created works like nothing I’d ever experienced before. In one performance, he had a pile of words on pieces of paper, and sang a kind of dialogue with another singer as they pulled words out one by one. It sounds simple but the way he did it was not. I wish I could fully describe what he does because not much of his work is online. There are some videos, like this one, but they don’t really capture the sensory experience of watching his work, much of which incorporates pauses in a way that gives them texture, a world of their own.

As we were preparing to leave the residency at the end of two weeks, Alex handed me a sheet of paper with what he said was a walking composition for me, like a musical score.

I’d learned by then that when Alex structured words and spaces in particular ways it was for good reason—he wasn’t just decorating the paper. The composition isn’t only the instructions written down, the strolling and treading and so on; it’s the way it’s shaped on the page, how he wrote it. Which, six years later, I still struggle to understand. The only way I’ll ever be able to gain some insight is by continuing to do the practice.

I started performing the walking compositions literally: 500 steps each day, strolling, meandering, pausing once to breathe for a while, all of it. I used Instagram as a small way to share that experiment with the world and ended up pairing a quote from something I was reading or listening to with a photo I took while performing the walking composition.

When I left Instagram and started this newsletter, I pulled that practice over with me. It’s changed, mostly because my words aren’t limited to a brief social media post. But the picture, quote, and thoughts all still entangle themselves in what I experience as a walking composition.

The topics of these triptych mini-essays range freely, from gardening experiments—why won’t the beets grow? (it was the soil; thank you for the advice, elm) how do we have zero cucumbers one year and a zillion the next? and always, always, the battle with knapweed and thistles—to skiing to hunting season to Russia to books I’m reading, whether science fiction or research on private property and the commons. Pretty much anything I end up walking with.

Which often might feel tangential, aside from the gardening with its obvious seeds and soil and commodified food aspect. What does this have to do with the commons?

Part of the reason I think the commons is so important to reinvigorate is because enclosure isn’t just of land and resources but of ideas and experience. A sense of scarcity and competition infiltrates every aspect of our lives. Even the idea of opening up a country’s history to narratives and realities that had previously been oppressed, if not outright killed, is seen as a threat to survival. Of what? Of identities, of a story we’re told, and tell ourselves, about what a society is and what it can be. And so that story becomes enclosed—impervious, its defenders hope, to outside influences.

These stories are commons, too.

Every thought we explore, every cucumber seed we plant, every forest we breathe in and path we walk, every essay that goes viral, every individual experience denied for the sake of another hot take, every child struggling over a poorly-worded math problem or a grief they’re not allowed to articulate, every fence posted with a “No Trespassing” sign, every community destroyed in extraction of a commodity it lives near, every life we injure or enrich, is the commons. Simply by existing, we are in the commons and of the commons.

I touched on this idea briefly toward the end of the original essay I wrote on the commons for Aeon,

“Troubling implications of our fetish for private property abound, well beyond the question of land ownership: the rights of companies to patent and therefore privatise seeds, taking access to food out of the public realm. Battles over open-source computer programming and whether libraries should be privatised bring into question who gets access to the powers of information and creation. . . . our very genes and tissues can be collected, traded, tested, and sold as private property, a prospect many people find appalling. It’s a long road from owning a mobile phone or a quarter-acre lot of surveyed subdivision to owning your genetic information, but all of these examples fall into the question of who owns what. Arguments in favour of preserving the public commons against private interest could be made for every one of them.”

and will explore them more fully in No Trespassing (an overview of that project is here).

When I told Alex Mah after a couple of years that I was still using the composition he wrote for me, he gave me another that instructed me to walk backward for a hundred steps. Which I did, on an ocean-pounded beach in Norfolk, on my way to view a village where 800,000-year-old fossilized hominin footprints had been found before they dissolved into the sea. What did I learn from walking backwards? I don’t know. But it’s something that I remember, the press of my boots on the sand, the roar of the relentless ocean, the feel of the mud cliff walls crumbling as I pulled out a tiny piece of flint rock.

I’ve walked enough by now to know that it’s those memories full of sensory detail—traffic on a city bridge in Pittsburgh, chickadees calling outside my home in early spring, the broken cobblestones of a Boston sidewalk, the particular scent of imminent snow, a child’s scream of frustration, a lover’s glance in the sunlight—those are the memories that stick around, that make a life.

I retained the title “walking composition” because I’m still walking, still thinking, still reading, still wondering, still taking a photo and pairing it with a quote. So is everyone, even without the photos and quotes. I’d love to have us all head out right now, every day in fact, and each find our own walking composition. Isn’t that, in a way, what resistance is—finding and fighting for our own ways to be in the world? Isn’t that what living is?

Walking is always a composition. We compose our lives by walking through them, however that looks and whatever that entails. Every part of that experience is our commons.

I’ve put over 5,000 miles on these boots. We’ve meandered and wandered, trudged and trespassed. We’ve walked so many stories together, and I hope will walk many more.

Walking composition

“Walking teaches patience. It works as an antidote against fear. It erodes cynicism about the violence of fellow Homo sapiens. In its capacity to sustain hope, it makes you a baby again.” —Paul Salopek, from “Cracked World,” Out of Eden Walk

Quick note on Threadable: Thank you to everyone who has signed up for the Land Ownership reading circle! And, very seriously, thank you for your patience with the link confusion (see previous post). Please email me if you’re still having trouble. Once you’re on Threadable, there are also other great reading circles to join, like “Water Politics and the World” and “Against Oppression: Black Antifascism(s).”
Our first reading is Chapter 1 of Andro Linklater’s Owning the Earth, which is uploaded on the app and ready for reading and commenting. Next week I will come up with a discussion forum format about the text on this newsletter. From here on out, I’ll put a “Threadable” subhead on any posts related to that project so you don’t have to read about it if you don’t want to!

Last week I stayed at a Forest Service cabin within a couple hours’ drive of my house. It’s one of my favorite places to be because there’s no internet or even electricity (gas light and stove) and rarely any other people nearby; but it does have the deep nighttime darkness that provides a dazzling starscape once the moon has set.

I sorted through a huge pile of research, read books, sat by the creek for long periods, and got to explore parts of my mind and self I hadn’t spent much time with in a while.

Audio respite: a little over a minute and a half of this babbling creek.

I was sweeping the floor just before leaving the place when I noticed how deeply worn down the sill of the door was. Many of these cabins are old homestead places, but this one was built—if I remember right—by the Forest Service itself for fire crews working in the area. In the nearby campground the evening before, I’d talked with a man who told me that when he was a child the cabin was in active use all the time, people cooking indoors and tents filling the yard outside.

I couldn’t help but think of all the shoes being scraped of dirt that had worn down the wood under the door. A long, clean curve dipped down from the edges, rubbed smooth like stone steps hundreds of years old whose edges have seen lives beyond count.

---

For some reason the door sill brought to mind the time my college roommate and I were driving back to St. Paul, Minnesota, after she’d spontaneously hauled me off to see the Ramones in Seattle. How she had called me out of the blue from a payphone in Glendive, Montana, the week before to tell me she’d be picking me up in a couple of hours; and I had to tell her no, it’ll be at least ten hours, and what that exchange taught me about experience and perception—she was from Kentucky and had never been further west than St. Paul. Despite its accurate mile measurements, the road map had given her no concept of how large Montana actually was, how vast the distances are in the American West. Perception is a strange thing, shifting and directing our lives and expectations in ways mostly invisible to us.

One of the most enjoyable books I read last year was Micaiah Johnson’s science fiction novel The Space Between Worlds. The unknowable space between universes, filled with vast coldness and a vigilant goddess, makes an obvious analogy to the unknowable spaces between people, but Johnson does a beautiful job of explicitly drawing out that tension—how little we often know of one another, and how much our expectations and fixed perceptions fill in the gaps.

---

Our footsteps leave innumerable stories as they press the ground, the road, the sill of a door. For each foot that scraped itself against that door frame, how many of them carried longing or fear or rage or a broken heart? What of my own story did I leave underfoot every time I stepped over that sill? What ghost of a former self will greet me next time I return?

Footprints and paths, traces of others’ existences, are a delight to me, much as I crave being in places where other people aren’t. The little reminders that people have had entire lives in places I visit cast me back to my own past selves, the way we change throughout our lives and have to become reacquainted with our selves, and one another, all over again. I once drove long hours with a girl from Kentucky to see the Ramones, and we danced in the mosh pit and drove back and broke down in Wenatchee and slept in the car for days and eventually picked up a hitchhiker named Rainbow and when we got to St. Paul he read our tarot in thanks for the ride and . . . and all of that, the 19-year-old who was there, is still here, too, driving across the plains and listening to the Ramones and wondering about all the past selves everyone else carries with them. And contemplating the spaces between us all.

The top photo and this one are not from that cabin, but of a hike I took a few days before. It starts from a fire lookout that you can just barely see on one of the hilltops in the top photo. This is bear poop. The berries were weeks gone from this altitude but the poop relatively fresh by the time I walked here—I wonder where it had been eating?

---

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Probably my favorite online magazine to read and to write for, Aeon, just turned ten years old, and they’ve asked contributors to reshare particular essays, in my case “Riot Acts,” a 2019 essay on the misunderstood psychology of riots and the real-life injustices behind many mass actions.

• I’ve enjoyed all of Andro Linklater’s books, Owning the Earth most of all. His original interest was in public land surveys and their effects on land, people, and ownership, which he explored in Measuring America and also in “Life, liberty, property,” published in Prospect Magazine in 2002: “In fact, the concept [of private land ownership] would have confused most people in the 17th century other than the English.”

• Samuel Clowes Huneke with “Toward a queer theory of the state” in The Point. Anything that talks about Foucault and Derrida and “the dialectic” tends to be miles above my head, but I found the interrogation of state power and what a state is intriguing: “The question, then, is if it’s possible to work out a theory of the state that weds the critically anti-normative impulses of queer theory to the empirical need for the state, coercive though it may be. But could any queer thinker today figure out what such a polity would look like?” He really stuck the landing on the end of this essay, too.

• Konda Mason of Jubilee Justice speaking on the Frontiers of Commoning podcast about land theft, land trusts, and food sovereignty: “The way it works in America is that it’s private property, and as private property it continues to feed into the inequality of our country. It continues to feed into what is wrong with how we do things.”

• Talking Headways podcast with an episode about transportation insecurity with two researchers who’ve been attempting not just to quantify, but to qualify transportation insecurity—fill in the blank spaces most of us never see: “So a lot of people use or rely on friends and family and neighbors and co-workers to get around. We had seen that, for people who do that, they experience a lot of stress and strain around asking people for rides. Some people say that they worry about being a burden. Some people feel like they don’t get invited places because people know they have bad transportation. And there’s also a whole other dimension that’s more sort of emotional and psychological around people feeling bad that they don’t have good transportation or feeling left out.”

• Anthropologist Matthew Gwynfryn Thomas writing about insomnia in Sapiens: “But examples from anthropology suggest that the solution to sleepless woes might be social and societal, not technological.”

• Architecture and urbanist professor Mohamad Nahleh in Places Journal with a beautiful, long essay about his month-long journey through Lebanon on foot: “A desire to illuminate the world is, in a sense, inherited from ideas of truth and rationality associated with the European Enlightenment. These ideas are also, of course, alibis for colonial administration or, in the postcolonial period, for economic development. The last thing I want is to indulge a preference for the visible, or the knowable, whether by privileging a community’s most prominent actors and institutions or by shedding unwanted light on those who find safety in darkness. My preferred method is thus to take a walk, by night, in the company of whomever I meet.”

• Jeremy Sachs, a programmer, has spent several years recreating the “green rain” style of code that became such an icon in the Matrix movies: “He said that he’s always wanted to make the digital rain, which he considers ‘probably the most widely sought after screensaver in existence.’” Sachs has provided the code freely, which means lots of people have been creating variations like this.

I deleted the previous post and am resending with a once-again corrected link and extra apologies because dealing with corrected-link emails is personally one of my least favorite things, so I am very grateful for everyone’s patience. I really hope to goodness this works.

Hello all! If you’re having trouble joining the Threadable reading circle, it looks like there’s an answer. Apologies—when I embedded the link yesterday, Substack turned it into a Substack link, which might be why many are having trouble joining. This link should work: https://threadablenative.page.link/voPLjeE4H7doM8zd8

Don’t hesitate to send me a message if you’re still having trouble. After my not-very-old laptop turning itself into a brick last week, I’m thinking digital technology might have it in for me. Please accept this sunrise from Wednesday morning, one of the most beautiful I’ve seen in a long time, as a balm.

Invitation to Threadable

A few weeks ago I mentioned a project I’m doing with a social reading platform called Threadable. Starting next Monday, October 10, I’ll be leading a three-month reading circle on the Threadable app structured around the subject of land ownership. I just got confirmation that my reading selections have been approved and uploaded to the app, and I’m excited to invite everyone—all subscribers, paying and free, and any friends, relatives, frenemies, strangers, coworkers, book clubs, random acquaintances at the bar, anybody who might be interested—to participate.

This link should get you straight to the app, where you can request to join the reading circle once you’ve downloaded Threadable. (The app is designed for Apple smartphone use. I’ve tried this out on my laptop and it seems to work but looks exactly like a little smartphone screen. Once I downloaded the app it took me straight to the Land Ownership circle, where you can request to join.)

All of the readings are between 10 and 25 pages long. I have one reading per week lined up, starting with Chapter 1 (pages 9-23) of Andro Linklater’s 2013 book Owning the Earth, which I return to repeatedly for its extensive scholarship and knowledge of how and why land gets turned into private property, and what the consequences are for both people and nature itself. The second selection, starting the week after, will be pages 16-36 (in Chapter 1) of law professor Eric T. Freyfogle’s 2003 book The Land We Share, which I chose for Freyfogle’s ability to demonstrate that the laws around land ownership arise out of values and stories a society tells itself. They’re not immutable laws of the universe.

After that we’ll be on to the original Charter of the Forest of 1217, with parts of an accompanying law review article (both accessible online), and then a section of Simon Winchester’s Land (by then I’ll try to have finished my unpublished review of Land and will post it here so I can be transparent about how much I disliked it and why). That’ll be the first session, with the second session focused on the detrimental effects of private land ownership, especially of the Doctrine of Discovery, mostly from the perspective of Indigenous writers and scholars; and the third session on the older philosophical arguments in defense of private property and newer scholarship on how we can start to look at the whole subject differently.

A note on the time commitment: I timed myself reading the first selection while taking notes on it yesterday and it took me about 40 minutes. It’s possible that I read weirdly fast, but I hope the length of the selections won’t be too burdensome for people. Again, none of them are over 25 pages long.

I realized the other day that this public reading project on land ownership will begin on what was once known (and still is in many places) in the U.S. as Columbus Day, celebrating Christopher Columbus; the day is now also known as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. At first this timing felt jarring, given the topic and the fact that Columbus was an eager enslaver and murderer of Indigenous people as well as colonizer of land. It still, to be honest, feels jarring. But maybe it’s also fortuitous. I have a clear purpose for this reading circle, which is to interrogate the very foundation of private land ownership: its legal basis, its history, its role in provoking and perpetuating injustice, theft, and genocide. Why is land able to be privately owned by individuals and what implications does that choice have for the planet and the rest of humanity?

In conservation circles I often hear the line that “private property is bedrock,” but I don’t think that’s true. I think that in many cases private property is what we cling to because so much else has been taken—beginning with land itself. We can see this in the first reading selection, where Linklater gives a brief overview of England’s enclosure movement starting in the 1200s and the tension it created between private profit and the losses of people who no longer had access to the land they needed to survive.

But this is my perspective. Part of what interests me about working with Threadable is that I’d really like to hear more of what other people think. Threadable’s structure happens to be a good fit for my own thought process—reading, taking notes, connecting a lot of seemingly disparate sources—and I hope it will be inviting for others. It will be a space to welcome ideas and discourse. No need (or desire) for dunks or hot takes. All you need to bring is curiosity and a measure of grace for everyone else.

Threadable is still an app in development (you can download it here), and unfortunately for now only functions on iOS (Apple phones). They are working on an Android version. After a couple conversations with subscribers who don’t have Apple but are interested in the subject, I’d like to run a kind of parallel conversation here on On the Commons.

On Threadable, the text selections are uploaded and people can highlight, comment, and have discussions about the text. That won’t be possible here, but I can tell you what book chapters we’re reading and link to texts that are in the public domain, like the 15th-century Papal Bulls that comprise the original Doctrine of Discovery. I’m not sure exactly what that will look like on here, but I’d like as many people as possible to be able to participate in these conversations because I think they’re important. And interesting!

I hope you’ll join, one way or another, in this commons of ideas.

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.

---

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.”

Essay

For several years, before and for a while after I had kids, I worked on a mystery novel set in eastern Montana. I wrote sketches and backgrounds for the major and minor characters; mapped out plot points, detailed motivations, and background for the murderer (he was a paleontologist selling fossils on the black market to pay for his mother’s cancer treatments), rewrote the entire thing start to finish at least eight times, went to a couple of encouraging mystery writers conferences, and generally had a fun time pitting my two main characters—half-sisters full of mutual resentment—against each other.

One day, sitting in a small, dusty library in an old building in upstate New York and struggling with another revision of said novel, I realized that I’d been forcing the writing for at least a couple of weeks. I dreaded sitting down to any of my works-in-progress, and actually started sneezing whenever I picked up the mystery novel, as if I were allergic to it. But I wasn’t allergic (maybe that was the library); the desire to write had left me.

I don’t mean I was blocked—“writer’s block” is very often just fear—or that I was stuck. This was something new. The desire to craft narrative, to feel the glide of a pen across a notebook or a printout of a manuscript, was just gone.

It was the oddest feeling. The urge to write had been with me almost as long as I could remember. I wrote my first stories at an age so young I barely remember them, though I still have the first “book” I wrote when I was maybe seven or eight years old.

Losing writing showed me how much it’s part of whatever “me” is. I imagine visual artists and musicians and dancers and in fact creators of any kind feel the same. Before writing left, I would have been hard-pressed to explain its neverending urgency to someone who didn’t already know what I was talking about. Like most writers, I received piles of rejections before my essays began finding an audience. Anyone who’s been bitten by a creative bug knows what I mean when I say rejection won’t stop you: It’s not an expression of ambition or some vision of success that keeps you going; it’s the writing itself. I could never have published anything in my entire life and that would have made me sad but it wouldn’t have stopped the writing. “Being a writer” is a full-on embodied thing that exists no matter what kind of feedback or public notice you do or do not get.

Which is, really, strange. I didn’t know how strange until it wasn’t part of my daily existence. I woke up and didn’t feel a need to write. I had a kid-free hour or two and didn’t bring out an essay to revise. I opened my copy editing work for the day and never turned off my work timer to dive into an idea that had just come. I read books for pleasure and never felt a twinge of envy or wonder “How did they do that?” It was probably the most free I’ve ever felt because I realized I could do other things with my life. I could become a firefighter, or apply to do a graduate degree in mathematics, or get a job at one of the local farms.

It was only when it wasn’t there that I realized how much space writing took in every moment of every day, every breath, every thought.

The absence only lasted about three months. I don’t know what writing was off doing during that time—maybe it was sick of reading that mystery novel for the fiftieth go-round. But when it came back, it saturated everything all over again; I could still go pursue firefighting or mathematics or picking overpriced organic tomatoes for weekenders from New York City—I could cook a stew or try to grow cucumbers and kill thistles and not be drawn to turn each of those acts into metaphor for human existence!—but wanting to write about that life was going to ride along no matter what I tried go after.

I’ve only talked to one other writer-friend who’s experienced this absence. She told me she thinks of her writer self as a middle-aged white guy who sits at a battered desk in a dirty office scribbling stuff out and throwing it to his assistant out front to type. And sometimes the writer dude disappears for no reason and the assistant bides their time playing Minesweeper (this conversation was before games other than Minesweeper and solitaire were widely available).

It was an interesting lesson to go through. I’m not sure any of us understand what writing is—what creativity is, for that matter; Arthur Koestler wrote a whole book about it (The Act of Creation, with lingering themes in The Ghost in the Machine) and didn’t really come to persuasive conclusions—much less why some are driven to do it no matter what the circumstances. As my father is fond of reminding me, Dostoevsky wrote in a freezing shack with his family all around, in exile in Siberia, which is partly why I’m not picky about the mechanics or location of the writing I do. I’ve written in coffee shops and libraries, at home with babies climbing on me and on campings trips in the early morning with frozen fingers.

When my last book proposal was rejected, I thought a lot about the time that writing went on vacation. It wasn’t that I was going to write the book no matter what; it was knowing that I could ask my writer self if this was still an idea worth pursuing and could trust the answer (yes). I’m a slow learner—and a slow writer—but I’ve heard enough internal “meh’s” to know when something isn’t going to let go.

I’m always curious about people’s relationship with writing and art. With creativity. There’s a tremendous amount of conflation between writing itself and “getting published,” especially getting a book published. I’m always intrigued when people say they hope to “become a writer”—I remember saying things like that, only realizing later that it was just something I was, not something I could choose to become. Does every one of us have to untangle those two things for ourselves, come to terms with the writer who’s going to be a driving, urgent force in our lives no matter what “success” or recognition we do or do not achieve?

Many of my favorite Russian writers and poets existed in frankly horrific circumstances. Exiled, jailed, living in extreme poverty, loss of children, loss of freedom, loss of country and home. They didn’t write because they hoped for a steady stream of book contracts and speaking engagements for the rest of their lives; they wrote, often at risk of government rebuke, censorship, or worse, because they could not help themselves. This has been true of artists all over the world, and over millennia. The best writers I know right now are writing because the stories want to be told, need to be told, and through them.

It’s not ambition that keeps people going; it’s more like an internal insistence. Not being able to help oneself. It’s why days or weeks without writing time leave me incredibly cranky and difficult to live with. It’s why I’m at this moment sitting at an ironing board set up under the stairs and behind the water heater (it’s the only place I have a chance of not being interrupted for a while, with the added bonus of making me feel more Russian than I actually am by being cold and uncomfortable and smelling strongly of pickles because we have a bucket of them fermenting in the same tiny space).

When that last book proposal was rejected and I thought about the time years ago when writing left, I couldn’t help remembering how much easier life was, how many more possiblities there were for how to spend my time. It hasn’t left in over a decade, but its absence is still visceral. It taught me a straightforward lesson: writing has nothing to do with either form or success—it’s either there or it’s not. A book is one form, as is a magazine byline, as is a blog, as is a speech, as is a letter to an old friend; and that all the book contracts in the world, either behind you or ahead of you, mean nothing when you’re exploring that next idea, seeing if it holds firm, asking it what it wants to be.

What matters in the end is your commitment to the story itself. Like any relationship, where you go together will be unexpected. It will have its griefs as well as its joys and there is always the potential of heartbreaking loss. Success and accolades are never guaranteed, and even when they come, they don’t change what writing—what stories—need from you. The writing might abandon you for a time, but what the story needs to know is that you will never leave it.