When I was a child, my father took me to the river—the mighty Ohio—so I could walk on water. It was January 1977, the second-coldest winter on record in Cincinnati. Twenty-eight days below zero led to a river freeze 12 inches thick. The river became a bridge between regions we have named Ohio and Kentucky, the North and the South. The Ohio froze more commonly in the 19th century than in the 20th, and the last time was more than 40 years ago. Given climate change, it is unlikely to freeze ever again. But I will always remember the sight of that formidable river transformed into a wintry walkway, and the sense of the impossible becoming possible.

I felt a closeness with that bridge of a river, but I didn’t learn until later that this was a river with a history of bearing enslaved Black people to freedom. On another January day, one of the coldest on record, in 1856, Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman in Kentucky, tried to escape with her family across the frozen river. The Garners were not alone in making a bid for freedom that January night. Nine other enslaved people also escaped in what newspapers disparagingly called a “stampede of slaves” down the “ice bridge” of the Ohio River.

[From the October 1948 issue: Mark Twain’s river]

Margaret’s story had been famous in the 19th century, but it faded from public consciousness until Toni Morrison used it as inspiration for Beloved. Margaret had been born an enslaved girl in Kentucky, near the river. The man who owned her, Archibald Gaines, started preying on her as a teenager. By the time she was 22, Margaret had been permitted to informally marry a local enslaved man named Robert Garner (informal because the law did not recognize marriage between unfree people) and had four children. Some of them were likely fathered by Gaines—the youngest was said to look nearly white. When she found herself pregnant with a fifth child, perhaps something inside Margaret snapped. She decided, in a state of desperation and daring, to escape up the river.

The family reached the home of Margaret’s free relatives in Ohio, but their reprieve was brutally brief. With armed officers by his side and the Fugitive Slave Law at his back, Archibald Gaines stormed the house and recaptured them. Margaret attempted to take the life of her children before allowing them to be enslaved again. She killed the youngest child and was put on trial. The court returned the family to Gaines, who immediately sold them down river into the Deep South.

Others did make it to lasting freedom up the frozen river. In 1893, former U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes told the historian W. H. Siebert that in the winters of 1850, 1851, 1852, 1853, 1855, and 1856, “the river was frozen over and crossing made everywhere practicable.” Hayes noted that this was “soon after the fugitive slave law” had passed. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 permitted the recapture of fugitives in the North and mandated that citizens cooperate in their forcible return, while severely penalizing those who aided self-liberating Black people. The law sent shockwaves of fear through free Black communities, where many former captives resided even as the law both targeted and radicalized abolitionists of all racial backgrounds.

We could say that the Ohio River froze for nearly five years straight after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law entirely by chance. But I don’t quite believe that. As a Black woman writer, I see this wily river as my inspiration, a reminder that despite the traumas of history and amid our current trials, nature can be a bridge.

“Outdoors” is a vast and variegated category. Yet many still see the outdoors as a narrow kind of wild zone visited solely by white people—either liberal day trippers in REI fleece interested in conservation or rural farmers and hunters dedicated to “traditional values.” African Americans are rarely imagined in these landscapes, except perhaps for in the past, picking cotton on southern plantations. Yet even exploited laborers lived significant lives outdoors. Many welcomed the natural world as an ally; nature, in turn, lent them comfort and insight. They were inspired by the wild spaces on the edges of our built environments, where life followed different rules. Nature was a classroom that taught them how to question societal beliefs and practices.

I began to think of Black liberation activists such as Harriet Tubman differently when I started to imagine the pronounced ecological consciousness required to survive enslavement and mastermind escapes across “wild” spaces.

[Read: Harriet Tubman was my wonder woman]  

Tubman was born an amphibious girl around 1821 into slavery on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay and destined through strife and experiment to mature into mastery of both land and water. She grew up as much outdoors as in—“like a neglected weed, ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it,” she confided to an interviewer. She chafed at the requirements of domestic production and household service and dreaded being cornered in rooms where enslavers could surveil and mistreat her. According to one biographer, she refused to learn to weave, “for she hated her mistress, and did not want to live at home.”

Tubman preferred being outdoors and indeed that became her primary workplace as a series of owners recognized her aptitude for field, farm, and forest labor. The landscape was still one of exploitation and yet, as Karen Hill, the director of the Harriet Tubman Home in New York, once said, Tubman “was able to separate the brutality of slavery from how she loved the land.”

When Harriet was born, the middle child of nine, her grieving parents had already lost children to the slave market. As fertile soils were exhausted and the tobacco economy faltered, slaveholders began looking to other financial opportunities. When she was only 6 or 7, Harriet was hired out by Edward Brodess, the owner of Harriet’s mother and hence of Harriet and her siblings. She was sent miles from home to labor for James Cook and his wife. There she was made to perform all manner of work inside and out, including wading through the cold, brackish waters near the Chesapeake Bay to collect muskrats from traps Cook had placed so that he could sell the creatures’ pelts. She fell ill with the measles and was sent home, where her mother nursed her back to health only to have Brodess lease Harriet out once more.

This time she was sent to the household of a white woman, Miss Susan, with a new baby. Because Harriet, not yet 10, could not keep the baby quiet or the furniture dusted to Susan’s satisfaction, she was beaten regularly, and bore the scars for the rest of her life. Once she snuck a lump of sugar and then, when she saw Susan reach for the whip, fled and hid in a pigpen on a nearby farm for four to five days. Harriet slept and ate with the little pigs and their mother until she became afraid that the sow would harm her for taking too much food from the trough. Hungry, dirty, and exhausted, Harriet returned to Susan’s household, where she was beaten without mercy.  

Harriet paid a terrible price for her recalcitrance, but she also learned that if she were daring enough and willing to risk deprivation and punishment, she could survive for days on her own outdoors.

Later, she worked for a man whose business was timber. She learned the mysteries of the forest, picking up which leaves, berries, and nuts were edible and in which direction the water flowed—north to south. In 1849, when she was around 27, she used this knowledge to escape, following the North Star to Philadelphia. Tubman would return for her brothers in December of 1854. Over the next decade, she traveled to the South approximately 13 times, helping 70 to 80 individuals liberate themselves.

Harriet preferred to travel in winter when longer nights afforded the fugitives greater cover. She followed the North Star to keep her bearings. She sustained herself and companions with wild foods when necessary. Neither she nor her fellow travelers, including infants and children, were ever recaptured during these journeys. Tubman’s remarkable success depended on numerous factors, not least of which were her own striking intelligence and daring, as well as the existence of a multiracial secret network of Underground Railroad activists. But her knowledge of and relationship with the outdoors was a significant, too-often-overlooked element of her accomplishment. She was, in the words of Angela Crenshaw, a former ranger at  the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park, “the ultimate outdoors woman.”

Harriet Tubman’s reliance on the North Star to navigate to freedom is legendary. But fewer know about her experience of an event that took place years earlier, back when she was still enslaved in Maryland, around the age of 11, on “the night the stars fell.”

Harriet told one of her associates the story. She would sneak out at night to see her mother, who had been hired to work on another farm and was staying in a far-off cabin. While Harriet visited, one of her brothers would stand guard outside to watch for white men who patrolled the roads, hunting for slaves out of place. Suddenly her brother called to Harriet to “come out and see the stars!” Harriet peered into the darkness where the stars were “all shooting whichway.” In that moment she thought “the end of the world had come.”

She was witness to the spectacular and widely reported astrological event known as the 1833 Leonid meteor storm. Overnight on November 12 and 13, approximately 100,000 fiery, white “stars” (in actuality, particles cast off from the comet Tempel-Tuttle) plummeted toward the Earth like a cascade of firecrackers.

Jane Clark saw the stars fall too. Years later she escaped to New York with the assistance of the Underground Railroad network. Jane would tell her story to a white neighbor, Julia Ferris, who wrote it down and read it aloud at a banquet in 1897.

[Read: What Steve King doesn’t understand about Harriet Tubman]

Jane Clark was raised in an unnamed southern state in the home of her maternal grandmother until age 6 or 7, when she was “taken in payment of a debt.” The person who then owned Jane hired her out when she was 8. Jane labored “with two other children, to bring water a long distance from a spring for culinary purposes for all on the plantation.” Toting containers of heavy water would have been onerous for adults and excruciating for children. As Jane recalled, the youngsters would “start out about four o’clock in the morning make two trips before breakfast four before dinner and one before supper. The hair was worn off their heads by the water pails which the children carried on them.”

The most dramatic hours of the Leonid spectacle occurred between 2 a.m. and dawn, just when little Jane and her fellows rose from their mats or dirt floors to collect the drinking and cooking water. “The children were on their way to the spring,” Jane’s story goes, when the sky erupted. “They were not old enough to be alarmed by the unusual sight but ran along trying to catch the stars as they fell.”

Another formerly enslaved child, Maria, spoke of how the stars “fell like a sheet and spread over the ground.” A man in South Carolina named Wesley Jones recalled: “Heep o’ stars fell when I was young.” Stories were passed to the next generation. One woman remembered her grandmother describing how “she run out of the house to pick up a star,” only to find “they showered down and disappeared.”

Fear and awe course through the testimony of enslaved people who described the meteor shower in oral accounts captured in interviews in the 1930s. “She said it turned dark,” Lizzie Johnson of Arkansas said about her grandmother’s recollection. “She said it was bad times. People was scared half to death.”

Stories of the stars and the meanings enslaved people made of this dramatic occurrence circulate among descendants even today. In an essay titled “The Night the Stars Fell: My Search for Amanda Young,” Angela Walton-Raji, a genealogist specializing in African American and Native American family research, reconstructs a story passed down from her great grandmother Amanda, who was enslaved in Tennessee as a girl:

Somebody in the quarters started yellin’ in the middle of the night to come out to look up at the sky. We went outside and there they was a fallin’ everywhere! Big stars coming down real close to the groun’ and just before they hit the ground they would burn up! We was all scared. Some o’ the folks was screamin’, and some was prayin’. We all made so much noise, the white folks came out to see what was happenin’. They looked up and then they got scared, too. But then the white folks started callin’ all the slaves together, and for no reason, they started tellin’ some of the slaves who their mothers and fathers was, and who they’d been sold to and where. The old folks was so glad to hear where their people went. They made sure we all knew what happened … you see, they thought it was Judgement Day.

Amanda and her fellow enslaved recognized a new truth that night, as their owners trembled in fear beneath an unleashing sky: There existed a power greater than white people’s mastery.

The natural world did not follow the legal codes of the slave states, or even of the United States writ large. Nature abided by the laws of physics, or rather, by the laws of God, and therefore operated above and beyond slavery’s human-made systems. Storms and floods, drought and disease, could hurt the mighty as well as the weak.

Richard Caruthers from Texas commented sharply, about his owner confronting the limits of mastery that upside-down night: “Them stars was over his power.”

Surely these memories pressed inside the souls of Black folk like bright leaves pressed into autumn soils, creating moist, fertile ground for self-knowledge, resistance, and resilience. Enslaved people had a critical awareness of their ecological contexts that we tend to overlook. In the stirrings of the natural world, they identified an essential, rare earth element: hope.

What did Harriet Tubman think of the star-fall? She may have been filled with awe or fear, seen both danger and reassurance in the event. She may have read it as a sign that God was active in the world. And if so, perhaps she took this to mean that God was prepared to punish enslavers. At the least, the meteor spray was an indication that miracles could take place outdoors. Stars fall. Rivers freeze over.

This article is adapted from Tiya Miles’s new book, Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation.

We are all shedding data like skin cells. Almost everything we do with, or simply in proximity to, a connected device generates some small bit of information—about who we are, about the device we’re using and the other devices nearby, about what we did and when and how and for how long. Sometimes doing nothing at all—merely lingering on a webpage—is recorded as a relevant piece of information. Sometimes simply walking past a Wi-Fi router is a data point to be captured and processed. Sometimes the connected device isn’t a phone or a computer, as such; sometimes it’s a traffic light or a toaster or a toilet. If it is our phone, and we have location services enabled—which many people do, so that they can get delivery and Find My Friends and benefit from the convenience of turn-by-turn directions—our precise location data are being constantly collected and transmitted. We pick up our devices and command them to open the world for us, which they do quite well. But they also produce a secondary output too—all those tiny flecks of dead skin floating around us.

Our data are everywhere because our data are useful. Mostly to make people money: When someone opens up their phone’s browser and clicks on a link—to use the most basic example—a whole hidden economy whirs into gear. Tracking pixels and cookies capture their information and feed it to different marketers and companies, which aggregate it with information gleaned from other people and other sites and use it to categorize us into “interest segments.” The more data gathered, the easier it is to predict who we are, what we like, where we live, whom we might vote for, how much money we might have, what we might like to buy with it. Once our information has been collected, it ricochets around a labyrinthine ad-tech ecosystem made up of thousands of companies that offer to make sense of, and serve hyper-targeted ads based on, it.

Our privacy is what the internet eats to live. Participating in some part or another of the ad-tech industry is how most every website and app we use makes money. But ad targeting isn’t the only thing our data are good for. Health-care companies and wearables makers want our medical history and biometric data—when and how we sleep; our respiratory rate, heart rate, steps, mile times; even our sexual habits—to feed us insights via their products. Cameras and sensors, on street corners and on freeways, in schools and in offices, scan faces and license plates in order to make us safer or identify traffic patterns. Monitoring software tracks students taking tests and logs the keystrokes of corporate employees. Even if not all of our information goes toward selling ads, it goes somewhere. It is collected, bought, sold, copied, logged, archived, aggregated, exploited, leaked to reporters, scrutinized by intelligence analysts, stolen by hackers, subjected to any number of hypothetical actions—good and bad, but mostly unknowable. The only certainty is that once our information is out there, we’re not getting it back.

It’s scary and concerning, but mostly it’s overwhelming. In modern life, data are omnipresent. And yet, it is impossible to zoom out and see the entire picture, the full patchwork quilt of our information ecosystem. The philosopher Timothy Morton has a term for elements of our world that behave this way: A hyperobject is a concept so big and complex that it can’t be adequately described. Both our data and the way they are being compromised are hyperobjects.

Climate change is one too: If somebody asks you what the state of climate change is, simply responding that “it is bad” is accurate, but a wild oversimplification. As with climate change, we can all too easily look at the state of our digital privacy, feel absolutely buried in bad news, and become a privacy doomer, wallowing in the realization that we are giving our most intimate information to the largest and most powerful companies on Earth and have been for decades. Just as easy is reading this essay and choosing nihilism, resigning yourself to being the victim of surveillance, so much that you don’t take precautions.

These are meager options, even if they can feel like the only ones available. Digital privacy isn’t some binary problem we can think of as purely solvable. It is the base condition and the broader context of our connected lives. It is dynamic, meaning that it is a negotiation between ourselves and the world around us. It is something to be protected and preserved, and in a perfect world, we ought to be able to guard or shed it as we see fit. But in this world, the balance of power is tilted out of our reach. Imagine you’re in a new city. You’re downloading an app to buy a ticket for a train that’s fast approaching. Time is of the essence. You hurriedly scroll through a terms-of-service agreement and, without reading, click “Accept.” You’ve technically entered a contractual agreement. Now consider that in such a moment, you might as well be sitting at a conference table. On one side is a team of high-priced corporate lawyers, working diligently to shield their deep-pocketed clients from liability while getting what they need from you. On the other side is you, a person in a train station trying to download an app. Not a fair fight.

So one way to think of privacy is as a series of choices. If you’d like a service to offer you turn-by-turn directions, you choose to give it your location. If you’d like a shopping website to remember what’s in your cart, you choose to allow cookies. But companies have gotten good at exploiting these choices and, in many cases, obscuring the true nature of them. Clicking “Agree” on an app’s terms of service, might mean, in the eyes of an exploitative company, that the app will not only take the information you’re giving up but will sell it to, or share it with, other companies.

Understanding that we give these companies an inch and they take a mile is crucial to demystifying their most common defense: the privacy paradox. That term was first coined in 2001 by an HP researcher named Barry Brown who was trying to explain why early internet users seemed concerned about data collection but were “also willing to lose that privacy for very little gain” in the form of supermarket loyalty-rewards programs. People must not actually care so much about their privacy, the argument goes, because they happily use the tools and services that siphon off their personal data. Maybe you’ve even convinced yourself of this after almost two decades of devoted Facebooking and Googling.

But the privacy paradox is a facile framework for a complex issue. Daniel J. Solove, a professor at George Washington University Law School, argues the paradox does not exist, in part because “managing one’s privacy is a vast, complex, and never-ending project that does not scale.” In a world where we are constantly shedding data and thousands of companies are dedicated to collecting it, “people can’t learn enough about privacy risks to make informed decisions,” he wrote in a 2020 article. And so resignedly and haphazardly managing our personal privacy is all we can do from day to day. We have no alternative.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t care. Even if we don’t place a high value on our personal data privacy, we might have strong concerns about the implications of organizations surveilling us and profiting off the collection of our information. “The value of privacy isn’t based on one’s particular choice in a particular context; privacy’s value involves the right to have choices and protections,” Solove argues. “People can value having the choice even if they choose to trade away their personal data; and people can value others having the right to make the choice for themselves.”

This notion is fundamental to another way to think of privacy: as a civil right. That’s what the scholar Danielle Keats Citron argues in her book The Fight for Privacy. Privacy is freedom, and freedom is necessary for humans to thrive. But protecting that right is difficult, because privacy-related harm is diffuse and can come in many different forms: At its most extreme, it can be physical (violence and doxing), reputational (the release of embarassing or incorrect information), or psychological (the emotional distress that comes along with having your intimate information taken from you). But, according to work by Solove and Citron, proving harm that goes beyond concrete economic loss is difficult in legal terms.

Citron argues in her book that we need a new social compact, one that includes civic education about privacy and why it is important. Simply understanding our right to privacy won’t vaporize overly permissive, opt-out data collection. It won’t completely correct the balance of power. But it will begin to give us a language for what is at stake when a new company or service demands our information with few safeguards. This education is not just for children but for everyone: executives, tech employees, lawmakers. It is a way to make the fight a bit fairer.

And how should we think about our data—all that digital dandruff? Scale is part of the problem here: Giving up an individual piece of location data may not feel all that meaningful, but having all of your movements tracked might constitute a violation. Context is also important: A piece of private sexual-health data may be a guarded secret of life-and-death import to the person it originated from; to a health-care conglomerate, that data point may be worth a fraction of a fraction of a cent. But when data are sliced and categorized and placed into profiles and buckets, their value increases. In 2020, Facebook made 97.9 percent of its revenue—nearly $85 billion—off of targeted ads, pinpointed by such data collection. Data, in the aggregate, is an asset class, one that powers innovative technologies and inflates bottom lines.

In a 2019 essay, the technologist Can Duruk discussed an analogy that, he admits, is a bit cliché: Data is the new oil. Extracting it is dirty, and storing it is dangerous. “We are barely recognizing the negative externalities of decades of oil production and consumption now, and it took us almost destroying the planet,” he writes. “We should do a better job for data.”

It’s interesting to imagine a society that would force companies to treat data as an oil-like commodity, something valuable, rather than digital ephemera in inexhaustible supply—where not only would the environmental toll of leaks and spills be remedied but victims could attempt to hold liable those trusted with storage. Maybe we’d demand a sort of supply-chain transparency to trace the flow of the product around the world. Maybe we’d find a way to quantify the externality.

Digital privacy’s climate-change analogy is not perfect, but when it comes to calls to action, the parallel is helpful. No single law or innovation could adequately reshape the world we’ve spent decades building. Quick fixes or sweeping legislative changes may very well have unintended consequences. We cannot totally reverse what we’ve put into motion. But there is always a reason to push for a better future. Last year, the environmentalist, author, and activist Bill McKibben wrote about a climate question he hears frequently: How bad is it? He is unsparing in his assessment but never overly alarmist. “Despair is not an option yet,” he writes. “At least if it’s that kind of despair that leads to inaction. But desperation is an option—indeed, it’s required. We have to move hard and fast.”

When reckoning with a subject as complex and fundamental as our digital privacy, metaphor is appealing—I’ve certainly reached for it throughout this essay. Our information is oil: a pollutant, a liability, a thing that powers the world. It’s skin cells: floating all around us. It’s a hyperobject: impossible to understand in its entirety all at once. If our data are what the internet feeds off of, maybe each piece—every datum, every bit of information from every tiny thing we do—is a calorie: incredibly powerful in the aggregate but invisible and incomprehensible to the naked eye, a sort of hypo-object.

We keep grasping for these metaphors because all are helpful, but none is quite sufficient. The internet as we know it is a glorious, awful, intricate, sprawling series of networks that needs our information in order to function. We cannot go back to a time before this was true—before turn-by-turn directions and eerily well-targeted ads, before we carried little data-collection machines in our pockets all day—and nor would all of us want to. But we can demand much more from the reckless stewards of our information. That starts with understanding what exactly has been taken from us. The fight for our privacy isn’t just about knowing what is collected and where it goes—it is about reimagining what we’re required to sacrifice for our conveniences and for a greater economic system. It is an acknowledgement of the trade-offs of living in a connected world, but focusing on what humans need to flourish. What is at stake is nothing less than our basic right to move through the world on our terms, to define and share ourselves as we desire.