The Wandering Farmer (an feirmeoir fánach)

December 29th, 2023

No one knows how they’ll feel the first time they’re in a city under rocket attack. Now I do. I woke up, oblivious, because I’d previously kept my Air Attack app on silent. I’d spent two months in a functionally 100% safe city (Chernivtsi) where the notifications went off for russian MiGs who were merely in potential range to strike. Like many people in Chernivtsi, I’d come to more or less ignore the air raid warnings from a personal safety viewpoint. In Lviv, the safety is not 100%, but nevertheless very safe compared to most places. It still is incredibly safe- compared to places like Kherson, or Kharkiv. 

 And yet this morning, my phone has messages from all directions from folks in Lviv. My Ukrainian friend who moved to Poland for safety with her kids, is back to visit family on the holidays, trying to sneak in a visit. Messages asking for their wellbeing, mixed with asking for mine. The WhatsApp group of the kitchen I volunteer at- a stream of messages asking and giving info about whatever we know of Lviv casualties. A woman I’m seeing- a morning text asking if I’m alright, me asking her how she is. It comes just thirty or so seconds after I’d heard a bang out the window that I hadn’t yet processed to be air defense probably taking down ordinance. There’s no app for “is that huge loud bang I just heard part of the attack, or not?” so I just kind of file it in my memory and do little else with the fact I’ve just heard it. Instead, I shift to the general emotions I’m feeling.

The emotions are anger, hatred, and resolve. Basically in that order. When I deal with new emotions or new heights of emotions, I tend to look to evolutionary biology to understand them. I’ve seen documentaries as apes react to accidents that happen near them, as they react with anger and seek causes. 

I feel it’s somewhat like a rock or clump of dirt landing near you from nowhere. At first you’re just kind of angry- a fight or flight response- you’re angry because either through intent or neglect, someone has put you and loved ones in danger. Our primate brain has that universal anger response that still allows for neglect or ignorance on the part of the doer. Whether it’s on the African savannah one hundred thousand years ago, or here, hearing sirens, hearing an explosion, a splash of dust kicked up by something landing near us, it’s all so similar at its meaty core. Someone or something just put me in danger- I must learn what it was and make it stop.

Hatred seethes in next, because you know exactly what the fuck it is and why. I must emphasize, the earliest emotion of simple anger, without yet knowing intentionality, lasted probably milliseconds, but it was there- it had that catharsis-seeking license for ignorance or lack of intentionality.

But, today, your brain instantly processes that it was intentional- albeit random. You know it’s Russian ordinance. Actually, it’s increasingly manufactured and exported by the islamic republic of Iran, to Russia- in the form of Shahed drones. I’ve also recently read that we may be seeing the arrival of North Korean missiles as well- traded for other Russian hardware. The axis of life-hating, state-institution-rotting assholes that is Russia, Iran, Hamas, and North Korea, (and peripheral allies like the Houthi insurgency in Yemen), they supply each other in materiel and intelligence for their various self-serving individual projects around the world. You’d wonder why their wildly disparate ideologies would have anything in common- but that’s the point. They simply don’t. It’s entirely the same as Mussolini’s idea of a superior Italian race reviving the glory of the Roman Empire, clashing with Hitler’s Aryan views, clashing with Japanese views of being the same in Asia. They really had nothing in common but being pariah states.

(writing January 1st, 2024)…Back to that morning…I was processing these new emotions, or not quite new but never-felt-at-such-heights emotions. On the volunteer group chat, people had been sharing info, and things moved towards a bit of an argument over when, and where, it is safe to share rocket attack information. Tensions are high, and amongst a chat mostly used to organize which local watering hole to drink beer at after volunteering, folks have exchanged strong thoughts about when to share what. It’s been a documented thing that russian intelligence has used, can use, and will use social media posts to gain knowledge of the efficacy of their ordinance and adjust fire for subsequent attacks. At the same time, people are shocked by what’s happened, they also want to get the word out, so some just post in on social media as this surreal reaction to being close to something like that. Everybody’s reaction is understandable but nevertheless, one side is right- the downsides to early sharing are too large, and have no upsides.

People are tense and the actions you do shortly after a rocket attack matter. For the majority of human existence, such feelings are precisely what’s needed to get you to the other side of tomorrow.

I don’t think anyone took it personally in the volunteer chat- you could see that more experienced in-country volunteers had lived under the strain longer and did not have more polite ways to say “it’s really dumb to post anything that hasn’t been posted by an authority figure who’s got a team thinking through each of those decisions.” We relied on the basic metric that if the mayor of Lviv had posted something on his Instagram, we could talk publicly about where it struck.

My conversations with those around me continue on Whatsapp…I later have my first experience to console or work someone through the emotions of the attack as well- even as I’m kind of dealing with mine. No one’s born expert in having a “measured response” to half-random state violence. Someone selected the city of Lviv as a target- may have even had a building in mind, other times not- depends on the ordinance. Someone made the call and sent it. Someone didn’t mind whether I died or not, nor cared whether my friends or people I cared about did. They didn’t want them to personally die, but wanted some kind of body count, some kind of terror.

This all happened about 28 hours before I started to leave the country. Further sirens and warnings happened another 24ish hours after the first big attack, as I cleaned my AirBnB and packed. russia uses these tactics to wear down resolve, to give poor sleep to as many people as possible, to spread air defenses thin. It’s funny to be dealing with a very, very modern problem or situation (cleaning one’s AirBnB so they give you a good customer review, something that feels like a sitcom plot hook) planning how to get to the bus station, while hearing another round of sirens going off. And to still have your latest social chats full of talk of the last one.

From a noontime bus departure, I had a heck of an adventure crossing the border to Poland. Maybe I’ll detail that another time. But, after much effort, I was in Krakow surprisingly only two hours after my bus’s scheduled arrival- though I’d actually crossed via a combination of bus, foot, local taxi, foot again, taxi again, and train, to finally get to Krakow. An evening whose emotional climax was walking between two walls of barbed wire in freezing rain, laughing with two Swedish eighteen-year-olds caught in the same boat as me, relieved to be only one extortionate taxi ride away from the comfort of a Polish train station.

Still, the emotions were strong and after dumping my shit off at the Krakow AirBnB. Ten hours earlier I was watching apps for more follow-up attacks, and now…in a chique AirBnB with that ubiquitous Krakow kind of surreal art on the walls.

I wandered into the square to find which restaurants were still open past 11pm, and settled to a treat- a nice affordable faux edging-on-tacky “American” place doing a rack of ribs, Greek salad, and potato wedges for $19- with 500ml of draught to wash it. When the very lovely, kind, polite-as-a-nice-Polish-girl-can-be waitress told me at 11:51 that they’d close soon and they’d like me to wrap up, I didn’t really snap, but by my standards (and by Polish standards) I snapped and said, “I’ll finish my beer, I’ll use the restroom, and I’ll be out before midnight.” I realized that although I was putting on an air of being proud of the bureaucratic adventures I’d gone through that day (the border crossing was more bureaucratic farce that I’d survived, than physical danger), I was actually on edge, and self-conscious of being in a peace-ridden place after a place where rockets are forced to be reckoned as something like the weather- something you have several apps for, and discuss the consequences of, daily.

I’d started the morning with air raid sirens cleaning an AirBnB, spent mid afternoon and early evening in pissing rain with too much luggage, hiking the side of the road to a taxi rendezvous, followed by a foot crossing, walking no-man’s land with barbed wire on either side, on what would be an 11 hour trip to cross a distance that would be 5 hours or less if Ukraine was in the EU and NATO, to…suddenly being in one of the premier cities of Poland, at a midscale restaurant with hipster lampshades dangling over tacky-decored tables, eating a delicious meal, feeling that my body was full of emotion and struggling to process it. Anger, guilt… resolve with no punching bag to go against. With nice, happy people around me doing normal things. British family on holiday in the booth to my left. Loudass Italians in the upper balcony joking and clinking beer steins. Polite, prompt, Polish college students working as waiters, buzzing table to table.

What is there to process? There is no rationalization. You feel strange because it IS fucking strange. Someone sat and designed a piece of hardware whose job was to fly in the air over hundreds of miles, to land with reasonable accuracy on a target, that an office full of military academy pricks have shared PowerPoint slides over, deciding if it’d be a reasonable show of force to intimidate a nation resisting their policy goals. It shattered glass in a wide radius, and people you know and have come to love are sharing info on joining cleanup groups to tarp the windows. It killed one person- to you, a stranger- but someone you could’ve been standing in line for groceries near, just a night ago, for all you know. It’s all concrete and local.

You feel anger because anger-inducing things have happened. You feel hate because you feel love. There is a welling of emotion that is not sadness or fear, but is adjacent to them. There is guilt for leaving because your first and continuing response is to resist the will of the owners of those missiles with every fiber of your being. Their goal is to make Ukrainians feel at risk, alone, cold, hungry, tired. My goal was, is, and will be to make them feel safer, not alone, warm, well-fed, and well-rested. I was at the end of my 90 day visa and had to exit as these things happened- and also had unchangeable plans in Krakow. Ask me 100 days ago, and I’d never have thought that my main emotion to a rocket attack would be to want to stay right where it happened or to get the hell back as soon as I can. If I wasn’t desperately scrubbing down my AirBnB that morning, I’d be sweeping glass with other volunteer teams that day.

I didn’t really have strong, strong flashes of fear over personal safety- because I know with 99.99%* certainty there is no god (within my reckoning) and I’ve said the things I feel to the people I care about. I live in a cosmic sliver of time with blank darkness behind and before me- the exact length of it is petty. I have very little to nothing to regret if I clock out at 35 instead of 95- I’d live no other way than I already have. I don’t want to live to 95 if it means failing to step up for my values.

I have exciting plans on the near horizon but they do not involve rejection of reality, rejection of danger- they are to embrace the positive emotions that drive me- love of others and love of higher principles. I don’t have much unfinished business and have lived proudly with the risks I’ve calculated as acceptable. But I fear for more than just me, and I have a sense of justice for more than just me. And so…it is what it is. Here I am. Angry. Incensed. Resolute. More sure than ever. Confused by my body and mind’s own reaction to opulence, peace, and irritated at the weight put on petty problems, and by fleeting fake senses of security.

Post Script on my 99.99% certainty of a lack of god(s)… don’t read if you are offended by blatantly atheist statements. And keep in mind, if you’re religious, you and I have more in common with each other, than I do with agnostics who’ve devised no new set of values after tepidly dumping religious practice to the wayside. Let us be judged by our fruits- brothers and sisters ; )

*I hold out a 00.01% chance of the existence of a capricious god who has intentionally designed the universe to look like he/she does not exist (because that’s exactly what the science suggests)- whose values I find odious and worthy of full and complete opposition, from my first drawn breath to any time I serve in their theoretical hell. If they exist, as such, I look forward to opposing them in this life and the next with the same ardor I pursue all my acts of resistance to unacceptable authority and curbing of righteous free will. We non believers can rally in hell and organize opposition from there. Of course…I don’t think it will come to that, so it’s easy to talk brave ; )