Rae Nudson | The Atavist Magazine |December 2023 | 1,950 words (7 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 146, “Damages.”

1.

Debra* had hoped that her medical nightmares were over. In 2009, she was diagnosed with breast cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes. The disease was estrogen positive, which meant that it was feeding on her reproductive hormones. After six months of chemotherapy and a double mastectomy, the cancer was declared in remission. To keep it that way, doctors put Debra on tamoxifen, a hormonal drug used as a prophylactic against certain types of breast cancer. She expected to be on it for about five years.

Debra has a wide smile, dimples, and thin, arched eyebrows. She likes high heels and she likes to talk. She used to work as a hairstylist, a job well suited to someone who falls easily into conversation with strangers. She is also a mom to two boys, and always wanted more kids. Patients on tamoxifen are advised against becoming pregnant; Debra, who was in her early forties when she started taking the drug, planned to conceive once she’d completed treatment.

Then, about halfway through her tamoxifen regimen, Debra got a letter in the mail with bad news: The results of her latest pap smear were abnormal. She had undergone the procedure, which involves scraping cells from the cervix, during a routine visit to a Veterans Affairs medical center near her home in Portsmouth, Virginia. (Debra was in the Air Force from 1988 to 1992.) An abnormal pap can indicate the presence of cancerous or precancerous cells; follow-up testing is usually recommended.

Debra knew that even with the tamoxifen, there was a risk that her cancer might come back, possibly in a part of her body other than her breasts; oncologists call this a distant recurrence. So she took the pap results seriously. When the VA referred her to two ob-gyns, Debra reached out to both. One had a monthslong waiting list, but the other had immediate availability. His name was Javaid Perwaiz. 

Dr. Perwaiz’s main practice was in a small redbrick building near a strip mall in the city of Chesapeake. The parking lot had 14 spaces, including one for handicapped drivers, and cars came and went in quick succession. Perwaiz had a reputation for working fast: An established patient could expect to arrive for an appointment and be back in their car in under 15 minutes. The waiting room was small, with a vaulted ceiling, a bank of windows, and walls painted a soothing mauve. Many of Perwaiz’s patients were Black women on Medicaid. Debra fit that profile.

When she met Perwaiz in July 2012, Debra felt confident about him as a doctor. He was in his early sixties and short, with a thick, well-groomed white mustache, bushy eyebrows, and a comb-over. During appointments he wore a white coat. He was matter-of-fact but not cold. He remembered details about his patients’ personal lives and asked about their loved ones.

According to Debra, after performing some tests, Perwaiz told her that she had precancerous cells on her cervix that would likely develop into cancer. He said that there was no drug she could take to stop that from happening. Given her history of breast cancer, he recommended a hysterectomy.

Debra was shocked and scared. She didn’t want to lose her ability to have more children. But she also wanted to live to see her sons grow up. After subsequent appointments with Perwaiz, during which she underwent additional tests, she agreed to have surgery, but said that she didn’t want her abdomen cut open. The doctor who performed the C-section during the birth of her first son had used a “beautiful subcutaneous suture” to close up the incision, resulting in a faint scar. “You couldn’t even tell that I’d ever had a surgery,” Debra told me. She wanted to keep her stomach the way it was. According to Debra, Perwaiz assured her that he could perform the surgery through her vagina; no abdominal incision would be required.

Debra trusted what Perwaiz told her. From their conversations, her understanding was that he would remove only her ovaries, because decreasing the estrogen in her body might diminish the risk of her cancer recurring. In fact, a hysterectomy by medical definition involves the removal of the uterus. But Debra didn’t know this going into surgery, because, she said, Perwaiz never explained it to her.  

On the morning of December 29, Debra arrived at Chesapeake Regional Medical Center and filled out the required paperwork for her procedure. One of the nurses was someone she knew from church, a friendly face. Then Debra was prepped for the operating room and given the sedative propofol. Hospital staff were wheeling her on a gurney down a hallway when she saw Perwaiz.

“What time do I need to tell my friend to come back and pick me up?” Debra asked him.

“That’s not the surgery you signed for,” she remembered Perwaiz replying.

She wasn’t sure what that meant. The propofol was making her sleepy. Then everything went dark.

When Debra woke up in a recovery room, she knew something was wrong. Groggily, she moved her hands to her stomach. She found tape covering an incision. Debra didn’t understand. She began to cry.

She was discharged the next day, and only then did it fully sink in: Perwaiz had performed an invasive surgery, slicing into her abdomen. Within a few days, Debra felt persistent, agonizing pains in her lower belly. The area also became swollen and tender. Debra was alone most of the time—her elder son had already moved out, and the younger one was in school during the day. She had trouble getting out of bed.

Debra called Perwaiz’s office for a prescription to help with the pain. When the medicine didn’t work, she called again. According to Debra, she spoke with Perwaiz directly. “Women all over the world go through this,” he told her. “You are just going to have to get used to the pain.” She was so out of it that she let the comment go. “I didn’t have the wherewithal to chew his head off,” she told me.  

One day a friend called to check on her and was alarmed to hear Debra cursing and not making sense. The friend drove to Debra’s house, and when nobody came to the door, she persuaded the landlord to open it. Inside, Debra was lying down; her skin was turning blue, and her stomach was so distended that she looked nine months pregnant. Her friend called 911, and an ambulance rushed Debra back to Chesapeake Regional.

Debra wondered if she was dying. In her head, she could hear a hymn her grandmother used to sing: 

I know it was the blood,
I know it was the blood,
I know it was the blood for me;
One day when I was lost
He died upon the cross,
I know it was the blood for me.

At the hospital, Debra learned that Perwaiz had removed more than her ovaries: Her uterus, cervix, and fallopian tubes were gone too. A diagnostic scan showed that a large amount of fluid had built up in her abdomen, and labs indicated that she had severe acute renal failure. There was also a perforation in her bladder—one of six, she later learned, made during her surgery. She was in sepsis.

Debra remained in the hospital for several days. She slipped in and out of consciousness. At one point she thought she saw Perwaiz at the foot of her bed. He looked nervous to her; his hands were clasped. “He might have been praying, ‘Please live,’ ” Debra said.

She did live. She had to wear a catheter for several weeks, but she got better. The long recovery gave Debra time to think on what she wanted to do about the man who had hurt her. “I’m gonna get this motherfucker—that’s how I was feeling in my head,” she said. “You don’t want to mess with me. I got teeth. I spit sulfuric acid.”

She requested her medical records and was stunned to find discrepancies with what Perwaiz had said to her during appointments. Most glaringly, she didn’t see any mention of precancerous cells on her cervix; the tests Perwaiz performed on her had come back normal. “If I was normal,” Debra said, “why did I have a surgery?”

There were other inconsistencies. One form from an appointment described Debra complaining of back and pelvic pain, which she told me she never did. Another document dated the day before her surgery stated that she “insisted on having those ovaries removed through the abdominal wall incision and not vaginally,” and that the “consent obtained after entirely counseling the patient [was] for abdominal hysterectomy.” In fact, she had requested the opposite surgical approach, and she recalled no such conversation with Perwaiz; the only time she’d spoken with him in the lead-up to her procedure was in passing in the hospital hallway.

Debra was sure she had a malpractice case. She went to several lawyers, but none of them would take her on as a client. “So many men—man after man saying, ‘You had a decent amount of care, and that’s all you’re afforded,’ ” she said. Frustrated, she came up with a new plan: “I said, ‘Alright, I’m going to learn how to sue this bastard myself.’ ” (Perwaiz declined to comment for this story.)

Debra enrolled in a paralegal program at Tidewater Community College. She learned how to research case law, how to write briefs, and how to file a suit. She didn’t have an Internet connection at home, so she used a law library at a nearby university to access everything she needed. She meticulously highlighted key phrases in her medical records and made notes in graceful cursive. When requesting materials for her case from health care providers, she signed emails “respectfully,” but she was not sorry to bother anyone. She followed up. She was tenacious. To get anything done, she knew that she had to rely on herself. “I was now acutely aware that people can’t be trusted,” she said.

As it is in much of the U.S., the statute of limitations for malpractice in the state of Virginia is two years from the date of occurrence. Debra filed her suit on December 23, 2014, six days shy of the cutoff. She asked for $1.5 million in punitive damages and to be compensated for loss of enjoyment of life, loss of the ability to reproduce, and diminished sexual intimacy, as well as lost wages and medical expenses.

Someone told her to file the suit in state court, but Debra declined. She knew about the history of coerced sterilization in America, of doctors persuading women of color to undergo unnecessary hysterectomies or performing the surgeries against their will. She couldn’t help but see her case in that context. She believed that the suit belonged in federal court because Perwaiz had violated her most fundamental rights.

A judge disagreed. In January 2015, Debra was asked to provide a valid reason why hers should be a federal case, and not one decided by a lower court. She responded with documentation explaining her position, but that May her case was dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. She appealed the decision, until one day she missed a filing deadline. According to Debra, she hadn’t received paperwork she needed to complete until the day before it was due, and there was no way she could get it to the court on time.

Just like that, her legal campaign to hold Perwaiz accountable was finished. But there were more patients like Debra, more women Perwaiz had injured. There were numerous dots waiting to be connected—someone just had to come along and do it.

Miranda’s twins were developing without proper lungs, or stomachs, and with only one kidney for the two of them. They would not survive outside her body. But they still had heartbeats. And so the state would protect them.

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Sharanya Deepak| Longreads | June 22, 2023 | 19 minutes (5,246 words)

Two years ago, I made myself a meal I often think about. It was an iteration of a ragù recipe, one I had pretended to learn watching my friend Isacco cook for me in Schaerbeek, the Brussels neighborhood where we both then lived. Isacco’s ragù was one of my favorite meals in the world, but I hadn’t learned anything as he stood over his pot and enunciated every single word of the recipe with special emphasis. When Isacco gave me instructions, I nodded amicably like a trained tourist, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was instead looking outside, as Youcef, our 8-year-old neighbor, chased pigeons in the street. 

As I heard the tomatoes sputter in Isacco’s pot, I regarded Schaerbeek’s sloping hills, walking up which my calves would tighten pleasurably, through which I had learned to claim this part of Brussels as a temporary home. I looked out at its Turkish bakeries filled with mountains of simit; a large Romanian church a short distance away that housed the city’s young and foreign on its steps. I often sat there, eating half kofte sandwiches and stuffing the remaining half into my bag. I told Isacco this, proud of  my resourcefulness, but he scolded me, asking me to eat better. “Now, consider this ragù!” he said, sternly, demanding my attention back to his stove.  

When I cooked the ragù at home in Delhi, I had been away from Brussels for almost five years, and it had  become stripped of any original instructions, weakened by the pandemic’s disruption of lived lives and linear time. My life in Brussels, once a map drawn inside my head that I would trace before I went to bed, had been stamped out by the pandemic’s large, monstrous presence. Like the rumbling metro I took to work in the city’s center, the Moroccan cafés in which I studied, surrounded by older men watching National Geographic while they drank tea, the cues I had for Isacco’s recipe, any hints at fragrance, had long since faded away. 

But I cooked the ragù anyway, adding carrots and celery to hot oil in a pan. I added red onion, lamb mince, Guntur Sannam chili powder, cumin, sour Indian tomatoes. Because I had them in the fridge, I dropped in cooked red kidney beans. I added some red wine from the fridge and drank the rest. I watched the pot with these things cooking, played music videos on my phone, and texted my sister. I remembered Isacco’s puritanism and was joyful to disobey it. I stirred the pot and congratulated myself, as if this was the point of cooking this dish, to disobey the process I had been taught—to infuriate the memory of my friend. 

In two hours, the mince turned to its edible form: somewhat swampy but aromatic, but also nothing like it was supposed to be. But that didn’t matter; the world outside had ceased to exist, and I only had myself to feed. Despite its imperfections, I ate the ragù on pasta, in between bread, and once with white rice. I ate consistently and happily for three whole days.

The first time I cooked for myself was also in Belgium. It was in Leuven, a town outside Brussels where I rented my first flat in Europe. I had just moved into it with Chiara—then a new housemate, soon to be my best friend.  

I had responded to Chiara’s post for a housemate on a university Facebook group, where we talked without stopping, moving quickly from polite questions about our origins to cheeky judgements of others in the group, arranging to live together in less than 15 minutes. She told me about her plans for the year—a holiday in Rome to visit her grandmother, a road trip through Armenia to see friends. “We’ll have fun!!!!” she typed to me, including me in her plans automatically, even though we hadn’t met.

In my first days in Leuven, with no one to bicker with on the street, nobody to turn into imaginative anecdotes, I wilted and shrank. Everything was so lacking in animation and friendliness that it froze me from within. In no time, first-world pleasures like boxed wine and IKEA visits had become as limp as they were imposing when I hadn’t known them in Delhi. I meandered in the town’s center, sitting under bleached, imperial churches, eating bags of fries and looking inside them for the things that my flashy, overpowering aspiration had promised, searching for the liberty that I thought lay in this continent of the free. 

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But however I felt, I had Chiara. And even though we had just met, we had become belted together at the hip as people do when they fall in love. In our first months together, we talked for hours, and went to parties linking arms, making jokes, and leaving together, as people called us to stay. We thrilled to each other’s stories, telling about our friends using only first names, turning our parents into caricatures, pushing carts around the supermarket and making sweeping anthropological statements about everything we saw. 

I had Chiara, and she was always cooking. We went diving inside dumpsters to find expensive chocolate that she turned into frosting; we met Italians on street corners from whom she managed to source bottles of sundried tomatoes and olive oil. Our shelves were always full, unlike the other students we knew. We had tall, slim bottles of oil that she was precious with, good tomatoes that she used more freely, pistachios no one was allowed to touch, and grains, her absolute penchant, that she turned into majestic salads, colorful and entirely out of place in my otherwise greasy life.  While I still remember everything she cooked for us in those initial months—a sandwich with provolone and sundried tomatoes, a pasta with yogurt, and small green beans—I was disappointed in the fervor, the emotional wringing, that surrounded our kitchen. I had expected a carefree life, answerable to no one. I desired the hardened emancipation and uncaring banter that I thought defined the lives of young white people in these frozen, faraway places I had dreamed of. 

When Chiara and I met on Facebook, I scanned her photos—of her friends leaning against one another, sitting on the street drinking from cans in London, of European teenagers scouring cities that we thought so grand, so universal in the metaphors of their youth. “These guys have it all, dude” I wrote to Vans, my best friend back home, with a link to Chiara’s photos. They lived much like we did in Delhi, but with special sheen. I painted them with the coated appeal, that particular authority that I attributed to whiteness through my young life.

When we met, I was also—as Chiara was quick to note and I hardened to admit—a dependent, high-functioning drinker. I spent most of the days between bottles of beer, glasses of dusty-tasting wine from boxes, and eventually, shots of vodka with new colleagues at the bar where I worked. Before I left Delhi to move to the Northern hemisphere, I had just lost a friend—a beautiful boy who existed with the vigor of those who live to fight the sadness in their bones. He was a loud talker, an enthusiastic hugger, an awestruck storyteller. And one autumn morning, as if making a cataclysmic joke, he had taken his own life. 

Like my friend, many of the boys I grew up with were fledgling addicts. They depended on frequent escapes to battle familial pressures, seeking the anonymity that came from burying ourselves in the city’s destructive nooks. My own drinking was limp compared to the boys I knew but it was still persistent. It awakened now and then on crutches, becoming lively and lit up when stoked. When my friend died, it made me feel dispossessed. I needed to get away, not to get better, but to be wrecked as usual. I needed to get away, to be without surveillance. I needed to wring free of love, concern, and scrutiny, of anything that kept me moderately afloat. 

When I arrived in Europe, it seemed logical to forget, to drown in drink, to get high when the opportunity presented itself. Wasn’t this the point of this place? I thought. Supposed emancipation?  No parental concern? Wasn’t this where people lived footloose from societal rules? 

To nurse my stewing addiction, I found people who cared little about me and saw me as a number at the table. I tolerated their bad quality chat and racialized mockery, and I surrounded myself with them. Chiara hated these people, and was constantly enraged at them being my primary company. She would cycle through the large, open bars where we sat, shouting “Vive la France!” or singing the Dutch national anthem to provoke comical inter-European rivalry. She pushed casseroles into my bag, roaring at me about when I would be home, knocking at the tables of my companions with her bike handles and long, green coat.

Like Chiara, I hated these people. But I was safer with them, I thought. I could hide here, I could be half a person. Since half of me was always filled with drink.

Every time I returned to our flat, Chiara would be at the door, cradling a meal like an American housewife. She filled it with people that would soon be our friends—Neapolitan couch-surfers playing loud classic love songs on a plastic synthesizer; a duo of tall, poetic boys from Galway who had what they considered an embarrassing obsession with daal. I would wait by the door, sniffing the air when she buzzed me in. “Try this,” she would say, pushing a ladle filled with roasted vegetables, stewy sauces, and buttery bits of bread into my mouth before I entered. “Good, no?” she would ask, and I would nod. It always was, but I didn’t want it. I wanted to be alone, unwanted, uncared for, but here was Chiara in her big maternal apron and her Doc Martens in the kitchen, always waving a scent over the stove, never leaving me alone. 

One day, I returned to our flat to a kitchen scant of Chiara. I was especially sour from drink, shrunk from being bullied by the people I was out with that night. I opened our cabinet and ate rapidly from a jar of pesto that Chiara had cooked for our friends. I spooned it into my mouth, I smothered crackers with it. I finished it quickly, relishing its fattiness, greedy with spite. When Chiara found me in the kitchen, we erupted into our first big fight. That night, she was inconsolable. By bringing my drinking inside our kitchen, I had broken her spirit, her keenness to build a home for us. And I had done it because I thought a home wasn’t what I wanted, that all I wanted was to be forgotten, to be entirely ignored. That night, we were equally aghast at one another, united in uncanny affection, but also in mutual confirmation. In that moment, neither of us got what we imagined we would from the other when we first met.  

The next morning, I cleaned, and left for my bar job as Chiara shouted from the shower, telling me she was leaving for Rome. When I returned that day, anything I had neatened was reversed into dynamic disarray, but with no sign of Chiara. The blandness of our cheap IKEA furniture, the poor views we had outside our windows—without her, all of this suddenly stood out.  

When I walked into the kitchen, bare for nourishment, I picked up a pink Post-it that had fluttered to the floor. sry it said, and I walked to where it had been stuck to the fridge door. Lined on the door were more yellow and pink Post-its with messages for me to read. I opened the fridge and saw that Chiara had stacked small boxes with little things, all half- prepared. Small aubergines salted and dried; a jar of chunky marinara; thin slivers of pink pork, marinated, ready to be put in the pan and in between bread for a snack. I made myself a cup of hot water and lemon, and heated a couple of pork slices, smoking half a cigarette as I ate them from the pan. I removed the Post-it that Chiara had stuck on the fridge, and read them in her voice. Don’t Be A Dickhead they said. Just Cook For Urself.

A year ago, at my paternal grandmother’s funeral, people praised her cooking. In crowded rooms on a summer day, relatives described her hospitality in the kitchen. Men came to announce their validation for her cooking as she lay in an icebox, dressed as a bride, bereft of her own identity even in death. “What sambhar! What daal!” they crowed as she lay there in her blue silk sari, sucked of life. “What sweets she would make for us all!”

The praises were especially perplexing to me because they were untrue. My grandmother was a terrible cook, disinterested and mischievous. She cooked because she had to, often dishing out swampy rice and burned vegetables, leading us to depend on nearby dhabas for food, birthing in everyone in my family a huge reliance on toast and eggs, on fried rice from the Masala-Chinese stall outside our house. I remembered my grandmother from the times she stole sweets she was forbidden, the time I emptied her pillowcase to find scores of toffee wrappers stuck between its layers, the grime sticking to the sheets. I thought of her in the kitchen, at the onset of her dementia, staring at the fire on the stove, watching its colors change as her brain turned to dusty grain. I wondered then why these others couldn’t admit to her poor housekeeping. To them, if a woman did not decorate the world with cuisine, did she not exist? 

The cuisines of dominant-caste Hindus, like the families I am born to, depend on the labor of women to keep their cuisines afloat. They are made up of rituals so obscure, recipes so complicated, that they act as a maze in which the oppression they espouse becomes codified as culture, and the abundant appetites of dominant-caste men and families become the normalized, nationalized ways in which to eat. In these cuisines, deviance from method and hierarchy is often punished, with the knowledge that even fleeting disruption will illuminate the discrepant cruelties that are held sacrosanct within caste-owned food. When these foods are documented, labor in the kitchen is romanticized. To put a meal together requires the work of several women, farmers, porters, workers, many of whom go hungry because of the hierarchies in cuisine. This hunger is often neglected and ignored.

As at my grandmother’s funeral, the passing of my other grandparents led my distant relatives to question my fertility and familial abilities. The passing of a generation awakens the need for another one, and at every funeral or wedding, I was interrogated by assemblies of aunts and uncles about plans to create a family into which these people could insert legacies of exclusion. I had lived abroad, I worked the job I desired. Now what else did I want? they asked. How many children? When would I have them? Most importantly, what will I have them eat? 

In the summer of 2022, one year after my grandmother died, I moved into a flat by myself in the neighborhood I grew up in. In India, I hadn’t yet lived on my own. I had been raised in a family and community woven together like tight bamboo. Nothing—the pitch of my voice, my dialect, my opinions, my appetite—was formed without other people, some welcome, others invasive presences in my life. In the last few years, I desired solitude almost constantly, even though I was the kind of person never found alone. “I wish I could be underwater,” I wrote several times in my journal during the pandemic, weighed down by the incessant communication that defined our times in isolation. I became fatigued by my performances for those that I loved, the expectations of my family, the needs of my friends. I wanted to be shrouded in quiet, to be able to hear myself think.

When I moved in, it was daunting to have a flat that reeked of me. My books, three jars of honey in the condiment cabinet, my shelves painted a messy blue with no one to combat my choices or tell me otherwise. In my first month there, I was overwhelmed by everything my flat lacked: shadows of my dog who had just died, my father darting across rooms and dusting furniture in a sleepless haze, my sister sitting with bad posture, eating fruit from a bowl on her belly on the couch. I wilted here too, under the tedious expanse of myself, my naive dreams laid bare in this brightly lit flat.  

And then I had to cook—in this place, on my own. There was no one else’s appetite or desires to determine, nobody with demands to concede to or disobey. Just myself, searching inside me for what I wanted to eat. Unlike outside in Delhi, where I always knew what kebab I wanted and which samosa stall had fresher oil, my palate had little identity in domestic spaces. I was raised to eat in alliance with other people, nodding along if someone offered me toast and butter, reaching my arms out when I sensed raw mangoes being salted in the kitchen, agreeing casually when asked if I wanted a second garlic naan. 

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A week after I moved into my flat, I bought the book Real Fast Food by Nigel Slater. Even though he was beloved in Britain, I was only mildly familiar with Slater’s work. In the subcontinent, after all, it was only the shouting white male cooks who made their way to our bookshelves and screens. For decades, we made way for the schmuckery of these men, consuming them in post-colonial malaise. But when Real Fast Food arrived, I read it like a short novel, sitting on the divan and weeping stupidly at words like “haricot” and “warm tomato salad.” I was used to cookbooks consisting of mountains of ingredients, of meals being large affairs. When I cooked Indian food, the smallest number I cooked for was four. But the book suggested that I could cook for myself. Meals for one. It advocated gentle ease as a way of making myself a meal.  

After I got Real Fast Food, I stocked my cabinet with what it needed: tomatoes, beans, salt, meat, and some basic spices, perhaps considered lavish for a British pantry, but automatic in mine. As I stuck postcards around and brought out my grandfather’s things, Real Fast Food proved to be a suitable companion; I could get into the kitchen and spend 20 minutes there. Then I could paint walls and unpack crockery, I could set up lamps and stack shelves. The meals I cooked were short respites from the larger ordeal of setting up the house. It seemed fitting that in this house full of me, I had this book. With it, I shared what I didn’t with my family. A devotion to warm fat on crusty bread, a deep obsession with vinegar, and buttered, fried beans. 

In Delhi, an “akeli ladki,” or a woman alone, is called a “khuli tijori,” an open casket of jewels. This phrase, often used when talking about sexual assault and murder, works in the favor of the person who steals from the tijori. What kind of fool, the metaphor seems to suggest, would leave a mountain of diamonds untaken? If there is an uncloaked opportunity lying around, what fault is it of men when they collect the loot?  

When I was 10 years old, I heard about the man who shot a woman in the head because she wouldn’t serve him a drink. It was a story I would remember for the rest of my life, but I remember watching the news with my father sometime in early 2001, as he ate a plate of rajma chawal on the cold floor, occasionally burying his head in his hands. The man, Manu Sharma, who was rich and powerful, had killed bartender and model Jessica Lal when she refused to bring him a drink after hours. To the man with the gun, it was a breach of the natural order he was raised on: A woman had denied him hospitality and refused to yield to his pleasure. And for this, he thought, she must die. 

A decade after she was murdered, her case resurfaced, and gossip about Jessica Lal crowded our screens. What was she doing in the bar? Why did she work a job like that? Was she married? Why not? And why didn’t she just serve him that drink?

Like many women, I inhabited the city on my own as Jessica Lal did. I stood on street corners eating kebab rolls and throwing their foil wrappers at lingering boys who asked to join me. When my friends and I went to drink around our university campus we carried big sweatshirts to wear over our clothes, the angrier ones of us lining the sides of the couches we sat on, ready to fight off any incoming threats.  

One day, in my first year at university, I sat in a restaurant eating a brownie with my friend. Near us, two men took out a small knife to brandish at a woman who refused to take a photograph with them. “Husband hai kya?” they asked her, smiling, as they played with her long hair and tried to hold her hand as she ate a piece of cake. “Do you have a husband?” When she replied that she did not, one man become dumbstruck and childlike. “Then what’s the problem?” he said, his weapon flailing around in his left hand. “If you don’t belong to anybody, why can’t you belong to me?”  

Even as I had seen many women threatened in the same way, I remember this one clearly. She stood her ground, and caught my eye across the café as a measure of stealthy security. Both of us knew that one moment of provocation, one raised voice, could cost her life. When the men finally left, the woman ordered another piece of red velvet cheesecake. She sliced it slowly and licked the frosting on the back of her spoon. She took a picture of it with her phone. And then one of herself, her phone flipped so her camera flickered in the light, her painted nails coyly covering her mouth. When she got up to leave, she stopped at the table where my friend and I sat, and flipped her hair before she looked our way. “Kitni variety hain a aaj kal?” she said, throwing one look at our single dismal brownie. “Isn’t there so much variety of cakes nowadays?”

As soon as she walked out the door, my friend and I, embarrassed, ordered two more pieces of cake. One rainbow-colored affair with frosting and a sprinkled donut with custard bursting out of its rims.  

These days, I think about the various meals for one that I have watched women eat in my lifetime. I have cheered silently watching young students strut to cigarette stalls and ask for their preferred brand, rattling their bangles at the vendor to get his attention if he dared entertain the gangs of smirking boys smoking raspberry-flavored straights near them. I think about women bolting inside the Delhi Metro’s women’s compartment, and opening up boxes of parathas, or snacks stored away from tea-time at work. I watch them sigh into their boxes, as they eat in the solace of safe transit in the city; preparing for the several duties that will face them when they arrive home. 

I also think about katoris filled with forbidden things, like pickles during a menstrual cycle, and sweets stolen during times of mourning, when widows are disallowed any inkling of pleasure. I think often of Annu Aunty, a momo vendor in Delhi’s Taimur Nagar, who I spent a week with when I interviewed her for work one winter. Like most people, I defined her through the labor she performed, her ability to churn out thousands of momos a day for the students who flocked to her stall. 

What I didn’t write about was Annu Aunty’s evening snack, which she ate every day when she finished work. I left out what she made for herself, for her own pleasure: a chutney-cheese sandwich, heavily buttered and fried in a pan, which she ate at her window, near a sea buckthorn plant from her native Nepal. 

One day during the pandemic I walked under my building to smoke a cigarette when I spotted Vimla Aunty, my 75-year-old neighbor, shuffling in a corner, hiding behind a tree. I stubbed my cigarette so I could chat to her, noticing that she ate hurriedly from a small bowl, as she came out of her hiding and sat on the bench close to where we stood. When I asked her what was in her bowl, she grinned, bringing it under a street light, showing me the large scoop of ice cream she ate topped with peanuts and thick waves of chocolate sauce. “Chocolate ice cream” she said to me in whispers, even though no one was around. “Unkay Bina,” she added, giggling. “Chocolate ice cream, without my husband. Chocolate ice cream. Only for me.” 

I don’t like to give my current position of oneness a sitcom-like gleam. I do not consider it so permanent as to be radical and I don’t think of it as so fleeting to entirely dismiss it altogether. I cannot pretend that emancipation is what I desire, or that in our worlds, it is possible at all. More than anything, I like to regard it, to look at it from the outside. To recognize it, to exercise my right to sometimes think, cook, and eat alone. Besides, how alone am I when I cook for myself? When I make a peanut-chili oil and drizzle it on noodles like my cousin Arya, or when I add dahi to my qeema like my friend Dr. Masoodi, thinking of her feeding the birds as she cooked. I like it this way, when the economy of the kitchen belongs to other people. A hot sauce left by my best friend Vani when she discovered an endless penchant for fermenting; a 25g jar of honey made by an artistic man I have a crush on, which I refuse to let anybody else eat. 

The kitchen is a memory keeper, crowded with recipes and prompts from the people of my life. But what is mine is the choice to get it right or fuck it up. When I cook for myself, I am “underwater” in a way. I am genderless, childless, a person without any hinges. I am, fleetingly, nobody, or whoever I want to be.

By now, I have cooked for myself several times. What I cook most is fried rice with eggs, green onions, and a mixture of dark and light soy sauce. I like the idea of bringing something sad out of the fridge and giving it new life. I cook my eggs separately, and don’t skimp on the oil, submerging the voice in my head that always tells me I don’t deserve to eat. I often cook very quickly, almost manically. I eat quickly too, sometimes as I cook, spooning the crusty bits of rice out of the hot wok with a spoon. Sometimes I stand back and inspect the incongruency of my process, like an artist looking at a canvas, amazed and satisfied with all this sudden disarray. I imagine someone lofty calling my kitchen a crime scene, and it makes me laugh. But it doesn’t matter; I have only myself to feed. The world outside has come back to life. But here, it is still just me. 

I find that domesticity, because it is stored in the bodies of women, is often considered an instinct. It is thought of as something supernatural, automatic, and easy to perform. But it is an education, I thought, as I stacked boxes in correct order and distanced my potatoes from my onions, so they wouldn’t sprout and rot. It is, among many things, labor, and memorialization. It is hard work, lived and learned.  

Now, when I cook, it is after I have read Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires, which teaches me to focus on my gestures. I avoid the need to text her every time I am moved by how she recalls action. Instead, I slice a malta orange. I watch my hand dip into the cut-glass box with chaat masala I stole from my mother and watch the masala emerge, tucked into a small steel spoon. I watch myself take the cluster off a head of garlic, I watch myself heat butter and mix honey in with it to put on toast. I watch myself. 

In these gestures, a new person emerges, a person that understands sensory preferences, who can witness herself move. I have never known this person. I like her. I tell her about how I always thought that pleasure belonged to someone else. 

Recently, I witnessed one of my favorite meals for one, cooked by my aunt in her flat. She lives alone, escaping the years of matchmaking that she went through when we were children and she was a young woman, when we lived together. When mustachioed uncles would come to the house as potential suitors for her, my sister and I, in our practiced routine—me crying uncontrollably, her glaring at them with her hands on her hips—would drive them away.  Through our theatrics and her determination, my aunt got what she wanted, and what no one else understood: to grow older by herself, and to be completely, and entirely on her own.  

In her meal for herself in her flat, I watched her blacken daal and add cut cabbage. I saw her pour an unmeasured amount of rasam powder into a pot of simmering water, nowhere close to a boil. Unlike me, who used everything I did to politically posture, my aunt—the first queer, opinionated person I knew—had no interest in curated rebellion. But here she was, cooking in a bizarre sequence, disobeying every culinary and societal rule that either of us knew. 

“You don’t have to, like, burn it, you know” I said lazily from the couch as she cooked. 

“Oh no?” she asked. “But it’s done now, what to do?” She smiled at me, and did a little jig to illustrate she didn’t care. She joined me on the couch, her meal in a bowl, all kinds of techniques overruled. It was a kind of mush, like my ragù, but it had come together anyway. “Come,” she said, as we sat down to watch Outlander on her TV, digging her spoon into her bowl enthusiastically. “It is Sunday. Let us do what we want. Let us give ourselves a treat.”

Sharanya Deepak is a writer and editor from and currently in New Delhi, India. She is a co-editor at Vittles Magazine. She is currently working on a book of essays. You can read more of her work on her website https://www.sharanyadeepak.com/.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Peter Rubin

The first time Vanessa had sex, she asked her boyfriend to stop, and he didn’t. Later, with other boys, Vanessa sometimes felt like she couldn’t say no to their advances, because she’d already lost her virginity. Only many years later did Vanessa recognize some of these incidents as sexual assaults, she told me when I visited her in 2017. She didn’t blame the boys, necessarily; they were just doing what everyone expected them to do, she felt. But her reputation suffered.

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Mylène Dressler | Longreads | April 11, 2023 | 19 minutes (5,461 words)

Surfing shouldn’t be done alone. Like diving, spelunking, rock climbing, or cutting a watermelon, too much can go sideways. Conditions are unpredictable, equipment or experience can fail — and injury is always the biggest worry. Come off a surfboard the wrong way in three feet of water, and you can hurt yourself, sometimes badly. Come off the wrong way, at the wrong moment, in the wrong place on a large wave and go tumbling into its powerful impact zone, and you might end up floating to the surface (or not) unconscious, or be unable to move some crucial part of your body you’d been counting on to steer you back to light, air, life, and joy.

And that’s the thing about surfing: risks and all, it’s an incredibly joyful activity. It is, in fact, the single most joyful thing I have ever done in my five decades on this beautiful, wave-driven, water-circled planet. And it’s an incredibly joyful life. Surfers plan their days around when they can plunge into the gorgeousness of an ocean, and then spend hours trying to attune their bodies to something as old as time, to the very water that our bodies are made of, and that feels, when you finally manage all that weight, like standing up on the lip of a laughing, moving heaven . . .  while at the same time it hurtles you, almost ferocious, across a strangely solid-seeming surface, on the ride of your hey-look-at-me-I’m-flying life.

There is nothing quite like it. Surfing is, for many who hit the waves, more than “fun,” “cool,” or “good exercise.” It is a way of being connected to a deeper deep, an older old. Perhaps even to feel, to learn something that is eluding you on land.

But there are those sticky risks, and all surfers know them, or should. Nonsurfers always ask me first: What about sharks? (Actually shark attacks are quite rare, although they do happen, and then not being alone on the water might save you — it’s how famous, now one-armed short-boarder Bethany Hamilton survived and still surfs.) What about protection from what can hurt you? Some surfers wear life vests, even helmets. Most surfers’ best protection is self-knowledge; they only go out when the size of the wave matches their skill level, and no higher. And all surfers know the admonition about going out with a buddy, or at least when there are others in the water. Just in case. It is common sense. It is wisdom.

And yet, some days, I go out alone.

Most surfers, when pressed, will tell you that surfing alone isn’t really an issue — because these days, and especially at the best surf spots on the planet, surfing solo is becoming damn near impossible. This is because there has been, in the last decade or so, an absolute explosion in the sport (what elite surfers do) and the addictive hobby (what everybody else does). Fueled at first by the development of safer, beginner-friendly boards (large, puffy, and buoyant, these “foamies” are easier to stand up on and less likely to slice you with a hard rail or razor-like fin), and then by an accompanying rise in the number of surf camps, clubs, instructors, and videos, the explosion turned even hotter and brighter in the dark season of the pandemic. Hungry and desperate for “safe,” liberating, virus-thwarting outdoor activity, thousands of novices (or “kooks”) headed to surf shops for boards, leashes, rash guards and wetsuits, and beaches filled with new, giddy converts. Many of these were women, who, after a half-century of being active and yet still barely visible in the water, now account for perhaps 20 percent of surfers worldwide.

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I was one of them. I had tried surfing for the first time about 10 years earlier, on the beaches at Wilmington, North Carolina, and then for a second time at surf hot spot Nosara, Costa Rica. Both times I fell in love with the feel of the waves and the deeper deep, and was in awe of the beautiful, expert surfers (both women and men) all around me, riding with such grace and focus. Still, it was hard to imagine myself, really, as one of them. I adored and could manage the surging, pushing “whitewash” — the “inside” of a surf break that is close to shore and consists of smaller, already broken waves, ideal for beginners — but it was hard to see myself ever surfing “outside,” where the full-throated, heavier swells were. And after I turned in my rented board and flew home again, distance did the work of doubt. If you don’t live close to the water, surfing requires even more gas, a greater effort of will and imagination. Ah, well, I thought. Who was I to pretend I could move in the way that Bethany Hamilton did?

Then the pandemic hit. As it happened, months before the virus shut down everything in between two oceans, I had already decided to relocate to Oregon to be closer to my elderly parents. They had moved to a tiny town, an unofficial but de facto retirement community perched high on a cliff above a beautiful Pacific cove. Strangely, we had had the sense that something, some surge was coming, something that would be better endured if we were all together (I’d thought, vaguely, it might have to do with climate change). We didn’t know what it was, but whatever it was, it would be better not to be alone.

The little town where we settled was low-key, serene, somewhat remote. (I am not going to   name it, in the time-honored and somewhat selfish tradition of a surfer trying to protect a special, quiet spot). It seemed like a good hideout. And there were, intriguingly, what looked, down below, like rideable waves.

In those early weeks when I studied the cove, there would indeed be a surfer, sometimes alone, and now and then buddied up, a pair of bodies floating tarred and thickened in heavy black wetsuits. Usually, though, the water was completely empty of humans. There were more whales and seals than any flipperless mammals. Even the small beach had few people combing it, and when I walked there I found almost all of them were older, some walking with balancing sticks.

I kept looking at the waves. Clearly they could be surfed. And the water was right here. But could I, barely a “kook,” handle it?

To find out, I drove 45 minutes and two towns away to the nearest surf shop. There an affable young man with dreadlocks told me that better breaks for beginners were farther north, and that the small cove’s waves weren’t really all that attractive, “mushy,” closing out fast, often criss-crossing as the tide went in or out. But people did surf there, sure. Not often. Not many. A few.

On his advice I bought a hooded black wetsuit recommended for 50-degree water, and a pair of black wet boots. I bought my first board: a blue and white beginner board, a foamie, eight-and-a-half feet long. I was so excited I had to call my friend back in North Carolina, the woman who had first encouraged me to go into the water. I was really going to do this, I told her. I was going to try to be a surfer.

The very first day that the gray, choppy waves below looked less cross-stitched and hairy, I lugged my board down. There was no one in the water, but there were a few people wandering around on the beach, and I decided that that would have to be safe enough, that at least I could be seen from shore. (The looks I got as I passed with my big, fat board were surprised, wrinkled, smiling.) Besides, I decided, if I was waiting for a buddy in a place where no one really surfed, I might be waiting for a long time.

I waded into the water, alert — but not afraid, I noticed, or at least no more so than I had been the few times I had surfed before. When the water was waist deep I hopped onto the deck of my new prize. The board was reassuring. A boat, of sorts. I floated for a moment. And then it happened. The lessons I had taken before all at once came back to me. Within a few minutes, I was surfing “inside,” standing up briefly and falling joyfully. Even in this cold, out-of-the-way, fairly inhospitable little bay, all the feelings I remembered from my earlier “sessions” came back to me. Of riding on the tongue of something magical, long, wild, wide and laughing. Of sinking into something huge and real and roiling that made it impossible to think or worry or wonder about anything else. Of being connected to something that was bigger than me, but included me, of being part of some unspoken history. (I am mixed race, part Pacific Islander. Had some current in me, I wondered, traveled this ocean before?)

What I hadn’t expected was how magical it was to be alone in the water. Always, when I had surfed before, there had been a crowd with me in the waves. Here, instead, flocks of gulls circled overhead, and an occasional pelican. I saw a seal’s head and neck at a bobbing distance, checking out my own black-hooded costume. The people on the beach were mere specks. Everything else that was human seemed to have melted away. In all that beautiful solitude I wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. I hadn’t known how much I needed this aloneness, after years of crowded work at a university, after months of eldercare, the phobias of the pandemic, and the stresses of a crowded, socially mediated, 21st-century life. And too, after five decades of being told, as a woman, I should try to avoid being alone in a risky place, whether it was a parking garage or at the base of a cresting swell.

My friend, Maia, the one I’d called from the surf shop, the first person to encourage me to try surfing, likes to say that water is the universal solvent. It breaks things down. Put anything in it for long enough, and it will dissolve it. It can erase distinctions. It can blur the rigid. Water, the ocean, scrubs, refines, releases. It defies expectation.

Under my wet boots I could feel the cove’s shifting sandbars rising and falling. When I came back a few days later, they were in another place. No place where you put your foot, in a sea, is ever the same. No wave, curling from the intensity of finding fresh bottom, is ever the same. Each moment in a surf session is unique. And in that endless originality, I quickly discovered, is a kind of salvation. A freedom. Because you can’t force an ocean to bend to your will. You can’t meet an ocean rigidly or with any idea of ultimate control. You are not in charge, and you can’t learn to surf if you think you are or ever will be. But neither are you nothing, disengaged. You are water meeting water.

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Week after week, month after month, session after session, I tried and failed and sometimes succeeded in riding, for longer periods, the smaller waves, while sowing all my stresses into the gray, punchy, churning Pacific. On the days that were too big for me to surf, I still stared at the waves and tried to read them, understand them. And understand myself beside them. It seemed to me I was learning to let go of many things, with their help: rabid control, the idea of being the perfect daughter, the perfect caretaker of aging parents, perfectionism in general, even (at least as it pertained to surfing), ambition. I was never going to be great at all of this, I decided. It didn’t matter. I would do my best. Each time I went alone into the waves, I couldn’t stop smiling. With no one to see the smile, and no one the smile was for. When I came out of the water, my cheeks actually hurt from so much joy. The water had been balm, the wetsuit had warmed it, and the ocean had circled me, and me alone.

For about a year I surfed solo in the cove. Now and then, on a big day, unsafe for me to do anything but watch from the sand, an experienced surfer might arrive and — ignoring my gaze — paddle to the outside, usually all by himself, and ride the fat waves there. Then come out, perhaps nod, and drive away. And then the cove was empty again.

Sometimes, when the cove looked sketchy and internet surf forecasts suggested better waves to the north, I ventured to the more crowded, “beginner” beaches. But I never noticed that I did any better there, and was always glad to come back to the imperfect and familiar. By now I and my blue and white board had become such a fixture on the beach I was called by the locals the “Surf Lady.” I admit, I reveled in this status. (They didn’t know I was at best a mediocre surfer, and it didn’t matter to me that I was.) I was a surf lady. My whole world, my life, had been transformed by my relationship with the water. My days were guided by 1) whatever it was my family might need that day, and 2) the rhythm of the waves and the tides. I learned to read the surf forecasts as though they were runes. I studied swell direction, wave energy, wave height. I watched for offshore winds (better for surfing), but went out in crosswinds or when they were onshore, too. Finally, I felt I had outgrown my beginner board and bought my second board: shorter, sleeker, thinner, pale cream with a brown stripe. It was amazing. Like switching from riding a mattress to riding a motorcycle.

One day, as I was coming out of the water with this new board and walking toward the cliffs and past the small, scattered line of elderly beachcombers, a man approached me and introduced himself. He had just moved to town, he said, he lived right there (he pointed close to the water), he had taken a surf lesson and loved it, and he wanted to surf more. His wife, however, wouldn’t let him surf alone; she held firmly to the buddy rule. So he was wondering: Could he surf with me?

I stared at him. He was lean, with a shaved head, and looked like a spry elf that had materialized from nowhere. I hesitated. I like to surf alone.

Then I remembered, when I had first started surfing, how kind Maia, and others, how welcoming they had all been to me. And no one owns the ocean.

We talked a bit, maintaining our pandemic-dictated distance. We were surprised to learn we were born in the same year, that we were both defectors from university life. And that we both wanted to surf, here, in this unlikely place, this tiny town, in this little cove. What were the odds? But then everyone wants to surf now, we agreed.

His name was Charlie, and he explained his wife had seen him in too many accidents — skiing, biking, kayaking. She basically didn’t trust him alone anymore. He didn’t look accident-prone to me. He looked lithe and athletic, especially with that shaved, sleek head. But I understood his wife’s concern. And even though it was never said, the implication, of course, was that going out with a buddy would be safer for me, too. And so it would be.

So I said, yes, why not, we could make surf dates.

At home, peeling my wetsuit off, getting in the shower, toweling dry, I suddenly felt, like a bruise, my error. I saw it in the mirror. Along with the red welt on my forehead from my suit’s tight black hood.

The water. The beautiful solitude. The water. It was never mine. It was better to have a buddy. It was wisdom.

But that didn’t mean I had just been wise.

When there isn’t solitude there is company. And unfortunately, for women surfers all over the world, at well-known breaks or on obscure little beaches, that company can sometimes be less than companionable.

The ocean is the opposite of a parking garage; the more people on it, the more risk there is, for some. Ask any woman waverider, go on any women’s surf group on social media, and you’ll find startling (or worse) stories of harassment (or worse): of women’s boards as they sail past a man’s being dangerously pushed down at the tail by a disapproving or mocking hand; of men “dropping in on” (ostentatiously and sometimes dangerously cutting in front of) the woman already riding a wave; of demeaning talk or its condescendingly “helpful” cousin, unsolicited advice (to impress upon the woman she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and perhaps has no business being out so far). Eighty percent of surfers worldwide are men; yet on any given day, in the experience of many women surfers, and depending on where you are, the actual differential can be much starker, a woman’s body more exposed. (Water dissolves, but it doesn’t necessarily dissolve gender, or at least it hasn’t just yet. Or culture. Or race, for that matter. Surfing is still an overwhelmingly white enterprise.)

Yet much of the surfing world is also generous, kind, capacious, always trying to do better. Water has a way of reminding: You all breathe the same stuff, correct? And Charlie seemed nice enough. The kind of guy who listened to his wife, anyway. And it seemed unlikely he would want to alienate the person his wife was going to allow him to surf with.

So that, I thought, isn’t really why you are anxious about a session with him.

I looked into the mirror, and knew.

You don’t want him to be better than you.

Water can dissolve. It can also, it seems, disguise.

In the water all alone, I had imagined I wasn’t competitive. That along with undercutting my perfectionism and some of my more unhelpful ambitions, it had melted my tendency toward measurement against another. But. But.

I am the Surfer Lady!

In the cove alone, I was the best surfer there.

Oh my god, surely, I thought, in all this expansive ocean I wasn’t so small as that?

To be certain, I texted Charlie as soon as I could. As soon as the sun was shining, the wind calm, the waves reasonable. Looks good, I say we go.

He waved as we met on the sand, his sleek, bright yellow, professional-looking board making my own look suddenly chunky and a little wan.

“Here we go!” he shouted, obviously excited. We quickly agreed we would not hover too close, but would keep an eye on each other, and signal if we got into any trouble. Since he was what surfers term “regular footed” (left foot forward on the board) and I was “goofy footed” (right foot forward), we would tend, usefully, to go different directions on a wave anyway, right versus left.

We paddled out on our boards. I was the first to take a small wave, smoothly, and ride toward shore. I was startled to hear a cheer and whoop go up behind me. When I turned, Charlie was grinning and fist-pumping at me.

I had never had anyone cheer me on a wave. It was like not knowing you needed a kite, and then finding one.

I watched him take his first wave, and saw he was a true beginner, not as far along as I was, using his knee to get to his feet, wiping out quickly, but then popping out of the water and grinning from ear to ear. So nothing to worry about. I whooped and cheered, too.

It was the first of our many sessions together, that summer and winter. We grew more comfortable with each other over time. I met Shelly, his wife, who had no interest in surfing and was happy to stay at home. Charlie and I surfed alone. Sometimes, on the water, we wouldn’t surf at all, simply marveling at the pelicans swooping low, diving for fish, or we’d stare at a shimmering sundog overhead, a rainbow with an eye.

Sometimes, on certain days, I still went out alone, either neglecting to tell Charlie I was going, or because he and his wife had gone out of town. On those days the full solitude was again delicious, relaxing, with no responsibility, in the water or elsewhere, for anyone’s safety but my own; smiling again with no one, and for no one. It always seemed to me I was a better surfer solo, too, connecting with the water more cleanly, more intimately. Yet it was also strange without Charlie. Like missing an optional but useful accessory, an extra arm out on the current.

One day Charlie and I both went out but I finished the session first, tired from ferrying my parents to distant doctors’ appointments earlier in the day. I sat on the beach, and Charlie came out and asked if he could try my board. He was having such trouble catching bigger, “green” waves. We both were, in fact. The timing needed for a larger wave is tricky, and Charlie and I both tended to be too late, not catching it until it was already broken and whitewater. He thought my more buoyant, shorter board might help. It didn’t seem likely to me. Longer boards are easier to surf than shorter boards, and taller people need longer boards. Charlie was taller than me.

“Sure, go ahead,” I said.

I was there. I saw it happen. The moment Charlie went from beginner to better. From “kook” to “intermediate” surfer. I watched him catch a nice overhead wave and ride it perfectly. He was so shocked afterward he turned to look at me from the foam, speechless. Then he hooted and fist-pumped and paddled out and did it again. And again and again and again.

I was cheering him on. Yet there was such a pain in my chest. There he was: Passing me up. On my own board. Right in front of me. As somehow I knew he was always bound to do. Leaving me behind. He was a skier, a kayaker, a road cyclist. (He was even, it turned out and as if that weren’t enough, a golfer.) He was an all-around athlete. I was a writer who happened to live by the sea.

Charlie was so high, so joyful when he came out of the water, he was trembling. I hoped he was oblivious to the slight hiccups, the tiniest of silences between my sentences of praise. He thanked me for the use of my board — wow, it had really helped! Yes. How happy, I thought, my board must have been, so responsive to, so relieved to find all that jumpy testosterone on its deck, and Charlie’s greater muscle mass.

We said goodbye — he and Shelly were going out of town again for a while — but assured each other we would surf together again when he got back.

In the weeks that followed, I went out nearly every day. But no matter what I tried, I could not do what he had done on my own board. I pushed myself. Hard. For hours. I cursed, I swore on the water (something I’d never done before). I tried changing my timing, my feet, the position of my arms. The waves went on passing underneath me, leaving me behind. Maybe I’ve reached my limit, I thought. Maybe I ought to be okay with that. But clearly I wasn’t. My surfing deteriorated. I kept falling off the board, impatient, unhappy, where before whenever I’d fallen I laughed with joy — because what is more wonderful than falling into white, frothy water, what could be more like play, more like an acrobat tumbling, when standing was merely what you did all day every day?

As with many things, there is no predictable arc of growth, of progress, of discovery, in surfing. Surfers describe “hitting walls,” or losing their “stoke” — the magical drive, the essence of their connection to the water and the wave that keeps them coming, entranced, back to the swells. Taking or being forced to take a season off, surfers will describe losing their takeoff or their timing. Middle-aged surfers will describe, with shock, how they can no longer leap to their feet or “carve” or “cut” their boards sharply back toward the top of a wave, as they used to do. Surfers will change boards, buy new ones, looking for fresh or lost magic.

The longer the board, the easier it is to ride. Watch children learning to surf on a longboard. It’s astonishing how easily they manage it, the way they take to it, the same way they take, perhaps, to new languages. I once asked an instructor why this was. Was it some innate, childish balance? Was it fearlessness? Intuition? A lack of acculturation? Not knowing any better? Not knowing that they couldn’t?

“Nope,” the instructor said. “They’re just so light, the board doesn’t even know they’re there.”

For days I felt nothing but my own weight. And deep frustration. With myself, my board, and the unaccommodating, slashing Oregon waves. I left town for a while, too, with my parents. The pandemic was beginning to lift its fog. I was tired, we were all tired. We needed a vacation. We decided to go inland. The ocean is beautiful but if you see it all day, every day, and what you see in it is a constant measurement of your own insufficiency, your own smallness, you’ll want to run from it and its wrinkled mirror.

Charlie texted he was back and hoping to surf; I texted we were just leaving and his best bet would be to go to one of the busier beaches. I wondered if he could read the subtext. Don’t depend on me. Stop depending on me. I was that small.

A set is a group of waves in a swell, created either by wind or current. There are generally between three and 10 waves in a set, followed by a period of relatively waveless quiet, a lull. Surfers will use the lull between sets to get “out the back,” behind the breaking waves. A lull isn’t always necessary to get past the break, but it can be helpful; it’s less of a beating, less of a fight, to get to where you’re trying to go.

Away from the water, my heart, I found, still yearned, still turned toward the waves. I found myself lying on the floor of a distant, white-carpeted room, practicing my paddling, my leap to my feet, my stance, my balance, thinking about what I knew was required for a bigger wave yet couldn’t bring myself to do. One of the many fascinating things about surfing is that it is both simple and complex problem-solving. The simple part is understanding the obvious mechanics of what it is you are trying to accomplish: Position yourself as you paddle on a moving floatation device so that it will neither nose-dive or stall back from the arc you are trying to catch, and then stand up on it at the precise moment when you can harness the energy of that arc and be launched down and forward by the force of gravity. The complex part is everything else, put together. You. Your brain. Your body. Unique to you. The wave. Unique. The surroundings. Sand or rock. Beach or reef. The shape of the land. Peninsula. Oceanfront. Bay. Cove. Island. Pier. The culture you are swimming in. History. Habits. Bad or good. Weather. Wind. Board. Tide.

The longer I stayed away, the more I missed surfing. But I was afraid to return to it, too. What if I returned, and I discovered that I had taken something so pleasurable, no, more than that, positively ecstatic, and lost it, because I had carried into it too much that was hard and brittle and me?

When we came back, Charlie and his wife had gone away again; he had decided to teach another class at his university. I stared out, uncertain, at the water. There was no one there. I told myself: Go out with no expectations. Try to let go. It’s hard. But try. Try not to think. Just go with the water. Just that.

I took my board in hand. Entering at low tide, I repeated the words of a little ritual I had initiated when I’d first started surfing in earnest. Hello Maia, to honor the woman who had gotten me into the waves. Hello Ocean, thank you, to honor the water, and maybe in a bid for it not to kill me.

I was all alone again. Here came a small wave. I turned and paddled for it. I didn’t think. I didn’t try to do anything new, ask myself to be better than I was. I leapt up.

And there it was. To surf is to ask a wave to let you join it, and get no response but the wave itself. It is not your partner, your friend, your compatriot, your competitor, your doppelganger, a mirror, or your enemy. It is physics touched by human imagination.

One day, not long after this, following a solo session that was quite wonderful but I can’t remember why (an odd thing about surfing, as many surfers will tell you, is that after you have ridden a particularly beautiful wave or had a particularly beautiful session, you sometimes can’t recall a thing about it, it all happens so fast, is so unthinking, so unlike any other part of recorded life), a woman approached me as I was crossing the cove. She introduced herself. Her name was Lori. We were about the same age, she a bit older. Small world; we found we both, through friends, knew Maia. We seemed to have so much in common.

And then we didn’t. Lori told me she had survived three separate bouts of cancer. Each had nearly killed her. That she had first tried surfing 10 years ago, in Mexico, but had to stop. That she was about to have more tests. That she desperately wanted to get back in the water, but was afraid to, alone.

She didn’t ask. I spoke. “I have a foamie. You get a wetsuit. I’ll take you out.”

A week later, Lori plunged in. I saw the fear in her eyes, at first. Everything is such a risk. Then the slow settling. The familiarity. Here is the water. I have been here before. We have been here before. This is where we come from. There is where we are going, dissolving.

She slipped and fell, slipped and fell, stood for a moment. She was overjoyed. “It’s coming back!” she said. “It’s coming back!”

The tide will do that.

Charlie returned. Introductions all around. Nowadays, we are often three on the water. Other surfers, more experienced, occasionally come and go from the cove. They prefer better waves. We stay. We have become a sight, a trio, on the beach. The other day a woman, a mother with a teenage daughter, just moved into town, said her girl wants to join us. Likewise a teenage son from another, new family. The cove is getting younger. If this keeps up, Charlie and Lori and I joke, things are going to get crowded. And the youngsters can’t go out alone. It’s not safe.

I still go out alone, from time to time. Not to be foolhardy. I study the forecasts to be safe. Not to “escape,” or at least not entirely to escape other surfers, or my responsibilities on land, my family, my work, or the fragile, half-inoculated world around me, or pretend I am free of things I am not free of. I go for a certain kind of peace, an assertion of body, and of choice; I go because there is surprise in solitude, as there is wonder in togetherness, in unity; I go because I can, and because, waving back to the older, caned beachcombers who smile and shake their heads at me, I don’t know for how long I can will be true.

I go to melt what I am able to, in cold, cold water, and make friends with how a wave passes.

Mylène Dressler is a novelist and essayist whose recent books include The Last To See Me and Our Eyes at Night. You can learn more about her work at mdressler.com.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Instagram Face has replicated outward, with trendsetters giving up competing with one another in favor of looking eerily alike. And obviously it has replicated down.

But the more rapidly it replicates, and the clearer our manuals for quick imitation become, the closer we get to singularity—that moment Kim Kardashian fears unlike any other: the moment when it becomes unclear whether we’re copying her, or whether she is copying us.

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In November 2012, I moved back home to Scotland after spending nearly all my savings backpacking. I stayed at my friend’s flat near the base of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh and began looking for writing jobs. With no end to the recession in sight, it turned out that there were none. I began temping and applying for editing-marketing-anything jobs. Went to an interview in a smart office in New Town. Realized the advertised “graduate marketing position” actually involved stopping strangers in an outdoor shopping center in Leith and trying to sell them phone contracts on commission. Cried. 

On a morning when the temping agency hadn’t called, I took the train north to see my mum and dad. Over dinner, Dad asked how the job hunt was going. I looked down at my shepherd’s pie and said it was going okay. He said things would be fine — I just needed to apply myself. 

I started looking beyond Edinburgh for writing-editing-anything jobs — and eventually moved to Berlin for a content editor internship. There, I was charged with sending out weekly newsletters to subscribers. One week, I was asked if I could theme an email around history’s adventurers. I didn’t really know which women to include, apart from that pilot Amelia Earhart. So I started Googling and soon came across stories of solitude-seeking, mountain-climbing, jungle-running women adventurers I’d never heard of. 

There was no room for Lawrence of Arabia in that week’s email. There isn’t in this reading list, either. 

I Walk Therefore I Am (Robert Macfarlane, The Guardian, August 2008) 

From Berlin, I emailed my mum and asked if she’d heard of Nan Shepherd. After all, she was born in northeast Scotland just 20 miles from my home, although admittedly a century before me. She worked as a quiet English teacher on weekdays. Then, on weekends, she’d morph into a “swirling ziggurat of tawny cardigans, scarves and skirts,” striding over the moors, sleeping on rocks, watching coils of golden eagles overhead, and feeling in every inch “how grand it is to get leave to live.”

Mum replied that she knew of Shepherd. Loved her, really. Said there was a wood engraving by the artist Paul L. Kershaw in the bathroom showing a black-and-white picture of the Cairngorms and a bite of Shepherd’s words. Hadn’t I ever noticed? I’d never noticed. Since then, Shepherd’s memoir, The Living Mountain, has become one of Canongate’s bestselling backlist books. 

This influential essay from Robert Macfarlane begins as a mini-biography of Shepherd, then explodes into a compelling thesis of Shepherd’s belief in what he calls “bodily thinking.” 

We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world — its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits — as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. We are, literally, losing touch. Shepherd saw this loss beginning more than 60 years ago, and her book both mourns it and warns against it: “This is the innocence we have lost,” she observes, “living in one sense at a time to live all the way through.” Her book is a wry, beautiful hymn to “living all the way through.”

This is her book’s most radical proposition. Radical, because Shepherd was a woman writing out of a Highland Scottish culture in which the cherishing of the body was not easily discussed. And radical because, as philosophy, it was cutting-edge. In the same years that Shepherd composed The Living Mountain, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed his influential theory of the body subject. For Merleau-Ponty, post-Cartesian philosophy had fallaciously divided body and mind.  His work, particularly The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), was dedicated to enriching the idea of the body, such that it could be said both to perceive and to think. Merleau-Ponty described this embodied experience as “knowledge in the hands”, a phrase that could have come straight from Shepherd. “The body is not . . . negligible,” she wrote, “but paramount”.”

Feminize Your Canon: Isabelle Eberhardt (Emma Garman, The Paris Review, February 2019) 

Whether the women in this list are alive today or were 100 years ago, I can imagine them coming across Sylvia Plath’s journals and underlining the following in a fury of black ink:

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars — to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording — all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery.  My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night. 

Isabelle Eberhardt did all those things. Around the turn of the 20th century, she was dressing as a man and burning across the Sahara on trains, on horseback, and on whatever money she had. She was buying skinned hares from Bedouins, couch-surfing with sheiks, or throwing the last of her cash from town windows because who needs material things? For this Swiss Russian writer, the thrill of sensation came in tasting cigarettes, anisette, and other bodies. It lay in the intoxication of running from the French police in anti-colonial protests turned violent. 

It’d be easy to focus solely on these salacious details of Eberhardt’s life, and Emma Garman is very good at finding delicious vignettes (“on her travels she’d carried a gun, but not a toothbrush” and was known as a child for dancing “about like a little wild animal along the garden paths”), yet what I love most about this essay is the ultimate focus on Eberhardt’s writing. 

These writings, which foreground the lives and experiences of North Africans, have established Eberhardt as a vital early critic of imperial rule. Her perspective, according to the Tunisian scholar Hédi A. Jaouad, “may have inaugurated the theme of decolonization in the Maghreb, for it expounded a theory of sociology and oppression whose theorists and critics would later include, among Francophone writers, the Martinican Frantz Fanon and the Tunisian Albert Memmi.”

Despite the compulsions — sex, drugs, alcohol, travel — that occupied her waking hours, her writing was of central importance, and she was eager for publication. She was driven to maintain, she wrote, “two lives, one that is full of adventure and belongs to the Desert, and one, calm and restful, devoted to thought and far from all that might interfere with it.”

Alexandra David-Néel (David Guy, Tricycle, Fall 1995)

In Eberhardt, in all these women, I adore their ability to thread words around the elementals — sun, wind, water — until they feel, in the words of Berlin revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, “at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” But you don’t need to go on a big trip to feel that. You can walk under twilight trees. Or open a window. Or listen to the rain. Maybe. Sometimes I think I’d like to just go off for years, travel, return, go, and return. Alexandra David-Néel did just that. She was a Belgian-French opera singer who practiced Buddhism in Asia through her 20s, then married a railroad engineer named Philippe Néel in Tunis in 1904. 

Once she had everything her childhood in Paris had taught her to want — a rich husband, a villa, days filled with luncheons — David-Néel unraveled into a world of headaches, nausea, and exhaustion. What she actually wanted was contemplation and adventure.  Attempting to satiate her desires, she’d go off and meditate in “perfect detachment” for an hour each day. But she wanted more of that. More and more and more. 

While her husband was away healing in Vichy’s thermal baths, she left for Asia to further her Buddhist studies. She studied with the Gomchen of Lachen, an esteemed hermit sorcerer. She meditated in a mountain cave for two winters. With a young monk whom she’d later adopt, she disguised herself as a Tibetan and set off through the Himalayas to the forbidden city of Lhasa. What a life! But I’m not sure David-Néel would like how contemporary writers tend to stake stories like hers onto narratives about how “free” a woman can be. The yak butter and rock shelters and people who sheltered her were intertwined with her. She knew that. Independence? No, no. We’re all as connected as can be. 

David Guy doesn’t do this. In this straightforward biography for Shambhala — where he elegantly recounts her life from birth to death — he takes care to focus instead on her religious beliefs. Guy also reminds us that there are many ways of seeing a story. It’s easy now to attribute a kind of colonial arrogance to David-Néel’s flouting of international borders, as she sidesteps into a kingdom that had purposefully closed itself off to foreigners. But Guy reads her actions differently: “To the Tibetans, it seemed perfectly logical for Alexandra David-Néel to have traveled to Lhasa: she was returning to the site of a previous incarnation.”

David-Néel was famous as an adventuress, but that description doesn’t seem adequate to her real accomplishments. She left behind voluminous writings, many of which have not been translated into English, and these are authentic not just because of her scholarship, but because of her lifelong practice. A woman who spent years in a mountain hermitage, who sat in meditation halls with thousands of lamas, who studied languages and scoured libraries for original teachings, who traveled for many years and for thousands of miles to immerse herself in a culture which few people had ever even heard of, writes with far more insight than someone who has only read about such experiences. It is her devotion to Buddhism and her willingness to trace it to its source that are finally most impressive about her life.

Adventurer Elise Wortley Recreates the Journeys of Famous Female Explorers (Claire Turrell, Smithsonian Magazine, March 2023) 

London’s Elise Wortley, aka Woman With Altitude, recently retraced Alexandra David-Néel’s footsteps through the Himalayas without modern-day equipment. She carried her things in a homemade “chairpack.” She wore yak wool clothes instead of Gore-Tex. Having interviewed Wortley about her experience for Outside, I can confidently say she was having the time of her life. (She also spent a summer in the Cairngorms — dressed like Nan Shepherd in a bandana, some tweed, some wartime boots.) 

I like that in this piece about Wortley, Claire Turrell also includes details from an interview with British fashion historian Kate Strasdin, who says that some early women hikers would have cords “sewn into the inside of their skirts, so they could raise them a bit like a Roman blind when they were climbing,” adding, “[o]ne explorer, after climbing snowy slopes, used to tuck her skirts underneath her and use it like a toboggan.”

I was also very excited to see Wortley reveal some of her future plans in this interview. I’d watch a series about this on BBC Sunday primetime over another Bear Grylls show, any day. 

Wortley’s wanderlust has only grown. The 33-year-old now has a wish list of 150 expeditions she’d like to take, all reliving the exploits of past adventurers.

“Some are more possible to do than others,” says Wortley. “There is Bessie Coleman who was the first woman of African American and Native American descent to earn her pilot’s licence in the U.S., who was famous for doing loop-the-loops. One thing I’d like to do is get a vintage plane and someone to teach me how to do loop-the-loops.”

But for now, the modern adventurer plans to bike across Sri Lanka to celebrate the journey of Annie Londonderry, who circumnavigated the globe by bicycle, leaving Massachusetts State House in Boston in June 1894, with a pearl-handled pistol in her pocket (though that’s one addition Wortley is sure to leave out of her suitcase). “I’m trying to get a bike from the 1800s,” Wortley says. “I might have to get it made.”

Wortley is also planning to sail across the Irish Sea in the wake of 16th-century pirate Grace O’Malley, who journeyed from Ireland to England to petition Queen Elizabeth I for the release of her son in September 1593.

“First, I would love to dress like a 16th-century pirate,” laughs Wortley. “But I would love to bring together a group of women and an old gully boat and row from west Ireland to Greenwich.”

A Six-Day Walk Through the Alps, Inspired by Simone de Beauvoir (Emily Witt, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, October 2016) 

Witt writes like a dream on just about anything (Björk, mescaline, orgasmic meditation). And I’m glad that, in this piece, she’s entwining her thoughts on existential philosophy and solitude, personal freedom, and life’s reality for refugees. I suppose it’d be very easy to instead fawn over simple beauty — the French Alps’ wildflower meadows and llamas and lilacs. Surely readers of a travel essay for T Magazine would lap up details like those. But Emily Witt does not fawn. Not over flowers. Not even over Simone de Beauvoir. Instead, she examines. She observes. I can trust a writer like that. 

On the last day I had a daylong descent overlooking the Mediterranean, my knees on the verge of giving out as I picked through rocks and along switchbacks to sea level. The landscape had changed from a stark moonscape to humid deciduous brush to bleached rocks and semi-arid plants. Discarded jeans and plastic water bottles began to litter the underbrush, and then I was walking behind gated villas with manicured topiaries, swimming pools, an aviary of tropical birds. I emerged suddenly at a marina with a flat view of the sea. I had done it. I changed out of my hiking boots on a park bench as motorbikes whizzed along the promenade, then hobbled to the station to take a train to Nice. It was the first station after the border with Italy, and as I approached I saw a group of men of African and Middle Eastern descent being led into a police van, also carrying their backpacks.

It is a delusion to think that life has no wills but your own, or that you can thrive without the care and concern of others. But sometimes you can engineer a temporary condition, and produce a sense of accomplishment and self-reliance that uplifts you. For six days it was enough, as Beauvoir put it, to think of nothing but “flowers and beasts and stony tracks and wide horizons, the pleasurable sensation of possessing legs and lungs and a stomach.”

Skiing and Nothingness (Rachel Kushner, Harper’s, April 2022)

I’d never wish for a mum and dad other than the ones who raised me. But if I’d had Rachel Kushner’s beatnik-ski bum parents leaving me on bunny runs from a young age, I’d be a much better skier than I am today.

At a certain point in my twenties… I could no longer tolerate ski culture. So much time with the [Berkeley Dirt Bag] ski team had burned me out. That realm was bro talk, gear talk, and it excluded too much of the world, and too much of interiority. It still is like that. It reaches new heights in Teton Gravity Research movies, which feature incredible skiers pondering, idiotically, the meanings of “stoke” and “dude.” I’m not threatened by that now. What bothered me, long ago, was the way this dumbing down drew my attention to an internal conflict between mind and body, between thought, the desire to do something creative with my life, and skiing, which came naturally, but excluded art and literature. I could hang with the ski bums, but they were a mirror of what I didn’t want to be. This conflict resolved itself on a life-changing trip with Ben [Benjamin Weissman, the artist and writer] and the artist Peter Doig, who, like Ben, is a fast and strong skier. We were a team, tearing around the mountain, but bantering in the gondola about, say, the pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi, or being quiet, tending to our inner selves. (Some of Doig’s paintings, I came to later understand, are like scenes through snowy goggles.) Skiing, I decided on that trip, could be strange and various, hilarious, with no compromise in speed or steeps.

Going It Alone (Rahawa Haile, Outside, April 2017) 

The Appalachian Trail is one of the most demanding hikes on Earth. Over 2,200 miles, hikers can expect blisters to bubble up and toenails to blacken and fall off. Joints to swell. T-shirts to disintegrate with sweat. For Eritrean-American writer Rahawa Haile, hiking the AT alone during the political upheaval of summer 2016, it wasn’t just these physical demands she had to face — it was also racism. 

In her essay for Outside, Haile says that although her fellow thru-hikers and trail angels were some of the kindest people she ever encountered, by the time she made it through Maryland, “it was hard not to think of the Appalachian Trail as a 2,190-mile trek through Trump lawn signs.” As she walked from Georgia to Maine, Confederate flags flew from hiker hostels to the RVs that swarmed the campgrounds. 

There were days when the only thing that kept me going was knowing that each step was one toward progress, a boot to the granite face of white supremacy. I belong here, I told the trail. It rewarded me in lasting ways. The weight I carried as a black woman paled in comparison with the joy I felt daily among my peers in that wilderness. They shaped my heart into what it will be for the rest of my life.

She Wants to be Alone (Rhian Sasseen, Aeon, February 2015) 

I have a strong desire to quote this whole essay, but I’m going to restrain myself and just say I love this piece for asking in its dek, “When even a simple stroll down the sidewalk is an exercise in self-loathing, why don’t more women run away to the woods?” Rhian Sasseen goes on to ask, what does it even look like to be a hermit if you’re a woman? Perhaps it looks like the life of ecologist and author Anne LaBastille, who built a cabin alone on the shores of a remote lake in the Adirondacks in the 1960s. Perhaps it’s in the visionary experiences of Orgyen Chökyi, the 17th-century Tibetan Buddhist nun. Or in the trials of Mary of Egypt when she fled for the desert in the fourth century. An essay to make you think.

To be alone, you need to know who exactly you are.

There is a reason why humans prefer groups of two or more: it’s easier. It’s easier to delegate tasks, to point to one person and say: You will find our food; to tell another: You will lead us along the way. In fairy tales, kings and hermits are always finding each other. An Italian fairy tale features a holy hermit (male, of course) who, after helping a youth win both a princess and a kingdom’s worth of gold, demands half of everything, princess included. When the youth draws his sword, moving to cut the princess apart, the hermit relents, happy to see that the young man ‘held his honour dearer than his wife’.

The princess is the prize. But Mary of Egypt was no princess. Alone, only one person makes the decisions. Food, shelter, water – they’re all one person’s responsibility. This is what true freedom looks like: if you fuck up, you’re dead. If you don’t, you survive. If you survive, congratulations: no one owns you.

The Inuit Woman Who Survived Alone on an Arctic Island After a Disastrous Expedition (Kieran Mulvaney, History, November 2021)

Ada Blackjack was 23, living in Nome, and desperate for work when four explorers came to town and hired her as a seamstress for their expedition to Wrangel Island. For the next year, it was agreed that Blackjack would come along to sew winter gear out of animal hides for them. 

Wrangel sits 100 miles north of Siberia. It’s a 2,900-square-mile sweep of fog and ice, polar bears and snow geese. When the group arrived on the uninhabited island in 1921, it seems they were in good spirits. They ate stews and bear blubber. They played with Vic, the housecat they’d brought with them. They ate their supplies of hard candy and tins of bread. They slept in canvas tents and seemingly weren’t too worried about rationing. After all, come summer, a fresh crew was going to replace them. 

The crew never came. That summer, the island remained surrounded by thick pack ice. They were stuck. No candy. No bread. Just the abyss of another winter, rushing in to meet them. Three of the four men attempted to cross the ocean ice to find help in Siberia. They were never seen again. Now it was just Blackjack, Vic the cat, and one remaining abusive crewmember — Lorne Knight — who was bedridden with scurvy and eventually died.  

Blackjack, an Iñupiat woman, had little experience hunting or living off the land — she’d spent her childhood at a Methodist mission school. But she looked after herself anyway. She barricaded the tent with boxes to protect Knight’s corpse from wild animals. She figured out how to trap white foxes and shoot seals for food. She picked roots and built a high platform so she could spot polar bears from far away. Then, after two long years on the island, a ship finally came her way. 

I wish I could tell you Ada Blackjack spent the rest of her days in comfort and peace, being fêted from a comfortable distance. That’s not her path. Still, she’s a survivor. 

Kevin Mulvaney brings her story to life in this detailed account of the terrible expedition to Wrangel.

On August 20, she woke from her slumber believing she had heard a noise. She heard it again. And again. She grabbed her field glasses and rushed outside. The perpetual fog enshrouded the island, but for a brief moment it lifted and through her glasses, she saw a ship. She raced down to the beach and splashed into the water just as a boat reached the shore.

She expected Crawford, Maurer, and Galle to be on board; the man who stepped out of the boat, Stefansson accomplice Harold Noice, expected them to be ashore. With the first words they exchanged, they both realized the full gravity of the situation. Ada Blackjack, the Iñupiat seamstress who had been a reluctant afterthought on the expedition, who had been belittled and berated and tied up, who had had to teach herself to hunt and trap and live in the Arctic, was the last survivor. She was alive, and she was going home to her son. And with that, she collapsed into Noice’s arms and cried.

Ailsa Ross writes about people, place, and art for The Guardian, Outside, The BBC, and many others. Her first book is The Girl Who Rode a Shark: And Other Stories of Daring Women.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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THAT YEAR, Jess’s daughter Halima turned 19, the same age Jess was when she had her. Halima was working that summer in Belize, where Jess’s mother lived and owned a cafe. Jess’s mother once had a publishing business near Detroit. Detroit is where Jess met her ex, Halima’s father, who she left after three years squirrelling away leftover grocery money, the only money her ex had ever allowed her for her independence. Jess kept a secret credit card, she told me, and left their home only with the clothes she was wearing. She went to her stepdad’s, applied for a trucking job, and was on a bus to a training facility in Indiana four days later. Halima spent fifth grade on the road. They solved math problems with dry erase markers on the truck’s windows and played catch in warehouse parking lots. On Halloween, Jess was picking up at a Hershey’s facility in Virginia. Normally security guards give truckers a chocolate bar or two, but when Halima said, “Trick or treat!” the guard dumped his whole basket of chocolates into her pillowcase. That was in 2012.

TWO MONTHS AFTER WE MET, Jess invited me to Las Vegas, where she and her friends from REAL Women in Trucking were gathering for the organization’s annual “Queen of the Road” ceremony. On a hot August night, we met up at a patio bar in the Flamingo Hotel and Casino, where actual Chilean flamingos lived in a marshy enclosure with catfish and koi. She was sitting, with Halima, at a long wooden table surrounded by women truckers. “This is Idella,” Jess said, introducing me to a silver-haired woman wearing a white button-down patterned with palm fronds. I recognized her name from admiring stories Jess had shared on the road. Idella told me she was based in Arkansas, where she moved high-value goods. “When I sit in the seat, there’s something in the diesel that turns into I’ve got to go,” she told me. “I’m good at what I do. The harder it is, the more challenging it is, the more I like it. Without a challenge, I have no purpose.”

For much of the time, her pregnancy is disconcertingly normal, though she has stopped going in for regular checkups to escape the company of expectant mothers. Deborah can feel the baby pushing against her ribs and hips and deep into her pelvis, causing pain that she believes comes from the lack of fluid cushioning the baby. On occasion she pushes back, mother and child adjusting to the give-and-take of life together.

In December, Deborah says,she texted the coordinator at the maternal fetal medicine office regularly, hoping to schedule an induction by Christmas. The response stunned her: After consulting health-system administrators about the law, the specialist concluded Deborah would have to wait until close to full term, around 37 weeks gestation, she recalled the coordinator telling her.

The doctor made his determination after having “legal/administration look at the new law and the way it’s written,” the coordinator reiterated to Deborah in a recent text message she shared with The Post. “It’s horribly written,” the text continued.

For Deborah, that meant resigning herself to a two-month wait, during which her anxiety and depression built.

From then on, Helen understood without question that if she left Miles, many people would die. She would die, the kids would die, and others – police or neighbours or whoever else Miles could take down – would die, too. Of that, she had absolutely no doubt.

Helen’s case was tough. She’d been charged with first-degree murder, and if a jury could be convinced the shooting was planned – even if that meant getting the gun and loading it moments before – she’d spend 25 years in prison before she could even apply for parole. Her conduct after the shooting, in disposing of Miles’s body and reporting him missing, wasn’t particularly sympathetic. And despite being a victim of severe physical and mental abuse for nearly 30 years, a psychologist who assessed Helen didn’t diagnose her as having battered woman syndrome. Her memory could be poor, and it was difficult – even impossible – for her to open up about the things she and her sons had endured.