Antonia Malchik

Droughts and wandering

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself.” —Fyodr Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I’ve been out of words recently. Lost in wondering what the point of words on pages is. I believe in stories and the power of narrative, but not every word thought by every person needs to be out in the world or amplified, including mine. The world is a noise, which is so different from a sound.

This feeling, however, is also a familiar one, what I call a dry spell. There are writers who never seem to hit these droughts, and I envy them, but I also know this will pass. The first time it ever happened to me I was working on a mystery novel that I’d revised umpteen times, and I suddenly lost interest in it so completely that even picking up printed chapters to try to revise again resulted in itchy skin and my throat swelling up. I literally seemed to be developing an allergy to writing. I wrote a friend of mine, Becky Hagenston, who is one of the best short story writers I’ve ever read, and asked if she’d ever experienced this. She wrote something so funny back to me that I keep it on my desk at all times, and it made me realize that dry spells are just something I have to accept.

This time it’s mostly a wondering and feeling of pointlessness, probably triggered in part by the state of the world and the formlessness of my own days. Now, as I think of the funny thing Becky said to me, and how much I enjoy and admire her short stories, my mind wanders off to when we met, that writing conference in St. Petersburg the year before I got pregnant with my first child, walking the city’s canals for hours and hours, drinking vodka in the bar late at night when the sun never set, watching the World Cup with my uncle and cousin at their apartment across town, looking for the story points of my father’s childhood when the city was still Leningrad and the communal apartment his family shared wasn’t upstaged by a Lexus dealership next door. The strange tour that a faculty member gave of how St. Petersburg’s architecture and corners was reflected in Dostoevsky’s portrayal of his main character in Crime and Punishment.

I’ll just have to wait for whatever passes for a muse in my brain/mind/self to come back from vacation. In the meantime, I’ve got a big pile of research books to dig into, pictured below. The stack on the right are books I’ve read; the two on the left are waiting to be opened (there are more on the way but this is what I have right now). If you were curious about private property, the commons, and the history of ownership, where would you start?

(Thanks to Dr. Greg Davis for pointing me to Nick Hayes’s The Book of Trespass! I hope it’ll be published in the U.S. soon.)

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Some stuff to read (no podcasts! I’ve been bingeing on the “Tides of History” podcast, so the rest are just piling up):

• “Hi Ho Cherry-O,” by Becky Hagenston, in Witness. Just one of her many excellent, eerie stories.

• I keep going back to reread Chris La Tray’s lovely essay “Ulm Pishkun” (published in High Desert Journal), about visiting First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park, and trying to excavate the vague memory I have of visiting the place for the first time as a child. Was it a school trip? Or did my grandmother take me when I was visiting her in Great Falls? I can’t remember. This essay evokes so much sensory memory, though. We are all, indeed, a little lost.

• I’ve been reading through my backlog of magazines, and had the delight this week of reading Will Hunt’s essay “A Pilgrimage on the Sacred Road,” about looking for and walking an ancient Mayan sacbe, in the Winter 2019 issue of Orion.

• Shannon Mattern on a cultural history of Plexiglass, its role in a pandemic and its reflection of our expectations about a world where our safety and ease are paramount, in Places Journal.

Jan Morris and the art of kindness

“Be kind.” — Jan Morris, A Writer’s World: Travels and Reportage 1950-2000

A long time ago now, at least within the span of my own life, I was deeply immersed in the travel and travel writing world. Among my favorites to read, the giants of travel writing literature at the time, were Colin Thubron, Pico Iyer, and of course the incomparable Jan Morris, who I was very sad to hear died on November 20.

Of the writers I was introduced to at the time, Morris was probably the last, at least among those who are well-known in that genre. Her book A Writer’s World, a collection of essays that spans five decades, sat on my shelves for a long time before I finally cracked the binding.

Inside, I found myself delighted by life’s many variations through the eyes of a skilled writer who never seemed to shake a love for the world no matter what she witnessed. It opens when Jan was still James Morris, emerging from a tent with ice in a beard, on the way to acclaim as the only journalist member of Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Everest; and ends with an essay that was a defining read of my life. After interactions with people all over the world who see humanity and reality in black-and-white, us-or-them, and striving to make meaning of it, Jan arrives at the only things that matters: be kind.

This was, it seems, an exhortation she lived by. Simon Winchester’s tribute to her in The American Scholar is filled with memories of her generosity to him as an aspiring writer. In that same magazine, senior editor Bruce Falconer writes of her as living by kindness, always kindness, quoting one of her columns for the magazine:

“I simply believe that everything one does in life can be measured against a scale of kindness. None of us can ever achieve full marks on the scale, and kindness itself must sometimes be weighed in the balance—is it ever kind to be cruel?—yet it seems to me that if there is any ultimate judge out there beyond the Milky Way, we can hardly be faulted if we have done our kindly best.”

After months of intentional government neglect, worry and fear, the loss of loved ones and the loss of connection, the unraveling of communities and relationships, our ability to be kind to ourselves, must less to one another, has been seriously strained. Let’s not forget that there are people with enormous power who have taken our taxes and our votes but refused to govern, and that whatever struggles we or our neighbors are facing are not—mostly—the fault of the people closest to us. Let’s do our kindly best by one another.

___

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• On the Sapiens podcast, an interview with one of the scientists who found a link between a higher percentage of Neanderthal DNA and worse Covid outcomes. I had no idea how widely Neanderthal DNA varies across the world.

• A compelling piece on how detrimental Biden’s pick for the head of the USDA, Tom Vilsack, will be for the Democratic Party’s hopes of garnering more support among rural voters. People I know who work or have worked in the Forest Service are happy with the choice, but I’ll be curious to see if Vilsack shifts USDA policy to start supporting smaller farms—and actual food—as well as dealing with food insecurity.

• Civil Eats published an op-ed that is more optimistic about Vilsack and the chances he has to make this country’s farms more sustainable (and, again, helping to restructure the system so that it rewards people for growing actual food!), but the very fact that they had to lay out a roadmap for improvement in an op-ed makes me nervous about its chances. On the other hand, it’s a comprehensive vision that takes into account the fact that food access and land ownership play a huge role in many issues of injustice.

• If you have any interest in the (Imaginary) West and its issues, I highly recommend listening to all eight episodes of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Timber Wars podcast. I have long thought that areas like the one I live in can trace their anti-environmental, anti-government, and anti-progressive attitudes to the timber wars of the late 1980s-early 1990s. Timber Wars does a great job of untangling the issues.

• FUN AND MORE FUN! Our local theater up here in northwest Montana recently launched their new production, “Your Musical is CANCELLED! The Musical,” available to rent from Vimeo. These are among the funniest and most talented people I know and they are the invisible connectors that hold this community together. They are absolute stardust. Rent it, watch it, laugh, cry, and then send it to all your favorite friends. (There’s a 6-minute sneak peak at the bottom of the page you can watch first if you’re unsure.)

Years ago I shared an apartment with a guy who used to take a month-long vow of silence whenever the mood struck him. He was the night cleaner at the coffee shop where I worked and played in a band (or sang? I can’t remember now). The apartment was absolutely frigid—my room was a kind of closed-in former second-story sun room and it was the middle of a Minnesota winter—but it was cheap and we got along fine.

I often worked the morning shift at the coffee shop, and would arrive slightly after 5:30 a.m. when my flatmate was still there cleaning. That job taught me to love the quiet of an early morning. The shift started at 6 but if I got there a bit earlier I’d have time to read the paper with a hot, fresh cup of coffee and quiet before we opened at 6:30.

There was a quality of entering the empty coffee shop when this guy was doing his silent month that I found soothing. When you know a person isn’t going to answer you with words, the social pressure to make small talk falls away. My own mind tended to rest more easily on those days, even if the rest of it was crowded with noise and chatter.

I was reminded of that experience when reading Jane Brox’s book Silence recently. The book was really more about time than silence, about modern life and what happens when the pace of it all, the demands on our time, are removed, either by choice, as in the case of Thomas Merton and the monastic life; or by law, as in the cases of the earliest inmates of the Eastern State Penitentiary, a prison designed by Benjamin Rush to keep all inmates in both total silence and total isolation because it would reform their souls.

The prisoners, Brox wrote, usually craved the work they were assigned (shoemaking in the early days) because it gave a point and structure to their days. The monastic life is likewise full of meaningful work and prayer. Both lives in her book had a minimum of verbal communication, but Merton still struggled against the invasion of time that the renown of his writings brought to the contemplative life he’d chosen.

None of us can truly shape our days any way we’d like. Attending writing residencies in the past showed me what my days would look like if I weren’t responsible for childcare, had little reliable phone service, and never had to cook or do dishes. It’s unbelievably productive and feels wonderful, in part because I don’t have to give or receive conversation unless I choose to and can dedicate all my prime hours to writing, but that’s not my life. Nor is it most people’s. We all have demands and obligations, many with far less control over their time than others.

I don’t know that I would want to take my old flatmate’s vows of silence (though sometimes I wish everyone else would for a while), but I do miss the quality of walking into a space where talking was not expected and I felt, even for half an hour, that I owned my own time.

Meditation, like silence, seeks to hush the cluttered audiosphere that keeps us from focusing on the existence of existence and marveling at it all, inside and out of ourselves. The stillness and aliveness and interconnectedness. They both serve to clear away the distractions that demand attention for the fleeting and irritating.

I would have thought that a pandemic semi-quarantine (whatever all of this is called where the U.S. has no national response and we’re trying to protect one another as best we can) would be a perfect time to really dedicate myself to building a meditation practice and rediscovering the peace of those half hours. But no. I’ve found the opposite.

I’ve been struggling with a strong aversion to my Headspace meditation app and meditation in general over the past few months. It’s partly that I loathe the moment when I first turn on my phone in the morning, but the pandemic has added another layer: the formlessness of the days. I’ve worked freelance from home for over twenty years, so that wasn’t an adjustment, but now my spouse, who has spent our twenty-year-plus marriage traveling more than half the year, is also home all the time mostly on conference calls, and our kids are homeschooling. The days have this godawful sameness that feels like it should be wonderfully malleable but somehow isn’t. It’s just formless, even with a routine to keep the days running. Forget meditation and mindfulness, it’s a struggle for me not to slide into living on beer and potato chips.

Trying to meditate with an app that’s loaded with hundreds of choose-your-own pre-recorded guided meditations feels weirdly horrifying. There’s a yawning maliciousness to it that grins at the meaninglessness of it all.

So I haven’t been meditating. I could do it without using an app but realized early on that I should have formed a robust practice years ago if I wanted to be able to keep meditating in this situation. My “practice” is haphazard at best. I have better luck with yoga or walking in the woods, or just walking out of the house, but even that’s a struggle—I hadn’t realized how much I rely on walking my kids to school to start my days. (I also miss being alone so, so much.)

An essay titled “Mindfulness is useless in a pandemic,” from 1843 Magazine (a publication of The Economist; it looks like it might be need a login but not a subscription to read) popped up on my Curio app last week. I’m not sure the arguments all made sense to me, but the point that expectation of future events is vital to survival and part of our evolution is well taken: “The pandemic has reminded us that the joy we take in planning is as valid as the event itself. . . . When the present is crushing, and when lives and economies are being ruined, our imagination offers us a welcome escape.” It was nice to hear that I’m not alone in a current aversion to mindfulness.

For some reason, right now the Headspace app makes me feel like I’m being dragged into a Black Mirror episode; and meditating on my own, without a guide, makes me feel like walking to Canada. Instead of trying to do meditation each day, I’ve been grateful for the reset from Pondercast, where host Laurie Brown has been doing a twenty-minute guided meditation each Monday and a grounding thought on Fridays. Each one is new and explorative.

Maybe it helps to be reminded that, if you have someone guiding your meditation, they’re not just sitting out the pandemic on a higher plane of perfect mindfulness or with the comfortable safety of a Silicon Valley executive’s income. They’re trying to walk through this year, too. The Pondercast meditations keep me anchored in time, reminding me that Earth is still moving and me along with it, and that every day is unique even if it all feels the same, and that however we find or form silence for ourselves, it’s likewise unique. As my flatmate wordlessly taught me all those years ago, every half-hour of silence can be its own world to explore.

In memorium

“We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.”
—Derrick Jensen quoting a friend in Endgame, volume 2

A few days ago I intentionally caused the death of another living being. (I won’t be graphic but stop reading if you’d rather not hear about this.) I am of the belief that we cause the deaths of other living beings every moment that we’re alive, but it feels different to do it with intention.

The hunting community in general refers to this act as “harvesting.” People “harvest” elk, deer, moose, and all sorts of other animals. I have a strong reaction against this word applied to animals that I’ve spent many hours observing and whose world I’ve tried to understand. Which makes me wonder if “harvest” is too life-denying for other things too, like carrots and kale and wheat. Certainly for trees. Collect? Gather? It’s always death-causing, no matter how we refer to the action. I pick kale and cause its death. I kill it in order to care for others, to live. Same for the deer I shot last week.

All of those words sound brutal. But after three years and countless hours I haven’t yet found hunting to be brutal. I find industrial agriculture brutal, whether of cows or of kale, but those long hours spent slow-walking in the woods, smelling snow, looking for signs, being scolded by squirrels and becoming weirdly obsessed with crows and the liquid call that I didn’t know they possessed—the end purpose of all of it is, yes, final, but the process is an act of building relationship. Even this particular endpoint, which involved a friend’s field rather than public woods, was integral with that community ecosystem, as the friend was the person who’s spent an enormous amount of time teaching and guiding me in this lifeway.

I know it doesn’t sound like it. It sounds like . . . something else. Hatred maybe. Cold-heartedness.

To depend entirely on your local ecosystem for your food (which, to be clear, I don’t, though as far as protein goes we’re pretty close) requires you to both know that ecosystem and to care for it. Derrick Jensen, quoted above, has said that, though you can’t help taking from the world in order to live, what that obligates you to is not guilt but care. I believe he said it initially of salmon, that if he takes a salmon from the river near him, it obligates him to care for the rest of that salmon’s community, including the water and the wider ecosystem on which it survives.

Reciprocity is clarifying; it gives purpose and meaning. When I look inside my freezer now it feels good in a complex kind of way. Good to provide for my family but good also because I have a clear vision of where my obligations lie: with caring for what it is in this world, especially where I live, that allowed that animal to flourish.

We

“Misanthropy is not the same thing as having a conscience.”
—Stephen Jenkinson, Dark Roads

One of the wrinkles I kept tripping up on when writing my book was the word “we”: “We as a society made the choice to do X” or “We were persuaded we wanted Y.” Did we? Is there a “we”? I kept trying to excise it. A search of an electronic version would probably find I failed miserably. And I can’t stop thinking about it every time I write anything now, tripping over it constantly. It reminds me of that step at a New York City subway stop that people stumble over all the time because it’s a teensy bit taller than all the others.

Sometimes I wonder if “we” is the most misleading word in the English language. In any language? In Russian, the word mir means “peace.” It also means “community,” but community is very specific—not a vague sense of neighborhood solidarity, but an ancient system of life in which resources, including tools, were shared and land occasionally redistributed as families grew and shrank. The mir was a robust system of communal living that didn’t erase the individual but neither did it elevate the individual above the health of the community.

In Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta uses the word “us-two.” He calls it “dual first person,” and I can’t tell whether it’s meant to be “we” as in him and the person he’s walking with, or a plural “me.” There is no equivalent in English, he says, which is probably why I don’t understand it.

What does “we” mean anyway?

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The photo above is of a gate leading into state-owned land where I spend a lot of time. Someone spent considerable energy ramming it with a truck. My friend and hunting mentor says it was a truck with double wheels at the back—he came upon the tracks fresh in the snow shortly after it had happened. He guesses it was a drunk kid. He’s more generous than I am, and less triggered by anger and perceived unfairness. All I see is a disregard for shared space, disrespect for land, dislike of being told you can’t drive wherever you please.

Someone really did a number on that gate. But if we related to the planet as we ought, would there be a gate there at all? Would we even need to close off some spaces so we don’t utterly ruin them?

(Here I go with “we” again.)

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One of my chronic irritants these days is that nearly everyone I know is complaining about all the influxes of people moving to Montana. Housing here is cheaper than the Bay Area or Seattle; we don’t get hurricanes like Houston does; teleworking has made living in far-flung and less expensive places easier. Right-wing people talk about how the state will be ruined by all the newcomers from California, somehow equating “California” with “liberal,” though the transplants I meet are almost always conservative Californians tired of living in a state that they have little hope of shifting away from progressive policies. (Given some of the ballot initiatives that failed there recently and the seeming immortality of Prop 13, I question how progressive the state is on a practical level.)

We’re going to be ruined by liberals. We’re going to be ruined by conservatives. We’re going to be ruined by people who don’t understand the value of public lands.

We, we, we. Every single person who’s made this complaint in my hearing is white. I keep trying to find gentle ways to ask: How do you think the Blackfeet felt when my great-great-grandfather built a dugout and claimed his homestead acreage? How do you think the Salish people felt when they were forced to relocate from the Bitterroot Valley to the Flathead Valley, and then later forced to open that land up to white settlement, resulting in private property, ubiquitous fencing, and the loss of a carefully built-up and free-roaming buffalo herd?

We (we who?!) can try to fool and grumble ourselves into thinking otherwise but migration is a human trait. Hominin species have roamed this planet since before Homo sapiens were around and it’ll keep happening whether we like it or not, whether people can telework or not, whether there’s affordable housing or not, whether someone builds a border wall or not. People wander the planet. People will wander the planet. How we treat one another when we arrive or when they arrive is what makes the difference, not the arriving itself (well, the treatment and also any diseases people carry and spread).

I fear losing everything I love, too. I fear the hills covered with houses and forests gated off for wealthy homeowners and Montana’s stream access laws overturned. I fear the erosion of all that I value. I am a “we.” My family has also been a “them,” many branches of it and more than once.

I want to fold all these new people into the land, show them how to respect it, how to let it shape them. I want to do that, though I don’t know how, don’t even know the ways in which it’s shaped me.

We have a lot of history in front of us.

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• I’m in the midst of Jane Brox’s book Silence. Although I wish it had less about old penitentiaries (depressing) and more about, say, being alone in nature, I can’t help loving it. Reading her book Brilliant (about the history of artificial light) was an experience I can’t forget, it was so full of things to learn but also poetry. One of those books that takes you by the hand and leads you somewhere beautiful with love and joy. She’s that kind of writer.

• MIT Technology Review’s podcast In Machines We Trust on how citizens are using facial recognition software to identify police, especially when law enforcement chooses not to wear name tags or other identification.

• “Come the Romans,” an excerpt from Stephen Jenkinson’s new two-part album Dark Roads/Rough Gods (from which I got the quote up top). We’re stuck with the legacy of Rome, and here’s how it started: “We can kill you right now, and you can die as an honorable pagan. . . . Or you can join us. . . . as honorary and immediate Roman citizens, now soldiers, and we’re going to ship you to the edge of the known universe, and beyond, and you will become the Roman Empire.”

• Amy Westervelt, whose podcast Drilled should probably be required listening for understanding “how we got here” when it comes to fossil fuels and climate change, on the At a Distance podcast talking about language, enabling, manipulation, and the fraught territory between forgiveness and justice.

• I was unexpectedly hooked by this episode of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring interviewing Betsy Gaines Quammen about her book American Zion and how the genesis of the Mormon Church drives the anti-public lands narrative for people like the Bundy family.

• The American Scholar’s podcast Smarty Pants on the East German 1970s-80s punk scene and how its role in resistance eventually helped bring down the Berlin Wall. (I’m not a music aficionado but my college roommate introduced me to the Ramones our first week of college and I’ve been hooked on punk ever since. Also this reminded me of my dad’s stories of him and his friends secretly and illegally copying and distributing Beatles and Jimi Hendrix albums in 1960s Soviet Russia.)

• FUN! Blackish’s second election episode pretty much sums up what’s wrong with the American election process (hint: money). I’m guessing they did an animated episode due to Covid? Not sure.

Wurtz Cabin, U.S. Forest Service

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I think a lot about homesteaders. The prevailing themes of my childhood were having a father from the Soviet Union, and being descended from Montana pioneers who’d homesteaded land that my grandfather’s cousin still ranched until his death a few years ago (his son now runs it). Being proud of all of it was expected, even when the other kids ran around at recess time calling me a commie and saying my dad was a spy.

How I think about homesteaders, including my own ancestors, has changed drastically over the last several years (how current generations think about immigrants from Russia has also changed drastically). My mother’s great-grandparents and their many sons were intrepid and hard-working, intelligent and forward-thinking. They would have had to be—the Homestead Act of 1862 granted land to settlers only if they could “prove up” within five years, and barely half of the people who settled land under the Act managed to do so. In Montana, 35% of acreage was “transferred successfully” to homesteaders (what “successful” is meant to imply I’m not certain, unless it’s the simple acknowledgment that land where people had supported themselves for thousands of years had been snatched away and turned into private property for white settlers), but the history of homesteading is rife with stories of crop failures, hunger, loneliness, unbearable winters, and giving up and moving on. This was not a land that was ever meant to be used for intensive agriculture, or cattle, or wheat, and many people couldn’t hold out.

Growing up in Montana in the 1980s, I was taught the state’s, and my own family’s, history as if the land had been sitting here empty waiting for people to live on it until 1870 or so. Almost everywhere I turn this teaching is still, frustratingly, the norm.

We stayed at a U.S. Forest Service cabin recently. It’s a restored cabin originally built by homesteaders in the early 1900s, and while I was impressed by their fortitude and dedication (and heart-rent by the very tragic story of losing two of their children), the silence of the land’s story before the husband and wife came over the mountains to build a cabin and try to farm was unsettling. It’s exactly in line with how I learned history as a child: a gloss of noble patriotism and self-sacrificing pioneers who built lives without, it’s implied, harming anyone else, while trying to maintain the pretense that pre-settler history didn’t exist.

The fact that my children’s generation are the first I’ve seen to be taught something even slightly different, that my son came home from 5th grade one day and said, “Columbus was a jerk” (which instantly made me fall in love with his teacher and also worry about the backlash other parents might subject her to), makes me want to cry and not stop. The fact that so many in our society—tens of millions of people—are determined to stick to the varnished, paper-thin story of American exceptionalism, the fact that they’re threatened by efforts to teach real history, is something beyond exhausting. I’m not sure what the word for it is. It’s as if there’s a deep psychological terror that goes back more generations than anybody can remember, as if telling and learning this history threatens people out of existence. I don’t fully understand what they’re so scared of, not at a deep level. Of shame? Of having everything taken away from them? Of being treated like European settlers treated everyone else all over the world? What is so frightening about acknowledging the truth and vowing to make the future something different?

People keep giving me answers, whether it’s things I read online or in-person conversations, but I’m not sure anyone really knows. I’m told it’s loss of status, of identity, of power, of a place in the world. Of hierarchy? Of meaning? My skin color signals that I’m white, and not only am I descended from homesteaders who made their lives on land violently taken from other people, but the other half of my mother’s line came to this continent in the 1600s and later had a significant role in governing the lands encompassed by the Louisiana Purchase. I can be curious about, and sometimes even proud of, those forebears (or some of them) while also trying to crawl deeper into that uncomfortable space of knowing how they, and I, benefited from genocide and forced relocation and theft. It’s a shitty thing, but pretending it didn’t happen doesn’t make it less shitty.

I don’t feel scared of looking at this history through a vastly different lens from what I was taught growing up. Maybe I’m not looking deeply enough (partly because I don’t have access to most of the stories—weirdly, for someone who’s been writing stories since she was a little kid, most of my ancestors weren’t people who wrote things down). It’s like there’s a vast, shapeless darkness at the center of all of this, something that people are so terrified of that they can’t even look at it straight. What is it about this fear that I’m not getting? What about all the other white people who aren’t afraid of it, or at least don’t act like they are? Are we all broken white people? Are white and white-passing people meant to have a genetic predisposition to denying past and current injustices and our own role in them? It makes no sense to me, but like the shitty history, its shittiness doesn’t decrease by pretending it doesn’t exist.

There’s this homestead cabin. It’s an amazing place to stay and I wish we could have stayed longer because it was beautiful and such a gift to get away from the hectic pace of everything, especially the internet. But I also wish that the Forest Service had some mechanism for telling the stories of the cabin’s footprint in a longer history, of what the land was and who lived on it before it became part of the National Forest Service, and what was done to those people that makes it “public” land. Maybe that’s a small achievable goal in the near future, to make sure those stories are included.

Pretending that dispossession and genocide didn’t happen in this entire region feels like walking on Astroturf instead of soil, as if you can’t really get to know the place at all because there’s a barrier between you and the stories it holds. Knowing the reality wouldn’t change how wonderful the place is to visit, or people’s ability to stay there and recuperate their spirits from the relentless pressures of modern life.

The fear over being given knowledge and stories that might complicate but certainly will enrich all of our lives is something I’ve been trying very hard to understand, but it remains incomprehensible to me. I’ll keep trying, and in the meantime am going to check out a few more of these cabins, with deep gratitude to the friend who stays at them habitually, encouraged me to go, and taught me to appreciate the slice of history behind each place.

I am grateful for all of these places, for the people who’ve lived with them before they became “America,” and what they provide for all of us. I feel privileged to visit them. Maybe that’s all I can say right now.

Ancestry and future planning

“If we want to be good ancestors, we should show future generations how we cope with an age of great change and great crises.” —Jonas Salk

My maternal grandmother showed up in a dream the other night. I can safely say I can’t remember ever dreaming about either of my grandmothers, but here was Grandma, standing behind me as I turned around and giving me a big hug and smiling and talking, which, for anyone who knew her, was very out of character.

Grandma was born and raised in Ohio in 1912 but spent the last forty or so years of her life in Great Falls, Montana, separated and then divorced from my grandfather, the man she’d met while in graduate school and with whom she’d probably imagined a very different life than isolation and motherhood on his family’s Montana homestead and eventual descent into alcoholism (his, though she did like her two or three glasses of scotch in the evening). She was not, to put it mildly, a hug-giving cookie-baking type. I think she made microwave brownies once. Or maybe I made them. She talked sparingly and read books almost not at all. She liked small dogs and swimming and playing bridge and volunteering weekly the Soroptomists and watching bull-riding competitions. She’d once been a pilot and flew competitively. I loved her very much though can’t say I ever really knew her. We got along well because I was tidy and not much trouble and liked to go to church with her. She died two days before my first baby was born.

I’ve been reading Roman Krznaric’s book The Good Ancestor and haven’t gotten to the “prescription for long-term thinking” part of the subtitle, but have been thinking a lot about elders and ancestry. Maybe that’s why I dreamed about my grandmother.

But maybe not. It’s hard to grasp what our relationship was, since she really did talk so little, especially about her life, and didn’t like children all that much. I don’t know how she would have coped with the realities of climate change and rising white nationalist movements and bewildering fake news saturating the internet. Probably calmly (though she had a healthy dislike of Donald Trump, even back in the 1980s). She didn’t like fuss any more than she liked cats (she deeply disliked cats).

I was listening to an audio version* of this piece on short-term thinking from MIT Technology Review this morning, and found myself irritated not just by the title—“Humanity is stuck in short-term thinking. Here’s how we escape,” by BBC journalist Richard Fisher (not that I blame him for the title since writers never write headlines)—but by the foundational idea behind it. It’s well-meaning, and presents a not-too-bad acronym idea for what keeps society stuck in short-term planning, but when it comes down to it I’m not sure I really buy the drumbeat claim that humanity as a whole is incapable of thinking and planning in the long term.

We hear this all the time, especially when it comes to climate change: humans are wired for short-term thinking, short-term benefits, short-term results. Thinking in longer generational or century terms is beyond us.

The more you look at human history, and even human present, though, the less realistic that claim seems. Yes, we have trouble refusing salt, sugar, and fats that are bad for us, even when we’re taught the long-term effects on our bodies, but plenty of people work and plan in the hopes of providing a good future for their children and grandchildren. You can find examples of long-term thinking all over the place without even starting to look at the ample evidence of societies that have made decisions for centuries based on some version of the seventh-generation concept.

I’m not so sure that humanity is incapable of working to build a world that will benefit our great-great-grandchildren so much that it’s in the interests of capitalism to convince us that we’re incapable of it. People get a sense of satisfaction from knowing that they’re benefiting a future they’ll never see all the time. My husband and I planted a number of trees last year that we know won’t provide shade and shelter until we’re old, but we take pleasure in knowing that future people will benefit from them, and we’re hardly examples of enlightened holistic futurism. Corporations dependent on short-term profits, however, are also dependent on convincing us that this kind of investment is an aberration.

Many of us have been persuaded to believe in a “fact,” even though it might not be true, simply because those who control the narratives profit when we’re convinced of its veracity. They then push the narrative further to convince most people that if they don’t grab resources for themselves—minerals, water, education, power, whatever—someone else will. Humans suck at long-term thinking; therefore, we have no chance of changing the course of a planetwide climate catastrophe, plus people are greedy and you can’t trust them, QED, so why bother?

Screw that.

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My grandmother was a practical person who had no real trouble planning for the future or thinking about what to leave her grandchildren. Years before she died, she gave my older sister her flatware set, my younger sister her locket, me her own grandmother’s diamond pin, and that was that. She also believed in education and working hard and saving money and contributing to her community. She believed, I think, in creating a good future for future generations, even if she wasn’t one to talk much about it.

As Grandma might have said if she’d bothered to opine on anything at all, face the future, don’t make a fuss, and get on with it.

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*I enjoy podcasts, but also use an app called Curio, which helps me stay away (most of the time) from news addiction by providing in-depth news stories from a variety of outlets—Aeon, The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, and several others—read aloud and beautifully by professional journalists. It costs about $8 per month (I have the beta version, so pay less than that, but I think I’d still subscribe at this level.) That’s where I listened to the MIT Technology Review piece, which I think is available to read only for subscribers.

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Origin Stories, the podcast from The Leakey Foundation, recently had an episode featuring a lecture by paleobiologist Dr. Nina Jablonski on the evolution of human skin color. Many of us have learned that darker skin has more eumelanin (melanin) than lighter skin, providing natural UV protection, but I didn’t know that part of this evolution might be to protect folate metabolism (a crucial B vitamin that protects against birth defects like spina bifida), or that people who ended up depigmented, with lighter skin, at northern latitudes still couldn’t absorb enough Vitamin D and so had to supplement with a fishy diet. There’s a lot in this lecture, including how NASA helped map shifts in ultraviolet radiation over deep time, and I highly recommend making the time to listen.

• The Origin Stories episode pairs well with this article from Nautilus on how deeply eugenics and statistics are intertwined, and on how early eugenicists forced categories of difference—inventing the concept of “statistical significance”—onto “races” that they helped invent, simply because they were certain those differences should exist: “Pearson’s statistical work was inseparable from his advocacy for eugenics.” (Insert me swearing a lot at these people throughout.) It’s no surprise that these early pseudoscience statisticians were deeply racist, nor that their influence has proven difficult to uproot. I am reminded again of the gazillion thistles in my yard.

• How Jakarta, long at risk from plate tectonics and volcanic activity, is working to save itself from sinking into the ocean by relocating 1,250 miles northeast: “The primary danger is not the changing climate, although that is a grave threat, too, but a potent yet lesser-known peril called subsidence, in which the combined forces of urbanization and plate tectonics push these vulnerable metropolises into the ocean.” From Steve LeVine on Medium’s magazine GEN.

• I really, really liked this essay in Aeon by Hayden Kee on how empathy makes us human.

• FUN! Following on the adventures in baking with ancient Roman yeast, Sapiens found some archaeologists making beer using 3,000-year-old yeast scraped from ancient jugs. The most interesting part about this was the theory put forth that agriculture might have developed from cultivation of grains for booze, not bread.

• MORE FUN! While I am an unabashed Trekkie, I am not really a pop culture aficionado. However, I am such a Trekkie that I delight in reading Vulture’s recaps of Picard and Star Trek: Discovery (plus, Vulture generally has quirky, entertaining writing about TV—it was only by reading their recaps of each week’s episode beforehand that I got through the first two seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale.) “The reigning organization protecting Earth [in Star Trek: Discovery Season 3, in which the crew of Discovery has jumped 900 years in the future to find the Federation pretty much wiped out] is the United Earth Defense Force, a protectionist super-agency whose charming demeanor brings to mind the likes of the IDF or ICE, and they are not interested in making friends. One of its leaders, Captain Ndoye, gets on the horn and immediately negs them for still using space Zoom (viewscreens) before telling them to GTFO or die. Welp!”

Movement and stillness

I wrote this post in my notebook early in the morning, by inadequate candlelight. In a gap through a neighbor’s larch trees and lodgepole pines, the planet Venus glowed for a while. Clouds came in eventually and it disappeared but not before it reminded me of one of my favorite things about living in a place where you can (for now) see the stars: If you’re up early in the morning, especially if it’s too early and you can’t sleep, and it’s a clear night, you can watch as the stars shift position and be reminded that it’s not the stars moving or the sun coming up but this massive, delicate planet spinning through space, held only by the relationships that gravity enforces.

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We stayed at a forest service cabin last week to give ourselves a reprieve from election updates, at least for a couple of days. (A break for me, that is. I can’t begin to describe how much of a mess I usually am on election days. We still have a good absentee ballot system, so for once I decided to take advantage of it and get outta Dodge.) It was one of the best, most restorative decisions I’ve made in a long time.

I brought a backlogged pile of magazines along, and all the adults ended up sitting around the woodstove in the evenings, reading The Atlantic under the low yellow glow of propane lights. I helped my daughter finish a sewing project from the kit I’d bought her in the spring. My kids and their cousins played cards and read books and took photos with an old digital camera I’d dug out. We went for walks and had a bonfire and my brother-in-law stuffed us with tremendous meals.

We go camping a lot in the summer, so it’s not as if I don’t regularly spend time in places with no cell service. But camping is more work than the cabin turned out to be, and I don’t usually have time to sit around reading by the campfire while the kids sleep.

Without the constant work of tent camping, the amount of space that my phone’s existence takes in my head became alarmingly obvious. Even if it’s off or in another room, I know that it’s there, all the messages to respond to and news to check. And that’s after I’ve deleted all of my social media accounts. Sitting around the cabin in the evenings with no possibility of internet or cell phone service anywhere, my mind felt like it whimpered with relief, curled up to take a nap, and came out refreshed and ready to give its attention to the sunrise, or my daughter’s sewing, or eight issues of The Atlantic.

Pico Iyer, who pays attention to at most five minutes of news per day and preferably only two, has a wonderful short TED talk on the rewards of stillness: “Sometimes making a living and making a life point in opposite directions.” Iyer does not own a cell phone, a car, or even a bicycle, and writes for five hours pretty much every single day. And still he grapples with modern distraction. Shakespeare, he pointed out, didn’t have to deal with 200 emails per day, and the Stoics weren’t on Facebook.

Maybe we should all have the right to a regular digital detox. My mind is constantly frazzled, even though I live in a place where I can see the stars at night and go for regular walks. I didn’t want to leave the forest cabin, it was such a relief to be away from the demands on my attention for a couple of days. How must millions of others’ minds feel?

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Iyer goes on a three-day retreat to a monastery once per season. He says in his TED talk that he feels guilty about it, about leaving his wife behind and not answering all the emails. But, he says, “as soon as I get to a place of real quiet, I realize that it’s only by going there that I’ll have anything fresh or creative or joyful to share.”

I felt guilty about escaping to a forest service cabin when so few people have that kind of option, especially in places where the right to vote is so constantly under attack. But I came back more ready to work for a better world instead of worn out by following the second-by-second anxiety of the news cycle. And can keep in mind, at least for the moment until it’s worn away by daily life, the larger realities of our existence.

The stars are not moving. We are.*

*That’s not entirely true, as our galaxy has its own rotation, but for the purposes of what we see in our night sky, it’s the shift in perspective of Earth’s movement versus stars and the sun moving across the sky that matters to me.

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• I was stalking Twitter the last few days, to my deep regret because Twitter is poison for me and that’s why I deleted my account in the first place a couple years ago. But because I was stalking and finally reminded myself I could go stalk people I actually know, like, and respect, I’m able to share these two threads: One from N.K. Jemisin (possibly my favorite living writer) via Chris La Tray on progressives’ inability to effectively storytell (salty snacks!); and the other from someone with Rural Organizing on the difference between what rural voters want versus what the Democratic National Committee thinks they want, h/t to the excellent journalist and Butte native Kathleen McLaughlin.

• Not all, or even many, of you will be into Star Trek, but you still might get a lot out of this interview with Reza Aslan on the Star Trek: The Pod Directive podcast. It’s about religion and an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I’ve always been particularly fascinated by, “Darmok,” where the Enterprise crew meets a people they’ve never met before and can’t communicate with them. Now, this is pretty much unprecedented because the universal translator (inexplicably, as the podcast hosts discuss) makes communication between all peoples possible. However, the people they meet turn out to communicate only by metaphor and story, so while the words make sense individually, together they mean nothing to the Enterprise crew. Anyway, Aslan’s breakdown of how profound this episode is and its application to our failures to understand one another goes far beyond fun Trek trivia (though there’s plenty of that in the episode):

“People that are not you are trying to tell you their stories, and they’re trying to tell you over and over and over again, and the thing that’s holding everything up is certain people are refusing to hear those stories. They don’t want to go deeper than, ‘The thing that you’re saying, it makes me uncomfortable, so I’m tuning it out entirely.’”

• In a non-public thread of book recommendations, I remembered how much I loved reading Darius the Great Is Not Okay, by Adib Khorram. Probably the best book about depression, especially for a teenager, I’ve ever read, and just a wonderfully told story. It’s technically young adult, so a fairly quick read.

• I am absolutely not into running, but loved this piece in The American Scholar about running, pushing yourself too hard, Aristotle, Camus, and coming to terms with mortality.

Love and lines

This is sunrise over a range of the Rocky Mountains that marks the western edge of Glacier National Park and runs into Canada, which is ten miles from where this photo was taken. But on Election Day, standing far from internet or cell phone service and watching the light come up and hit the snow-covered peaks one by one, I wasn’t able to think of it that way geographically. I’ve found myself erasing those kinds of lines over the past few years. I’m not sure if it’s the effect of trying to immerse myself more in pre-Columbus history where it’s available, or other stories in North America from non-white settler perspectives, or something else. I love this land so much. Sometimes I think it’s the love itself that’s erasing the lines.

Wouldn’t that be something, if enough love could erase boundaries and banish imaginary political lines and erode barriers?

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I just finished reading Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk, and it was one of the most mind-bending books I’ve ever read. I was only partway into it when I knew I would be rereading it again soon. It was an aligning book and like so many things these days I’m saying that without knowing what I mean by it. But it was. He said many things that I’ll probably walk with forever, at least I hope so, and one he kept coming back to is the question so many of us ask: Why are we here? To paraphrase his answer: Silly question. We’re here to be custodians of Earth, land, place, life. (It was more than that, but that’s the tweet version.)

He wrote about songlines (Yunkaporta is of the Apalech Clan in Australia) and, knowing how little he is probably allowed to say about them yet how much energy came through that little bit, I wonder what else I’m missing. What many of us are missing.

How much life are we missing? Is attention life? Do we breathe life into that which we attend to?

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An extra photo, just because, because when I stand in these places the love seems to come from my feet and my gut, not centered in my heart, and I don’t have any idea what that means either but damn it fills me up and topples out everything else. Photos can never do it justice, but it’s what I have to share. With love, and no borders.

The extraordinary unlikeliness of us

I mentioned in my Saturday walking composition a video that my journalist friend— Bethany Bell, who works for the BBC—made back in March about lockdown in Rome. I couldn’t find it, so she sent it to me again (it’s something she did independently, not a BBC production, to be clear). The feelings in it, the strange shifts and concerns, are coming back like the turn of the tide. I asked her if I could share it for Election Day and she said of course, and that “it reflects the way my cameraman and I felt in March—and again now” as many parts of Europe roll back into lockdown.

I can’t think of more to say, nor more intelligently and compassionately, than Bethany does about humanity and its long, uncertain history in this short video: “It’s extraordinary that anything survives.

“But somehow, we have. And somehow, we will.”

Rome—Lockdown City, March 2020