Blood and Water

Walking composition

“God money, let’s go dancing on the backs of the bruised.”
—“Head Like a Hole,” Nine Inch Nails

Last week I was immersed in beta-reading a friend’s book that will be coming out in January—Blood Money, by Kathleen McLaughlin, which I highly recommend pre-ordering (and check out the cover!). It’s about class and the international blood plasma industry, which relies on America’s shaky social scaffolding and economic precarity. It reminded me of something that’s lingered in my mind from this interview that Anne Helen Petersen did with Meg Conley last year about multi-level marketing and pyramid schemes:

“America is a pyramid scheme. It relies on people buying into the American Dream and then working hard to get to the top. But of course - almost no one does. Beneath each successful person in America is a downline of unpaid and underpaid labor.”

Blood plasma, I’ve learned from McLaughlin’s book, is an ingredient in incredible, often life-saving medications, including one she herself relies on. But upstream of those treatments is a vast pool made of millions of scantily-compensated people selling their plasma to make ends meet. I knew plenty of people in college who sold plasma for money, but I’d never thought about the industry pipeline they were being bled into.

The same week I was being riveted by Blood Money, my sisters and I were discussing how to set up a GoFundMe to help cover our youngest sister’s upcoming expenses for a major surgery, which is just—it’s insane that this is how we’re meant to think about medical care in a supposedly advanced civilization, which is also saying absolutely nothing new, nothing you don’t already know. Which then brought me back to a recent newsletter from Elizabeth Aquino about her daughter recovering from Covid that really put a fire in my belly. I urge everyone to read it, in particular for the passages she quotes from a friend about what it’s like to care for and try to protect a medically vulnerable person during a still-ongoing pandemic when so much of society just wants it to be over:

“You’re right. It is hard. And one day, you’re going to ‘get your lives back’ and you’re going to forget all about those of us who have to live with the scraps you’re willing to throw us. And, guess what! You all did get your lives back and forgot about us. Disability? We're just inconvenient now and preventing you from having parties and seeing your friends and running errands without masks on or riding Amtrak and hacking and coughing.”

Something that I had to learn repeatedly while researching walking and walkability is at work in all these realities: if society isn’t working for its most vulnerable, then it isn’t working.

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The last couple of weeks, aside from reading (and preparing for a research project that I’m kind of excited to share when it’s ready because it’s one you’ll get to actively participate in if you want to), I’ve been doing a lot of what I do this time of year: skinning and freezing peaches, canning and pickling various things, cleaning my rifle and thinking about where to go hunting this season, waiting for wildfire smoke to clear so I can go up the mountain and see if there are enough huckleberries to pick for the freezer.

I’ve been wandering all over town looking for chokecherries because this is the time of year I usually pick them to make chokecherry jelly, but all of my usual trees are almost bare. Sometimes I’ll see a few strands of chokecherries way up high, but not really enough to make jelly, even if I could climb up to them.

I wondered if it was bears because, as usual, there are a lot of bears around and they like chokecherries, but the trees don’t have any broken branches. Just no chokecherries.

When I mentioned this to a friend she said they might have been hit with the same thing that resulted in no plums for me to turn into fruit leather for the winter: the cold, rainy early summer that culminated in low-elevation snow in mid-June. It’s been so hot that I’d almost forgotten that earlier weather, when we were driving down from Canada warily watching the swollen rivers and suddenly looked around just north of home to say, “Wait, is it snowing?” And it was, indeed, snowing. I feared for a while for the cherry orchards down south of us, along the lake shore, because I remembered that spring twenty-some or thirty years ago when we’d gotten a hard, late frost just after the cherry trees had blossomed and so many of them died. I’ve never forgotten driving down the east side of Flathead Lake seeing chopped-down cherry trees, stacked up high like the heart-shattering aftermath of a small war.

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The chokecherries might be missing this year—and I miss them—but wandering around in search of their bitter tannins reminds me of how much I love this place, how much it gives me without my ever asking, and how much I owe it in return.

Sometimes I don’t know how to describe what it’s like living in a place that’s so beautiful it can defy superlatives. Not just the lake-dotted, mountainous part of Montana where I live but the wider geological region, including the prairie and farmlands to the east over the spine of the Rockies, the sprawling, unexpected landscapes that keep drawing me back.

I got a reminder of my own good fortune in living here this weekend when we went paddleboarding on the North Fork of the Flathead River with some friends. The North Fork is a special place among special places; that stretch of river will feature prominently in the “water” chapter of No Trespassing for specific reasons that you’ll eventually be able to read about. It’s not far from where I live, and, like almost everyone else here I know, I love it up there.

But I’ve never been on it. It’s very popular for rafting, but I don’t like rafting much because it combines two things I avoid as much as possible—sitting for long periods and lack of shade—and I have a healthy terror of both deep water and whitewater leftover from a family canoeing accident that almost killed me as a child.

The river’s low now, though. So low that in less than a week we’d probably have to carry the boards across many of the rock bars. But this weekend it had just enough water to carry us over and down for a couple of hours, with enough rapids to challenge my pretense of equanimity and thrill the kids. So I’ll leave you with a bit of that, if you like, a one-minute recording of the river, its voice and muted late-season energy as it carried my paddleboard splashing through tiny, rushing runs of rapids (the thumping sound is the tip of my board hitting as it bumped over the waves).

There’s so much of a river in how we relate to one another, in the ways that we rely on each other and in what breaks apart when we pretend we don’t need to. I don’t know that blood truly is thicker than water, but they both run through our lives in ways we can’t run away from.

Bonus photo: Looking toward the peaks of Glacier National Park from the North Fork of the Flathead River, though in a slightly different spot from the recording because there was no way I was taking my hands off the paddle or my eyes off the river to fiddle with my phone while running through the rocks. As I told a friend later that day, a river has no ego. It just wants to love you and hold you and sometimes drown you.

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Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Unfortunately, this is print-only, but Montana Quarterly’s (summer 2022 issue) short, tightly-written piece “The Town That Refused to Die,” about Garrison, Montana’s, history with pollution and the phosphate industry was a reminder that struggles between life and profit are just new versions of old stories.

• Short and sweet: Amanda Holmes reading Heinrich Heine’s poem “Ich grolle nicht” (“I bear no grudge”) for The American Scholar.

• Luke Burgis caught my imagination with a piece in Wired on how the tensions of culture can be like the seemingly impossible three-body problem posed by calculating the positions of heavenly bodies. Where once faith and reason contested as competing human values, Silicon Valley has placed utility in prime position: “The questions of what is true and what is good for the soul are now mostly subordinated to technological progress—or, at the very least, the questions of Athens [reason] and Jerusalem [faith] are now so bound up with this progress that it’s creating confusion. . . . Humanity is at a crossroads.”

• Via Dark ‘n’ Light Magazine, a 16-minute video celebrating and explaining the yoiking music of the Northern Sami people.

• It’s getting very hard to avoid talk of water and drought issues in the American West. For Grist, Jake Bittle writes about seemingly far-fetched plans to pipe water from wet regions to arid areas. Among other plans: “The basic idea is to take water from the Mississippi River, pump it a thousand miles west, and dump it into the overtaxed Colorado River, which provides water for millions of Arizona residents but has reached historically low levels as its reservoirs dry up.” (Despite how non-feasible Bittle says these proposals are, I’m left with the haunting knowledge that when people want a resource badly enough, they’re willing to throw practicality, as well as other people’s needs, out the window.)

• Also from Dark ‘n’ Light, Arcx, a podcast about literary inspiration, starting with a 6-part series featuring interviews with South Asian science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction authors.

• Neanderthal researcher Bruce Hardy writing in Sapiens on the question of whether Neanderthals made art: “Art must be older than we think. It did not arise de novo with modern humans in the form of durable materials. And yet, that seems to be the narrative in paleoanthropology. Every time a new discovery is put forward that could be Neanderthal art or symbolism, it is questioned. But why?”

• Yevgenia Belorusets has returned to Kiev and is again writing about the war in Ukraine for isolarii: “The farther you are from the war, the clearer the procession of time becomes, and you think half a year of conflict needs a special approach, a rational analysis or a case history like the ones for sick patients, in the hope of a speedy recovery.
  But here in Kyiv, the symbolism of this round number crumbles when the people involved in the war—almost every Ukrainian, in one way or another—cannot afford any distance from the conflict.”