Where does belonging land?

Walking composition

“It doesn’t make you a hero just because everybody else didn’t do their job.” —A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, T. Kingfisher

Hunting season has started in Montana (rifle season, that is; archery season opened ages ago but I am not a bow hunter), which means I’m constantly distracted these days by getting ready to go into the woods, wishing I were in the woods, or being in the woods. Though that last hopefully means I’m being attentive rather than distracted.

I love hunting. Not because I love the potential moment of violence inherent in the process; I love it because the attention required is so achingly slow that it feels like it sinks into the soil with the moss and fallen leaves. It could become part of the earth’s humus if you stayed there long enough. Every step has my attention, every breeze-danced branch from the trees, every hint of tan color around the bend of a hill. The way I breathe, the way my braid brushes my coat if I’ve forgotten to clip up my hair. How cold my hands are, how heavy the rifle is on my shoulder. The twigs and fresh deer poop and carpet of larch needles underfoot. The scolding squirrels and the arrival of winter one slow-falling aspen leaf at a time.

Every now and then I come upon a flock of chickadees twittering and flickering wildly among a clutch of trees, which was what happened on a recent afternoon as I walked in the rain and the light slowly faded from the woods. So I sat on a hillside and watched them fly around until sunset neared with no deer in sight and the wet, chill air sank through my layers and I wished I could stay all night.

Light rainfall in the woods.

My parents hunted throughout most of my childhood and took my older sister, but never managed to take me out. They had traded a gun shop owner in town: a rifle for Russian lessons, and deer and elk were almost the only meat we had. I can afford other food now, but even before moving back to Montana eight years ago I wanted to learn to hunt. While washing dishes in upstate New York, I’d watch deer wander through the woods a neighbor owned and think about how to become more connected with the life and place my family’s food comes from, whatever that might look like.

Being responsible for my food is part of the lure, but it’s more than that. Even if I don’t get an animal every year—or most years—it’s that slow process of getting to know the lands around me that makes me look forward to walking in the woods. Or maybe it’s the prospect of letting them get to know me. The 50- or 100-something- or 10,000-acre pockets of life tucked behind hills and little ravines, slightly insulated from highway noise and saturated with the kind of silence that isn’t really silence but is instead the sound of a world that is doing its own thing, existing, whether you’re there or not.

---

I spoke with a university class recently, mostly about walking and writing and books. (I read a lot of books but if I never do anything else good in my life, I’m glad I got to tell them that no, reading a lot is not a prerequisite for telling stories.) I don’t like standing in front of a crowd reading my own work aloud (so boring for all of us); I’d much rather have a conversation, and this class did not disappoint. I enjoy talking with younger people and being reminded how insightful they are about the world that surrounds them, and how much received information they’re willing to question.

The conversation eventually moved to authoritarianism, Russia, and the Soviet Union, prompted by a question about Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. How do you live under an authoritarian system? What does it mean to have freedom of mind, to not have your thinking and worldview shaped by propaganda? I mentioned Eric Hoffer’s book The True Believer, which I reread last year and recommend to everyone, though I’m not sure that it gives the kinds of answers we’d hope for. There is no magic pill that will protect people’s minds against propaganda and brainwashing, especially not en masse. How one lives a life under an authoritarian system while still keeping values intact is something I think about a lot; that’s what my Russian grandparents did when Stalin was in power, and I wonder all the time how they managed it. How do you maintain honesty and integrity as your primary values when almost the whole of your society makes them impossible to adhere to?

I told the class what my father had once explained to me, that when you’re within a system like that, or any system, you don’t necessarily know that there’s anything to question. His mother listened to Radio Liberty and sometimes got the BBC, so had some access to outside information. They read illegal Solzhenitsyn at night, passing each loose-leaf page around as they finished. My grandfather was also proudly a Communist Party member and my father was head of the Komsomol—Communist Youth League—at his university, the Leningrad Polytechnic.

My grandparents grew up in the pre-1917 Revolution Russian Empire, both of them confined to Jewish villages in the Pale of Settlement, as their ancestors had been. After Catherine the Great established the Pale of Settlement in 1791, Jewish people were not allowed to live or conduct business in non-Pale Russia almost up until the 1917 revolution. My grandparents left their religion and their villages the first chance they could get. They met in Leningrad, both eventually pursuing careers in engineering. They embraced atheism and humanism, the prospect of defining their own lives and raising their children to do the same. To them, the Revolution and the communist system meant freedom.

That freedom was an illusion that Stalin sought to destroy through purges and repressions, as well as an almost-realized plan to deport all ethnically Jewish people to Birobidzhan, along the border with China. (Supposedly, an advisor’s resistance to the plan threw Stalin into such a rage that he died on the eve of executing it.)

In Soviet Russia, as in tsarist Russia, my grandparents were told they didn’t belong. In that place. On that land.

---

I was thinking of my Russian grandparents recently while out hunting, after a friend sent me an article about the current diaspora (paywalled, unfortunately) of Russian intellectuals and entrepreneurs leaving the country in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In the article, a rabbi talked about what the Russian intelligentsia could learn from the Jewish diaspora, since people have been able to keep Jewish culture alive over two thousand years of evictions, pogroms, massacres, forced conversions, theft of children, and any other method societies have used to make Jewish people disappear. He said—I’m paraphrasing—that the culture and practices survived because they were disconnected from physical location, from land. (The interviewer didn’t ask how this relates to the physical reality of Israel.)

In my print-out of that article, I highlighted and kept rereading that line, wondering why it scared me.

Out in the woods, breathing in the smell of fresh rain and loving the sight of tamaracks turning yellow and the chickadees in their flurry, and this one particular liquid call from a raven that I’ve only ever heard when I’m out alone in the woods, I thought of that line again. I’ve never loved anything as much as I love the lands where I was born and raised. To be forced to physically leave them might break me, though millions have had to survive that reality and far worse. The thought of severing even my thin settler-colonial descendant’s emotional connection to these lands, how that connection defines me and how much I want to care for this place, feels impossible to contemplate. I spent twenty years living elsewhere and never stopped longing for home.

My grandparents’ families had no choice in where they lived, nor did generations of their ancestors. Someone else dictated that. My grandparents chose a different home when they had the freedom to do so, and except for evacuating to the Ural Mountains—where my father was born—during the three-year Siege of Leningrad, they never left. I wish I knew what kind of connection they were forming with that place, whether my grandfather walked the same routes through the islands of St. Petersburg I’ve trodden with my uncle; if my grandmother had any relationship with the now-mature trees of the research forest nearby.

Ever since I started hunting, I’ve considered every cold, miserable, slow, unsuccessful hour out in the woods a luxury and a gift. But there are larger questions here: questions about what we choose to love and, perhaps more important, what circumstances or others force us to leave. About what place could mean to each of us, and us to it. About belonging.

What is land, this live, life-giving heft of a thing? What is a relationship with it, and with place? I’m not convinced that any of the people I come from would have known, or had known for generations, whether that ignorance was due to choice or coercion.

For me, for the time being and likely for the rest of my life, even the hope of loving this place I’ve committed to—and finding out what that means, what that obligates me to—has to be its own reward. It’s full of joy, and I’m grateful for it.

In 2003 my older sister and I interviewed our father while visiting him in Moscow. The sound quality isn’t great because the hours of cassette tape recordings were made to transcribe for family, not for public consumption. I’ve been trying to find some clips decent enough to share. The following is my father’s short response to my reminder that he’d once told me that, when he emigrated to the U.S., people assumed he got his ideas about women’s rights and so on from being in America, and he had to tell them, no, it was how he was brought up.

---

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• I’m halfway through Adam Curtis’s new BBC documentary TraumaZone, about the fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing failure of democracy in Russia. It’s Adam Curtis, so it’s weird and surreal and I don’t know what to say about it except that the clips bring back the flavor of those times so vividly I keep having to stop it and go for walks. (Non-UK viewers have to use the YouTube workaround.)

• On Threadable, the Water Politics and the World circle has been reading David Owens’s New Yorker piece “The Biggest Potential Water Disaster in the United States.” All of the readings in this circle, led by dam historian Varsha Venkatasubramanian, have been riveting. But also like investigating an ongoing train crash in slow-motion.

• Cognitive neuroscientist Phil Jaekl writing in Nautilus about an experiment in logging his own inner thoughts: “When you think a lot about thinking, it gets complicated.”

• Walking artist and activist Jonathon Stalls on the War on Cars podcast talking about his new book Walk: Slow Down, Wake Up, and Connect at 1-3 Miles per Hour and his ongoing project Pedestrian Dignity. I interviewed Jonathon for my book and wrote him a blurb for his, and am constantly inspired his ability to talk about what walking and walkability really mean—for everyone.

• Mark Schoenfeld’s profile of Texas outfitter Josh Crumpton in Modern Huntsman is tagged as longform (usually those are 2-3000 words at a minimum), but I found myself wanting to read a lot more about Crumpton’s history and what sounds like a long journey to becoming an adult-onset hunter: “Reflecting on his attitude toward the mostly white and male hunters he experienced at a young age, Josh said, ‘I was jealous that these kids were doing something with that male role model in their lives, something I was lacking.’”

• Archaeologist Dr. Paulette Steeves on Last Born in the Wilderness discussing her book The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere and what colonial archaeology and anthropology get so wrong about the long histories of people on the North and South American continents: “When you use pyroepistemology, you decolonize that literature—you’re creating paths for everybody, Indigenous and settler, to begin this healing journey.”

• Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson on the Frontiers of Commoning podcast presenting the case for the evolutionary advantage of pro-social groups over an ethos of individual selfishness: “Natural selection also takes place at the level of groups, that a group of cooperators or a group of pro-social individuals would robustly outcompete a group whose members cannot cohere.”

• Ian Jack in The London Review of Books with a review of Brett Christophers’s The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain: “The notion of idleness is important to the argument: land cannot be allowed merely to sit there minding its own business – it needs somehow to be put to work, to be efficient.”