We speak of things like ships, cities, and even the earth itself as female, yet men are so often the ones confidently plodding through these spaces in literature (and in the corporeal world), conquering them as they would a female body. Even if we’ve progressed enough as a society to move past the laws that kept women in nineteenth-century Paris from safely walking the streets at night, meant to keep them indoors so as not to be confused with prostitutes, we still differentiate between the male and female streetwalker. We still tend to wonder if women can even wander Paris at night, if all cities aren’t just a little too dangerous for women to walk through alone. But women walk the streets even when the dialogue can’t catch up to them; I saw them on the Metro, their shoes often the first thing I noticed. From black heels to teal New Balance trainers, there were no assumptions I could make about the person wearing them except that she chose her footwear with purpose, for comfort or style. Walking in Paris is not an afterthought.
In the very early morning of July 12th, Treischmann finished her records and registered them with a file clerk in the building’s basement. Then she headed upstairs to go home. In the stairwell, she bumped into three fellow interns who were also on their way out, and mentioned the faint difference in the air. The group decided to investigate, and continued climbing the central stairway.
When the students opened the door to the third floor, the air seemed thicker. They kept going. The fourth floor was murkier still, the fifth even worse. Trieschmann never considered turning back. She has always loved adventure; she used to go scuba diving in ocean caves. Something interesting was happening, and she wanted to know what it was. So she and her colleagues climbed one more flight of stairs, to a door that opened into the sixth and top floor. She remembered that this was where the older military records were kept, the ones from World War I, World War II, and Korea, but she hadn’t been up here since orientation. Now, as she pulled open the door, she saw the cardboard boxes neatly stacked on metal shelves as far as the eye could see.
They were on fire.
Human power is what defenders of wilderness often fear, since we might use it to destroy — even as some of them rely on the same power in trying to preserve an idealized notion of the wild, and by spilling blood, no less: the massacre of rats to restore the tortoise. What underlies this paradox is the romantic ideal of wilderness without humans. But imagining us outside of nature is the same mistake as imagining us as having limitless mastery over it. In both cases, nature is our opposite, like a foreign land, rather than the home whose threshold we naturally cross when we tend the garden and till the soil.