camping – Antonia Malchik

Dis/connection

September 28, 2024by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment

The bacon was frying slowly and the water wouldn’t boil. I was poking at both over the camp stove, rain beating the tarp overhead, when my sister asked me something. “I was just thinking,” I answered her, “about how this stove is getting old, and how cold it was the other night, and how I’m stiff from the hike yesterday. I can’t get warm by the fire unless I stand in the rain, and we’re going to have to suck it up and pack all our gear away wet.”

It had dipped below freezing the previous night as we lay huddled in our tents, and I’d been up since 3, tired but still soaking in the full double rainbow that had spanned the narrow valley a little after 5 that morning. I rambled on in that vein to my sister for a minute and then said, “And how much I love all this.”

I’ve always enjoyed camping, ever since childhood. It’s something else to be standing wet and tired and cold over a semi-functional camp stove, and realize you’re happy. I do. I love it.

The more I do these things, the less I want anything the digital world provides—other conveniences, too, like central heating and electric lights, which bring comfort and ease but also are frustratingly disconnected from whatever rhythms and routines my 48-year-old descendant of millions of years of hominin evolution craves. I want less of that and more waking up stiff and sore, a rock digging into my hip, to hear the birds start up and wait for Sun to soak the mountains while Moon is still shining in the south and a rainbow forms and a cold river welcomes my feet, all of it so beautiful it feels like a miracle. It is a miracle; is there anything more natural than worship of stars and Moon, trees and animals?

I recently gave up my smartphone. It was a long process that started in my head over a year ago, and in action sometime last February, when I spent too much time in Reddit forums trying to find a mobile phone that didn’t support apps and wouldn’t allow me to go online.

There used to be a podcast called Note to Self that was one of my favorites until it abruptly disappeared, and with its guidance I had all notifications except for calls and texts turned off, and my phone in grayscale, by the end of 2016. I’d deleted all social media and email apps, the internet browser app, and anything else unnecessary, and corralled all the other apps into tightly controlled categories, where they remained until sometime in June, when I factory reset the phone, removed its number from Apple ID and iMessages, and handed the device over for someone else to make use of.

I was a late smartphone adopter, but quickly became addicted and spent far more time trying to manage my phone use than I ever thought would be necessary. I’d gotten a better grip on time spent staring at that screen over the years, but none of the usage tweaks had been enough and I still needed some kind of phone. I’m fortunate to have work that doesn’t require me to have a smartphone, but I have young kids. Being unavailable in emergencies isn’t usually an option.

The first draft of this was written sitting by a creek listening to a mountain chickadee, waiting for my hair to dry in the sun and being distracted by a small blue butterfly—two blue butterflies, who seemed to enjoy hanging out around the mud at the edge of the creek, buttercups nodding overhead. A month ago I would have had my phone with me and tried to catch their fluttering, but the camera I replaced it with is heavy enough to make me think twice about carrying it around, and so there I was, idly noting the butterflies’ presence in a notebook with a pencil that was growing dull.

Over the last few months, preparing to let the device go, I thought carefully about what sociologist Zeynep Tüfekçi in her book Twitter and Tear Gas called “affordances”: In what ways is a technology useful or enabling of personal freedom and societal democracy? In what ways is it at best a distraction or, worse, a tool for oppression?

I was in a meeting recently where I had to listen to a presentation on the use of what’s called artificial intelligence in the classroom. I’m not going to go into AI. I don’t find it an interesting subject or even an interesting technology. What I find interesting is its use case for lessons on ethics, along with labor and wage theft. I’ve written before about the theft of my first book for the profit of ChatGPT’s owners.

As I told the group in this meeting, a technology isn’t a thing. It’s a philosophy, a structure used to change the way humans live and work together and with the rest of life. A fence isn’t some abstract, objective material, or even a noun. It’s a form of relationship, one used to either work with life in balance, or subject it to domination and control, usually in the form of ownership.

So I spent a lot of time thinking about what my smartphone afforded me that was useful (voice memos), what was nice but unnecessary (Merlin Bird ID, iNaturalist), and what was an annoyance that degraded my life (Apple News). I made a list, worked out what was replaceable and what I could live without, bought a camera and a dumb phone, and, once I’d ported my number to said phone, tried to remember if texting had always been so maddeningly slow.

I have only 24 emojis. I miss the rest of them. But so far, it’s been worth it.

The whole process reminded me of when I first started dedicating my life, and my kids’, to walkability. Walking them to and from school every day, biking in the rain and snowstorms, teaching them to do the same themselves, building in extra time to get to meetings, trying to find myself a yoga class that didn’t require a drive to get to.

It all took work and time. As with all technologies, there come points when some people have that luxury and most don’t. Without our agreement or desire, we’re forced into dependence on technologies that are expensive and have disastrous consequences for both the living planet and for human social connections. Over time, societies are taught to forget those harms. The forgetting is intentional. That’s what happened with cars, their pollution and theft of public spaces and greediness for our income buried under the narrative that people chose to create their lives around car culture. With digital technology it’s simply happening on a faster timeline. A percentage of people benefit, a tinier portion profit hugely, and the vasty majority either suffer or are given no choice or both, and life continues to be subject to extraction for something that is mostly unnecessary.

No technology is without cost. The energy use of data centers for cloud storage is monumental and rarely reported on. We cannot say that we have true choice in its adoption unless that cost is weighed into its manufacture and use—the cost to everyone, not just in the balance of our own personal comfort or convenience.

There are no absolute right answers. There never have been at any time in human history. But there are better directions, led by the health of waterways, the diversity of bugs and plants, the visibility of the stars, the nurturing of empathy and compassion and relationships, and the restoration of our own fractured attention.

I’m glad to have some of mine back. When I first sat down to start writing this, it was in a cabin that my mother’s husband built in the 1970s. A creek runs past banks of willow bushes. There is no electricity, and water comes from a spring piped through a hose.

Making coffee can take an hour, building a fire in the old cast iron cookstove and waiting for the fire and then the water to heat up. But even waiting for the coffee is its own pleasure, sitting in a chair by the stove, reading a book and enjoying the fire’s heat while rain and hail hammer the roof.

Cooking by wood stove, dishes by candlelight

It is something in this world, to be able to spend as much time offline as I’m able to, watching yellow warblers in the willow outside the door and hearing Swainson’s thrushes start up after the last of the night’s snipes have finished calling, to not see the sight of a digital screen for days, or hear the sound of digital music or voices. To go to bed with Sun and embrace boredom and reach occasionally for the field guides on the bookshelf while two marsh hawks soar and cry above a meadow. To linger in memory of the clearly visible Milky Way and confetti of stars covering the sky in the middle of the night.

To face ourselves without distraction, temptation, numbing, even other humans’ company, is one of humanity’s most consistent terrors, as well as one of its most consistent needs. Who are you, who am I, without the demands of a routine, schedule, the pressing obligations of work or caregiving, and the ability to check out? The allure of distraction is constant because to face ourselves is so terrifying. It’s also, in a time when our minds are offered or force-fed distraction at almost every turn, an odd kind of privilege.

If we know ourselves, we might have to be ourselves, and the dominant culture has spent thousands of years ensuring we can’t do, and even learn to avoid doing, either.

My last morning at the cabin, I was walking through a meadow after a final dip in the creek, feeling sun-warmed and a little lazy, and almost walked smack into a pair of sandhill cranes. I stopped twenty feet from them as they called and wandered down-field. The marsh hawks were soaring and screeching as I passed through, and two whitetail deer bounded off into the woods, pausing, tails raised, to watch me.

In that moment, I had nothing with me to record the calls or take any photos. But all of that life was present, vivid and vibrant, along with the wind in the lodgepole and songbirds calling from the willows, and so was I, present. As I was a minute later writing this paragraph in a notebook leaned against a wooden fence rail, under two friendly pines. In the hope that if I stay in these moments then you, too, can find yourselves present within them.

Let the flow of time take you

May 2, 2024by Antonia Malchik3 Comments

On the Commons explores the deep roots and ongoing consequences of private property, commodification—from the Doctrine of Discovery to ancient enclosures of the commons, and more—along with love for this world and being human in the middle of systems that often make such “being” difficult.

Alpenglow-lit clouds at sunset, above the western peaks of Glacier National Park.

Last August I wrote about my time on a volunteer trail crew in the Bob Marshall Wilderness here in northwest Montana, about the river we camped next to and the trail we worked along, what it means to serve land and try to build a relationship with both river and Earth, and how, when I’m in areas where I have no phone or internet access, time itself becomes fluid.

“To sit on a charred log eating trail mix and hearing nothing but air in the foliage-less trees and a persistent woodpecker somewhere out of sight. To watch the light shift along those mountainsides. To spot snowberries and poke at the masses of Oregon grape, and to watch a river that slips through the valley like time itself.

Or it might be that time is slipping through us like the river. That’s what being out there does for me: it turns time into water.”

I felt that again last week, during my three nights at a U.S. Forest Service cabin I like to stay at by myself a couple times a year. This cabin is near the North Fork of the Flathead River, and ever since I started staying there a few years ago, I’ve found myself spending less and less time working and much more time hanging out with the river.

This trip, I intentionally brought very little work with me: Chapter 1 of No Trespassing, which I’m sorry to say I’m unsatisfied with, a couple of books to read, a raw essay draft I’ve been sitting on for over a year, and some half-baked ideas.

I touched almost none of it until the day I had to leave, and was okay with that. Instead, I devoted chunks of the afternoons to sitting by a fire, and otherwise spent hours by the river. A couple of hours before and after sunrise, coffee in hand, another hour in the evening to catch the alpenglow, and at least a couple hours in the middle of each day, when the sun was just hot enough to keep me from going hypothermic after (probably stupidly but I can’t help it) dipping in the freezing water.

A boulder under my head, I lay there listening to the water and an occasional robin, blinking at a dusky daytime crescent Moon in the northeast and Sun at a complementary angle, both high in the sky. Sometimes Canada geese flew over. Sometimes a thought passed through my head that I could, or should, go back inside the cabin and do a little work. I told the thought to gently carry itself off downstream.

To be completely at peace with that spot, occasionally asking the river a question, makes me wonder if it’s something of what place-time and space-time feel like if we could ever fully shake off imposed structures of time, deadlines, progress, and profit enough to find these moments of simply being. I feel like I got a hint of it there during those hours by the river, what it might be like to be wholly alive in a world that itself also feels whole, and there was—and is—nothing I want more than to stay within that awareness.

For a few hours last week I was able to fully release anxieties about being productive, getting work done, earning a living. Bundled up against the temperatures near freezing, lying on a bed of river rocks, listening to water flow—it was like a recuperation regimen for the mind. It didn’t feel lazy. It felt necessary.

In their book The Prehistory of Private Property, authors Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall repeatedly go back to the main difference that they see in a private property society versus one where private ownership of, say, land, much less water and food, is unknown: freedom to leave. That is, if you want to walk away from your people, or your place, can you do so and still support yourself? Can you walk away and find or make food, shelter, and clothing? In non-private property societies, the freedom to walk away and still live just fine is the norm. In private property societies, it’s almost nonexistent. You have to work to make rent. Land-rent, you might call it. Someone else owns the land, and you have to pay to live on it.

The extent to which this reality runs counter to most of our existence, even if we’re just counting the few hundred thousand years that Homo sapiens have been here and not the millions of years of hominin evolution before that, is mind-bending. There have been territories and civilizations and controlling empires for thousands of years all over the world, but for most of our species’ existence, most humans had some kind of freedom to live on, with, and from land without needing to pay someone else for the privilege of existing. Until relatively recently.

We can’t all spend our time as we would wish not just because capitalism allows a few humans to hoard an increasing amount of money and power, but because the planet’s dominant societies force land to be privately owned, and make access to food and clean water something we have to pay for. Priscilla Stuckey wrote a beautiful and very informative piece about the bizarre concept of land ownership recently:

“It’s a strange idea if you think about it, the idea that we can own land. Because land is not like, say, a shirt or a table or other objects we own. Land is something else altogether. Land provides the material that makes the shirt. Land grows the trees that make the table. Land brings forth everything—all our food, all plants and animals, all the forests and creeks. And us! Land has brought us forth too!

So it’s absurd to think that we could ‘own’ land.”

Around a year ago, I wrote about this same cabin, and explorations of time and attention, and how much I truly like working, how I could spend hours losing myself every single day in writing and research, and even copy editing work.

“I like other kinds of work, too, like chopping wood and digging in the garden and pulling knapweed and spending whole days hunting in the freezing rain, or hiking miles to spend a couple hours picking berries and then processing whatever I’ve brought home or gathered from the garden, thinking about what’s needed to get my family through the winter and early spring.

I do those things because I enjoy them and can make the time for them, but the reality is that as long as a few people at the top of the capital pyramid keep sucking up the richness of the world, including human labor and time and ingenuity as well as land and what are called ‘resources,’ none of those activities will ever amount to much more than hobbies, even for me.”

Add to that the question of land access. We have to pay to live on land, and at the same time people with far more money and resources can buy and cut off access to the lands where berries, roots, animals, free-flowing water, and trees exist. Can you walk away and survive has become, for me, a key question of freedom. In a world where you have to pay rent for your footsteps, freedom isn’t possible.

During these times when I run away from the online world and my domestic obligations, I’ve become accustomed to waking up in the middle of the night and spending some time with the stars. They were at their brightest this last week. Nights so clear it was like I was breathing a poem of air, and, with Moon setting earlier, the starscape hovered low, rich and full, our galaxy’s path clearly visible and the sky so transformed I wondered if, if every human could see the sky like this every night, smothered in starlight, we could all remember what it is like to walk among a living spirit world.

I met up with a friend a few months ago who has been through significant trauma, and now runs trauma workshops and mindfulness training. We were talking about grounding, and I told her I’d realized recently that when I feel out of whack and need grounding, the only thing that works is to put my bare feet in running water, no matter what the weather. “So you find grounding in flow,” she said.

I love that. Flow is where I ground myself, and it’s this river that has taught me that lesson most often. We should all have access to food, shelter, air, water, and medicines, but we need this, too: the freedom to find what brings us closest to home, to our selves.

I take gifts to the river when I go, and to the creek that lies hidden behind the cabin. No matter what I bring them, or how much of my coffee I share in the mornings, it never feels like enough for what I walk away with. All those hours by the river being reminded: you are alive, with all that could possibly entail if we had both the courage and freedom to embrace it, draw it into ourselves and walk out into the flow of existence we live in, remembering that time, and this water, are one and the same.