Into Woods

by Bill Roorbach

  Geography, what is it? Just a backdrop to career. A coincidence of career. I lay in bed wondering how I could ever leave our little house. All the work we’d done! And somehow, at forty-some, roots had grown from my feet and found the earth. I felt deeply dug in, thoroughly connected. But this new job was big time, I told myself. I’d have grad students. I’d have a raise of nearly one hundred percent, over time. I’d halve my teaching load. I’d write and write, and write myself right out of there. But Maine!

  Geography, gravity on its side, was winning. The decision was all but made: we’d stay. UMF would promote me, give me a competitive raise. But then Juliet was accepted into the painting program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. That tipped the balance. I took the job at Ohio State. Still unsure, I asked for a leave of absence from UMF, and was kindly obliged: two years.

  Ambition cared little about continuity or place or friendships or the travel weariness of souls or the five stages of grieving. Ambition looks up into the clouds and likes what it thinks it sees up there, doesn’t care at all about the rugged or impassable or even deadly cliffs and gorges and precipices its owner must stagger through and climb over on his way (hers, too) to wherever, just as long as the direction looks like up.

  The summer of 1995 was like this: drive to Chicago to look for and find an apartment for Juliet (there were lots of small apartments available, because, horribly, the heat had killed hundreds of old people that summer), then to Columbus to find an apartment for me. Motels and hotels and weeks of bad food. Then back to Maine (ah, sweet and cool Maine, where no one dies of the heat, but maybe of hitting a moose with a car!) to pack, and to consider the incredible range of response from friends to our leaving (veiled anger mostly, at perceived abandonment), then back to Chicago to move Juliet into her new digs (an apartment so small that perhaps I should call it a dig), then to Columbus to move me into mine (a pleasingly eccentric sublet from people who have since become good friends). Despite the stresses of all this we did one smart thing, at least: we kept our house in Maine. It’s cheap enough (our fifteen-year mortgage, now two-thirds paid, is $369.12 a month), and to sell it would have been to cut our anchor chain in a storm.

  We sped a thousand miles back to Maine that first June in the Year of Ambition, but Juliet lived nine weeks of that summer, day and night, at the Skowhegan School of Art, where she’d won a prestigious fellowship. At Juliet’s soul speed—in, say, a canoe—the town of Skowhegan would be something like thirty hours from our nest, downstream along the Temple Stream to the Sandy River to the Kennebec River. By car on good roads it’s only forty-five minutes, but forty-five minutes made all the difference for Jules that summer; she was away from home and from me no matter how close. We had two weeks together unrelaxed before September came and the long drives back to our separate cities. Then back to Maine in June, Juliet with a School of the Art Institute of Chicago painting degree in hand, then September, and back both of us to one city, Columbus, German Village, to that weary military-surplus-brown rental house where Juliet couldn’t figure out what room to sleep in, that Ohio town full of Ohio people, that outpost on the edges of the ancient prairie, at the ends of the eastern forest, through winter, through seductive early spring. Then back to Maine, and forth to Ohio, and back, a rhythm our hearts began to understand, if not our souls: moving, moving, all the time moving, tolerated till the baby came. Elysia slept in my arms and made me see that my soul had never left the house in Maine, not even to look down the street and see where the rest of me had gone.

  Here is more from Moving for Work, by our favorite sociologist, Anne B. Hendershott. It’s actually a footnote to the following rather familiar sentence: “On the list of all time stressful events, moving comes right after the death or divorce of a spouse.” Familiar sentence, because Juliet and I kept repeating it to each other as we moved, possibly as an explanation for why we felt so grouchy, but possibly as a threat. The footnote:

  Change in living conditions carries 20 “stressor points” according to The Social Readjustment Rating Scale by T.H. Holmes and R.H. Rahe published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research 11 (1967): 213—218. However, while 20 points in itself would not be difficult to manage, a move for work carries an additional 36 stressor points, a change in financial state (positive or negative) carries an additional 38 stressor points, a new mortgage carries 31 stressor points, a change in responsibilities at work carries another 29 stressor points, having a spouse begin or stop work brings another 26 stressor points, and a change in recreation brings 19 points, a change in church activities brings another 19 points, and the 18 points that a change in social activities causes brings the total number of stressor points caused by moving to an alarming 236 stressor points. In contrast, the death of a spouse carries 100 points in itself, and divorce carries 73 points.

  I’ll let my reader argue with Dr. Hendershott about stressor points (don’t death and divorce lead to changes as harrowing as and much worse than those of moving?), and merely point out that at least Juliet and I didn’t have church activities to make things worse.

  I was born inside St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago, August 18, 1953. We—my mother, father, older brother and I—lived in Park Forest, near the big city, till I was but one year of age, at which time I was moved to Needham, Massachusetts, where my memory dawns (though in an inkling way I remember some vague something about my street in Park Forest). Did that move cast the psychic mold for my later life of constant moves and upsetting dis-ubiety?

  The house in Needham was brown, as was the family station wagon. My dad was being promoted at work, and promotions meant hierarchical moves: Chicago office, Boston office, New York office.

  The summer I turned tender six—that age when most psychologists agree that identity and personality become firmly set—we (big brother Randy, Boston-born sister Carol, Mom, Dad, I) moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, a commuter exurb of New York City, one of those towns to which the golden honey of the big city flows, leaving the worker bees behind. The date was around August 20th, 1959, which I recall and can confirm easily because my little brother Douglas was being born. Thirty-three years later I would hold his new baby girl, dark and brown-eyed as he is, and like an explosion remember holding him, not déjà vu, not some kind of synaptic glitch, but memory, this little pink-brown baby in my arms. Memory full of emotion: love, jealousy, anger, curiosity. Memory full of the smells of that time, and of the feeling of displacement. I held Dougie’s daughter and felt the old displacement again.

  Imagine: my mother, already mother of three, already an uprooted (and perfectly nice) Midwesterner, gives birth in Boston, rests a day or two, and moves with new son to new town with no friends and husband under major-league pressure in a new office (he must have been stressed, Dad must, though he’d never say so; such was his training as a man), this husband away from home at least ten hours a day, an hour each way on the train to town, not to mention his frequent European and Asian and South American and African business trips of up to six weeks. Mom essentially alone in a new town, no relatives around, not even in-laws, no one at all, nothing, the phone thought of as too expensive except for emergency, and emotions no emergency. And how many additional “stressor points” should we award her for giving birth? For having four kids? For having us four kids? Then a fifth?

  I was alone a great deal, my athlete big brother having hooked up with the sportsy kids in the neighborhood immediately upon our arrival and able to fend for himself (interestingly, he hasn’t moved at all—still lives in New Canaan, not two miles from my parents’ house). But even he came home—according to my mother, who remembers the scene to this day—came home after an altercation in the neighborhood and said “I don’t even like it here,” which made Mom cry.

  I fished and roamed around in the woods contentedly alone, attached myself to the blue sky and turtles and ponds and large stumps and abandoned farm implements and mossy toadstool worlds the way I still do. There weren’t any kids I liked around. I got
pounded for being new, mostly, though Mike Vitello across the street invited me over to his house after punching me and throwing me in the gravel-pit pond, and we did hang out.

  I started first grade in Center School because West School wasn’t quite finished, so every kid from my part of town was moved at Christmastime to a new school building and huge raw playground where I broke Rosie Smith’s glasses (maybe on purpose: a rock was involved, the glasses perhaps snatched from her face, perhaps by me) and some other girl’s leg (absolutely by accident in a perfectly standard game of dodgeball, though I was thought guilty of violence after Rosie’s glasses—so my parents were called in) and supposedly pushed Dale Lybrand down trying to kiss her, hurting her knee (though what I—really, truly—believe actually happened was that she fell chasing me in a game of stolen kisses, in which boys, and certainly I, always played the role of terrified prey). I got in trouble in other ways, too. Clearly I was pissed about something, and letting it be known. The move? The displacement? The trickle-down effects of the isolation of my mother, that trailing wife trailing kids?

  When I was ten we moved to another house in New Canaan, a compact builder’s cape with six bedrooms and four baths on an acre of ridge above a bird sanctuary. And I lived in that house (except for a few high-school summer months in Montana in the care of my Uncle Bill—my first fly-fishing, first extended backpacking, first times mostly naked with a girl I loved) until I went to college, and in that house my parents still live, same phone number since 1959. At least there is that phone number for continuity. At least my parents are still home when I call, knock wood.

  The United States, let’s face it, is a country of exiles. Not even the descendents of the original inhabitants live where they want to live, or where their people started out (in fact, most Native American tribes in the best of times moved camp several times a year following game or the weather; even agricultural tribes are said to have moved on when the soil got thin, two or three years of stasis at best; and all this moving must reflect the heritage of all humans, which must point to moving as an activity thoroughly atavistic and perfectly in character—so why am I moaning?). My parents, whose parents in turn were from elsewhere, both grew up in Liberty, Missouri, met when Dad came from another part of Kansas City in the seventh grade. They began going steady in high school and married at age nineteen. By the time they were thirty-six they’d moved step-by-step away from staunch Liberty and its Depression Victorianism to polished New Canaan and its permissive postwar optimism. Surely they were reeling, even if they were growing rich.

  Part of the attraction of Maine for me, I think, is its strong resemblance to the Connecticut of my childhood (or at least the Connecticut of my childhood perception) and therefore my memory. I didn’t notice the wealth, particularly (not much of that in our part of present-day Maine). I didn’t notice the separation of work and worker in the commuter ethos of our town. What I noticed as a kid was the forest, the ponds, the bogs, the many bugs, the bright and clear days, the distance to neighbors, the working farms, the old fellows in wool caps, the New England churches, the crocuses, the five hundred birds of summer, the bright leaves of fall in particular progression, the snow.

  By my most conservative count I moved twenty-one times during my college years, from dorm to dorm, from farmhouse to farmhouse (and from band to band—I played piano), from shack-ups with more and less magnificent girlfriends to crowd scenes with student or musician roommates, from high above Cayuga’s waters in the hills around Ithaca to a series of rundown houses on that deep and narrow lake, from protofamily to protofamily, some all brothers, some all sisters, several households mixed girls and boys (these the most comfortable and comforting to me), some of the band households mixed ages, as well. Unconsciously I was recreating the large group and the muted chaos that was my family. In those five years I lived with some seventy-five people in all. Not many are still on my radar screen today, but I’d gladly hug anyone of them on sight. Maybe ten are still friends, though of those ten I regularly talk to only two or three or four. Several are dead—scary to say I can’t say how many, except as a minimum: three.

  Perhaps in all this moving around and confusion of allegiances and de-bonding and re-bonding I was recreating an insecurity that felt homey to me—not only emotional insecurity, but an insecure sense of place and belonging. Moving provided insecure circumstances I could then blame for any soul turmoil I felt instead of blaming the turmoil itself, this turmoil that has its roots in the early moves of my life and the effect of those moves on my parents. Moving! It’s moving what made me bad!

  Or maybe there was nothing for it; maybe if I wanted work and a life in the last part of the American Twentieth Century, I had to be on the move.

  From the time I finished college in 1976 (a year and three months late, the August I turned twenty-three) until the time I was married (at age thirty-six), I moved twenty-five more times, that is, completely relocated myself and my belongings to new parts of town or the country or the world, though some of these moves were toggle moves back and forth from New York City, where I’d established an agreeable home base and a rhythm of overwintering labor in the city and recreational estivation in the hills and shores. I had portable work: music, bartending, handyman, writing. From one house to another in Ithaca and surrounding towns six times, then to Seattle, two houses, then to Madison, Connecticut (while beloved Susan, who would have been my first wife in a different era, worked on her doctorate in music at Yale), then to Martha’s Vineyard (escaping the ménage and suburbia and regaining a huge and roiling family of roommates), then to New York City for the first time, then back and forth, first from a loft in Soho, then a loft in the meat district west of the West Village, then the Upper-Upper West Side, to these places: Oslo, Norway; Lenox, Massachusetts; Meredith, Colorado; Helena, Montana; Dearborn, Montana; and Martha’s Vineyard, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, all of them glorious places where a confirmed putterer could spend all his scraped-up money on the cheapest possible rents and on piles of used books and on ten million bottles of beer in the summery bosom of nature.

  An old teacher of Juliet’s (along, I believe, with the counselors of AA) called it the geographic cure: you move to start a new life in a new place—erase the blackboard—only to discover that when the dust settles you’re still you, with all your troubles intact, no matter that the street names are different, the second-tier fast food unfamiliar. The marks on the new slate as they appear despite you are in eerily the same handwriting.

  A Zen saying puts it more cheerfully: Wherever you go, there you are.

  And, of course, where you end up is everything in a move. In Montana, I felt my mind spreading out to fill the vast spaces around us. There I was. You could look off miles in every direction, and the sky was famously huge. Great valleys reached (and reach) miles to great ridges of mountains. It’s all high and dry and always there’s a wind. Newly wed, Juliet and I struggled to make friends—these Montana people were self-selected for the wide-open spaces, and they liked a lot of space around them, needed it. If you stood on the street to talk, your interlocutor stood four feet away. If you stepped a little closer, New York distance, two feet or so, your Montana acquaintance moved back to keep that wide valley between the mountain ranges that were your very separate selves. Always I felt I was hallooing across huge windswept geographical basins to have a conversation. Emotional space mimicked physical space—a visit once a month or so was considered a great deal of contact by our new friends. And their inner lives as you got to know them resembled the Great Plains, too: wide open spaces, inaccessible features. Hours of driving and the mountains no closer.

  The plain, sturdy landscape of the central part of Ohio seems to attract plain, sturdy minds, smart people whose thoughts despite intelligence don’t climb many hills, but hop on the perfectly straight interstate and go where they’re going, whose rivers of emotion are stable, easily dammed, slow flowing, often muddy and brown, oxbows of indirection hiding great fish of aggression (
I’m more of a grizzly bear—bite your goddamn head off, but at least you hear me coming), who like gatherings, since gathering is easy: high school football games in great stadiums, endless malls, giant universities. People who need dramatic or intricate or undulating or featured or obfuscatory landscape just don’t stay here. People who don’t, do. And they have children over generations so that a new species emerges: Ohio Man. Or am I just being mean, blaming Ohio and everyone living there for my own psychic struggles?

  Hell, no!

  And what about climate? In Ithaca, rain. And more rain. And snow. And more snow. Gray, gray, gray. That crazy town is equipped with gorges (you’ve seen the bumper sticker: “Ithaca is Gorges”), gorges to leap into when the gray skies get a person down. And people did leap. What sort of soul handles all that gray weather, all that rain, cheerfully?

  Inner climate can be predicted from outer. Maine is full of chilly characters, forty degrees below zero on the warmth meter, perpetually sure the good news is about to turn bad. On the most perfect day of summer, say “Nice day” to a true Yankee and he’ll say: “Winter is coming soon.”

  In Norway, there’s the national jollity, which is the flip side of the national depression (c.f. Edvard Munch), which two poles form a picture of the year there: midnight sun at summer solstice, twenty-two hours of night at winter.

  Thus does the geographical character of a place account for migration. It’s no mistake or mystery that Scandinavians ended up in Minnesota. Maine surely reminded various strains of Brits of their beloved British Isles and French Canadians of their beloved French Canada. In Maine, at any rate, among the Smiths and the Butlers and the Porters and the Kings, the Castonguays and Beauvoirs and Bellefontaines and Roys, my last name is a constant source of conversation—the spelling is so mysterious, that crazy “h” on the end that sounds like a “k,” wicked strange! One of my UMF students trying to remember my name to one of my distinguished colleagues said, “Oh, you know, that foreigner.”