Living at the End of Time

by John Hanson Mitchell

  My brother had some friends who were planning a raft trip down a section of the Rio Grande in the Big Bend area, so we drove west from Dallas and met them in a sad little restaurant in Odessa. We launched the raft at a place called Woods Landing in a near-trackless desert, having already dropped another vehicle downstream at a bridge crossing into Mexico.

  For the next five days, we drifted, paddled, poled, and floated through rapids and stretches of quiet water, downstream toward the Mexican bridge. We camped each night by the side of the river, and after dinner lay on our backs staring at the sky and talking quietly. This was in the early 1960s, and at one point we saw an odd, wandering star cross the sky. It appeared over a ridge, and against the backdrop of the fixed stars moved slowly across the night until it disappeared over another ridge to our west. It took us a while to figure out that it was a satellite, the first we had ever seen. My brother, ever the cynic, suggested that it would be only a matter of time before some military use was found for the device. He went so far as to suggest that it might be used to trigger nuclear rockets.

  The winter before we left for our Western trip Hugh had been studying about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and over the spring and early summer had been working on his series of poems about the bomb. As we moved down the river, day by day he tortured us with stories about Hiroshima, read passages from his works in progress, and lectured us on the development and testing of the bomb. Moving through that desert country was like moving through a postnuclear world. The only indication that life had not ceased to exist was the river itself. The part of the Rio Grande we were on was bounded by canyons and short, steep hills. Each evening when we stopped to camp, we would climb out of the river valley and stare across a barren landscape. The world there was brown and rucked and devoid of any signs of human habitation. But snaking through this seemingly lifeless desert was the great green ribbon of the river, with its lush bank-side vegetation.

  On their first night out on the Concord River, Henry and John Thoreau saw a great glow in the sky and heard, far in the distance, the clanging of fire bells. Somewhere in Lowell a fire was raging. On our first night out we climbed to a peak above the canyon walls to watch the fireball of the sun go down over the desert, and long after sunset sat there on the peak, talking. We began to descend to the river in near darkness. Halfway down the mountain, just as my brother was stepping over a rock, he heard an ominous buzzing and saw a rattlesnake, coiling itself and curving its neck back in preparation for a strike. We stepped back, then watched it for a while and let it escape, grateful to it for warning us. A year before this, on a cliff along the Palisades in New Jersey, a copperhead had struck at my brother while we were on an excursion together. It missed, and somewhat ungraciously, I thought, my brother had picked up a stick and flipped him out of our path over the edge.

  On their river trip Henry and his brother stopped at local farms for milk and pie. They saw fish and muskrats, heard foxes, watched birds, and paddled and rowed through the lush watery plants that grew beside the river. My brother and I passed mile on mile of bare rock, slipped through canyons three hundred feet deep, and heard the gurgling of rock-bound water. One dawn, before first light, I heard the elegiac song of canyon wrens dropping like rainwater amidst the crevices and rock outcroppings. Hummingbirds darted above the riverside vegetation; we saw the tracks of peccaries, heard one night an odd caterwauling, watched the stars, spoke of time and history and bombs.

  Three days into his trip Henry found the remnants of an ancient Indian camp near the river. Three days into our trip we found petroglyphs carved at an indeterminate time by local Indians. Henry and John locked themselves through a system of organized, channeled rivers. We came to spots in the river—well known to the river rats, as we called Hugh’s friends—where we could hear ahead of us a dark roaring and gushing. Here we tied things down, approached slowly, and then swirled through rapids, skimming at one point through a narrow cut between two immense boulders which channeled the river to such a height that the raft nearly left the water entirely. We came to a quiet pool where we swam in the cold waters, and then, after a few days, came to Big Bend National Park, where we stopped at a hot spring, bathed and swam, and then, as did Henry and John, undertook a short overland trip. Henry and John went into the cool heights of the White Mountains; we went into the flat heat of the Mexican desert.

  There was a small village in Mexico, not far from the Rio Grande. The river rats were dry and wanted to buy tequila con gusano, a favorite drink of theirs. We left the river and hiked to the town. Since I was the only one who spoke Spanish, they sent me to pick up the tequila while they drank cold beer at a local cantina. I went up the stretch of rocks and sand that served as a main road for the place, asked an old man where I could buy some wine, and went through a small, unmarked doorway up the street. It was dark inside. There was a short pine bar, and the walls behind the bar were lined with bottles and decorated with calendars showing naked women in lush, North American forest settings. It took me a minute to get used to the darkness, but once my vision cleared, I could see that the room was filled with eyes. The place was unusually quiet, but it was crowded with sad-looking men drinking in the darkness of the midafternoon. I realized suddenly that I was the cause of the silence. It was not a place that Anglos often visited, although it was only a few miles from the United States border.

  I was just back from a year in Spain, and my Spanish at that time was good. As soon as I spoke, the tension was broken. It was my accent. It was clearly not Mexican, but I had lost all traces of American English, and they wanted to know where I was from, how I had gotten to their godforsaken little village, and why I had come there. They bought me a beer, and we talked about Spain, about Franco and John Kennedy and Castro, the bomb, women. A demented man kept interrupting the conversation to ask if I knew a certain tune, which he would then sing in a cackling, outlandish voice. They told me not to bother with him, and at one point gave him a warning, but he was insistent. He asked if I had a girl friend, asked me to dance, and when I politely refused, he danced by himself for a while, cackling and winking at me with his bright, crazy eyes. Someone shouted at him to dance harder, and, arms cocked on his hips, legs flying in all directions, he spun wildly around the floor until he collapsed in a chair. Someone brought him a beer, tousled his hair, and kissed him on the forehead.

  I loved that bar. It was such a contrast to the wide, inhuman spaces of the desert. I had just come back from two years in Europe and I was not yet comfortable with the American landscape. The country seemed so raw to me, so huge and unfriendly and violent. Not five minutes after getting off the boat in New York I had seen a fight in the streets. The police were angry, the traffic insane, and the energy of the country, the frenetic pace of it all, had shocked me. The trip West had been a relief since my brother and I had camped alone in remote wilderness areas for much of the time. Now in Mexico I had rediscovered some of the sense of community I had experienced in southern Spain. I might have stayed there forever had the river rats not come to fetch me. The barflies and I had known each other less than an hour, but the farewells we gave there were warmer than the greetings I had gotten from some North American friends I hadn’t seen in two years.

  That night we were back on the river and camped in a scrape of beach below a skyscraper of a cliff, alone with the gurgle of the river and the lonely, sinking calls of the canyon wren.

  The next day we drifted into a narrow canyon so deep the river was bathed in the half-light of dusk. The river rats knew this section of the Rio Grande well and instructed us to beach the boat at a little outcropping. There, above us on the Mexican side of the river, we could see a cave in the sheer face of the cliff and, dangling from the mouth, the remnants of a homemade ladder, constructed apparently from salvaged driftwood and some kind of natural fiber from a desert plant. About fifteen years earlier, according to river lore, a man had lived in the cave. The story was that when he heard that the Russians had developed the atomic bomb, he
decided that nuclear war was inevitable. He became convinced that civilization was coming to an end, and he wanted to cut himself off from all human contact and spend the rest of his days in the desert. For seven years he lived alone in the cave above the river, eating rattlesnakes, lizards, and the big Rio Grande catfish. Sometimes people passing below on the river would hail him, but he would glare down at them without a word, as if they were an alien species whose chatter was incomprehensible to him. Early one spring, after a heavy downpour that raised the river and stiffened the rapids, he saw something orange washed up on the rocks below his cave. He descended to investigate and found there the body of a drowned woman. God knows what he saw in her face, but after that he gave up his isolation and returned to civilization.

  When Henry and John returned to Concord after their two-week trip, the marks left in the bank by their launching were still visible. John left Concord not long after their return to visit their common love in Scituate. Henry threw himself into his work and began translating Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound.

  When we came to the Mexican bridge we found the river rats’ truck still there. My brother and I got our car and drove north, returning home in late summer. That fall Hugh went off to work in a settlement house in New York and I went on to an American college. Later that year the river rats wrote to us. They had heard that the cliff-dwelling man was selling advertising in San Francisco.

  6

  My Lady of the Squirrels

  JUST AFTER DAWN on the fifth of October I heard a sharp rap on the roof of my cottage, as if someone had thrown a stone. I woke up, fell asleep again, and was awakened shortly thereafter by another rap. Five minutes later I heard the noise again. I heard it the following day, and the next morning as well, and all through that week and into the following week.

  It was clear by the first day what the noise was all about. Gray squirrels foraging in the hickory trees around the cottage were dropping nuts on my roof—the small stone terrace just beyond my door was littered with the shells. The work continued for the next two weeks, until they had thoroughly stripped the trees, and after a few days I became comfortable with the sound. But it was a clear sign that the cold weather was about to set in and that I had better do something about getting ready for winter.

  My cottage was without insulation, without storm windows and, more to the point, without any source of heat. So early that fall I set about preparing the place for the coming season and once again found myself operating in tandem with my mentor.

  Why Henry Thoreau, master of the practical arts, would wait until late autumn to begin preparing his cabin for a New England winter is beyond me, except that he seems to have enjoyed essential experiences, including the cold. It was not until November that he completed his indoor fireplace, which means he spent all of October without heat. He purchased a load of secondhand bricks and hauled up some stones and sand from the shores of Walden. He mixed the sand into his mortar, and slowly, taking his time, he layered up a good chimney and fireplace. He lathed the interior of his cabin and mixed plaster, using lime he had made himself from clamshells he had burned the winter before. He lived at his parents’ house for the few weeks that it took to complete the plastering work, and then, on December 6, he moved back into the winterized summer cabin.

  My work was somewhat easier. I ran an insulated chimney through a hole I cut in the roof and installed an airtight wood stove. Henry also used a stove the second winter he was at Walden, but he made do the first year with a fireplace that must have consumed wood voraciously and would have lost its fire each night, leaving the cabin cold on winter mornings. I burned good hardwood, and my stove was a small, efficiently designed European device that would burn through the night, and would sometimes hold coals for fifteen hours. Henry burned stumps that he dug up from his garden; he must have spent a good deal of his time chopping.

  I thought about plastering my house, just for tradition’s sake, but ended up insulating the pine walls with fiber glass and covering the interior with plasterboard. I bought more insulation for the ceiling at the local hardware store and then boarded it up with the same rough-cut pine with which I had built the walls. Henry enjoyed plastering his cottage. He went about the work slowly, and I imagine him pacing himself, listening to the call of the migrating birds in the surrounding woods as he worked and taking time off to walk and to visit with his friends in town.

  By contrast I grew to hate the messy business of getting ready for winter. I do not like to measure things, and fitting the wallboard between the frames required a lot of accurate cutting. I cut the panels outdoors and brought them inside to fit, but rains plagued me, and little bits of plaster and dust began to accumulate everywhere. I am sure that I breathed in my quota of fiber-glass insulating material, and when the plasterboard was all fitted, I had to go over the walls again and do more measuring and more cutting to finish off all the trim.

  Nevertheless, when I was done my cottage was snug and comfortable. I sealed all the windows, covered them with an extra set of recycled windows, puttied the cracks, and then, after the cold weather came, spent hours staring at the open door of the wood stove, enjoying the searing heat of the fire.

  I had some visitors that month. A friend from the Berkshires, Alice Dart, arrived with a quiet, serious man named Randall Mason, who had spent too much time in the wilderness and had almost forgotten how to talk. The two of them were used to cramped quarters and primitive living conditions, and they were content to sleep in my loft and cook their food on my makeshift outdoor fireplace. Alice was doing research on traditional Eastern Woodland Indian basketry at Harvard, and every day the two of them would drive off to Cambridge like commuters.

  One Saturday morning the three of us took a walk down to a larch swamp on the other side of some pasture land beyond the western slope of the ridge. Our intention was to find black ash, a species that Alice is forever searching out in order to make basket splints. We took the trail I had made behind my house leading to the hemlock grove, and then we turned south and wandered down the west side of the ridge, climbing in and out of the hollows. On the lower slopes, about a hundred yards in from a cleared pasture, we came to a collection of immense boulders overgrown with moss and lichens, some with ferns growing on them.

  Local folklore held that this site was the burial ground of some of the last Pawtucket Indians in this valley. There was a substantial Christian Indian village not far from the spot, but during King Philip’s War the inhabitants of the village, their Christianity notwithstanding, were rounded up and shipped to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where most of them died during the hard winter of 1676. A few stragglers returned and lived on at the edges of civilization, reverting, some said, to their primal, shamanistic religion. One by one these few died off and were buried among the boulders on the west slope of the ridge.

  For some reason I was never able to find this burial site when I set out specifically to look for it. I would come across the spot only while I was on some other expedition. There was something about the lay of the land, the strange south-running, short valleys in the midst of a generally westward slope, that made that part of the ridge hard to navigate. Sometimes, it seemed to me, different species of trees grew around the boulders at different times; sometimes it seemed the slopes of the hollow where the site was located angled off into different directions. The boulders themselves were mysterious. Some were immense—twelve or fifteen feet high—and after studying them for a while I got the impression that there was an order to their arrangement, as if they had been set down by Paleolithic temple builders. In fact the arrangement was probably the work of the greatest earth mover of them all, the glacier, and indeed, on some occasions, staring at the rocks, I could see no order at all, simply a jumble of broken stone.

  Alice was fascinated with the spot. She had grown up in an intensely religious household—her uncle was a well-known Episcopalian minister—and as an adult Alice had rejected Christianity and taken up the religions of the American In
dians. For several summers she had studied under the tutelage of a Crow medicine woman and had spent a lot of time with various Indian groups, learning to make baskets. One of her many theories was that it was not the colonists who were responsible for the stone walls of New England but the Native Americans.

  “They used them to track astronomical events,” Alice said, “the solstices, moon rise, star positions.”

  She also believed that they built small temples or meditation chambers.

  “This looks just like one of their sacred spots,” she said when she saw the boulders.

  I told her about the burial ground, and also about a local rumor that blacks, moving north on the Underground Railroad, used to hide out among these stones.

  “Slave catchers from the South used to pass through this valley. Farmers in the area who were hiding blacks would always send them out here,” I told her.

  “Well, that fits right in,” she said. “The Indians probably guided them here. These were Pawtuckets in this area, a humane people, very spiritual.”

  “But the last Indian here died in 1725,” I said.

  “Who says?”

  “The history books.”

  “Well, that’s just our history. Indians don’t believe that. They believe that they are still here. They were here in 1860 when these black people were coming through.”

  She looked around.

  “They’re still here, I bet.”

  Alice used to be a normal person. She used to live in a little town with tall trees in a house with a sewing room. On winter nights her mother would teach her how to stitch and cut patterns, and for years—for thirty years in fact—Alice believed that she would grow up and marry, have children, and move to a little town with tall trees. Once she did marry. Anthony Dart was a journalist who fancied himself a novelist, but who in time gave up fiction and went to work for Digital, always an option for free-lance writers in Boston. Alice was teaching art at crafts centers in Cambridge at the time, and after her husband became a computer person, she began to feel constricted by her marriage, although she wouldn’t admit it to herself. The two of them managed to stay together for another year, but the year took its toll. Alice would stay up late playing the same tune over and over again on her flute, She would walk at night along the roads in Concord, and when summer came she took long, moonlit swims across Walden Pond, always alone. She grew destructive and depressed. Uncharacteristically, Anthony began to work too hard. Finally they gave up. He stayed on at Digital. She packed her draw knife, some basket materials, and a sleeping bag in her Volkswagen and headed to the Berkshires. Some friends lent her a small cabin by a pond and she settled there in September, not certain what she would do when winter came.