From scary movies to roller coasters to extreme sports, there are ways we can scare ourselves—for fun. Why do some people enjoy uncertain, risky, or dangerous situations? In this Believer essay, Elisa Gabbert reflects on her fear of heights, and also explores fear as pleasure, the philosophy of games, and anxiety as a luxury.
I collect this kind of story, the kind that reveals a crack in reality. They give me that skin-tingling feeling, a flutter in the chest. We tell ourselves that roller coasters are perfectly safe and that planes don’t crash. I don’t want it not to be true; I don’t want to die on a plane. So why do I like the stories? It’s like I want my sense of reality to be destabilized. It’s like I’m playing some kind of game, a game in which the complex world falls away and I focus on a single threat. A single strange-but-very-real threat. I can stop riding roller coasters, obviously, but it’s harder to avoid planes or other forms of transportation. Trains do get derailed. Bridges do collapse. So the threats are very real—but not immediate. Not for me, when I’m reading the news, when I’m sitting at my desk.
Is there anything useful about that feeling, I wonder? That artificial fear, or fear at a distance? Might practicing fear be a good idea? It seems more useful than anxiety—if anxiety is just the brain burning energy it doesn’t really need, because you’re not currently starving, or trying to outrun a lion. These may be just concepts, words I attach to agitation, but when I call the feeling anxiety, I’m mapping it alongside paralysis and existential dread. I associate anxiety with stasis, with insomnia, lying supine in bed. Fear, on the contrary, is a vertical feeling. It’s activating. If I’m scared, I want to be moving.
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For Granta, Momtaza Mehri reflects on the life and legacy of Sinéad O’Connor, on the first anniversary of the singer songwriter’s death.
I suppose that’s why I’ve always been in awe of O’Connor as a musician and a daughter. In publicly exorcising the mother-daughter relationship, she obliterates the hyphen at the cost of her sanity. There’s a reckless porousness to her work, a willingness to return again and again to that garden, locked-out and trembling. Formative nightmares can sometimes fuel you. An artist can decide to have her own baby, despite the stern advice of her record label. She can willingly choose the terror of motherhood. In photoshoots, her belly will protrude. ‘Wear a Condom’, her crop top reads. She will flash a cheeky grin. Her first child will be born three weeks before her debut album.
If you are implicated in everything you witness, and vice versa, then how do you live with yourself? The borders of your personhood become dangerously compromised. Such hyper-empathy can be a perilous position from which to think or live, one with personal and professional costs.
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• A woman who survived the unimaginable
• Whether a school shooter’s parents are legally liable
• A mother’s ordeal, a son’s journey
• The reality of an autism diagnosis in your 40s
• The massive, marvelous ecosystem living in the earth’s crust
Ryan Hockensmith | ESPN | June 26, 2024 | 5,538 words
Eleven years ago, Emma Carey plummeted 14,000 feet to the ground after a tandem jump with her skydiving instructor went horribly wrong. For ESPN, Ryan Hockensmith takes us through Carey’s life-altering fall. “Emma Carey is flying, and she is so happy,” he writes. “She is 14,000 feet above the earth, gripping the straps of her parachute pack like an excited kid on the way to her first day of school. Oh my god, I’m going to become a skydiver, she thinks, not knowing that just about the most terrifying thing a human being can experience is about to happen to her.” Her accident could have easily taken center stage in this piece. Hockensmith is a skilled reporter and writer who uses evocative detail to tell us so much more than the basic facts of Carey’s accident and the aftermath. He introduces us to Emma and her best friend, Jemma Mrdak. The duo is a “package deal” who did everything together, including skydiving. It’s unclear precisely what happened during Carey’s jump. All she knows is that the main and safety chutes became entangled and neither opened as expected; her instructor landed on top of her, unconscious. She does not blame him for what happened and has kept his name out of news reports in the aftermath. The premise of this story is compelling, but what I loved most is that Carey’s attitude is almost a full-fledged character in this piece. “She began toggling between moments of tremendous gratitude that she’s alive, and tremendous anger at the accident, at the world, at her body, at everything. Sometimes she had a good morning and a bad afternoon. Other times it was a bad 1:52 p.m. and a good 1:53, then a bad 1:54. She just tried to keep getting to 1:55,” Hockensmith writes. This is a gripping story of pure will and determination. While Emma may have lost feeling and partial use of her legs, she is here to tell you that as a person, she is absolutely whole. —KS
John Woodrow Cox | The Washington Post | July 8, 2024 | 8,641 words
This is the second story I’ve chosen for the Top 5 this summer that focuses on the parents of young people who committed mass shootings. The first, written by Mark Follman for Mother Jones, is about Chin Rodger, who is helping experts understand the psychology and behavior of mass shooters in an effort to prevent future crimes, based on her experience with her son, Elliot. The second, by the masterful John Woodrow Cox, is about James and Jennifer Crumbley, who were recently convicted of involuntary manslaughter because they failed to secure the gun that their son, Ethan, used to murder four people and wound seven others at his high school (a gun, it is worth noting, that his parents gave him as a gift). Together, these stories point to new fronts in the effort to combat America’s epidemic of gun violence, and the one Cox depicts is controversial. As the headline of the story notes, the case against the Crumbleys was historic—no parents had ever been held legally responsible for a mass shooting committed by a child—but it was also high-risk. Karen McDonald, the prosecutor who led the cases, faced death and rape threats, as well as doubt from some of her peers. The work consumed her life and that of her colleagues; the need for therapy is mentioned in the story more than once. Cox embedded with the prosecution over many months, which allows him to show in intimate narrative detail what it took to win in court and what was lost in the process. “Before the shooting,” Cox writes, “there was a lightness to McDonald, at least with family and friends, said her 26-year-old daughter, Maeve Stargardt, describing her as a ‘total goof’ who reveled in throwing surprise parties and giving quirky presents. She watched that part of her mom wither. But she’d accepted that’s what her mother needed to become, not just to support four grieving families, but also to overcome the persistent doubts about her decisions.” I found myself commending this sacrifice while also thinking that no one should have to make it. America’s toxic gun culture destroys lives in more ways than one. —SD
Ryan Nourai | Esquire | July 24, 2024 | 4,757 words
It does little good to dance around the atrocity, so here goes. Four years before Ryan Nourai was born, his mother was carjacked, kidnapped, and repeatedly raped, then shot twice in the head and left for dead in an alley. She survived, albeit with fragments of a bullet lodged in her brain. Her son knew the bullet part, but little else; only after her death, decades later, did he begin to seek the full breadth of what had happened. “Why,” he writes, “now that she was gone, now that her body was in the next room, was the incident starting to feel closer than ever?” The assailants had long been captured and imprisoned for the attack, so Nourai’s ensuing investigation is more of a howdunit than a whodunit, an effort to fill the lacunae that existed between him and understanding. But as he gets closer, jumping across the years—scattering her ashes, riding with the retired homicide detective who investigated the crime, even speaking at one of the attackers’ parole hearing—you start to realize that closure isn’t the point. Something else is at play here, something shaped like grief but tinted like self-discovery. “I had been trying all along to find out whether her mettle and spark lived in me—and to do that, I thought I had to replicate her pain,” he writes. “Now I knew that wasn’t true.” In unadorned prose, Nourai sketches the boundless length and depth of a son’s love. —PR
Mary H.K. Choi | New York Magazine | July 3, 2024 | 5,906 words
My brother received his autism diagnosis in his late 40s—an important new framing for our family. At the time, I thought such a delayed diagnosis was unusual, but a few years later, I had the honor of editing John Paul Scotto’s Longreads piece about his own late diagnosis, “I Tried to Forget My Whole Life. I’m Glad I Failed.” After the essay was published, Scotto was overwhelmed by the number of people who contacted him to share their affinity with his story; it can be significant to shine a light. When autism was not as well understood, discovery was slower, and many grew up without the knowledge that could have helped to alleviate many difficulties. But it’s never too late to seek answers, as shown yet again by Mary H.K. Choi’s powerful piece for The Cut. Choi explains that even after being diagnosed at age 43, she still grappled with a form of imposter syndrome, writing, “And even if I was officially autistic, was I autistic enough for it to matter? And what did that mean?” She struggles to feel that her diagnosis of ASD level one, the mildest form of autism spectrum disorder, counts despite being able to see—and candidly write about—her anxiety, her awkward moments, and the pain she has caused those close to her. Gradually, Choi comes to terms with how “the disorder is not a spectrum but spectra, a solar system of sprawling constellations in 3-D that differs from one person to the next,” and that it intertwines with her cultural identity and other influences to make her who she is. After so many years of trying to fit a box, she is finally adapting the box to suit her. —CW
Ferris Jabr | The New York Times Magazine | June 24, 2024 | 5,966 words
Deep within the Earth’s crust, an ancient underworld teems with intraterrestrial microbes. They’re tiny but mighty, and different from their cousins above ground—breathing rock instead of oxygen, for one. They’re also extraordinary, having carved massive caverns over time, “engaged in a continuous alchemy of earth,” writes Ferris Jabr. They’ve survived the planet’s cataclysmic events over billions of years, possibly even helping to form the continents and lay the foundations for terrestrial life. I’m drawn to writing about Earth that frames its vast geological history in an accessible and beautiful way, and Jabr does exactly this, bringing inanimate rock, and these amazing microbes dwelling deep within it, to life. He explores some of the principles of Earth-system science, which studies Earth and life as a single self-regulating system, and the idea that living creatures—humans, animals, plants, microorganisms—aren’t just products of evolutionary processes, but participants in their own evolution. In other words, he writes, we are Earth. My favorite science writing informs as well as awes. Much like Jabr’s story on the social life of forests, this piece reminds me of the interconnectedness of all things, and challenges and shifts my understanding of this wondrous physical world we live in. —CLR
Audience Award
What was our readers’ favorite this week? The envelope, please.
Simon Wu | The Paris Review | July 18, 2024 | 2,841 words
There’s little to be said about wholesale members’ club Costco that hasn’t been said already. (Including in our own pages.) Or so I thought. Simon Wu adds to that prodigious canon by organizing a family vacation to Costco Travel’s most popular and well-reviewed destination: the Mayan Riviera. The result: an essay as thoughtful and selective as a trip to Costco isn’t. —PR
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Eleven years ago, Emma Carey survived falling 14,000 feet to the ground after a tandem skydive went horribly wrong. For ESPN, Ryan Hockensmith recounts the story and the aftermath, highlighting Carey’s incredible courage and sheer determination in the face of disaster.
She soars for the first half-minute, soaking in her first skydive. About 30 seconds in, she feels a tap on her shoulder, the signal from her instructor to cross her arms to brace for the jolt of her chute going off. She crosses her arms and then … nothing.
She’s not slowing down. She feels a tug on her hair, and she tries to see what the instructor is doing behind her. He’s out cold, unconscious from the ropes attached to the chutes. She can see the chutes, giant chunks of red fabric, flailing around in bunched-up bundles. They’re not supposed to be bunched-up bundles.
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In 2022, a new Bitcoin mining facility made its home in Granbury, a small rural Texas town. The center’s computers, running 24/7, are cooled by thousands of fans, also running constantly. “As more machines were switched on,” writes Andrew R. Chow, “the noise sounded like a ceiling fan, then a leaf blower, then a jet engine.” Granbury’s residents of all ages have experienced a long list of medical issues and emergencies since, including hypertension, heart palpitations, chest pain, migraines, vertigo, tinnitus, hearing loss, ear infections, panic attacks, and more. Even the area’s nonhuman residents—from pets to local wildlife—have shown unexplainable symptoms. Chow reports on the physical and mental health effects of the mine’s noise pollution on the town’s population, and the need for stricter regulation in the state.
At first, residents responded to the intrusion by vacating their porches, retreating inside, and turning up their fans and air conditioners to the max. But many still felt tremors in their beds—including Larry Potts, a 77-year-old retired pastor who lives up the road from the plant. Potts says he stopped sleeping and started losing hearing in both ears. In February, his heart gave out after another sleepless night; he was rushed to the hospital and kept alive by an external pacemaker. There, he was diagnosed with third degree atrioventricular block, hypertension, and depression.
“We’re living in a nightmare,” Sarah Rosenkranz says, sitting at a barbecue restaurant in downtown Granbury on an evening in May. As rock music blares from the speakers and other patrons chatter away, Rosenkranz pulls out her phone and clocks 72 decibels on a sound meter app—the same level that she records in Indigo’s bedroom in the dead of night. In early 2023, her daughter began waking up, yelling and holding her ears. Indigo’s room directly faces the mine, which sits about a mile and a half away. She soon refused to sleep in her own room. She then developed so many ear infections that Rosenkranz pulled her from school in March and learned how to homeschool her for the rest of the semester.
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An old boyfriend, let’s call him K, used to tease me, saying I wouldn’t make a very good meal—“not enough fat.” He might have been talking about himself, though. He was mostly tendons and veins.
There was something sensual about killing animals with him. We trapped and hunted together in the winter, commercial fished in the summer. During those long July days, we hammered salmon heads until their bodies stiffened into the pose that preceded death. Fish slime made its way from my cotton gloves up my plastic arm guards, onto my neck, my chin, my hair. All day, my fingers worked fast to yank fish off the net, then pull a gill to bleed them. If we didn’t pick fish fast enough, seagulls would pluck out their eyeballs, seals would tear through their flesh. Most days, we caught hundreds. Some days, we caught more than a thousand.
I was recently reading an online essay about salmon and stumbled on a photo of myself from one of those summers. I’m wearing ripped jeans, a gray tank top, blue earrings, no shoes. A turquoise headband holds my hair and my skin is as tan as I’ve ever seen it. I look good. Blood cakes my knuckles as I work my knife along a salmon spine. In the corner of the photo, the salmon’s decapitated head sits open-mouthed and unblinking; its eyes stare back at me as I stare into the screen.
2.
I didn’t grow up killing animals, but there was a period in my mid-20s, the period that overlapped with my relationship with K, when I killed a lot. There was the beaver I retrieved by swimming naked through a half-frozen lake. The duck wings I hung like prayer flags from the porch. The organs we liberated from the belly of the caribou.
I had qualms. I’d stopped eating meat in high school, citing animal cruelty and climate change. In my 20s, I let my vegetarianism slip when I moved to rural Alaska. Eating caribou roast and moose tacos and salmon burgers seemed different than ordering a steak whose origins as an animal were concealed; these wild creatures led uninhibited lives in vast landscapes. Choosing to eat the calories from their flesh meant not eating something that had flown thousands of miles to reach me. It’s a painful inevitability: the calories have to come from somewhere.
Desire sharpened my senses, made the rest of the world recede. Desire cut through other parts of my life then, too—it was a time of wanting, wanting, wanting.
Still, my enjoyment in what was a kind of murder troubled me. When I was killing hundreds and at times thousands of salmon a day, I was often having a ball. Sun on my skin, slime in my hair. I was viscerally, unabashedly alive. On land, too, I found stalking entrancing: following a grouse through the forest, slithering on my elbows to sneak up on a goose, watching a beaver lodge for hours. Desire sharpened my senses, made the rest of the world recede. Desire cut through other parts of my life then, too—it was a time of wanting, wanting, wanting.
I was becoming a hunter.
I tried to pay homage to the lives I took. I learned how to use as much of each carcass as I could—baking trout liver, tanning beaver hides, boiling salmon roe. I made up rituals of thanksgiving, trying with words to honor the bodies I ate. I pushed myself to remember that the food I ate came from someone’s life. I wasn’t always sure it was enough, though. While I’d had a few close calls with other animals stalking me, my main associations with the word “predator” weren’t with carnivores of the tundra. Occasionally, I wondered: did every man who ever turned me into a piece of meat justify it by saying he was grateful?
At the time, I didn’t think of my relationship with K in such terms. If he was the hunter, that would mean I wasn’t one—it would mean I was his catch. I didn’t want to see myself that way. I wanted to live up to my namesake: Diana, goddess of the moon, the hunt, the wild.
Still, when K wrapped his arm around me, he named my body parts the way he did with a caribou: brisket, backstrap, hindquarter. Still, when we got together, I was 25. He was 51.
3.
The killing-animals phase eventually faded. I moved from rural to urban Alaska; K and I broke up; I married my husband, David, who’s never owned a gun. David and I still catch salmon every summer to fill our freezer. We don’t hunt, but we eat meat from moose and caribou and deer that our friends kill. I’m less in touch with my animal self than I once was. The wildness I lived around in my 20s, and the wildness I found within, at some point started to scare me. I got charged by bears on a few occasions. Wolves killed my dog. I thought, for a brief moment, I might end up with K. The danger—the life and death of it all—became too much. Too much hunting, too much killing, too much wanting.
4.
K used to comment on my body a lot: my curved lip, my crooked toes, my veiny forearms, my toothy smile—like none of a kind, he’d say. He teased when he praised my looks, saying he didn’t want to tell me I was beautiful too often, for fear I’d think he only liked me for my appearance. And yet, he kept telling me how beautiful I was, again and again and again.
Our romance was unsteady, unmoored; as all of my friends put it, unhealthy. As a few brave friends put it, emotionally abusive. Toward the end, there was a prolonged off-and-on period, which happened to overlap with a particularly intense salmon season. There were moody hours picking fish in silence, staring into the ocean in a rage, wanting to be back on land, wanting to push him in the water. At one point, he told me I’d gained weight when things were too good between us, let myself get soft reading The New Yorker by the fire. He made clear he preferred the version of me whittled down by stress. The ugly thing? I preferred that version of me, too: the sculpted arms, the visible collarbones, the sharp awareness of what was happening around me. I was more active, attuned, alive. Few people are as alert as a hungry hunter.
The ugly thing? I preferred that version of me, too: the sculpted arms, the visible collarbones, the sharp awareness of what was happening around me.
When things were back on between us, we couldn’t get enough of each other. Sometimes, when waiting for the fishing period to open, or the net to fill with salmon, we’d peel off our Helly Hansens and hide in the sole of the boat just below the bow. The plywood floor was coated in salmon scales and dried blood.
5.
A big part of my attraction to K was how much he talked about being attracted to me. It scares me, how much I’ve focused over the years, on being desired. It might be why it was such a revelation to briefly identify as a hunter in my mid-20s.
I was the one doing the desiring. I was the one in control.
I remember the first time I noticed a truck honk—I must have been 11 or 12. There was a thrill to it, a mix of terror and lust: I was wanted, yet a threat of violence threaded those exchanges. Later, when the honks and whistles grew commonplace, I used to fantasize about pushing back, staring these men straight in the eye and saying don’t fuck with me. I never did, too meek, too scared of what might happen next. Even once I identified as a hunter, it was only in the most marginal of ways. Yes, I could sight in a rifle, identify lynx, wolf, and wolverine tracks, skin a fox, dismantle a ptarmigan. But what happened when a man came onto me and I didn’t want him to? So much of the time, I still tried to be nice.
About a year after my first boyfriend and I broke up, he messaged me to tell me he’d changed: as he put it, he was less of a predator now. There have been so many times when I thought I’d changed, too, was over and done with scummy men, over and done with being prey, and yet when I was with K, he often joked that I was like an animal he wanted to trap, or an old nasty fish head a fox wants to bury for winter and keep for himself, or a beautiful hummingbird he wanted to cage. At the time, I didn’t think of myself as his prey. I found it exciting, all this talk of how much he wanted me. Exciting, of course, until I started feeling like an animal with a leg clenched in the jaws of a steel trap, eyes wild with rage. Exciting until I started wondering which of us had put me there.
6.
I eventually told my parents I was dating a man twice my age who was teaching me how to skin river otters and fry caribou liver. My dad said, “You’re a grown woman, so you can do what you want, but I want you to ask yourself, ‘Am I being used?’”
Later, when I told K about this conversation, he replied, “Aren’t we using each other? I mean, we’re both having sex.”
Where is the line between being exploited and fulfilling your own desires?
What I remember less often now, because of the way things ended with me and K, is how much I wanted to be with him—how much I loved being with him. Picnics in the boat, sharing pilot bread, cheddar cheese, dried caribou, smoked salmon, blueberry cake. Evenings listening to Martha Scanlan’s “Seeds of the Pine” on the muskox-skin couch. Mornings watching him build a fire in the barrel stove. We used to eat half of a lingonberry pie after each meal.
For years, I’ve read about Indigenous traditions around hunting. I have found it comforting to learn of practices that turn predation into partnership, consumption into communion. In Southeast Alaska, the Tlingit people throw salmon bones back to their home river as a gesture of reciprocity, in the hopes that the salmon will come back. In Yupik communities, hunters give the seals they’ve killed a drink of fresh water to quench their thirst. In a Koyukon community, anthropologist Richard Nelson described an elder carrying a plate of meat to her neighbor’s house with a cloth over it. She explained, “It wouldn’t be right to leave this open in the air, like it doesn’t mean anything.”
I’ve tried to find my own practices to treat meat like it means something. Some days, before eating, I recite the Five Contemplations, Thich Nhat Hanh’s script for mindful eating (“This food is the gift of the whole universe…”). I try to use food that’s available close by, growing a big garden in the summer, picking wild berries and greens from the tundra, putting away gallons of fermented root veggies for winter. I try to celebrate food with careful cooking and vibrant ingredients, smoking salmon bellies and collars with brown sugar and salt, collecting seaweed to sprinkle in miso soups and big pots of rice, tending moose meat as it slow-cooks with apple cider vinegar and star anise. I try to share good food with friends, sitting around a table with salmon filets broiled with sesame seeds, farro with roasted carrots and whipped ricotta, salads with quartered beets and goat cheese, black lentil stews with wilted kale and cubed sweet potatoes. But there is still the question of whether it’s all enough; each summer, I find my fingers wedged in the prickly gills of a salmon, trying to hold the fish still so I can bang a club against the animal’s head—and smiling as I do so.
It’s not always clear, the difference between a relationship defined by love or predation—or some mix of the two. When I was inside the story with K, I didn’t see it the way my dad did. I saw myself as a hunter, too.
7.
K taught me how to set steel traps. We ran a small trapline, killing martens and beavers and foxes. We tried eating fox meat once when we feigned being hungry enough for it. It tasted terrible—predators don’t make very good meals. Usually, we left the carcasses outside the door for ermines to chew on.
One night, after skinning beavers by the woodstove, we heard the cry of a fox caught in a trap on the river. It was midnight and 30 below. We donned headlamps and snow pants and walked the trail down to the shore. K let me kill the animal; I steadied my .22 as he held a spotlight on the thrashing body. I squinted into the scope, inhaled, then exhaled to pull the trigger. The jerking legs released their fight.
I carried the fox away from the trap site, then skinned him. My hands got stiff with cold as I worked, so I warmed my bare fingers against the fox’s flesh, which was still hot. I later sewed his fur into a pair of mittens, pulling fake sinew tight after each stitch. I jabbed myself repeatedly with the sharp needle, trying not to stain the orange hairs with blood. Those mittens eventually kept me warm on other 30-below nights, when I camped alone on a frozen river, my body prone under the winter sky. A couple of those nights, I had a stomach virus. Puking over the side of my sleeping bag, I feared I might freeze: the thrashing of my desire—to keep living, wanting, killing, eating—stilling into a limp pose of surrender. I knew, then, as I wiped vomit from my lips and shimmied back into my sleeping bag, how quickly my flesh would become meat. The ravens would circle, the wolverine would lumber through the spruce, the foxes and wolves would trot down the river, frosted snouts high in the air.
8.
Soon after I first started trapping, I wrote my friend Sophie a letter and shared my qualms about killing animals. She replied with a letter about her own experience fishing in Southeast Alaska. Once, when gutting salmon on the boat, she’d decided to keep their hearts separate from the guts she threw into the sea. When she looked up from the filets, she saw a pile of salmon hearts thumping on the counter. Out in the open air, pulled from the cavernous bellies of fish, those hearts continued beating—a heap of pulsation, life holding onto life.
Remembering that letter now, I wonder: what did she eventually do with all those hearts? How do we ever properly honor what we take from other bodies? And how might we make sense of the mix of violence and tenderness, desire and cruelty that sustains us?
9.
In my first year of marriage, I cooked voraciously: red lentil stews, toasted chickpeas with paprika, elaborate lasagnas with butternut squash. I tried to make a pie a week and a friend teased that I should start a blog entitled “Fifty-Two Pies.” David and I planted seeds in a neighbor’s abandoned beds, where our green beans dangled from the vine, the arugula grew leafy and bitter, the kale proliferated so much we had to freeze numerous Ziplocs because we couldn’t keep up.
We joked, at the time, that we’d been domesticated: we bought sheets and towels, discussed the merits of the Instant Pot, took dozens of pictures of our two sled dogs. We were housesitting that first winter together, and the cabin had a double office in the loft that looked out over a hay field. It was the coldest winter on record in Fairbanks since the 1970s, and ice stitched onto the window, obscuring our view of the snow with frozen crystals in the shapes of stars and ferns.
I trust David more than anyone I know. He is a very good person, a very good man, so trained in not objectifying me that for years, he rarely commented on my looks. Our engagement came soon after I finally put an end to the off-on period with K. I wanted to anchor in a safe harbor. I wanted to domesticate myself. But domestication hasn’t always come easy: our first summer of marriage, also the first summer of the pandemic, my seasonal work leading backpacking trips was canceled, so I stayed home. I picked 30 gallons of wild berries—18 blueberry, 12 cranberry. Come fall, I spent hours in the kitchen pickling our carrots and beets, making veggie soups to can and freeze. I got scared, as David worked on his laptop downstairs, that my world had become too small, that it wasn’t the pandemic but the word wife that was containing me.
It was the coldest winter on record in Fairbanks since the 1970s, and ice stitched onto the window, obscuring our view of the snow with frozen crystals in the shapes of stars and ferns.
This is what I’d wanted: to feel safe. To erect sturdier walls between me and animals that might kill me. To have a partner I could trust. I no longer wanted to find myself looking over my shoulder as I skied across the tundra or walked down the street, wondering who might be following me. And I no longer wanted to carry a gun when I ventured out, always ready to turn beings I met into meat. When I walk through the woods now, I no longer stalk or worry about being stalked—instead, I often clog my ears with headphones, pausing every once in a while to refresh email. The other day, when talking to a friend on the phone while wandering nearby trails, I almost stumbled on a cow moose munching on willows. The sight of her blond fur literally brought me back to my senses. Most of the time, I’m not as awake as I once was; danger, and hunger, no longer demand it. I’m grateful to feel safe, to have secure access to good food, and yet I also occasionally wonder: where has the hunter gone?
10.
When I was newly enamored of K, I focused on his eyes: green and, if you looked close enough, a splash of yellow around the pupil.
There were his arms, too, which he knew were a surprise for his age. When we lived together, he spent a lot of time shirtless—puttering around the house half-naked in the middle of an Arctic winter. Maybe he also wanted to be looked at and objectified every now and then, to pretend that he, too, might be considered prey.
We were living in his home at the time, which was nestled on a hill and surrounded by hundreds of miles of boreal forest and tundra. At the time, it was freeze-up, which meant the river was half-frozen, which also meant there was no way for me to leave if I wanted to. The nearest human, besides us, was 30 miles away. When I remember these details, I sometimes wonder why I considered myself “a hunter” in those years—why I said things like, “I was the one in control.”
11.
I recently read an article that described the microwave as the most eco-friendly way to cook. When I turned 30, I rediscovered the device after David and I moved into an apartment with one. I hadn’t lived around a microwave since I was a kid. I became obsessed; you can steam a sweet potato in five minutes! You can poach an egg in 55 seconds! You can pop bulk popcorn in six minutes!
When I was with K, I was in a phase of my life when I was trying to live as far from the nearest highway—and microwave—as possible. It wasn’t unusual for me, during that time, to haul 15 to 30 gallons of water per day. I liked to wait until the temperature dropped below zero to split wood—logs shattered at the slightest tap like candle ice. One spring, when I was alone in a remote cabin, I cried over a salad. As I stared at my plate with the first wild greens of the season, fireweed shoots and willow leaves, I improvised new prayers: Thank you for the bounty and the beauty of the land, the people I love who are both near and far, and the many joys of being alive. By the time I chewed and swallowed, my eyes were wet with tears.
Despite my current efforts to practice mindful eating, careful cooking, and local harvesting, I still sometimes find myself pushing food into my mouth while standing up or looking at my phone or talking in such animated conversation that I forget to taste the miso-butter brine on the turnips, or the crispy skin of pan-fried salmon, or the sharp bite of ginger in a wakame salad. There are days when I am so caught up in my mind I don’t realize my body is absorbing another body.
Often, I miss the way hunting demanded my attention, turned my gaze toward the cost of my still-beating heart. I wish I could remember that without having to kill, though. When K and I were in our prolonged off-and-on period, I was also more awake than usual, even if that meant I was more distraught than usual, too. I memorized Rilke poems, journaled furiously, went for multi-hour runs. K’s accusations at the time—mostly that I was sleeping with various other people—were maddening; I thought I was losing my mind. And yet, our reunions were ravenous. I was high and low and rarely anything in between. I felt unmistakably alive.
Often, I miss the way hunting demanded my attention, turned my gaze toward the cost of my still-beating heart.
I don’t have nostalgia for that relationship in the way I do for hunting, even though the process of falling in love and having my heart broken woke me up to the world, too. At this point, I want to feel awake to my surroundings, alive in my relationships, a part of my environment—and also to feel safe. But I don’t want comfort to mean complacency. I still want to feel each meal, each touch, each body I absorb into mine.
12.
A few years before I met K, I went diving with a friend in Southeast Alaska. We drove his boat into a small cove and put on wetsuits, and my friend strapped weights to his chest to help him drop down and plumb the ocean floor for sea cucumbers. I stayed near the surface, spectating—neither hunting nor being hunted. I peered through my mask at kelp undulating in the waves. Water gurgled and the whole world seemed somehow far away and too close at once.
Meanwhile, my friend dove down, his flippers swishing as his fingers sorted through sea stars and sand dollars, looking for the slippery oval beings we hoped to later unravel, cutting thin strips from their bodies, nestling flesh against sushi rice, cucumber, and nori. When you grabbed their bodies, he later told me, they tensed up in your grip.
The memory returns to me now as I look for an option between predator and prey—some new way to be in contact with the world, with other bodies, with my own body, with wildness and domesticity both. There was still exploitation: the sea cucumbers died; we ate them for dinner. But in the moments in between, there was something else, too: the moon’s pull on the kelp, the invertebrates, my limbs. There was my need to hold my breath and plunge into a beautiful and terrifying place. There was that zip of attention, another being in my palms, the undeniable pulse of something (briefly) alive.
Diana Saverin is a writer and outdoor educator who lives in Anchorage, Alaska. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, The Guardian, and others.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Peter Rubin
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Thirty-seven years ago, Ryan Nourai’s mother was kidnapped, brutalized, and shot in the head. She would go on to have a son, with whom she shared some—if not all—of what she had endured. Now, after her death, Nourai writes how he came back to her ordeal, tracing her steps and even tracking down the men responsible. A tough read at times, but a tender one.
After my mother died, the incident remained, hanging over everything. Because those twenty-four hours were so horrific and so influential on her life as well as mine, which made them feel both unresolved and dynamic, I fixated on the incident more than I grieved her death. As months passed, then years, I came to believe I could learn about my mother by learning about the incident. Did she find the strength to survive in the faith that she might eventually raise a child? If I could find out the make of the gun, could I know if our relationship ever dulled her pain or chased her nightmares? If I found the names of the two men who shot her, would I feel closer to my mother or further away?
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