Living at the End of Time

by John Hanson Mitchell

  A few days later I went back to Emil’s to ask if they had had any trouble with the peeping Tom. I told them about Bill.

  “You mean this poor man sleeps in the forest alone?” Minna wanted to know.

  “He claims he prefers it. He won’t even go near the road.”

  “We should set out honey for him, maybe?” She laughed.

  “He is the Green Man,” Emil said. “You have to take care of him. He’ll take our chickens otherwise.”

  “He is who?” I asked.

  Throughout history, he explained, a man has appeared in the folklore and mythologies of various cultures who, although human in form, lives in the netherworld between the village and the forest. He assumes various names: Gilgamesh, Osiris, Dionysus, or in Celtic myth Amaethon, the god of vegetation. The legend persisted even after the advent of Christianity in Europe. Medieval peasants were careful to set out gifts of food and drink for the Green Man each night, even though they might themselves be hard-pressed for food. In return, the forest-dwelling Green Man would take care of their crops, their animals, and, if necessary, their children. Sometimes, while gathering nuts or greens in the forest, children would see him, a wild, shaggy figure clothed entirely in green leaves or bark. He was a lonely, isolated character, more comfortable with animals than people, and yet never really free from his civilized roots. Green Men do not live in the wilderness; they prefer the wood lot, the forested wild edges just beyond the grazed meadow.

  “This is a harmless man,” Minna said. “Who are these ruffians with guns? They watch all night television and think the killer is everywhere.”

  Minna used to blame almost every human ill on either television, automobiles, or the state.

  “So what if he looks in a few windows at night. He’s lonely. He needs a woman,” she said.

  I did not hear Bill’s bird notes again that winter, and I would not find his tracks, even after the snows. The following spring I began actively to search for him. Once I thought I heard his low, sweet whistle, but it was only the song of the wood thrush. Again and again that spring, even after I gave up my search, I would be reminded of him by the bird calls, by the sight of the goldthread, the groundnut vine, or the little hog peanuts that grew along the stream by the lake. He seemed to be everywhere on the ridge—in the tree trunks, in the ground cover, the squirrel middens, and the long, lazy call of the red-eyed vireo. I couldn’t get him out of my mind.

  His almost palpable absence seemed as strong as his presence, and after a year or so, with the onset of the next winter, I began to wonder whether I hadn’t simply imagined him. He was, perhaps, not so much an entity as a possibility.

  I once asked a psychologist friend of mine what she would say about a man who graduated from Harvard College but spurned his degree and subsisted by taking odd jobs around his hometown. Who never married but loved children and was forever taking them out on forays in the woods and fields. Who lived all his life at home with his parents and sisters. Who, for two years, lived alone in a one-room cabin by a pond in the woods in a section of town where drunks and lowlifes of one sort or another often took refuge. And finally, what would she say if this man announced, confessed, boasted, even, that he was happy living in this manner, that he was right and the world was wrong?

  “I would have to say,” she answered, “that this poor guy has a serious character disorder. I’m not surprised he says he’s happy. These types are often so out of touch. They’re really only a step away from psychotic.”

  “Well, what if this man said that sometimes he felt that he actually ceased to be? That he felt suspended above earth? That he once described his profession as mystic, transcendentalist, and natural philosopher to boot?”

  She began to catch on, and when I told her I was describing Henry Thoreau, she accused me of taking things out of context.

  But who was this Mr. Thoreau who never married but loved children; who had older women and poets as his confidants; who lived alone by Walden Pond and seemed to attract to himself the wild animals of the forest; who would stand for hours in a single spot studying nature; who waded chest deep into swamps and waited there all morning observing frogs; who watched fish, counted flower petals, and found tonic in wildness?

  John Burroughs, writing a generation after Thoreau’s death, said he was an American Indian. Emerson said he was “the bachelor of thought and nature.” Some describe him in political terms, the founder of the passive-resistance movement, some in philosophical terms, the only real transcendentalist. Some think of him as an essayist, some as a naturalist, and locally—that is, among the people of Concord—he is thought of as a drunk, an eccentric, and a malingerer. Even now, one hundred and twenty-five years after his death, Thoreau still bothers the good burghers of his hometown.

  Since everyone else has an opinion, I offer one more: Henry was a Green Man.

  The facts speak for themselves. He lived apart, at the edge of the village. There was a frontier beyond him, a true wilderness, but he stayed behind; there are no Green Men in the wilderness. Henry loved animals. Birds would land on his shoulders. Squirrels, to the amazement of visitors, would feed from his hands. He had a pet wild mouse who would climb up his legs and eat cheese from his fingers. He walked in the forest and fields every day. He lived off wild food; he was forever out berrying or fishing. He swam regularly, he talked to woodchucks, and he was more at home in the field and forest that at the dinner table or in the drawing room.

  Green Men appear to have existed in every age. It was fashionable on the estates of eighteenth-century England to have one’s own hermit in residence in some remote section of the grounds. Charles VI of France, in the spirit of the Green Man, was fond of dressing in green leaves and romping with his friends through the streets of Paris. King Arthur’s knights, when they were sick at heart, would retire to the forest and dress in green ivy.

  Even in our time Green Men can be found. There is, not far from Walden Pond, a man who lives in the local woods and community gardens and feeds on wild plants and spoiled food from the supermarkets. There was a half-blind man who lived in a makeshift plastic tent in one of Boston’s parks for a while. He was a bird man who could identify species by call and knew more about nature than most of the city’s sighted residents. And then, of course, there was Bill.

  But what makes them go? What was it that drove Bill to the woods? What was it that drove—or, perhaps, more accurately, called—Henry to the woods around Walden Pond?

  My eldest brother—known to my children as Uncle Jim—came up for Christmas in mid-December, bringing my eighty-year-old mother along with him. Uncle Jim ensconced himself in the loft of my cottage while my mother stayed nearby at a bed-and-breakfast. Whereas my father, my brother Hugh, and I have kept journals, Jim has always kept a sketchbook. He began drawing as soon as he was old enough to hold a crayon and now supports himself by painting. Unfortunately he is not a good businessman, and the world of galleries and art dealers has kept him frustrated for most of his adult life. But he has nonetheless managed to acquire, through periodic windfalls and the occasional profitable one-man show, enough cash to amass a sizable collection of material goods, mostly from the 1930s.

  Uncle Jim is a man stuck in time. It is his studied opinion that the world went into sharp decline after 1938 and has yet to recover. In order to counteract this sad state of affairs he lives as best he can in the brighter world of his imagination. He owns two or three—the number varies periodically—pre-1940 automobiles (machines, he calls them). He has a veritable boat yard of older skiffs, pulling boats, punts, powerboats, sailboats, and work boats; he reads National Geographic and Life magazines from the 1930s and 1940s, has shelves full of old hardcover books. He makes regular rounds of yard sales, barn sales, secondhand stores, and antique shops, and never, in all his life, has he ever intentionally thrown anything away. At night he dreams of England—green pastures and willow-lined rivers. By day he earns his living by painting the past: sailing ships, romantic harbors, flo
wery gardens by the sea, summer porches of another era. There is no hope in him. He is a lost romantic.

  Uncle Jim arrived on a grim December day, carrying his battered leather-belted suitcase. He is never comfortable doing nothing—he is forever puttering—and, anticipating his arrival, I had arranged a number of projects for him.

  For months I had been worried that my children might fall out of the loft some night in their sleep. So, with the help of my daughter, Lelia, Jim and I started to build a rail across the open end of the loft. We bought the wood at the sawmill where I got the lumber for the house. We cut two posts, nailed them between the floor of the loft and the ceiling, and then ran rails from either side of the posts to the sloping walls, thereby enclosing the loft. I noticed that this slight internal improvement seemed to stiffen and strengthen the cottage considerably.

  That done, we began building a lean-to shed off the back of the cottage on the north side. We put up a frame, ran a stringer across the back wall of the house, planked the roof, and laid on a roll of roofing paper, intending to shingle later when the weather improved. The lean-to served as a combination woodshed, toolshed, outhouse, and catchall.

  After that we took on a few lesser projects. We built a Gothic bird feeder modeled on my cottage. Uncle Jim and my son, Clayton, built a small table; Jim made a few drawings for new outbuildings he thought I should construct in the spring. He taught my daughter about mixing colors; he lectured my mother on her erratic driving; he attempted to persuade my erstwhile wife to use an antique car in her new career as a real estate agent; he searched through the toy stores of Concord for the little model antique cars that he likes to collect; and throughout it all, he ate. He is always eating. He will feed eight to ten times a day, every two or three hours—coffee, doughnuts, bananas, eggs, more coffee; a little later some toast, more bananas (he always carries a bunch in his car); then lunch; then, around two or three, another lunch of bananas; high tea around five; then dinner; drinks with bananas after dinner; and finally, if it is offered, a dessert. In spite of his voracious appetite he is not fat. His constant projects seem to burn off the calories.

  On Christmas Day, in the tradition of all good bachelor uncles, he finally relaxed. He had his usual breakfast or two, opened a few presents in the living room, and then set to playing with the children’s toys. Since my father’s death he has been very solicitous of my mother. He drives her whenever she takes a long trip, makes sure she has enough to eat and drink, and, unlike either of her other two children, he argues with her. They bicker over details; he worries about her; she worries about him; and in this manner, each worrying over the welfare of the other, they get through life. After they left that Christmas, as after nearly every visit, each called to report on the eccentricities of the other.

  “I’m worried about that boy,” my mother announced (he is over fifty years old).

  “We’ve got to do something about Ma,” my brother said (she has been taking care of herself and her family for sixty years).

  With the departure of my mother and Uncle Jim and the onset of the new year, I settled in for the long siege of winter. By now I had my cottage fairly well set to survive whatever January and February chose to throw at New England. I had the place insulated; I had enough firewood; I had a good working stove; and the interior of my cottage was snug and warmly furnished. Just to the left of the front door stood an old desk where I kept the journals I was reading. On the right I had a bureau with a fine antique oil lamp. Under the bookshelves on the western wall was the bed that used to belong to my brother Hugh. When he was a child, to the horror of my parents, he had carved his initials in one of the posts, and I could still see them there, darkened and old, like a symbol carved by an Indian.

  Beyond the bed was another large bureau where I kept sheets and blankets, and beyond that, in the northwestern corner, a waist-high shelf held a camp stove, my copper water urn, plates, cups, tea, coffee, and a little vodka and sake for chilly evenings when the fire was low. On the east wall were more bookshelves; in the northeast corner I had built a closet with shelves at the bottom where I kept my clothes and hung winter coats and the like, and beyond the closet were more bookshelves. There was a table beside the east wall, an old stuffed chair, and my wood stove. On the back wall of the house stood the antique parlor organ. It was the first thing you would see on entering, and the last thing you would see as you shut the door upon leaving. It had a wonderful Gothic look to it and matched very nicely the exterior of the house. Sometimes, while the fire was catching, I would simply stare at it; I loved the low gleam of the polished wood in the light of the oil lamps, the dark shadows in the intricate carvings that ran up either side, and the glowing white of the ivory keys.

  In the loft above the first floor I had put two beds, one double and the mate to my brother Hugh’s single bed. I had constructed more bookshelves on the back wall upstairs, and between the beds I kept another desk, one that I had used as a child. It was always warm in the loft, and whenever my children were not staying with me I would sleep there.

  The snows, which had made a tentative beginning that winter in December, started in earnest by January. There was a storm shortly after New Year’s Day, another a week later, which created a solid base, and then another three or four days after that. It snowed regularly—no great blizzards or ice storms, simply a normal New England winter, with snowfall after snowfall layering up in the forest and over the fields and meadows.

  During the summer and fall I used to leave my car down by the road in a little clearing and walk up to the house. But after a week or so of heavy snow I found that even walking was difficult, and the only way in, by mid-January, was to ski. I dug out a little parking area close to the road and packed a trail up through the woods to the cottage. Then I forged another trail down through the meadow to my former house. The difficulty of simply going home, of getting wood, and, most especially, of hauling water to the cottage increased with each new snow. The track deepened and grew narrower until finally it was a mere animal trail through the fields and forest, a slim, curving line that disappeared into the trees.

  Around the cottage the hickory trees cracked in the wind, and little patches of snow caught in the crevices of the bark. In the deeper forest to the west of the house, snows collected on the feathery boughs of the white pines, piled up, and then fell to the forest floor in little plumes. Regularly I would ski through the woods to the hemlock grove. I watched there for animal signs, the tracks of raccoons and squirrels, deer droppings and quills of the porcupine. At night in my cottage I listened for the caterwauling of the great horned owls that had once nested in the hemlocks. The world around my place was transformed to an elemental environment of wood and snow and stone. I was more cut off than ever from the outside world. There were no uninvited visitors anymore, no alfresco dinners in my garden—no garden for that matter—and no meadow, only a long pasture of white snow covering walls and trails and all but the spikes of the tree trunks. The wind shot at the eaves beyond the loft, limbs snapped and fell. Death itself stalked the life beyond the walls. But I was happy.

  9

  The Other Side

  ONE NIGHT early that winter, after the leaves were off the trees, I noticed a bright halo of light in the sky above the hill on the other side of the valley. The glow was from the new Digital plant. I noticed that it was there, even in the depths of the night, every day of the week; in effect the lights never went off; the glow never went away. I was especially conscious of its presence, since I had become acutely aware of the use of energy for light and heat. I blew out my lamps whenever I left the house even for a little while. I banked my fires carefully and used water sparingly.

  Sometimes, seeing the glow, I would think of the loyal penitents, the programmers and engineers, laboring through the night at their computer terminals, alone in their cubicles, with the winds circling the walls outside the plant. I was still curious about the people who worked so long and hard at Digital. Even though I would see t
hem in the town and watch them every morning as they labored up the walkway to the main entrance of the building, I still had not met any of them, and I would find myself wondering what they did in their city on the hill. I used to ask friends who worked for the company what was inside the building, but none could tell me exactly. I did learn something of the life of the Digital employee, though. The people who worked at Digital were intensely loyal. Only two of the many I talked to that winter spoke critically of the company. One had worked at the Digital Equipment Corporation for twenty years, practically since he was a child. He said he was ready to give up work altogether, get a tent, and spend the rest of his life trekking through the wilderness regions of the world, hoping never again to have to see an industrial building. The other said that he had positive proof that Digital was spying on him through his own terminal. The company was monitoring his private life through a specialized remote sensing system, he said. He was now building a case toward a lawsuit.

  Other than these two excommunicants, everyone I met loved the place. They came from a variety of backgrounds. A few were novelists who had finally admitted to themselves that they were not going to be able to make a living by writing fiction. One or two were former teachers, one was a former librarian, one had been a greenhouse worker. There was a housewife, a mechanic, and a perpetual “student of life,” as he described himself. In short they were a very unengineerlike group of people.

  One of the employees who was most enthusiastic about the company was a divorced friend of mine who had grown up in Schenectady, New York, the daughter of an assembly-line worker. She had married young, had had two children, and had come to the area when her former husband got a job with one of the technological firms along Route 128 outside Boston. Her husband developed a fanatical devotion to his work. He began to spend more time at his office than he did at home, often working through the weekend. When he left her for another woman, neither of the children really noticed since they had hardly known him anyway. He was simply a shadowy figure who had sometimes appeared at their house on Sunday mornings.