Out of the Woods (24 page)

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long enough and you begin to realize that the maps you've made to the person you were and the life you lived can become outdated; my personal map was based on a set of narrow and harsh coordinates: all that I didn't do or failed to accomplish, everything I meant to be and wasn't, all the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

T
his 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.

 

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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

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