We Went to the Woods

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  We all felt it was best to stay without electricity, as both a romantic and a practical gesture. We liked the idea of getting up with the sun. And it would have been a headache to have it installed, not to mention expensive. Solar panels were similarly rejected; the price tag was prohibitive. Louisa bit her lower lip whenever it came up; I knew she wanted solar power, and could have paid for it, but refrained from insulting or alienating us with a show of her largesse. The tedium of dealing with powered-down phones and laptops soon became routine, as all inconveniences do. Chloe said that it was almost like a practice, to remind ourselves that electricity came at a cost.

  Plumbing was more contentious. No one was especially excited at the notion of shoveling their own shit, but we similarly rejected the possibility of installing a full-blown leach field, a luxury that would have cost in the neighborhood of fifteen grand. For me, this was an astronomical sum and therefore a purely hypothetical question. Louisa tactfully suggested asking her dad to invest, but none of us was very keen on this. We agreed that if two years from now we still wanted running hot water and toilets that flushed, we would work out the financing then. The unspoken if was “if we are still living at the Homestead,” but queerly, no one said it. We decided on a composting toilet in a freestanding outhouse to be communally emptied in rotation. A simple pump that worked off the well near the big cabin provided potable water, and in the summer we would use rain catchment bags that spent the day baking in the sun for showers. We could also bathe in the swampy pond, as long as we used the right kind of soap and shampoo. We were confident in our ability to rough it once we moved in full-time that first summer, and we felt sure that we would work out all the other little kinks in no time at all. Ha.

  * * *

  Until we were better situated, we were mostly reliant on the pond; the well provided some drinking water, but severe droughts had brought the water table dangerously low, and the well ran dry regularly. Beau informed us it wasn’t nearly deep enough—“Maybe in the nineteenth century, my dears, but altogether too shallow for our twenty-first-century woes.” The pump was similarly unreliable, and froze or broke pretty often. While the advisability of drinking pond water seemed iffy to me, we boiled it each evening, and so far had yet to unearth evidence that we were gulping down parasites and other treacherous organisms. The bathing arrangements were currently rustic: you could heat a bucket of water and perform ablutions in your cabin, spattering the floor with moisture, or, when it wasn’t frozen, you could use the outdoor shower for a frigid, though more thorough, engagement with hygiene. I had tried the outdoor shower exactly once and discovered that my constitution was not sufficiently hardy. Since we weren’t yet formally moved in, we still had other bathing options at our homes, but there were days of manual labor that demanded at least a cursory wash before reentering the world.

  Chloe and I were alone at the Homestead one afternoon—Jack and Louisa were acquiring some equipment, and Beau was at work. We’d been painstakingly sinking postholes so that the garden could be protected from critters once it was up and flourishing. We were hot, our sweatshirts soggy, and I desperately wanted a shower before we broke for dinner. Chloe lowered her nose into the neck of her shirt and made an eloquent expression of disgust before smiling at me.

  “We are filthy creatures,” she acknowledged. “Shall we try to clean ourselves up?”

  “Ugh, but we’ll freeze.”

  “Let’s light up the sauna. We can have a quick dousing and then warm up in the barrel.” This seemed sensible, if not downright pleasurable, and we stoked the fire in the cylindrical structure and set about preparing our “shower.”

  The pond had been frozen since our first visit to the Homestead, and we had either broken open the crackling ice at the bank or ventured farther out to an ice hole into which we could dip our buckets. The weather had been bitterly cold this whole week, and the ice was frozen solid for a good ten or fifteen feet from the bank; we would have to walk out on the ice to get the buckets of water we needed. This process always made me nervous, but Chloe slid confidently out onto the slippery surface, delicately stamping a boot into the ice every few feet to test its solidity. She cracked a skein of surface ice off the hole we’d been using and gingerly lowered a bucket, grinning at me while I stood reluctantly on the shore. She trundled back to me with the first bucket, which we emptied into the basin on top of the woodstove. We both tramped back to the pond to repeat this several more times, each with our own bucket. We skated across the surface, goofing off slightly while we hauled water up from below.

  When I heard the first crack of the ice beneath my feet, it elicited an overwhelming neurochemical response unlike anything I had ever experienced. I was closest to the hole, Chloe just a few feet behind me. I could hear the gunshot sounds of ice moving, changing its mind. We froze, paralyzed with panic as the ice began to shift. We had gotten cocky, I realized, after our first few forays. I had stopped testing each step, had grown complacent.

  “Get down and spread your weight,” Chloe said, right before the ice collapsed beneath her and she shot down into a chilly fissure. I leapt forward, hoping to grab her before she disappeared, and in my hurry, I sprang off my back foot, cracking the ice underneath me. The surface of the pond began to fragment, turning into a slushy ice floe in what seemed an impossible matter of seconds. My boots were pulling me deeper, and though I clawed at the splintering edges of the ice, there was no purchase, just cold handfuls of icebergs. I splashed into the freezing water, my chest immediately constricting. My heart banged and hurt, and I remembered dimly that cardiac arrest was common if you fell into water this cold. I flailed around, looking for Chloe and panicking. Mack, you must. You must keep your head clear. I felt sluggish. How long had I been in the water? Ten seconds? Twenty? I wasn’t sure I could breathe. I slid deeper into the water, and the weight of my sweatshirt tugged me off the precarious shelf to which I had been clinging.

  Under the ice, I felt oddly lucid. Opening my eyes, I could see the light just a few inches above my face. The rest of the pond was obscure, and, out of some old childish instinct, I didn’t dare confront the darkness. I kept my eyes aimed towards the surface. I could hear Chloe thrashing nearby, and I thought perhaps she was saying my name. Even as my brain started to panic without oxygen, I thought, ever so briefly, of the human being whose death we had observed—it was one thing to watch someone’s body plunge into icy water and a wholly different experience when it happened to you. Was this what his—or her—final moments had been like? Brutal shock, a racing heart, and then recognition that you will never take another breath again?

  My winter boots pulled me downward, and my feet abruptly sank into the silt of the bottom. The pond was only six feet deep or so where I had gone in, and though my legs felt numb and unspeakably heavy, I kicked against the bottom. For a hallucinatory moment, the mud held me down, and I felt certain that some pond goblin was clinging to my soles, a cranky naiad unwilling to let me return above. Then my boots released from the mud with a sucking squelch of resistance, and I shot back up to the surface. My forehead smacked against an ice chip, but, thankfully, the solid ice on which we had so recently stood was now entirely disrupted, and I didn’t have to battle my way back to my point of ingress into the water.

  “Mack!” I heard Chloe say behind me. Swirling around and grasping for any floating object, I saw her plowing her way towards me. She seemed nearly able to stand on the bottom; she was several inches taller than me. I sank again, and as the water again poured icily down my neck and into my sweatshirt, Chloe grabbed my arm and pulled, much harder than her delicate frame would suggest possible. We both flopped gracelessly towards the shore, breaking up the remaining ice in our desperate bid to get out of the water. I tripped up the bank, panting, and Chloe and I collapsed, shuddering, on our backs on the cold ground. Her lips were blue.

  “Fuck me. Fuck.” I wasn’t sure if it was Chloe or me speaking. I reached out
my hand, which I couldn’t feel, and groped for her. Grasping her sodden arm, I squeezed, a vague acknowledgment of our survival.

  “We have to get up,” I managed to chatter. Though we were out of the water, I realized that we were in no way out of danger. I rolled onto my belly and forced myself up onto my knees, giving Chloe a shove. We both managed to drag ourselves upright.

  “The sauna,” Chloe croaked, and we stumbled towards it, clinging to each other. My legs felt not like my own. We reached the door, grabbed the handle (made from a deer’s antler), and tripped inside, feeling the hot draft of woody air. Though the sauna wasn’t quite up to temp yet, it was still at least one hundred degrees inside, and the heat stung my skin. With numbed fingers, we tore at bootlaces and ripped off saturated socks. Each item of clothing hit the sauna floor with a sloppy slap. Our frantic striptease lasted just seconds as we peeled off every freezing layer. Thankfully, we had put fluffy towels in the sauna to heat up, and, naked, we swaddled ourselves in them, wrapping them around our shoulders and shivering fiercely, trying to get closer to the stove. I was reminded of being a little girl, cold from the bath during icy winters when we couldn’t afford to turn up the heat. My mother would rub my shoulders and arms through the towel to dry me, and the gesture was one of pure coziness and care. Unthinkingly, I reached across the sauna to do the same to Chloe, and she purred in delight as I scrubbed her skin with the dry, hot cotton. She reached out with the edge of her towel and began to tousle my hair dry, flicking droplets from my split ends onto the woodstove, which spit and sizzled. I could see her golden body through the opening in the towel, the sloping curve of her abdomen and the dainty bend of one breast. Her hip bone was the only sharpness I could find, a knob of definition against the bow of her belly. She pulled me in closer to dry the nape of my neck, and I couldn’t help reaching out, my chilled forearm seeking the already warm center of her body. We folded in on each other, our two towels now forming a tepee of warmth, and I leaned my forehead against her clavicle, feeling the pulse of her blood there. Still moving, thank God.

  “We could have died,” I said dumbly.

  “It was so incredibly stupid,” she agreed. “What a fucking dumb way to die.” I snorted into the skin just above her breast, which made her giggle.

  “We didn’t think. Careless.” We shivered in relief, laughing at our foolishness. My nose nestled against the skin where her chest met her arm.

  “Did you think of them too?” she asked. “In the water?”

  “The jumper?”

  She nodded.

  “Yeah. It’s a cold death.”

  She shivered against me. “Let’s maybe not mention it to the others,” she said, after a pause.

  “What? Why?” I was surprised; I was already imagining the tale as a fireside story. The terror was still too fresh for me to think of it as funny, but I knew that when I warmed up and my adrenaline settled, I would see the humor of our thoughtlessness, and the providence that had allowed us to walk away. Chloe seemed to be considering her words.

  “I sometimes feel like they—like they think of me as helpless. Damsel in distress,” she added. “I know I don’t have Louisa’s fierceness or Beau’s, I don’t know, stoicism. Or even your stubbornness.” She smiled, and again I was surprised. I tended not to consider myself stubborn. “I have to dredge my resources up elsewhere. I couldn’t stand for them to think me foolish. Helpless. I think they think of me, sometimes, as just a beautiful rag doll.”

  “Oh,” I said. I realized that I, too, felt vulnerable, as though I also had something to prove to our intrepid companions. I liked that Chloe was telling me this, entrusting me with this insecurity of hers. “Well, we’re not helpless. We got ourselves out of the pond.”

  “Luck,” Chloe said with a shrug. “If we’d been another ten feet out, we’d be dead.” This unsettling assessment struck me hard, and I again felt the weak-kneed relief of having simply survived.

  “Okay. Let’s not tell them,” I agreed. She nodded, pulling me closer. I was happy to share a secret with her. So many secrets, even in those early days. I felt her mouth close gently on my earlobe; I shuddered, and not because of the cold.

  “Well, there is an upshot to our misadventure,” she murmured.

  “Oh?” I said, distracted.

  “At least we’re clean.” I laughed, and she slithered her arm fiercely around my waist.

  Chapter 5

  We moved in on April 1. I had informed my parents a few days earlier that I was moving to a farming co-op nearly twenty miles away to hoe rows of beans and sit around the campfire talking radical anarchist politics. I did not tell them I was more or less in love with the four people with whom I would be undertaking this excellent little project, that only one of us had serious farming experience, or that we had virtually no money. I reassured them that I would be keeping up with my job, earning my pittance. I would have email. I would invite them over for dinner as soon as we had the place organized. They volunteered to help me move in, but I didn’t want them to see the Homestead as it looked now, with deep ruts of mud piled high and the cabins drooping under the weight of melting snow. As I was packing up a modest suitcase (jeans, books, and, optimistically, my prettiest underthings), they lurked anxiously in the doorway.

  “But what about your student loans, sweetheart?” my dad murmured.

  “I’ll still be working and earning some money.” I didn’t tell them that Louisa nearly had me and Chloe convinced that defaulting on our loans was the right solution; we would be free of the debt while saying a simultaneous “fuck you” to privatized loans and the credit-rating system. I knew this to be an irrevocable choice (much like getting into debt in the first place, really, though the permanence of that decision had been deliberately obscured while I was making it), and I was therefore hesitant. And frankly, it was easy for Louisa to talk.

  I’d made plans to pick up Chloe; though I was running late, I knew that she would still be sitting in a heap of clothes, helplessly trying to decide what to bring and what to give away, so I felt only a little rushed. Still, I had no desire to drag out this scene with my poor parents. For months they had been hinting that I should seek full-time employment and an apartment of my own (“There are some temp jobs in town, sweetheart—you could try that until you get on your feet?”), but they were visibly unenthusiastic about the solution I had arrived at.

  “And car insurance? How will you keep up with that if you’re, uh, farming all the time?” My father, ever the bourgeois, stuck to the money.

  “We’re all contributing to the insurance and the gas. And the inevitable repairs.” I smiled brightly. “Really, we’ll only be using it once a week for runs into town.”

  “Do you think this is such a smart move, after what happened the last time you decided to get involved in some little experiment?” my father pointed out bluntly.

  I flinched. “This is different. There won’t be any cameras this time. We’re off-grid.”

  “When you say ‘self-sufficient,’ hon, what does that mean? Are you going to, I don’t know, make your own flour and things?” My mother wrinkled her nose adorably; I knew she had been Googling madly, trying to see if this was something all the kids were trying.

  “We’ve given ourselves a small budget for the first few months, until we’re really producing. To buy things like flour, lentils, meat. We’re mostly going to rely on barter once we’re up and running, for anything we can’t grow. There are lots of small farms willing to trade for the basics.” At least, Beau knew of two, and we figured we’d soon find more. “We’ve bought some supplies from local growers with greenhouses for the next few weeks, and by June, we should have some food of our own.” This was wildly optimistic, but the most intricate agricultural enterprise either of my parents had engaged in was managing the houseplants in the living room, so I thought they probably wouldn’t call me out.

  �
�Sweetie, it’s just, you know, I looked up a little bit about what you’re trying. Homesteads, intentional communities, and all that. And I mean, I don’t want to sound like a worried parent, but I just, I read about this other commune or whatever you call it and they sounded like really bad news.”

  “What do you mean, Mom? Like, historically?”

  “No, this was recent! They were news items. Somewhere out in Hector, there was this group that started off a real successful farm co-op, but then, I guess, they became…well, I hate to say it, sweetie, but it sounded like some really creepy stuff. Sex stuff.” She pronounced the word in a hushed voice, as though someone might be listening.

  I snorted. “Mom, don’t worry about it. We won’t get involved in any creepy sex stuff.”

  “It just seemed…I don’t know what I Googled exactly, but aren’t you going to be in Hector?”

  “Mom, it’s fine. I’ll be okay. I’ll email you tomorrow, I’ll send photos, this is a good thing, I love you,” I reassured them, schlepping my suitcase through the carpeted halls of the modest single-story house I had grown up in. My dad insisted on dragging my suitcase to the truck; my mother hovered, tears in her eyes, and insisted I take a bag of groceries. I finally accepted, unable to tell her that we wouldn’t eat anything she’d given me because it was all processed, and none of it was locally produced. Were we ridiculous? Yes, I suppose. As I put the pickup in drive, my mother made a final salvo: