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Ride Safe

One dyke’s journey to healing from the West Bank to the West Coast

an essay by Josina Manu Maltzman

Prologue

Quote “We become who we are in part because of the family system that shaped us, but we can become even more of who we are when we resist, when we take a look at where we’re from, where we want to go, and then begin to transform our future…I believe we can decide to transform every system in which we are embedded—our families, our communities, our places of work, our schools, our organizations, our institutions—if we seek out and are given the support to heal and act.”

— Prentis Hemphill

Table of Contents

Preface: Minneapolis Dispatches

On May 29th 2020, when the Armored Security Vehicles moved in, I couldn’t help but think of the West Bank during the Second Intifada, my only other experience in an area under siege. I was careful walking to the end of the block as the National Guard advanced, then quickly ducked behind a neighbor’s car, peeking around the side to watch as the police formed a line like military troops. One difference between this and the last intifada, I reminded myself, is twenty years. Their weapons and tactics are that much more developed, tried first on Palestinian civilians to prove their efficacy.

I walked back home and got to work. Our community networks sprang into action immediately and organically. We helped each other navigate through police barricades and past trucks with armed white men, to get medical aid and security support to people in need. An encrypted message from person X to deploy group Y to help evacuate and get people home safely from area Z. The crew who was dispatched didn’t know their contact’s intel source and didn’t ask; the less each person knew, the better. And this is how we survived: building webs of communication based on trust, and action grounded in love.

Two hours of sleep every night and I was wired awake. The air was toxic, thick with chemicals and building materials that should never be burned. I walked to the post office two blocks away to witness its charred remains. Gone too was the bank, the gas station, the strip of stores. Left standing was the barricaded 5th Precinct, protected by a newly erected tall fence guarding its parameters (since the burning of the 3rd Precinct, the rest were on high alert). I wept at the destruction—not because Wells Fargo was gone (fuck them)—but because I knew this small commercial area was where many of my neighbors, primarily the two buildings densely populated by refugee families who rely on these businesses, managed their day-to-day survival. And yet the cop station stood. It was cruel.

A few months later we were no longer operating in crisis response-mode but were still tending to the urgency that this uprising had exposed. Community care and self-reliance had never been on such a scale in this city. Encampments for unsheltered neighbors had sprung up in more than twenty parks, maintained by dedicated residents; trained medics and security groups were based in area hotspots. An infrastructure of care that had been built over generations in this city in response to state violence and neglect was no longer underground and was growing to meet needs.

Before May 2020, my conversations about community safety were largely about Jewish American fears of survival, in contrast to and in the context of liberation for Palestinians. Now I was working on a community safety project aiming to provide support for neighbors in crisis. This, while the world was reeling from a pandemic. This, while the world watched as Black people were murdered in the streets and their homes. None of us were doing well. We had slipped off a cliff, each of us undergoing immense change in our lives, and we came together to forge something that we hoped would catch us.

The pressure of sustainability amidst backlash, as well as internal conflicts and growth edges, has dampened, altered, or transformed many of the efforts that were in full swing during that year. But the needs of our communities remain, some with less urgency while others in imminent crisis. The questions of how we keep each other safe and the personal role of healing from trauma remain critical to how we build healthy communities together. This essay percolated during that time of vibrant exchange of ideas, vision, reflection, and action. It is one wave within an ocean of conversation happening on the cusp of change, a tide we continue to ride.

Part I. Getting on the Bike

The first time I hit any speed on a motorcycle my helmet caught wind and lifted off my head, its loose strap aiming to choke my windpipe as it clung to my throat. I was near the top point of Virginia and this was early spring in 2005; the sun angled low in the sky but grew generous with its warmth. The helmet was a perfectly round disco ball of gold glitter, scored at a garage sale for five bucks. The bike was an ‘82 Honda CB 650, Betty Page lipstick-red, and I’d bought her that week for just $500. I was thirty-two and it was the longest year of my life. I looked as if I were headed to the moon.

Low bushes lining the county road zoomed by. Forty-five miles per hour felt like light speed as my heart slammed to the back of my ribs and I clutched that bike between my knees, gripping my thighs as tight as I could as if that were the same as buckling up. I felt the engine push against air and air push into my lungs and I had to think through shifting each gear, second third fourth, and once I made fifth I gave a loud WOOHOO! and let the gush of wind choke my laughter, feeling the momentum keeping me upright and this was life, right?

Every day after work I’d find a reason to go out with Betty, taking a left or a right at the county road depending on my mood. A right went into Purcellville, the nearest town, and a left took me north through the open country. No matter what direction, being on that two-lane road was what I needed to clear my head and feel in my body. I was trying to unwind a swirling replay of thoughts: what I was running from in my life and within me, what I was afraid of, what felt safe, what was safety.

I’d ditched Philly where I was living and moved to rural Virginia exactly because I knew no-one. I’d evicted almost everyone from my life in the city, anyone who I’d gotten too close with, and felt like a stranger to myself and those around me—so I wanted to be one. When I heard from a friend of a friend that a farmer down in Virginia was short a farm hand, I packed my bags and headed the three hours south.

Now, five months later, I was working as a carpenter’s apprentice spending my days on a huge jobsite with a dozen other crews renovating a mcmansion. Driving to the job on our first day, my new boss (who was also my landlord) said Giving head is part of your job description. I told him to fuck off and minutes later we pulled onto the estate swarming with white men in construction hats. My days were spent avoiding the men’s paws and their insults while trying to learn finish carpentry, and my nights were spent drinking alone listening to Linda Ronstadt records from the thrift store.

I’d had my motorcycle license for six months when I found Betty in an ad in the local classifieds. In license class they provided a little 250 Nighthawk, and until Betty that was the only bike I’d successfully stayed upright on. Scanning the Purcellville Penny Paper, I chose this Honda CB 650 because it was around the size I was looking for, the price was right, and it was beautiful. Beyond that, I didn’t really know what I was getting.

After the seller rolled it off the back of his trailer and I paid him cash and he showed me the basics and bid me farewell, I immediately tipped it over trying to get it on the center stand. I had no one to ask for help getting it upright and besides, I might have been too embarrassed. I crouched and heaved with the four-hundred-pound bike at my back just like I learned in class, as gasoline dripped out from the tank into the soft gravel. With one hand keeping the brakes on I eventually got my footing so that I could walk it upright, careful to not over-do it and tip it the other way. After that, I felt like Betty and I were officially bonded.

I was floating in a survival dysphoria: I was defending my dignity and fending for my safety all the while being suicidal, alive only because I hadn’t succeeded in killing myself eight months earlier. In my depression I’d destroyed every relationship I had on the east coast, shunning the very people who wanted to help, and now I clung to the remaining threads of a safety net scattered across the country.

I wasn’t just depressed and I wasn’t just facing sexual harassment at work. I was grappling with older trauma and had lost discernment between what was in the moment, and what I was responding to years after the fact. I had recessed into my own darkness. I didn’t yet understand that what I was going through was post-traumatic stress; I just thought I was going crazy.

I was unconvinced of my ability to navigate safely through life because I wasn’t very attached to it. I was passively alive; here not because I had chosen to be here but because I hadn’t died yet.

I knew I had to decide to live.

In a dramatic turn, I quit the job and packed up my truck, building a ramp out of plywood to roll Betty into the back with my tools packed around her wheels. I needed to do something I couldn’t imagine myself surviving. I needed to be afraid and do it anyway.

I was ready to try to convince myself.

I fled Virginia and returned, tail between my legs, to Minneapolis where I had grown up and left years before. I arranged to go to Colorado that summer, to help my friend build his house in the high desert near New Mexico. My plan: to take a bike trip from Colorado to California, up the coast, and back. I had people along the route but the ride would be alone.

I wasn’t afraid of traveling solo; in my life, I’d already put thousands of miles on the road—but never on a bike. My fears were many: I feared death by collision (I heard road rash was brutal, your flesh scraping off your bones onto the road surface), I feared being assaulted by strangers (not that I had been before). I’d never met anyone who’d done a solo bike trip though I’d heard of it plenty. I didn’t know what to expect, going through small towns on a bike as a lone queer white Jew woman-type-person. I feared traveling at high speeds on a vehicle entirely exposed and vulnerable to the weather and anything that chose to come in my way. I would need to ride safe enough to survive these extremes and everything in between.

I would need to choose to live at every turn.

I already had hand-me-down chaps for when it rained or got cold, and a leather biker jacket second-hand from a gorgeous femme in Philly who said her riding days were over. I learned that my denim vest was called a “cut,” and prepared to cover it with patches of the places I went. I started collecting a mishmosh of travel gear: a hard trunk case meant for a Goldwing, saddle bags from a garage sale, a backpack meant for hiking, and a tank bag I’d bought new for the trip. I practiced loading up my gear, deciding what I could take and what I couldn’t and how it would all pack together. I made tie-downs using bicycle inner tubes with rivets and plastic clips to secure my raggedy rig. I topped it off with a silver tarp, my cherry on a sundae, that I intended to use as a tent taco when camping.

On an early morning in mid-July 2005, I set out from my friends’ land in southern Colorado. Bags mounded behind me, I maneuvered Betty over the soft clay road with palms sweating. The weather was perfect, the same clear blue I’d seen every morning for weeks and the smell of pine needles warmed the air. I planned on going about three hundred miles a day, alone, having no idea if I could handle it.

I took a right on Colorado State Highway 67 heading south, facing the Wet Mountain range I would cross a few hours later in the rain. By the time I reached the peak and it started to pour I’d gotten used to the weight of my rig. I was prepared for bad weather but had hoped to avoid it; I’d never ridden in rain before. The sky was gray and the smell of it filled the air as I passed through sprinkles that collected on my helmet visor, making it difficult to see. (I had a legit helmet now, a glossier red than Betty’s, after learning that helmets are only good for a few years and need to fit snug). Her tires felt different rolling along wet asphalt, a slickness that I wasn’t used to, and I was hyper-aware of their potential to slip out from under me, but I knew she wasn’t going to. We were melding, becoming one. I didn’t allow my imagination to see a splattered me across the road. The rain stopped on the other side of a mountain that rolled into New Mexico.

Covering three hundred miles a day meant about six hours of riding in an eight- or nine-hour travel day. I took as many breaks as I wanted; the summer days were long and I had only myself and the elements to contend with. I reminded myself, as I passed rock formations outstretched like arms, that I had some things to look forward to in life. I had my good friends in Colorado and more in California, and family in Oregon, so I was anticipating the much-needed connection with them on this trip. I planned to return to Minneapolis at the end of the summer (where I also had family and friends), with a job on a renovation crew waiting for me there—which was good because I was living on money borrowed from family. Camping out and eating one hot meal a day was the only way I could afford the trip. My budget allowed for a few paid campsites and two nights in motels if I really needed them, but my plan was to throw down my bedroll wherever I found a good spot.

Having no way to listen to music I sang loud at the world, recycling lyrics to songs I didn’t know I knew. Prince melded with X-Ray Spex became Billie Holiday…and then my thoughts took over, the same loop as before: what was I running from in my life and within me, what I was afraid of, what felt safe, what was safety?

I returned from Bethlehem in the West Bank of Palestine in the spring of 2002; this was three years earlier, just before my twenty-ninth birthday. I was living in Philly and my friends threw a party at the old oil refinery, a washed-out urban wasteland where we would bring booze and hangout, music bouncing off the metal and concrete. It was a special celebration for me because of my return from a war zone. It was the last and only time I remembered being truly grateful to be alive.

In my two weeks in Palestine I had been to a silent demonstration in which israeli soldiers shot live ammunition at our feet, hitting people with shrapnel. I’d stayed in al ‘Azza refugee camp and witnessed israeli snipers stationed on rooftops and heard them fire shots at people leaving their own homes. Occupation was strangling people in severe, tangible ways…but I got to leave when my travel date approached.

I had been among people who savored life and who were fighting for their survival and I was affected profoundly but in ways I wasn’t aware of yet, not on that birthday at least. That birthday I was just grateful to have community and friends and for having met people in Palestine for whom to merely exist was an act of rebellion, let alone to exist with dignity. My proximity to trauma in Palestine would uncork my own childhood wounds and I was thrown, spiraling, down a rabbit hole searching for my haunted past, with no concrete memories nor words to put to what I experienced as a kid.

Betty and I maneuvered around semis on narrow highways, and I thought about how safety doesn’t exist, not really. I remembered all our attempts at building radical queer and trans spaces in the Nineties, how bold my activist friends and I were to guarantee a “safe” space for our communities—until we learned that there is no such one thing for everyone. We learned instead to attempt at creating “safer” spaces, gathering our interpersonal and collective skills to increase a proximity to safety.

Remembering this, I reflected on the many small ways we have a choice or a say in what our proximity to safety is, and all the ways we don’t. How close I ride to the edge of my lane for example, or how I choose to pass that semi. Then of course I thought about how some of us have more say in our own safety than others. Some of us have more say in other people’s safety than they do.

All the small ways we don’t have a choice or a say in how we are safe. Children and elders and others whose safety is dependent on their surroundings. Whole communities who are controlled by others’ whims of safety, explicitly and implicitly.

Miles stretched beneath my wheels and I thought about the material conditions of being not safe. It was Palestine, it was here. Then, following the curve in the road that I barely noticed an hour ago from the hundred-mile-away view and a new world was revealed, breathtaking and terribly huge, the unfurling of this beautiful planet we live on. 

My days began early. I loved seeing the sun in my mirror as it crested the earth. I knew the light at my back made it difficult for oncoming cars to see me, but those were few. I’d stop at the first gas station to fill my coffee mug and to eat a breakfast of dried apricots and mixed nuts, maybe some cheese I’d stocked up on the day before at a market.

I kept to state and county highways, taking alternate routes to stay off the mind-numbing interstate, going through as many of the big parks as I could. I stayed two days in the petrified forest dazzled by the wood turned to stone, but other stretches of new-to-me geography sped by. I remained a stranger passing through.

Eight or so hours of this and I could no longer ignore my aching ass, my throbbing lower back, my tingling thumbs. It was time to start looking for my rest spot because you never knew how long that could take.

A good spot was one where I couldn’t see houses, was quiet and off the road but not so far as to be isolated, and one where I could park my bike close to a tree and then, in between the two, unroll my tarp but keep it folded in half.

I’d lay out my inflatable mat then sleeping bag inside the tarp, and stuff my backpack down at my feet. I’d fold my leather jacket as a pillow and take out my pocketknife to hold in my hand while I slept. Every morning I woke with the sun.

I already had a daily practice of stretching, and now I needed it more than ever. I used that time to say Thank you earth and Thank you sky and Thank you to the water if I was near it, for helping to keep me safe thus far.

On this trip I learned that bikers talk to each other at gas stations, and there’s a sense of looking out for one another.

Before and after the big parks we’d gather to fill-up and get ready for the next leg, whichever direction that was. Most of the riders I saw looked white and the women were riding passenger; rarely were they on their own bikes. They’d smile at me, and with the men I’d exchange chin-nods.

The white guys with Harley head wraps and covered in leather below the neck, riding bikes that cost more than a small home, walked over to check out my rig, impressed by the condition of this little red bike, waxing nostalgic over their first ride, teasing me about the mound of gear I was traveling with.

These guys slept in motels at the end of the day so their rigs were stripped down with sleek matching luggage. No bedroll.

Parting ways always included a mutual farewell—part prayer, part blessing—as we fired up our engines: Ride safe.

I left the petrified forest and headed west, determined to sleep in Vegas that night. I was not prepared for the beauty of Lake Mead. I caught just the edge of it and the glisten off the water slowed my roll—I had no idea what seeing mountains rising from a lake could do to my heart. What I thought was stark natural beauty turned out to be Hoover Dam’s reservoir on the Colorado River, and I learned it provided water to people across multiple states—after drowning out the original Puebloan people from the area.

I pushed myself that day, sights focused on Vegas, but the sun started to set before I reached its outskirts. I hated riding at night; still do. My reaction time is limited by the shadows and I want to see where I am beyond the dome of headlamps. By the time I hit the city, well past fatigue, my vision blurred from the marquee lights. I was counting on finding a cheap motel the perfect amount of seedy to flop for the night, banking on my imagination that they even existed.

I skirted the main strip but the motels I saw, I didn’t trust. Blinds were ripped, doors looked loose on their hinges, the lights flickered. If I was going to be vulnerable for the night I wasn’t going to pay for the “luxury.”

I picked what looked like a low-rent casino with its aging façade and smoky interior. Eighty-nine dollars, plus tax. Up in my room with the last of the whiskey in my flask, I cried as I counted what was left of my cash.

The Death Valley heat smelled like thirst, parching my throat like a hair dryer to the face. I soaked my purple paisley hankie with water at every gas station sink, wiped my cheeks and brow then rinsed again before twisting it into a cord to tie around my neck.

On that trip I wore a long-sleeved cowboy shirt, white cotton with small blue flowers printed on light fabric, under my cut. I’d sewn large pockets on the inside to hold my water bottle, cheap plastic with a spout I could open with my teeth, easy to grab, and was sure to sip from it every time I passed a road sign warning HEAT KILLS.

Back in Philly a few years before, I had quickly burned out after I returned from my two-week trip to Palestine. Within months I was anchored in a mindset of trauma and I continued to experience the world around me as a never-ending loop of active violence. I was running myself ragged and expecting everyone around me to do the same. (There is a brutal war on Palestinians for fuck’s sake! Don’t people care??)

Being an antizionist Jew was a staple of my identity and how I moved in the world, and I was in communities of people who shared visions of collective liberation in a world still reeling from the aftermath of 9/11 and the racist, fascist crackdowns that came in its wake. I was in a thriving freaky queer Jewish antizionist scene and we’d found each other through zines and traveling and organizing and dance parties.

We made art and hooked up and had Purim spiels for Palestine and broke fast together on Yom Kippur. I spoke at universities, alongside a Palestinian comrade, about our experiences in Palestine and what we could do here to end apartheid.

I was working with others on a carpenter’s collective, talking about the future and how we could build towards something together. But I became toxic to be around, lashing out at people who were my friends, acting judgmental and over-critiquing, and I didn’t trust the people around me, even those I was close to. It got to where I couldn’t think of anyone else’s safety, not where I lived and not in Palestine, so I withdrew to focus on my own. My politics didn’t change but my ability to engage with others, to be present in organizing work, disappeared.

I had plummeted into a vacuum of grief and rage about experiencing sexual violence as a child. My housemates were forced to live with a volatile, withdrawn, self-absorbed, self-harming person who both demanded love while shunning it. They asked me to get help, so, feeling rejected, I fled down to Virginia where I knew no-one.

Today I understand trauma as “The experience of violence or loss that we are powerless in the face of, and the protective inherited intelligence of our nervous systems to keep us from feeling everything at that moment because it’s too overwhelming,” says my friend Sun Yung. “Our nervous systems have evolved to help us survive the immediate crisis and recover. It is our social systems that harm us when our trauma hasn’t been witnessed with compassion and room for our truths. Other people harm us when they don’t believe us or minimize the effect of what happened to us for their own safety, because they are not healed enough to support us, to help us down-regulate and access our inherent resilience.”

When we are lodged in a cycle of post-traumatic stress, we are unable to decipher the past trauma from the current moment, and we return to the loop of fight/flight/freeze/fawn as though we are traveling through time, reacting to the past experience as though it is happening now. I was stuck in “fight” mode, having nothing else modeled for me in my life. I didn’t have these words for what I was going through; all I knew was I kept tripping over an invisible wire and I couldn’t avoid the sudden cascade of rage or grief that would immobilize me when I fell. I wanted out of this loop.

All of this I ruminated on as the hours unraveled behind me, playing over scenes where I’d disappointed myself or others. My sweat dried in the hot wind blowing against my temples as I wrestled with shame. I took another swig of water.

My tank bag was strapped to the top of my bike and had a plastic pocket window to keep my map in easy view while riding. On breaks I’d refold it to keep my location center, then tuck it back in its sleeve. Once I reached the Pacific and hit Highway 101 I knew where I was going. Entering the redwoods with Betty, the rich smell of duff in my lungs spread through my body, feeling like home.

A few weeks later I began my return to Colorado from Eugene, Oregon, leaving a visit with family and a conjuring of ghosts. At a gas station outside of town a pair of bikers came over to make roadside chat, a man and a woman, she was maybe twenty years my senior with wrinkled skin like grooves in a well-traveled road, looking over my ride and talking about the miles ahead. She sized me up, then my tires, and asked if I was going to get them checked out before heading back east. “That rubber’s lookin thin,” she said more than once, and as we parted she asked again, “You gettin those looked at?” Yeah, I said.

I’d learned a lot about Betty in the month I’d been on the road, but I hadn’t looked at my tires, hadn’t paid much attention to their wear. Not like I’d tended to the chain or the clutch or the brakes. But I didn’t want to stay in Eugene another night, not with family. Not that we had been fighting; I just wasn’t ready to face my demons that lived there. I went to a bike shop and asked them what I needed, and they called ahead to a shop in town by my next overnight stop. I spent that day on the road in a white-knuckled fixation on our safety, mine and Betty’s, imagining a protective shield over her wheels preventing further wear until we finally rolled into Ontario, Oregon, and I handed over the rest of my savings in exchange for new tires.

There’s a place in the northeast corner of Utah called the Flaming Gorge. On my way up the mountain range Betty’s carbs began to stutter and choke, I was losing speed. I knew I wasn’t out of gas; it had to be my carburetors reacting to the thinning oxygen. A crew of about seven bikers stopped as I was pulled to the side, the shoulder just deep enough for a car to not slip off the edge. They were fancy bikers on fuel injected Ducatis wearing helmets with a comms system so they could talk to each other while riding. I had my tools out and was adjusting each carb screw a quarter turn to get the right mix for that altitude. I was relieved they stopped for me, seeming genuinely concerned; they left me only after I assured them I was ok, even though I wasn’t convinced myself.

I stood and looked, really looked around me. The mountains striped in pink and red earth, flaming indeed flaming gay flaming gorgeous flaming alive flaming I was alive.

Part II. Mom’s Gun

Step out onto the balcony that summer and the dahlias were taller than anyone I knew. The potted tomatoes were healthy, growing bigger and faster than any other tomatoes around, leaning over the second-floor deck side to dangle limbs heavy with fruit. The hanging flowers swayed, pushed by easy breezes. I built that deck and its handrail spilling flowers. I knew the space intimately because I created it with my hands. It was my birthday present to myself that year, turning forty-nine. It was 2022. I was still alive.

I always chose to sit in a chair with my back against the house, this large 3-story Victorian house in Minneapolis I bought and had been living in for fourteen years, facing out at the plant-covered handrail and the traffic twenty feet below. But that’s exactly where my mother Miriam wanted to sit announcing that, as matriarch, she got first choice and she “wanted to see everything.” I squeezed in across from her then, allowing my back to be shielded by the dahlias, imagining myself a tiger hidden in clear view in the jungle. We sat in a circle around the table: my partner to my right between my mother and me, my brother next to me on my left, and my mother’s husband next to him before the round was complete. 

This was the second family visit since Covid began. My younger brother and I and our partners rotated as host for our mom and her husband on their visits. Tonight was my night. I’d wiped the small patio table clean of bird shit and weather smudges, and it now had barely an inch of open surface left with cocktail and water glasses and our plates overflowing with Ethiopian take-out. An even smaller table to the side had a pitcher of water, a bottle of vodka and of whiskey, and a bucket of ice so we wouldn’t have to go downstairs for anything except to refill plates.

We were halfway into the dinner and well into our second round when my mother began, “Do you want me to share what it was like?” She was ready to tell a story, one of the few she repeats (not daily or monthly, but every few years, whenever the subject of her early twenties comes up), but only when she has a drink or two in her.

“Not if it will traumatize you,” I said. These are the stories of how she was the victim and of what she endured. She has three incidents that she’s willing to recount, each about the radical left group she joined when she was barely more than a teenager. And each time she tells one of these stories she seems to have forgotten that this isn’t new information for us. At least, not for me.

“If you want me to tell you I will,” she said as if angry, her body tense with the emotions of what she was remembering. No one was asking her to retell her stories. The subject of the Coalition came up because of a podcast we all listened to, about that era of 1970s underground radical militants, the Black Liberation Army and Weather Underground. We don’t normally all listen to podcasts together; this one sparked specific interest because of its relative closeness to what the Coalition was up to at the time.

The Coalition was founded by Ray Eaglin, a former Black Panther up in Portland who went down to Eugene to organize with members of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS. He wanted to build a cross-racial coalition against imperialism and found a handful of others on the U of O campus with a similar vision, mostly white people like my mom but also a number of Asian, Black, and other organizers of color. They were all young, nineteen to twenty-six or so. Our mother told me and my brother in a text that she wanted to talk about it when she came to visit.

“Don’t do it for us,” I said, even though I could see my brother lean in all tall and lanky, waiting for her to begin. His eyes were wide behind his glasses, showing genuine interest, but I didn’t want this teetering on the edge of meltdown from her, I didn’t want to have to be the one to clean it up. Sitting across from her I felt too close to the target, her straight-ahead shooting of words, the darts from her eyes. She couldn’t tell past from present and I was in her sights.

She ignored my plea and began.    

“Ray had pulled together this sort of ‘trial’ against Sheryl. For what? Because she’d hooked up with him and was pregnant. She was pregnant and said it was Ray’s kid but he denied it. So he puts on this trial and has all the guys there—all the men of course—and us women were like No way, this is fucked up. But they decide she’s guilty and a liar and that was it, that was the end for us. We women were like This is too fucked up. That’s when Ray came over to the house and was beating the shit out of me.”

Ray was the founder and leader of the Coalition, and Sheryl was one of my mom’s good friends. “All the men” my mom spoke of, I had some idea of who that included—my bio dad, probably.

I was holding out for a new story, one I hadn’t heard before. This one was about the time Ray pulled her gun on her. Maybe if I’d never heard it I would be sitting rapt like my partner seemed to be, or shocked by the intensity.

“That’s when he pulled my own fucking gun on me,” she brought her drink to her mouth and broke eye contact with me to take a sip. Any questions derail the monologue, but I wanted to hear details where she left gaps. What was missing from this story?

It was me. Because her early twenties were my childhood. Unlike anyone else at the table, I was there.

“Where was I?” I asked, breaking the rule of silent audience. I had interrupted her before with this question but was never so determined to hear an answer. I was emboldened by the podcast. It was narrated by one of the children of the Weather Underground, someone else who was powerless at the time everything went down, someone I could relate to.

“Where was I?” I asked again, and this time my question snapped her too suddenly from the story the way she wanted to tell it. My question was a nuisance.

“I don’t know,” she brushed me away with her hand, her diamond ring shooing me.

“You don’t know where I was? How old was I?”

“I don’t know, three or something.”

“Well where was I?”

“I don’t know! In the other room or downstairs or something!”  Her nostrils flared. She tucked a thin wisp of silvery hair—much like mine was becoming—behind her ear.

“Ray was beating the shit out of you and threatening you with your gun and your child was just somewhere?” I didn’t have kids but this seemed ludicrous to me. Wouldn’t a mother be afraid for the safety of her only child? Wouldn’t that fear of safety for her kid be seared into her memory?    

No one else spoke. It was only my mother and me there, in that moment. I could hear the traffic behind me, a car swerving around another car to speed up and catch the light. I could hear the birds, the family of sparrows that live in a corner of the porch roof below, having their own domestic argument. Miriam didn’t hear any of that. I could see she was still fighting Ray, in that bedroom, decades ago. 

Part III. Social Contract

I think about safety a lot, always have for as long as I can remember. I blame that on the Coalition. I also blame the Coalition for the fact that my childhood memories are so spotty. What little I remember centers around Robin, my Coalition sister who was a year older than I. We weren’t related by blood but I knew her as my sister. We were separated not long after the Coalition broke up when I was around five years old, and because I missed her so much I started telling people that my name was hers.

Aside from my memories of shadowing Robin’s every move, I relied on news clips and other people’s stories to get a sense of what I experienced within the Coalition (the FBI raids, the federal charges my mother faced, us kids staying at the farm for months at a time without proper supervision).

Sure, safety was talked about and drilled into the culture of my childhood. Safety against The Man: the feds, the cops, the system. Also drilled into the culture was violence within the group, the lack of safety that wasn’t named or challenged. The racism, the misogyny, the sexual abuse. The physical violence when people didn’t toe the line, especially the women. It was a lack of safety over which some people, adults, had control, while others, the kids, did not.

I think about safety a lot: are the doors locked? Are the front steps shoveled in the winter? What obstacles are in the path? Where are the exits? I run the checklist in the background of my mind and am appalled when others around me seem oblivious to the details of our surroundings. Don’t you care to notice? I can’t not look at these details, which affects how I am able to trust people. I inherited from the Coalition what may be a too-healthy paranoia about who’s in the room, who’s watching, and who is suspect. Not that I believe the state is keeping close tabs on me; it’s more a general assumption of constant surveillance. The shades never truly feel drawn.

Safety is not a tangible singular concrete thing, it’s more of a concept; it is a sense that is unique to each person. There are security measures everyone does for themself to increase their proximity to safety: checking both ways before crossing the street, not eating something that smells like it’s gone rotten, locking the door at night. We each do our personal variations of these things that wouldn’t work with everyone nor be relevant everywhere. And there are things we do in groups, ways that we structure society to increase safety for the whole: stop lights, for example. Nonetheless, a singular absolute safety for all would have to cater to endless variations of needs for each individual; it becomes a thing of a myth.

Safety as a monolith may be mythical but being unsafe is not. I can’t think about safety without thinking about harm. I can’t think about harm without thinking about my role in it. My role, our role, someone’s role. What safety isn’t—or—what is when safety isn’t there.

What is it to be un/safe with and among the people you love? How are we “safe” in the very material and necessary meaning of that intangible word?

We have primary, basic needs of survival to be met: food, shelter, healthcare, and consent. Consent being key because you can have the others and still experience harm. And all of which, within patriarchy and racialized capitalism, becomes political. Our political bodies. Which bodies are allowed safety, which are not. Whose safety is sanctimonious, and who else’s safety is sacrificed for them. Safety of groups, in groups. Our own physical body and the community body, the “us” body. Family and kin body. Identity body. Targeted body.

I try not to think in terms of victimhood; instead I consider what is active harm, past harm, perceived harm? When I think of victimhood I think of the zionist narrative, framing Jews as powerless while at the same time morally superior, incapable of committing harm and only able to experience it. It is unidirectional. Being raised Jewish greatly informed my understanding of safety because of genetic memory and my own experiences and fears of antisemitism. But I can’t deny that how I was raised Jewish included the weaponization of antisemitism.

I didn’t go to synagogue until my mom and another Coalition member who became a father to me left the Coalition and Eugene behind, and moved with me to the suburbs of Minneapolis, where his family was from. Then we joined a religious community, the Reform synagogue my new extended family belonged to. I became active in the youth group and went to weekend retreats. Throughout the religious and social culture was woven a dedication to israel as a state for the Jewish people.

I was also close with my mother’s mother, my grandma in Los Angeles, and spent summers with my grandparents there. They were very socially liberal, proud Jews, and devoted to the state of israel as part of their identities.

I questioned the assumption that I, too, must devote myself to that nation state as a part of my Jewish identity. This questioning began in my early teens and, looking back, it was during the First Intifada when the news was splattered with images of Palestinian children throwing stones at israeli tanks in the streets. According to the zionist adults around me, I was supposed to be rooting for the tank. But that messaging was contradictory to the anti-imperialist culture these same adults raised me in. It made no sense to me. I fought with my family over their racism and nationalism from that time forward.

Through my own journey I found doykeit, or hereness, a way of being Jewish that embraces relationship to the place we are in and building connections in that place. In this way, I embrace the “other” in myself and those around me, just as I do as a queer. My spirituality and Judaism and cultural identity as a Jew has nothing to do with being constantly afraid.

The weaponization of antisemitism says that as a Jew I’m supposed to be kept safe from the mere concept of Palestine. Anything challenging the idea of israel as a Jewish ethno-state is an existential threat to my future and that of every other Jew. My Jewishness is under attack wherever I go: I will be hated, feared, mocked, or exterminated and I need a place on the planet that is reserved for me, a back-up state to escape to when the death drum begins its beat, because nowhere is safe for me except for this backup state and it’s only a matter of time.

But israel has never made me safer as a Jew. If anything, the israeli government and its citizens committing atrocities against Palestinians in order to wrest land away from them, all in the name of Jews worldwide, puts me more in harm’s way, not less. I won’t claim land that isn’t mine and terrorize its people until they die or leave. Wherever I live I want to share resources, not hoard them.

When I think on my early exposure to cultural images of white woman’s power and victimhood I remember watching “Gone with the Wind” on television when I was five or six (I can’t believe my caregivers, radicals as they were, allowed this but they did—and maybe that says a lot). The next day I played Scarlett O’Hara by sitting on the grass complaining about war, war, war, and made my friends fetch things for me…. How quickly my child mind absorbed the messaging. And indeed I’m coded as a white woman. I am supposed to be kept safe from the aggressor, usually coded as a dark man, and from violence. In fact, violence is done in the name of my protection. I know I can look to an armed person or entity to defend me; that is my birthright. All I need is to enact it, say go—and even if I don’t, the violence of white supremacy is done for me in my name, just as the violence of zionism is.

I task myself with undoing the birthrights of whiteness and zionism because I care about safety—that primary, basic safety—which I believe is a woven fabric of connection between people that requires safety for everyone, if safety is to exist at all. I came to this belief through paying attention to systems of care in the natural world. I came to this belief through the lessons of my elders who modeled for me how to lean towards each other in moments of community crisis. I came to this belief through trying to create queer community with others and stumbling.

What happens when past traumas and socialized anxieties—and by that I mean the anxieties that are cultivated within us by structures of power—combine in the present moment to stir fear?

How do traumas from the past affect our ability to feel safe in the moment, and what do we do when we don’t “feel safe” because of that? 

What about those times when we are responding in the moment to something that happened in the past?

I remember in my early twenties when I directed my righteous rage from having experienced sexual violence towards men who, for all they could tell, I consented to sleeping with, because I myself was grappling with what my own consent looked and felt like, and I was mad at them for it. Neither of them raped me and I didn’t accuse them of it, but I was mad (at them? at myself?) that we’d had sex and I challenged them to confront issues of consent in a deeper way—something we all should do, but how I confronted them was not helpful to me or the cause.

Both these men were white, one was an old friend who I never spoke with again, and another was a punk guy who traveled in similar circles. I want to believe that neither of them would choose to violate me which means that it was up to me to know when I was “time-traveling” (in a state of post-traumatic stress and being triggered), and to not have sex that sent me reeling back in time.

Later, as I was reeling from the stress of unrecognized childhood sexual abuse, my own life seeming to collapse around me, I was a storm through other people’s lives. Bossy, controlling, hyper-sensitive, always seeking out the enemy and finding it in those closest to me, then appalled when they left me.

Recalling this brings me to the question: What are we allowed to ask from others, and what is our personal responsibility to heal from that trauma to not continue a cycle?

What is my responsibility for my own safety, and what is the burden or responsibility of someone else? How responsible am I for other people’s safety? Do we have a social contract for keeping each other safe? Does that vary between people, and our relationships to each other?

Part IV. The Tiny Visitor

On my second bike trip—a year after the first—I headed west from Minneapolis on County Road 12 towards the Badlands of South Dakota, or Makȟóšiča as I learned is the Lakota name for the area. In my year of living in Minneapolis, through friends and getting back into organizing, I was more attuned to the precolonial history of the land I lived on and wanted to know original names.

I also now had an mp3 player and three disks with twelve hours of music on each that I would play on shuffle to make the miles pass quicker. Obscure dyke punk bands I didn’t know the name of played next to Allman Brothers jams on headphones that regularly slid out of my ears under the helmet. I was aiming for southern Oregon, which meant five days straight on the road. I left on July First, 2006, and spent my nights camped out beside the highway off a county road under a tree, listening to drunken revelers shooting off fireworks, multiple nights in a row and hundreds of miles apart, the sky flashing like lightning in the distance.

In that year between bike trips I’d started my own healing work. Now I was thirty-three. It had been four years since my mental health crisis began, sparked by my trip to Palestine and fueled by childhood trauma that I couldn’t even remember. I couldn’t afford therapy or any kind of bodywork, but I was able to get on some meds for a time which helped me sleep, and I was seeking out community. Beginning my own healing process enabled me to have space for other people’s journeys again, not just mine. I was going to events held by Dakota activists about what colonization did to the Dakota people and understanding settler colonialism in multiple contexts. I was building relationships with other antizionist Jews in town and going to events for Palestine. I was beginning to put my personal traumas into perspective and see how they wove into larger narratives around safety, and whose safety was prioritized. I had been frozen into a state of post-trauma and now my edges were thawing, which made me want to jump back in the fight. I was ready to feel connected again.

Another travel upgrade I’d done in the intervening year was to give Betty a pair of highway pegs, the footrests that stick out at the sides of a touring motorcycle near the front. These allow the rider to recline with her legs up, a huge relief on the body.

I made these foot pegs from the timing belt I took off an old yellow Toyota pickup by spot-welding each link in the chain, and my blacksmithing mentor made mounting plates for them to attach to Betty. They looked hardcore and post-apocalyptic.

For about six months I had been learning metalwork on the evenings and weekends, when not being a carpenter on a renovation crew or working production at Bedlam, the experimental theatre. I was hovering above depression, kept aloft by constant motion and a cocktail of pharmaceuticals.

Planning the second bike trip not only gave me something to work towards, it was also a promise: I knew that, on the road alone, there was no running away from myself. It was all coming with me and I had to face it.

I dreamed about a bat.

A bat tattoo, and my mentor the blacksmith was going to tattoo it on me.

The tattoo would be on my chest as if it were flying into my heart, and the rendering would be realistic, like an old science illustration.

I woke up remembering the dream clearly, eager to tell him at the shop later that day when I went to get the pegs. I was packing up my gear and would be heading out that week.

The gate to the blacksmith’s yard sagged, always needing a lift to open, and when I closed it behind me there he was, a tall skinny white guy weighed down with jewelry in his ears and face, tattoos—from his fingers to the tops of his shoulders—disappearing behind a torn work shirt.

“Check this out,” he said, holding a bat.

It was on a piece of cardboard and about the size of my open palm. It was intact but dead. I was awed. I told him about the dream but he just shook his head and shrugged.

It’s no big deal, he said, he finds one about every week—the cat probably kills ‘em. He took a drag from his cigarette and winced at me through the smoke.

“You’re into death metal and you don’t see the cosmic significance of my dream?”

“No, not really. But the bat is cool,” he set it up on a shelf next to the garden tools, too high for the dogs to get at, and flicked his cigarette before unlocking the shop.

Going through one-road towns I wondered, Geez what is everyone staring at? until I remembered that I was a lone white young queer, covered in tattoos and riding a motorcycle with plates from four states away.

They probably didn’t guess I was Jewish, but I knew how it made me an even farther outsider.

The look of me conjured many things in people’s imaginations, and I had to prepare myself for each one—but I was used to that, being raised female and all.

The balancing act: don’t come off as an angry bitch, but don’t be too friendly at the biker gas pump chit-chat, lest someone interpret my “hello” as an invitation for more.

Talk about the road ahead or behind me was kept within a hundred miles, so the guys didn’t know where I’d been or was headed to.

Pulling out of stations, I checked my mirror to make sure I was leaving alone.

The road stretched: mountain curves, open deserts, fields and pastures, riverbeds. So many ways to disappear and die out in the world, as big as it is. Staying alive and enjoying it was my daily task.

I had no one in my life I was responsible for, no person or thing that depended on me. I wasn’t close to my younger siblings; they never learned to lean on me because I hadn’t stuck around. I worked hard to protect myself at all costs, regardless if my armor bruised others as I made my way through life.

I never felt like someone else had wanted to keep me from harm, and I was still trying to decide if I was worth fighting for.

I couldn’t deny that I was running from the ways that I hurt other people as much as I was trying to outrun how much I was hurting. I had a mental list of all the people I’d damaged as I stormed through life, and made room for more I wouldn’t know about unless they told me. I recounted ugly things I’d said out of ignorance, or by willingly wanting to hurt someone. I thought of my impact on the planet and ways I’ve harmed other living things.

I tracked all the ways I’d been racist: to family members, lovers, strangers. Brash words I’d said at parties at someone else’s expense, little cuts I’d made to lovers.

How easy it was for me to weaponize the language of revolution because it was the lexicon I was raised with. Like how, in the second grade, I tried to get out of gym class by arguing to the teacher that sports and competition were a product of capitalism and should be done away with. (She told me to get my ass on the track and start running). I was always the one critiquing the movie for its political value, the artist for their social impact. Every person and every thing had to serve its purpose for the revolution—or so I was told—and anything outside of that was frivolous. The crit/self-crit sessions my parents held was the culture of my early environment, the flavor of my child atmosphere, the blade of my adulthood.

I’d always been good at turning this knife on myself.

Now, on the bike, I had all the time in the world to remember and dissect, come to terms and reckon with who I was, who I was capable of being. In those memories, woven with the harms others had put on me, I noticed patterns—and also choices.

I was still hooked on the thrill of survival, enamored by the vast and inescapable beauty of this continent.

I passed Bear Lodge, the incredible mountain that’s flat at the top with vertical ridges striping its circumference, and the Teewinot, and rode hundreds of miles in the path of Snake River towards Wimahl and the Pacific.

I went through mountains as green and wet as Death Valley was brown and dry the year before.

Each night, as I unrolled my sleeping bag near what I hoped was a neglected road, I could hear an arsenal of fireworks explode along with the drunken whoops of testosterone-soaked teens, reminding me that it was early July in amerikkka.

Images of the white boys I’d encountered flipped through my mind, gas station clerks with their features smeared over in patriotic red white and blue face paint.

I clutched the knife in my palm as I drifted off to sleep.

To be not safe is to be intruded upon.

Violated.

Shot raped abandoned attacked hijacked controlled poisoned stalked starved threatened injured imprisoned vulnerable harassed powerless manipulated harmed not-cared-for exposed isolated cut maimed hit touched looked-at broken talked-to smacked unsheltered drugged teeth-knocked-out choked disappeared nonconsensual polluted stolen in-harm’s-way.

Despite the thoughts I went to sleep with, I woke up ready to begin again. With every mile came molecular healing. Feeling the earth unfold beneath my wheels and the change in air measure the distance traveled, the scope and scale of the world was imprinted on me.

I am grateful to have been through those places, the trees and riverbanks each with their own smells, approaching one side of a mountain with angles of sun that make the trees grow in that direction and seeing the angles change on the other side, carved by wind. Everywhere was alive in multitudes, splendid in the way that hits the back of your throat, the taste of elements.

Mixed with a little road dust, the flavor of passing through and not really knowing it because to really know it means knowing every season the way the seasons know you.

The luxury of passing through becomes the luxury of making any kind of story out of it.

Riding through hundreds of miles of Indian country, Lakota and Nakota and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Kiowa and Shoshone and Umatilla and Sahaptian and Wintu (and many more) lands, I thought about poverty forced on a people and riches stolen in the process. About how even the concept of “riches” was an act of brutality. I was humbled by the awareness of all I have as a white person on this land, the blood and the bounty. It caught in my throat as the lands sped by. I thought of the violence of conquest and the trauma we inherit, both as the violators and the violated.

Traumas that cannot be compared but they must be examined side-by-side. To live as the oppressor inflicts its own kind of wound that must be unmasked and named, because people are behaving from that trauma—repeating the cycles of violence it brings—on every level, and no body is left unharmed.

State violence begets intimate violence and back again.

This loop is sewn into my body as cellular knowledge, with fear layered over it like images projected on a screen.

I am told all the time I should be afraid.

My virtue as a “white woman” is represented everywhere as under threat. It will be stolen from me, raped out of me, ostensibly by a dark stranger.

But every time I’ve been sexually assaulted it was by a white boy or man I knew and trusted.

I’ve seen the statistics that show a majority of sexual assaults are perpetrated by someone known to the survivor (except in the case of Indigenous women, who are assaulted at a rate far higher than any other group of people, most often by men they don’t know).

How has my whiteness affected when and how I feel safe? Where I feel safe? What spaces has my white, able, small body eased into where others cannot? I wondered how many times in my life I was oblivious to my own safety.

And what about differentiating between feelings of unease and feeling unsafe? Sometimes being alert and physically on-edge means that I need to pay attention because I’m learning something, or out of my element, or being confronted with truths that are hard to hear…but there is no threat to my wellbeing. My job, in those moments, is to know the difference between my discomfort and a legitimate threat.

It was my fourth day riding. Tomorrow would be my last day heading west; once I got to my friends’ land in southern Oregon, I would take a few weeks going up and down the coast to visit lovers and friends before looping back east.

I’d been following the Salmon River for hours, tracing its contours and zigzagging across it on tight bridges. This was a two-lane highway with a shoulder of green sloping down to the river’s bank.

The road got so close to the water I could see each large rock heated by the sun and I imagined my boots off, outstretched legs dangling toes in cool water not propped up near the scorching engine as I sped around bends.

Occasionally there were gravel pull-offs, spots for fishing or a dip, but I wanted to stay on schedule. I was getting tired of the road and being with myself for so long. And besides, my ass hurt.

Sometimes before approaching a bridge, I’d see a path of packed dirt forking off to the right, disappearing underneath. Then, not stopping, I’d say to myself I’ll get in the water when I stop for the night. But I waited too long, and by the time I came upon another bridge with a road I could take down it was nearing dusk and all I wanted to do was make camp and try to sleep.

The bridge overhead was old and narrow. A few feet away, out in the open, was a fire pit and old beer bottles, their labels bleached by sun. Even though this was the most structural shelter I’d had outdoors on these bike trips, I felt the most vulnerable. If someone came along—or worse yet, a group of guys out looking to party—I had few escape routes. I also knew it was more dangerous for me to stay on the road when I was this tired. I hoped that any amount of sleep would make me more alert if someone did show up.

It was blessedly quiet—no fireworks, no revelry. But instead of sanctuary I felt doom, like I couldn’t trust it. I couldn’t trust myself. I listened to the river’s steady rhythm and watched the swallows make black swoops against a darkening sky, in and out from their nests above me.

I woke to a gray early morning light feeling no rest, as if my consciousness were a stone skipping on the surface of sleep all night. Nothing had changed around me except for the sun’s rays. Now I could take everything in. It was beautiful. I could smell the sweet damp floor of the tree stand nearby, cedar and pine needles. River seemed quieter somehow, as if it hadn’t woken yet. It was right beside me, down an easy slope of sand. My body filled with gratitude, a receiving of blessing. I felt protected.

The water was clear, each stone smooth from the current. I spoke my thank you out loud, dipping my hands and putting them to my face. I did my morning stretches, then started to break camp.

I went to reach inside my sleeping bag to retrieve my backpack from the bottom. When I pulled open the flap I saw something small and brown and curled. As I looked closer, I could see its folded wings and its body was still, as if sleeping, wrapped in itself, cradled in the spot my body had left. 

I picked up the little creature, awed by its fragility. It hardly responded to my handling, as if it was happy to be held. It was soft, and I could see how bulgy its little eyes were behind its lids, shut to keep out the early light. It was much smaller than the bat in the blacksmith’s back yard; this one was fewer than three inches long. Its little claws flexed like an infant’s hand. I looked over head, wondering if it had fallen from a bat roost above me. I assumed it was a baby that had fallen, but I didn’t know how bats lived, or who looked after the young ones. Was this normal?

I set it in the shade then finished my packing. It didn’t move, not in any way as if to leave. Finally it was time to hit the road but I didn’t want to abandon this tiny creature who came to visit me. I held it again, taking photos to show its diminutive size in my hand. It would easily fit in the breast pocket of my cut. I laughed at the cartoon image in my mind, the tattooed bearded motorcycle dyke with her trusted companion sidekick, Batty, roaming the countryside.

I returned it to the shade, hoping it would make its way home before a predator found it.

I told the story of the bat to everyone I saw, starting with my dream. I felt visited, and also called-to. It never once occurred to me, in all my concerns around safety and survival, that the bat could have rabies. It wasn’t until I was in a stranger’s house in Arcata, at a dinner party a lover of mine had an obligation to attend, that my ignorance was exposed. The host had a library of books on birds and other flying things, and my attention was drawn to an encyclopedia of bats of North America. I found the region of eastern Oregon where the encounter happened, and then a photo of a Little Brown Bat that looked like my visitor.

“This is it!” I went to get my lover’s attention, but also caught my host’s, and soon she was standing next to me and the book. When I told her the story she said, “You could have rabies!” with such alarm that I thought she was kidding.

“You need to get rabies shots. Bats don’t just crawl into people’s sleeping bags,” she said. She was a small woman but her voice carried the sound of crisis and authority.  

“No way. This was a little baby bat that had fallen out of its nest or something and couldn’t fly in the daylight. Or something.” I took a swig of beer.

“Some bat species are that small as adults, and the behavior you’re describing is that of an adult with very progressed rabies. You said it was in your sleeping bag?” This host, it turned out, happened to be an ornithologist who also studied bats. She was speaking slowly now, as if to a child. I deserved this tone of voice. I set the beer down.

“Yeah, and I held it.”

“You held it? With your bare hands!” She explained that bat bites can be very small, sometimes undetectable, and asked if I had any marks or small cuts.

I displayed my hands covered in abrasions, hard cuticles splitting open, weathered callouses from riding and carpentry and metalwork. She ended with one last “You really need to get rabies shots,” then walked away, done with me. I tried to make a feeble safer-sex joke to my lover about forgetting to screen for rabies, but they kept their mouth in a flat line, not amused, and made me promise to get the shots.

I spent a few weeks in Oregon and California, then my return east took me through Colorado to visit my good friends there. I didn’t tell the bat story anymore now that it was tainted by my stupidity and the possibility of a deadly virus. But I still wondered at the mystery of this little visitor.

Part V. Occupation

I go to the West Bank for four weeks in the spring of 2024. I, unlike my hosts in Palestine, can travel from Dheisha camp in Bethlehem through Jerusalem to Haifa inside ’48, up to Ramallah, down to Masafer Yatta.

I witness an israeli settler militiaman aim his rifle at an unarmed Palestinian shepherd out with his flock.

I hear stories and watch footage of armed settlers violently taking over Palestinian homes.

With my hosts, I personally experience water shortages and harassment.

I see how people live day-to-day under occupation and its impact on people’s bodies and psyches.

I listen for war planes headed to Gaza.

What is safety when living under occupation?

Now every sound from the sky is the sound of fighter jets. Even if it’s the wind against metal roof: fighter jet. Trees swaying: fighter jet. The echo of children’s laughter: fighter jet. Once you hear it, all else is spoiled.

The sea just wants to be the sea, the land only wants to be land. The sky reaches with no limits, as the sky is wont to do. Without bomber jets piercing it with violence, without borders and blood to declare a value, without bodies floating next to capsized boats. I wish my friends could touch the sand, bring that salty water to their lips, cool their feet in the singing waters. Are my tears from grief? Fatigue? Rage? They blend into one like drops in the Mediterranean. The wind steals kites; occupation steals lives.

The family who I stayed with last night has been living on their piece of land for generations. They are the last family standing in their village, since the illegal settlement started (all settlements are illegal, but it’s important to have these words together). Settlers stole one of the family wells, the oldest, to use as a mikvah. In the other two wells close to the house the settlers snuck in and poured gasoline to ruin them. The family somehow managed to clean them and now have security cameras set-up everywhere, donated by a legal support project. They document every abuse (which is part of my job as well), and they have a court case pending, but that doesn’t stop the settler violence.

Genocide is what is happening here in the West Bank, on a different scale and timeline than in Gaza but no less horrible. If this slow choking could be captured in a photo it would have a content warning.

I grapple with witnessing and telling. It’s not my story to tell and yet that is my mandate, to get this story out.

Occupation is imprisonment in people’s own homes and lands; it is house arrest. Occupation is violence at any moment, from any direction. Occupation controls the movements, aspirations, hopes, lives, every aspect of day-to-day existence.

North America is occupied. Same choking, same control, same invisible to the people who do the strangling.

I am antsy. It might be all the sugar in the tea but I need to mooooove! The restriction of movement here is so intense. Here, right here in Um Dhorit where the land stretches in all directions and you can watch the settlers stroll down the road for miles if they want to, but Palestinians are confined to a small parcel made smaller with every casual walk the settlers take.

Is there no place here that isn’t colonized? How many actions are forbidden. Laws against living, livelihood, extend to every depth. The act of drinking water—how did they clean their wells after contamination?

To live as Palestinian is a series of little insurgencies.

It will take me weeks and months, upon my return home, to make sense of this experience and I will feel guilty for that, because millions of people live it every day and never get to “process.”

On October 7, 2024, I will feel as though if I try to speak the names of every person killed this year my lungs would collapse from their weight.

What is it to be safe under rubble? To live with a target on your back? What the fuck gives israel the right to rob a people of their life and dignity? To unilaterally repeal from an entire population any resemblance of safety? These questions will plague me.

But I will not shatter from them. This time, this trip to Palestine is different than last time because it doesn’t unleash a trove of traumas that I had been ignoring. The grief is sometimes debilitating, yes. The rage at times blinding. Yet I remain present.

Part VI. What Feels True

I can get caught up trying to explain to folks what the Coalition was, trapped by the feeling that I’m supposed to. I could go into why I believe these young people decided to take radical action to resist the US imperial war machine of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, then got caught up in their own cycles of abuse. I could share more facts but that would take a while, because the real story of the Coalition is woven in the space between hard data. I consider the words that others in the Coalition—both the adults and kids (all of us grown)—now use to describe it: commune, cult, revolutionary. But telling people I was born into a radical militant lefty cult not only sounds hokey, it doesn’t feel true.

What feels true: The political vision of the Coalition shaped how I see the world and are values I still embrace; most of the adults in the Coalition were in their early twenties and hadn’t themselves worked through their own traumas before coming together; the Coalition did some good in their community, and also caused serious harm; some of us kids in the Coalition experienced abuse of multiple kinds; some kids chose to fall as far from the tree as possible while I landed at its roots; I was a small child when the Coalition broke up, but the shadow of it defined the edges of my growth.

Some of those edges: I’m allergic to cults of personality and groups with a singular leader. I have learned to be wary of purity standards and am able to hold multiple contradicting truths. The same kid who wanted to root out capitalism from gym class, I now see things in terms of their context within a larger strategy. I’m abrasively antizionist and antiracist, yet instead of striving to be the vanguard of any movement, I know I’m still learning how to live my values, and I continually fuck up.

I talk about safety all the time. To my partner, to my housemates, in organizing spaces, and to friends. When I was a teen, I made sure my peers were stocked up on condoms. I’m the one in the organizing group making sure our docs aren’t openly shareable, and you’re damn right I keep a blanket in my van in case something happens.

Being an antizionist Jew in the U.S. means having the safety conversation with other Jews, those who are mired in the messaging that we need our own ethnic-majority nation for when the shit goes down. And we know shit will go down here, because it always does. (And this is where the weaponization of antisemitism comes in: when any criticism of israel gets labeled as hate speech against Jews it further entrenches these fears in the collective psyche, and leads to censorship of criticism of israel). This loop of fear for our safety defines safety as something we must fight an enemy for control over and hoard once we get it, a precious limited resource that is all about land, and is perpetuated by Islamophobia and racism.

Similar to the conversation about policing, inside of it lies a relinquishing of personal agency and forking it over to an outside entity to insure or enforce safety for us. A belief that safety must be guaranteed through force over things we cannot control, and that there is an existential threat to our wellbeing if we don’t put our strongest support behind that force. And then there is the entitlement to being deserving of that force.

What is the actual harm we are fearing? Does the existence of israel/the police/prisons ensure against that harm happening? Have they proven themselves to? What is the cause of this harm and what are preventions that have worked in the past? And here is a conversation about something that looks like resourcing community. So then how do we do that? How do we put our energy, time, and materials towards that which will actually increase our collective safety?

The Coalition, from what I had researched, held events with Palestinian speakers back in the early Seventies but these days my mother, who was one of the only Jews in the Coalition, is firmly zionist. My antizionist politics were not inherited, I fought for them. I didn’t know any details about my mom’s journey to a more mainstream liberal perspective on most things, a normalizing of violence against many communities to maintain a status quo of safety for a few—a sharp turn from the radical politics of the Coalition. My hot take was that the violence she experienced in the Coalition pushed her away from any politics she associated with the group.

I wondered what a healing journey would have looked like for her, had she chosen to embark. I still wasn’t sure what violence my mother or anyone in the Coalition survived, exactly. And for years I was wracked with the weight of my own self-doubt, not knowing what I survived, causing a loop of post-trauma on my own body and psyche. Then, not long after I returned home from my second motorcycle trip, I was contacted by Robin, my Coalition sister.

Part VII. Cornerstone

I returned to Minneapolis from my second bike trip in August 2006 and got the series of rabies vaccination and antidote shots. Luckily it was covered by the state at the time, otherwise it would have cost thousands out of pocket. Knowing I was vaccinated against rabies made me feel invincible for a while; I volunteered myself to friends as a bat whisperer, and on two occasions helped get a bat out of people’s homes.

The message from Robin began, “Hi, um, Josina? This is Robin, your….” She didn’t know what to say here, so skipped it. “…From the Coalition. I hope you don’t mind me reaching out. Did your dad tell you I was going to? Well, I hope you want to talk sometime and, you know, catch up. Will you call me back?”

Robin had found me through our respective parents. Her mom, who I remembered well, reached out to one of my parents and initiated contact. The voicemail came in on a regular Wednesday night, a few months after I returned from my bike trip. I was in a cabinetmaking program at the community college at the time, taking additional classes to learn Arabic, and working as a stage manager for the annual community pageant that took place on Halloween called Barebones. I was preoccupied with puppets and ghosts, and ghost puppets.

I listened to Robin’s voicemail and felt a crack inside me, not to a deep chasm of despair but an opening to something light and with possibility. I quickly called her back, leaving a message of my own, and eventually we set up a phone date. My heart caught in my throat with a joy that I didn’t know existed.

Robin’s brother Hartley was a few years older than her, and he remembered everything from his childhood and told her stories.

Later Robin sent me a letter, with Hartley’s permission, that he’d written to their mother, along with a bunch of photographs of us pudgy little kids on roller skates or dressing up as pumpkins for Halloween. Our little white bellies sticking out from under our shirts as we raise our fists in front of a sign that reads END U.S. IMPERIALISM. I wondered if she still had those rosy round cheeks and long lashes framing hazel eyes.

Robin hadn’t done the same kind of research on the Coalition that I had done, so I sent her photocopies of articles that I had found. Between her brother’s memory, the documented information, and what little we eked out of the adults, Robin and I had a patchwork of story we could claim as ours.

I read Hartley’s letter to his mom and swallowed it like a singing bird in my throat, gagging on fresh yellow feathers. I wept tears of gold, spiky veined feathers pouring from my eyes. Hartley was the witness I needed, his words on paper a living proof.

He detailed the extended stays at “the Farm,” not a working farm but a parcel of land the Coalition owned outside of town, where we were left under the supervision of Allen who was assigned to take care of the children. Allen used the role to sexually exploit us kids, forcing the children into sex with him and each other.

Hartley wrote about the military-style weapons training the older kids underwent, and the “detachment” exercises we were put through, which were designed to make us less attached to animals or people, specifically our parents.

Hartley’s story was my story, at least a version of it. It wasn’t the same with me and Robin, I knew to repeat this in my mind over and over; I knew he was older than us, and the older kids had it different. But we were all together in it; we were all a part of the same fucking mess. This new information locked into place inside my body the missing pieces to my own story, the story I knew but didn’t remember, and I began to feel less crazy. 

This was a cornerstone in my healing. Suddenly I wasn’t alone—something I didn’t know was possible in the four years I was on this journey. I had tried a lot of things during this time: the motorcycle trips, anti-depressants, sex, yoga, self-medication with booze and weed, reinvention, spirituality, SM, my job, art, exercise, organizing, writing, and being in nature. And all these things worked, to a certain extent, and each within their own limitations—until they didn’t. What I didn’t have was a witness to validate what I was going through, a mentor or therapist to acknowledge it was real. The recognition and validation of my experience from Robin was the balm I needed and—miraculously, it seemed—received. 

Sometime in the early hours of April 18th, 2009, my grandma Diane—my mom’s mom—got up to use the bathroom and fell, hitting her head on the bedside table.

Her husband—my grandfather—slept through the fall that knocked his wife unconscious. When he woke the next morning there was Grandma in what could only have been an alarming position, still unconscious on the floor.

Instead of calling for an ambulance, my grandfather decided to drag his wife’s tiny body into their bathroom and leave her there.

It was two days until, finally, my aunt stopped by and found her father in the kitchen drinking coffee and her mother still on the bathroom floor, lying in her own excrement.

My mother called to tell me. When my phone rang I saw what day it was so I greeted her with “Happy Birthday!” She went right into the story of what had happened. My grandfather was undergoing psychological evaluation, she said, and grandma was recovering in the hospital both from her head injury and from dehydration.

My grandfather passed the psych eval.

I thought about cycles of abuse, and how this behavior wasn’t isolated. He had always been a bully to Grandma, telling her what she was or wasn’t thinking or feeling and bossing her around. Hell, he was a bully to everyone. Which is why he and I didn’t get along, even though I was very close with my Grandma.

The family was shook up and acting out. Ugly power-grabbing overtook my mother’s siblings, and no-one was talking about generational abuse and its impacts—but that’s all I could see. For me, this crisis with my mother’s parents pushed generations of family violence from the shadows into harsh, undeniable light.

I started writing, trying to make sense of it. I was compelled to explore the connections between my mother’s childhood, and the context in which she joined the Coalition.

I wanted to understand these cycles of violence, as if naming them could stop the wheel from turning.

Of all the things I did to get myself to an OK place within my body and psyche, what I hadn’t yet done was get a dog.

Beau came into my life during Rosh Hashana that same year, 2009, three years after contact with Robin and six months after my grandma’s fall: a small, golden-brown mutt with muscles and jowls like a pitbull but with the long nose of a hound. She had big brown charcoal-lined eyes, and her ears stuck out like, yes, a bat’s.

She was a rescue and I planned the adoption, but the timing was circumstantial. I was ready to be needed, to love and be loved unconditionally—a fitting way to start a new year.

I named her Beau, inspired by Bo Brown, the badass bank-robbing revolutionary dyke in the George Jackson Brigade—but since it’s taboo in the Jewish culture in which I was raised to name someone after a living person, I gave her a spelling that had numerous other evocations.

Beau, my handsome escort.

Beau, my ride or die.

Beau, like me, was a slightly feral, traumatized creature who didn’t know an active threat from a past one. I had to coax her out of hiding with words that I needed to hear myself: You are safe. It’s ok now. You can do this.

I was learning how to extend care, patience, and forgiveness—all things I needed for myself, yet no one else had provided so I was learning how.

Over months her stiff tail loosened from between her legs, and eventually it raised in attention or excitement, until one day she wagged.

Beau spread calm in me. She helped me to assess my surroundings—if I was feeling on edge I would look to see if her brows were raised and pinched together in concern. If they weren’t, I knew I could calm the fuck down. Our walks were the daily medicine I needed, keeping me outside and connected to nature. I felt like she had given me superpowers, powers that only existed through her as a conduit. I experienced being needed and responsible for another creature which made me more aware of how I treated myself. What would happen to her should something happen to me? Suddenly I cared.

I was at a familiar crossroads with the exposed pattern of violence in my family and my search for answers: I had to choose how to address my trauma, and the stakes were life and death. But this time, I had new resources.

I now had Beau.

I was beginning a loving relationship, one that was significantly different than any other I’d been in.

I now had health insurance.

I had other privileges in society, like being white, and the generational wealth that made it possible for me to buy a house.

But perhaps most importantly, the violence had stopped. I’ve learned from the Healing Justice movement that no healing is possible when the trauma is ongoing because then, all we have in us goes towards survival.

All of this combined made it so that I was able to stay on the side of healing and repair as I navigated what was happening in my family and life. Whereas before I would have spiraled into a deep depression, sabotaging relationships so that I could wither alone, now I could remain connected to other people’s struggles and journeys.

As I read bell hooks’ All About Love, the words “healing is an act of communion,” highlighted themselves on the page. No matter how deeply personal it is, we don’t do it alone. If bell hooks had seen me she’d probably think me a fool, lashing out at the people who cared for me most. I needed the solitude of the motorcycle rides to learn how to trust myself, but I also needed to learn how to trust others to transform the hurt. I needed to build connection.

Just a few years before, my own reliance on community terrified me so much that I burned bridges, ashamed of my need of others. Now I had come to realize our undeniable interconnectedness and wanted more for all of us. In doing so I began to wonder, what collective skills and knowledge do we have to support each other? What do we have, as communities, that doesn’t depend on wealth or capital? How do we, as a community, make healing possible for more people?

During this time I was also showing up when I could to support local Dakota land reparations efforts. Over the coming years I was researching, along with others, how our local police and sheriff’s departments were participating in joint training programs with the israeli military, connecting the issues of police brutality in the US and apartheid in occupied Palestine. Building relationships with others around issues that were important to us helped to thicken the community I was a part of, because the issues that concerned us were inextricably tied. This, too, was a crucial element of my growth and healing. Working with people who were their own agents of change ignited the agency in my own life. To be accountable to others was to be accountable to myself.

Robin and I stayed loosely in touch, always with the wish to see each other in person. But I never went to visit, not until her brother Hartley died. Robin called to tell me. I already knew that he had struggled with severe depression his whole life. I was grief stricken that he wasn’t able to outrun his demons, or face them, or heal from them. Hearing he had taken his own life was too close, too real—especially after learning that Hartley had named his childhood in the Coalition as an inescapable cause of his despair. I felt as though I lost a brother I hadn’t known, and that he was eaten by a childhood that I shared, if only in part.

My body needed to process all of this. I began running. I began training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I began training with firearms. I responded to Hartley’s death and continued repercussions from my grandmother’s fall with the drive to develop my ability to defend myself—to increase my stamina, strength, and readiness. I needed to focus my attention somewhere, channel the grief and rage towards skills. I was honing my spatial awareness, anchoring my hyper-attentiveness with discipline instead of letting my trauma direct my perception of physical safety. This too was an act of healing, helping to ground my nervous system, to better identify threat and, more importantly, safety. The rigor was also an outlet, exerting my body to relax my mind. I was gaining confidence in my physical abilities. I was demystifying weapons.

Some people I talk to who train with firearms have them for personal safety and carry one regularly. They’d either experienced gun violence themselves or wished they’d had a gun when they were harmed. Others, like me, wish to develop skills but aren’t interested in packing daily. The narrative of guns I was raised with was that they’re a tool of resistance against aggression and harm toward one’s community: the Jewish partisans, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, the Očeti Šakowin at Wounded Knee, Palestinians in Palestine. The line between personal and community safety can shift in a heartbeat when threat approaches the “us” body, the family and kin body, the targeted body. I straddle that line intellectually and hope to never have to face it.

I don’t know what happened to my mom’s revolver after Ray pulled it on her, just like I don’t know the resolution to that scene.

I don’t believe that guns make anyone safe. For me, training with guns underscores the responsibility to heal, because accurately assessing harm and its scale in the present moment is indisputably necessary if one has the option of lethal force. If weapons are a strategy of community safety, it is imperative that healing from our collective trauma be as well.

But before the healing can start the violence must stop. Communities and individuals actively under threat in real time, from water insecurity to home demolitions to wide-spread disappearances, are not yet positioned to attempt healing. The conditions that support healing need to be present for the communal body just as it must be for the individual. The body needs to have basic needs met and not feel at risk or danger. Once these conditions are there, the “us” body carries the collective responsibility to heal.

So how do we collectively protect ourselves in order to survive, while navigating the time-traveling of trauma? I don’t know the answer, but I do see how we, within communities, sometimes turn our weapons on ourselves.

Does working on my own shit and healing from trauma fulfill my responsibility for other people’s safety? Is this what a social contract for safety could look like? Because part of being safe is feeling safe, which cannot happen without healing, and that cannot happen if we’re not able to recognize the traumatizing past from the present moment. It is a circle, as irreverent of linear time as trauma is itself.

Part VIII. High Holy Days

I spend Yom Kippur 2024 wrestling with my accountability in the madness of this world. What is my role? How did I—the symbolic “I” and the literal one—contribute to the catastrophes of this last year? I will bend my head forward in regret for all the harms I’ve caused, that my people are causing. I will pause from the meetings, phone calls, agendas, strategizing, scheming, daydreaming, and just plain work of organizing in a community safety project, working carpentry, and trying to stop this fucking genocide and support liberation for Palestinians—and, ultimately, for all of us—so that I can be in contemplation about my personal accountability in all I do. Taking pause, assessing, staying present…this is the work of being human and alive.

I reflect on how far I’ve come since last year’s High Holy Days, which came about six months after Beau died in my arms in March 2023 at the ripe age of fifteen. She lived a blessed life and with her passing I was completely ruined by grief, frozen by anxiety. It wasn’t until Beau died that I realized how much of a support she was to me. Suddenly I was snapped back in time to before we met, when I was dealing with family and learning about my childhood. When she died, I felt completely stranded. The loss of her brought up all the losses, I had to reckon with each one all over again. By the time High Holy Days came around I was still mired in the pit of my sorrows, knowing my depression was beginning to take a toll on those around me.

And then October 7th happened. And now there will always be a before and an after.

The grief has stacked so high this year. It is shapeless and continuous like space, but heavier.

I fast in solitude. I go on a walk and marvel at the weather: warm yet crisp. The wind gives the air a little nip to it. At least here, in Minneapolis, it is a beautiful day.

Throughout Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee they are reeling from the devastation of hurricanes Helene and Milton, and the tornadoes that came with them. It’s too much to take in, the ferocity and speed of climate disaster, but I do not turn away; I must witness.

I notice the hunger in my belly and I breathe into it. I haven’t eaten since sundown last night and I have a few hours to go before I will eat again. I am taking stock without pummeling myself. This commitment to growth is part of my healing.

We need each other more than ever right now.

Part IX. Counting Blessings

The road called me again, and again, I headed west. It was July 2019, and now I had a newish Kawasaki Vulcan 900 I called Rita, red and silver with leather bags and heated grips. This time I was traveling from Minneapolis to a school residency for an MFA program—not directing my route to visit friends and family. It would be a straight there-and-back trip to the Puget Sound, S’Klallam territory, nestled between work gigs, and I planned to spend each of my four nights on the road in motels. No more bedrolls for me; my body was thirteen years older, after all.

I felt rusty as I started to get ready. Not only was I a different person with significant life and body changes, but the world had also changed in both subtle and profound ways. That year, “safety” for me was in response to the dawning fascist state. (And a year later, it was about COVID. How do you track the moving—or multiple—goalposts when it comes to safety?) Police violence had been destroying Black and Indigenous lives in my community for years and felt like it was reaching a fever pitch, and street violence had increased against many of us; I knew the crosshairs were focusing on trans and queer people, women, Jews (among so many others). The potential dangers that loomed were on a science-fiction scale and I wanted to be adequately prepared.

For a day I considered packing a pistol. Might as well, I thought. People are fucked up and getting more so, was on my mind. And, Shit’s gonna go down at any second and I want to be ready. But shit’s already going down, I reminded myself, and still I choose not to pack every day. Why then would I do it on this trip? If I carry, and something does go down, I’ve just guaranteed it will involve a firearm.

And what does safety mean exactly when you’re white and financially secure? I had stable housing in a home I’d lived in for eleven years at that point, and a mortgage that I could meet. I was able-bodied and confident in my career. I had no dependents but I had three housemates and a partner who owned her own home, all of us operating somewhat collectively and increasing each other’s quality of life. I had the ability to take work off and go on a long road trip. Even though I worked in sometimes-hostile environments as a carpenter, these days I often could choose where and how I moved around in the world—my proximity to safety. I decided to leave the gun behind, locked and stored.

Now I was sleeping in motels every night and pulling up to gas stations on a bigger, newer bike with fuel injection and an actual radiator, with black leather touring luggage to match the black leather saddle bags, managing to blend in a little more with the riding crowd even though I was traveling alone. When I took my helmet off, gray hair at my temples hinted at how many miles I’d stared down. That, and the patch on my vest that read LEZZIES IN CONSTRUCTION, the biker guys had less to say to me.

On my earlier trips I had little invested in thriving beyond mere survival. I was on my bike precisely because of the danger; I was down the rabbit hole of grief and recovering from trauma. I felt alone so I wanted to be alone; even though I was rich with community and support, depression lied to me and made them inaccessible. Whereas now I felt responsible to Beau and many people in my life, to the people and creatures I loved and the future I wanted to fight for with them. Now I saw my healing from trauma is an act of accountability, one that had lasting impacts beyond just myself.

Because we are an intricately woven fabric, I now could see what my healing helped me do for others that I couldn’t before. I was more capable to show up when it counted, to bring food, pick up prescriptions, sit with a friend. The more balanced I was, the more I could do for myself and for others.

And I got more savvy at identifying when I was safe. As my body aged and I came to feel more grounded in it, I learned to recognize my easy heart rate, relaxed attention, and physical comfort are what safety feels like in my body.

It was cold. I took the northern route, towards Blackfoot territory and Glacier National Park. Partly because I’d never gone this route before, but mostly to avoid the man camps. Much of North Dakota was ravaged by pipelines and fracking, and around the camps was a notoriously dangerous place to be if you were Native, and/or a woman. The motels I could afford would probably be filled with camp guys, and I was advised to not be in that situation. Still, I didn’t expect it to be this cold in the summer. I wore long underwear beneath my thick jeans and chaps on top of them, every shirt I’d packed, and my thickest riding gloves over the heated grips.

The land and sky met far away on the horizon, and the road led me into it. It was a neutral, easy light that didn’t allow for shadows, but to my left was a cluster of dark clouds flashing from the inside and pouring down water that washed everything below it in gray. It was so far away that I couldn’t hear the thunder, and I prayed that it wouldn’t cross my road ahead. For hours we traveled side-by-side, this storm and me, until I finally veered right in a mile-long swoop, out of its path.

I returned home taking as southern a route I could while remaining on course; I was afraid of being as cold coming back as I was going out. I went south to Portland then east from there along the Gorge, then farther south, through Boise and towards Yellowstone. I decided to take longer on this leg of the trip, so that I could enjoy the natural wonders. I checked into a boarding-style room above a souvenir shop in West Yellowstone then went out to find food and see the attractions. Every sidewalk shop displayed t-shirts with Trump’s head on Rambo’s body, or another version of nationalist fervor. Were these tourist shops meeting a demand, or was it a message from the town to the tourists, signaling whose turf we were on? Any images or references to First Nations of the area were caricatures, and I couldn’t find information on original names for the area. The next day’s traffic through the national park was as absurd as the tourist town. I was in a long, slow caravan, most of us in fossil-fueled vehicles, many RV’s, chugging past the strange and beautiful mounds spilling vapor upwards to the sky, the smell of sulfur mixing with that of exhaust.     

We slowly wound through the park in bumper-to-bumper tourist traffic along the stretch of asphalt circling steaming pools of water and herds of bison, while I contemplated the industry it took to build this road and marveled at how our civilization was violence forced on the land. How unsafe nature is in our hands.

When a single bison decided to make a crossing the traffic stopped on both sides, then inched past the incredible animal, each driver and passenger getting pictures and selfies through their vehicle windows. I felt completely naked without a steel cage between me and the huge beast and wanted the cars to move quicker, nervous to be so close that I could see each fly its tail was swatting.

I felt lucky to cry, to be solitary on that bike—and solitary in the best of ways. Singing at the top of my lungs into the swooshing air, I could make myself come with seventy miles an hour purring between my legs. I was grateful to be riding through those places again, landscapes that now live under smokey pink skies when once they were blue and endless. Places where my friends have had to evacuate in recent years because of fire.

What is safety when your world is burning? What is safety when you live in a tinderbox?

We have damaged the earth and our relationship to it, and our relationships with each other. Healing takes time yet it is incalculable next to the speed of change.

Being on the open road, just me and my ride and the hugeness of the world splayed out in every direction, I forgot to be afraid.

I remembered to stay present and alert.

I remembered to count my blessings, too numerous but I will try anyway, yelling thank you to the river as it sped along next to me, and to the mountains that disappeared into the clouds above.