Antonia Malchik

I’ve been doing a lot of gardening recently, probably more than at any other time of my life except when my spouse and I bought our first house nearly twenty years ago and thought we’d become avid gardeners like both of our mothers. Between the heavy clay soil, ubiquitous thistles, poison ivy, and—once a friend of ours trained her lawnmowing goats in our yard and brought her horses by a few times—mile-a-minute vine, it was far more laborious and less fruitful than we’d hoped. Later, when we’d scaled back our ambition and built a few raised boxes filled with bags of soil purchased from Home Depot, the seeds of a perennial sunflower we’d planted took over and made itself into an impenetrable (if pretty) autumn jungle; aside from a small effort at tomatoes every year we gave up. I probably could have handled the labor but the heat and humidity of upstate New York did me in.

I’ve been promising our kids a garden ever since we moved back to Montana, somewhere they could grow carrots, berries, and pumpkins, but gardens are work, our summers are short, and the soil of our yard turned out to be a thick gumbo-like substance similar to the clay we had in New York. I was digging rows for potatoes last weekend and each forkful brought up a heavy mass that was less “dirt” and more a soil-like clod of slick glue riddled with thistle roots and (thankfully) worms. Breaking each chunk apart by hand showed strata and fracture lines that reminded me of shearing lava rocks when I was little. Left long enough, this soil, too, might eventually compress into solid rock.

A neighbor friend was working at a tree trimming service last year, and dumped truckloads of mulch on the garden throughout the summer, which seemed like a useful thing until a friend pointed out that most of the trimmings were cedar, and cedar leaches nitrogen from soil. Which meant we’d have to add nitrogen in the form of other soil, compost, and, in the long term, nitrogen-fixing plants like lentils or vetch.

Gardening seems to require purchasing soil or compost anyway, which was really odd to me once I started thinking about it. My mother never bought soil when I was growing up, and she cultivated bountiful gardens in nearly every house we lived in, even ones we only rented for a year. In one, we spent only one summer but had the largest, sweetest strawberries in my memory. The house was in a sheltered hollow an hour or so south of where I live now, and the soil, as I planted carrot and pea seeds under her instruction, was loamy and soft, at least eight inches of enriched glacial silt.

It’s hard to grow things in clay soil. Fruit and vegetable roots struggle to wind through thick compacted dirt, no matter how much nutrition it holds. I dug a row to grow tomatoes and peppers last year, just to get something in the ground after we fenced in an area during lockdown, and they grew sparse and yellowish, producing very little. This year, my buddy who’s been gardening most of his life told us to go down to the place on the south end of Flathead Lake that sells peat mixed with compost to till through the soil, feeding it while breaking it up. I nixed the tilling part because every time I dig in this area of the yard I bring up some substantial object, like a hammer or a kitchen knife or a length of pipe or chunk of brick. I didn’t know what a previous owner used to do here but it wasn’t gardening. (Unless they were gardening snips of wiring because I’ve found hundreds of those.) In our last yard we’d used a tiller in the garden and ended up nearly wrecking it because the soil there had good-sized rocks seeded all throughout the clay, and sometimes a large one would get stuck in the tiller’s blades. It’s an expensive mistake to assume your dirt contains only dirt.

I haven’t gone to pick up a cube of peat because I have to get my truck’s oil leak fixed first, but the whole idea of it has given me pause—to enough to not do it, but I’ve been thinking a lot about peat and topsoil and where it all comes from. I’ve bought about twenty bags of gardening soil from the hardware store in the last month, piling beds on top of hand-dug clay, and each time I haul out and rip open that forty pounds of plastic-wrapped dirt, I have to wonder about its origins. Unlike, say, trees, soil isn’t precisely a renewable resource. It’s not something you can extract and then plant again. Pretty much all of our life depends on soil, yet it’s not something we’ve really learned to make. Make up for the lack of, yes, sometimes, but not make, at least not fast or at scale.

Making soil is in essence what compost is. We take organic materials—banana peels, chicken bones, supposedly compostable plastic bags or parchment paper—pile them up to promote the creation of heat, add worms or enzymes or nothing, and wait. Given enough heat and time, the materials turn into something that can then be used for the eventual creation of tomatoes. It’s rich and effective, but is it soil? Soil at its most unmolested contains worlds that we’ve barely begun to understand, microbes and bugs and interlocked roots and mycelial networks that leave researchers wondering where mushrooms end and fungi begin.

(It’s all connected. Pause for a minute and really, truly think about that. Every single speck of existence, connected. I know it’s been said in numerous wonderful ways but it’s always worth letting yourself sink into the knowledge.)

I recently finished Charlotte Gill’s book Eating Dirt about her years working on a tree-planting crew. It came recommended from science writer and former Arctic researcher Sarah Boon, who shared enticing excerpts, but I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I’ve read so many books about trees!

Whatever I expected, Eating Dirt turned out to be different from that. More. Deeper. Fuller. I told Sarah and our little group of science writer friends that it had been a long time since a book actively felt like it was slowing my mind down. Pulling me down into the dirt and getting this jumpy, too-inattentive mind of mine to settle down and enrich itself with light but held attention. Despite the fact that Gill frequently describes the speed of the work itself, as the planters are paid so many cents per seedling in the ground, the effect of her language was exactly the drawdown I look for in mindfulness practices and bonfires and books and slow walks in the woods by myself.

It was like being furrowed by a gentle hand reminding me of the richness that each of us contains in our selfs. And at the same time she refocused me on the soil as I read, since Eating Dirt made me think about dirt and soil far more than it made me think about trees:

“Even now, old-growth soil is ancient and alchemical. A world beneath our feet that’s oceanic in its unknown fecundity. Crustaceans live in it. Out of this dark fundament, life is born of inert matter, from rocks and clay and sand. Trees germinate here: light-drinking organisms that suck molecules from the air and transform them into a wondrous polymer, which is both strong and flexible. And when they are done living they disassemble and return to the earth. Dust to dust.”

The area we lived in New York is a big agricultural region. We were surrounded by corn fields and apple orchards, and just a few miles away was some of the richest soil in America, hummus so deep that fully intact woolly mammoth fossils have been extracted from it. It’s called the Black Dirt Region, tens of thousands of acres of the remains left by the glacial lake of a previous ice age. It was until recently the source of nearly a quarter of the U.S.’s onions, and the soil is so treasured—between 30 and 90% organic matter when most soil has less than 10%—that it’s illegal to sell. (Why our yard was full of compacted clay instead is another question, though I think it had been a corn field for a long time.)

Which brings me back to the question of purchased soil, just a thing we do these days. Build some boxes, start some seeds, and go buy soil. I had a friend who ran a microgreen business for a few years, and she had to buy mountains of fresh soil for her seeds. It got reused in her larger farm, but still, she had to bring it in. And then there’s my friend’s advice to follow his lead and buy big cubes of peat to work into our clay.

Peat, as I learned when living in Scotland, is a huge carbon sink and grows at a rate of about a millimeter per year. It has to be mined or extracted and growing it back can take lifetimes. The bags of soil I buy at the hardware store are probably mixed with peat, and often with topsoil, which is also mined from somewhere else. The more I poked around in the question, the more the dependence on this shipped-in resource seemed odd, or at least odd in its inexplicability, its presentation of “here’s dirt!” without a mention of its origin, its homeland. And it’s weird that the backyard gardener even has to go looking for advice on “how do I grow vegetables just in my own dirt?”

I can make compost myself, which would feed and lighten the soil over the years, and we’re fortunate to have a composting business in the area, which picks up customers’ buckets of compostable materials and drops off bags of compost in the spring. And there’s a dairy farm a few miles away that sells the sawdust it uses in the cow stalls, which supposedly makes a good gardening addition once it’s composted itself, especially for this bulky clay soil. In other words, I have options other than cubes of peat moss or plastic bags of soil. 

Robert Macfarlane has a chapter in his book Underland in which he ventures for miles in tunnels built for the extraction of potash, an essential ingredient in agricultural fertilizer and of which there is, again, only a finite amount on the planet. I thought of that chapter, an eerie realization among many in Underland, as I was pouring soil on top of dirt over the last couple of weeks in order to plant onions and spinach, potatoes and peas, that everything we wish to do, even wholesome things, is part of a massive, often unseen, shifting of resources stripped away in one part of the planet, packaged and sent to another.

I think, maybe, while I’m trying to figure out how to eradicate thistles and knapweed and protect water and build resilient communities and narratives for an uncertain future, I’d better think more carefully about building this soil, too, without depending on extraction from elsewhere. To slow down and begin seeing dirt the way Charlotte Gill does, as something miraculous, precious, and absolutely necessary to our survival.

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Bonus photo:

Hello thistles, my old friends. I’ve come to murder you again.

Walking composition

“To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.”
—The Magna Carta, 1215

I have a tendency to overcommit. It’s not a failing I’m unconscious of, nor am I alone. I try to hold back from always saying “yes,” yet even with my personal guidelines about where my time and energy go, I inevitably end up with too much. Sometimes way too much, as has happened recently.

Perhaps that was why I ended up finally burning all of my personal journals in a backyard bonfire on Saturday night.

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There are a number of things on my plate (at this point a soggy paper plate that’s about to disintegrate) that have taken an unexpected amount of time recently, top of the list being a one-day workshop on science writing for the public that I’m giving to groups of eighth-graders. I’ve never, frankly, taught writing before, and the amount of preparation involved was far more than I’d imagined, in part because finding appropriate material turned out to be challenging. Readable, but not fluff; interesting but not something that might anger parents (turns out most of my favorite science writers swear a lot in their work, and I wasn’t sure which social issues might be touchy); and for myself I didn’t want to load them down with too much depressing material in one hour. Climate change, water pollution, and teen depression all in one go seemed like a bad idea.

We’ll have to see how it goes. I’m not thrilled about the final formation of the workshop but I am extremely tired of preparing for it.

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The journals I burned have been sitting in a box waiting for a fire for months. Or years. About a dozen years ago I decided to give myself a decade to decide whether or not to burn all of my journals as I wrote them—this is purely personal material, no actual writing-draft notebooks. I decided, and then they sat there until we built a fire pit during lockdown last year, and I moved their box into a psychological waiting room.

I’d planned on burning them alone, but when my spouse invited some friends over for dinner and a fire, I decided to let it be a group project with the understanding that nobody was allowed to read them. We pulled out notebooks going back decades and opened them over the flames, and despite the fact that I still have too much work to do and this workshop to get through and a staggering amount of volunteer work and a new copy editing contract and the daily homeschooling to manage and still soooo many thistles to kill, I felt, the next day, lighter.

And then my sister came over and said it looked like burning my journals was fun, and I asked how she knew since I hadn’t mentioned it, and she showed me a Facebook post from one of my friends. “I’d recognize your handwriting anywhere,” she said, though the friend was careful not to post anything terribly legible or personal.

When I walked around today listening to the Futures podcast episode about our virtual selves and they talked about whether or not you can ever really die online, I thought of that moment and wondered what entangled thing our species is becoming as we knit our digital selves together. It’s inescapable, it seems. How much stronger would it be if we fully recognized the mirror interconnection in our physical lives?

None of those musings will help me teach eighth-grade girls science writing in fifty minutes—especially if there’s no swearing involved—but it does remind me what small blips we are. And what, for the moment, a relief that is. To know you are a blip, the self poured onto a page ready to fall apart in ash and grow into something new and full of life.

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Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Well-intentioned preservation of cave paintings in Indonesia—thought to be the oldest in the world at over 45,000 years old—might have destroyed anthropologists’ ability to accurately date them, by Franco Viviani in Sapiens.

• A very interesting essay in Aeon by history professor Douglas Boin pokes into the various tribes of peoples who were swallowed up by the Roman Empire, and the tricky, evolving idea of who got to be considered “Roman.”

• I have no idea if this is slightly disguised advertising, but did like the vision portrayed in this 7-minute film about a future of fenceless ranching that could be possible through the use of techy-techy collars for cows. It’s the kind of technology that falls more on the “serves life” side of things, maybe. The vast fencing required by ranches is very damaging to wildlife corridors, so it’s nice to see the Ranchers Stewardship Alliance trying a different approach, though I’d like to know more.

• From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a short but sobering look (if anyone needed that) at the presence of cesium 137 in honey, a legacy of 1950s nuclear testing.

• Which is a good invitation to “Earshot,” a prompting to end (or at least pause) overthinking, from the Pondercast podcast.

Walking composition

“I could stand to have my back broken if this was the way a spine could grow back.”
—Charlotte Gill, Eating Dirt

I spent two hours last weekend spot-spraying Canadian thistles with vinegar. With most weeds I’m live and let live but the thistles are vicious—sharp enough to poke through shoes—and spread with gleeful abandon. If they’re allowed to flower they seed everywhere, and if you try to dig them up every bit of chipped-off taproot sprouts a new plant. Spraying them is a complete tedious pain but I told myself that this would be the year I get some kind of grip over the enormous thistle problem in our yard.

A friend stopped by later to assess our garden soil and drop off a couple of honeyberry bushes. I told him I think of the thistles as white supremacy and he said that knapweed, which we also have plenty of, was probably closer and the thistles are more like the patriarchy. The thistles, he said, eventually burn themselves out but the knapweed injects a toxin into the soil to stop other plants from growing.

And then I thought it’s kind of silly for me to make sociological analogies out of invasive weeds. It’s an ingrained tendency for a nonfiction writer, I think, but thistles and knapweed are just thistles and knapweed. They don’t need to carry the weight of problems larger than themselves.

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While I was spraying I listened to a half-hour episode of At a Distance, a podcast I usually enjoy for its thoughtfulness. I ended up frustrated with this one, though, and almost didn’t finish it because the guest and hosts riffed for a bit about how unreasonable “environmentalists” are for resisting nuclear power and genetically modified food plants.

This kind of criticism makes me weary. It’s very common and depends on strawman arguments, leaps of logic, and a stereotyping of opponents being anti-science instead of grappling with very real problems those technologies pose. Every time I hear someone defend GMOs they talk about Vitamin A rice, but they never talk about enormous increase in the use of pesticides and herbicides in the American midwest and the damage it causes to waterways, or, dicambra drift, or the GMO grass that was developed for golf courses, escaped, and is now spreading across Oregon.

And I don’t think I’ve ever heard a proponent of nuclear power truly grapple with the sacrifice zones that are necessary for both ends of that production line: places where uranium is mined, and places where waste is stored. Nor do they talk about the reality that the damage caused will extend to uncountable future generations, another iteration of what plastics researcher Rebecca Altman calls “time-bombing the future.”

It’s very easy to promote forms of energy and engineered food when you’re the recipient of them if you ignore the ecosystems and people sacrificed in the process.

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A few years ago I hired a goat lawnmowing service. The animals were very effective at chomping down the thistles (they were also super cute) but they didn’t touch the knapweed. Evidently knapweed is so unattractive as fodder that elk have changed migration patterns to avoid it.

Every time I remember I have to deal with it, the knapweed happens to be in bloom and is covered in wild, native bees. Since bees are in decline pretty much everywhere I don’t have the heart to remove this food source when they’re using it but I’m going to have to figure something out eventually. I don’t know which plants might be strong enough to overcome the toxins left behind when the knapweed is pulled out, but I’ll start with my favorite free, cheerful, edible, soft-to-walk-on and easy-to-grow plant whose dislike by yard enthusiasts I’ll never understand: dandelions.

I suppose removing knapweed and replacing it with something else will be a lifelong project, but it’ll be interesting to see if we can turn this mini sacrifice zone into something more supportive of life’s diversities.

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• This Futures podcast on how brain chemicals influence your life was fascinating enough that I might read Ginny Smith’s book Overloaded. She managed to explain complicated ideas—like a possible relationship between inflammation and depression—without overselling them.

• Mary Jo Salter’s collection of “Zoom Room” sonnets for The American Scholar was a needed interlude. I don’t read a lot of poetry but enjoyed this selection.

• Sarah Boon’s Watershed Notes this week is, delightfully, about trees. I can’t wait to share her forthcoming essay on individual trees for Psyche and, hopefully someday, the longform essay she mentions about our relationship with forests.

• Michelle Nijhuis’s essay “The miracle of the commons,” in Aeon, arrived serendipitously on the same day I posted that walking composition about Peter Linebaugh’s commons research and the Magna Carta. Nijhuis, author of the book Beautiful Beasts, about endangered species, made me very happy by bringing Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning work on commons systems of ownership to the world with this essay, and dismantling Garrett Hardin’s too-often-quoted and logically flawed “Tragedy of the Commons.” She asks why Hardin’s work persists in our imaginations but Ostrom’s is little-known, to which my answer would be that Hardin’s simplified, pessimistic view of humans’ capacities to manage the gifts of the ecosystems we depend on serves power and profit, so of course it’s the image of ourselves that is pushed upon us.

• Neutron counts at Chernobyl’s confinement shelter have started to creep up, prompting worries about increased fission reactions that could lead to decay and radioactive dust. (Did I mention sacrifice zones?)

Walking composition

“No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.” —Spinoza

The light recently has been remarkable. Sometimes we get days like that, often during or between bouts of rain. Clouds rumple in a mix of gray-blue, sunlight glancing off odd angles, and the deep pine green sets off against it. One of the things I miss about walking to the elementary school is the sky-cloud vista from the playground, open and breath-full like little else around here.

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I recently listened to an interview with Peter Linebaugh, a history scholar and professor whose work on the Magna Carta and the commons I’ve followed for a few years. Coming across the interview was a serendipitous moment, as I’ve been thinking what to do with material gathered for the no-book on ownership and the difficulty I’ve had reading Linebaugh’s books The Magna Carta Manifesto and Stop, Thief! They’re extensive, vital works of scholarship on this history but they’re kind of all over the place and I kept putting them down because they’re hard to follow. Full of mind-bending tidbits, though, like how important honey and hives were as a right of the commons—not just in England where the Magna Carta and Charter of the Forest were so formative, but all over the world where honey was a source of calories—and that the patron saint of England, St. George, was from Palestine and the dragon he slew was in Libya.

The interview prompted me to dive back into The Magna Carta Manifesto with all its scattered points of time and characters, like how in 1214-15 King John began stealing forests, ransoming children, and selling women (including his wife Isabella) in order to finance the Crusades as a way to bolster up his faltering power.

In the interview, Linebaugh gave some background to Karl Marx I also hadn’t heard before, that some of his economic thinking came from seeing German Rhineland peasants prosecuted for foraging wood for heat—for stealing—because large Prussian timber interests were using the wood for their own profit.

Everything old is new again.

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What do we have the right to? What do we have the right to be protected from? How does power use scarcity to divide people who would otherwise work toward common purpose?

It was only with privatization that criminality was created, said Linebaugh. “Crimes against property had been an essential part of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.” In The Magna Carta Manifesto he wrote about criminality and the encroachment of property-protecting law into rights of subsistence that have been eroded and reclaimed time and again over the centuries.

There is something fitting about watching the rumple-gray sky, its complexity and unpredictability, and sitting with the idea that our modern struggles against commodification and for a right to life for life go back some thousand years and probably millennia more. As I write these sentences dark rain clouds—our favorite kind—are moving in and a pheasant is squawking in my neighbor’s yard. I think of seeds I need to plant start and planning for this fall’s hunting already an eager, murky idea even as the trees I can see have barely begun to open their buds.

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Some stuff to read:

• Jeremy Adelman’s essay in Aeon about the difficulty that progressive thinkers have grappling with liberal nationalism (as opposed to globalism) made me think a lot. I’m not sure I agree with all the ideas; I’ll have to give more time to better understand them. America, as Adelman points out in his rebuttals to Jill Lepore, is complicated: “To restore the myth of the nation ‘born liberal’, to rescue it from ethnocidal nativists, means leaving others out of the story until they become ‘immigrants’ seeking shelter from illiberalism somewhere else.”

• I had less trouble getting my head around the ideas in Paula Keller’s essay in Psyche about what art history shows us about anti-feminist women. Her explanations about people who don’t understand the oppression they live under make a lot of sense, though they still don’t go far enough to answer a question I’ve been asking myself privately for a while now, most specifically since the special Alabama election in 2017 in which 63% of white women had voted for a candidate who’d been creditably accused of sexual assault against teenage girls: “What is wrong with white women?” As I am a white women, this is a question I feel compelled to grapple with as deeply as possible.

• Jordan Shapiro’s essay in Nautilus on the need for more feminist dads sounds predictable but was really . . . I was going to say “lovely” but maybe “restful”—as in “someone else is thinking about this difficult problem in compassionate and insightful ways, so maybe I don’t have to worry so much about it”—is a better word.

• (I’d like to say something revelatory about the fact that an essay on anti-feminist women and the desire for feminist dad role models showed up in my inbox in the same week, but I don’t have anything except that it happened.)

• And something totally different, a heartbreaking but beautifully written essay by Stephanie Austin in The Sun Magazine on her father’s death and a lifelong difficult relationship that I think will speak to many. “Maybe the emotional disconnect I felt with my father — that most people felt with my father — was not his fault. I started to ask around: ‘What was my dad like when he was young? Did he have friends? Did he make eye contact? Tell me about his eye contact.’”

Walking composition

“The private property society is . . . a bizarre mutation alien to most of humanity.”
—Andro Linklater, Owning the Earth

A story came across my feed yesterday regarding a court case in British Columbia that could end with almost all Crown land—land “owned” by the provincial government, otherwise known as public land—being back under guidance and control of First Nations. I’ve been trying to get my head around British Columbia environmental and property law as part of research on an ongoing cross-border environmental contamination situation involving a river, a dam, and the world’s second largest miner of metallurgical coal (the whole Teck Resources disaster for anyone who’s curious), so I’m very interested in the long-term implications of this legal ruling.

Where this BC Supreme Court decision will go is going to be fascinating, especially as, from what I understand, 95% of British Columbia is Crown land. As I crawl my way through a very readable but equally dense Buying America from the Indians, the murkiness of North American title and ownership transfer continues to show the ways in which history has been rewritten to attempt to solidify settler “ownership.”

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This research was all originally part of a book proposal I’d been working on about ownership, private property, and the future of the commons. It has, unfortunately, been turned down by pretty much every publisher my agent and I sent it to, and while that situation is disappointing, it’s also enlightening. The responses were warm to the idea and the writing, but hesitant about packaging and marketing. An easy thing to be critical of, but despite so many people—including me—wanting to dismantle the systems we’re constrained by, people still have to make a living and businesses have to stay functional. I am sure the stories will find their places when they’re meant to.

I do believe that private property, the dominant way that this dominant society owns the world we live in and among, frames many of the problems this same world faces. I’ll keep working on it in different iterations, including here, because I can’t help it. It’s an idea that won’t let go.

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I wrote something about chickadees returning a while back, and my mother emailed to tell me that chickadees don’t leave; it’s just that we start hearing their particular “cheeseburger” call in the spring.

There is so much of the world that never receives our attention. Sometimes I wonder if it’s better for it, but then realize how much damage is caused by that which we do give our attention to. I don’t usually even know, really, how to husband and care for my attention, and how to put it to best use. Does anyone?

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Some things to read, listen to, or watch:

• A fantastic dig into the nitty gritty of oil and gas leases on public lands from the National Wildlife Federation’s podcast Outdoors.

• How misinformation acts like a virus, and how information can’t protect us, by Elitsa Dermendzhiyska in Aeon: “Suppose the perfect message does find a person in need of disabusing, and even succeeds in fixing their false beliefs: will that person’s attitudes and behaviour change accordingly? If you tell people that 97 per cent of climate scientists agree about the reality of global warming, studies show that you’ll likely increase their perception of expert consensus on the subject. But whether this greater awareness translates into action – say, support for carbon-reduction policies – remains unclear.”

• Jesse Singal demonstrating the whisper-thin evidence for the influence of grit in Nautilus, which reminded me of Nicholas Tampio’s older Aeon piece about how grit might not be the educational panacea we’re looking for, and might actually be damaging to children.

• “Field of Vision-Utuqaq” or “Ice has memory,” a riveting half-hour film on climate change, Greenland, and the blind spots of visiting ice researchers, directed by Iva Radivojević (narrated in West Greenlandic with subtitles).

• Nick Martin writing in The New Republic about the difficulties that white/colonial culture and people have with interacting ethically with land. In this article, public lands, but Martin does get a bit into the commodity relationship—even when we’re “getting out into nature” to feed our souls, we’re still trying to extract something from it rather than engaging in relationship with it.

A little over a year ago, early in our state’s lockdown, I watched one of my children crumble into a million pieces. She’d held up okay until then. We’d done a lot of family walks, and my kids were still enjoying the novelty of the puppy we’d adopted shortly before Covid became more than a passing mention in the U.S. news. But it was never going to last. “I miss her so much,” said my kid of the friend we’d been talking about. It was almost like I could see every emotional retaining wall break inside her.

Being a serious introvert, I hadn’t fully appreciated until that moment what the day-to-day emotional need for friends really meant to my kid. This was not just missing friends, not just needing the regular social interaction that school brought. This was an absolute need, like food, water, and hugs.

I should have known better. I read a lot about loneliness while researching walking—because the loss of walkable, connected communities has contributed to epidemics of loneliness in several countries, especially among teens and the elderly—and talk with people about it a lot, about what regular human interaction really looks like, about what it feels like to experience true connection as opposed to “not alone,” about the litany of poor health consequences that result from chronic loneliness. And yet, I hadn’t understood that for my own daughter, simply having her family and beloved new dog nearby all day wasn’t enough. I knew enough to know better, but I’d missed it.

Earlier on in the pandemic, I was wary of bringing up loneliness for fear of it being weaponized by “the cure is worse than the disease” hardliners. But a year later it’s still not being treated as the priority it should be. We now have decades of research on loneliness and its related health consequences. The physical damage of chronic loneliness is comparable to the effects of high blood pressure, obesity, or smoking. John Cacioppo, a lead researcher on this subject for years, wrote in his book Loneliness that “the pain of loneliness is a deeply disruptive hurt.” It can, for example, undermine our ability to take care of our physical health:

“Going for a run might feel good when you’re finished, but for most of us, getting out the door in the first place requires an act of willpower. The executive control required for such discipline is compromised by loneliness, and loneliness also tends to lower self-esteem. If you perceive that others see you as worthless, you are more likely to engage in self-destructive behaviors and less likely to take good care of yourself.” 

This relationship is a deep part of our evolution, an internal signal that developed to tell us when we’d roamed too far from the tribe—and kept us from acting selfishly within tribal life in the first place. Selfish behavior could lead to ostracism or exile, which in tribal days could be deadly. There was no such thing as rugged individualism; we evolved to need other people because . . . well, we needed other people. “For social behavior, the warmth of connection is the carrot; the pain of feeling isolated, also known as loneliness, is the stick,” wrote Cacioppo.

Division, mistrust, hate, and tribalism are certainly part of human nature, he wrote. But so equally, or perhaps more, are cooperation and community. Addressing the oft-quoted Thomas Hobbes line about life being nasty, brutish, and short (which was written, by the way, at a time that England had experienced civil war, the beheading of a king, and enormous religious strife—realities that had defined all of Hobbes’s own life), Cacioppo wrote that, 

“The point which the Hobbesian analysis misses is that, if such ruthlessness were, in fact, the defining essence of human nature, we would have never evolved our way out of the rain forest, much less the grasslands of eastern Africa. . . . The driving force of our advance as a species has not been our tendency to be brutally self-interested, but our ability to be socially cooperative.”

So what is loneliness, this strange creature, this nebulous beast that can topple us into depression, isolation, and shame?

Cacioppo has probably the best descriptions. Loneliness is an evolved response that developed in order to protect us from danger. We needed our tribe in order to survive; feeling lonely was our mind-body’s way of telling us that we were alone or isolated enough to put ourselves at risk. That doesn’t mean we can never be alone. As, again, a serious introvert, I have about the same reaction to lacking time alone as my daughter does to lacking time with friends. Worse, actually. I don’t just fall apart. I get cranky and short-tempered. I’ve told my spouse regularly for over twenty years that I need time alone as badly as I need sleep. Alone-deprivation and sleep-deprivation feel almost the same to me.

But needing time alone is not the same as loneliness. It might take more to get me feeling lonely, or it might take different situations. I left my college graduation party after saying hello to my two favorite professors because, I told myself, nobody would miss me, as if I hadn’t just spent four years among friends and teachers I would value for decades, as if I didn’t belong. That was a long time ago now, but looking back I think it was how my loneliness manifested. Leaving a crowd or a gathering of people whose company I enjoyed, telling myself nobody would miss me, was probably a subconscious pre-emptive defensive maneuver against feeling rejected and left out. Now that I’m aware of that response, I can manage it instead of believing it at face value. I am better at differentiating between when I need to be alone, and when I’m feeling lonely.

One of the points made repeatedly by Cacioppo and other loneliness researchers is that a person can feel lonely just as easily among other people as they do when they’re isolated. The key is the lack of connection. To avoid loneliness, you have to feel connected to other people, not just surrounded by them.

The pandemic has put millions, if not billions, of people into a situation where for over a year many important connections have been severed. I feel very fortunate that we have the technologies we do that enable certain levels of connection. For months I was on the phone or Facetime with family almost every day. Even when we started homeschooling, my kids could take music lessons over Skype. My job has been remote or online for nearly twenty years (though the homeschooling has meant far less of it), which has allowed me flexibility and mobility.

But those tools still failed to help most people feel truly connected, not connected in the ways that counter the slow seep of loneliness into your bones. It might get there, someday, if this titanic movement of our digital lives ever manages to shift to serve being human rather than humans serving the tech and the profit drive of its stakeholders. For the time being, though, as I wrote about at length in my book, digital tech like social media does more to exacerbate loneliness than alleviate it, particularly for teenagers. It’s a problem that’s getting worse, not better, the more time we spend online.

There was a beautiful essay in 1843 magazine in 2018 about loneliness (reading it in full requires registering for an account) that repeated the question, “What does loneliness feel like?” like mournful cello refrain, eliciting the physical reality of feeling lonely, the existential self-questioning that comes with it, the way it can overtake your sense of self:

“‘And what does loneliness feel like?’

‘Loneliness is worthlessness. You feel you don’t fit in, that people don’t understand you. You feel terrible about yourself, you feel rejected. Everyone goes to the pub, but they don’t invite you. Why? Because there’s something wrong with you.’”

“‘What does loneliness feel like?’

‘It’s like being offered a full meal, and not being able to eat it.’”

“‘What does your loneliness feel like?’ I ask Fiona.

‘It feels like a bereavement – like an enormous loss of something. And it also feels suffocating – tight and strangling and suffocating, even though it’s an absence.’

‘And what do you do when these feelings become overwhelming?’

‘Nothing. I used to make myself go on bike rides and stuff. Now I just try to put up with it. I think, “this is it, then. This is what loneliness is”.’”

The whole essay delves into the lived reality of loneliness for people, how it manifests in their physical and emotional selves. After seeing its effects directly in my daughter, I could perceive better how harmful loneliness can be in wider society. And in productivity-driven, individualism-revering Western culture, some of loneliness’s destructive capacity lies in society’s adherence to believing that if we feel horrible—depressed, anxious, lonely, worthless, lost, powerless, etc., etc.—then it must be because something is wrong with us. We’ve internalized this so deeply that extracting ourselves from this belief can be an all-consuming lifelong struggle.*

More recently, a team at MIT, which had been studying loneliness before the pandemic hit, backed up reported experiences like these with neuroscientific research. Starting with mice, researchers found that social isolation changed very specific neurons in the brain, pointing to the idea that loneliness has identifiable consequences. (I love the question that Kay Tye, the cognitive neuroscientist who started the research, was exploring: “How does the brain imbue social isolation with meaning?”) When they started studying human brains, they found that loneliness lights up the same areas of the brain as hunger does. As a science writer friend put it to me when we talked about that research last year, “We are literally starved for connection.”

The consequences can go beyond our individual selves. It’s not just that loneliness can prompt such a desperate need to feel belonging and connection that people might, say, join a violent right-wing extremist group, but that government itself can use loneliness as a weapon to undermine resistance. Hannah Arendt wrote that loneliness is the essence of totalitarian governments because it severs people from human connection. (Samantha Rose Hill’s essay on Hannah Arendt and loneliness in Aeon is well worth reading.) In Zeynep Tufekçi’s book on social movements, Twitter & Teargas, she wrote extensively of the role of social media in protest, contrasting and comparing and complementing in-person protests, in ways that few others have. As part of that research, she also wrote about the ways in which repressive governments break movements by making people feel alone: “Fostering a sense of loneliness among dissidents while making an example of them to scare off everyone else has long been a trusted method of ruling.”

In her section on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s idea of the civil rights movement as a “beloved community” and insurgent Zapatista villages in Chiapas in the 1990s, Tufekçi wrote that,

“This affirmation of belonging outside money relationships and of the intimacy of caring for people is the core of what motivates many to participate in protests. It explains the presence of libraries, the sites’ cleanliness, and people’s deeply felt desire and motivation to stand with one another in rebellion. That longing also explains many other aspects of networked antiauthoritarian protest movements.”

The loneliness of activism is something that I’ve been trying to address in my personal connections over the last year. Living in a state that always leaned conservative and has recently taken a hard-right turn, it took me a while to realize how lonely my progressive friends are feeling—probably due mostly to the fact that I wasn’t seeing much of them; the loneliness itself is also partly due to the fact that none of them were seeing much of people who care about the same things they do. The people who were out in the world—service workers, child care workers, etc.—were seeing the worst of those who, to put it bluntly, made it a point of pride to care less about other people’s life and health than they did about their own perceived freedom.

For my progressive friends in Montana, loneliness has been a very effective means of undermining their commitment to activism work without them even being conscious of it, which is partly why I keep directing statewide acquaintances to Forward Montana. The organization does great work on its own, but most importantly, to my mind, its weekly emails and podcasts serve to directly address the loneliness people might be feeling, to bring a spotlight to the (often accurate) perception that those in power don’t care about us or our needs, that we’re not heard, that we’re alone. Loneliness is terribly dehumanizing. It’s partly why I wrote that piece last month acknowledging that things might not be getting better anytime soon but to know that you are not alone is the most important tool we have right now.

Unfortunately, for children and for many adults, repeating this to ourselves isn’t enough. Just before Thanksgiving I ran into an acquaintance at the grocery store who’d recently sent one of her kids back to school. “I had to choose between that and worrying about her committing suicide,” she said. The social isolation was too much, and she’s not the only friend who said something similar after sending their kid back to school.

Over a year into this, and many months into a new presidential administration, and still nobody in charge is talking about loneliness. If our society weren’t completely inside-out as far as values go, loneliness would be right up there with making sure that highest-risk people are protected from the virus. We’d be addressing both things together, protecting the most vulnerable while doing the best we could to mitigate loneliness. But even with Dr. Vivek Murthy—who published Together, a book about loneliness and community last year, and who made loneliness one of his top priorities later in his service as Obama’s Surgeon General—back as Surgeon General, I am hearing . . . nothing.

Loneliness is a signal from our evolutionary selves telling us that something is not right. The face that loneliness reached epidemic proportions in many countries even before the pandemic tells us that something is deeply wrong with the structures of our societies. Not that we needed another sign. This one, like depression and anxiety, feels like a species-wide scream being smothered under the comforts of consumerism and the demands of productivity. It would probably be less expensive in the long run to start asking what the problem is trying to tell us than spending yet more money and resources covering up the symptoms.

We can’t silence the screams forever. 

*I highly recommend Johann Hari’s book about depression, Lost Connections. While he was originally criticized for questioning the efficacy of antidepressants, I’m not sure that those critics read the book. He does go deeply into the flawed and thin research on antidepressants, but also writes extensively of their usefulness in many situations, including his own life. As with so many things, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. More importantly, the book is largely about the societal structures that make so many of us feel isolated and powerless in the first place, leading to or exacerbating significant rates of depression and anxiety. His point being that it might not be only about a chemical imbalance, but also about the structures we live in that can make life feel meaningless, or individuals feel worthless. It’s worth noting that when Stockton, California, reviewed its experiment in Universal Basic Income, the city found that rates of depression, anxiety, and stress among those receiving UBI decreased by levels comparable to clinical trials of Prozac. And their UBI was only $500/month.

Olivia Laing’s book The Lonely City is also a tremendous examination into the author’s own overwhelming loneliness, and how loneliness becomes political as well as personal (the book interweaves her own experience of loneliness after moving to New York, with the AIDS crisis that erupted in tandem with the artistic movements of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s.)

Walking composition

“The law is to protect property, and it thinks too much of property.” —Shadows on the Rock, Willa Cather

I just read All Systems Red, the first in Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries series. Felt a bit meh about the first part of it because I don’t usually enjoy stories from the perspective of self-aware AI (except for Marvin the Paranoid Android in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, of course), but the character’s mopey, self-conscious tendencies managed to thread a narrative the escapes being cliche. It did make me wonder for the first time, though, why it’s so hard to write believable self-aware AI characters. AI is a computer, so we expect it to have the clinical logic of Spock or Data. But if it’s self-aware—if it can feel fear, pain, hope, joy, and a desire to survive—writers tend to want to turn it into either the perfect human or the perfect killing machine.

This particular self-aware robot, which is programmed to kill and/or protect and has hacked its controlling governor module, was forced onto the ship’s crew as part of a corporate contract, and it just wants to sit around watching TV all day. There’s something deliciously different about that.

—-

My wonderful cross-country writing group helped me practice hosting a Zoom webinar so that I don’t horribly mess it up when hosting a forum for candidates in our upcoming school board election (this is something I started doing two years ago—definitely easier in person from a logistics perspective). Later we had a regular meeting to catch up and when the standard question these days, “How are you really?” came up, I asked if anyone even knows how to answer that question anymore.

Crickets.

—-

If we asked a self-aware AI that question, I wonder if it might spend the rest of its life trying to find an answer. Is that what we do all our lives? Is that what a mind is, an embodied consciousness walking through the world and all day every day asking, “How am I really?”

How are you really?

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• A lovely reflection on Wendell Berry and Larry McMurtry by Seth Wieck at Front Porch Republic: “Five years after reading Benjamin’s essay in the Dairy Queen, McMurtry published Lonesome Dove. He famously and consistently was attempting to ‘demythicize’ that section of history which Westerns exploit for its myth. He famously failed.”

• . . . which led me back to an essay I’d forgotten about, Wallace Stegner’s 1992 “A Sense of Place.” “I was born on wheels, among just such a family. I know about the excitement of newness and possibility, but also know the dissatisfaction and hunger that result from placelessness. Some towns that we lived in were never real to me. They were only the raw material of places, as I was the raw material of a person. Neither place nor I had a chance of being anything unless we could live together for a while.”

• In one of the more uplifting podcasts I’ve heard in a while, Ed Roberson of the Mountain & Prairie podcast interviewed Marci McLean and Cora Neumann about Covid’s impact on Native communities. McLean is Executive Director of Montana Native Vote, and Neumann is a Bozeman, Montana-based public health expert who worked on Ebola. They started working together when they realized Covid was going to be serious, especially for Native communities, and have a lot of to-the-point reflections on the importance of leadership, trust, connection, and community.

• “Four Masks and a Funeral,” Jeffrey Wasserstrom writing in The American Scholar about the four different times he’s written about masks in Hong Kong.

Walking composition

“J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said,
No. I believe in this connection we all have
to nature, to each other, to the universe.
And she said, Yeah, God.”
—Ada Limón, from “What It Looks Like to Us and the Words We Use”

We keep having these hail-like snow squalls ride the wind in to remind us that winter takes a long time to let go in Montana, and it makes a good excuse to hole up for a few hours with a book and a fire. Sometimes my days get so busy I forget how much I love just sinking into a book, but I managed to for a couple hours on Sunday.

Later, while doing the dinner dishes after sunset, I watched the light fade slowly slowly slowly. Like watching early in the morning with no other distractions, and reminding yourself that the sky grows lighter, or darker, as the planet spins around that enormous ball of fire and gases millions of miles away. It takes a long time for the sun to come up, and for the light to fade after it’s gone down but I don’t always notice the lingering. A reminder of the sun’s size and energy, the sky cooling and ticking over as its engine removes its heat.

—-

I had a meeting with someone this week, just a casual friendly conversation to talk about his mindfulness practices because he has an intense job and has been practicing Buddhism since he was sixteen. At the end of our hour I asked him, “What do you think a mind is?”

He said something like, “It’s our consciousness at any given moment in time.” An embodied consciousness, with the mind affecting the body and the body affecting the mind in turn. When the body dies, the mind does, too, but the consciousness remains in some kind of smaller, unrecognizable form. He gave an analogy of the embodied mind consciousness being more like the space between dice if you stacked them up rather than linked like a necklace.

What is a mind? I’m big on the mind-body connection, but maybe the mind is simply the body and consciousness together. Maybe the mind is what is both.

—-

It was an Elly Griffiths mystery novel I got to get lost in on Sunday. I like Elly Griffiths because her series protagonist is a slightly overweight forty-something forensic archaeologist. I like the landscape, the coast of Norfolk, which I can see and feel, with its marsh and lonely seascape and disconnected otherworldliness and the regular references to ancient henges in liminal lands.

Coincidentally, since I’d just finished Rory Stewart’s The Marches, the book of Griffiths’ I was reading was also about Roman ruins and ancient British history. Questions of what it means to be British/English/Briton. And Celt/Pict/Welsh. How the land shapes those senses of self.

Are minds shaped by their landscapes, too? What does it mean when your mind can watch the light fade after the sun disappears, and feel the wonder of it? What does it mean when you can’t?

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• The Atlantic has launched a series about American wilderness, starting with an essay by editor Ross Anderson. I think it might be one of the most important series the magazine has run in quite a while.

• The Futures podcast is still turning out unexpectedly interesting interviews, this time on humanistic artificial intelligence with the designer of Siri, Tom Gruber. There were many insights in here and I kept pausing the podcast to think. “[AI] has the ability to control human beings at scale. Four billion human beings are part of a system, being controlled at scale, to get them to do what? Stay online.”

• A lovely piece on Montana’s hard right turn in the last election cycle by Flea Journal editor Paul Kim: “Democrats have a deep, existential problem in rural areas, made worse by an archaic Senate and electoral college. If democracy is to survive in this country, it must survive in Montana. If democracy perishes, let it be known that it made its last stand here, in the great Rocky Mountains, where decent people fought tirelessly against long odds for something far greater than themselves. I do not wear the cloak (the burden?) of whiteness and yet I still believe in Montana.” (I really liked the essay, though I don’t know if Montana is democracy’s last stand, and definitely know that the decent people fighting are not tireless.)

• I just finished the sci-fi novel In the Quick, by Kate Hope Day. I think it was good, though it wasn’t really for me. I had too many questions about the logistics of things, and something about the lack of quotation marks for dialogue made me feel like the voices were underwater and not coming through clearly. I didn’t mind the lack of quotation marks in Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, but maybe it takes a specific kind of narration to pull that off. But then again, a lot of people have liked this book, so it’s less of a critique than just a “not for me.”

Walking composition

“I want to be where all the ground is friendly.” —My Ántonia, Willa Cather

I went up to a Forest Service cabin last week, by myself, just me and a pile of books and notebooks, a few gallons of water, and a cooler of cheese and carrots and leftover ribs so I didn’t have to use the stove for anything but coffee and tea. Forty-eight hours of focused work and deep realignment, the sunrise coming slow over the still snow-covered ranges in Glacier. I walked down to the North Fork of the Flathead River, just preparing for the widening of spring runoff, and got startled by raven call.

No human voices for forty-eight hours. Sometimes when I’m up before sunrise at home, I step outside and watch my neighbor’s tall spruce. Are the trees relieved at night, I wonder? Released for a few hours from the press of human noise and human demands? I imagine them so, limbs resting in relief, never able to otherwise escape us. What demands we make of this world.

—-

When I came home and went online, a conversation thread in a newsletter steered toward the excitement of virtual reality, of some company making its VR responsive to our neurological signals, what a thrilling mind-altering experience that is, to be immersed so completely in a world.

Maybe some people need help to see the world the way it is, its vast complexity. Maybe for some people VR is like that time I watched my two college friends drop acid, and when I asked what it was like, my kindred spirit, the girl who always knew what I was thinking, said, “It’s like our world, only more.”

—-

I thought back to that cabin, the swift ice-covered creek, the river starting to swell with snowmelt, the pink alpenglow hitting the snowy peaks for a brief window, the raven call, how surreal that clear star-smothered sky might be to someone who’s never seen it, crisp with white lights like a billion spaceships about to descend, and I wonder if we’re all living in the same world.

—-

Some stuff to read, watch, or listen to:

• I don’t really have words to describe this 16-minute video of a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner and his former guard.

• “Learning to Walk Again,” an essay by Hugh Crawford (who teaches seminars on the literature and philosophy of walking) about long-distance walking again after getting a knee replacement — a reminder of all the reasons walking fascinated me as a subject in the first place.

• This series of philosophy talks, starting with “Total Eclipse of Descartes—the Inheritance,” by British comedian Rob Newman, was sent to me by a relative and I’ve listened to it a few different times. It reminded me of why British humor crossed with philosophy can be get everything so right, especially about capitalism and the long influence of patriarchal and class-dominated philosophy on British (and probably American) society. And yet making me laugh out loud at the same time.

• A wonderful essay in Audubon by John Moir, about field biologist Jan Hamber, who led the charge to save condors at a time when there were very few other women working in field biology: “‘In those days women were expected to be homemakers or possibly teachers or nurses,’ she says. ‘No one imagined we could be out tramping around with backpacks.’ Much less play an important role in saving America’s largest land bird, while inspiring a generation of younger women following in her footsteps.”

• Finally all caught up on Orion, and was particularly impressed with the four-essay series on plastics edited by Rebecca Gasior Altman. David Farrier’s piece on medical gloves and the history of soft plastics; Max Liboiron on researching marine plastic waste in Newfoundland, and how hard it is to consistently sample beaches across the world; and Meera Subramanian on what is happening between plastics and life in the unmonitored ocean. Which all made me want to go back and read Altman’s incredible original Aeon essay on plastics, “Time-bombing the future.”

Before the country’s Revolution and subsequent decades under communism, Russian intellectuals were known for heading off into the countryside and monasteries in search of the “pure Russian soul”—a thing that they believed existed, and they were sure resided within the minds of the repressed and recently enslaved peasantry. They believed that if Russian peasants could be truly free, in mind and soul as well as body, the spirit of Russia would come into flower and thrive. Orlando Figes, author of Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, wrote of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol and the Slavophiles who believed a pure Christian soul, uniquely Russian, resided in the peasantry:

“Pyotr Plavilshikov [in his 1792 essay ‘On the Innate Qualities of the Russian Soul’] maintained, for example, that in its peasantry Russia had a natural creativity that had more potential than the science of the West. . . . After the triumph of 1812 the idea of the peasant’s soul, of his selfless virtue and self-sacrifice, began to be linked to the notion of Russia as the saviour of the West. This was the mission that Gogol first developed in Dead Souls.”

Dostoevsky, Figes wrote, attached himself to the writers who comprised the country’s “native soil” movement.

“They called on the intelligentsia (and on Russia’s writers in particular) to turn toward the peasants, not just to discover their own nationality and express it in their art but, more importantly, in that truly ‘Russian’ spirit of Christian brotherhood, to bring their Western learning to the backward villages. . . .

The simple Russian people, Dostoevsky claimed, had found the solution to the intellectual’s torment over faith. They needed their belief, it was central to their lives, and it gave them strength to go on living and endure their suffering.”

Tolstoy, too, has a well-documented history of relationship with Russian peasants and an abhorrence of wealth accumulation. He was evidently terrified of death, and, wrote Figes, “had long believed that the peasants died in a different way from the educated classes, a way that showed they knew the meaning of their lives.” Peasants’ acceptance of death seems to have been a recurring interest among the intellectuals, showing up frequently in literature, though not, Figes wrote, without some basis in reality: “Some put down the peasants’ resignation to a serf-like fatalism in which death was viewed as a release from suffering.” (An interesting quote as “fatalism” is a characteristic often ascribed to Russians even today.)

I was reminded of this history—especially the nearly three hundred years during which Russia was ruled by invading Mongolian khans—in unexpected ways recently when reading Rory Stewart’s book The Marches, about his walks along Hadrian’s Wall, the modern border between England and Scotland, and the British “Middleland,” a term coined by Stewart’s father to encompass “the geographical centre of the island of Britain,” that Stewart describes as “a land naturally unified by geography and culture for two thousand years, but repeatedly divided by political frontiers.”

(Thank you to Greg, who recommended this book after I wrote recently about choosing not to finish Stewart’s book The Places in Between, about his walk through Afghanistan.)

I admit to a longstanding fascination with the history of Romans in the British Isles—not due to interest in the Empire itself, but to curiosity about the indigenous populations they either repressed, or wiped out entirely. There is so little known about the people who inhabited those lands before the Romans invaded, and much of what is known is easily romanticized. The Marches could have used a more exacting editing knife in some places, but the histories that Stewart seeks, along with the doubtfulness of many speculations based on scant facts, are deftly told.

Early on, while walking along Hadrian’s Wall, or what remains of it, sometimes with his father but most often alone, Stewart relates the Roman Empire’s views of itself, its actions, and its conquered peoples to the ways in which the British Empire has viewed itself and its actions—specifically, the most recent “War on Terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which Stewart served in the military. The comparison is not always favorable to Britain, much less to Rome. The Romans, he told his father,

“‘still seemed much more interested than American and British commentators today in describing how their enemies lived, and much better at imagining why their enemies might consider their cause to be just.’ Tacitus, for example, a prominent Roman politician, did not describe Rome’s enemies as my father sometimes described Islamist insurgents, as ‘cowardly’ or ‘pure evil.’ . . . Tacitus found the British—notwithstanding their ‘fanatical religion,’ nudity and muddy legs—engaging, dignified, and often admirable. . . .

The climax of Tacitus’ Agricola, written in AD 90, comes in the final battle with the British leader Caratacus. Tacitus constructed a speech for the insurgent, praising British courage and love of freedom, and attacking Roman imperial hypocrisy. Most famously, he makes the insurgent say of his own father-in-law’s Roman army, ‘The Romans create a desert, and call it peace.’”

I’ve heard before that Rome’s power lay in its willingness to conquer and absorb any people anywhere, and bring their culture and people into the fold of the Roman Empire. As Stewart passed the ruins of ancient Roman forts, he catalogued the shrines and gods that different garrisons brought with them from their homelands: tribes from lands that are now Belgium and Holland, Hungarians, “Aramaic-speaking Iraqis, and 5,000 Sarmatians, who were nomadic horsemen from Central Asia. And in one of the camps there were Africans who had left behind their own ethnic cooking pot—a clay tagine.” The list is a reminder, if it’s needed, of the scale and multicultural nature of the Roman Empire.

Despite the vast scope of Rome’s successes, it seems that every time they pushed north into what is now Scotland, within ten years they’d fallen back to the fortifications of Hadrian’s Wall, a reality that lends much to speculation and national pride: they manned the wall with tens of thousands of troops and yet still couldn’t “conquer” the whole of Britain. “The fundamental fact,” wrote Stewart, “which historians seemed to resist, and which Romans too perhaps resisted—was that the very existence of the wall and its forts signified failure.”

“Egypt, a much wealthier and more populated Roman province, had needed only one legion to control it. The Romans struggled to hold Britain with three legions, and a total of almost 50,000 men—the equivalent proportionality of the British and Americans keeping half a million troops in Afghanistan—and they maintained this presence for 300 years. And even this remarkable commitment was not sufficient for them to pacify the North, or create in the South local state structures that could survive their departure.”

The problem in both Roman Britain and occupied Afghanistan—and Vietnam, and Iraq—Stewart told his father, was that no numbers would have been sufficient, no “surge” ever worked, because “the occupier lacked the knowledge, the legitimacy, or the power to ever shape such a society in the way that it wished.”

Stewart’s walk is through the lands of long-lost cultures that he honors in at least remembering that they existed, even if we know almost nothing about them: the Votadini, Selgorae, Novantae, and others, along with the slightly better-remembered Scots and Picts who, a priest in the sixth century wrote, promptly swarmed Hadrian’s Wall and reconquered parts of Britain once the Romans were gone.

I couldn’t help thinking, while reading these sections, of various empires trying to claim the North American continent. The military reality, from what I understand, is that almost no Native nation ever lost a battle against American armies, a claim that one of Montana’s pre-eminent historians, K. Ross Toole, made even back in the 1980s. Invaders resorted to massacres and treaty betrayal, along with using alcohol and the theft of children as a tool, and were assisted by deadly pandemic diseases, but they did not win battles in the traditional sense of the phrase. Which makes one wonder—how might have this continent’s history differed if the lack of immunity to diseases like smallpox hadn’t been an overwhelming factor? And how might the invading European culture “lose” in the long run, even if the people stay? 

On a second walk along the Scotland-England border, Stewart dwells on later Norse-influenced kingdoms like Northumberland and Cumbria. Here, he has more chronicled history to lean on, but it’s also here that he hits a stumbling block of story and imagination, and begins to remind me of those Russian intellectuals.

As Stewart walks through Middleland, he talks with all the people he encounters, never a bad practice in travel writing. But cumulatively, they disappoint him. Even if their family’s history on these lands is ancient, they lack, he feels, an identity formed by the soil beneath them and the stories it holds.

“In Afghanistan, each village home in which I stayed had a different set of stories of an ambush, or a lost animal, or a saint: stories from two years or two centuries ago, linked to local rocks. In Britain, the people I talked to were energetically absorbed in subjects which had little to do with the soil beneath their feet—pigeon-fancying for one (he flew his pigeons from his housing estate in France); disability legislation for another; Fair Trade bananas in the Leeward Islands for a third.”

Compare this phrasing with Figes’s description of Dostoevsky’s thoughts on the Russian peasant’s soul:

“Dosotevsky’s Orthodoxy was inseparable from his belief in the redemptive quality of the Russian peasant soul. . . . In all his novels the quest of the ‘Great Sinner’ for a ‘Russian faith’ is intimately linked to the idea of salvation through reconciliation with the native soil.”* (Emphasis added.)

Stewart’s disappointments deepen and clarify throughout his walk—“My walk had often made me feel how modern Britain was: how bewilderingly mobile, how thin in identity, how unconcerned with history, how severed from its deeper past”—and he compares the people he meets and their concerns unfavorably with the depth of village identity he observed while walking across Afghanistan.

I had to wonder what it was he had expected. Idyllic rural farmers whose families had been running sheep for over a thousand years, and could show him family artifacts of their Votadini heritage and the gods they had once worshipped? No, but he was disappointed in the lack of, say, Cumbrian identity, a feeling that became tangled in his probing for feelings about Scottish nationalism (Stewart was at the time a Member of Parliament, and this walk took place shortly before Scotland’s first referendum for independence).

I don’t want to be too critical of Stewart, as I enjoyed this book and appreciated the efforts to unearth a more indigenous British history, but his reflexive disappointment seems in part to reflect Stewart’s class. He seems to yearn for something pure, something born and nurtured and alive today in the British soil, something akin to the pure Russian soul of the peasants that drew Russia’s politically active intellectual class to the countryside and created that land’s own “native soil”-dependent mythologies. In her book Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia, historian Lesley Chamberlain wrote that,

“When the Russians faced up to the idea of becoming a modern country, they did so conscious of the fact that they were choosing naivety as a quality they, unlike the intellectual Germans, had never lost. They chose a myth of simplicity connected with the community and nominated ‘the people’ as their guide. . . . What the Greek vision was for the Germans, the peasant obschina became for the Russians.”

(Obschina were traditionally communal Russian peasant villages that had some slight autonomy even under serfdom.)

Stewart was born in Hong Kong and spent much of his life overseas, first where his father was posted for the Foreign Service, and then where he himself was. As a former commissioned officer in the British armed forces (if I understand his appointment correctly), he has clear views on military interventions in the Middle East. As an alum of Britain’s most elite schools—Eton followed by Balliol, the most upper-crust of upper-crust Oxford—he has robust if tattered opinions about the UK’s role in the world and its relation to itself.

He never ponders whether the “thin” nature of British identity is due to the very fact that it once strove for international empire, or if the heart of Rome might have been populated by the same kinds of people. Given the international nature of his upbringing and career, it seems odd to question others British citizens’ “bewildering mobility,” unless it’s a subconscious sense that the upper classes should travel for Queen and country while everyone else should stay home and make sure there is a reliably British Britain for them to come home to, akin to women maintaining hearth and home for adventuring or war-mongering men. To his credit, I don’t think he would consciously believe this, but I wonder if second-guessing his own expectations might have occurred to him in the years since this book was published.

Stewart wants Britain—and former Cumbria and Northumberland and the Highlands and Middleland—to meansomething, to have a clear, discoverable identity. It’s a craving that might be familiar to anyone, or at least the language is: Who is a “true” American patriot; where can we find the “pure Russian soul”; what does a “real” Montanan or Texan look like?

Humans are a species prone to intergenerational migration, and perhaps this search for identity has plagued us ever since we began forming tribes. Who are we? What are our traditions and beliefs? And how, fundamentally, is our sense of identity related to the lands we inhabit? Why do I feel so rootless away from mountains, and why is it so hard to persuade a New Englander to move away from the ocean?

This is not a light question. Perhaps it’s the deepest one of all. I’d be curious to know whether, over the past several years, Stewart has begun to look at this question at a broader and deeper planet-wide scale than simply, “Why do the people who populate what was once Cumbria not have a sense of Cumbrian identity?” The phrase “check your privilege” might be hackneyed by now, but this is a case where examining one’s privilege and experience in one specific culture might be very informative.

In the end, I came away wondering if Stewart’s real journey, one that hasn’t yet been revealed to him, was to find his own identity. He’s searching for Britain’s deep past while at the same time listening to his constituents’ modern concerns; he has a rather obvious reverence for sheep farmers and struggles to couch his contempt for “outsider” ecologists in polite language; he writes enough about his genealogical research on sites like Ancestry.com to make clear his yearning to ground his own family’s 3,000-year-old story on the soil he feels attached to. And through it all, he recounts his father’s stories, his father’s career and opinions, their walks and conversations together, and his own love for a man whose love for him in return is clear but whose approval he still seems to crave.

Stewart might have set out to search for Britain’s or the Middleland’s identity, but aren’t we all always searching for our own? Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gogol, in all their writings and seeking for that amorphous Russian soul, were in truth grappling with their own tortured faiths and sense of identity within Orthodox Christianity and tsarist Russia. 

Stewart wrote at one point that he found it hard to express what long walks give to him, what he finds in them. I wonder if he set out on one not to examine a culture but to journey within himself, what he might find.

*I have long thought that most Americans, indeed most Westerners, can’t begin to comprehend the power and longevity of this history in Russia. For anyone who wonders “why Putin?” or what the dynamics are that inform many of Russian leaders’ current appeals to the populace, this section in Figes’s book is a good start: “It was the root of [Dostoevsky’s] nationalism and his messianic vision of the ‘Russian soul’ as the spiritual saviour of the rationalistic West, which ultimately led him, in the 1870s, to write in the nationalist press about the ‘holy mission’ of ‘our great Russia’ to build a Christian empire on the continent.”

Lesley Chamberlain addresses this history, too: “The economic extension of the [spiritual myth of naivety] was the idyll of peasant cooperation. The Russian ideal, the native way to happiness, never invited men to become individuals and think for themselves; it actively discouraged that independence. In compensation, it invited them to belong, and feel secure, and to protect themselves from a damaged, disintegrated, aggressive West. Right up to 1991, Russia remained with its willed naivety.”