Safe on the lower slopes, headed toward the lowlands and the life-giving water, he was able to see human life again as a part of the great forces of nature, albeit a small part. The experience at the summit of Katahdin had been overwhelming for him, though.
“Think of our life in nature,” he wrote. “Daily to come in contact with it—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks, the solid earth, the actual world. . . . Contact, Contact, who are we? Where are we?”
11
Journals in Dreamtime
WHEN I RETURNED from Puerto Rico, I found decided changes in the world surrounding the cottage. A warm wind had come up from the south, bringing rain and high winds. The snows had melted back; great flooding puddles were steaming everywhere; and in some south-facing spots in the open meadow I could see, for the first time since December, exposed areas of ground. The grass in these places was a flat, matted brown, and daily, as the south winds held, the brown sections of bare earth expanded. Patches of open forest floor appeared in the woodlands; the path down to the house cleared; and one warm day, not far from the stone wall on the northern side of the property, I saw a mourning cloak butterfly, a hibernating species which commonly emerges in early March.
After that, with a few setbacks, winter began to roll toward spring with a surprising normality. The snowbanks grew smaller and smaller until finally there were only a few deep banks lingering and steaming in the dank, dripping woods. The mourning cloaks began flying regularly; mayflies and obscure woodland insects appeared in the air. The red-winged blackbirds returned on schedule early in March, and then a few days later, coming home along the Great Road, not far from the Digital Equipment plant, I saw a flight of grackles.
One day toward the end of the month the wind veered around to the southwest again and clouds moved in, bringing with them a heavy downpour. It rained hard all day. Some sections of Beaver Brook rose; a few streets in the area flooded; and at nightfall, with the rain still sheeting down, I went to look for frogs and salamanders.
My daughter and I drove over to a swamp on the west side of the ridge about half a mile from my house. During the first warm, rainy nights of spring I would often see a variety of amphibians there, including the blue-spotted salamander, an endangered species. Finding an endangered animal so close to home, and observing the mad, amphibian frenzy of calling frogs and migrating salamanders always gave me a feeling of hope. But that night I noticed some deep, muddy tracks on the gravel road that led to the swamp, and a curious lack of frogs; usually on such a night they would be everywhere. At the site of the swamp I found out the reason. There was an official sign posted by the road indicating that the area was about to be developed. Behind the sign was an acre or so of raw fill. The wetland itself was gone; the red maples, the reeds and rushes, the sensitive fern, royal fern, and the black alder, the toads, frogs, and salamanders were nowhere to be seen.
We got out of the car to listen. Ordinarily on rainy nights at the end of March this part of the world would be loud with the ringing call of spring peepers. That night there was an ominous stillness, punctuated by the lonely dripping of rain from the surrounding trees, and in the distance the barely perceptible whine of a car.
“Let’s go,” I said to Lelia. “Nothing left.”
We got back in the car and I started it up and turned on the headlights. At the edge of the woods, just inside the trees by the side of the road beyond the swamp, I thought I saw a hunched figure standing in some alders. It looked like a huge bird, a crow, or an owl, its head pulled low, but it was the size of a man, and as soon as the lights flicked on, it stepped backwards into the deeper tangle of the shrubs.
“Go,” Lelia said. “Quick. I don’t like this.”
“It might be old Bill come back again,” I said.
“Go,” she said.
I pulled forward a little and tried to maneuver the lights into the deeper woods. Far back in the gloom I thought I saw him again, standing perfectly still this time.
“Go,” Lelia insisted.
“All right. We’re going. But what if that’s poor old Bill alone and wet?”
“I don’t care. What if it isn’t him, and anyway I don’t like Bill.”
“You don’t know Bill, Lelia. He disappeared before you were ever born.”
“I still don’t like him. Go.”
I backed the car around and we drove to the cottage in silence, having failed to hear any frogs or see any salamanders.
“Maybe you’re right, Lelia. Maybe that wasn’t Bill.”
“It wasn’t,” she said. “It was someone else. And I didn’t like him.”
Development notwithstanding, the skunk cabbages and the false hellebore poked up in the surviving swamps, and one night, in a clearing in the woodland between my cottage and Beaver Brook, I heard the familiar call of breeding woodcocks. On the twenty-seventh of March the weather cleared. The air was sharper, and it had that rich, lush odor of moist earth and early spring. From the little patch of woodland just north of my house I could hear the familiar call of a phoebe. I was not surprised. Phoebes are seen elsewhere in the region earlier than that date, but they always come to my land on the twenty-seventh of March, no matter what. The newly arrived bird scouted around the land for a week or so, and then later, after a mate appeared, the two of them built a nest in the shed my brother and I had built behind my house. As the weather warmed, I watched them raise their young.
One March some years earlier I was doing research at the library of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. I was looking for photographs by William Brewster, a Concord ornithologist who, during the late nineteenth century, had photographed the landscape west of Boston. While we were poking around, the librarian pulled a notebook from the stacks. “Look at these,” she said casually. “Thoreau’s notes.” I opened it. I remember a certain charge or tingling sensation as soon as I saw the scrawly penmanship of the man who lived at Walden Pond. Scanning the month of March, my eyes fell on the notation for the twenty-seventh. There, in his rolling hand, he had noted that the phoebe had arrived that morning.
The same librarian told me on another occasion that it was not Brewster who had taken most of the photographs I was so interested in but a black man named W. S. Gilbert, or simply Gilbert. I knew this name. In many of the Brewster photographs there is a youngish black man, finely dressed, who appears in company with some of Brewster’s Boston acquaintances. I learned that Gilbert was his manservant, a sort of jack-of-all-trades who accompanied him everywhere and was popular with Brewster’s rich friends. The librarian explained that Brewster would point his stick at a scene that he wanted to record, and the resourceful Gilbert would go about the picky business of setting up the cumbersome nineteenth-century camera to take the photo. This would explain how it was that William Brewster managed to appear in his own shots.
Brewster spent part of his summers and many of his weekends at his country estate, October Farm, in Concord. Some nights he would sleep at a camp, or cabin, on the Concord River about a mile below his house. He had landscaped the woods around the cabin with wildflowers, which he, his workers, and his friends would dig up from the surrounding woodlands. He also had a strange tomblike boathouse on the river where he kept canoes and other small craft for outings with his friends.
One day I walked down a long dirt road to the spot on the river where the cabin and the boathouse and gardens once stood. Just off the road about a quarter-mile from the cabin site was an eighteenth-century gambrel-roofed house with a sagging ridgepole and a crumbling chimney. Except for a chain and a dog’s water bowl by the front door, the house looked deserted. I threaded my way between the dead cars, passed a sagging barn, and went down the wagon track to the river, where I found the boathouse. There in the cement wall I saw the initials “WB, 1916.”
I also searched for the remains of the cabin, but I couldn’t find them, and after spending some time beside the river, I decided to go back home. The feeling of time past was almost palpable there. In the wind, in
the flow of the river, I imagined I could almost hear the voices of the boating parties that used to launch at this very spot, nearly one hundred years ago. I believe I was able to pick out some of the same trees I had seen in Brewster’s photographs.
On the way back to my car that day I first met Sanferd Benson. Not far from the crumbling house with the gambrel roof, I saw an old man who appeared to have materialized from the time of Brewster. He was standing in the middle of the dirt road, dressed in baggy overalls, and he had lank, white hair and circular, cloudy glasses. I introduced myself and told him why I was there. He told me his name, announced that he was ninety years old, and said that both he and his father had been born in that house. I did a quick calculation and figured that his father must have been alive when Brewster was living at October Farm.
“Did your father ever know a man named William Brewster?” I asked him.
“Why, I knew William Brewster,” he said. “I worked for him when I was a boy, and I will tell you that he was as fine a man as ever walked the earth.”
Benson’s father had worked as a handyman for Brewster, and Sanferd would regularly help out with the chores. He realized, in retrospect, that Brewster had paid him far more than the going rate.
“He was ever so generous, don’t you know. As fine a man as ever walked the earth.”
On later visits I discovered that this expression was a favorite of his.
“Mr. Brewster had the darkest eyes of any man as ever walked the earth,” he would say. “Mr. Brewster was as kind as any man as ever walked the earth.”
The old man was a wealth of knowledge. His memory of the nineteenth century was better than his recollection of events of a few years past, and he had a fine memory for detail.
I asked him if he had ever heard of Gilbert.
“Why, I knew Gilbert. He was my age. We used to play together.”
He leaned a little closer to me.
“Did you know that Gilbert was one of these ‘colored’ fellows?” he asked. He said this as if there were perhaps one or two hundred black people in the entire world.
After that day I kept running across Gilbert’s name. It seems that after Brewster’s death Gilbert, who had become a favorite among the photographer’s Boston Brahmin circle, had gone on to college. Benson told me that Gilbert was the first black man to graduate from Harvard.
“He became rich, even,” Sanferd explained. “He went over to Stockholm and made a great deal of money making shoe polish. But the war came” (he meant the Great War) “and he couldn’t get the fat he needed for his mix, and he lost his fortune.”
Periodically over the next few years I would ask Mr. Benson more questions about Gilbert. But the capstone of this arch of events was put in place the winter I lived in my cottage.
As part of my rereading of the classics, I read Tender Is the Night that winter. One sleeting Sunday afternoon I came to a passage about the murder of a black man in a Paris hotel. In the course of the investigation an American man named Jules Peterson appears on the scene. He is described as “a small respectable Negro on the suave model.” Fitzgerald tells us that Peterson was from Stockholm, where he had failed as a manufacturer of shoe polish. Everything coincided—the year, the description of the man, the business, the place. Jules Peterson must have been modeled on Gilbert.
One of the other journals I had acquired that winter was a short piece of writing begun, coincidentally, in the year that Thoreau died, 1862. My grandfather was twenty-three at the time and living in Port Tobacco, Maryland, teaching school. He began his journal on a whim, in a sort of running contest, as he said, with a “young lady” of his acquaintance. In contrast to some of the other journals I was reading that year, this one gave no particulars of the environment, no sense of place or personal quest. The journals begin early in the year 1862 and dry up at the beginning of August that year. What is interesting about them is what they don’t say. The Civil War was swirling through the countryside around him when he was setting down his notes, but he makes only oblique references to it. On Ash Wednesday, March 5, for example, he recalls his college companions of the year before, “many [of whom] are now engaged in war—perhaps fighting on this very day.” On August 5, the last entry in his journal, he comments on the death of a school companion, one Mike Robertson: “He fell gallantly fighting at the head of his company.” The journal ends on this note with one of its few musings: “While in life,” he wrote, “we are in the midst of death. Remember well, the night of death draws near.”
Not long after ending the journal my grandfather rowed across the Potomac at night, avoiding the Yankee gunboats, and subsequently joined “the Cause” as a noncombatant. He entered the Virginia Theological Seminary and worked in Confederate hospitals in the region. During this same period his younger brother Andrew served in the cavalry with the notorious Mosby Raiders, the terror of Yankee encampments. I have a photo of Uncle Andrew in front of Appomatox Court House on the day of surrender. His horse hangs its head as if in sorrow, and Uncle Andrew stares defiantly out from beneath his slouch hat with the sharp black eyes that are characteristic of that side of my family.
“Mine is such a small and uneventful life, there is not much to record,” Andrew’s brother, my grandfather, wrote in his journal during the height of the war.
In sharp contrast to these writings are the journals of my father. He began writing them early in his life, at age sixteen or seventeen, and continued writing until he was forty, when he finally married. The richest of these journals in a personal way are those covering his first year at college, when, in November, his mother died suddenly, followed shortly thereafter by his father, who had been sick for almost a year. But the most interesting historically are the accounts of his three years in China, 1915 to 1918.
The international world of Shanghai, the squalor and the intensity of Chinese life at this period of history, was a shock to my father, accustomed as he was to the small, sleepy life of the Eastern Shore. In the little glimpses I get from his journals, his childhood seems to have been idyllic. He passed his days in autumn scouring the forest with bands of friends, collecting chestnuts or hunting squirrels. In summer he sailed on the bay, swam, took excursions to river farms; and he whiled away the winters with cards and conversation. But in China he was overwhelmed by the colors, the tumultuous crowds, the filth, the smells, and the indifference to life. He was sometimes desperately homesick. The whistle of a steamer in the harbor would flood him with yearnings for the Eastern Shore, and there are times in his journal when the intensity of life in China, the bitter proximity to the edge of total dissolution, was too much; he would leave things out.
He got lost in the countryside one night after returning late from a pheasant-hunting trip on the Grand Canal. He and some companions had taken a canal boat inland, had moored along with hundreds of other boats, and then, having walked across several fields, had proceeded into some woods on the side of a hill. My father became separated from the group; coming back after dark, while he was crossing the fields, he stumbled over something in the middle of plowed land. He does not explain clearly in the journals what it was.
The story of this hunting party became part of family folklore. What he found in the field, he told us, was a “poor dead puppy.” This in itself was enough to evoke in us children a deep sense of pity and fear. But in retrospect it seems odd that a man who was certainly used to the death of animals, and who had encountered extremes of destitution in China, should have been so shocked by a dead puppy. It was not until years later, when we were all grown, that he told my brother Hugh that what he had found in the field that night was not a puppy but a dead baby.
Death was all around him in China. Daily bodies would float by on the river. He describes sickly, hungry crowds, lepers with running sores, beggars lining the streets in certain quarters, starvation in the countryside, trains of refugees moving from place to place, flood, famine, and plague. He wrote home mentioning—briefly, as if it were normal—the cond
itions. The country was on the verge of a dangerous plague, which, for the time being, had not spread beyond Nanking. “But as usual in China, there are other troubles,” he wrote. “Thousands are homeless from floods earlier in the year. Dikes have breached and river water has flooded the precious surrounding lowlands, meaning more famine in the coming year.” Civil unrest was still raging. “Bandits are worse than usual,” he reported. “Recently they captured some American engineers and are holding them for ransom. Conditions in the interior are all terribly unsettled. And yet, life goes on as usual. That is the remarkable thing about China; no matter how unsettled are political matters, you are still able to travel, mail letters, and hold school.” Surrounded by this chaos my father began a journal of a different sort.
One night he and a group of his friends became involved in a discussion of dreams and their meaning. As he explained in the introduction to this new journal, since coming out to China his dreams had been particularly vivid, so he decided to keep a diary of them, “a mere record,” as he called it, “of the unrestrained flights of the imagination. It should prove interesting to the future.”
This was the pre-Freudian, pre-Jungian era, at least for my father, and what seemed to interest him most was the interrelationship between waking life and the life of dreams. As a result, he recorded on the left-hand page of the journal the account of a dream, and on the right-hand page some possible explanation, most of which had to do with the events of his life at that period.
The accounts of the dreams are quintessential personal journals, a voyage into the unconscious. My father had set out to explore the wider world, but having got there, he seems to have discovered Thoreau’s dictum that it is not worth the while to fit out an expedition and sail round the world to count the cats of Zanzibar. He embarked on a voyage to (in Thoreau’s words) “that farthest western way, which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor conduct toward a worn out China or Japan.” He was headed inward.
Living at the End of Time Page 17
