Surrender E-Book

Joanna Pocock

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Blending personal memoir with reportage, Surrender is a narrative nonfiction work on the changing landscape of the West and the scavenger, rewilder and ecosexual communities, inspired by a two-year stay in Montana. In the style of Barry Lopez and Annie Dillard, Joanna Pocock, the winner of the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, explores the changing landscape of the West in an era of increasing climatic disruption, rising sea levels, animal extinctions, melting glaciers and catastrophic wild fires.

Leseprobe

SURRENDER

MID-LIFE IN THE AMERICAN WEST

JOANNA POCOCK

‘Surrender is an astonishing book about the fragility of nature, grief, the American West, the consolations of travel and the exquisite agonies of mortal life. Pocock travels widely in time and space, through memories, visions, the deaths of her parents and the birth of her child. Beautiful, wise and deeply moving, this is ambulatory philosophy at its finest – for readers of Rebecca Solnit, Lauren Elkin, Garnette Cadogan and Iain Sinclair.’

— Joanna Kavenna, author of A Field Guide to Reality

‘Written with great narrative richness and an anthropologist’s intrepid gaze, Surrender is fascinating, urgent and profoundly compelling. It is an important addition to nature’s library.’

— Chloe Aridjis, author of Sea Monsters

Contents

Title PageEpigraph Surrender IllustrationsReadingsAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorCopyright

Surrender

We all hit the middle of our lives at some point. When my sister Mary turned twenty-six did she have any idea she would be dead at fifty-two? Not a clue. What we call our mid-life crisis often doesn’t hit at the mid-point of our lives unless we live into our eighties, nineties and beyond – which many of us won’t. A better term for ‘mid-life crisis’ is the less grandiose-sounding but perhaps more accurate ennui. By a certain age, we simply get bored of the rhythm of our days, whatever those may be: the commute to work on a packed train, the rush to get a child ready for school, the smell of car fumes as we sit in traffic, the dog whining for its walk. We tire of our living spaces and how the light hits a certain wall each afternoon. We sicken at the sight of the same smudge of sky from our beds, the piles of laughing gas canisters in the gutter, the seemingly endless whoosh of greasy Styrofoam fried chicken containers blowing down the pavement after the pubs close. And the pubs – even they seem threadbare and dull or loud and violent. We begin to realize that we have more past than future – the known is eclipsing the unknown. We panic and plan our escape, whether that be via psychedelic drugs, taking up a religion, or ditching the one we have, quitting our jobs, taking up a fresh partner, joining a polyamorous community – all in the belief we are heading towards that magical thing: freedom. Whatever form it takes, mid-life often arrives in a package with a bright red ‘self-destruct’ button attached.

The mid-life crisis package I was handed came in a box marked with one simple word: Montana. Over the years my husband Jason and I had spent time in New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, California, Colorado and Wyoming, either travelling or working on various writing and film projects. Now we were approaching fifty and it was time to leave our small patch of east London. The American West was calling us.

We developed an eccentric but effective process of elimination for finding exactly where in the West we might go. This was partly based on after-school activities for our daughter who was six when the planning began. Who knew that the only club she would be able to join in Alpine, Texas was cheerleading? Through a combination of coincidences and research we settled on the alliterative Missoula, Montana, and cajoled our daughter Eve into thinking this would be a Great Adventure. We packed up our house, filled one suitcase each and left London. I had the idea that we could pare away the superfluities of life, only allowing ourselves the necessities, or what Henry David Thoreau called the ‘necessaries’, the things that over time become ‘so important to human life that few, if any … attempt to do without’.

For Eve, this consisted largely of soft toys. The main player in her menagerie was a large rabbit called Lulu, with a strawberry-scented heart. Lulu’s accessories filled half a suitcase. I intervened at times over Eve’s choice of clothing. She had never experienced a North American winter, so I surreptitiously stuffed jumpers and warm socks among her swimming costumes and sundresses.

I found the process of deciding what I needed and what I thought I needed to be the first step in liberating myself from the known. I started with my books: Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City by John Tallmadge, The Significance of the Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner and the Moon Guidebook to Montana, which was a last minute gift from a friend.

Jason’s packing was quick: his camera, the novels he was reading and very few clothes. To Thoreau the ‘necessaries’ consisted of food and fuel. Clothing and shelter were only ‘half unnecessary’. Among the few implements he had with him at Walden Pond were a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, lamps, stationery and ‘access to a few books’.

We landed in Seattle and spent our first night at the Kings Inn, the last downtown motel in a rapidly gentrifying, or some would say, long gentrified city. We hired a car and drove east the next morning to begin our new life. My vision of Washington state as a lush ambassador of the Pacific Northwest with thick, impenetrable rainforests was challenged as we crested the Cascade Mountain Range. For hours our car windows transmitted a sandy blur of desert and sagebrush, which was replaced by deep green forests and rocky buttes as we hit the Idaho panhandle and then it thinned out again as we edged into western Montana.

It was on a sweltering July day that we took the exit ramp off Interstate 90 down into Missoula, a university town of around 65,000 people. The layout from above was puzzling. It looked as though a giant hand had tossed a bunch of buildings into the air, leaving them where they landed. Missoula now sat in the dried bed of an ancient glacial lake – its name means ‘place of the frozen water’ in the Salish language. I had imagined Missoula to be a pretty town with its ring of mountains and its snaking river, but as we approached, the reality was far from the idyll I had conjured.

My daughter read out ‘Five Guys Burgers and Fries’, savouring the rhyme, as we passed the fast food joint on a corner next to a towering Conoco petrol sign. After that, I don’t remember her saying a word. I think we were both stunned by the intense heat, the hard-edged sunshine, the long drive, by the giant signage, the wide roads, the landscape of objects and buildings at once familiar (trucks, shops, houses, roads) and yet utterly foreign in their details.

We pulled up in our rental car to the Campus Inn, which appeared to be the least run-down of the cheap motels on a strip of highway at the entrance to town. The faux quilted bedspreads gave off a vaguely simulated country aesthetic, quickly undermined by the strong smell of bedbug spray. Faded prints of Canada Geese flying across pastel wetlands hung above the Queen-sized beds.

That night I saw a type of funnel-web spider called a hobo. Its body was the size of a nickel and I watched, terrified, as it crawled along the skirting board. Jason and I kept quiet about the spider and lay in bed with Eve between us, listening to the trains chugging past the motel, their boxcars loaded with coal from eastern Montana. My scant dreams were apocalyptic and seemed to linger through the following day. Despite my better judgement, I gave into Eve’s pleas that we go swimming in the motel’s wildly overheated pool. A few days later, management mysteriously hung a ‘CLOSED’ sign on the door. E. coli had found its way into the water, which led to my kidneys becoming infected and a stay in an emergency ward. The hospital bill would take us months to pay off.

As we got into our rental car after that first sleepless night to find somewhere to have breakfast, the sun was coming down hard and hot and I remember thinking, ‘What the hell have we done?’ The Campus Inn would be our home until the house we had found to rent became free.

Two years on, we are back in London and the American West is on fire. Since the 1970s, the wildfire season has increased from five months to seven. And the acreage is also increasing. Before Europeans arrived in the West, wildfires were less intense, moved more slowly and tended to pass through forests every five to twenty years. Vegetation was able to regenerate itself. Fire is such a natural part of the life cycle here that some species need it in order to propagate: the cones from ponderosas, lodgepoles, jack pines and giant sequoias need very high temperatures for their seeds to be released. From early on, the new settlers in the West decided that the best way to keep their homes and livestock safe was to continually suppress fire. The result of this is unnaturally dense forests which are like giant tinderboxes in these increasingly hot, dry summers.

Over a million acres in Montana are burning in twenty-six separate conflagrations. North of the 49th parallel, in British Columbia, a hundred and forty fires are raging. In Idaho twenty-three are still going, eleven in Washington. Sixteen fires are still blazing in Oregon, one of which has ripped through the Columbia Gorge, dropping ash in Portland. Fifteen fires are still uncontained in California. A firefighter has just been killed by a falling tree in western Montana, and the full effects of smoke inhalation are yet to be seen.

Forests are being wiped out and animals are dying. Sometimes predators can benefit from fires in the short term by preying on animals as they flee but this isn’t always the case. Bears, wolves, bison and elk are burning to death. Often it’s the young who cannot escape quickly enough. Sometimes an adult will return to the den for safety, only to suffocate. Many animals sense fire before humans can, but their response isn’t always lifesaving. Porcupines and squirrels react to danger by climbing trees, which in a forest fire is deadly. Large birds can often escape but smaller, low-flying ones can asphyxiate or die of exhaustion. Probably the most affected species in this new age of giant fires are fish. The water that is used to put out fires or the rain that may finally arrive after months of drought washes ash into creeks and rivers. Particulates in fresh water can work their way into the gills of fish, suffocating them. Bears rely on fish, and the knock-on effect of ash entering the ecosystem is obvious. The centuries-old pattern of animals fleeing fires and finding sanctuary in another part of the landscape is long gone. Where can they go, these animals when their habitats have been parcelled up, paved over, built upon and mined out of existence? They are trapped in these forests waiting to burn.

My friends in Washington state are writing to tell me that their bags are packed in case they are evacuated. A close friend with an asthmatic daughter has left Missoula for the Oregon coast so her daughter can breathe more easily. My Facebook feed is full of questions about the best masks to filter out particulates. My dreams these days are filled with burning trees.

These fires are not unrelated to this book.

In Missoula, my proximity to mountains, lakes and rivers brought me closer to the Earth. I could walk out of my front door and be up Mount Sentinel in less than ten minutes. Every night, I’d look out at it, ‘Yup, still there,’ and head into bed. You cannot live in the American West without feeling a connection to the land. In London, when I look out my front door, I see blocks of flats, streetlights, walls and pavements. In Missoula, I was confronted with mountains and sky and deer looking in at me through my bedroom window, their eyes parallel to mine.

There were a few problems with our rental house in Missoula, which meant we couldn’t move in. We’d signed our tenancy agreement and handed over a large deposit but the house wasn’t habitable. Tearful arguments ensued while we convinced our landlords to clean the place. We’d just checked out of the motel and I wasn’t keen to play host to the hobo spiders or kidney infections, so we looked at a map and decided to head to Butte, a town of around 35,000 people an hour and a half down the I-90 southeast of Missoula.

I was so mired in details to do with our move that I hadn’t really thought about what we would find in Butte. In our travels around the West we had come to know the layout of most towns, with their Main Streets, their false-fronted buildings like the ones in Anthony Mann films, their one-storey mercantiles – those ubiquitous general stores selling shoe laces, dog food, cans of propane, powdered milk and energy bars – the diners with their swivelling stools at Formica counters, the bars with their flashing neon advertisements for Coors and Bud Light, the churches and the clapboard bungalows. I was not prepared for the streets of Butte, lined with tall, handsome nineteenth-century buildings, many of them empty and up for sale or rent. Butte’s central district, which contains almost 6,000 buildings, is a National Historic Landmark – the largest in the United States – and looks more like a nineteenth-century Manhattan or Chicago than small-town Montana.

As we wandered over to the Berkeley Pit in Uptown Butte and gazed into the toxic, mile-long turquoise pool of contaminated groundwater left over from an open pit copper mine, we were swiftly reminded that we were thousands of miles from the ‘East’. The Berkeley Pit is the town’s primary tourist attraction, and also happens to be the country’s largest Superfund site – in other words, a place that has been contaminated by toxic waste and identified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as posing a risk to humans and the environment.

We paid our two bucks to walk through an elevated tunnel to a viewing platform where we stared into this solution of arsenic, cadmium, zinc, sulphuric acid and a bunch of heavy metals. Every now and then sirens blared to deter birds from landing in the appealing blueness of the tainted water. When birds do land, which is not infrequent during migration, their oesophagi corrode and they die a horrible death.

As we gazed out over the Berkeley Pit, a woman on a tannoy told its story against a background of upbeat banjo music. We were in Simpsons territory: Houses were cleared away to make room for more mines! And the people were happy to lose their homes because more mines meant more jobs!

As you drive into Butte, you are faced with a large stone flowerbox the size of a coffin straddling two stone pillars. It is topped with a sign that reads

WELCOME TO BUTTE The Richest Hill on Earth

From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, Butte was indeed one of the wealthiest places in the United States – the result of two tectonic plates meeting at the Continental Divide and rising upwards to reveal precious underground metals.

In 1882, miners in Butte were bringing over 4,000 tons of copper to the surface. A year later, they were mining over 10,000 tons. Around this time, Augustus Heinze started the Montana Ore Purchasing Company and was selling close to 1,000 tons of copper every month. The timing for the discovery of this precious commodity could not have been better. These giant seams of copper ore were discovered just when telephones and electricity were taking off. In 1896, an eight-square-kilometre section of the town was producing over twenty-six per cent of the world’s copper and over fifty per cent of the country’s needs. Heinze and his competitors Marcus Daly and William Clark were known collectively as the Copper Kings and between them turned Butte into the biggest city between Chicago and San Francisco, and one of the richest places in America.

Butte’s wealth went into the pockets of the Copper Kings, but in order for their businesses to keep expanding, they needed workers. The population grew steadily around the turn of the twentieth century with a workforce from Italy, Finland, Austria, Montenegro, Mexico, China, Cornwall, Wales and Ireland. People from Butte (a writer friend calls them ‘Butticians’) will tell you how the ‘No Smoking’ signs in the mines were written in sixteen languages and how in the early 1900s there were more people speaking Irish under the streets here than in any other part of the world outside Ireland.

Fourteen towering steel headframes still sit atop old mine shafts in Butte. These structures, also called gallow frames, were used to lower and raise workers, mules and their equipment into the mines and back again, laden with the metal ore. Looming over boarded-up brothels, shops, theatres, handsome red brick houses and more recent bungalows, these headframes have become an icon of the town printed on T-shirts and lending their silhouettes to the logo for a local micro distillery.

Because of these rich seams of copper, Butte is a hilly town. Driving uphill to get a sense of its layout, we came across a small piazza overlooking some gaping holes in the earth, the remnants of open cast mines. This monument is dedicated to those killed in the Granite Mountain Disaster, the country’s most deadly hardrock mining accident. On 8 June 1917, a group of men descended into the mine to inspect a loose electrical cable. An acetylene gas lamp accidentally touched the oily paraffin wrapping of a wire, sending fire along the cable and turning the mineshaft into a giant chimney. Not all of the 168 men who died here were killed instantly. Some wrote letters to their loved ones as they slowly asphyxiated. This disaster, along with so many others, is very much part of Butte’s collective memory. What you sense in Butte is a town that has survived. There is a toughness to it. It’s Evel Knievel’s hometown, after all.

Jason and I fantasized about moving here. The cheap rents and the town’s lack of pretension were a tonic compared to the more upscale and pricier Missoula. But we were told over and over that the water in the Berkeley Pit was likely to reach the town’s water table by 2020. Butte, we could see, was a wonderfully Montanan conundrum of a place: beautiful, desirable, complicated and rife with historic problems.

On our way back to Missoula, we stopped at a diner in Wisdom. Our waitress told us how she’d escaped a ‘bad situation’ out East and had stopped here for gas. The diner offered her a job and here she was, years later, happier than she’d ever been. This was a variation on a story we were to hear many times over.

Westward expansion has been written about since Europeans first stepped outside the ‘civilized’ states of the East and crossed into the ‘wild’, ‘barbaric’ outposts of the West. It was famously discussed by Frederick Jackson Turner in his 1893 Atlantic essay, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’. ‘The problem of the West,’ he wrote, ‘is nothing less than the problem of American development… What is the West? What has it been to American life? To have the answers to these questions is to understand the most significant features of the United States of to-day.’

This question and the answers it engenders still haunt the place. The West has always encouraged personal reinvention. Historically it has been the place where the restless, the dispossessed, the persecuted, the fugitives, the lost, the chancers and the speculators have gone to seek redemption and reinvention. Wallace Stegner, the author and environmentalist who set up the creative writing department at Stanford University, where he taught Wendell Berry, Edward Abbey, Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry and Thomas McGuane, called the West ‘hope’s native home … a civilization in motion, driven by dreams.’ But he was also careful to add, ‘The West has had a way of warping well-carpentered habits, and raising the grain on exposed dreams.’

Like every region of the United States, the West is culturally, historically and geographically rich. Yet there are specific characteristics that are unique to it: space and aridity. In 1878, the American geologist and explorer John Wesley Powell defined the West as being the part of America that lies west of the 100th longitudinal meridian, a geographical definition which is still used today. ‘Passing from the east to west across this belt a wonderful transformation is observed,’ he wrote.

On the east a luxuriant growth of grass is seen, and the gaudy flowers … make the prairie landscape beautiful. Passing westward, species after species of luxuriant grass and brilliant flowering plants disappear; the ground gradually becomes naked, with bunch grasses here and there; now and then a thorny cactus is seen, and the yucca plant thrusts out its sharp bayonets.

Those grass-covered prairies, however, have been overcultivated and are no longer luxuriant. And the aridity seen on the western side of the 100th meridian is creeping east. Aridity, in this context, means land that receives less than twenty inches – roughly fifty-one centimetres – of rainfall per year and requires extra irrigation for agriculture. The line is shifting as the West is becoming drier. In the 1870s, Powell saw this aridity as a problem for human habitation. He urged the American government to rethink settlement in the West and to organize water and land-management plans that took into consideration the dryness of the land. Political leaders rejected the idea, seeing it as a hindrance to development. And the West as we know it continues to suck its aquifers dry and live on what seems to be borrowed water.

The complex history, the literature, the geography, the vast array of cultures and the mythology born and raised in this part of the world were not things I had given much thought to. That is, not until I found myself rolling up to the front door of our motel in Missoula, Montana that July day. What reinvention was I hoping for? What interior grain would become exposed? I wasn’t here to seek my fortune, to pan for metaphorical gold or to discover that fabled western self-reliance. I was escaping, yet I was also seeking something. I just didn’t know what it was.

Every day of my two years in Missoula I watched the light touch Mount Sentinel. Sentinel is by definition a mountain, but a small, rounded one. I got to know the way the sun worked its way across this folded hunk of earth in shades of gold in autumn, a pale lilac in winter, buttery yellow in spring and a vibrant orangey-red in summer. Each season seeped into my body via this mountain. In winter the snow would spread its whiteness and then retreat in spring. Yet our two winters in Missoula were mild for Montana and ski resorts struggled to stay open.

When I spoke to those who had lived in Western Montana a long time, they told me that the seasonal rhythms were out of synch. Perhaps I felt it more acutely because being from Ontario – a place with distinct seasons very similar to those in Montana – I remembered the waist-deep snow in the winters of my childhood, having to be shovelled out of our house because the front door could not be pushed open from the inside. I remember the long days of summer and the achingly beautiful fall evenings where the turning leaves, lit by a setting sun, seemed on fire against the pale sky. The melting ice of spring has laid down in my bones the soundtrack to March, April and May. I could feel the dislocation of the seasons, swinging off their axis, in my body.

Every winter the glaciers in the eponymous Glacier National Park in Northern Montana are shrinking. Of the hundred and fifty that existed in the park in the late nineteenth century, only twenty-five remain. And it is estimated that in the next twenty to thirty years all the named glaciers in the United States will have melted. With no glaciers, there will be no spring run-off. With no spring run-off there can be no rivers. With no rivers, there is no irrigation, fish or fresh water. You get the picture. This is only one example of the myriad climatic changes you can see with your own eyes in Montana, and it is not looking to improve any time soon.

Scott Pruitt, the climate change sceptic and briefly Donald Trump-appointed head of the Environmental Protection Agency (who sued the EPA fourteen times when he was Attorney General for Oklahoma) reversed many of the clean air and clean water acts put into law by previous administrations. A statement Pruitt made just after he was hired could have been uttered a century ago by European settlers: ‘True environmentalism, from my perspective, is using natural resources that God has blessed us with.’ Land is there to be used and exploited, especially in the West where oil, gas and precious metals are just a few boreholes away from making some people very wealthy.

If you even have half an ear to the ground, you will pick up the debates around land treaties that were made with Native Americans – the true custodians of much of the West. Many of these treaties have been broken and are still being contested – treaties whose illegal terminations deny tribes (and by extension everyone else) access to clean water, the right to hunt humanely, to grow wild food and to breathe clean air.

The American West is a crucible for so many of the issues coming at us from our news feeds. Living here you are constantly confronted with land, wilderness, wild fires, drought, mountains and rivers. In this landscape, you are made aware that you are both incredibly small and yet indelibly part of the interconnected web of life. This idea of ‘everything being connected’ has over the years been bandied about by new agers, but back in 1962, the scientist and author Rachel Carson wrote eloquently about it in her groundbreaking book Silent Spring, which played its part in launching the global environmental movement. ‘The Earth’s vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants and the Earth, between plants and other plants, between plants and animals,’ she wrote. ‘Sometimes we have no choice but to disturb these relationships, but we should do so thoughtfully, with full awareness that what we do may have consequences remote in time and place.’ Carson’s book, despite fierce opposition from powerful chemical companies, did provide the ammunition needed to ban one of the worst synthetic weedkillers around: DDT.

Although Carson’s argument was a new one for mainstream Americans, it was an idea that most indigenous communities had understood for millennia: that all organisms – however big or small – rely on each other to thrive. The Oglala Lakota chief Luther Standing Bear put it thus, ‘Only to the white man was nature a wilderness and only to him was the land “infested” with “wild” animals and “savage” people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery.’ Chief Standing Bear died of flu in 1939 after working as a rancher, teacher, lay minister and shopkeeper on reservations in South Dakota. He witnessed the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee in which 250-300 Lakota were killed and another 25 soldiers lost their lives. In what seems like a contradictory move, Chief Standing Bear accompanied Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show to Britain. He eventually became a Hollywood actor, later writing two books about his life: My People the Sioux and Land of the Spotted Eagle.

This interconnectedness he and others speak of is palpable and yet so are the strands severed from it. For instance, invasive saltcedar bushes, with their pale pink flowers you see waving in the wind like puffy magic wands across great stretches of the West, might look pretty to a newcomer until you look a little closer. Saltcedar plants, also known as tamarisk, were brought to the US in the nineteenth century as ornamentals. They escaped into the wild in the 1870s and have been aggressively spreading ever since. As if sucking up 200 gallons of water a day from the soil weren’t bad enough, the tamarisk secretes salt into the ground, making it inhospitable to native vegetation. Only four species of bird use tamarisk for food or habitat, whereas native species can support up to 154 types of bird per hundred acres.

Despite the visibility of non-native species, razed forests, mined earth, and rivers running orange, there are still people clamouring to dig for copper just eleven miles from one of the last pristine rivers in Montana. And there are those who see federal lands as theirs to use as they want – as their God-given right – and whose idea of a National Park is an untapped energy source rather than a place whose remaining scraps of wildness need to be preserved. Montana strikes the newcomer as a sort of Eden – and in many ways it is. But it is also so much more complicated.

For 12,000 years, the land of the American West was viewed as a gift of creation, to be shared in common. In 1810, the Shawnee Chief Tecumseh was asked by Governor Harrison (who became president of the United States for a month in 1841) to place his trust in the white man’s parcelling up of land. Tecumseh is recorded as saying:

The way, the only way to stop this evil is for the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be now – for it was never divided, but belongs to all. No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers … Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the Earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them for all the use of his children?

It wasn’t until the Europeans arrived with their agriculture, domestication of animals and their sedentism that this conscious effort to support human and non-human life sustainably was replaced by the idea of private ownership.

This mastery over the environment and the belief system that justifies it is embodied in the actions of Cliven Bundy, a Mormon rancher from Bunkerville, Nevada, who was in the news a lot when we first got to Montana. Bundy headed the 2014 stand-off with federal and state police over his refusal to pay the required fees to allow his cows to graze on public land – land managed by the Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service. The fees for this privilege amount to $1.41 per ‘animal unit per month’ – an ‘animal unit’ being one cow and her calf, one horse, five sheep or five goats. His failure to settle such a relatively small fee highlights how much of his refusal to pay was driven by ideology rather than solely financial necessity.

Cliven Bundy, his family, and many of his supporters are affiliated with the Sovereign Citizen Movement, a loose but sprawling subculture whose members believe in the illegitimacy of the United States government. They not only reject having to pay grazing fees to a government they do not recognize, but also refuse to file taxes, register their vehicles, or drive with a licence. Some refuse to use US currency. Their desire to live ‘free of any legal constraints’ is a brand of libertarianism that is rife in the Western states. I see a direct line between the nineteenth-century pioneer homesteaders and the Bundys of today. Their vision is aligned with the idea that you should be able to raise a family, graze your cattle and do whatever you need to in order to protect your guns, your family and your God – in their case a Mormon God – from what you see as a tyrannical government.

Another armed stand-off in January 2016 between militias and federal employees involved the Bundys. This clash between anti-government protesters and law enforcement officers was set against the backdrop of a fragile ecosystem: the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon – a 760-square-kilometre bird sanctuary established by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908. The desert, dunes and meadows here are carved out by marshes, rivers, ponds and lakes. This rare combination of water and land supports over 320 species of waterfowl, songbirds, shorebirds and raptors.

In the early 1900s, the photographer William Finley began to document birds around Malheur Lake and noticed that their numbers were dwindling. White pelicans, sandhill cranes, trumpeter swans and the snowy egret were being decimated by plume hunters, who were feeding the fashion craze for gigantic feathered hats. It wasn’t only the feathers that nineteenth-century milliners craved: entire heads, wings and sometimes whole taxidermied songbirds would end up perched, silent and staring onto hats worn in the drawing rooms of New York and London. In 1910, Finley wrote a piece in the Atlantic in which he despaired at a pair of plume hunters wiping out an entire population of white herons in just a day and a half. ‘Malheur has seen many such massacres,’ he wrote, ‘but none so great as that.’ It was at Finley’s behest that Roosevelt decided to protect the Malheur ecosystem and its bird populations.

The Paiute peoples have been living in and around Harney County for 16,000 years, thriving on the lakes, the land and the diverse ecosystem until they came into contact with Europeans in the late nineteenth century. The Paiute were forced by aggressive settlers and a government keen to expand its ownership of resources in the West to live on a small parcel of land known as the Malheur Indian Reservation, whose borders were constantly chipped away until the Paiute were eventually denied hunting and fishing rights. In 1878, they were forced from their ancestral lands. That winter, 550 Paiute men, women and children travelled 560 kilometres to their new ‘home’, the Yakama Reservation, in Washington state. Many died along the way from cold, starvation and disease. In 1883, the surviving Paiute were allowed to leave Yakama and some returned to Harney County. In 1972, a hundred years after their homeland was parcelled off to private interests, the Burns Paiute Indian Reservation acquired just over 771 acres of land near the Malheur refuge in Harney County. As of January 2016, there were 349 registered members of this tribe.

Perhaps because of the ecological and historical significance of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, Cliven Bundy’s son Ammon decided it would be a fitting location for another armed stand-off against the government. The Bundys gathered with several militant groups in Burns, Oregon, a town of 2,800 just fifty kilometres north of the refuge. In a Safeway parking lot, the Bundys whipped up enough anti-government frenzy to mobilize the takeover of the refuge. When asked about his claims to the land upon which sits the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, Ryan Bundy said, ‘We also recognize that the Native Americans had the claim to the land, but they lost that claim. There are things to learn from cultures of the past, but the current culture is the most important.’

One of the sparks which ignited the Bundys’ anger was the arrest and conviction in 2012 of the Oregon rancher Dwight Hammond and his son Stephen for two counts of arson on federal land. The Hammonds were re-sentenced in 2015, unleashing fury from Sovereign Citizens and their friends. The Bundys saw this as yet another example of an unfair, punitive government. Despite the Hammonds refusing to be part of the protest, the Bundys went ahead on their behalf, claiming that ‘The Lord was not pleased with what was happening to the Hammonds.’ They felt it was their duty to summon their contacts within the Pacific Patriots Network, a militia umbrella organization which includes a handful of other grassroots militias, to fight against what they saw as an unfair verdict for the Hammonds.

These heavily armed protestors took over the buildings and the surrounding land of the refuge which is run by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. LaVoy Finicum, a friend of the Bundys and spokesperson for the Malheur occupation, told the Washington Post that ‘it needs to be very clear that these buildings will never, ever return to the federal government’. He was shot dead by the FBI shortly after making this statement as he allegedly reached for his gun.

The Malheur occupation crystallized for me much of what was going on in my new home in the West. Ryan Payne, an electrician and army veteran, was one of the occupation’s organizers, and lived just outside Butte, in Anaconda. The Bundys, with their mistrust of what they interpret as a tyrannical government, their stubborn refusal to see land as anything other than acreage for grazing their herds, and their self-conscious and often ahistorical myth-making around the idea of the cowboy, lurk in the darker corners of Montana. If I dug a little, I would be able to get at this material. I could mine not for gems but for the less obvious stuff coursing under Montana’s shiny, picture postcard surface.

After our trip to Butte, we finally moved in to our rental house in Missoula. I realized soon after unpacking that I had spent most of my energy over the past few months dealing with the physical details and bureaucracy of moving house and relocating a seven-year-old. I had been worrying about my daughter’s abandonment of her friends in London, putting scrapbooks of photos together, gathering addresses, organizing pen pals and focusing on how she would settle into a new school, in a town so different from the one she had left behind. Between making the move ‘fun’ for a child and keeping on top of the minutiae of life, like remembering where I’d filed the inoculation forms which would allow her to go to a Missoula Public School, I had forgotten to think about myself.

After walking Eve to Paxson Elementary School on a sunny September day, giving her a hug and then crossing the road to head to our new house, I turned around to see her standing in the third grade line with her gigantic backpack. She was stock-still, her back perfectly erect. Her body language read: terrified. I felt like shit. What had we just done? I went home and collapsed. Although I had a novel to finish, I hadn’t given any serious thought to what else I was going to do here. I wandered around aimlessly for several days, worrying about my lack of focus.

And then this happened: Missoula started reminding me of Ottawa, the town I had grown up in. This was not good. I am told that when I was very small, I would often ask my parents when we would be leaving. My child’s mind could not fathom living there. My hometown was stifling, conservative and suburban. I left at seventeen, as soon as I graduated from high school, and only returned for weddings and funerals – and not even for them much of the time. The reasons for my visceral dislike of this city is a whole book unto itself. In fact, that was the novel I was writing while I was in Missoula. I sunk into a very mild depression, more like a dip than a chasm.

I tried to isolate the details of how this town reminded me of the place I had escaped all those years ago. The layout of Ottawa’s streets and the horrible things that happened to me there were beginning to haunt me in a more concrete and present way. I studied Missoula’s physical features as if I were looking at a face that reminded me of someone I once knew who had hurt me. The street signs were the same as those in small towns, affixed onto metal poles that slant awkwardly. As kids we would turn them on their axes so that drivers would get lost, thinking how hilariously rebellious we were being. Like many suburban streets in Ottawa, those in Missoula had front lawns stretching to the sidewalk. Then there was another patch of grass between the sidewalk and the road. I had only ever seen such strips in my hometown. It was these patches of perfectly mowed grass that undid me. There was something about their superfluousness that brought home the affluent emptiness of suburban North America. And here was another problem that had plagued me in Ottawa: I did not know how to drive. Despite having chosen to be here, I felt lost and had no real concrete reason to be here.

In this spirit of confusion and self-doubt, I found myself one evening cycling through the rain to a fundraiser for the anti-trapping organization, Footloose Montana, at the Hell Gate Elks Lodge in downtown Missoula. Built in 1911, the three-storey lodge is older than many of the downtown buildings and stands out for its tall classical columns. Inside, however, it was a mash-up of a high school gym and dive bar. I stood on my own sipping a beer in the dark, underground space when a few people approached me and made small talk in that friendly American way. Where was I from? How had I heard of their organization? Did I know there was a raffle for the posters in the lobby? I ended up chatting with a guy in a suit who told me he liked nothing more than being out in the mountains camping, hunting elk and deer. He didn’t mind killing animals for food, but he couldn’t see the point of trapping them, which was why he was a member of Footloose. I asked if he ever worried about sleeping outside with nothing but a thin piece of nylon between him and the bears and wild cats roaming around. He looked at me like I was crazy: ‘I could only ever live in a place,’ he said, fixing my eye, ‘where I am not the top predator.’

I had never thought of myself as prey. This was when a shift began to occur inside me. My relationship to the Earth had just been set on a new course because of a throwaway comment from a complete stranger in the gloomy basement of the Missoula Hell Gate Elks Lodge. Of course I am prey. We all are. And so we should be, yet we do everything in our power to rise above the predators around us, to dominate the land and its non-human inhabitants. We need to take on the responsibility, the vulnerability, the inevitable acceptance of our death that comes with being prey. We are prey. It was this thought that allowed me to see my new home through a different lens.

¶ Shortly after our move to Missoula, I found myself waking up in a motel room in Gardiner, Montana (population 875) at 4.30 a.m. on a drizzly September day. Jason and Eve rustled in their beds, reluctant to get up. The sister of a friend of mine, the poet and naturalist Ilona Popper, showed up at 4.45 a.m. sharp. Tall with short, greying hair, sensible shoes and an easy, warm manner, Ilona bundled us into her car and drove us along the northern edge of Yellowstone National Park in the pitch black, towards where she thought we might find a pack of wolves known as the Junction Butte Pack.

After about an hour, we parked up in the Lamar Valley behind half a dozen cars, while half a kilometre away twenty or so Gortex-clad wolf watchers were planting their viewing scopes on the crest of a hill. Ilona introduced me to Rick McIntyre, who had just shown up. As the biological technician for the Yellowstone Wolf Project, Rick started working here in 1994, the year before wolves were re-introduced from Canada. Rick, who is revered locally for chalking up more than 5,000 consecutive days watching wolves, nodded in greeting, then pulled his binoculars up to his eyes and got to work. Much of what we know about the Yellowstone packs comes from his observations and the books he has written on the subject.