water – Antonia Malchik

Trespass against

July 3, 2026by Antonia Malchik2 Comments

Holland Creek running out of Holland Lake, Montana

All wild waters have a different flavor. The North Fork of the Flathead River, the river near the off-grid cabin I stay at most often, is wide, and fast enough I wouldn’t risk trying to swim across it. Its headwaters are in Canada, and it has so far been saved from toxic selenium levels by an international agreement that turned its sister rivers, the Elk and then Fording Rivers, into a sacrifice zone for the waste of mountaintop removal coal mining in British Columbia.

The saved river tastes of snow and rock, a little pine and something of the young otters I once watched playing in the rapids just off the opposite bank. The uncanny warmth of ice.

A little-visited creek on the other side of the mountains where I search for caddisfly casings in late summer tastes of dirt, like fresh-planted geraniums, and the fireweed and kinnikinnick where its waters gather high up in the eastern portion of the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

Caddisflies, like many macroinvertebrates, are a sign of a water’s health. They need water that runs, chortling and burbling along rocks and moss, well-aerated and low in pollution. Caddisfly larvae build tiny, nearly perfectly cylindrical casings out of various materials, usually gravel. They’re hard to spot, bits of washed-bright gravel clinging to similarly colored rocks under rushing water.

I fell in love with caddisflies during my son’s fifth-grade field trip to a local wetland, less than 10 years ago. Although I grew up fishing Montana’s waters, and my mother is an expert fly fisherman, the kind of fishing I did involved worms rather than flies, and I was never taught much about the waters themselves, much less the tiny creatures that make up their vast ecosystems. I’d never seen a caddisfly before that hot spring day with my son’s class, learning about rescue birds of prey and macroinvertebrates at a hidden wetland sanctuary in the shadow of the ski mountain on the edge of town.

Caddisflies fascinate me. Miniscule creatures! Maneuvering miniscule bits of rock to form perfect little temporary homes! What more does one need to be awed by creation?

Learning about them and other macroinvertebrates from scientists near where I live, I learned about rivers, too—the level of cleanliness they need for health, the way their ecosystems spread underground, far beyond the borders of their visible shores.

Architect and planner Dilip Da Cunha wrote a book I haven’t yet read called The Invention of Rivers. He wrote in the book’s introduction, of Alexander the Great’s military campaigns, that they were not just empire building projects, but “more fundamentally and necessarily to articulate an earth’s surface with a line separating land from water.”

“. . . to articulate an earth’s surface with a line separating land from water.”

I bought the book after hearing an interview with Cunha, floored by his obvious but revolutionary argument that of course rivers don’t have solid boundaries. How could they? Maps of rivers’ flow, length, shape, and course are deceptive. Rivers are living, breathing creatures. Expecting one to adhere to a mapped route is like expecting a toddler to fall in line with your expectations of behavior just because you read a seemingly smart book about parenting your spirited child.

I was recently able to turn back to No Trespassing, the book I’ve been promising readers here for far too long, and came across a passage in Chapter 2—the chapter on water—that I ended up repurposing in an essay for the “Air” volume of The Center for Humans & Nature’s Elementals anthology:

“Trespass is fluid. It’s a transgression. In the case of pollution, trespass is far more physical than simply breaking through somebody’s property line. If I sneak through my neighbor’s yard to get to the nature preserve on the other side I might annoy them, but if my neighbor burns a pile of tires in that same yard and I don’t go near it, his waste will trespass into my family’s bodies just the same. This form of trespass, though, is exactly what the law currently allows.”

In the published essay, this passage is about what is carried through the air and into all living beings, contrasted with barbed wire fencing and No Trespassing signs that keep our physical bodies from wandering.

In the unpublished chapter, though, it follows a section I wrote about Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent in a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court case involving decades of pollution from a mining company layered in the soil of Anaconda, Montana. The court’s opinion leaned on lack of jurisdiction, but Gorsuch’s dissent went straight to the issues residing deeper within legal history: the plaintiffs’ arguments, he wrote, relied on “ancient common law causes of action like nuisance and trespass.”

The majority decision, he wrote,

“strips away ancient common law rights from innocent landowners and forces them to suffer toxic waste in their backyards, playgrounds, and farms.”

This wasn’t what the law was written to do, Gorsuch claimed, “it was what it was written to prevent.”

(For my American readers: Gorsuch, right? I know. He can surprise, as in he did in McGirt v. Oklahoma.)

The most commented on essay I have ever published here was about borders, particularly the violence that borders perpetuate by their very existence. The most read essay remains one I wrote about my Russian-Jewish grandparents in the Soviet Union, of their time during dictator Josef Stalin’s violent political purges, which killed millions. It’s an essay about moral codes that might not defeat the face of evil, but will withstand the wreckage of history. The second most read essay is about an early American court case involving a fox, a hunter, and a landowner, and provokes the question of ownership contrasted with a right to exist.

The commons, I believe, is all of this and more. It is all that is shared, cared for, carefully managed and husbanded. Enclosures of the commons sought to wall in land’s abundance for a privileged few. For nearly 800 years those enclosures were fought by commoners in England and elsewhere, often in bloody battles that killed thousands. Those people knew what was at stake when the commons were stolen. Their thriving, livelihoods, and even survival were trespassed against. And so they trespassed back—against unjust laws, in defense of life and freedom.

I firmly believe that just about everything imaginable and unimaginable is connected to a commons—air, water, ideas, food, soil, stories. Survival. Thriving. Liberty. A person’s right to determine their own identity. But I am aware that my writing here strays in and out of a strict scholarship definition of the commons as a subject. Because of that, the title of this newsletter has been bugging me for a while. The concept of trespass is more fitting for what happens in this space. It is, after all, what sparked rebellions against theft of the commons in the first place. Who gets to define what is trespass, and what is law?

The answer, as is always true of hardened borders and hardened ideas: they are defined by those in power.

A river embodies trespass. It refuses to remain where it’s told. It lives not simply according to its needs, but also the needs of all the beings that rely on its unique ecology. When circumstances demand that a river change its borders, it does not hesitate, even when human expectations have relied on it staying put. A river can be dammed, drained, poisoned, siphoned off for agriculture or hydro-fracking for fossil fuels, built against so heavily that its banks erode, but it cannot, in the end, be conquered. In whatever form, its waters refuse to stop living.

Braided river coming out of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, eastern portion

Like wild waters, every form of trespass in every fold of Earth has its own flavor, its own unique ecology. Trespassing, really, is what this newsletter is about.

I am writing this at a cabin near a lake where my family used to camp regularly when I was growing up. I have many memories of this place. Most of them are not great—my childhood was defined by fear, violence, and poverty—but the ones that involve the water itself feel so lively, so embedded as small sparks of joy, that by now, in my fourth year staying here alone as an adult, I feel welcome.

This lake knows me. And I her—the pounding falls at the far end, pouring out of the western half of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the mountains still covered in snow at the end of April. The Loon that called this morning (stupid Canadian wolf-bird for you fellow Heated Rivalry fans; shout-out to my younger sister for getting me hooked on that show), the Eagle that soared for hours yesterday, the Red-breasted Nuthatch I spent some time watching clear out a nest cavity, and the Ruby-crowned Kinglets who will not shut up.

The Grizzly Bear whose very fresh, very large pawprint on the trail turned me right around a couple years ago. The memories of my sisters and me jumping from the rope swing you could only, in those days, reach by canoe. The laughter of children and murmurs of lovers echoing across the water for hundreds of generations before colonialism sought to dominate these places.

Caddisfly casings, like rivers, aren’t built like nuclear bunkers. If you watch them for long enough, you can see the insects crawl partway out the end now and then, gather more material and wiggle back inside. Their boundaries are fluid, like water. Like life.

Waters trespass against the demands of a world that asks too much, gives too little, and yet somehow is still granted so much life, so much abundance, that nature’s generosity is almost a trespass itself. Against capitalism’s need for scarcity. Against the desire of a few to own everything. And against our own fear that we’ll never survive it all.

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.