I knew this was a radical departure for a person with my background, and I relished the thought of the courage and discomfort it would demand of me. Maybe over time I would ease into an earthier, more rooted rural life, growing some vegetables, cutting some firewood, and learning at least a few self-sufficiency skills. I would manage the world on my own terms. I pumped myself up and swore that nothing would dissuade me.
Chapter 6
May 21
It’s been a while since I kept up with my journal, mainly because there’s no way my scribblings can adequately describe what I’ve been doing or feeling. Why am I bothering with this? Who am I writing to? I ask as I sit here and flail at the blackflies that torture me.
To myself, of course. Basic principle: Leave tracks so you can find your way back. What idiocies led you here? Remember and avoid them next time. Assuming you bother to read your own diary, which I don’t—lousy handwriting, too much whining. Thus am I condemned to repeat history.
I am camping on my land, alternating three or four days out here with a partial day and a night at a cheap motel near the interstate where I can shower and watch TV, enjoy indoor plumbing and the absence of dirt, and make phone calls—there’s no reception on my hill. Also to escape the pressure of insects who want to suck me dry as a mummy. Little pestilent shits! I kill every one I can slap, determined to reduce their available DNA in proportion to the nutrition they extract from me, which would otherwise go to breeding new ones.
It’s been very hard. Goodie! I felt at first, with each new difficulty or discomfort. But I failed to anticipate the effect of prolonged subfatal, insufficiently dramatic discomfort. It erodes even masochistic impulses. And I hadn’t taken fear into consideration—not the urbanite’s comfortable, self-imposed existential fear, but a primal, irresistible terror springing from the deep caverns of instinct. Fear has been hard.
Writing about the last few weeks is an exercise in answering the question “What’s the hardest part?” Answer: All of it. Mostly it’s been a bastard. It’s been murder.
There have been some wonderful moments, but nothing has ever been easy. I realize now that the camping trips we so enjoyed were nothing more than luxurious fantasies of rugged living. We set up our tent on a flat piece of mowed grass with our car fifteen feet away. We were surrounded by other families, never all alone in the deep woods. Running water, toilets, sinks and showers, firewood for sale at the ranger’s office, a coin-op laundry room. Clothes and food kept safe in the back of the station wagon. Not a wild animal within a mile. Hardly any bugs. We thought we were roughing it, but we were just playing house. But I fell for the fantasy, and now I’m stuck with my own foolishness.
My tent has turned out better than I expected. I had no idea tent technology had advanced so far. It’s tall enough to stand up in, big enough to tuck my sleeping stuff out of the way and to keep my old sea chest here, full of clothes and other necessities. I keep food in a strongly built wooden cabinet covered with galvanized sheet steel to keep mice and porcupines from chewing their way in—Earnest taught me that trick—nailed to a tree near my campfire circle. But the tent had its “hardest part” moments.
The night of my first heavy rain, two weeks ago, began as one of the greatest delights I’ve ever experienced—lying in the dark, listening to the varying patter and thrum of the rain on the tent’s fly, hearing it hiss and roar in the trees in every direction, hundreds of layers of distance and intensity. Rain comes and goes in irregular waves, and you can hear a heavier fall moving through the trees toward you. I was ecstatic and less afraid than usual—surely no bears or mountain lions or deranged hillbillies would be out in this. The sound was symphonic in complexity, sometimes a murmured susurrus, then swelling to a bass waterfall sound, grand and sometimes martial, even threatening. And the air was exquisite, as if the rain carried down cool, pure, rarified atmosphere from high altitudes, tinged with ozone.
Drifted off in a heavenly state. Woke up well before dawn to find that my sleeping bag and pillow were sopped and cold, the floor was slimy. The seams had leaked and humidity had condensed on the ceiling and fallen on everything inside, a baby rainfall birthed by its big mother.
I spent a miserable day wearing a plastic trash bag over my last dry clothes as the rain came and went. I couldn’t retreat: I was ashamed to go down the hill and risk having anyone at the farm see me in my bedraggled condition. So I spent a second horrible night shivering in my ever-wetter sleeping bag, getting up now and then to mop the hanging droplets off the ceiling with paper towels.
When I finally came down, Earnest was there—he’s often not, off working as a tree surgeon up in Chittenden County. He’s started to call me “Pilgrim”—either an allusion to the old John Wayne movie or a subtler comment on my purpose for being here. “You look like shit, Pilgrim! Don’t know enough to come out of the rain?” He explained that if you’re tent camping for any extended period, you’ve got to make sure you’ve sealed your seams. And you have to build a wooden floor, even just a few inches off the ground, and set your tent on top of that. That way, the air circulates beneath, the ground moisture never touches your tent, everything ventilates better, no condensation. He took me to the lumberyard that morning and we brought the boards back in his pickup. We strapped it all to a flat trailer that