It's also recurring theme. As in her note of "the decline of everything in America we used to take for granted."
She notes victims: Choctaw, Palestinian, Irish. And all the bottom 99% of us: Americans "being pulled into something worse than war. . . . pulled into a global realignment in which our existence is inconvenient. The ruling class doesn’t want to spill my blood: they want to kill my soul and hope that I don’t notice."
Killing the soul requires schools where teachers first of all must cede their own souls to the corporate textbook packagers and standardized testers. Thus rules the ruling class by units, numbers, "rationalized" groupings, and all the conceits of linearity which Sarah wonderfully opposes in her own humanly vital non-chronologies, her own shifts in places visited, finds found, and further allusions digressed to.
Indeed. But also consider this: “I was after lost time: for what else is a fossil but found time? I imagined pressing the fossil and discovering it was a magic button that would transport us to the past. I prefer the past to the future because I know it’s there.” Riding my bike to middle school in St. Louis way back when, I passed by the Pulitzer family estate. Wonder if it’s still there…
Just rewatched Wag the Dog. I had forgotten that the movie producer (Hoffman) is killed in the end. Dies poolside of heart attack. Kubrick died the same way just before Eyes Wide Shut was released giving Warner Brothers time to cut some scenes. I don’t believe anything anymore except rocks.
I'm with you on the rocks! I remember when Kubruck died; I was still in college but I was freelancing in entertainment journalism. The rumor that he was murdered for revealing the secrets of a sadistic elite in the movie was around back then, long before Epstein and the like were in the news. "Kubrick was killed" was told to me by the same industry insiders who warned me to stay away from Harvey Weinstein when I got invited to Miramax screenings. I wish I had written down everything they told me. I didn't grasp the relevance at the time.
There was also an interesting article recently about how Kubrick allegedly filmed Eyes Wide Shut at properties now revealed to have belonged to Epstein clients, but I'm not sure of the veracity of the claim; if it proves true, I'm going to add a link.
Oy. Made it through EWS once a quarter-century ago and never went back, even when reviewing a fine documentary on Kubrick a year or two ago. Kubrick films always reward a second watch, but I've just never talked myself into stomaching another 160 minutes of the top Scientologist gun trying to convince viewers he could have made it through med school. Now, the reading you're suggesting makes a second viewing much more likely. My film studies mentor liked to say that audiences hated EWS because it was fundamentally a 60s movie, with a very different sense of time and space and narrative construction (Stanley's films always serving as examples of director's cinema, not actor's cinema) than the post-multiplex and dawning digital generation could handle. Will be very interested in the article (if you end up linking it).
I rewatched EWS a few days ago to refresh my memory; last time I watched it was around 2020. It’s plodding, but I think the main scene showing the ritual is significant. There are also some strange details (I mean inexplicably strange, not purposefully Kubrick strange) that seem like conveying a code. I’d call it an in-joke but it’s clear he’s not joking. The subject matter is too grim. Like everyone, I’m curious about what material got cut after he died.
I only watched it once about 20 years ago, and "inexplicably strange" pretty much sums up my feelings at the time. I felt like at least half of the movie had flown over my head, like there was a secret language being spoken behind the plain English that I just couldn't decipher.
Here's one (made by a Swedish director) about trafficking of minors from the Russian side that was released a few years after EWS and tore me to pieces. Haven't watched it since it came out, but remember it as a superb (though agonizing) film. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0300140
People talk about "going back to..." after this "administration," as if it's a mere blip on the timeline of the USA. But there's nowhere to go back to in a country founded on taking. Taking land, taking rights, taking resources, taking money, taking sex, taking whole human beings. It never ends.
We can go back to having the chance to right wrongs; one of the most demoralizing aspects about the last decade is that people finally began to confront historical wrongs, and attempts at reparation and redemption were annihilated not only by overtly evil people but by people who proclaimed they were on the side of justice, and were lying
I would like to see that, but to be honest, I'm skeptical. My childhood began with the loss of JFK, King, and RFK. Vietnam. Bussing. The oil crisis. Stagflation. The failed Iran hostage rescue occurred during my gap year abroad, and the reaction of foreigners to the USA was eerily similar to what I'm hearing today regarding Greenland. I know you've said your generation's entire life has been one scandal after another, but I'd counter that the one before you had it no better. And America has been poorly regarded overseas for decades.
I've had to hold my nose for over 45 years voting for establishment Democratic politicians foisted on the electorate while the kingmakers kneecapped more progressive candidates. Or worse and more treacherous, watch candidates run on progressive platforms, like Obama, and then govern like Reagan-era Republicans.
Mamdani gives me some hope, although his name is literally not allowed on the r/Democrats subreddit. I worry that we're going to have to hit a much lower point before people wake up and realize that we deserve better than "vote blue no matter who." We can't continue this downward spiral of milquetoast mainstream Democrats doing nothing every four to eight years, as the GOP ratchets further right. Pulling off these existential by-the-skin-of-our teeth elections, e.g., 2020, without real forward movement, isn't solving anything; it's just giving the right more time to build their dystopian nightmare.
The only real solutions are getting money out of politics or creating a truly viable third party, and I don't see either of those happening in the near future. I don't recommend not voting, but we need more than the ballot box -- something along the lines of the civil disobedience of the '60s and '70s. Are Americans either just too comfortable or too beaten down and fearful for that now? Are they waiting for leadership? Not an individual savior, but something like a squad or committee to lead a unified strategy?
Happy New Year, Sarah. I finished reading "Hiding In Plain Sight" on the weekend with the news of Venezuela still bonking around in my head. I felt like crying when I put the book now. And now I have started "They Knew" this week. I just want to wrap my head around your prescient words because even though the world is a POS your writing is whip-smart and keeps me grounded.
Thank you very much! "They Knew" can be rough -- it ended up being *extremely* relevant for 2026, but that's not a fun thing, given all that's happening. My latest book, "The Last American Road Trip", is a lighter read. My advice on "They Knew", if it freaks you out, is to take breaks between chapters. To some degree, each chapter stands alone. I wrote it that way in part because it freaked *me* out!
I am from Dallas and was 18 in 1963. Let me recap what life was like on that day. My girlfriend and I woke intending to cut school to see JFK's motorcade go by, but it was raining and the radio advised JFK and Jackie would be under the bullet-proof covering of his car, so we went to class. My dad was having lunch at the Adolphus Hotel, right across from Dealey Plaza. My friend and I had gone to a meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society a few nights before to see if we could meet others similarly interested in civil rights. Instead a greasy-haired guy came up to us and tried to pick us up. He was so weird we left. Yes, it's been confirmed, that was Lee Harvey Oswald. Dallas was a raging hotbed of right-wing conspiracies, violent anti-UN sentiment with Amb. Adlai Stevenson being pelted with tomatoes, my mom ostracized since she let our Black landscapers drink from glasses instead of the hose; anti-semitism all over including my English teacher lecturing us on "Jewing people down" and setting a "non-makeup test" for the Jewish High Holidays. Fluoride was a communist plot, and HL Hunt (then US richest man) on his knees at Piggly Wiggly stores warning not to buy Polish ham since that was a commie plot. The skies cleared shortly before noon and I regretted not going to the motorcade. But then at the Adolphus my dad heard noises, then sirens, then a man rushed in and screamed, "Please bow your heads! The president has just been shot!" and exited. All hell broke loose. I saw boys heading for their cars, turning on radios, hearing the terrible news. We headed home to hear a right-wing general declare it was a Commie invasion and he was declaring martial law. We shut down all weekend and watched live as Oswald was murdered. Now at 80 years old with political science BA and MA on national politics, a law degree, educator, member if the US Supreme Court Bar, I am reliving the mess of 1963 daily.
Thanks. I have more comments about Jack Ruby and what history books wrote that were absolutely not accurate. It led me to major in political science, history, and become a lawyer.
"I replay the events of 2025 and how, despite my best efforts, my mind adjusted to the horror, even if my heart never could and never will. I’d rather carry this shattered reliquary in my chest than let it beat blithely to unremitting cruelty.
It’s not what I asked for, but it’s what I am, and they’re not taking that away too."
I feel shattered. And it's a perfectly normal response to all of the abnormal and intentional harm that a few are causing. I understand that there are sociopaths. I will never understand how someone can do the things they do.
Yes. It's one thing to know it's coming -- I've been writing about it for nearly two decades -- but it's another thing to live through it, and a third thing to raise children in it. 2025 didn't shatter my illusions, but it did shatter my dreams.
They want both your soul and your blood. Bottom line is the billionaire elite think there’s way too many people hence, no environmental concern, crazy new medical guidelines and restrictions and expensive insurance, a repulsiveness to help people that are middle and lower classes and religious fanaticism, with some, in that they truly feel they are superior and God‘s chosen ones. Yes it’s about power and money, but it’s also about eugenics.
Yes, the eugenics obsession is frightening. It was an obsession of Epstein and his backers, who sought to kidnap women and rape them and impregnate them to breed a “master race” from Epstein’s genes.
When I was ten, my aunt and uncle took me on a trip to keep my cousin company, and we went to visit family in Philadelphia by way of Virginia. We stopped at Luray Caverns, and a few minutes into the tour the guide warned us she was going to turn out the lights. Then she did.
I stood in that utter darkness, and I think I may have had a moment of epiphany that stayed with me for the next 68 years. In that wonderful, lightless nowhere, I existed. Me. I WAS. Not my body. For that brief moment when I couldn't see it, it wasn't real, but I was.
Your essays are such a gift. Thank you! I'm a lifelong Pacific Northwest resident and have therefore been exposed to the white, American culture's co-opting of the Bigfoot legend for decades. My view is so parochial that I was surprised to learn of Bigfoot's popularity in the Ozarks, but of course Bigfoot lives there, too. Interestingly, our local forestry center currently has an indigenous exhibit running called Sasquatch: Ancestral Guardians. Sasquatch offers good medicine, and perhaps is an interdimensional being who appears to indigenous peoples especially attuned to their natural environments, whether forests, grasslands, or deserts. Given all the time I've spent in our forests, I feel the truth in this. 75% of the old-growth in our greater bioregion (much more in Oregon where I live) has been logged and either destroyed outright or converted into monoculture tree farms. This is yet another tragedy of colonization and extractive capitalism. Settlers wiped away complex lifewebs that took millennia to form in just a few decades. Trying to save what is left, especially on federal lands in the face of the horror and continuing plunder of the Trump regime may be a lost cause, but, for Bigfoot and all forest life, the struggle continues. https://worldforestry.org/sasquatch/
I'm fascinated by this -- I love visiting the Pacific Northwest but don't know it well. I didn't know Sasquatch was of such interest there! The interest in Bigfoot here is very much rooted in indigenous folklore that white settlers coopted. I've talked to both Native and white folks in this region about it and many are true believers, though I've heard Native folks say that Bigfoot despises the white invaders and therefore hides away, revealing himself only to those he respects -- like the link you sent says, he's seen as a sort of protector and kindred spirit. But the legend is huge in majority white regions too. Southern Illinois, in particular, is very serious about Bigfoot. Anywhere with ancient geology and thick forests seems to attract interest, and the geology here is among the oldest in the world.
My youngest brother's "plushy" (which he treasured well into adulthood and may still have at 58) was a giveaway Bigfoot from "Bigfoot's Bank" in Washington State in the 1970s. Bigfoot sightings and footprints were frequently in the local news when we were growing up and remain a huge part of the area culture.
Oh yeah! I love visiting Kentucky, I still haven't seen every public passageway of Mammoth Cave (or all the other caves.) I noticed all the Bigfoot stuff there too.
My son and mother are cave people, too. That’s their special “just them” activity. They’ve been to many. If you haven’t already, Ruby Falls in Chattanooga, TN is my favorite. The waterfall is inside the cave.
I was SO close to going to Ruby Falls in 2021! But then my daughter got sick and we headed home instead. We did stay in the hotel in Chattanooga where the feds held Al Capone, which is still decorated with his hat and his arrest warrant. I want to go back to Chattanooga because I read there's a place where you can kayak under a bridge where bats emerge at night.
I spent 16 years in Mississippi. During that time, I served on a Federal jury to determine the guilt or innocence of an enrolled Choctaw who committed his crime on the reservation in Neshoba County. I was appalled at how indifferent the tribal authorities were to the molestation of a 14 year old girl which occurred mainly out of a sense of entitlement in a male member of the tribe. My experience touches on two or three of the threads you have woven together with your usual skill.
I have so many photos! But Substack sends the post to spam if I add too many. I might add more in a later post. I hope the bat is OK too. The guide was really well informed on the science of the cave and also seemed like a truly kindhearted guy, so at least the bat is in good care.
I'm really grateful that you didn't take and post of picture of a huge spider-egg sac! If I had been your daughter, I would have hightailed it out of there the second I saw that. She's cool, and also polite for not correcting the guide.
I was bitten by a bat, took the treatments--human rabies immune globulin and subsequent rabies vaccines. Hard to muster any affection for those little mammals, though I know they have a place and purpose.
“What the oligarchs want most is no one left to tell the story, and no one left to love what was.” This, Sarah. This. I want to write your words on my skin.
“I’d rather carry this shattered reliquary in my chest than let it beat blithely to unremitting cruelty.”
👆👆👆
Pulitzer Prize worthy sentence right there.
Dayum that’s good.
Thank you
Sarah has an extraordinary gift with words!
Thank you Judy!
It's not just words, Judy.
It's also recurring theme. As in her note of "the decline of everything in America we used to take for granted."
She notes victims: Choctaw, Palestinian, Irish. And all the bottom 99% of us: Americans "being pulled into something worse than war. . . . pulled into a global realignment in which our existence is inconvenient. The ruling class doesn’t want to spill my blood: they want to kill my soul and hope that I don’t notice."
Killing the soul requires schools where teachers first of all must cede their own souls to the corporate textbook packagers and standardized testers. Thus rules the ruling class by units, numbers, "rationalized" groupings, and all the conceits of linearity which Sarah wonderfully opposes in her own humanly vital non-chronologies, her own shifts in places visited, finds found, and further allusions digressed to.
There was no need to call out Judy. Your first sentence was completely unnecessary and frankly, annoying.
Indeed. But also consider this: “I was after lost time: for what else is a fossil but found time? I imagined pressing the fossil and discovering it was a magic button that would transport us to the past. I prefer the past to the future because I know it’s there.” Riding my bike to middle school in St. Louis way back when, I passed by the Pulitzer family estate. Wonder if it’s still there…
I had the same thought when I read those words.
Ms K has a special talent for relating her feelings through her words. She is an American treasure.
That sentence should be part of the NYTimes Best Sentences of 2026.
Another wonderful read of your travels, Sarah, and utterly poignant messages regarding our state of affairs.
Thank you!
Yes!
Just rewatched Wag the Dog. I had forgotten that the movie producer (Hoffman) is killed in the end. Dies poolside of heart attack. Kubrick died the same way just before Eyes Wide Shut was released giving Warner Brothers time to cut some scenes. I don’t believe anything anymore except rocks.
I'm with you on the rocks! I remember when Kubruck died; I was still in college but I was freelancing in entertainment journalism. The rumor that he was murdered for revealing the secrets of a sadistic elite in the movie was around back then, long before Epstein and the like were in the news. "Kubrick was killed" was told to me by the same industry insiders who warned me to stay away from Harvey Weinstein when I got invited to Miramax screenings. I wish I had written down everything they told me. I didn't grasp the relevance at the time.
There was also an interesting article recently about how Kubrick allegedly filmed Eyes Wide Shut at properties now revealed to have belonged to Epstein clients, but I'm not sure of the veracity of the claim; if it proves true, I'm going to add a link.
Oy. Made it through EWS once a quarter-century ago and never went back, even when reviewing a fine documentary on Kubrick a year or two ago. Kubrick films always reward a second watch, but I've just never talked myself into stomaching another 160 minutes of the top Scientologist gun trying to convince viewers he could have made it through med school. Now, the reading you're suggesting makes a second viewing much more likely. My film studies mentor liked to say that audiences hated EWS because it was fundamentally a 60s movie, with a very different sense of time and space and narrative construction (Stanley's films always serving as examples of director's cinema, not actor's cinema) than the post-multiplex and dawning digital generation could handle. Will be very interested in the article (if you end up linking it).
I rewatched EWS a few days ago to refresh my memory; last time I watched it was around 2020. It’s plodding, but I think the main scene showing the ritual is significant. There are also some strange details (I mean inexplicably strange, not purposefully Kubrick strange) that seem like conveying a code. I’d call it an in-joke but it’s clear he’s not joking. The subject matter is too grim. Like everyone, I’m curious about what material got cut after he died.
I only watched it once about 20 years ago, and "inexplicably strange" pretty much sums up my feelings at the time. I felt like at least half of the movie had flown over my head, like there was a secret language being spoken behind the plain English that I just couldn't decipher.
I felt sick after watching it once, way back.
I'm not easily shocked, but this just oozed insidious menace i couldn't place or understand. Reading some of these comments puts it in a new light.
Here's one (made by a Swedish director) about trafficking of minors from the Russian side that was released a few years after EWS and tore me to pieces. Haven't watched it since it came out, but remember it as a superb (though agonizing) film. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0300140
I watched the trailer, Brian. Thank you.
Am still engulfed in wonder at the impunity, the dehumanization of our elites.
I know that one. Absolutely soul-shattering :(
https://open.substack.com/pub/kaitjustice/p/stanley-kubrick-filmed-his-warning?r=1kuck&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay
Ooh thanks! I couldn't find it
Many thanks for sharing the link. Eyes now wide open indeed.
I read it. By Kait Justice. She’s doing great work right now.
Thank you for reminding me of the timing and circumstances of Kubrick’s death 😔💔
People talk about "going back to..." after this "administration," as if it's a mere blip on the timeline of the USA. But there's nowhere to go back to in a country founded on taking. Taking land, taking rights, taking resources, taking money, taking sex, taking whole human beings. It never ends.
We can go back to having the chance to right wrongs; one of the most demoralizing aspects about the last decade is that people finally began to confront historical wrongs, and attempts at reparation and redemption were annihilated not only by overtly evil people but by people who proclaimed they were on the side of justice, and were lying
I would like to see that, but to be honest, I'm skeptical. My childhood began with the loss of JFK, King, and RFK. Vietnam. Bussing. The oil crisis. Stagflation. The failed Iran hostage rescue occurred during my gap year abroad, and the reaction of foreigners to the USA was eerily similar to what I'm hearing today regarding Greenland. I know you've said your generation's entire life has been one scandal after another, but I'd counter that the one before you had it no better. And America has been poorly regarded overseas for decades.
I've had to hold my nose for over 45 years voting for establishment Democratic politicians foisted on the electorate while the kingmakers kneecapped more progressive candidates. Or worse and more treacherous, watch candidates run on progressive platforms, like Obama, and then govern like Reagan-era Republicans.
Mamdani gives me some hope, although his name is literally not allowed on the r/Democrats subreddit. I worry that we're going to have to hit a much lower point before people wake up and realize that we deserve better than "vote blue no matter who." We can't continue this downward spiral of milquetoast mainstream Democrats doing nothing every four to eight years, as the GOP ratchets further right. Pulling off these existential by-the-skin-of-our teeth elections, e.g., 2020, without real forward movement, isn't solving anything; it's just giving the right more time to build their dystopian nightmare.
The only real solutions are getting money out of politics or creating a truly viable third party, and I don't see either of those happening in the near future. I don't recommend not voting, but we need more than the ballot box -- something along the lines of the civil disobedience of the '60s and '70s. Are Americans either just too comfortable or too beaten down and fearful for that now? Are they waiting for leadership? Not an individual savior, but something like a squad or committee to lead a unified strategy?
"It is soothing when the outer world matches the dark state of your soul. It makes you search harder for the light" is another great sentence.
Thank you!
Happy New Year, Sarah. I finished reading "Hiding In Plain Sight" on the weekend with the news of Venezuela still bonking around in my head. I felt like crying when I put the book now. And now I have started "They Knew" this week. I just want to wrap my head around your prescient words because even though the world is a POS your writing is whip-smart and keeps me grounded.
Thank you very much! "They Knew" can be rough -- it ended up being *extremely* relevant for 2026, but that's not a fun thing, given all that's happening. My latest book, "The Last American Road Trip", is a lighter read. My advice on "They Knew", if it freaks you out, is to take breaks between chapters. To some degree, each chapter stands alone. I wrote it that way in part because it freaked *me* out!
When you’re right, you’re right. And you are way too often. Had to put down “They Knew,” but picked up LART. Great writing in both.
Thank you!
"In the 21st century, defiance is compassion; compassion is defiance."
That's a hard lesson!
That sentence spoke to me, too, and I noted it as my marching orders. It is both bad-ass and loving. Like Sarah, now that I think about it.
Before reading The Invaders I had just finished reading a piece in The Atlantic today about The Wrath of Stephen Miller. What a contrast!
This is the sentence I will cite while recommending this piece! Something that most people could try to live up to...
I am from Dallas and was 18 in 1963. Let me recap what life was like on that day. My girlfriend and I woke intending to cut school to see JFK's motorcade go by, but it was raining and the radio advised JFK and Jackie would be under the bullet-proof covering of his car, so we went to class. My dad was having lunch at the Adolphus Hotel, right across from Dealey Plaza. My friend and I had gone to a meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society a few nights before to see if we could meet others similarly interested in civil rights. Instead a greasy-haired guy came up to us and tried to pick us up. He was so weird we left. Yes, it's been confirmed, that was Lee Harvey Oswald. Dallas was a raging hotbed of right-wing conspiracies, violent anti-UN sentiment with Amb. Adlai Stevenson being pelted with tomatoes, my mom ostracized since she let our Black landscapers drink from glasses instead of the hose; anti-semitism all over including my English teacher lecturing us on "Jewing people down" and setting a "non-makeup test" for the Jewish High Holidays. Fluoride was a communist plot, and HL Hunt (then US richest man) on his knees at Piggly Wiggly stores warning not to buy Polish ham since that was a commie plot. The skies cleared shortly before noon and I regretted not going to the motorcade. But then at the Adolphus my dad heard noises, then sirens, then a man rushed in and screamed, "Please bow your heads! The president has just been shot!" and exited. All hell broke loose. I saw boys heading for their cars, turning on radios, hearing the terrible news. We headed home to hear a right-wing general declare it was a Commie invasion and he was declaring martial law. We shut down all weekend and watched live as Oswald was murdered. Now at 80 years old with political science BA and MA on national politics, a law degree, educator, member if the US Supreme Court Bar, I am reliving the mess of 1963 daily.
Oh my goodness...I am amazed you were actually there. What a horror to witness. And then to see the aftermath never end. Thank you for sharing.
Great Story! I'm gonna check out your substack.
Thanks. I have more comments about Jack Ruby and what history books wrote that were absolutely not accurate. It led me to major in political science, history, and become a lawyer.
Thank you for this:
"I replay the events of 2025 and how, despite my best efforts, my mind adjusted to the horror, even if my heart never could and never will. I’d rather carry this shattered reliquary in my chest than let it beat blithely to unremitting cruelty.
It’s not what I asked for, but it’s what I am, and they’re not taking that away too."
I feel shattered. And it's a perfectly normal response to all of the abnormal and intentional harm that a few are causing. I understand that there are sociopaths. I will never understand how someone can do the things they do.
Yes. It's one thing to know it's coming -- I've been writing about it for nearly two decades -- but it's another thing to live through it, and a third thing to raise children in it. 2025 didn't shatter my illusions, but it did shatter my dreams.
Thank you for seeing and writing. It's been so good to know I'm not the only one.
Came for the political analysis, stayed for the photo captions.
Haha thanks!
"They linger like teardrops waiting to fall. When one falls on me, it feels like a tear of joy, a sign that the world perseveres in darkness."
Absolutely beautiful writing. Thank you. ♥️
Thank you!
They want both your soul and your blood. Bottom line is the billionaire elite think there’s way too many people hence, no environmental concern, crazy new medical guidelines and restrictions and expensive insurance, a repulsiveness to help people that are middle and lower classes and religious fanaticism, with some, in that they truly feel they are superior and God‘s chosen ones. Yes it’s about power and money, but it’s also about eugenics.
Yes, the eugenics obsession is frightening. It was an obsession of Epstein and his backers, who sought to kidnap women and rape them and impregnate them to breed a “master race” from Epstein’s genes.
When I was ten, my aunt and uncle took me on a trip to keep my cousin company, and we went to visit family in Philadelphia by way of Virginia. We stopped at Luray Caverns, and a few minutes into the tour the guide warned us she was going to turn out the lights. Then she did.
I stood in that utter darkness, and I think I may have had a moment of epiphany that stayed with me for the next 68 years. In that wonderful, lightless nowhere, I existed. Me. I WAS. Not my body. For that brief moment when I couldn't see it, it wasn't real, but I was.
I've loved caves ever since.
Yes, that's it exactly! That's how I felt the first time in a cave too.
Your essays are such a gift. Thank you! I'm a lifelong Pacific Northwest resident and have therefore been exposed to the white, American culture's co-opting of the Bigfoot legend for decades. My view is so parochial that I was surprised to learn of Bigfoot's popularity in the Ozarks, but of course Bigfoot lives there, too. Interestingly, our local forestry center currently has an indigenous exhibit running called Sasquatch: Ancestral Guardians. Sasquatch offers good medicine, and perhaps is an interdimensional being who appears to indigenous peoples especially attuned to their natural environments, whether forests, grasslands, or deserts. Given all the time I've spent in our forests, I feel the truth in this. 75% of the old-growth in our greater bioregion (much more in Oregon where I live) has been logged and either destroyed outright or converted into monoculture tree farms. This is yet another tragedy of colonization and extractive capitalism. Settlers wiped away complex lifewebs that took millennia to form in just a few decades. Trying to save what is left, especially on federal lands in the face of the horror and continuing plunder of the Trump regime may be a lost cause, but, for Bigfoot and all forest life, the struggle continues. https://worldforestry.org/sasquatch/
I'm fascinated by this -- I love visiting the Pacific Northwest but don't know it well. I didn't know Sasquatch was of such interest there! The interest in Bigfoot here is very much rooted in indigenous folklore that white settlers coopted. I've talked to both Native and white folks in this region about it and many are true believers, though I've heard Native folks say that Bigfoot despises the white invaders and therefore hides away, revealing himself only to those he respects -- like the link you sent says, he's seen as a sort of protector and kindred spirit. But the legend is huge in majority white regions too. Southern Illinois, in particular, is very serious about Bigfoot. Anywhere with ancient geology and thick forests seems to attract interest, and the geology here is among the oldest in the world.
My youngest brother's "plushy" (which he treasured well into adulthood and may still have at 58) was a giveaway Bigfoot from "Bigfoot's Bank" in Washington State in the 1970s. Bigfoot sightings and footprints were frequently in the local news when we were growing up and remain a huge part of the area culture.
Kentucky, where I live, is also serious Bigfoot country. Woods and karst, hills and hollers.
Oh yeah! I love visiting Kentucky, I still haven't seen every public passageway of Mammoth Cave (or all the other caves.) I noticed all the Bigfoot stuff there too.
My son and mother are cave people, too. That’s their special “just them” activity. They’ve been to many. If you haven’t already, Ruby Falls in Chattanooga, TN is my favorite. The waterfall is inside the cave.
I was SO close to going to Ruby Falls in 2021! But then my daughter got sick and we headed home instead. We did stay in the hotel in Chattanooga where the feds held Al Capone, which is still decorated with his hat and his arrest warrant. I want to go back to Chattanooga because I read there's a place where you can kayak under a bridge where bats emerge at night.
Chattanooga is really lovely. I recommend walking the path along the Tennessee River
I spent 16 years in Mississippi. During that time, I served on a Federal jury to determine the guilt or innocence of an enrolled Choctaw who committed his crime on the reservation in Neshoba County. I was appalled at how indifferent the tribal authorities were to the molestation of a 14 year old girl which occurred mainly out of a sense of entitlement in a male member of the tribe. My experience touches on two or three of the threads you have woven together with your usual skill.
United States v. Dudley Cotton
Case No. 4:00-CR-26
Southern District of Mississippi
Thank you for including the photos, especially of the little gray bat. I hope he's okay.
I have so many photos! But Substack sends the post to spam if I add too many. I might add more in a later post. I hope the bat is OK too. The guide was really well informed on the science of the cave and also seemed like a truly kindhearted guy, so at least the bat is in good care.
I'm really grateful that you didn't take and post of picture of a huge spider-egg sac! If I had been your daughter, I would have hightailed it out of there the second I saw that. She's cool, and also polite for not correcting the guide.
I was bitten by a bat, took the treatments--human rabies immune globulin and subsequent rabies vaccines. Hard to muster any affection for those little mammals, though I know they have a place and purpose.
“What the oligarchs want most is no one left to tell the story, and no one left to love what was.” This, Sarah. This. I want to write your words on my skin.