Every summer, meat anxiety begins to take hold of my family. Sometime in June we open the freezer and notice the growing roominess, the meals that gradually include less meat over the following weeks. For Matt, the absence beckons, a small worry that grows into a full, rounded anxiety by August.
I was a vegetarian when I met my husband. Growing up, my family did not hunt, and I was much more inclined to make friends with any animal rather than think well of hunting. But hunting is a part of my husband’s identity and I’ve always appreciated his knowledge of the natural world. When we first met, I was intrigued and tried to be open-minded about his hunting, as one is when first falling for someone, and wanted to know more. We hiked in the mountains in Oregon after grouse when we were first together—grouse that suddenly appeared everywhere in the foggy trails, seemingly invoked to appear by the act of looking for them. I’d hiked those same hillsides before but had never seen them. Early morning duck hunts, dark, cold, drizzly, full of waiting. Dove hunting in the hot late September evenings of the Willamette Valley, the equinox sun casting long shadows, an occasional coyote or flock of Canada geese weaving in and out in the background.
Inevitably, we moved to Alaska where Matt grew up, and—also rather inevitably—I am no longer a vegetarian. Still, I cried the first time we shot a deer together, and I can never see an animal killed and not regret the life that was taken. But I can’t deny the truth that what we eat has to be killed, and a hunted animal, treated with respect, has a far greater quality of life than any meat we could buy. The unavoidable truth of that, and the intimate knowledge of animals and place, and the relationships needed in order to hunt successfully, is something I’ve also come to love and respect.
I’ve also come to appreciate the shared experience of hunting. There’s a reciprocity to the hunt, especially when it comes to hunting a large animal. It can’t be done alone. It requires a shared awareness and respect—for safety, the landscape, the animals, and for others. From packing the meat, keeping up on miles of hiking through tundra, sharing resources of boats and gear, being dropped off by plane, and trusting that the landscape, the weather, and the pilot will cooperate for your return—it’s a vulnerable act, of placing your fate directly alongside the landscape, the animals, and your companions. It requires a shared trust—a trust that others will hold you up if you fall, that they will support you, and you them. The hunters I know most often remember year to year whose turn it is to take the lead that season, whose hunt is being supported. And the work continues after the hunt as the meat rests: tents are hung out to dry, equipment cleaned, and then setting to work on the butchering, trimming, packing up. And giving. Meat is given to friends, family, to those who helped pack and camp, and those that never stepped foot in the tundra but kept kids and pets and homes going.
It has been interesting to observe people who are new to hunting—their unfamiliarity with it and their excitement at learning how to do something that is fundamental to the natural world. Often I’ve noticed that newer hunters are so excited when they successfully hunt their first moose or caribou—they see it still as an individual gain, and tend to hoard their meat. Individual achievement is so entrenched in our world that they don’t recognize that it’s not a matter of ownership, and of the custom of sharing. Sharing the meat is a testament to the work of all. It reflects the act of generosity that began with the animal’s death, which gives generously to the hunters’ ability to live. Giving away ensures that act of generosity is carried on with the animal’s meat. It’s the acknowledgment of the help and the shared experience of the hunt. Indigenous peoples have known this for generations, and share that tradition with those who listen. The work of hunting needs more than one individual in order to feed each individual.
Alaska can be an isolating place, but it is one that reminds you repeatedly that no one survives alone. That life is a shared experience, not singular. It is reliant on the roots that underlay and work in circuit beneath us. The individualist god that America loves to honor is here—and Alaska, particularly, is ever in thrall to a settler frontier ethos. Of course, the reality that no one survives alone is not distinct to Alaska. It’s perhaps just that the many roots built from actions of trust and generosity are sometimes closer to the surface here, when the landscape is a common, unignorable experience.
The reality of prolonged, home-bound routines has indelibly heightened how much people want—and need— to be together. And yet we also clamor to be alone, in charge of our bodies, our homes, our worlds. We’ve armored the desire to be individual to the extent that it’s become—or mistaken for—entitlement, obliviously denying the many acts of work it takes to help one another meet their needs and desires.
People love stories of the lone survivor in the wilderness, but it’s a fallacy. No one survives alone. Those stories leave silent the generosity and work of others—the roots that circuit and wind beneath every individual existence.
Social distancing isn’t new—we’ve perfected it. We need to work instead on shaping a world that is built on the truth that no one survives alone.
I wrote this essay when the world was reeling from yet another earth-shatter of a moment in 2020—the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an election less than 50 days away, and what felt like a monumental fight for justice and democracy to survive—even before the horror of January 6. Fires were burning in the West with the force of hurricanes, echoed by actual hurricanes to the East. As if the natural world, angered at not being heard, was admonishing us with another reason to wear masks and enforce social distance, with skies of red smoke making it unsafe to be outside. Layers upon layers of pandemics. Layers upon layers of reasons why people cannot continue to live as if we are all alone in the wilderness of the twenty-first century.
Individualism has been incubating within us for centuries. We want and need to be independent individuals, able to pursue our lives. But cleaving to individualism alone has created pandemics of greed, racial injustice, climate change, economic insecurity, wealth disparity, poverty, disenfranchisement, violence. And depression. Social distance—from trust, generosity, justice, and the care of one another—is killing us.
Rebecca Solnit writes:
…Some species of trees spread root systems underground that interconnect the individual trunks and weave the individual trees into a more stable whole that can’t so easily be blown down in the wind. Stories and conversations are like those roots.
As I read the above, I thought that aspen trees do this—like the aspen groves standing in small rises in the Alaskan interior, like the aspen that whisper in groups along the eastern mountain highways of Oregon. And suddenly my mind thought back to memories of road trips, hiking in the mountains, hunting in interior Alaska, a favorite poem that describes aspens. Memory and place overlayed—stories entwined with the people and places that make me who I am.
Sharing stories—bearing witness to what we experience, the memory of experiences, both positive and traumatic—is part of what is built beneath us, strengthening our ability to stand collectively. Hannah Arendt wrote
An experience makes its appearance only when it is being said. And unless it is said it is, so to speak, non-existent.
Without conversation, of stories beyond anecdotes, pleasantries, and rants—without bearing witness to the experiences around us with the depth of shared experience—we are neglecting the roots it takes for generosity, for trust. To recognize ourselves in one another.
Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet, wrote her masterpiece Requiem after standing outside for 17 months, along with many other women hoping to hear news of their loved ones, who were imprisoned under Stalinist policies. Akhmatova’s writing had been unofficially banned under Stalin, and while she could not publish, it didn’t stop her from writing. She termed these times ‘her vegetarian years.’
As she stood in line with the other women, weary and numb to the threat of death and missing loved ones, a timid woman approached her, recognizing her. Akhmatova relays the story in the introduction to Requiem:
One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there): ‘Can you describe this?’ And I said “I can.’ Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had been her face.
Akhmatova wrote poetry about what she saw, bearing witness to the experience of so many injustices— the horror and numbness from arrests, trials, exiles, and deaths, suffering. She burnt the poems after they were committed to memory by friends (as a printed poem could mean a death sentence), and these poems of experience were shared, circulated in secret, whispered aloud to ensure their existence. A network of collective memory, based on one individual writing about what she saw, building roots of woven experience.
There is no action or part of life that is truly done alone. The individual needs independence, but not to remain solitary. Our very existence is a fact because it was carried by another body. Trust requires recognition of the external roots we reach out for, that connect us to one another. Generosity requires an other in order to exist, an action from one individual to the next. If we don’t speak aloud of what we experience and see, we can’t begin to hold on to the roots we need to keep ourselves whole.
We need voices and stories that testify to what we feel, what we are enraged by, and what we cherish so that we have a foundation to rely on. We can’t rely on the idea of a self that lives in a vacuum. Reliance on ourselves and others is the only way that we can validate experience from multiple dimensions, to measure and see where the system is weak and new roots can be built—a collective gaze that will let us see forward. To bear witness to what we’re seeing, write it down, share it, converse, build the emotional infrastructure we need to strengthen our ability to stand.
Solnit goes on to write:
Being unable to tell your story is a living death and sometimes a literal one….Stories save your life. And stories are your life. We are our stories, stories that can be both prison and the crowbar to break open the door of that prison; we make stories to save ourselves or to trap ourselves or others, stories that lift us up or smash us against the stone wall of our own limits and fears. Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories.
When I read Matt’s text from the hunt that morning, I thought about how our friend’s success in getting a moose meant that we all had been successful—and of the sharing to come, of how the return of the trust extended during the hunt arrives with generosity. Generosity of the animal, generosity of the hunters, generosity of and to others.
After each hunt, I look forward to the stories that are told—of how it happened, the difficulties and scares that occurred, close calls, the descriptions of the wildlife seen, the conversations had. Calls to friends often follow in the next few days, fellow hunters and family who enjoy hearing the story of the trip, and similarly call to share theirs, and maybe of another friend’s story who was out somewhere else. And as everyone is helping to pack the meat, stories and memories are shared of past hunts, successful and unsuccessful, of times shared with others who are no longer with us. All of the stories mused over while working, one memory leading to another, moving from person to person to share a similar or wildly different story, and handed back again to someone else’s memory. Lessons learned and shared with others. The stories and experiences divided and shared among everyone, along with the animal’s meat.
Over the last eighteen months, I’ve often thought that the only way I can make sense of the world is to think that maybe the entire purpose of being here on this earth is to witness. To tell the stories of now—whatever the now is—of what we are witnessing, find clear and strong and true language that connects experiences, that builds something more than is ever possible alone. That threads different times, people, cultures, histories into a broader collective reckoning. Donna Haraway writes,
Making kin and making kind (as category, care, relatives without ties by birth, lateral relatives, lots of other echoes) stretch the imagination and change the story.
We change the story by sharing stories. By bearing witness.
I was reminded, reading Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s words after her passing, of her memory of being a student in Vladimir Nabokov’s European Literature class at Cornell in the 1950s. Nabokov— who had fled Germany as World War II began, after fleeing Russia years earlier—is who Ginsburg credits for greatly influencing her brilliant legal writing.
Our roots are influenced in ways we can’t imagine or recognize, in the stories and experiences of others and their others, from the dead and the living. I hadn’t imagined that a favorite writer—influenced by his own experiences—was connected to the work and success that Ginsburg was able to achieve. For all of us. The threads that lead from one corner to another through the maze of life, continued and handed off generously with trust and care.
Ginsburg wrote,
I seek the right word and word order. And I use the ‘read aloud’ test to check whether I have succeeded.
We need to tell stories aloud and share them loudly. To honor each other by speaking of memory, of sharing the authority of individual experiences. We move forward by breaking silences and sharing the direction they lead us toward. The way we live through the forevers of now is to speak loudly, with commitment, to be generous and many with our voices and our words—with trust that we can braid the threads or roots we are given into a strength that can withstand storms.
well, at first I could say I don't agree with hunting as it seems a murder to me in any aspect, then I have considered everything, commonplaces, fashionable trends, and even lack of knowledge around our origins. Man survived by eating meat and consequently hunting animals. It's true that it s not a matter of health only, eating too much red meat may cause damages, this is a topic which has been debated long time and the result is that vegetarians (as I have been green basically just for TASTE S SAKE NOT FOR CHOICE, _I prefer legumes eggs and vegetables..rather than the taste of meat-) and vegans have more than doubled.
Hemingway hunted, he considered it as an art:
"the way to hunt is as long as you live against, as long as there is such and such an animal:just as the way to paint is as long as there is you and colors and canvas, and to write as long as you can live and there is pencil and paper or ink or any machine to do it with........."
Now, I would say that it's difficult to judge and charge hunting, rather I prefer focusing on the species going to be extinted and the relationship between man and animal in the eternal fight, on the other side cows, chickens, birds, fishes are on our plates , but we are not supposed to watch them when they are killed or caught in the sea !
As to solitude of human beings, just recallingl "INTO THE WILD", mirroring the failed myth of happiness in the nature, without sharing daily experiences with other people who can help , support , contrast you and make you grow improving your perceptions in feelings and sensations I would mention Anne Bronte
"No one can be happy in eternal solitude"
P.S. I eat white meat, especially turkey twice a week!..I changed my habits, as I started feeling to be in the mood for animal proteins!!!
thanks for your writing.hug Ale
as..