Out of the Woods (7 page)

I remember that day because it was one of those moments of rare insight when you realize just how crazy you have become. It was late on a hot afternoon, another day of getting nothing done. The sun was just beginning to disappear over the ridge, for which I was grateful—it was the hour when the fury at myself for doing nothing and the anxiety that prevented me from doing anything about it finally dissolved into a promise that tomorrow would be different. It was always a tricky transition, however, and sometimes the lie didn't take—I knew that tomorrow wasn't going to be any different, and I would spend the evening writing long journal entries about what a failure I was while listening to old Cowboy Junkies albums.

But that evening, I was simply relieved to have the day done, and I went outside to sit on the stoop and play with the sad-faced puppy. He was worrying a bone I had given him earlier and ignoring me and my efforts to interest him in a game we could play together. So I decided to take the bone away—a move, had I known anything at all about dogs, I would have executed with extreme caution (if at all), but I didn't know anything about dogs. Besides, the dog-training book said it was important to establish dominion over your puppy or he would always be the master, and thinking of the lamentable Rosie, and also perhaps of my inability to establish any dominion over myself, I was determined to do just that.

I crouched down next to the oblivious ball of fluff. Drop it, I said, in the low tone of command I was instructed to use in puppy-training class. Henry didn't look up. I said it again and again, and of course he ignored me. Finally, determined to exercise at least this much authority, I grabbed the bone to take it away. Henry snarled as savagely as something that looked like a stuffed baby polar bear could snarl, and bit me.

For a moment I just stared at the puppy, who looked back at me, his head slightly cocked, endearingly, infuriatingly indifferent. I had been trying so hard to make him love me. Then I sat down in the dirt and cried. That got Henry's attention, and he stood up. But if I was expecting a Disney-esque moment where he loped over to console me—and of course I was—I was mistaken. Henry edged away, with a little frightened whimper, turned his back on me, and fell asleep.

As I sat in the dirt, half laughing at the utter misery of the moment, a memory bloomed, of rolling around on the floor of the loft with Zoë after a checkup at the pediatrician's. I hadn't slept in days, Lee was in China, and I could not figure out how to get her out of the Snugli that bound the baby to my chest. She was crying and I was crying and I was pretty sure that in the history of the world in all its folly there had never been so spectacular a failure of a mother. Zoë's arrival had changed everything, and I had wondered if I would ever be the same. I never was of course, a fact for which I am still stupendously grateful.

Now, Zoë, by her leaving, had once again turned my life upside down. But if her presence had become, after our somewhat shaky start-up, the wind in my sails, her departure had blown away my moorings as easily as a child blows away the seeds on a dandelion, scattering everything I thought I knew, leaving an emptiness unlike any I had known. Why was I so undone?

Because she was the only thing I ever did right.

The idea came unbidden. I ran my hand through the dirt, feeling its grit on my palm, breathing in the dank air that smelled of the decayed fallen weeds, looking up at the opaque, tree-shrouded hills that seemed every day to grow closer and closer, making it harder to see the sky. Was it true?

Raising Zoë had been the only thing I had done without design. As with Henry, I had read a million books about how to be a mother, but Zoë had thrown them all out the window simply by virtue of being herself. No book could tell me who she was, no parenting guide could tell me what she needed. Only she could do that.

Being a mother was the only thing I had done instinctively, improvising, making mistakes, figuring out what worked and what didn't. I had never set out to be a great mother or a good mother—I hadn't even known I wanted children until I fell in love with my husband's. I expected nothing from myself—I just didn't want to mess her up. The British pediatrician Donald Winnicott had a phrase for that: he called it being a good enough mother. And I think I had been that.

What had saved me—what had saved Zoë—was that motherhood was a world I had entered without expectations—my own or any others. If I had tried to be a great parent I would have failed, or if I hadn't failed I would have figured out a way to belittle my performance, to blame myself for botching the job. But unlike work, or school, or any other arena of life that mattered to me, parenting wasn't an arena where goals had been set—by myself or my parents or anyone else—and not met, where the need to be good had inevitably made me run headlong the other way. Zoë was chaos, the wilderness, where I had had to make my own way.

That was the way the past looked to me then, staring past the snuffling puppy in the fading sunlight, to the maze of memory that was my map to the way things were. For a long time it was the only map I had, but it was not in fact the only one that existed.

The next morning Calvin and Mike and the others had arrived to fix my roof, the mudroom, and the woodshed, and, as it turned out, to restore a little sanity into the bargain.

For one thing, they loved Henry. They didn't mind him getting in their way when they worked, they brought their wives and girlfriends to meet him, roughhoused with him when they had the time, and ignored him when they were busy. They laughed when he rolled in mud puddles and cuffed him when he misbehaved. He was just a dog to them, not a litmus test, not a sociopathic shark puppy, just a dog doing doggy things. Calvin, in particular, took an interest in him. He had grown up on a farm and helped his father raise forty hunting dogs. He's a fine pup, Calvin said. He's going to be a good dog.

I worry that he doesn't like me, I confessed.

Calvin gave me the look, the slightly pitying but polite you're-talking-to-a-foreigner look I was getting used to in Vermont. He has to, Calvin said. Beat him till he's blind, he'll still think you're the sun and the moon. Can't help himself.

One afternoon, I came outside to find them staring up the driveway at a corner of the yard where the wild weeds met the more feral brambles that marked the onset of the creepy woods.

They were watching Henry, they told me. Every afternoon he ambled up the circular path of flattened grass that was the putative driveway, headed for the brambles, stayed for a while, and then half trotted, half tumbled back down again. Something up there sure got his attention, they said.

I walked up after him. The puppy would stick his head in the bushes and jerk it out again, nibbling something. I looked closer. Blackberries. The brambles were actually blackberry canes, and that corner of the yard was thick with them. But getting at the fruit was hard work for the puppy: most of the berries were too high up for him to access and the ones closer to the ground were deep within a wall of very sharp thorns.

I reached in, snagged a few of the fruit, and tried them. They were fat, sweet, and juicy, blackberries as I had never known them. I grabbed a few more and knelt down and offered them to Henry. He snaffled them up and we looked at each other, in mutual greed, and I went to work, dividing the impromptu harvest equally until we had both had our fill.

After that, our trip to the blackberry bushes became a ritual, first thing in the morning, last thing in the afternoon. The puppy began to follow me, and together we explored more of the land immediately surrounding the house than I had ever done on my own. On such frail anchors do we begin to hang a routine, a rhythm, a connection, perhaps even a life.

One day I came back from some errands to find Calvin, Mike, Hank, and Jimmy packing up their gear for the last time. The work was done: the ceiling in the mudroom was freshly painted and perfect, the wood was back in the newly constructed woodshed. The redesigned garage now boasted a space big enough for a car and a roof that would withstand the snow. There was nothing left to do (actually there was a lot left to do, but there was no money left with which to do it).

I was sorry to see them go. Sorry, and a little afraid of facing the empty house and its silent rebuke. As he was gathering the last of the paintbrushes and plaster knives, I thanked Calvin, the de facto leader of the group, for the work they had done and for helping me to understand Henry. He's a good dog, he said again. I think he's ready for more. Take him out, maybe in the woods. I had the feeling that perhaps it wasn't just Henry who Calvin thought might be ready for more.

 

I
t was turning into a spectacular fall, one of those rare intersections of changing weather and waning light combining to produce the most vibrant color seen in years. In town, the residents and the shopkeepers were as stunned by the display as the leaf peepers, as they called the tourists, and drivers would stop their cars in the middle of the roads leading in and out of town, gobsmacked by the beauty.

All that loveliness—inviting, ephemeral—made the woods much less forbidding. I stood at the back window, watching the play of light on the leaves of a white birch. Calvin was right: Henry and I were ready for a walk. The puppy had never seen the creek; we would clamber down the hill at the back of the house and take a look around.

I found Henry under the crab apple tree. Ever since our blackberry communion, he had been more tractable. A day or two earlier he had ambled into the living room with something loathsome in his mouth. Drop it, I had said, more out of habit than of hope, and much to our mutual surprise, he did.

I took Henry to the backyard, to the lip of the hill that sloped steeply down to the little creek. At first I was wary: I had rarely walked in these woods without getting lost. But the falling of the first of the leaves had begun to create gaps in the formerly solid wall of green, piercing its opaque mystery. If we didn't go too far, if we kept the house in sight, surely nothing could happen.

At first we stuck to the plan. The puppy ran down the hill until gravity and speed overthrew him and he somersaulted and slid on his belly, bouncing off stubbly bushes and outcroppings until he flopped into the creek and immediately set about chasing dragonflies and darting little fish. Then a shadow on the other bank caught his attention and he was off, splashing through the shallow water and up onto the far side of the creek.

I started across the creek myself, intent at first on simply fetching him back. But it was a lovely afternoon, and the warm wind seemed charged with a volatile excitement, and throughout the wood there was a sense of kinetic energy, like that of a great orchestra tuning up, playing on the infinite variety of shape and color, light and motion of the trees. I was suddenly aware of being at the beating heart of a moment, of the leaves high above my head that were just barely rimmed with crimson, their stems still stained with the green of summer, and the ones just a breath away from falling, curled and brown, their history written. It was the kind of day that mocked your fears, made you impatient with any and all hesitation. On such a day you can do anything; I was suddenly sick of the anxiety and the lethargy that had lingered for so long. Today was the file hidden in the layer cake, the key slipped inside a book beneath the wary eye of the guards.

Henry was almost out of sight. I took a last long look over my shoulder, and up the hill, back the way we had come—I could still see the house, sort of, through the trees. We would be fine, I thought, mostly because I was far too giddy to think otherwise at that point, and because it was too fine a day for anything bad to happen. And besides, there was something else: I knew things now that I hadn't before. Or thought I did.

 

I
had brought two books with me to Vermont. One was a standard navigational handbook on the uses of map, compass, and altimeter. I had cracked that one first. It started out encouragingly enough: any moron, it promised, could learn to find his way in the woods. That was the shallow end. The deep end of the book was made up of passages that talked about how to combine map reading with compass use: “After the compass has been set for the proper bearing, carry the compass and the map in the same hand, holding them firmly together with the edge of the compass lined up with the route of the map and the direction of travel arrow pointing forward. Then keep the compass map and (one)self oriented by always keeping the north part of the compass needle over the north arrow of the compass housing, letting the front right hand or left hand corner of the base plate take the place of the thumb.”
Take the place of the thumb?

The second book was called
Finding Your Way Without Map or Compass
, written in 1957 by Harold Gatty. Gatty, whom Charles Lindbergh called “the prince of navigators,” was a handsome, daring, and distinguished Australian flier who in 1931, with his partner Wiley Post, circumnavigated the world in a record-breaking eight days, a feat so stunning that the United States awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross by a special act of Congress.

After World War II, in which he had served as group commander in the Royal Australian Air Force, Gatty and his wife settled in Fiji, where he established an airline and set up a coconut plantation on Katafanga, his own island. At the same time, he traveled the globe, researching his book on path finding as it was practiced in every culture and climate, illustrating his observations with detailed drawings of camel caravans in the Arabian desert, termite mounds in northern Australia, Maori canoe routes, and glacier tables at the North Pole.

Gatty had trained bomber pilots for the United States Air Force, and the responsibility of sending young men out over trackless oceans, deserts, and snow-covered tundra lends his book an underlying sense of urgency and precision. At the same time, his work is a prose poem to the glories of the natural world and the mysteries it veils in plain sight.