Out of the Woods (9 page)

Several hours later I at last wandered into a twisty, shadowy road that led deep into scrubby pines. I thought the road would take me to the water's edge, but it dead-ended at a swamp instead. The car sunk up to its hubcaps in the mud. Wandering on foot, looking for a road that would lead to rescue, I came across a small, sunlit, grassy meadow strewn with red wildflowers, in which stood a very pregnant chestnut mare. On an ordinary day, in the ordinary way, it would have merited a mere flick of the eyelids, but I was in the rapturous state that frayed nerves, heightened senses, and a jolt of adrenaline can create, and the beauty of the scene, the animal's glossy flanks and quiet calm, and the absolute silence rioted through my young and addled head, dissolving the fear and insecurity on which I had been choking. In that moment, I knew that everything would be all right; I could look past my own doubt and see that the world was immense and my future as rich in possibility as the swelling belly of the brown mare. I remembered that moment always. It was a great gift, a promise that was redeemed, many times over.

As far as the real world went, I was still lost, of course, and would be for hours afterward, but that was mere detail. When you are young, time is buoyant; you know that sooner or later it will float you home.

I thought about that girl, the one I had been, and how nothing about the situation I was now in would have bothered her. She would not have felt this vulnerability to chance, to the insouciant indifference of fate. But then nothing at all had happened to her yet. So this is what it means to get old, I thought, to find yourself at the mercy of your own mortality.

One of my projects in coming to Vermont had been to learn how to grow old, not merely gracefully, but also with style and panache—and I had convinced myself that I could take it all in stride, with a minimum of lamentation. But until that moment when I found myself lost, in my own backyard, I had never really understood what we lose when we finally realize we are not immortal. It didn't seem that far a leap to the fear that flashed in my grandmother's eyes whenever she crossed a threshold—because, she said, you never knew whether you would make it back.

The shadows were lengthening. I began to wonder if we would have to stay the night. The very thought inspired new energy—I walked back up a hill I'd tried before, determined this time not to stop until I had reached some ridge or crest from which I might gain some perspective. Finally I came to another bridle path, which was well worn and led downhill—surely it would lead eventually to some human habitation.

Eventually the path intersected with an unfamiliar stream, and I changed course once again, deciding that the stream was the better bet—if I followed it down, I told myself, I would eventually come to a house. I did, about twenty yards later—my own. The house was not where it was supposed to be. It was nowhere near where it was supposed to be. Later, much later, when I was looking at a topographical map of the area, I could get a general idea of what I had done, which involved circumscribing a giant loop de loop of about eight miles. But back then all I knew was that I was tired, and deeply, deeply angry.

I wasn't angry because I had been lost. I was angry because I no longer possessed the optimism and the elasticity that had made getting lost a delight, and if I could no longer lose myself, this troublesome burdensome self, in the way I most loved, then I did not know what to do.

I sat on the steps of the porch for a long time, the exhausted puppy in my lap—Henry had been so tired that he had fallen asleep with his head in his water bowl, sending forth a small flotilla of bubbles with each exhale. It was strange: I had not minded growing older until now. None of the obvious drawbacks of age—the lost looks, the creaking knees, the constricting horizon—had seemed particularly upsetting, compared with the relief to be had in surviving one's youth.

But the disastrous walk reminded me that I had reached an age where only careful planning and a steady eye would keep me safe—in the woods, and in my life. I needed to stay alert, to find my bearings, if I was to avoid wasting time walking in circles. I couldn't stumble into old age the way I had through my front door, not quite knowing how I got there. And yet, in a way that I could not define, the best of me—as well as the worst—was inextricably tied up with a love of the accidental and unexpected. I had never been the sort of person who made five-year plans, or saved for a mortgage, or even kept a date book. I admired people like that, I envied them, but I had never wanted to be like them. I had led a life in which I had made few thoughtful decisions, and yes, it had cost me dearly in many ways, but it had also brought me great happiness, and in the end it was simply who I was. For me, the miraculous had forever been bound up in the random; what if the elements crucial to growing old in a way that wasn't self-deluded were antithetical to what I needed to be happy?

 

I
was not the first to freight a sense of direction with so much moral weight, to bind the knowledge inherent in compass and map to the dictates of philosophy. Direction has always been bound up with magic and with faith.

The first maps pointed the way to heaven; the compass began in China as a fortune-telling device. In the thirteenth century, an English sea captain confided to his journal during a long voyage that he had to take great care when using his compass aboard ship. So great was the power associated with this new device that were his sailors to see him use it, they would fear him as a magician who used black arts to set their course.

Even those who did not fear the compass saw it as much more than a navigational aid. Jacques de Vitry, the Crusader bishop of Acre, acknowledged the device's usefulness while sailing almost as an afterthought—he seemed far more impressed by its resistance to witchcraft and poisons, and its use as a cure for insomnia.

The poets, too, were dazzled. Erasmus wrote that geography was essential to poetry, and it's easy to see the compass as a kind of poem, marrying as it does the molten core of the earth to the steadfast position of a distant star. In the thirteenth century an Italian poet, Francesco da Barberino, wrote a poem advising his readers on how to lead a good life in the aftermath of a shipwrecked heart. Build a compass, he advises. It will point you to virtue. In the
Inferno,
Dante contrasted the dangerous lure of physical love with the soul's inner compass, which points the soul to God's eternal love. Ever since men first tried to get from one place to another, it seems there has been a distinctly moral quality to knowing where you are going, to choosing the right direction.

The compass, of course, makes no distinctions among directions. On its plain round face, the choices are weighted equally; east is as good as west, north no better than south.

And yet, from the beginning, the four cardinal directions have been symbols of good or evil, weighted differently in every time and place and culture. To say that a man had gone west, in an English novel of a certain era, was to say that he had died—Golgotha, where Christ was crucified, lay to the west. Resurrection, on the other hand, lay to the east, the Orient, which is why, when we get lost, we must first orient ourselves. Indeed, before the Reformation, many European maps placed east, not north, at the top, while in China, south was at the top, because south was the location of the gates of paradise. In Bali, however, believers faced north to pray, and the word
insanity
in Balinese translates as “not knowing where north is.”

Every direction is freighted by a shifting amalgam of history, culture, and religion, a tug of the senses at a subliminal level. North is forbidding, harsh, purifying, dreadful. South is indolent, seductive, ripe. East is mysterious, of course, and mystical. West is shining with possibility in this country, full of woe in others. These connotations, these dreams of past and future, influenced the placement of temples, the resting place of a suicide, the augury to be found in the flight of a bird.

Which way to go? What choice to make? Nowhere is the profound anxiety of direction more evident than at a crossroads. No other geographical feature bears the same freight of human mystery, fear, and speculation. The intersection of one road with another in every culture portends a meeting with doom or destiny. A place to meet the devil or see the man you will marry, to watch the witches dance or confound the ghost who is out to get you.

There is something poignant about this need to invest direction with such significance, to find benevolence emanating from one path and evil from another. We have always needed to know not only where food is to be found, and fire and shelter, but also which way leads to heaven and which to hell. In direction, symmetry, in the elegant phrase of the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, is pulled apart by life—because life itself has only one direction, and we fight like hell not to go there.

I wasn't looking for the gates of paradise, but I had a lot riding on my own understanding of direction; in my own way, I hoped, like the poet, that it would lead me to virtue, and like the sailors, I was more than a little afraid.

4

Waypoints

Adventure is a sign of incompetence.

—VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON,
Arctic explorer

A
l-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, third Fatimid caliph and sixteenth Ismaili imam, after riding into the Musett hills on his donkey for one of his regular nocturnal meditations.

The Ninth Spanish Legion, during the Roman conquest of Britain.

Vandino and Ugolino Vivaldi, Genoese sailors, while attempting to reach Asia from Europe by sea.

Gaspar Corte-Real, looking for the Northwest Passage.

Francisco de Orellana, while exploring the Amazon.

Henry Hudson, set adrift by mutinous sailors.

American politician John Lansing, while mailing a letter.

Thomas Lynch, after signing the Declaration of Independence.

Ludwig Leichhardt, on the Darling Downs between the Swan and the Conmore rivers, in Australia.

Henry Every, pirate, after capturing the flagship of the emperor of the Mughal empire and escaping with £600,000.

Percy Fawcett, in the jungle of Mato Grosso, searching for the lost city of Z.

Judge Crater, after entering a New York City taxicab.

Everett Ruess, while sketching in the Utah desert.

Paula Jean Weldon, on the Long Trail, near Glastenbury Mountain.

D. B. Cooper, from the rear of a Boeing 727 with $200,000 in cash.

The three lighthouse keepers on the Flannan Isles.

Dorothy Arnold, heiress, after buying a book in New York City.

Arthur Cravan, French Dadaist, near Salina Cruz, Mexico.

Richard Halliburton, while sailing a Chinese junk across the Pacific Ocean.

Michael Rockefeller, in southwestern New Guinea.

The crew of the
Mary Celeste,
their ship discovered, seaworthy and under full sail, near the Strait of Gibraltar.

 

T
he lost haunt us. The famous, the notorious, the hapless, the determined, the ones who walked out of their lives and never looked back, the ones whose fevered dreams consumed their money and their health and their lives, the ones who acted on a whim that might have been forgotten a moment later had a door blown shut or the sound of a dinner bell distracted them. The ones who got away with it. The ones who didn't. They remain immortal, living on in mystery long after they would have survived in life. They conjure complicated emotions—not merely grief, but envy, anger, frustration, bewilderment. Such is our need to know.

The lost haunt us: our helplessness, our loneliness connect us to theirs. There are so many fates into which our imaginations cannot enter, but this one binds us; we all know what it is like to be lost. The fear that comes with being unmoored from the familiar, the free fall of the spider from the web of identity, the recognition of just how precarious one's hold on life is. You can feel it on a mountain trail, but you can also feel it in a parking lot in broad daylight. To be lost is to not know not only where you are but also who you are, to realize how much of your sense of self is embedded in place, in context. We see ourselves by the light of the familiar. Take away the familiar, loved or loathed, and confidence evaporates.

So perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the stages of grief and the stages of being lost are much the same: the lost and the grieving stumble along the same double helix of what they knew and what they must come to know, trying to relocate themselves along the same fragile axis of understanding.

In the beginning there is always denial. You refuse to believe that you don't know where you are, that you can't find your way, that anything has changed. You keep going the way you had determined to go at the outset, walking faster, perhaps, and with more urgency, certain that if you simply press on, then everything will fall into place.

After denial, anger: the grieving blame the dead, or life, or God. The lost blame themselves, or the compass, or the woods. The anger drives out logic. The anger leads inexorably to the third stage, to the frantic search for a way to make the present emergency conform to the old reality. In grief, it's called bargaining—if only you will bring him back, if only you will let me live, I will do anything. In the woods, it is the time when the lost waste what energy they have in frantic attempts to assure themselves that the lake they can see from the top of a tree is surely the lake they passed an hour ago. The fork in the road is the same fork they were looking for all along. This is the time for walking in circles; this is the time of dread. The grieving person is trying to find a way back to the life he knows. The lost person is trying to make the map in his head, his mental map, fit the world he is looking at. But it will not. It cannot.

Depression is next. You are beaten. Everything you know, about yourself and the world and the way things could or should have been, has no bearing here. You give up, at least for a time. It's not a bad thing. You are doing what you have to do—you are letting go of the world as you thought you knew it, in order to see the one that confronts you now.

After depression, acceptance. A tricky phase, because it can lead you to darkness or to light. Either you will surrender to your grief, and let time stop and twilight take you, or you will bury your dead and take the first tottering step into the unknown. Either you will curl up in a tree trunk or an abandoned school bus and wait, or you will decide that it is up to you to find yourself, because only after you have done that do you have a prayer of finding your way.

When I first got back to Castle Dismal after that disastrous walk, I was sure I would never again travel down any surface that didn't have a dotted white line down the middle. But before the alarm and confusion had given way to Overwrought Existential Despair, there had been that small intense euphoria, found in a bright button of a wildflower, or the cool spookiness of a hollow tree, a sense of elation tied to nothing but the moment, and of that, I wanted more.

There had to be a way to walk away from the house when it was driving me nuts, away from the questions and the turmoil and the paralysis in a way that didn't court utter disorientation.

There was one possibility. At the bottom of the hill, my road, Keeling, as it was then called, intersected with Noah Wood, which, to the left, led out to Route 106, the two-lane blacktop that ran north to Woodstock and south to the interstate. But to the right, Noah Wood ascended sharply uphill before essentially dead-ending. Past that point it turned into little more than a trail much like my own. But I had no idea where it went.

I thought of asking Greg Fullerton, but I hesitated. Greg, though polite and patient, had an air of such competent self-containment that I was always a little embarrassed to admit the full extent of my haplessness to him, though it was no doubt on full display: he was, after all, the person to whom I turned for the kind of questions that weren't even questions in his book, and most of our early encounters involved him pulling my car out of the ditch whenever the Jeep took a flyer. My neighbor Tom was also a possibility, but we weren't on the best of terms at the moment.

Tom was a native of the area, a boy from one of the neighboring villages who had moved away to Massachusetts and made good with his own investment company. He had built a beautiful house up on a hill on the ten-acre parcel next to mine and used the place mostly on weekends, in summer when the haunting sounds of his alto sax floated out over the hollow between us and pretty much nonstop during deer hunting season in the fall, when he had been known to take potshots at bears from his deck.

Everyone who knew Tom said he was the nicest, most tenderhearted guy on God's green earth, which made it all the worse that I seemed to invariably drive him into a state of tight-lipped indignation. When I used to visit my house intermittently, he had been a kind and friendly neighbor, but lately everything I did seemed to drive him nuts. I was a flatlander, that was part of it, I knew, and I was pretty sure he thought I was nuts living in so isolated a place by myself, an opinion that made me furious, only because I was in imminent danger of sharing it. But there was so much I couldn't know and didn't see at the time about this complicated, sensitive man with his own inevitable set of misgivings, sorrows, regrets, and doubts. He came up to this part of the world for escape and for solace, and an inept newcomer bumbling around wasn't high on his list of the place's natural wonders. Which meant that most of our encounters had involved lectures, half serious, half teasing, about the general wrongness of everything from the house itself to my way of living in it. It was a stupid place to build a house! It was in the middle of a swamp! Did I know that? The driveway was in the wrong place and at the wrong pitch, my dog pooped in the wrong place, that wasn't the way to haul wood into the house, no one could figure out what I was doing up there.

Recently we had had a major set-to. Tom had discovered Henry with an apple in his mouth. The apple was one of dozens that had fallen from a tree at the side of our mutual road, but the tree was definitely on Tom's land.

Tom was in a bit of a bad mood—he'd been busy blowing up beaver dams in reprisal for the beavers' felling of a two-hundred-year-old Vermont apple tree; he kept repeating the description, as if two-hundred-year-old-Vermont-apple-tree was a genus of its own. So the sight of Henry munching happily on one of the windfall apples that had tumbled to the ground from one of his still-standing trees was the last straw.

Halfway through a lecture about how the apples were for the deer because the deer ate the apples and hunting season would be here soon, I had interrupted him. I know all about that, I said eagerly, needing to show him I wasn't totally uninformed about the customs of the country. I had heard about it from one of the men working on the house. He was a bow hunter, I told Tom; in fact, I had invited him to hunt on my land.

Hunters, it turns out, are somewhat territorial about their hunting grounds. Tom's eyes threatened to leave their sockets. He told me I was never to do that again and conjured up images of throngs of armed men running amok, gunning down what were apparently his very own personal deer. I wanted to point out that state law permitted hunters to hunt anywhere they pleased on land that wasn't posted to the contrary, that we lived next to a state forest in any event, and that it wasn't really up to him to tell me who could or could not hunt on land to which I held the title. But I was too taken aback. I asked him, incredulously, if he was angry. I gotta go, he said, and zoomed off, muttering something about how people like me were ruining Vermont, how pretty soon the place would be so left it would be illegal to make a right turn.

I'm a coward when it comes to confrontation, and besides, I didn't need anyone else telling me what an incompetent I was: I was doing just fine in that department on my own. So I had been avoiding Tom as much as possible. But it was the middle of the week, hunting season hadn't yet begun, and he probably was in Massachusetts. I decided to chance walking down the road, take the mysterious right onto Noah Wood, and see, finally, where it went.

It was a misty morning of soft light and little movement in the trees; only the rushing of the little brook that paralleled the road broke the silence. Along the side of the road the last of the summer wildflowers bloomed, scraps of lavender and orange against gray stone wall and black lichen. There had been a bit of rain the night before, and the sudden dips were slick with wet and the air was sharp with the scent of cool air rushing up under the warmth. I began to enjoy myself, hopscotching down the rough parts of the road, using my walking sticks to swing myself over the rocks.

At the bottom of the hill Henry and I turned right, onto Noah Wood, which would climb steadily upward for three-quarters of a mile before petering out into a dirt road. I didn't know how far the Jeep trail went, or where for that matter, but at least it was a marked path to follow, which meant that this walk was unlikely to end in savage self-recrimination. I could always turn back.

There were two houses at the intersection of my road and Noah Wood, both inhabited only occasionally by their out-of-town owners. But farther up, after a steady climb to the crest of the hill, there was a tidy, deceptively compact two-story frame home built snugly into the side of the ridge, which then ran down to a large pond. To the left was a small brown barn encircled by a split rail fence, along which the last of the summer's lilies shot out a few forlorn salutes. A chestnut horse and a pony of the same color looked up at us with mild curiosity. Henry was thrilled and slipped under the railing to make friends, at which point the side door of the house opened and a small, fast-moving blur burst onto the deck, shouting warnings about the horses and the dog and the dire results of a collision between them.

But the horse and the pony decided to tolerate Henry, and their owner invited me in for a cup of tea. Her name was Harriet Goodwin. She was a clinical psychologist and gerontologist from Boston who, with her husband, Dean, a mechanical engineer, had retired to South Woodstock over twenty years ago. She was a petite woman with piercing blue eyes that radiated shrewd assessment and a dry humor and arch manner that made her somehow appear taller than she really was. We had met briefly on one of my earlier visits. It was impossible not to get to know Harriet; she was frank, curious, talkative, and opinionated. Most of the residents of Woodstock, particularly those who had moved here from somewhere else, were polite but reticent to the point of blandness, at least until they knew you better, but Harriet was much too interested in people to observe such niceties. She knew everything about the area and everybody in it, and every newcomer was fair game for a thorough cross-examination, after which she was able to pinpoint your precise location within the South Woodstock social geography.

This time around, Harriet hauled out Dean for a proper introduction. He was a giant of a man, as quiet and grave as Harriet was talkative, with a handsome, fleshy face, his head slightly cocked as he listened intently. Dean was one of those people, and there are few of them, with whom you know right away that only your best and most plainspoken self will do. He wasn't much for small talk: he would listen, to see if there was any help he could provide, and if there was not, he would vanish and leave the ladies to their conversation.