by Jon Katz
My parents had no idea where I was going, or when I would be back. They thought my passion for fish strange, anyway. My father believed young boys should be playing baseball, and my mother never once set foot in my fish room, to my knowledge. They were in their own worlds; the fish were mine.
My companion in this private realm was Sam, my willful basset hound, a dog from another era. Nobody ever trained him or cleaned up after him; he was never walked on a leash. In the morning, rain or shine, someone let him out the back door; in the afternoon, someone let him back in. In between, he hung around the yard, eating garbage and dozing.
Inside, he was so insistent on sleeping in my narrow little bed that he often shoved me right out onto the floor, then growled or nipped if I tried to climb back in.
Whenever I wasn’t in school, I was up in my room with Sam and my fish. The lights above the tanks hummed and reflected off the colored gravel; the whole room had an eerie, underwater sort of glow. Lying in bed at night, I stared for hours at the rhythmic swimming, circling, and eating that marked the lives of fish.
Each tank had its own design, its own little concrete and plaster community, complete with houses and castles, pirate ships and treasure chests. I’d constructed elaborate ecosystems with fake coral reefs and real plants. Windmills turned, tiny divers raised and lowered their arms, dragons blew bubbles from their noses. Periodically I undertook massive cleanups, involving the transfer of fish, the draining of tanks, the scraping of glass and boiling of gravel. The pumps and filters needed constant maintenance. I liked knowing I could always reassemble everything afterward.
Up in my room, my little kingdom grew. No caustic teachers, nasty kids, troubled siblings, quarreling parents. Fish lives are simple, revolving around one another and food.
I saw the one-armed man two or three times a week, and he proved a ready and lucrative market for the scores of baby fish I was cranking out in my bedroom. And I needed constant infusions of cash. Riding public transit buses, clutching unstable plastic bags filled with fish—this method of transport had a high casualty rate.
Life in my room wasn’t simple, either. Lightbulbs blew out, filters filled with gunk, equipment malfunctioned. The floor was piled with fish magazines full of counsel about filtration systems, gravel, and food. Since fish do not live long, they had to be continually replaced. It was common to come home from school and find dead fish floating; I flushed them unceremoniously down the toilet.
My toughest, and most lucrative, work was breeding Siamese fighting fish, those vivid fantailed fish, usually kept in tiny bowls, that puff up colorfully at the sight of one another. (I was also proud of having crossbred mollies with platys, something rarely achieved by amateurs.)
Breeding the fighting fish—betas, they are properly called—is a laborious process. The male blows a bubble nest at the top of the tank, then fertilizes the eggs his mate lays and places each egg in a bubble. The parents have to be separated promptly before he can harm her, but separated without disturbing the fragile nest of bubbles, subject to disintegration at the slightest disturbance.
It was a painstaking process for all involved, but the one-armed man paid top dollar for the babies. After a while, I didn’t have to steal money for fish or equipment.
As I monitored my pregnant fish, separating the newborns from predators, Sam lay at my feet for hours. I appreciated his companionship. I thought him immensely loyal—no one else ever wanted to enter this water world—but perhaps he had his own agenda. (When we moved to southern New Jersey a few years later, so that my father could take a new job, my parents gave Sam away. It seemed ridiculous to them, not even worth discussing, to move two hundred miles with a dog.)
One night our family was having dinner downstairs when I heard what sounded like a series of thumps, followed by tinkling glass. My mother was the first to notice water dripping from the chandelier over the table—my bedroom was just above the dining room—and onto our dinner plates. She screamed.
I ran upstairs as quickly as I could. The central monitor that controlled all the heating units for the tanks had short-circuited and blown out the sides of every tank. The mess was astounding—water, gravel, plants, broken glass, and flopping fish all over the floor.
Sam was rushing from one corner of the room to another, gulping down as many of my fish as he could. Afterward, he threw up for days. We were picking out dried-up carcasses from behind radiators and dressers for weeks.
When I came across environmental psychologist Louise Chawla’s mesmerizing article “Ecstatic Places,” it was as if I’d come across a key to understanding my own life.
Chawla, who writes about childhood, nature, and creativity, went back to the ancient Greek for the original meaning of ecstatic. Most of us use the word to describe delight or joy. But the word’s root sense (ek + stasis) has to do with “standing apart,” or “standing outside ourselves,” and Chawla uses it to describe an intense memory or experience that affects a child who goes on to become a creative adult.
Such memories vary, but often they involve simple affection for a place where one has felt “comfortable, secure and well-loved,” a place that often—though not always—included nature and seemed “imbued with life.”
Chawla’s notion is that such environments offer a child freedom, a sense of enormous potential, an openness to discovery. These places “beckoned enthrallingly.” And they can be transforming. “We do not need to consciously preserve these memories; we know that we can never lose them,” Chawla writes. “They are like radioactive jewels buried within us, emitting energy across the years of our lives.”
She sees a deep, though still poorly understood, link between nature and creativity. Ecstatic memories, Chawla suggests, provide us with “meaningful images; an internalized core of calm, a sense of integration with nature, and for some, a creative disposition.”
If disconnection from nature is a form of social suicide, and triggers alienation and loneliness, as some psychoanalysts argue, then experiences in nature when we are young can shape our imaginations and affect our lives forever after.
I now live in an ecstatic place, one that daily takes me outside myself and into nature. Ecstatic moments have become an integral part of life here, as commonplace as encounters with plumbers or cranky customer-service reps.
The histories of people who create things for a living—books, buildings, paintings, woodwork—often include stories of how the imagination is sparked and nourished by glancing occurrences that only in retrospect appear significant—encounters with flowers in bloom, city lights at night, birds in a nest. These memories and experiences become embedded in the imagination, and echo through our lives.
Ecstatic places can also be interior or urban. What they have in common, Chawla says, in addition to an association with the physical freedom of discovery, is the psychological freedom of undisturbed encounter. They occur beyond the pale of friends, outside the direction of parents and teachers.
Alone, free from intrusion, distraction, surveillance, and prohibition, the child is free to encounter a place spontaneously. The place, in a sense, belongs to the child; he’s not an interloper in someone else’s territory, but feels the place is his own.
I got chills coming across these ideas in someone else’s book. Lights began switching on in my head about me, my farm, my ecstatic encounters, my freedom from intrusion, distraction, surveillance, and prohibition.
If any single notion defined my own early life, it would be undisturbed encounter. I drifted from place to place, alone and unobserved. It remains my most comfortable state.
So much memory of my early life has dissipated, whole years blurred or vanished, that it seems to me my life began when I married Paula and we had our daughter, Emma. I am a lucky and often happy man, my life filling with riches. That my childhood was very different is a testament to the fact that one part of life need not inevitably determine the outcome of the rest.
Growing up in Providence, with few friends or inter
ests outside my fish and comic books, I drifted through empty days, often skipping school, wandering.
I felt as close to rocker Buddy Holly as anybody. My “friends” were bus drivers, retail clerks, and waitresses in the places I visited regularly—like Dolly, the counter waitress at the Sheraton Hotel downtown, who gave me pieces of pie, and the one-armed czar of tropical fish at Newberry’s.
Before and (especially) after the destruction of my fish universe, I haunted the city, walking for hours, riding buses and trolleys, visiting pet stores downtown, eating dinner at hot dog stands, knowing where to seek shelter from rain or cold. I bought coins, cards, trinkets, and books, usually with stolen money. I snuck into old movie theaters and befriended street vendors.
Since I hated school, but rarely wanted to go home afterward, either, especially once my fish were gone, Sam and I developed a new headquarters in one of the family vaults in a vast, unkempt, and little-traveled cemetery on North Main Street, a half mile from our home.
The vault sometimes seemed fearful, but mostly tranquil. Well away from the street, reached via shady paths, it was dark and dank, perhaps ten or twelve feet high and twice as long, constructed of a thick stone, now gritty, worn, and water-stained. On sunny days, light streamed in through a couple of skylights; on cloudy days, it was very dark. And even in the middle of summer the enclosure was chilly.
Inside lay several generations of Sandersons, their names chiseled into the stone. Sam and I encamped in front of Nicholas’s resting place. I can’t remember when Nicholas Sanderson was born, but the year of his death is etched in my mind: 1942. I often imagined him a war hero, killed in combat. He was, I was sure, a pilot who went down bravely after a fiery battle in the clouds.
The vault wasn’t a gloomy place; it was my place. I ate candy bars and peanut butter crackers and daydreamed there. Sam generally curled up in a corner of the vault to sleep, his snores often echoing in the chamber.
I was careful to clean up my wrappers and leave no trace of my presence. Once or twice the police spotted Sam and me on the way in or out of the cemetery and drove us both home, with appropriate scolding and lectures. They thought we might be vandals; at times, they feared we might also become victims. They and my parents warned me to stay away.
But we caused no damage, and after a while, we were almost always able to avoid being spotted. The police don’t like to wander around cemeteries any more than most people.
Nobody else ever came into the vaults, just as nobody seemed to notice a kid hanging around a quaint old downtown in the middle of a weekday. So I could continue taking refuge in the vault. It was there I cried for Buddy Holly when his death in a plane crash was announced on the radio, there I constructed a life for Nicholas Sanderson and fed Sam bits of hot dog and bread.
As we grow older, we selectively recall those memories, incidents, and images we believe significant. The thread of my own life, my own story, it suddenly seemed to me, provided a straight line from Sam in the cemetery to Orson and the farm. Both dogs had accompanied me or led me to ecstatic experience, shaped who I was or wanted to be.
In my water world, I did experience the freedom Chawla talks about, a sense of potentiality, an openness to exploration and discovery in a place that was unquestionably enthralling. Later, my stone hideaway among the dead, and the streets and stores of old downtown Providence, served much the same purpose.
I would have said I had an uneasy relationship with nature, which I always saw as the province of environmental dogooders and sappy documentaries. I was sent to a summer camp when I was a kid, wet my cot most nights, got eaten alive by bugs, was terrified of the water, and hated every second of outdoor life. For decades, I didn’t feel drawn to return.
I don’t like heat, dirt, things that crawl or fly through the woods at night. I’ve never understood the charm of camping, sleeping on hard ground, battling mosquitoes. I became a committed city dweller, living most of my life in places like Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, and Dallas. When we weren’t working, Paula and I happily haunted restaurants, theaters, galleries, and bookstores.
But caring for fish, creating my own world for them, learning how to breed and heal them, was involvement with nature, even though almost everyone who knew me thought me a strange, withdrawn, sedentary child. Like dogs, fish don’t leave or say cruel things or lose their tempers. They allowed me to provide soothing, nurturing, and safe environments for them. In doing so, I created my own sanctuary, and if I wasn’t always happy there, the experience almost perfectly reflects the idea of the ecstatic place.
The destruction of my collected aquaria and inhabitants may seem a sad conclusion to the story, but I don’t remember it that way. When I saw the water and broken glass, and my companion happily slurping up the fish I’d so painstakingly raised—despite our epidemic emotionalization of them, dogs are very unsentimental characters—I knew that one part of my life was over and another had begun. I just didn’t know what was ahead or that it might take decades to learn the outcome.
After the cleanup, there was little or no discussion in my family. The fish were not mourned or, as far as I can recall, missed. My guess is that my parents were relieved.
I think I knew, on some level, that I had to move beyond those gurgling confines, and might not have been able to do it on my own. I haven’t owned a fish since, nor wanted to. I eventually left the cemetery behind, too. My involvement with nature seemed to end with the collapse of my fish empire. Yet, clearly, I was wrong. My need for nature wasn’t finished; it was a memory, an experience embedded in my subconscious, simply waiting to come to life again. Perhaps waiting for a dog, a disturbed border collie, to awaken it.
Today my life is enveloped by nature, by what I can call ecstatic experiences. Instead of fish, I have dogs, donkeys, sheep, chickens. Instead of tanks, I have barns. Watering systems have replaced filters as a concern; hay has replaced fish food. I still breed animals, and sometimes they die. My dogs live in a world at least partly constructed for them, a landscape of fences, sheep, streams, and paths.
I walk miles in deep woods each day, help the farrier care for the donkeys’ hooves, share this place not only with my farm animals and dogs but with raccoons, coyotes, skunks, weasels, chipmunks, bats, foxes, countless birds, hordes of bugs and snakes. The boy who hated summer camp would be astonished. I still can’t name most of the flowers growing in my gardens, or the varieties of bushes and trees that surround me. I can hardly distinguish one bird from another. A farmer friend was excited last summer to see several Baltimore orioles dancing around an old tree near my driveway, a rare sight. I hadn’t noticed.
Only recently have I begun to understand that we can experience nature in different ways, come to it from entirely different perspectives. Nature isn’t found only in the wild.
At Bedlam Farm, my moments and memories include having breakfast with Paula on the front porch, taking the sheep to the pasture on a moonlit night, watching the chickens peck their way across the grass, sitting in front of the crackling woodstove on a dark, still winter’s night.
Sometimes such moments are passive: watching black thunderclouds roll in from miles away, listening to raucous birdsong. Sometimes they are active: maneuvering a tiny lamb out from its struggling mother, finding and eating fresh eggs in the morning, wading with Clementine into brooks and streams. I can sit for hours watching coyotes prowl or a hawk circling, hunting mice and snakes.
My soul mate on this journey has been Orson. He brought me here. He stands with me here. Dogs are emotive, affectionate, and stimulating far beyond the capacity of the brightest-colored fish. A life with dogs—since they are animals, not human—is always an encounter with nature, no matter where it occurs, one that quite frequently connects us to our pasts. They’re simple creatures, but they provide sensory diversity, opportunities for discovery and imagination, both connection and solitude—they are certainly radioactive jewels of memory.
The ability of an adult to look upon the
world with wonder is an essential instrument in the work of the poet, the artist, the creative thinker. Edith Cobb, who often wrote about the imaginative experiences of childhood, said that wonder is the genesis of all knowledge.
My fish and now my dog Orson may not be able to experience a sense of wonder, but they can evoke it in me. That could be one of Orson’s most meaningful gifts—and yet another reason to see him and other dogs as animals, not humans. The more like us they seem, the less of a bridge to nature they are.
“Let’s go for a ride,” I yelled to the dogs on a hot and sticky July afternoon. I’d been working all day, and suddenly, I was tired and discouraged. Sometimes I get sick of sitting at a computer, sick of myself. I miss my wife and daughter and the ease of life in New York City and Jersey.
Anthony and his crew had finished the Dog Room and moved on to other jobs elsewhere. I was glad to have more peace and quiet, but of course I missed them. This is one reason I love dogs: they will not go off to college, tire of my mood swings, or take new jobs. On the other hand, they cannot talk or understand my weariness. A wave of sorrow passed over me.
I opened the back door and the dogs rushed out. Clem was happy to go anywhere, Orson just wanted to go with me. Only Rose stopped to see what we were doing. Heading for sheep? Riding the ATV? Walking across the road to the meadow?
Let’s take the ATV, I decided. A trip for Orson and me. I left Rose and Clementine on the porch; they were disappointed, but they would get over it.
I pulled the cover off the machine and Orson hopped up onto the backseat. The engine roared to life and we headed up the slope, along the fence, over the top of the hill. Orson navigated intently over my shoulder.
I steered the ATV off the trail and, for the first time, into the woods at the crest of the hill, deeper and farther than I’d gone before, beyond my own property and through a thick stand of pine. I saw by the stone fences and rusting wire that this was once pasture.
