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.