Out of the Woods

by Lynn Darling

  But that afternoon, I wanted no part of superhighways relentless as time, speeding out of one map and into another. I needed those slow-poky little roads. They would be dotted with small towns and country stores and old barns, farm stands, and intersections that invited you to stop and look around, idiosyncratic places that could bolster the reassuring sense that life continued, despite the fear beginning to hammer at the back of my brain that mine had hit a wall. These roads would take their time, in a syncopated rhythm of hills and flats, orchards and pastures, villages and strip malls. They were old routes shaped by the landscape, not blasting through it, and the places that grew alongside them were testimonies in brick and wood and marble to what had mattered to the people who lived there. In their details, I would see how Maine differed from New Hampshire, and New Hampshire from Vermont. I would be passing through somewhere, rather than anywhere.

  I studied the map. That is to say, maps: I had a book of Vermont maps, and another of New Hampshire maps. (What I didn’t have was a GPS. That was cheating.) Both books chopped up each state into squares, one square to a page, none of them necessarily contiguous. Flipping back and forth among the grids, I figured out an alternative route that looked more direct and eschewed all highways. It was composed of a somewhat bewildering tangle of what were probably two-lane blacktops that unspooled like a web of thin spidery veins over a half-dozen unconnected pages. It would be a little tricky in places—New Hampshire in particular seemed dauntingly chockablock with massive lakes and mountains. But the beginning part was simple enough. I identified a smallish-looking state road that seemed to split off from Route 1, the Maine coastal road, at about the right latitude (if that was even the word I wanted), although it seemed to disappear once it arrived in New Hampshire. No matter, there was another one going in more or less the same direction. A lot of them, in fact. They crissed and crossed and do-si-doed all over the place, but eventually some of them evidently intersected with Interstate Route 4, which would take me directly into Woodstock. There were also a lot of alternative, even thinner lines that might or might not provide a shortcut, and a few roads that seemed to change their names simply for the hell of it before popping up in unexpected places. I thought about writing down a route but decided against it. It looked simple enough. And I wanted an adventure.

  This day, after all, was not only an end but also a beginning—of a new life in a new world. I needed to get to where I was going according to my own lights, along a path I had chosen, not one generated by some witless computer program, or traced out by helpful strangers.

  Later I would learn about route delusion and disorientation behavior and a whole lot of terms scientists use to characterize the bizarre ways people make an utter hash of getting from one place to another. At the time, however, I tossed the maps onto the passenger seat and pulled out of the parking lot, blinking away the last of the tears. You’ll be fine, wiser heads had told me when I asked them how they got through this day. You’ll cry, but then you’ll feel light in a way you haven’t felt in years.

  I had doubted that second part, but as I slipped out of Brunswick onto the highway that would in turn tip me onto the coast road, I sensed it, that first stirring of exhilaration. It was a fine day, there was plenty of it left, and I was headed into a brand-new life, one in which, for the first time in many years, I had no idea what would happen next.

  My husband, Lee, had died when Zoë was six, and in the beginning, and for many years afterward, life was a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. I don’t mean to say there wasn’t a rich complement of joy and deep satisfaction, along with the usual hardships of single parenthood, to accompany the archipelago that grief requires us to navigate, only that the way was straight and the direction clear. I had a child to raise and a living to make and I did these things cocooned in the warmly reassuring diurnal rhythm of playdates and sleepovers, of tête-à-têtes with other mothers, of teacher conferences and bake sales—and with little concern over the parts of life that might be missing.

  But after my daughter entered high school, the soft focus and narrow spectrum through which I was used to viewing the world shifted sharply. Her new school politely made it clear to the freshmen parents that their involvement in their children’s academic careers was essentially limited to attending school events and writing large checks on a regular basis. My daughter passed into that seemingly endless phase of adolescence during which an adult’s presence was mainly required at times of intense unhappiness. More and more vacations and weekends were spent at other people’s country homes or on the kind of educational jaunts meant to impress the jaded eyes of the college admissions committees in the rapidly advancing future. Soon, too soon, she would be gone.

  I had begun to sketch out the outlines of my response to that inevitability about ten years before, though I didn’t know it then. One of my two stepdaughters had been married at her mother’s house in Barnard, a small hamlet about ten miles north of Woodstock. I was struck by the beauty of the place, a country of green hills and old barns and grazing cows, and by the faint breeze of memory it stirred of childhood visits in summer and at Christmas to the hardscrabble speck of a town in southern New Hampshire where my father had grown up.

  The decision to spend time in Woodstock alone was a last-minute idea, impelled by my daughter’s going to summer camp for the first time, by a July heat wave that made the prospect of an air conditioner–less loft in New York City unappetizing at best, and by the startling realization that for the first time in a very long time, I was facing a month in which I could do as I pleased.

  Parents lead contingent lives, the personal put on hold, decisions of what to do next based on the needs, well-being, and schedules of others. That summer when it changed—if only for a month—was, I see now, a small intimation of what lay waiting around the wide bend of my daughter’s childhood: the beginning of the rest of life.

  The house I rented, sight unseen, and selected from the scant few that were still available, reflected the extemporaneous nature of that decision: it was an odd little place, painted a violent shade of pink, which perched precariously on a narrow bit of ground above the wide shallow river that wound its way through the village.

  My temporary roost sported an eclectic conglomeration of architectural elements and was only sparsely furnished, the result of the recent divorce of the house’s owners. The bareness of the place appealed to me—as did, to a much more limited extent, the ex-husband. Angus was a Ph.D. in botany who worked nights as a waiter so that he could dedicate his days to … well, no one was really sure how he spent his days, beyond Rollerblading and executing ill-conceived, highly public pranks, usually performed in costume and received with irritated wonder by the village’s inhabitants. But he was a connoisseur of the country’s beauty: he once took me to a waterfall hidden deep in the forest, a place so lovely that you could almost believe that dryads and fairies were real, I observed. Angus looked at me with a faintly pitying surprise. “Of course they are,” he said.

  For the first time in years my hours were for hire, freelance agents ready for any employment. Zoë’s summer camp was one of those shoestring operations where the 1960s lingered on, sustained by large doses of Joni Mitchell and politically correct entertainments like the daylong reenactment of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, which was offered up under a broiling sun for Parents’ Visiting Day ceremonies. No cell phones or computers were permitted, which meant that Zoë and I were unbuckled from each other for the first time, apart from the handwritten letters detailing cold morning swims, mean girls, kind counselors, and an aggressive mold population that was slowly turning everything in her tent, including the inhabitants, an alarming shade of gray.

  Every morning I walked down the steep hill and bought coffee and a pastry from the somewhat self-consciously European but extremely good café and then trudged back up again, amazed at the spaciousness of the day ahead. In the beginning I took the coffee and the pastry up the winding stairs to the odd little c
row’s nest of an office at the top of the house, where I tried to make headway on a book I was supposed to be writing, although most of the time I just watched the progress of the indefatigable wasp who was patiently attempting, so far unsuccessfully, to wedge himself through a gap in the screen that covered the window. In the afternoons I would calm my anxiety over the work I didn’t do by climbing Mount Tom, a gentle old hill laced on its southern side by an easy switchback that used to bring turn-of-the-century ladies and gentlemen up to the summit for the view. Or I would walk along the Ottauquechee River and up into the hills on rolling country roads, hypnotized by the green buzzing beauty of the place.

  In Woodstock I felt lighter, at least when I wasn’t trying to work. Here was a place where I was none of the things I had been, not widow nor wife, not mother, a place where I would not encounter the ghosts of old selves and old lives. A place where I could imagine being a woman alone in a future still safely far away.

  One morning I walked past a woman hunkered down over some window pots outside the Yankee Bookshop, planting orange and scarlet dahlias. She was blond, buxom, and barefoot, in her forties, presenting a round face full of frank curiosity and a glint of mischief in her bright blue eyes. Her name was Susan Morgan, and she was the owner of the store.

  She looked me up and down. You can’t be on vacation, she said. You look terrible. The snaky dread began to fill my lungs. I’m writing, I said. Or not writing. Mostly I’m having a little bit of a breakdown. It’s kind of a full-time job. Then I stopped. In New York, people tended to discuss breakdowns and anxiety attacks with the same casualness they did the difficulty of finding a cab during the afternoon shift change. But Woodstock wore an air of such self-complacency that the comment felt like very bad manners. Susan looked at me thoughtfully and asked a few questions about where and with whom I was living. I told her. Well, that’s the problem, she said. You’re too alone. Of course you’re going crazy. Why don’t you write here?

  Normally, I would have thanked her kindly and moved on—I had a complicated ritual when it came to writing that stopped just short of human sacrifice; it was not easily transported. But I was desperate, and the project was long overdue. The next day I brought my laptop to the bookstore and Susan set me up on a couple of billowy floor cushions in the travel section. I wrote two chapters.

  That was the first of many visits to Woodstock. A month later, the World Trade Center fell and the night sky was lit by two beams of blue light marking their place and the way in which the future had changed forever. Woodstock, its beauty, its safety, took on a talismanic quality; I returned every summer while my daughter was in camp. I came to know a few people a little, the way you do when you see them on the street while doing errands, or behind the counters of the stores you frequent. Their warmth in welcoming me back each successive summer was gratifying. And though I barely knew them, I wanted to be one of them, no longer an outsider like all the other visitors with their impatience and their restlessness.

  I found a real estate agent, Lynne Bertram, a woman whose own roots ran deep in the area—she was the daughter of Wallace “Bunny” Bertram, who had operated the country’s first mechanical tow for skiers, fashioned out of 1,800 feet of rope and a Ford Model T up on Gilbert’s Hill just outside of town. When she wasn’t selling real estate, Lynne helped her husband, Nelson, to run a two-hundred-acre farm, where they raised Scottish Highland cattle, enormous beasts with great shaggy heads and arcing horns, and a small but ever-growing flock of sheep, whose lambs she named after French cabaret singers. In her spare time she presided over an orchard of ancient apple trees and a spectacular flower garden. She was a handsome woman and had been a great beauty and a professional ski racer on the international circuit in her youth. She was not one to mince words.

  We sat at the counter in the coffee shop, where Lynne reminisced with her cousin Sandy, the café’s manager—Lynne had been the flower girl at the wedding of Sandy’s aunt, and they talked about the dresses the grandmothers had made for the bridal party—and I envied the way in which they were stitched into each other’s lives.

  We ate grilled cheese sandwiches and I told Lynne what I wanted. A small windfall from a real estate sale had made it possible for me to buy a house out in the country—nothing fancy. I’ll see what I can do, she said, and eventually she found me the house at the end of the road. I hadn’t spent much time there while Zoë was in high school, and when I did go I went alone. Zoë had come with me once, her freshman year, but she had a city kid’s allergy to the country: she couldn’t sleep; it was too quiet. So the house became my retreat, the place where I could slip away when the noise of life began to overwhelm. I thought of it, a little sheepishly, as my Fortress of Solitude, like Superman’s Arctic redoubt in the comics. When I was a girl, whenever family life became too intrusive (which, of course, was nearly always), I would lie in bed and read about his trips there and envy him desperately. One day, I had promised myself, I would have such a place of my own. And now I did.

  In those days, I visited the house like a shy courting lover, stealing a weekend here and there, or a week of Zoë’s high school spring break. I brought flowers and books and other votive offerings, and because I was there so rarely, the place remained a Shangri-la, both intimate and exotic. I was entranced, like many a refugee from the city before me, by the seeming simplicity of my life there, the quiet order of the hours. Because I depended so much on the sun for power, my days followed a simple progression: I would get up just before dawn and watch the first of the light cast a leafy shadow play across the living room wall while I drank my tea. The window by which I sat overlooked a small meadow that gleamed gold and green in the early-morning light; sometimes, I would linger there, hoping for a deer or bear or moose to wander by. By the late afternoon, I was upstairs in the rocking chair in my bedroom, where I could take advantage of the last of the western light while I read or knitted and dreamed of a life where such ordinary pleasures and welcome constraints could be the rule rather than the exception. And now they were about to be.

  Coastal Route 1 ambled past Portland, where I picked up Route 25, which seemed to head west in approximately the right place. The late-August light slanting across the road had the valedictory quality of late summer, and I wasn’t sorry to see the season come to an end. I wanted autumn to arrive quickly; I want everything to be over. I was so sick of goodbyes.

  The spring had been endless. Zoë had been admitted early decision to Bowdoin College, and the whirlwind of anxiety and deadlines in which we had lived from the beginning of her last year in high school had abruptly given way to the torpor of the second-semester senior. I discovered with some wonder how much real estate in my brain had been taken up over the last three years by deadlines and the ratios of applications to admissions, by grade point averages and achievement scores, and by the emergency consolations required by midnight meltdowns over the entire spectrum of late-adolescent angst—from the fatal mediocrity that would result in her rejection by even the stoner college that was her safety school, to the dismal number of tags and pokes, whatever they were, that determined her popularity on Facebook, and therefore her self-worth. Now the days were devoid of most of these woes, and I realized how little thought I’d given to what was to replace them.

  The school counselors talked about a phenomenon called “fouling the nest,” in which the child of your bosom begins to act like the scorpion in your shoe, an adolescent’s defense mechanism, apparently, to make it easier to leave home. I would look at the ceiling and count the days until her departure, thrilled not to be dreading it anymore, on the rare occasions of her bad behavior. But then something would happen, Zoë would play a song that had been her favorite when she was twelve, or her two best friends would saunter in, with a strange new self-possession that had come in the mail with the acceptance letters, and I would remember the night I had nursed one of them through her first wretched encounter with vodka, or some silly afternoon I had been lucky to be a part of. And I wondere
d if I would ever know the women they were on the verge of becoming, now that the road had opened and they were setting out in so many different directions. The memories skittered like dry leaves along the bare wooden floors of the apartment, echoing and reechoing, and then swirling away.

  Around this time, I went to a book party with an old friend. It was held in one of those beautiful old West Village apartments, crowded with a worn velvet sofa, easy chairs, and a settee draped in quilts and vibrant silk cushions. Thin spring sunlight filtered in through a big bow window overlooking Washington Square Park. A gray cat dozed amid the chatter of perhaps a dozen guests, worldly, successful people from a variety of walks of life. There was a grave, bespectacled Turkish photographer, a celebrated biographer, a stylish editor from a well-respected publishing house, and a plump grandmotherly woman who had known the author since she was a child.

  The guest of honor was a woman about my age, whose sixth novel we were celebrating. She was married to an old college classmate of mine; they had six children. She was a professor at an English university and the official American translator for an eminent novelist. She was dressed in a black dress and black stockings that should have looked dowdy but instead came together in the kind of elegantly careless disarray that is somehow the hallmark of confident British intellectual women of a certain age.

  We were introduced and she was very kind, but when she asked me about myself, I could think of nothing to say. I mumbled something about being at a turning point, about my child going off to college, and trailed off midsentence, unable to remember what I did with my days.