Emmye Vernet |  Issue 6, Spring 2025

Rose and I stepped onto the trail just as the sun was reaching the peak of golden hour, the snow beneath us firming with the darkening day. We let our dog off leash and watched her gallop ahead, as we took our time behind her, moving our boots across icy, prickly barren ground. The salt pond lay just ahead, and we moved towards it, letting the imprint of yesterday’s footsteps guide us towards the glimmering blue.

I reached for Rose’s hand and exhaled. “I’m happy we’re here.”

~

We moved to the almost-middle-of-nowhere about six months ago. Our lease in Brooklyn had come to an end, and Rose’s sister and their partner begged us to join them for the off-season on a rural peninsula in Maine, where they had both found jobs and fallen in love with the land. Hungry for a change in pace and with no definite plans ahead of us, Rose and I ended up agreeing to the pitch. And now, the four of us live together in a four-bedroom rental home tucked back into the woods, settled in the belly of the peninsula.

When we first moved in, I was shocked by the quietude of this place. I don’t really know what I had been expecting when I was asked to come to rural, coastal Maine: perhaps that there would be fellow Queers hiding out like forest elves in tiny log cabins, waiting for the gaggle of my roomates and I to arrive and, at last, start building the lefty commune of our dreams. But that wasn’t exactly what I found. Instead, it was long drives on winding roads to get to anywhere, a social calendar that felt full if it was booked twice a month, and a tiny library that was the evident hub of all community activity.

This was a stark contrast from my life in Brooklyn. There, I had lived in what my friends and I referred to as the “shtetl,” named after the pre-WWII Eastern European villages of our ancestors. Our Brooklyn shtetl was a compact neighborhood where a tightly-woven web of Queer, anti-zionist Jews (and many, many other kinds of people!) lived just doors away from each other. We ritualized together, organized together, put on living room drag shows, crowdsourced for mutual aid, stayed up late dreaming about the world we wanted to build and the people we wanted to be at the end of it. There, in the borough that so many of our ancestors had lived, worked, and organized in, I felt a sense of lineage that connected me to something much bigger than myself.

But here, it’s undeniably different. A dense population of like-minded comrades has been replaced by a density of trees, gulls, and snowfall. In our house we carry on the kinds of conversations we had back in Brooklyn: politics, identity, art, ritual. Outside of these walls, though, it’s a different story. It’s not just that we’re far away from people we share a world-view with, it’s that we’re far away from everyone.

~

Our house sits at the edge of a sprawling blueberry barren that overlooks a saltpond. Now, in the heart of wintertime, the barren is a rolling field of empty red bushes, tall golden grasses, and dustings of snow. The ground is scattered with rocks—boulders and their fallen pieces spread across the hill the way I’d imagine it would look if another planet fell from the sky and landed on earth. Just hours after moving into our new house, Rose and I discovered the magic of the barren, and since then, it has become the site of our twice-daily walks with the dog. The routine of coming here day after day has been a lifeline of steadiness amidst the uncertainty of a big move.

It was maybe a month or so into being in this new town when one day, for the first time since I’d arrived, I didn’t make it to the barren at all. I don’t remember why: maybe heavy rain, maybe I was sick, maybe I went to find a new trail somewhere else. Whatever the reason, the next day when I made it back to the barren and looked out towards the rolling hills and the shrubbery and the salt pond, I realized that even after just one day, I had missed it. I felt a visceral sense of longing in my gut, and was surprised by the intensity of this feeling. Had a place ever imprinted on me so quickly?

It was then that I understood that although here, in this new town, I hadn’t yet found close friends or comrades, I was not without connection. It just looked different. I was developing a relationship with the land, with the earth, with the tangible world around me.

It was, and it is, the beginning of a new type of kinship.

~

Turning towards the land as a site of connection has been a journey. When I ask a question to the forest, a tree does not respond with words. When I sing into the barren, it joins me only in my own echo. Relationship, in this case, is not about an equal exchange of words or ideas. It is instead something that exists in a space of silence, that is cultivated through listening, that can be felt in my bones but can hardly be described. Though for all the ways that it is different from the kind of relationships I had in Brooklyn, there are similarities too: my ancestors would have also resourced themselves with the land—garlic, cedar, and pomegranate—as much as they did with their people. The salt pond, the sky—these are certainly not substitutes for affinity-group organizing and gender neutral clothing swaps, but they do offer genuine support. I have been finding a newfound sense of assuredness, calm, and reverence that I wouldn’t have expected to find in the absence of my people. Being in Queer community absolutely means being in relationship with other Queer people, but I’m learning that it also means Queering the very sense of what we understand relationships to be in the first place.

I don’t know how long Rose and I will live on this tiny peninsula. For all the days that living so close to the land feels like the most life-giving thing, there are still days when the silence feels painfully challenging. Moving here, I knew that I would miss my friends back in the shtetl; the unpacking, the processing, the celebrating, the scheming. That grief is real and expected. What I didn’t expect, though, was that I would find a profound measure of support in the more-than-human world; that I would ever consider the land a genuine friend.

But I do, and for now, it seems to be holding me.