Living at the End of Time

by John Hanson Mitchell

  Digital has a good reputation as an employer. It has promoted women and minorities, offers extensive employee benefits, rarely fires people, and offers flexible working hours. Furthermore, for a variety of reasons, some of which are economic rather than moral, the company does not accept military contracts. The fact that in the same year that I built my primitive dwelling, one mile away one of the fastest-blooming multinational corporations should construct a huge, sophisticated central engineering complex dramatically increased the irony of this already incongruous part of the world.

  The site the company selected was one of the more scenic in the town. In the mid-nineteenth century, in the years when Henry Thoreau used to come occasionally to the town common, the owners expanded their farm. They sold off their dairy herd and planted an extensive orchard on a northwesterly slope just beyond the common. As late as the mid 1980s the orchard was still a thriving operation, and the flowering trees, the heavy fruiting of autumn and late summer, and the spidery landscape of the winter branches provided a pleasing contrast to the clutter of gas stations and shops that had sprung up around the town common in recent decades. But the orchard was a prime piece of real estate, and after holding on longer than many would have, with old age approaching, the owners were forced to sell.

  There was a series of meetings about the proposed development in the town, none very well attended by the people of the community. No one seemed to care that a giant industrial building was about to be constructed just off the town common. The various town committees did their best to make sure that the development met all the state and local regulations and building codes. But, as there was no law prohibiting the construction of office buildings in pear orchards, the project moved along. A slight delay occurred when it was learned that the parking lot for the building was planned for an area that had questionable drainage, and for a while—for quite a while, in fact—company engineers and the local boards struggled to work out a compromise so that the parking lot could be constructed in such a way that the local water cycles could continue their ancient patterns. The Digital engineers, experienced in dealing with town boards, exhibited a certain resigned patience, and they dutifully designed and redesigned their plans to meet the local standards.

  When I learned of the development, I became concerned about a number of barns and historic houses that were located on the property. One was an elegant eighteenth-century dwelling with two narrow stone walls bordering a long landscaped drive. There was also a great, sturdy nineteenth-century barn with a foundation constructed from immense granite boulders. And there was a tall, narrow outbuilding that I had coveted for years. My thought was to move it to my land if no one else wanted it.

  The colonial house was saved as a conference center, but, driving through the town common one morning, I noticed a bulldozer parked in front of the barn—always an ominous sign. When I drove back through the common later that evening, a hole had appeared in the sky. The place where, for one hundred and sixty-two years, the barn had stood was level again; the great beams and posts had been carted off to some unknown fate, the huge granite foundation blocks presumably buried on the site. The tall outbuilding I had cherished had been smashed; I could see little bits of it piled here and there.

  About a year before I began to build my own modest house, the construction crews broke ground for the Digital buildings. They sliced off the top of the hill; giant earth-dredging machines dug out an immense foundation; concrete trucks appeared, seemingly from all corners of the world, and slowly, week by week, throughout that year, in spite of the rains of autumn, the snows of winter, and the mud of spring, construction progressed steadily.

  Later, when the steel frames were going up, I began work on my house, and for a while we worked in tandem. I raised a beam, and they, with their tall cranes and their sky hooks, set their I-beams. With rough-cut pine boards from the local mill, I sheathed my house in board-and-batten siding; they poured concrete and faced their structure with a thin layer of brick. I shingled, strip by strip, my steeply pitched roof. They poured some sticky waterproof substance over their vast flat-topped roof.

  After I completed my cottage, I found—somewhat to my surprise—that I had fashioned exactly what I had drawn on paper: a high, neo-Gothic, chapel-like cottage. They had in turn constructed exactly what their designers had in mind, a square, low-slung building, which, in spite of its overbearing presence, somehow looked ashamed of itself. It was inordinately plain, neoindustrial, characterless, and so flat, so boxlike, so boring that I actually found it perversely interesting.

  In spite of this intrusion, my cottage and the uninhabited ridge behind it proved an excellent refuge from the world at large. My house was decidedly primitive—I had no running water or electricity—but there was a satisfying, elemental comfort about life there. On certain evenings a deep, almost primeval silence would descend. Often in the midst of this vast stillness I could hear the high bark of foxes, the wailing of the whippoorwills, and the ghostly hooting of the barred owls that inhabited a swamp just to the south of the lake. With no street lamps or city lights nearby, the moon and stars seemed brighter, the sky blacker. Inside my house the light of the oil lamps cast a warm glow over the rough-cut pine walls, and in the peace of the long summer evenings I came to appreciate the beauty of shadowed corners, of silence and the uncivilized night. It was a curious existence. Here, in the very center of the expanding American electronics industry, I was living a sort of third-world existence, without modern conveniences, and surrounded by woods and old fields. It was a retreat into a closer wilderness, which was, to my mind at least, all the wilder for its very obscurity. I felt I was the only one who really knew the place.

  Shortly after I moved into my cottage, I began keeping a record of the little events that occurred on my land. These notes soon evolved into something more than a simple account of the weather, or the blooming of flowers, or the arrival and departure of migratory birds. They became an exploration of the way in which I was living. Coincidentally, about the time I moved into my cottage I was given a full set of the 1906 edition of the journals of Henry Thoreau. Slowly, day by day, week by week, I began reading through them and in time became consumed by the enigma of Thoreau’s short life.

  I had also collected that year a number of journals kept by various members of my family. My middle brother, Hugh, had sporadically written a journal; one of my cousins, who was something of an amateur naturalist, had kept meticulous, rather dry records of the natural history of his land on the Eastern Shore of Maryland; and my grandfather had periodically set down accounts of his daily life in the late nineteenth century. Most instructive, however, were journals kept by my father throughout most of his early adult years, including accounts of the years he spent in China between 1915 and 1918, and his life and travels in Europe and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s.

  Together these various writings, along with my own modest records, covered a span of some one hundred and fifty years. Thoreau began his journal in 1837. My grandfather, who was over fifty when my father was born, began his in 1862. My father, who also started his family late in life, began his writings in 1911, when he was still in school; and my brother’s and my cousin’s journals covered the 1950s and 1960s. I came to realize that what I was reading was not so much daily notes on how people had lived in the world as accounts of the contracts that these individuals had made with the universe in order to survive. Skimming through them in anticipation of reading them more thoroughly over the winter, I realized that I was involved in a true Thoreauvian journey, an exploration of the private sea of being alone.

  Within a week after moving into the cabin I had developed a pattern that would continue throughout the year. I’d get up as soon as the sun streamed in the east window, make coffee, carry it in a thermos to a sunny spot along the south wall, and sit there thinking and daydreaming. I came to love mornings at my cottage. Even though I had a regular job while I was living there, I seemed to have an inordinate amount o
f free time—partly, I think, because I had no modern conveniences: no radio, television, or telephone to interrupt my thoughts. I enjoyed what some would consider the hardships of my existence—the lack of plumbing and electricity—and in fact I gained a healthy perspective on the way in which we live in our time. I would find myself marveling at common phenomena such as running water and instantaneous electric light. By contrast I came to relish the elemental experience of hauling water, trimming the wicks of oil lamps, and cooking over a camp stove or open fire.

  Periodically the darker side of the miracle of modern technology would reassert itself, and I would become sharply aware that these are not the best of times. Quite apart from the fact that the superpowers continue to stockpile enough thermonuclear devices to obliterate the world, we seem to find ourselves in an age of environmental change that is matched only by the vast upheavals of prehistory—the extinction of the great land mammals at the end of the Pleistocene, the ice ages, the demise of the dinosaurs. In our time, toxic waste, the destruction of the world’s tropical forests, global warming, the holes being eaten through the protective atmospheric layer, and other apocalyptic developments seem to be accumulating at an increasing rate. To add to the confusion, while I was living in my cottage I was immersed in the daily life of the nineteenth century through my reading. Henry Thoreau’s journals gave me a sense of day-to-day life in Concord in the 1850s, and through my father’s journals I was immersed in China at the beginning of the twentieth century. Almost every day that year I would pass through places in Concord that Henry had written about a hundred years before. And it seemed astonishing to me that my own father, the man I had known so well, had actually lived in Shanghai.

  I am the youngest in my family by six years, the student, protege, and victim of two energetic older brothers. My father, who was nearly fifty when I came along, was born in 1893 and grew up in a small town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He went to Trinity College in Hartford, and then went off to China to teach English in Shanghai. He was a long-winded raconteur and a stickler for an orderly nineteenth-century way of life; our formal evening meals were often dominated by his singular, rambling accounts of China in the early part of the century or stories of his childhood on the Eastern Shore.

  My mother, who was also from Maryland, was something of a renegade in her modest way. My father was an Episcopalian minister, but unlike many wives of ministers, my mother was not a joiner; she served on no committees and tried to stay clear of community affairs, preferring instead to put her energies into her teaching career. I began visiting her more often the year I lived in my cottage, and we would compare our memories of family dinners. The one thing we were able to establish was that my father, in the tradition of the old patriarch, tended to hold forth. I remember his rolling delivery, the deep voice, the carefully selected phrasing, the silences before the storms of his periodic outbursts of discipline, and his enduring view that there was something deep and serious behind the frivolity of daily life.

  It was little wonder that he held this view in his adult years. Constantly he would come in contact with the tragedies of the town—deaths, alcoholic lives, troubled souls. But more to the point was his own past. During his first year in college, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, his parents died one after the other, and this shock, combined with the pressures of a freshman year in the alien North, threw him into a dark period of self-examination and struggle. It was after his graduation in 1914 that he left for China. He spent the next three years there. My mother used to say that he was trying to get as far away as possible from his past and his home. And indeed he came back from China sporting a nicely trimmed moustache, white ducks, and, according to his sister, speaking in an accent that was decidedly British—not an uncommon occurrence, apparently, for those returning from long stretches in Shanghai.

  He seemed to have experienced a spiritual renewal in China. His own father had been a minister, so it was not surprising that he should choose the ministry himself. But before he went out to the Orient, before he was exposed to a world of civil war, poverty, and starvation, he was still casting about for a career. When he came back he went on to earn an advanced degree in English at Yale, and only then, after tutoring young people and knocking about in various university cities of the Northeast, did he decide to enter the seminary.

  My father was able to endure an endless round of committee meetings and untold hours of personal counseling. Various lost souls in the community would regularly appear at our door and then disappear with him into his study to talk late into the night. He was deeply involved not only with his town and his flock but also with the larger world. He spent the summer of 1937 in Russia and western Europe. He stayed on Ukrainian collectives, and while he was in Germany heard the last sermon of Martin Niemöller, the famous antifascist Protestant minister: Niemöller delivered a fiery oration against Hitlerism, put away his notes, ended the service, and that afternoon was arrested by the Nazis.

  My father returned from Europe a changed man. He became involved in politics and grew obsessed with history. During my childhood there was not a single evening meal at which some aspect of the past was not discussed in detail, either family history or world events. Night after night, in the large, high-ceilinged dining room, my father would spin out the pageant of time for us while, always in the background, I could hear the regular tick and chime of the antique French clock on the mantelpiece.

  It seemed to me from all this that there was no escaping the overwhelming reality of change; the known world was coming to an end.

  Yet, in the cottage, I was surrounded by bridges to the past. I had behind me in the woods the flourishing record of another age in the flowers of the dooryard gardens of farms long deserted. I would regularly pass through the Concord landscape of Henry Thoreau’s journals; I had the handwritten accounts of people’s daily lives; and I even had the artifacts of my father’s past, the staff he had used when he climbed Mount Fuji in 1916 and a shard of a yellow tile he had picked up from the wall of the Forbidden City. I had my father’s original editions of the books of the orientologist Lafcadio Hearn. Pressed in the middle of his copy of In Ghostly Japan I found a ginkgo leaf he had collected in a temple yard in Japan sometime in 1917. I had my father’s photos of street life in Shanghai in 1916. I even had the camera he used to take the pictures.

  One of the objects I remembered best was a peculiarly horrid piece of statuary that had taken on an almost magical power in my young mind. It was a small ebony figure of a squatting, baldheaded man, about six inches high. The man held in front of him a larger head, sliced off at the hairline and hollowed out to create a small bowl. The faces on both heads were Oriental, expressionless, serene, and ominous.

  This object was moved from place to place in the house where I grew up. For a while it sat on a shelf in my father’s darkened study, where north light spilled through the leaded glass window. It sat on his desk for a time. Then it was banished by my mother to an obscure shelf beside the stove in the kitchen, where it was used to hold matches, and finally it was moved to the attic and eventually disappeared.

  The statue had the bitter smell of old ashes. The bowl held little bits of broken wooden matches, and if you ran your finger around the inside, it came out smudged and redolent of something evil. Once I dreamed about the head. Nothing happened in my dream except that the head seemed to have a power or life of its own. Years later, thinking about it, I came to realize that this hideous thing symbolized for me the entire experience of my father’s years in the Orient. It was somehow the essence of time past, mysterious, dark, and profoundly attractive.

  The summer I moved into the cottage I finally located the statue. One rainy July afternoon my eldest brother, Jim, who never intentionally throws anything away, brought it to me. It was inside an old cardboard box, wrapped in newspapers dated 1963, the year my father retired and moved from the rectory of his church. Layer by layer I unwrapped the papers, and there it was, nesting in the news of the past.
The thing was smaller than I had remembered it; the dark wood seemed to have lost some of its sheen; and a crack I didn’t remember had appeared on one side of the bowl. But it still seemed to carry with it all the memories of past lives.

  3

  Beside the Green Meadow

  BY EARLY JULY the forest and the fields surrounding the cottage were flourishing with a sustained vigor. Bird song was never so charged, the woods never so lush and sweet-smelling nor so alive with insect life. Butterflies drifted over the open areas; the meadow crickets began calling; the leaves were full, the grasses green and water-filled; and the buds of field wildflowers, which all through June had been swelling and filling, were in bloom.

  Nowhere was this vigor of summer life more apparent than in the meadow beyond the stone terrace of my cottage. Just to the south of the house, rolling to the southeast in an easy slope, was a cleared area of an acre and a half, which, by early summer, had become a veritable jungle of grasses. I once counted some twenty different herbaceous plants growing there. On another occasion I discovered twelve dew-bejeweled webs of the orb web weaver spider glistening in the morning sun. I used to lie there on those spacious, early summer afternoons surrounded by the wall of woods and watch the wild sky play out its cloudscape overhead, and sometimes I would fall into a sort of reverie in which the restrictions of space would dissolve, and I would feel myself transported. Given a little leap of faith, I could imagine myself in some high pasture undisturbed by time and the twentieth century. There were periods when I would spend the entire day simply staring at things, rising occasionally to move my chair to some more favored spot in the meadow, following the sun and thinking vaguely that, sometime, I should get up and do something.

  Five years before I moved to my cottage, the meadow was a pine forest, an entirely different and, in many ways, less appealing place—dark, rank with poison ivy, and essentially devoid of wildlife. In a survey that I made when the area was wooded with trees, I counted a patch of Canada mayflower, a few cucumber roots, and a great deal of poison ivy. Birds avoided the place, and only one mammal, a gray squirrel, nested there. Some forty years earlier the pine woods had been an orchard. In among the dark pines I could still see the decaying trunks of old apple trees. In its declining years, part of the orchard had been used as a dump by a family named Case who lived in the old house below the meadow, and before that the orchard had been a pasture for the family cow. Before the coming of the white man three centuries ago, the place had probably been forested with oak or white pine, the trees that make up the climax forest in this part of the world.