Living at the End of Time Read online

  Or was that part of a dream I had? I was forever dreaming about the place, and sometimes I couldn’t be sure what was dream and what was real. I knew this woman—she was the gardener who lived on the other side of the ridge who could make things grow by staring at them. In a more rational world, or in a more rational place, she would have spoken to me. But then the ridge was out of step with time.

  I did not set out to explore the mysteries of the place the year I lived there. What I really wanted to do was think. My wife and I had separated a year before I built my cottage, and for a while I had rented an apartment about three miles from the ridge. But life was dull there. I sometimes felt drained and unconnected. I would go back to the ridge and walk around, and I would always come away with a sense of energy and renewal. The place had power; there was something about it that nourished me. At the end of the year I decided to return and build a cottage in the woods, behind my old house. I could be closer to my two children by living on the ridge. I could be closer to the mysterious wooded slopes. Set back from lights and roads and noise, I could attain that singular state that is so hard to find in our time—solitude.

  This move was not a new development in my life. From an early age I had planned to retire at twenty-seven to a small country village, there to watch the passage of the seasons and study the smaller details of life—the frogs and the crickets, the flights of migratory birds, and the blossoming of the forest. I took as my model for this the champions of the small life, Gilbert White in Selbourne, England, and closer to home, Henry Thoreau, who spent two years living by the side of Walden Pond in Concord, far enough from civilization to experience the adventure of living close to the natural world, but not so far away that he couldn’t walk home for dinner.

  In some ways I had already achieved my goal. At age twenty-seven I had left New York City and had taken a job teaching little children about nature in a small town in northwestern Connecticut. After that I lived in Europe for a while, then on Martha’s Vineyard, and then I moved to the valley with the low ridge. These were all pleasant enough years, but there always seemed to be too many windows and walls between me and the natural world. What I needed, what I had always wanted, was a one-room cabin where I could wake up and step outside without getting dressed.

  Once I had decided to build, I spent a lot of time on the back lot trying to choose the best possible place to site my cottage. I finally settled on a spot just beyond a small meadow, in the copse of young hickory trees, not far from the hemlock grove where the last bear in the valley was killed in 1811. The site had southern exposure, good winter sun, dappled shade in summer, and the bright, flowery expanse of the meadow to the southeast.

  No one in the United States who decides to spend a year or so living in a cabin in the woods, watching the course of the seasons, does so without at least a nod to Henry Thoreau, and this experiment was to take place in the heart of Thoreau country, no more than sixteen miles from Walden Pond. I was working in Lincoln, Massachusetts, two miles from the site of Thoreau’s cabin, and regularly on clear days I would walk there. After a few years, almost in spite of myself, Henry began to insinuate himself into my life. One hundred and thirty years after his death he still had a presence in the area; I could not walk anywhere near Walden Pond without thinking about him. I began to read his works. I studied Walden; I read A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and I delved into some of the editions of his journals. When I went to construct my small house, quite logically, I considered building a version of Henry’s cabin at Walden.

  It seemed a propitious time to undertake such a project. Down at the Walden Pond Reservation the state government was in the process of constructing an exact replica of the cabin. I knew Roland Robbins, the man who had discovered the actual site of the cabin, and who was overseeing the construction of the replica. Robbins gave me a set of plans for Henry’s cabin and encouraged me to use them. But studying the spare, hard lines, I began to wonder whether I really wanted such a place. My tastes in architecture (not to mention world views) differed from Henry’s. The cloistered, spartan life led by Thoreau, while attractive in a theoretical way, did not quite match my semicivilized style. Furthermore, I had to face certain significant realities. Thoreau went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately and confront only the essential things in life. I went there because my wife and I had separated and the woods were the only place I could find affordable housing.

  In addition to Thoreau’s works, I had been reading those of Andrew Jackson Downing, an American landscape architect of the mid-nineteenth century who had written two books on house and garden design. Although he and Henry were contempoaries, Downing was the antithesis of Thoreau in architectural tastes, favoring elaborately decorated Victorian structures. Even before I read any of his books in depth I had come to appreciate Downing’s designs, and I decided to build a house based on one of his gardener’s cottages. It would be about the size of Henry Thoreau’s cabin, ten feet by sixteen, but it would have board and batten siding, a steeply pitched Gothic roof, and a lot of gingerbread trim. The cottage quite suited my own philosophy of land use, which falls somewhere between the managed gardens of Andrew Jackson Downing and the wild, untamed nature of Henry Thoreau.

  I drew up some rough plans; I bought the lumber from a local sawmill, one of the oldest continuously operating mills in the country. I purchased the nails, roofing, and other materials from the hardware store, and I began to search for used doors and windows. From a massive Georgian structure that was in the process of being refurbished, I managed to salvage some elegant narrow windows; I found heavy yellow pine French doors at a barn sale and some beautifully fashioned porch rails at a house that was being torn down. Finally, with all the materials more or less on the site, I began to build.

  This dream of building a house of one’s own is very nice in theory. But in fact, building is a maddening process. It requires a certain amount of skill in measuring. You have to handle cumbersome, dangerous tools. You are forever tripping over things, losing essential equipment, barking your knuckles, and lifting objects that are too heavy. I had had some experience in light construction. I once built a porch; I had made a greenhouse and a chicken house; but I would never in all the world claim to be skilled in carpentry. In fact I hate heavy work; I simply build things because it is often easier to do it oneself than to hire someone else. Fortunately, for this project, which was by far my most ambitious, I had help.

  I had a friend named Higgins who lived on the banks of the Nashua River in Groton in a former stable, which he and his paramour, Jane, had retrofitted into a comfortable little yachtlike house. Higgins had a variety of talents. He had worked as a backup musician, a yacht captain, a tow-boat operator, and, for a while, as a reader for a publishing company. He was also a carpenter. When I began thinking about building a house on my own, I called him for help, and with Higgins as a resource, I slowly came to understand the intricacies of the process.

  One afternoon in early March he and I laid out the square for the foundation posts on the site I had selected in the hickory grove at the top of the ridge. That done, Higgins retired to other projects, and I spent one whole day digging the four holes, four feet deep, as he had directed. Higgins came back for a few hours one afternoon and helped me lay out the sills, and he returned on another day and showed me how to set up the frames for the ground floor, although I had to do most of the heavy work myself. The house was a sort of modified post and beam. I built frames for the ground-floor walls on the deck Higgins and I had constructed, and then, struggling mightily by myself, forced, pushed, hoisted, and otherwise raised the whole end of the house into place and temporarily nailed it with supports. It took me a day to raise the two gable ends, another to construct the two side walls, and a third to get them up and nailed in place. The whole boxlike affair was horribly unstable and rickety, but Higgins assured me that the frame would tighten up as the building progressed.

  The project went slowly. I was working da
ily at my regular job, and I was taking care of my children while my erstwhile wife was in the process of launching herself in a new career. I was also, somewhat vainly, still attempting to enjoy the glorious spring that was by that time sweeping across the ridge. By mid-May, however, I was ready to put up the rafters. Higgins came back one weekend and taught me how to select the proper angle for the roof without using complicated mathematical formulas. We simply laid the actual rafters down on the deck; I chose an angle that I felt best suited the Gothic style of the house, and we cut them on the ground and nailed them together. That done, the two of us set about the precarious task of hoisting the rafters onto the ground-floor framework and setting them in place.

  For all his skills Higgins is not good at math and measuring. Neither am I, and at one point we discovered (he discovered, to be more accurate) that we had miscalculated and somehow skewed the rafters by an inch or two. Since the whole frame would eventually be covered in ceiling material, and since the error would not affect the strength of the cottage, we carried on. All day and into the next, balancing ourselves on my swaying, unstable frame, we nailed rafters in place. When it was completed, at the end of that weekend, I could see for the first time what my cottage would actually look like. Higgins and I walked down the little driveway I had cut through the pine woods and looked back up the hill through the trees. There it was, a tiny chapel-like structure, standing alone among the hickories, the sassafras trees, and the white pines.

  Higgins christened it “The Vicarage.”

  “I’ll be back for vespers,” he said.

  I didn’t expect him to return; he had done enough already, and he was one of those people who always take on more projects than they have time for. Once, twenty years earlier, I had worked on a boat with Higgins. He was first mate, and I was a lowly deckhand. He tried his best to snarl and act the part of a proper seafaring man, but I recognized in him a gentle soul, and we became fast friends in spite of our unequal rank. He knocked about in boats for years after that first summer, and then, horrified by the decline in interesting sailboats, put the proverbial oar on his shoulder and walked inland until someone asked him what that thing was. And there he settled, never again to go to sea.

  Actually, he ended up in Groton because Jane lived there. They had known each other on Martha’s Vineyard, which she had left some years earlier to go to film school. She was now a free-lance film editor, and, more to the point, she had been given an old stable not far from the Nashua River, a perfect place for Higgins to bide his time. One thing led to another; they fell in love (again) and set up housekeeping in the stable one summer while they fixed the place up. After three years the former stable had become a warren of hidden sleeping lofts, libraries, tiny pantries, and catwalks.

  Higgins did come back again to help me with the roof. Together we planked the steeply pitched rafters and then, since time was running short for Higgins, we began shingling even before the side walls were built. Originally Higgins had tried to talk me into using cedar shingles, but I was running out of money by then as well as time. My self-imposed deadline of June 21 was closing in.

  Still, things were moving along. Even though it had no walls, the house now kept out rain; it had the feel of a gazebo or a Japanese teahouse set at the edge of a mysterious wood. Over the next month I constructed the frames for the windows and doors, then planked up the sides and nailed battens along the seams in the popular Victorian style of Andrew Jackson Downing’s designs. Working alone now, without the benefit of my mentor, I made slower progress but managed well enough. I could now actually see what had to be done, rather than conceptualize imaginary angles and shapes. I still had to measure, however, and I spent an inordinate amount of time cutting and recutting boards because of my incompetence at fractions.

  One day in June I hung the French door. The house looked completed, and in fact I could have moved in, but there was a lot more to do. Using a borrowed saw, I cut filigreed bargeboards for the gable ends of the roof. I built tiny, Gothic-style trim boards for the many windows, and sawed out a decorative swan and nailed it above the front door. Once these important details were completed, once the floor was sanded and varnished and the windows screened and the front porch constructed, I was ready to take up residence.

  I collected some of my favorite possessions: an antique parlor organ, a bed that had belonged to one of my brothers in his youth, a little desk I had grown up with, a few books, a mandolin, an antique French flute my mother gave me for my thirtieth birthday, paintings by my eldest brother, and old family photographs my father had taken during cruises on the Chesapeake Bay in the 1920s. My house in order, there could be no further delays, and right on schedule, on a sultry midsummer evening that smelled of soil and roses, I moved in.

  2

  In Two Worlds

  THAT WAS A NOISY FIRST NIGHT, I remember. There was a terrific raccoon battle somewhere in the woods behind the house; the whippoorwills, which for years had arrived in the nearby woodlands in mid-June, called throughout the night, and I heard all manner of scratchings and scurryings around the house. At one point, just after midnight, a horrific scream sounded out, a ghostly yowl that started as a whine, increased in volume, and then crescendoed to a high pitch. Whatever it was went bounding off into the woods after its first scream, screeching and yipping as it went.

  I sat up in bed under the window, listening. The scream had silenced the whippoorwills, and once the thing disappeared into one of the many hollows behind the house, the forest was silent again. The night was warm; a slight breeze rustled the tree tops, and I could hear whispers in the trees as if the leaves were talking to one another. I lay back and drifted off. From the distance came a single hoot, followed by a clatter which slowly grew louder, a train passing on the Portland-Ayer line that runs beyond the lake in back of the cottage. I listened as it approached, clacking and rattling, and then moved off to the north. Singly, then in twos and threes, the whippoorwills started up again, the breeze hissed in the leaves, a dog started barking on one of the farms over the hill—and I fell back asleep.

  In spite of the interruptions of the night, I woke up refreshed. This was June 21, the first day of summer, and the sun was slanting in through the French door and spilling across the wide pine floor. Bird song was everywhere, rolling in through the open windows, and the cottage was filled with air and light and the fresh smell of the morning woods. Except for the fact that I had a roof over my head and screens on the windows, I might as well have had my bed out of doors, which of course was my intention.

  I brewed some coffee and took it out to a sunny spot in the meadow to sit and think for a while. The raking light of early morning was spearing through the trees into the fresh green grass, and I could hear the long, bubbling call of the indigo bunting, one of the common bird residents on my patch of land. I drank coffee and landscape in alternating sips.

  Henry Thoreau would have liked my domain, I thought. Houses, telephone wires, roads, and other intrusions of the modern world were nowhere to be seen. The wall of the forest surrounded the little meadow on three sides, and on the east the land was bordered by a low tangle of shrubs and young trees. A tiny footpath winding down through the meadow disappeared into the shrubs and continued on through the old gardens of my former house, where my children still lived. Here, on the back lot, I was isolated from the outside world, surrounded entirely by wildness, even though family and friends and civilization were close at hand. It was a quiet, private corner of the world, a good place to think. And yet it was an ironic landscape. This wild ridge, with its mysterious, forgotten forest, was located no more than thirty-five miles west of Boston, not far from Route 128, America’s “Technology Highway,” and a little more than a mile beyond Route 495, another beltway ringing the Boston suburbs.

  I poured a third cup of coffee and sat back to listen to the chorus of birds. Towhees, thrushes, warblers, robins, and buntings were filling the woods with song. But as I listened, I became conscious of another sou
nd. I could hear the dull roar of traffic on Route 495, as well as cars passing on another, smaller highway that ran southeast from the small towns of southern New Hampshire. As early as seven-thirty every weekday morning a great tidal surge of cars would sweep down that road. Car would follow car in a steady stream, each tailgating the others, their drivers rushing toward offices along the industrial belt that encircled Boston. Eight hours later, the tide would turn and the cars would flow back again to New Hampshire.

  The volume of traffic on these local roads had increased significantly in recent years. The area where I had built my cottage was one of the fastest growing on the East Coast. New houses, new industries, were popping up everywhere, but my house was located in an empty quarter. Development had failed to cross the highway that separated the ridge from the rest of the town, so the woods, the old fields, and the farms of my immediate surroundings were still intact. But beyond this small, as yet undeveloped patch, the world was changing.

  One of the largest new buildings occupied a hill on the other side of the valley east of my cottage. Long before I made plans to build my cottage, an obscure notice appeared in the local newspaper about a hearing concerning a new industrial building that was proposed for a site in a pear orchard just to the northeast of the town common. Digital Equipment Corporation, a multinational company that had grown enormously in the past few years, planned to construct in the orchard an industrial complex consisting of two immense office buildings, which would hold, upon completion, some four thousand workers.