She used to send long, introspective letters to me and to other friends. Things were slipping. She was alone. It was autumn, and already the firewood was running low. She was nearly out of money and too proud to take any from her ex-husband. Her family was a continent away and offered no solace in any case. She was, she wrote, seemingly emptied of everything that had once filled her. “My life is flattened on the road,” she said in one letter.
At night she would sit by the pond and stare into the water, listening to the call of the geese passing overhead and the lonely hoots of the owls in the nearby forest. She heard the rustling of mice, the crack of trees on windy nights. She read books, wrote more letters, studied nature, tried to find new friends. And then one night in October she looked down into the black waters of the pond and saw the sky.
The night was still and the stars were so bright that the images of the constellations were reflected on the quiet waters. She looked up and, for the first time since her childhood, saw the great band of the Milky Way arching through the night. She looked down and saw its dull glow in the waters. Water and sky seemed to merge. “The great ribbons of light formed a circle around me. And I was a part of it,” she wrote. Abruptly her mood changed, the struggle eased. “I knew what it was to be reborn. I don’t know what I was born into,” she wrote, “but I knew I was part of this natural world.”
She began to reexamine virtually all her previously held beliefs, and for the first time in her life religion seemed to make sense. The idea of a great father-god who dwelt in the sky and who had a son who was tortured to death by the very people who invented the god never made much sense to her. The existence of a spirit in trees, rocks, and animals, a sacred earth, an eternal circle of being, did. She began once again to explore the world of nature through the eyes of American Indian shamans and medicine men, and the more she studied, the more the world made sense to her. She was blond, blue-eyed, and very un-Indian in her talkative, neurotic way, but for a while she out-Indianed the Sioux and the Crow. She went to powwows, learned ritual songs and dances, built a sweat lodge for herself, and did everything but wear feathers and hunt buffalo.
None of the arts or crafts she had been involved with before had satisfied her. Except for pottery, she felt that they were removed from nature and the real world. Then as part of her immersion in Indian cultures she learned the art of natural basketry. Rather than buying materials at art-supply stores, she took to gathering them herself. She would spend days in the forest searching for suitable oak and hickory and black ash. She would locate the best trees and then return later to cut them down and strip the bark. The woods became her second home. It was this near-constant search for useful trees that led us to the ridge that day.
She was obsessed with finding black ash. “Where do we go now?” she asked me.
“On to the larch swamp,” I said.
We crossed the pastures, rounded a pond at the base of the slope, and then crossed another field to the swamp. Black ash typically grows in wet areas, but search as we might, we could not find one, so we headed back, taking the route up the northern edge of the slope. The ground there is steeper and the brush thicker, and we had to struggle to walk even a few paces. Conversation fell off, and silently we picked our way through blueberry bushes and thickets of pine and scrubby oak. I thought we were heading toward the hemlock grove where we had started, but as is often the case on the ridge, we got turned around. When we broke out of the brush, we were on the old carriage road not far from the gardens at Megan Lewis’ and, in fact, not that far from the boulders southwest of the grove.
In the middle of the old road Randall spotted the droppings of some large mammal. Whatever it was, it had been eating a mixture of berries and animals; we could see seeds as well as the little claws of squirrels or mice in the droppings.
“Maybe a coyote,” Alice suggested.
“There are coyotes around,” I said.
“But this isn’t one,” Randall said, breaking an hour-long silence. “This is a bear dropping.”
“But there are no bears around here,” I said.
“He knows his bears,” Alice said, nodding.
Randall was fond of solo wilderness trips and had once spent a summer alone in Labrador. One night, Alice said, a bear had come to his camp.
“He wasn’t after food,” she explained. “He just sat there staring at him. Isn’t that right, Randall? All night, he didn’t move. No sleep, right?”
“I don’t know what he wanted,” Randall said.
“I do,” Alice said.
“What?”
“He wanted your soul.”
I told them the story of the bear that had been killed nearby in the hemlock grove, the one that had come back to life, briefly, in the form of a Pawtucket shaman.
“But that was in 1811, Alice, and no bears have been seen since,” I said.
She merely smiled.
That autumn the Digital Equipment Corporation opened building number LKP 595. The building sat on the hill among a stand of white pine trees. It was a vast brick and glass structure, very angular in appearance, about ninety feet high, with long windows running the full length of the walls. On each corner, mounted on the ramparts, were TV surveillance cameras that swept to and fro across the parking lots.
Traffic increased dramatically shortly after the plant opened. At the wrong time of day it was actually possible to get caught in a traffic jam around the town square, something that used to happen only after the annual town parade on Memorial Day. Accidents were not uncommon. Once a week, it seemed, I would see shattered glass or car parts in the road.
I learned that it was possible to avoid the worst of the traffic by driving through the Digital parking lots, then on past a nearby VFW hall, with a Second World War howitzer sitting on the lawn in front. Jill Brown lived not far from LKP 595, and I took this shortcut regularly to get to her house. One day, as I was driving through the parking lot with a kayak on top of my car, one of the surveillance cameras spotted me and followed as I drove through the property, out onto the public highway, and past the lowered barrel of the howitzer.
My car is old and rusty and fairly distinctive, and I noticed that the cameras watched me on subsequent days as well. In fact, if I were more paranoid I might have imagined that the cameras and the howitzer were in communication and that some fine morning I would be blown off the road for my trespasses. But I overlooked the obvious symbolism of the juxtaposition—the marriage of war and industry—and continued to use the shortcut.
Traffic also increased beyond the common, after the Digital plant opened. Out on the Great Road the volume of the tidal bore grew substantially. On some days things would go wrong, the flow would cease altogether, and the river of cars would back up for a mile or so. This created a curious, ironic landscape, a long line of halted cars, throbbing impatiently amid corn fields and hay fields, beside fruit and vegetable stands.
There were also some changes in the human landscape of the town. In the morning, as I drove by the building, the lines of Digital workers bending up the switchback path to the plant doors reminded me of pilgrims entering a religious shrine after some long journey. Every day around noon the doors of the plant would open and the workers would stream back out. Some were model technicians complete with shiny black shoes and white socks, and the requisite shirt-pocket protector holding a neat row of pens. Some were young and health conscious, emerging, even in the colder weather, in shorts and running shoes to lap off a few miles during their lunch hour. Some practiced various methods of walking for health, striding along fanatically, eyes fixed, lifting their arms into seemingly unnatural positions. One man, a great sweating hulk, would stride along the country roads carrying dumbbells, which he would lift above his head as he walked.
Most of the workers, though, simply wandered around looking for restaurants. They always traveled in bands, little packs of men and women laughing and gesticulating, all easily identifiable as Digital workers, virtually all of them w
earing, like amulets, the little plastic identification tags bearing their name, photograph, and identification number. Whatever the image, these newcomers created a stark contrast to the farm workers, shopkeepers, and housewives who for decades had constituted the daytime population of the town.
In fact, Digital workers are as varied a group as one is likely to find in industry, perhaps the freest of all the technical workers in the region. They come and go on a relaxed schedule. Freest of these, and yet, on a deeper level, the most thoroughly imprisoned, I was given to understand, were the programmers. These we did not often see on the roads on sunny days. They came and went as they pleased, when they pleased, sometimes appearing at dusk to work through the night. They were the blessed, the most fervently pious, so intent on their work that some of them were not conscious of the weather, or even the time of day. They rarely socialized with the others, but on arriving at the plant would proceed directly to their cubicles, switch on their computers, and spend the next eight to ten hours staring at the mystical light that appeared on the screen. Some would not even break to eat, while others would stay at their desks, switch off their Digital work, and play computer games while they ate.
On the other side of the valley, far removed from the isolated cubicles of these devoted monks, I stoked my wood fires, trimmed the wicks of my oil lamps, and read my journals. By night the limbs cracked above the cottage; clouds scudded past the moon, and Orion rose in silence. By day the sun angled low across the sky. Light faded early; barred shadows of the setting sun made a brindled pattern in the meadow by four in the afternoon. I dreamed of my father in China. I split wood, dressed warmly, studied Thoreau, and took long walks in the woods.
“O solitude!” Henry wrote. “Obscurity . . . I never triumph so as when I have the least success in my neighbor’s eyes.”
One warm day that autumn, as I was returning from the lake on my bicycle, I saw, plodding among the youthful Digital workers out on their lunch break, the dark form of an older man. He was wearing a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, and he had on an overcoat in spite of the fact that it was an Indian summer day. In his right hand he carried a battered cardboard suitcase, held together with clothesline and electrical tape.
I knew him immediately. The winter before I built my cottage he had set up housekeeping in an island of woods created by the exit ramp between Route 2 and Route 495. Passing motorists, seeing his campfire glowing through the trees, would sometimes report him to the police. He was there even on the coldest nights. Nobody knew much about him, except that his name was Rudolph, and that he had once lived west of the area, somewhere around Leominster or Fitchburg. Prince Rudolph, as he came to be called, was like some of the old barns and outbuildings in the community: many of the local people considered him an eyesore and would have liked to be rid of him. But I enjoyed his presence. He provided a contrast to the new face of the town as he plodded along in his tattered overcoat, unshaven, with his grim mouth and angry, glaring eyes. Rudolph was not the friendly town drunk, hale and waving to passersby. He rarely looked up. Once or twice I had tried to talk to him, but he was monosyllabic.
I watched him approach the intersection at the town common. A little pack of Digital people came up from behind, moving faster; they parted around him like a wave around a piling and passed by. He didn’t even glance up. I was walking my bicycle in the opposite direction, toward him, and when I was four or five feet away I greeted him. He looked up, continued on without a word, and then did a double take.
“What’d you say?” he asked.
“I said how are you?”
He seemed to contemplate this for a second or two.
“That’s what I thought,” he said and walked on without further comment.
7
Autumnal Tints
ONE OF THE THINGS I came to appreciate better that year was the beauty of the night sky. A few weeks after I moved into the cottage, I noticed that my night vision seemed to have improved so that I could walk up from the road on the darkest of nights without a flashlight. Sometimes I would even go for night walks to the hemlock grove, picking my way along the trail by watching the sky. The stars had never seemed so bright. I became acutely conscious of the changing position of the constellations as the seasons rolled by, and I always knew what quarter the moon was in. Some nights when I was alone in the cottage I wouldn’t bother to light the lamps. I would simply sit there in the dark, watching moonlight spill in through the windows and the glass door, listening to the sounds around me.
There were three incredibly clear nights during the full moon that November. On one of those nights, when the moon was at its fullest, I sat alone in the dark for a while in front of the wood stove and then went out into the garden to watch the moon through binoculars. Many species of birds migrate at night and, although this was the end of the migratory season, every few minutes I would see a few silhouettes fly across the moon, and I could hear the sharp cry of passing shorebirds. While I was sitting in the moonlight I heard something moving around in the woods behind the wall. I stood up and saw a large dog nonchalantly shuffling through the pines. It was the size and shape of a Newfoundland. I went over to the wall and whistled for it, but it paid no attention. I whistled again and it continued on, head down, sniffing at something on the ground. I raised my binoculars, couldn’t locate it, lowered them to look again, and lost the spot. The dog simply disappeared. It was very un-doglike in its behavior, and curiously indifferent to my presence.
My children and I had a number of little adventures with the wildlife of the ridge that autumn. One Saturday morning in early November my son, Clayton, was digging a hole in my new garden at the southwest corner of the stone walls that surround the meadow. As he was working he had a sense that something was watching him, looked up, and saw on the other side of the wall, staring at him with its golden eyes, a full-grown Eastern coyote.
The animal was about ten yards back in the woods, standing with its mouth slightly open and its ears pointed sharply forward. Clayton thought at first that it was a strange-looking dog, but he quickly realized from its markings that it was a coyote. For a few seconds the two of them stared at each other across the wall, then Clayton began to back away through the garden while the coyote watched him steadily, apparently unafraid. By the time I got to the garden, it had disappeared.
One morning my daughter, Lelia, left the cottage to catch the school bus and returned in tears. She had surprised a herd of deer feeding in the meadow, and when they saw her they had “charged” her, she said, their great autumnal antlers lowered. Some weeks later I saw another coyote drift across the clearing, a shadowy, ghostlike form that loped through the grasses as if it were moving a few feet above the ground. It was a misty gray day, and the coyote seemed to materialize from the mist, cross the open ground, and disappear into the mist again. On a warm day that same month, while I was reading in the garden, a young fox climbed over the wall and curled up in the sun at the southwest corner of the meadow and promptly fell asleep, unconscious of the fact that I was sitting no more than twenty yards away.
The squirrels continued to feed in the oak and hickory trees in the nearby woods throughout that month. The remnant leaves shuddered and fell, and the stark, bare bones of the forest revealed themselves for the first time since April. Rains came—long, soft days of mists and leaden skies. The weather cleared, there was another Indian summer, and then, abruptly one morning, great racks of winter clouds scudded across the skies bearing a front of winter cold. Orion rose earlier and earlier each evening; sparrows filtered through the dried flower stalks in my garden. Immense flocks of high-flying Canada geese moved overhead. I stoked my wood fires, made tea, and embarked on a project to reread the old classics. I read Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland, and Wind in the Willows to my children; The Iliad, The Odyssey, Gilgamesh, and Beowulf I read to myself. The cottage was snug and warm and silent, a fine retreat from the twentieth century.
Unlike Henry Thoreau, who made do w
ith only a few books, I had moved into my cottage a small library. I lined my walls with shelves, and as they filled, I built more. The little cottage was getting crowded. I salvaged some old family teapots. I collected more photographs and mementos from my father’s years in the Orient. Sometimes when I was alone I would take down the mysterious figurine of the man with the bowl and inspect it in the gleam of the fire from the wood stove. And sometimes I would play long, slow fugues on the old parlor organ against the west wall.
This organ was a fine piece of carpentry. It was built sometime around 1890—about the time my father was born—and it had a remarkably clear tone and many working stops. I would start quietly enough, on those still evenings, but in time, line by line, the music would consume me and I would find myself pumping harder and harder, pulling out the stops one by one to layer on harmonies until, finally, I would snap out the great subbass and let the dark bass lines roll outward. I have no formal training in music, but since childhood I have been able to improvise on various instruments, and sometimes at night in the cottage it seemed that it was not me playing but some other, more talented soul who had temporarily moved into my body and actually knew how to construct music rather than pretend. Anyone passing in the nearby woods, hearing those wild fugues pouring out from the dimly lit cottage, would no doubt have avoided the place, presuming that a madman lived there. I would occasionally lose track of time while I was playing and would stop only when my fingers were too tired. Then, in the silence that followed, it seemed to me that the cottage would settle to earth, as if it had been floating above the ground.
Living at the End of Time Page 9
