Footsteps and Past Selves

Walking composition

“Walking teaches patience. It works as an antidote against fear. It erodes cynicism about the violence of fellow Homo sapiens. In its capacity to sustain hope, it makes you a baby again.” —Paul Salopek, from “Cracked World,” Out of Eden Walk

Quick note on Threadable: Thank you to everyone who has signed up for the Land Ownership reading circle! And, very seriously, thank you for your patience with the link confusion (see previous post). Please email me if you’re still having trouble. Once you’re on Threadable, there are also other great reading circles to join, like “Water Politics and the World” and “Against Oppression: Black Antifascism(s).”
Our first reading is Chapter 1 of Andro Linklater’s Owning the Earth, which is uploaded on the app and ready for reading and commenting. Next week I will come up with a discussion forum format about the text on this newsletter. From here on out, I’ll put a “Threadable” subhead on any posts related to that project so you don’t have to read about it if you don’t want to!

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Last week I stayed at a Forest Service cabin within a couple hours’ drive of my house. It’s one of my favorite places to be because there’s no internet or even electricity (gas light and stove) and rarely any other people nearby; but it does have the deep nighttime darkness that provides a dazzling starscape once the moon has set.

I sorted through a huge pile of research, read books, sat by the creek for long periods, and got to explore parts of my mind and self I hadn’t spent much time with in a while.

Audio respite: a little over a minute and a half of this babbling creek.

I was sweeping the floor just before leaving the place when I noticed how deeply worn down the sill of the door was. Many of these cabins are old homestead places, but this one was built—if I remember right—by the Forest Service itself for fire crews working in the area. In the nearby campground the evening before, I’d talked with a man who told me that when he was a child the cabin was in active use all the time, people cooking indoors and tents filling the yard outside.

I couldn’t help but think of all the shoes being scraped of dirt that had worn down the wood under the door. A long, clean curve dipped down from the edges, rubbed smooth like stone steps hundreds of years old whose edges have seen lives beyond count.

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For some reason the door sill brought to mind the time my college roommate and I were driving back to St. Paul, Minnesota, after she’d spontaneously hauled me off to see the Ramones in Seattle. How she had called me out of the blue from a payphone in Glendive, Montana, the week before to tell me she’d be picking me up in a couple of hours; and I had to tell her no, it’ll be at least ten hours, and what that exchange taught me about experience and perception—she was from Kentucky and had never been further west than St. Paul. Despite its accurate mile measurements, the road map had given her no concept of how large Montana actually was, how vast the distances are in the American West. Perception is a strange thing, shifting and directing our lives and expectations in ways mostly invisible to us.

One of the most enjoyable books I read last year was Micaiah Johnson’s science fiction novel The Space Between Worlds. The unknowable space between universes, filled with vast coldness and a vigilant goddess, makes an obvious analogy to the unknowable spaces between people, but Johnson does a beautiful job of explicitly drawing out that tension—how little we often know of one another, and how much our expectations and fixed perceptions fill in the gaps.

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Our footsteps leave innumerable stories as they press the ground, the road, the sill of a door. For each foot that scraped itself against that door frame, how many of them carried longing or fear or rage or a broken heart? What of my own story did I leave underfoot every time I stepped over that sill? What ghost of a former self will greet me next time I return?

Footprints and paths, traces of others’ existences, are a delight to me, much as I crave being in places where other people aren’t. The little reminders that people have had entire lives in places I visit cast me back to my own past selves, the way we change throughout our lives and have to become reacquainted with our selves, and one another, all over again. I once drove long hours with a girl from Kentucky to see the Ramones, and we danced in the mosh pit and drove back and broke down in Wenatchee and slept in the car for days and eventually picked up a hitchhiker named Rainbow and when we got to St. Paul he read our tarot in thanks for the ride and . . . and all of that, the 19-year-old who was there, is still here, too, driving across the plains and listening to the Ramones and wondering about all the past selves everyone else carries with them. And contemplating the spaces between us all.

The top photo and this one are not from that cabin, but of a hike I took a few days before. It starts from a fire lookout that you can just barely see on one of the hilltops in the top photo. This is bear poop. The berries were weeks gone from this altitude but the poop relatively fresh by the time I walked here—I wonder where it had been eating?

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Probably my favorite online magazine to read and to write for, Aeon, just turned ten years old, and they’ve asked contributors to reshare particular essays, in my case “Riot Acts,” a 2019 essay on the misunderstood psychology of riots and the real-life injustices behind many mass actions.

• I’ve enjoyed all of Andro Linklater’s books, Owning the Earth most of all. His original interest was in public land surveys and their effects on land, people, and ownership, which he explored in Measuring America and also in “Life, liberty, property,” published in Prospect Magazine in 2002: “In fact, the concept [of private land ownership] would have confused most people in the 17th century other than the English.”

• Samuel Clowes Huneke with “Toward a queer theory of the state” in The Point. Anything that talks about Foucault and Derrida and “the dialectic” tends to be miles above my head, but I found the interrogation of state power and what a state is intriguing: “The question, then, is if it’s possible to work out a theory of the state that weds the critically anti-normative impulses of queer theory to the empirical need for the state, coercive though it may be. But could any queer thinker today figure out what such a polity would look like?” He really stuck the landing on the end of this essay, too.

• Konda Mason of Jubilee Justice speaking on the Frontiers of Commoning podcast about land theft, land trusts, and food sovereignty: “The way it works in America is that it’s private property, and as private property it continues to feed into the inequality of our country. It continues to feed into what is wrong with how we do things.”

• Talking Headways podcast with an episode about transportation insecurity with two researchers who’ve been attempting not just to quantify, but to qualify transportation insecurity—fill in the blank spaces most of us never see: “So a lot of people use or rely on friends and family and neighbors and co-workers to get around. We had seen that, for people who do that, they experience a lot of stress and strain around asking people for rides. Some people say that they worry about being a burden. Some people feel like they don’t get invited places because people know they have bad transportation. And there’s also a whole other dimension that’s more sort of emotional and psychological around people feeling bad that they don’t have good transportation or feeling left out.”

• Anthropologist Matthew Gwynfryn Thomas writing about insomnia in Sapiens: “But examples from anthropology suggest that the solution to sleepless woes might be social and societal, not technological.”

• Architecture and urbanist professor Mohamad Nahleh in Places Journal with a beautiful, long essay about his month-long journey through Lebanon on foot: “A desire to illuminate the world is, in a sense, inherited from ideas of truth and rationality associated with the European Enlightenment. These ideas are also, of course, alibis for colonial administration or, in the postcolonial period, for economic development. The last thing I want is to indulge a preference for the visible, or the knowable, whether by privileging a community’s most prominent actors and institutions or by shedding unwanted light on those who find safety in darkness. My preferred method is thus to take a walk, by night, in the company of whomever I meet.”

• Jeremy Sachs, a programmer, has spent several years recreating the “green rain” style of code that became such an icon in the Matrix movies: “He said that he’s always wanted to make the digital rain, which he considers ‘probably the most widely sought after screensaver in existence.’” Sachs has provided the code freely, which means lots of people have been creating variations like this.