Living at the End of Time

by John Hanson Mitchell

  I began cutting down another row, consumed now by the slow rhythm of the scythe. In that single pass, three leopard frogs dashed out from the cover of the grass and with grand, arching leaps fled before the whispering blade. I thought of Levin in Anna Karenina scything with his peasants in the meadows of Russia, one of the great scything portraits of history. I thought of my ninety-four-year-old friend Captain Bill Vinal—long since dead now—who had told me stories of cutting salt hay on the marshes of the North River in southeastern Massachusetts. In his youth in the 1890s he and his father and a gang of boys would rise early in the morning, take the hay wagon to the river marshes, and spend the day scything, drinking switchel—the traditional beverage of scythers—and eating cucumbers with bread and butter. There was always competition among them to carry the heavier end of the hay load, which they would transport to the wagon by ramming two long beams under the haystack. Young Bill once asked his father if he could possibly carry the heavy end. The old man fixed his eye. “You will carry the heavy end soon enough,” he said.

  Perhaps I should be grateful to Uncle Kenny’s city on the hill. Where would we be without computers and electronics? What would our culture be like without television, without video cassette recorders or televised sporting events, which, on a brilliant summer or autumn afternoon, when the sky is almost too blue to bear, hold millions indoors? I should be grateful. Without television they might all swarm over the landscape into the woods and the meadows, littering and shooting birds and crowding useless poets from their reveries.

  Ah, Henry, thou should’st be living at this hour, New England hath need of thee.

  By the time the shadows began to lengthen in the meadow, I had mowed up to the garden. It was time to meet my friend at Digital. I hung the scythe in the shed, poured some cold water into a basin on the front porch of my cottage, and washed up in the open air. I changed into some clean clothes and checked myself in a mirror I had hung on the back wall. It seemed to me that I looked very brown from the sun. I would probably be the only one at the plant that day who lived in such a primitive manner. But then I once knew a computer analyst who worked for a bank. He had a lot of money, but by choice he lived in the back of his car. By day he would appear in the bank in respectable clothing. By night he reverted to his gypsy car camp. We all have secret lives of one sort or another.

  The day had been a fitting prelude to my visit. A wilder man than myself, a more committed naturalist such as Henry Thoreau, would never have mowed the grass in that meadow; he would have let the land take its natural course and grow back to forest. On the larger scale of history, the scythe is really only a few steps away from the computer, and in fact not that far removed from the bomb.

  I parked my car in the visitors’ lot at LKP 595 and walked up toward the front doors, passing along the way the dark wood of white pines which Uncle Kenny had left standing. For some reason I was reminded of Dante in the dark woods on the outskirts of hell. But in fact I was about to ascend into my long-sought-for city on the hill and meet my computer-age Virgil in his cowboy clothes.

  The lobby was the scene of a great deal of activity. A conference was under way, and men from various alien computer companies were milling about, introducing themselves and exchanging cards. One poor man, an Indian, was lost and had arrived at the wrong Digital plant. I waited at the desk while the receptionist explained to him how to get to the other plant some twenty miles down the highway. I stepped to the counter after he left, explained my mission as instructed by my friend, and then signed my name and the date in the great Book of Names. A column requesting “Affiliation” threw me for a few seconds. It was a good question.

  The nice receptionist instructed me to take a seat and explained that Virgil would be down soon. Outside, beyond the sealed plate glass windows, which because of the climate-controlled environment of the plant were designed to discourage the entry of even the slightest draft of fresh air, the languid summer afternoon was winding slowly toward a generous evening. I could see the wind stirring the trees and grass, but it was like watching a silent film of nature—no smells, no sounds, no feel of air and sun. Inside, a vaguely institutional sense of a hospital dominated. There were concrete walls, cold, uninviting couches, racks of literature advertising Digital innovations, and, spread over low tables, computer magazines. I tried to read one of them. They were written in English, but the meaning was unfathomable to me.

  My friend did not appear. I waited. I looked out the window a while longer, regretting the flight of a fine afternoon. I watched a group of men behind a glass wall finishing up a conference. They were standing around in their shirtsleeves, shaking hands and sorting through papers. Some looked like Mexican bandits, with wide, turned-down mustaches; some looked like stereotypical technocrats, with their shirt-pocket pen protectors; and some appeared to be ordinary businessmen in three-piece suits.

  I poked around some more, found an application for employment at Digital, and, having nothing better to do, filled it out. No one was paying any attention to me. The guards were relaxed, there were crowds of people, and I began to wander beyond my appointed range. I passed through some glass doors and came to a long hallway lined with blank walls. I turned around and saw, on my left, another large, glassed-in room. There, inside, I saw row on row of computers, clicking away unattended, like a private brain for the building. I stood watching in awe, feeling somewhat dizzied by the magnitude of the room, the seemingly random, independent energy of the computers. Someone opened a door at the other end of the hall, and I fled back into the lobby, disoriented.

  The conference men emerged just then and surrounded me. They were now in the highest of spirits, and to escape them I crossed the lobby, checked to see whether Virgil had appeared, and then, still disoriented, started down another hall on the north side of the building. There was a signboard on the wall, listing, I thought, the names of the people who worked in the various offices, and in an effort to locate Virgil I began reading through them. The names sounded very familiar to me, very New England, and then suddenly I thought I was losing my mind. There, emblazoned in bright letters, working, as the sign explained, on the second floor, was Henry David Thoreau.

  I looked again, unbelieving. “Henry David Thoreau,” it read, “Second Floor.”

  I read down the list. There was Ralph Waldo Emerson on the fourth floor. Bronson Alcott was working for Digital; so was Henry’s enemy at Dial magazine, Margaret Fuller. They were all there, all the transcendentalists of Concord, having somehow skipped through time to sell their talents to Uncle Kenny. I was genuinely confused; too much sun, perhaps, too much immersion in the nineteenth century, too much contrast in one day.

  “Conference rooms,” someone said behind me. “We named them after the people around here. Homage to Concord.”

  It was Virgil, dressed in his cowboy clothes with his shoulder-length hair falling around his silver necklaces.

  “Thank God you explained,” I said. “I thought I was going mad.”

  We began on the first floor. He showed me the great computer brain, which I had already seen. We went to the second floor, where, in the central part of the building, I saw row upon row of cubicles stretching off into the distance, out of sight almost.

  “This building is an innovation. All the cubicles are the same height here, regardless of rank,” Virgil explained.

  The real Virgil took his Dante deeper and deeper into the depths of hell. I was guided ever upward toward the light. But there really was not much to see—floor after floor of identical cubicles. I could see inside some of them as we passed down the labyrinth of hallways. People were hunched over their terminals, their backs to the doorway. Some had decorated their walls with vistas of American landscapes—the Rockies, deserts, waterfalls, and wild animals. Some cubicle walls were simply lined with shelves stacked with reports and computer manuals.

  In time we came to Virgil’s own cubicle, and here he demonstrated to me the uses of his computer. Since he was some spe
cies of manager, he had a larger, more powerful piece of equipment, which he attempted, and more or less failed, to describe to me. At one point he gave me a demonstration of the marvels of technology. He explained that he could communicate with anyone in the building through his terminal. After some fiddling with his keyboard, he typed in a message to a nearby colleague. There was no response. He tried another tack, then another. Finally, in exasperation, he stood up on his chair and shouted down the row of cubicles.

  “Mike,” he said. “Turn on your machine. You’ve got a message coming in.”

  Mike obeyed.

  HELLO* MIKE* THIS IS A DEMO* Virgil typed.

  Mike’s computer, after a delay of a few seconds, slowly, letter by letter, responded.

  HELLO* I READ YOU* O* K*

  “You see,” Virgil said. “You can communicate all through this building.”

  We moved on, passing through hallways and rooms. I asked to visit the conference room that was named for Henry Thoreau, and Virgil dutifully guided me there. It was an empty, windowless room with a long table, well insulated from the former pear orchard and the surrounding landscape Henry had once praised. On the wall hung a woodcut with a quote from Henry: “In wildness,” it said, “is the preservation of the world.”

  We moved upward again and came to a vast interior room. Huge anacondalike wires ran across the ceiling, twisting and snaking downward to machines that sat on the floor in a dimmed, subdued light. Here, Virgil explained, was the essence of the building. Here the prototypes for the networking systems that would later be developed and sold were designed. There were only a few people in the room. It was past five o’clock, and the cubicles and halls were beginning to swarm with departing workers. But in one corner a group of diligent engineers stood puzzling around one machine. As Virgil explained, a “ghost” had appeared. Things were happening inside the machine that should not happen, and they were occurring not in an orderly fashion but in a seemingly random pattern.

  “If it happens regularly you can fix it,” Virgil said. “If it’s random, it’s trouble. They’re worried. They might be here all night.”

  We left the worried engineers and ascended to the next floor. In one area was an electronic workshop of some sort, all cluttered with computers and snips of wires. We came to a cafeteria. Virgil took me to a walkway that led to what would soon be the second building of the complex and proudly showed me a large maple tree that had been left standing between the two buildings. It was actually quite a pleasant touch. The tree cast a green shade over the glassed-in walkway. Finally we reached the fifth and highest floor, where we wandered through the maze of cubicles and ended up on the western side of the building. We were at one of the highest points in the town, and the view was splendid. Below us the slope of the former pear orchard rolled away to the wide highway, which was crowding up at this hour with the cars of commuters. Beyond we could see the old fields of a former farm that was deserted when the highway came through, and beyond that I could see the low ridge on which my cottage was located. Somewhere over there the meadow would still be giving off the rich odor of fresh-cut hay, the indigo buntings would be calling, and the grasshoppers would be scrambling over the fallen grasses. I felt a pang of loneliness.

  Beyond the ridge, beyond the stretching penaplain, deep blue now in the lowering afternoon sky, I saw Mount Wachusett—Henry Thoreau’s lonely peak, standing apart, without society.

  By June 21 I had been living in my cottage for one year. It rained that night, a warm, sustaining rain that dripped off the leaves in the hickory grove and filtered down through the tangle of wildflowers into the soil of the meadow. Just before going to bed I went out and stood in the open air, allowing the cleansing coolness of the sky to fall over my shoulders. I was alone, and below the meadow, in my old house, a light was burning, a brighter reflection of the warmer light of the oil lamps in my cottage. I thought of a flicker I had heard the night before. For some unknown reason, in the middle of the night, it had let out a long whinny from the woods beside the cottage. The sound woke me instantly, and I felt a strange sense of communion with the bird—a fellow traveler in the experiment of life, a spark in a generally lifeless and desolate universe. I felt a similar communion seeing the light below the meadow. I felt that I and my family, my friends and allies and acquaintances, were all shrinking down into the small, wild spaces of the world. I was determined now to stay on.

  The rain slowed, spilled to a mere drip in the surrounding woods; a cricket started up, and deep in the mat of grasses on the south side of the meadow I saw the bright flash of a firefly.

  Epilogue

  EARLY THAT SUMMER I finished reading the journals of Henry Thoreau. I had already completed my father’s and my brother’s journals. Delving into these personal accounts of other lives made me think back on the time, one year earlier, when I had first moved into my cottage.

  I originally built the cottage because my marriage was breaking up. I was broke, I didn’t have a good place to live, and I was cut off from the most meaningful landscape I had ever come to know. I was at the end of my tether. But then so was Henry when he went to Walden. So was Megan Lewis after her husband died. So were Alice Dart, Emil and Minna, Bill the Green Man, and Prince Rudolph. It seemed that everybody I had concerned myself with that year had been through some sort of trial. Most had recovered and survived, and some, myself included, had gone on to experience small, private ecstasies.

  Perhaps this account of that single year in my life is being set down too soon after it occurred for me to make any sense of it. The places you live, or the things that happen to you, or the people you take up with may seem accidental, but I believe that we are all reflections of one another, and that the people I knew that year, the experiences I had, and the landscape in which I lived were all in fact an extension of myself, an invented, imaginary world.

  Yet the place was indeed real. In fact, I continued to live in the cottage for two more years. During that time there were very few changes on the ridge. I expanded the garden along the western wall. The grasses grew thicker in the meadow, and to the north and west the woodlands continued to flourish. If anything, the ridge seemed to grow wilder. But at some point I knew I would have to leave the cottage—if I had stayed on, life would have become normal there—and so, by the end of that first year, I had begun to think more seriously about building a “real” house on the land.

  I had continued to admire the ideas of Henry Thoreau’s contemporary Andrew Jackson Downing. I had even come across a reference to him—a derogatory one—in Walden, where Thoreau took Downing to task for recommending earth-colored houses. But in spite of this squabbling between my mentors, I was able to make a clear choice and decided to build a replica of one of Downing’s cottages. The construction of that place—the various modifications and misadventures that are so much a part of house building—is another story entirely. Suffice it to say that after a year and a half of struggle, there was yet another Gothic Revival house beside the little meadow, this one properly constructed by a craftsman who, as fate would have it, was named Jackson. I moved into the place toward the end of a strangely snowless winter.

  On my first night there it finally did snow, a beautiful slow drift that covered the winterkilled meadow, the stone walls, and the steep gables of my new house. Just as I was falling asleep I heard, coming from the woods beside my former cottage, the most lonesome, tragic howl I have ever known. The sound echoed through the pines. It reverberated along the stone walls and seemed to permeate the rooms of my as yet unfurnished house. The call was that of a lone coyote, and later that winter this single individual was joined by another. By spring a whole pack had taken up residence on the ridge.

  In spite of the increasing wildness of the area, I was now once more living behind real walls. Even though I had a house with many tall, narrow windows opening onto gardens and terraces and parterres, I lived cut off from the outdoors, in the manner of most moderately well-off people in the Western world.
Life there was luxurious. I had running hot water, heat, a proper stove, and a well-insulated dwelling that successfully kept the winter winds at bay. My children, who continued to come on a regular basis, had rooms of their own, and I settled into a generally civilized existence.

  Often in spring, after the weather warmed, I would think back on my first year in the little cottage. That single year, which had been filled with so many new discoveries, had proved an excellent refinement of views I had been developing before I moved there. Day to day, my so-called primitive way of life had sharpened those things I already knew about myself: that I find great solace in living close to the cycles of the natural year, and that living in this way, I feel more in touch with deeper, less evident cycles in the universe, closer to the moving spirit of the land. More to the point, I discovered firsthand, as Henry Thoreau so often taught, that the essence of civilization is not the multiplication of wants but the elimination of need. In our time it never hurts to rediscover such simple truths for oneself.