by Lynn Darling
We begin in dreams, tatty, foolish, romantic; we end in ashes, which, if we are lucky, allow us to begin yet again. The carapace that had been my fantasy of life in Vermont would burn off slowly, and I would cling to it as long as I could, because even as I watched it begin to evanesce, I could not imagine what would take its place.
Some part of my brain, in those first few weeks, knew that the wise thing to do would be to simply get back to work. “There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than busyness,” a scolding voice reminded me, quoting from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. I had proposals for a few magazine stories I needed to write, and notebooks to comb through in search of ideas for longer projects, but the assertion of authority required to unpack the boxes, the conviction that I had anything left of a writer’s curiosity and passion, were packed away as well. Besides, these were the days before the stock market crash and the recession, and there was just enough money trickling in on which to get by—just enough, if you factored in my la-di-da attitude toward going into debt. (I wonder, sometimes, if there wasn’t a drastic drop in the number of midlife crises taking place in this country once the bottom dropped out of the American economy.)
Since I couldn’t seem to focus on work, I made lists. Long lists, of everything I needed to fix, or understand or abandon or acquire. At first there were a lot of short lists, but in the end I boiled them down to two: List Practical, and List Metaphysical, which I kept in a notebook labeled F OF S (for Fortress of Solitude, I’m afraid).
List Practical was very long and covered everything that needed to be done around the house and grounds. The items ranged from Buy Tomato Plant to Deal with Electrical Wiring, to Learn Difference Between Weeds and Flowers, and the list grew like kudzu as each day taught me another thing I didn’t know.
List Metaphysical was much shorter:
Get Sense of Direction
Find Authentic Way to Live
Figure Out How to Be Old
Deal with Sex
Learn Latin
This last item might sound as if it should have gone on List Practical, if it went anywhere at all, but I figured if I became the kind of person who ended her day at the kitchen table (when I had a kitchen table) with her head bent over Cicero, then all the other items on the list would have been taken care of and I would probably have some time to kill.
The biggest item on the first list was becoming remotely comfortable with living off the grid, which meant an immersion in a set of responsibilities and chores that were as foreign and exotic to me as the customs of a country whose language I didn’t understand.
It would have been daunting if the system worked with clocklike efficiency, but this was not the case. About a year after I had bought the house, I had replaced the balky backup generator that rumbled into noisy life when the sun was shining brightly and it therefore wasn’t needed, and retreated into sulky silence when it had been raining for three days straight and there was nothing left in the solar battery to power the lights. The new one was a model of efficiency, but it nevertheless required the same level of care as a three-year-old with a bad cold. A young man named Dave came over to teach me about logging oil levels and working hours and how to switch the thing from automatic to manual in order to maintain the equipment. This, in turn, involved dealing with an enormous colony of wasps whose nest was established in the generator shed. Probably want to get rid of that, Dave advised. At night, he said, when it was cooler, and they were asleep. Or better yet, wait for fall.
The solar power system was even more complicated. Outside, on an alarmingly fragile-looking wooden platform, were the twelve gray solar panels that would have to be swept with a broom whenever it snowed. Inside, in a corner of the basement, lurked a massive bank of solar batteries and the inverter, a bewildering, blinking, flashing, button-festooned electronic box that coordinated the rest of the system as well as its interaction with the generator.
I tried to read the manuals the Rileys had left, but the technical language made my eyes cross. I called around to the local solar energy companies and found someone who agreed to review everything with me. Howie was a tall, lean young man with bushy hair beating a premature retreat from his forehead, the kindly, curious expression of Big Bird, and the calm patience of a budding bodhisattva. He would stand with me for hours in the musty basement, in front of the blinking yellow, green, and red lights, his eyes blinking in response as he listened to my anxious questions and tried—once again—to explain amperes and volts and solar cells and the necessity of bringing the system up to float. I would take furious notes, which, when I read them over again, would consist of numbers and arrows and abbreviations and illustrations of the sun that might as well have been Mayan glyphs for all the sense they made. Howie was sanguine. It’s a very steep learning curve, he said. But you’ll get there. I think what you’re doing is very brave. That last bit worried me a little; I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know what he meant by it.
After Howie came Dan, dark-haired, wiry, with a long ponytail threaded with gray—he was growing it long in order to donate the hair to be used in wigs for chemotherapy patients, in memory of his brother, he said, who had died recently and very young. His love and his anguish were written on his face. Dan must have had less confidence in my abilities, or more experience with newbies, because he tried to keep things simple. He showed me how to keep the twenty-four battery cells filled with hydrochloric acid and distilled water, what numbers to watch for on the complicated electronic menus in order to gauge the relative health of the system, and most important, his home phone number in case things went wrong. Which he was pretty sure they would: The batteries were old, and the inverter’s software was written in the technological equivalent of pidgin English. Besides which, Dan didn’t think I had enough solar panels to power the house full-time, and even if I did, the surrounding woods kept my hours of available sunlight to a minimum.
I would have to be very conservative, he said. Don’t use the clothes dryer, let the sun do that job. Don’t run any appliances late in the afternoon—use the vacuum cleaner on a sunny day, not a rainy one, so that the cells would have a chance to recharge. Forget about the garage door opener or the device that churned up the water in the bathtub. Don’t even think about the dishwasher, and unplug everything that wasn’t in use.
I began to grow a little afraid of the house. I would think about the solar cells emptying and the generator choosing that moment to fail and what it would be like in the coming nights, when the house was as black as the night sky and I was alone. I was terrified of waking up in the middle of the night to find I couldn’t turn on the bedside lamp. I bought a dozen flashlights and checked and rechecked their locations, but it wasn’t terribly reassuring.
Luckily I had a very long list of things I thought I needed, and in the mornings I would flee the house for the safety of my car. I had a wonderful car, a four-door Jeep Wrangler, in no-nonsense army fatigue green. I told myself that I bought the car because it was practical, because it was one of the few vehicles that had a fighting chance of getting up my road in winter and mud season. But the truth was that I am a suburban girl at heart, for whom a car had always signified and would always signify freedom. Driving was meditation and escape and power: driving was bliss. I fell in love with that rig, as I learned to call it. At its wheel I was cool and swaggering and bulletproof and invulnerable; if I could have lived in it, I would have. The chassis was high off the ground, and behind the wheel I was lord of the forest and everything unfamiliar. I would kick off my shoes, turn the music up loud, kiss the accelerator with my calloused foot, and drive way too fast down the bumpy road.
Nothing in Vermont is close to anything else, particularly around Woodstock. Apart from Gillingham’s, the wondrous but expensive general store, the town has a genteel horror of the utilitarian; even the two hardware stores are safely outside the village. For most of the practical stuff of life people tend to go farther afield, past the piratical
antique stores, and the odd little tourist baits selling Scottish goods and lawn ornaments shaped like cows, and the little bakeries and handmade pottery shops, and the occasional auto body shop to Interstate 89, exit 20, the first in New Hampshire, which dumps you unceremoniously onto what is inexplicably called the Miracle Mile, an arid, treeless, concrete gateway to a limitless expanse of shopping malls and discount stores that blanket both sides of the road.
I would set out with a list of things—silverware, television set, mixing bowl, a tomato—but I rarely returned home with any of the things I had set out to get, or, if I did, it was only after long detours through the countryside, well beyond Best Buy and Home Depot and Applebee’s and McDonald’s. I invariably found myself driving through the empty streets of the old towns along the rivers, the towns that had thrived alongside the woolen mills, and died when they did. I would slow down as I passed the handsome old abandoned brick mills, perched above the falls of still-formidable rivers, a few shards of shattered glass winking in their empty windows; past the shuttered storefronts on steep streets of deserted business districts, and the occasional brightly lit, newly renovated café, hoping against all odds for customers. These towns were caught in an ebb tide of history, ghosts of an earlier New England, and they brought the area into focus in a way the highly polished, tourist-thronged streets of Woodstock Village, with its five Paul Revere bells and pre-Colonial houses gleaming as white as newly lightened teeth, never could. Hardscrabble and grim, having long outlived their usefulness, they were more real to me than the fairy-tale town with which I had first become enchanted.
One afternoon I went to look at wood-burning stoves, concerned that the heating bills would bankrupt me before the winter was out. On the way home I got lost somewhere along the border between Vermont and New Hampshire. I was on a winding, narrowing road high above the White River, driving past old weathered frame houses with crumbling porches that sagged under the weight of castoff sleds and children’s bicycles, old tires and plastic bins and broken fans peering out of windows in bedrooms no longer occupied; it was a strange day, a mid-November kind of day that had fallen like a stone into the gleam of late summer. The sky was darkening, it had rained off and on, and there was a touch of spookiness in the air, a brooding New England spookiness, and I thought of Hawthorne, and the witch trials, and the angry old fathers ever on the watch for sin.
I thought of Hawthorne again that day when I finally made it back up the drive to my house, which stood cheerless and sodden in the rain. The author had begun his writing career in the dreary house in Salem, Massachusetts, in which, following his father’s death, he had grown up with his mother, two sisters, and his mother’s family. Castle Dismal, he called it, and then and there I rechristened my own house. It was no Fortress of Solitude, and I was no Superman, but it made a very nice Castle Dismal, or as a friend of mine liked to dress it up a bit, Château Lugubre. The name change cheered me up. The way a rain does on a hot day, it cleared the air, acknowledged the unhappiness I had been afraid to admit.
Because the inside of the house depressed me, I decided to concentrate on the outside. Tess Riley had been a passionate gardener, and the first summer after I bought the place, the porch was surrounded by a fanfare of yellow tiger lilies in the front, while on the right side, a bank of pillowy white hydrangeas bloomed. At the entrance to the septic field, a wooden trellis supported the efforts of a young climbing rose, and at the edge of the yard, a determined bank of begonias was doing its best to screen off two gigantic white propane tanks that lay like dead beached whales in full view of the front windows.
The front yard, encircled by the unfinished driveway, was home to a half-dozen young fruit trees, which prompted visions of baskets full of apples and pears and plums. In the shadowy beds near the unfinished stone wall, ferns, bleeding hearts, forget-me-nots, and Queen Anne’s lace prospered, while near the front door a young climbing rose had begun an ascent that was clearly meant to one day outline the entire entrance in jubilant pink.
It had been lovely, and I had loved looking at it, the pleasure laced with a somewhat jaundiced regret, the way a roué in a 1930s melodrama savors the loveliness of the young innocent he knows he will ruin. I am no gardener: By the time I moved in full-time, the tiger lilies and the hydrangeas were choked with thorny weeds, and the mysterious vine growing up the trellis had begun to engulf the porch. The fruit trees looked sickly and had yet to produce so much as a blossom, aside from the singular apple that had greeted my arrival. The rhododendron, starved of fertilizer and other attentions, had retreated, and the ugly white propane tanks basked naked in the sun. I bought a beautiful basket of flowers to hang on the porch, but the sun soon burned them to a crisp. The only living thing that had so far survived my ministrations was a small tomato plant in a clay pot near the front door.
I had long ago made my peace with my lack of gardening skills; the lawn, however, was another matter. Lawn is perhaps too nice a term for the mixture of crabgrass, dandelions, and milkweed that surrounded the house, but whatever it was, it was growing fast. Worse, the cleared field covering the septic tank was shrinking, as an advance artillery of brush and spindly saplings announced the woods’ intention of expanding its territory. This was worrisome, being an entirely too accurate reflection of the chaos that was colonizing my general state of mind. The place was beginning to look as if it belonged to an old lady with eighteen cats.
I had to do something. I consulted with Greg, the hardworking, laconic son of the long-established Fullerton clan, and the man who had looked after the place when I wasn’t living here and plowed the road in the winter. Greg said that if I wasn’t going to put a proper lawn in—and I emphatically wasn’t, once I heard the cost—I might as well just weed-whip the place. I didn’t know what a weed whipper was, but I dutifully went to the hardware store just east of the village and asked for one. It turned out to be a cumbersome machine that was expensive and dauntingly complicated-looking. I settled for a slender little gadget—also called a weed whipper—that consisted of a long handle with a set of wicked-looking teeth at the end of it.
The weed whipper was no match for the crabgrass. The wicked-looking teeth promptly bent double. I went back to the hardware store and got a machete. The machete worked, sort of, but it was a backbreaking business, and I didn’t make much progress. I went back again—by this time I was getting some openly curious looks—and this time I bought a scythe. I was very excited about the scythe. It had a long, thick oak handle, taller than I was, and an enormous curved blade, and it was oddly beautiful in a Grim Reaper sort of way. Then I googled “How to Scythe” and came up with a YouTube video featuring a hearty, red-faced farmer with a German accent who demonstrated the proper technique. It didn’t look too hard. At the end of the video the farmer said to be careful, because if you weren’t, ho ho ho, accidents could happen. Then the camera panned to the young boy standing next to him, a big grin pasted on his face despite the fact that one of his trouser legs was empty. I was pretty sure it was a joke.
I liked scything. It was rhythmic and deeply satisfying to chop off the heads of those arrogant weeds, and it made me feel like a character in a Thomas Hardy novel. But scything was also really hard and time-consuming and painful for a woman with negligible upper-body strength. I didn’t give up on scything but I went back to the hardware store to buy a hand mower for backup.
I met up with a part-time clerk I’ll call Jake, who thankfully hadn’t witnessed my other purchases. We bonded over the fact that he and his wife also lived off the grid; in fact, they cooked everything on a woodstove, even baked bread in it. By this time Jake, whose benign blue eyes, grizzled beard, and affable 1960s commune smile masked the instincts of a born pool hall hustler, had an idea of what he was dealing with. After I bought the hand mower, he asked what I was going to do about dead branches—if I had a bow saw, I could use them for kindling. And what about a hatchet, essential for splitting large pieces of firewood into pieces small enough to fit into
the woodstove I wanted. I bought the bow saw and the hatchet, and he spent a little time showing me how to use the hatchet. It was all in the swing, he said. Now you try, he said. You should get your husband to do that for you, though, he added. I told him I lived alone and he told me I was very brave.
Pretty soon my garage looked like an armory, as if I were preparing to launch an attack on the place. Or maybe it was a defensive maneuver, a defense of my sanity against that image of the crazy old lady and the cats. I spent hours in the sun, chopping things down, until the lawn was littered with branches and thorny brambles and clumps of severed grass, and anxiety had yielded to aching arms and calloused hands.
I eventually abandoned the long aimless drives, but even the more purposeful ones on more familiar ground emphasized my outsider status. A handmade sign near a lumberyard flashed by, advertising HAY! SECOND CUT! And it bothered me that I didn’t know whether the second cut was better or worse, and why it mattered. What was hay exactly? Such details had seemed exciting and curious once, but a visitor sees things differently than a stranger trying to settle down in a place, and Woodstock, as the days began to shorten and the nights to cool, seemed more alien to me than ever. There was so much I didn’t know.
One day I had lunch with Lynne at the same coffee shop where I had first felt the urgent need to belong to this place. Over turkey soup she mentioned she would have a great deal more mulch this fall than she could ever use. Would I like to buy some from her?
For some reason that was the moment when the strangeness of what I had done and where I had landed became overwhelming. Mulch? What the hell was mulch? I thought about faking it—I have all the mulch I need right now, thanks … I’ve decided not to mulch this season … mulch doesn’t go with my furniture—but I didn’t have it in me.
I don’t know what that is, I said. And stupidly I started to cry. People keep telling me I’m brave, I told her. Why do they say that? Do they know something I don’t know?
