The Point of Vanishing

by Howard Axelrod

  PRAISE FOR The Point of Vanishing

  “Axelrod lyrically captures the essence of nature as he ponders his own self-worth and purpose in life.... In his first book, the author pushes beyond the boundaries and safety nets of the modern world and opens a doorway to feelings and experiences many long for but never encounter. His writing is a balm for world-weary souls. A vibrant, honest, and poetic account of how two years of solitude surrounded by nature changed a man forever.”

  Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  “A sensitive and sensual book about seeing and feeling deeply; witty, wise, and beautifully written from beginning to end. When a debilitating accident rocks his world, Axelrod finds himself in free fall, the gleaming trajectory of his successful life suddenly tarnished and unclear. In documenting his retreat to a snowy solitude and the lessons learned there, Axelrod creates a surprisingly suspenseful narrative. I was constantly torn between wanting to savor his prose and tear through the pages to learn what happened next.”

  GERALDINE BROOKS, author of March

  “Out of sudden and profound loss, Axelrod has drawn a haunting, tender memoir that grips like an emotional thriller. The Point of Vanishing is raw, exquisitely written, and full of poetic insights. This is a big book about big truths that matter to us all. It delivers a message of hope and strength, and reveals what is most human in our most unspoken yearning for something real, something true.”

  BELLA POLLEN, author of The Summer of the Bear

  “Deeply alive and exciting and nuanced, a story of injury and years alone in the woods, The Point of Vanishing is all about what it means to see, and how we might ask ourselves to see differently—to live differently in our own bodies, and in the world. Though this book is set largely in the snow and silence, there are embers of hunger and questioning and longing that glow deep in its core and refuse to be cooled. Their heat charges and illuminates every moment of these pages. Powerful and ineffable, it feels like a blessing.”

  LESLIE JAMISON, author of The Empathy Exams

  “This is a very real book, in bone-on-bone contact with the actual world. It made me think about my own life in new ways, and I think it will do the same for you.”

  BILL MCKIBBEN, author of Deep Economy

  “Blindness and insight are the twin subjects of Howard Axelrod’s intricate and beautiful memoir of his two years of solitude. In detailing his growing estrangement from ‘ordinary’ life, Axelrod offers a vision of what most of us take for granted. The unimportant falls away, in this book, and what comes closer is a luminous sense of the essential, the beautiful, the sacred, and the unspeakable.”

  CHARLES BAXTER, author of The Feast of Love

  THE

  Point

  OF

  Vanishing

  a memoir of

  two years in solitude

  Howard Axelrod

  Beacon Press, Boston

  For my parents

  Two truths approach each other. One comes from inside, the other from outside,

  and where they meet, we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves.

  —Tomas Tranströmer, from “Preludes,” translated by Robert Bly

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART I

  Into the Blind Spot

  PART II

  Learning to See

  PART III

  The Point of Vanishing

  Prologue

  The house wasn’t something you stumbled upon by accident. It wasn’t something you passed going anywhere else. To get there you drove through Glover, Vermont—a general store, no traffic light, one Busy Bee Diner—climbed along switchbacks through maples, evergreens, and birches, then turned left onto a wide dirt road. You passed the barn and blue silo of the Mooreland dairy farm, snaked past a few scattered houses and trailers, then followed deeper into the woods, the maples tapped, tubed, and strung together like prisoners on a chain gang, as it was early March now, sugar season. A few miles in, at a mailbox nobody used, you forked off the wide dirt road onto an unmaintained narrow lane, the deeper snow tugging at your car as though part of a different gravity. You slipped through a tunnel of overhanging trees, came to an empty field bordered by tall pines, then passed an uninhabited house, its siding job left unfinished, then followed as the road dwindled into what seemed only the ghost of a road—no car tracks but your own, the twin trail in the snow behind you like a vestige of the two ruts in summer, when the weeds between them would grow taller than your hood. A small meadow opened on your left, three gnarled apple trees glimmering in the sunlight like chandeliers, and beyond the meadow was the beginning again of forest, with little promise of a house at all. From there, just inside the buried fence-posts, you walked. And at the bottom of the steep grade, with its sky-blue paint flaking, its lines badly canted, sat the two-story house, like a sunken ship.

  Not much from the outside world found me there. In the year and a half since I’d moved in, there had never been a knock on the door. I had no television, no computer, no cell phone. There was a land line, which rang maybe twice a month, so a wrong number was an event. As for other news, the yellowing issues of the Newport Chronicle, stacked in the corner by the woodstove, reported on beaver problems, church suppers, DWI charges, and missing dogs, but all from years past. Sometimes, kindling the fire’s embers at dawn, I’d find myself wondering about a handsome spotted pointer or the cutest darn black mutt you ever saw. But then I’d notice the newspaper’s date: those dogs had lighted out for their canine dreams two summers earlier, long before the snows.

  The only news that didn’t reach me with a kind of ghostliness came through the house’s windows or from my daily walks up into the woods. Clouds wrestling on a blustery afternoon, sunlight opening through the birches as though from behind a curtain. Slow flurries descending towards dusk. And about once a week, if the roads were clear, I’d make the drive down into the town of Barton for groceries at the C&C, then up the curving road to the Lake Parker General Store. West Glover’s tiny post office hid at the back of the store, in an elevator-sized room with bars and a window, as though it had once been the town’s tiny bank. The young woman behind the counter was no more than eighteen, lovely and bovine in her slowness. She would walk the dirt-worn floorboards very deliberately, past the cooler full of milk, past the six packs of beer, past the canned goods, then enter the post office and check the box for General Delivery. Not wanting to make her any more self-conscious, or myself any more aware of what it would mean to be alone with a woman again, I’d wait up at the counter. When she returned, she’d blush like something blooming in one of those time-lapse nature movies, the red rising up her neck, then her cheek, the blush all the more vivid when there was no mail for me. Maybe this was because I looked something like a wild animal—shaggy beard, eyes too intense. Or maybe it was just because my voice had gone unused since my last trip to the store, and, when I thanked her, too much feeling was stored up inside it. Even to me, my words seemed to come from far away, as though they required travel time, like light from a distant star.

  So on that moonless March night, when three raps came at the mudroom door, surprise wasn’t the word for my response. Each rap sounded alarmingly inside the house, hardening the posts and beams into place. A current ran through my body—a rattling, physical charge. The blue candle guttered on the table. It seemed I was underwater and something was bobbing on the surface far above me. In the darkened windows to the woods, the reflection of my dinner flickered soft and shadowy, more the idea of a dinner than anything solid. And my image flickered just the same.

  On my weekly trip to the C&C, I was prepared, knowing I would be seen: reflections, however glancing, would be cast back at me from the check-out girl s
napping her gum (hippie), from the bulky matrons trundling their carts (drifter)—reflections bearable because they seemed so obviously wrong. But the thought of someone there, as close as the mudroom door, was like a mirror flashed close to my face. A man alone, a barely furnished room, a candle on the table. The scene like an ancient interrogation but with no visible interrogator. The downstairs bathroom did have a mirror, but I never confronted it—not brushing my teeth, not washing my face, not stepping out of the shower. Not because I minded my face itself, or even my blind right eye, which had developed a pearly green cataract since my accident, but because the gaunt twenty-five-year-old man in the mirror was no one I recognized. A figure was there, a physical presence, but he followed me only at a distance. Even keeping a journal had come to feel strange—as though I was trying to sketch my own outline, to corral the wind, the snow, and the stars into the shape of a man. Coming to the woods hadn’t been an exercise or a retreat—it wasn’t something to take notes on and jar for later, like summer berries. I needed to live without the need of putting on a face for anyone, including myself. I needed to be no one, really, while carrying the hope that my particular no one might feel familiar, might turn out to be someone I had known all along—the core of who I’d been as boy, the core of who I might become as a man. Beneath all the masks I’d accumulated over the years, beneath even the masks that resented those masks, there had to be something there, something essential, some sense of reality and of myself that couldn’t be broken.

  The knocking came again, the same three sharp raps. Standing frozen by the woodstove, I pictured the night outside. The last stretch of road to the house so narrow, the snow six feet deep, the passage like a bobsled run. The darkness mitigated only by the stars. The only people I’d seen in the nearby hills, apart from Nat and his son, who occasionally came to plow the unmaintained lane, were deer hunters. But hunting season was months gone. The winter sun had long since set. Whoever was at the door had to be more frightened than I was. If there was a crazy man in the woods, a wild bearded loner liable to do anything, I was him. I am the crazy man! I am the crazy man! It was the same thing I’d told myself so many times hearing a branch snap in the woods or the stairs creak in the middle of the night. I am the crazy man! I am the crazy man! Usually, it hardened my fear into something like resolve. But now I couldn’t help picturing a middle-aged man in a checked wool jacket, slouching at the door. A glowing cigarette in one hand, a rifle in the other. And no deer for miles.

  The three raps came again, more insistent. It was probably an emergency, someone was probably in need. Smoke was rising from my chimney. Candlelight spilled out onto the snow. There really wasn’t much of a choice. I stepped into my moccasins, crossed the plywood mudroom floor, and opened the door.

  PART I

  Into the Blind Spot

  1

  It felt like a homecoming. It didn’t matter that a thunderstorm was raging, the rain drumming on the tar-paper roof, gunpowder flashes lighting up the dense, dripping foliage behind the house. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t stocked up yet at the C&C, so my dinner was only a piece of toast with melted cheese. And it didn’t matter that Boston was hundreds of miles away—and had stopped feeling like my home years earlier. My one frying pan sat on the stove. My two forks, two knives, and two spoons were installed in the drawer by the sink. My sweaters, wool socks, and snowpants were unpacked on the plywood shelves upstairs. And outside, at the top of the steep dirt grade, my little white Honda sat empty. I pictured it like a pack horse finally unburdened, its body wild and calm with relief. It had known some beautiful pastures since my college graduation three years earlier—elk plodding through a drifting snow in the Grand Tetons; the mesa late in the day gone ochre and purple above the Rio Grande—but for the first time, it would be in one place longer than four months. There would be no need to leave, no need to pack my bags again, no need to search elsewhere. Lev, the owner of the house, wouldn’t be back until June. Finally, I could allow myself not to be an outsider, to belong to the land.

  I’d found the house by posting handwritten signs across northern Vermont, on the quilt-like bulletin boards outside general stores, on the musty walls inside laundromats, in Peacham, Johnson, Jay, in Barton, Newport, and Morrisville, and even in one town called Eden. My attempt at respectable handwriting hung there beside the firewood for sale, the beloved lost cats, the spaghetti dinners already weeks gone: Wanted: a cabin or house set in the woods, with good light, very solitary. Proximity to a stream or brook. Running water and electricity preferred. Only one man had replied. Lev was a philosophy professor, leaving in September to teach in his native Tel Aviv. He’d bought the house the previous summer and was refurbishing it. In August, I made the six-hour drive from Boston, and Lev took me on a tour, pointing out his meager renovations. He was surprisingly tall, with a reddish beard and restless hands. It was hard to see the house through his talking. He’d planned to take sabbaticals with his wife, but after one winter of solitude for two, they were divorcing. He’d never lived in the house alone. He said he greatly anticipated such a winter—God only comes to those who are alone, he said—but it was obvious from his combination of bluster and warning that he viewed me as a guinea pig. I didn’t mind; the guinea pig rate was good. I’d only have to pay for six cords of firewood, electricity, and a bit of propane for the hot-water heater—less than one thousand dollars all told.

  From the outside, the house resembled a battered pirate ship run aground. A glass look-out tower, small slanting decks with sagging wooden railings, a catwalk along the second story, its two planks noticeably bowed. Doubling as the hold was a makeshift garage—a corrugated steel roof sloped over a dirt floor, the berths not large enough for cars but well-suited for storing firewood. Inside, through the mudroom, the main room was no less jerry-rigged—the lightbulb above the table exposed, half the floor plywood, half faux-wood flooring—but it wasn’t a cave, wasn’t damp or dark. There were three floor-to-ceiling windows offering a kind of triptych of the woods. There was a refrigerator, an electric stove, a toaster oven. There was a woodstove for heat. Up a steep set of wooden stairs was the bedroom—with wide wood floorboards, a sloping ceiling, and a mattress in the corner. On the far side of the mattress was Lev’s pride and joy: a small raised office space, with a desk and commanding view of the Green Mountains. The window looked out above one of the pitched and beaten decks. The green hills retreated into the distance like cresting waves.

  “Nine months,” Lev had said, as we looked out. “You move in October 1. You go into the Vermont winter and through it. You are certain you can manage?”

  I nodded.

  “In these woods time plays tricks on you.”

  “I understand.”

  He wanted me to understand, but he didn’t want me to understand, he wanted to explain. “Your timing sense changes.”

  “Sure,” I said. I was picturing an air filter from a car, the closest my mind could come to a timing belt, which was the closest I could come to picturing timing sense. Since my eye accident, I tended to see what I heard, even if the picture only confused me.

  “Make sure to study the manual I leave you. Remember what I tell you about the creosote in the chimney. And shoveling the roof. And the toilets freezing. Freezing, it is possible.”

  Lastly, as we went back downstairs, he admitted that the house was a strange one. It was built in the ’70s by a hippie from New York, a man who suffered from an almost pathological fear of war. The man had constructed a bomb shelter in the basement, a cinderblock crypt reached by a staircase that was hidden below a panel in the floor.

  Finally ready to humor Lev, now that he was across the Atlantic and the house was mine, I pushed aside my toast and opened the manual he’d written. As I read, lightning flared outside, the yellow birch leaves exploding like thousands of dressing room lightbulbs. The pines flashed deep blue. A roll of thunder rumbled under the floorboards. The rain went on describing the house, introducing the roof and the window
s. It was soothing to hear my shelter, to feel its shape around me. That seemed like the real manual, the one I’d have to learn day by day in the months ahead.

  The typed manual was eighteen pages long. There were lists, there were histories, there were warnings. There was the painfully obvious: Do not use the toilet if toilet water has frozen. There was the painfully insignificant: The woodstove is the Jotul brand, from Sweden, and is very respected. There was the painfully loud: DO NOT ALLOW WOODSTOVE TO GO ABOVE 700 DEGREES, CHIMNEY COULD CATCH FIRE AND EXPLODE. CHECK RED DEVIL GAUGE ON LEFT SIDE OF STOVE FREQUENTLY!

  The hazards kept coming. I could slip off the roof. I could get snowed in for weeks without food. I could encounter a bear right outside the house. I felt as though I was stumbling over the frozen corpses of men strewn along the path up Everest, this one ravaged by obsessiveness, that one undone by loneliness, this one overtaken by fear. It wasn’t a manual on how to care for the house so much as an inadvertent primer on the dangers of solitude. For company you could surround yourself with potential threats, so you didn’t have to recognize the larger threat of simply being alone. THE THREAT OF SILENCE. THE THREAT OF NO DISTRACTIONS.

  The manual annoyed me. I didn’t want Lev as a model. I didn’t want any anxious chatter inside my head. And, besides, I’d come here for that silence: a silence that might enable me to hear more, which might enable me to see more. I needed that expansiveness in the house, and I needed it in the woods around the house—even if it meant a great loneliness would come, too.

  As I kept flipping the pages, growing afraid to miss something actually important, a kind of fissure opened inside me, a weakness unstringing through my ribs. I knew what it meant to be too alone, knew how that bone-deep loneliness could begin to fuzz your mind. I knew how you could lose your sense of direction, not just of north, south, east, and west but of something more basic, something having to do with your own sturdiness in the world. Your own sense of what was solid.