Out of the Woods
Page 23
The notion that getting older meant a chance to discover who I really was had been alluring. It seemed to posit that all the mistakes I had made as a young woman were merely a passing madness of the blood, not faults of character cut into the living rock. But that idea had its dark side as well: if everything you had done or wanted was a product of biological and social destiny, of the urgings of the womb, then what was left when the storm subsided, when the flood tide ebbed, taking with it the thing on which you had pinned most of your identity?
As we age, we hear ourselves repeating our parents’ refrain: if only I had known then what I know now. But perhaps the reverse was true as well—perhaps what we miss about being young is all we didn’t know, the mystery and terror of being young and clueless, the capacity of life to surprise when there was so much of it left to discover. I thought I had needed to know what was next, to have a game plan, but now I wanted only to go forward not knowing exactly where I was heading, but ready to look about me, as I did in the woods, and to see what had been there all along.
The last time I walked the Harriet Line as a full-time resident of Vermont, it was April, the end of mud season, and small lavender wildflowers were beginning to show themselves through the muck. The snow was gone, so the landscape in which I walked was very different now; I was ducking under the sap lines I had once stepped over.
Henry and I reached Harriet’s house more quickly than usual—Henry in particular was anxious to see her because he had found a thoroughly disgusting deer skull he wanted her to have. She came to the door with an apology in her eyes: she had visitors from Massachusetts. Could we come back later?
The day was fine, so we continued on, up to the end of Noah Wood and then into the woods. We followed the stream for a while, splashing through its twists and turns, and then took off in what the compass said was the general direction of my house. I rarely took a bridle trail or footpath now.
I wandered for the sake of wandering. The spring came late to these hills, and as yet they were all still scruffy, a monochromatic brown, bare boughs only hinting at coming glory in tightly furled buds, the young pines barely visible among the trunks of fallen giants. Still there would be something, a shaft of light, a precocious bloom that would take me one way and not another, and so I kept a watchful eye on the thin red needle that pointed toward home.
We emerged from a thicket of brambles and there before us, a little sooner than I had expected it, and farther west, was the old pile of mossy stones that marked the beginning of the grassy road that would take us the last part of the way. It was a road that used to drive me crazy; it was the most direct way back to Castle Dismal, and yet I could never find it on any map—I would stand on this road that was clearly a road and look for it on my topo map and it wasn’t there. It says something about the uncertainty in which I lived then that I believed the map over my own two feet and followed the road with a great deal of suspicion, half convinced that if I didn’t watch it carefully, it would take me somewhere else entirely.
Maps, I know now, are not static. Walk in a place long enough and you see all the mistakes that have yet to be corrected, the disconnect between the three-dimensional reality on which you walk and its two-dimensional representation. Walk in a place long enough and even the most accurate maps fail to represent what is actually there.
When I look at a topo map of that patch of woods that I so painstakingly learned to navigate, there are no obvious errors, but neither is it a map of the Harriet Line. It’s just a uniform square filled with irregular shapes and sepia squiggles, indicating a ridge here and a road there, a small creek, and a handful of steeps and valleys. But to me this same patch of ground is a dense and intricate landscape, a place both mysterious and comfortingly familiar. I know it inside and out, and I don’t know it at all. It is a place as big as California, as slender as a birch, a place that has borne witness and given rise to mistakes and understanding, a place where I have barked my shins, and crowed with delight, and wandered dazzled down a highway cast by a fat old moon. An ordinary patch of wilderness, to which I am most beholden.
Just as the woods are more intricate than any map could indicate, so, too, was the past more complicated and less drenched in emotion than my crude line drawings—this is where it all went south, this is where my luck turned—would indicate. Wander around in your memories long enough and you begin to realize that the maps you’ve made to the person you were and the life you lived can become outdated; my personal map was based on a set of narrow and harsh coordinates: all that I didn’t do or failed to accomplish, everything I meant to be and wasn’t, all the good things that had been and were no longer. The result was a map that failed to account for most of the country it covered.
“Any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats,” George Orwell observed. Most lives don’t add up to much on paper: a child raised, a task or two well done, too many people disappointed, one man well loved—accomplishments that may not mean a great deal in the eyes of the world, but rich nonetheless in both beauty and squalor, in the mortality of the red bloom on the snow, the transcendence of the bright bird on the wing. Quite a big deal, in fact, if you are the one who did the bushwhacking that brought you to whatever place you find yourself.
Thoreau wrote in Walden that he went to the woods in order to live deliberately, to pare life down to its essential facts. I went to the woods to run away, to begin again, to become a strange and fabulous creature: my true self.
I’m no longer certain such a thing as a true self exists: we are all of us a web of genes and circumstance, of accident and purpose, and our notions of identity are as entwined with time as they are with blood and bone, nerve and sinew. Besides, the question no longer mattered the way it once had: getting older is largely a matter of getting over yourself, of stepping out of your own way, the better to see the world through a wider lens than the narrow preoccupations of self had ever provided.
I wasn’t any of the things I had strived to be, or tried to escape. I was just a walker in the woods, who had learned a thing or two perhaps about finding her way, one who would get lost again and again. With luck, I would walk into the future the way I walked into the woods, with my wits about me, with curiosity and humility, with a first aid kit and a compass.
Or so it seems to me now. We believe what we need to believe, in order to get on, until life takes its next swing and we land, on top of the world, or brushing the dust from our knees, and once again, we make ourselves new maps.
Acknowledgments
This book owes everything to my extraordinary editor, Jennifer Barth, of HarperCollins, who was the unerring guide, navigator, and sharp-eyed observer through the wilderness of my first drafts, always able to see not only the forest and the trees but also the way going forward.
My agent, Philippa Brophy, was, as she has always been, a lighthouse on many a stormy night and a constant friend and source of encouragement.
Thank you to the people of Woodstock, Vermont: to Susan Morgan of the Yankee Bookstore; to George, Linda, and Josh at the Village Butchers; to the staff of the Woodstock Pharmacy; and to the amazing women of the Whippletree Yarn Shop—Andrea and Shelley, you kept me sane.
Thank you to Kathy and Jon Peters of Runamuck, especially for Henry.
For the information on the Piro Indians, I am indebted to Peter Gow’s essay “Land, People, and Paper in Western Amazonia” in The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, edited by Eric Hirsch and Michael O’Hanlon.
To Garrett Epps and Joe Olshan, there can never be enough hosannas for the comfort, kindness, and confidence.
Harriet Goodwin and Lynne Bertram are my guardian angels and good friends—thank you for taking such good care of me.
Thank you, Cynthia Gorney and Megan Rosenfeld, for your reading and your advice, for your good humor, and for being two of the most dazzling women I know.
To Peter and Susan Osnos, as always, deepest gratitude for your friendship and your
kindness.
To Doctors Ronald Ruden, Bonnie Reichman, and Alexander Swistel, and to the nurses and technicians of New York–Presbyterian Hospital and Lenox Hill Radiology—I would literally not be here without you.
And finally and always and in every way, thank you to the radiant and redoubtable Zoë Lescaze, my love, my happiness, my dearest child.
About the Author
LYNN DARLING is the author of Necessary Sins. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, and Elle, among others. She lives in New York City.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Also by Lynn Darling
Necessary Sins
Credits
Cover design by Milan Bozic
Cover photographs: © Lorna Wilson / Getty Images (leaf);
map image provided by MyTopo, a Trimble Company
Copyright
This is a work of nonfiction. The names and identifying characteristics of some individuals have been changed to protect their privacy.
OUT OF THE WOODS. Copyright © 2014 by Lynn Darling. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reproduce from the following:
Excerpt from “The God Abandons Antony” from Collected Poems by C. P. Cavafy. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Copyright © 1992. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
Excerpt from “The Seven Sorrows” from Collected Poems by Ted Hughes. Copyright © 2003 by the Estate of Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Excerpt from “Winter in the Village” from Collected Poems by Ted Hughes. Copyright © 2003 by the Estate of Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-0-06-171024-7
EPub Edition JANUARY 2014 ISBN 9780062199218
14 15 16 17 18 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollins.com