Out of the Woods

by Lynn Darling

  I called Henry and headed more or less in that direction, zigzagging a bit whenever something caught my attention. I was beginning to understand how you could both wander in the way I loved, enjoying the brash orange of a tiny wildflower growing in a patch of icy mud, and yet keep your bearings. Knowing that you could find your way back took away from the adrenaline rush of complete disorientation, but it diminished the terror as well, and that was a trade-off I could live with.

  I found my way back to the road, though I had made a few mistakes—I hadn’t paid proper attention to landmarks and I hadn’t taken note of the terrain, whether it was rising or falling, steep or level. And I didn’t end up at the exact spot where I left the path. But that was okay. We never go back to where we began, and we probably wouldn’t want to.

  I kept walking and came to a crooked little side trail I’d never noticed before. It was late and I was cold and tired, but still I wandered down the path, curious to see what lay around the bend. Why does the path ahead beckon so irresistibly that you follow it even when you know you should turn back? Is it only the crooked paths, when you can’t see what happens next and you need to find out, as you do in a story? Or is it any road you haven’t taken or don’t remember?

  When I was about to begin chemotherapy, a dear friend told me she wasn’t worried about how I would manage. “You’ll do fine,” she said. “You’re good at catastrophes. It’s just normal life you screw up.”

  I think that’s true for a lot of us. It’s easy to navigate when your destination is clearly visible, no matter what obstacles lie in your way. A simple matter of optic flow, the experts tell us, and the same neural circuitry that gets a beetle to a blade of grass will suffice. You do what you have to do, walk through the brush or around the swamp, get through the chemo, bury the dead, deliver the child to the far side of senior year. When you have the object in sight, you just mow over the bushes. Because when things go wrong, the adrenaline kicks in, and then you are thinking with disaster brain instead of normal brain.

  Disaster brain is invincible. Disaster brain says, To hell with the neurotic self-doubt! Who cares if you’re no good at anything? You still have to get through this mess you’re in, so just do what you have to do because nothing else is important. Disaster brain is cool.

  Normal brain, on the other hand, is not cool. Normal brain stumbles around in a swamp of negative thoughts: What if my life has been a giant mistake? What if I really am doomed to be a failure and a perpetual screwup? Then normal brain tells you to put on Emmylou Harris and eat a lot of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, and play Boggle on the smartphone until your fingers fall off or until a fresh breeze, a stray compliment, or an inspiring quote from the ever-growing pile of self-help books beside the bed lifts you out of irons.

  The trick is to figure out a way to bring disaster brain’s unflappable logic—the philosophical equivalent of map and compass and common sense—to ordinary life. Because normal life doesn’t have a clear view of the end of the road. Normal life is much more of a bushwhack. You don’t get to see what’s up ahead, or how to get there, and obstacles loom much larger than they really are or disguise themselves as worthwhile destinations of their own. So you let them lead you astray or you walk part of the way around them but don’t make it all the way back to your original course, and the few degrees’ difference leads to a different place entirely, one that makes you wonder, three miles, or a decade later, just where you went wrong—if wrong is in fact the direction you went.

  I walked the Harriet Line two and three times a week over the next few months, as winter turned slowly to spring. That walk became a kind of companion to me—one that was never the same two days running, one that always had something new to say and remained consistently surprising, no matter what mood I brought to it or how bleak the weather.

  By now, I used the compass only as a general indicator. I knew that if I traveled halfway up the rise of the hill and then walked more or less parallel to the crest, the broken spar of a tall pine in a small clearing would come into view, and from there I would see Jill’s meadow and beyond it the smoke from the chimney of Harriet’s house, and I would adjust my path accordingly. The return trip was even simpler. I would turn toward the cleft that the unassuming little stream that ran past my house had carved out of the hills a couple of geological epochs ago, knowing that sooner or later I would see the light flashing off one of the windowpanes, or catch sight of the blue of the solar panels off to the left.

  There were other landmarks—a large rusted red box that I needed to keep downhill from wherever I was on the ridge; an intricate loop de loop of bright blue plastic tubing marking the place to turn right; an abandoned hunter’s blind high up in an old oak that meant I was too far to the south. There were other signs, more ephemeral: a rust red stain in the snow, shaped like a peony in full bloom; two sets of tracks converging, but only one leading away.

  Some days Harriet was home, and we visited, but much of the time she was gone. Dean had died just a few months earlier; the community church in South Woodstock had been filled with children and grandchildren and the many friends made by a man who had crafted a good long life along lines clean and strong. Harriet was a Yankee of the old school when it came to sorrow; she carried on. But her face bore a look I remembered, an expression no longer frozen in shock but drained of curiosity, the face of a soldier on a long march, intent on putting one foot in front of the other.

  One day in late February, as I ducked under a strand of Chip Kendall’s sugaring web, a small movement caught my eye. Perfect round circles were progressing very slowly through the blue plastic tubing. The sap was rising; sugaring had begun. What I was looking at were air bubbles caught in the sap, but their slow, pulsing movement, the drip of the transparent liquid, reminded me of the steady drip of the toxic liquids in the plastic bags during those long afternoons in the chemo salon, reminded me that I had survived to see this, one image at once superseding and silhouetted by the other. This was a tapping of life, yes, but life that would renew itself the way the spent body renews itself after all the insults it sustains in the name of saving it.

  We all have our different ways of making it through the world, whether we consult map and compass or GPS or the trade winds. In Australia, aboriginal tribes travel thousands of miles through the country’s interior desert by means of the songlines, as they are called in Bruce Chatwin’s book of that name. According to aboriginal legend, the songlines are the paths created in the wake of the world’s beginnings; they mark the ways taken by the creator during the Dreamtime. The people who followed those ways recorded them in songs and stories, dances and even paintings, and if you know the stories, then the songlines are the only maps you need. They describe the location of waypoints and destinations, and the landmarks along the way: lakes and rivers and the craters in the earth that are the footprints of the gods.

  Some of the songlines are very short; others extend for hundreds of miles. Amazingly, speakers of many tribal languages can understand them because what matters is the rhythm of the songs, the melodic contour, which mirrors the terrain of the country traveled through—the words are almost irrelevant. To sing the song is to see the country it describes, to feel the ground beneath your feet.

  I think we all have songlines, routes that are almost incantatory in their power to settle and soothe, to reconcile past and present. I still walked the Harriet Line long after it had ceased to be a challenge, and it nearly always brought me great peace when I did. It was a strange place that had become a familiar place, and, as such, a reminder, not always heeded but always there for the taking, of what can happen when you face a fear, take a chance, look forward and not behind. I learned a thing or two there.

  Epilogue

  In April, I returned to Castle Dismal after a month’s absence in New York. The loft, which had been on the market ever since the market crashed, had finally sold, promising an end to the debt in which I had been drowning, but also raising a number of ques
tions as well, all of which I had ignored as long as I possibly could. Finally, however, the closing date began to draw near—there were twenty-seven years of living to be taken apart and put into boxes.

  Selling the apartment meant making decisions. Zoë would graduate in a few months’ time. There was nothing tying me to New York now, save the usual rounds of medical tests and follow-up. But there was nothing tying me to Castle Dismal either, was there?

  I thought about that. Something had changed in my relationship to my odd, ungainly house. I had begun to see things I had spent a good deal of energy not looking at. I could admit that I was sick of being alone, sick of the isolation and the difficulty. The strange thing was, the more I could admit to myself how much I hated life at Castle Dismal, the fonder I became of it. We were in this thing together in our awkward, cantankerous way.

  Besides, life in Vermont was more doable now: I had friends, a routine, and more than anything, I had the plainspoken beauty of the place—not the overly quaint village and its green moneyed hills, but the round-shouldered grumpy ridges that surrounded but didn’t shelter Castle Dismal, the scruffy dark interior splendor of the woods that covered them. They had given me a sense of where I was, a place on a map. Perhaps I worried that I wouldn’t find that sense anywhere else.

  And yet something was pulling me away. For a long time, I had been thinking about this question of where to live and who to be. I had learned, much to my chagrin, that I was not the self-sufficient anchorite I had thought myself. The solitude in which I lived for the last four years had been nourishing; had given me the room in which to unfold my cramped and crumpled thoughts and fears, to give them space to walk about and sort themselves out. But now, I needed people. I needed the world, a different world than what I had made for myself in Woodstock. A small town in Maine? Near my family in Virginia? The Isle of Mull? (A long shot admittedly, but the site of one of my favorite movies.) I tried to think adventurously, to imagine a place that could combine this solitude I loved with a community into which I could knit myself, to finally get it right. But my heart sank at the idea of once again picking up and moving somewhere new.

  There was one place that did have a claim on me, though it took a long time for me to realize it. As I cleared out the apartment on lower Broadway, ran errands uptown and down, got in touch with old friends, the city, in its pushy insistent way, demanded my attention. I had fled Manhattan feeling like an exile and a failure, but now the city reasserted itself, clamorous, incessant, polyglot, struggling, a place where I could turn a corner in a dozen different neighborhoods and find a chapter of the life that had been my life, a place that was both present and past. Home?

  I wasn’t sure. But I found an apartment, a small one, in a neighborhood far from the one in which I had lived. It was near Central Park—I was hoping that its open spaces would make the move easier on Henry and, for that matter, on me. I would rent it for a year, a place to roost while sorting things out.

  A place for Zoë as well: she was graduating from college that spring, and would live with me for a time while she sorted out her next step. In a month, I would take my compass and measure out the distance from the place where I watched her walk away that first day of her freshman year to the podium from which the president of the college would hand a diploma to an accomplished, confident young woman I was proud and grateful to know. One hundred and sixty paces, on a northwesterly bearing of 320 degrees. A small distance. An immense journey.

  I had only a short time to pack up the loft, and no time to decide what to do with all of the things that wouldn’t fit in the new apartment, which was about a fourth of the size of the old one. I took the coward’s way out and had most of it carted off to storage until Zoë and I had time to go through it all when she was back for the summer.

  The last night at the old apartment I sat in the living room, stripped now of nearly everything that had made it home. All our belongings were packed in boxes, anonymous and hidden. I had been afraid of this night, of the storm of memory and grief it would arouse, but in the end it wasn’t like that. The room was quiet, calm, merely a space now, one where I no longer belonged. Yes, there was something irrevocable about leaving, but there was something light, something fresh as well. Lee was gone in a way he had not been as long as we lived in the place where he had lived and died. But so was a feeling I had never wanted to acknowledge, of being trapped in time, of being unable to escape a long obsolete idea of who I was.

  When a man or a woman dies along the Bajo Urubamba River in Brazil, the family does not stay in the house where he or she lived. Sometimes, they burn the house down. But to live on the river is to walk a thin line of survival, so more often, the place is taken apart when the family moves away, and the thatching is used for a new roof, the doors and window frames placed in the walls of a new house in a new place.

  There is a powerful reason: the samenchi, as the Piro people call them, the dead souls, refuse to leave their old homes, so attached are they to the life they lived there, to its joys and sorrows, to the people they loved. If you stay in such a place, the Piro believe, the samenchi will haunt you, weeping and begging you to join them. The living must turn their backs to the seductive call of the dead, no matter how hard this may be, or they will die themselves.

  After the last box had been packed and the movers had come, I had a moment of alarm that Lee would not be able to find us, that he would think we had abandoned him. It was an embarrassingly illogical thought, but nonetheless it lingered for the first weeks in the new place as I edged my way around mountains of boxes, trying in that first wave of unpacking to find sheets and towels, spatula, teapot, mop and broom.

  But then I opened the first of the many cartons of books, the ones that had surrounded us for so many years, old dusty hardbacks, many of them collected by his parents, a few first editions he had saved for and collected when he was young. One by one I picked them up and brushed them off and found a place for them on the bookshelf, and that was where I found him, where he had always been, as he had always been, a part of the conversation between the present and the past, a cherished part of life. But not, in this new place, the only thing I could see in the room. I had wondered, I probably always would wonder, if I had let too much of my life end with Lee’s death. Maybe I had. There were still times when I missed the company of men fiercely, and the daily intimacy of married life, not to mention sex. But when I thought about love, I thought about this: my husband was the only man who had ever seen me for who I was and didn’t blink, the only one I had loved the same way, the one who survived the myth I first made of him, and let me in. We had been able to be ourselves with each other: that was all. It takes time to love and to be loved like that. Time and luck, I suppose. It seemed a little greedy to expect it to happen again.

  I thought about the list I had made, that first fall at Castle Dismal. Deal with Sex, I had written. Figure Out How to Be Old. Had I done these things?

  When I first moved to Woodstock, I had been afraid of wanting something that, as I aged, would be in increasingly short supply. After treatment had ended and my hair had grown back, I tried dating once again, in part to prove to myself that I still could. Some of the men I went out with were interesting, but nothing really took. Dating was more an obligation than anything else; I didn’t need the reassurance it used to provide, that I was attractive or smart or interesting, and what I did miss about relationships were all the things that came only with time—shared glances, and private jokes, the kind of physical intimacy that glows long after the heat of the first flames dies away. Dating, with its elaborate explanations and rote retellings of old stories, was tedious and, especially on the Internet, a lot of work. I didn’t have the pluck or the optimism or the capacity to deal with rejection that my bolder, more successful friends did, and my profiles all seemed to convey that message, according to friends who vetted them.

  It occurred to me, as I sat across from the kind, nervous veterans of bad marriages and disappointing ch
ildren, that I might never have sex again. That was too bad—there were days when that was really too bad—but I realized it wasn’t the end of the world. Trollope observed in one of his novels that the reason some men grow avaricious as they age is that avarice is a passion compatible with old age, something to focus on when other passions fall away. I couldn’t see avarice succeeding eros, but I did find pursuing desire at this stage of life a little awkward and unbecoming.

  Besides, time and solitude had taught me that it wasn’t love I wanted nearly so much as a life, a full one, made of friends old and new, and a generous curiosity about the larger world, where the keen edge of desire could be deployed in less narrow pursuits. Into such a life love might accidentally stroll, but whether it did or not, it could be a satisfying life and a useful one. And for me that was more easily done in the mutable and marvelous city.

  As to the other items on the list, the only thing I could say for certain was that my ability to decode Ovid was improving—slowly. Growing older, now, that was trickier—at this point, I was still grateful to have a shot at getting old. Cancer teaches you to appreciate the ordinary: the bright yellow teapot on the gray winter morning, the patter of rain on the windowpane. These are the things that save you.

  I had wanted aging to be an adventure done with panache, even an art form. That was hooey, I learned. Getting old was not a business to be romanticized, and as for accomplishing it with grace, that was as easily done as sailing through adolescence without a gawky moment. But I had come to look on myself with more equanimity and, occasionally, even kindness. Regret was something I had less time for—the mistakes I made no longer loomed large as true north at the top of my map to the past, but had begun to diminish—most of the time—into the cliffs and swamps, the dead ends and roundabouts that over the years had altered my course one way or another.