Soil and soul, water and light

Walking composition

Welcome! For those new here, On the Commons explores the ancient roots and ongoing consequences of private property and commodification—from the Doctrine of Discovery to ancient enclosures of the commons, and more—along with immersion in the offline, off-grid world, and examining the systems that present barriers to simply being human.

5% of this quarter’s On the Commons revenue will go to Ríos to Rivers. Next quarter’s 5% will go to Oglala Lakota Artspace.

Social reading adventure: Some longtime readers might remember a couple of projects I’ve done with the social reading platform Threadable, one on the history of land ownership and one with science fiction short stories. (Lists of those readings, and related essays, can be found in the Research & Resources section of this newsletter.) As someone with a social media addiction who is always trying to find more fulfilling ways to be online, I like having something like Threadable to turn to where I can just read, and think about the reading with others. Sometimes I use it as a brain reboot when I’ve been mindlessly scrolling too much.

For a new project, I’m starting with the Introduction of my own book, A Walking Life. This is a way for anyone on Threadable to read a bit of it with me—ask me anything!—but I chose it because I never, ever get tired of hearing other people’s walking stories, their relationship with walking. The chapter is uploaded to Threadable, where you can read, highlight and comment on the text, share thoughts, and ask questions. Threadable is free, you can sign up for the app here (or here for the web version), and the Introduction—the book is directly linked here—is only 10 pages. What do walking, migration, trust, and human connection mean to you?

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Audio version:

There is a kind of light I rarely see, held by a wide, rippling river during moments of sunrise and sunset. Metallic, with a warmth of wild rose—not simply light on the water; a light that is only possible when the water meets a particular angle of indirect sunlight. It reminds me of low midnight Sun on the canals of St. Petersburg, Russia, during White Nights at midsummer.

I spent a while watching that light on a recent solo camping trip to one of my favorite spots outside of Glacier National Park. The book I’d been reading by my campfire drifted down to the ground, as they seem to do on these trips, and the riverlight became a more compelling story, one that has no interest in human-marked time.

Much of my previous year has been spent barefoot. It’s almost a compulsion, like there’s some call from beneath the soil to remove barriers between my feet and the ground. Picking huckleberries and thimbleberries high in the mountains recently with one of my kids, I kept my hiking boots on until the urge got too strong, and picked berries in barefoot contentment until a couple hiked by us and stopped to chat. They were nearing the end of their several-month journey on the Continental Divide Trail, which we happened to be on.

My mother taught me about the Continental Divide when I was very young, how all water flows from its peaks near where we lived either into rivers eventually running into the Pacific Ocean, or to the Gulf of Mexico. I always liked thinking about that, the slight shift that sent a stream into one world or the other, a neverending beginning of water’s cycles.

I’ve drunk straight from those streams ever since I was a child, before we knew much about giardia, much less all the pollutants humans have seen fit to subject water to. A friend who grew up similarly told me recently that it’s possible she and I have had a touch of giardia all our lives, even if we never felt many symptoms. My family’s main rule was to drink from running water—creeks and streams—and not still water, like lakes, though as a teen I drank many times from Avalanche Lake, at the end of one of Glacier Park’s most popular day hikes, earning myself lectures from tourists, which irritated me at the time but weren’t undeserved.

I don’t drink wild water frequently anymore, but driving up to this most recent camping trip at one of my favorite river spots, I had an incredible thirst. I didn’t want books or food, and definitely not other people. Just cold, clear water. I set up my tent, chopped some firewood, took my shoes off in relief at the feel of evening-chilled dirt and dry pine needles, and went down to the river, where I found a hole deep enough to dunk in and some comfortable rocks to lie on afterward, warmed by late afternoon Sun.

The taste of the river lingered on my lips—snowmelt and sand, cutthroat trout, the huff of an elk herd I’d passed earlier, thousands of years of human relationship, ancient rocks tumbled smooth, the cold wild rose of the evening light, and a bit of iron that tasted something like resilience.

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In his book Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power, Scottish writer and activist Alastair McIntosh uses his childhood on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides as a backdrop for a larger story of land and water enclosure—theft of the commons from people who lived and relied on them—throughout Scotland, and a more recent decades-long battle to win back one small part of them from a wealthy absentee landlord: the Isle of Eigg, whose residents eventually managed to purchase the island back from the landowning “laird,” and against his will.

The book is meant to be about how the residents—crofters—of Eigg became “the first Scottish community ever to clear their laird from his own estate,” but the most compelling parts are McIntosh’s personal experiences illustrating the innumerable ways that land and water relationship has always had a stronger claim than ownership.

I read Soil and Soul about a year and a half ago, when subscriber Alec first recommended it to me, and have been trying to find a way to write about it ever since. I don’t usually have a problem writing about books—it’s one of my favorite things to do, read things and write about them—but something kept holding me back.

I think it’s that Soil and Soul is so complete. A complete worldview, a complete local history, a complete thought process. A complete something. It’s not just about one people’s relationship with land and how it was stolen from them, though its focal point is that story. It’s about everyone’s. This is not because it has something to say about every people’s experience of land theft, but because much of our modern legacies of such theft spill out from the history of Scotland and the ways in which its lands were stolen from its own people, many of whom were evicted from their homes during the Highland Clearances and ended up perpetuating the same injustices in places like North America.

It’s a resounding case for land relationship and the preeminent rights of those who have it, and, at the same time, a book that people probably need to experience for themselves. It’s a storytelling that links us together, all of us who care about this world, her life, and our place in it, wherever we are on the planet. With rare exceptions, like Simon Winchester’s book Land, which I hated (and wrote about here), I try to avoid telling people how they should think or feel about books or ideas. Soil and Soul kept me in that spot even more firmly, as its focus can be uneven and everyone seems to find their own aspect to connect to, or disconnect from.

Not all parts will speak to everyone, and there are some points I’m hesitant about myself, but it does what I’m often trying to do here, which is to show that a different way of relating to the world and to one another is possible, and even the most reasonable path, for all of us—and in fact always has been. “If humankind is to have any hope of changing the world,” wrote McIntosh,

“we must constantly work to strengthen community. We need, first, to make community with the soil, to learn how to revere the Earth. That means walking lightly in the demands we make of life.”

He manages to link these land relationships to ancient Gaelic bardic traditions and the ways in which they kept people connected to a more fundamental understanding of what land and water mean:

“Ultimately, the true bard does not just compose poetry. Rather, she or he is gripped by it at the gut level of cultural genesis. Poetics make the bard. As such, to be a poet is an outrageous calling, not a judicious career move.”

We need poetry and those devoted to its creation to understand the world and our place in it. And on a more practical note, “High land prices (which we all pay for in rents and mortgages) are really no more than a tax by the rich on the poor.”

Land relationship puts no price on land, but ownership must, and we all lose when bending to its demands.

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Many years ago, I wrote a naive letter to the business-oriented National Public Radio show Marketplace, making the case that they had the expertise to reorient their reporting around the health of the continent’s rivers rather than the fluctuations of the stock market. There was no reason not to do so, I wrote, and every reason to at least try. We don’t need the stock market, but we need clean water, and yet somehow it’s become acceptable for anyone to damage water to the point that nobody can drink from it, much less eat fish from it.

I never got a response to the letter and didn’t expect to. I could almost imagine the rolled eyes and “we’re not environmental reporters,” missing the reality that no economy can exist without the gifts of nature—most of them stolen from the commons or damaged without accountability.

The damages to water are endless. John Lovie covers the subject of water in detail on his newsletter Mostly Water (with many recent updates on PFAS contamination). And some months ago, Annabel Abbs (whose Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women is a great book for anyone who enjoys reading about walking) introduced me to her friend Li An Phoa and her documentary Drinkable Rivers, which documents her 1000-kilometer walk along the Meuse river through France, Belgium, and The Netherlands, where Phoa is from. The motto for her Drinkable Rivers organization is simple:

“Not so long ago, most of our rivers were drinkable. But not anymore. We work to make our rivers drinkable again.”

Those damages are on my mind whenever I go up to this particular river I camped next to recently, which is protected by an international political agreement that feels like a fluke and is probably less secure than it appears. A river that starts in the same location in Canada as this one does has a very different fate: carries heavy selenium pollution, and more, from coal mines in British Columbia far into the Columbia River watershed.

To dip in the water that’s close to my home, taste her free-running, lie on the rocks by her side listening to her murmurings, to watch that rosy, metallic light play with the ripples for a few brief minutes per day, feels like stepping into a place without time, waiting for most of humanity to come back to its senses after thousands of years of oppressions, power struggles, and disconnection. Soil. Soul. Water and light.

I crawl out of my tent in the hidden hours of the night to sit by the river’s side under starlight, draped in the dense galaxy river of the Milky Way on a night without clouds, and without Moon’s light, wrap my arms around my knees, toes in the dirt, picking out constellations I’m familiar with and remembering that stories about the Seven Sisters—stories shaped around the Pleiades constellation—are known in different forms in every corner of the world.

Stories of the Seven Sisters are common to humans across the planet, even though the last time seven stars were easily visible in the Pleiades was around 100,000 years ago. Most of the known stories contain an explanation for the loss of the seventh sister—she was abducted, or went into hiding after being chased by brothers in Orion’s cluster, or some other reason.

Because of its planet-wide reach and the fact that most people can only see six stars, it’s theorized that the Seven Sisters is the world’s oldest story, one that all humans once knew.

Every drop of water we’ve ever thirsted for was there to see it told, and no matter where we’re from, no matter what we’ve done or what we’ve lost, some ancestor of ours was there to hear it. The Seven Sisters is a metaphorical river that connects all of us, like water itself does.

In the deep of the night, tasting the water’s starlight and cold mountain home in drops running from my cupped hands, I wonder if the river is also granting me a taste of thousands of tellings of the Seven Sisters, murmuring across the world.