Accessing the least-crowded section of New York’s Lido Beach requires either money or insider knowledge. Anyone staying at one of the hotels on the beach can walk through the lobby, and those living in the adjoining town can waltz in through a separate gate using a residents-only electronic access code. Everyone else, though, has to come in through a public entrance half a mile away and walk over the sand.

In theory, some portion of every beach in the coastal United States is reserved for collective use—even those that border private property. But exactly how big that portion is varies widely, and in practice, much of the shore is impenetrable. Simply figuring out which patches of sand you’re allowed to lie on requires navigating antiquated laws and modern restrictions that vary by state—not to mention vigilante efforts from landowners intended to keep people out. Lido Beach is a classic (and absurd) example: Like the rest of the New York coast, it’s technically open to everyone up to the high-tide line, but actually reaching that public strip is difficult without trespassing on private land. A trip to the ocean has never been more confusing.

[Read: Beware the luxury beach resort]

Visiting a completely public spot, such as Myrtle Beach in South Carolina or Santa Monica Beach in L.A., might seem like the most drama-free way to get time in the waves. But “in some states, you don’t really have that option,” Shannon Lyons, the East Coast regional director for the Surfrider Foundation, a group that tracks beach-access laws, told me. The nearest totally public beach might be a long drive away or far from public transit. Plus, there just aren’t enough of them. Although plenty of cities and states own entire beaches outright, much of the property bordering the shoreline rests in private hands. In New York and Florida, only about 40 percent of land by the coast is owned by the government. These numbers decrease as you travel north: In Maine, somewhere from 6.5 to 12 percent of the seaboard is fully open to anyone, depending on the source; in Massachusetts, it’s less than 12 percent. Of course, the remainder of the shoreline in those states isn’t entirely private; it’s most likely just adjacent to private property. But as oceanfront land has become some of the most desirable and expensive in the country, actually getting onto the public sections of those partially private beaches has become harder and harder.

Beaches did not always hold the allure they do today. Two centuries ago, they could be used as sites of trade, not leisure, and were clogged by vendors, shoppers, and fishermen. Real-estate agents also saw little value in them: Until 1898, in Connecticut, they were often included for free with the purchase of any nearby property, Kara Murphy Schlichting, the author of New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis From the Shore, told me. But by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a peculiar combination of factors made the beach into a cultural obsession. Doctors began prescribing trips to the sea as cures for “melancholy,” and beaches came to be seen as places of relaxation. Soon after, a new industrial work schedule gave middle-class workers weekends off and the possibility of vacations. Some used that time to go to the ocean, eventually leading to the rise of urban beaches, such as those in Coney Island and Santa Monica. The real-estate bundles went away, and oceanfront property became a moneymaker. In Connecticut, by 1910, land along the water that a decade earlier had sold for $400 to $1,000 an acre was on the market for $3,000 to $10,000 an acre.

[Read: The historic healing power of the beach]

Seaside homes quickly morphed from something relatively accessible to people across class backgrounds into a luxury for the wealthy. These rich newcomers pushed out working-class and Black communities who had long lived on the coast, Schlichting told me. They also began to accuse beachgoers of trespassing. Invoking a legal threat like that, Schlichting said, was “very useful to landowners,” who might hope that the prospect of a fine or a night in jail would scare off sunbathers.  

In many cases, however, visitors weren’t actually trespassing—a reality that holds true to this day. According to the public-trust doctrine, a principle dating back to ancient Rome that has also been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, some section of the entire shoreline must be open to anyone. But states interpret how much of the beach that applies to very differently. In Oregon, all of the dry sand is public, up until the vegetation starts. In Rhode Island, too, people can legally stroll much of the beach, provided they don’t stray more than 10 feet above the high-tide line—although how many people will be able to measure that out at a glance? In Maine and Massachusetts, by contrast, only the space that is essentially always underwater is open for public recreation.

State laws become more complicated from there, and visitors are frequently left to piece together this complex legal picture on their own. Where they’re allowed to be might also depend on what they’re doing. In Massachusetts, for example, hunting and fishing are fair game in the intertidal zone, meaning the wet sand between high and low tide, but sunbathing and most other types of recreation are not; swimming is permitted, provided, per a 1907 court ruling, that your feet don’t touch the ground—a tough law to follow, given how shallow the water tends to be in that zone. So if you’re reading a book near an oceanfront house in Cape Cod, you could be accused of trespassing. But if you have a fishing pole or gun in your hand instead of a novel, your right to sit there is legally protected. “It’s kind of kooky,” Josh Eagle, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies beach access, told me.

Even if you master your state’s particular laws, other obstacles may make actually getting to the ocean difficult. Some places make you buy a pass, which can be pricier for out-of-towners: Westport, Connecticut, charges nonresidents 15 times more than residents for season passes. And recently, a Texas legislator proposed a bill that would let people living by the sea block visitors from using footpaths on their land. This could lead to a similar situation to the one playing out at Lido Beach, in which part of the shore is public in name but challenging to reach.

[Read: Is the internet killing the nude beach?]

Other roadblocks skew more rogue: In Malibu, California, homeowners have repeatedly put up illegitimate Private Property signs in the sand or placed traffic cones and unauthorized No Parking signs in nearby lots, trying to scare away outsiders. Elsewhere in the U.S., homeowners have constructed questionably legal barriers that separate their property from the rest of the beach—but also mean that anyone attempting to get to the water would have to climb over a fence.

Some people are trying to democratize beach access. A writer and an activist named Jenny Price co-created an app, Our Malibu Beaches, that spells out exactly where visitors are allowed to go—and which bogus signs, put up by residents, to ignore. In Malibu’s Broad Beach, for instance, the app reminds users that they can park in spaces blocked by traffic cones, which “have no possible legitimate or official purpose.” Meanwhile, in Connecticut, residents built fences and made getting to the beach so difficult that, starting in 1999, the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection began erecting signs that outline the public’s legal rights to Connecticut’s shoreline. Dave Kozak, who worked as a coastal planner on the project, told me that local politicians complained to him that the signs were causing overcrowding. Some homeowners would simply take the signs down. But the state kept putting them back up.

Indeed, keeping the beach a common resource has become a practically Sisyphean struggle. Over the past century, just as more people in more regions have come to recognize the value of these prized natural spaces, they have been, sometimes literally, walled off. The public-trust doctrine is remarkable for guaranteeing a public right to the beach, regardless of private-property claims. But it means little in practice if beachgoers have to continue to wade past fake signs and confusing laws to actually go for a swim.

In 2019, a mnemonic began to circulate on the internet: “If the Naomi be Klein / you’re doing just fine / If the Naomi be Wolf / Oh, buddy. Ooooof.” The rhyme recognized one of the most puzzling intellectual journeys of recent times—Naomi Wolf’s descent into conspiracism—and the collateral damage it was inflicting on the Canadian climate activist and anti-capitalist Naomi Klein.

Until recently, Naomi Wolf was best known for her 1990s feminist blockbuster The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, which argued that the tyranny of grooming standards—all that plucking and waxing—was a form of backlash against women’s rights. But she is now one of America’s most prolific conspiracy theorists, boasting on her Twitter profile of being “deplatformed 7 times and still right.” She has claimed that vaccines are a “software platform” that can “receive ‘uploads’ ” and is mildly obsessed with the idea that many clouds aren’t real, but are instead evidence of “geoengineered skies.” Although Wolf has largely disappeared from the mainstream media, she is now a favored guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast, War Room.

All of this is particularly bad news for Klein, for the simple reason that people keep mistaking the two women for each other. Back in 2011, when she first noticed the confusion—from inside a bathroom stall, she heard two women complain that “Naomi Klein” didn’t understand the demands of the Occupy movement—this was merely embarrassing. The movement sprang from Klein’s part of the left, and in October of that year she was invited to speak to Occupy New York. Was it their shared first name, their Jewishness, or their brown hair with blond highlights? Even their partners’ names were similar: Avram Lewis and Avram Ludwig. Klein was struck that both had experienced rejection from their peer groups (in her case, by fellow students when she first criticized Israel in the college newspaper).

Klein had once admired The Beauty Myth, but she realized to her horror that Wolf had drifted from feminist criticism to broader social polemics. When she picked up Wolf’s 2007 book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, her own book, out the same year, came to mind. “I felt like I was reading a parody of The Shock Doctrine, one with all the facts and evidence carefully removed.” To Klein, the situation began to seem sinister, even threatening. She was being eaten alive. “Other Naomi—that is how I refer to her now,” Klein writes at the beginning of her new book, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. “A person whom so many others appear to find indistinguishable from me. A person who does many extreme things that cause strangers to chastise me or thank me or express their pity for me.”

The confusion was particularly galling because No Logo (1999), Klein’s breakout work, was a manifesto against branding. And yet here she was, feeling an urgent need to protect her own personal brand from this interloper. Klein asserts that she didn’t want to write Doppelganger—“not with the literal and metaphorical fires roiling our planet,” she confesses with a hint of pomposity—but found herself ever more obsessed by Wolf’s conspiracist turn. How do you go from liberal darling to War Room regular within a decade?

Like Klein, I loved The Beauty Myth as a young woman, and then largely forgot about Wolf until 2010, when Julian Assange was arrested for alleged sex offenses (the charges were later dropped), and she claimed that Interpol was acting as “the world’s dating police.” Two years later, she published Vagina: A New Biography, which mixed sober accounts of rape as a weapon of war with a quest to cure her midlife sexual dysfunction through “yoni massages” and activating “the Goddess array.” In one truly deranged scene, a friend hosts a party at his loft and serves pasta shaped like vulvae, alongside salmon and sausages. The violent intermingling of genital-coded food overwhelms Wolf, who experiences it as an insult to womanhood in general and her own vagina in particular, and suffers writer’s block for the next six months. (I suspect that the friend was just trying to get into the spirit of Wolf’s writing project.) I remember beginning to wonder around this time whether Wolf might be a natural conspiracy theorist who had merely lucked into writing about one conspiracy—the patriarchy—that happened to be true.

Her final exile from the mainstream can probably be dated to 2019, when she was humiliated in a live radio interview during the rollout of her book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. She had claimed that gay men in Victorian England were regularly executed for sodomy, but the BBC host Matthew Sweet noted that the phrase death recorded in the archives meant that the sentence had been commuted, rather than carried out. It was a grade A howler, and it marked open season on her for all previous offenses against evidence and logical consistency. The New York Times review of Outrages referred to “Naomi Wolf’s long, ludicrous career.” In the U.K., the publisher promised changes to future editions, and the release of the U.S. edition was canceled outright.

Klein dwells on this incident in Doppelganger, and rightly so: “If you want an origin story, an event when Wolf’s future flip to the pseudo-populist right was locked in, it was probably that moment, live on the BBC, getting caught—and then getting shamed, getting mocked, and getting pulped.” If the intelligentsia wouldn’t lionize Wolf, then the Bannonite right would: She could enter a world where mistakes don’t matter, no one feels shame, and fact-checkers are derided as finger-wagging elitists.

“These people don’t disappear just because we can no longer see them,” Klein reminds any fellow leftists who might be enthusiastic about public humiliation as a weapon against the right. Denied access to the mainstream media, the ostracized will be welcomed on One America News Network and Newsmax, or social-media sites such as Rumble, Gettr, Gab, Truth Social, and Elon Musk’s new all-crazy-all-the-time reincarnation of Twitter as X. On podcasts, the entire heterodox space revels in “just asking questions”—and then not caring about the peer-reviewed answers. By escaping to what Klein calls the “Mirror World,” Wolf might have lost cultural capital, but she has not lost an audience.

[Helen Lewis: Why so many conservatives feel like losers]

Klein notes that this world is particularly hospitable to those who can blend personal and social grievances into an appealing populist message—I am despised by the pointy-heads, just as you are. She ventures “a kind of equation for leftists and liberals crossing over to the authoritarian right that goes something like this: Narcissism (Grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public shaming = Right wing meltdown.” She is inclined to downplay “that bit of math,” though, and feels uncomfortable putting Wolf on the couch. Nonetheless, I’m struck by how narcissism (in the ubiquitous lay sense of the term) is key to understanding conspiracy-theorist influencers and their followers. If you feel disrespected and overlooked in everyday life, then being flattered with the idea that you’re a special person with secret knowledge must be appealing.

Klein’s real interest, as you might expect from her previous work, tends more toward sociology than psychology. Her doppelgänger isn’t an opportunist or a con artist, Klein decides, but a genuine believer—even if those beliefs have the happy side effect of garnering her attention and praise. But what about the culture that has enabled her to thrive?

At first, I thought what I was seeing in my doppelganger’s world was mostly grifting unbound. Over time, though, I started to get the distinct impression that I was also witnessing a new and dangerous political formation find itself in real time: its alliances, worldview, slogans, enemies, code words, and no-go zones—and, most of all, its ground game for taking power.

To explore this ambitious agenda, the book ranges widely and sometimes tangentially. At one point, Klein finds herself listening to hours of War Room, hosted by a man who has built a dark empire of profitable half-truths. Why does Klein find Bannon so compelling? Here Doppelganger takes a startling turn. The answer is that, quite simply, game recognizes game. Klein’s cohort on the left attacks Big Pharma profits, worries about “surveillance capitalism,” and sees Davos and the G7 as a cozy cabal exploiting the poor. Understandably, she hears Other Naomi talk with Bannon about vaccine manufacturers’ profits, rail against Big Tech’s power to control us, and make the case that Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum has untold secret power, and she can’t help noting some underlying similarities. When Bannon criticizes MSNBC and CNN for running shows sponsored by Pfizer, telling his audience that this is evidence of rule “by the wealthy, for the wealthy, against you,” Klein writes, “it strikes me that he sounds like Noam Chomsky. Or Chris Smalls, the Amazon Labor Union leader known for his EAT THE RICH jacket. Or, for that matter, me.”

[From the July/August 2022 issue: Steve Bannon, American Rasputin]

This is Doppelganger at its best, acknowledging the traits that make us all susceptible to manipulation. In a 2008 New Yorker profile of Klein, her husband described her as a “pattern recognizer,” adding: “Some people feel that she’s bent examples to fit the thesis. But her great strength is helping people recognize patterns in the world, because that’s the fundamental first step toward changing things.” Of course, overactive pattern recognition is also the essence of conspiracism, and a decade and a half later, Klein expresses more caution about her superpower. When 9/11 truthers turn up at her events—drawn perhaps by her criticism in The Shock Doctrine of George W. Bush’s response to the tragedy—their presence leads her to conclude “that the line between unsupported conspiracy claims and reliable investigative research is neither as firm nor as stable as many of us would like to believe.”

We live in a world where the U.S. government has done outlandish stuff: The Tuskegee experiment, MK-Ultra, Iran-Contra, and Watergate are all conspiracies that diligent journalism proved to be true. QAnon’s visions of Hollywood child-sex rings might be a mirage, but the Catholic Church’s abuse of children in Boston was all too real—and uncovering it won The Boston Globe a Pulitzer Prize. Klein worries about whether a political movement can generate mass appeal without resorting to populism, and about how to stop her criticisms of elite power from being co-opted by her opponents and distorted into attacks on the marginalized.

[Read: A 2014 interview with Naomi Klein about climate politics ]

However, Klein’s (correct) diagnosis of American conspiracism as a primarily right-wing pathology prevents her from fully acknowledging the degree to which it has sometimes infected her own allies and idols. In Doppelganger, Klein notes that anti-Semitism has served as “the socialism of fools”—stirred up to deflect popular anger away from the elite—but she does not discuss the anti-Jewish bigotry in the British Labour Party under its former leader Jeremy Corbyn, whom she endorsed in the 2019 election. (Corbyn once praised a mural of hook-nosed bankers counting money on a table held up by Black people, and his supporters suggested that his critics were Israeli stooges.) The party has since apologized for not taking anti-Semitism seriously enough.

At times, this can be a frustrating book. Near the end, Klein says she requested an interview with Wolf, promising that it would be “a respectful debate” about their political disagreements. She also hoped to remind Wolf of their original meeting, more than three decades earlier—when Wolf, then 28, captivated the 20-year-old Klein, showing her the possibilities of what a female author could be. But Wolf never responded to the request, and the doppelgängers have not met face-to-face since then.

Still, Klein emerges with a sense of resolution. She writes that the confusion between the two of them has lately died down, now that Other Naomi has become an “unmistakable phenomenon unto herself.” Even better, the situation has introduced “a hefty dose of ridiculousness into the seriousness with which I once took my public persona.” Not that the zealous Klein has disappeared: The next few pages are a paean to collective organizing, worker solidarity, and “cities in the grips of revolutionary fervor.”

Doppelganger is least interesting when Klein returns to her comfort zone, but her brutally honest forays into self-examination are fascinating. The book is also a welcome antidote to the canceling reflex of our moment and a bracing venture across ideological lines. Klein successfully makes the case that the American left is more tethered to reality than the right—not because it is composed of smarter or better people, but because it has not lost touch with the mechanisms, such as scientific peer review and media pluralism, that act as a check on our worst instincts. Exposed to many of the same forces as her conspiracist doppelgänger—fame, cancellation, trauma, COVID isolation—this Naomi stayed fine. That has to offer us some hope.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “The Other Naomi.”

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.