Now I know the difference between the drum of a deer’s hooves, a bear’s heavier, twig-breaking tread, the measured thump of a moose, the footless rustle of a porcupine or skunk. Also the bipedal beat of a man moving in the woods. I didn’t then. I stood for another minute in heart-pounding, hand-tingling paralysis before I could resume my uphill trek.
The scariest part—the saddest—was that in that startle and long moment of trembling, part of me welcomed catastrophe. Invited it. I felt a savage, cruel yearning for injury or death, punishment or atonement. Some kind of finality.
Chapter 3
By the time I married Matt, I had lived with two men and was by no means unfamiliar with the ups and downs of cohabitation. People are all a little crazy; my boyfriends were and I was, too. You joked, confided, argued, figured out the other gender’s laundry, learned each other’s sexual preferences, talked about your respective pasts. You drifted distant and then worked back closer, or didn’t. You accommodated—or didn’t—the inevitable eccentricities and neuroses. Sex was sometimes great, sometimes less than. Men coped with PMS and women dealt with fragile male egos beneath hard but brittle exteriors. And you wondered whether your bond was strong enough, your affinities adequately synced, for the long haul.
But marriage turned out to be different from mere cohabitation. Maybe the biggest difference is, what with that legally stipulated long-term commitment, you dissolve into a collective identity. You become a sugar cube melting gratefully in a cup of warm tea. It’s not about me anymore; it’s about us. Home decor that began as an eclectic mix of two collections pulls together in a consensually determined style. Your finances merge; your circle of friends is winnowed to those both of you can enjoy or at least endure. You confide your life histories until they become a shared possession, until you’re telling each other’s stories at parties. Your friends say “you” not in the singular anymore, but as in “you guys,” “you two.”
I let myself dissolve more than Matt did. With no family beyond my invisible brother and my Schenectady aunt, I was more susceptible to this blending. Maybe I needed sure connection or a defense against loneliness more than Matt did. Or maybe those are tendencies shared by all women.
In any case, by the time our marriage ended I had dissolved too much and I seemed unable to become solid again. I fled to Brassard’s valley in large part to pull myself back together. To congeal, to cohere again. Given my proven, pitiful tendency for melting, I knew it had to be a solitary process.
But this was not the only factor propelling me toward the land. From my father, I had inherited a romantic’s belief that living close to the earth was righteous and good, and the vacations we took when I was a kid affirmed that notion. We would pack the car and drive to Maine or Vermont to set up a miniature household in a canvas army tent at some state park. Campfire, hissing Coleman lanterns, showers in a concrete-floored bathroom shared by strangers, fishing with my father from a rented aluminum canoe. All four of us sleeping in the same cozy space. At night, Erik and I ran with other flashlight-wielding kids among the trees and glowing tents. In our sleeping bags, hearing the murmurs of other campers conducting their bedtime rituals, we felt an embracing sense of common humanity.
These were the best of times. My parents lost their workweek edge and became expansive, accommodating. I loved our hikes, the white, muscular calves of my father pumping along in front of me, my brother behind me, Mom bringing up the rear to motivate stragglers. We were like a little railroad train, exploring nature’s splendors.
Pop, in particular, blossomed when nourished by woods and sky. By the time he died, he had achieved many of the things he wanted, but finances had denied him one important fulfillment: owning a little forest home away from home. It became one of those mythological regrets built into the family identity, like Yeah, I had a chance to buy into Apple back in the day, but …
Yeah, we’ve always wanted some land, but … became one of ours. Certainly, that yearning, and memories of those camping trips, helped bring me to Brassard’s place.
But there’s another reason, too, harder to explain. My attempts to talk about it always come across as a political polemic when, in fact, it’s a personal confession. I haven’t a name for it, but environmental angst comes close. I mean our political, social, cultural, economic, and, yes, environmental milieu—the larger situational brine we marinate in every day. To me, it felt increasingly like a toxic immersion.
My parents raised me to have a passion for social justice, and a suspicion of materialism and unbridled striving after wealth. They believed in respect for others, sticking by your values, practical and emotional self-sufficiency. But I saw the country, the world, mutating, moving in a direction diametrically opposed to these values. Matt reminded me that it had been doing so for decades, that there’s not much any individual can do about deterministic trends, that it’s best to develop a thick skin and get on despite them. I knew he was right, but it didn’t help much.
At times, I worried about getting crushed beneath the rubble of a decadent society crumbling under its own weight. I had read Collapse and could not doubt that, like the Easter Islanders, Americans would cut down the last living tree just to make some one-percenter the wall paneling he simply had to have. America was fighting two ugly wars, and even our veteran friends admitted that they were unwise, unwinnable, unnecessary. Bush the younger had seemed to feel contempt for the Constitution and any dissenting citizen—easily half of America. Obama was trying hard, but his election had aroused the awful snake of racism and xenophobia that coiled around America’s heart. We ate food
