Living at the End of Time Read online

  I have the more recent history of the area on the authority of a man named George Case, who appeared at the doorstep of my cottage that summer and explained that he had once lived on this land. Case’s father had left home when George was about eight years old, and his mother moved her three children around from house to house until finally, in 1925, she restored her maiden name and moved back to her family home in Littleton. The Case house was small; downstairs there was a living room, a tiny birthing room where old man Case and his wife slept, and a kitchen wing. The upstairs was partitioned into several little cabinetlike rooms where various children of the extended family bedded down. By the late 1920s seven people were living in what was, in essence, a five-room house.

  Old man Case, George’s grandfather, was a sometime farmer who supplemented his income by working in a webbing mill in town. He kept a white horse in the apple orchard, had a pig, a flock of hens, and a noisy rooster named Fred. George and his cousins used to ride the white horse bareback around the apple orchard, but it was only half tame and would try to scrape the children off its back by galloping under low branches. The children became adept riders, wheeling off to the side and clinging to the horse’s neck and body Indian fashion to avoid the trunks and limbs. On so small a farm there was not much work for the children to do, and whenever they couldn’t catch the horse, they would wander the land around the house looking for excitement. George had a lot of stories about the forested ridge beyond the meadow, and, as we sat drinking coffee on the stone terrace in front of my cottage, he recounted them. Much of what he told me I had heard before, but I liked his slow, dreamy delivery.

  One night, he told me, he and his cousins had slept out in the woods behind the orchard. They made a campfire and posted a guard to watch through the night, each taking turns.

  “I’m sitting there on watch,” he said, “and I hear this crunch, like a guy walking. I look up and I see this Indian with a spear standing there. Long leggings, bare chested. When he sees me look up at him, he bares his teeth and hisses, like a bat or something. I don’t mind telling you I pissed my pants.”

  George screamed. His cousins woke up, searched the forest with flashlights and torches, but found nothing.

  “But I’m telling you that I saw that Indian as clear as I see you now. Clearer, maybe. That was fifty years ago and I haven’t forgotten yet.”

  The year he turned sixteen, shortly after the stock market crashed, George and one of his cousins knotted some sheets together, lowered themselves out an upstairs window, and hit the road. They ended up riding the rails to Oregon, found work as timber cutters, and after knocking about in various logging camps eventually settled down there. George married, continued to work for timber companies, and led an uneventful life, no doubt by choice; he had moved enough during his youth. This was his first trip back east since he had run away in 1930, and as we walked the land, he stared silently and shook his head in disbelief. “I remember good times here,” he said at one point. What impressed him most was the pine forest just south of the meadow. The land had been a sunny field when he ran away; now it was penumbral and ominous.

  A more natural man than myself—Henry Thoreau, for example—would have luxuriated in the return of the white pine forest. In Henry’s time nearly 85 percent of New England was open fields, so it is little wonder that the forest fascinated him. In my time that statistic has reversed. Several years before I moved into the cottage I concluded that it would be a good thing to cut down the pine trees that had grown up on that part of my land and restore the pasture. My wife and I had met a woman who had a timber-cutting operation in which she used not heavy equipment—skidders, cherry pickers, and bulldozers—but mules, and when I decided to clear the pines, I called her up and struck a deal. She would leave me the hardwood for my woodpile and take the pine for herself to sell to a lumber company. It was a pretty even trade as far as I could calculate.

  This mule-driving woman was not, as you might imagine, a raw-boned Amazon. She was about thirty years old, of medium build, with clear, soft skin and a mane of chestnut hair that she often wore in a single long braid. She was married to a timber operator who occasionally worked with her, but mostly she ran the business herself, marking the trees, cutting and trimming them, and then setting the tackle for her mules to drag the cut timber out of the forest to a loading area. She loved her mules with that kind of respectful love one might have for a large and powerful, perhaps slow-witted, child. She used to ride them, and in fact was a member of a hunt club in a nearby town, where she would appear among the properly attired huntsmen with their expensive horses and dogs on her favorite mule, Tulip, a great giant of a thing with ridiculous crooked ears. Once mounted she was one with her mule, a little like a female centaur. One day, while I was dozing against a tree in a park, I saw her storm past, surrounded by a motley crew of hounds. She had let her hair out of its braid, and she thundered by me like a Valkyrie, the ground shaking under the hoofbeats of her mule.

  For a while she worked as the dog warden for the town, and during that time was given charge of a full-blooded wolf that had been confiscated from someone in the state. She used to run the wolf on a long lead through the woods around Walden Pond and the town of Lincoln, and I would sometimes come across her, trotting along in her jogging shoes, with a huge yellow-eyed wolf at the end of a long tether. I got to know her wolf. It was the most terrified, timid thing I have ever met, shying away to the end of its lead whenever I stopped to talk.

  Laura, the mule woman, arrived to clear my land with her mules and two male helpers. The men set to work immediately, felling trees, while Laura walked her team up the ridge to the area that was being cleared. She trimmed a couple of fallen pines, chained them together, and then hooked the chain to the mules and walked with them back to the road. Once she had repeated this procedure a few times, the mules had learned the routine. They would haul the logs down to the landing and wait there for Laura to come and unhook them.

  What I had planned was essentially a clear cut, an anathema to some environmentalists. I intended to take out virtually every tree inside the three stone walls that surrounded the lot on the south, west, and north. The idea was to recreate the pasture of the late nineteenth century. But once the actual cutting started, I began to have some reservations about what we were doing to the forest. What right did I have to cut down innocent pine trees that had lived longer than I, and whose ancestors had been living in the area for some eight thousand years? Given the retreat of open land in New England in the present century and the return of the white pine forest, I had rationalized that cutting over a mere two acres of this overbearing, dismal woods to let in light and restore some of the nineteenth-century landscape would be a good thing. By clearing a small patch of land in the midst of a great sea of forest, I was creating an edge, a place for grass and herbaceous plants to grow, which would attract and provide food for birds, mammals, and insects.

  Nevertheless, I watched with remorse as the mules hauled out the first of the tall fifty-year-old pines, brutally stripped of their feathery branches, quartered into movable pieces, and ignominiously stacked beside the road to be carried away and turned into—what? Boxes? Two-by-four studs that would be buried in the walls of some suburban tract house? My remorse deepened as the forest diminished, and when the two-acre lot became, in the space of a few days, nothing but an open, raw-looking wasteland with neat piles of brush stacked here and there, I had the sense of having done something horribly wrong and irrevocable.

  Once the mill operator had hauled away the pine and the hardwood was cut, split, and stacked, I had to decide what to do with my clear cut. For a year I simply let the land heal, and I was surprised to see how quickly it recovered. A lot of poison ivy had been growing in the pine woods and along the stone walls, and as soon as there was a clearing, it began to spread furiously, along with blackberry, grass, cinquefoil, and goldenrod. By the end of that summer healthy young plants were growing everywhere. This was good for most of
the local wildlife, and I felt somewhat vindicated for my rash act of tearing down the forest, even though the new growth made the place almost impassable for human beings.

  Apart from the rank thicket of brambles and poison ivy, there were four unsightly piles of brush and stumps in the clearing—not exactly what I had had in mind for my meadow—so I gave up on all natural solutions and called in my archenemy, the bulldozer. In a single day a big yellow monster, in the hands of a grizzled man named Jim, dug out the stumps, buried them along with the slash, shifted a few boulders for me, and in the process ground down, uprooted, or otherwise destroyed the full two acres of blackberries and poison ivy. When he finally left, a peaceful silence descended over the clearing.

  I let the area grow up again. First to return were the poison ivy shoots and the blackberries, which, although ground down to nothing on the surface, had their roots deeply set in the topsoil. But this time other species came along as well, and by the end of that growing season the lot showed more diversity of plant life than it had had in perhaps its entire previous history. Toward the end of that summer I counted the number of species in my first informal ecological survey. In subsequent years in the meadow I found brown snakes, red-bellied snakes, garter snakes, and milk snakes. I saw leopard frogs, pickerel frogs, wood frogs and toads, red-backed salamanders, katydids, meadow crickets, long-horned grasshoppers, and uncountable species of beetles. Foxes and skunks regularly crossed the meadow; deer grazed there; juncos, whitethroats, song sparrows, and tree sparrows garnered the weed seeds in autumn and winter. Robins and flickers were abundant; flycatchers darted from the trees along the edges to snap up the field insects flying above the ground; swallows coursed the clearing by day, followed by bats at night. There was light and air; stars, wind, and sky; life had returned.

  I was not leading an entirely monastic life at my cottage in the woods. About a year before I moved in I had met a woman named Jill Brown who had recently separated from her husband, as I had from my wife. We used to go out to lunch together to commiserate. Then we began going out to dinner, and then we began going out in earnest. She smelled vaguely of cinnamon, and had a passion for French; she used to quote long, sad passages from Baudelaire. On weekends we would often go to concerts together, and during the week we would wander around looking for adventure. One evening in early July she and I were poking around the back streets of Concord looking at flower gardens and daydreaming of an orderly life, as compared to the disorderly one we seemed to be leading. We were passing along a picket fence when it suddenly struck me that we should visit Thoreau’s grave. It was more than a thought; it was an imperative, something we had to do that very day.

  In spite of the fact that I used to visit Walden Pond regularly, and in spite of my increasing interest in Henry and his way of life, I had yet to visit the spot on Authors’ Ridge where he is buried, alongside Emerson, Alcott, and other luminaries of Concord.

  We walked back through the center of town and out to the east, to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. This was the most pleasant of summer evenings; an immense colony of swifts had nested in the chimneys of an insurance company near the town center, and as we passed, they were coming in to roost. They made a vast swirling funnel above the roof, circling like a storm and filling the air with their loud chattering as they prepared to enter the chimneys for the night. They were the only sign of life at that hour; the streets were curiously empty, the shops closed and sad. We walked up through the darkening grounds of the cemetery and then climbed the steep, short hill to the ridge and the grave sites.

  Quite fittingly, Henry was buried without pomp among the members of his family. Central in the grouping of gravestones is the marker for his mother and father, who are surrounded by their four children, all of whom died without issue. Even though the stone itself was indistinguishable from the others, Henry’s grave stood out. Pilgrims had been there before us that day and had laid bunches of flowers at his tombstone, while the other small markers were barren. We stood there for a while, thinking about the family.

  The sun had long since set, but a warm, smoky light held in the sky above the trees. Under the branches, on the hill, and among the surrounding monuments there was a cathedral-like gloom. I read the simple inscription on Henry’s gravestone: “Henry D. Thoreau July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862.”

  “What is the date today?” I asked Jill.

  “July twelfth,” she said.

  I began to suspect that this Henry Thoreau was becoming more entwined with my life than I wanted.

  On July 4, 1845, the year he turned twenty-eight, Henry moved into his house at Walden Pond. He borrowed a wagon from a friend, loaded it with his few earthly belongings, and hauled everything out through the woods to the door of his newly constructed dwelling. He did not own much. As he tells us in Walden, he had at the cabin a table, a bed, three chairs, a three-inch looking glass, and a tent, which he kept rolled in the loft. He also had three plates, a cup, a spoon, two knives and forks, a japanned lamp, a flute, a kettle, a skillet, a dipper, and a washbowl. He brought with him a few cherished books, including his copy of The Iliad, and some lighter reading.

  The cabin was not actually completed when he moved in. The walls had yet to be plastered, and there were wide chinks between the secondhand boards he had used for siding. He claimed to enjoy the flow of air through these chinks, although he does not tell us what he did about the infernal New England mosquito.

  July in New England lends itself to outdoor living. Henry had yet to build his fireplace, and he did virtually all his cooking over a campfire outside his front door. When it rained, he constructed a shelter over the fire and went right on baking. He loved bread, and he tried various experiments with different grains until he found the proper combination. He ate sparsely, swam regularly, roamed the nearby forest, chased foxes, and lived, as he says, close to the bone. It was an intense, focused life, stripped of luxury.

  He got his water for drinking and washing from Walden Pond. He would also bathe there, sometimes twice a day, once just after he woke up and once after he had finished working in his nearby bean field. Presumably he washed his few dishes there as well. Somewhere near his cabin he had a privy, although as one of his biographers, Walter Harding, points out, he was too prudish, even in his wild, elemental state of mind, to tell us anything about it.

  After his morning bath Henry would meditate on his natural surroundings and then tend the bean field he had planted, or continue in his meditations. In the field he would work barefoot until the day grew hot and the sandy soil burned his feet. Then he would wander off into the forest looking for plants and animals, and sometimes spend the rest of the day there, observing the diversity of the natural world. Later in his life, after he left Walden, he would become more methodical about these observations, more scientific, but at this point he seemed simply in awe of things. Every day he wrote in the journal he had begun in 1837, and it is the record of these days—the thoughts, the observations, and the accounts of his small adventures—that became the core of Walden.

  Often in the afternoon he would walk to Concord, there to catch up on the news, which, from the comfortable distance of his Walden retreat, he was able to view with some remove. Any more involvement in daily life might have oppressed him. He would talk to townspeople, visit his family and friends, and often stay for dinner, either with his mother and sisters or with the Emersons.

  After dinner he would walk home to Walden through the darkened woods. He grew to love these lonely, homeward-bound passages, the mist and dankness of the night woods, the darkness of the forest. He would feel his way between the trees, sensing, rather than seeing, the soft path.

  His was an idyllic existence, the model balance between sociability and privacy, with space enough to think and feel and write. The idea of Thoreau as a loner, an eccentric, is more the result of nineteenth-century rumors about him than actual fact. Although he was criticized by uncomprehending townspeople, he was not friendless, he was not alone, and he was not
a drunk, as was commonly believed among the less-educated people of Concord. Furthermore, he was happy. He lived between two worlds, a city of muskrats to the south and, to his north, the town of Concord. He would visit both to observe the inhabitants, and, although he was critical of men and not of muskrats, he clearly enjoyed the spectacle of the town. He was no mountain man, this Henry Thoreau. He was a literate American, a social critic, and he needed a village.

  Henry seems to have lacked direction in his early life. All things fascinated him equally. He was an inveterate researcher; he filled his journals with notes on trees, fruits, fish, geology, measurements, Indians, travels, people, and almost anything else he came across, but it was not clear to what end he was working.

  Henry never fit in very well with his schoolmates in Concord, and he was something of an outsider at Harvard. When he graduated in 1837, jobs were hard to come by in Concord, but he was lucky and managed to land a teaching position at the local school. He lasted two weeks.

  Henry and his brother, John, who was also a teacher, had ideas about education that were unusual for their time. Henry brought some of these views with him to the public school system. He was opposed to corporal punishment, for example, and did not, as was the custom in those times, thrash his pupils. The school officials, hearing about this odd behavior, made a visit and directed him to beat the students. So Henry lined them up, arbitrarily selected a few, and thrashed them. Then he quit.